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“But isn’t that worse? Devastated by not exactly a tragedy?”
“Look”—she sighed, put down her cards—“the thing is, life is…it’s…long. And it’s even longer at the beginning. You met Marius at university. You still had shell on. You both did. And you’re thirty now.”
“Thirty-one, actually.” As if that made a difference. As if it made the years after Marius any more meaningful.
“That’s a lot of living, and a lot of changing, and sometimes love doesn’t change with you.”33
I blinked.
“Is this meant to be comforting?”
“I’m just saying. He loved you when you were eighteen.”
“And I would have loved him for his whole life.”
“Him? Or someone he used to be?”
I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn’t. I put my head in my hands. “Oh, I don’t know anymore. I don’t know where love ends and habit begins.”
“Who does?” She reached out and patted my arm. “But Edwin, you need to let someone fall in love with who you are now.”
I must have answered with something silly or dismissive because the game went on, and I lost soon after. But once I got home again, as I blundered through my house by the light of my mobile phone trying to find a torch, I couldn’t help thinking about what she’d said, and about what it would mean.
For someone to love the man Marius had left.
The kitchen is long and narrow, like a train carriage.
The light is languid here, and paints strips of gold upon the counters and the floor.
He filled it once with small dreams: two bodies sliding past each other, arms around his waist, a chin on his shoulder as he cooks.
Sometimes other fantasies, more urgent, less domestic ones, of being pressed against the pantry door or hoisted onto the washing machine to be taken in a rush of heat and need, as sweet as the scent of the herbs—coriander, thyme, and parsley—blooming on the windowsill.
The next morning, I was woken by the rumbling of engines, and when I pulled back my curtains I saw the street was covered by a thin layer of shining water. I dragged on some trousers and hurried downstairs, but the worst of the flooding hadn’t reached me yet. The edges of my sandbags were barely damp. I called work to tell them I wouldn’t be in, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one. The road closures had apparently turned central Oxford into a ghost town. The truth is, the English live for mildly extreme weather conditions. We are, after all, a nation who will call an inch of snow asnowpocalypse. And no matter how much you love what you do, there’s something irresistible about stolen days.
It was cold in my house without any heating, but I wrappedmyself in a jumper, a cardigan, and a blanket, and curled up cosily in my study. I was working on a first edition ofThe Flora of Ashton-under-Lyne and Districtas compiled by the Ashton-under-Lyne Linnæan Botanical Society, including a list of the mosses of the district by Mr. J. Whitehead of Oldham. I’d found it in the bargain box of a charity shop, the front board partially detached and only a fragment of the spine still intact. The shop assistant had let me take it away for ninety-nine pence, somewhat bewildered that I would want it at all.
I’ve been so fortunate that my life allowed me to make my hobby my job, but it has never stopped being my hobby. Something Marius understood easily enough when it came to art—but he never saw the art in this, nor the deep, quiet pleasure of it. His nature was to create newly beautiful things, and mine to restore lost ones.
Sometimes I wonder what will happen when someone comes to archive me. What a peculiar library they will find. Roscoe’sWandering in South Wales(1845, cloth binding),The Survey Atlas of Scotland(1912, J.G. Bartholomew, large folio, maroon cloth binding),A Practical Discourse Concerning Death(date unknown, brown leather stitched binding),Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, of the King’s Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Vol. I(1862, half-leather binding with marbled end pieces). All these forgotten books I have found and tended and made whole again.34
I’d already removed most of the rotten spine linings ofFlora, and now I set about replacing them with Japanese paper, fixing everything in place with wheat starch paste. Then I carefullyreattached the boards with Aerocotton, and created an oxford hollow out of acid-free kraft paper to provide more support. It was not how it had originally been bound, but it would make the spine more flexible and less likely to split when the book was opened.
When I looked up again, I had a crick in my neck, it was the middle of the afternoon, and somebody was knocking on my door. I hurried to open it and found Adam waiting there, holding a pair of wellies.
“Ta-da!”
I looked at them. They were not prepossessing. Battered and tattered and mud- streaked.
Adam’s smile slipped a little. “The more I think about this, the less it seems like a present and the more it seems like an insult. Um. Do you want my spare boots? They’re clean. Ish. And you’d be able to walk through flood water like a pro.”
“I’ve never met anybody who had one pair of wellies, let alone a spare.”
“I’m special.” He said it so dryly, but what I thought was:yes.
“It’s very kind of you,” I babbled, in an attack of nonsensical politeness, “b-but I really can’t. W-what if you need them?”
“Actually they’re mysparespares. These live in my car. I’ve got more at home.” He waved them temptingly, and I didn’t really know how to refuse such a thoughtful—if bizarre—gift.
