5,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
In a forgotten nook of Cambridge a little shop stands where thousands of sheets of beautiful paper and hundreds of exquisite pens wait for the next person who, with Clara Cohen's help, will express the love, despair and desire they feel to correspondents alive, estranged or dead. Clara knows better than most the power a letter can have to turn a person's life around, so when she discovers a cache of wartime love letters, she follows them on the start of on a profound journey of her own.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 390
Ähnliche
The Lost Art of Letter Writing
MENNA VAN PRAAG
For Ash, With love for giving me goosebumps with her talk of stationery shops and with thanks for all those beautiful letters
&
For Clara, With thanks for being the namesake and with love for always knowing when I need cake
Contents
Chapter One
The shop is tucked down a little side street, missed by most people, except those few seeking it out or accidentally stumbling upon it on their way to somewhere else entirely. The shop has a little green door, requiring customers to stoop upon entering, and tiny windows so cluttered that it’s impossible to peer through and see what’s going on inside. Which is exactly how Clara wants it to be. She doesn’t desire great wealth or prestige; she doesn’t dream of attracting crowds of students and tourists passing through Cambridge, as other shop owners do. No, Clara wants those who have wandered away from the crowds, those who are feeling distracted and disconnected, those with bruised hearts, those who don’t know how to undo the past and soothe their pain, those who doubt it’s even possible.
Until, that is, they wander along the tiny street and come upon the tiny shop. In one of its tiny windows is tucked a tiny note, written in tiny, but elegant, handwriting, inviting them to venture inside and:
Learn the lost art of letter writing …
Most can’t remember when they last sat down to press the nib of a pen to paper, when they last inscribed an envelope, found a stamp and dropped a letter into a postbox, imagining the person who’d open it, grateful for the gift of thought and time sent from afar. And yet, even if they’ve never written so much as a postcard before, still they’ll step inside – seized by a sudden, silent urge they can’t understand – and gasp.
The walls of the little shop are lined with letters, hundreds and hundreds of letters, in every colour of ink and paper and every style of handwriting. Dark oak cabinets contain writing papers in a thousand different designs: papers lined with silver leaf, embedded with roses and violets, papers studded with glittering foil stars, or painted with watercolour sunflowers – each unique and furnished with matching envelopes. Shelves sit above the cabinets, weighed down with a rainbow of notebooks: bound in leather, swathed in silk, embroidered on linen or cotton, some made of paper stitched with flower petals but none the same as any other.
Only one corner of the little stationery shop is clear of any papers, pens or other writing paraphernalia. In this corner stands a delicate ornate Victorian writing desk made of mahogany and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, containing a dozen drawers – one of them curiously locked and impossible to open – and accompanied by a chair cushioned with dark-green velvet.
It is here that Clara’s particular magic takes place.
Upon the lettered walls hang half a dozen glass cabinets lined in crimson velvet, each just large enough to contain a single pen. Clara has held each of these pens, except one. Her grandfather made them all, buying them back at great expense years after he’d sold them. One was used by John Lennon to compose Imagine, another by Daphne du Maurier to write Rebecca, another by Quentin Blake to illustrate Matilda …
The only pen Clara hasn’t touched is the one her grandfather made especially for her. The nib is gold, the inlay platinum, the barrel plated in silver, the cap topped with a small, single pink diamond. It was a gift on her thirteenth birthday and, with it, Clara’s grandfather attached a promise that one day – when she was ready – she’d use it to write her own great novel. He’d seen it in her spirit, he whispered, the day she was born he had seen that literature was her destiny.
So far, however, Clara has never been able to write anything longer than a letter. She’s planned plenty of books and begun (with the assistance of lesser pens) a great many of them. She’s written millions of words, constructed thousands of sentences, even completed a paragraph or two, but hasn’t yet managed to finish a first chapter. Every day Clara tries in vain to realise her grandfather’s prophecy but lately, twenty years after he gave her the pen, she’s starting to wonder if he didn’t make a mistake.
Clara is sitting behind the counter (carved by the same carpenter who created the writing desk, in dark mahogany and mother-of-pearl and topped with an antique black-and-gold cash register) when her next lost soul walks into the shop. For a moment the woman seems confused, as if she’s trying to remember why she’s standing in the doorway of a stationery shop at all. Then she glances up and catches Clara’s eye.
‘Welcome to Letters,’ Clara says with a smile, grateful for the excuse to put down her unresponsive pen. She stands, walks around the counter, and stops at the cabinet on the other side of the room. Then she turns back to the woman. Clara waits for a moment, then speaks into the silence.
‘So,’ she says gently, ‘to whom are you writing?’
‘I’m sorry?’ The woman seems confused again.
‘Well,’ Clara says, ‘you’ve come here to write a letter …’
The woman frowns. ‘I have?’
Clara smiles again. ‘Just give me a moment.’
She glances at the cabinet again, her eyes slowly scanning each unlabelled drawer in turn. Then she stops, bends and opens a drawer close to the floor. Clara picks carefully through the papers, until she selects one and holds it out towards her new customer on her open palm.
‘If I gave you this paper, to write something you needed to say to someone you haven’t yet said it to,’ Clara says, ‘then who might that someone be?’
The woman reaches out to take the paper, holding it as if it were made of gold, which, indeed, it is: a sheet of cream linen flecked with tiny slices of gold leaf.
‘My sister,’ she says, so softly that Clara almost can’t hear. ‘I’d write a letter to my sister.’
Clara’s smile deepens. ‘Perfect.’ Crossing the room, she ducks behind the counter again, pulling open unseen drawers and closing them again. ‘I’ll find you the perfect pen, so you can sit down and write.’
‘Oh, no.’ The young woman shakes her head. ‘I can’t.’
Clara looks up, her fingers curled around a long, thin, silver pen.
‘Why ever not?’
The woman stares at her feet. Her voice, when at last she speaks, is as soft as falling leaves. ‘Because she’s … dead.’
Clara nods, as if she’d expected exactly that answer which, indeed, she had.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ she says. ‘But I wouldn’t let a little thing like death stop you. And don’t worry, I have a special postbox for letters like that.’
‘You do?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Clara says. ‘Of all the letters written in this shop, perhaps half of them are written to people who won’t ever read them. At least, not in a way that we might understand.’
‘Really?’
‘Take this,’ Clara holds out the silver pen. ‘You don’t need to know what to write. The desk will help you with that. Almost as soon as you sit the words will start to come, I promise.’
Tears fill the woman’s eyes. She steps forward and takes the pen, tentatively, between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Thank you.’ She presses the paper to her chest. ‘I want—I never had the chance to say …’
Clara nods, taking a step back to allow the woman to walk to the writing desk. She has read hundreds, possibly thousands, of letters to ghosts in the last decade of owning the stationery shop. Each letter has touched her heart, and each writer has captured her curiosity. And yet, there is something about this woman that particularly intrigues Clara. She wants to sit and drink cups of tea and listen to her life and learn why her pretty blue eyes seem so very sad. But, of course, she can’t.
‘Sit,’ she says instead, as the woman hovers by the desk. ‘Take as long as you want. No one will come into the shop until you are done.’
The woman does so then, placing her paper carefully on the square of green felt, smoothing it over with her palm. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, just loud enough to be heard, then curls her body over the desk, takes a deep breath and presses her nose to the paper.
Clara watches as the woman slips slowly into the past, her breath and memories mingling in concentrated puffs. Later, her breath comes in silent sobs as she wipes tears from her cheeks before they fall onto the paper, while still clutching the immobile pen tight in her fist. Clara watches the woman’s shoulders shake. Then a stillness comes over her and she begins again to write. Clara watches the pen race across the page, inky black letters sliding out at such speed that every word surely obscures the next. The air crackles with the burst of energy just released, the nibs of all the other pens twitch excitedly, impatient for their turn. A thousand papers rustle in a hundred drawers and Clara watches, a smile on her lips and a wish in her heart that one day she will be possessed to write like that; only a book instead of a letter. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the magic of the writing desk doesn’t seem to lend itself to anything other than letters.
When the speeding pen is finally still again and the air is silent, Clara pulls her gaze away and pretends to be studying the empty page of the notebook on her lap. She’s staring at it when the woman is standing in front of the counter, wiping her blue eyes.
‘I didn’t … I don’t,’ she mumbles. She takes a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what to do with …’ She folds the letter twice in half. ‘Will you read it, if I give it to you?’
‘Only if you want me to,’ Clara says.
‘Oh,’ the woman says. ‘But why would I …?’
‘Some people feel that letters aren’t really letters until they’ve been read,’ Clara explains. ‘Even if it’s by someone who isn’t the intended recipient.’
The woman considers this. ‘Yes, I suppose … Well, I’d like to leave it with you. But I’d rather you didn’t read it, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course.’ Clara nods, hoping the disappointment doesn’t show on her face. ‘Then I’ll find you an envelope.’
She walks across the carpeted floor to the cabinet of closed drawers, bending down and opening the same one where she’d found the linen paper flecked with gold leaf. When she stands, Clara offers her customer the matching envelope.
‘Thank you.’ The woman slides her letter inside then licks and seals her secret.
‘Would you like to post it?’ Clara asks.
‘Where?’
Clara points to the small, flat face of a dark-red postbox embedded into the wall behind the counter. ‘Just there.’
A slight smile dimples the woman’s cheeks. She walks to the box and drops her envelope inside – kissing it quickly before letting it go. She turns back to Clara. ‘I can’t … I … Thank you … But, how much do I …?’
‘That depends,’ Clara says. ‘Would you like the pen, or only the letter?’
The woman glances down at the pen in her hand, as if she’d forgotten it was there. She looks at the small leather bag hanging at her side.
‘I—just the letter, please.’
‘Okay. Then that’s four pounds and fifty-five pence, please.’
The woman opens her bag, pulls out her purse and thrusts a ten-pound note into Clara’s hand, along with the pen.
‘I’d give you more, if I could, but’ – she grasps Clara’s hands tightly – ‘thank you, thank you, thank you so much.’
Then she lets go and, without looking Clara in the eye, turns and hurries out. As the green door falls closed behind the unknown customer, Clara walks back to the counter and rings the money into the till, feeling a slight tug of sorrow knowing that she’ll never see this particular woman again. Clara feels this way each time a customer leaves, wishing the connection could last just a little longer but, of course, it can’t.
With a soft sigh, Clara slides the silver pen back into its drawer.
Clara wrote her first letter when she was four years old. It contained three sentences and was addressed to her cat. Now she writes nearly every day, letters long and short, addressed to people she doesn’t know and will never meet.
Although Clara only lives a few minutes’ walk from her shop, she never goes straight home after closing time. Instead, whatever the weather, no matter how wet or cold, she takes long detours through town, sometimes (on long summer nights) venturing along winding country roads and across fields into the surrounding villages. While she walks, Clara glances into the windows of the houses she passes, looking for the recipient of her next letter. Then she’ll stop and take a closer look. One day she’ll see an exhausted mother rocking a crying child, another she sees an old man gazing sadly at the wall, or a bachelor eating a TV dinner for one. Some days Clara sees no one, but it doesn’t matter because there is always the next day and the day after that.
Clara knows when she sees someone she can write to, someone who will open her letter – her anonymous, unasked-for letter – and, instead of tossing it straight in the wastepaper basket, will sit down and spread the paper open on their lap, gazing in wonderment at the words – words that are, somehow, exactly what they need to hear in that moment, words that will heal, motivate, inspire or console, words that have clearly been chosen by someone who can see straight into the darkest nooks and crannies of their souls.
They will sit a while longer then, pressing the paper beneath their fingertips, letting the words soak off the page and into their hands, until a tiny spark of hope ignites in their chest and they stand, filled with renewed determination and a sense of self-belief and faith they haven’t known since childhood. They’ll put the letter away in a safe and secret place, returning to it again and again over the coming days, weeks, months and years – whenever they need to remember, to reignite that spark of hope they felt upon first reading it, until they’ve imbued it so many times that the words have knitted together into the cells of their blood and the marrow of their bones.
When Clara sees such a person she feels it in the tips of her fingers – a tingling sensation akin to a slight electric shock – then she notes down their address in her notebook and continues walking.
Sometimes the letter takes a week to write, sometimes only an hour and Clara has a ritual accompanying the start of each one. First of all, she sits at the counter, remembering the person she saw, the look on their face, the layout of their living room, the wallpaper on their walls … Then she slides off her chair and hurries across the dark wooden floorboards to the cabinets containing the writing papers. Usually, Clara instinctively knows the drawer she needs, immediately plucking out the perfect piece of paper, though sometimes she has to search a little longer before finding the right one. Choosing the envelope follows and, finally, the pen. Although she has thousands of papers to choose from, and hundreds of pens, it never takes Clara more than a few minutes to make her selection. Which is a shame really, since she enjoys the moment of anticipation so much.
Once she has her instruments, Clara sits at the little writing desk and, much like her customers, waits for inspiration to strike. Sometimes this takes only moments, sometimes a little longer, though, no matter how long it takes, Clara doesn’t find the waiting a frustrating experience but a meditative one. She enjoys the silence, the tentative sense of connection with a complete stranger, the expectation of hope and healing to come.
And when, at last, she starts to write, Clara doesn’t select the words herself, doesn’t carefully craft sentences of specially tailored wisdom and inspiration for the intended recipient, since she has no idea what she ought to say and what they need to hear. Instead she allows the magic of the desk to take over. So the pen skims across the paper, leaving a loping trail of purple ink in its wake, and Clara just holds on. She’s hardly aware of what she writes and never reads the letters back when they are finished. She simply sits at the desk until the pen stops and she knows she’s done.
Chapter Two
His letter arrives on a Tuesday morning. Edward sees it as he bumps down the stairs in his tatty tartan slippers, the ones Tilly bought him three Christmases ago and he’s worn every day since. He walks past the mail on the mat and heads towards the kitchen. As he steps onto the cold stone floor, he pulls his dressing gown cord tighter round his waist. The gown is still too big (he lost a lot of weight three years ago) and too feminine (paisley silk in shades of purple) in his humble opinion, but Greer made it for him the summer she died so he’ll wear it until it falls off, which won’t be long now. Tilly has sewn so many patches on the threadbare gown that it’s virtually become a quilt, but Edward ignores his daughter every time she begs him to throw it out. He also ignores the two flannel dressing gowns sitting in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe – still in their plastic wrap – birthday gifts from Tilly, gentle attempts to help her father heal and move on.
Edward flips on the coffee machine. The hum follows him across the kitchen as he drops four slices of pre-cut bread into the oversize toaster, then loads up his arms with milk, margarine, orange juice and jam. A twinge of guilt hits Edward’s stomach as he unloads his flimsy breakfast goods onto the table. He should be making scrambled eggs and baked beans to accompany the toast, perhaps with slices of bacon, or porridge with fresh fruit and nuts – something substantial and nutritious for a growing girl. Edward can’t remember the last time he ate a piece of fruit, though he knows he must have done since his favourite sister’s frequent visits are always accompanied by healthful snacks.
The toast pops up and Edward spreads jam (strawberry without seeds is all Tilly will accept) on two slices of toast and pours a glass of orange juice, warming the glass in his hands before setting it on the table, to soften the chill of the juice.
‘Till! Breakfast!’ Edward aims his voice at the ceiling – also the floor of the bathroom, where his daughter now spends most of her time. Isn’t thirteen too young to be caring about make-up, dresses and boys? He can’t remember either of his sisters caring about such things so young, one of them still doesn’t and probably never will. Sadly, Tilly seems all too acutely aware of such things. Last night, to Edward’s absolute horror, his daughter refused rice pudding after dinner on the grounds that she was ‘watching her weight’. As these three words hit the table and rolled towards him, like bowling balls careening towards his chest, Edward was at a total loss for what to say. Unfortunately, Tilly had taken the silence as validation of her need to diet.
‘See,’ she’d declared, pushing her chair away from the table, scraping its wooden feet on the stone floor. ‘I knew you thought I was fat!’
‘I … I … What?’ Edward had fumbled about in the fog, trying to grasp hold of something that made sense. ‘Of course I don’t think you’re fat,’ he’d said at last. But it’d been too late, his daughter had already slammed the kitchen door shut behind her.
In light of this rather horrifying turn of events, Edward has been feeling the loss of his wife in a different way. For the first few years, he simply felt as if a large slice had been taken out of his heart, along with the breath from his lungs, leaving something fundamental missing, a gaping hole from which to view what remained of his life. But for the past few months, as Tilly has somehow mutated from a sweet, shy little girl into a mercurial, bolshie teenager, Edward has longed for Greer even more as a mother than just a wife. He wants her to hold his hand during these strange, unbalancing experiences, wants her to explain what’s going on, to come and take charge, before it all gets any more out of control.
Generally, before Tilly turned strange, Edward thought he was doing okay. Not wonderfully or brilliantly, but okay. He’d learnt how to live, how to function from day to day, without his wife. He’d learnt, until recently anyway, how to single-parent his child. He’d learnt how to skirt around the edges of his loss so that, while he still saw the gaping hole, he no longer fell into it.
‘Till! You’ll be late!’ Edward tips his head back towards the ceiling, noticing, for the first time, a large crack in the plaster snaking across the surface. It’s not the first crack he’s discovered, the house (a beautiful three-storey Victorian terrace with bay windows and red-brick walls, found after they left their home on Hope Street) is riddled with them – along with patches of mould, creaking floorboards, flickering lights and jammed doors. Last Christmas, when she was still a sweet little girl, Tilly suggested these physical quirks were in fact the ghosts of her mother and stepmother trying to send messages from beyond. Edward can’t remember what words of parental wisdom he’d responded with, though he knows he didn’t admit he’d had the thought more than once himself and only wished it were true. Now he stares at the crack and sighs, having neither the energy nor inclination to deal with any of it right now, or indeed in the future.
A hairdryer blasts on above his head.
‘Tilly!’
Taking a bite of toast, then pulling his dressing gown cord tighter, Edward heaves himself out of the kitchen and into the hallway. He rests his foot on the first step of the stairs and leans against the bannister.
‘We’ll get stuck in traffic if we don’t leave in ten minutes,’ he shouts. ‘So get your skinny self down here, now!’
Above him, the hairdryer flicks off and the house is suddenly silent. A moment later, Tilly pokes her pretty face out onto the landing.
‘Hold your horses, I’ll be down in a sec. And I am not skinny. I wish!’ She rolls her eyes, before disappearing again.
But Edward can tell, by the flicker of a smile on the edge of her lips, that – for once – he’s said the right thing. He takes his foot off the stairs and turns to head back to the kitchen, when he notices the mail again, the little pile of letters lying on the mat. Just underneath the telephone bill at the top, Edward sees an envelope – the paper embedded with flower petals – addressed to ‘The Homeowner’ in purple ink. He stoops to pick it up, leaving the other letters untouched, and sits on the first step of the stairs, his silk dressing gown slipping open and exposing his legs to the chill of the unheated hallway. Not that he notices.
Gently, Edward pulls a single sheet out of the envelope and rubs the edge between his fingers. Dozens of flower petals he can’t identify are scattered through the paper – red, mauve, pink, yellow – and suddenly he remembers. Greer’s wedding dress looked just the same. She’d sewn it from a fabric that had also been embedded with petals: roses, violets, peonies, primroses … She’d pointed out each one to him with her slender, clever fingers while he had watched her mouth move around the words, still in awe that his soon-to-be wife could create such incredibly beautiful things.
Edward skims the letter, searching for the subject, glancing down to see the signature – slightly startled to see that there is none – then stops and reads it properly once, and then again.
Tilly is kicking the step above him before Edward realises she’s standing there. He shifts sideways so she can pass by. Tilly hops down the stairs then pauses at the bottom to look up at him.
‘Are you okay, Dad?’
Edward nods.
‘You look a bit weird.’
Edward manages an almost-nonchalant smile. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Okay,’ Tilly says with a shrug. ‘If you say so.’ Then she bounces off towards the kitchen, leaving her father gazing at the paper of pretty flowers and startling words he still holds in his hands.
There is one person Clara writes to regularly: her mother. These are not anonymous, unasked-for letters but accounted-for, anticipated letters.
‘I don’t know why you don’t just call to arrange things, like everyone else,’ is Sophia’s most common complaint.
‘Because letters are more personal, more thoughtful than phone calls,’ Clara protests. ‘Calling is … perfunctory; I like to write.’
‘Your calls are, and that’s whenever I can actually get you on the phone,’ her mother says, ‘but I like to chat. You can discuss things properly that way, share ideas, talk …’
‘Well, we can do that now, can’t we? Now that we’re actually together.’
‘I suppose.’ Sophia adjusts her teaspoon so it sits just at the edge of her saucer. ‘But I like to be spontaneous. I don’t see why we always have to make appointments.’
Clara looks into her own cup, as if searching for the right response in the murky depths of her milky tea. Instead, she says nothing. Sophia reaches for another scone and soaks it in butter, then adds a dollop of clotted cream.
‘But you do make the best scones I’ve ever had,’ she says. ‘And I’ve had plenty.’ She glances down at the folds of her stomach, under the shelf of her breasts.
‘Thanks,’ Clara says, deciding to accept this unexpected compliment graciously.
‘It’s a shame we didn’t inherit your granddad’s genes,’ Sophia continues. ‘That man could, and often did, eat entire afternoon teas without putting on a single ounce. Mum was like me, though, more’s the pity.’ She casts an eye over her daughter. ‘You didn’t stand much of a chance, what with me and your father, did you? It’s a shame, but still …’ She shrugs, adding a little more cream before taking another bite of the scone.
Clara studiously ignores both her own stomach and the remark, and takes another sip of tea. She’d been about to have a second scone herself, but won’t now.
‘Your grandma was a fabulous cook, though, I’ll give her that. She published a cookbook once. Did I ever tell you that? Dad was proud as punch. Or is that pleased as …? At any rate, he was thrilled.’ Sophia beams as she munches. ‘He used to sell signed copies in the shop. He made her one of his special pens, so she could sign them all in style. I think he bought half the publisher’s stock, gave them as gifts to everyone we knew.’
Clara stares at her mother. ‘You’ve never told me that before.’
‘Didn’t I? Oh, I thought—’
‘What’s it called?’
Sophia holds her scone in mid-air. ‘You know, I don’t remember. Isn’t that funny? I must have read the recipes hundreds of times, ’til I had them memorised, but I can’t recall the title.’
‘But you must have a copy,’ Clara says. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen it.’
‘Actually, I don’t. I had my own, signed, of course. But it got so stained over the years – I suppose at some point, I must have thrown it out.’
‘You threw away Grandma’s book?’
‘I’m sorry, sweetie.’ Sophia shrugs. ‘You know I’m not very attached to things. Your father taught me that.’
Clara winces but says nothing.
‘And,’ her mother continues breezily, ‘once I had all my favourite recipes memorised, I didn’t really need the book any more now, did I?’
It’s not about needing, Clara wants to say, it’s about treasuring. But she knows there’s no point. Her mother is so unlike her in this respect (and most others) that they simply aren’t able to understand each other. Sophia’s house is all cream and chrome, plain carpets, unadorned walls, sleek modern appliances, without a sign of past or personality, and everything looking – at least on Clara’s rare visits – as if airbrushed for an imminent magazine photo shoot. By contrast, Clara’s house (inherited from her grandfather) is a homage to chaos, clutter, colour and old-fashioned living. No two rooms are alike, though they share common themes – vintage clocks, weathered Persian rugs, velvet cushions, potted purple orchids, stacks of books, framed letters written by famous people – and all are unified by the fact that everything appears to be dated c.1900 and it seems that nothing once arrived in the house had ever left again.
Clara tries to keep cordial relations with her mother, which means keeping visits fairly frequent (or Sophia starts texting pointed remarks about feeling abandoned and unloved) but as short as politely possible. It bothers Clara sometimes, if she ponders on it for too long, that she isn’t close with either of her parents and that she doesn’t have any siblings. But then she thinks of her grandparents and decides that the two things – one unfortunate, the other not – balance each other out fairly enough.
‘I’ll bet there’s at least a few hundred copies in this house, if only you could find them in the mess,’ Sophia says, finishing off her scone in another bite.
Clara shakes her head, not rising to the bait. ‘If there was a single copy I’d have found it. I know every book in the house. It’s not here.’
Her mother pauses, teacup at her lips, to consider. ‘Have you looked in the attic?’
Clara frowns. ‘What attic?’
Sophia raises an eyebrow and doesn’t attempt to hide her smile. ‘I thought you knew everything about this place.’
‘I’ve only lived here ten years, you grew up here,’ Clara says, trying not to snap.
Sophia slips off the breakfast stool she was perched on, her feet encased in expensive dark-brown suede boots, alighting with a determined thud on the wooden floor. Another way in which Clara differs from her mother is in appearance, not in size, perhaps, but in presentation. Sophia is always impeccably put together in muted monochrome silk, satin, cotton and cashmere – so her clothes blend with her kitchen – while Clara favours cheap, cheerful prints in bright colours, so she stands out like a sore thumb in her mother’s sterile surroundings but blends seamlessly with her own oriental rugs.
‘Follow me,’ Sophia says as she disappears out of the kitchen.
Clara hurries after her. After the second flight of stairs, Sophia stops halfway along the landing. She points up at the ceiling.
‘It’s here.’
Clara looks up at a beautiful oriental rug attached to the ceiling, mirroring the one on the floor beneath it. ‘Where?’
‘Underneath that rather hideous rug, I presume.’
Clara flinches.
Sophia stands on tiptoe, takes hold of the closest corner of the rug and gives it a sharp tug.
‘It’s nailed in place,’ Clara says, ‘we need a ladder.’
Ignoring her, Sophia gives another tug and one end of the rug rips off the ceiling. She sidesteps the cloud of dust that showers down upon them.
‘Pass me that garish umbrella,’ Sophia says, waving her hand in the direction of a polka-dot umbrella leaning against the wall. ‘Goodness knows what it’s doing all the way up here, but for once your clutter is useful.’
Clara hands her mother the umbrella. Sophia turns it upside down, using the curved wooden handle to unhook the brass ring fixed onto a large square of wood in the ceiling. It springs open and, after another tug, a wooden ladder uncurls to the landing floor. Clara peers up into the dark hole above her head. ‘I can’t believe I never knew about the attic.’
Sophia mounts the stairs. ‘Well, don’t stand gaping like a goldfish, come on.’
The words land like pebbles on Clara’s upturned head. She shakes off her confusion and follows her mother up the steps. When Clara emerges into the attic – to see her mother already rooting through a pile of cardboard boxes in the corner – she lets out a little gasp. The attic is large and, like every other room in the house, full to the brim with everything one could possibly imagine, and a few things one couldn’t: books, boxes, furniture, leather suitcases, racks of clothes, cracked teapots and piles of papers … Everywhere she looks Clara sees something new.
‘What is all this?’ she asks, under her breath.
‘It’s probably all rubbish,’ Sophia says, without glancing up. ‘But we might find the odd gem worth selling – I doubt it, but you never know.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at it,’ Clara ventures. ‘Perhaps it’s private, perhaps that’s why they didn’t tell me.’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly.’ Sophia abandons the cardboard boxes and casts her eye about for something more promising. ‘Anyway, they’re dead now, so the issue of privacy is moot.’
Clara raises an eyebrow. ‘Do you feel that way about your own death?’
‘Don’t be so morbid, Clara,’ her mother says, fingering the edge of a bright-yellow satin swing dress. ‘Oh, I do wish my mother had had better taste. I wouldn’t have minded a few vintage gowns to go dancing.’
Clara regards her mother. ‘I didn’t know you danced.’
Sophia smiles. ‘What you don’t know about me, dear, is a lot.’
Clara is about to reply to this remark when her curiosity is snagged by a box a few feet away. The box is set apart from the general cornucopia of bric-a-brac and appears to have somehow escaped the thick sprinkling of dust coating everything else. The box is twelve inches tall and deep, made of shining mahogany, intricately carved in a pattern Clara recognises but can’t quite place. And then she realises. The box must have been made by the same carpenter who created the writing desk. Her mother’s chatter drops to a background hum as Clara steps towards the box, carefully picking her way over the piles scattered across her path.
Clara sits, squeezing herself between a rack of dresses and a low wall of cardboard boxes, and passes her palm gently over the top of the box, tracing her forefinger along the swirls and swells in the wood. She finds the catch and very carefully, very slowly, opens the lid. Then she’s staring down at a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. And, on top, sits a note, yellowed, worn and barely readable:
For Clara,
If you haven’t found your first story yet,
I have one here for you.
I hope, too, that it might make up for all the family you have lost.
Chapter Three
After dropping Tilly at school, Edward returns immediately to the letter. He’d left it propped up on the kitchen counter by the kettle but has been thinking of nothing else since – as if he’d left pieces of his skin behind on the pages and needed to return to reattach them to himself. When he’s at last sitting with the letter in his hands again, Edward feels a deep sense of relief he can’t explain.
For months after Greer died, he’d felt that sense of loss all the time: every second of every minute of every day. He’d be walking along the hallway and stop and turn around, trying to recall what he’d forgotten. Then he’d remember: his wife. The idea that she’d gone in any sort of absolute and permanent way wasn’t something he could make sense of – neither his mind nor his body could comprehend it – he felt instead that she’d wandered off somewhere and neglected to tell him where she’d gone while, at the same time, taking a part of him with her. Eventually, Edward had managed to overcome this extremely disturbing phenomenon by shutting down every feeling part of himself, so there was nothing to miss any more, whether he’d ever had it or not.
Now he slowly unfolds the letter, half expecting the words to have evaporated in his absence. It’s not addressed to him by name, simply beginning with a sentence at the top of the page, but there’s absolutely no doubt in his mind that it’s intended for him.
Monday 1st May ’17
I know that you have given up hope of ever feeling happy again. I know you’re just shuffling through your days now, trying not to make any major mistakes, waiting until it’s all over, until everything is at an end. And, should you want to pass the rest of your life like this, you won’t be judged for it. And yet, there is a tiny part of you that still flickers brighter than the rest, a dim spark of hope that lingers on. I know you feel it flare up sometimes: when you step into an unexpected patch of sunlight, when your daughter laughs, when you chance upon a deer who’s wandered into your garden and, instead of skittering away, he stops and looks you right in the eye.
I know you’ve suffered great tragedy twice in your lifetime, twice more than any man should have to suffer and I know that, even then, you still experience little moments of glory and wonder – hidden bubbles that burst up unexpectedly amid the madness and misery. I know, too, that occasionally – usually at twilight, when the veil between the magic and the mundane is nearly lifted – you see that a choice is open to you, and that the life you choose is up to you.
Edward folds the letter on his lap twice in half, smoothing the edges across his knees. He knows he’ll open it up many times again, that he will reread and reread, but for now he needs a little silence. He needs to make sense of this mystery, to figure out who sent him the letter and why. It must be someone he knows, since the writer clearly understands him so well, better in fact than he understands himself. Which is rather strange and, in fact, slightly scary. Has someone been watching him, following him, spying on him? But even then, how could they see so deep into his heart? Perhaps it’s from his sister, Alba. Yet it doesn’t read as if it’s written by a sister, being both too impersonal and yet too intimate all at once.
Edward takes a deep breath. He already feels different, despite himself. In the past three hours, since he first read the letter, his cells have started to shift about, his blood has begun pumping a little faster, his bones are realigning, minute cracks are creeping across the ice encasing his numb heart.
Edward puts his hand to his chest, feeling an ache in his muscles and bones, as he sometimes does when he stands after kneeling on the floor for too long. He wonders, for a moment, whether he might be about to have a heart attack. So he sits, waiting for the pain to pass, glancing about the kitchen, wondering what his wife would have thought of the state of this house. He asks this of himself often, though he knows the answer: she would have hated it. She would have thought it boring and bland, the opposite of the magnificent multicoloured costumes she created which, Edward reminds himself, was exactly the point. A few months after she’d died he’d suddenly decided that he had to find a new place to live, a place that didn’t remind him of her every single second of every single hour of every single day. It was a decision he’s regretted in a million moments since.
Edward stares at the oven. And then, for some reason, after studying a rogue spot of strawberry jam on the marble worktop, Edward glances up at the ceiling, at the thick black crack snaking across the plaster. He feels a sharp tug in his chest and presses his hand closer to his heart. And then, for the first time in a very long time – almost three years, in fact – Edward feels the urge to do something, something useful, something ordinary and insignificant.
Edward stands. He will mend the crack in the ceiling.
Clara sits with a box of papers in her lap. Her mother chatters away in the background, something about swing dancing and high heels, while Clara presses her fingers to the first page, the heat of her skin making marks on the black leather. She’s torn between a desperate desire to read and devour every word and a longing to save the pages forever untouched, so keeping a little piece of her grandfather always alive and unwrapped.
Clara has never been a particularly curious person. She’s never kept awake at night wondering what’s happened to all those people who receive her letters. She doesn’t want to ask her customers what they write in their own letters. She’s never tempted to open the ones she’s promised not to read. Once, when Clara was thirteen, she had a deep crush on a boy and, while they sat in his bedroom listening to records, he left to go to the bathroom. She shifted to lean against the wall and felt something hard under the duvet. It was his diary. She hadn’t read it. Perhaps, Clara sometimes thinks, this lack of curiosity accounts for her lack of success as a writer of fiction. And yet, she knows now that, no matter how much she longs to hold on, no matter how greatly she wants this moment to last for ever, she will, of course, read this diary.
Every inch of the first page is enveloped with her grandfather’s handwriting, a small, slanting script in twilight-blue ink from the nib of his favourite pen. She can imagine him, hunched over the writing desk in the shop, scribbling away. He only ever wrote with one pen, the very first he ever made, when he was an apprentice in Amsterdam, before his family came to England. And he’d never allowed her to write with it, no matter how much she’d begged.
‘A perfect pen falls in love with a single hand,’ he had said. ‘Its love is lifelong and loyal. In the hand of another it will dry up, it will scratch out words and turn everything into an illegible mess. It isn’t fair to put it through that pain. So you may hold my pen, my sweet, but I’m afraid I can never allow you to write with it.’
A sigh of sorrow rises in Clara’s chest but she swallows it down, knowing it’d arouse comment from her mother. Her grandfather’s twilight words blur. Clara blinks and brushes her fingers over her eyes. Then she takes a deep breath and begins to read:
My dearest Clara,
You’ve found this because you’re looking for a story and, I’m guessing, because you’re lonely and longing for a connection – with yourself and with others. Well, I can offer you both. Enclosed in this box are letters. They belong to our family; they tell of a great love story. I won’t say anything more than that, since I’d like you to discover the rest without my help.
I believe, if you should want to find out more, that the adventure will do you great good. It will ignite desire in you, it will set you on a path to grand adventures – out in the world and inside your own heart – that will ultimately bring you great joy. Of course, if you already have this in your life now, then you may not want to venture down the rabbit hole to which these letters will lead you. But, I have a feeling that, when you find this note, you’ll still be hiding away in your little shop of letters, writing to those who call upon you, offering your magicto transform their lives yet neglecting your own. Of course, if I am wrong, you can ignore your silly, fussing grandfather. If I am right, however, then please read these letters. And please follow where they will lead …
With all love,
Granddad xox
‘Dad! What on earth are you doing?’
Edward looks down from where he’s standing on the tabletop. He brushes plaster out of his eyes, then wipes long dusty white streaks across his jeans.
‘I’m mending the crack in the ceiling,’ he says.
Tilly raises an eyebrow. ‘It looks like you’re making a massive hole in the ceiling.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Edward says. ‘It’s all part of the process.’
The arch of Tilly’s eyebrow rises higher. ‘Ok-ay.’ Dropping her school bag on the floor (then shifting it a safer distance from underneath the large hole) Tilly walks over to the cupboards and starts searching for biscuits.
‘Pass me that hammer,’ Edward says, ‘and stop doubting your father’s skills. I am an architect, you know.’
Tilly sticks her head out of the cupboards and picks up the hammer with her free hand, the other clutching a packet of dry digestives. ‘Dad, you haven’t done that for years.’
Edward takes the hammer and taps at the jagged edge of the hole. A little shower of white powder dusts his hair. ‘I know. But, I’m thinking maybe it’s time for me to start working again.’
