He met her gaze. She was altering before him, moving away from love, rewriting herself and leaving him behind.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For having loved me like that.’
‘You’re welcome.’
What a gift love was. For a moment, as a memory, floating free from time and meaning. What a wonderful, willing gift.
‘Did you call for lunch earlier?’ said Nicky. ‘I’m starving.’ She got up from the bed and wandered from the room, while Howard started talking about keeping the skin safe and drawing up some sort of contract, an agreement to preserve all their skins for the future.
‘To remind us of why we need to stay together, forever,’ he said, as they ate, later.
ENVELOPE
She died in a retirement home on the Isle of Wight. That’s not new, or news. It happened thirty years ago. Dan reads about her war skin, carefully preserved by the family. The skin finally came up for sale a month ago and was bought by a company called Envelope.
The article reads:
She was an inspiration, singing of hope at a time when her country needed it most, and her voice was the thread that pulled people together, gathered them: she was the force they were drawn to, during the war.
It takes Dan too long to realise this isn’t an article but an advertisement:
Fifteen days later, the package is delivered to his house.
Dan slides his purchase free of its wrapping and sets it on the kitchen table. It has its own silver stand that kicks out behind the frame, presenting it, pride of place. The image is a famous one: the black and white view of her in uniform, back straight, her feet planted in the soil. She holds a spade in one fist. Her chin is lifted and her hair is set in sweetheart curls. She served in the Land Army, travelling to London to sing in the evenings. A facsimile of her signature – a printed squiggle that tapers to a strong straight line – is in the top left corner.
The bottom right corner holds the tiniest swatch of her skin. A hole has been cut in the glass, just big enough for one finger to touch it. Beside the hole is a sticker that reads:
He still can’t believe he bought it.
It’s everything he hates about the world. It’s sentimental and exploitative and all the things that are wrong with the love industry, but it’s also part of a past he wants to understand. A past that belongs to him as much as to anyone else. No matter how they dice it up and present it, it’s a skin from a war that his great-grandfather fought in, that his grandfather taught him about while showing him the old scrapbook of mementoes, and listening to her songs. The legacies of an inherited war.
He puts a finger on the hole in the glass and touches the skin.
He feels love.
It’s not strong, but it’s there. He gets no image with it, no flashes of insight, but it is real and warm. So this was her: Edith Learner, during the war, planting seeds and singing songs with the mouths of the country joining in. But she didn’t just belong to them: she was in love. With who? He strains to find the subject of her passion, but it won’t come.
It’s possible to be in love and not give everything away. Dan knows this. When the others still lived here – when they were the Stuck Six, sticking together – they were in love, and yet none of them really knew him. They didn’t want to. It was enough that he was part of their love, sealed up tight within it. The secret part of him has always remained hidden inside.
Dan takes his finger away. He puts the frame back in its packaging and slides it to the back of the cupboard under the sink. It’s none of his business; he knows that. He sits at the table and waits for Liam to come downstairs.
Liam surfaces just after ten. He’s fully dressed and looks fresh, rested. He has his phone in one hand, and he holds the screen out as he takes a seat at the table.
Dan’s expecting a cat video or a news story, something to provoke emotion either way. Liam feeds on feelings, starts every day with them, setting emotions on high with a quick trawl of the internet. Today it’s a news story.
‘We must have both been out,’ Liam says. ‘He would have knocked, right?’
A photo of Mik, naked, is on the screen. Dan knows that body so well. The sight of it is a shock; it’s like coming across what looks like a familiar person and then realising – that’s my own reflection.
But it’s a reflection of Mik.
The white of Mik’s body against the dark grey water. The line of the lake, the curve of the landscape behind him… Dan realises the photo was taken just outside, practically on the doorstep.
‘But we were in yesterday, weren’t we?’ Liam says. ‘We were right here.’ The way he keeps saying we is annoying.
‘I went to Bedford to pick something up. Didn’t you say you walked into the village?’
‘Oh yeah.’
Dan gets up from the table, turns away from the phone and switches on the kettle. ‘Mystery solved, then,’ he says, even though it patently is not. But he finds he doesn’t want to solve it, at least, not with Liam. Later, alone, he’ll puzzle over it, try to unpack it. Mik was here.
‘The mystery is not why we were out,’ says Liam, patiently, ‘but why he was here at all. Maybe he wanted to see you. Maybe you should ask him.’
Enough pretence. Dan faces this man he lives with, extended an invitation to for reasons he doesn’t understand. They only share certain spaces, and he needs to spell out the limits of that space, yet again. How many times does he have to do this, before Liam leaves? Everyone has their limits. ‘He’s welcome to come and go,’ Dan says. ‘This was his home. It’s not your home.’
Liam puts his phone, screen down, on the kitchen table. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I haven’t forgotten. I am looking.’
But you did forget – Dan thinks. He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t call out the lie. How he despises these lies, but finds comfort in them, too. They are his guarantee that he will never fall in love with Liam. ‘All right,’ he says.
Liam puts out a hand, and stretches it forward until it brushes the lower buttons of Dan’s shirt.
When Dan is certain his lines have been re-established to his satisfaction he leans over the table and kisses Liam, until Liam responds, opening his mouth, giving up his tongue to the moment.
‘He could have let himself in,’ Dan says, so casually, ‘The spare key is still in that pot Sunetra made.’
‘Oh God, those night classes,’ chuckles Howard, down the phone. ‘Do you remember when she came home crying because she’d made a pottery duck and it had exploded in the kiln?’
These polished, well-worn memories. Dan understands the need to collect them, then display them to another. It reminds him of his grandfather, although that thought makes him uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to examine it. Still, these are not stolen moments of a war. They are smooth and tumbled stones that Howard loves to turn over and over during these calls. Once a week, on a Saturday afternoon, they touch base this way. That’s what Howard calls it: touching base. And so the old memories are turned and turned again until Dan finds the right moment to say, ‘But why was Mik here? Do you know?’
‘I’ll ask him later,’ says Howard, ‘but it was probably just a spur of the moment thing. You know Mik.’