Chapter 24
Underneath the Buttons
After Verity had gone, he sat for a long time in the living room with the lamp off and the window open a hand's breadth on the sound of the river.
She had left at one. He walked her to the bottom of the iron stairs and saw her out into Lantern Row, where the rain had stopped and the cobbles shone like the backs of fish. She stood on the pavement a moment in her soaked coat with her face turned up to the sky, as if testing the air. I'll have Gareth fetch me, she said. I'll ring from the corner. She touched his arm. It was the first time she'd done it of her own accord. I'm sorry. About the station. About everything. I'll understand if you tell me to go to hell. Then she went, her heels striking sharp and uneven on the stone, toward the lit end of the lane, and didn't look back.
Don't worry. I've got Nonie.
He turned it over. He turned it over in the dark with the cool river air on his face and felt it settle, like a coin dropped into a pool, in a slow spiral down to rest beside the others at the bottom.
A girl I used to know.
Something I picked up.
Half the school thought we were sisters.
She had a friend who looked exactly like her. Her mirror. Only the mirror was the real one.
He didn't tell himself it was nothing. He had stopped doing that on Friday, under a strip light, with his cheek against a carpet. He only sat and let the pieces move where they would, into the shape they were beginning to take. When the shape was as clear as it was going to be, he got up and turned on the lamp and went to the windowsill and lifted the jar.
It was heavier than he'd expected.
He carried it to the table in both hands, the way you carry something that might spill, and set it down in the circle of light and unscrewed the zinc lid. He had always lifted the lid and turned the top layer with two fingers. He had never gone further. It had seemed a violation, in some way he couldn't have defended: something of hers that he mustn't take apart. He'd treated the jar like a holy relic, kept whole, its secret in its order, like the contents of a drawer in a dead woman's desk.
It's a jar, he thought. It's buttons.
He took a sheet of newspaper and spread it on the table. He tipped.
They came out in a long, soft, shining slide, with a sound like dry rain, brass and bone and horn and glass and pearl, a hundred little tinkling falls. They ran across the paper and over the edge and rolled in every direction across the wood. He caught a few. They were warm from the lamp. They smelled of metal and of the faint sweet dust of an attic. Some he knew: the carved laughing face, the anchor buttons, the cracked tortoiseshell. Some he didn't. A tiny red enamel one the size of a lentil. A black jet one with a star. A great flat gray one like a coin, with a worn crest.
One for every place I've been somebody.
He sorted them. It was something to do with his hands. He pushed the buttons about with a finger, the way a child pushes beans, and let them fall into small clusters on the paper: the brass in a heap, the pearl in a row. As the pile on the table grew and the jar emptied, he began to see that the old easy way they'd lain wasn't the order of a collection but of a design. There were layers. At the top were the recent ones, the cardigan, the coat. Below them, going back, the years: the wedding, the flat, the first holiday. At the bottom, hard against the thick green glass, lay the oldest. A clump of buttons tangled together, black and white, smaller than the rest. They were costume buttons: cheap, cloth-covered, stamped out by the thousand for the wardrobes of amateur theaters. And one of them, a flat brass one stamped with two small letters in a circle, wasn't sewn on any garment he had ever seen.
CP.
He turned it over under the lamp.
Carrow Playhouse.
He sat holding it in his palm. It was a small thing, lighter than a coin. Someone had given it to her, he thought, or she had taken it. It had lain at the bottom of a jar for years, under four hundred others, and he had walked past it every morning.
And beneath it, flat against the glass, where he'd thought there was only more glass, was something white.
It had been pressed down so tightly, and for so long, that it came out of the jar in the shape of the jar.
A rolled package about the length of his hand, wrapped in a square of oilcloth and tied with a bootlace. The oilcloth was cracked and yellow. The knot was very tight; he had to cut it with the little scissors from his drawer, and the cloth sprang open in his hands like a dried leaf.
He laid out what was inside on the newspaper, in a row, under the light.
A hospital identity bracelet. A strip of plastic, once white, now cream, with a snap fastening and a printed label. He read it with the sharp unsteady attention of a man reading his own name on a stone. MARLOW. Baby. F. 12.08.11. 3.2 kg. St. Aldric's, Whitby. It was so small. It would have circled a finger. He held it between thumb and forefinger for what seemed a long time.
A photograph. A square Polaroid, faded to the greens and ambers of old film. A girl lay in a hospital bed, propped on pillows, in a faded gown, her hair in a plait and her face white and smeared with exhaustion. She was holding a bundle. She was looking down at it. The whole of her face, in that fading light, in that cheap flat flash, was open: not smiling, not crying, not afraid, but simply and entirely there, with the look of a person who has been handed, for the first time, something she doesn't know how to hold. On the back, in pencil, in a hand he had learned at the age of thirty: Me and E. Day 1.
A letter. Two sheets of thick cream notepaper, folded in thirds, in a hand he also knew, though not so well: an upright, elegant, backward-curving script in blue-black ink. The paper had a crest at the head. It was dated the fifteenth of August, 2011.
Isabel,
You are exhausted and you are not yourself, and so I shall say this once and in the plainest words, so that there can be no misunderstanding afterward.
The child will go to Verity and Gareth. It is arranged. They are good people and they will love her. You will recover, and finish your degree, and you will not see the child again. This is not a punishment. It is a mercy. You are twenty-one years old and have the whole of your life before you, and there is no need for you to be burdened for ever by a single error.
I will see to everything. You need not think of it. You need never speak of it. In a year you will hardly remember. I have done this for you because I love you, and because your father must never know.
You will do as I ask. I know that you will, because you always do.
Mother.
He read it standing.
He found he was holding the table with his free hand, and the buttons on the newspaper were trembling with the shaking of the wood.
Because you always do.
He thought of a woman in pearls, with her head on one side, across the tea tray. Dear boy. He thought of a dry cool hand laid over his own, and a voice saying a bridge and a river and a bad night. He thought of the long hall under the lamp, and the portrait of the young woman in white with her chin lifted. You'll make me look the way I wished I'd looked.
And under the letter, folded small, was a last thing.
It was a scrap of lined notepaper torn from a pad, in a rapid, forward-leaning script with high-crossed t's. He would have known it from across a room.
Told V. on the phone. Not C. yet. Sunday.
If I'm to do this I must do all of it. Esme. Cal. Nonie. Mother. Everything.
N. says I'm brave. I said I'm not, I'm just tired of being the other one.
Whatever happens: it was always the opposite of leaving.
There was a date at the top. Friday 14 Nov. 5.30.
The very afternoon she died.
He sat down. There was a chair behind him and he found it by blind instinct, the way a sick man finds a bed. He sat at the table with the note in his hand and the lamp throwing a hard bright circle on the bracelet and the photograph and the shining heap of buttons. The room went away from him by degrees, wall by wall, until there was nothing left but the paper and the small, plain, upright words.
I'm just tired of being the other one.
N. says I'm brave.
The opposite of leaving.
He had been right. That was the thing. He'd been right all along about the only question he had ever truly cared about. She hadn't been leaving. She'd been coming home. She had meant to walk in on Sunday with a fourteen-year-old girl by the hand and say, in the kitchen, in the flat voice she used for things that mattered, Cal, this is my daughter, and watch his face. She had been afraid he couldn't bear it. She'd been afraid of his anger, his loss, what it might do to a man who had stood in a corridor in 2020 and heard a doctor say eleven weeks. And she had gone out into a storm to put it right.
He put his face in his hands.
For a time the only sound in the room was the small dry ticking of the lamp. Then, quite gently, there was another: a thin glassy chiming, like a hand in the buttons. He looked up. A single small pearl one had rolled to the edge of the newspaper and hung there, trembling over the drop. As he watched, it tipped and fell and struck the floor with a clear bright ring.
Whatever happens.
He stayed where he was.
She was brave, he thought. She was braver than any of us. And hard on that, with a clean cold pang that was almost relief, like the first touch of the surgeon's knife: And somebody knew.
Somebody knew she was going to tell.