Chapter 14 #2
The cloth is faded to the colour of a river in winter.
The corners are bumped. The gold of the title is half-gone from the front cover.
However, you can still read it at an angle, Chateaux of the Loire, and underneath, smaller, the author’s name: some Englishman with three first names and an OBE after them; the type to have known a locksmith’s father in a French village, well enough to write eight pages about hinges.
I sit cross-legged on the rug with the book in my lap.
The photos are appalling, Laurence was right.
Appalling: everything is slightly too green, the skies have gone magenta at the edges, the entire spectrum is offset like all mid-eighties colour printing was offset.
A woman in a headscarf in the foreground of a shot of Chambord is frozen mid-blink like evidence in a murder trial.
The captions are worse. Chenonceau at dusk, a bridge in a dream.
The Loire at first light, the river knowing kings.
I find the chapter on patient hinges. It’s real.
He wasn’t inventing it at three in the morning to put me to sleep.
Eight full pages on a gate in a village I can’t pronounce.
The locksmith’s father. The way the hinge sounds in summer versus winter.
A photograph, captioned A gate having known a century, of what is unambiguously just a gate.
I’m grinning. I didn’t mean to.
I turn back to the front.
The flyleaf.
And there, in black ink, in a hand that is not Laurence’s. Smaller, more slanted, the g’s looping backwards in a pattern no left-handed person’s g’s take. There is a dedication.
To Laurie. Because you said you’d never been. Because the hinges are patient and I am not. Because the masonry will still be there whenever you can bring yourself to go.
Four lines of white space.
Then, lower down on the page, small, tucked into the bottom corner like a footnote hidden there:
your Hugo.
I stop breathing for a second.
your Hugo.
The possessive does the damage. Not Hugo. Not yours, Hugo, with the comma that keeps it formal. your Hugo. Lower case, tucked into a corner like a man giving himself to the reader as a thing already owned.
Four years and a different city ago, when I was fourteen and didn’t yet know what mathematics was for.
I’ve seen this Hugo once, on a Facebook profile photo I wasn’t meant to find.
I read the dedication again. I am not patient—the self-portrait in a single clause
I turn the next page.
There is a small thing pressed between page six and page seven.
At first, I thought it was an old receipt.
It is not a receipt. It is a ticket stub; flimsy cardboard, the print half-gone, but enough legible to tell me SNCF and a date and a route I can’t read because the ink has given up.
Paris to somewhere ending in -eaux. A journey you save because you went together.
I think: four years later, he was reading this book in bed at three in the morning on the night I couldn’t sleep.
I think he told me about the patient hinges, and he did not tell me whose book they were.
I close the book. My hands are shaking, which doesn’t match the just-snooping story.
I put it back on the shelf in the same spot. Spine out, aligned with the neighbours. The small gap I made closes behind it.
From the bathroom: the water stops.
I stand up fast. The t-shirt rides up to the middle of my thighs, and I pull it down on reflex like the shelf has eyes.
The bathroom door opens. I hear his feet on the hallway tiles, wet, unhurried, a man walking barefoot across his own flat to his own bedroom without knowing I’ve spent the last minutes reading a dedication he never told me about.
The bedroom stays empty. I stand in the living room in the dark in his shirt with the bookshelf behind me, and I try to file what I just learned in a drawer I do not yet have.
Laurie.
I am not patient.
Whenever you can bring yourself to go.
A man who kept the book. A man who, at three in the morning on a night his eighteen-year-old fuckbuddy couldn’t sleep, picked up the unopened invitation from the ex and used the language in it to talk a boy in Fallowfield down off a ceiling shaped like Italy.
I choose not to ask.
I go back to the bedroom. He’s sat on the bed, toweling his hair, and he looks up when I come in and smiles.
The small private smile. The one I am not sure he has ever shown anyone else in a while.
I climb into the bed, and the bed is warm where he was, and I close my eyes and put my face against the pillow and my mouth against the cotton.
‘What were you doing.’ Quiet. Curious. No edge.
‘Nosing.’
‘At.’
‘Your shelves.’
A pause. ‘Find anything interesting.’
A hundred answers, a thousand. Yes. Your maths is alphabetised, and there’s a whole shelf of countries you’ve never been to. Someone once signed himself into your books as yours, small letter, bottom of the page.
‘Lots of travel books,’ I say into the pillow. ‘Didn’t have you down as the type.’
A beat. Then his weight settles on the bed behind me. The arm, across my waist. Same place as that first morning.
‘I am not,’ he says into my hair, his voice close. ‘I keep meaning to go. I never go.’
‘Where.’
‘Oh.’ The small laugh that isn’t really a laugh. ‘Anywhere.’
The Loire stays unnamed. I lie still under his arm, counting the silences, and I understand.
Suddenly, as a proof breaker.
Loving someone older than you is this: discipline, devotion, grace offered for history I can’t touch.
His breathing slows against my neck, evening out.
I keep my eyes open in the dark for a long time after his have closed.