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I walk about on tiptoe, feeling like a burglar invading a stranger’s home. It’s hard not to feel insulted by the generic nature of my new place. A pink bedroom with tasselled curtains; a wardrobe filled with high-heeled shoes and filmy floral dresses, rather than the trainers and jeans I’d usually favour. I remind myself that Gwent hardly knew me, but I can’t help but feel that his perception of women seems to be inspired by the clichés of women’s magazines. I think of Mrs Carmichael, back in 1861, of the hooped skirts she wore that made it hard to sit down, of the corsets that crushed her ribs. Clothing designed to restrict women, keep them at home, keep them in their place. She wasn’t a kind boss to me when I was governess to her daughter, but I saw why; with so little power in her life, she lorded it over her staff; it was the only domain she was allowed to express any sort of control over.
As for Mr Carmichael, when his wife and daughter were absent, he would sometimes coax me into being photographed in his study, in return for favours that I desperately needed: time off to visit my mother at Hanwell; the money for the travel there and back. Though I suspect that Fate introduced the subplot for titillation, I didn’t feel like a victim; as a poorly paid governess, I became so invisible that I often felt like a ghost. At 130least Mr Carmichael made me feel like flesh and blood, even if it meant becoming a caricature of his lust.
I check my inbox. There are emails from an Emily, a Daniel, a Mary, but nothing from Jaime. I hesitate, then type in ‘Mum’ to see if I have a mother in this story. ‘No results,’ my email informs me. The little clock on my Mac tells me it’s 1.32 a.m.
Water sluices over my body in wave upon wave of bliss. After months of using a pail of warm water to wash, the shower feels like regal decadence. I stand naked before the mirror, examining my reflection. My hair is the same colour as it was in real life, dark brown, but it seems to have been highlighted and possesses a glossy sheen that I never used to have. I used to cut my own hair with the kitchen scissors and, if it went wrong, pretend it was meant to be a jagged, layered look. I felt like hacking at the neat ends now, but perhaps I ought to play along with Gwent’s world.
A scratching noise. I open the door; a black-and-white cat purrs around my damp ankles and I pick it up. Its fur becomes wet with my tears. The day I went to visit Fate, I left my dog behind with my neighbour. I know he loves Tommy and will have adopted him by now, but still, I miss his cuddly warmth, his gruff barks, the thump of his tail when he’s happy. Sometimes I would stare into his eyes and feel ashamed at the thought that I loved Tommy more than any human I knew. 131When the cat streaks back through the window, pads along the windowsill and into the flat next door, I watch her go with a wistful heart.
Yawns are curling up my throat but I’m afraid that sleep’s oblivion will beget a fresh amnesia. I sit in the living room with a notebook on my lap.
‘Gwent?’ I say to the empty room. ‘Gwent? How can I get in touch with Jaime?’
Silence. Just as he promised: no intervention, only free will.
I hate this humming noise in the background of Gwent’s novel, modern machines perpetually reminding us of our dependency on them. I’ve grown used to the clatter of hooves on cobbles, the dominance of birdsong.
My fingers are tingling, but there are no canvases in this flat, and it’s been a long time since I last picked up a brush. I pick up a notebook, click a ballpoint pen, smooth the blank page, and begin to write:
My name is Rachel Levy. I was born in Horsham, Surrey, in 1987.
I pause, afraid to spill the emotions welling up inside me, to assert my own narrative. I am used to shaping my ideas through images, colour, texture. But then, in jerky script, the words find their flow: 132
Here’s a childhood memory: when I was six years old, I showed my mum a sketch of a robin.
It’s lovely, she told me. She asked where I’d got it from. When I said that I had drawn it myself, she went very quiet. That evening, she gave me bread and margarine and jam to eat, but didn’t make any for herself. As I devoured mine, she assured me that she wasn’t hungry.
This went on every night for ten days. I began to feel scared that she wasn’t eating because she was sick and going to die. I was sitting at the table sketching when I heard her come home from work. Her face was flushed and she said, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ It was a box of twenty-six colour pencils. I drank the shades in like milkshakes. Even then, I had some sense of the sacrifice she had made, and I tried to give her a clumsy hug. She wasn’t a tactile woman, so she gently pushed me away and set me down before a sheet of paper with a stern look.
I am an artist.
In 2010, I took a trip to Assisi with my mother. She was much better around this time; still a pale version of herself, but able to survive in the world. I feel guilty about my resistance to going on that holiday, fearing we would regress into teenager and parent. But we had a beautiful time swimming, eating and lounging on the beach. She brought Augustus Fate’s The Beetle Fossil as her holiday read; I had brought The Baronet. We both declared Fate our favourite author. We enjoyed his historical novels the most. He wrote books that you could drown in; if you were immersed in one long enough, you would look up and be startled by the fact that the world around you possessed planes and mobiles, so deeply did he take you into his Victoriana. His characters felt as familiar as family, and as for his use of language – well, I am no critic, but I could see that if Fate were an artist, he would paint in oils, layer upon layer, the colours rich as wines – a slow and patient craftsman. 133
In the weeks before I visited Fate, I stayed inside my flat and disconnected my phone. I got my neighbour, Joe, to take Tommy for a walk, explaining that I had developed agoraphobia; every time he returned and passed the lead back, he would emphatically ask if I was OK. My blinds kept the sunlight distant; I might have been living in some post-apocalyptic landscape. I would sit before my computer, staring at a stream of tweets where it was impossible to distinguish truth from fiction. Sometimes I even tried to compose one myself, but only managed a fragment, a few words that hung in the blue box in pure potentiality. Then there were the news pages, which were often skeletons of stories strung together with the bones of tweets. Once offering essays and analysis, journalism had now devolved into children’s stories. I would wake and think about how I might progress the narrative of my life. I might work at an animal hospital, where every day would be sweet with compassion. I might travel for a year, find dissolution in disorientation, reshape myself.
The Vedas state that we are in the depths of Kali Yuga, that darkest hour when the positive laws of humanity lie dormant, where demons thrive and misery is the median. I visited suicide forums because they were honest places, filled with people who, even with their trauma, had the sanity to see that the world was not as it should be. Tommy had taken to lying by my feet and whimpering, unable to understand why the love I used to lavish on him was gone. But I could not stroke him, because to feel the warmth of his flesh, the beat of his heart, would be to connect with a world that I refused to could not
What do you do when the narrative of your world is one that you can no longer believe in? When you no longer want to be part of it? You can slit your wrists. You can say ‘fuck you’ to the world, mimic its cruelty, and strap explosives to your waist. You can find religion and pull its tatty, thin coat around you in the hope of protection, conscious 134of its holes, of the winds of life that keep blowing through. Or you can seek a place in which to hibernate, to …
The last trip I made after leaving my flat was to Wales, to the home of Augustus Fate. I cannot recall the moment when Fate gave me the tea, but I know that I needed no persuasion to drink it.