My throat hurt now, as though I had been shouting.
‘He was round the twist,’ Bracewell said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
He told me that he had been waiting in Reek’s office one day when he noticed a letter lying on the desk. The letter had the name and address of an asylum in the top right-hand corner, and it confirmed Jones’s recent arrival.
‘Where did they send him?’ I asked.
Bracewell shrugged. He hadn’t bothered with the details.
‘The way he used to stand there on one leg like that — for hours. I could never work out how he did it.’ Bracewell stared into space for a few moments, then shook his head and, getting to his feet, walked out into the car-park. Once there, he turned and studied the place where the twine stretched across the entrance. ‘I don’t think they’ll see that,’ he said, ‘do you?’
It seems to me that part of the true function of a mystery is precisely that it remains unsolved. The world would be far too neat a place if the things that puzzled us were always, eventually, explained. We need unanswered questions at the edges of our lives. In fact, I’d go further. It’s important not to think we can understand everything. Not to understand. The humility that can come from that. The wonder. Every now and then, though, one of the less pressing mysteries is revealed to us, as if a god had decided to satisfy, in some small way, our natural craving for symmetry and resolution.
I had forgotten all about the silver sandal until Victor took me upstairs one evening to show me a book that he’d been working on. We sat facing each other in the lamplight, our knees almost touching. The book rested on his lap. Two feet high, some six or seven inches thick, it had the formidable dimensions of a family bible. He had bound it himself, he told me.
‘You know what it’s made of?’ His eyes had grown paler and brighter, as light bulbs do before they blow.
I scrutinised the book. ‘I can see leather —’
‘Yes,’ he interrupted, ‘but what kind of leather?’
I bent closer and ran my fingertips across the cover. There were pieces of leather, but there were pieces of suede too, and rubber and canvas and raffia, all ingeniously and meticulously stitched together into a sort of patchwork.
‘It’s shoes,’ Victor said, unable to wait any longer.
‘Shoes?’
When they came for his wife, he said, they hadn’t given her the chance to pack. She had taken almost nothing with her — none of her shoes, for instance, and she had always loved shoes. He had bought many of the pairs himself, of course. After she had gone he couldn’t bear to look at them, and yet, at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. Whenever a pair of shoes caught his eye, he remembered something that had happened — a dinner party, a walk in the mountains, a game of tennis. He remembered their life together, and how happy, how very happy, they had been. There were some shoes that she hadn’t worn at all, that she’d been saving for a special occasion, perhaps, and it saddened him still more to think that she would never even put them on. Then, as he lay in bed one night, unable to sleep, the idea came to him: he would turn the shoes into a book.
‘What do you think, Tom?’ he said. ‘Am I mad?’
Just then I saw my mother’s bare feet on the road, and they were wet, and the pink polish on her toenails was chipped. I had to push the image swiftly to one side. Instead, I concentrated on the book in front of me. I concentrated hard. I could make out eyeholes now, and buckles too, and half a strap. And there, round the middle of the book’s wide spine, was a section of the famous silver sandal. On the back, a hiking boot revealed itself. Then a plimsoll, an espadrille — a flip-flop. I began to get an almost visual sense of who Jean Parry had been.
‘It’s like a photograph album,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Victor said in a strange loud whisper. ‘Yes, that’s right. Clever boy.’
I asked him what was inside.
The story of his wife’s first life, he said, the one she had lived before she was taken. Each chapter was narrated by a different pair of shoes. He had given the shoes voices. He had let them speak. It was heretical, of course, in that it celebrated the world that had existed prior to the Rearrangement. On the evidence of this book alone he could probably be imprisoned — or, worse still, transferred to the Green Quarter, where almost everyone wrote books, apparently. ‘So don’t say anything.’ His eyes darted into the gloomiest corners of the room, as if government officials might already be lurking there. ‘Not a word.’
For the first time I realised the extent to which Victor had been on guard against me ever since I had appeared on his doorstep. The absent-minded, ghostly quality that had characterised so much of his behaviour may well have been rooted in the grief he felt over the loss of his wife, but he had also been intent on concealing the outer, more complex edges of his own identity. He had seen me as an intruder and also, potentially at least, as an enemy. It must have been exhausting, I thought, to have had to keep himself so hidden, while at the same time being compelled to work, to live, to function normally, but then I suspected that he, like so many others, had become used to leading a double life. The Rearrangement had created a climate of suspicion and denial — even here, in this most open and cheerful of countries. People had buried the parts of their personalities that didn’t fit. Their secrets had flourished in the warm damp earth, and it was by those secrets that they could be judged and then condemned. In showing me the book of shoes, Victor had placed his life in my hands. He had decided to have faith in me, and I determined, from that moment on, that I would never disappoint him or let him down.
By the time I turned fifteen I was two inches taller than Marie, and every now and then people would mistake us for lovers. Since my experience in the railway carriage, I had imagined all kinds of closeness with Marie, but never that. I had so many pictures of her stored inside my head, some real, some invented. They weren’t wrong, just private. When we were seen as a couple, though, I felt as if someone had found out, and all the guilt came down on me, and all the shame, and anger too, a bright, crooked flash of anger through me, like a shiver. Marie thought it was hilarious, of course.
Gradually, I came to expect the comments, and I prepared myself. One morning, in the supermarket, somebody touched me on the elbow, and I turned to see an old woman smiling up at me. It warmed her heart, she said, to see two young people so much in love. I thanked her. Then, leaning closer, I told her that I had never been happier — and, curiously, I didn’t have the feeling I was lying. Marie almost choked. I watched her disappear round a stack of cereals. You know what you should do? the woman said. I shook my head. The woman’s smile widened. You should marry her. I wish I could have found this entertaining, as Marie did. When I got home, though, I sank into a deep despondency. My dreams had come true, but only for a few moments, the moments during which an old woman in a supermarket had believed me, and now, once again, they were just dreams, and always would be.
In time, I succeeded in turning it into a game — I would spend hours thinking up different histories for us, fresh dialogue — but secretly I was flattered to be thought of as Marie’s boyfriend. I wanted to be seen in that light, I liked the fact that it looked possible, and it would always come as something of a disappointment to me if we went out together and no one said anything.
Every once in a while, Marie would tell me about a fling she was having. On the one hand I felt privileged that she had chosen to confide in me. On the other, I couldn’t stand hearing about a person whom I viewed, almost inevitably, as some kind of rival. It split me right down the middle, just listening to her.