I Saw a Man

by Owen Sheers

  Samantha’s morning sessions became the foundation of what had now become her weekly routine. Every morning, regardless of the weather, and more often because of it, she could be seen out there, next to the willow, bending to her viewfinder. On three of those mornings, after taking her pond photographs and walking Rachel to school, she went to work as a PA for a film director in Hampstead village. The work wasn’t taxing—organising his expenses, replying to emails, ordering prints and booking lunch meetings, screenings. But it was new to her, and sociable. While he worked in his office at the top of the house, Samantha worked on the kitchen table, making her party to the movements of the day. Not just the editors and writers who came to meet him, but also the comings and goings of his wife and two sons. It was a workplace, but also a family home. Martha, her sister, had feared it might make Samantha grieve for her own. But the variety and rhythms of the house invigorated her, inspired her even, reminding her of what she’d once wanted and of how much of it had somehow drifted from her over the years of her marriage.

  On the other two days of the week she studied at the Royal College, going to lectures and seminars, spending hours in the computer and printing rooms. Again, despite her being ten years older than most of the students, the environment excited her. But it frustrated her, too. She was impatient to learn, to improve. She felt as if she had years to catch up on, a lost decade. Whereas the other students behaved as if time was an inexhaustible luxury, Samantha, knowing it to be a rare reserve, harried at her course and her tutors.

  Over those first months after Josh moved out, Samantha gradually came to realise that just as she had autonomy over the hours of her days, so she could choose how to spend her evenings and nights. There was no mortgage on the house, and although Josh no longer had a job, he was still able to pay regular contributions for Rachel and the housekeeping. Whatever Samantha earned from the PA work was hers to spend how she wished. For so many years she’d allowed her socialising to be dictated by Josh’s work, by his colleagues and their wives. There were few of them she’d liked on her own terms, so when after a few months she’d begun to contact friends again, to email them about cinema showings or phone someone for a drink, it was nearly always a case of reconnecting with a friend from years ago, rather than anyone, except for Michael, whom she’d seen regularly before Lucy’s death.

  In this way, between her hours at the director’s house, her studies, caring for Rachel and a few old friends, Samantha occupied herself. But none of it did anything to appease her grieving for Lucy. Her daughter had been just four years old. But Samantha had known her for longer than that. Ever since her body had begun forming within hers, ever since the tides of its growing had driven her cravings, her sleep patterns, and mood swings. And yet, at the same time, she’d only recently felt as if she were becoming acquainted with who Lucy actually was, and with who she might become. In the last few months before her death, when Samantha watched her playing with Michael, or on her own, engrossed in a conversation with her dolls, she thought she’d begun to see the hints of the girl beyond the child. And then, within those hints, like a receding line of mirrors within mirrors, the teenager beyond the girl, the woman beyond the teenager and even, in certain fleeting expressions, the elderly woman beyond the adult.

  But now Lucy’s would be an imagined life, existing only in her mother’s projections of who her daughter might have been. The ache of her loss became as familiar to Samantha as breathing, or opening her eyes to see. It was just there, and would always be there, a translucent presence behind the scenes of the day. A shadowing that hurt, but which Samantha would never want to live without, its essence now being all that was left of Lucy beyond the ephemera of memory, photographs, and film, all of which were too painful to ever look at for long.

  Rachel, once she’d emerged from the numbing of her own shock, soon became sensitive to these depths of her mother’s remembering. In the light of their altered relationship, she’d developed a breed of admiration for Samantha, which she felt but did not yet understand. From out of nowhere, death, like a meteor, had struck their home. There had been sadness, rupture. They were scattered by its impact. Her father was now a man who met her from school, or took her out on the weekends. He was no longer bound by the family walls. She, herself, had been sent far from her own knowledge, and her mother, too, had been on a long journey. But now, from all this disturbance, her mother was back and revealing a warmth Rachel had never previously known. Focused and strong, as if she was recklessly pouring love directly into her. She asked Rachel more questions, her opinion, as if she were eightteen, not eight. She allowed her to stay up late, to stay on the sofa with her, watching TV together. Sometimes Rachel became aware her mother wasn’t watching the screen at all, but was watching her instead. Without intention or observation, but merely to witness her. Over breakfast, as Samantha asked her which blouse she should wear, or which skirt, it could seem as if they were impossible sisters, rather than a mother and daughter. And then there were those other times, too, when their roles felt reversed completely. When, on entering a room and discovering her mother to be there, Rachel would sense Samantha’s darkness, and would come to her silently, folding her body into its contours in an attempt to at once absorb and soothe her pain.

  For Michael, every minute spent with Samantha and Rachel was like torture. There had yet to be a moment, in all the seven months since he’d left their house that day, when, being in their presence, he hadn’t felt acutely the sadness of the loss he’d caused, or that somehow Rachel cradled a secret knowledge of her sister’s death. And yet at the same time being with them was the only salve his conscience knew. To be there, contributing to their recovery, their new lives. It was both his privilege and his punishment. In practice this often meant no more than giving his encouragement or advice to Samantha, or coming round for a drink or some food, or agreeing to look after Rachel on nights when she had to be out. It was as simple as being her friend. Someone who’d known them before, and with whom, now that she was ready, she could talk about her loss as an equal, as a colleague in grief. No one else Samantha knew had lost anyone other than their parents. No one else had had death enter, so suddenly, their lives. Michael, however, had been there before her, felt and thought his way through its aftermath. And so she’d found herself looking to him for markers, for acknowledgement and consent. He made her feel normal and, perhaps more important, possible, a woman shaped by her daughter’s loss, not defined by it. A woman who would still extract joy from life, not despite her grief but because of it.

  Alongside his involvement with Samantha in the wake of her grief, Michael’s own life continued to expand and gain momentum in the diminishment of his. In December, just before he travelled to Sussex to join Samantha and Rachel at Martha’s for Christmas, he completed the first draft of The Man Who Broke the Mirror. It was shorter than he’d expected, and not the book he’d set out to write. The exploration of Oliver’s thesis had become no more than a subplot, a hinterland to the account of his life over those two years that Michael followed him. A portrait of a man in emotional and intellectual extremis, a thinker and a drinker burning brightly as he burnt out.

  The book was imperfect, and Michael knew when he submitted it to his agent that unlike what he’d said to Samantha about BrotherHoods, it was far from “cooked.” But that it had been written at all was a personal achievement for him. It had begun, in those early months in his new flat, as no more than a muscle memory of routine. As a way of tricking his mind and his body into living again. There’d been no financial imperative for Michael to write it. BrotherHoods was still selling well in the U.S., and although he’d sworn not to touch it, there’d also been the compensation money and the payout from Caroline’s insurance, too. In the writing of the book, however, Michael had rediscovered a rare peace in the age-old formation of experience into words. Not necessarily always in service to the broader story, but just in honour of certain minutes, even seconds. Past moments he was able bring into being
in a way he often wished he could in real life, but which he knew was possible only like this, at his desk, on the page.

  Such was the solace Michael found in his writing that on delivering The Man Who Broke the Mirror he’d immediately embarked on a new project, even before his agent had finished reading the draft. This was to be a book closer to home, in every sense of the phrase. With his silent promise to Samantha and Rachel he had bonded himself to London, to their street and to his flat beside their home. So this is where he went looking for his next book, one in which he would immerse himself not just in the life of an individual subject, but in the stories of four houses and the families who’d lived in them. The houses had once all formed part of South Hill Drive, each built on a plot of land where a modern block of flats much like Michael’s own now stood. It was a map in a local museum that had first brought these buildings to his attention. The map, of the Heath and its surrounding streets, was marked with a pattern of black dots, each marking the site where a bomb had fallen during the air raids in the Second World War. Instinctively, Michael had looked for his own street on the map, and then his own flat within it. A single black dot marked its position exactly. He looked at the other three dots scattered around the loop of South Hill Drive. All of them marked other modern blocks, built after the war and slotted into the sweeping curves of the original houses.

  The research that such a book would require—hours at the Public Record Office in Kew, or trawling the local archives in Hampstead—promised Michael the scope and structure of a regular routine. But beyond this he couldn’t say exactly why this project had appealed to him above others. He knew there were probably reasons for his preference that at this stage in his planning he’d rather not look at directly—a historical study of death from the air, an exploration of the relationship between a family and its home. But he knew, too, that the project’s attraction was in some way associated with his penance, a private accumulation of gestures on the other side of those scales. And that it was about the nature of ghosted existence as well, the way Caroline had appeared to him in that bath. Or the way every time he passed the Nelsons’ staircase he still saw, with such clarity, the detail of Lucy’s falling. Every house in the street was layered with such existence, the spaces within them thick with lived human lives. But the four modern blocks of flats were haunted by entire buildings, not just people. Homes that had gone in a matter of seconds. And it was this, Michael sensed, that was drawing him. The prospect of re-creating the houses themselves as well as their inhabitants. Of rebuilding the very vessels and witnesses of the living that had occurred within them. As if, in having seen one ghost and created another, Michael was leaving himself no other choice than to immerse himself in an endeavour of multiple resurrection.

  Beyond his writing, Michael’s life was beginning to move on in other areas, too. He’d begun going for drinks with a group of other fencers after club nights in Highgate. There was a woman among them about whom Samantha often teased him. A divorcée in her early thirties who’d already made it known among her friends that if Michael was interested, she’d love to see more of him. Michael took Samantha’s teasing and probing in good nature, but her comments were an effective sounding of his emotional state. The thought of what she suggested in her jokes still felt impossible to him. Caroline was too present, and perhaps, he sometimes wondered, always would be.

  “I suppose,” Samantha had said one night in the pub, as they’d waited for Rachel to finish at her drama group, “you lost her early, didn’t you?”

  “Early?” Michael said, although he already knew what she meant.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Samantha said, playing with her half-eaten salad. “I mean before you had a chance to ever feel bored with each other. Or pissed off.”

  “Maybe,” Michael said.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.” She leant forward and laid a hand on his arm. “None of my business. It’s just…”

  “No, no,” Michael reassured her. “You’re probably right. It was all just starting, really.”

  Samantha sat back in her chair. “It’s what she’d have wanted, you know. Eventually.”

  “What? For me to start sleeping with other women?” Michael couldn’t keep the distaste from his voice.

  “Yes,” Samantha said. “Or, at least, to have someone. To not be on your own. Unless, of course, that’s what makes you happy. Being on your own.” She smiled and reached forward to give his arm a squeeze again. “But you mustn’t be afraid of it, Michael. Or feel guilty.”

  They’d had that conversation more than a month ago, but nothing had changed since, and Michael was yet to make any attempt to find that person, or even begin a journey towards them. But he knew Samantha was right. Caroline would have wanted him to be with someone else. If he was honest, it was possible this might even have been true if she’d lived. He’d often wondered, if never aloud, for how long they’d have been together. He’d hoped forever, of course, but he’d never known for certain. Not for sure. Caroline had found solidity in him, in their marriage. She’d found a peace. But she wasn’t naturally of an exclusive nature, and had always been more multiple than singular of character.

  Despite his reluctance to enter another relationship, Michael still missed women physically. Recently, late at night after a day’s work, he’d found himself typing “Hampstead + Escorts” into his search engine more than once, browsing the posed thumbnails of “Erika,” “Giselle,” and “Cindy,” the lists of their services and rates in bold below each of them. But his desire had never taken him as far as the contact email or phone number, and although he’d told himself that hiring one of these girls would be preferable to risking the feelings of a longer-term partner, he’d always ended up closing his laptop and walking away from his desk.

  Instinctively, Michael felt that if he were ever to start again with another woman, then it would have to happen elsewhere, beyond London. Already, despite his resolve to be governed by the lives of Samantha and Rachel, the prospect of a move was increasingly seductive. Once the new book was done. Once he knew Samantha and Rachel were further along their recovery. The thought of it, when he allowed it to, excited him. He was grateful to Peter for his flat, but it had always been intended as a holding pattern. And soon, he could feel it, he’d be ready to leave. The guilt, the pain of what had happened here, he would always own. But a move, he knew, would alter the texture of that pain, the nature of its ache. Perhaps to somewhere on the continent, or back to New York. There was something about the fabric of the city that would suit his situation. Its streets, breathing with single lives, were fed by their hungers. Once there, having changed the geography of his living, then Michael could imagine perhaps finding someone: a woman from elsewhere who, having altered her own landscape, might be ready to accept someone like him with whom to share it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE GALLERY WAS crowded, so Michael saw Josh only when he’d already been at Samantha’s private view for more than an hour. He was standing in a far corner, talking animatedly to a younger couple, occasionally pointing at the framed print beside them. He was tanned and had lost weight, but still looked much older than when Michael had last seen him at close quarters. The grey that had always seeded his hair had spread, and his face was more lined than Michael remembered. The collar of his shirt was worn on one side, its sleeves rolled. His forearms, Michael noticed, were crosshatched with cuts and scratches.

  ―

  The gallery was owned by a friend of Sebastian’s, the director for whom Samantha worked as a PA. It was a small, two-roomed space on a mostly residential street beyond Flask Walk. Originally a florist’s, it now housed four or five temporary exhibitions a year. It was Michael who’d persuaded Samantha to show her employer some of her prints, but Sebastian who’d done the rest. A week later the gallery owner, Emmanuel, had written to her. Could he exhibit Samantha’s work? Only for a couple of weeks at first, but if it sold, then maybe longer.

  With the arrival of Emmanuel’s emai
l, Samantha’s previous confidence in her work evaporated. She told Michael it was too soon, that she still had over a year to go with her MA. That the work wasn’t good enough.

  “What happened to the only-half-cooked idea?” Michael asked her.

  “Very funny,” she’d said, a spread of her prints covering the dining table. Their family portrait still hung above it, and as she slid the photographs over one another her younger self looked over her shoulder, Lucy on her knee, Rachel sitting on Josh’s lap beside her.

  “Seriously, though,” she’d said, running a hand through her hair. “How am I meant to choose? He said he could hang twenty-five at most. Maybe thirty at a push.”

  She’d been taking her pond photos for over eight months by then. Over 240 images, all from the same position, at the same time of day.

  Michael, who’d been leaning against the kitchen island, came to sit opposite her. “I’ll help,” he said, spreading the prints and turning them round so he could see them.

  “Really?” she said. “God, that would be amazing.”

  “I wouldn’t get too excited,” Michael said. “I’m no expert.”

  “Yes, you are,” she countered, as Michael placed a winter scene next to a morning in March. “It’s meant to be what you’re good at, isn’t it? Finding the story?”

  Since that evening, Michael had assisted Samantha with other elements of the exhibition, too. Bringing the framed prints back to her house, choosing their positions in the gallery, suggesting a title for the show: And Again. Earlier that evening, forgoing his fencing-club night, he’d shared a cab over to the gallery with her and Rachel, its floor filled with boxes of wine, glasses, and fruit juice. Samantha had been quiet on the journey, her nerves drying up her talk. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” Rachel had said as they’d driven up alongside the Heath, the boxed glasses chattering at their feet. “They’ll like you, I know they will.”