‘You can see the Vineyard sometimes from here on a clear day,’ I said. ‘Look.’
She dusted the sand off her hands and stood up. The sky to the west was beginning to turn a lobster pink. ‘Where?’
I came up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders; she softened slightly into my touch. ‘Over there, I don’t think you can see it today.’
I put my arms round her waist and pressed my face into her crispy, dry hair.
‘Patrick hated this beach,’ she said, in a whisper. ‘He complained about the flies and the stones.’
Her back arched slightly towards me, her hip pressed into my crotch. She stayed there for a moment and then gently disengaged herself.
‘Miranda,’ I said.
‘I’d love to, Damien,’ she said, ‘but I think it would be a little weird.’
TWENTY
MRS DELAMITRI KISSED ME on the mouth when she left. She honked her horn as she backed out of the driveway, and I waved at her as Patrick must have done many times from the bank of lawn beside the road. Then I went back to the house and had another drink.
I hadn’t been drunk since coming to the island. I think I had some idea that it would set a dangerous precedent for someone living alone. It had been part of Patrick’s weird stability that he rarely drank — although I had a distant recollection of him drinking whisky and listening to opera on a rainy afternoon while following the libretto.
But I was already drunk — and I was already leaving — so I poured myself a whisky, leavened it with a couple of drops of water from the tap, and turned on the jukebox in the summer kitchen.
The sunset was fading out of the sky, and the evening that drew on seemed to hum with possibility. It was the wine, but it wasn’t just the wine. All I wanted was to be back among the living — anywhere — in Vientiane, Cardiff or Cuzco. And I didn’t care what I did. Even going back to work in London held no terrors; at least it was a life.
Now that I was able to leave the house behind, I realised that the solitude had been a purgative. My old life had died with Patrick. And the dusty, isolated, frugal legacy he had left me actually affirmed its opposite. I felt grateful to Patrick. I was Scrooge, waking up on Christmas morning after the third visitation, having finally grasped the message that the dead bring to all the living — that there’s still time. Patrick was my Ghost of Christmas Future. I felt grateful to him for being my unwitting angel.
I lay down on the grass and looked at the sky, and by a strange reversal, it seemed to be below me, like an ocean of stars, fading away in its depths to blackness. Around me, the island seemed to be breathing in time with the sea. Then I realised it was my own breath, respiring as the waves broke and withdrew.
Going back into the house to refill my glass for the second or third time, I remembered the box files. They were stacked where we had left them in the library. I carried four of them up to my bedroom to open them.
The first one contained letters, but there were fewer than I had expected. I threw them into the air — a sheaf of yellow pages covered with round, childish handwriting spilled over the floor.
Because I’d seen his handwriting so recently, I got it into my head that the author of the letters was Nathan Fernshaw, and I wondered why he had written to Patrick in such detail. I picked up a couple of leaves from the floor. The first lines I read had the felicitous spelling mistakes of a young child: ‘my friend raymond was unconshase’; a second page was written by a self-conscious adolescent wiseacre: ‘Dear Patrick, I just wanted to write a letter that doesn’t begin, “How are you?” — oops — it managed to sneak in anyway …’ A third page was somewhere in between:
‘it is the end of my holiday and it is halloween. we are going for a midnight walk with dad and we will bring our scooters and vivian’s go cart we hope we are thought to be ghosts and suspicions are arosed about ghosts walking across the common but we will no who they were but if real ghosts did walk across the common brrr.’
And now there was a flash of recognition — or flashes that froze instants of the distant past. My widowed father pushing Vivian along a path on Wandsworth Common. The great orange lights of Trinity Road pushing back the blackness. A ‘midnight’ walk that took place at 8 p.m. The first anniversary of my mother’s death. I knew instantly what would be at the foot of this page, and the previous page, and every other page in the box. Love Damien.
I opened the other box files, thinking I might find more of my own letters, or Vivian’s, or letters from my father. One box contained yellowing royalty statements for Peanut Gatherers. The others held a miscellany of unconnected papers: receipts, invoices for some gardening work, an old copy of Boston magazine with an article about Patrick’s writing classes for the prisoners, and a coffee-stained manual for the computer in the dining room.
I gathered my own letters into a thin sheaf and lay in bed poring over them. They were embarrassing reading, as only your own letters can be. I had sent my uncle an exhaustive explanation of the rules of conkers with diagrams; various thank-you letters; two pieces of correspondence written from boarding school in consecutive late Octobers full of nostalgia for summer barbecues and Bolder than Mandingo. By a weird symmetry, the mild Ionian night that I said I missed in my letters hung thickly over the window of my bedroom, where I lay, more than twenty years later, reading my own handwriting. I felt able to recognise, at that moment, what my teenage self, cooped up in the oppressive male atmosphere of a boys’ boarding school, couldn’t or wouldn’t remember: that those summers had been full of longueurs, that we had had no friends, that there was a loneliness intrinsic to time spent with my family. And I remembered too that each holiday contained a moment of recognition when I realised I ached with boredom and solitude, and that Stevo was having a better time working in his dad’s sportswear shop in Kentish Town.
I had to go back downstairs to get the other boxes. It was past midnight. It had begun to rain and clouds had extinguished the starlight. Inside the house, the darkness was so deep it seemed to have a texture — the restless, electric quality you find on the inside of your eyelids.
The first box was empty, and my disappointment deepened when I found the second also contained nothing. I wondered if Mrs Delamitri had been telling the truth when she said she had respected Patrick’s privacy. The third held a collection of auction catalogues. But in the fourth, concealed under several sheets of blank paper, was a typescript with the same quirky lettering as the inventory.
I pulled back the wire trap that held the typescript flat in the bottom of the box. There were close to a hundred pages, loosely fastened through a hole in the top left-hand corner by a piece of cord with a metal stay at each end. The first page was blank, the second was a title page. A single row of capital letters across the middle of it read: THE CONFESSIONS OF MYCROFT HOLMES
TWENTY-ONE
THE NAME ALONE was like a spark igniting a gunpowder trail of associations in my brain. Mycroft is Sherlock’s older brother. That’s a fact — a fictional fact, in the sense that Arthur Conan Doyle invented him, rather than Patrick. Mycroft is mentioned in only a handful of Doyle’s stories and there’s something troubling about his absence.
Nothing really explains Mycroft. He’s superfluous to the stories. That’s what’s so interesting about him. He’s not created for a reason, he doesn’t have a function in the plot. He’s there because he’s there, vivid and unnecessary — like all the best things. He’s extra, the imagination’s tip to the reader.