Dear Thief: A Novel Page 5

  After midnight the real money comes out, small but serious sums, and then I lose interest; I still abide by the friendly pact you and I made, to play only for honour and never for money. So I sit aside with pen and paper, here by the glass display of the counter, leaning on Yannis’ copy of The Rainbow that has a receipt as a bookmark, which is still towards the beginning of chapter one.

  Yannis believes my Poker skills are better than they are, perhaps because he is not used to women being able to play cards at all; I have told him about the games you and I played and explained to him that it was never in the name of skill or even fun—no, only ever in the name of jeopardy, throwing ourselves at chance and seeing who was luckier, and who the universe favoured first. Our little deals with God, I told Yannis, and he said, God does not play cards (which may or may not have been a pun, with Yannis it is hard to tell). In any case, under this misapprehension that I have any talent for the game he always positions himself with his back to me when I sit out and go to the counter, so I can see his cards and stop him if he is about to do a catastrophic thing, but I never stop him. Lately, like now, I just sit here at the counter and write to you.

  Do you remember that morning when you were sitting on the windowsill at the far end of the living room, going through some old letters and photographs of your ancestors? Leaning against the wall. I think it was winter. I don’t know why but I often think of this when here with Yannis and the others. You found out that your great-grandparents had been part of a large influx of Lithuanians to Coatbridge in Scotland, at the turn of the century, all poor as birds and shipped in to work in the coalmines. Unlike the peasants who went to the New World in search of milk and honey, the letters and photographs of your ancestors did not give the impression that these Lithuanians expected anything beyond a reprieve from starvation; maybe not even that. There was only one picture of your great-grandmother, and I remember it well—do you? She is standing in a long, heavy coat in a grey street with a collection of saucepans hanging by string over one shoulder, a bundle of clothes or food in the crook of that arm, and in the other arm a baby—your grandmother—swaddled grimly. It appeared cold, she appeared cheated, but not surprised.

  You looked at that photograph for a long time over a cigarette; you drank in the smoke slowly and steeply while you stared at this woman who was not really anyone. Her hard face and her scowl. The child in her arms would go on to marry one of the fortunate Lithuanians who thrived in Scotland, a Jewish man who became a doctor, so she is the one everybody starts with when they trace the family’s history, being, as she is, the good news. But my interest was in the poor broken human being who gave birth to and held her, the one who didn’t prevail, who nobody ever talked about and who probably died young in Coatbridge with bad lungs and no notion of any life that would ever yield anything but hardship and grind. You looked at the picture with a kind of fascinated contempt. You pitched your ragged beauty on our windowsill like a makeshift tent; really you never did look like somebody who was going to be there long, and I remember thinking that as I came into the room and saw you in silhouette, with your unbrushed hair tucked behind your ears. (Maybe this is the link, the thing that makes me think of you when I’m here, because Yannis and the others have this temporary look too, like they are staying and not living, even if they stay for the rest of their lives.) Behind you in the garden Nicolas and Teddy were running about in some weak Morda sun.

  Your grandmother—to return to a happier theme—met your grandfather on a train to Glasgow; she going on a frugal shopping errand, he going to his last year of medical school, both immigrants, but he without any of the expectations of defeat that came with that title. They saw one another and fell in love with themselves, seeing in the other the heroic survivor they each thought they were. (Am I right in what I remember? I go over these facts sometimes in case they tell me something new about you, in the way people like to find out new things about the dead. But this memory of you on the windowsill is twenty years old and decidedly worn down.) Five, six, seven years later—your grandfather by now a specialist in lung diseases—they moved to escape the Scottish cold and ended up in the small mining community in Shropshire that is Morda, where he ran his own practice; your father was born, became interested in botany and, after the Second World War, in his early twenties, became the first in his immigrant family to go back to Lithuania, to fight for its independence from the Soviets.

  This is what you told me—and that in going back he came to be involved with the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, where he joined a project to archive seeds of indigenous plant species that were fast disappearing under Russian industrialisation. This is how he found himself face-to-face with the intimidating beauty that was your mother, who was working as a typist at the Academy. Your brother was born soon and out of wedlock, but it was another seven years before you arrived, into a now coherent and happy family in a respectable area of Vilnius; born and then, before you could know it, left as the communist grip was tightening on people like your father, and came back to Morda.

  I think of the day you showed me the things of your ancestors and in that memory you are the lazy little Jewess slung in the warmth of the window, the only one of your family for generations who has had nothing material to overcome and no danger to face. You don’t even have a working religion, the Jewess is just a title that gives you licence to flirt inconsequentially with other faiths in the way a married woman can flirt inconsequentially with other men. Atrocity is going on over there, where your people are from. You just draw on your cigarette without appetite, toss the photograph onto the table and rest your head back against the wall. So I take the cigarette from your hand and sit at the opposite end of the sill, and think how strange it is, the random loins we spring from, the beauty that unfolds even from a sullen shuffling woman with clanking pans. That she left her country in 1901 and eighty-two years later it is still not free—yet that you are free, and I am free. We are free and here on the windowsill. You put your bare foot on top of mine; there are times when the very presence of another person can be a miracle. Your foot is warm, which is surprising. I suddenly remember this as I write.

  And you would ask Nicolas and me, ‘Where did you two meet?’

  ‘On a filthy Thames beach,’ we would say.

  And then a few days later, or a few weeks later, ‘Where did you two meet, anyway?’

  ‘On a filthy Thames beach.’

  You would sigh, ‘Ah yes.’ Which made me think that either you forgot the answer time and again because it wasn’t romantic enough, or that you asked repeatedly because the answer was so romantic you wanted to hear it again. As children are prone to doing with stories they like.

  I used to think your longing for other people’s romantic anecdotes was just one of your many ironic gestures, or a strange nervous tic you hadn’t been able to shake off from girlhood—but maybe it was actually one of your more conventional traits. We take all sorts of gleeful interest in things we would never have or do in our own lives, why else would my Wednesday afternoons be spent hauling in a pile of execrable crime novels from the mobile library to feed the appetites of those mild old ladies who read them in a little scented plume of rosehip and lilac? They lap up the stabbings, the disappearances, the trail of blood on the passenger seat. Their lumpy knuckles cannot put the books down; their faces become gentle and settled while they read about gore, as if they are back in their days of breastfeeding. Never so merciful or so reposed, and I can feel a moment of such warmth, such love towards them like that.

  And so with you in your own way, if you heard that someone was in love, or had done something sweet. You were absolutely sincere, almost adulatory at the notion of one person loving and finding shelter in the life of another. You would declare, ‘How beautiful’ and then tilt your head off to one side in calculation of exactly how beautiful, and you might not move, and if you were in the middle of doing something like tearing a piece of bread from the loaf, you might stop with the bread poised hal
fway to your mouth. That same hand, so given to batting away any faint hint of romance for yourself, would float in quivering appreciation of somebody else’s.

  ‘And then what?’ you once said. ‘After you and Nicolas met. Your first date.’

  I told you we went to the Serpentine, to see an exhibition; perhaps that was when he gave me the conch, though I really couldn’t say. It was about a week after my grandmother’s death and the day after her funeral. Perhaps you don’t remember this conversation, but I firmly do. We were sitting at the kitchen table in the cottage in Morda one night drinking Polish vodka, while Nicolas was away for work and Teddy in bed—I’d drunk four or five shots while you’d barely touched your first. I told you about how I stayed the night in my grandmother’s house with my parents after the funeral, and the next morning, while they were going through some of her things and deciding what to do with it all, Nicolas and I went to the Serpentine. We didn’t touch one another, we only toiled chastely around the rooms, hands in pockets, and were polite, and feigned expertise.

  You reared up, do you remember? You raged! An exhibition, my friend? My dear friend, who never much liked art or galleries or places that had to be crept around, who took some peculiar Platonic offence at the idea of a painting of a tree, when you could just go and see a tree. A first date at the Serpentine! This insincere use of art for courting couples who’d rather be fucking is a waste of everybody’s time. You said, An obscene squanderment, and you said it standing with your arm flung theatrically. Men and women are born to share their bodies in a way that aeroplanes are made to fly; they should do it shamelessly, routinely. They may do it liberally if they wish, and in different configurations. Men can do it to other men, women to other women. Wives to other women’s husbands, husbands to other men’s wives. Let’s not be prudish. But they should not do it while pretending to do something else. An aeroplane is never coy about flying. Imagine it! Down with the coquettish aeroplane! Somebody put a great deal of work into that exhibition, and all you could think about was your loins. You should have booked an hour in a cheap hotel and been done with it.

  Your anger was very unreasonable, Butterfly. You were such a tyrant; just because my romance failed to come up to scratch, you felt your world had been betrayed. This is the problem with people who live vicariously, they ask a lot of their friends. In the face of your outbursts I would always clam up and make a decision to withhold things from you as a punishment for your unreasonableness; maybe you noticed, although, then again, maybe not.

  But now I imagine you on your own in this so-called desert, trying to build a life out of little, and it hardly seems to me that it can hurt to step forward again into our conversation, even if so many years later, and end this petty punishment. It never made me feel good anyway. You once intimated that if only I had spoken up more for my relationship with Nicolas you might have behaved differently, and at the time that idea made me sullen with injustice. But maybe there was some truth to it; I have often had to consider that since.

  Later on in that conversation with Yannis the other day, after I had refused to write to his wife, we got talking about our marriages. We talked about their early days and the romance. I suppose this is what prompted me to write what I just wrote—which incidentally, on a reread, I think is true in gist, but the outburst about coquettish aeroplanes might be a bit improvised and slightly unfair on you. However, there is the self-made law of honesty to abide by, so it must stay.

  Yannis and his wife had their first and last real date at the age of seventeen at Lake Kournas in Crete. They skirted past acres of ocean in a beeline for one clear disc of lake, the only one on the whole island—all that land, and they headed for one tiny hole in it. This is what it is to fall in love, he said, there is a world of firm ground but we go for the gap. We aim for vertigo. In that lake were the inverted White Mountains, whiter and cleaner in the water than they were out, as if the mountains themselves were a crude afterthought.

  He and his wife dived in for the mountains, thinking they would find them together. Love makes you very optimistic, he said. An intense day of basking on volcanic rock and slipping into water as pedaloes wove by, a few hours spent burning up with love and enduring the downsides of heat, of midges swarming to one’s warm parts, and by the next day she was pregnant. They married so quickly they never had time for another date, and then their son Akis was born. Akis, who sprung from that day like the infamous Lady of the Lake, who purged Kournas of its sins. Yannis is romantic, like you; when he says that love makes us optimistic, he says so as if we are right to be optimistic. In a way he reminds me of you, and I think you would like him.

  This was his turn; when it came to mine I told him about the night Nicolas and I spent locked in the Royalty Theatre in the West End, a night that stands out, one I spent a lot of time thinking about yesterday after I wrote what I wrote. It was October I think, or November, 1976. Nicolas and I went to this theatre, where he was doing the lighting for their programme of perpetual failures. He worked there for nothing to get experience, which meant he stood on a platform show after show training a light on a cast of disconsolate actors who played to a near-empty auditorium. One night I met him there after a show and he brought me in to wait while he packed up. I went to his platform and he introduced me (as if to friends) to the new electric spotlights and tried to explain to me about lumens and foot-candles, gobos, the projection of a crescent moon onto the black backdrop of the stage. And while we were there the theatre was locked. The caretaker came in and turned off the main auditorium lights, and we saw him from our perch and said nothing.

  Nicolas switched on a spotlight. There was just one column of white light spiralling diagonally through darkness to the left-hand side of the stage, which seemed a number of miles away. The Royalty was a big thousand-seater theatre, and the darkness took away its walls and made it a ten-thousand-seater, fifty-thousand. With torches we climbed down into the auditorium and Nicolas sat at the back of the stalls. He said, ‘Go to the stage and stand in the spotlight.’ I picked my path there slowly. I put my feet in the centre of the circle of light and laid the torch down. I asked what I should say. ‘Tell me about the men you’ve known,’ he replied.

  There had been some men in passing, I told him, though I couldn’t see him in the glare. Some men—or, rather, many men. There wasn’t much else to do out on the Welsh Borders. You finish your A levels, you are so busy discovering yourself that you forget to go to college or get a vocation, you start working in a pub and, when your best and only friend leaves town, you become a loner and invest yourself in things that rely little on the company of others, like pleaching willow and learning how to slum it comfortably under the stars, and singing. You start singing in the pub on the evenings you’re not working and people come to see you because you have a good voice and an unintentionally provocative appearance—it isn’t your clothes that provoke but what is underneath them, despite your efforts to cover it. The singing is short-lived, you realise you love the company of others, but only when they are indifferent to you. You like trees and fungus and the challenge of making water boil in a tin pot, and rinsing the coffee cup in the river—rain even better—so that you can pour wine into it and sleep deeply and wake up thirsty and starving.

  None of the men had been of much note, I told him, and to my surprise he found this sad. It was the only time he interrupted my speech, and his voice came from the dark and was thin with distance. ‘Many men and none of note? Do you not think maybe you chose the wrong men?’ But the thing is of course that choice had little to do with it. Shropshire is not London. Not that you take whatever you can get, just that you have to take some of what you can get, and what you could get then was severely restricted. Anyway, the need for meaningful solitude is sometimes best met by being in meaningless company, wasn’t that the paradox? He probably baulked at the word meaningless, maybe because he imagined the possibility of himself being just such a man who delivered nothing to a woman. But they were not nothi
ng, I tried to explain, they were just something without meaning and without note. All sorts of perfectly good things fall into this category.

  When it came to his turn, and we swapped places so that I was near-invisible in the stalls and he was the one in the spotlight, he explained that he, himself, had been more reserved and thoughtful. He had been in love, but not often, and not the love his mother had told him to hold out for, but still, nothing meaningless. Well, almost nothing. Maybe one or two. His girlfriends tended to be small and slender with one particular part of their bodies of which they were mortally ashamed, though this had never been the eyes, which in four of six cases had been brown, bright and lovely.

  They tended to have fringes, he said, and birthmarks. Fringes were like well-kept gardens and denoted a homely girl with an open, tidy face. You see, you are brought up in the Kent marshes, just you and your mother in a wooden house whose land has no boundaries, you just guess at where the garden might end and where the acres of treasure-studded flatness begin. It is just a changeable guess. Then a miracle: when you are fourteen you move with your mother’s new husband—who has emitted from nowhere and married her so fast even you missed the wedding—to a wholesome suburb of New Hampshire where the sun is very often out and the large gardens demarcated and where the seasons arrive with clear intention in discreet unmistakable blocks. Glorious times of having and giving. Pumpkins as big as a full moon.

  America! Where you find a home for your enormous smile, where the gap between your two front teeth is no longer a defect but an open door through which girls hurl themselves, where the dimple in your large chin turns you from an awkward kid into an all-American youth, easy and jokey, where you learn that expression of almost permanent sardonic amusement, and take to wearing aftershave and growing stubble and holding your head proud, where people call you dashing; you take to amateur dramatics and discover that you have the kind of face that can do anything. It can suit a baseball player or an intellectual, depending on how much stubble and whether a T-shirt or a linen shirt, and whether the prescription glasses—once the bane of your life—are on or off. If off, and if bouncing a ball from knee to knee, you are the high-school heartthrob. And if on, suddenly you can be a New York Jew, clever and sharp and easy, playing life and winning; playing life and always winning.