Alongside his involvement with Samantha in the wake of her grief, Michael’s own life continued to expand and gain momentum in the diminishment of his. In December, just before he travelled to Sussex to join Samantha and Rachel at Martha’s for Christmas, he completed the first draft of The Man Who Broke the Mirror. It was shorter than he’d expected, and not the book he’d set out to write. The exploration of Oliver’s thesis had become no more than a subplot, a hinterland to the account of his life over those two years that Michael followed him. A portrait of a man in emotional and intellectual extremis, a thinker and a drinker burning brightly as he burnt out.
The book was imperfect, and Michael knew when he submitted it to his agent that unlike what he’d said to Samantha about BrotherHoods, it was far from “cooked.” But that it had been written at all was a personal achievement for him. It had begun, in those early months in his new flat, as no more than a muscle memory of routine. As a way of tricking his mind and his body into living again. There’d been no financial imperative for Michael to write it. BrotherHoods was still selling well in the U.S., and although he’d sworn not to touch it, there’d also been the compensation money and the payout from Caroline’s insurance, too. In the writing of the book, however, Michael had rediscovered a rare peace in the age-old formation of experience into words. Not necessarily always in service to the broader story, but just in honour of certain minutes, even seconds. Past moments he was able bring into being in a way he often wished he could in real life, but which he knew was possible only like this, at his desk, on the page.
Such was the solace Michael found in his writing that on delivering The Man Who Broke the Mirror he’d immediately embarked on a new project, even before his agent had finished reading the draft. This was to be a book closer to home, in every sense of the phrase. With his silent promise to Samantha and Rachel he had bonded himself to London, to their street and to his flat beside their home. So this is where he went looking for his next book, one in which he would immerse himself not just in the life of an individual subject, but in the stories of four houses and the families who’d lived in them. The houses had once all formed part of South Hill Drive, each built on a plot of land where a modern block of flats much like Michael’s own now stood. It was a map in a local museum that had first brought these buildings to his attention. The map, of the Heath and its surrounding streets, was marked with a pattern of black dots, each marking the site where a bomb had fallen during the air raids in the Second World War. Instinctively, Michael had looked for his own street on the map, and then his own flat within it. A single black dot marked its position exactly. He looked at the other three dots scattered around the loop of South Hill Drive. All of them marked other modern blocks, built after the war and slotted into the sweeping curves of the original houses.
The research that such a book would require — hours at the Public Record Office in Kew, or trawling the local archives in Hampstead — promised Michael the scope and structure of a regular routine. But beyond this he couldn’t say exactly why this project had appealed to him above others. He knew there were probably reasons for his preference that at this stage in his planning he’d rather not look at directly — a historical study of death from the air, an exploration of the relationship between a family and its home. But he knew, too, that the project’s attraction was in some way associated with his penance, a private accumulation of gestures on the other side of those scales. And that it was about the nature of ghosted existence as well, the way Caroline had appeared to him in that bath. Or the way every time he passed the Nelsons’ staircase he still saw, with such clarity, the detail of Lucy’s falling. Every house in the street was layered with such existence, the spaces within them thick with lived human lives. But the four modern blocks of flats were haunted by entire buildings, not just people. Homes that had gone in a matter of seconds. And it was this, Michael sensed, that was drawing him. The prospect of re-creating the houses themselves as well as their inhabitants. Of rebuilding the very vessels and witnesses of the living that had occurred within them. As if, in having seen one ghost and created another, Michael was leaving himself no other choice than to immerse himself in an endeavour of multiple resurrection.
Beyond his writing, Michael’s life was beginning to move on in other areas, too. He’d begun going for drinks with a group of other fencers after club nights in Highgate. There was a woman among them about whom Samantha often teased him. A divorcée in her early thirties who’d already made it known among her friends that if Michael was interested, she’d love to see more of him. Michael took Samantha’s teasing and probing in good nature, but her comments were an effective sounding of his emotional state. The thought of what she suggested in her jokes still felt impossible to him. Caroline was too present, and perhaps, he sometimes wondered, always would be.
“I suppose,” Samantha had said one night in the pub, as they’d waited for Rachel to finish at her drama group, “you lost her early, didn’t you?”
“Early?” Michael said, although he already knew what she meant.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Samantha said, playing with her half-eaten salad. “I mean before you had a chance to ever feel bored with each other. Or pissed off.”
“Maybe,” Michael said.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” She leant forward and laid a hand on his arm. “None of my business. It’s just…”
“No, no,” Michael reassured her. “You’re probably right. It was all just starting, really.”
Samantha sat back in her chair. “It’s what she’d have wanted, you know. Eventually.”
“What? For me to start sleeping with other women?” Michael couldn’t keep the distaste from his voice.
“Yes,” Samantha said. “Or, at least, to have someone. To not be on your own. Unless, of course, that’s what makes you happy. Being on your own.” She smiled and reached forward to give his arm a squeeze again. “But you mustn’t be afraid of it, Michael. Or feel guilty.”
They’d had that conversation more than a month ago, but nothing had changed since, and Michael was yet to make any attempt to find that person, or even begin a journey towards them. But he knew Samantha was right. Caroline would have wanted him to be with someone else. If he was honest, it was possible this might even have been true if she’d lived. He’d often wondered, if never aloud, for how long they’d have been together. He’d hoped forever, of course, but he’d never known for certain. Not for sure. Caroline had found solidity in him, in their marriage. She’d found a peace. But she wasn’t naturally of an exclusive nature, and had always been more multiple than singular of character.
Despite his reluctance to enter another relationship, Michael still missed women physically. Recently, late at night after a day’s work, he’d found himself typing “Hampstead + Escorts” into his search engine more than once, browsing the posed thumbnails of “Erika,” “Giselle,” and “Cindy,” the lists of their services and rates in bold below each of them. But his desire had never taken him as far as the contact email or phone number, and although he’d told himself that hiring one of these girls would be preferable to risking the feelings of a longer-term partner, he’d always ended up closing his laptop and walking away from his desk.
Instinctively, Michael felt that if he were ever to start again with another woman, then it would have to happen elsewhere, beyond London. Already, despite his resolve to be governed by the lives of Samantha and Rachel, the prospect of a move was increasingly seductive. Once the new book was done. Once he knew Samantha and Rachel were further along their recovery. The thought of it, when he allowed it to, excited him. He was grateful to Peter for his flat, but it had always been intended as a holding pattern. And soon, he could feel it, he’d be ready to leave. The guilt, the pain of what had happened here, he would always own. But a move, he knew, would alter the texture of that pain, the nature of its ache. Perhaps to somewhere on the continent, or back to New York. There was something about the fabric of the city that would suit his situation. Its streets, breathing with single lives, were fed by their hungers. Once there, having changed the geography of his living, then Michael could imagine perhaps finding someone: a woman from elsewhere who, having altered her own landscape, might be ready to accept someone like him with whom to share it.