Near the end, I will say that I want you to see my house beside the sea, and the next day I will drive us and both of us will know what will happen after we have had dinner. We will cook eggs and bacon and move around my kitchen as if we have been choreographed, and we will eat at the table amongst the books.
The day after that, I will take you to lunch on Candover Street for hot salt beef and a warm beer. I will walk you home and we will kiss for the last time at your front door, on the street where anyone can see, but neither of us will care. Your lips will taste of mustard and cloves.
I will write you a letter.
Gil
[Both letters placed together in Prophecy—What Lies Ahead, by Oswald J. Smith, 1943.]
Chapter 9
In the hallway, towering piles of books lined the walls all the way to the kitchen. Precarious columns of paperbacks and hardbacks with cracked spines and dust jackets rose like eroded sea stacks, their grey pages stratified rock. Many were higher than Flora’s head, and as she walked between them it was clear that one bump might have them tumbling in an avalanche of words. The house had always been full of books, far too many for one person to get through in a lifetime. Her father didn’t collect them to read, to own first editions, or to keep those signed by the author; Gil collected them for the handwritten marginalia and doodles that marked the pages, for the forgotten ephemera used as bookmarks. Every time Flora came home he would show her his new discoveries: left-behind photographs, postcards, and letters; bail slips, receipts, handwritten recipes, and drawings; valentines and tickets, sympathy cards, excuse notes to teachers—bits of paper with which he could piece together other people’s lives, other people who had read the same books he held and who had marked their place.
Flora hadn’t been back for a month or two, and in that time it was as if the books had spawned. When she looked into the sitting room it was the same: nearly all the surfaces—the side tables, coffee table, and sofas—were covered. A second wall of books as high as her waist had always leaned against the outer one, but now that had grown in height, sagging in places and collapsing in others like a rockslide on a mountain road, and a third buttress was in development, encroaching on the diminishing space. She was surprised Nan hadn’t said anything; her sister would surely have been worried about their father’s state of mind before now.
From the doorway, Flora saw that the record player was clear of books and a record had been left on the turntable. Just for the sound of something so she wasn’t alone in the house, she made her way across the room and switched it on, and a guitar started, a man sang. She picked up the album cover—one she hadn’t seen before among her father’s collection—showing a man sitting at a kitchen table, pots and pans hanging above his head. Townes Van Zandt was written along the bottom. She turned the volume up so she would be able to hear it through the house, and then she flicked the sitting-room light off and went down the hall. There were fewer books in the kitchen, but they still hugged the walls, cluttered the table, and roosted on the counter. These had strips of newspaper, hanging out like loose grey tongues marking pages. Flora picked up a brick-red hardback without a jacket, its cover worn in places to brown suede: Queer Fish by E. G. Boulenger. She flicked through it and one of the homemade bookmarks fluttered to the floor. She stopped somewhere in the middle and held the book up to her nose—dust, memories, and the smell and colour of vanilla. She found a pen and at the bottom of the page drew a phalanx of fish dropping from a rain cloud. She closed the book, replaced it, and checked in the fridge: a bottle of milk in the door, four eggs in a box, an opened packet of smoked bacon secured with a pink elastic band that the postman must have dropped. Flora sniffed the milk, filled the kettle, and spooned leaves into a teapot.