The Tenth Gift (2 page)

T
HE DOORBELL RANG
. M
ICHAEL CROSSED TO THE WIN
dow and looked down. In the street below a man stood, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as if in dire need of a visit to the lavatory. He was dressed too warmly for the weather, in an old wool Crombie and cord trousers. From his bird’s-eye vantage point, Michael could see for the first time that the top of Stephen’s head was almost bald, save for a thin covering of comb-over which looked almost as if it had been glued down. He looked comically out of place in this part of Soho, where young men paraded up and down in muscle shirts, ripped denim or leather, and knowing smiles, and tourists got vicarious thrills by entering, if only for an hour or so, the cruising scene.

Old Compton Street hadn’t been quite so outré or lively when Michael first moved into the flat: He felt now, watching the tide of young life passing by outside, as if he were looking through a window into someone else’s party, one to which he was too old and straight to be invited. Especially now that he was back on the narrow path, playing the good husband.

“Stephen!” he called down, and the balding man lifted his head, shading his eyes against the sun. “Here!” He threw his keys out of the window. “Top floor.”

Not just his keys, either, he thought ruefully as they left his hand, but Julia’s, too. He supposed he should return them to her now that it was over. But it just seemed so … final.

The arrival of Stephen Bywater interrupted his thoughts.

“You could have come down to the shop,” he said accusingly, wiping the sweat off his forehead. Four flights of rickety stairs, and he wasn’t a young man. “It’s not as if Bloomsbury’s more than ten minutes’ walk.” He struggled out of his Crombie as if to emphasize his discomfort.

“I didn’t want people interrupting us,” Michael said quickly. “You’ll see why in a moment. Sit down.”

He pushed a pile of newspapers and textbooks off the threadbare sofa to make space for his visitor. Stephen Bywater looked at the stained canvas dubiously, as if he didn’t want to risk his trouser-seat on it, then balanced himself uncomfortably on the edge, his bony knees and elbows sticking out at all angles like a praying mantis.

“It’ll be worth your while,” Michael went on excitedly. “Just wait till you see this. It’s quite extraordinary, a real gem, unique. Really, there’s no point in my wittering on. Take a look and see for yourself.”

From a black carrier bag on the coffee table he extracted a small, brown-paper-wrapped parcel. This he handed to Bywater. His visitor opened it gingerly, removing a little pale, calf-leather-bound book with flecks of gold tooling on the spine. He murmured appreciatively, turning it to examine the back board, the rough paper edges, the binding.

“Very nice. Sixteenth, seventeenth century.” He opened the front cover with infinite care, turned to the title page. “Sixteen twenty-four. Remarkable.
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie.
Heard of it, of course, but never actually laid my hands on a copy. Very pretty. A little light spotting and some old handling marks, but generally very fine condition.” He grinned up at Michael, showing teeth as yellow as a rat’s. “Should fetch a few quid from a specialist collector. Where did you say you got it from?”

Michael hadn’t. “Oh, a friend. Selling it on behalf of a friend.” This wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t too shy of it. “Look inside, look properly,” he urged impatiently. “It’s a lot more extraordinary than you might think at first glance.”

He watched avidly as the book dealer blew on the pages and separated them gently, making faces as he did so. “Well, it’s all there,” he said at last. “The patterns and slips and all.”

Michael looked deflated. “Is that all you can say? Come on, man, it’s unique, a … a palimpsest! Can’t you see the secret text, written in the margins and between the patterns? It’s not easy to make out, I’ll admit, but you can’t have missed it!”

Bywater frowned and reapplied himself to the book. Eventually he closed it and looked at his friend oddly. “Well, there’s certainly no palimpsest here, dear boy. This is paper, not vellum: There’s no sign of scraping, no
scriptio inferior
, nothing that I can see. Marginalia— well, that’s quite a different matter, as you should know. Now, marginalia in the author’s own hand, that would add some value, possibly double it—”

“It’s not in the author’s hand, you idiot. It’s written by some girl. It’s a unique historical document, and it’s probably priceless! You must need glasses.…”

Michael snatched the book roughly from the dealer’s hand, opening it at random, flicked through it frantically as if the writing he had seen the previous day might magically reappear.

After a minute, he put it down again, his face like thunder.

Then he ran to the phone.

I
KNEW
A
NNA
, M
ICHAEL’S WIFE, FROM UNIVERSITY
. T
HERE
, we had been the Three Amigos, me, Anna, and my cousin Alison, as unlike from one another as you could imagine. Where Anna was petite and doll-1ike, Alison and I were of solid Cornish stock, raised on rich dairy products and pasties. When I let it down, I could sit on my blond hair, while Anna’s was short and black and model-perfect; and Alison’s shoulder-length hair was chestnut brown, then red, then black, then scarlet, and back to brown again, depending on whether she was teaching English or Drama. Together we made the perfect symbiotic unit for getting through the trials of university and our first post-degree jobs—Anna in a bookshop, Alison teaching, me in an endless series of café s and bars.

Alison and I messed around, took drugs, got drunk, got laid, had fun, but Anna made shapes with her life: She took the threads of her experiences and wove them into something purposeful. She worked hard, and it showed. She was now a successful fashion magazine editor, earning a small fortune, although ironically, she was the only one of us who never really needed the money. Her family was, from what I could gather, though she was quite secretive about her background, and a bit shy around Alison and me and our noisy and frequent financial crises, really rather rich.

After college it was, I suppose, inevitable that we should drift apart. Alison met and married Andrew, for a start. I have to admit I was never that keen on Andrew. He was one of those ruddy, sweaty rugby-playing men, hearty and overconfident, with a tendency to
grab your knee, or something else, in the middle of a conversation, depending on how drunk he was. But he had a wicked sense of humor and no facility for embarrassment and he made Alison happy, for a while at least, so I did my best to make friends with him. They took me in time after time when I got my heart broken by one unsuitable man after another, poured drink down me, and Alison would look on indulgently as Andrew flirted clumsily with me while I laughed and wept and choked on my wine. When he cheated on my cousin and caused her to come running to me in tears, feeling that her life had come apart and could never be put back together again, I was livid with him and did not speak to him for the best part of two years.

How ironic. For shortly after that I met Michael.

How well I remember it all. Anna, a little breathless, flushed, embarrassed. “Julia, come and have a drink. There’s someone I want you to meet. My fiancé, in fact.“

Well, she’d kept that quiet. I was astonished, and rather hurt by the secrecy and suddenness of it all. She’d never even had boyfriends at college. When the rest of us were making the most of our newfound freedom, Anna was writing essays, researching, revising. While I was cheerfully experimenting with sex, Anna stayed focused and celibate. She took life a lot more seriously than the rest of us. After college she had plowed her energies into her career: She had a plan, she said, and it certainly seemed to be working for her. “I’ll marry in my thirties,” I remember her telling me, “once I’m properly established at the magazine and can take time off to have children.” And at the time I’d scoffed and reminded her how John Lennon had said that life was what happened to you while you were making plans. So there she was, at thirty-one, announcing her engagement, the next step in her life scheme.

“Are you pregnant?” I’d teased her.

She was indignant, but went very pink. “Of course not,” she said.

I wondered if she had even slept with him.

There had to be a flaw, since there is no such thing as perfection, in life or art or anything else. Perfection tempts fate. I remember reading that ancient Japanese potters always worked a tiny flaw into each pot they created, for fear of otherwise angering the gods, and Anna must surely have tempted some impish spirit somewhere in the pantheon, to have been punished for her hubris with Michael. And in having me for a friend.

Unfortunately for all of us, the attraction between Michael and me was instant. We made electric eye contact, and at one point during that first evening at a crammed little bar in Covent Garden, he brushed his hand, quite deliberately and with devastating effect, against my bottom. Three weeks later, after a lot of meaningful looks and some furtive touching, we slept together.

“I can’t tell Anna,” he said to me that same afternoon, as if it was a foregone conclusion, and I, missing my first and best opportunity to unravel the developing tangle, lay there concussed by sex and guilt, and agreed. After that it became increasingly unthinkable to admit our treachery.

I was maid of honor at the wedding.

As we lay together on snatched Wednesday afternoons in Michael’s Soho flat when he wasn’t teaching, summer sunlight slipping through the louvered blinds, slicing our bodies into lit and shaded slivers, he would confide to me, “She’s not very physical, Anna. I always feel I’m imposing myself on her.” At the time I felt triumph, but my confidence was misplaced. Anna’s cool distance intrigued and challenged him: She remained an unseized prize, an elusive country he had only fleetingly glimpsed but never claimed as territory. Whereas me he had staked out, explored, tied down—often literally. Sometimes when we made love, Michael would wind my long, pale hair in his hands, using it like reins. Once he tied me to a hotel bedstead with it. We had to use the pair of miniature sewing scissors I kept in my handbag with my embroidery kit to cut me free, he had made such a mess of the knots.

I recalled that particular incident now, four years later: It seemed
an apt metaphor—an omen perhaps—for how things had turned out. Michael had knotted my life into a vile tangle and then cut me free. I was angry with him, furious in fact, before admitting to myself that I had to take at least as much of the blame for the situation. Anna was, after all, my friend. I had felt ashamed of the affair, my betrayal of our friendship, from the start. But shame is an uncomfortable emotion, one we don’t much like to confront. The pressures of Anna’s work made this easier than it might otherwise have been, and I had become a master of excuses in avoiding dreaded tête-à-têtes and dinners à trois. Racked by the knowledge of how I was betraying her, day by day, hour by hour, I found I could not bear her company. She was so happy, and only I knew the truth that would render that happiness rotten and hollow.

Now that Michael and I had come to an end, I wasn’t sure I could ever endure to see her again.

The day after our breakup, exhausted by weeping, I took myself out of London for a week to walk the cliffs of the south coast, feeling much of the time like throwing myself over them, but never summoning the courage. I left my mobile phone behind in the Putney flat, to ensure I did not weaken and call him. Instead, in the time when I was not stalking mechanically along footpaths, impervious to the magnificent scenery, I devoted myself to a new embroidery design I had been meaning to start for some weeks.

It was for a wall hanging, and therefore to be worked on stout linen twill, in colored wools rather than silks. Ever since the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, this type of work has been known as crewel work, from the old Welsh word for
wool.
Which seemed fitting. I would spend many bitter hours playing on the unfortunate pun in my head as I stitched. Crewel world, crewel fate, crewel to be kind, crewel and unusual … I could go on but won’t. I had already marked out on the fabric a coiling monochrome pattern of stylized acanthus leaves picked out with flares of color where flowers burst through the foliage. Very traditional in style, after the Flemish Verdure
tapestries I’d seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the delicate in-filling of the leaf design inspired by the filigree of Venetian needlepoint lace. It was a large piece, and would easily cover the space where the beautiful, framed black-and-white photograph of Michael had hung in my bedroom. This, I had ceremonially burned in the back garden before leaving the flat, but the wall annoyingly retained its ghostly shape, and it would be a constant reminder of the absence of both man and picture.

Embroidery is an improbable hobby for someone as disordered as me, but it’s the very precision of it that attracts me, the illusion of control it offers. When engaged in stitching a new pattern, I can’t think about anything else. Guilt, misery, longing all flee away, leaving just the beautiful little microcosm of the world in my hands, the flash of the needle, the rainbow colors of the thread, the calming exactitude of the discipline. It was the wall hanging that saved my sanity in the days following our breakup.

I returned to London a week later, somewhat restored to myself, to find my answering machine flashing crazily.
You have twenty-three new messages
, the digital voice informed me. My heart thumped. Perhaps Michael had had second thoughts about finishing the relationship, perhaps he wanted to see me. I pushed this possibility firmly away. He was a bastard and I was well rid of him. Before I could backslide, I deleted all the messages. If there had been anything crucial, the caller would phone again, I reasoned. I knew that if I so much as heard Michael’s voice, my resolve would crumble.

I walked into the bedroom, where all was still in the disarray in which I had left it: the bed unmade, discarded clothes scattered across the room. I cleared everything away, filled the washing machine, and came back to make the bed.

The book Michael had given me lay in the tangle of sheets. It weighed beautifully in my hand, its soft calfskin cover warm, as if it were still alive. I opened it at random, folding the ancient paper back with care, and was confronted by a pattern for a slip: a delicate
repeated motif of a twining vine designed to be executed in black-work that the author suggested “would doe beste in a quaife or a caule, or to edge a handcarcheef.” The rest of his instructions were obscured beneath a defacing crosshatch of penciled markings. Annoyed, I carried the book to the bedside lamp and squinted at it under the round of golden light.

Someone had written all over the page in a tiny, archaic hand. Long
f
’s for s’s and that sort of thing; it was hard to read and in places blotched and faded, but from the words I could make out, it had nothing to do with embroidery at all; not unless the author had a taste for samplers themed on blood, and death. I retrieved a magnifying glass from the bureau, fetched a notebook and pencil of my own, turned to the frontispiece, and began to make a sort of translation of what I had found.