Dear Thief: A Novel Read online

  Then one night the following winter, when they were away again, you took the Safavid vase from the mantelpiece, laid it sideways on its great copper belly on the table and began arranging fruit in the enormity of its mouth. This task took you two hours. First a watermelon, a polished planet filling the opening, and in front of it plums, an apple, a quince, some damsons, some red-currants that spilt out onto the table. You left it there for two weeks until the melon had collapsed inwards and sent a river of juice over the vase rim, and in this swam the flaccid damsons and the remains of the redcurrants. The apple and quince were withered and furrowed as anxious old brows. The plums were a low mossy outcrop. You pointed at the new darkness behind it all, the darkness that was the inside of the vase and which had been revealed by decay, and when you pointed at it, it was true that it emanated with a kind of force, a ravenousness.

  The photograph you took of it was bawdy and bold. You called it Still Life with Irascible Hole, after Roger Fenton’s infamous Still Life with Ivory Tankard and Fruit. Vanitas, you explained, was the art of symbolic still life to represent the passing of transitory things and the emptiness they leave. In Fenton’s photograph the fruit was rude with ripeness and the dark opening of the tankard relatively small, like a carp’s mouth agape. In yours, the dark opening of the Safavid vase was more a beast mid-roar. In his, the emptiness threatened in the way a beautiful red dawn threatens the day, but in yours the threat was fulfilled and the day was done. His was subtle, but halfway measures have never been for you. It was a photograph that threw death at your face. But all the same it was lovely to look at in all its sepia richness, the glowing of the copper, the glossy juices and shining, sagging pulp that were full of your fearfulness. ‘It’s yours,’ you said. ‘For you, my dearest friend, to remind us that our days on Earth are numbered, and the numbers are not that big.’ You winked, you flashed a smile. ‘Thank you, Nina,’ I said.

  Us in the tunnel, up the tree, by the fire, in the lane, on the sofa, at the stove, behind the camera, on film, the various nouns and prepositions of our lives over several years. You appearing one day in a cream crochet shawl that your parents had bought you for your twenty-first birthday and which seemed at once to confirm and reinvent you. You sauntered in tall and vulnerable and with an air of magnificent poverty about you, tossed your hair, flung the shawl like a matador his cape, and grinned.

  You on the floor by the fire, roasting yourself until the silver cobra that wound up your right forearm began to burn your skin, which prompted you to turn and roast the other side. Your camera by your feet, your dark hair to your waist, your earlobes flushed and your back bent forward. Those strong, rough-skinned hands holding the Upanishads: What remains when old age comes, when decay begins, when the body falls?

  But you looked so old and sad when we saw you last. I am plagued by this—by your crochet shawl, in particular, once creamy as a new lamb; when you came back for the last time it was filthy and torn, but torn in just one place, and this single tear—with the white of your shoulder coming through like some fallen rampart—betrayed a loss of dignity far greater than if you had stood naked in public. You were hunched, and there was something cruel about your face, though, when I think about it now, it might have been a cruelty reflected onto it from the world, and not one coming from within. But then what is the difference, when all’s said and done? A face is cruel or it isn’t, it lets itself become that way or it doesn’t.

  Are you better? I am not naive; it seems clear to me that there is something very wrong in a language that uses the same word to mean ‘improved’ and ‘cured’. By better I mean only improved. You telephoned us from the station and I went to collect you. You were standing at the end of the platform with your head down and your weight off one foot, in the way I’ve seen wounded wolves stand in films like Once Upon a Time in the West—not that I have seen this film, but this is how I imagine it to be. It had been almost two years since we had seen you before that. When I got you home and we asked where you had been, you said, ‘I’ve been in an elevator, going up and down.’ So we sat you out in the garden at the mossy table and gave you tea, and asked you again. ‘I’ve been in an elevator, looking for love.’

  ‘For two years?’ we asked.

  ‘Love is hard to find.’

  The garden was blowing with leaves and Nicolas put his elbows on the table with an attempt at anchorage and a seriousness that was almost morbid. He said, ‘So did you find it?’

  ‘I didn’t find the one. But I found a lot of people I wasn’t looking for, and I made do.’ He asked, ‘Who were you looking for?’ and you told him, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

  He stood sharply and walked indoors. Your moods were the stuff of legend, and that day your mood could only be described as dangerous—languorous, facetious, self-absorbed; you were amused by yourself and this was the worst of all possible states, because it was the kind of amusement I imagine Caiaphas felt when he made a deal with the Devil. The amusement is a mask for the wretchedness we feel for striking up an unhappy alliance—in your case this alliance was with yourself, whom you had long thought badly of and were always escaping. But on that day it was as though you had recognised that you owned only yourself, were shipwrecked with yourself, and your mood reflected your disgust at this most desperate, careless misfortune.

  Later that evening you went on the train to London and Nicolas went with you. ‘I’m getting out’ was the last thing you said to me when the two of you left for the station. He came back alone two days later, and that was that where the three of us were concerned.

  Get out of what? This mess, this life? I have always wondered—and I will only ask you once—did you manage it, did you get out?

  Teddy was here yesterday; his arrival made me put down my pen for the first time in days. He came to visit for the night on his way to see friends for New Year’s Eve, but he brought no bags as such, just an extraordinary array of energy drinks and some crash weight-gain powder that he had as pudding with a glass of wine, as part of a prolonged attempt at gaining breadth. He has grown up willowy like my father, without Nicolas’ sturdiness—but this strikes me as strange when I write it, because Nicolas was a slender man when younger and hardly (what would you say?) burly himself. It’s just that, at twenty-two, Teddy is taller than Nicolas ever was and doesn’t have that thickset neck and jaw, and the prominent Adam’s apple, the sheer masculinity, and it bothers him. Wrongly, but all the same.

  The thing is that I see very little of Teddy lately, and when he visited this time it was to tell me that I will see even less of him still. In four days, January 3rd, he is taking his camera and travelling around eastern Europe for a few months to photograph the forests, to travel to Lithuania in particular. Perhaps to find a wife, he said. English women stifle him. We were out on a night walk by the river at the time; the skies were clear after days of snowy cloud, and he wanted to show me the arrangement of Jupiter and Venus on a rare cross-path, one above the other in the western sky, rather like lights on some stupendous radio tower.

  We saw the planets sure enough. I thought they looked rather alien-invasion and wondered why I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘Things are rarely seen without being looked for,’ Teddy said with that palladian, harmlessly arch tone that sounded strange coming from somebody whose nappies I had once changed. Yet I respect him and he shows himself routinely worthy of it in the things he knows or thinks or feels, for example when he insisted that we try to see the planets, and the sky in general, in reflection in the water, because a sky without a reflection is just the sky in profile. I discovered on that walk that my son loves reflections, he loves and requires symmetry. But though we stood at several points along the bank in the grainy mulch of mud and thawing snow, and though the city found some crude reflection, the river was too wide, full and flowing with meltwater to reflect any of the subtleties of the sky. We stood pointlessly in the way people do when they have come to see something and end up seeing nothing.

  ‘But Lithuania,’
I said to him. ‘It’s too far away.’ He took my hand hesitantly. ‘In the scheme of things, it’s just around the corner,’ he replied, and I could only say, ‘Not in my scheme of things.’ ‘Well, I’ll send you photographs, one a week.’ But I knew that, even with the best will in the world, he would not, so I suggested, ‘Send me one—just one—make it a good one.’

  Five years after you finally disappeared I found a postcard from you in Teddy’s bedroom. It was 1991, so he must have been eleven at the time. It bore a picture of a chihuahua on the front wearing a Tommy Cooper hat, and on the back a Lithuanian stamp. I haven’t seen the postcard itself for years, but I do still remember the picture on the stamp, which was a castle, and I remember this because Teddy was very much into castles and fortresses at that time and had drawn a tiny knight in its turret and another on a horse approaching at speed from the far left, above the words Dear Teddy.

  In the card’s short message you claimed to be living in the desert, and it bothered him immensely that you had not said which desert; he had looked at his atlas to see if there were deserts in Lithuania and found there were none to speak of. When I asked him about the postcard, this was his only concern, that he might discover which desert you meant. He thought perhaps you were referring to the dunes along the spit, down to Nida—could people live in dunes? He had a look of respect and despair when he asked that, which implied that of all the women he knew, past, present and future, you were the one who could most plausibly live alone in sand dunes.

  I did not have the heart to tell him that as likely as not there was no desert and that he had been flung a metaphor. It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else. You try to dig with it and it bends in half. This is not the kind of woman you can expect to get something straight from, I wanted to tell him. It made me feel defensive of him, because he was a child and still in the habit of taking you at face value, of worrying about and trusting you.

  I am sure that his trip to Lithuania is a delayed response to the call of that postcard, but I decided not to bring it up. I have always wanted him to live life fully and not to be afraid, and not to put barriers in his way—above all else, not to be the barrier itself. Instead, as we left the river and walked up through the streets, I decided to change topic by asking him what was wrong with English girls.

  ‘They don’t know anything about the world,’ he said. So I asked, ‘And other girls do?’ He ruffled his hair with his fingertips as Nicolas has always done. ‘I don’t know yet.’ I suggested that maybe it is because we live on an island, and islanders are always more closed off from the world, and he turned to me with his grey eyes narrowed and said, ‘Mind you, I do have a thing for Jean Shrimpton.’

  I laughed. ‘Jean Shrimpton! She’s older than me now.’ ‘What, did she used to be younger than you?’ he asked. He made a square with the thumb and forefinger of both hands. ‘You know the picture I love best? The one of her with the white scarf around her head.’ He loosed his hands upwards in adulation. ‘Ah, she looks so perfect in that one.’ I said, ‘Where she looks like a young girl, you mean?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Vulnerable, unblemished—’ ‘Underage.’ ‘Exactly.’

  Then he gave that smile of disruptive mischief that I’ve known him to have since he was weeks old, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement, suddenly serious, and looked directly up at the clear sky.

  ‘You know when I see stars I always think about . . .’ He left a pause, so I invaded it. ‘When you see stars you should think about stars, Teddy.’ I said it with frustration, admonishment, though I had meant to be more delicate than that. And I regretted saying it, because he looked at the ground without reply and appeared to shrink into the old shape of himself as a child.

  He was going to say, in case you missed the nuance, that stars make him think about the holes of light that beamed through your shawl the day you arrived at our back door. He has made the observation more than once before. It is funny how deeply affected we can be by the smallest things that happen in childhood—I have no doubt he still sees you exactly as he did that day, raising your arms against the spring glare and growing wings. His vocabulary was limited more or less to nouns in animal picture books then, and I will always remember his glee at having a word for what he saw: butterfly! This great, dark-winged vision leaking light as if bullet-holed. Two decades later he still packs the truth of you into this vision etched on his one-year-old retina and thinks of you as eternally magical and light-shot, so that even the stars are first and foremost reminders of you.

  Should I, his mother, disabuse him of this view? Should I say to him, Teddy, Butterfly is not quite the creature the name implies. Or should I let him see the good in you and have him run with this glorious vision he has: you with your head thrown back in laughter, you with a copy of the Upanishads quoting May we never hate one another while your eye gleams wickedly, you wrapped in the shawl and stoking the fire in the woods as the sun comes up, you in the dunes, negotiating and renegotiating your terms with every shifting grain of sand so that they allow you to make permanent home amongst them.

  Am I being unfair? Perhaps you are a tender creature after all and perhaps Teddy’s notion is the truest. There are butterflies that survive winters. To be resilient is not always to be hard. If your nickname were purely ironic it would never have survived so long, surely, and you would have shrugged it off as you shrugged off everything that no longer suited you. I cannot say for sure that Teddy is wrong in his assessment, this is the thing, and so I let yet another subject go.

  My own father once said that your children are beautiful to you in a way that nothing else is; as a girl I remember him telling me about my beauty as if he were outlining a profound fact, or setting out a singular truth. It was not a description, because that would suggest it was from his point of view; no, it was an explanation of my very particular beauty as known by him, the world expert on his subject. He knew something about me that I would never be able to know myself; he knew it because he was my parent and preceded me, and could see into all the voids from which I’d sprung. And as soon as I became a parent I could acquire that piercing vision and could know and see the same as my father had known and seen. It is such a steady love you feel for your child—bottomless and generous—and all afternoon I have missed Teddy, and every time he goes I miss him, as if each time he falls once and for all from the face of the Earth.

  Somehow I feel fraudulent to have written most of the last few pages in January, after Teddy left the country, and to have made it sound like I was still referring to ‘yesterday’. In fact I went back to work on New Year’s Eve and haven’t had time for this letter since.

  More than this, I am aware that I haven’t been completely truthful and I wonder why. How can it be that we can begin something wholeheartedly and slip, so quickly, into guarded omissions and liberties with the truth? Under the circumstances the goodness of human nature is very quick to buckle, don’t you think? But then, of course you agree, and you hardly need me to point it out.

  So a dilemma arises: let’s say you lie in a letter, or maybe not even lie as such but just write something that is not completely honest, or omit something that might have been important to add. Do you edit that letter with an infill of truth so that the reader never knew there was a lie, which might mean removing or rewriting a page or two, or even starting again with a new, robustly direct approach? Or do you admit the lie, as I have done, and remove nothing, and be transparent for good or bad? And isn’t the admittance of a lie more honest, anyway, than a truth arrived at through editing?

  I have wondered about this kind of thing for the last hour, sitting here turning the piece of Roman jet in my hand and trying distractedly to think of ways of describing it. This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable. This Roman jet, for example, which
is a thimble-sized amulet bust of a man with angled cheekbones and gaze of steel, who might be an athlete according to Nicolas, and who might also be made of carbonised wood and not jet at all. I treasure him, but the longer I look at him the less able I am to say anything that would make anybody else feel the same, or even anything that justifies why I feel that way myself.

  Yet this instinct, Butterfly, that I should simply record things for good or bad, as I said. I suppose I have gradually come to believe that what’s written cannot simply be amended to suit some later preference and so I have decided this is the way I will go on, writing without amendments, transparently, yes, see-throughably, as though any of what I wrote mattered in the slightest. All you can do is trust me, even though I might be writing one thing and thinking another. While I write my spare hand might be doing anything, for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach. But of course it isn’t, dear Butterfly! All I mean is: aren’t written words strange in this way, so inscrutable, all hurrying together on the paper to cover up reality like a curtain drawn across a stage.

  Come on then, I hear you say. What was this frightful lie?

  As I told you, it is not really a lie so much as an omission, and the omission is Nicolas. I went to great lengths to describe to you what happened on the night of my grandmother’s death, including the bones, the falling away of the gauze, the pedantic detail of orange street light on my kneecap, the two monks and their groceries, and so on, and it feels now that all of this might have been just deflection, as if describing effects without mentioning a cause, and I don’t know why I would have done this.

  You see, as well as finding a pile of animal bones on the Thames shore that night, I also found Nicolas; he was crouching on the shale, by the water, and he seemed to be scrutinising something there. Of course, I didn’t know he was Nicolas then, he was just a stranger without detail—a drunk, I thought, an eccentric, homeless possibly. He was there when I made my way back to my grandmother’s house with the bones wrapped up in my dress, but we didn’t speak. You do not want to come across a man when you are alone there at night. Probably I should not have been on my own there at all. But when I got back to my grandmother’s door I realised I had dropped one of the bones, and I noticed because it had been one of the more unusual. A cow shin, I’ve since assumed, and the longest and finest of the heap I had picked up. It had been washed down so much by the river currents that it was perfect, without any torque, almost like a purpose-made musical bone or a razor clam—at least that is how I remember it. I tipped the other bones onto the doorstep and, without going indoors, I went back to the river.