Of course, Clara, even with her languid lack of curiosity, reads the letters. Or, at least, she tries to read the letters. Unfortunately, she isn’t able, since they’re all written in a language she doesn’t understand. It doesn’t help too that the handwriting is virtually illegible but, even once she’s deciphered each letter of the first paragraph on the first page, she’s still made no progress at all.
Since Clara is a committed Luddite when it comes to technology, refusing to own a computer, or dabble with the attendant evils of emails and the like, whenever she has to use the Internet she visits the library and makes sure to check out a few books at the same time. It’s a sort of equivalent, she considers, to cutting down a tree and planting another in its place – if only everyone would balance their embracing of modern technology with an equal expenditure on and employment of real books, pens and paper. The world would be a better place.
Today, instead of tackling the computer herself, Clara asks the librarian for assistance. He informs her that the letter is written in Dutch. Meaning, Clara reasons, that they came from her grandfather’s family, of whom she knows little to nothing about. Only that most of her family had fled from Amsterdam just before the outbreak of WWII and most members of their Jewish family who’d stayed behind had perished.
Since discovering that the letters are in Dutch, Clara keeps them by her bedside – so they are the last thing she sees as she switches off the light and the first thing she sees when the sun through her curtains wakes her. Somehow, even the feeling of keeping the letters close, though Clara can’t make any sense of them, gives her comfort. She’s always missed the fact of having very little family – once her grandparents died, her mother was all she had left. Clara has no father to speak of and no siblings, so the notion of a few extra family members is an appealing one.
Clara knows it’d be fairly easy to find someone to translate the letters in Cambridge – it’s a city of students, after all, some of whom no doubt read multiple languages – but she’s holding back. Perhaps because she’s a little nervous about embarking on this adventure and also because she wants to hold on to the mystery – full of potential and possibility – for a while longer. The mystery gives her imagination free rein so Clara can bask in images of reunions and love and joys to come. And she’s not yet willing to let go of these delights, however unreal, for the probable disappointing bump of reality.
On the rare occasions she’s not thinking of the letters, Clara finds her mind drifting to the man whose name she doesn’t know. When she’d seen him in his living room, sitting on the sofa with his daughter – at least, Clara presumed it was his daughter – reading a book, she’d been so touched it’d almost brought her to tears. Clara can’t rightly say why; she had no urge yet to have children and hadn’t found the man himself especially alluring, so hadn’t been moved by maternal or romantic feeling. And yet, for some reason, the image of them returns to her.
Clara doesn’t usually think of the people to whom she sends letters. After the letter is written and posted, she closes that mental file and moves on to the next one. Very occasionally, years later, Clara might find herself writing to the same person a second time – most people usually experience several ups and downs in their lives, after all – but she’d rarely thought of them in the intervening years. With this one, though, it’s different.
Clara wonders if it might be because her own father left around the same time, when she was about the same age as the young girl. And, even though this other father seemed so sad, he also seemed solid. He wouldn’t desert his only daughter, he would stick with her through thick and thin. He’d make her hot chocolate late at night, he’d run to her bedroom when she had nightmares, he’d make her favourite breakfast of French toast on a Sunday morning. Of this Clara was absolutely certain. She couldn’t say how she knew, but she knew. Clara’s own father had left when she was twelve. He’d been leaving in increments for years before that, so Clara wasn’t actually very surprised to find him gone one morning. Her mother, on the other hand, had been rather more surprised and thus had remained considerably more bitter. But Clara hadn’t felt the presence of her father for a long, long time – as if he was slowly fading away like a ghost – and so, she always imagined that, one day, he’d simply evaporated into thin air. Her mother, if she knew any different, never divulged the particulars and Clara, knowing it would get her nowhere, had never asked.
Of course, Clara has thought of her father often over the years, wondering where he might be and what he might be doing. But since he’s never tried to contact her, never written with his whereabouts, she confines her wonderings to the realms of unreality. And since it’s less painful to think about a virtual stranger, Clara thinks on this other father instead. Sometimes she’ll be sitting behind the counter, waiting on her next customer, doodling on paper with one of the special pens, and find that she’s quite accidentally begun writing him another letter. She’ll look down and see the words:
How are you? How’s your daughter? What are your names? (Why does that matter?) I hope you’re both well …
And then she’ll snap out of her reverie and pull herself back to attention.
Once Edward has mended the crack in the kitchen ceiling (a task that took him a good few days longer than he’d anticipated, after he initially made it a good deal worse before at last making it better again) he moves on to other long-neglected DIY projects. Now that he has surveyed the house with a critical eye, he can’t believe that he’s let it get into such a state of disrepair. Every room is in serious need of a good lick of paint, gutters are cracked and overflowing with leaves, the garden is overrun with weeds and Edward can’t even bear to acknowledge, let alone begin to confront, the obscene levels of dirt and dust on every single surface in every single room.
As he tours the place, taking inventory, it increasingly strikes Edward that the state of his house reflects the state of his life: neglected, broken and shabby. Which is embarrassing and, considering that he’s raising his daughter here, more than a little shameful. So Edward makes a list and sets to work. He starts at the bottom and takes each project room by room. Five days after he starts, Edward reaches the bathroom.
The bathroom, he’s sorry to see, is probably in the worst state of all the other rooms in the house. Eleven items, on his list of forty-eight, relate to the bathroom. The first that must be dealt with are the tiles. It’s the biggest job and should be done as soon as possible in order to allow enough time for the grouting to dry before Tilly takes one of her infinite showers the next morning. The amount of time teenage girls spend in the bathroom seems, to Edward, to bear an inverse ratio to the amount of time they actually need. Still, what does he know? So, with a shrug, Edward sets himself to work. And, as the hours pass in clouds of dust and humming and sweat, he finds that he’s smiling while he sings and, for the first time in a very long time, all of a sudden he belts out a note:
‘Waterlooooo …’
‘Hey, Ed.’
Edward instantly stops. This behaviour would definitely fall under the category of ‘embarrassing things that fathers aren’t allowed to do’. He glances up guiltily from grouting the bathroom tiles. But, as he does so, he realises that Tilly only ever calls him ‘Dad’. Still confused, it takes Edward a moment to realise who he’s seeing, sitting on the loo seat with her legs crossed. For there, even more beautiful, but significantly more transparent than Edward remembered, is Greer Ashby, his dead wife.
Edward has no idea how long it takes him to speak, anywhere between an hour and a day, or just a full fifteen minutes. All he knows is that the pathways between his brain and his mouth seem to seize up for rather a long time. He’s always been a very practical, pragmatic man – not entirely an atheist, perhaps, but certainly leaning heavily in that direction – and has never been inclined to flights of fancy, certainly not in the direction of his dead wife. Although, that’s not entirely true, as he now recalls. In the weeks and months after her death he’d kneel on the bathroom floor – on the floor of every room in the house in fact – and beg a God he didn’t quite believe in to send her back. Every night he’d sob into the darkness, pleading for Greer’s spirit to return to him.
‘It’s you,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘It is.’
Edward continues to stare at her, confused. ‘But, but …’ Edward stares at her, open-mouthed, since, even when he’d asked her the question, he still assumed that she was an apparition, a figment of something, an ethereal gift from a finally benevolent universe, but not one that could actually speak. And she sounds exactly as she did and looks so similar too, with the exception of the extra dose of beauty and transparency.
‘But what?’
‘But, why are you here?’ he asks, still not entirely convinced that she actually is.
Greer gives a little shrug. ‘I’m not entirely sure.’
‘B-b-but …’ Edward stutters, trying to gather his colliding thoughts and still not quite certain he isn’t hallucinating. ‘If you’re here – then why … why did you wait so long?’
Greer is silent.
‘Why did you come back now?’ he asks. ‘When, when …’
‘When you don’t need me any more?’ Greer finishes.
‘No,’ he says, a little too quickly. ‘That’s not what I mean …’ He pauses for several moments. ‘Well, okay, yes,’ he admits. ‘I just, I literally just started putting my life back together. I just began learning how to live without you and now, and now …’
His wife watches him, waiting.
‘Why? Why couldn’t you come back when, when’ – his eyes swell with tears as he remembers – ‘when I couldn’t bear to be alive without you?’
‘Oh, Ed.’ Greer doesn’t move, though she seems to shift forward in her seat, as if wanting to go to him but being unable. ‘I’m so, so …’
‘I hate that you’re being so Zen about all this, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, while I’m falling apart on the bathroom floor.’ Edward finds a small smile. ‘And I’ve done more than my fair share of that in the past few years, don’t you think?’
Greer nods. ‘I know, sweetheart. And, if I could have made it any easier for you, I would have. In a second, in a heartbeat.’
‘So, why didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ his wife admits. ‘But, if I had, would it really have made it easier for you to let me go?’
Edward snorts, then shrugs. He’s a little surprised at his own reaction, even as he’s having it. He’d always imagined that, if he ever saw his wife again, he’d either weep uncontrollably or be overwhelmed with joy. As it is Edward feels so strangely conflicted that he isn’t exactly sure what he’s feeling at all.
Greer continues to look at him from her position on the loo seat.
‘No,’ Edward admits after a while. ‘No, I suppose not. Though that doesn’t make it any more forgivable.’ He knows, even as he says it, that, of course, it does.
‘I think, perhaps, I had to wait for you to heal,’ Greer says softly. ‘I think I had to wait for you to be okay before I came back.’
She says this to comfort him but, in truth, she really has no idea at all.