Justin seemed not to hear her. ‘It’s this way’ he said. ‘The Metro’s just round that corner.’
Colette didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
That night she went walking through underground passages. Unlike the catacombs, though, the walls were not stone. They were white, almost transparent in some places, and very smooth. They were made entirely of bone. As Colette walked on, they thickened and closed like diseased arteries so that she had to stoop, crouch, and finally crawl. When she breathed on them, she found that they melted, and so she concentrated on one patch and breathed and breathed until the passageway rang with her own sighs. And eventually the bone melted away, and behind it was a door.
She felt unwell the next morning, but Justin insisted they rise early to visit Versailles. A proper visit wasn’t included in the bus tour, he reminded her, so if they wanted to explore it thoroughly they would have to go that day. After nine a.m. the queues were impossible. He’d read that in the guide book.
They arrived just on nine, and already a line of people stretched down to the palace gates. Hundreds of feet had cleared a path in the snow from which nobody deviated; the expanses of white on either side were untouched. Just in front of them in the queue was the fat German girl. She was holding hands with a man Colette didn’t remember from the bus. When the girl turned, Colette saw that her lips were so chapped they were dark with dry blood.
After waiting for more than an hour, the tour was over very quickly. Colette would have liked more time to admire the spindly furniture, to imagine herself sleeping in the high, curtained bed, writing at the inlaid desk with its many secret compartments.
‘Moving on, moving on,’ the tour guide kept saying.
Justin was reprimanded for taking a photograph; others were asked not to touch chairs, not to lean against walls. One of the last rooms they visited was the Galerie des Glaces. Its wall of mirrors was designed to throw sunlight back outside, to remind visitors to Louis XIV’s garden that this was the residence of the Sun himself. Colette watched herself passing the icy wall. And then Justin came up behind her and took her hand, but she didn’t see the real Justin, only many different reflections of him, and her own hand being taken again and again.
One Sunday after the fire, so he didn’t have to spend time at home, Patrick went to the museum. He wandered from room to room, past glass cases filled with dead birds, butterflies, shards of porcelain, past mannequins dressed in antique clothes and positioned in antique bedrooms and parlours, past swordfish and suits of armour, masks and maps and bones. In his pocket was the silver disc from the cloakroom, and every few minutes he made sure it was still there. Without it the women behind the counter might not believe he was himself, and he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his bag with his name written inside, or his coat with the label saying Mercer sewn to the lining.
In the Egyptian room he saw golden fingertips which ensured dexterity in the afterlife. He saw golden eyes and a golden tongue, and fragments of flowers buried with a princess. He also saw a mummified cat; like an awkwardly shaped gift, its wrappings betrayed their contents at a glance. Displayed around it were the embalmer’s tools: bandages, stoppered vials and jars, beeswax, resin, moss, thin hooks as long as knitting needles. In a neighbouring case lay a much smaller creature, its contours suggesting a pine-cone or an egg, perhaps a fish. Mummified falcon, read the plaque. For the Egyptians, falcons embodied Re, the sun-god. Patrick imagined it inside the bandages, wings folded against its soft body, feet tucked away. All these years later, the plaque told him, it would still be preserved.
At one end of the Egyptian room was a door Patrick hadn’t noticed at first. Everybody else was passing it as if it didn’t exist, and for a moment Patrick thought it must be closed to the public. When he got closer, though, there was no sign denying him entry, so he turned the handle.
The first thing that struck him was the fragrance. The air was close and sweet, like skin dusted with powder after a bath. Very little light entered through the high, tight windows.
‘Can I help you?’ said a voice, and Patrick jumped.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I was just, I’m sorry—’
A man appeared from the shadows. He was about the same age as Patrick’s father and he smiled and said, ‘I don’t get many visitors.’
He motioned to Patrick to follow him, and as they made their way through the gloom they passed rows and rows of books.
‘What would you like to see?’ said the man. ‘Did you have anything particular in mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Patrick, his eyes slowly adjusting to the light. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘This one, then,’ said the man, stopping and selecting a thick volume. ‘Here might be a good place to start,’ He unfastened two gold clasps, laid the book on a sloping oak stand and opened it. ‘A psalter,’ he said. ‘A book of psalms, made six hundred years ago,’
Patrick had never seen anything so beautiful. Framing two columns of text was a border alive with beasts and birds and curious figures: there was a mermaid, a man with bird’s feet, a woman playing a tambourine, another with a unicorn in her lap. There were herons and stags, peacocks and rams. There were ivy leaves and centaurs, a hunter with a crossbow, a man blowing a horn, a woodsman swinging an axe. In a large initial D, a robed man poured oil on the head of a boy while angels watched. Scattered through the text, wherever there was space at the end of a line, were winged serpents, dogs’ heads, lizards with leaves in place of tails. And, dotted across the page, filling the background inside the D, speckling the border, was gold.
‘It’s all written by hand,’ said the man. ‘Every letter. Can you imagine?’
Patrick shook his head. He tried to make out some of the words: Dominus illuminatio mea—
‘It was saved from destruction in 1573,’ said the man. ‘There was a fire in the cathedral where it was kept, and the entire building would have burned to the ground had it not been for the wolf.’
Patrick looked up. ‘The wolf?’
‘The fire was discovered because a wolf rang the cathedral bell.’
‘Oh,’ said Patrick, and returned to the saved book. As he turned the pages the dots of gold sparkled and danced.
‘It’s parchment,’ said the man. ‘It’s skin.’ And he told Patrick how an animal pelt—usually calf, sheep or goat—was soaked in lime for days on end, how the hair and fat and shreds of flesh were scraped away, how the sharp paring knife could make holes if pushed too hard. Sometimes, he said, damaged skin was used anyway, particularly in monasteries, where the monks couldn’t afford perfection, and he could show Patrick a page of text with a hole in it, a space like an egg or a white eye, and the words, he said, had simply been written around it. He told Patrick how the skin was rinsed in water for two more days to remove the caustic lime, how pebbles were twisted into the edges to form a sort of button, how the buttons were tied to a frame and the skin stretched taut. Then, he said, it was scraped again, the lunellum—the crescent-shaped knife—peeling away layer after layer. When the skin was dry it was scraped yet again until the parchment was fine enough, and the surface suitable for writing.
‘Look closely at the page,’ he said, handing Patrick a magnifying glass. ‘Do you see the tiny dark dots?’
Patrick nodded.
‘Now turn it over. Any there?’
‘No,’ said Patrick.
‘The flesh side is always the finest,’ said the man. ‘It’s whiter and softer, it’s easier to write on and it naturally curls away. It’s the side that once faced the animal’s flesh, the underneath part of the skin. The hair or grain side, on the other hand,’ and he turned the page back again, ‘is darker. The tiny dots are the traces of follicles, from the animal’s hair.’
As the man continued talking, Patrick ran his fingers across the page. It was thin and soft and velvety, slightly furred, like the skin of an apricot. The dots of gold felt like Braille to the touch, the larger strips like raised veins. This was the so
urce of the sweet smell; it was coming from the pages themselves. He had a sudden memory of Faye curled into him on the blue sofa, her skin soft from the bath. He continued turning the pages while the man told him about the tree-like vein marks which were sometimes visible, and which were the result of blood in the skin when the animal died. Sometimes, too, on larger pages, dense ridges could be made out; vestiges of the point at which the backbone transected the skin. And very occasionally, on one edge, a scalloped curve could be detected. That, said the man, indicated the animal’s neck.
‘That’s horrible,’ said Patrick.
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘why do you think books are shaped the way they are?’
Patrick shrugged.
‘Think about the shape of a calf, or a goat, or a sheep. Think about the shape of the pelts from those animals. They’re always going to be roughly oblong, aren’t they? Always higher than they are wide.’
Patrick nodded.
‘That’s why manuscripts are rectangular. And modern, printed books preserve the form. They echo the dimensions of a skin.’
On the way home, Patrick could still smell the pages on his fingers.
‘Where have you been all afternoon?’ said his mother. ‘It’s getting dark, you know.’ She placed her glass of sherry very carefully on the new table and hugged Patrick, her breath hot and cloying. ‘Your father’s been out too. You are a naughty thing, leaving your mother alone all afternoon,’
Patrick went back to the manuscripts room every weekend after that, and the curator always had something new for him to look at, something new that was hundreds of years old. Sometimes he showed him lives. They were usually brief, jumping from birth to death in less than a page, the illustrations showing men pierced with arrows, swallowed by lions and dragons, women broken on wheels, beheaded, burned. There was Saint Luke the Younger, who levitated during prayer; Saint Bee, who was fed by gulls and who received a bracelet from an angel; Saint Alexis, whose corpse exuded a fragrance so powerful that his tomb was believed filled with perfumes; Saint Juliana, who was put in a tub of molten lead which became a cool bath around her. There was Saint Columba, who copied Saint Finnian’s valuable psalter in secret, and whose fingers shone when it grew too dark for him to see. Of course, said the curator, Patrick mustn’t believe a word. The lives were as untrustworthy as fairy tales. They were mongrel blends of hearsay, fact and plain fabrication; they were Chinese whispers written down. Often the text had been copied and recopied, each author making alterations, adding embellishments in order to preach to the faithful, convert the wicked, or simply tell a good story. One miracle was interchangeable with another; the same visions surfaced over and over like recurring dreams. And they were all written by hand. Had Patrick ever tried to copy something word for word? Had he made mistakes, misread certain sentences, skipped lines? He should remember Saint Columba, the one with the glowing fingers. The bible copier. Who was to say that his replica was exact? Who was to say that Finnian’s was? How could we ever know the true story, when even the word of God might contain errors?
Patrick didn’t mind. True or false, the manuscripts were beautiful things. They had lasted hundreds of years. They had survived floods and silverfish, lootings and rodents, moths and mould and fire.
After finishing with a book the cover was closed tight, the clasps secured. Parchment needed to be kept under slight pressure, said the curator. Without clasps to hold them firm, the pages would cockle. They would return to the original shape of the animal.
Losing a child was the fear of every parent. It was planted in the heart’s warm chambers when the creature was still boneless and unborn, when it was without a name, without fingerprints or gender. It was fear that accounted for a parent’s many crimes: the laundering of favoured toys, the disposal of sweets and bus tickets found on the street, the confiscation of sharp things. The rationing of television, the curfews, the unreasonable judgement of friends, the banning of particular movies, certain parties; all such actions were motivated by fear of loss. Ruth had done those things, had made an enemy of her daughter because of it, and still it hadn’t been enough. She wished she had imposed far greater limits. Other parents, she knew, while they didn’t say as much, believed that there must have been some negligence involved in Laura’s disappearance, some moment of carelessness on Ruth’s part. Over their coffees and hot chocolates and herbal teas, she imagined, they congratulated themselves on their own caution. She wished she had permitted Laura no driving lessons, no outings alone. No interaction with others. She wished she had kept her inside forever.
Before she started taking the sleeping pills, in those first few wretched days, Ruth jolted awake several times a night. She had always been a deep sleeper, but now any creaking of the house, any click from the contracting metal roof was enough to rouse her. The hours of darkness were broken into many fragments, abbreviated nights lasting a few minutes, an hour at most. It was like the day Laura disappeared, she thought, when there had been a three-minute night in the morning, and all of nature was thrown off balance.
The strange thing was, Ruth always heard the clicks and creaks a split second after she felt herself jump. There was a snatch of panic as she wondered what had woken her, why she was poised for flight, and then the sound came. And although these moments startled her, she took comfort in them. They reminded her of the body ‘s instinctive abilities, its ways of recognising possible danger and responding, keeping itself safe. During the day, as she waited outside on the porch, the door open so she could hear the phone, she watched goosebumps appear on her forearm. She saw the tiny hairs rise and trap a layer of warm air about her, a shield to protect her from freezing. She had not willed this; her own body knew what was necessary, and provided it. We are all much more hardy than we believe, she told herself. She thought of documentaries she had seen that showed the formidable strength humans could exert in emergencies. Cars could be lifted, fallen trees thrown aside. Nights could be spent in the snow, incredible distances covered on foot. Even newborn babies were much stronger than they appeared. Young fathers often had to be told that they needn’t hold their infants like bone china cups, that the child who survives birth can survive being hugged, and swung in the air, and cuddled, and loved. Perhaps, she thought, even if Laura had no one to help her, her body would keep her safe.
As a child, Laura had always been alert, rushing to answer the telephone before anyone else heard it, often spying coins on the street. She had never been interested in team sports; all those pushy netballers thundering about the place bored her stupid, she said. On the tennis court, though, she shone, anticipating the moves of her opponents as if reading their minds.
‘How do you do that?’ Ruth asked her once. ‘How do you know where they’ll hit the ball before it’s even reached them?’
Laura laughed and said it was all done with mirrors, and really she wasn’t clever at all, just good at physics.
‘But you hate physics,’ Ruth said, frowning.
Laura laughed again, so Ruth dropped the subject. She resented her daughter’s evasiveness, the private jokes she suspected were often at her expense, but pushing her for information only made her angry.
Ruth hadn’t known about the diary—or rather, she hadn’t known Laura had kept it. She remembered Malcolm’s mother sending it for Christmas, but she also remembered Laura tossing it into her pile of unwanted presents.
‘Grandma means well,’ Ruth had said, and Malcolm had slipped his new home-knitted socks over his hands like gloves, although the morning was humid, and said, ‘Good old Mum, another set of elbow-warmers,’ and he and Laura had laughed. The diary had fallen open among the boxed handkerchiefs and the garish scarf and the little-girl hair clips, its pages bright white in the sun and fluttering every now and then in the breeze from the garden. A blank year.
‘People who keep a diary must be the most tedious creatures on the planet,’ Laura said. Beyond the open window the cabbage butterflies were devouring the garden, their papery win
gs opening and closing. Ruth watched them eating holes in the lettuce, turning the leaves of the runner beans into dark lace. They only lived for a day, but a lot of damage could be done in a short space of time.
‘We must spray the garden,’ she said.
The police found the diary in Laura’s shelves, neatly wedged in as if it were a normal book, one of the horsy novels she still read now and then, or a high-school romance.
‘We’ll need to borrow it for a while,’ they said, and took it away just like that.
Ruth waited a few days but it wasn’t returned. When she rang she was casual, gripping the edge of the table to keep her voice slow. She was just wondering, she thought she might just check, she didn’t suppose there was anything—
‘It’s not quite what we were expecting, Mrs Pearse,’ the detective inspector said, ‘but there might be something useful in it. We’ll need to keep it for a while.’
Ruth hated to think of the officers handling Laura’s diary, dissecting it word by word. Perhaps, she thought, they talked about it over lunch, passed it to interested colleagues like a cheap romance. Perhaps that was how they dealt with the unpleasant nature of their work; perhaps it was a way of forgetting. She couldn’t bear the thought of official hands all over it, her daughter’s life read aloud in the tearoom, her Laura—it was unthinkable—fuelling the fantasies of middle-aged men.
‘I’d like a photocopy,’ she said, ‘Every page. I realise you need to hang on to it for a while, but I’d like my own copy.’
They hadn’t pressed hard enough on the spine. There was shadowing down the middle of each page where Laura’s writing grew darker, rose with the pull of the binding and tumbled into black. Ruth had to lean in close to make out the words.
4 January 1988
I met him today. He is the most beautiful man you could imagine—wavy black hair, green eyes, olive skin. He’s quite a bit taller than I am, but I like that, because when we kiss I can feel him pushing my neck right back and I think of Vivien Leigh on the posters for Gone with the Windy where her neck’s almost horizontal with the weight of Clark Gable’s kiss, and that’s how I see myself too, and if I were to open my eyes I would be looking straight into the blue sky or the stars.
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