I found the office easily enough, above a Spanish restaurant on Botanic Avenue. Up the stairs. Into the dusty light. The philatelist was short, slight, bald, with hanging spectacles and a whiff of disintegration. Belfast is full of odd people who have hidden away from the Troubles: they live inside tiny spaces and enormous imaginations. He put his spectacles on his nose and peered at me with wide eyes. There was something of the raccoon about him. He didn’t seem at all perturbed by the presence of Georgie who not so delicately sniffed his crotch.
He wiped my chair with his handkerchief before I sat, then he rounded his desk, folded his hands, and said my name as if it were the only punctuation the day deserved.
The library lights cast odd shadows. He was framed by a row of Graham Greene novels, perfectly arranged leather editions. The slightest clue can give us away. He opened the plastic and tut-tutted a little bit, I wasn’t sure if in awe or derision. He glanced at me and then back to the letter. He put on a pair of forensic gloves and set the envelope down on a piece of blue felt, turned it over with a pair of tweezers. I tried to tell him the story, but he kept holding up a finger to stop me. He surprised me by clicking on a brand-new computer and deftly scrolling through his files. He looked up to say that there were dozens of instances of Alcock and Brown letters available, he had been to many shows in Britain where he had seen the actual letters himself, they were worth considerable sums especially if they were in fine condition. He said my letter had come from Newfoundland, for sure, that the envelope was correct, the indicia were authentic, but it wasn’t a transatlantic stamp, it was an ordinary Cabot. There was no postmark so it could have been sent any year at all and in all the records there was never any mention of another letter and so there was no form of absolute authentication.
The name Jennings meant nothing to him. Nor did Frederick Douglass. He took his magnetic eyeglasses apart and let them fall at the hollow of his little chest. “To be frank with you, you’d have to open it, Mrs. Carson.”
I told him that he had missed my mother by about a decade and that she could have authenticated it quite easily, she had been in the Cochrane Hotel when the flight took off. Seventeen years old. She had watched the plane — and the letter — leave and go small against the sky. It never got to Cork. Years later she followed the letter to England, met Arthur Brown in Swansea. He had forgotten the letter in his tunic pocket. He gave it to her and Emily, and she tucked it away, not knowing what it might become. I was brief and to the point but still he seemed to disappear into his chair, until finally he said that he couldn’t quite bring himself to give an absolute value to what was obviously a family heirloom, though it was worth a considerable amount, perhaps a couple of hundred pounds, though with a postmark it could be several times this.
He rose from his chair and opened the door, pausing to scratch Georgie behind the ears. What had I expected anyway? On Botanic Avenue the light stung my eyes, so I made my way down to the Spanish restaurant where the pretty young owner took pity on me and bought me a glass of Rioja along with some tapas, while her husband played on the piano, ragtime and Hoagy Carmichael tunes. Our own age never ceases to astound us. I am quite sure that Lily Duggan felt something similar once, and Emily Ehrlich, and Lottie Tuttle, too, the succession of women whose lives were folded in the letter I held in my hand.
I am not of the opinion that we become empty chairs, but we certainly end up making room for others along the way.
TWO GLASSES OF wine got the better of me. Dizzy, I eventually found the car, drove a while, but then pulled into the side of the Newtownards Road. I must have dozed for a few moments because Georgie began snarling and there was an impatient knocking on the window. A woman in uniform. I rolled down the window. Dark had fallen.
“You’re parked cockeyed,” she said.
The truth was that I hadn’t even realized I was parked at all. I could almost see my own thoughts moving through my mind, carp in a pool, obvious and slow. “Excuse me, officer.” I started the engine, but she leaned in across the steering wheel and took the keys.
“Have you been drinking?”
I reached across and stroked Georgie’s neck.
“Do you have any family nearby?”
I told her I didn’t know a soul, but then she threatened to breathalyze me, and suggested that I might have to spend the night at the police station — she called it the barracks — and I cast around for who might still be around in the city.
I had a sudden recollection of days that still seem agile with laughter. In the 1960s, Lawrence used to belong to a group of gentlemen farmers who got together on Saturday mornings. They wore tweed jackets. Plus fours. Their cartridge belts clanked as they stepped down along the lough. The wives—as we were known back then — played tennis. I never quite inherited my mother’s passion for the game but I went along with it. We met our husbands in the early evening, drank cocktails, drove our cars into ditches on the way home. There is still, I am convinced, an imprint of our wheels on the mudflats, like the remnants of herons.
It’s hardly a hallelujah memory, but I must admit I was rather generous with my affection. Over the years, I had several affairs, most of them hurried and fretful and frankly dreary. A meeting in the parking lot, snatched moments in a golf-club bathroom, the cramped quarters of a patched-up yacht. The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives. I went home to Lawrence, steeped in guilt and melancholy, promised myself never to stray again. I’m quite sure he did the same also, but I was never interested in finding out. I hunkered into motherhood. Still there were occasional moments when the world got away from me. The most memorable was a single afternoon with Jack Craddogh, a history professor from Queen’s University who owned a small summer house just outside Portaferry, all glass and champagne and seclusion. His wife was a furniture designer who regularly went to London. We approached each other tentatively at first, but then he ripped the buttons off my dress and the afternoon disappeared into ecstasy. How odd to recall the gymnastics we were capable of: it is as if I have taken a photograph of the one moment when my young hand lay across his thumping chest.
I stammered a moment, then told the policewoman that I knew a couple who lived nearby, in the direction of Donegall Square.
“Call them,” she said, thrusting a mobile phone at me, but I surprised her with my BlackBerry. Jack answered after the very first ring. He, too, sounded like he had a little vermouth on his tongue. I asked if I could stay the evening. He was confused and I bawled down the phone that they were going to throw Georgie and me in jail for the night.
“Georgie?” he said, and then he remembered. “Oh, Hannah.” Some muffled complaints in the background, a complicated sigh.
The policewoman hesitated a moment, then said she would drive behind me to make sure I got where I wanted. I must have wobbled a little bit because she pulled me over again and drove the car herself while her partner continued behind us. She said that it was pathetic at my age to be drinking and driving, and if it wasn’t for the dog she would have arrested me there and then. She looked like the sort of woman who had once, long ago, had a steel rod expertly inserted up her backside. It would hardly emerge now. I was tempted to tell her my exact history with Jack Craddogh, just to see if I could coax a smile out of her — he actually bit the very last button off my dress, pretended to swallow it, kissed me — but I sat quietly beside her, properly chagrined and said nothing. We were all young once: my mother used to say we should make sure to drink the wine before it turns.