David Mitchell: The Book of Other People

Gulls are her familiars. Damp tourists, anglers, local hoodies and drug addicts, bored rich Germans, spiteful June Nolans, soya-milk Winnifreds and bronzed Marions, holiday admirals in their affordable yachts… they watch on, wondering, Who is that woman? Why is her sadness so deep? She will remain anchored in the inlets of their memories, long after today. This woman moves in a separate realm. A Meryl Streep sort of realm. A realm which ordinary people can glimpse, but never inhabit.

Tucked up on the toppermost shelf of the town, Oliver Dunbar Photography was open for business as usual. A bell greeted me: the very bell Olly must have heard every day of his working life here. Right here. I must obtain it, and have it rigged up to my door at home. Inside, a man was speaking on the telephone. Leo! I recognized him by his voice. Leo is a touch beefier than Olly, but he has those sensuous Dunbar eyes, and that Jeremy Irons bone structure. His black clothes – obviously he’ll be in mourning for weeks yet – suited him well, and what pluck, I thought, to keep the show on the road at a time like this. Doubtless the Dunbars are rallying round. Despite my discreet enquiries, Olly never mentioned Leo’s wife or girlfriend, and all ten fingers were free of rings. With the receiver still wedged between his ear and his manly shoulder, Leo smiled apologetically and gestured that I should make myself comfortable. An electricity passed between us. I sense these things. Why should it not? He is my dead lover’s brother. I am one of the family. Closing my umbrella, I stood it in a bucket, and withdrew into a side-gallery to give Leo some privacy. His conversation wasn’t worth overhearing, anyway: arrangements for wedding photographs at the council offices. Olly and I were to have married in a stone circle.

The side-gallery was walled with portraits. Some faces are windows, others are masks. What jokes had Olly told to coax out those smiles? What gentlenesses? Whatever they were, they outlived Dear Olly, and, in these portraits, my dear man’s humour and compassion will outlive us all. Diamond-anniversary couples; babies on rugs; sisters in easy poses, extended families in stiffer groups; matriarchs amidst tribes of grandchildren; shiny newly-weds; surly, softened adolescents; a Sikh family even, here in Dorset. What a miracle it is, how two faces become one in their children’s.

Families, I decided, come in three types.

First, families who participate in each other’s lives.

Second, families who merely report their lives to each other.

Third, families who don’t even do that.

We Castles, I suppose, are type two. Philip has his sights on type three, which is his lookout. But my fondest aspiration is to belong to the first type of family. To belong to a family who won’t push you away for the crime of desiring intimacy! Even if I suggest to Camilla, my daughter , that I visit her in London, it’s No, Mum, this week’s no good ; or Sorry, Sinead’s having a party this weekend ; or Later in the summer, Mum, work’s gone mental right now . Then August arrives and she clears off to Portugal with her father and Fancy-Piece. How am I supposed to feel? So Muggins here does her best at the bookshop, the drama society, my England in Bloom Committee, and what do I get? The likes of June Nolan dubbing me a ‘busybody’ of course, that’s all water off a duck’s back, but where’s the sin in wanting to be needed? In telling one’s loved ones those home truths they need to hear?

Everything would have changed, post-wedding. Everything. Olly, his sisters, Leo here, plus better halves, plus toddlers, gather at their parents’ home every weekend. I’d be a peace-broker, a soft-shoulder, a mucker-inner, a washer-upper. We swear, Judith, we don’t know how we got by without you.

‘ So sorry to keep you,’ said Leo. ‘You wouldn’t believe how – ’

The phone rang.

‘Not again !’ Leo rolled his long-lashed eyes. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Go ahead.’ Judith Castle-Dunbar’s voice is armoured in self-belief, and brings to mind the huskiness of Margaret Thatcher. I like it. ‘You must have so much to sort out.’

‘This is too rude, and you are too kind.’

‘Not at all.’ I toyed with my pearls, wondering if he’d guessed the identity of little old moi . ‘You’re holding up valiantly.’

Leo smiled his roguish smile and answered the phone in his masculine way. I perched on a bottom stair and did some pelvic-floor exercises. ‘Jimbo!’ Leo muffled his voice this time, speaking low and turning away. ‘Olly’s not here, no…’

An acquaintance had yet to hear the dreadful tidings, doubtless.

‘He’s not answering the phone for a day or two.’ Leo spoke low, but my hearing is excellent. ‘He met this woman on the Internet, right – yeah, I know, how dodgy is that? So they meet up, just the once, just a week ago, right, in Bath – and in sink those female talons… Nah, she said “mid-forties” but Olly reckons it’s more “mid-sixties”… It’s not that, though. After just one meeting , right, she books herself in at the Hotel Excalibur no less to – exact words, I josh not – to “consummate our relationship”! “ Consummate our relationship ”! Couldn’t make it up, could you? So Olly comes on his knees to me, right, to phone her up and tell her he’s dead. It’s not funny! No other way to get her off his back… Whassat?… I dunno… some tragic menopausal hag. Like she’s desperate to be loved, but she pounces on anyone who might love her, so desperately, so hungrily, they run a mile! What?… Oh, that’s the funniest part. I meant to say he’d had a heart attack – nice and clean, see, no complications – but when the crunch came, right, out came this garble about a hit-and-run driver… Stop laughing! Then , of course, Miss Hormone Replacement Therapy demands a starring role in the funeral, right, so then I have say he’s already been cremated, and I tipped his ashes off the Cobb myself… Look, Jimbo, got to run, a customer’s waiting. Olly’ll be down the Lord Nelson later. Get the gory details off him yourself. Yep. Bye.’

An ice-cream van crawled by in the hissing rain.

Its chimes played that famous pop-ballad. About love, and Robin Hood.

What ’s that song called? Top of the charts, it was, one summer.

One long hot summer, when Camilla was little.

Oh, everyone knows that song.

The cinema was tiny: twelve rows deep from the blacked-out wall and the shadowed doorway down to the empty screen, which had started to stare at him, a kind of hanging absence. How did they make any money with a place this small? Even if it was packed?

Which it wasn’t. Quite the reverse. There was, in fact, no one else here. Boy at the door had to turn the lights on just for him, Frank feeling bad about this, thinking he shouldn’t insist on seeing a film all by himself and might as well go to the bigger space they kept upstairs which had a balcony and quite probably gilt mouldings and would be more in the way of a theatre and professional. In half an hour they’d be showing a comedy up there.