“Never touched your passport — Humph thought I’d spirit you away from him if I had it. Which was crazy. I could’ve sold you, I guess. But how much was I seriously going to get?”
“I know it was you who set up that card, Venn.”
“Just tell me what I did,” he said, “and I’ll be happy to take credit.”
Harriet entered the library. “Oh, darling, you are useless!” she told her husband, picking the infant off the carpet. “You just left her asleep on the floor — I should call social services.”
“She was so adorable. I couldn’t move her.”
“Actually,” Tooly said, standing, “you know what? We were just calculating that I won’t make it back in time if I leave tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Harriet, but I should get going.”
“Sure,” she said indifferently, and carried the baby upstairs.
Tooly collected her shoulder bag from the guesthouse and walked around Beenblossom Lodge. Venn stood in wait, leaned against his black Range Rover.
“You really affected my life,” she said. “Everything I chose to do, how I am now. I think you changed me more than anyone I ever met.”
“Did I?”
“Why do you think I was in love with you?”
“You obviously were.”
“How come you never tried anything?”
“I’m not an animal,” he said. “I’m not someone who just launches himself at any girl on the premises. Anyway, you’re ugly, aren’t you.”
“You’re just being cruel now.”
“If you don’t want to know, don’t ask the question. Think of it this way: if you’d been attractive, I’d have had you and got bored (fast in your case, I’m guessing), and you’d never have lasted.”
“I won’t hassle you again.”
“Thank goodness for that. Wouldn’t want you going the same way as the ferrets.” He embraced her, locking his arms around her lower back, inhaling to expand his chest and compress hers, his knuckles cracking as he squeezed the air out of her. “An absolute pleasure,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Don’t ever fucking do this again.”
Her high beams swept across dark tree trunks, burst out into the roadway. She drove toward Cork, gripping the wheel, then turned into a closed Morris Oil to calm down. But she had to escape this place, so drove onward, tire treads kicking up pebbles.
In a hotel room outside the airport, she sat naked on the bed, running her fingers over her ribs, his grip there, that kiss on her brow. It was as if she had brushed aside a lock of hair and found an eye, a throbbing eye, a hideous growth blinking at her, repulsive yet her own, fed by her own blood. This is how he seemed, incorporated into her yet monstrous. The shower wouldn’t cleanse her. She left her muddy clothing in the hotel bathroom, abandoning her entire outfit there, and arrived for her flight hours early, just to be among strangers at the terminal.
SATELLITE IMAGES SHOWED the swirling eye of Hurricane Irene inching up the Eastern Seaboard. The authorities warned of flooding, a shutdown of mass transit servicing New York City, a state of emergency across the region. “It’s going to be up to individuals to get out of their own areas,” Mayor Bloomberg announced on television, ordering the evacuation of high-risk zones, including where Humphrey lived in Sheepshead Bay.
He was asleep when she opened the door to his room. Someone — Humphrey couldn’t recall who — had run tape in X’s across each windowpane to stop the glass from shattering during the storm. The rest of the room seemed to have been visited by a hurricane already: books everywhere, dirty clothing strewn about, used cups and plates on the floor. Yelena had left town, stuffing Humphrey’s bar fridge with ready-to-eat meals before departing. He had helped himself to a few, but thrown out none of the refuse, nor washed himself or shaved in a few days. Tooly spent two hours restoring order, helped him to the bathroom, cleaned him, returned him to his armchair. Mentioning Venn hardly stirred Humphrey, while references to the coming hurricane puzzled him.
As he slept that afternoon, she went through his documents. She discarded junk mail, then organized his bills by date. It didn’t take long to find the bank statements. As she put them in order, she found payments in each of the cities she had passed through during the preceding decade, including one final transaction from a few years earlier, the transfer of the remaining balance to the Mintons in Caergenog. “You,” she said when he awoke, “were the one helping me. My magic bank account.”
He frowned — waking was always hard for him. Forty minutes later, the statements still lay in his lap.
“Why did you give me all that?” she asked. “It was all you had left, wasn’t it. And I was so stupid with it. As far as I’m concerned, the shop belongs to you. It’s not worth much. But I’ll sell it, or try to. Whatever I get is yours. And we can move you somewhere decent. Okay?”
“You went lots of places,” he said, gazing down at the bank statements.
“Did you read those to know where I was?”
“I thought of you doing things.”
“And I thought of you, Humph. Often, I did.”
“I wasn’t doing anything worth thinking about.”
She took his hand.
“You have a bookshop!” he declared. “You really are my dream girl! I imagine you there, ringing up all the sales.”
“We don’t make many, I’m afraid.”
“You,” he said, “are the favorite thing I did in my life. Even if I didn’t make you.”
“Don’t say things like that.” She blinked. “Look, you have to come see the shop. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let me describe it for you.” She gave her best portrait of the village, the former pub that contained World’s End, the first editions, the snug at the back, and her lone employee. “You’d enjoy Fogg; you two would get on so well. I can imagine you having debates for hours on end.”
Humphrey gave a short nod, by which he communicated that this trip would remain only a fancy. “I’m in the same place as my favorite person I knew. For nearly all of existence, before and after now — nearly all of it — I don’t get to be with you. But now I am. I even helped you a bit in your life.”
“You helped me so much.”
“I don’t remember everything that happened in my life,” he said, frowning. “Parts, I do.”
Ever since her first visit to Sheepshead Bay, he’d been beset by these fragments — his past flickering, repetitive but incomplete. She’d been able to help only by replaying anecdotes he had previously recounted. But now she did know his story. “Venn explained all about your life,” she said. “Shall I tell you?”
“All right,” he said, looking blindly past her. As Humphrey listened, he squinted at the X’s on the window. Tooly had seen him exert himself before — when Mac visited, for example. “Do your best,” she urged him. “Tell me if this sounds right.”
She went on, watching him, his eyes closed tightly with concentration. At times, he specified that he just couldn’t recall this bit, or interrupted with small corrections. At other points, he added details she’d never known. Mostly, he paid attention.
His mother, Tooly began, was born at the turn of the century into a middle-class Jewish family from Pressburg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family spoke many languages, but their first tongue was German. As a young girl, she had aspired to a creative life, to act and paint. And by her late teens she frequented artistic circles, where she fell for an aspiring actor, a Russian Jew who had left Leningrad to make a name for himself in the West. But his career was hampered by stage fright, worsened by his thick accent. He decided to write and direct instead, but the fragile confidence that had undermined his performances foiled his offstage career, too. He was an endearing nebbish, though, so she married him, telling her parents only after the union was legal.