The fog rolled in off the Bristol Channel just after dawn, the sort of thick grey that swallowed the harbour bell at Lundy Pier and turned the cobbles of Pilgrim's Lane into something felt more than seen.
Vera Lockhart set the heel of her palm against the spine of a worn copy of Tinker Tailor and slid it home between Tartt and Tolkien. The shelves smelled of damp cloth and binding glue. Somewhere beneath the radiator, the pipes clicked twice, then fell quiet.
She was thirty-two years old and had run Pilgrim Lane Books for nine months. The shop had been her husband's project, then her inheritance, then, in the way these things arrange themselves, her profession. The inheritance certificate still lived in the bottom drawer of the rolltop desk, beneath a stack of unsorted bills and a tin of mints no one had touched since the funeral.
Vera reached for the next paperback.
The phone buzzed against the till.
She ignored it. The call display read a number she half recognised, the London prefix bracketed by an area code she could never quite place. Whoever it was could wait. The S's were a mess. Someone, sometime in the shop's previous life, had shelved Sparkes beneath Sellar and Young, which had the misfortune of landing between Sayers and Sebald, which was its own minor bibliographical tragedy. Vera had opinions about the alphabet and about Sellar and Young in particular, and she intended to see the matter through.
The phone buzzed again.
She set down the paperback and crossed the narrow aisle. The bell above the door would ring if anyone came in. No one came in at quarter past nine on a Tuesday in January, not when the fog had wrapped itself around the chimneys of Fore Street and the post office down the lane had already closed for the day.
"Vera Lockhart."
"Vera. It's me."
Eitan. Of course it was Eitan. The voice came through tinny and wrong, as though he were calling from the bottom of a well, or a Boston bar at last call. The rasp she remembered from his schoolboy years had thickened into something else, a working man's gravel that hadn't quite settled into a Londoner's drawl.
"Eitan." She leaned one hip against the counter. "It's early here."
"It's later here. Half nine. I'm at the shop."
"You're still at the shop."
"Where else would I be. Typesetting doesn't do itself." A pause, a breath, the click of a lighter. Eitan had been off the cigarettes for two years and back on them for one, a fact he'd confessed in a Christmas card. "Vera, I need to talk to you about Mum."
Vera said nothing. She turned her head to look at the window. The fog pressed flat against the glass, grey and close, and she could see her own face faintly in it, her hair pulled back with a pen, the line of her jaw set in a way she didn't intend.
"She rang me yesterday," Eitan said. "Twice. The first time she rang me, she said she couldn't find the kettle."
"The kettle."
"She was standing in the kitchen, Vera. She knew she wanted to make tea. She knew she wanted the kettle. She said the word came back to her halfway through pouring. Halfway through. As though she'd gone down a corridor and found the door at the end."
Vera closed her eyes. Behind her, the radiator ticked once more. The shop smelled of cold tea and old paper, the particular Devon cold that crept up through the floorboards and settled in the bones.
"What did she do," Vera said.
"She laughed. You know what she's like. She laughed and said she'd had a senior moment and put the phone down. Then she rang me again an hour later and said she couldn't remember the word for sock."
"The word for sock."
"Sock. The thing that goes on your foot. The thing you've put on every morning of your life since you were four. She said she knew exactly what it was. She could describe it. She could hold it in her hand and tell me the colour, the texture, the brand if I asked. But the word wouldn't come. It sat on the tip of her tongue and wouldn't come."
Vera opened her eyes. The paperback in her hand, the one she'd been about to shelve, was a tatty copy of Possession with the cover half torn off. She looked at it for longer than she needed to.
"How long," she said.
"Long?"
"How long has this been going on, Eitan."
A pause. The line hummed with the static of an ocean between them. Eitan drew on his cigarette, the faint push of air against the receiver.
"Months," he said. "Maybe longer. Maybe a year. I don't know. I haven't been home in a year, Vera. You know that. I'm in Boston. I'm typesetting a monograph on the semicolons of Evelyn Waugh for a man who has strong feelings about Evelyn Waugh, and I'm ringing my mother once a week because I promised I would, and I'm only just noticing."
"You're noticing now."
"She asked me last Tuesday what the morning was called."
"The morning."
"Breakfast. She wanted to know the word for breakfast. She said the room was wrong, the smell was wrong, the time was right, but the word wouldn't come. She said she thought she'd invented it. She thought breakfast might be something she'd made up."
Vera set the paperback down. She put both hands flat on the counter and felt the cold wood through her fingers.
"You need to come home," Eitan said.
"I am home."
"You need to come to Mum, Vera. I'm not asking. I'm telling you."
"She's not your responsibility to delegate, Eitan."
"She's not anyone's responsibility to delegate. That's the bloody point. She's in a cottage in Hay-on-Wye with a head full of words and the words are going. She forgets the kettle, the sock, the morning, and somewhere in there, eventually, she's going to forget us."
Vera said nothing. She heard the bell above the door give a small shiver as the heating came on, the way it always did at this hour, and she turned her head toward it without seeing anything.
"I'm ringing the GP tomorrow," Eitan said. "I'm going to fly in on the fourteenth. I'll land at Bristol at eleven. If you're not at the cottage by lunch I'll get a taxi myself, and I don't want to do that, Vera, because last time I saw Mum she asked me three times what my name was."
"She was tired."
"She wasn't tired. She was confused. There's a difference."
Vera drew a slow breath. Through the window, the fog had thickened further. The bakery across the lane had vanished entirely; the chemist's awning was a smudge of green in the white. She could hear, faintly, the coastguard horn out beyond the breakwater, a low and mournful note that the fog swallowed whole.
"Fourteenth," she said. "I'll be there."
"You'll be there at Mum's."
"I'll be there. I promise. I'll drive up after closing. I'll be at the cottage by half nine."
"Say it again."
"Eitan."
"Say it again, Vera."
"I'll be at the cottage by half nine on the fourteenth," she said. "I'll bring the photograph album. I'll bring her reading glasses. I'll bring whatever she wants."
Eitan was quiet for a long moment. The static settled between them like the snow she sometimes saw on the news from places she'd never been.
"There's something else," he said.
"Vera."
"Sorry. Force of habit." He took another drag. "She rang me a third time. After the sock. After the breakfast. She rang me at three in the morning her time, which is ten at night mine, and she said she'd been looking through the desk in her study."
Vera's hand moved, without her meaning it to, to the drawer beside the till. Inside, beneath a stack of bookmarks and a stub of pencil, lay a key she hadn't used in nine months.
"She said there was a drawer she hadn't opened in years," Eitan said. "She couldn't remember what was in it. She said she wanted to write down the title of her next novel and the title had gone out of her head, and she thought maybe the drawer would tell her."
"What was in the drawer."
"She didn't open it."
"Why not."
"She couldn't find the key."
Vera closed her eyes. The key in the drawer beside the till was cold against her fingertip. The lock in Margot's study, a small brass thing, had been fitted the year Vera was twenty-three and Margot had begun, in earnest, the work that would make her name.
"Vera," Eitan said. "Are you there."
"I'm here."
"What do you want me to do."
"Don't open the drawer."
There was a long silence. Outside, the fog pressed against the shop window, patient and grey.
"I'll be at the cottage on the fourteenth," Vera said. "Don't open the drawer before I get there. Whatever you do."
"Vera."
"Promise me, Eitan."
"I promise." A pause. "Are you all right?"
Vera opened her eyes. The shelves of Pilgrim Lane Books stood around her, the S's only half corrected, the Tatts and Taylors leaning against one another like tired soldiers. The radiator ticked. The fog bell from the harbour sounded once and was gone.
"I'm fine," she said. "I'll see you on the fourteenth."
She set the phone down. She stood for a moment with both hands on the counter, her breath shallow, her shoulders set. Then she reached into the drawer beside the till and took out the brass key. It lay across her palm, small and cold, and she looked at it for a long time.
From the street, faintly, came the sound of a man whistling for his dog.
From the street, faintly, came the sound of a man whistling for his dog.
Vera did not move for a long moment. The key lay in her palm, and the fog bell from the harbour had stopped its single toll. She could hear the radiator, the settling of old shelves, the almost imperceptible creak of the shop as the temperature changed. The fluorescent strip above the counter had begun to flicker, a thing she kept meaning to replace, and the light it gave was the colour of weak tea.
She slipped the key into her coat pocket. She walked to the door and turned the sign. Closed. The red side of the placard faced the street, and beyond the glass the fog had thickened until the books across the lane were only shapes, suggestions, the spines without titles. She drew the bolt at the top, and the bolt at the bottom, and stood for a moment with her hand against the wood.
When she turned, she saw him.
He was already inside.
He stood near the poetry shelves, his hands in the pockets of a long dark coat, his hair silver at the temples and black at the crown. He was watching her the way a man watches a fire he has not yet decided whether to tend or to leave. There was a cardboard box at his feet, and the box was tied with brown twine.
"You never did learn to knock," Vera said.
Cassiel Thorne smiled. The smile reached his mouth but stopped there, as if it had been instructed to go no further. "You never did learn to lock the door behind you," he said. "Though I'll grant you the bolts are new."
"I had them fitted."
"I can see that." He tilted his head. "May I?"
"May you what."
"Speak with you." He stepped forward, one hand raised, palm open, the gesture of a man who had once known how to ask. "Only speak. I have something for you."
Vera did not move from the door. Her left hand, behind her, rested against the bolt she had just thrown. The keys to the shop were in her right pocket, and beside them the small brass key for Margot's drawer pressed against her thigh through the cotton lining.
"I am closing," she said.
"I know." His voice was low, and warm, and unhurried. He spoke the way he had always spoken, with each word given its own air, its own small silence. "I waited until you turned the sign. I would not have come otherwise."
"You would not have come at all, a year ago."
"A year ago," he said, "I was a different man."
"You were the same man with fewer reasons to stand in my shop."
He inclined his head. The silver at his temples caught the flickering fluorescent and threw it back. He was fifty-three, she knew. He had been twenty-four the summer she had known him, and he had been beautiful in the way that certain men are beautiful when they have not yet learned that beauty will not save them. He had been in Devon to take photographs of the coast for a book that never went to press. He had stayed for her. She had let him. That had been a long time ago, in a country she no longer visited.
"You look well," he said.
"You look tired."
"I am tired." He said it simply, without performance. "My aunt died in October."
There was a silence. Vera felt the word land where he had placed it, in the small space between them. October. The month the leaves come down. The month Margot had been born.
"I am sorry," Vera said.
"Thank you." He looked down at the box at his feet. "Her name was Magdalene. You would not have known her. She lived in Launceston, in a house full of books and cats. She was a great reader of yours."
"Of mine."
"Since the first Lockhart novel." He smiled again, and this time the smile went further, reached his eyes, and there was something in it that was not charm but grief. "She kept every edition. She wrote to you once, I believe. You did not reply."
"I receive a great many letters."
"You receive a great many and answer none." He bent and lifted the box, and she saw that it was heavier than it looked. "I have been going through her things. There were journals. There are journals. Twenty-two of them. Leather-bound, mostly. Some bound in cloth."
He set the box on the counter. The sound it made against the wood was solid and flat, the sound of something that has waited.
"I have read none of them," Cassiel said. "I could not. They are not addressed to me." He paused. "She wrote your name on the inside cover of every one. She wrote: for Vera, if she should wish to know."
"If she should wish to know what."
"I do not know." His gaze was on her face now, steady, without apology. "But you are the only person I have ever known who might understand what is written in them. My aunt was a careful woman. She was also a strange one. She did not speak of you to me, but she spoke of the Lockhart novels as if they were scripture, and she wrote in her journals as if she were keeping a record of something she expected to be disbelieved."
Vera did not move.
"I cannot keep them," Cassiel said. "I do not want them. I have brought them to you because I do not know where else they should go, and because I am asking you, Vera, as a favour, to take them."
The radiator ticked. The fog pressed against the shop window. Somewhere above them, in the flat, a pipe groaned as if remembering a winter.
Vera looked at the box. The twine was knotted with the care of a person who did not trust the knot to hold. The cardboard was soft at the corners from handling. She could see, through a small tear at the side, the edge of a leather spine, dark and cracked.
"Twenty-two," she said.
"Twenty-two."
"You have read none."
"None."
"And you expect me to believe that."
He did not flinch. "I expect you to believe what you choose, as you always have." He straightened. "I will leave them here. I will go now. You may do with them as you see fit."
He turned toward the door. He had taken three steps when Vera spoke.
"Cassiel."
He stopped. He stood with his back to her, and she could see the line of his shoulders, the set of his head. He was waiting.
"Why me."
"Because my aunt asked for you." He did not turn. "And because I owe you a debt I have never paid."
"You owe me nothing."
"I owe you the truth about a summer I did not name." He said it quietly, and the words fell into the shop like a stone into a well. "I have carried it a long time. I will carry it longer. But I would not bring you a lie tonight. The journals are what they are. I have not read them. I do not know what is in them. I am asking you to take them because there is no one else."
He turned then. He looked at her, and she saw that he was not performing. That was the worst of it. Cassiel Thorne had always been a man who could make any feeling look rehearsed, and tonight he was not rehearsing. He was simply standing in her shop, near the poetry shelves, with a box of his dead aunt's journals, and he was asking.
"Leave them," Vera said.
He nodded. He did not thank her. He walked to the door, and she stepped aside, and he passed her, and she smelled the cold of the street on his coat and beneath it the faint, clean scent of soap.
He opened the door. The fog came in. He paused on the threshold.
"The fourteenth," he said.
"What."
"You are going somewhere on the fourteenth. I heard the bellman at the post office mention it." He did not smile. "Be careful, Vera."
He stepped out into the fog, and the door swung shut, and the bolt was still drawn from the inside, and he did not knock.
Vera stood for a long moment with her hand on the door. She could hear his footsteps on the pavement, then nothing. The fog swallowed them. The fog bell did not sound.
She turned back to the counter. The box sat where he had placed it. The twine was knotted. The tear at the side showed the leather of a spine, dark and cracked.
She untied the twine. She folded it and set it aside. She opened the flaps.
The journals were stacked inside. Twenty-two of them, as he had said. Leather-bound, mostly. Some in cloth. They were not new. They were not old. They were the kind of objects that had been handled and closed and opened again, and the air that rose from them was faintly sweet, faintly dry, the smell of paper that has been kept in a house with a coal fire.
She lifted the first one. The leather was dark, and the gilt on the spine had almost gone. On the inside cover, in a hand she did not recognise, was written: for Vera, if she should wish to know. And beneath it, in a smaller hand, the date. October 1979.
She set it down. She lifted the second. The same inscription. A different date. March 1981.
She went through them, one by one, slowly. The dates ranged from 1979 to the spring of the year before last. The hands did not change. Whoever Magdalene Thorne had been, her handwriting had not changed.
The last journal in the box was the thinnest. It was bound in green cloth, and the gilt on the spine was brighter than the rest, and when Vera opened it, she saw that the date inside the cover was from the autumn of the year Margot had been born. October again.
She looked at it for a long time. The shop was quiet. The radiator had stopped ticking. The fluorescent strip above the counter was no longer flickering; it had gone out, and the only light in the shop now was the grey light from the street, and the small green pilot on the emergency socket above the door.
She set the green cloth journal on the counter. She opened her bag, the leather one she had carried since the year Eitan went to university and did not come back. She set the journal inside. She closed the bag. She set the bag on her shoulder.
She folded the flaps of the box. She retied the twine, though not as he had tied it. She wrote on the side of the box, in her own hand: M.T. To be sorted.
She carried it to the back of the shop. She set it on the floor beside the filing cabinet, behind the door that led to the stairs. She would come back for it. She would come back for all of it.
She turned off the emergency socket. She locked the back door. She checked the bolts at the front. She stood for a moment with her hand on the counter, her bag on her shoulder, the small brass key in her right pocket, the green cloth journal in her bag against her hip.
The fog bell from the harbour sounded once. She listened until it stopped.
She turned out the light. She stepped into the lane. The fog was so thick she could not see the books across the street. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of water against the harbour wall.
She locked the shop door behind her, and stood for a moment on the pavement, and did not know which way to turn.
She turned left. She walked the length of Pilgrim's Lane through the fog until she reached the coast road, where the metered bays stood in the yellow light of the single working lamp. The fog had gathered on the windscreen in a fine mist of droplets, and she used the sleeve of her coat to wipe a porthole wide enough to see the kerb by. Her car was the only one there.
She opened the driver's door. She set her bag on the passenger seat, where the green cloth journal pressed its edge against her hip through the leather. She started the engine. The heater, when she switched it on, blew air that smelled of salt and old upholstery, and she let it run a moment before she pulled out onto the road.
The harbour fell away behind her in the fog. She took the coast road north, the headlamps making a pale corridor of the tarmac, the cliff at her left rising as a darker shape against a darker sky. The fog bell from the harbour had long stopped sounding. Out in the grey somewhere there was the slow wash of water on rocks, though she could not see the water.
She passed the closed kiosk at the second headland. She passed the turned-off street lamp and the fence where, in summer, the ice-cream van parked with its small striped awning and its smell of vanilla that reached the road. The fog thinned a little as she left the coast, then thickened again as the road curved up toward the cliff.
At the long straight where the lane ran along the edge of a low scarp before bending back inland toward the village, she stopped.
She did not, at first, know why she stopped. She put the handbrake on. She left the engine running. She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel and listened to the tick of the cooling block and to the fog against the roof of the car, a soft shifting sound like someone turning in sleep on the other side of a thin wall.
Then she took her phone from her bag.
There was a voicemail. The number was her mother's. The time stamp was three days ago, on Tuesday afternoon, in the quiet hour when her mother used to sit in the window seat in the front room and watch the gulls come in to the back garden. Her mother had been dead for fourteen months.
Her thumb hovered over the screen for the length of a breath. She pressed the message.
There was the small hollow hiss of an old line. Then her mother's voice came through, bright and unhurried, as it had always been on the telephone.
Vera, love, it's Mummy. I was just wondering, when you were going to bring the cat? You said you'd bring the cat. We haven't seen the cat. Is the cat all right? Give my love to your father, and to the children, and tell the cat Mummy sends her love.
There was a small pause. The hiss returned. Her mother, quite clearly, drew a breath to say something else, and the line disconnected.
Vera set the phone down on the seat beside her, screen up, screen dark. She stared through the cleared porthole in the windscreen at the grey bulk of the cliff and the paler grey of the sky above it, where the fog moved like a slow tide.
Her mother had not, at any point in the forty-three years Vera had known her, owned a cat. Her father had been allergic. Her mother had used to say that a house with a cat in it was a house with a secret, and that her house had no secrets, and that was how she liked it. Her mother had died in a hospice in Exeter with a vase of cut lilies on the bedside table and no cat in the building.
No one had telephoned Vera from her mother's number in fourteen months. The number, which had been in Vera's own name since the year her mother gave up the cottage, had been disconnected on the afternoon of the funeral. Vera had been the one to make the call to the provider. She remembered the precise tone of the automated menu, and the precise place in the script where she had been required to say, in her own voice, that the account holder was deceased.
She picked the phone up again. She held it. She did not press the callback button. She set it down.
In the footwell of the passenger side, where she had set her bag against the seat, the leather sagged a little, and the green cloth journal, inside it, slid against something. She reached down and took out, instead of the journal, the small brown envelope of receipts she always kept in the bag's inner pocket. She took out, also, the ballpoint pen she kept clipped to the inside seam.
She folded the handbrake off. She reached across and, with the sleeve of her coat again, wiped the inside of the passenger window clear. She drew a receipt from the envelope and turned it over.
On the back of the receipt, in the wide blank space below the pump number, she began to write.
She wrote slowly. She did not know, when she began, what the sentence was to be. Her hand made the first letter, and then the next, and then the next, and the sentence arrived under her pen as if it had been waiting in the shape of the empty space to be filled, in the way that the first sentence of a book sometimes does when the book has been hovering in the air above the writer for a long time and has only just now, on an evening such as this, consented to come down.
She wrote:
The house my mother kept after she died was not the house she had lived in, and the cat she asked after was not the cat she had never owned, and my father, when I told him of these things, said only that the house, and the cat, and my mother, had always been exactly what they were.
She read it back to herself once, in the silence of the fog and the tick of the cooling engine. She did not know whether it was the beginning of the book she had been circling for two years, or the beginning of a different one. She did not, in that moment, particularly mind. It was the first sentence of something, and it had her mother's voice in it, and it had the cat in it, and it had the house in it, and she had written it down.
She folded the receipt in half. She put it back in the envelope. She put the envelope in the bag beside the green journal, and the green journal settled against the envelope with the small papery sound that paper makes against cloth.
She let the handbrake off properly this time. She put the car in gear. She let the clutch up, and the car pulled away along the straight, and the fog closed behind it as if no car had ever been there.
At the bend, she glanced once in the mirror. The straight stretch of lane was empty. The low cliff at its edge was a dark bank against the dark. She could not tell whether the lamp at the head of Pilgrim's Lane, far below her, was still lit, or whether the fog had taken it for its own.
She turned into the cottage drive. She parked. She killed the engine. She sat a moment with both hands on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling and the small sounds of the fog against the slate roof above her.
Then she took her bag from the passenger seat. She stepped out into the fog. She let herself into the cottage. She did not turn on any of the downstairs lights. She climbed the stairs in the dark, with the bag in her hand and the green cloth journal in the bag and, inside the bag, the folded receipt with the first sentence of the unnamed book on the back of it.
At the top of the stairs, she paused. The house was very quiet. Somewhere below her, in the kitchen, the clock that had belonged to her grandmother ticked once, and then was still.
She went into her study. She closed the door.