Also by David Ambrose
Superstition
The Man Who Turned into Himself
Mother of God
Hollywood Lies
Copyright
The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations and public figures are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are totally imaginary.
Copyright © 2001 by David Ambrose
All rights reserved.
First published in the United Kingdom by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56666-7
Contents
Also by David Ambrose
Copyright
Acknowledgments
“GEORGE”
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
“LARRY“
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
“SARA”
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
“LARRY“
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
“GEORGE“
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
“LARRY“
Chapter 34
“SARA“
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
“GEORGE“
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
“SARA“
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Coincidence
Praise for Superstition
Acknowledgments
Many of the coincidences quoted in this book (although none of those on which the story actually hangs) are taken from the extensive literature that exists on the subject. I would particularly like to record my thanks to and admiration of: Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making by Victor Mansfield; Synchronicity, the Bridge between Matter and Mind by F. David Peat; Patterns of Prophecy and Incredible Coincidence by Alan Vaughan; Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny by Ira progoff; and, perhaps most important, The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Philosophy… leaves everything as it is.
—Wittgenstein
“GEORGE”
Chapter 1
It started with my father’s death. At least, that was how it seemed at the time. Now, looking back, I realize how impossible it is to be sure where anything really begins; or, for that matter, where, or even whether, it has ended.
I was alone at our apartment in Manhattan for the weekend. My wife, Sara, was in Chicago checking out a couple of young artists who were exhibiting there. She had her own gallery downtown in TriBeCa and a reputation for bringing new talent to the attention of a sophisticated market at just the right time. It was Sunday evening and I’d spent the day alone, trying to work up an idea for a new book. I write nonfiction books that occupy a kind of no-man’s-land between real science and fantastical speculation. I’ve dealt with poltergeists, ESP of various kinds, stone circles, ley lines, the pyramids. You get the idea. I have a good time and never knowingly write junk. I mean I don’t just invent stuff or make claims unless I can support them with at least a respectable amount of evidence. They’re not best-sellers, but at least they do well enough to keep my publishers coming back for more, so I suppose I can’t complain. But I didn’t have the vaguest notion what my next subject was going to be. I felt I was in a dead end, written out. Nothing would come together no matter how long I cudgeled my brain in search of a theme or framework that had some spark of novelty.
Around six-thirty I poured myself a scotch and took it out on the terrace, where I watched the lights coming up across the park. It was the time of year when the trees were turning into a rich blend of copper, gold, and red. Looking at them made me think of New England and that whole East Coast, and of the small town where my father lived in a retirement home. I’d spoken to him on the phone earlier in the day, as I did most weekends. I went up to see him every couple of months or so, and I was about due for another visit. Maybe I’d go up at the end of the week, I told myself, or at the very latest the week after.
It was at that moment, when the image of my father and his sad, frustrated life were at the forefront of my mind, that the phone rang. I went inside to answer it. It was Abigail Tucker, the superintendent of the home. I knew at once from the tone of her voice that he was dead. A heart attack, she said, less than an hour ago.
I thanked her for letting me know so quickly and said I’d take a train up in the morning. She agreed that there was no point in my rushing up immediately. She herself would make arrangements with the funeral home if I wished. I said I would be grateful for that and thanked her again.
When I hung up I didn’t move for some time, just stood there looking at my reflection in the window, watching it grow clearer moment by moment as the light outside faded. What were you supposed to feel, I asked myself, on learning of your father’s death? Was there something specific, something deep-rooted in the psyche, a special sense of loss? Or growth perhaps? And how remarkable that I should have been thinking of him at that very moment when the call came.
Except, of course, it wasn’t remarkable at all. The association of trees, New England, the fact of having spoken to him that morning, and of feeling slightly guilty about putting off my next visit to him as long as I could explained the coincidence. But I felt no rush of remorse, no sense of unfinished business as a result of having missed that last chance to see him, no lack of “closure,” as your local corner therapist would call it. I felt nothing that I hadn’t been feeling half an hour earlier. The only difference was that my father had been alive then and was dead now. A simple fact.
But, although -I didn’t consciously know it then, I had found both the subject and the title of my next book.
Coincidence.
The sky was overcast when I stepped off the train and crossed the footbridge to where a taxi waited to take me the last three miles to the home. As we wound up the hill I looked out at the familiar sights passing by, seeing them for the last time—and feeling, to be honest, little apart from relief that I would not have to make this journey again.
At least, I told myself, he had been well looked after. The place hadn’t been cheap and had eaten up my father’s modest capital as well as his pension, and had still required several thousand a year from my own pocket. But it was money I’d been happy to pay. Somehow it made up for the lack of warmth between us, allowing me to feel that I at least had done everything I possibly could, and that it was my father who had resented me and kept me at arm’s length all my life, not I who had in any way let down, betrayed, or walked away from him.
Sara, to her credit, had been as anxious as I was to ensure that he was given the b
est possible care when it became obvious five years ago that he was no longer fit to live alone. Two falls and a growing drink habit had done that. He wasn’t an alcoholic; it was just something to do. He was bored. My father had been bored, and bitter, almost all of his adult life. He had continued to drink in the home, though far less; it wasn’t one of those regimented places that regarded old people as an inconvenience to be drugged senseless and kept out of the way as much as possible. They had their own rooms and, within reason, their own routines.
Mrs. Tucker appeared at the door of the handsome old house as I got out of my taxi. She was a pleasant-looking woman around forty, dressed casually for the country and looking more like a favorite aunt than some matronly superintendent. She took me into her office, which looked onto a broad sweep of tree-covered countryside. I was impressed by the efficiency with which she had assembled all the necessary paperwork, but then reflected that this was not exactly a routine she was unaccustomed to in her line of work. Tea was brought in as we took care of everything, after which she drove me to the chapel of rest, where my father’s body had been taken the previous night. He was lying in a “temporary casket”; I almost embarrassed myself by laughing out loud when I heard it called that.
We had already decided that the funeral was to be the following morning, Tuesday. There were no far-flung relatives to be informed and who would need time to make travel arrangements, therefore no sense in waiting. I had spoken to Sara, who said she would be back in New York late Monday and would either take a train or drive up early Tuesday. I told her it wasn’t essential she be there and I would understand if she was too busy, but she wouldn’t hear of not coming.
It only remained for me to pick the casket in which he would be buried. I chose the one I thought he would have chosen himself: simple to the point of being ascetic, but in the best materials and workmanship available. My father appreciated quality but dismissed with scorn anything that he felt could be described as chichi. Design for him was governed by function, all unnecessary ornamentation being regarded as the worst form of original sin.
I spent the afternoon going through the things in his room. It was bare and anonymous compared with some of the other rooms I glimpsed through open doors as I made my way along the corridor to his. Most people had pictures of their family, treasured possessions accumulated over a lifetime, gifts sent by friends and relatives. My father had nothing of that kind. A few books, mostly thrillers and adventure stories; a couple of suits, some sweaters and casual clothes; four pairs of shoes. The only things in his drawers, most of which were empty, were socks, shirts, and underwear. I found his wallet in a bedside drawer. It contained a few dollars in cash, his driver’s license that he hung on to though he hadn’t driven in years, and a few yellowing business cards. In the same drawer was a key ring with two small keys that looked as though they might fit a briefcase or a piece of luggage. I had found nothing of that kind in the room, but, as I double-checked, a young woman called Shirley who was on duty that afternoon put her head around the door. She had a round face and a bright smile, and I knew that she had made repeated efforts to draw my father out of his shell, all to no avail. She asked if I needed any help or whether I might like a cup of coffee or anything else. I thanked her and said I was fine, then gave her one half-empty and one unopened bottle of whisky from my father’s drinks cabinet and suggested she pass them to one of the gardeners or keep them herself, whatever she chose. I also asked if she could arrange to give away his clothes if they were of use to anyone, otherwise perhaps send them to some local charity shop. She said she would see to it.
“By the way,” she said, “would you like someone to bring up your father’s chest from the store room, or will you deal with it down there?”
“Chest?” I said, surprised, because I had no memory of his having had any such thing when I helped him move in. “How big?”
“Fairly large,” she said, using her hands to make a shape in the air that suggested a substantial piece of luggage.
“Is it locked?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked at the keys that I still held in my hand.
“I’ll come down,” I said, “if you’ll show me where it is.”
Chapter 2
The store room, which had been a four-car garage when the house had been privately owned, was a window-less cavern with two long strips of overhead lighting. One of the gardeners hauled a battered, ribbed traveling trunk down from a shelf and dragged it into the middle of the concrete floor. He was delighted when Shirley presented him with the bottles of whisky I had given her, then they both tactfully withdrew to let me go through my father’s things in private.
Both locks snapped open like mousetraps, but I hesitated a moment before lifting the lid. My first thought was that a trunk this size must almost certainly contain some of my father’s paintings. My father, I should explain, was an unsuccessful artist who had given up in despair and bitterness and finished his working life behind the counter in a gentlemen’s haberdashery. After he had been doing that for about a year my mother died—of an accidental overdose, according to the coroner’s verdict. I, however, was convinced and still am that it was suicide. My father took his sense of failure out on her, not in any brutish physical way, but with a thousand little mental cruelties. All my life (I was twenty when she died) I had heard his peevish references to the way in which domestic chains were death to an artist’s soul. Looking back now, it was almost as though he were preparing himself for a failure that in his heart he knew was unavoidable, and making sure that the blame could be laid elsewhere than on himself. Whether he really had talent or none at all I never knew. When he finally faced up to the fact that the success he yearned for had eluded him, he destroyed all his paintings in one frenzied afternoon and forbade any mention of them in his presence ever again.
So it was with mixed feelings that I finally opened the battered old trunk in that dark bunker of a place. My father’s paintings, though I had lived with them for so many years, had left only the dimmest of memories in me: vague, abstract landscapes, a sparing use of color, nothing that sprang to the eye any more than now sprang to mind. As I pushed back the lid I didn’t know whether to expect a painful confirmation of my father’s mediocrity or whether to prepare myself for the even more painful discovery that he had been a true though neglected talent. Would it not be a bitter irony, I mused, if I could persuade Sara of his work’s value and have her establish some small posthumous reputation for him?
But of course, and perhaps not for the first time, I found I had misjudged him. The trunk contained only bric-a-brac, the detritus of life that he had never found time or made the effort to throw away. Or perhaps this trunk was the place where he’d thrown it away and then forgotten about it. I rummaged through old cameras, a broken radio, a box of cheap cuff links that had never been opened, books, letters, a scattering of old photographs, and a couple of albums into which several more photographs had been fixed.
There was also a stack of yellowing old newspapers. They were intact, not cuttings, though most of them had been folded open at some particular page. Glancing through, I saw that several carried reviews of exhibitions my father had held over the years at various obscure galleries in out-of-the-way places. Their tone ranged from the dismissive to the patronizing, and I felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the poor man faced with this response to the work into which I knew he had poured everything he had to offer. It just hadn’t been enough, that was all. There is a theory that provided you know you’ve done your best, then failure isn’t so hard to bear. I don’t think that’s true. I think the worst thing of all must be to do your best, to work and slave and wring the last drop of talent you can find out of yourself, then to be told you’ve wasted your time, that you were never up to the endeavor in the first place.
I knelt there for some moments with a terrible sense of heartbreak for my father’s wasted life, as well as for the undeserved misery into which his failure had dragged m
y poor, unassuming, unambitious mother. Tears stung my eyes. As I wiped them away, I realized that this was the moment of mourning I had not allowed myself so far: which, indeed, I had persuaded myself I had no need of. I had wept for my mother long ago, but never thought I would for him. I had been wrong again. He was my father, and whatever his faults I couldn’t help but cherish him in some corner of my heart, and champion his heroism in attempting the dauntingly impossible task in life that he had set himself.
There is an odd and poignant fascination in old photographs. I picked up a handful that lay there in the trunk and started looking through them. They were mostly of holidays on various stretches of New England coastline, some taken before I was born and showing my parents as a handsome and happy young couple whom I could barely recognize as the same people I had grown up with. There were several of me as a child during one long and wonderful summer when we’d been lent a small house on Cape Cod. I remember my father painting happily all day while my mother and I went sailing with our neighbors, who had two boys about my own age. That summer was the best time of my childhood. Looking back, I think it was the last good time my parents had together; it was certainly the last good time we had together as a family.
I picked up one of the albums, wondering what memories my parents (most likely, I thought, my mother) had found worthy of preserving in this special way. The pictures stuck onto the plain gray pages all dated from before my birth, though only just. In a couple of them my mother was heavily pregnant. These too were happy pictures, most of them featuring another couple about the same age as my parents and whom I’d never seen in my life. Some of the pictures had obviously been taken in a private garden, which I also didn’t recognize, and which fairly obviously belonged to the other couple, not my parents. In several of them the man—good-looking with thick dark hair and a winning smile—was turning steaks and sausages on a barbecue, and in others pouring wine and serving lunch to my parents. His wife, assuming that she was his wife, was blonde and pretty. There were several pictures of them with their arms around each other, clowning for the camera. By comparison with them my parents were shy-looking and reserved. All the same, I sensed a bond there and a real warmth among the four of them. I was curious to know who they were, and why they had disappeared from my parents’ life before I had ever known them.
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