Samantha Harvey: Dear Thief

‘What did you lose?’ And so I said, without thinking, ‘My grandmother’ and I lifted my chin defiantly and took him in for the first time.

He had the hair of a king; I could imagine women running wax through it. Thick, curly and dark, and dark serious brows. ‘Careless,’ he said.

Then he stood and made his way down the slope in two sideways strides. He took something out of his pocket, took a torch from the other pocket and shone the light onto his opened palm. ‘The tail of a peacock,’ he said. I glanced it over and he explained, ‘A broken half of a figurine from Victorian times, or maybe before. I found it a few weeks ago on the shore near Blackfriars Bridge.’ So I said, partly because I was annoyed with his flippancy about my grandmother, and partly because I had no idea what else to say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

He lifted one of those heavy brows and turned the peacock in his palm a couple of times before putting it back in his pocket. ‘Do you mean your grandmother has died?’

When I nodded he showed an expression that surprised me — sorrow; no, not sorrow. I don’t know how to explain it, except that you will know it anyway, that expression he has always had in which his whole life turns up for a moment in his eyes. He might be thinking anything, though in fact there probably is no thought he could single out. The most ineffable of looks — I put that down to the moonlight at the time, though I realise now of course it is nothing to do with the light. It is a look that fuses poles. It could be fear, then and again it could just as easily be peace; I always think, when I see it, of the way very hot water can feel cold for a moment — there is some point of intensity where one thing can be experienced as its opposite, and that is the intensity I am talking about in his expression.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you lose something on this shore and you keep looking for it, one day it’ll turn up. It’s widely believed that the river reunites all things.’

I wasn’t sure if this fatalism was supposed to be his attempt at solace, as if death unites all things, as if one day I would find my grandmother again; anyway, I was not consoled. I was needled. His openness wrong-footed me, his candid, unproblematic face, which I knew (consciously, even at the time) I would fall for because it was not like mine, and which made me bad-tempered because it had taken away my power to decide what I wanted and didn’t.

‘I suppose you think it’ll offer up the other half of your figurine?’ I asked finally, when I realised he had said all he was going to say on the subject of my grandmother. And he replied instantly, ‘I do.’ ‘So will you be coming to look for it for the rest of your life?’ Again, instantly he said, ‘Surely that depends on how soon I find it.’

We crouched at the bottom of the slope, in the marsh grasses. ‘I’ve come back to find one of the bones I dropped,’ I said, and before I could go on he intervened with, ‘I guessed.’ ‘A long one,’ I said, ‘I thought it was worth the return trip. Maybe I dropped it when I climbed up here.’

He said I didn’t seem to have; I had to agree. I looked at him in profile, at the proud curve of his nose, at his lips that rose permanently at the corner in a smile, at his overall slapdash elegance as he sank deep and loose into that crouch. And me deep and loose in mine too, because I am a natural croucher, but not elegant, more functional, as if I have been designed to hinge at extreme angles for a purpose still, at the age of fifty-two, not discovered.

‘The Thames is full of loot,’ he said. ‘Maces, axes, swords, half peacock figurines, coins, Roman shoes, pipes, pots, cannonballs, cufflinks. Bones, of course — as you know. Animal and human — some of them might have been Neolithic ritual offerings.’ ‘Do you think mine are Neolithic ritual offerings?’ I asked, and he looked east along the river. ‘Very much doubt it.’ ‘But you haven’t even seen them.’ Then, I remember, he reeled in his gaze rapidly until it was fixed on my mouth. ‘So why did you ask me?’

He watched me at an angle as if taking in something extremely curious, and then we got back to our feet; my blood had rushed and I’d felt for a moment that the moon was hurtling. ‘I’m sorry about your grandmother,’ he said, and took my hand to help me up the slope.

‘Please don’t be, she was happy. She always fed her dogs fresh mince and red-wine gravy, and put two eggcups of brandy in their water to give them good dreams — her heart was good and big. Heaven will find room for her, please don’t be sorry.’

‘I meant I was sorry for you.’

I told him he mustn’t be.

‘When did she die?’

‘When you first looked at me from over there.’

He opened and closed his mouth without managing to produce a word, and when he saw I was smiling he did so too. Mine was a smile dredged up from somewhere thick with the overpowering smell of incense. My mother had always burnt eucalyptus, holy basil, cardamom, ginger grass, lemon grass, palmarosa, brought back from her trips to Kerala, and that was the smell of home. Now it smoked up heavily in my nostrils as if I were catching my own scent.

When I told him I had to go back, he said, ‘Come on then.’

If it struck me as strange that he was coming with me, that I didn’t refuse, that he’d known about the bones despite never having looked up the first time I went past, that he’d assumed my grandmother’s death without the slightest doubt, or even that I had assumed that death without doubt, well then this strangeness was nothing to be marvelled at. We were not living in normal times just for the moment. We walked.

We stopped when we had reached the pile of bones on the doorstep. When I bent to them my head filled with tears as if I were a bucket being emptied, and I sobbed, because I had no idea how I would move her or what to do with a dead person.

‘Wait until the morning,’ he said, and ran a thumb under my eye to staunch the tears. I blinked and the tears ran horizontally along his thumb and down into the well between knuckles, into the small hammock of webbed skin.

‘I don’t think you have a hope in hell of finding your figurine,’ I said, and he thanked me, and said he appreciated the encouragement.

In my mind I have always since conflated his smile as he said that and walked away with the smile on my grandmother’s face when I found her dead, both expressions of infinite contentment. In the morning, after I had called for an ambulance and my grandmother had been taken away, I was left sitting in her rocking chair, tearless and calm after that peculiar epiphanal night of seeing through the gauze , my foot stroking her dog’s back. I hadn’t wanted to go in the ambulance and I had agreed that I would walk to the hospital straight away to see to the papers. It was then that Nicolas came back; it couldn’t have been much after seven a.m. but the sun was long up and when I heard the knock on the door I had no doubt it was him. I was still wearing my dress from the night before, which was streaked with the bones’ dirt and the to-and-fro across the flood wall, and which in any case he took off — may I say it? tore off — once the door was closed.

I refuse to feel awkward telling you this.

Shortly after we met I gave him one of my grandmother’s rosaries, which was made of beads of ox-blood red. He gave me a conch that looked like a harp. He had found it on that same bit of river beach a few years before, in the marsh grass. How did a bright queen conch from the tropics arrive downstream of Woolwich? It struck me, these strange relocations the things on our planet go through; but of course, Nicolas says, the Earth is a closed system, where else can things go? We live on a sphere with a roof and a floor. Things simply move from here to there either underground or across the ground or through the air, disappearing, emerging, decomposing, re-forming, transforming. All this, yes, but never ceasing, because ceasing to exist is not an option on offer to the things on this planet.