The Tenth Gift

by Jane Johnson

  During the time Alison and Andrew had lived in Cornwall, my cousin and I had maintained our friendship via long phone calls and periodic visits by her to London, when she would escape her married state and stay with me so that we could pretend to flirt with younger men in pubs along the river. She had never encouraged me to visit the Cornish house; this would be my first sight of it, except in a thousand before-and-after photos.

  Alison and Andrew’s home was a short drive from the station: a rambling converted farmhouse in the hills to the north and east of Penzance. She had loved it from the start, even though it was neglected and abandoned: No one had lived in it for years. She had practically bullied Andrew into buying the place, having seen its potential from the outset, and Andrew, with so much to make up for, had eventually given in and let her have her way with it, and his money. They had lavished a great deal of effort, imagination, and time on their home—you could see that as soon as you entered the driveway. A formal garden had been planted—concentric circles of box enclosing bay trees and beds of lavender and hand-laid pebble paths that ran between the beds. A fountain occupied the center of a sunray patio made of smooth white pebbles against a dark background, but the water was still and silent, pocked by the rain.

  Inside, the house was fresh and bright—walls painted in old white, and soft pale green carpets; ethnic rugs in cool colors, modern paintings of seascapes and fish that looked to be originals, solid furniture in heavy dark wood, but absolutely no clutter. Instead, there was a sense of space, simplicity, and serenity. I did not feel Andrew’s presence in any of it. The ambience was that of studied order and balance. It was hard to believe a man had so violently, and so recently, ended his life under this roof.

  “I’ve put you in our room. I hope you don’t mind—I just can’t face sleeping there at the moment. It’s got its own bathroom, and a lovely view,” she added apologetically.

  “That’s fine,” I lied, though the idea of it made my skin crawl.

  On the landing, I watched as her gaze inevitably fixed itself on the stairs to the attic, then slid away sharply, remembering.

  She made us a pot of tea and we took it out into the back garden. There, amid fragrant beds of peppermint and thyme, she told me how the two of them had renovated the farmhouse together room by room as the money came in, right up to the attic, which they had converted only this year. They had dug up the old cobbles and concrete of the yard and replaced them with flowers and trees and herbs. And for a time that had been enough: hard physical work that exhausted them and devoured their time, throwing them together in a shared project in which they both took pride, and in which they buried their troubled past. But it was as if converting the attic had been the last straw. Ever since they’d finished that, Andrew had withdrawn into himself, becoming gradually more taciturn and short-tempered—very different from the convivial, rambunctious Andrew I had always known—started drinking heavily, neglected first his family, then his work. He was an Internet trader, and it had not taken long for his business to fall apart and the debts to mount up.

  “I never saw it coming,” Alison said at last. “I knew he was depressed. I kept trying to persuade him to go to the doctor, but he just wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t talk to his sister, his friends, no one. Kept saying there was no point, that what had happened had happened and no one could change it. I had no idea what he was talking about, still don’t. But suicide … how could I have been so blind?”

  I threw my arms around her, and she wept loudly for a good long while.

  “I miss him!” she wailed. “I miss the smell of him in the house. I even miss his cold feet in bed.”

  Eventually she broke away from me to blow her cracked, red nose.

  “Al, darling, I’m quite sure there was nothing you could have done to stop him,” I said. “How could you possibly have foreseen such a thing? I mean, I never saw Andrew as someone who took life that seriously.”

  She shot me a look. “Neither did I. Even when he proposed to me, I thought he was joking.” She grinned weakly. “In fact, I think he was. We were both drunk, and then suddenly everyone was talking about it and we just sort of went with the flow. And then I got pregnant, and, well …”

  She’d been four months pregnant when she walked down the aisle, but no one other than me, Andrew, her mother, and her best friend, Susie, had known. The dress had been Empire line, the bouquet carefully positioned, and no one made any awkward little jokes. Which was just as well since two weeks later she miscarried and almost died and had never been able to get pregnant again by any natural means.

  “The thing is …” she started, looking away as if making an uncomfortable confession. “The night he … died … I was trying to persuade him to have a go at IVF. I never saw him so furious. I honestly thought he was going to hit me. ‘Don’t you ever try to trap me like that!’ he screamed at me. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got me caged up in this godforsaken corner of the world, in this bloody house, without passing the whole fucking disaster on through our genes?’ And then he stormed out of the room and went up to his den. It was the last thing he said to me. So when he didn’t come down for supper I wasn’t surprised—to be honest, I was relieved. I couldn’t face having another argument with him. I picked at a salad, went up to bed early, fell asleep. I woke up at three in the morning, suddenly, in that way that you do sometimes. My heart was knocking so hard I could hardly breathe. And then I knew.” She turned to me. “I just knew. And still I couldn’t go up there. Not till it was light.” She gulped, mastering herself. “The police surgeon said he’d been dead since before midnight, so there was nothing I could have done. But I feel terrible that I didn’t try to patch things up, didn’t take him up his usual glass of brandy. Something. Anything …” Her words ran out.

  I gazed at her, not knowing what to say. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper.

  “It’s just a photocopy,” she explained as I stared at it. “The police took the original, though they’ve said I can have it back. Not that I need it—I know it all by heart.”

  “Are you sure?” I knew as I took it from her that I didn’t want to read it. As if on cue, my stomach rumbled loudly, breaking the somber mood. I looked down at it as if at a badly behaved pet. “God, I’m sorry.”

  She looked at her watch. “Have you not eaten anything? I didn’t think …”

  “The buffet car pretty much ran out of supplies before Plymouth,” I said, relieved to change the subject. “I ended up ordering one of their microwaved hamburgers, but when it came out of its wrapping all damp and wrinkled-looking, I just couldn’t fancy it.”

  Alison made a face. “That sounds disgusting.” She thought about it for a moment, then added, straight-faced, “Reminds me of a couple of men I’ve known. Good thing it wasn’t hairy as well.”

  I stared at her, then we were both roaring with laughter, and didn’t stop for the next ten minutes as humor gave way to a huge release of tension and made the world a better place again.

  EVEN SO, BY the time it came to go up to bed that night, I was feeling apprehensive. Paper-thin, paper-light, the letter lay in my pocket like a lead weight. I put all the lights on in the master bedroom and lay there on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Was the attic beam from which Andrew had hanged himself directly above me now? I wondered, and had to push the thought out of my mind.

  I got up, ran a bath, and settled back with a book I’d picked up at the Smiths at Paddington Station, but within three pages I just didn’t feel like reading it.

  I got out, dripping, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat down on the bed. Andrew’s letter lay there, folded in quarters: a silent rebuke. Gingerly, I opened the sheet of paper and smoothed out the creases. Andrew’s handwriting was small and neat and rather old-fashioned looking, not what I had been expecting at all.

  “Dear Alison,” it read, formal; formulaic.

  My death will, I know, come as a terrible shock to you, even though yo
u have, in part, been responsible for driving me to this point of no return. I cannot go on. This house has taken everything from me. It has sapped my will to live. When you started again to talk about children I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. Why bother to pretend there’s a future—for me, let alone a child of mine? History repeats itself, again and again: There is nothing we can do to change our fates and it is madness to think we can shape our lives. I am sorry that our marriage has been a sham. I am sorry for the pain I have given. Most of all, I am sorry that I did not see the course my life should take in time for me to follow the path alone, rather than drag you down it with me. At least now you have a chance to make a new future for yourself. Sell this house and get out of here. It is a stifling place, full of despair and failure. Get out while you can: Save yourself. Go back to London, find someone else, and do not tie yourself to the lead weight of my life, or my death.

  Go, if not with my love, then with my care.

  Andrew

  I sat there with the photocopied note trembling in my hands for twenty minutes. At last I got up and went over to the window, looking out across the lawn to the ocean beyond. This lovely light-filled house that he and Alison had made, with its pretty garden and its wide-open views, gave me no sense of a prison, or a cage. It was hard to hear Andrew’s voice in the phrasing or in the sentiments expressed, but I had never known Andrew in extremis, only in the grip of alcohol and/or lust, full of bonhomie and testosterone. Even so, something about his words rang true in a part of me I could not quite access.

  Up above a slender crescent moon shone like a glimpse through night into another world. An owl hooted in the distant trees. My mother had always averred that owls called with the voices of the dead. She, with the deeply ingrained superstitions of a long Cornish ancestry, had touched wood (but only without legs, for fear your luck would walk away from you), and if she spilled salt, had tossed some over her left shoulder to ward off the devil, even though she said she didn’t believe in him. She believed that there was a transitional state between life and death and that spirits walked till they were at peace; she believed that some spirits never found that peace.

  I found myself shivering despite the warmth of the night, but even so, I felt suddenly compelled to throw open the windows, as if to cleanse the atmosphere, to allow myself to breathe more easily—or to let Andrew’s spirit out.

  CHAPTER 8

  SOME DAYS LATER, IN ORDER TO DIVERT ALISON FROM HER misery, which pressed harder upon her now that the adrenaline of the initial shock had run out and the distractions of the funeral and practical arrangements had passed, I told her some of my more entertaining Michael stories.

  My affair with Michael had driven a bit of a wedge between Alison and myself, especially once she had experienced the ignominy and pain of Andrew’s adultery. She had never approved of Michael, even as Anna’s husband. “There’s something essentially untrustworthy about him,” I remember her remarking to me very early on in their relationship. I hadn’t dared tell her about the two of us for more than a year after it had started, and when I did she had gone completely silent, her lips pursed. At last she’d said, “I ought to call Anna right now. I ought to just pick up the phone and tell her that her best friend’s screwing her husband and she should get rid of them both.”

  I’d half-willed her to do it, though I knew Anna would be furious and hate me. But I also knew that no matter what he had done, she would not let Michael go that easily, and that he would never leave her, not for me. Partly, it was her money, but it went deeper than that in a way I did not want to examine too closely.

  In the end Alison had told me exactly what she thought of me, then left a long pause and added: “If you ever screw Andrew I’ll kill you.” She managed to keep a straight face for all of thirty seconds. But I knew she kind of meant it.

  We’d done our very best to patch up our friendship since then, but the specter of infidelity was always there with us. I was deeply touched that Alison had turned to me in the depths of her misery, so as a poor form of repayment, I rolled out all the funny stories I could muster—how on an early date Michael had taken me to a smart Chinese restaurant; how I’d been desperate to make a good impression, yet while eating my noodle soup I’d managed to inhale too hard so that a strand had whipped across my chin, leaving a red weal that promptly blistered in a highly unattractive fashion; how we’d made love in a bluebell wood and he’d run a naked half mile trying to get rid of an earwig that had crawled into his hair. How Anna had one day turned up at my flat and Michael spent four hours freezing his nuts off in the garden shed.

  I got quite carried away with this heady rehashing of what had been for a lot of the time an anxious, emotionally unprofitable experience. It was a relief to talk about it at all, let alone make it into an entertainment for someone. I began digging out ever more excruciating anecdotes, often at my own expense, and soon Alison was giggling.

  At last I found myself staring down at the surface of the table, at the gouges and stains that marked its antique surface. At the beginning of its existence it would have been a smooth sheet of pine, honey-colored, clean and wholesome, but even then it would have had its natural knots and whorls. None of us were perfect, and life made us infinitely less so. Tears of self-pity pricked my eyes.

  “Ah well,” she said softly, seeing that I had come to a halt. “He always was a shit.”

  Well, we agreed on that. I told her about the breakup dinner. “He gave me a book as a farewell gift. Let me show you.” I dug in my handbag and brought out The Needle-Woman’s Glorie.

  “Good grief,” she said after a while, turning it over in her hands. “I’m pretty sure this was one of the batch Andrew unearthed from the attic a couple of weeks ago and sent up to Michael to sell for us. In fact, I’m sure of it, because it was one of a pair, and that struck me as odd. How weird that you’ve ended up with it.”

  This statement hit me like a rabbit punch. So he hadn’t even bought the book for me, and in addition, by giving it to me, he had cheated Andrew and Alison out of whatever money they could have sold it for. I felt terrible. “Oh. God. Perhaps you should have it back.” I paused. “Or I could give you something for it?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. It’s yours. Anyway, look, it’s been defaced. He probably wouldn’t have been able to sell it in this condition, anyway.” She peered at Catherine’s tiny penciled handwriting, then she sucked in her breath. “Hang on,” she said. “Did you do this?”

  “No!” I was shocked that she would think I would deface such a lovely, ancient thing.

  “It’s just … well, your writing is so similar.”

  I frowned. “Is it?”

  “Apart from all the funny s’s and curlicues, yes. It’s not a typical secretary hand—it’s more cursive, freer of form. See here, how the g loops up, just like yours? And she—I take it she was a ‘she’—dots her i’s a little way to the right, just like you do.” She held the book up to the window, screwing her eyes up. “And see here—this italic a— no one else I know forms their a’s like that.”

  I write my a’s the way they are printed in books, rather than the usual o with a tail. My frown grew deeper.

  “That’s really odd. It’s never struck me at all. Even so, I’m not sure you’re right.”

  Alison pushed her chair away from the table with a screech of wood on wood and walked off into the dining room. When she came back, she carried a notebook and a pencil. With a knife from the kitchen block, she sharpened the lead to a needle-point.

  “There you go,” she said, sliding notebook and pencil across the table to me. “Go on. Write something—write it as small as in the book.”

  “Write what?”

  “Whatever you like—no, hold on.” She opened the book somewhere in the middle, turned the page sideways, and scrutinized it closely. “Write this: ‘An Ægyptian woman came to the scullery door today.’ And that’s ‘Egyptian’ with a diphthong.”

  “A what?”

  Aliso
n rolled her eyes. Despite her wild times at university, she had come away with a good degree and had always regarded me, affectionately, as a bit of an intellectual dullard. “AE run together, you dope. ‘An old Ægyptian woman came to the door today. She came on—’ I can’t read the next bit. …”

  I took the book from her. “I think it’s ‘a mule.’” I passed it back.

  “ ‘—and was arrayed most strangely with bells and scarves, her face and hands almost black’—that’s ‘black’ with an e on the end. …”

  I duly wrote it all down. I had to admit that when we held my version close to Catherine’s, they were more similar than I expected. But “Mine has more of a slant, and the verticals are longer,” I said stubbornly.

  “You’ve just taken up more space than she has. She had to squeeze it in to wherever she could. Mind you, it’s surprising that she was able to write at all—she’s not an aristo or anything, is she?”

  I shook my head. “No, but I think her mother must have been educated, and it sounds from what she says at the start as if her mistress might have taken a bit of a shine to her and encouraged her.” I paused, staring at what I’d written. “Egypt’s a very long way from Cornwall,” I said dubiously. “Are you sure that’s what it says?”

  “It’s the old word for ‘gypsy’—they thought they came from Egypt. Some of them probably did.” She paused. “Did you say Cornwall?”

  I had forgotten to explain that small detail. “Um, yes. She’s called Catherine Anne Tregenna—Cat, for her initials—and she worked at a manor house in the seventeenth century, somewhere around here, in fact. Ken … something.”

  “Kenegie?”

  I looked at her in surprise. “That’s the name, yes. Why, do you know it?”

  Alison’s eyes were wide. “It’s the name of the Elizabethan manor house—we’re within its old boundaries. In fact, we had a load of old rubbish from the manor house stuffed in our attic. Good heavens, that book must have been here for the best part of four hundred years. She probably lived right on this estate!”