Dear Thief: A Novel Read online

  He was still there when I got back, but this time he was sitting on the slope of the flood barrier with his legs outstretched and ankles crossed, gazing out—and he turned around. I saw him do that and I thought he was about to speak, then he turned back to the river. Not the murdering type, I told myself. Too healthy in the face: large jaw, dimpled chin, plump lips, dark eyes; not killing anyone, too kind. Young, handsome, proud-looking; he had looked at me uncertainly as if worried that he was worrying me, and that was when he turned away. I wish men would not do this. But it didn’t matter anyway, because I suddenly had no fear of him. Somewhere between his intention to speak and his decision not to, I realised my grandmother had died—it was as if my certainty grew out of his lack of it and, because of this exchange between us, I felt completely unafraid. I picked my way down the slope, just a few feet from him, and started scouring the beach. It was only after I had been looking for the bone for a minute or two that he called to me.

  ‘What did you lose?’ And so I said, without thinking, ‘My grandmother’ and I lifted my chin defiantly and took him in for the first time.

  He had the hair of a king; I could imagine women running wax through it. Thick, curly and dark, and dark serious brows. ‘Careless,’ he said.

  Then he stood and made his way down the slope in two sideways strides. He took something out of his pocket, took a torch from the other pocket and shone the light onto his opened palm. ‘The tail of a peacock,’ he said. I glanced it over and he explained, ‘A broken half of a figurine from Victorian times, or maybe before. I found it a few weeks ago on the shore near Blackfriars Bridge.’ So I said, partly because I was annoyed with his flippancy about my grandmother, and partly because I had no idea what else to say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  He lifted one of those heavy brows and turned the peacock in his palm a couple of times before putting it back in his pocket. ‘Do you mean your grandmother has died?’

  When I nodded he showed an expression that surprised me—sorrow; no, not sorrow. I don’t know how to explain it, except that you will know it anyway, that expression he has always had in which his whole life turns up for a moment in his eyes. He might be thinking anything, though in fact there probably is no thought he could single out. The most ineffable of looks—I put that down to the moonlight at the time, though I realise now of course it is nothing to do with the light. It is a look that fuses poles. It could be fear, then and again it could just as easily be peace; I always think, when I see it, of the way very hot water can feel cold for a moment—there is some point of intensity where one thing can be experienced as its opposite, and that is the intensity I am talking about in his expression.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you lose something on this shore and you keep looking for it, one day it’ll turn up. It’s widely believed that the river reunites all things.’

  I wasn’t sure if this fatalism was supposed to be his attempt at solace, as if death unites all things, as if one day I would find my grandmother again; anyway, I was not consoled. I was needled. His openness wrong-footed me, his candid, unproblematic face, which I knew (consciously, even at the time) I would fall for because it was not like mine, and which made me bad-tempered because it had taken away my power to decide what I wanted and didn’t.

  ‘I suppose you think it’ll offer up the other half of your figurine?’ I asked finally, when I realised he had said all he was going to say on the subject of my grandmother. And he replied instantly, ‘I do.’ ‘So will you be coming to look for it for the rest of your life?’ Again, instantly he said, ‘Surely that depends on how soon I find it.’

  We crouched at the bottom of the slope, in the marsh grasses. ‘I’ve come back to find one of the bones I dropped,’ I said, and before I could go on he intervened with, ‘I guessed.’ ‘A long one,’ I said, ‘I thought it was worth the return trip. Maybe I dropped it when I climbed up here.’

  He said I didn’t seem to have; I had to agree. I looked at him in profile, at the proud curve of his nose, at his lips that rose permanently at the corner in a smile, at his overall slapdash elegance as he sank deep and loose into that crouch. And me deep and loose in mine too, because I am a natural croucher, but not elegant, more functional, as if I have been designed to hinge at extreme angles for a purpose still, at the age of fifty-two, not discovered.

  ‘The Thames is full of loot,’ he said. ‘Maces, axes, swords, half peacock figurines, coins, Roman shoes, pipes, pots, cannonballs, cufflinks. Bones, of course—as you know. Animal and human—some of them might have been Neolithic ritual offerings.’ ‘Do you think mine are Neolithic ritual offerings?’ I asked, and he looked east along the river. ‘Very much doubt it.’ ‘But you haven’t even seen them.’ Then, I remember, he reeled in his gaze rapidly until it was fixed on my mouth. ‘So why did you ask me?’

  He watched me at an angle as if taking in something extremely curious, and then we got back to our feet; my blood had rushed and I’d felt for a moment that the moon was hurtling. ‘I’m sorry about your grandmother,’ he said, and took my hand to help me up the slope.

  ‘Please don’t be, she was happy. She always fed her dogs fresh mince and red-wine gravy, and put two eggcups of brandy in their water to give them good dreams—her heart was good and big. Heaven will find room for her, please don’t be sorry.’

  ‘I meant I was sorry for you.’

  I told him he mustn’t be.

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘When you first looked at me from over there.’

  He opened and closed his mouth without managing to produce a word, and when he saw I was smiling he did so too. Mine was a smile dredged up from somewhere thick with the overpowering smell of incense. My mother had always burnt eucalyptus, holy basil, cardamom, ginger grass, lemon grass, palmarosa, brought back from her trips to Kerala, and that was the smell of home. Now it smoked up heavily in my nostrils as if I were catching my own scent.

  When I told him I had to go back, he said, ‘Come on then.’

  If it struck me as strange that he was coming with me, that I didn’t refuse, that he’d known about the bones despite never having looked up the first time I went past, that he’d assumed my grandmother’s death without the slightest doubt, or even that I had assumed that death without doubt, well then this strangeness was nothing to be marvelled at. We were not living in normal times just for the moment. We walked.

  We stopped when we had reached the pile of bones on the doorstep. When I bent to them my head filled with tears as if I were a bucket being emptied, and I sobbed, because I had no idea how I would move her or what to do with a dead person.

  ‘Wait until the morning,’ he said, and ran a thumb under my eye to staunch the tears. I blinked and the tears ran horizontally along his thumb and down into the well between knuckles, into the small hammock of webbed skin.

  ‘I don’t think you have a hope in hell of finding your figurine,’ I said, and he thanked me, and said he appreciated the encouragement.

  In my mind I have always since conflated his smile as he said that and walked away with the smile on my grandmother’s face when I found her dead, both expressions of infinite contentment. In the morning, after I had called for an ambulance and my grandmother had been taken away, I was left sitting in her rocking chair, tearless and calm after that peculiar epiphanal night of seeing through the gauze, my foot stroking her dog’s back. I hadn’t wanted to go in the ambulance and I had agreed that I would walk to the hospital straight away to see to the papers. It was then that Nicolas came back; it couldn’t have been much after seven a.m. but the sun was long up and when I heard the knock on the door I had no doubt it was him. I was still wearing my dress from the night before, which was streaked with the bones’ dirt and the to-and-fro across the flood wall, and which in any case he took off—may I say it? tore off—once the door was closed.

  I refuse to feel awkward telling you this.

  Shortly after we met I gave him one of my grandmother’s rosaries,
which was made of beads of ox-blood red. He gave me a conch that looked like a harp. He had found it on that same bit of river beach a few years before, in the marsh grass. How did a bright queen conch from the tropics arrive downstream of Woolwich? It struck me, these strange relocations the things on our planet go through; but of course, Nicolas says, the Earth is a closed system, where else can things go? We live on a sphere with a roof and a floor. Things simply move from here to there either underground or across the ground or through the air, disappearing, emerging, decomposing, re-forming, transforming. All this, yes, but never ceasing, because ceasing to exist is not an option on offer to the things on this planet.

  Beggar’s spoils, you called all the useless things he collected. Broken relics of man’s washed-up endeavours on the shores of the Thames, and the flint, coral and graptolite he dug up in the woods upriver from Morda. Nicolas’ sorry old beggar’s spoils, you said, which was frankly uncharitable. You told me, in his presence, never to trust a man who forages in the substrate. He answered only that I should never trust a woman who tells another woman what she should never trust in a man. It was not his way to rise to your or anyone’s bait, and I respected this about him. He knew he had some lonely and pedantic habits that hardly needed a psychologist’s eye to be seen for what they were—digging in the soil, scratching at limestone for fossils, mudlarking on the shores of the Thames for washed-up trinkets. Each boy needs his father; those who have lost hope of ever having one never stop looking for something else instead.

  But even in full awareness of how open he was to mockery, from you especially, he was not ashamed of what he did. No, he only talked more about its subtleties, which felt to me curiously brave. He called these surfacings of fossils and flint unmanned miracles. He said that nature was pushing its bounty up through the soil, silt and mud and that people like him who collected it were less archaeologists and more flower-pickers. Sooner or later each thing under the ground would bloom above it, and whoever had his fingers ready to pluck would be the one rewarded. And he felt that if he waited long enough each treasure would have its season and what was missing would surface, including therefore the other half of his figurine; he didn’t ever seem to doubt its appearance, or worry that his fingers would not be the ones hovering when it did.

  ‘Flower-pickers!’ you would tease. ‘Our own little florist of the river shore.’ With this reproach you would tussle his hair or press your thumb along his eyebrow as though neatening a child. To which he would respond without words, more with an amused smile—the sexily boyish, playful smile that you and I once agreed was his trademark. You will remember that once he went upstairs, brought down his box of beggar’s spoils and laid them on the kitchen table in front of you. Flint, coral, porcelain, coloured glass, metal deer brooch, dagger, trilobite, gemstone, dog tag, watch battery, leather sandal, plastic button, gun, pin, bone. And he asked you to take your pick. Of course you picked the gun, a Mauser C-96, a German piece from the First World War that he had found on the north bank of the Thames. You thought it was wonderful. You lifted it to your head with a rueful grin and pretended to shoot yourself.

  This was something I loved about Nicolas, that he would not be bullied, that he made the bully rueful, but never took pleasure in doing it. He was—is—a sincere man at heart. That is the thing.

  Yannis sells the best fried squid, marinated anchovies, salted sardines and unleavened bread in the whole of London—he says the whole of England. He also says this isn’t saying much. He has a griddle in the tiny kitchen area behind the counter, where he fries the squid to order and sells it in a greaseproof paper bag. Occasionally I go to his shop in the evening when he is about to close and buy a bag at a discount, and eat it on the way home. Yesterday evening he asked me to stay for a few minutes because he had something he wanted to discuss, so we sat at one of the two high, round tables in the window, with a glass of beer each and a plate of bread and anchovies, and he asked me what a man had to do to get his wife back.

  ‘I think begging is the only way,’ I said, but he had tried that. He came to England four years ago because his wife had got a job as an oncologist in a hospital here, but now she was the one who couldn’t settle and wanted to go home, while he had built a business from scratch and wanted to stay. She says it is his fault they can’t go back to Crete, his stubbornness. He says she is unreasonable to drag him all the way here only to drag him back. He has been working through a stack of English modernist novels in a bid to anglicise himself—he has laboured through page after bewildering page and learnt phrases like ‘a pint of porter’ and ‘the industrial epoch’; words like ‘brat’ and ‘rascal’ and ‘ghastly’ and ‘nothingness’. She cannot tell him this effort has been for nothing?

  After months of arguing to what has become a script, she has gone. Except not to Crete, but to her sister’s friend’s house in Muswell Hill. ‘Muswell Hill!’ he said to me. ‘This is bloody ghastly.’ Unknowingly he pressed his thumb into an anchovy’s face as he said that, because he was gripping the rim of his plate. So I removed the thumb and squeezed his hand. ‘It is not the anchovy’s fault,’ I told him, and he looked at his plate, at the wretched flattened fish, and muttered a string of apologies.

  The upshot is that he asked me to write to his wife and point out his virtues. Like a letter of recommendation. I told him I could not; it wouldn’t work. Let’s put aside the fact that she is his wife, and if she hasn’t seen his virtues yet she may never do so. The finer point is that women are loath to accept the recommendations of other women. He seemed intrigued to be told something about what women do and don’t do, and looked at me brightly, like a dog that has seen its lead. But the truth is I have no other insights to share with him, and I told him that—not only can I shed no light on womankind, but I also know nothing about relationships except for some faint grasp of the multiple ways they can go wrong.

  ‘But people like you,’ he said, ‘who have been married and divorced, you know things the rest of us don’t.’ I suggested that a special knowledge of failure is not such a valuable thing, and besides, I was never actually divorced, only separated. After a moment of surprise he seemed genuinely disappointed. ‘You mean you’re still technically married? After ten years of being apart?’ ‘Actually it’s fifteen years,’ I said, and I tried to explain that while it only requires a single yes to get married, to get divorced you have to say no so many times in so many different ways, and so expensively, that it does not always seem worth the trouble. Marriage is a construct easily put together, and painstakingly dismantled. The law makes it this way. To prise it apart, legally speaking, you have to take to it with a sledgehammer as if it were your worst enemy you were obliterating, and not the remains of your tenderest dreams. Not the little patch of fertile ground your only child sprang from. Nicolas and I could never bring ourselves to do that, that’s all. Is it so strange?

  You will see my cunning here, as if my agenda is to relate to you in passing a conversation I had with Yannis, when really of course I am using it as an opportunity to tell you something. I just thought you might be wondering what had happened between Nicolas and me after you left. Sometimes I wonder if you assume we carried on as if nothing had happened, and there is a part of me that likes you to think that, and a part of you—a caring part of you—that probably likes to think that too. And it is true that I do still see him from time to time now that we both live in London. Anyway, I suspect I overstated the point when I said what I did about tender dreams, because Yannis poured the last of his beer into my glass with great, warm compassion—and I suppose I should mention that for him to appear compassionate is a triumph of character over looks, because he is in fact made like a warlord, with a long straight nose that is almost vertical and a forehead that slopes back alarmingly—and said that he thought it must be chilly, to be in a marriage that is over but not ended. Because the other has left, he ventured. They have left, but not shut the door. It must be like living in a room with a draught always coming in. Hi
s big, savage, Cretan face winced at the thought.

  They know me here; an hour or two after closing time Yannis drags the two tables together and a few of them congregate. Sometimes, once a month or so, me amongst them. When they sit together it is like the edges of the city have been drawn in, those with gold teeth and polished teeth and false teeth and missing teeth, those chased to England by Idi Amin, those who are the children of the Windrush, those who own a piece of the Berlin Wall. They come in comfortable shapeless hand-knits or beautiful suits from charity shops, except the one Nigerian who comes in beautiful suits from House of Fraser. There are always spirits and often coffee and sometimes bread. Each has fingers quick with cards; the usual is five-card-draw Poker played with a royal deck. Coppers and silvers and nothing above a pound, before midnight anyway, because no one has money to waste. It is just company and cigarettes and spirits and laughter, and an exaggerated communal love of the Queen—Poker is a royal game and she is their patron, Britannia, the matriarch it is better to love than be scorned by, the aggressor in a pair of brogues; they make affectionate attempts at mimicking her voice, which sends the ash from the tips of their cigarettes flying in gusts of laughter.