In the years that followed, no one had any news, apparently, of Jasper Gwyn. The gossip about that peculiar obsession with the portraits slipped quickly out of the newspapers, and his name appeared less and less frequently in the literary news. It might be cited in ephemeral charts of recent English literature, and a couple of times he was mentioned in relation to other books that seemed to take up certain of his stylistic habits. One of his novels, Sisters, ended up on the list of “One Hundred Books to Read Before You Die” drawn up by an authoritative literary review. His English publisher and a couple of foreign publishers tried to get in touch with him, but in the past everything had been handled by Tom, and now, with his agency closed, there seemed to be no way to talk to that man. The feeling that sooner or later he would appear, and probably with a new book, was fairly widespread. Few thought that he could have truly stopped writing.
As for Rebecca, in the space of four years she reconstructed a life, choosing to start from the beginning. She had found a job that had nothing to do with books, she had left the shit boyfriend and had gone to live just outside London. One day she had met a married man who had a wonderful way of making a mess of everything he touched. His name was Robert. In the end they fell in love, and one day the man asked her if he might perhaps leave his family and try to make another one with her. It seemed an excellent idea to Rebecca. At the age of thirty-two she became the mother of a girl to whom they gave the name Emma. She began to work less and get fatter, and she regretted neither of the two. She very seldom thought of Jasper Gwyn, and always without particular emotion. They were faint memories, like postcards sent from a previous life.
Yet one day, while she was pushing Emma in her stroller down the aisles of an enormous London bookshop, she came across a special offer on paperbacks, and at the top of a pile she saw a book by Klarisa Rode. At the moment she didn’t notice the title, she simply took in the fact that she had never read it. Only at the cash register did she realize that it was, in fact, the book that four years earlier Jasper Gwyn had given her, the day when everything ended. She recalled what she had done with it. She smiled. She paid.
She began to read in the Underground, since Emma had fallen asleep in the stroller, and they had quite a few stops to go. She was really enjoying it, oblivious of all the people around, when suddenly, on page sixteen, she was dumbstruck. She read a little further, in disbelief. Then she looked up and said, aloud, “Look at this son of a bitch!”
In fact what she was reading, in Klarisa Rode’s book, was her own portrait, word for word, exactly the portrait that Jasper Gwyn had made for her, years earlier.
She turned to her neighbor and in a surreal way felt bound to explain, also aloud: “He copied it, he copied it from Rode, shit!”
Her neighbor didn’t seem to grasp the importance of the thing, but meanwhile something had started up in Rebecca’s head—like a form of delayed common sense—and she lowered her gaze to the book again.
Just a minute, she thought.
She checked the publication date and realized that something didn’t add up. Jasper Gwyn had done her portrait at least a year before that. How can someone copy a book that hasn’t yet been published?
She turned again toward her neighbor, but it was evident that he couldn’t be of much help.
Maybe Jasper Gwyn had read it before it was published, she thought. It was a reasonable hypothesis. She vaguely recalled that the situation with Klarisa Rode’s manuscripts was intricate. Nothing more likely than that Jasper Gwyn had managed, in some way, to see them before they ended up at the publisher. It made sense. But just then, from a distance, there came back to her something that Tom had said to her, a long time before. It was the day when he was explaining to her what sort of person Jasper Gwyn was. He had told her that story of the son he hadn’t acknowledged. But he had also told her something else: that there were books, at least two, written by Jasper Gwyn, that were circulating in the world, but not under his name.
Shit, she thought.
That’s why unpublished works by that woman don’t stop coming out. He writes them.
It was madness, but it might also be the truth.
It would change quite a few things, she said to herself. Instinctively she thought back to that day when everything ended, and saw herself throwing that stupid book against the wall. Was it possible that it wasn’t a stupid book but a precious gift? She had trouble putting the pieces together. For a moment the idea crossed her mind that something important had been restored to her, something that she had been owed for a long time. She was trying to understand what, exactly, when she realized that the train was at the station where she was supposed to get out.
“Shit!”
She got up and hurried out.
It took a moment to realize that she had forgotten something.
“Emma!”
She turned while the doors were closing. She began to beat the palms of her hands against the glass and yell something, but the train was slowly pulling away.
Some people had stopped and were looking at her.
“My daughter!” cried Rebecca. “My daughter’s on the train!”
It was not so simple, then, to get her back.