Traffic thrummed past as they lingered outside the rear stage door. The first sounds of the brass instruments were already trumpeting out through the doors. For the last ten minutes Tabitha had been doing her best to encourage him inside, but he was shaking his head.
“I can’t do it,” he said. His hands fiddled one at the other, his gaze locked tight to the floor, avoiding the trumpet case that was resting at his feet. Tabitha looked down to see his hands were trembling.
“What do you mean you can’t do it? I’ve heard you play. You’re good.”
“It’s not the same,” he protested, glancing again at the doors. “Playing at home is one thing, playing in there is another.” His stance tightened and he shook his head and folded his arms like a small boy who wanted to make his point heard. There was no doubting that she had cajoled him into it, but when Tabitha had broached the idea, she had made it sound easy. And he had wanted to do it, had even washed the instrument through last night, oiled the valves before practicing for three hours straight. Eventually Elsie had come over to tell him to pack it in. But certainty was infectious, and it was easy to get carried away by somebody else’s confidence, like watching a TED Talk on YouTube and thinking you could take on the world at the end of eighteen and a half minutes. “I don’t think I can do it, Tabitha. I’m not ready. I should just be back at the house, looking for the box.”
Disappointed, she let it go, a simple nod of her head to show understanding. One thing she had learned about Harry was that there was no point in pushing him. If he wasn’t ready, it would have to wait. She knew that about herself too, that sometimes you needed more than one attempt before you were able to execute a correct and necessary step.
“What about just going in and saying hello, without any pressure to actually play?”
He pulled the flyer from his pocket. “It says here that they meet on a Tuesday and a Friday,” he said. “We could come back on Friday when I’m feeling a bit better about it.”
“Okay, that’s a great idea,” she said, hoping it sounded as encouraging as she intended. The last thing she wanted to sound was sarcastic, a lilt that, she had been informed since she married, often decorated her voice. “And you can practice some more in the meantime. That way, you’ll feel better prepared too.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” He picked up the case and together they walked away.
By then it was late afternoon, the lazy sun stretching the shadows across hot pavements, the air still thick and oppressive. It had rained briefly last night, but not enough to break the atmosphere. They had sat and watched the storm together, the flicker of lightning rippling across the sky through a thick mass of cloud.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Harry, I’m really hungry,” Tabitha said as they headed toward the bus stop. Being off work because of a fake sickness meant she didn’t have access to the work van, and Harry had lost the keys to his car somewhere in the disarray.
“We can pick something up on the way back. Cook in the newly cleaned kitchen.” The back garden was filling up with rubbish, but the benefit of that was that the kitchen was almost clear. “Whatever you fancy.”
“Or we could eat out,” Tabitha suggested. “What about going to a pub?”
“A pub?” Harry didn’t seem convinced. “I think we should stop wasting time away from the house.”
“But cooking will take just as long,” she said, gazing up and down the street at what might be available. “We can’t search every moment of the day, and well, frankly, I’m hungry now,” she said. “By the time we shop and get home and then cook something it’ll be at least another hour.” The way she used the word home softened him, and he felt himself relenting. One of her hands rested on his shoulder as she pointed the other toward the pub across the street. “Let’s go there instead. We can eat quickly and still have the rest of the afternoon and evening for searching. And while we are in there, I’ll try to do some searching on the archives online, see if I can find anything more about the Klinkosch box that might help us.”
“Okay,” he said. “If we’re quick.”
“We will be. Come on, this will be my treat.”
They chose a booth in the far corner, and Harry sat his trumpet down on the leatherette bench seat like it was a guest at the table. Just a short while later Tabitha was heading back from the bar with a pint of something brown, a glass of red wine, and a ring of plastic with the number twenty-three written on it.
“Should be about fifteen minutes. I ordered you the fish and chips.” For a moment then she wished she hadn’t been presumptuous, wondering if perhaps she’d overstepped the mark. Daniel hated it when she made decisions on his behalf. “But I can go and change the order if you like. If it’s not what you want. Or,” she said, her anxiety growing, “you can go. I was silly to order. I didn’t think. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think.”
“No, no,” he said, oblivious to her anxiety, waving his hands for her to sit down. “It’s fine. It’s what I would have chosen anyway.” Whether that was true or not, she liked the sentiment of his agreeability. It was an echo from the past, when she would try to help and it wouldn’t be misconstrued. How she had missed him, and his sense of easygoing kindness. In a show of appreciation, he smacked his lips together after a sip of beer. It used to drive her crazy when he did that. Such a simple thing back then seemed so important, but now the way she judged another person’s flaws was set against a very different standard.
“I suppose we needed to get out for a bit,” he said then, relenting.
“Yes,” she said. “We needed a break from it, I think.” Opening her phone, she began to search for information on the internet.
“And it’s years since I last did something like this.” Dark walls surrounded them, lights over the booth making it feel as if they were both on show, and yet somehow alone in the world. Her screen glowed between them. Only the background chatter of the other guests reminded him that they were surrounded by strangers. “Can’t even remember the last time I’ve been in a pub.”
“Really?” she said, pausing. He nodded. “Well then, I’m glad we stopped. You have missed out on so much in the last ten years, Harry.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” That idea made him think about his mother. “Oh, by the way. Did you get any news about the necklaces?”
“Not yet,” she said, not looking up, not wanting to linger on the thought of her lie. “Hopefully it won’t be too long. But in the meantime, when it comes to rebuilding your life, you just sort of have to try and get back in the saddle, so to speak. Try new things. Do old things again.”
His shoulders curved in. “You mean like going into that theater.”
“Well, it would have been nice.”
As if weighted, his head lowered toward the table. “Next time. I promise.”
Pausing, she realized it wasn’t easy for him. “Don’t make a promise for me, Harry. Do it for yourself,” she said, reaching to touch his hand. Harry felt the hairs on his arm stand up as her fingers brushed against his. “You have lived for too long in that house. You need something else in your life. Something for yourself. You’ll have something in common with those people. They like what you like.”
“I know, but you have to remember, for the last ten years I haven’t done much. I’m out of practice with these things. I don’t think I know how to talk to people anymore. I know you hate the fact I’ve got those birds cooped up in a cage, but I’ve had more conversations with them in the past few years than I have with anybody else.” With his fingers in a damp ring on the table, he drew a figure of eight. “I’m out of practice with a lot of things, Tabitha. For ten years all I’ve known is my job at the nursing home and my mother. Unless you count Elsie as a friend, I haven’t really had anybody to chat to.”
“Elsie counts for sure. Don’t you remember that old man who lived above us in the flat? What was his name?”
“You mean Eric?”
“That was it. You always used to be up there talking to him.”
“I used to like chatting with him. He survived the Normandy landings, you know.”
“Why did you never hang out with people our age?”
Harry shrugged, but he knew the answer. “I never thought they had much to say. Older people had experience, had better answers to questions I had. In my foster homes, they were the constant, the people who helped me understand what I was doing there. I guess I just liked their company more. They never criticized Mum either. The kids at school never had anything nice to say.”
“So, what was she like?”
“Mum? Well, you met her. You know.”
The pub was filling up, and the background noise gave her reason to lean in. A sip of velvety wine loosened her words. “Not really, Harry. I only met her once, and to be honest, at the time, I was more interested in the fact that you were telling me you were never coming home.” He glanced at his hands, took a sip of his drink, and then a big breath in. “I guess what I’m really asking is, was it worth it?”
For a while she wondered if she had pushed him too hard, because for a few moments he didn’t say anything and his gaze hung limp, his eyes staring at some invisible scene from the past. “I don’t know whether it was worth it, to be honest. But she was a good woman, I think,” Harry said then. “Eccentric, definitely, not entirely well mentally perhaps, but she was a good person.”
“You think she had mental health problems?”
“Other than the hoarding, at the time she died she hadn’t left the house in months. Wouldn’t even see the doctor. I kept telling her that she had to go, especially toward the end because her leg was swollen and red. They knew it had a clot in it, but she refused, and even when I organized a home visit, she wouldn’t let the doctor in. She was supposed to be taking something to thin the blood, but she wouldn’t even take that. I was supposed to be doing the injections. The nurse trained me and everything, but she wouldn’t let me give her a single dose.” Eyes snapping shut, Tabitha could see how hard it was not only for him to recount the memory, but to accept that he hadn’t been able to help. “She said she didn’t deserve their care, and that when it was her time she would go without fanfare or protest to the contrary.”
“You did everything you could for her, Harry. There was nothing more you could have done.”
“Sometimes I feel like I should have forced her, injected her while she was asleep. I thought about it.”
“It was her choice. You gave her ten years of your life. That was more than she gave you.”
“I’m not sure about that.” When he looked up Tabitha was surprised to see the immature hint of a smile. “She gave me you, didn’t she? She brought you back into my life. I have to be grateful for that.”
Harry’s last comment made her think about the letter she had received, and how it might have been possible for Frances to send it when she hadn’t left the house, and when she died before the postmark was stamped. But beyond those discrepancies, she had to admit she was grateful to have received it.
“Yes, Harry. She did. But it must have been hard, all this time with her. Don’t try to convince me it has been easy.”
He shrugged. “It was what it was. Family is family, and you get what you get, right?” She could relate to that. “What about yours?”
“Still not talking to them. Nothing’s changed for me.” Diverting her attention back to the phone, she resumed her scrolling.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re . . .” she began, but her stock answer, the one she always had ready when somebody asked, no longer seemed enough after the conversation they’d just shared about his mother. To tell him that they didn’t care and neither did she, seemed trite and inaccurate, childish somehow. It’s what she told him ten years ago, but a lot had changed since then, for both of them. “I don’t think there’s a way back from the troubles we’ve had.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be.” She shrugged. “I made choices they didn’t like. They acted in ways that hurt me. I did try to smooth things over after . . .” She paused, sipped more wine. “You know, after you left, but it fell apart again. I met somebody they didn’t approve of. I thought I was in love.”
“Oh?” he asked.
She wondered whether it mattered that she hadn’t told him about Daniel, or that she was in fact married, or that she had seen her husband only days ago. Either way, he should know the truth. But putting anything of Daniel into what she shared with Harry felt so wrong, and she didn’t want to talk about the lost necklaces, only get them back as soon as she could. Trying to piece the story together, to create a way that she could tell Harry, she went over it in her mind. But it didn’t make sense even to her, so how could she risk telling Harry? She couldn’t even begin to imagine what she would do if he didn’t want to see her anymore.
“Yes. All a big mess really,” she said, letting the chance for the truth fade away. “We’re not together anymore, and I haven’t seen my parents in years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. But look here at what I’ve found.” Turning the phone toward him, he saw the Klinkosch box fill the screen, and next to it was an ornate key, the handle a twisted olive branch. “Apparently the key was found in Austria in the nineteen fifties in an old apartment. It was returned to the last family who owned it in a gesture of goodwill, the Ellison family, who it says here used to live in Paris, before they eventually moved somewhere south.”
“Do they still have it?”
“Doesn’t say. But it does say they had to move because people kept breaking into their home to try and steal the box. That a person was attacked for it.”
“Bloody hell,” Harry said. “Are we in danger if we find it?”
Tabitha shrugged a little, but the look on her face suggested she thought they might be. “Maybe we shouldn’t make too much noise about it if we do. Items like this are heavily sought by many.”
“Where did they move to exactly? This Ellison family.”
“Doesn’t say that either.”
They were interrupted as the meal arrived, two oversized plates with a small piece of fish, overdone chips, and a bowl of unappealing tartar sauce that seemed dry around the edges. It was his first meal out in ten years, and all he could think was that he hadn’t been missing much. They shared a look of mutual understanding before picking up their knives and forks.
He took the first bite. It tasted better than it looked. “Did you ever think about going back to see your parents? Maybe you could still put things right?”
Over the years she had come up with hundreds of excuses why she shouldn’t. But now she began to wonder whether there really was a good reason to stay away, except for the fact she was still technically, and in perhaps many other ways, married to the man they hated. “I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t tell him the truth. To do so would be to reduce her presence in Harry’s house to a necessity when she knew it was so much more than that.
“I guess when you don’t have something anymore, you just get used to it not being there,” he said.
She reached over and touched his hand then. “I’m not sure you ever get used to it.” The moment of sudden, charged emotion left him with a raw panic, desperate to change the course of the conversation. Was this when he was supposed to tell her how he felt, about the fact that he had never stopped loving her? Did she feel the same way as he did? At first he had intended to tell her how he felt, but he had since come to understand that to do so was to risk being knocked back, and that was too big a gamble to take. If she didn’t feel the same way, she would undoubtedly leave, and that would be it. Gone for a second time. Lost because of his own failings. No, he had to keep his feelings tight to his chest. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her again.
That night when they arrived home, they did some more clearing. They arranged for a man who Tabitha knew to come with his pickup truck the next day to take everything from the back garden. But first they had to clear the hall so there would be space for the removal team to work. They were nearly through the mess when Harry stopped and sat back on his heels.
“What is it?” She checked her watch. “Come on, don’t flake on me now. I know it’s nearly three a.m. but we’ve nearly finished.”
“I was just thinking.”
“About the box, yes, I know,” she said, knotting another black bag. “You’re thinking about it even more than I am.”
“No, not that,” he said. What he wanted to say had been on his mind since that afternoon, and although he wasn’t ready to admit how he felt about her, he did want to tell her how grateful he was that she had chosen to be there. “You know, you’re the first one . . . the first person to, um . . . the first person who has ever stayed with me through choice.”
“What?” she whispered.
His head turned to face her then, and she saw that his eyes were wet. In that moment the world around her faded into oblivion. Even the walls of the room retreated. It was just her, and him. Two people in love, and both too afraid to say it. “You’re the first person who made the decision to stay with me, and you did so at a time when most would have run away screaming. I guess what I’m trying to say is, thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” There were so many things she wanted to say. She should be the one who was thanking him, for giving her an escape from a life she was desperate to leave. But that would have negated everything he just said, so she held it back.
“And I need to say sorry, because I keep letting you down. I still have my birds locked up outside that I know you hate, and I keep holding on to things that you think I should throw away. I can’t even go into a room full of strangers and blow a bloody trumpet when you’ve put so much effort into organizing it, and when I said I’d do it. And I wanted to, really I did.”
“If it makes you feel better, I only made a phone call, Harry.”
“No,” he said, firm now. “Don’t try and minimize what you did. You bothered, and I’m so thankful for it.” He took a heavy sigh in and let it go, staccato through his lips. “And all after I hurt you so much ten years ago.”
Instinctively she knew where his hand would be, so she reached out, her fingers finding it alongside his hip. For a second, she felt them flinch, before they relented to her touch.
“Nothing that happened ten years ago matters anymore.”
“It matters to me. I shouldn’t have abandoned what we had. Not for anything.”
“Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? You didn’t lose me.”
“I did for a while.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Harry.” All those conditions, the variables that she had at first tried to ignore, peeled away then. She wasn’t there because she had nowhere else to go. She wasn’t there because she was buying time until she could get the jewelry back, or any of the other things she had wondered over the last few days. In her heart she knew that while she might have been there for all those reasons to begin with, she was now there for one thing only. For him. With Harry she felt like herself, rediscovering all those hidden feelings that she had never quite been able to deny.
Deciding to leave the letters that evening she closed her eyes as they slipped into their makeshift bed. Only moments later she felt his breathing deepen as he slept with her in his arms. She thought to herself then how she had been lost all this time, but not just from Harry. She had also been lost from herself. Now she was only grateful, that here beside him, she felt as if finally she’d been found.