When he gets home he finds that the clothes of hers that he hung on the chair are gone. He looks on the floor, under the bed, but he can’t find them. He wonders whether he put them away himself and simply forgot. He wonders whether he hung them there at all.
~~~
The will is straightforward. Mr. Skinner, the solicitor, reads the document, but it’s a formality. John remembers being here with her when she made it, a month after she’d been diagnosed. When the reading’s finished, John stands and waits to shake Mr. Skinner’s hand, but the solicitor remains seated.
“There’s something else,” he says, and he reaches into a brown envelope on his desk and pulls out a black notebook.
“What’s this?”
“Her diary. She posted it to me with the instruction that I give it to you on the reading of the will.”
“What does it say?”
“I haven’t read it.”
At home, John sits on the bed, under the gaze of their photographic pasts, and reads the diary. It tells him some things he knew, some things he didn’t, and some things he knew but had never admitted to himself. He reads the diary from beginning to end, and when he has finished he goes back and reads it again. As he reads the words they take on more substance, become more resonant, become livid or joyous or sorrowful, until eventually he is no longer reading ink on a page but hearing her words as she whispers them to him.
Terry’s very understanding. John’s working less and less, and when he does come into the workshop, he seems distant and unfocused. The parts that Bill scavenged from the oil sheikh’s wreck arrive, and John begins the painstaking task of repairing, refurbishing and refitting, but his work on the car is autonomic. There’s none of the joy that he once felt. He just uses it as a reason to get out of bed now.
“I thought you loved that car,” Craig says to him, and he can’t think how to answer. He did love that car. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Terry takes him to one side, says that his heart’s obviously not in it at the moment, it’s quite understandable, it’ll be all right in time, he should take some time for himself. John nods.
The next day he takes the photograph from the mantel and drives down to the coast. He’s sure that the picture was taken in Brighton. He pushes through the Lanes and down to the seafront, and when he gets there he holds up the picture of her and tries to calculate where it was taken.
The wind has a sting to it, and it whips the sea into splintering peaks. He doesn’t remember being here. He holds the picture in front of him and tries to match the two horizons, to picture her before him, to imagine how it might have been. He wonders why she didn’t say anything about him spending time away, working on the car, chasing parts across Europe. Or maybe she did, and he just didn’t hear it. Didn’t want to hear it.
The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
The seafront is busy. People flow around him, into him sometimes, sorry, sorry, then on, huddled against the wind and clinging to one another as if they were falling, tumbling down the street. Then, in the polished glass of a shop front, he sees her. Just for an instant, behind him, looking right at him. Wide brown eyes, dark hair moving in the wind. He turns, looks, but sees behind him only the promenade and the greying sea. He looks back at the window, but is confronted only by his own reflection, standing ghost-like behind the glass. He looks again, but there’s nothing.
He buys fish and chips, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and returns to the car. When he gets there, on the driver’s side window he sees a face. Not a real face; a cartoonish approximation of dots and curves, as traced in breath with a finger. She drew something like it on the bathroom mirror once, so that in the mornings, when he got out of the shower, he’d have a smile to cheer him up. It’s a sweet gesture, and he doesn’t really mind that it’s slightly distracting to have one on a car window. He doesn’t remember it being there before.
He lays out clothes for her every night before he goes to bed now, and sometime the next day they are always gone. He finds them eventually, days later, in the washing basket, so he washes them for her and hangs them in the wardrobe. He replenishes the feminine toiletries as they dwindle in the bathroom. He has taken to cooking two meals in the evening.
He doesn’t like looking at himself in the mirror any more. The reflection that stares back at him with those sagging eyes is a lie. The images in the old photographs are the real him, caught in an intangible past. The images are the real her.
He comes to the workshop after hours now, to rebuild the car. To be away from Terry and Craig, though he’s not sure why.
It’s finished now, the car. The parts all installed. He’s got the engine working. He’s polished the paintwork, and the mirrors and the windows. He’s vacuumed the seats. Dusted the dashboard. He’s filled the tanks with oil, brake fluid, petrol. It gleams, frozen and impenetrable.
Except it isn’t finished. The leather at the side of the passenger seat is cracked and thin. The rear bumper is pitted with coppery blooms of rust. Already the perfection is crumbling.
It isn’t finished. It’ll never be finished.
~~~
It’s a Saturday, and he’s in the High Street, on his way to the supermarket. He sees Craig
