Emma, a wool blanket thrown over her and another rolled up as a pillow, slept on the library chaise longue. She woke up stiff and cold down one side. At first she thought she was in her apartment near Sydney Harbour, that she heard the neighbours noisily pass on the outside corridor to go to work. She lay there cramped with cold, wondering why she could not hear Sam in the shower. They had married in an enthusiastic rush, but she had no inkling he was not happy. Grumpy, unkind, inattentive of late, but she had thought she had nothing to worry about, until he came home one day and told her he had a new partner. A child with a nice-sounding name was also mentioned and Emma ran from the apartment. Two days later she returned while he was at work, snatching some clothes, her passport and her mother’s necklace, three strands of aurora borealis stones with a silver clasp. The judge had given it to her when she turned eighteen. Reaching into a drawer on his desk, he had taken out the bunch of stones, sparkling in the afternoon sun. He let them drip from one hand to the other as the necklace uncoiled.
“This was your mother’s favourite necklace. I hope you look after it well,” he said. No other explanation was offered.
Now, the curtains were not drawn in the library, so she lay in the gloom of the wet and cold morning looking out over the back garden, which was so overgrown it was hard to see where it ended. She creaked off the chaise longue, pressing on the lamp at the judge’s desk, her eye travelling down the room. When she was very young, she had thought he was a prisoner here, only visiting the dining room when they had company. More often than not he had supper on a tray as he worked. Sometimes, she heard him climb the stairs late and would duck under the covers, pretending to be asleep. Once, she moved too fast and he spotted she was awake, stepping into the room and telling her off sternly, so that she shut her eyes, afraid to open them even when she heard him continue to his own room, across the landing.
Angie had arranged for Andrew Kelly to come later in the day to oversee the transfer of the judge’s law books to the Four Courts. When the Irish Law Reports were taken away, the last vestiges of the judge would go out the door with them. There was nowhere else in the house that held the judge’s spirit.
She shook her head to push thoughts of the judge away, wishing she had a room that would so neatly tidy away her life with Sam.
*
Andrew Kelly rang the bell early. Wearing jeans with an open-neck shirt and cardigan, he looked very different.
“Mrs Hannon got in touch, said you needed the law books moved. I have brought along a few people to help with the lifting, if you don’t mind us doing it now.”
Emma pulled back the front door as about ten young men and women traipsed in.
“Martin never set it down on paper, but he often said he would like his books to be donated to the Law Library.”
“You knew my father well, Mr Kelly?”
“Please call me Andrew. Yes, your father was a very good friend over the last ten years . . .” His voice trailed away and he turned to direct the operation.
Emma watched as each student was assigned a set of books, lifting them carefully from the shelves and placing them in cardboard boxes. Slowly the grey shelves were revealed, naked without their heavy load. Rows and rows were packed together, box sets of the law to be treasured now by others. With the books gone, what had been Judge Martin Moran would be gone as well, in this place at least. A desk, a chair and a few bent folders would be all that was left to sum up the father; precedents laid down in bound law books to sum up the judge.
“Is there anything you want to keep as a reminder?” Andrew asked gently.
“Maybe Salmond’s Law of Torts. Even the judge had secrets.”
He looked oddly at her, letting the book slip through his fingers.
“Apologies, I am all thumbs this morning,” he said, and she smiled, crouching down to pick up the book. Spying a small pink envelope under the hall table, she reached for it, tucking it into the book as she stood up.
“Do you need me here? I thought I would go upstairs, continue on the rooms there,” she said.
“You go on, it is just heavy lifting here.”
She slipped up to the blue room, sitting at the dressing table to read the letter, the morning light pooling through the window. Using the teeth of a small comb, she unpicked the gummed flap. Carefully, she pulled the paper from the envelope. With age it had become dry and flimsy. There were brown crackly creases, as if it had been read and reread, folded over and carried around.
August 31, 1953
My dearest Grace,
They say there is no greater place in the world to show the love of one man for a woman than the Taj Mahal. I want to bring you there, to hold your hand and whisper my love for you in your ear. Please let me take you away. I can see the two of us in front of the great monument.
Grace, know that I love and adore you: nothing can change that. I hope in the future you will learn to accept that as a given every day.
Shah Jahan was able to commission a great edifice to show the love for the woman he adored. I can only tell you and tell you again how much I love you, and reassure you that we will be together. You, Grace, are everything to me. Please believe me when I say it. I can’t build great monuments to show you. I can only go on my knees before you and tell you I love you.
I don’t need to tell you how beautiful, how powerful the Taj Mahal is, but I can tell you how I feel, thinking of us standing in the shadow of such a dream in marble. I know our love is strong, and if wishes could be granted I would wish to sit in the shadow of that great monument, to hold your hand and just be. Stay strong, my love, and we will find a way to be together.
All my love,
Vikram
A furrow of pain barged between her eyes and tears pressed down her face. The sun was rising high in the sky, sliding into the room. Loneliness consumed her, sitting here at Grace’s dressing table: loneliness that no man had ever written to her in this way.
When Andrew Kelly called up the stairs, she rushed to wipe her eyes. Hastily, she opened Grace’s make-up and patted some decades-old powder across her face, rubbing it in with her fingers. Red lipstick she dotted on, spreading it with her middle finger.
“Sorry I was buried deep in a box,” she said as she came down the stairs.
Andrew took in the pink blotches near her eyes, the powder streaked into ridges under her neck. “It is not too late to change your mind.”
“I want to see the library empty.” She peered into the room, taking in the length of the shelves, the desk alone at the end of the room, the light seeping in to fill the entire space.
Andrew gave the keys of the truck to the last man out the door and closed it behind him. He walked into the library and picked up a blackthorn stick in the corner.
“That was not Martin’s.”
Emma stared at it. “It was Aunt Violet’s. She lived here when I was young.”
“A tough woman by all accounts. Do you want to keep it?”
Emma shivered. “I hardly want to touch it, but I know what to do with it.”
“No time like the present.”
Emma snapped up the stick. She could hear Violet’s voice. “You might think you are high and mighty, girl, but believe me, you are nothing. Just because the judge calls you his daughter, that does not mean anything these days.”
Emma marched outside to the skip and fired the stick so that it swished through the air, landing with a clatter on top of an old fridge, the door half open.
Andrew was pacing the library, his hand lightly fanning the shelves, when she returned.
“It does not feel the same without his law books. He could not bear to have them moved before he passed away.”
She did not say anything and, sensing an agitation in her, he made to leave. “Call me if you need me, Emma,” he said as he went out the front door, pulling it hard behind him.
Taking Vikram’s letter from her pocket, Emma walked down the library, her steps echoing, the room no longer insulated by his books. The empty shelves stood sentry on a life lived and now gone. Marooned at the end of the room, his desk no longer dominated. Now the suitcase sat on top, Grace’s presence prevailed.
She sat at the desk and opened up the letter again. The house was still around her, the sounds of the city far off. Grace should have run, run, run to Vikram, that is what Emma knew, but there was nothing to show she had.
She read slowly each line again, her shoulders shaking, the tears rolling down her cheeks, some dropping onto the paper, and she wondered would anyone ever come to love her so.