Having cleared up the mess and heated some more milk, Laura sat at the table cradling her warm mug. She could feel the clouds gathering about her and the ground slipping beneath her feet. There was a storm coming, of that she was certain. It wasn’t just the neighbors who were troubling her, it was Anthony too. Over the past weeks something had changed. His physical decline was gradual, inevitable with age, but there was something else. An indefinable shift. She felt as though he was pulling away from her like a disenchanted lover secretly packing a suitcase, preparing to leave. If she lost Anthony, then she would lose Padua too, and together they offered her asylum from the madness that was the real world.
Since her divorce from Vince, the precious few bearings that had set her course through life had drifted away. Having given up university and the chance of a writing career to marry Vince, she had hoped for children and all that motherhood would bring, and later, perhaps, an Open University degree. But none of these had happened. She had fallen pregnant just once. The prospect of a child had temporarily shored up their already crumbling marriage. Vince had spared no expense and completed the nursery in a single weekend. The following week Laura had miscarried. The next few years were spent doggedly trying to replace the child that was never born. The sex became grim and dutiful. They subjected themselves to all the necessary invasive and undignified medical interventions to determine where the problem lay, but the results were all normal. Vince became angry more than sad that he couldn’t have what he thought he wanted. Eventually, and by then to Laura’s relief, the sex stopped altogether.
It was then that she began to plan her escape. When she had married Vince, he insisted that she had no need to work, and by the time it became clear that she was not going to be a mother, Laura’s lack of experience and qualifications were a significant problem when she began looking for a job. And she had needed a job, because she needed money. She needed money to leave Vince. Laura just wanted enough to get a flat and be able to keep herself; to slip away one day when Vince was at work and then divorce him from a safe distance. But the only job she could get was part-time and low paid. It wasn’t enough and so she started writing, dreaming of a best seller. She worked on her novel every day for hours, always hiding any evidence from Vince. In six months it was complete, and with high hopes Laura began submitting it to agents. Six months later, the pile of rejection letters and e-mails was almost as thick as the novel itself. They were depressingly consistent. Laura’s writing had more style than substance. She wrote “beautifully” but her plot was too “quiet.” In desperation, she answered an advertisement in a women’s magazine. It guaranteed an income for writers who could produce short stories to a specific format for a niche publication which was enjoying a rapidly expanding readership. The deposit for Laura’s flat was eventually paid for by an embarrassing and extensive catalog of cloying erotica written for Feathers, Lace and Fantasy Fiction—“a magazine for hot women, with burning desires.”
When she began working at Padua, Laura stopped writing. The short stories were, thankfully, no longer necessary to provide an income and her novel ended up in the recycling bin. She had lost all confidence to begin another. In her darkest moments, Laura wondered to what extent she had engineered her own failures. Had she become an habitual coward, afraid to climb in case she fell? At Padua with Anthony she didn’t have to think about it. The house was her emotional and physical fortress, and Anthony her shining knight.
She poked with her fingertip at the skin forming on the surface of her hot chocolate as it cooled. Without Anthony and Padua she would be lost.
CHAPTER 5
Anthony swirled the gin and lime round in his glass and listened to the ice cubes tinkling in liquid the color of peridots. It was barely noon, but the cold alcohol woke what little fire was left in his veins, and he needed it now. He took a sip and then set the glass down on the table among the labeled bric-a-brac which he had taken from one of the drawers. He was saying good-bye to the things. He felt small in the gnarled oak carver, like a boy wearing his father’s overcoat, but aware as he was of his own diminution, he was not afraid. Because now, he had a plan.
When he had started gathering lost things all those years ago, he hadn’t really had a plan. He just wanted to keep them safe in case one day they could be reunited with the people who had lost them. Often he didn’t know if what he had found was trash or treasure. But someone somewhere did. And then he had started writing again; weaving short stories around the things he found. Over the years he had filled his drawers and shelves with fragments of other people’s lives, and somehow they had helped to mend his—so cruelly shattered—and make it whole again. Not picture-perfect; of course not after what had happened. A life still scarred and cracked and misshapen but worth living nonetheless. A life with patches of blue sky amid the gray, like the patch of sky he now held in his hand. He had found it in the gutter of Copper Street twelve years ago according to its label. It was a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle; bright blue with a fleck of white on one edge. It was just a scrap of colored cardboard. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed it, and those who did would have dismissed it as rubbish. But Anthony knew that for someone, its loss could be incalculable. He turned the jigsaw piece over in the palm of his hand. Where did it belong?
JIGSAW PUZZLE PIECE, BLUE WITH WHITE FLECK—
Found in the gutter, Copper Street, 24th September . . .
They had the wrong names. Maud was such a modest little mouse of a name, quite unlike the woman who owned it. To have called her strident would have been a compliment. And Gladys, so bright and cheery-sounding; it even had the word “glad” in it. But the poor woman it described seldom had any reason to be glad now. The sisters lived unhappily together in a neat terraced house in Copper Street. It had been their parents’ house and the place where they had both been born and brought up. Maud had entered the world as she had meant to carry on in it; loud, unattractive, and demanding attention. Her parents’ firstborn, they had indulged her until it was too late to salvage any sensitivity or selflessness in her character. She became and remained the only person of any significance in her world. Gladys was a quiet, contented baby, which was just as well as her mother could barely accommodate her basic needs while coping with the exhaustive demands of her four-year-old sister. When, at eighteen, Maud found a suitor almost as disagreeable as herself, the family breathed a collective and only very slightly guilty sigh of relief. Their engagement and marriage were enthusiastically encouraged, particularly when it transpired that Maud’s fiancé would have to relocate to Scotland for his business interests. After an expensive, showy wedding, chosen and then criticized by Maud and entirely paid for by her parents, she left to inflict herself upon an unsuspecting town in the far west of Scotland, and life at Copper Street became gentle contentment. Gladys and her parents lived quietly and happily. They ate fish and chips for supper on Fridays, and salmon sandwiches and fruit salad with tinned cream for Sunday tea. They went to the pictures every Thursday night and to Frinton for a week each summer. Sometimes Gladys went dancing at the Co-op with her friends. She bought a budgerigar, named him Cyril, and never married. It wasn’t her choice; simply a consequence of never being given the choice. She had found the right man for her, but unfortunately the right woman for him had turned out to be one of Gladys’s friends. Gladys had made her own bridesmaid dress and toasted their happiness with champagne and salty tears. She remained a friend to them both and became godmother to their two children.