Chapter 9
The Things Between the Pages
She opened it in the kitchen, at midnight, with the door closed and the light turned down and a pair of kitchen scissors, as she opened every box that came to her in the archive.
It was a habit that no grief could break. She laid out a clean white tea towel on the scarred pine table, and she put the box in the middle of it, and she stood for a minute with her hands flat on either side, looking. It was an ordinary brown cardboard carton, twenty inches by fourteen, stamped on the lid with a printed number and the crest of the county constabulary. Somebody had taped it shut with a wide strip of red evidence tape that said, in white capitals, SEALED. DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT BY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL, and then, below it, in blue biro, in Quill's cramped upright hand: Released to next of kin. T.Q.
The scissors went through the tape with a sound like a zip. She lifted the flaps.
The smell came up first.
She had not expected that. It rose from the box in a soft warm cloud and took her by the throat before she could close her mouth: lemon soap, and wool, and the faint salt-and-cedar scent of his skin on a collar, and underneath it the damp wool smell of the old gray overcoat. It was him. It was so entirely and unmistakably him that she put both hands over her face and stood bent double over the table, breathing it in through her fingers, shaking.
When she could, she began to catalogue.
One gray wool overcoat, Marks & Spencer, size L, with a loose button on the left cuff. One blue shirt, folded. One white shirt, folded. Two pairs of socks, black, one pair darned at the heel in her own green thread. One toilet bag, containing: toothbrush, tube of toothpaste (half used), razor, a bar of lemon soap in a plastic dish. One pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses, the left arm bent. One mobile-phone charger, white, the lead looped round and tied with a twist of wire.
She laid each thing on the tea towel in a row. She did it quietly, with the care she would have given the possessions of a stranger. She did not let herself feel. She let her hands do it, and her eyes, and the cold clear methodical part of her mind that wrote labels. And when the carton was nearly empty she took out the last of it, wrapped in a clear plastic sleeve, with a tag.
It was the blue enamel mug. It had been washed. Somebody, some stranger in a police laboratory, had rinsed out the tea and the brown film and dried it, and it was clean, and chipped, and cold, and perfectly empty. It sat in her palm like an egg.
She put it down on the tea towel, very gently, at the end of the line.
There was a smaller object at the bottom of the box. It was wrapped in a layer of tissue paper, and when she took it out and peeled the paper away, she found the book.
It was heavier than she remembered. She turned it over. The cracked spine. The coffee ring on the cover. The faded gilt lettering, almost gone: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. A label from the police property store had been stuck to the back, and under it, in the corner, someone had scribbled a number and a date and initials. It had been through a stranger's hands. It had been opened and fanned and held up to the light. A police officer, she thought, had flicked through this on a Saturday, looking for a note. Had found none. Had put it in a bag.
The book. Before anyone else.
She sat down at the table.
The kitchen was quiet. The rain had stopped, and in its place there was the soft drip of the downpipe outside the window, the tick of the cooling boiler, the faint breathing of the old house settling around her in the dark. Upstairs a floorboard creaked and was still. She laid the book on the white cloth, in the cone of the lamp, and put her hand on its cover.
For D. So you always know the sea is coming back. A.
She had written that herself, on a Wednesday afternoon in September 1990, at this table, with her tongue between her teeth. She had agonized for three hours. She had written four drafts on the backs of old catalog cards. For the man who comes home. For D., who reads the same book forever. For my own Dantès. They had all sounded stupid. In the end she had written the simplest thing she could think of, because it was true: that whatever else happened, the tide would turn, the water would come back, and that she would be on the shore.
She had given it to him on the first anniversary, wrapped in brown paper, and he had opened it, and read the inscription, and gone quiet. He had said, Oh, Mara. He had held it against his chest with both hands. And then he had said something strange. He had said, in a low rough voice, Nobody's ever given me a thing I could keep.
Don't be silly, she had said. You've got a house full of things.
No, said Daniel. You don't understand. I mean a thing that's mine.
She had laughed and kissed him. She had not heard it. She had not heard it for sixteen years.
She opened the book.
It fell open at a place near the middle, where the spine was broken, and something slid out of the gutter and landed on the tea towel with a small flat click.
It was a key.
She stared at it. It lay on the white linen in the lamplight: a small brass key, no longer than her little finger, with a round bow worn smooth by thumbs and a short notched shank. It was tied through the bow with a loop of string to a luggage tag, a buff paper one, soft with age, and on the tag, in faded black ink, in a hand she knew better than her own, were a letter, a full stop, a letter, and three numbers.
H.S. 114.
Her fingers went numb. She did not pick it up. She sat with her hands pressed between her knees and looked at it, as one looks at a snake that has dropped from a branch, and then, slowly, as if she were reaching into a cage, she took hold of the book with both hands and shook it.
A sheet of paper dropped out.
It was a small page, creamy and thin, torn from the sort of pocket notebook that sold for two pounds in any stationer's, and it had been folded in four. It was damp with years. It was a little brown at the creases. She opened it flat on the table, with the edge of her thumbnail, and smoothed it, and bent over it with her breath held, and for a long minute she did not read the words at all. She only looked at the handwriting.
It was Daniel's. It was cramped and slanting and a little too heavily pressed, the writing of a man who had learned his letters late and had never stopped being careful of them. But it was not his everyday hand. It was shakier. The ink was blue. In several places the pen had gone through the paper.
Mara,
If you are reading this, I could not tell you myself, and I am more sorry than I know how to say. I meant to. I wanted to tell you every day for fifteen years. It was never the right day. It was never going to be.
Everything I have ever said to you about myself was true except for the facts. I need you to believe that. Please believe that.
Do not trust M. I cannot say more here. I cannot be sure who will find this. If it is you, then the key opens the place where the rest of it is. Go there alone. Tell no one. When you have read it, there is a woman in Dunmarrow who will help you. Ruth Anselm, Harcourt Square. Her number is on the back.
Where the dead are kept, so is the rest. You will know it when you see it. I know you will understand.
Whatever you decide to think of me when you have finished, remember that there was one thing I never lied about. It was you.
D.
She read it once. She read it a second time, slowly, with her finger moving beneath the lines. And then she turned it over, with a hand that she could not feel, and found on the back, in smaller letters, a telephone number with a Dunmarrow dialling code, and, beneath it, three more words, pressed so deep into the paper that they had left a ridge on the other side.
Friday, eleven. Remember.
She did not scream. She did not cry. She did not move. She sat at the table in the yellow lamplight with the note in one hand and the key in the other, for perhaps ten minutes, and in that time she was aware of a number of things with a perfect lucid precision, as one is aware of the details of a room in the instant before a car crash.
She was aware of the sound of her own heartbeat, quick and light and fluttering, like a bird in a paper bag. She was aware of the smell of him from the open box. She was aware of the clock on the wall, which said ten to one. She was aware of the old kitchen, her kitchen, with its blue cupboards and its terracotta tiles, slowly and silently turning into the set of a play. And she was aware that she was not, any longer, in the same room as the woman who had sat down at that table an hour before.
Everything I have ever said to you about myself was true except for the facts.
She said it aloud. It came out of her in a croak. Except for the facts.
It was an extraordinary sentence. It was the sentence of a man who had spent a long time, in a long dark room, working out how to say something that could not be said. It was a sentence that was both a confession and an apology and a plea. And it was, she thought, with a kind of wild frozen astonishment, entirely typical of him. It was the sort of thing he did. He took the truth and he turned it carefully in the light until he had found the one angle at which it did not cut.
Do not trust M.
Her mind went to it like a tongue to a broken tooth. M. She went through them in order, one after another, with the clinical speed of the archive. Martin. She felt her stomach lurch. No. Don't. He was the first person she thought of, and she thought of him with a kind of horrified tenderness, and put him away at once, because it was not possible. Because it was Martin. Because he had driven her to Dunmarrow in the rain and held her up at the graveside and wept in a church.
Marianne. Margaret. Michelle. Miss. A woman, she thought, with a bitter little twist of the mouth. It would be a woman. It was always a woman, in the plays. Do not trust M. She felt it come over her like a slow flush, the shame and the rage and the cold, the old bitter dull ache of every betrayed wife in every cheap paperback. She saw a woman's hand on the back of his neck. She saw a hotel. She saw him bending to kiss someone in a doorway, with the same sweet awkward tenderness with which he had kissed her under the dripping bronze soldier.
Don't be absurd, said a cool voice somewhere far back in her head. You've never seen a man less able to lie.
Except for the facts.
She put the note down on the cloth.
There was one more thing, and she almost missed it.
It had been tucked into the back of the book, behind the endpaper, where the cloth of the binding had come away from the card. She would not have found it if she had not, at last, pressed her thumb to the inside back cover as she pressed it to the cover of every old volume that passed through her hands, to feel for the hollow. It crackled. She slid two fingers into the gap, and drew it out.
It was a photograph.
It was a small square print, four inches across, of the sort that came back from the chemist's in a paper wallet in the days when a camera had to be taken to be developed. The colors had gone warm and soft and slightly green with age. It had been handled so often that the white border was furred and the corners had been rounded by thumbs. She laid it under the lamp and bent over it, and her breath stopped.
A man and a small boy were sitting on a river bank in the sun.
It was summer, high summer, hot and white and blinding. Behind them a shallow brown river ran over stones, and there was a willow trailing in it, and a flattened place in the reeds where somebody had set down a bucket and a plastic rod. The man had his arm around the boy's shoulders. The boy, who was perhaps nine, thin and brown and gap-toothed, with a cowlick of dark hair standing up at the crown, was holding up a fish. It was a silver fish as long as his forearm, dripping, enormous, and he was laughing at the photographer with the whole of his face, with a joy so complete and so unself-conscious that it seemed to come up off the paper like heat.
The man was Daniel.
It was her husband, thirty-four years old, in a shirt she did not know and a haircut she had never seen, with his sleeves rolled and a smear of mud on his forearm. He was not looking at the camera. He was looking at the boy. He was looking at him with an expression she had never in fifteen years seen on his face, not once, not in the church or the hospital or the bed. It was the face of a man looking at the only thing in the world that has ever been wholly his.
She turned the picture over. On the back, in faded pencil, in the same cramped slanting hand as the note, there were four words and a date.
Dan & Kit. Aug 1996.
She read it. She read it again. And all at once she was cold.
Kit.
It was a name she had never heard. She went through the people she knew like a woman going through a card index, quickly, with practiced fingers: nephews, cousins, the sons of friends, the children of the yard. There was no Kit. There was nobody at all. Her husband, who had held every one of the children on Marsh Lane at some time or other on his knee, who had stood in the nursery of a friend's house in the spring of 1999 and wept silently with his face turned to the wall, her husband, who had held her through three losses and had never once, in fifteen years, said I wish, had a photograph of a boy of nine whom he had loved, and had kept it in a book.
Nobody's ever given me a thing I could keep, he had said.
Her head swam. A tight knot of nausea rose in her throat, and she swallowed it, and bent again over the small bright square of the photograph. The boy's smile. The cowlick. A gap in the front teeth, left side. She did not know why it troubled her. She thought, for no reason, of a gray hood in a wet street.
Don't, said the cool voice at the back of her head. Don't make it fit. You've known a boy's name for four minutes.
She put it down, face up, in the center of the cloth. She took the page. She turned it to the note again, and read the last line in the dark pressed ridges of the pen, Where the dead are kept, so is the rest. You'll know, and did, finally, what a woman does who has spent twenty years turning old paper to the light. She took the photograph, the note, and the key, and laid them side by side in a row on the white cloth, as she would have laid out three items in an accession.
One photograph, color print, c. 1996. Two figures, one identified as D. Hale. Verso: pencil inscription.
One note, autograph, blue ink. Undated.
One key, brass, with luggage tag.
Provenance, she thought. Unknown.
H.S. 114. She thought of the phone book on the shelf in the hall, thick as a brick, the yellow pages. Harbourside. Hartley. Harvey & Sons. She would look in the morning. There would be a storage firm. There would be a number, and a door, and a long drive down the motorway in the rain. And there would be Martin, at the end of the telephone, ready to help.
Do not trust M.
And then, because she was alone and it was one in the morning and there was no one to see, she put her head down on her folded arms on the table, in front of the three small objects, and wept for the man she had buried that day, and for the man she had never met, and for a boy with a fish.