by Sarah Winman
I set out in autumn sunshine. Through Christ Church meadow to the High Street, a slow amble down to Magdalen Bridge, and The Plain. As I get close to St. Clement’s, all I can think about is seeing her again, Ms. Annie Actually, and anxiety begins to overwhelm me, and in my head I’m trying to control how it’s going to be, what I’m going to say, how she’ll respond, a smile perhaps, maybe we’ll fall into each other’s arms and I’ll apologize—I don’t know—but I run through various scenarios by the time I reach her bookshop. I stand to the side and surreptitiously peek through the books in the window to the space inside. I see no one. I open the door. A bell rings. Mabel had a bell above her shop door, too.
I’ll be with you in a minute! she shouts from the back. Oh, her voice.
There’s a cappuccino left steaming on the desk next to a biographical study of Albert Camus, 1913–1960. I drink it. Strong and sugary, nothing changes. I drink some more and look around. Fiction R–Z is housed in a beautiful tall oak shelf. There’s an armchair in an alcove over to the side. She’s putting music on. Chet Baker. Nice one, Annie.
Coming! she shouts. Oh, her voice.
And there she is. Comes out from behind the bookshelf and her blonde hair is tied up and falls down by her cheeks and she wears dungarees over a jumper, and she stops. Her hand on her forehead.
I open my arms out wide and say, O Captain, my Captain!
She says nothing. I put down her coffee. Chet Baker is doing his best to create a mood of love.
You fucking bastard, she says.
I’m an idiot.
And now she smiles. And now she’s in my arms.
You smell like you, she says.
And what smell’s that? I say.
Betrayal.
* * *
• • •
I LOOK AFTER the shop as she goes next door to buy me a double macchiato. I sell a copy of A Year in Provence and, as soon as she comes back, I tell her excitedly that I did.
Here, she says. Commission, as she gives me the coffee and kisses me on the head.
Dora used to do that to me all the time, I say.
Then it’s true, she says. He married his mother.
I open my mouth to say something but she says, Don’t speak to me, I just want to look at you. I wouldn’t trust anything you said, anyway. She points to my beard. This I like, she says.
We drink our coffees.
We drink one another in. She sighs. She rests her chin in her hands. Her eyes on my beard. Her eyes on my body. Her eyes on my eyes.
You’re back, she says. You are, aren’t you? For good?
I am.
I’m back, I say.
D’you know—I’ve got vongole for tonight.
I love vongole.
I’ll make it stretch three ways. We have wine—
—I can bring more.
And I’ve got spinach to have on the side.
My favorite.
It is, isn’t it? she says.
It’s as if you knew, I say.
The bell rings as the shop door opens.
Sorry, says an older woman. Am I interrupting?
Not at all, Rose. Come on in. What are you after?
I have a list.
Tell me.
Amongst Women. Buddha of Suburbia and that Ingrid Seward’s book about Diana.
A good list, says Annie.
So what shall I buy first? says Rose.
Let me confer with my assistant, says Annie. Mikey?
In that order, I say.
I agree, she says.
Amongst Women then, please, says Rose.
* * *
• • •
ANNIE CLOSES UP the shop for the rest of the day. On the sidewalk outside, I say, Does he hate me?
No, she says. He could never.
We walk hand in hand along Cowley Road and I say this place has changed and she asks me how. I don’t know, I say, I just know it has. Maybe it’s you, she says. Maybe it is, I say. I’m sure it is, I say. Maybe you’ve seen too much of the world, she says. Maybe it all just feels too small?
No. It’s not small, I say. It’s perfect.
Outside Mabel’s old shop, we stop.
January 1963. It’s snowing heavily and I’m sitting in the back of Mr. Khan’s minicab as it crawls along this road. The wipers are battling. He’s never seen snow before and he’s driving slowly, big eyes full of wonder. There’s a rag-and-bone cart in front of us and the horse stops and shits, and Mr. Khan gets out of the car with a shovel and scrapes the dung into a plastic bag.
What are you doing? I ask.
It’s for Mrs. Khan, he says. She likes to put it on her rhubarb.
Really? I say. We have custard on ours.
Oh, you funny fun strange boy, he says and pulls up outside this shop. My new life waiting to happen. Mabel is there and she’s old, but she’s not really, looking back. And I’m lonely and scared, until I see Ellis behind her. The cavalry. And I remember thinking, You’re going to be my friend. My best friend.
I remember the car door opened and Mr. Khan said, One prodigal grandson with two suitcases full of books. And I stepped out into the snow. Later, Ellis asked me, Are they really full of books?
Of course he did, Annie laughs. What did you say?
I said, Just the one.
That was the night I had my first glance of Dora. She’d come to pick up Ellis and I was looking down from my bedroom window and caught them as they left the shop. I knocked. She paused by the car and looked up. Bright red lipstick in a white night. She smiled and waved at me with both arms.
We wait for the traffic to slow and we run across the road.
Are you ready? asks Annie.
No, not really, I say.
Come on, she says, and we walk hand in hand up Southfield.
The day is surprisingly mild and I’m happy for once. Overwhelmingly so. We stop at the corner of Hill Top Road unseen, and she pulls away from me.
Where are you going? I say.
Give you both time.
Annie?
She doesn’t turn. She raises her arm and keeps walking away. I’m alone. Me and the years. My sight drawn to the figure working in front of the garage.
How little he’s changed, I think. His sleeves are rolled up, the same tousled hair, same frown wrestling with a dilemma, be it a kitchen shelf, be it love. A radio for company. He places a plank of wood on the workbench. He lifts his hand to the pencil behind his ear and measures—once, twice—before beginning to cut. The sound of a miter saw whining in the air. Sawdust floating. And then silence.
I start to walk across the road, and my footsteps are loud. He looks up now. He’s squinting. He’s shielding his eyes with his hand, autumn sunlight glinting off windscreens. He grins. He puts down the plank of wood and slowly comes toward me. We meet in the middle.
I’ve missed you, he says.
In my chest, the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.
ELLIS
June 1996, France
He stands, sketching, at the window of his quiet first-floor room. His limbs are an even shade of brown and he has the start of a beard growing. The deep furrows across his forehead have softened, and his hair is longer than it usually is. He’s been here six days already, and every day he wonders what took him so long. He wears flip-flops and secondhand khaki shorts, and a pale blue T-shirt that once came from New York. The collar is frayed.
The window is open and the sounds are of cicadas, swallows and occasional footsteps on the path below. Across the grounds at the back of the mas, the air is corrugated by the blistering heat. The color of the sky brings back memories that are no longer painful.
He looks at his watch. It’s time. He puts down his sketchbook and leaves the room.
The cou
rtyard is deserted. The tables have been cleared of breakfast, and water from a small fountain dribbles noisily into a granite trough. He sits down in the shade of an olive tree and waits.
He hears car tires on gravel, a door slam. A smallish man with gray hair—sixty maybe?—comes toward him smiling, hand outstretched.
Monsieur Judd, he says. I’m sorry I’m late . . .
Ellis stands up and shakes his hand. Monsieur Crillon? Thank you for meeting me.
No, no, please, he says. I’m so sorry about your friend. Of course, I remember Monsieur Triste. He arrived my first summer here. Come.
Ellis follows him into the cool of his office. Monsieur Crillon opens a drawer and says, The sheds are not homes now, but you know, eh?
Yes, of course. I realize, says Ellis.
Monsieur Crillon looks up from the desk. Here, he says. Keys. This is for the main gate. The others—you must try.
* * *
• • •
ELLIS CROSSES the gardens toward the dark monoliths of cypresses. The key turns easily in the wooden gate, and he makes his way through the scrubby grass, as Michael once did, toward the five stone sheds and field of sunflowers that lie behind. And he thinks about Michael’s loneliness, and he thinks about his own. And he thinks his own might be manageable now.
The sign “Mistral” is barely visible on the left-hand shed and he tries three keys before one turns. He pushes hard against the door. An oblique ray of sunlight cuts through the dust and gloom. A lizard scatters across the floor.
You got here then. I knew you’d come.
Nineteen. In his favorite striped Breton top, holding water and peaches. Look out there, Ell.
Ellis goes to the shutters. He pulls them open and the frame fills with sunflowers, a yellow world of beauty stretching as far as the eye can see. He lights a cigarette and leans against the ledge. Swallows soar with heat on their wings.
Did you know you were ill, he thinks. When did you know?
The song of cicadas unrelenting, always there.
I never would have left your side.
He walks out to the middle of the golden field and faces the sun, and he thinks, We did have time. We had so much more than many do.
And he feels all right. And he knows he’ll be all right. And that is enough.
* * *
• • •
IN THE FRONT BEDROOM, propped up among the books, is a color photograph of three people, a woman and two men. They are tightly framed, their arms around one another, and the world beyond is out of focus, and the world on either side excluded. They look happy, they really do. Not just because they are smiling but because there is something in their eyes, an ease, a joy, something they share. It was taken in spring or summer, you can tell by the clothes they are wearing (T-shirts, pale colors, that sort of thing), and, of course, because of the light.
* * *
• • •
THE LOCATION of the photograph was not glamorous, not a holiday destination, or a once-in-a-lifetime visit. It was taken in the back garden of Ellis and Annie’s house. The photographer wasn’t a photographer at all but a wood merchant. He had just delivered the oak floorboards that Ellis had planned to lay in the back room, a job he never got to start. He came into the back garden and music was playing, the three of them sprawled on a blanket on the grass. The woman, Annie, had a camera and she asked him, Would you? And he took the camera from her, and he took his time because he wanted to get them right. He thought they looked so happy, and he thought they were family, and he wanted to show that in the photograph. They were all that mattered on that hot sunny evening in June 1991. And in the fleeting moment in which he met them, he realized that it wasn’t the woman, Annie, who held this small group together, but the man with scruffy dark hair. There was something in the way the other two looked at him, and that’s why he was in the middle, his arms tightly around them. As if he’d never let them go.
The shutter clicked. The wood merchant knew he had got the photograph and didn’t even take another to be sure, because he knew. Sometimes one frame is all it takes.
See you later, said the man to the other two. What are you going to see again? he asked.
Walt Whitman talk, said Annie. You can still come.
Nah, he said. Not my thing.
Love you, they said.
The wood merchant got back in his van pleased with himself. He never told anyone about the people he met or the photo he took, because why should he? It was a moment in time, that’s all, shared with strangers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank everyone at Tinder Press for their commitment to this book, especially my editor Leah Woodburn, Vicky Palmer, Barbara Ronan, Katie Brown, Amy Perkins and Yeti Lambregts.
Thank you to Christopher Riopelle and the National Gallery. To the Cowley Car Plant for their generous help, and to the British Library. My thanks to Pam Hibbs for sharing her stories of St. Bart’s hospital in the 1980s.
Thank you to my friends who keep me laughing. Thank you, Mum, Si and Sha.
Thank you to my agent Robert Caskie for your belief in this book ten years ago, and for the incredible journey that followed.
Thank you, Patricia Niven, always.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Winman is the author of two novels, When God Was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvellous Ways. She grew up in Essex, England, and now lives in London. She attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and went on to act in theater, film, and television.
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