Just before I left for America V and I were asked to the wedding of an old friend of hers from university. At the bottom of the invitation they had written: ‘No presents please, your presence is the only present we need.’ V had fake retched when she’d read that. What crap, she’d said, everyone wants presents.
It came to me the next morning and so I went at lunchtime to a rare bookshop I found on Google. There were hardly any books of the type I requested, he’d told me over the phone, but naturally he did have one. Its rarity, he warned me, would make it more expensive than the hideously expensive ones all around us in the musty, over-crowded shop, but I had expected that. I waited while he went to fetch it, breathing in the dust of centuries and running my fingers across worn and broken spines, the leather cracked and chipped.
I was pleased by the size of the book which he laid on to the wooden table at the back of the shop and, as soon as he turned the first page, I knew I was going to buy it. There were pages and pages of detailed, gorgeous pictures of eagles, each one protected by a thin layer of white tissue paper. The prints were good enough to cut out and frame, something the dealer told me had happened to so many of these types of books. I was lucky, he said, that I had found his shop because he could guarantee he was the only person in London to have such a magnificent item in stock. But I was barely listening, instead marvelling at the riches in front of me, the golds and blues, the intricate details, the amazing scenes. He told me he could let it go for ￡3,500 and I didn’t bother to bargain because I would have paid double, maybe even triple, for a gift so perfect.
I had the book professionally wrapped at another place I found on Google, leaving it overnight and collecting it at lunchtime. From there I had it couriered to Steeple House. I could have taken it back to the office to accomplish all these tasks, but couldn’t bear answering questions about it all afternoon in the office. I didn’t want to turn up with it on the day and, more than that, I hoped V would open it before the wedding, I hoped she would get the message.
V once told me that I’m useless at interpreting signs and at the time she was probably right. We were lying on the grass near to her home in Sussex and it was one of those blisteringly hot summer days which only really seem to exist in memory. We had taken a picnic to a nearby field and V had laid our rug in the semi-shade of a tree. We had eaten well and drunk a bottle of wine, and I was on my back, V was resting on my chest, my arm lazily slung around her. I could feel her head rise and fall with my breathing and I remember thinking that this was what bliss felt like. That you could put a picture of us next to the word in the dictionary and everyone would understand. And I also knew it was the first time I had ever truly felt that way. Of course Elaine and Barry had made me feel happy and safe and even loved, but this feeling, which seemed to spread through my blood, into my toes, up through my head, along my muscles, this was new. It was also delicious; it was like a drug and I was already addicted.
‘Look, there’s a swan,’ V said, pointing upwards.
I looked into the sky but there was nothing there. ‘Can they fly?’
She laughed. ‘No, not an actual swan. A cloud swan.’
‘A what?’
‘Didn’t you ever play that game when you were young? You know, making shapes out of the clouds.’
‘No. We didn’t play any games.’
She leant up on her elbow so she was looking down on me and her hair brushed against my cheek. ‘Sorry, Mikey. I didn’t think.’
‘It’s OK.’ I reached up and wound a piece of her hair round my finger. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘Was it very terrible?’
I tried to think of something to say about my childhood, but all that came to mind was the colour grey and the feeling of cold concrete. It had only been three years since I had last seen my mother by then but she had already blurred and morphed into more of a feeling than a person and I found I couldn’t grab hold of a memory which felt real. ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ I tried, but that sounded wrong. ‘Elaine and Barry were great.’
‘Of course,’ V said. ‘But what was your mother like?’
V and I had only known each other for about six months at that point and I had never spoken to anyone before about my mother. But with V I always had the feeling that nothing was ever enough, that we could never do or say or know enough about each other. If I could have turned myself inside out to show her how I worked I would have done.
‘She was very sad,’ I said finally, which sounded true as I said it.
‘In what way?’
‘In every way.’ I tightened my twist on V’s hair and realised how easy it would be to rip it from its roots. ‘I think she drank as a way of blocking life out.’ The conversation was starting to make me feel funny, as if there was something I was forgetting.
‘What about your dad?’
‘I don’t have a dad.’
‘Everyone has a dad,’ V said, her eyes locked on me.
‘No, the space is blank on my birth certificate. My mother said it could have been one of a few men, none of whom she was still in contact with.’ The words sounded unreal outside of myself, where they had lived for so long. I almost wanted to catch them like butterflies and put them back. I couldn’t meet V’s eyes in case I had made her hate me.
But she leant down and kissed me very softly on the side of my mouth. ‘Oh, poor baby,’ she said, so gently I could have cried. Then she laid her head back on my chest and we breathed together for a few minutes. ‘The swan is still there,’ she said.
I looked back into the sky, but all I saw were wispy clouds against the peacock blue. ‘I still can’t see it.’
She laughed. ‘You’re not very good at interpreting things, are you?’
I pulled her closer to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, needing to say it so much at that moment I thought it might burst out of me if I didn’t.
She was quiet for a moment, but then, ‘I love you too,’ she said.
I can’t tell you why V loved me as much as she did. I spent the first year of our relationship terrified that she would wake up and realise she had made a stupid mistake, or identify me as the faulty goods I had always presumed myself to be. But it didn’t happen and I came to realise that she loved me in spite of who I was, which was not something I had ever imagined happening. At times I even let myself believe that she loved me because of who I was, although that thought never seemed quite real to me.
I thought it was a joke when she came up to me at a party I hadn’t wanted to go to in our second year at university. I thought once she had her light she would walk off, but she leant against the wall and asked me my name and what I was reading and where I was from and all those normal questions. And I was so stunned I didn’t ask her any in return, which I only remembered after I got back to my room hours later. I sat at my desk then and wrote out a list of things I wanted to know about her, all the things I would ask her next time, if the phone number she had given me proved to be real. And I also marvelled at the fact that I had even been at the party, via a series of odd coincidences, which was the first time I considered the possibility that fate had wanted us to meet.