Chapter 38
Which of Us
The grave was on the slope above the Dunmere, in the old part of the cemetery at Alder Weir, under a copper beech, and the stone was so new that the lettering still looked wet.
ISABEL MARLOW WRAY. 1989–2025. SHE ANSWERED BACK.
He had chosen the words himself, in December, in a daze, at a mason's yard off Kemp Street, and hadn't been able to look at them since. The man had said, It's a bit unusual, sir. Most people go for beloved. And Callum had said, She wasn't most people, and then, because that sounded foolish, had added, she liked an echo.
He stood in front of it now at six in the evening on the last Sunday of June, with a paper cone of white roses in one hand and the other in his pocket, and read it, and found for the first time that he could.
The sun was low. It came in a long gold slant through the gaps in the beech, laying bars of light and shadow across the grass, and the bark of the great tree glowed a smooth ashy gray, like the skin of an elephant. It was quiet. Somewhere below, on the river, a boat's engine was turning over. A thrush sang on the churchyard wall. And on the grass, a few paces off, with her hands in her coat pockets and her cap in her hand, stood the woman who had asked to come.
"I can go," said Nora. "If you'd rather."
"No."
"I've never been. I thought of it every month. I'd get as far as the station." Her voice was low and dry. "I didn't think I had the right."
"Come here."
She came. She stopped beside him, a pace off, and stood looking down at the stone. They didn't touch. They stood side by side in the long gold light, a tall gaunt man in a gray suit and a slighter woman in a dark coat, two people at a grave, and the shadow of the beech fell over both of them and ran on down the slope.
SHE ANSWERED BACK.
"That's the best thing anyone's ever written for me," said Nora abruptly.
"It isn't for you."
"I know." She laughed shakily. "I know. I'm only saying."
They stood a long time.
"I want to ask you something," said Callum, "and you needn't answer."
"I've been answering things for a week. I'm quite used to it."
"The phrase."
"Which?"
"Well, there's a thing." He kept his eyes on the stone. "I've been turning it over for a month. You said she got it from you. You said you never said it. And I've listened to your voice reel till I can say the clips by heart." A breath. "It's in the fourth. At forty-two seconds. You say it in the radio play."
"I do."
"Where did you get it?"
She was silent for a time.
"I've asked myself," she said at last. "Since you asked me in the garden. I've gone back through everything. I've gone through every script I've ever done, every line, every play. It isn't there. It isn't in the text of the radio piece. I added it. I improvised it, on the day, in the booth, because it felt right." She looked at her hands. "And I thought: where did I get that? And I couldn't remember. I couldn't remember ever hearing it from anyone but her."
"So it was hers."
"That's what I thought. And then I rang my mother's old friend. Mrs. Lacey, who kept the sweet shop. She's ninety-one. I asked if she remembered my grandmother saying it." Her mouth shook. "She said, Oh, my dear. Every morning of your life."
He turned.
"Both," said Nora. "That's the answer. Or neither. I've no idea. My grandmother said it, and I said it, and Izzy heard me say it in a corridor at nineteen and said it back, and I heard her say it six weeks later and thought it was hers." Her eyes were wet. "That's what we were. That's what I've been trying to tell you. There wasn't an original. There was a game we played so long that the pieces got mixed. And the day she died I lost the only person who knew which of us had started which."
"I thought I loved her laugh."
"You did."
"I thought it was hers."
"It was." She said it quite steadily. "Callum. It was. She had it by then. She'd had it fifteen years. She did it in her own way, with her own hand, in her own kitchen, with you across the table. Whatever I started, whatever my grandmother started, by the time you saw it, it was Isabel's. It had gone through her and come out different." A faint smile. "That's the thing about a copy. It's never the same. It's always a little more her. I used to do the Dean of Studies, you know. Within a year I was doing the Dean of Studies as played by Izzy, because that's who he had become."
He said nothing.
"Do you know what Hester told me?" said Nora. "On the phone. That night. She said, You two weren't copies, you know. You were the same idea having two goes." She laughed. "I've written that on a card. I keep it in my wallet."
The light had moved. It lay now in a narrow bar across the foot of the grave, gilding the base of the stone, and the white roses in their paper cone glowed in his hand like something lit from inside.
He knelt. He laid them on the turf. He did it slowly and arranged them, and sat back on his heels with his hands on his knees. From the pocket of his coat he took a small, flat, brass object and held it in his palm.
"What is that?" said Nora.
"Yours."
He held it out. It lay in his hand in the sun, the size of a penny, worn bright at the edge by years of handling, with two small letters in a circle.
CP.
"I found it in the jar," he said. "At the bottom. Under the rest." He turned it over. "She kept it twenty years. Under four hundred others. I think it was the first."
Nora didn't take it.
She stood quite still with her arms at her sides. Her lips had parted. She looked at the little button on his palm with an expression he had never seen on her face, not on the platform, not in the garden, not even on the floor of his kitchen: an expression of utter, naked, helpless wonder, like a child who has found, at the back of a drawer, a toy it was sure was lost.
"It's from the cloak," she said.
"What cloak?"
"Sebastian's. The brother's. The one I wore at the Playhouse, when I was nineteen, the first time I played him. It came off in the wings. Izzy found it. She put it in her pocket." Her voice cracked. "She never told me. She said it was a joke. She said, you've lost a button, Nonie. And I said, keep it."
"She did."
"She kept it." Nora put her hand over her mouth. "All that time. She put it in the jar. The first." She began to laugh, and the laugh turned. "Oh, you stupid girl. Oh, you stupid, stupid girl. Why didn't you ever, why didn't you just—"
She couldn't finish.
He took her hand and turned it over, palm up, and laid the button in it and closed her fingers over it. Her hand was cold. It was a little bigger than Isabel's. The fingers were longer, the knuckles more prominent, the nails bitten short. A small scar, white and neat, ran across the base of the thumb where she must have cut it once on something. He hadn't seen it before. It wasn't on the other.
"There," he said.
"I can't."
"It's yours."
"It's hers."
"Which of you," said Callum gently, "do you think she'd have wanted to have it?"
She looked up.
In the slanting light, on the green slope, under the copper beech, with the wet-lettered stone beside them and the river shining far below, she looked at him with Isabel's eyes. They weren't Isabel's. They were lighter and sadder and more tired. They were a stranger's. They looked at him with a grave, shy, steady, questioning attention, the way you look at something you've been told about for years and have only now been allowed to see.
I see you, he thought. I see you.
I don't see her at all.
It was the oddest thing. It came to him on the grass, quite quietly, like a change in the weather. For nine weeks he had been afraid that the day would come when he'd look at that face and see only a likeness; that it would turn out to be a trick of the light, a cheap seduction, the face of a stranger wearing a dead woman's bones. But what he felt wasn't disappointment or loss. It was a settling. Something laid down. He looked at the woman in front of him and saw her entirely, the thin cheek, the bitten nails, the line of the jaw, the small scar on her thumb. He saw that she was herself, and that the other was gone, and that she had never been, and wouldn't be, and couldn't be asked to be, her.
"I thought I was looking for her," he said.
"I know."
"I was looking for you."
"I know that too." Her voice trembled. "I think she sent you."
"Perhaps."
"I think she wanted me to have somebody. After." The brass button was in her closed fist; she held it against her chest. "She used to say, if I go first, Nonie, you'll have Cal. I said she was being morbid. I said, he's yours. And she said, No one's anyone's. But you'll be all right with him. He looks at the carelessness."
He laughed. It came up out of him like water out of a well. He put his hand over his eyes.
"Oh, God," he said. "She said that?"
"She said it a lot."
"I don't, I'm not—"
"You are," said Nora, quite firmly. "You do." She wiped her face on the back of her sleeve. "You looked at me for a second in the Orangery and saw a woman who hadn't got a scar. That's the first thing you said. Not you look like her. You haven't a scar." She was laughing now, and crying, both together. "I thought: he's the only person I've ever met who'd notice that I was me."
They stood on the grass.
The sun went behind the beech. The light changed from gold to a cool bright gray, and a breath of wind came up the slope from the river, smelling of cut hay and water, and stirred the white roses and lifted the loose ends of the woman's hair. A long way below them, in the town, a church bell began to ring for Evensong.
Neither spoke. The stone said SHE ANSWERED BACK. The echo, if there was one, was in the bell.