The Shades Read online

  Looking out over the city, he realized that the deterioration of his relationship with Catherine was about as unsurprising as the demolition of the shipper’s warehouse next door that he’d watched being torn down over several days. There was a momentum to these things: once the wrecking ball was in motion it was near impossible to stop. Few would mourn what had been there before and only what had taken its place would seem to matter. He hoped that Catherine would catch up to these feelings, since she had been the one driving them, unconsciously or not. While Paige was right to say that Catherine had become isolated, there had also been encouraging signs of late—her renewed interest in others had been a major one. When he had last seen Catherine two days before, she had been at her most argumentative and confrontational, but she was also the most fiercely energetic that he had seen in fourteen months. It was more than possible that she was on the way to getting back to being the formidable Catherine of old.

  Perhaps the most unlikely sensation at that moment was the lightness in his chest, almost a fluttering, as if a host of butterflies had been trapped and would soon burst forth in a surge of optimism. He saw obstacles ahead but had a presentiment that he could overcome them; if he’d been asked a day before, he would have said he would not. He had survived the worst of years, running flagellating circles of self-recrimination, but he was still alive and there was nothing else to do except keep moving forward and living. The idea of preserving the status quo was too bleak to ponder.

  He allowed his imagination to take flight over this new terrain and pictured what life might look like in a Catherine-free zone.

  He saw himself looking for a flat. They’d have to sell Hamdean first—not good in a soft market, and it was too particular for a quick sale. When he had bought the place, the price had already been knocked down; he had paid more for it than he should, having factored years of use into the equation.

  He’d have to move out of central London, as rents would be too high. The thought of that depressed him. He could see that he’d have to be proactive about making new relationships, as it didn’t suit him to be alone. It was unlikely that anything romantic would develop at work—he and his colleagues barely tolerated one another by day—whatever brief thoughts he’d had about Paige, she was eliminated by virtue of her friendship with Catherine, while allowing for images of her with her poetry app in the bathroom stall of a fashion magazine.

  He hovered for a moment, wondering where men of a certain age went to meet people.

  Bar, theater, concert?

  Starbucks?

  After that it was a slippery slope to the Internet.

  His spirits sagged. The landscape with difficult Catherine looked more alluring than the great unknown.

  Most seriously, he saw that Catherine wasn’t as strong as he would like to believe. Although optimism was important, she was still fragile; he wasn’t sure how she’d be able to cope on her own. He was ashamed that he’d entertained such disloyalty. He felt foolish that he had been naïve enough to think that he could excise the flesh wound of history, plaster himself with a Band-Aid, and be healed in time for a serendipitous meeting at Wagamama. This wasn’t who he was: a dastardly quitter who shied from responsibility. He always did the right thing. He wasn’t going anywhere; he cared too much about Catherine. He would never leave.

  The belief that he still had stamina and purpose marked a return to form, as his life had always been governed by a steady diligence—dogged could have been Michael’s middle name. In this respect he was more like his parents than he liked to admit. When he was old enough for entry as a day boy, his father had taken a position at St. Christopher’s, a private school in Hampshire, remaining there thirty years, a soft-spoken fixture of the history department. This unassuming figure had managed a Herculean task of shoring up five successively inadequate headmasters, until the last in the chain of incompetents forced his retirement at the age of fifty-eight. The gold pen he was given for long service was to sit on his desk barely used, apart from the occasional writing of shopping lists and condolence letters to bereaved friends. Fifteen years later his penmanship was fondly remembered by one such recipient of his kind sentiments, in a letter to his widow after his death. Michael’s mother had trained as an elementary schoolteacher, but opted for an administrative position at St. Chris’s, as a family with two employees qualified for better housing in the form of a really very nice bungalow, almost in bowling distance of the cricket pitch. This feature came into play when Michael was quarantined with chicken pox and could watch games standing on the table with a pair of binoculars. However, simple home economics meant that while other students summered and wintered in other locations, Michael’s holidays were spent on school grounds—either alone in the library or kicking around an empty soccer field, playing a solitary waiting game, knowing he had no choice but to slog it out. He had no brothers or sisters for company, although he picked up fairly quickly that his mother had wanted another child, hearing her being asked by other mothers how many children she had. Her response was always terse. Just the one, she said, sometimes adding, two wasn’t meant to be and rearing her head as he’d seen horses do. It wasn’t difficult for him to read disappointment into her gestures; like him, she too had taken the short straw.

  Michael’s industriousness continued all the way to university, where he’d taken a history scholarship at Christ Church, and lasted through his marriage, which had always been hard work, with him doing more than his share of the heavy lifting. He had met Catherine at a saleroom viewing. He had stopped at the auction house on the way to deliver a letter for his boss. She was one in a phalanx of polished assistants at the ready, armored with ambition and smarts. He noticed her immediately: her proud nose and jaw, eyes guarded by fierce intelligence. When he asked a question about the provenance of a group of architectural drawings, her detailed and specific knowledge of drafting techniques and paper conservation made it quickly apparent that she was the cleverest person in the room. He had to return several times before summoning the nerve to ask her out for coffee. When he did, she was up-front that she didn’t want a relationship. She had just moved to London, she explained. To stay afloat she had to put all her energy into work. In any case, she warned, she wasn’t good company. Her mother had died suddenly while she was away finishing her master’s. Six months later she was only just beginning to process what had happened—the circumstances around her mother’s death were never clear. He appreciated that she was honest about the more painful aspects of her family’s history. The candor of her rejection only deepened his interest by making him understand the need for patience; otherwise he would not have lasted through the next two dates, which were a torture—she was distant and aloof and he couldn’t help being stiff and boring. However, on the third date, he managed to penetrate her indifference. On a lucky hunch, he had bought tickets to a concert performance of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo—the fact the tickets were cheap had been as much a motivating factor as an interest in early Baroque music.

  The opera, written in Italian, retold the mythic story of Orpheus’s journey to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice, after her death. When Orfeo tries to cross the Styx, the river that separates the land of the living from the dead, Caronte, ferryman of shades, the souls of the dead, refuses to take him, as Orfeo is still alive. Orfeo uses all his art to serenade him to sleep before making the passage across. Once Orfeo is reunited with his beloved wife, his mission fails after he breaks the one condition that has been imposed on him by Pluto: on leaving Hades he must not look back. In contrast to other versions that had Orpheus torn apart by Maenads, female worshipers of Dionysus, in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo the lovers are given a triumphant reprieve when Apollo intervenes and whisks them up to heaven.

  The music was astonishing. The lack of costumes or sets didn’t diminish the power of the performances. Sitting close to Catherine and listening to sublime expressions of loss and yearning, while attuned to the rise and fall of her breath, was its own ecst
atic experience. During the impasse between Orfeo and Caronte at the Styx, hearing the ferryman’s stark basso refusal, Michael saw there were tears rolling down the side of her face. He offered his hand, which she took, interlacing her fingers between his. The clasp was intimate, charged by something more than friendship. After, they walked toward the underground station, chatting unreservedly as they joined the throng of people emptying from theaters and pubs. They were plugged in, connected to each other. At that moment, with the energy surging between them, he could have believed that all the people around them were part of the same electrical network too. She was effusive in her praise for L’Orfeo. “It’s pure, unfettered by character or needless plot—totally modern.”

  Michael found this refreshing to hear of something written in 1609. “Yes, it’s often described as the first opera—or the first to have been considered worth writing down. It must have seemed very d’avanguardia back then.”

  “It’s groundbreaking now. It doesn’t stop being modern just because it has been copied.” She stopped. “I’m sorry if I was a baby in there. It was the ferryman’s voice. It wasn’t human—more like a foghorn, a warning in the dark.”

  “No apology necessary.” Then, because she was so serious, he added, “Just as well we saw the version with the happier ending.”

  “It isn’t about whether he was successful in bringing her back,” she corrected, “it’s that he went to get her at all.”

  This seemed to him as good a definition of love as any, and moved him to lean in and kiss her. As her response was kinetic, they hopped in a taxi and went directly to her digs in Bermondsey, to have sex in the bathroom of her roommate’s flat.

  Their relationship proceeded much as he intended, as if all boxes were being ticked. Within four years Michael had persuaded her to marry him. Yet, there was something else in the margins, a remoteness that created a space between them that he never understood; except, bottom line, he knew that his attentions were not quite reciprocated. He noticed that their lives ran parallel but never together or intersecting, and that was what he longed for and missed, some collision of purpose. They had art in their lives. As much as he loved old masters, he did not share her passion for abstraction, or her desire to be out every night looking at it. She found his taste for museum collections fusty, and said there was nothing more stifling than an object or painting behind glass. Then there were children—but curiously this had not brought them together. She made all the decisions and he always felt relegated to the role of a benign onlooker rather than active co-parent.

  Then Rachel was dead. After that, time had staggered and crawled, with each day as heavy and insurmountable as the next. Although after the accident he was bonded in grief with Catherine, their interchanges soon went back to being little more than a scheduling of movements that were designed for her to be in one place while he was in another; now that there were two homes, this was easier to manage. Catherine chose the country to be nearer Rowan’s school, while he preferred to be in London because he could always cry work as a reason not to be there—meeting only highlighted their insufficiencies and reminded them both of failure. Soon after, Rowan was gone as well.

  In many ways they had taken him for granted. He was born within a year of Rachel—Irish twin, Catherine had said, hearing she was pregnant again—but unlike his sister, for whom everything was an imperative and nothing was accomplished without a dramatic statement of it, Rowan had a relaxed, even temperament. They never worried about him as he breezed through his school subjects, allowing them to believe lack of stress was a measure of stability and success. Rowan was a natural middle-distance runner with an athletic style that was as effortless as his academic approach. His coaches gave up trying to correct his lolloping gait because he was unbeatable and a marvel to watch because he made the 1500m look so goddamn easy. He was the team’s star runner but turned down the captaincy, as he had an innate dislike of bureaucracy; he had no desire to send nanny-mails about uniforms and race-day breakfasts. If the pedestrian traffic at the house in London on weekends was any indication, he had no shortage of friends, male and female. After Rachel’s death, they entered unfamiliar territory together, but when they looked to their son he was already distancing himself, receding still, leaving them in an even more lonely and inhospitable place.

  The call had come in the early hours of the morning; the kind any parent lived to dread. The officer provided few details. He would tell Michael only that his daughter had been involved in a motor accident: she was in Chelsea and Westminster A&E. Michael had been traced through the mobile found in her pocket by dialing the number in the address book marked “Dad.” On the way to the hospital Catherine unraveled. She reproached herself for having allowed Rachel to stay with a friend from school, Mira, whom they barely knew; for not having taken the time to ask basic questions about where Rachel was going, what she was doing. She had only a superficial impression of Mira and her parents from seeing them at a fund-raiser, the mother with the soulful kholed eyes and expensive handbag. She didn’t even know where the family lived. Michael kept telling her, She’s going to be all right. She’s going to be all right, as if by persuading them both he could affect the outcome.

  By the time they arrived, they were already too late: their daughter had been dead ten minutes. They heard that the cause of death was a subdural hematoma, as she’d been partially ejected from the car. They were told that the driver had also been killed instantly: both air bags had failed to activate. Neither passenger had been wearing a seat belt. Alcohol had been found on the floor, so there was the question of whether the driver had been drinking. The other party involved—a van driver—was in intensive care. He later testified that the other car had been going eighty miles per hour and jumped the light, blindsiding him as he made a protected green-arrow right turn. Further investigation of CCTV footage corroborated this view.

  All this was told by Jackie, a pale crisis worker, with the tact and delicacy of a practiced bearer of bad news, with the officer who had telephoned Michael standing by. After hearing the worst, Catherine said, “Rachel couldn’t drive. She didn’t have a license. Nor did Mira. They were too young, you see.” She’d managed a smile, although the stream of anguished tears told another story. However, the social worker cautioned that Catherine should prepare herself as they’d found an ID belonging to Rachel in the car. The police officer added that the vehicle—a Porsche—he said significantly, was registered to the name of Merhan Azadi, and it appeared that he had been the driver.

  “I don’t understand.” Catherine had stared at him blankly.

  But Michael did. He always remembered a name, face or place. “Azadi is her family’s name. Our daughter’s friend. The driver must have been her father.”

  “More like her brother, sir,” the officer suggested. “The driver was seventeen.” Soon after, they learned that his supposition was right.

  They were taken to see her, already a waxen image, a poor, damaged effigy of their child. The social worker had left them alone, but the sight had sickened Michael as if his body were trying to reject the terrible information he was being forced to ingest. When Catherine broke down—he was surprised that she had managed to hold up so long—Michael was glad to take her out and get away from this cruel imposter, the travesty of their daughter, and the noxious smell of antiseptic that was no match for the pervading one of death.

  As they left, they saw a couple coming toward them in the corridor. Almost a mirror image of themselves. Bent in grief, shrouded in tears. They were being escorted by bloodless Jackie, who was working double shifts and proving to be the Caronte of the Chelsea and Westminster. Michael immediately recognized the couple. Like Catherine, he remembered Mrs. Azadi’s luminous eyes, all the more distinct for being the only part of her that wasn’t swathed in scarves or clothing, but now looked up at them in clouded red half moons. At the sight of Catherine, she stood up straight, as if seeing another woman who was mad with grief had suddenly made her stronger.
She said, “Mrs. Francis—” She broke off; she couldn’t find anything else to say.

  “Please tell me why Rachel wasn’t at home with Mira.” Catherine’s voice was restricted, as if someone were squeezing her throat.

  Mr. Azadi replied, “She went for a drive with Merhan. That’s all.” His tone was abrupt and defensive; Michael might have said a little rude.

  Catherine stiffened. “That wasn’t the plan. You know that wasn’t the plan.” Her voice had dropped and become firm. Michael observed she was preternaturally calm.

  “They were young. Young people go out. You can’t follow them around, checking on every single thing they do,” Mr. Azadi responded dismissively.

  Jackie, seeing the situation was deteriorating, jumped in. “Mrs. Francis, we should all take time to gather our—”

  Catherine ignored Jackie, directing more questions at Mr. Azadi. “May I ask how long your son had been driving?”

  “Two months,” he answered, adding, “he was a very good driver.”

  Catherine snorted, “When you gave your seventeen-year-old a fast car, seriously, what did you expect?”

  Her sudden, prosecutorial stance took everyone by surprise. The Azadis gasped. Michael did the same, quickly intervening, “We’re all in shock. We shouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Jackie agreed, “You all need time to—”

  But Mr. Azadi dismissed her with his hand, his chest swelling with outrage, “My son was a gentleman. They were in love and planning to be married.”