17

That day, Mark was in the process of preparing the fine art sale.

The back door to Pearsons had been opened to allow for a delivery, an executor’s sale. Mark was watching the unloading of an entire married life. He watched as it passed him, noting the details against the record: half a dozen mahogany bar back armchairs and an oak secretaire, a George III gilt-wood wall mirror. He glanced up and noticed a man crossing the parking lot, heading straight for him.

“Mark Pearson?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“John Brigham.”

It took a second for the name to register. Mark took the proffered hand. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Catherine isn’t here. She’s due back any minute.”

“Can I wait?”

“Please do,” Mark said. He stepped back and ushered John into the salesroom. They made their way to Mark’s office. Brigham stopped on the way to look at his own dresser, standing in the far corner.

“We thought it worth the wait,” Mark said. “It’s too good a quality to go in the fortnightly general sale.”

Brigham said nothing. He looked at the dresser for some moments, then around at the rest of the lots. “You have a good selection,” he said.

“Several deaths,” Mark commented dryly. “Always good for business.”

There was a beat, then Brigham walked on. They passed back out, through the double doors, to Reception and his and Catherine’s offices.

“Come in,” Mark said, opening his own door. He called back to the receptionists, asking for coffee; when he came in, Brigham had already seated himself in front of the desk.

The catalogue was in the process of final editing; reference books were piled on the rear cabinet.

“Researching something?” Brigham asked.

Mark smiled. “Medals,” he said. “There was a whole stack of them in one of the chests of drawers. Burma Star, Africa Star. A First World War death plaque. Not my field. I had to resort to help.”

“Is there always such a range?”

“Always,” Mark told him. “Last fine arts we had a harp. Terribly posh, carved angels, winged beast feet. Then there was the polyphon, and a couple of train sets, and an elastolin set of a British Army band, the christening spoons, a trophy celebrating a tennis tournament in 1952 …” He grinned at Brigham. “Oh,” he added, holding up a finger, “and the tazza with floral pierced and gadrooned border.”

“A tazza?”

Mark spread his hands. “Search me,” he joked. “Sounds brilliant though, don’t you think?”

The coffee arrived. Mark took the opportunity to inspect Brigham in detail for the first time. Catherine had not given much away: all he knew was that she was practically living with this man. It disturbed him, what seemed to be the almost total submersion of her previous life into his; and yet, at the same time, it gave him some satisfaction to see her smile. She had not done so in so many months. If this tall, graying, handsome man was responsible for that, he felt that he ought to be grateful to him. But John Brigham didn’t look too approachable at the moment. He was frowning to himself as he stirred sugar into his coffee.

“How are things at Bridle Lodge?” Mark asked. “I heard you altered all the waterways. Restored them.”

“Yes,” Brigham said.

“Must have been quite a project.”

“It was.”

“Have you anything else planned?”

Brigham glanced up at him. “No, nothing.”

“I hear it’s a fine Arts and Crafts house.”

Again, another frown by way of reply. OK, Mark thought, so you don’t want to talk. He stood up. “Would you mind very much if I carried on with the delivery?” he asked. “It’s a busy day today.”

“No,” Brigham said. “Not at all. Please, go ahead.”

As Mark came out of his office, he saw Catherine coming in the front doors. He waited for her; she said something to the girls at the desk and then came over to him.

Mark put a hand on her arm. “You’ve got a visitor,” he said. “John Brigham’s in my office.”

“He is?” she replied.

“Cheerful sort of chap, isn’t he?” Mark said. “Never stops talking. Is he checking up on his goods?”

She shook her head. “No. I shouldn’t think so.”

“He looked at the dresser.”

“It shipped all right, didn’t it?” she asked.

“Of course it did. It only had to come ten miles down the road.” Mark pulled a face. “He looked like something didn’t quite meet his standards,” he said. He raised his eyebrows at her and walked back through the salesroom.

She watched him go for a second, then went into his office. John was already standing.

“I thought I heard your voice,” he said.

She kissed him. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “How did it go with Robert?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s getting a place in London …”

“And?”

“Nothing really,” she said. “Nothing.”

He regarded her closely. “Are you busy this afternoon?”

“A bit of paperwork,” she said. “A few return calls.” She looked at the piece of paper that the receptionists had given her. “And I have to call in on Mr. Williams. He wants to see me. Something urgent.” She sat down in the next chair and put her hands to her face. “Oh, God,” she murmured.

He sat down again next to her and she dropped her hands from her face.

“What are you going to do about Robert?” he asked. “Do you want to go back, do you want to stop …”

“Stop what?”

“Us,” he said.

She stared at him. “Is that what you think?”

“Breathing space. Now that you’ve seen him.”

She looked at him closely, thinking that he had come here, to this neutral ground, with a frown on his face, to find an excuse to stop seeing her. It washed over her quickly. That can’t be it, she thought. Surely that isn’t it. It couldn’t be it, she reasoned improbably, because she was carrying an imprint of him: his hands, his thoughts. She wanted to be away from Robert, from Mark, from the salesroom, the noise of the traffic outside. She sat motionless in her chair and wanted John acutely, a physical necessity, like salt on the tongue dissolving, an acute dry heightening texture in her mouth. This peculiar longing, something like impatience; anxious at one moment to be out of his arms to breathe, to walk away; anxious in the next to be with him, to swallow the world in an instant, to obliterate it.

“Do you want the truth?” she asked.

He was holding her hand in his loosely, almost reflectively.

“I haven’t given Robert a thought,” she confessed. “I haven’t given him half a thought for eight weeks. I ought to, wouldn’t you say? Don’t you think that a newly abandoned wife should give the smallest little shit for where her husband is and what he’s doing?”

He shook his head. She still couldn’t read his face.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I don’t want to think about Robert, because for one thing he lives in a prison in his head, and for another, I can’t think about him, because, since you, there isn’t room.”

At this, John glanced up. His expression relaxed and he began to smile.

She leaned forward. “I’ve just talked to a man who …” She searched for the words. “I got the same feeling, the feeling that I was dying on my feet. That I’d become invisible.”

“You’re not invisible.”

She stopped for some time. “Walking around inside a maze,” she murmured. There was a long pause. “What was it like with Claire?” she asked.

“Claire …?”

“Did you ever feel that you were staring at a wall, a brick wall? That she didn’t understand you, something you’d said, an idea you’d had, what you wanted?”

“No,” he told her.

“Did you feel like two people?” she asked. “Two people with different feelings?”

“No,” he told her. “Never.”

She held his gaze for a second. “Did you know that it’s a weakness to be like that?” she asked, her voice heavy with irony.

Abruptly, she stood up, dragging on his hand so that he got to his feet. “Let’s go,” she said. “Take me out of here.”

They drove out to Sandalwood after lunch.

The journey took them through the river valley as it wound out of town, between the shallow hills. They turned off toward the village, and the river widened and the road narrowed. The water spread out into reed beds to the left; to the right, the land rose gradually. Barley had been planted; it was too short to ripple under the wind and stood in feathery green tracts up to the edge of the woodland. The road curved and twisted through other fields, over bridges. At last they came to the village and turned up the lane for the house.

“Did you ever come to this village at the start of the year?” Catherine asked.

“No.”

She slowed down, nosing the car through the entrance, over a cattle grid. Lilac, with its first fists of purple and white, hung untended over the driveway.

“The churchyard is next to the house,” she said. “In the spring, snowdrops come out on the graves. They’ve been planted on almost every one. They look like featherbeds.” She glanced at him. John was looking out of the window at the grounds. She drove the car over to the side and pulled on the hand brake. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” she asked.

He looked at her. “There’s nothing wrong.”

“You’ve barely said a word to me. And Mark said that you hardly spoke to him.”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t think that I like Mark much.”

She was amazed. “Mark?” she repeated. “He’s the nicest man you could wish for. What did he say to you? Did he crack some sort of joke, or what?”

“Yes, he cracked a joke.”

“Look,” she said, “you don’t take Mark too seriously. He has a black sense of humor. Are you worried about the dresser?” she asked. “The catalogue description is fine. It’s exact. The dresser is unmarked. And insured.”

“It isn’t the dresser.”

“What, then?” She was anxious; he had never cut her off like this before.

He shook his head. “Something I want to do.”

She waited. He didn’t elaborate. It was evident that whatever was on his mind, he wasn’t prepared to tell her at this moment. She fought down the feeling that this was just like Robert; she had to tell herself consciously that this was not the case.

She lifted the hand brake and drove to the door of the house.

As she stood on the step after knocking, she looked around herself at the white wisteria that swamped the frontage; she saw that it had wound itself around the downspouts and was curling its way onto the roof.

John got out of the car. They waited. Above their heads, house martins were darting in their easy ballet and disappearing under the timber eaves.

Catherine knocked again. She stepped back and looked again at the upper floor. One window was open; the edge of a curtain fluttered from it.

“He rang me first thing this morning,” she said. “I was talking on another phone.”

“Perhaps he went back to bed,” John suggested. “How old is he?”

“Eighty?” she guessed. “Eighty-five?” She looked doubtfully at the front door and again at the window. “I’ll try the back,” she said.

They went around the side, on a flagstone path in the shade of heavy conifers, so that it was greened over with moss and lichen. Bindweed grew up through the roots. They passed two huge bay windows, which must have been permanently overshadowed, even if the heavy curtains had not been drawn. Catherine noticed the whorls of damp on the linings, the encrusted paint on the frames, the rust marks running from the outdoor sills to the ground.

They came to a garden gate and opened it onto the back of the house. The whole terrace here was shrouded in a gloomy half-light, so thick were the trees alongside. In the deep shade was a garden potting shed, completely covered in some kind of thick, pale green climber with star-shaped white flowers. The padlock hung from the lock, open; the floorboards of the shed were rotted. No one had been in here for years, Catherine thought.

They got to the back door. It was open onto a back hall and kitchen.

“Mr. Williams,” Catherine called. “Are you there?”

There was no reply, except for a cat that came down the hallway, mewing loudly. Catherine held out her hand to it, and it backed away.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Hungry?”

By way of reply, it skittered past her, tail up. When it got to the terrace, it turned back and scowled, fixing them both with a yellow stare.

“Mr. Williams,” Catherine called, stepping further along the hall.

John looked in the kitchen. It was old-fashioned, with its wood cupboards and a wooden draining board bleached to ivory and two iron taps over the stone sink, but it was clean and tidy. He stepped inside briefly, feeling the cold side of the kettle, noticing the empty table.

Catherine came back to the door. “John,” she whispered. “Come and see.”

She took him up the hall. This, too, was tidy, almost antiseptically so. It was the hallway that Catherine had seen before, with its antler coat rack and umbrella stand, and cracked Delftware on the walls, the plates that Mr. Williams said were not worth selling. She had always been shown into the room on the left of the front door: just like a waiting room, with a row of Edwardian hard-backed chairs and a small pine table.

She had looked in this room while John was in the kitchen; then she had crossed the hall, whispering Mr. Williams’s name hesitantly. She took John now in the room; just a tiny space little more than a cupboard, the original clothes-drying and boots room of an Edwardian family. Coat hooks lined the wall; paneled cupboards were underneath. Green brocade cushions, flattened by use, faded by age, ran along the top of the cupboards.

“Oh, my God,” John murmured.

The dim ocher walls were filled with photographs. They were all framed, and all but a handful of them featured the same woman. Catherine put her hand gently to the nearest one, a studio portrait of a pretty girl in a soft-collared frock, her hair waved neatly to her cheek. She was smiling modestly, her chin dipped. The black-and-white print was so old that it was becoming sepia. She looked no more than eighteen, perhaps younger, holding a little posy of violets in her lap.

Next along was a wedding picture. Small and rather out of focus, it showed a large group of people on a set of wide-fanning stone steps, the front door of a country house that was not Sandalwood. This was far more opulent; the women were trussed in furs and fancily buttoned shoes, despite the glare of the sun. In the center of the front line stood the bride and groom; the same woman in the previous photograph, now in a long dress with a huge lace train, carrying a massive bouquet of lilies. The man alongside was Mr. Williams, uncomfortable in a starched collar and frock coat.

Farther still along the wall, the photographs and the country changed: the inscriptions were written diagonally across each one in black ink. Jaipur 1946, Sandy and Denny Marshall, Col. & Mrs. Powell. Here, among the wide-brimmed straw hats and the military fatigues and embroidered mess dress, were nameless dusty outposts and hillsides; camels around a water hole, knees buckled under them. Naked boys standing, arms crossed behind their backs, at the edge of the water. An army jeep drawn up at a crossroad that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere; a rocky promontory in a vast empty backdrop, the men swathed against the rising wind with cotton shawls wrapped around their necks and faces.

Here was an older version of the pretty eighteen-year-old girl; now obviously in her thirties, she lay full-length by the side of a pool, in dark sunglasses, holding a cigarette. Playing cards were on the small table next to her, and a mixing jug for martinis.

“Look at all this,” John said.

He had opened a cupboard on the opposite side of the room.

It was fitted with hanging rails. Inside it were generations of clothes: coats, dresses, ballgowns, sweaters, skirts. There was rack upon rack of shoes, each carefully stuffed with tissue paper, as if the wearer might want them again at any moment. There were scarves, gloves, even handkerchiefs; underwear in separate sliding shelves, with small bags of lavender on each row.

John looked at her. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

“Nothing quite the same,” she said. “Not preserved like this.”

“Do you know what it is?” he asked. “It’s a shrine. He made a shrine to her.”

They went back out into the hall, the gardenia scent of the dead woman clinging to them.

Catherine looked up the stairs.

They opened the door to the bedroom; the curtain halfway across the window, caught under the open sash, was the one that Catherine had been able to see from the front doorstep.

There was a double bed, with a red satin eiderdown and pillows with stenciled patterns of trailing roses. The wallpaper behind the bed was all roses, too: old English roses with double petals, red on white. It was an overtly feminine room, seemingly untouched from the early sixties. The curtains hung in elaborate swags and ruffles; yet more roses embossed on damask.

A large wing armchair stood facing the foot of the bed, its back to the door.

John stepped past her. He walked to the chair, looked at its occupant. Catherine heard the sharp intake of breath, but he didn’t move for a moment.

“What is it?” she asked.

She moved to his side. He put out a hand, palm upward, to try and stop her.

As she walked, she noticed the photograph first. Another photograph of the fresh-faced girl of the studio picture, a copy, framed in gilt. It was propped on the eiderdown close to the chair. Then Catherine saw the hands, their papery thinness, the white knuckles shining. The tips of the fingers were blue; the hands lay curled in Mr. Williams’s lap, relaxed. All the space between the hands was soaked with blood.

Above the hands, Mr. Williams’s face was white, expressionless. His eyes were open, gazing at the picture in front of him, blue eyes the color of faded ceanothus flower. He had dressed himself in his best suit. The collar, ill-fitting around his neck, was clean. He wore his regimental tie and a badge of some kind of charity organization in his lapel.

Only when Catherine had stared at him in horror for a second did she see the knife that Mr. Williams had used, a small penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, resting on his knees.

He had cut his wrists and remained quietly where he was, waiting.

It was two o’clock in the morning when John gave up sleep.

He had been lying on his back staring at the ghosts of light on the ceiling, Catherine finally asleep beside him, his mind purposefully blank to the events of the day.

But it kept coming back, in rewind: the ambulance, the police. The body taken downstairs, the sound of footsteps in the hall. Cameras in the bedroom. He had been standing on the landing outside the room when they had lifted Mr. Williams and put his body into the mortuary bag. John just couldn’t get over the plasticity of the arms and hands, even after the rigor had declined. The head had rolled just a little as they put the body on the bed, to put him into the rubberized sheet. The shoes seemed so pathetic, laced and polished, the effort to be well presented now gone.

John had turned away. It was so pitiable, such a wreck of an ending. But then all endings were pitiable, in their way. Dignity was a label attached by the living, he thought. Something to soothe us, like babies afraid of the dark.

When he had been a little boy, he’d been afraid like that. Terrified, in fact. Even when he was seven or eight, the lights had to be on outside his room. And even that didn’t help very much. In the light cast by the twenty-five-watt bulb outside his door he saw wraiths crowding to catch a glimpse of him; he heard footsteps, he saw smoke stream along the floor. He couldn’t be placated, even when it was explained to him that he had been dreaming. It just seemed like you were awake, his mother would say.

He wondered now, so many years later, in this dark room with Catherine breathing shallowly at his side, if he had ever put away the dreams of childhood. If he allowed himself, he could see them all now, massing silently at the edge of his sight. All the things he didn’t want to look at.

He sat upright, swung his legs out of bed.

This was no good. This would get him nowhere. It wouldn’t help him, it would only make it all so much worse.

He kept seeing Mr. Williams’s face, the abdication in it.

He had his own choices now, he thought. Piece by piece, painting by solitary painting, Mr. Williams had sold his life over the years; hated selling any of it, according to Catherine. Each little bit was a wrench. Catherine had told him tonight that she thought that Mr. Williams’s giving her the last portrait by the Scottish colorist had been nothing more than a sustained good-bye, his ticket out of the world. It was the last thing he loved, the last thing of all the pieces that he and his wife had bought together. Giving it to her had been like writing a suicide note: even more graphic, in its way, than the knife resting on his knees.

I have a room downstairs, John thought to himself.

He got up and walked to the window, pulled back the curtain a little, and looked down through the garden. It was a calm, starlit night. Looking up into the sky, he could clearly see the Little Dipper, resting on its side, almost directly above him. The Three Sisters of the Pleiades. In Spain, they had looked closer than this. He had learned all their names, once, watching their slow procession around the sky over weeks and months. The miracle of received light, the flickering messages from old worlds. Candles to light the way.

He had begun to buy in earnest in Spain. He had even sometimes come back to London specifically to make a particular purchase. Probably at some point he had even been to Bergens, and attended an auction, while Catherine had worked there. Strange, that she had perhaps been so close when he had been working so hard to fill the void.

Into the starlit candled dark he had poured objects. He hadn’t even kept them in the house, but had hired a storage unit, a dusty flea-bitten place on the edge of Málaga. He would drive there with his precious buy, wrapped and boxed, and he would put it in with all the others. Just another box among the many. He couldn’t have explained to a living soul why this worked. It was a kind of insanity, a mechanism of mourning. He put beautiful things into boxes and hid them away, and he would think of them under lock and key, in the anonymous yard on an industrial estate, among other people’s furniture and stores. Hundreds of little lights under bushels, that only he knew about.

He just needed to know that they were in the world.

When he had come back to England and they had been brought with him, he had asked the movers to unload the boxes into the drawing room. Without unpacking them he had fixed the alarm system. And only then did he unwrap everything. It took him two days, because each thing carried a memory.

I made a shrine, he thought. I made a shrine, too.

And the thought now almost asphyxiated him. He dropped the curtain and stood gasping for breath, his hands on his hips, his head dropped nearly to his chest.

He looked back at Catherine, and kept looking, trying to discern her face in the darkness. As if in response to him, she stirred. There was a second or two of silence, then he heard her call him.

He came to the side of the bed.

“Can’t you sleep?” she asked. She propped herself up on one elbow, pushing the hair back from her face. He reached out and touched her. She was so warm.

“I’m going to sell everything,” he said. “Everything downstairs.”

“What?” she said confusedly. “What do you mean? Why?” He tried to think of a reason that would make sense to her. “I don’t want to be like him,” he told her; and she grasped his hand, pushing back some of the shadows that stood by the door, that stood in his way wherever he looked.

He wanted to trust her. He wanted to give it all away and turn his heart over to her, and he wondered—with the shapes of faces eternally at the door, their shifting selves getting closer now, smoke drifting along the floor of his memory—if he could trust Catherine Sergeant. Not just with these things, precious as they were, all the days of the past that they represented. But with everything.

Every priceless secret thing that he had been entrusted with.