"I'm glad to hear he felt some remorse," I said coldly. "I can't say I noticed any at the time."
Winifred blamed me, of course. After that, it was open war. She did the worst thing to me that she could think of. She took Aimee.
I suppose you were taught the gospel according to Winifred. In her version, I would have been a lush, a tramp, a slut, a bad mother. As time went by I no doubt became, in her mouth, a slovenly harridan, a crazy old bat, a peddler of ratty old junk. I doubt she ever said to you that I murdered Richard, however. If she'd told you that, she would also have had to say where she got the idea.
Junkwould have been a slur. It's true I bought cheap and sold dear-who doesn't, in the antiques racket? -but I had a good eye and I never twisted anyone's arm. There was a period of excessive drinking-I admit it-though not until after Aimee was gone. As for the men, there were some of those as well. It was never a question of love, it was more like a sort of periodic bandaging. I was cut off from everything around me, unable to reach, to touch; at the same time I felt scraped raw. I needed the comfort of another body.
I avoided any man from my own former social circles, though some of these appeared, like fruit flies, as soon as they got wind of my solitary and possibly rotten state. Men like that could have been egged on by Winifred, and no doubt were. I stuck to strangers, picked up on my forays to nearby towns and cities in search of what they now callcollectibles. I never gave my real name. But Winifred was too persistent for me, in the end. All she'd needed was one man, and that's what she'd got. The pictures of the motel room door, going in, coming out; the fake signatures in the register; the testimony of the owner, who'd welcomed the cash. You could fight it in court, said my lawyer, but I'd advise against it. We'll try for visiting rights, that's all you can expect. You handed them the ammunition and they've used it. Even he took a dim view of me, not for my moral turpitude but for my clumsiness.
Richard had appointed Winifred as Aimee's guardian in his will, and also as sole trustee of Aimee's not inconsiderable trust fund. So she had that in her favour, as well.
As for the book, Laura didn't write a word of it. But you must have known that for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn't. I didn't think of what I was doing as writing-just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth. I thought of myself as recording. A bodiless hand, scrawling across a wall.
I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself.
It was no great leap from that to naming Laura as the author. You might decide it was cowardice that inspired me, or a failure of nerve-I've never been fond of spotlights. Or simple prudence: my own name would have guaranteed the loss of Aimee, whom I lost in any case. But on second thought it was merely doing justice, because I can't say Laura didn't write a word. Technically that's accurate, but in another sense-what Laura would have called the spiritual sense-you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.
I remember Laura, when she was ten or eleven, sitting at Grandfather's desk, in the library at Avilion. She had a sheet of paper in front of her, and was busying herself with the seating arrangements in Heaven. "Jesus sits at the right hand of God," she said, "so who sits at God's left hand?"
"Maybe God doesn't have a left hand," I said, to tease her. "Left hands are supposed to be bad, so maybe he wouldn't have one. Or maybe he got his left hand cut off in a war."
"We're made in God's image," Laura said, "and we have left hands, so God must have one as well." She consulted her diagram, chewing on the end of her pencil. "I know!" she said. "The table must be circular! So everyone sits at everyone else's right hand, all the way round."
"And vice versa," I said.
Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It's a left-handed book. That's why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it.
When I began this account of Laura's life-of my own life-I had no idea why I was writing it, or who I expected might read it once I'd done. But it's clear to me now. I was writing it for you, dearest Sabrina, because you're the one-the only one-who needs it now.
Since Laura is no longer who you thought she was, you're no longer who you think you are, either. That can be a shock, but it can also be a relief. For instance, you're no relation at all to, Winifred, and none to Richard. There's not a speck of Griffen in you at alclass="underline" your hands are clean on that score. Your real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as to who his own father was, well, the sky's the limit. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, saint, a score of countries of origin, a dozen cancelled maps, a hundred levelled villages-take your pick. Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.
Fifteen
Epilogue: The other hand
She has a single photograph of him, a black-and-white print. She preserves it carefully, because it's almost all she has left of him. The photo is of the two of them together, her and this man, on a picnic. Picnic is written on the back-not his name or hers, justpicnic. She knows the names, she doesn't need to write them down.
They're sitting under a tree; it must have been an apple tree. She has a wide skirt tucked around her knees. It was a hot day. Holding her hand over the picture, she can still feel the heat coming up from it.
He's wearing a light-coloured hat, partially shading his face. She's turned half towards him, smiling in a way she can't remember smiling at anyone since. She seems very young in the picture. He's smiling too, but he's holding up his hand between himself and the camera, as if to fend it off. As if to fend her off, in the future, looking back at them. As if to protect her. Between his fingers is the stub of a cigarette.
She retrieves the photograph when she's alone, and lies it flat on the table and stares down into it. She examines every detaiclass="underline" his smoky fingers, the bleached folds of their clothing, the unripe apples hanging in the tree, the dying grass in the foreground. Her smiling face.
The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there's a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It's the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.
How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what wasgoing to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Drowned now-the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds. All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it.
The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.