فصل 31

31

Dear Louisa,

So I had my first decent night’s sleep in weeks. I found your letter when I got back from a night shift at six a.m. and I have to tell you it made me so bloody glad that I wanted to shout like a crazy person and do a dance, but I’m crap at dancing and I had nobody to talk to so I went and let the hens out and sat on the step and told them instead (they were not massively impressed. But what do they know?).

So can I write?

I have stuff to say now. I also have a really stupid grin on my face for about eighty per cent of my working day. My new partner (Dave, forty-five, definitely not about to bring me French novels) says I’m scaring the patients.

Tell me what’s going on with you. Are you okay? Are you sad? You didn’t sound sad. Maybe I just want you not to be sad.

Talk to me.

Love,

Sam x

The letters arrived most days. Some were long and rambling, some just a couple of lines, a few scribbles, or a photo of him showing different parts of his now-completed house. Or hens. Sometimes the letters were long, exploratory, fervent.

We went too fast, Louisa Clark. Perhaps my injury accelerated it all. You can’t play hard to get with someone after they’ve literally held your insides with their bare hands, after all. So maybe this is good. Maybe now we get to really talk to each other.

I was a mess after Christmas. I can tell you that now. I like to feel I’ve done the right thing. But I didn’t do the right thing. I hurt you and it haunted me. There were so many nights when I just gave up on sleep and went to work on the house instead. I’d fully recommend behaving like an arse if you want to get a building project completed.

I think about my sister a lot. Mostly what she’d say to me. You don’t have to have known her to imagine what she’d be calling me right now.

Day after day they came, sometimes two in twenty-four hours, sometimes supplemented by email but most often just long, handwritten essays, windows into the inside of Sam’s head and heart. Some days I almost didn’t want to read them – afraid to renew an intimacy with the man who had so comprehensively broken my heart. On others I found myself running downstairs barefoot in the mornings, Dean Martin at my heels, standing in front of Ashok and bouncing on my toes as he flicked through the wedge of post on his desk. He would pretend there was nothing, then pull one from his jacket and hand it over with a smile as I bolted back upstairs to enjoy it in private.

I read them over and over, discovering with each one how little we had really known each other before I left, building a new picture of this quiet, complicated man. Sometimes his letters made me sad:

Really sorry. No time today. Lost two kids in an RTA. Just need to go to bed.

X

PS I hope your day was full of good things.

But mostly they did not. He talked of Jake and how Jake had told him that Lily was the only person who really understood how he felt, and how each week Sam would take Jake’s dad on a walk along the canal path or make him help paint the walls of the new house just to try to get him to open up a bit (and to stop eating cake). He talked of the two hens he had lost to a fox, the carrots and beetroot that were growing in his vegetable patch. He told me how he had kicked his bike exhaust in desperation and fury on Christmas Day after he had left me at my parents’ and hadn’t had the dent repaired because it was a useful reminder of how miserable he had felt when we weren’t talking. Every day he opened up a little more, and every day I felt I understood him a little better.

Did I tell you Lily stopped by today? I finally told her that you and I had been in touch and she went bright pink and coughed out a piece of gum. Seriously. I thought I was going to have to do the Heimlich on her.

I wrote back in the hours when I was neither working nor walking Dean Martin. I drew him little vignettes of my life, my careful cataloguing and repairing of Margot’s wardrobe, sending photographs of items that fitted me as if they had been made for me (he told me he pinned these up in his kitchen). I told him of how Margot’s idea of the dress agency had taken root in my imagination and how I couldn’t let it go. I told him of my other correspondence – spidery little cards from Margot, still radiant with joy at her son’s forgiveness, and from her daughter-in-law, Laynie, who sent me sweet flowered cards updating me on Margot’s deteriorating condition and thanking me for bringing her husband some closure, expressing her sadness that it had taken so long for it to happen.

I told Sam how I had begun to look for apartments, how I had headed, with Dean Martin, into unfamiliar new neighbourhoods – Jackson Heights, Queens, Park Slope, one eye trying to assess the risk of being murdered in my bed, the other trying not to balk at the terrifying differential between square footage and cost.

I told him of my now weekly dinners with Ashok’s family, how their casual insults and evident love for each other made me miss my own. I told him how my thoughts returned again and again to Granddad, far more so than when he was alive, and how Mum, freed from all responsibility, was still finding it impossible to stop grieving him. I told him how, despite spending more time by myself than I had in years, despite living in the vast, empty apartment, I felt, curiously, not lonely at all.

And, gradually, I let him know what it meant to me to have him in my life again, his voice in my ear in the small hours, the knowledge that I meant something to him. The sense of him as a physical presence, despite the miles that separated us.

Finally I told him I missed him. And realized almost as I pressed send that that really didn’t solve anything at all.

Nathan and Ilaria came for dinner, Nathan bringing a clutch of beers and Ilaria a spicy pork and bean casserole that nobody had wanted. I had thought about how often Ilaria seemed to cook dishes that nobody wanted. The previous week she had brought over a prawn curry, which I distinctly remembered Agnes telling her never to serve again.

We sat with our bowls on our laps, side by side on Margot’s sofa, mopping up the rich tomato sauce with chunks of cornbread and trying not to belch at each other as we talked over the television. Ilaria asked after Margot, crossing herself and shaking her head sadly when I told her of Laynie’s updates. In turn she told me Agnes had banned Tabitha from the apartment, a cause of some stress for Mr Gopnik, who had chosen to deal with this particular family fracture by spending even more time at work.

‘To be fair, there’s a lot going on at the office,’ said Nathan.

‘There’s a lot going on across the corridor.’ Ilaria raised an eyebrow at me.

‘The puta has a daughter,’ she said quietly, when Nathan got up to visit the bathroom, wiping her hands on a napkin.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘She is coming to visit, with the puta’s sister.’ She sniffed, picked at a loose thread on her trousers. ‘Poor child. It is not her fault she is coming to visit with a family of crazies.’

‘You’ll look out for her,’ I said. ‘You’re good at that.’

‘Colour of that bathroom!’ said Nathan, arriving back in the room. ‘I didn’t think anyone did cloakroom suites in mint green. You know there’s a bottle of body lotion in there dated 1974?’

Ilaria raised her eyebrows and compressed her lips.

Nathan left at a quarter past nine, and as the door closed behind him Ilaria lowered her voice, as if he could still hear, and told me he was dating a personal trainer from Bushwick who wanted him to visit at all hours of the day and night. Between the girl and Mr Gopnik he barely had time to talk to anybody these days. What could you do?

Nothing, I said. People were going to do what they were going to do.

She nodded, as if I had imparted some great wisdom, and padded back down the corridor.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure! Nadia, baby, take that through to Grandma, will you?’ Meena stooped to give the child a small plastic cup of iced water. It was a sweltering evening and every window in Ashok and Meena’s apartment was open. Despite the two fans that whirred lazily, the air was still stubbornly resistant to movement. We were preparing supper in the tiny kitchen and every motion seemed to make a bit of me stick to something.

‘Has Ashok ever hurt you?’

Meena turned swiftly from the stove to face me.

‘Not physically, I mean. Just …’

‘My feelings? As in messing me around? Not too much, to be honest. He’s not really built that way. He did once joke that I looked like a whale when I was forty-two weeks pregnant with Rachana, but after I got past the hormones and stuff I kind of had to agree with him. And, boy did he pay for that one!’ She let out a honking laugh at the memory, then reached into a cupboard for some rice. ‘Is this your guy in London again?’

‘He writes to me. Every day. But I …’

‘You what?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m afraid. I loved him so much. And it was so awful when we split up. I guess I’m just afraid that if I let myself fall again I’ll be setting myself up for more hurt. It’s complicated.’

‘It’s always complicated.’ She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘That’s life, Louisa. So show me.’

‘What?’

‘The letters. Come on. Don’t pretend you don’t carry them around all day. Ashok says your whole face goes kinda mushy when he hands one over.’

‘I thought doormen were meant to be discreet!’

‘That man has no secrets from me. You know that. We are highly invested in the twists and turns of your life down there.’ She laughed and held out her hand, waggling her fingers impatiently. I hesitated just a moment, then pulled the letters carefully from my handbag. And, oblivious to the comings and goings of her small children, to the muffled laughter of her mother at the television comedy next door, to the noise and the sweat and the rhythmic click-click-click of the overhead fan, Meena bent her head over my letters and read them.

The strangest thing, Lou. So I’ve spent three years building this damn house. Obsessing over the right window frames and which kind of shower cubicle and whether to go with the white plastic power sockets or the polished nickel. And now it’s done, or as done as it will ever be. And I sit here alone in my immaculate front room with the perfect shade of pale grey paint and the reconditioned wood-burner and the triple-pleat interlined curtains that my mum helped me choose, and I wonder, well, what was the bloody point? What did I build it for?

I think I needed a distraction from the loss of my sister. I built a house so I didn’t have to think. I built a house because I needed to believe in the future. But now it’s done and I look around these empty rooms, I feel nothing. Maybe some pride that I actually finished the job but apart from that? Nothing at all.

Meena stared at the last few lines for a long moment. Then she folded the letter, placed it carefully in the pile and handed them back to me. ‘Oh, Louisa,’ she said, her head cocked to one side. ‘Come on, girl.’

1442 Lantern Drive Tuckahoe Westchester, NY

Dear Louisa,

I hope you are well and that the apartment is not proving too troublesome. Frank says the contractors are coming to look round in two weeks – could you be there to let them in? We’ll give you the firm details nearer the time.

Margot isn’t up to writing too much these days – she finds a lot of things tiring and those drugs do make her a little woozy – but I thought you’d like to know that she is being well cared for. We have decided, despite everything, we cannot bear to move her into the home so she will stay with us, with some help from the very kind medical staff. She still has plenty to say to Frank and me, oh, yes! She has us running round like headless chickens most days! I don’t mind. I quite like having someone to look after, and on her good days it’s lovely hearing all the stories of when Frank was a boy. I think he likes hearing them too, even though he won’t admit as much. Two peas in a pod, those two!

Margot asked me to ask you would you mind sending another picture of the dog? She did so like the other one you sent. Frank has put it in a lovely silver frame beside her bed and I know it is a great comfort to her as she spends so much time resting now. I can’t say I find the little fellow quite as pleasing to look at as she plainly does, but each to her own.

She sends you her love and says she hopes you’re still wearing those gorgeous stripy pantyhose. I’m not sure if that’s the pharmaceuticals talking, but I know she means well!

With warmest wishes,

Laynie G. Weber

‘Did you hear?’

I was headed out with Dean Martin to work. Summer had begun to assert its presence forcefully, every day warmer and more humid, so that the short walk to the subway left my shirt stuck to my lower back, and delivery boys exposed pale, sunburnt flesh on their bikes and swore at jaywalking tourists. But I was wearing my 1960s psychedelic dress that Sam had bought me and a pair of cork wedge shoes with pink flowers over the strap, and after the winter I’d had, the sun on my arms was like a balm.

‘Did I hear what?’

‘The library! It’s been saved! Its future has been secured for the next ten years!’ Ashok thrust his phone at me. I stopped on the carpet and lifted my sunglasses to read the text message from Meena. ‘I can’t believe it. An anonymous donation in honour of some dead guy. The – hang on, I got it here.’ He scanned the message with a finger. ‘The William Traynor Memorial Library. But who cares who it is! Funding for ten years, Louisa! And the city council has agreed! Ten years! Oh, man. Meena is over the moon. She was so sure we’d lost it.’

I peered at the phone then handed it back to him. ‘It’s a nice thing, right?’

‘It’s amazing! Who knew, Louisa? Huh? Who knew? One for the little people. Ohhh, yes!’ Ashok’s smile was enormous.

I felt something rise inside me then, a feeling of joy and anticipation so great that it seemed as if the world had briefly stopped turning, like there was just me and the universe and a million good things that could happen if you only hung on in there.

I looked down at Dean Martin, then back at the lobby. I waved to Ashok, adjusted my sunglasses and set off down Fifth Avenue, my own smile growing wider with every step.

I had only asked for five.