Anthea frowned, finally shrugged, picked up the book and dropped it onto the floor. “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she said, and rolled on top of him.
A year or so later he did read Still the Seasons, when a virus kept him in bed for several days and Anthea was caught up with research at the British Library. The book unsettled him deeply. There were no monsters per se, no dragons or Nazgûl or witches. Just two sets of cousins, two boys and two girls, trapped in a portal between one of those grim post-war English cities, Manchester or Birmingham, and a magical land that wasn’t really magical at all but even bleaker and more threatening than the council flats where the children lived.
Jeffrey remembered unseen hands tapping at a window, and one of the boys fighting off something invisible that crawled under the bedcovers and attacked in a flapping wave of sheets and blankets. Worst of all was the last chapter, which he read late one night and could never recall clearly, save for the vague, enveloping dread it engendered, something he had never encountered before or since.
Anthea had been right—the book had a weirdly visceral power, more like the effect of a low-budget, black-and-white horror movie than a children’s fantasy novel. How many of those grown-up kids now knew their hero had been a paedophile?
Jeffrey spent a half-hour scanning articles on Bennington’s trial, none of them very informative. It had happened over a decade ago; since then there’d been a few dozen blog posts, pretty equally divided between Whatever happened to…? and excoriations by women who themselves had been sexually abused, though not by Bennington.
He couldn’t imagine that had happened to Anthea. She’d certainly never mentioned it, and she’d always been dismissive, even slightly callous, about friends who underwent counselling or psychotherapy for childhood traumas. As for the books themselves, he didn’t recall seeing them when he’d sorted through their shelves to pack everything up. Probably they’d been donated to a library book sale years ago, if they’d even made the crossing from London.
He picked up the second envelope. It was postmarked ‘March 18, 1971’. He opened it and withdrew a sheet of lined paper torn from a school notebook.
Dear Rob,
Well, we all got back on the train, Evelyn was in a lot of trouble for being out all night and of course we couldn’t tell her aunt why, her mother said she can’t talk to me on the phone but I see her at school anyway so it doesn’t matter. I still can’t believe it all happened. Evelyn’s mother said she was going to call my mother and Moira’s but so far she didn’t. Thank you so much for talking to us. You signed Evelyn’s book but you forgot to sign mine. Next time!!!
Jeffrey felt a flash of cold through his chest. Dear Rob, I still can’t believe it all happened. He quickly opened the remaining envelopes, read first one then the next and finally the last.
12 April 1971
Dear Rob,
Maybe I wrote down your address wrong because the last letter I sent was returned. But I asked Moira and she had the same address and she said her letter wasn’t returned. Evelyn didn’t write yet but says she will. It was such a really, really great time to see you! Thank you again for the books, I thanked you in the last letter but thank you again. I hope you’ll write back this time, we still want to come again on holiday in July! I can’t believe it was exactly one month ago we were there.
July 20, 1971
Dear Rob,
Well I still haven’t heard from you so I guess you’re mad maybe or just forgot about me, ha ha. School is out now and I was wondering if you still wanted us to come and stay? Evelyn says we never could and her aunt would tell her mother but we could hitch-hike, also Evelyn’s brother Martin has a caravan and he and his girlfriend are going to Wales for a festival and we thought they might give us a ride partway, he said maybe they would. Then we could hitch-hike the rest. The big news is Moira ran away from home and they called the POLICE. Evelyn said she went without us to see you and she’s really mad. Moira’s boyfriend Peter is mad too.
If she is there with you is it okay if I come too? I could come alone without Evelyn, her mother is a BITCH.
Please please write!
Dear Rob,
I hate you. I wrote FIVE LETTERS including this one and I know it is the RIGHT address. I think Moira went to your house without us. FUCK YOU Tell her I hate her too and so does Evelyn. We never told anyone if she says we did she is a LIAR.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
Where a signature should have been, the page was ripped and blotched with blue ink—Anthea had scribbled something so many times the pen tore through the lined paper. Unlike the other four, this sheet was badly crumpled, as though she’d thrown it away then retrieved it. Jeffrey glanced at the envelope. The postmark read ‘August 28’. She’d gone back to school for the fall term, and presumably that had been the end of it.
Except, perhaps, for Moira, whoever she was. Evelyn would be Evelyn Thurlow, Anthea’s closest friend from her school days in Islington. Jeffrey had met her several times while at university, and Evelyn had stayed with them for a weekend in the early 1990s, when she was attending a conference in Manhattan. She was a flight-test engineer for a British defence contractor, living outside Cheltenham; she and Anthea would have hour-long conversations on their birthdays, planning a dream vacation together to someplace warm—Greece or Turkey or the Caribbean.
Jeffrey had emailed her about Anthea’s death, and they had spoken on the phone—Evelyn wanted to fly over for the funeral but was on deadline for a major government contract and couldn’t take the time off.
“I so wish I could be there,” she’d said, her voice breaking. “Everything’s just so crazed at the moment. I hope you understand…”
“It’s okay. She knew how much you loved her. She was always so happy to hear from you.”
“I know.” Evelyn choked. “I just wish—I just wish I’d been able to see her again.”
Now he sat and stared at the five letters. The sight made him feel light-headed and slightly queasy: as though he’d opened his closet door and found himself at the edge of a precipice, gazing down some impossible distance to a world made tiny and unreal. Why had she never mentioned any of this? Had she hidden the letters for all these years, or simply forgotten she had them? He knew it wasn’t rational; knew his response derived from his compulsive sense of order, what Anthea had always called his architect’s left brain.
“Jeffrey would never even try to put a square peg into a round hole,” she’d said once at a dinner party. “He’d just design a new hole to fit it.”
He could think of no place he could fit the five letters written to Robert Bennington. After a few minutes, he replaced each in its proper envelope and stacked them atop each other. Then he turned back to his laptop, and wrote an email to Evelyn.
He arrived in Cheltenham two weeks later. Evelyn picked him up at the train station early Monday afternoon. He’d told her he was in London on business, spent the preceding weekend at a hotel in Bloomsbury and wandered the city, walking past the building where he and Anthea had lived right after university, before they moved to the U.S.