Her Fearful Symmetry (23 page)

Julia shrugged. They walked through the shop without speaking and out onto Knightsbridge. Valentina thought the tube ought to be just to the left, but Julia turned right and began walking very quickly. They passed Hyde Park Corner tube station. Valentina said, “There’s the tube,” but Julia ignored her. They crossed into Mayfair and began to zigzag, making random turns, Julia leading, Valentina trotting after her. Valentina knew they would continue walking until Julia decided to speak to her again; meanwhile they would get thoroughly lost.

It was rush hour and the streets were crowded. The evening was clear and cold. Valentina saw familiar shops, squares, street names, but she had no internal map of London, no way to organise her surroundings; that was Julia’s job. Valentina had not bothered to pay attention. Valentina began to be frightened. She wondered if she should just walk off and find a tube station; they were in central London; there ought to be stations all around.
I should leave her and go home.
Valentina had never tried that, abandoning Julia in the middle of a fight. She experienced a qualm at the thought of taking the tube by herself-she hadn’t done it without Julia. Then she saw the familiar red, white and blue sign: OXFORD CIRCUS.

The twins crossed Regent Street and were immediately caught in a crush of people trying to enter the tube station. There were currents within the crowd, and for a few minutes they found themselves walking against the stream. Julia was struck by how calm everyone was, as though they all did this every day at 6:30 p.m.; perhaps they did. Valentina was behind her, and Julia could hear her breathing hard. She reached her hand back and Valentina took it. “It’s okay, Mouse,” she said. They found the current of people moving in the direction they wanted to go. Now they were not pushed and jostled so much.

Valentina felt as though she were drowning. She could not draw a breath; she was pressed by people on all sides. All thought of going into the tube station vanished. She wanted only to get out of the crowd. Elbows and backpacks jabbed her. She heard the buses and cars going by a few feet away. People muttered their annoyance to themselves and each other, but to Valentina all the noise seemed muted.

There was a surge in the direction of the tube entrance. Julia was pushed forward, Valentina backwards. Julia felt Valentina’s hand pull out of her grip. “Mouse!” Valentina lost her footing and fell sideways into the oncoming people. A man said, “Whoops! She’s down! Stand back, please!” in a jocular tone, but no one could move. It was like being in a mosh pit. Hands groped for Valentina; she was put back on her feet. “All right, then, luv?” someone asked. She shook her head, she could not answer. She heard Julia calling her name but couldn’t see her. Valentina tried to catch her breath. Her throat closed; she tried to suck in air very slowly. She was walking, the crowd pushed her forward.

Julia stood outside the crowd, panicking. “Valentina!” No answer. She dived into the crush again but could only see the people next to her.
Ohmigod.
She saw a flash of bright hair and lunged towards it. “Watch it there.” Valentina saw Julia and put her hand to her throat.
I can’t breathe.
Julia grabbed her, began to elbow and push at the people in front of them. “She’s having an asthma attack; let us out!” The crowd tried to part. No one could see what was happening. At last the twins spilled out onto the Oxford Street pavement.

Valentina leaned against a brightly lit shop window full of cheap shoes, gasping. Julia ransacked Valentina’s purse. “Where’s your inhaler?” Valentina shook her head.
I don’t know.
A concerned knot of bystanders watched. “Here, use mine.” A teenaged boy, long hair occluding his face, skateboard in one hand, proffered an inhaler with the other. Valentina took it, sucked at it. Her throat opened slightly. She nodded at the boy, who stood with his free hand slightly extended, as though he might need to catch her. Julia watched Valentina breathe, tried to make her breathe by breathing deeply herself, willed Valentina to breathe. Valentina took a few more puffs on the inhaler, stood with her hand pressed against her sternum, breathing. “Thanks,” she said eventually, handing it back to the boy.

“Sure, anytime.”

The little crowd that had been watching dispersed. Valentina wanted to hide. She wanted to get out of the cold. Julia said, “I’m going to get us a cab,” and strode off. It seemed like hours before Valentina heard her calling, “Mouse! Over here!” and she could climb gratefully into the warmth of the black cab. Valentina plopped down on the seat and began scooping the contents of her handbag onto her lap until she found her inhaler. She sat with the inhaler clutched in her hand, weapon-like. Despair blossomed in her.
This is crazy. I can’t spend my whole life as a Mouse.
Valentina glanced over at Julia, who was staring impassively out of the window at slow-moving traffic.
You think I need you. You think I can’t leave you.
Valentina looked out at the unfamiliar buildings. London was endless, relentless.
If I had died in that crowd…?
She imagined Julia calling their parents.

Julia looked at her. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“We should get you a doctor.”

“Yeah.”

They rode back to Vautravers in silence. “You want to look at that web site?” Julia asked as they let themselves into the flat.

“No,” said Valentina. “Never mind.”

V
ALENTINA AND JULIA were puzzled by an empty shelf in Elspeth’s office. Since the office was jam-crammed with every conceivable kind of book, knickknack, writing implement and other things useful and useless, space was in short supply-therefore the existence of a pristine, thoroughly empty shelf was a conundrum. It must have held something once. But what? And who had removed it? The shelf was twelve inches deep and eighteen inches wide. It was the third shelf from the bottom in the bookcase next to Elspeth’s desk. Unlike the rest of the office, it had been somewhat recently dusted. There was also a locked drawer in the desk, for which they could find no key.

The former contents of the shelf were now sitting in Robert’s flat, along with all the other things he’d removed from Elspeth’s, in boxes on the floor next to his bed. He had not touched anything in the boxes except Elspeth’s jumper and shoes, which he had placed in their own drawer in his desk. Now and then he would open the drawer and pet them, then close it and go back to his work.

He had placed the boxes on the side of his bed away from the door, so it was possible for him not to look at them for days. He considered putting the boxes in the spare bedroom, but that seemed unfriendly. Eventually he would have to explore the contents. Before Elspeth died he had thought he wanted to read her diaries. He thought he wanted to know everything, be privy to all her secrets. Yet for quite a long time he put off touching the diaries or bringing them into his flat. Now they were here, and still he did not open them. He had his memories, and he did not want them altered or disproved. As a historian he knew that any trove of documents has incendiary potential. So the boxes sat like unexploded ordnance on the floor of his bedroom and Robert did his best to ignore them.

I
T WAS 12 MARCH, a grey, lowering Saturday; Marijke’s fifty-fourth birthday. Martin woke up at six and lay in bed, his mind flitting from happy anticipation (she would expect him to call and must surely answer the phone) to anxious consideration of his birthday tribute to her (a dauntingly complex cryptic crossword in which the first and last letters of each clue made multiple anagrams of her full name and the solution was an anagram of a line from John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). He had given the crossword and her present to Robert, who had promised to send it express. Martin had decided to wait until two to call. It would be three o’clock in Amsterdam; she would have had her lunch and would be in a relaxed, Saturday-afternoon mood. He got out of bed and began to make his way through his morning routine, feeling like an only child waiting for his parents to wake on Christmas morning.

Marijke woke up confused, late in the morning, in weak sunlight that came through the shutters and onto her pillow.
It’s my birthday. Lang zal ze leven, hieperderpiep, hoera.
She had no plan for the day, beyond coffee and cake with some friends that evening. She knew Martin would call, and hoped that Theo would-sometimes Theo forgot; he seemed to deliberately cultivate a protective layer of obliviousness. She always called Theo to remind him of Martin’s birthday; perhaps Martin did the same for her? She had dreamed about Martin, a very
aangename
dream of their old
gezellig
flat in St. John’s Wood. She had been washing dishes and he had come up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck.
Memory or dream?
She imagined his hands on her shoulders, his lips brushing her neck.
Mmm.
Marijke had been policing her erotic imagination since she’d left Martin. Usually she was quick to boot him out of her mind when he tried to sneak in, but this morning, for a birthday treat, she let the dream-memory unfurl.

The package arrived around noon. Marijke put it on her kitchen table and spent some minutes hunting for a Stanley knife as the package was almost completely covered with tape and beseechments to HANDLE WITH CARE.
It looks like it’s from an insane person. But he’s my insane person, my very own.
She ferreted through the plastic packing and pulled out a fat envelope and a pink box. The pink box contained a pair of cerulean-blue leather gloves. Marijke slipped them on. They fitted perfectly; they were soft as breath. She ran her gloved fingers over the invisible hairs on her arm. The gloves disguised her knobbly knuckles and age spots. She felt as though she’d been given new hands.

The envelope contained a letter and a crossword, with the solution in another, smaller envelope. Marijke opened the smaller envelope straightaway; she had no talent for crosswords, and Martin knew this. She could never have begun to solve the masterpieces he made for her each year, and they both understood these birthday crosswords for what they were: a demonstration of devotion, the equivalent of the intricate, eye-popping jumpers Marijke knitted for Martin on his birthdays. Inside the envelope were two stanzas of the Donne poem:

Marijke smiled. She opened the letter and a tiny package fell into her blue-gloved hand. She had to take the gloves off to open it. At first she thought it was empty-she shook the package and nothing came out. She probed with a finger, and found two bits of metal and pearl clinging inside. They spilled onto her palm.
Oh, oh! My earrings.
Marijke carried them to the window. She imagined Martin hunting among the boxes for days, excavating layers of plastic-embalmed possessions, just to find her earrings.
Lieve Martin.
She closed her hand around the earrings, closed her eyes and let herself miss him.
All this distance…

She raised her head, looked at her one-room flat. It had been the hayloft of a livery stable in the seventeenth century. It had pitched ceilings, heavy beams, whitewashed walls. Her futon occupied one corner, her clothes hung in another corner behind a curtain. She had a table with two chairs, a tiny kitchen, a window that overlooked the little crooked street, a vase of freesias on the windowsill. She had a comfortable chair and a lamp. For more than a year now this room had been her haven, fortress, retreat, her triumphant, undiscoverable gambit in her marital game of hide-and-seek. Standing there, clasping the earrings in her hand, Marijke saw her snug room as a lonely place.
Apartment. A place to be apart.
She shook her head to change her thoughts and opened Martin’s letter.

Perfect,
Marijke thought. She arranged the gloves, the earrings, the crossword and the letter on her table like a still life.
It’s almost too bad he’s going to call and ruin it.

Martin stood in his office with the phone in his hand, watching the clock on the computer count up to two o’clock. He was wearing a suit and tie. He was holding his breath. When the clock hit 14:00:00 he exhaled and pressed 1 on his speed dial.

“
Hallo,
Martin.”

“Marijke. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“Has Theo called yet?”

Marijke laughed. “I don’t think he’s even awake yet, hmm? How are you? What’s new?”

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” Martin lit a cigarette. He glanced at the list of questions on his desk. “And you? Still no smoking?”

“Yes, no smoking. It feels amazing, you should try it. I can smell things. I had forgotten what things smell like, water, freesias. There are so many beautiful smells. Those gloves you sent, they smell like the first day of winter.”

“You like them?”

“Oh, it was all perfect. I can’t believe you found my earrings.”

“The Americans have a new word for that:
regifting
. It seemed a bit miserly to send you your own earrings on your birthday, but having found them…” Martin thought of Julia putting the earrings into his hands. Marijke thought of the occasion upon which Martin had originally given her the earrings, which was Theo’s birth.