The Scattered Remains of Something Broken

In one of the many charity shops in the city centre -one of those charities that have enough money to give its shops the surface impression of a vintage boutique, an austerity chic for the less privileged- Leah was browsing the bookcases. She was there because she preferred old books to new books, she liked anthologies of poetry annotated by the previous owner, reaching the point of a novel where the spine was at its most broken, and finding improvised bookmarks made of detritus from someone else’s life. She was also there because half of her paycheque every month went on her rent. That’s cost of living in one of the richest areas of the country when you aren’t rich, and Leah wasn’t about to give up reading.

The classics section was always her first port of call, as years of general consensus tended to assure quality, she was not about to waste good time and money on something badly written. On this occasion she picked up a couple of Fitzgerald novellas, a hefty tome by Dickens and brick of Dostoyevsky. She handed over two hours’ pay.

She read the Fitzgeralds over several train journeys. The Dostoyevsky sat on her bookcase and bored its virgin pages into her temple when she watched TV. The Dickens, Bleak House, she picked up a few weeks after having bought it, feeling like she needed to hunker down into something sizable after flitting between a few short story collections.

A little way in, after the fog dinosaur, Leah found a postcard slipped between the pages. The front was a black and white image of an insect wing under a microscope. On flipping it over Leah saw that it was from the V&A, but not before she took in a cramped message in a looping hand.

‘Nicola,

I hate how things are now with us. I thought I was doing the right thing for you by leaving. It was selfish of me, I realised that ‘right’ and ‘easy’ are not the same.  I miss you. I’ve been telling myself it’s too late, that it has been too long. Is it too late? Remember that mild winter we fed pastry to the fat squirrel, in the park by the weir? You are so beautiful when you laugh.

All my love,

Ina.’

The address was a local one. Leah recognised the street; it was about half a mile from her flat. She spun the card in her fingers as though she were trying to trap the message behind the fragmented film of the wing. Then she placed it back inside the book.

~

The next day she met James for coffee. James was not her boyfriend, he was not anyone’s boyfriend. It was a weekday and the café was half empty, a few sightseeing pensioners in brightly coloured raincoats sipped hot chocolates by the window, and two pearl encrusted ladies picked at salads while they gossiped. James was sat against the back wall. A girl on his master’s course had recently told him he looked a bit like a Hollywood detective hero, in the dark, if she squinted at him, and since then he had taken to wearing the actor’s signature fitted white shirt and skinny tie combo.

Leah negotiated the furniture with her four-shot latte and sat opposite James.

‘And how is the starving artist today?’

He smiled sheepishly up from the tatty notebook he had been scribbling in. 

‘You don’t want any of my Nobel Prize money then?’

‘You’re too young and you haven’t been to war, so I think I’ll risk it.’

He looked slightly downhearted at this. Leah suspected he would gladly go to war if it got him good copy.

‘Really, how’s it going?’

He leant across the table, dipping the end of his tie into his tea as he did so.

‘I’m studying the art of upper-middle class conversation’ He looked pointedly over Leah’s shoulder and she knew he meant the women eating lunch.

James sat back, jumped when the wet end of his tie hit his stomach and stared mystified at it while Leah giggled. While he dried it on some paper napkins she tuned into what the ladies were saying and garnered that both of their unfeasibly named children were on their gap year, year pronounced yar.

‘I’ve got something to show you’ Leah said eventually, once she was sure it would make its full impact, and retrieved Bleak House from her satchel.

‘Sorry to disappoint you, darling, but I read that when I was 16.’

‘And I’m sure you were very popular for it. It’s not the book, I found this inside it.’ She handed over the postcard. He read it, then handed it back.

‘Cool, a Post Secret thing. I’ve heard about people slipping them into library books.’

‘You think that’s what it is?’ Leah looked at him doubtfully ‘It has a stamp on it.’

‘Maybe she didn’t have the courage to post it so she hid it.’

‘I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like it was put there on purpose. It feels like it was forgotten.’

‘So she got over her. Ooh ‘literary lesbian love affair’ is a great bit of alliteration.’

 ‘Well maybe she sent it. Maybe it meant a lot to Nicola. What if she thinks it’s lost?’ Leah was irked by how flippant he was being about her discovery.

‘Let me see it again?’ James drew an imaginary magnifying glass from his shirt pocket and squinted at the card. ‘There is no postmark. I deduce two possibilities. The first, that she changed her mind and never sent it, or the second, she decided to hand deliver it instead.’ He looked very pleased with himself.

Leah stared at him impassively, ‘What are your plans for the rest of today?’

James stretched his arms up and placed them behind his head. ‘Oh you know.’ He eyed the women as they daintily shuffled around their chairs, gathering up handbags and umbrellas, ‘Squeezing genius from my brain onto the page like a wet rag.’

‘Or a tea soaked tie?’

‘Shut up. What did you have in mind then?’

~

The morning rains had cleared, the sky brightened, and the chill spring sunshine scattered diamonds across the wet pavement.

Leah held the postcard in front of her with both hands like a map, the bulk of her duffle coat making her look a little childlike. James walked beside her, the collar turned up on his black trench.

‘Maybe she’s dead,’ James said suddenly, apparently apropos to nothing.

‘What?’ Leah stopped at the crossing and absent-mindedly pummelled the lights button.

‘Think about it. When do people give the most stuff to charity? Clearing a house after someone has died. When Gran died we kept a few bits but most of the stuff, especially books, went down to the hospice shop.’

Leah looked down at the postcard and reshuffled the image she had in her mind, of a happy couple who had accidently given away a piece of nostalgia during a tidy out, into a very different one.

‘Ina or Nicola?’ She wasn’t sure why this mattered, but she felt somehow one would upset her more than the other.

He shrugged ‘I’m a detective, not a psychic.’

They crossed the street and turned onto a wide Georgian road. The house was tall and thin, blackened with pollution. Like a lot of the old townhouses it had been hacked up into flats. The postcard said number 4. There was no name next to the buzzer.

Leah did not know what she had been planning to do once she got here and now found herself staring at the blank name plate. She stepped back into the street and looked up at the long windows on the first floor. She could see crowded bookshelves and bare light bulbs on long cords.

She was brought back to ground level by James skipping up the steps and ringing the doorbell.

‘What are you doing?’ she hissed at him.

‘I’ve not come with you to peep through windows and not even get a good story out of it.’ He smiled benignly at her mortified expression ‘Relax, you can tell her I’m not a murderer.’

The door opened before Leah had time to run and hide. A slight, older woman, with a grey bob and wearing a flowing layered cashmere ensemble, stood in the hall. She looked quizzically at James, then at Leah. It occurred to Leah that she had not considered how much time had passed since the postcard had been discarded- it was not dated or yellowing and the book didn’t smell mustier than the general smell of second hand books. She thought again of James’s theory and wondered if what they were about to do was not in fact incredibly cruel. 

 ‘Yes, may I help you?’

‘Good afternoon, madam.’ James paused to smile gallantly at the lady, whose eyebrows had disappeared up under her hair, ‘Sorry to bother you, but my friend and I came across a piece of post with this address on it and, seeing as it wasn’t far, we thought that we would return it. Are you, by any chance, Nicola?’

The woman gave a single bark of laughter which seemed to hold no mirth.

‘No, my dear, I am not Nicola. There was a Nicola here, but now she is gone.’ Leah’s stomach lurched at the potential confirmation of the worst possibility. She thought she could detect a European tunefulness to the woman’s voice. Ina, she thought, wasn’t that a German name?

‘Somewhere I have the forwarding address. I could send it on for you?’ The woman took up the reading glasses that were hanging around her neck and put them on.

Leah held out the postcard and the woman took it delicately from her. As she released it Leah found that she felt suddenly bereft, the quest was over, but there was no answer.

The woman peered at the card without seeming to read it, ‘Where was it you found it? I will let her know.’

‘It was in an old book I bought, Bleak House.’ Leah answered distractedly as she rummaged through her satchel for a pen and then ripped a page from her notebook.

‘With your note can you include this? It’s my address, I’d like to know, if, well, if she’d like to know anything more, she can write to me.’ She faltered to a lame finish, sending the woman’s eyebrows on another trip skywards.

‘If she would like to know, very good, it will go in too.’ She took the smudgey scrap with rather less grace this time. Leah suspected that it would go straight into the bin. ‘Thank you for calling with this, it was very considerate. Goodbye.’

Leah and James sheepishly said goodbye to the closing door.

James gave a long whistle as they started to make their way back towards town, ‘She knew what you were about.’

Leah blushed ‘I know. But it’s not so bad is it? To want to know if things turned out ok for someone, or a couple?’ She stared at the pavement.

James put a consolatory arm around her. ‘No, it’s not bad.’

Leah smiled at him and reminded herself of the many reasons that kissing him would be a terrible idea. Some actions can steal time and make it too late to retrieve what is lost. As they passed by the weir, a squirrel scampered across their path and up a tree, a crust of bread in its mouth, courageously pilfered from the swans.

                                                                                    ~

Back inside, the woman pulled her little writing table up to her armchair and sat down. She took a sip of tea and considered calling her daughter to tell her about this strange visit, but it had been so very long since she had had an excuse to write a letter and she would have to post the card to her anyway. She didn’t like to think of those years of estrangement from her, so it was with a bittersweet swelling of her heart that she thought of how much she owed to overcoming her own pride, and most of all, to her child’s forgiveness.