I lift it and study the teeth marks in the wood. They don’t look like his, but how much can you tell from a chewed pencil? It could be anyone’s bite. And the house has been full of people since his death, after all: surveyors, appraisers, and solicitors. It might have just ended up here. Or else I could infer that someone else was here with him. I hold the idea in my mind for a moment before dropping it. It would be quite a profound change in character if I found out my father had shared a room, a bed, with someone else after thirty-odd years alone. Perhaps that is what he has brought me here to see: his truth, whatever that may be?
I reopen the small black notebook and flip through. It is a workbook of sorts: anagram wheels, sudoku panels, plays for chess games long past. Random quotes interspersed with his familiar line sketches. I linger now on one quote, scrappily penned under some undefined calculations: For a man to know himself: he must be tested.
So far, so Dad. Seneca. His favorite philosopher, a Roman stoic, famously exiled for adultery and forced to live out his days on the island of Corsica. Pleasingly topical, was this my father’s Corsica?—although what crime he committed to end up in exile I do not know. It certainly wasn’t adultery.
The quote’s sentiment tracks, though. My father was always one for a challenge, for setting them, for accepting them.
He would leave puzzles out, my childhood and early adulthood peppered with increasingly complex problems. Whenever life was hardest for me—a new school, problems at work—the games would materialize, and the challenges would get harder.
Maths problems, riddles, translations, all pointing to some meaning, some answer. The distraction always bigger than the last, more taxing than the previous but also more rewarding.
I look around the room again. Is this one of them? After all, this is the hardest year of my life. Wouldn’t it be just like him to set me my hardest challenge yet. A game bigger than we have ever played before. A game that seems to begin with Anderssen’s Opening, with the ball in my court.
If this is a game, I will need more clues.
I head into the kitchen. He hated cooking, or rather it seemed to baffle him. So I’m more than a little curious as to what on earth I will find in this house’s incredibly well-appointed food preparation area. The fridge I know is full of my favorites so instead I open the first cupboard I come to and take in the neatly arranged tins: chopped tomatoes, five different varieties of beans, artichokes, bisques, all stored pristinely. In the next cupboard, rows of baking ingredients: flours—brown, white, strong bread flour, self-rising, gluten-free—muffin sleeves, cupcake cases. I stare at them agog. Neither of us baked. Images of my father dusted in flour, rolling pin in hand, suddenly flash through my mind, more than a little baffling. Perhaps he developed a secret late-life love of The Great British Bake Off? I close the door on that and open another, this one full of spices and herbs: their seals broken, clearly well used. Another cupboard of dried goods, a fully stocked fridge, and several cupboards of chicly minimal crockery and I have completed the kitchen. There are enough basic ingredients here to make almost any dish. And while I am aware that James’s company has obviously just had the kitchen restocked, it is clear that some of these items have been here for a while.
My father did cook, then. Or he had a cook. Or someone else was here who cooked.
I jolt out of my search abruptly as that thought lands: my father wasn’t living here alone. There could have been a woman out here with him, or a man: a lover I never even knew about—a secret kept—as heartbreaking to me as it is unsettling.
I make a mental note to ask James if there is any record of another inhabitant.
—
I STAY UP LATE INTO the night scouring every inch of the house, every cupboard, shelf, drawer, and ledge.
I find little of substance, though every now and then I do stumble across a knickknack, or well-thumbed book, that I recognize from the house back in England. Objects that must have slowly made their way back over here with him. A small travel clock from his desk. His well-used Montblanc fountain pen, a gift from the university faculty after he won his first award. A rare first edition of The Waste Land, my mother’s unfamiliar hand scrawled into the insert.
For the greatest man I know by the greatest I do not. All my heart,
your Hyacinth Girl
I stare at her words.
Your Hyacinth Girl.
As Maeve said, he was a private man. I knew he loved my mother, I felt it to my core, more from the way he handled her memory and what objects of hers our house retained, than from his direct address of the subject.
I reread her words: words from beyond the grave to the man she loved, and now to me. All that love and now both of them gone. The fleeting nature of love and life is almost tangible to me for a moment—and then it is gone too.
I turn the book over, in hand, and look at the cover art. I am familiar with the text. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Strange material for a lover’s gift, strange and sad, and heavy and portentous: as if she somehow knew her fate long before it befell her.
I try to remember what I know of the poem inside this book and what her reference here to a Hyacinth Girl could signify. Then the words tumble back to me: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl”…Looking into the heart of light, the silence. A shot of hope, of transcendence, in an otherwise melancholic poem.
Was my father on the cusp of genius and madness—was she his shot of hope in the darkness? If so, he hid it well. But parents hide a lot of the world from their children, especially if they love them. He was happy and kind and content, I think.
I think.
But then here I am in a house of his making that I knew nothing about until now.
I slot the thin volume back into the bookshelf and continue my search.
Having run out of movable objects I turn to the walls themselves. I carefully check behind his priceless paintings for provenance—where and when each was bought—though I know James’s firm will have notes on each in the beneficiary pack.
I am tired and sad and looking for my dead parents behind abstract paintings.
—
