Sipsworth E-Book

Simon Van Booy

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 219

Beschreibung

'A gorgeously odd tale about finding yourself again, unexpectedly. If you want a little piece of joy in your reading life, buy it' Jojo Moyes 'Loaded with charm, resilience, and the deep desire for connection that all mammals share. I loved it' Ann Patchett 'Utterly charming and beautifully written, Sipsworth is a tender tale about loss, loneliness and the healing power of connection that you won't want to put down' Mike Gayle 'Utterly charming and heartwarming' Ruth Hogan, The Keeper of Lost Things 'Beautiful and enchanting'Washington Post Following the deaths of her husband and son, Helen Cartwright returns from sixty years in Australia to the English village of her childhood. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. Helen retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit. Then, one cold autumn night, a chance encounter with an abandoned pet mouse on the street outside her house sets Helen on a surprising journey of friendship, and a way back into life itself.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR SIPSWORTH

‘Sipsworth is a love story about a woman and a mouse. Reason suggests that such a relationship couldn’t possibly work, and yet I found myself pulling for this unlikely duo on every page’

Ann Patchett, author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Commonwealth

‘Beautifully detailed, and filled with heart, Sipsworth is a slim, sparkling jewel of a novel’

Christina Baker Kline, author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Orphan Train

‘Through tears, laughter, joy, and pain, I just couldn’t stop reading this novel about friendship and second chances. Sipsworth is a marvel – storytelling at its absolute finest’

Marc Levy

PRAISE FOR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

‘Tantalizing… some of the most beautiful prose of Van Booy’s oeuvre… The Presence of Absence runs blood-rich with declarations that make you inhale sharply’

Washington Post

‘Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable. The Presence of Absence boggles and reverberates: wise, witty, and always breathtakingly beautiful’

San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of 2022

‘With its elegant passages on love and the fallibility of memory… this indelible portrait of transience, sorrow and hope will move readers’

Shelf Awareness

‘Formally playful and fable-esque… If you don’t just like reading, but reading about reading, then this is the book for you’

Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘Rich in setting and emotion. As ever with Van Booy, the reader is in good hands’

Publishers Weekly

‘A tour de force… A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity’

New York Journal of Books

‘The Presence of Absence amazed me. It’s a moving, brilliant book’

Ann Beattie, author of Onlookers

‘The Presence of Absence is impossible to resist. Consistently insightful, symphonic in the music of its thought’

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

SIPSWORTH

SIMON VAN BOOY

For Joshua and his father, Dale.

Contents

Cover

Praise for Sipsworth

Praise for The Presence of Absence

Title Page

Dedication

Overture

Friday

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Saturday

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Sunday

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Monday

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Tuesday

Chapter 17.

Chapter 18.

Chapter 19.

Wednesday

Chapter 20.

Chapter 21.

Chapter 22.

Chapter 23.

Thursday

Chapter 24.

Chapter 25.

Chapter 26.

Friday

Chapter 27.

Chapter 28.

Chapter 29.

Chapter 30.

Saturday

Chapter 31.

Chapter 32.

Chapter 33.

Sunday

Chapter 34.

Monday

Tuesday

Chapter 35.

Wednesday

Thursday

Chapter 36.

Friday

Chapter 37.

Acknowledgements

Also by Simon Van Booy

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

OVERTURE

HELEN CARTWRIGHT WAS old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen.

Walking helped, and she tried to go out every day, even when it poured. But life for her was finished. She knew that and had accepted it. Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle – as though even for death there is a queue.

Not a single person who glimpsed her bony figure flapping down Westminster Crescent could say they knew her. She was simply part of a background against which their own lives rolled unceasingly on. In truth, Helen Cartwright was native to the place – born in the old Park Hospital while her father fought at sea. The hospital was long gone, but the brick cottage where Helen had grown up was still there. Now and again she walked that way into town. The front garden had been paved over, but cracks in the cement sometimes bled flowers she could name, as though just below the surface of this world are the ones we remember, still going on.

Her home now was a detached pensioner’s cottage with a mustard door. She had purchased it through the internet after living abroad for sixty years.

A lot can happen in six decades. A place can change. But she hadn’t changed.

Helen realised that the moment she had gotten out of the airport taxi and stood before the new house on Westminster Crescent. The home she had given up on the other side of the world would have other people by now. She imagined them unrolling leaves of newspaper to reveal objects that were important or fragile, but in truth were just links in a chain that led you back to the beginning.

No, she hadn’t changed at all.

She simply knew more because of all the things she had been through. And contrary to the fairy tales told to her at bedtime as a child, anything of value she had returned home with was invisible to anyone but herself.

After the taxi chugged back to Heathrow, Helen had gone inside and dropped her luggage at the foot of the stairs. Like all houses, this place had its own smell that would disappear once she was used to it. On the hall floor beside her feet were letters addressed to someone she didn’t know. She wondered about the people who had been here before. Tried to imagine their lives but kept returning to the husband and son, now far beyond her reach.

Still wearing her coat with the scent of aircraft cabin and coins forever loose in the seam, Helen walked through the kitchen and stood in the empty living room.

Stared out the front window.

A hundred times as a girl, she must have run, skipped, or ridden her clanking bike past this house. A hundred times as a girl, without ever thinking it a place she would return one day, to close her life in a perfect circle.

On her eightieth birthday, Helen spent the day moving things in the kitchen cupboard. Wiping down shelves. Vacuuming the stairs. Turning from any face that appeared in the dust or the darkness between cans.

Three years pass with nothing to fill their pockets.

Then early one morning, something happens.

___

FRIDAY

___

1.

IT IS PAST midnight, but still so dark, day cannot yet be separated from night. Helen Cartwright is standing at the bedroom window in nightdress and slippers. Has nudged the curtain just enough to see a world emptied by the smallness of the hour. Unable to sleep, she is about to go downstairs and put the television on, when something moves. She bends to the cold glass but loses the street in a sudden flower of breath. It clears to reveal a neighbour in robe and slippers, laden with black bags for the early-morning waste collection. Helen watches him drop his load then return to the house. Instead of locking his side gate, he props it open with a brick, then wobbles out with a large box, which he sets down on the nest of plastic bags with great care.

Over the past several months, Helen has become curious about what people throw away. Several times she has even gone out to inspect the mounds of bags for an interesting bulge – some object mistakenly tossed before its time. A hollow clunk is usually an item of wood; a delicate rattle means porcelain. Anything that sloshes is to be avoided.

And so after the neighbour has latched the side gate and locked his door, Helen steps into her tartan slippers and goes downstairs. Ensuring there is no one outside, she pulls on her coat and drops into the stomach of night. It must have been raining, for the street is like soft, damp ribbon. Helen doesn’t mess with any bags. She goes straight to the large box her neighbour had been carrying, which isn’t a box at all. It is a glass fish tank full of rubbish. Nothing special – except for what lies on top. A child’s toy Helen has seen before – a prop from the life she has outlived, some piece of her memory that has somehow broken off and found its way back into her shaking hands.

The shape and feeling of the toy make Helen wonder if she is, in fact, upstairs in her bed sleeping soundly – and that moments later will open both eyes to the milky stillness of her room. She lets her gaze travel from the discarded object down the long row of houses on Westminster Crescent, as though a light, or a door, or the neighbour’s cat might appear and break the skin of dreaming.

But nothing moves.

No one comes.

The gowned women and pyjamared men of the street are the ones doused in slumber, not her. She alone brings consciousness to the moment.

Helen turns the item over. A plastic deep-sea diver. Touches the air tank and flippers. Behind the diving mask two painted eyes seem to recognise her. She had bought the very same thing for her son’s thirteenth birthday. Then it had been part of a set. She wonders what could be in all the small cardboard boxes underneath. Perhaps this one is part of a set, too, and the pieces will appear, one by one, as if gathered in by the long whiskers of grief.

Without thinking, she bends, heaves up the fish tank with its toy diver and dirty cardboard boxes. It’s heavier than Helen has imagined, and though it isn’t far to the house, halfway back, a seam of cloud opens. Everything in the aquarium is soon soaked. Water snakes down Helen’s cheeks. Her head is vibrating with cold, and her hair feels sticky. There really isn’t far to go – another fifteen metres – but the pooling drops increase her burden. And despite sinewy arms now swaying with strain, Helen is determined not to put the thing down. Inside, she can go through the contents and decide what to do. Memory has never come to her like this in the physical world. It has always been something weightless – strong enough to blow the day off course, but not something she can reach for and hold on to.

The weight of the fish tank with everything in it is not unlike the weight of a large child, and so she keeps on, powered by coals of instinct.

Getting the tank through the door is not easy and requires tilting. Fibres in her arms and neck writhe, and she waits for a ripping pain in her chest – but somehow there is strength left for this final test. Once in, she stumbles to the sitting room and drops the tank onto the coffee table with a thump.

After rubbing a tissue under her nose in the downstairs loo, Helen carries herself upstairs and sheds her sopping clothes. Draws a bath with a capful of eucalyptus. Lowers her shivering body into the melting water.

In warm, wet stillness she ponders the deep-sea diver she can now feel holding her entire life in place like an anchor dropped years ago and then forgotten. But for what purpose is she being held at the edge? Everyone she has ever loved or wanted to love is gone, and behind a veil of fear she wishes to be where they are.

Now there is an object downstairs trying to drag her back in – a child’s toy that belongs to her memory as much as it belongs to the past of another.

This sort of thing was supposed to be over for her. There is nothing in the house even to look at. No birthday cards, no letters. Even photo albums were discarded for her big move three years before. She burned them, actually. In the driveway under the terrace. She had to. Even the one of a trip to New Zealand when David was nine and they’d sat as a family with ice creams on a low wall watching small boats make for the open sea, like children leaving home.

Helen can feel steam on her face like a pair of hands. Lets her head sink back into a rolled towel. Closes her eyes against the empty rooms of her home.

Without her, it could have been anybody’s house.

There had been some furniture when she arrived. A bed frame, a chest of drawers, and a modern hall table with brass legs. Curtains and carpets were also in place. The rest of her things she purchased from a catalogue. Helen had watched as two men and a woman carried in the bundles, which then had to be unwrapped and put together. She had given the workers tea and a plate of biscuits, but sat most of the time upstairs so they could talk freely and work without feeling watched. In the early evening two of them carried out the discarded packaging. The other had started the lorry and was sitting in it. On the doorstep, Helen offered something extra, in case they wanted a hot meal. There were many pubs in the town, and in the early hours of Saturday and Sunday morning, if Helen opened a window, she could hear singing or distant laughter like ripples on the surface of night.

When she was a girl, many people worked in the factories. There was one not far from her house on the other side of a canal. During her first year living on Westminster Crescent, Helen would listen for the noon whistle. But during the six decades of her absence, the place had been rased and the whistle hauled off in a pile of broken brick.

It wasn’t easy coming back after so long. Everything had been going on without her as if she’d never existed. The outdoor market where her mother liked to chat with the fishmonger was now a place for cars. And where the stall had been stood a tall machine that took coins for parking. The shop near the school that stayed open late for people coming home from the factory was still there. But it looked and smelled different. The burgundy awning that flapped in winter had been replaced with a white plastic sign lit up from within. And there were several tills, not just the one that stood guard before a wall of gumdrops, licorice, and sherbet.

Returning after sixty years, Helen had felt her particular circumstances special: just as she had once been singled out for happiness, she was now an object of despair. But then after so many consecutive months alone, she came to the realisation that such feelings were simply the conditions of old age and largely the same for everybody. Truly, there was no escape. Those who in life had held back in matters of love would end in bitterness. While the people like her, who had filled the corners of each day, found themselves marooned on a scatter of memories. Either way, for her as for others, a great storm was approaching. She could sense it swollen on the horizon, ready to burst. It would come and wash away even the most ordinary things, leaving no trace of what she felt had been hers.

2.

HELEN OPENS HER eyes. The bathwater has cooled. She moves her arms and legs then looks into the hall. The carpet is thin. Its once rich blue now the blue of early morning. The bathroom door, she keeps open – even when perched on the toilet wiping herself – because she listens to the house. There is nothing to hear, of course, but the emptiness reassures her; thoughts can wander, unfurl without touching. Helen lifts her body from the tepid water and dries herself with a towel. Dawn has come and morning’s pale cheek is flat upon the world.

The fish tank is downstairs, dirty and dripping.

Helen dresses and brushes her hair. She gave up long ago on jewellery, even her wedding ring. That was the hardest. But Len had gone and would not be coming back. She had also rejected traditional ladies’ slippers in favor of the more rugged tartan variety with elasticated backs and rubber bottoms. She felt ready to go, of course – had been for a while – but if she tumbled down the stairs and was unable to move, no one would find her for perhaps a year and this was somehow undesirable. Helen didn’t know why, exactly, but as a child she had fallen into a disused well where she was trapped for two days.

Downstairs, Helen makes tea and flicks on the hall radio. A young man reads the morning news. When he comes to the weather, scattered showers are expected and will be general across low-lying areas. Nothing new there. But his voice fills the house as though it were his home, too.

I heard it rains day and night back in England.

This was one of the first things Leonard ever said to her. A question in the form of a statement.

They were dancing.

The year was 1960.

She had bought new shoes from Gulliver’s for the dance. Kitten heels with a buckle on each toe. But no one noticed the buckles, or how they caught tiny snatches of life as she moved. Helen had met Len on a Number 7 bus the week before. This was their first proper night out.

‘You should stay in Oz, love…’

Young Helen in new shoes kept dancing.

‘Why is that, Len? Because it’s sunny all the time?’

They had given their bodies to the music, but were looking at each other from worlds animated with more desire than experience.

‘Not just the weather, Helen. I reckon you could have a life here if you wanted it. Go to college. Do something you enjoy. Maybe even settle down eventually with a nice fella called Len.’

That was probably the moment, she thinks. Not later on the boardwalk with I love you, or later still in the wooden church when he said, I do… but there, then, that smoky dance hall with free lemonade and shabby curtains, tangled up in the music of childhood’s end.

The memory was so intact, Helen could have looked down and fingered a button on his shirt.

She leaves the radio playing. Carries her mug to the sitting room. It is an English opera she saw once, long ago. She stands over the coffee table, slurping hot liquid with the faint but impassioned voice of Dido lamenting from the hall table. The fish tank looks bigger now that it’s inside. Helen marvels at how she’d been able to carry it. Len would have clapped. But then an irritating thought alerts her to the possibility that other treasures in the bags have been missed.

Should she go back out?

The rain has stopped but is supposed to start again. And there will be people with dogs. Children mincing on their way to school.

No. That part of the day has closed to her for good. If she did go out, it had to be as a shopper or an old woman, not a scavenger rooting in rubbish.

Helen decides to spread the excitement of her find over the coming weekend while most people are glued to the television, or looping bright shops for things to buy and bring home. On Saturday morning, she will fish out every box, open it, examine the contents one by one, then carefully wash each item before setting it aside for more detailed examination on the Sunday – while something bakes in the oven. Helen has several pairs of tights that have recently fallen from grace on account of holiness at the big toe, so there will be no shortage of cleaning materials.

She returns to the kitchen with strange energy. Fills the kettle for another round of tea. When it’s ready, Helen takes down the biscuit tin and carries a few brittle discs into the sitting room along with her steaming mug. Just looking at the deep-sea diver atop his aquarium is enough for today, she thinks; the important thing is to have a plan and not rush.

With the biscuits gone and the sugary tea half drunk, Helen pulls her feet up onto the sofa and lets her head sink into a pillow. She stares at the fish tank before her. Below the plastic deep-sea diver and under the cardboard boxes are coloured plastic objects in shapes she doesn’t understand. Helen tries to imagine the last person to have touched these things. Where are those hands now and what are they doing?

As so often happens, her last thought before dozing off takes on new life as a dream: she is standing next to her son, David. They are out on the second-floor terrace. It is bright and very hot. Their clothes are many colours and large birds squabble in treetops behind the house. No one ever mentions the birds; it is just a sound they were used to. In the yard, the uncut lawn is dark and silky, a shade of shade. Len is wearing sunglasses she has chosen for him from a display at the pharmacy. The terrace wrapped around their entire house and could be accessed from every room except the toilet. Helen is about thirty-eight and standing barefoot. Her feet are small and soft on the tiles. Their son is about to open a present. He knows what it is because they had all tramped down to the pet shop a week before to help him pick everything out and to pay for it. But they’d wrapped it anyway because that’s what you do with children. There is a cake somewhere. Helen doesn’t see it in the dream, but knows it is just inside the screen door on a counter. After all these years. Everything that has happened. To think there is a place where your child’s birthday cake still waits to be eaten.

3.

HELEN SLEEPS RIGHT into the afternoon. As promised, the showers have been steady. The world outside is soft and dripping. The radio is still on and piano music tinkles through the house like another sort of rain.

Her tea mug is cold to the touch; that’s how she judges the length of each snooze. Sometimes ten minutes feel like hours. But she’d know because the mug would still be slightly warm.

A few months ago, one of Helen’s naps carried her right through the afternoon onto night’s wing. She had woken in the sober presence of BBC’s News at Ten. What a nuisance. Too late for supper and wide awake – she had been forced to watch television until another swell of tiredness carried her upstairs. There was a time, she remembers, when broadcasting ceased at a certain hour. People in the studio went home to crisp envelopes of bed. Now the television went all night. An endless loop of voices. Even if there was no one in the studio or watching at home, it kept on, seeking to fill the emptiness but only intensifying it.

As she lies there on the couch, watching her dream recede, Helen feels foolish for having carried into her home what is so obviously rubbish. Here is a dirty great fish tank, probably cracked somewhere under the boxes, which are likely full of dull, unwashed parts from a machine that could never be put back together.

But the deep-sea diver… that surely is something.

Helen sits up and studies the thing. Nothing so personal has ever come back to her in such a way. She wonders if this being the town of her birth has anything to do with it. Perhaps more remnants of her life will soon be washing in?

For the rest of the afternoon she rearranges items in the refrigerator by colour, then watches the children’s programmes that begin at four and end at five-thirty with a soap opera.

Following the contrived drama of each channel’s six o’clock news, it is time for a game show. Then comedy or drama. Sometimes there are programmes with a studio audience. These are fine. If you laugh naturally with the others, it’s a bit like you’re there with them – caught in the same net.

At dusk, Helen stares out into the back garden. Mostly overgrown now, but quite pretty in late summer when the wind turns things over. The front lawn was paved long ago, and so spares her concerned or reproachful glances from anyone passing on foot.

Friday night dinner is usually a frozen pie cooked in the oven. The label says two servings but it’s really only big enough for one and a half people. Helen considers boiling a potato to go with it, but the peeler isn’t in its usual spot, and by the time she’s found it, the pie is cooked through.

At the close of the nine o’clock news it’s time for bed.

But going up the stairs, Helen pauses midstep like a wind-up toy at the end of its run. Should she take another bath? Usually, if this desire presents itself, she will go back down and stand outside the French door for twenty minutes to freeze herself.

But it’s late and it feels late.

The lights are already off downstairs and she has a job tomorrow unpacking the fish tank. If she can get her head down, it will feel like moments before she is up with tea and toast, cutting tights for the adventure ahead.

Helen continues the ascent, the sound of her feet on each stair like grunting. Without turning on a light, she locates her nightgown, then slides under the cool, musty sheets. She usually sleeps on her side, but when she is very tired, Helen sleeps on her back.

In the middle of the night, her eyes open.

Helen doesn’t know why she is awake, so floats there in the steady swell of breath. Perhaps this is it. The finale. But then she hears something downstairs.

She listens again.

Very faint, but definitely there.

She keeps her body still, the way her son, David, pretended to be asleep when she arrived home from a late shift at work. Light would spill upon the cushion of his face through the open door. The boy’s eyes were closed but he knew his mother was there.

This isn’t a loud noise, but an insistent one.