Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

(Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio. It turns out I am not at my desk in central London but in a cell awaiting trial without bail, because whoever bought the cottage in Morda decided to dig foundations for an extension to the kitchen, which was admittedly always too small, and the digger turned up bones and teeth and a silver cobra, which they believe would have been worn on a woman’s upper arm, some small hooped earrings and some scraps of undecomposed leather and zip from a pair of winter boots.

People in the village mutter: How could she have done it? Which leads me to think: How did I do it? Suffocation is the kindest way, especially if you were in one of your stupors; strangulation unlikely since you would not have let me; knifing or bludgeoning impossible because you are, after all, a friend, one held dearly and much loved, and I am not a monster.

I will plead guilty to a crime of passion, something I have often imagined with fondness and craving, as though nothing could be more wonderful than such a crime. Some days I look around me at the hundreds of people all moving purposefully towards a blind fate, or not even at this, but at something more banal — the arch of the underground train tunnels, which are made with human hands and are as courageous as a swan’s neck, or a swan’s neck as breakable as a hazel twig, or the sheer, pointless, brilliant glare of sun on glass that makes you blink and long for something that vanishes before you know what it was — and it seems to me that this whole universe is a crime of passion. So reckless in its short-termism, wreaking such magnificent havoc on those who come to live in it, so unreasonable and grotesque and glorious and rampant and murderous, because nothing escapes it alive, yet nothing escapes it without having lived either, without having been zealously loved and brought to its knees — even if only once, for a moment — by it.

Oh, to have murdered you, Butterfly, with my heart on fire. And then to write out my defence just as the universe defends its crimes with a sunset. Happy days, happy, wild and playful thoughts. Meanwhile, both (probably) alive, I suppose we proceed meekly on.)

Yesterday evening after work Ruth’s daughter was waiting for me. Or I should say I saw her outside in the driveway of the care home about half an hour before I was due to finish, so I went out to her, and she said she’d be happy to wait. She sat in the summer house until seven.

‘You could have come indoors,’ I said, when I was finished. ‘The evenings are still so cold.’

‘I prefer it outside.’

‘Did you want to talk about something?’ I asked, at the same time as she said, ‘I’d like to talk about something.’

So I suggested that we walk towards the Tube, and go to a café there. By the time we got to the café it was closing, so we just walked up past the farmers’ market at Swiss Cottage and made a loop behind Hampstead Theatre and back, and repeated it. She told me that she wanted to give up her religion, this was the gist of it. It had suddenly become very clear to her that she needed to leave it behind.

‘Do you feel guilty for that?’ I asked.

‘Guilty? No, no.’

I was going to ask her in that case why she was telling me and not her parents, why she seemed to be coming to me for reassurance. But then I saw she hadn’t come for reassurance, she had come to be heard as an adult. She must be twenty-one, a year younger than Teddy, but she has a plump dimple in the middle of her chin that makes her look perpetually childlike. All of Ruth’s children have this, a look that is almost Amish — thick honey-coloured hair and smoke-grey eyes and fresh, gentle features. We hardly ever saw them when they were growing up, they were always at this group or that class, or staying with Ruth’s mother in Suffolk. I can’t even remember when you would have last seen Lara; it must have been when she was four or five, and I can’t say she’s changed much essentially since then. Goodly, we called Ruth’s children; the goodly brood . All the same we — you too — were awestruck by their looks and kindness in our own way.

‘It’s since we saw the Pinter play,’ she said. ‘I watched that old man speaking to an empty chair and pouring a glass of wine for nobody, and it’s exactly like speaking to God, and taking communion for God. Have a glass of wine, God. Here, let me drink it for you since you haven’t shown up again.’ She paused and looked at me.

‘Is that how you see it, that God stands you up?’

There was a small sound that was almost laughter and she looked at me as if to say I didn’t know the half of it. Then she asked, ‘Did you think that man in the play seemed lonely?’

When I answered yes she said, ‘Every Christian, Jew, Muslim is lonely. They speak to God, and God never speaks back.’

I had been moved, or maybe impressed, by her rapture at the Pinter play. It wasn’t a child’s rapture. Now I suppose I could see why, though I wasn’t prepared for this kind of discussion or for how agitated she was. And I realised that she had chosen me to speak to about it, not arbitrarily or for lack of other opportunities, but very specifically, because she viewed me as the godless family friend who countered their piety with cynicism; I wanted to say: But I am not godless! It’s just that God has got tired of me. I could feel how much she wanted my cynicism now, and for that reason I couldn’t give it — because I didn’t want her to give up the cause so easily.

‘My grandmother used to tell me that everybody without God is lonely,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s what they say isn’t it? That’s the official thing, the—’

‘Party line.’

‘Yes.’

‘But maybe the point is that we’re lonely either way — sometimes anyway. Atheists and believers alike.’

‘At least atheists aren’t also stupid. I sit in church every week with my head all low like a bad dog, falling for the biggest joke that ever was.’

I couldn’t help but smile. ‘There’s no shame in falling for a joke,’ I said, and I might not have sounded sincere but I was, oh I was — because of course all life is a joke and falling for it is the best we can do. Better than refusing to laugh along, which I sometimes think is the route to madness.

I put my hand on Lara’s shoulder as we walked, and I wondered at how much courage had gone into this conversation on her part, or how much going against the grain. If ever the phrase ‘in the bosom of one’s family’ could be used without irony, it would be in relation to the belonging, wholesomeness and gentle piety of her family, its sheer warmth and durability. I remember Ruth once saying that she had created for her children a home that was failsafe; there were no needs, spiritual at least, that could not be met by the love they found there. And in light of that, Lara seemed to me, in the dusk, a fledgling that had crept out of the nest and up the branch an inch or two, and wanted to go neither back nor forward, nor up nor down.

‘When I used to ask God to speak to me,’ she said, ‘I was always sure he did. I heard a man’s voice, which actually is just my Uncle Billy’s voice. Not God at all, just Uncle Billy, who Dad says is a gambler, a womaniser and a racist. And now when I ask there’s nothing at all.’

I took my hand from her shoulder and put it in my pocket. ‘Then withdraw your belief. If God exists he’ll wait for you to come back, and if he doesn’t you won’t feel his loss.’

For a while she didn’t answer, and when I looked at her she was staring straight ahead, and I thought she was irritated with me for being facile. Her cardigan was draped over her bag and the belt was dragging along the ground, so I picked it up and looped it around the bag strap. Then she said, ‘I feel like I’m always carrying a sack of stones.’ And she smiled, as though I had given her permission to put it down.