Samantha Harvey: Dear Thief

‘For two years?’ we asked.

‘Love is hard to find.’

The garden was blowing with leaves and Nicolas put his elbows on the table with an attempt at anchorage and a seriousness that was almost morbid. He said, ‘So did you find it?’

‘I didn’t find the one . But I found a lot of people I wasn’t looking for, and I made do.’ He asked, ‘Who were you looking for?’ and you told him, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

He stood sharply and walked indoors. Your moods were the stuff of legend, and that day your mood could only be described as dangerous — languorous, facetious, self-absorbed; you were amused by yourself and this was the worst of all possible states, because it was the kind of amusement I imagine Caiaphas felt when he made a deal with the Devil. The amusement is a mask for the wretchedness we feel for striking up an unhappy alliance — in your case this alliance was with yourself, whom you had long thought badly of and were always escaping. But on that day it was as though you had recognised that you owned only yourself, were shipwrecked with yourself, and your mood reflected your disgust at this most desperate, careless misfortune.

Later that evening you went on the train to London and Nicolas went with you. ‘I’m getting out’ was the last thing you said to me when the two of you left for the station. He came back alone two days later, and that was that where the three of us were concerned.

Get out of what? This mess, this life? I have always wondered — and I will only ask you once — did you manage it, did you get out?

Teddy was here yesterday; his arrival made me put down my pen for the first time in days. He came to visit for the night on his way to see friends for New Year’s Eve, but he brought no bags as such, just an extraordinary array of energy drinks and some crash weight-gain powder that he had as pudding with a glass of wine, as part of a prolonged attempt at gaining breadth. He has grown up willowy like my father, without Nicolas’ sturdiness — but this strikes me as strange when I write it, because Nicolas was a slender man when younger and hardly (what would you say?) burly himself. It’s just that, at twenty-two, Teddy is taller than Nicolas ever was and doesn’t have that thickset neck and jaw, and the prominent Adam’s apple, the sheer masculinity, and it bothers him. Wrongly, but all the same.

The thing is that I see very little of Teddy lately, and when he visited this time it was to tell me that I will see even less of him still. In four days, January 3rd, he is taking his camera and travelling around eastern Europe for a few months to photograph the forests, to travel to Lithuania in particular. Perhaps to find a wife, he said. English women stifle him. We were out on a night walk by the river at the time; the skies were clear after days of snowy cloud, and he wanted to show me the arrangement of Jupiter and Venus on a rare cross-path, one above the other in the western sky, rather like lights on some stupendous radio tower.

We saw the planets sure enough. I thought they looked rather alien-invasion and wondered why I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘Things are rarely seen without being looked for,’ Teddy said with that palladian, harmlessly arch tone that sounded strange coming from somebody whose nappies I had once changed. Yet I respect him and he shows himself routinely worthy of it in the things he knows or thinks or feels, for example when he insisted that we try to see the planets, and the sky in general, in reflection in the water, because a sky without a reflection is just the sky in profile. I discovered on that walk that my son loves reflections, he loves and requires symmetry. But though we stood at several points along the bank in the grainy mulch of mud and thawing snow, and though the city found some crude reflection, the river was too wide, full and flowing with meltwater to reflect any of the subtleties of the sky. We stood pointlessly in the way people do when they have come to see something and end up seeing nothing.

‘But Lithuania,’ I said to him. ‘It’s too far away.’ He took my hand hesitantly. ‘In the scheme of things, it’s just around the corner,’ he replied, and I could only say, ‘Not in my scheme of things.’ ‘Well, I’ll send you photographs, one a week.’ But I knew that, even with the best will in the world, he would not, so I suggested, ‘Send me one — just one — make it a good one.’

Five years after you finally disappeared I found a postcard from you in Teddy’s bedroom. It was 1991, so he must have been eleven at the time. It bore a picture of a chihuahua on the front wearing a Tommy Cooper hat, and on the back a Lithuanian stamp. I haven’t seen the postcard itself for years, but I do still remember the picture on the stamp, which was a castle, and I remember this because Teddy was very much into castles and fortresses at that time and had drawn a tiny knight in its turret and another on a horse approaching at speed from the far left, above the words Dear Teddy .

In the card’s short message you claimed to be living in the desert, and it bothered him immensely that you had not said which desert; he had looked at his atlas to see if there were deserts in Lithuania and found there were none to speak of. When I asked him about the postcard, this was his only concern, that he might discover which desert you meant. He thought perhaps you were referring to the dunes along the spit, down to Nida — could people live in dunes? He had a look of respect and despair when he asked that, which implied that of all the women he knew, past, present and future, you were the one who could most plausibly live alone in sand dunes.

I did not have the heart to tell him that as likely as not there was no desert and that he had been flung a metaphor. It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else. You try to dig with it and it bends in half. This is not the kind of woman you can expect to get something straight from, I wanted to tell him. It made me feel defensive of him, because he was a child and still in the habit of taking you at face value, of worrying about and trusting you.

I am sure that his trip to Lithuania is a delayed response to the call of that postcard, but I decided not to bring it up. I have always wanted him to live life fully and not to be afraid, and not to put barriers in his way — above all else, not to be the barrier itself. Instead, as we left the river and walked up through the streets, I decided to change topic by asking him what was wrong with English girls.

‘They don’t know anything about the world,’ he said. So I asked, ‘And other girls do?’ He ruffled his hair with his fingertips as Nicolas has always done. ‘I don’t know yet.’ I suggested that maybe it is because we live on an island, and islanders are always more closed off from the world, and he turned to me with his grey eyes narrowed and said, ‘Mind you, I do have a thing for Jean Shrimpton.’

I laughed. ‘Jean Shrimpton! She’s older than me now.’ ‘What, did she used to be younger than you?’ he asked. He made a square with the thumb and forefinger of both hands. ‘You know the picture I love best? The one of her with the white scarf around her head.’ He loosed his hands upwards in adulation. ‘Ah, she looks so perfect in that one.’ I said, ‘Where she looks like a young girl, you mean?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Vulnerable, unblemished—’ ‘Underage.’ ‘Exactly.’

Then he gave that smile of disruptive mischief that I’ve known him to have since he was weeks old, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement, suddenly serious, and looked directly up at the clear sky.

‘You know when I see stars I always think about…’ He left a pause, so I invaded it. ‘When you see stars you should think about stars, Teddy.’ I said it with frustration, admonishment, though I had meant to be more delicate than that. And I regretted saying it, because he looked at the ground without reply and appeared to shrink into the old shape of himself as a child.