‘You should have spoken to him anyway,’ my mother said.
‘I couldn’t, the organist beat me to it. After that, I could only look like an imitator. Everyone made such a fuss — “I thought I knew the face!” “You haven’t changed a bit!” — and she stood next to the photo so we could compare. Before and After.’
‘You could have taken him aside,’ she insisted, ‘he’d have remembered you, especially if you’d mentioned Douglas. Your uncle was one of the first people to recognize his genius.’
We were sitting on the balcony at opposite ends of the overstuffed sofa. Her eyrie, she called it with a laugh, no self-respecting widow has a den. In the wintry light of late afternoon, with the branches of the planes etched against the glass and the distant rush of traffic on the motorway, it was like a tree house.
I told her about my last visit to Mrs Pinheiro and the Doctor’s dead letters. The idea dismayed her. ‘Dead letters,’ she said. ‘What usually happens to them, I wonder. Where do they go when they die?’
‘Back to their Maker — if there’s a return address.’
‘And if not? There must be some that can’t be deciphered.’
‘They go round and round in the sorting room, it’s a kind of purgatory for lost mail, according to Mrs Pinheiro. But eventually, with the authorization of the Chief Sorter, they’re sent to the basement and they stay there in canvas bins for a year or so.’
‘And then?’
‘The incinerator.’
‘Sounds terribly final.’
‘That’s what she said. That’s why the hopeless cases, the ones they couldn’t figure out between them, were never taken back.’
‘He decided to save them! Pinheiro’s ark.’
‘Something like that. It wasn’t legal, of course, but they didn’t see it that way. The letters weren’t stolen so much as borrowed, held in trust, she said. Apparently the Doctor always hoped someone would come for them one day.’
‘And she showed you some of the survivors?’
‘Yes, she went into Dr Pinheiro’s room, which is closed to visitors, and came back with a bundle secured by two rubber bands.’ Most of the letters were creased and soiled as if they’d been carried in a bra or a sweaty pocket, or dropped on a dusty pavement and stepped on, and the addresses reeled across the envelopes, sloping this way and that, or squashed together against one edge in an impatient queue. ‘You could see these letters were sent by people who could barely write or afford the cost of the stamp. Half a person, half a place, bits of farms and villages, the name of a hill or a railway siding known only to the person who wrote it down. Names you’ll never find on a map or in a directory.’
‘It sounds sad.’
‘It is. I keep thinking about what the letters must say, the good news and the bad, and about the people who wrote them and the people who never received them. Lost souls, calling after one another in the dark.’
I couldn’t bring myself to say that Dr Pinheiro was gone.
The twilight deepened on the balcony.
‘You should make friends your own age,’ my mother said, ‘you’re spending too much time with old people. It’s depressing, believe me, and it will make you old before your time. Leave Mr Auerbach alone.’ After a moment she went on, and the lightly mocking tone darkened. ‘I think you’re looking for a mom and dad. The father part I can understand … but you’ve got a mother already. When you tell me about this old widow in her crumbling halls with her strange fancies, sitting around drinking tea and hearing voices, it’s as if you’re going off to an institution to visit some dilapidated version of me. It’s a horrible prophecy.’
The door to the yard stood open. It was midwinter, but the garden was as lushly overgrown as ever, except that the grass had been cut to uncover a patch of brick paving on which stood a wire-mesh table and two chairs. A sickle lay on the table top like a gleaming question mark. I went into the garden and sat at the table with my coat collar turned up.
Mrs Pinheiro brought the tea tray and sat beside me. In broad daylight, the cosy was more parrot than hen. The letterboxes leaned out of the shrubbery like savages, glaring at us with cyclops eyes, or hung down shamefaced and glum, with their long lips pursed. The air was full of the radio static of insects scraping their legs against their bodies.
While the tea was drawing, Mrs Pinheiro slipped the rubber bands from a bundle of letters and fanned them out. In answer to the question posed by her enlarged eye, I tapped on one of the letters. She picked it up and tried to read the address. As she opened the flap the static broke off and a prison cell folded out of the silence, a small bare room with walls of the same pale green as the envelope. A man lay on his side in the far corner with his back turned to us. She folded him into an upright position against the wall and pressed a fingertip to his brow. He was shivering. With a sweep of her hand, she smoothed his damp, bloodied body out against the table and raised him to his feet. But as he held out his bound wrists and made to speak, she closed him between her palms like a paper lantern and slipped the letter back into the pack.
‘Tea?’ While she poured it for us, she asked, ‘Do you like our museum?’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘I thought you’d appreciate it. You should have seen it in its heyday, mind you. The Doctor used to cover the specimens with sacking in the winter, as if they were tropical plants, but I can’t be bothered.’
We both laughed. To get the taste of leaf sap and fibre from my mouth, I reached for the biscuits on the tray. Eet-Sum-Mor shortbread in a box decorated with a plaid sash and a drawing of a baker in his apron. I noticed that he wore a collar and tie and had a pencil behind his ear, for taking orders or writing down recipes, I supposed. He reminded me of the Doctor in his passport photograph, trying to look blameless. Poor old Pinheiro. I imagined him lying in the sickroom with a postman’s leather satchel over the back of a chair and the sacraments of a grim departure on the bedside table: Oros, cream crackers, a portable radio. On the wall, a motto in needlepoint: Aluta continua! Perhaps this was the photograph Auerbach was destined not to take?
‘Let’s talk about the letters,’ I said, dipping a biscuit in my tea. ‘Why have you kept them?’
‘What else can I do?’
‘But they don’t belong to you.’
‘But they do.’
Without another word, she unfolded a small girl into a shady corner of the garden. The poor scrap was barefoot and weeping. There was too much unhappiness in the world, I thought, in the world of letters, at least. Despite having resolved to stay out of it, I licked my finger and cleaned the corners of the child’s eyes, while Mrs Pinheiro straightened her skirt and tucked in her blouse. She put the child aside and reached for an air letter. A man and a woman slipped out together in a fug of cigarette smoke and perfume, their limbs folded loosely into one another at the joints.
I tried to speak but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. My lips tasted of glue.
Mrs Pinheiro chose a padded envelope covered with stamps and opened it on the tip of the sickle. A paper chain of men and women, hundreds of them joined hand and foot, clattered out like galleys from a printing press. Between us, we folded them at the perforations, running the creases between our fingernails, and tore them apart. Free at last, stretching their limbs and cracking their joints, they began to tell their stories. When this envelope was empty, there were others, from which sprang an unbroken line of creatures delighted to suck air into their lungs and born to speak. All afternoon their numbers grew, until the air was so thick with stories it couldn’t be breathed. Even then, Mrs Pinheiro went on opening envelopes in the fog and tossing the soft, damp forms into the crowd. I gathered the discarded pages, smoothed them flat and put them back in the envelopes. Mother’s little helper.