In the morning Helen rose, her hand still cramped from the effort of writing. Standing from her bed, she was greeted by a chorus of lights that she thought of, without alarm, as brain-lightning. A strange calm took her as she made her way to the kitchen, and abided with her even as she reached for her second shoe, and felt a ripping inside her mind. A sudden, violent tearing of seams. It didn’t feel at all like the Parkinson’s; in the quiet lucidity that suddenly brimmed in her, it seemed to her instead that this was something altogether new—something freeing—a thunderbolt, a stroke, a mercy. Saving her from the grinding fate she’d most dreaded, even as it schooled her in disappointment. It’s all right, she told it. I’ve known for a long time.
Still wearing the rumpled suit in which Patricia Starling-Haight and Patricia Smith had dressed her, she carried a slim envelope to the post office half a block from her flat. The wait was long, and the low-ceilinged room tilted and slewed about her. She shuffled forward in the queue, holding to the wall.
The clerk behind the counter was sallow, lightly pimpled, too thin for his clothing. She handed him the envelope.
He studied it, then held it up before her, pointing to the stamp she’d attached.
“This isn’t enough postage to get to Israel,” he said.
She smiled thinly. Then, to appease him, she fished her coin purse from her satchel. She opened it and set it on the counter.
He looked affronted. “I’m not going to search about in there for your money.”
She waited, swaying slightly at the counter.
He squinted, perplexed—and then, when seconds had passed and still she hadn’t spoken, as though he wanted to ask whether she was all right, but couldn’t find the words in which to do it. She saw that he needed forgiveness for his failure to inquire after her well-being, and for all the things he’d failed to say in his slim but mounting years. And so, toppling the open purse with the tips of her fingers until it had disgorged a small pile of coins—enough, surely, to purchase postage for a letter that bore no signature and would not reach its destination because it had none—she answered him with a small smile that held the world’s mercy.
30
August 12, 1667
22 Av, 5427
Richmond, Surrey
Birdcalls. The hush of the moving current. The sounds of the river, fresh and expectant.
A bright, bewildering blue.
The large white sheet Alvaro had laid on the grassy bank was dazzling in the sun. She took the final steps of the dirt path toward the bank. Then, hesitating an instant, stepped onto the grass, her shoes slipping on the gentle pitch.
From the water’s edge, he looked at her and smiled. His breeches were rolled above the knee.
“If I die of a chill,” she said.
“At last,” he said. “I knew I’d persuade you.”
The grass smelled intoxicating. “You haven’t,” she warned.
“If you die of a chill,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard, “I shall publish your writings under my name, and become famous throughout the world for my thoughts, until some king removes my head to prevent it from producing them.”
She refused to laugh. “Promise,” she said severely. “Say you’ll burn them.”
Skimming the water’s surface with one foot, he sent a splash just shy of her feet. “Shall I teach you to swim, now?”
“Not until”—she began again—but was stilled, unexpectedly, by a thought: how Mary would laugh at the two of them, and tut at the bargain that had bought this life, and laugh again.
“Watch now, Ester!” He stood, aligned his feet on the verge of the bank, and pushed off. His thin form dove arrow-straight into the water. She watched his body shoot under the brown surface, a strange species not dreamt of in all her days.
He stroked back to her, his arms scattering brilliant droplets.
How, in the exile that ought to have killed him, had he learned this?
Pulling himself from the water, his white shirt clinging so she could see every rib, he squinted up the path—up the hill whence the cherub carver would come, once the servants directed him from the house. A glad anticipation lit his face.
“Promise!” she said weakly.
A bright, bewildering blue.
31
April 9, 2001
London
He reached for his phone, the fourth time today. He dialed Helen’s number—he’d learned it by heart these past forty-eight hours—and spoke to her answering machine.
“Helen, it’s Aaron again. I swear I’m not stalking you. Just let me know you’re all right, will you? I promise I won’t come steal the documents, despite being a marauding American.” He hesitated. “Listen, this isn’t a threat, but if I don’t hear from you today I’m going to have to sound the alarm at the university.” The silence on the line felt endless. “I promise not to tell Martin how much you’ve always admired him.” While he was weighing how much further to carry the joke, the machine cut him off.
He turned back to the computer screen. The blinking cursor reproached him. Without the new set of Richmond documents in hand, and in the absence of any word from Helen for the second day running, he’d found himself at such a loss that, sometime around noon, he’d made himself open his dissertation. What he’d found there: pedantic analyses; notes for an argument he’d never succeeded in building. He’d read and read—walking circuits around his dissertation as though it were a walled city—unable to find a point of entry.
What was he waiting for? Something had happened to Helen; he needed to act. Yes, logic said she might just have retreated to work on the papers all by her prickly English self. But he didn’t believe it. Something was wrong: she wasn’t well, she’d fallen, she needed help. Or so it seemed to him—that is, if he could trust his instincts about anything anymore?
His own impotence shocked him. Five days had passed since Marisa’s e-mail, and he still hadn’t replied. Marisa would assume, correctly, that his silence meant cowardice. She’d sniffed him out from the start: Aaron Levy was half real, half fa?ade . . . and by now it must be clear to her, as it was to Aaron, which half would prevail. This—his deadening failure, his inability to even approach the subject without an obliterating panic rising in his chest—was the measure of the man he would always be.
And now Helen had disappeared, and he couldn’t even think what to do. How had he never bothered finding out where she lived?
Slowly he rose and forced himself to change out of his sweatpants—realizing only as he did so that he hadn’t left his flat since the day before yesterday. He made it to the door and was blinded by the pollen-laden afternoon. The fact of spring seemed incongruous. But once out in the fresh air, he revived. Shaking off his torpor, he set off for the Tube.
He arrived at the rare manuscripts room only to find it closed. A sign indicated that a bookcase was being installed, and the room would reopen at three-thirty. It was three-fifteen, and he slumped against the glass wall to wait. He hadn’t been there two minutes, though, when footsteps sounded on the floor, and he was joined by none other than Brian Wilton—who balked at the sight of Aaron but clearly could think of no plausible excuse to retreat. Wilton read the sign—then, with a polite nod, took up a station near Aaron.
They stood side by side, backs to the glass wall.
“Bloody bookcases,” Wilton said.
“Bloody bookcases,” Aaron echoed.
Wilton nodded agreement.
They stood.
Wilton’s brown hair was thick and wavy; his clothing was rumpled but well-kept; everything about him was affable. Aaron had never disliked Wilton personally the way Helen did, but now it seemed to him that he might be able to muster the emotion. It was unnatural, Aaron thought, for a historian and an Englishman to be so polished. To have such an innocent face. Wilton would be the hands-down winner of the all-England charming historian competition. The all-England bodacious hair competition.
“You haven’t seen Helen Watt lately,” said Aaron, aware of a faint churlishness in his tone, “have you?”
“No,” Wilton said immediately, as though he’d been thinking about Helen too. “Not for a few days.” Something played on his face. Slowly it dawned on Aaron that it was guilt.
Speaking cautiously, Wilton continued. “I hear she’s retiring.”
“In word only,” Aaron countered—too fast to mask his defensiveness.