I remember an evening when we walked up to the castle, a clear black sky above our heads. It had been raining earlier. Water rushed in all the gutters, and the air was full of river smells, reeds and mud and roots. When we reached the entrance — a pair of tall gates, padlocked at sunset — Marie asked me to give her a hand. I helped her up on to the wall, then she scrambled down the other side, first on to the roof of a garden shed, then down again, into the castle grounds.
Steep steps led to a stone tower, which was the highest point in town. There was a lawn up there, with a lime tree in the middle. Perched on the wrought-iron seat that circled the trunk, Marie lit a cigarette. A single raindrop promptly fell from somewhere and extinguished it.
She grinned. ‘You think someone’s trying to tell me something?’
We climbed a spiral staircase to the top of the tower, then leaned on the battlements looking east. In the distance a pale glow showed here and there where the downs had been quarried for chalk. Marie began to tell me about Bradley Freeman, her current boyfriend. They had been going out for six months, and she had just discovered that he’d been seeing someone else all along. It took me a second or two to realise that she was talking about the man who had taken me to see Miss Groves on the day of my first interview at the Ministry. He’d been pursuing Marie on and off ever since. I went back in my mind, but I could remember nothing about Bradley Freeman, nothing except his amiable manner and his endless mundane questions.
‘Why him?’ I asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re my brother.’
‘He doesn’t realise how special you are.’
She sent me a sharp dark glance, as if she thought I knew something that I had no right to know, then she looked away again.
‘Sometimes he does,’ she murmured.
I stared out over the rooftops. They seemed to mill and jostle in the darkness, as though straining at their moorings — more like boats than houses. The ground itself felt uncertain, unreliable. Everything could come apart so easily.
‘I wouldn’t treat you like that,’ I said.
She cupped a cold hand to my cheek, then turned from me and started down the steps. I hesitated, unable for a moment to conceive of any action that was not extraordinary. I would do anything for her, I thought, anything at all.
I caught up with her below the castle, outside a pub called the Silk Purse. She was standing on the pavement, a cigarette alight between her fingers, her eyes fixed on the window. She glanced at me across her shoulder. ‘Fancy a drink?’
‘I’m not old enough.’
‘Of course you are.’ She took me by the arm. ‘Come on.’
In the lounge bar she ordered two glasses of red wine. And then another two. And then I’ve no idea how many.
It was the first time I’d ever been drunk. As we stumbled home down streets so narrow that if I ricocheted off one wall I collided with the other, I remember telling her that I loved her, no, I adored her, which made her laugh, and her hair fell forwards against her cheek like the tip of a cutlass and her teeth flashed in the black air.
I had to stop and stare at her. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ I said.
She had stopped too, though not because of what I’d said. Something else had just occurred to her. ‘What kind of girls do you like, Tom?’
I was staring at her again, but for a different reason now. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t understood. ‘Like you,’ I said.
She put a finger to her lips. ‘You’ll wake everybody in the street.’ But she still had laughter in her eyes. They had sharpened at the corners, and the dark parts shone.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘Like you.’
She didn’t seem to hear what I was telling her — or, if she did, she automatically discounted it.
We came down out of the old town and on to a main road near the station.
‘I’m not your brother, Marie,’ I said. ‘We’re not even related — not really.’ I felt I was risking everything in saying this, and yet I couldn’t hold back. But she didn’t take it the way I had expected.
‘How much do you remember?’ she said. ‘You know, from before?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
She stopped again and looked at me. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘Only my name.’
‘What was it?’
‘Matthew Micklewright.’ The words sounded like gobbledegook. I wished I hadn’t said them.
‘But you were eight years old. Nearly nine. You must remember something.’
I shook my head savagely. ‘No. Nothing.’ What I was telling her was true, and for the first time ever I was glad it was true. I had an urgent need to deny her something. I was taking a kind of revenge on her.
‘That’s astonishing,’ she said, though she didn’t look astonished. She was staring at the ground as if she had just noticed a bird with a broken wing.
As we crossed the river I insisted on walking in the gutter, even though I knew people always drove too fast on that particular stretch of road. Once, I looked up to see a pair of headlights hanging in front of me, and Marie had to pull me back on to the pavement.
‘You’ll get killed,’ she said.
‘What do you care? I don’t mean anything to you.’ It all came out blurred. My tongue seemed to have swollen, filling my mouth.
Back home, I sprawled on the bathroom floor, the black-and-white tiles constantly swerving away from me but never going anywhere. Everything I thought of made me feel sick. I clutched the lavatory seat with both arms, my cheek resting heavily against my sleeve. Cold air rose out of the bowl. I tried to look round, but the ceiling tilted and I fell sideways against the bath.
Hauling me upright, Marie placed a hand on my forehead. I had to reach up and push it away. ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘Leave me alone.’
The impossible weight of her cool hand.
The impossible beauty of it.
On returning from the public library one evening, I opened the front door and called up the stairs as usual, but there was no response, nothing except the patient tick-tick-tick of the boiler and the creak of the bottom step beneath my foot. Outside, the shops had already shut and the street was quiet. It was the summer before I went to university. I would have been eighteen.
I was standing by the fridge drinking a glass of juice when I became aware of a breathy, repetitive sound coming from behind me. At first I thought a mouse had worked its way into the kitchen wall, but then some instinct sent me hurrying round the corner into the store-room where I found Victor in the shadows by the washing-machine, with his face in his hands. I asked him what was wrong. He shook his head. I reached out and touched his shoulder. His whole body was trembling. I thought of how machinery behaves when it’s about to break down — all that pitching and staggering, all that vibration. Head still bowed, he turned towards me. I took him in my arms and held him. Victor. My father. I felt something cold land on the back of my hand and realised he was crying. Then the words came, heaved out of him like sobs. Jean had died, he told me.
He stood in my arms until the light began to go.
His wife had already died once, years before. Now, though, she had died again, and this time she was gone for good. This second death was final, unambiguous, and left no room for hope. Had she suffered? Had somebody cared for her towards the end? Had she wanted to speak to him? He would never know. The gap that had opened up between them would never be closed.
I remember asking how he had found out. After all, it had been a decade since she had been taken from him. Being an adult, she would have kept her name, but her tracks would have been well covered. And even if he had been able to trace her, the law expressly forbade any contact.