Chapter 10 Nina

Chapter 10

?Nina

After I haul my suitcase onto the bed in the largest of three generous bedrooms, I take in the room again now that James is gone.

As the largest of the three bedrooms this must have been my father's room—his bed, his sheets, his pillow.

I walk over to it and gently place a hand onto the soft give of it. I know the sheets will be long changed, fresh for my arrival, but I bend and inhale, hoping for his soapy citrus-and-cedar scent. A smell that has a direct line to my parasympathetic nervous system. But of course it is not there, just the scent of crisp, clean bed linen.

He is not here, not in that sense. But I know he will be somewhere.

I spot the large built-in closet lining one wall and head over. Inside is full: immaculately dry-cleaned shirts, trousers, cashmere jumpers folded. I run a hand over a tomato-red sweater, its texture telling me its quality, and I guess at its brand. The clothes in this closet are all expensive and new. I know they likely aren't actually new, but in comparison with my father's usual wardrobe of ancient Jermyn Street attire, this collection of garments looks rarely worn.

I look through each garment and imagine how he might have looked thirty years ago, how he might have looked before I was born. When he and my mother were together, back when she was still alive. For the first time in a while, I feel a different kind of heartache, perhaps a less selfish one—a heartache for him: for the life he could have had with my mother if she had lived. He raised me alone, a brilliant man forced to raise a child solo. Forced to hold his world and mine together after losing the woman he loved. He never married again after her death, never took off his ring, never so much as went on a date. Though I would have to take others' words for that as I was only a few months old when she died from post-birth complications.

He raised me, he had time for little else, and yet look what he achieved. In spite of me, perhaps, or if I credit myself, for me ? I cannot even begin to think what he might have accomplished without me. It's funny, a thousand thousand days of selfless care and devotion to me, and my education, and my life, and the few times he was disappointed with me seem to lurch out at me from the past since he went.

I try to push a memory away but I can't.

I was eleven, it was my birthday. It was after bedtime and I was sneaking back downstairs to get a chocolate bar I knew was unfinished in my bag of gifts. I passed his office and heard voices. A man and a woman. My father and someone else.

It's funny to think that I didn't know the sound of her voice until then. He never talked about her, not really. He told me she would have loved me, that she would have been proud, that she liked flowers and Earl Grey and marzipan. But who she was, in her heart, was his. She was his and she was gone.

I walked in thinking he had a visitor. But he did not, his voice was not coming from him but from the old tape player on his desk, the whir and clack of it now obvious. His voice from before I was born and hers too, just talking. A soft laugh. The sound of tea being drunk.

They must have recorded themselves for fun. She sounded a little self-conscious as he asked her what she made of the book they had just read.

My father looked up at me standing in the doorway and clicked off the tape, his eyes on me filled with a disappointment I still can't quite fathom to this day. And all I could think was, He wishes she had just walked in, not me.

I know I didn't kill her. She died from complications after birth. Medical failure. Oversight. A million tiny mistakes that meant her heart stopped working. But the truth seemed so clear in his look. The truth was that I was there and she was gone. That brilliant, beautiful woman, a woman bright enough to match the genius of my own father, had been exchanged for me. A moderately gifted, moderately attractive eleven-year-old albatross. He barked a "Get out." And a core memory was formed.

I did not mention the tapes again. Or her. She was his. And he would mention her when he did and when he did, she was still his.

Maybe I should have asked more? Maybe he wanted me to? A new type of regret blossoms in me.

But my thoughts have gone down a cul-de-sac and I know it. I push them away and gently close his closet. And it occurs to me that this place might just be a holiday home: that my father might just have needed more of the world to himself. And after a lifetime of service to me, wasn't he entitled to that? If he kept his wealth to himself, wasn't that also his right?

No one owes all of themselves to anyone else. We are all individuals, and what we give of ourselves, we must choose to give freely.

I feel a wash of guilt at having assumed my father did anything nefarious to secure this house, at having grown jealousthat he had kept something more for himself and not told me about it. He was a human first and foremost—he was my father too, but he had a life outside of that, a life he did not oweme.

This house must have been part of that life.

—

I spot the small nightstand next to the bed and am drawn to it instinctively. The little drawer in the nightstand, beckoning me. I lower myself to sit on the thick carpet in front of it and tentatively pull it open, its contents rattling as I do.

Piece by piece, I lay the drawer's contents out on the carpet in an arc around me. A set of keys, silver metal with a red float fob. I hold them up, turn them. It is unclear what their use is in a house with an integrated electrical locking system. I place them down and let my thumb find the grained black leather cover of a pocketbook. A small Moleskine notebook. Peeking inside, I see it is full, his handwriting bunched and scrawling through its pages as I flip.

I look across the room at my handbag, resting innocently on the low armchair by the door, and think of the letter of wishes that lies still unread inside it. Though the contents are purely functional, I know I will get more of his handwriting there too. I consider the other articles in front of me. A dog-eared Alexandre Dumas classic—not one of my father's favorites, I note, but a topical one given our island location. Then my eyes move to a small sterling-silver pig figurine, no bigger than a fifty-pence piece.

Beside it, a red pencil, stubby and chewed at one end.

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.

—

Then my mind inevitably turns to the room downstairs. I head down, the glowing blue light of the locked room's door panel pulsing at the end of the corridor. The one room I have not scoured, the one room I cannot enter.

Anderssen's Opening: an opening move, a locked door. A move that seems simplistic, innocent, that could almost be made in error. But it has a clear and targeted purpose: to make the other player make the first move.

Every answer I could ever want might be hiding just a few inches from me. An answer as to why he had this house, what it was for, who lived here with him, and why he never told me it existed. I walk over to it and touch the thick white-painted metal. The hydraulic door is warm, warm like a living thing.

I try the lock again. It does not open.

—

The blue light pulses on, slow and mesmerizing—it couldn't look more like an invitation, an opening move, if it tried. And suddenly I am certain that the reason my father has brought me out here is just behind that door.

In my mind, the house takes on the form of a puzzle box with this room at the start of it.

Somehow I need to get in there.