‘I would recommend a very heavy laundering with starch at a Chinese laundry,’ continues Bunce. ‘Although that advice is based on my experience of wearing, y’know, proper clothes.’
Harvey looks down at the phone again. The image of Kelly clicks back to Bunce’s home screen, a picture of himself that Harvey has seen before, on the Toledo County Prosecuting Attorney’s website – Bunce, smiling, teeth forward, a kind of publicity shot, wearing a suit and tie, and underneath it, a white, 100 per cent cotton, Brooks Brothers, button-down-collar shirt. He lifts his glass, full of American beer.
‘Congratulations, Bunce.’
And Bunce raises his, and they clink, and Harvey feels small drops of the beer fall onto his sticky hands.
* * *
Violet Gold sits in her room at Redcliffe House, holding her copy of Solomon’s Testament. It has always sat on her little mantelpiece, next to a framed photograph of her nephews, a biography of Bruce Forsyth and two crime novels – one by Patricia Cornwell and one by Barbara Vine. She has never read the whole book, despite its dedication to her, printed after the title page. To V.
She wonders if now would be too late to read it. She has started it before, a few times. This copy, a first edition, was given to her by Eli on April Fools’ Day 1953, three days before he left her. It is inscribed, below the dedication, ‘… light of my life, love you still’. And then he’d signed it: Eli Gold. She had thought at the time that that was a little strange – that he hadn’t written Eli, or E, with maybe a few xxxxs. It speaks to her now of a number of things – Eli’s apartness from her; his not wanting to put down in writing (especially not in writing) their intimacy; his grandiose sense of self, even in this, his first book, as if his name said in full had a power that diminutives would lack; his need to give her a clue that he would soon leave and therefore to familiarize her with a more formal type of address, a world in which pet names would be dead and awkward – but mainly she thinks maybe he thought it would be worth more. Maybe he thought, after I’m gone, she’s going to need the money, and when I’m the most famous writer in the world, with my full signature that’ll be worth something.
She tried to read it first on the night he gave it to her. Eli was out, again, as he was most nights towards the end of their marriage, and she went to bed early. She put her bedside lamp on, and read, like Eli did every night, although without all the sighing and blowing in frustration at the rival author. With the blankets around her, Violet felt a small thrill at the possession of her own territory, alone in their bed, reading. She didn’t wear glasses, but considered looking for Eli’s spare pair, not because the words were blurred on the page but because it would complete the picture of herself reading that she had in her mind.
But the book was difficult. She had read books before, schoolgirl stories, Angela Brazil, Dora Chapman, Elsie J. Oxenham, with titles like Rosaly’s New School and The Fortunes of Philippa. These were about girls her age, and though their life and education bore no resemblance to her own – except on the odd occasion when Rosaly or Philippa would pass by some poor children and feel sorry for them – reading these books felt comforting to Violet, projecting her into a safer world, with rooms and fires and tea and turrets and rules that everyone knew without having to learn them. Solomon’s Testament did not do that. It did not project her into any world. There were so many words in every sentence, and everything was described so much, that the only world conjured up by the book was a world of language – or, rather, a closed door of language, behind which lay the world of Solomon’s Testament.
That was her first attempt. A few months later, after all Eli’s things had gone from their bedsit, she picked it up again. But not to read it. It had crossed her mind to use the book to make some grandiloquent gesture, like women were supposed to in these circumstances – maybe burn the book, or tear out the pages one at a time, or write some obscenity across the cover and send it back to him in the post. None of which she did: when she thought about herself doing such things, it felt contrived, like behaviour copied from the movies. She knew that she wasn’t coming up to the mark in terms of vengefulness, that the expected feminine response to being left by one’s husband was rage, parleyed eventually into an air of good riddance to bad rubbish, but she didn’t really feel it, however much she pretended it was the case to an encouraging Gwendoline. What she felt, in her heart of hearts, was that now at last she could get on with her life: the quiet, simple one she was supposed to have had.
Some years later, when Eli was long gone and had left his second wife, the French film actress Isabelle Michelet, she tried again, reading it not in bed but on the tube. The journey from Kilburn to Monument took over forty-five minutes in those days, and she noticed that a fair few people passed the time with books. She found that having a book with her made quite a difference to the way in which she travelled. Most importantly, it made her keener than ever to get a seat. She was, by then, over thirty: not old enough to have a seat given up for her in deference, nor young and beautiful enough any more for a man hoping to start a conversation to do it either. Or, at least, not considered so at the time; now she sees on television and in the magazines that women are allowed to hold onto youth and beauty for much longer, into their fifties even. So if she wanted to read she needed to find a seat: it was too uncomfortable to hold the book standing up all that way. She tried it once, but her hand began to hurt by Oxford Circus.
Mostly, though, she did find a seat, even in the rush hour. This was when she discovered her penchant for crime fiction. A good Agatha Christie, or latterly Patricia Highsmith, could wrap her in a bubble of narrative mystery, which protected her from noticing the packed groins in front of her face, or the rancid recirculated air of the tube. They also made her feel like she could read books for grown-ups, books about death and the dark side, and so felt minded to give Solomon’s Testament another go.
It didn’t work, though. Apart from anything, she was worried about the book’s physical safety. The crime novels protected her; her copy of Eli’s signed first edition felt like it was something she had to protect. Reading it on the tube, she was concerned that men might brush their grimy flies against its spine, or that if she put it down on the seat next to her it might pick up an imprint of the rough check, or that she might just leave it behind when she got off. The book itself made her feel more keenly than ever a sense that she was holding a rare jewel out on her palm for anyone on public transport to scratch, because the words within it so failed to create a bubble around her. They seemed designed, in fact, entirely to burst that bubble. Solomon’s Testament made you aware all the time of the fact of reading – which made it very hard to go into the trance. And when you did, when for a couple of paragraphs she could follow it for long enough to feel that, yes, here was a story, then the character who she had hung her hopes on, who she would be using as a rope into it, would vanish, and a new one would appear, only for them to go a few pages later. Plus there would be characters who would recur, or at least Eli would be writing as if they were recurring, but she couldn’t remember who they were, so she would have to flick back through the pages to try and find their first appearance, in order to identify and situate them in the crazed geography of the novel.
Sometimes, when she didn’t have a book, she would buy a copy of the Daily Express, in order to do the quick crossword. She liked the replacement of one word with another, the filling in of blank space, the satisfying way the letters fitted together. But sometimes she saw, over the male commuters’ shoulders, or on the backs of their copies of The Times or the Telegraph, the cryptic crosswords. She would stare at the clues and all they would do was stare back at her. ‘A ring, found, makes the Hoover cleaner, perhaps’; ‘The bell, not heard in this congregation’; ‘Man, puts head in lion, tame?’; ‘From Bletchley, a river next, sailed on by a sheikh’. They would not yield. Even when she saw an answer being pencilled in by one of the men, still nothing was clear – she still could not tie the answer to the clue, th
e meaning to the words.
This was what it seemed like reading Solomon’s Testament. Like Eli had written a whole book of cryptic crossword clues. And what would be the point of that? Especially when he hadn’t put in the answers at the back.
So she gave up again. And periodically, throughout her post-Eli life, she tried again. But it never took hold for her. And as her life went on, and her history with Eli became more and more unreal, there seemed less and less reason to read it. It was not her type of book. The only reason for her to read it would be her connection to the author, and as that connection frayed in her mind with time, the book sat on her mantelpiece: an ornament, a relic.
Valerie was always on at her to sell it. In the mid-1970s, she brought an antiquarian bookseller called Neville round, uninvited, to Violet’s Cricklewood flat, in order to make an estimate. Neville was swarthy, and had a moustache whose tips ran all the way to his chin. He picked up the book and held it close to his face, as if sniffing it.
‘I mean, who knows?’ Valerie had said, flipping her arms up while keeping her elbows at her side. ‘Some people may pay good money for it!’
She shook her head as she said it. Violet felt a little sorry for Valerie: she so clearly wanted this symbol of her sister’s moment in the sun no longer to be around, but she also patently wanted to impress Neville, who Violet thought she may be having an affair with. She wanted him to make money from it; at the same time, she was desperate to suggest that the book was essentially worthless. Confusion rang out from her features, even as she pouted towards Neville.
‘It’s signed to you, I presume?’ he said, looking at the frontispiece.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘We were married. I am V.’
He opened his mouth, making his moustache curve down through the middle, like two arms describing the shape of a cartoon sexy woman.
‘You were married?! To Eli Gold? Valerie, why didn’t you tell me?’
Valerie raised both eyebrows and made a downward move at the corners of her mouth, as if to say: Didn’t think it was important. They were having tea. The radio was playing tinnily in the background. Violet had recently started to leave it on all day, perhaps as a counterbalance to living alone. She vaguely recognized the music as something by The Osmonds, that song with the sirens in it at the start. She didn’t know anything about pop music, but she had seen them on the TV and found that the looks of the main one, the one with the teeth as white as a newly painted wall, moved something in her and made her want to blush.
‘That’s amazing. What’s he like?’ From the inner pocket of his tweed jacket Neville took out a packet of Menthol cigarettes and offered Violet one. She shook her head.
‘Well, I don’t know if I can say any more. We were divorced …’
‘He left her,’ said Valerie, taking a cigarette. She was supposed to have given up, but Neville being a smoker would have wiped out her resolution.
‘… in the fifties. We were married ten years.’
‘But still. Eli Gold.’
‘I suppose he was –’
‘Never mind about him,’ interjected Valerie, waving a match out, as if its tiny flame were Eli’s personality. ‘What about the book? Come on, Neville – valuation’s your strong point.’
Neville picked up the book again, and flicked through it with a certain self-consciousness, a sense that he was now performing the ritual which would demonstrate the truth that valuation was indeed his strong point. He drew deeply on his cigarette; a second later, smoke billowed from his nostrils. Violet imagined its tendrils snaking through the packed black nostril hair.
‘Hmm … small amount of yellowing at the edges … in the original dustjacket … one tiny bump to the rear board … but overall a fine copy. And, obviously, the inscription adds a personal dimension, which a lot of book buyers love – Nabokov sometimes gives close friends copies of his books with a drawing of a butterfly on the flap: that’ll add a small fortune to a copy of, say, Lolita …’
Valerie was nodding, as if this was all information that she, of course, knew already. She combined the nod with a smirk at the mention of Lolita, to suggest that such a reference must be flirtatious.
There was a pause. It was the kind of pause that in a few years, on The Antiques Roadshow, would be viewed often by Violet – though always with a certain level of discomfort, concerned that these people, normally aged and vulnerable, were about to be let down; or that, during the pause, they might not be able to keep the greed and hope out of their straining faces.
‘Violet,’ said Valerie crossly. Violet looked at her blankly. ‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What … oh. Humming. Was I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hardly know I’m doing it.’
‘You always do it. The minute there’s any silence. You’ve always done it. I wouldn’t mind if you actually hummed a tune, a nice tune, but it never actually –’
‘OK,’ said Neville, breaking through the sisterly spat, which had rather destroyed the dramatic tension of his pause, ‘I’d say, to a collector … if you were lucky … for this copy of Solomon’s Testament …’ He held it up, like a flaming torch, ‘… you’d be asking two hundred pounds.’
Valerie immediately let out a long, slow whistle, which, because it had so obviously been coming whatever figure Neville was going to quote, induced in Violet a shudder of repulsion.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘How marvellous!’ said Valerie. ‘Do you have a collector in mind?’
‘I do, actually. Big modern classics lover. Jewish, so, you know – not short of a bob or two.’
‘Although they don’t part with it easily …’
‘Don’t I know it. But I think for this …’
‘That’s very interesting, Neville,’ said Violet, getting up and brushing some biscuit crumbs off her skirt, feeling as she did so how wide-hipped she seemed to be becoming – broad in the beam her father used to call it, ‘but I don’t think I actually want to sell it.’
Neville coughed, and stubbed out his cigarette. Valerie narrowed her eyes at her sister, menacingly.
‘Is the issue … commission?’ said Neville. ‘I normally charge fifteen per cent but in this case I was thinking – no more than ten …’
‘No. No, I – I just think I want to keep it.’
‘Right.’ He scratched his nose. ‘It’s just that Valerie – I assumed … had you not spoken?’
‘Yes! Of course!’ said Valerie.
‘Val …’ said Violet.
‘What? I remember quite clearly a conversation we had about what it might be worth.’
‘Yes. Not about whether or not I wanted to sell it.’
‘Well, what on earth else is one supposed to conclude from such a conversation?’ said Valerie, raising her voice a notch not only in volume, but also in class. Violet had noticed long ago that her sister disavowed their background in the way she talked; when challenged, and angry, her vocabulary would not revert to type, like some, but instead become even more artificially refined.
‘I …’
‘Violet. Can I ask?’ said Neville. ‘If you don’t mind, why don’t you want to sell it? I mean, seeing as, as you said, it was all a long time ago …’
Valerie turned from him towards her, and nodded, slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Good question, Neville. Very good question.’
Violet was still standing. She felt awkward, as neither her sister, nor her sister’s friend, had risen, which had the obscure effect, though she was physically above them, of making her feel the more bullied: as if both of them were simply ignoring her body language and its patent implication that this meeting was over. An answer came quickly to her mind: That’s none of your business. It was followed almost as quickly, however, by a flash of uncertainty, an intimation that the phrase that’s none of your business normally implied a clear, if private, motivation. But she did not know what her motivation was for not selling the boo
k. Valerie was right, however sneeringly she said it: Neville’s question was a good one. In the silence, surreally punctured by the fading of the synthesized sirens from the radio, various explanations did come to her:
I haven’t even read it yet.
The smell of it reminds me of when I was young.
It’s mine. It’s signed to me. There’s an inscription.
It’s the only proof I’ve got that, once, I was married to Eli Gold.
The thought of saying these things out loud triggered in her a rush of self-pity. They made her sound so like a child; but she also knew, even as they appeared as discrete phrases on the wall of her mind, that she would never say any of them to these people, and felt sorry for herself again, trapped forever under the boot of inhibition. She felt a tear begin to appear and, for the first but not the last time, had an impulse not just to cry but to flood: to let all excreta come from all orifices at once; to respond to this question by melting in a heap of tears and snot and blood and shit and piss.
‘Oh,’ said Neville, flushing, ‘I’m so sorry … of course. I’m sure it must mean a lot to you; please don’t worry about it any more.’
‘No, wait a minute, Neville …’
‘Valerie …’ This in a whisper. ‘She’s crying.’
Valerie frowned at her sister. For a split second her face softened, and there showed in it some sign of sibling concern, some trace memory of when she was five and Violet was seven and their father carried her in from outside because she had hurt her wrist on one of the cobbles, and Valerie’s sky had fallen in. At this first intimation of life’s capacity for damage she had begun to cry, much, much more intensely than Violet, and did not stop crying until Violet returned from hospital with her arm encased in a frayed, white plaster, and told her sister, many times, that she was all right. And then Valerie let this memory fall back into the velvet pouch of her soul, buried so deep now in the earth of her she had no idea it was still there: the softness vanished, no more than the faintest flit, to be replaced by the hard set of an eternal tut.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 26