Chapter 29
The Courtyard
He found her at six in the morning, sitting on the stone rim of the sundial with her hands in her lap, like a woman waiting for a bus that hasn't run in years.
He'd been given leave to walk. That was how Tilda put it: you can have half an hour in the garden, Mr. Wray, if you promise not to climb anything. She unlocked the glass door at the end of the corridor with a key from her belt and stood back with her arms folded, her round dark face solemn, a mother letting a boy out to play. He went down three steps into a gray dawn that smelled of box and wet earth, and the courtyard opened around him: four stone walls hung with ivy, a path of crushed shell, clipped hedges laid out in squares, and in the center the old sundial, a pillar of green-stained marble with a bronze dial, and a figure sitting beside it.
He stopped on the path.
She had her back to him. She wore a long dark coat, a gray woolen scarf wound three times round her neck, and a man's cap pulled low. She sat straight, ankles crossed, gloved hands folded, looking at the dial. It was too early for a shadow. The bronze plate was a dull flat disc in the dim light, and the little blade that casts the hour pointed at nothing. She seemed to be reading it.
He knew her before she moved. He knew her the way you know the weather coming. And yet his body didn't do what it had done at the tram stop, or the station, or the Orangery. There was no lurch. His heart didn't leave him like a bird from a hand. He stood on the shell path with his dressing-gown cord wound round his fist, looking at the straight narrow back, and felt instead a great still seriousness, like standing at a graveside when the coffin has been lowered and the first earth is in the priest's hand.
"Miss Albright," he said.
She didn't start. She sat a moment longer with her head bent. Then she took off the cap, slowly, and turned.
It was the first time he'd seen her in daylight.
It made a difference. In the Orangery, under the hanging lamps, and on the platform in the steam, he'd seen a face with the mask of his own need laid across it, so complete that he couldn't have said afterward what he had been looking at. Now, in the clear gray of the garden, with no one else to see, he saw a woman.
She was thirty-six. She was thinner than Isabel had been, with a shade more hollow under the cheekbones, and a fan of fine lines at the corner of each eye which Isabel, who had laughed more, had never quite had. Her hair was parted a little to the left and had a few threads of white. Her mouth was a little wider, and set differently, drawn down at one corner like a person used to holding back a remark. The gray eyes were lighter than he'd thought. They were red-rimmed and heavy, and they regarded him across ten feet of wet gravel with an expression he couldn't read.
It was the same face. And it wasn't. It was like looking at a painting and its first copy, side by side, one in good light and the other in bad: the same bones, the same plan, and in every detail that mattered a kind of difference, like two people who've been given the same words and have said them differently all their lives.
"You look like her," said Callum.
"I know."
"No. I mean you don't." He heard his own voice, rough, uncertain. "I thought you'd look more like her. I thought I'd see it at once. And I look at you, and I don't. I see someone I've never met."
"That," said Nora Albright, "is the kindest thing anyone has said to me in six months."
Her voice was low and dry and clearly her own. It had the northern vowels. It had a rueful, careful, self-mocking humor in it, the voice of someone who expects not to be believed and has decided to be amused. He felt something let go in the back of his neck.
"Dev rang me," she said. "On Monday. I don't know how he got the number. I think he stole it off the agency's list. He said you were in the Infirmary and that you had the letter. He said I should come." She smiled without joy. "He was weeping at the time. I've never heard a man weep so loudly down a telephone."
"He's a good friend."
"He's a frightened one." She looked down at her hands. "So am I. I took the early train. I've been sitting in this garden since five. The porter let me in. I said I was an aunt."
"Why did you come?"
"Because of what he said you'd read."
"I haven't told him what's in it."
"He didn't need to be told." She raised her eyes. They were wet. "He said, she wrote to him. That's all. She wrote to him. I put the telephone down and stood in my kitchen and shook for ten minutes."
They sat on the cold stone rim of the sundial, a yard apart, with the rising light on their faces. It was an awkward arrangement. She sat straight and he sat with his shoulders hunched; he was in a hospital dressing gown and she in her good black coat; and neither looked at the other. They looked at the hedges. A sparrow hopped on the path. From a window high above them came the faint clatter of breakfast trays.
"I'd like to tell you something," said Nora, "and I'd like you not to say anything until I've finished. Because if you do, I'll stop. I'm not brave. She was the brave one. I only get this one go."
"All right."
"I knew her. You know that now. You went to see Hester." A faint smile. "I rang her the same night, and she said, Nora, my dear, I have told that poor man everything, and I'm very sorry, and I'd do it again. She's eighty. She has a stick. She's the only teacher I ever loved."
"Go on."
"We were nineteen. Two girls in a corridor with the same face. I won't tell you what it was like, because it can't be told. It was like being a person who's been waiting all her life for a mirror and finally finds out that it can answer." She spoke very evenly. "It wasn't a game. I want you to understand that. I used to think people who talked about soulmates were soppy fools. But Izzy and I were something else. We passed things. She'd say something and I'd say it back. I'd laugh a certain way and a week later she'd be doing it. I don't know who started what. I honestly don't. After a year there wasn't a gesture in either of us that hadn't been in the other first."
"Three taps."
"I did that. I think." She frowned. "My grandmother did it, on the bread board, before she told a joke. I picked it up in her kitchen when I was four. But I couldn't swear it began with her. When you've held a thing for twenty years. It could have started anywhere." She shook her head. "She had a phrase. Well, there's a thing. It was hers, I always said so. She says it was mine."
"She said it was yours?"
"She said she got it from me." A long breath. "I said, I never said it in my life."
Callum looked at her.
"That's the sort of thing we did," said Nora. "That's the sort of thing we were. After a while there was no telling. And then there was Lantern Night."
She told him that. She told it quietly, without ornament, with her eyes on the gravel, in a way that was very like Miss Fenwick's and entirely different: not as a story, but as something she'd said so often to herself that the words had worn smooth. The bar, the cable, the boy in the wing. The inquiry. The weeping girl in the principal's study in a Varya costume, with her hands over her face.
"I'd swapped with her," she said. "She came to me at the half-hour. She was white. She said she had one of her heads, her migraines, and couldn't be at the desk, and if I'd sit it for her she'd owe me a favor for life. I said, of course. I always said, of course. She went to her dressing room, and I went to the desk in her coat. And at half past nine the bar came down."
"And Isabel said you hadn't."
"Isabel said I'd lied." The gray eyes were dry. "In front of the board. In front of a stranger in pearls. She said it so well. I heard it from the corridor." A crooked smile. "I've spent a great deal of my life able to tell when somebody was acting. And I stood outside that door and thought, she's wonderful. She's wonderful. She's saying it better than I could."
"Did you hate her?"
"For about six years."
"And then?"
"And then she wrote me a letter." Nora looked down. "In 2023. Out of nowhere. Four pages. She'd got my address from the agency. She said she'd spent twelve years looking for the words and none of them were good enough, so she was going to use the plain ones. I let you take it. I knew you'd take it. I was a coward and my mother paid the school and I let her. She said she'd never forgiven herself and wouldn't ask me to." A long pause. "I didn't answer for three months. Then I rang her. We talked for two hours, and neither of us said anything at all, we just breathed." She laughed shakily. "We'd both been waiting."
He sat still.
"We met," said Nora. "Secretly. Four times in two years. In motorway services. In a cathedral. We sat in a café in a town neither of us lived in and held hands across the table like lovers. She told me about you." Her voice cracked. "She told me everything. The shed at the end of the garden in Dunmere Bay. The jar. The time you cut your finger on the Gerard and wouldn't let her touch it. She said you were the only person in her life who had never once asked her to be anyone but herself." She turned her head and looked at him at last. "I think I hated you a little for that. I thought: he gets to have her. And I thought: he'll never know the half."
The sun had cleared the wall. It lay in a pale bar across the shell path, and the bronze of the sundial woke, and the little blade began, very faintly, to cast a hair of shadow on the dial.
"Why did you come to Carrow in May?" said Callum. "To the dinner."
"I didn't come. I live there." A tired smile. "I was asked to host. By the agency. I said no at first, and then I saw your name on the list." She turned her cap in her hands. "I wanted to see you. That's all. I wasn't going to speak. I was going to stand at the back and look at you for ten minutes. Because she'd told me what you were like, and I couldn't believe it."
"What did you think I would be like?"
"A man who counted her phone calls."
He stared at her.
"That's what I was told," said Nora, very low. "By a person who had every reason to know. That you were possessive. That you checked her mileage, her messages, her bank. That she was frightened of you." She flinched. "I wanted to see if it was true. I watched you give your speech. And I thought: oh. He's just sad." Her voice shook. "And then I laughed at something and tapped the table, and you looked up."
"Who told you that?"
She was silent.
"Miss Albright."
"Nora."
"Nora. Who told you I counted her calls?"
"I can't say."
"Was it a man in gloves?"
Her face didn't change. But she went white, from the hairline to the throat, the way a sheet goes white in bleaching sun, and her gloved hands tightened on the cap until the stitching creaked.
"Please," she whispered.
"Was it?"
"Please. Don't ask me."
"Were you on the bridge?"
It came out of him before he knew it was there. He heard it fall on the garden like a plate, and watched her flinch, and didn't take it back.
For a long moment she looked at him.
Her eyes were enormous. He saw her whole face change; he saw every muscle in it tighten and let go; and in the gray depths of her eyes something rose, a dark huge shape like a fish surfacing, and turned, and went down again into the deep.
"No," said Nora Albright.
She said it quite steadily. She said it with her chin lifted and her hands clenched, and a drop of water running down her cheek and falling on the gloved knuckle. And Callum, who had spent twenty years reading surfaces, and had told a hundred students that a copy is always more careful than the original, felt with a dull cold sinking of the heart that he had never heard a lie so well made.
"I'll go," she said.
"Nora."
"I'll go now." She rose. She put on the cap and drew it down and stood a moment on the gravel with her hands pressed to her sides. "I can't tell you the rest. There's my brother. There's a place at a clinic that somebody pays for, and I can't, I can't, you don't understand what they'd do." She drew breath. "But you've got the painting. She told me. She told me she'd sent it. When you've cleaned it, ring me. If you still want to. And then I'll tell you why I'm afraid."
"What's in it?"
"The truth about her mother." She turned. She walked away along the shell path between the box hedges, quick and straight and small, a dark figure in the pearl-gray light. At the gate she stopped with her hand on the iron and looked back.
"Callum."
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry about the shoe." Her mouth shook. "It's a stupid thing. But I could have stopped. I saw you. I knew it would tell you." A small broken laugh. "I couldn't help it. I've done it for twenty years. I didn't know it was hers."
She went out.
He sat on the cold marble in the new sun with his dressing-gown cord wound round his hand and listened to her footsteps going away down the lane behind the wall, light, uneven, quick, fading into the noise of the waking city. The shadow of the little blade on the dial beside him crept a hair's breadth across the bronze and touched the first small figure of the day.