both want to come?’
You were on the sofa, in your jodhpurs, ready to go to the stables. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ you said, much to my relief.
‘Yes, Cynthia, of course,’ I said, realising how important it seemed to her. ‘I’d love to be there.’
‘Very good,’ she said. ‘I’ll write it on the calendar.’
* * *
You said little in the car, en route to the stables. I remember leaving you there, and feeling what I had felt at the funeral. That strange sensation of departing myself, a leaking out of my soul, complete with the darkening sense of vision. And then on my return, of course, I saw him. Denny. It was getting dark and so, when I turned towards the paddock and saw this sweating figure in running clothes, shining pale in the car headlights, I thought it might be a hallucination. I blinked him away but he was still there, staring straight at me.
I got out and told him to leave. He walked away, giving me a look of steely resolution, before continuing his run. Then I called to you, do you remember? And we had that row as we walked Turpin back to his stable. Apparently you had no idea what he was doing there. Apparently you hated him just as much as I did. Apparently he’d never been to gawp at you before.
You were perfectly convincing, and I was perfectly convinced, even if I had the sense that I had been woken up to something. There was so much that was precious in my life that I had been leaving open and undefended. ‘I’m sorry, Petal,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have raised my voice.’ And you nodded and watched the houses slide past, perhaps wishing you were behind their square, golden windows, happily lost in another girl’s Tuesday night.
I remember trying to sort out your brother’s belongings. I sat there, on his bed, and felt the foreignness of the room. Posters of films I had never heard of. Unfathomable technology I didn’t even realise he owned. Magazines covered with women who didn’t look like women, women who looked so inhuman they might have been designed by an Italian sports car manufacturer.
I went through his school bag and found a letter he never gave me. It was from his headmaster, informing me that he had missed two of Mr Weeks’ history lessons. The letter dated from March, before Mr Weeks had lost his job. I remembered him from the time he had come into the shop with his wife and his son George, to buy the pine mule chest. A tall yeti of a man who could have been quite a bully in the classroom, I imagined.
It was strange, being in his room. Reuben’s presence was so real, contained as it was in all those objects, those possessions that reminded me how little I had understood him. With Cynthia’s help we eventually packed a lot of stuff away in the attic. You helped with some of it, didn’t you?
Though the thing I really need to tell you concerns his bicycle. As you know, I popped an advertisement in the window, offering it for twenty-five pounds. Within a day a woman had called and arranged to come in and buy it for her son. A Scottish lady with a long face that reminded me rather of the aboriginal statues on Easter Island.
I was retrieving the bicycle from the shed when the darkness crowded around me and I again felt that peculiar sensation at the back of my brain. Only this time it was stronger. It was as though someone was turning a dial in my mind, sliding it across frequencies, trying to find a different station. The feeling was at its most intense as I patted the saddle and let the Scottish lady wheel the bicycle away from me. I stood there for a while, in this kind of vague trance, watching her roll it down the street. I stayed there until the bicycle disappeared, and the sensation stopped, leaving my mind restored to its comforting mode of sadness.
As your former hero Pablo Casals once put it, to be a musician is to recognise the soul that lives in objects. A soul that may be made most visible by a Steinway or a Stradivari, or may be most well expressed by a Bach or a Mozart, but that is always there, in every thing of substance.
Of course, I am not a musician. I sell antiques, but the same knowledge applies. You sit all day in a shop, with the old clocks and the tables and the chairs, the plates and the bureaus, and you feel just like them. Just another object that has lived through events it could not change, crafted and transformed, forced to sit and wait in a kind of limbo, its fate as unknown as all the others’.
A customer came in one afternoon – a bullish man of the Yorkshire mould. The sort of chap within whom arrogance and ignorance compete for top billing. He grumbled his way around from price tag to price tag, telling Cynthia and myself that he’d be very surprised if we’d get this much for an art nouveau figurine, or that much for a reading table.
‘Oh,’ said Cynthia. ‘But it’s rosewood.’
‘Makes no difference,’ the man said.
‘And it’s early Georgian.’
‘Early Mesopotamian wouldn’t justify that price.’
By that point, I’d had enough.
‘There are two types of customer for antiques,’ I told him. ‘There are those who appreciate an object’s soul, and understand that, truly, even the smallest items – the sauce ladles, the thimbles, the silver barrel nutmeg graters – can only ever be undervalued. These I would call the true aficionados, the people who appreciate all the lives that have grated with, or worn, or poured, or sat at, or cried near, or dreamed upon, or cried against, or fallen in love in the same room as such things. These are the people who like to frequent an establishment such as Cave Antiques.’
He stood there, mirroring Cynthia’s widening mouth and eyes, as unlikely to interrupt as the figure in his hand. The Girl with a Tambourine, decorated in green and pink enamels. I had bought it originally as part of a pair. The other one had dropped and smashed when I had collided with the chest on my way to reach Reuben, the night he died.
I continued: ‘Whereas the other type, the type I might just see before me now, is the customer who sees an object as the sum of the materials with which it has been made. The customer who does not understand or acknowledge the hands that went into its making, or the centuries-long affection which various and long-dead owners have bestowed upon said item. No, these people are ignorant of such matters. They don’t care for them. They see numbers where they should see beauty. They look at the face of a brass dial clock and see only the time.’
The man stood there, almost as bemused as myself by this outburst. ‘I was going to buy this for my wife’s birthday,’ he said, placing the art nouveau figure back where it came from. ‘But with service like this I think I’ll take my custom elsewhere.’
After he left I had Cynthia to deal with. ‘Terence, what on earth has got into you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t like the way he was talking to you.’
‘Good God, Terence. I’m old and ugly enough to look after myself. We just lost a sale there.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. It wasn’t about him. I’m sorry.’
She sighed. ‘You know what you need, don’t you?’
I shook my head.
‘You need to get away. You and Bryony. A holiday. I could look after the shop for a week.’
A holiday. Even the word seemed preposterous. A dancing jester at a wake, handing out picture postcards. It prompted a fleeting blink of a memory. Heading south on a French motorway with you and Reuben asleep in the back, your bodies curved towards each other like closed brackets.
