Divided Kingdom (7 page)

‘What do you think, Tom?' he said. ‘Am I mad?'

Just then I saw my mother's bare feet on the road, and they were wet, and the pink polish on her toenails was chipped. I had to push the image swiftly to one side. Instead, I concentrated on the book in front of me. I concentrated hard. I could make out eyeholes now, and buckles too, and half a strap. And there, round the middle of the book's wide spine, was a section of the famous silver sandal. On the back, a hiking boot revealed itself. Then a plimsoll, an espadrille – a flip-flop. I began to get an almost visual sense of who Jean Parry had been.

‘It's like a photograph album,' I said.

‘Yes,' Victor said in a strange loud whisper. ‘Yes, that's right. Clever boy.'

I asked him what was inside.

The story of his wife's first life, he said, the one she had lived before she was taken. Each chapter was narrated by a different pair of shoes. He had given the shoes voices. He had let them speak. It was heretical, of course, in that it celebrated the world that had existed prior to the Rearrangement. On the evidence of this book alone he could probably be imprisoned – or, worse still, transferred to the Green Quarter, where almost everyone wrote books, apparently. ‘So don't say anything.' His eyes darted into the gloomiest corners of the room, as if government officials might already be lurking there. ‘Not a word.'

For the first time I realised the extent to which Victor had been on guard against me ever since I had appeared on his doorstep. The absent-minded, ghostly quality that had characterised so much of his behaviour may well have been rooted in the grief he felt over the loss of his wife, but he had also been intent on concealing the outer, more complex edges of his own
identity. He had seen me as an intruder and also, potentially at least, as an enemy. It must have been exhausting, I thought, to have had to keep himself so hidden, while at the same time being compelled to work, to live, to function normally, but then I suspected that he, like so many others, had become used to leading a double life. The Rearrangement had created a climate of suspicion and denial – even here, in this most open and cheerful of countries. People had buried the parts of their personalities that didn't fit. Their secrets had flourished in the warm damp earth, and it was by those secrets that they could be judged and then condemned. In showing me the book of shoes, Victor had placed his life in my hands. He had decided to have faith in me, and I determined, from that moment on, that I would never disappoint him or let him down.

By the time I turned fifteen I was two inches taller than Marie, and every now and then people would mistake us for lovers. Since my experience in the railway carriage, I had imagined all kinds of closeness with Marie, but never that. I had so many pictures of her stored inside my head, some real, some invented. They weren't wrong, just private. When we were seen as a couple, though, I felt as if someone had found out, and all the guilt came down on me, and all the shame, and anger too, a bright, crooked flash of anger through me, like a shiver. Marie thought it was hilarious, of course.

Gradually, I came to expect the comments, and I prepared myself. One morning, in the supermarket, somebody touched me on the elbow, and I turned to see an old woman smiling up at me. It warmed her heart, she said, to see two young people so much in love. I thanked her. Then, leaning closer, I told her that I had never been happier – and, curiously, I didn't have the feeling I was lying. Marie almost choked. I watched her disappear round a stack of cereals.
You know what you should do?
the woman said. I shook my head. The woman's smile widened.
You should marry her.
I wish I could have found this entertaining, as Marie did. When I got home, though, I sank into a deep despondency. My dreams had come true, but only for a few
moments, the moments during which an old woman in a supermarket had believed me, and now, once again, they were just dreams, and always would be.

In time, I succeeded in turning it into a game – I would spend hours thinking up different histories for us, fresh dialogue – but secretly I was flattered to be thought of as Marie's boyfriend. I wanted to be seen in that light, I liked the fact that it looked possible, and it would always come as something of a disappointment to me if we went out together and no one said anything.

Every once in a while, Marie would tell me about a fling she was having. On the one hand I felt privileged that she had chosen to confide in me. On the other, I couldn't stand hearing about a person whom I viewed, almost inevitably, as some kind of rival. It split me right down the middle, just listening to her.

I remember an evening when we walked up to the castle, a clear black sky above our heads. It had been raining earlier. Water rushed in all the gutters, and the air was full of river smells, reeds and mud and roots. When we reached the entrance – a pair of tall gates, padlocked at sunset – Marie asked me to give her a hand. I helped her up on to the wall, then she scrambled down the other side, first on to the roof of a garden shed, then down again, into the castle grounds.

Steep steps led to a stone tower, which was the highest point in town. There was a lawn up there, with a lime tree in the middle. Perched on the wrought-iron seat that circled the trunk, Marie lit a cigarette. A single raindrop promptly fell from somewhere and extinguished it.

She grinned. ‘You think someone's trying to tell me something?'

We climbed a spiral staircase to the top of the tower, then leaned on the battlements looking east. In the distance a pale glow showed here and there where the downs had been quarried for chalk. Marie began to tell me about Bradley Freeman, her current boyfriend. They had been going out for six months, and she had just discovered that he'd been seeing someone else all along. It took me a second or two to realise that she was talking
about the man who had taken me to see Miss Groves on the day of my first interview at the Ministry. He'd been pursuing Marie on and off ever since. I went back in my mind, but I could remember nothing about Bradley Freeman, nothing except his amiable manner and his endless mundane questions.

‘Why him?' I asked.

‘You wouldn't understand.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you're my brother.'

‘He doesn't realise how special you are.'

She sent me a sharp dark glance, as if she thought I knew something that I had no right to know, then she looked away again.

‘Sometimes he does,' she murmured.

I stared out over the rooftops. They seemed to mill and jostle in the darkness, as though straining at their moorings – more like boats than houses. The ground itself felt uncertain, unreliable. Everything could come apart so easily.

‘I wouldn't treat you like that,' I said.

She cupped a cold hand to my cheek, then turned from me and started down the steps. I hesitated, unable for a moment to conceive of any action that was not extraordinary. I would do anything for her, I thought, anything at all.

I caught up with her below the castle, outside a pub called the Silk Purse. She was standing on the pavement, a cigarette alight between her fingers, her eyes fixed on the window. She glanced at me across her shoulder. ‘Fancy a drink?'

‘I'm not old enough.'

‘Of course you are.' She took me by the arm. ‘Come on.'

In the lounge bar she ordered two glasses of red wine. And then another two. And then I've no idea how many.

It was the first time I'd ever been drunk. As we stumbled home down streets so narrow that if I ricocheted off one wall I collided with the other, I remember telling her that I loved her, no, I
adored
her, which made her laugh, and her hair fell forwards against her cheek like the tip of a cutlass and her teeth flashed in the black air.

I had to stop and stare at her. ‘You're so beautiful,' I said.

She had stopped too, though not because of what I'd said. Something else had just occurred to her. ‘What kind of girls do you like, Tom?'

I was staring at her again, but for a different reason now. I couldn't believe she hadn't understood. ‘Like you,' I said.

She put a finger to her lips. ‘You'll wake everybody in the street.' But she still had laughter in her eyes. They had sharpened at the corners, and the dark parts shone.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘Like you.'

She didn't seem to hear what I was telling her – or, if she did, she automatically discounted it.

We came down out of the old town and on to a main road near the station.

‘I'm not your brother, Marie,' I said. ‘We're not even related – not really.' I felt I was risking everything in saying this, and yet I couldn't hold back. But she didn't take it the way I had expected.

‘How much do you remember?' she said. ‘You know, from before?'

‘Nothing,' I said.

She stopped again and looked at me. ‘Nothing at all?'

‘Only my name.'

‘What was it?'

‘Matthew Micklewright.' The words sounded like gobbledegook. I wished I hadn't said them.

‘But you were eight years old. Nearly nine. You must remember something.'

I shook my head savagely. ‘No. Nothing.' What I was telling her was true, and for the first time ever I was glad it was true. I had an urgent need to deny her something. I was taking a kind of revenge on her.

‘That's astonishing,' she said, though she didn't look astonished. She was staring at the ground as if she had just noticed a bird with a broken wing.

As we crossed the river I insisted on walking in the gutter, even though I knew people always drove too fast on that particular stretch of road. Once, I looked up to see a pair of
headlights hanging in front of me, and Marie had to pull me back on to the pavement.

‘You'll get killed,' she said.

‘What do you care? I don't mean anything to you.' It all came out blurred. My tongue seemed to have swollen, filling my mouth.

Back home, I sprawled on the bathroom floor, the black-and-white tiles constantly swerving away from me but never going anywhere. Everything I thought of made me feel sick. I clutched the lavatory seat with both arms, my cheek resting heavily against my sleeve. Cold air rose out of the bowl. I tried to look round, but the ceiling tilted and I fell sideways against the bath.

Hauling me upright, Marie placed a hand on my forehead. I had to reach up and push it away. ‘No,' I mumbled. ‘Leave me alone.'

The impossible weight of her cool hand.

The impossible beauty of it.

On returning from the public library one evening, I opened the front door and called up the stairs as usual, but there was no response, nothing except the patient tick-tick-tick of the boiler and the creak of the bottom step beneath my foot. Outside, the shops had already shut and the street was quiet. It was the summer before I went to university. I would have been eighteen.

I was standing by the fridge drinking a glass of juice when I became aware of a breathy, repetitive sound coming from behind me. At first I thought a mouse had worked its way into the kitchen wall, but then some instinct sent me hurrying round the corner into the store-room where I found Victor in the shadows by the washing-machine, with his face in his hands. I asked him what was wrong. He shook his head. I reached out and touched his shoulder. His whole body was trembling. I thought of how machinery behaves when it's about to break down – all that pitching and staggering, all that vibration. Head still bowed, he turned towards me. I took him in my arms and held him. Victor. My father. I felt something cold land on the back of my
hand and realised he was crying. Then the words came, heaved out of him like sobs. Jean had died, he told me.

He stood in my arms until the light began to go.

His wife had already died once, years before. Now, though, she had died again, and this time she was gone for good. This second death was final, unambiguous, and left no room for hope. Had she suffered? Had somebody cared for her towards the end? Had she wanted to speak to him? He would never know. The gap that had opened up between them would never be closed.

I remember asking how he had found out. After all, it had been a decade since she had been taken from him. Being an adult, she would have kept her name, but her tracks would have been well covered. And even if he had been able to trace her, the law expressly forbade any contact.

‘I felt it,' he said.

Waking from a nap, he had somehow known that, at that moment, the woman he had always loved had ceased to breathe. The knowledge reached him with such force that he had jackknifed into an upright position, his heart beating so fast, so loudly, that he imagined he heard footsteps in the street below, a heavy person running.

I asked him if anything like that had ever happened before.

He shook his head. ‘No.'

He didn't think to question the information, though. For him, it had the incontrovertible power of a divine message or an oracle. It couldn't be verified, neither could it be disproved. Later, I saw that his behaviour had a distinct emotional logic to it. In sensing his wife's death, he had reclaimed her as his own.

Not that it was much comfort to him. He locked himself into his room and refused to come out. I would hear him weeping at all hours of the day and night. He wouldn't eat the meals I prepared for him. He even stopped listening to the radio. And Marie couldn't help. She had troubles of her own.

She had moved back into the house on Hope Street only a few days before. While working for a law firm in the capital, she had fallen in love with one of the senior partners, a married man more than twice her age. She became pregnant by him, but
subsequently lost the child. Not long afterwards, he embarked on an affair with his new secretary. Marie resigned. One Sunday morning she appeared on the doorstep with a suitcase, her complexion pale, almost soggy, her hair oddly lacklustre. I remember how frail she felt when I hugged her, as if all the spring and verve, all the resilience, had gone out of her. Less than a week later, Victor woke from his afternoon nap and the period of grieving began.