“Maybe.” It always amazes her, how these thoughts float into his mind. “I mean, do you remember it or is it just something you know? Deep inside you, do you know that someone carried you?”
“Probably. It’s why we have to be nice to my mother.”
“I am nice to your mother.”
“I never said you weren’t.”
Al and Susan watch as the shark drifts past, breathing in silent synchronicity. Her heart slows, lost in her own overpowering future, the proximity to danger, the serenity of his arms wrapping around her chest, swaying her back and forth.
“I want our children to be deep-sea divers,” he says. “I want them to identify twenty new species of fish and discover long-forgotten wrecks.”
“I just want them to have everything,” she says, squeezing his hand. “Everything they want.”
2010
Viola never gets mail. So it is unusual when she discovers a postcard (still life, fruit, a jug) resting in her letter box.
To: Viola with the fake cigarettes
c/o St. Sylvia’s College, Cambridge
Ring me, it says with a number.
In the last week, she has rewatched—twice—a period drama in which Orson plays a brooding artist/farmhand who is sent to war and makes obsessive drawings of a local heiress. By the time he comes back from the bloody battle scenes (layered obviously with pastoral reveries and provincial longing), his memory of his beloved has been so warped that he mistakes her for her sister, who turns out to have been in love with him all along. Long, moody shots of the Yorkshire Dales. Birds taking off as the sun rises. His face, screwed up and intent: this is how she has kept him alive.
She phones him from the wildflower garden outside of the library.
“Hello,” she says. “It’s Viola.”
“Ah, hello! I wasn’t sure you’d call.”
Of course she was going to call. “I’m sorry,” she says, “for abandoning you so abruptly.”
“Well, that’s just it. The thing is that I really hate to be in debt and I still owe you a drink. I was hoping you might come with me to a… thing I have to do this Thursday. London thing.”
“A thing?”
“It’s for charity. You like charity, right? You’re a fundamentally good person?”
“I’d hope so.”
“I can’t imagine you doing anything truly awful. But then again, I’m a terrible judge of character.”
Surely it is the only reason he is speaking to her, the only reason she has stuck in his memory one week later, when he has returned to wherever it is he goes, surrounded by beautiful anointed people. He must have figured it out: the resemblance to her mother, the name. Would it spoil things to mention it? To project a dead woman’s judgment onto the situation?
“So you’ll come, then?”
Inside the library, she can see the table she shares with Niamh, the stack of books by her own empty seat, all selected with the intention of reading them, or at least flipping decisively to the relevant section and pulling several key quotes to use in her extended essay proposals, which are drawing frighteningly close. It is strange, isn’t it, that she says yes without hesitation, that were he any other anonymous forty-year-old man, she would never agree to come meet him. But this is Orson Grey. Quite possibly the love of her life. She can afford a Saturday. She knows more or less the ingredients for her essay: propositions, representations, relationships.
“Saturday. I’ll get you a hotel. You can take the train?”
Across the garden, two women have entered, tourists, taking pictures and commenting unsubtly about whether or not the quad featured as a location on some TV show. They bend over, enchanted by the bees suckling at the last nectar in the red blossoms of autumn sage.
“I can get the train.”
One of them takes out her phone to photograph the stone library, and as Viola hangs up, she finds herself caught in the snap. Her mind dislocates and she is cardboard, a stock figure in someone else’s romance. There is an unpleasantness in the objectification: of her, of a place that, however ethereal, has become real to her—a home. A porter roundingthe courtyard calls out: “Members of the college only, ladies. Didn’t you see the sign?”
They slink away, leaving Viola feeling slimy. She’d had a similar sensation when, a few days after meeting Orson, she caved and texted Sebastian. Somehow, she wanted it to be a peace offering, an appeal to Sebastian’s twisted intrigue. A way to break the frost without apologizing.
