She’d been let go from the cleaning job at the school after the council had made budget cuts. Sadly, for both Finn and Mary, it took her an entire year to find a new job. During this time, while he couldn’t play, Finn took to scratching at scabs on his skin until they bled, over and over again, until they scarred. He sucked his thumb so fiercely it got blisters and twisted his hair so hard it shed in clumps. When, at last, his mother was gainfully employed and quickly saved to buy him another violin, Finn clutched it to his chest so tightly he could barely breathe and wept with relief.
Finn plays every morning at daybreak. Sometimes he serenades the birds singing outside his bedroom window, other times he accompanies them and, occasionally, he lets them take the lead. It’s his meditation, his inner settling before being thrown into the fray of the day. Finn doesn’t do well with people. He’s okay with kids, which is why he teaches music four days a week at the secondary school across town. He relies on the stable income, as well as enjoying the biweekly injection of unadulterated enthusiasm the kids give him.
Today, Finn steps over piles of cardboard boxes to reach his open window. It’s all new to him: the house, the window and the little garden beneath. He’d moved in the day before but it already felt like home. Really, all Finn needed was his violin to feel at home. He could have been pitched up in a tent in a field or in a sleeping bag under a bridge and, as long as he had the sweetest part of him, he’d be all right.
Cool spring air blows through Finn’s fingers as he plays, warming up with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – autumn and winter – as he always does, before mixing in a little Mozart and Beethoven, then letting himself go into a free style of his own making. As he plays Finn glances out of the window onto his garden below. It’s a bit of a mess – the previous tenant clearly hadn’t cared much for gardening – but the garden next door to his is absolutely glorious. He keeps playing as he lets his eyes flit from one flower to the next until, finally, they alight on a woman standing at the edge of the lawn, holding a cup of tea, staring up at him. She’s beautiful, with long black hair and big dark eyes. Instinctively, Finn darts away from the open window, clutching his violin tight to his chest, as if the woman had been intending on snatching it from him. He waits in the shadows behind his curtains for a while, before finally peeking out of the window again.
This time he sees something else entirely. The woman with the long black hair has gone but, as Finn glances around, he sees another woman standing at the bottom of his other neighbour’s garden. This woman has red hair that curls and spirals in the wind, freckles scattered across her bare skin – of which there is quite a lot – and an air of serenity he’s rarely seen in another person. Indeed, Finn is so mesmerised by this woman, so enchanted, that it takes him a while to realise that she isn’t actually standing on the lawn but hovering a few inches above it.
Chapter Five
Of course, Clara, even with her languid lack of curiosity, reads the letters. Or, at least, she tries to read the letters. Unfortunately, she isn’t able, since they’re all written in a language she doesn’t understand. It doesn’t help too that the handwriting is virtually illegible but, even once she’s deciphered each letter of the first paragraph on the first page, she’s still made no progress at all.
Since Clara is a committed Luddite when it comes to technology, refusing to own a computer, or dabble with the attendant evils of emails and the like, whenever she has to use the Internet she visits the library and makes sure to check out a few books at the same time. It’s a sort of equivalent, she considers, to cutting down a tree and planting another in its place – if only everyone would balance their embracing of modern technology with an equal expenditure on and employment of real books, pens and paper. The world would be a better place.
Today, instead of tackling the computer herself, Clara asks the librarian for assistance. He informs her that the letter is written in Dutch. Meaning, Clara reasons, that they came from her grandfather’s family, of whom she knows little to nothing about. Only that most of her family had fled from Amsterdam just before the outbreak of WWII and most members of their Jewish family who’d stayed behind had perished.
Since discovering that the letters are in Dutch, Clara keeps them by her bedside – so they are the last thing she sees as she switches off the light and the first thing she sees when the sun through her curtains wakes her. Somehow, even the feeling of keeping the letters close, though Clara can’t make any sense of them, gives her comfort. She’s always missed the fact of having very little family – once her grandparents died, her mother was all she had left. Clara has no father to speak of and no siblings, so the notion of a few extra family members is an appealing one.
Clara knows it’d be fairly easy to find someone to translate the letters in Cambridge – it’s a city of students, after all, some of whom no doubt read multiple languages – but she’s holding back. Perhaps because she’s a little nervous about embarking on this adventure and also because she wants to hold on to the mystery – full of potential and possibility – for a while longer. The mystery gives her imagination free rein so Clara can bask in images of reunions and love and joys to come. And she’s not yet willing to let go of these delights, however unreal, for the probable disappointing bump of reality.
On the rare occasions she’s not thinking of the letters, Clara finds her mind drifting to the man whose name she doesn’t know. When she’d seen him in his living room, sitting on the sofa with his daughter – at least, Clara presumed it was his daughter – reading a book, she’d been so touched it’d almost brought her to tears. Clara can’t rightly say why; she had no urge yet to have children and hadn’t found the man himself especially alluring, so hadn’t been moved by maternal or romantic feeling. And yet, for some reason, the image of them returns to her.
Clara doesn’t usually think of the people to whom she sends letters. After the letter is written and posted, she closes that mental file and moves on to the next one. Very occasionally, years later, Clara might find herself writing to the same person a second time – most people usually experience several ups and downs in their lives, after all – but she’d rarely thought of them in the intervening years. With this one, though, it’s different.
Clara wonders if it might be because her own father left around the same time, when she was about the same age as the young girl. And, even though this other father seemed so sad, he also seemed solid. He wouldn’t desert his only daughter, he would stick with her through thick and thin. He’d make her hot chocolate late at night, he’d run to her bedroom when she had nightmares, he’d make her favourite breakfast of French toast on a Sunday morning. Of this Clara was absolutely certain. She couldn’t say how she knew, but she knew. Clara’s own father had left when she was twelve. He’d been leaving in increments for years before that, so Clara wasn’t actually very surprised to find him gone one morning. Her mother, on the other hand, had been rather more surprised and thus had remained considerably more bitter. But Clara hadn’t felt the presence of her father for a long, long time – as if he was slowly fading away like a ghost – and so, she always imagined that, one day, he’d simply evaporated into thin air. Her mother, if she knew any different, never divulged the particulars and Clara, knowing it would get her nowhere, had never asked.
Of course, Clara has thought of her father often over the years, wondering where he might be and what he might be doing. But since he’s never tried to contact her, never written with his whereabouts, she confines her wonderings to the realms of unreality. And since it’s less painful to think about a virtual stranger, Clara thinks on this other father instead. Sometimes she’ll be sitting behind the counter, waiting on her next customer, doodling on paper with one of the special pens, and find that she’s quite accidentally begun writing him another letter. She’ll look down and see the words:
How are you? How’s your daughter? What are your names? (Why does that matter?) I hope you’re both well …
And then she’ll snap out
of her reverie and pull herself back to attention.
Once Edward has mended the crack in the kitchen ceiling (a task that took him a good few days longer than he’d anticipated, after he initially made it a good deal worse before at last making it better again) he moves on to other long-neglected DIY projects. Now that he has surveyed the house with a critical eye, he can’t believe that he’s let it get into such a state of disrepair. Every room is in serious need of a good lick of paint, gutters are cracked and overflowing with leaves, the garden is overrun with weeds and Edward can’t even bear to acknowledge, let alone begin to confront, the obscene levels of dirt and dust on every single surface in every single room.
As he tours the place, taking inventory, it increasingly strikes Edward that the state of his house reflects the state of his life: neglected, broken and shabby. Which is embarrassing and, considering that he’s raising his daughter here, more than a little shameful. So Edward makes a list and sets to work. He starts at the bottom and takes each project room by room. Five days after he starts, Edward reaches the bathroom.
The bathroom, he’s sorry to see, is probably in the worst state of all the other rooms in the house. Eleven items, on his list of forty-eight, relate to the bathroom. The first that must be dealt with are the tiles. It’s the biggest job and should be done as soon as possible in order to allow enough time for the grouting to dry before Tilly takes one of her infinite showers the next morning. The amount of time teenage girls spend in the bathroom seems, to Edward, to bear an inverse ratio to the amount of time they actually need. Still, what does he know? So, with a shrug, Edward sets himself to work. And, as the hours pass in clouds of dust and humming and sweat, he finds that he’s smiling while he sings and, for the first time in a very long time, all of a sudden he belts out a note:
‘Waterlooooo …’
‘Hey, Ed.’
Edward instantly stops. This behaviour would definitely fall under the category of ‘embarrassing things that fathers aren’t allowed to do’. He glances up guiltily from grouting the bathroom tiles. But, as he does so, he realises that Tilly only ever calls him ‘Dad’. Still confused, it takes Edward a moment to realise who he’s seeing, sitting on the loo seat with her legs crossed. For there, even more beautiful, but significantly more transparent than Edward remembered, is Greer Ashby, his dead wife.
Edward has no idea how long it takes him to speak, anywhere between an hour and a day, or just a full fifteen minutes. All he knows is that the pathways between his brain and his mouth seem to seize up for rather a long time. He’s always been a very practical, pragmatic man – not entirely an atheist, perhaps, but certainly leaning heavily in that direction – and has never been inclined to flights of fancy, certainly not in the direction of his dead wife. Although, that’s not entirely true, as he now recalls. In the weeks and months after her death he’d kneel on the bathroom floor – on the floor of every room in the house in fact – and beg a God he didn’t quite believe in to send her back. Every night he’d sob into the darkness, pleading for Greer’s spirit to return to him.
‘It’s you,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘It is.’
Edward continues to stare at her, confused. ‘But, but …’ Edward stares at her, open-mouthed, since, even when he’d asked her the question, he still assumed that she was an apparition, a figment of something, an ethereal gift from a finally benevolent universe, but not one that could actually speak. And she sounds exactly as she did and looks so similar too, with the exception of the extra dose of beauty and transparency.
‘But what?’
‘But, why are you here?’ he asks, still not entirely convinced that she actually is.
Greer gives a little shrug. ‘I’m not entirely sure.’
‘B-b-but …’ Edward stutters, trying to gather his colliding thoughts and still not quite certain he isn’t hallucinating. ‘If you’re here – then why … why did you wait so long?’
Greer is silent.
‘Why did you come back now?’ he asks. ‘When, when …’
‘When you don’t need me any more?’ Greer finishes.
‘No,’ he says, a little too quickly. ‘That’s not what I mean …’ He pauses for several moments. ‘Well, okay, yes,’ he admits. ‘I just, I literally just started putting my life back together. I just began learning how to live without you and now, and now …’
His wife watches him, waiting.
‘Why? Why couldn’t you come back when, when’ – his eyes swell with tears as he remembers – ‘when I couldn’t bear to be alive without you?’
‘Oh, Ed.’ Greer doesn’t move, though she seems to shift forward in her seat, as if wanting to go to him but being unable. ‘I’m so, so …’
‘I hate that you’re being so Zen about all this, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, while I’m falling apart on the bathroom floor.’ Edward finds a small smile. ‘And I’ve done more than my fair share of that in the past few years, don’t you think?’
Greer nods. ‘I know, sweetheart. And, if I could have made it any easier for you, I would have. In a second, in a heartbeat.’
‘So, why didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ his wife admits. ‘But, if I had, would it really have made it easier for you to let me go?’
Edward snorts, then shrugs. He’s a little surprised at his own reaction, even as he’s having it. He’d always imagined that, if he ever saw his wife again, he’d either weep uncontrollably or be overwhelmed with joy. As it is Edward feels so strangely conflicted that he isn’t exactly sure what he’s feeling at all.
Greer continues to look at him from her position on the loo seat.
‘No,’ Edward admits after a while. ‘No, I suppose not. Though that doesn’t make it any more forgivable.’ He knows, even as he says it, that, of course, it does.
‘I think, perhaps, I had to wait for you to heal,’ Greer says softly. ‘I think I had to wait for you to be okay before I came back.’
She says this to comfort him but, in truth, she really has no idea at all.
Chapter Six
Finn is late for work. He’s cycling madly across town, hoping to hell he doesn’t get hit by a car or, worse still, a bus, and knowing that – no matter how fast he goes – his legs aren’t able to get him to the school on time. He’s late because he always stays too late in the morning, playing. Although, he’s not simply playing, he’s also watching the woman (actually, the women) who come outside every morning to stand in their gardens and listen.
Having another point of attention while he plays is entirely new for Finn. He’s always been completely and utterly focused before, to the point that major natural disasters could have befallen his surroundings and he’d never have noticed. He’s always put himself so completely into his playing, feeling the birth of every note quiver through his fingers and every echo hum long and deep in his chest. It’s the very reason Finn loves to play – loves it more than any other experience he’s ever had, even sex, though that’s admittedly been a limited foray so far – because when he plays he forgets himself so entirely. It’s almost, though Finn isn’t a religious person, a spiritual experience – in that he feels his body disappear and his spirit rise up to merge with and melt into wherever it has come from, the energy that had created everything in the first place. Playing music, for Finn, is so much bliss, joy and ecstasy all at once that he’s never had an orgasm to match it and he certainly doesn’t want to dilute it.
And yet, he can’t pull his attention away from the woman with red hair who floats above the grass at the end of her garden, looking up and listening to him so intently. And actually, far from diluting Finn’s experience, it strangely seems to enhance it. He feels the intensity of her listening so deeply that it’s almost as if she’s touching him. It feels as if her fingers hover just above his bare skin, so he can feel the heat of her, then she strokes her fingertips along his body, unwrapping him like great swathes of silk, until she’s able to reach in and take hold o
f his heart so it lies warm and beating in her hands.
And, as she listens, his playing takes on fresh force so that the music becomes his fingers and with every note he reaches out, very gently and very slowly slipping her clothes off, until he’s caressing her, tracing his touch through the spirals of her hair, along the arc of her cheek, the slope of her neck, the swell of her breasts, the curve of her belly … He feels himself stroke his fingertips over every inch of her soft body, as the notes begin to wrap themselves around her, draping over her shoulders, curling tenderly around her chest, until her whole body is enveloped by his music, his touch, his spirit and his soul.
By the time Finn finally pulls himself, with paralysing reluctance, away from his violin, his skin is slick with sweat and his heart pounds against his ribs. When he drags himself away from the window, catching sight of the alarm clock and knowing he can’t postpone his departure a second longer, he has to bite his lip to stop from calling out to her. He hasn’t the nerve. Because he’s terrified, that she’ll either turn away and never return or – more likely – that she’ll prove to be a transparent, floating figment of his imagination. And Finn will gladly put off that moment of disillusionment for ever – even if the woman isn’t real, even if her presence is putting his job in jeopardy, he doesn’t care.
Ava is giddy. Every morning she wakes before her alarm, her eyes snapping open, her bare feet already on the floorboards as she hurries towards the bathroom. Her new neighbour plays every morning as the birds start to sing and she needs to be outside to hear him so she doesn’t miss a single second. She wants to soak up every note, every sound. She wants to close her eyes and let the music sink deep into her body. She wants it to flood through her, the pure tones cleansing her blood, healing her spirit, clearing all the thoughts from her head.
The Lost Art of Letter Writing Page 4