The question didn’t surprise me particularly or make me nervous. At some deep level, perhaps, I had known that it would come.
‘Not exactly,’ I said.
Victor’s pale eyes seemed to blacken. ‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?’
I repeated what Mr Reek had said in his study on that bright spring afternoon, and then told Victor about my visit to the Ministry and the unexpected reappearance of Miss Groves. It came as a relief to be able to rid myself of all this information. Until that moment I hadn’t realised quite how burdened I was.
‘I thought so,’ Victor said. ‘My God.’ His left hand closed into a fist, and he wrapped his other hand around it and held it tightly. His great bald forehead gleamed. ‘So have you said anything? Have you reported us?’
‘No.’
‘And would you?’
I hesitated. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
This time I paused for longer. I wanted to express what it was that I had felt within a day or two of arriving at the house – what I still felt, in fact – but it was difficult. I had never thought to put the feeling into words before, not even in my head. Then, suddenly, I had it – or something that seemed close enough.
‘Because I want you to be happy,’ I said.
Victor rose to his feet and walked over to his wall of books. He stood with his back to me, touching the spines of certain volumes with fingers that seemed unsure of themselves. Finally he turned to face me again. His eyes had a silvery quality that hadn’t been there before. ‘You’re a good boy, Thomas, and we’re glad to have you here. You know that, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘We haven’t talked a great deal,’ he went on. ‘That’s my fault entirely. I’ve had other things on my mind, I’m afraid. Also, to be honest, I didn’t trust you. I was sorry for you, of course, being taken from your family like that, and I felt responsible for you in some strange way, but I didn’t trust you.’ He looked at me. ‘That sounds dreadful, I know.’
I shook my head. ‘I understand.’
‘Do you?’ He squatted down in front of me, gripping my shoulders. ‘Do you really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anything you want to ask?’
I was about to shake my head again, then checked myself. ‘There is one thing.’
‘What?’ Victor leaned forwards, his eyes intent on mine.
‘It’s Mr Page,’ I said.
Victor’s head tilted a little, and an upright line showed in the gap between his eyebrows.
‘What happens when he gets angry?’ I went on. ‘I mean, does he still look as if he’s smiling?’
For a moment Victor remained quite motionless, then his mouth opened wide and several odd inhaled sounds came out of him.
It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh.
Although I had asked about Mr Page and then reported my findings to Bracewell, his influence on us both had waned considerably. Once in a while, out of a quaint sense of loyalty, we would sit opposite the dry-cleaner’s, but we were no longer expecting any miracles and we never stayed for very long. After all, we had a new passion now – the motorway.
We had only ridden out to the broken bridge a handful of times when we chanced upon an abandoned service station about a mile to the north. We immediately adopted it as our headquarters. There were curving roads with pompous white arrows painted on them, which we delighted in disobeying. There were meaningless grass-covered mounds. Inside the building was an arcade that was lined with video games, their screens all smashed, and a restaurant with wicker light-shades that hung from the ceiling like upside-down waste-paper baskets. Sometimes we would sit in the entrance, under the glass roof, and try to imagine what it was like before. Cars would park in front of us and people with weird old-fashioned hairstyles would get out. They would walk right past us, relishing the opportunity to stretch their legs, and we’d be sitting there, in the future, invisible.
We must have absorbed something of the atmosphere of the times, I suppose, since we invented a whole series of what we referred to privately as ‘border games’. One morning we cycled further north than usual and found a section of the motorway that was in the process of being dug up. In our minds, the area instantly became a no man’s land, with construction workers standing in for guards. We would pretend to be people from the Blue Quarter – unstable, indecisive types – or, better still, violent criminals from the Yellow Quarter, and it would be our mission to cross into sanguine territory, which was on the far side of the road. Camouflaged by pieces of shredded tyre, we would hide in the long grass at the edge of the building site and study the guards’ movements through binoculars made from chopped-up bits of one of Victor’s cardboard tubes. The game required audacity, cunning and, above all, patience. Each escape attempt was carefully orchestrated and timed to perfection, and it could take an entire morning to carry it out successfully. Once, we were spotted by a man in a yellow hard hat. He lifted an arm and took aim at us, two fingers extended like the barrel of a gun, thumb upright like a trigger. Ducking down, we imagined the thrilling zip of bullets in the air above our heads. On weekends one of us would have to assume the role of guard. I would prowl among the cement-mixers and scaffolding poles, clutching a second-hand air rifle I had bought in a junk shop on Hope Street. On my head I would be wearing an old motorbike helmet that was the shape of half a grapefruit. If it was Bracewell’s turn to patrol the border, he would often bring his mother’s spaniel along and pretend it was an attack dog.
We spent whole days out at the motorway, fortifying our headquarters against intruders or thinking up variations on the border game or just lying on our stomachs observing the guards, and every now and then we would talk about the old days, that peculiar, almost dreamlike time when Thorpe Hall had been a kind of home to us. On one such afternoon we decided to fit the service station with an alarm system. We used a length of fishing-twine as a trip-wire, fastening one end to a pile of dinner plates which we’d found in the kitchens at the back. As Bracewell unwound the twine across the main entrance, he surprised me by saying, ‘Do you remember Jones?’
My heart speeded up. I had never married Jones, I hadn’t even mixed my blood with his, but I had listened as he voiced his worries and I had done my best to reassure and comfort him. When he began to act strangely, I believed it was at least partly my fault. I had failed him, somehow, and that was a source of private shame to me. Then, when he was taken away, my shame redoubled, because secretly, somewhere deep down, I was relieved that our awkward friendship was over. Even now, more than three years later, I blushed at the mention of his name, but fortunately Bracewell was busy stacking plates and didn’t notice.
‘Jones,’ he said. ‘You know. Stork.’
‘What about him?’
‘I know what happened.’
‘He was transferred,’ I said. ‘Reek told me.’
Bracewell sat back on his heels and steered a crafty look in my direction. ‘Reek was lying.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘They sent him to a mental home.’
My throat hurt now, as though I had been shouting.
‘He was round the twist,’ Bracewell said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
He told me that he had been waiting in Reek’s office one day when he noticed a letter lying on the desk. The letter had the name and address of an asylum in the top right-hand corner, and it confirmed Jones’s recent arrival.
‘Where did they send him?’ I asked.
Bracewell shrugged. He hadn’t bothered with the details.
‘The way he used to stand there on one leg like that – for hours. I could never work out how he did it.’ Bracewell stared into space for a few moments, then shook his head and, getting to his feet, walked out into the car-park. Once there, he turned and studied the place where the twine stretched across the entrance. ‘I don’t think they’ll see that,’ he said, ‘do you?’
It seems to me that part of t
he true function of a mystery is precisely that it remains unsolved. The world would be far too neat a place if the things that puzzled us were always, eventually, explained. We need unanswered questions at the edges of our lives. In fact, I’d go further. It’s important not to think we can understand everything. Not to understand. The humility that can come from that. The wonder. Every now and then, though, one of the less pressing mysteries is revealed to us, as if a god had decided to satisfy, in some small way, our natural craving for symmetry and resolution.
I had forgotten all about the silver sandal until Victor took me upstairs one evening to show me a book that he’d been working on. We sat facing each other in the lamplight, our knees almost touching. The book rested on his lap. Two feet high, some six or seven inches thick, it had the formidable dimensions of a family bible. He had bound it himself, he told me.
‘You know what it’s made of?’ His eyes had grown paler and brighter, as light bulbs do before they blow.
I scrutinised the book. ‘I can see leather –’
‘Yes,’ he interrupted, ‘but what kind of leather?’
I bent closer and ran my fingertips across the cover. There were pieces of leather, but there were pieces of suede too, and rubber and canvas and raffia, all ingeniously and meticulously stitched together into a sort of patchwork.
‘It’s shoes,’ Victor said, unable to wait any longer.
‘Shoes?’
When they came for his wife, he said, they hadn’t given her the chance to pack. She had taken almost nothing with her – none of her shoes, for instance, and she had always loved shoes. He had bought many of the pairs himself, of course. After she had gone he couldn’t bear to look at them, and yet, at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. Whenever a pair of shoes caught his eye, he remembered something that had happened – a dinner party, a walk in the mountains, a game of tennis. He remembered their life together, and how happy, how very happy, they had been. There were some shoes that she hadn’t worn at all, that she’d been saving for a special occasion, perhaps, and it saddened him still more to think that she would never even put them on. Then, as he lay in bed one night, unable to sleep, the idea came to him: he would turn the shoes into a book.
‘What do you think, Tom?’ he said. ‘Am I mad?’
Just then I saw my mother’s bare feet on the road, and they were wet, and the pink polish on her toenails was chipped. I had to push the image swiftly to one side. Instead, I concentrated on the book in front of me. I concentrated hard. I could make out eyeholes now, and buckles too, and half a strap. And there, round the middle of the book’s wide spine, was a section of the famous silver sandal. On the back, a hiking boot revealed itself. Then a plimsoll, an espadrille – a flip-flop. I began to get an almost visual sense of who Jean Parry had been.
‘It’s like a photograph album,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Victor said in a strange loud whisper. ‘Yes, that’s right. Clever boy.’
I asked him what was inside.
The story of his wife’s first life, he said, the one she had lived before she was taken. Each chapter was narrated by a different pair of shoes. He had given the shoes voices. He had let them speak. It was heretical, of course, in that it celebrated the world that had existed prior to the Rearrangement. On the evidence of this book alone he could probably be imprisoned – or, worse still, transferred to the Green Quarter, where almost everyone wrote books, apparently. ‘So don’t say anything.’ His eyes darted into the gloomiest corners of the room, as if government officials might already be lurking there. ‘Not a word.’
For the first time I realised the extent to which Victor had been on guard against me ever since I had appeared on his doorstep. The absent-minded, ghostly quality that had characterised so much of his behaviour may well have been rooted in the grief he felt over the loss of his wife, but he had also been intent on concealing the outer, more complex edges of his own identity. He had seen me as an intruder and also, potentially at least, as an enemy. It must have been exhausting, I thought, to have had to keep himself so hidden, while at the same time being compelled to work, to live, to function normally, but then I suspected that he, like so many others, had become used to leading a double life. The Rearrangement had created a climate of suspicion and denial – even here, in this most open and cheerful of countries. People had buried the parts of their personalities that didn’t fit. Their secrets had flourished in the warm damp earth, and it was by those secrets that they could be judged and then condemned. In showing me the book of shoes, Victor had placed his life in my hands. He had decided to have faith in me, and I determined, from that moment on, that I would never disappoint him or let him down.
By the time I turned fifteen I was two inches taller than Marie, and every now and then people would mistake us for lovers. Since my experience in the railway carriage, I had imagined all kinds of closeness with Marie, but never that. I had so many pictures of her stored inside my head, some real, some invented. They weren’t wrong, just private. When we were seen as a couple, though, I felt as if someone had found out, and all the guilt came down on me, and all the shame, and anger too, a bright, crooked flash of anger through me, like a shiver. Marie thought it was hilarious, of course.
Gradually, I came to expect the comments, and I prepared myself. One morning, in the supermarket, somebody touched me on the elbow, and I turned to see an old woman smiling up at me. It warmed her heart, she said, to see two young people so much in love. I thanked her. Then, leaning closer, I told her that I had never been happier – and, curiously, I didn’t have the feeling I was lying. Marie almost choked. I watched her disappear round a stack of cereals. You know what you should do? the woman said. I shook my head. The woman’s smile widened. You should marry her. I wish I could have found this entertaining, as Marie did. When I got home, though, I sank into a deep despondency. My dreams had come true, but only for a few moments, the moments during which an old woman in a supermarket had believed me, and now, once again, they were just dreams, and always would be.
In time, I succeeded in turning it into a game – I would spend hours thinking up different histories for us, fresh dialogue – but secretly I was flattered to be thought of as Marie’s boyfriend. I wanted to be seen in that light, I liked the fact that it looked possible, and it would always come as something of a disappointment to me if we went out together and no one said anything.
Every once in a while, Marie would tell me about a fling she was having. On the one hand I felt privileged that she had chosen to confide in me. On the other, I couldn’t stand hearing about a person whom I viewed, almost inevitably, as some kind of rival. It split me right down the middle, just listening to her.
I remember an evening when we walked up to the castle, a clear black sky above our heads. It had been raining earlier. Water rushed in all the gutters, and the air was full of river smells, reeds and mud and roots. When we reached the entrance – a pair of tall gates, padlocked at sunset – Marie asked me to give her a hand. I helped her up on to the wall, then she scrambled down the other side, first on to the roof of a garden shed, then down again, into the castle grounds.
Steep steps led to a stone tower, which was the highest point in town. There was a lawn up there, with a lime tree in the middle. Perched on the wrought-iron seat that circled the trunk, Marie lit a cigarette. A single raindrop promptly fell from somewhere and extinguished it.
She grinned. ‘You think someone’s trying to tell me something?’
We climbed a spiral staircase to the top of the tower, then leaned on the battlements looking east. In the distance a pale glow showed here and there where the downs had been quarried for chalk. Marie began to tell me about Bradley Freeman, her current boyfriend. They had been going out for six months, and she had just discovered that he’d been seeing someone else all along. It took me a second or two to realise that she was talking about the man who had taken me to see Miss Groves on the day of my first interview at the Minis
try. He’d been pursuing Marie on and off ever since. I went back in my mind, but I could remember nothing about Bradley Freeman, nothing except his amiable manner and his endless mundane questions.
‘Why him?’ I asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re my brother.’
‘He doesn’t realise how special you are.’
She sent me a sharp dark glance, as if she thought I knew something that I had no right to know, then she looked away again.
‘Sometimes he does,’ she murmured.
I stared out over the rooftops. They seemed to mill and jostle in the darkness, as though straining at their moorings – more like boats than houses. The ground itself felt uncertain, unreliable. Everything could come apart so easily.
‘I wouldn’t treat you like that,’ I said.
She cupped a cold hand to my cheek, then turned from me and started down the steps. I hesitated, unable for a moment to conceive of any action that was not extraordinary. I would do anything for her, I thought, anything at all.
I caught up with her below the castle, outside a pub called the Silk Purse. She was standing on the pavement, a cigarette alight between her fingers, her eyes fixed on the window. She glanced at me across her shoulder. ‘Fancy a drink?’
‘I’m not old enough.’
‘Of course you are.’ She took me by the arm. ‘Come on.’
In the lounge bar she ordered two glasses of red wine. And then another two. And then I’ve no idea how many.
It was the first time I’d ever been drunk. As we stumbled home down streets so narrow that if I ricocheted off one wall I collided with the other, I remember telling her that I loved her, no, I adored her, which made her laugh, and her hair fell forwards against her cheek like the tip of a cutlass and her teeth flashed in the black air.
I had to stop and stare at her. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ I said.
She had stopped too, though not because of what I’d said. Something else had just occurred to her. ‘What kind of girls do you like, Tom?’
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