I Saw a Man (29 page)

“But she’s right, isn’t she?” Samantha said. “Surely you must have seen it with
BrotherHoods
? How it becomes other books in other people?”

“Yes, but as a book in itself, it was done,” Michael replied. “Or at least done to the best of my ability. I’d probably change it now—actually, I’d certainly change it now, but at the time I finished it, it was finished. It wasn’t the book itself that was half cooked,” Michael said, warming to his theme. “So much as the experience.”

Samantha shook her head. “Now you’re just getting into semantics.”

“No, no, I’m not.” Michael put down his glass and picked up the top photograph, the pond beneath bare branches, the mist like cannon smoke. “All I’m saying is that these are far from half cooked. They’re quite the opposite. They’re bloody good, and they’d be that good, that true, whether people saw them or not.”

He handed the print to Samantha. “The communication was made when you took this, when you printed it. From then on it exists in the world, seen or not.”

He took another drink of his wine, looking for the right phrase.

“Its weight has been added,” he said eventually.

“Its weight?” Samantha looked doubtful, but she could tell Michael was being serious.

“Yes.” He picked up another print, the same pond, at the same time of day again, a swan and her cygnets drifting across the foreground. “Its telling has happened. That’s how I see it, anyway. The vision, your intention, your motivation, whatever you want to call it, is no longer purely internal. So regardless if I or anyone else looks at it, its story has still been told. Its purpose served.”

―

Samantha started taking photos of the pond shortly after Josh moved out. It had begun as a way to get to know the new camera she’d bought for her MA. She still wasn’t sleeping, so early one morning, a few hours after dawn, she’d set up a tripod next to the fence at the bottom of the garden. She stayed there for an hour, experimenting with exposures and timings as the Heath altered under the rising light. The next day she’d found herself awake at the same time. On coming into the kitchen, she’d noticed how different the Heath looked from the day before. It had rained overnight. The light, it seemed, had been washed, cleaned. The water of the pond, dark the previous morning, was metallic, polished. She took her camera to the fence again and, setting the tripod legs in the holes it had made the day before, began taking photos.

On the third morning, despite having fallen asleep in the small hours, she’d woken at the same time once more. She knew why. Those quiet, focused minutes. The slow reveal of the day, its light and weight, its texture and scent. Her body was expecting it, and her mind was asking for it. The exact same scene she’d stood before the previous mornings, but changed, altered. Never the same. Capturing it stirred in her a sense both of movement and of continuity. Of seeing afresh. How many times had she looked out her back door and seen that view? But never, not one of those times, as she’d seen it on those mornings, a unique recipe of light, weather, and season, framed in the lens of her camera.

Samantha’s morning sessions became the foundation of what had now become her weekly routine. Every morning, regardless of the weather, and more often because of it, she could be seen out there, next to the willow, bending to her viewfinder. On three of those mornings, after taking her pond photographs and walking Rachel to school, she went to work as a PA for a film director in Hampstead village. The work wasn’t taxing—organising his expenses, replying to emails, ordering prints and booking lunch meetings, screenings. But it was new to her, and sociable. While he worked in his office at the top of the house, Samantha worked on the kitchen table, making her party to the movements of the day. Not just the editors and writers who came to meet him, but also the comings and goings of his wife and two sons. It was a workplace, but also a family home. Martha, her sister, had feared it might make Samantha grieve for her own. But the variety and rhythms of the house invigorated her, inspired her even, reminding her of what she’d once wanted and of how much of it had somehow drifted from her over the years of her marriage.

On the other two days of the week she studied at the Royal College, going to lectures and seminars, spending hours in the computer and printing rooms. Again, despite her being ten years older than most of the students, the environment excited her. But it frustrated her, too. She was impatient to learn, to improve. She felt as if she had years to catch up on, a lost decade. Whereas the other students behaved as if time was an inexhaustible luxury, Samantha, knowing it to be a rare reserve, harried at her course and her tutors.

Over those first months after Josh moved out, Samantha gradually came to realise that just as she had autonomy over the hours of her days, so she could choose how to spend her evenings and nights. There was no mortgage on the house, and although Josh no longer had a job, he was still able to pay regular contributions for Rachel and the housekeeping. Whatever Samantha earned from the PA work was hers to spend how she wished. For so many years she’d allowed her socialising to be dictated by Josh’s work, by his colleagues and their wives. There were few of them she’d liked on her own terms, so when after a few months she’d begun to contact friends again, to email them about cinema showings or phone someone for a drink, it was nearly always a case of reconnecting with a friend from years ago, rather than anyone, except for Michael, whom she’d seen regularly before Lucy’s death.

In this way, between her hours at the director’s house, her studies, caring for Rachel and a few old friends, Samantha occupied herself. But none of it did anything to appease her grieving for Lucy. Her daughter had been just four years old. But Samantha had known her for longer than that. Ever since her body had begun forming within hers, ever since the tides of its growing had driven her cravings, her sleep patterns, and mood swings. And yet, at the same time, she’d only recently felt as if she were becoming acquainted with who Lucy actually was, and with who she might become. In the last few months before her death, when Samantha watched her playing with Michael, or on her own, engrossed in a conversation with her dolls, she thought she’d begun to see the hints of the girl beyond the child. And then, within those hints, like a receding line of mirrors within mirrors, the teenager beyond the girl, the woman beyond the teenager and even, in certain fleeting expressions, the elderly woman beyond the adult.

But now Lucy’s would be an imagined life, existing only in her mother’s projections of who her daughter might have been. The ache of her loss became as familiar to Samantha as breathing, or opening her eyes to see. It was just there, and would always be there, a translucent presence behind the scenes of the day. A shadowing that hurt, but which Samantha would never want to live without, its essence now being all that was left of Lucy beyond the ephemera of memory, photographs, and film, all of which were too painful to ever look at for long.

Rachel, once she’d emerged from the numbing of her own shock, soon became sensitive to these depths of her mother’s remembering. In the light of their altered relationship, she’d developed a breed of admiration for Samantha, which she felt but did not yet understand. From out of nowhere, death, like a meteor, had struck their home. There had been sadness, rupture. They were scattered by its impact. Her father was now a man who met her from school, or took her out on the weekends. He was no longer bound by the family walls. She, herself, had been sent far from her own knowledge, and her mother, too, had been on a long journey. But now, from all this disturbance, her mother was back and revealing a warmth Rachel had never previously known. Focused and strong, as if she was recklessly pouring love directly into her. She asked Rachel more questions, her opinion, as if she were eightteen, not eight. She allowed her to stay up late, to stay on the sofa with her, watching TV together. Sometimes Rachel became aware her mother wasn’t watching the screen at all, but was watching her instead. Without intention or observation, but merely to witness her. Over breakfast, as Samantha asked her which blouse she should wear, or which skirt, it could seem as if they were impossible sisters, rather than a mother and daughter. And then there were those other times, too, when their roles felt reversed completely. When, on entering a room and discovering her mother to be there, Rachel would sense Samantha’s darkness, and would come to her silently, folding her body into its contours in an attempt to at once absorb and soothe her pain.

For Michael, every minute spent with Samantha and Rachel was like torture. There had yet to be a moment, in all the seven months since he’d left their house that day, when, being in their presence, he hadn’t felt acutely the sadness of the loss he’d caused, or that somehow Rachel cradled a secret knowledge of her sister’s death. And yet at the same time being with them was the only salve his conscience knew. To be there, contributing to their recovery, their new lives. It was both his privilege and his punishment. In practice this often meant no more than giving his encouragement or advice to Samantha, or coming round for a drink or some food, or agreeing to look after Rachel on nights when she had to be out. It was as simple as being her friend. Someone who’d known them before, and with whom, now that she was ready, she could talk about her loss as an equal, as a colleague in grief. No one else Samantha knew had lost anyone other than their parents. No one else had had death enter, so suddenly, their lives. Michael, however, had been there before her, felt and thought his way through its aftermath. And so she’d found herself looking to him for markers, for acknowledgement and consent. He made her feel normal and, perhaps more important, possible, a woman shaped by her daughter’s loss, not defined by it. A woman who would still extract joy from life, not despite her grief but because of it.

Alongside his involvement with Samantha in the wake of her grief, Michael’s own life continued to expand and gain momentum in the diminishment of his. In December, just before he travelled to Sussex to join Samantha and Rachel at Martha’s for Christmas, he completed the first draft of
The Man Who Broke the Mirror.
It was shorter than he’d expected, and not the book he’d set out to write. The exploration of Oliver’s thesis had become no more than a subplot, a hinterland to the account of his life over those two years that Michael followed him. A portrait of a man in emotional and intellectual extremis, a thinker and a drinker burning brightly as he burnt out.

The book was imperfect, and Michael knew when he submitted it to his agent that unlike what he’d said to Samantha about
BrotherHoods,
it was far from “cooked.” But that it had been written at all was a personal achievement for him. It had begun, in those early months in his new flat, as no more than a muscle memory of routine. As a way of tricking his mind and his body into living again. There’d been no financial imperative for Michael to write it.
BrotherHoods
was still selling well in the U.S., and although he’d sworn not to touch it, there’d also been the compensation money and the payout from Caroline’s insurance, too. In the writing of the book, however, Michael had rediscovered a rare peace in the age-old formation of experience into words. Not necessarily always in service to the broader story, but just in honour of certain minutes, even seconds. Past moments he was able bring into being in a way he often wished he could in real life, but which he knew was possible only like this, at his desk, on the page.

Such was the solace Michael found in his writing that on delivering
The Man Who Broke the Mirror
he’d immediately embarked on a new project, even before his agent had finished reading the draft
.
This was to be a book closer to home, in every sense of the phrase. With his silent promise to Samantha and Rachel he had bonded himself to London, to their street and to his flat beside their home. So this is where he went looking for his next book, one in which he would immerse himself not just in the life of an individual subject, but in the stories of four houses and the families who’d lived in them. The houses had once all formed part of South Hill Drive, each built on a plot of land where a modern block of flats much like Michael’s own now stood. It was a map in a local museum that had first brought these buildings to his attention. The map, of the Heath and its surrounding streets, was marked with a pattern of black dots, each marking the site where a bomb had fallen during the air raids in the Second World War. Instinctively, Michael had looked for his own street on the map, and then his own flat within it. A single black dot marked its position exactly. He looked at the other three dots scattered around the loop of South Hill Drive. All of them marked other modern blocks, built after the war and slotted into the sweeping curves of the original houses.

The research that such a book would require—hours at the Public Record Office in Kew, or trawling the local archives in Hampstead—promised Michael the scope and structure of a regular routine. But beyond this he couldn’t say exactly why this project had appealed to him above others. He knew there were probably reasons for his preference that at this stage in his planning he’d rather not look at directly—a historical study of death from the air, an exploration of the relationship between a family and its home. But he knew, too, that the project’s attraction was in some way associated with his penance, a private accumulation of gestures on the other side of those scales. And that it was about the nature of ghosted existence as well, the way Caroline had appeared to him in that bath. Or the way every time he passed the Nelsons’ staircase he still saw, with such clarity, the detail of Lucy’s falling. Every house in the street was layered with such existence, the spaces within them thick with lived human lives. But the four modern blocks of flats were haunted by entire buildings, not just people. Homes that had gone in a matter of seconds. And it was this, Michael sensed, that was drawing him. The prospect of re-creating the houses themselves as well as their inhabitants. Of rebuilding the very vessels and witnesses of the living that had occurred within them. As if, in having seen one ghost and created another, Michael was leaving himself no other choice than to immerse himself in an endeavour of multiple resurrection.