extract from THE STORY as submitted to NaNoWriMo

(29th November - 29days written, 50,698 words)

NB This is largely unedited, uncorrected and rushed, so if you actually want to read it you might prefer to wait until I put up a "tidy" version after I've gone through and corrected it. This is the raw 50,000-words-in-one-go version, and it is not pretty. It's all a bit bland and it ends in a rush, and it may be riddled with poor spelling and grammar, but it's here as proof that I did the NaNoWriMo2012 challenge. They said "write 50,000 words of novel in 30 days", they didn't say it had to be any good.

NB - the last chapter is missing from this version. I know it may seem mean, but I am not posting the last chapter here in the public online version just yet. If you want to see it, I am happy to give a copy to everybody who sponsored me. Otherwise, the full copy will be available somewhere after I have gone through it and tidied it up. I may even extend the last chapter into another 28!

CHAPTER 1

If you happen to walk past the Meadow Buildings on the south side of Christ Church, in Oxford, late on a November afternoon when the rooms are being lit but the curtains are not yet drawn, and if you happen to glance up at the windows of the rooms on the first floor that have tiny stone balconies leaning out through the dusk towards the meadow and the river beyond, you might notice one room that has its ceiling lamp hung at an angle different from all the others. At that window you might see a slim woman, probably with her hair drawn tight in a pony tail or a bun to stop it falling across her face as she writes, sitting at a desk looking out across the meadow. This is Julia. I tell my friends that the reason I always think of her this way is that this was the way that I first saw her. Of course, what I tell them is not true. I had seen Julia many times before I saw her in that window.

From her desk looking across the meadow Julia can see the mist rising as darkness falls, and through the bare branches of the trees can pick out, far away and almost silent, the last of the eights turning in the water and rowing back to the boathouses. A few dark-shadowed figures wrapped against the cold still move along the broad path below the window: some hurrying on their varied ways back home or to a late afternoon appointment, some more slowly walking for the sake of walking, taking a turn around the meadow and along the river as the light fades and the special winter evening silence of a  windless day settles with chill dampness to mute the clash of rowers’ blades, the shutting of a gate, the call of a grounds man locking up the shed, and the other distant, muffled signals from the world outside Julia’s window. As she works, she looks up between each line that she reads, each note that she writes, and each time sees a little less of the darkening world outside and a little more of the inside world reflected in the glass. Herself, her desk and lamp, the slightly open door and the light spilling into her study from the hallway outside. In the half-lit reflection the room is orange and black and warm and yellow; full of books and fabrics - lots of fabrics, draped and hanging, framed and folded or wrapped and boxed and labelled in carefully organised drawers.

Julia signs her name in the English way, but when she thinks of it she thinks of it the Russian way, the way her mother gave it to her: Yulia, spelled entirely in letters of the Russian alphabet that do not occur in English. When she sees herself reflected in the window of her study it is Yulia she sees sipping clear tea from a small blue cup, but when she stands and puts on her pale brown duffel coat and her college scarf, as she turns from the window and leaves the room, as she walks down the stairs to join the thin and gentle tide of lonely souls outside, and passes the empty porter’s box at Meadows Gate to take the day’s last look at the riverside path, it is Julia, English Julia, who pulls the scarf up high to hide the fact that she cannot, today, put on her brave face.

CHAPTER 2

You can never know how things are going to turn out. Every journey is an adventure. Whether it is a thirty-minute walk around Christ Church meadow, a road trip of thirty days or a career of thirty years it is impossible at the start to know for sure what your destination will eventually be. And when you look back from the end of each adventure, from the end of each journey, from the end of each day, it is hard to know for sure how the adventure really started, or to know for sure where you have really come from. Whether we look forwards or backwards, we are looking into the mist. But even though we may not see it clearly looking back, every adventure had a first day. Usually, at the time it happens, we do not notice that first day. We do not look up as it passes quietly with its flag folded in its pocket, the first moment of a story that turns into something of which we will later say: how did this begin? Where were we when we set off? Where did we think we were going? But that first day, once it has been the first will always be the first. Few of us are unfortunate enough to see something for the first time more than once.

Long ago, when I lived in the house in Aberdeen with Rollei, after the Russians moved in and our quiet routine changed it was Rollei the fat history professor, glasses askew and dressing gown adrift, lunging out of the bathroom either drunk or sobering by degrees like the shipping forecast, rising and veering, who launched what he saw as our shared adventure each day. It might end at breakfast in a crash of plates and marmalade and a slamming of his bedroom door followed by the crunch and roll of mattress springs, or might swell catastrophic into a high tide of what, in those days, I thought was grand rebellion and the outlaw life of beer and cream-cake mornings. And on the flood, on the arch, on the crest of those days, on Union Street swimming in poetry and smoke I would watch Rollei sail majestic into sad afternoons where I was too young to follow, staring after him along the line of his wake as he disappeared into his own forgiving and concealing sea-foam fog, from which he would emerge, glasses askew and dressing gown adrift again, tobacco pipe in one hand, Bible or Dylan Thomas in the other, roaring at the morning and lunging out of the bathroom to begin another day. The Russians were younger than me, but when they looked at Rollei they seemed to be looking back with regret.

Looking back from here, many of those days that you thought at the time were your great adventure, perhaps the start of something wonderful, turn out to have been days in the box, days before you were really awake. Days before you knew who you were. Practice days. Pretend days. Somebody else’s days that you look back on like a person dreaming, or imagining, rather than like a person remembering. Reaching back now for the Russians as they were in Aberdeen, they are so long ago that memory and imagination start to merge and I know that they are gone from me. All that is real is the dedication that Yulia wrote into the front of her copy of Pushkin when she gave it to me as a parting gift, written in a hand that I can hardly decipher, in an alphabet that I hardly knew before I met her, and which I was careful for many years not to translate precisely, because she asked me not to. Because I was young I took these things seriously, and I did as she asked.

Although he was loud, and like a rolling storm entirely filled any space that he entered, Rollei did not speak very much other than to quote, sometimes at enormous length and invariably with his eyes tight shut, selections of poetry or historical text that he deemed apposite to the situation in hand, or to proclaim in single words or in fragments that emerged like eruptions of treacle from great depth his current situation or state of mind. “Hot”, and then, after a pause of several minutes or even hours: “Lunatics!” I never knew Rollei in his role as a Professor at the University, but he had a reputation for great eloquence. I never witnessed this, but have frequently observed that what we see depends very little on what is actually there. What people show us of themselves depends very little on what they have inside, but more on what they see in us. Perhaps Rollei knew, even then, that eloquence was not what drew me to him. His eloquence was for his colleagues and his students; for people he needed to persuade.

The Russians he entirely ignored for fully six months when they moved into the house. They largely ignored him in return except that like cats ignoring a dog who shares their space they seemed always to know exactly how to be precisely where he was not. Although we all lived together in the same house for nearly a year, I can recall only a handful of occasions when I saw Rollei and the Russians in the same place at the same time. It was as though they lived on slightly divergent planes of existence, or at slightly different wavelengths. In my memory, or my imagination, it seems to me now that they could have passed through each other like ghosts. Only in the last few weeks that we were all in that house did their parallel spaces converge, and then only through the influence of Yulia’s mother, who arrived to supervise the Russians’ departure but in the end stayed with us, or, rather, with Rollei, for longer even than we had known her daughter. As for the second Russian, Yulia’s friend, we did not at first fully understood who she was,  even to the extent that we referred to her not by her name by simply as “Yulia’s friend”. Her name was Ricky, but names do not always tell us very much, and in the case of Yulia’s friend her name tells us nothing.

The house in Aberdeen would have been big enough for ten, but was rented as just four extended units. We each had a large bed-sitting room that included en-suite bathroom facilities and mini-kitchen, and we had shared use of two sitting rooms, a huge kitchen and two substantial bathrooms. Rollei, for reasons unknown, always used the shared bathroom on the 1st floor instead of the en-suite in his own apartment, and always took breakfast in the huge shared kitchen. Rollei resplendent and fleshy in underpants and glasses reading last night’s Press and Journal was almost certainly the first reason that the Russians never used the kitchen in the mornings. My times with the Russians during that year were in the evenings, when Rollei had launched off into the dark and secret parts of his day where I didn’t follow, and when the Russians had returned from their work at the University. I was working independently with no fixed hours or commitments, and from the desk in one of the shared sitting rooms where I chose to do a lot of my writing I was able to see them as they returned from each day’s expedition. In fact, after a few weeks I made sure to be at that desk each day at the time they were due to come in.

Mostly surrounded by trees but with some views over the river and towards the sea, the house stood in its own modest grounds near to the Bridge of Don, on the northern edge of the city. This was before all the new building on the Bridge of Don estates, and before the warehouses and exhibition centres and car showrooms on the Ellon Road. The house had no immediate neighbours and leaving the front gate one could turn right towards St Machar’s Cathedral, the University and the town or left towards the bridge, the river and the sea. That was my first decision of the morning on those days that I wasn’t following Rollei on whatever adventure he had chosen for himself. Usually it would be the river and the shore for me, out past the mouth of the Don and onto the open windy sands against the crashing cold North Sea. From there the coast was open for miles to the north, backed by driftwood dunes and farmland all the way past Balmedie, although that has changed since then. Everything has changed since then. Even the sea has changed. Even the sky. My mother used to say that the skies were deeper blue when she was young. The sky was really something then; you should have seen my sky. I know now what she must have felt when she told me that. Sometimes I feel the same when I remember Rollei and the Russians. People were something then: huge people, towering people. But I realise that probably it was I who was small, not they who were large. I have met larger people since, and I have passed others in the darkness without seeing them, I am sure.

The Russians, when I first met them, did not seem large at all, except that they were Russian, which was itself a special badge of being different, of being new to me. It was November when they arrived. One of those late November Aberdeen days where the darkness never really goes away, and a fog-wrapped half-light persists even through the middle of the day. They arrived at dusk, with the first flakes of that winter’s snow in their hair.

CHAPTER 3

On that first day when the Russians arrived, it was Rollei who opened the front door to them. I was a few seconds behind him and by the time I reached the hallway Rollei had turned his back on the Russians and was making his way back into the house. He had not spoken, but he glanced at me as we passed. At that point I had only known Rollei for a few months, but he was somebody who it was easy to feel you knew well, and I thought that I had seen him in his full rainbow of moods. It was a broad rainbow. Rollei was a creature that could live in the ultra-violet and the infra-red as well as the visible spectrum that the rest of us see. His rainbow had dark, dark bands below the violet, and sparkling arcs of light above the red. As he passed me in the corridor after seeing the Russians for the first time, he was in one of the darker bands, but one that I had not seen before. His expression as he passed, the look he gave me, was disappointment. Deep, deep disappointment.

I have no idea what Rollei can have been expecting. When Lachlan the landlord had written to tell us that the Russians would be arriving to fill the two vacant apartments his letter did not lead me to any great anticipation of wonders or miracles. His instructions, which always came on picture postcards depicting traditional Scottish views, were never detailed, but neither were they ambiguous. “Two girls from the University,” he had written, “have taken the ground floor flats and will arrive together by taxi during the afternoon of November 3rd. They will have no keys. Please arrange.”  Most of Lachlan’s postcards ended with the words “please arrange”. Inevitably it was I, not Rollei, who would do the arranging. It was odd, now that I think back, that Rollei had even gone to the door. At the time I thought nothing of that, perhaps because I was struck so much by the expression of disappointment that drew him along the hallway like a half-filled sail. As he came level and passed me by, the sound he made may have been the word “two”, but I was not sure, and did not dwell on it because as he spoke it he moved out of my line of sight and it was now my turn to see Yulia, and her friend, for the first time.

There have been a small number of occasions in my life where a first meeting has stuck in my memory and has become an important part of the history of my experience of that person. I once met a real-life princess, indeed I became her friend, and the first time that I saw her she was gliding, floating, dreaming into a room as a fairy-tale princess should. She continued to glide, float and dream throughout the time that I knew her, and because that first encounter set the tone, met my retrospective expectation of what it should have been, it remained part of the story; verified, confirmed, validated by what I knew had happened next. On other occasions, with other encounters, that first moment became notable for the false impression that it gave. Occasions when I have thought, later, “well there was no sign of that in him on that first day”. And then the first impression is preserved as a notable, memorable, remarkable mistake. And then there are occasions such as the moment when I first saw Yulia: occasions where either the story turns out later to be complex, to be real, to be more than a first-impression stereotype, or it turns out to be trivial and ultimately not worth remembering, so that the recollection slips away, or is obscured by later memories and imaginings, or is overprinted with lies. I can no longer say for sure what I saw when Rollei moved past me and revealed the open doorway. I remember the blue paint, patched and peeling on the door frame, caught in the light spilling out from the hallway. I remember a sound which must have been the taxi drawing away from the house. I remember the pattern of the snowflakes caught in the light against the darkness of the trees. I remember all the edges of the picture but nothing from the centre.

On the day that the Russians arrived, Rollei had not gone out of the house at all. The smoke and poetry bars had been denied the pleasure of his company that day. On days like those, when we were both in the house in the evening, we had taken to sitting together for a while at the big table in the shared kitchen. It was the first kitchen of its type that I had ever seen, although I have since encountered others like it in big country houses elsewhere. If the kitchen had been the only room in the house I could have lived there happily for a lifetime. When I was growing up the kitchen was a small space for making food and washing up dishes. Nobody would spend longer in there than necessary. It was strictly a cooking-kitchen. This kitchen in Aberdeen was a living-kitchen. There was a three-piece suite. The pieces didn’t altogether match but they did their job. There was an open fire which we lit around November and kept burning through till March. There was a huge peat-burning range. The table where I sat with Rollei. Shelves and cupboards and pictures and clocks and a fern that started in the kitchen and ended in the sitting room next door. And shadows: throughout the winter when the room was lit all day by firelight and lamps the room was richer in shadows than any I had seen or have seen since. Small lamps were everywhere, casting small lights and leaving larger darknesses between them. It was subterranean and we were troglodytic. Living there alone we were descending into darkness.

Rollei and I did not have conversations as such. Words were spoken, sounds were made and we communicated, but the interaction was as much by intuition as by discussion. I had assumed Rollei to be Scottish when I first moved into the house and found him there, but it gradually became apparent that he might not be exactly Scottish. He could have been a little bit French, or perhaps even Belgian. I think on balance I might go with Belgian as my final answer. But as with so much we will never know for sure. He did not give a lot away. There was nothing in the house to revel anything about him. I never ventured completely into his apartment, but in the shared areas of the house and in the parts of his apartment that I could see from his doorway on occasions when I delivered something to him or collected him to go on some expedition there was no sign of any personal belongings beyond the absolute essentials and whatever book he was carrying with him each day. I never saw his office at the University, and even now I find it hard to picture the Rollei that I knew as a functioning academic interacting with students and colleagues in a well-lit workplace, but I have heard that his office was entirely the opposite of his home. His office was a riot of personal and professional belongings. A compendium, an emporium of everything Rollei. Books, pictures, clothes, mementoes, everything he had written, everything he had read, everything he had collected was squeezed into his offices at the University. Apparently he had two offices, one in each of the two departments where he evidently held senior positions, and a substantial storage space for “research materials” in the basement of Marischal College in the middle of town. While I was living with him in the house in Aberdeen I knew nothing of this. I took him at face value for what I could see. What he was in that house and on his whiskey afternoons on Union Street, and on the quiet evenings when the outside world was too much and he stayed at the kitchen table in front of the open fire, was something separate from whatever he was for everybody else. Perhaps it was because I had no connection with that other, real life that he allowed me to be part of his disturbed, disturbing other self.

Before I arrived in the house Rollei had lived there alone for several months after Lachlan the landlord and owner had moved away with his work. Before that Rollei had been Lachlan’s lodger, moving in at Lachlan’s suggestion after Lachlan’s mother had died. Before that, Lachlan had lived there for most of his life with his mother. I had never met Lachlan, and so I pieced together this history slowly from my exchanges with Rollei. It was not clear to me exactly how Lachlan had chosen Rollei as a lodger, or whether they had known each other previously. The furnishings and decoration and general clutter of the house spoke more of his mother than of Lachlan. When he moved out, he left no visible trace in the parts of the house that were rented out. His frequent postcards of instruction gave little away. The correspondence by which Lachlan had set up his rental agreement with me had been precise but impersonal, and I had arrived, rather like the Russians, by taxi in the afternoon little knowing what to expect. Like the Russians, I had been met by Rollei at the door, and the taxi was already pulling away as I turned to see it go. When I turned back to the open door Rollei had already gone inside. I carried my bag along the hall and as I came within sight of the kitchen Rollei like an apostle from the table in front of the fire looked to the ceiling, raised first a finger and then his whole arm, opened his mouth and after an almost imperceptible pause tipped his chin down and said: “at the back”.

The back of the house on the top floor was, for me, the ideal place for a room. The top floor was smaller than the floors below, and the front part of it was given over to a landing, the sliding glass doorway onto a tiny front balcony, a store room and a small bathroom that was technically shared with other members of the house but was far out of their natural territory. The whole of the top floor was therefore essentially my own, with a balcony and bathroom to myself and with views to the front and rear stretching to the skyline of Old Aberdeen in one direction and to the sand dunes and the sea in the other. Rollei had the floor below, which also included a set of rooms that Lachlan had kept as his own and locked up when he left. The ground floor, which stretched out in a series of one-storey extensions, included all the shared rooms and the two apartments, at the back, that were to be occupied by the Russians. On that first day I wondered why Rollei had not taken the room on the top floor, with the better view and the greater degree of privacy, remote from the rest of the house. As I came to know him I could see the value for him of being at the centre of the house. Like a general at the heart of the campaign. Like the life and soul of a secret party that only he could see was happening. Like the conductor of a great symphony, the players in which could not hear the notes and were unaware of their roles, Rollei was the master of his own imaginary kingdom.

About an hour after I had arrived, just as I had finished the usual first-night unpacking and organising, Rollei appeared on my landing. This time the apostolic finger pointed downwards through the floor. The chin tipped down. A momentary pause. He said: “drink”. He turned like a quarter-mile ocean-going tanker, pointed himself at the top of the stairs, and drifted away.  At the time, it seemed quite normal to me that he should have come upstairs and invited me down for a drink, but I don’t think it ever happened in quite the same way again. Rollei was somehow able to establish a routine by just once making the most subtle of indications. The next evening at the same time he called from the landing below: “drink!”. From then on we both knew the routine. On the days that Rollei was in the house we would convene at the Kitchen table at the start of the evening. At first he would prompt me in fragments to tell him about myself or about the day just gone or planned. “Journey?” he asked on that first night as I followed him into the kitchen. Yes, I had found the place OK and it was only a short taxi ride from where I had been staying before, on St Machar drive by the botanical gardens. “Settled?” Yes, thank you. I love the room at the top of the house. It actually reminds me of where I grew up. We were on a top floor there, as well. “Drink?” Let me eat first and I’ll have one after. He poured me one anyway, and I had one sip then let it stand while I started to put together my food. I sensed even then that it would be a mistake to try to follow him drink for drink. When I cooked, I would always show him what I was about to make, and he would always decline with a shake of his head. I would cook and eat. Rollei would drink in tiny sips and nod or shake his head in response to any questions or comments that I made, and prompt me occasionally to say more. He spoke only when necessary, and over those first few days as I learnt to understand him more he said less and less. When he got out the chess board for the first time, he said nothing. He simply placed it on the table after I had cleared away my plate. He had placed it with the white end facing me, so I made the first move. Learning from Rollei, I realised that I didn’t need to say whether I could play or whether I wanted to. I just showed him. Rollei smiled, and as we waited for him to decide that it was time to make his move I felt that I was being allowed to share his solitude in front of the fire. I was being drawn in as an accomplice in that strange, quiet part of his life that happened in the kitchen of the house at Bridge of Don. I wondered whether it had been like this with Lachlan, and how Rollei had felt when Lachlan left.

CHAPTER 4

From the back of the house a garden gate opened onto woodland. Paths snaked their ways up the hill towards what was, in those days, open country, and along the winding course of the river Don either inland towards Seaton and St.Machar or downstream towards the coast. It was a way of getting to and from the house without going onto the road, and sometimes during that winter when it felt that we were living in our dark sanctuary there were days when I preferred to walk out by the largely unused woodland way to preserve the imagined solitude and the sense of isolation. Of course we were not really isolated at all. Although it was much quieter then than it is now, we were within just a few minutes of the main road to the north and the centre of the old part of the town around King’s College. Later I lived in a smallholding further up the coast and more remote, but nowhere that I have stayed, even in tents in the high arctic or on the slopes of tropical volcanoes, or even in the desert a hundred miles from the nearest marked location on a map, has ever felt as secluded as that kitchen table by the fire and the peat-burning range in those first few months living with Rollei at Bridge of Don. Climbing up the path behind the house and looking across the roofline towards the south I felt the same as when, many years later, I climbed the moraine behind the camp in Greenland and looked out across the frozen lake towards the sea. But in Greenland I would be remembering Yulia. In those first weeks with Rollei I had never even imagined anybody like her.

At the top of the hill, which was really just the top of the valley side and brought me out onto the level of the surrounding country, it was my habit to turn towards the coast and walk down past the Bridge of Balgownie along the river to the sea at the end of Donmouth Road. The climb behind the house seemed like a necessary precursor to the walk to the sea. Somehow it set a context, a framework for the journey. I could equally have set out from the front of the house and walked much more directly to the sea, but would then have emerged onto the coast almost unawares, almost by surprise, not having taking in the big picture, the overall view, before traipsing through the trees and along the path beside the river and over the main road and past the houses at the end of the golf course until eventually the road faded out into sand and there, finally, was the open sea and the empty wind and the tight-stretched sky. In either case it would have been the same sea, but reaching it as the culmination of a journey that started with a long view and a plan was somehow more controlled, more deliberate, safer than having it emerge from between the trees or underneath the bridge and allowing it to see you before you had seen it, checked it, been sure of it before you arrived. At some times in your life it feels most comfortable to be sure of where you are going. But eventually, if you walk far enough or wait long enough you reach the limit of the ground that you could see before you set off. Donmouth road runs east along the edge of the river, with houses along the north side and with the south side open to the sloping river bank before it comes to a dead end for traffic and breaks down into sandy paths heading out through the dunes onto the sandy corner of coast where the river fights to keep open a path through the line of sand that works its way north from Aberdeen. Once you drop down off the end of the road and into the dunes you are into unpredictable ground. From the woods above the house you could see across Donmouth Road to the horizon, but could not see down behind the dunes onto the beach itself. As you approach the end of Donmouth you can look along the river to where it meets the sea, but not around the corner of the dunes onto the grand, vast, magnificent sweep of sand that stretches off to the north. That great new tract of territory opens up only as you turn the corner of the dunes to face north, and although it remains in its broad essentials more or less the same, at a distance from day to day, year to year and even through the decades, there are details there which, against the broad white palette of blowing sand stand out against the memory of yesterday’s design. The tides and storms arrive and rise and pass and fall and bring with them the flotsam of the wind and waves. A coil of rope emerging from the soft eroding sand. A fish box brought ashore from Peterhead or Fraserburgh or the far flung islands to the north. Some fresh pattern in the sand or some new crack in the slowly collapsing concrete of the abandoned wartime defences that serve less well against the rising sea that they were intended to do against the rising forces of conquest. Some new line of shells to mark the line of yesterday’s advance. Some new line of footprints to show that you are not the first to pass this way today.

I used to love the fact that there was a Faroese commercial office on the dock side at Aberdeen, and thought how wonderful it would be to find some Faroese jetsam washed up on the beach. Whereas most places lose their magic once they have been opened and explored, some remain magical. Long after I left Aberdeen I sailed to the Faroe Islands, and they remain magical now in my memory as they were then in my imagination. Some magic is ephemeral, existing only in the hope and imagination of the dreamer, disappearing at dawn or upon arrival in the new land. Other persists in the memory and survives the shocks of waking and arrival. Both types are equally unreal, or so I said to Rollei in the evening after I had first discovered the office of the Faroese commercial attaché in Aberdeen. I told him each day about whatever walk I had taken, and what I had seen. “The tide was up today,” I might say, “and there was a seal in the Don”. Rollei might look at me and nod, and hold his glance for longer than I might have anticipated. His expression seemed to indicate that he expected more. The next day I might tell him about a line of gulls or the cut of a strange-shaped cloud or how the light fell on the blocks of flats along Seaton Crescent and Regent Walk. He would look at me and nod, and pause as if to say “Is that all?”, and sip his drink and take out the chess board or the cards, or return to his book. And so we slipped into another of his routines, where I would tell him each day what I had seen, and with no more than a nod of his head Rollei would make me feel that I had not seen enough. And so each day I started to look for more, and brought back my reports like a pilot returning each evening from a new reconnaissance, a scout returning from a new sortie, the captain of a small boat returning from what should have been a new ocean but turned out to be another inlet into an old and tired continent.

It was on the Sunday before the Russians arrived that I decided to launch a mutiny, or if not a mutiny at least an intervention, and break several of the routines that we had started to establish, as well as challenging the insecurity that I was beginning to feel around the sensation, real or imagined as it might be, that I was somehow failing an unannounced test every time Rollei nodded, paused and looked away at the end of my daily list of sightings and adventures. Let us see, I thought, what Rollei can see! And so I devised my plan for a field trip to the beach. Of course, in all probability I had misread Rollei’s nods and pauses. In all probability he was little interested in what I had seen but paused, politely, to be sure that I had finished speaking before he looked away. Nevertheless, at a little after one in the afternoon, I knocked for the first time on Rollei’s door. It opened almost immediately, as though he had been standing by it waiting for my knock. He was fully and quite smartly dressed, as though for work, although I had not seen him go out that morning. He stood with chin lowered and regarded me over the top of his glasses. I did not allow his surprising readiness distract me from my plan. I pointed a less than apostolic finger towards the front of the house, lowered my own chin and said: “walk”. Without Rollei appearing to move, the door swung shut and I feared defeat, but before I could consider my next move the door opened again and there stood Rollei as before but now dressed in his dark green woollen hound’s-tooth overcoat and with his indelicately scented umbrella in hand. He raised both eyebrows. I turned and walked towards the door. I had no idea how this was going to turn out. 

I was about to receive a lesson that I would look back on many times in the years to come.

CHAPTER 6

I have read that sometimes that the smallest objects, which are not visible when we look at them directly, can be seen clearly if we look slightly to one side. The star at the bend of the handle in the Big Dipper, the kink in the tail of the Great Bear, appears to most people as a single point of light. The star is called Mizar. If you look closely, and if your eyes are good, you can see another star very close to Mizar, slightly smaller. If the Dipper were the “right way up”, this small companion star would be up and to the left of Mizar. It is called Alcor, and many people cannot quite see it, as it is so small. But if you look slightlt to one side, rather than gazing directly at it, from the periphery of your vision you may see it clearly. Look back directly at it and it will fade away again. Look away, and it returns in the corner of your eye. Eddie Stock, a friend at Oxford, had shown me that trick. He was very proud that he could see both Mizar and Alcor clearly without any tricks, His eyes were good, he said. But I don’t think he ever knew that there was even more to see. As well as having a companion in Alcor, Mizar itself is not a single star but two, but nobody can see both parts with the naked eye. Not even if they look away. Perhaps only if you closed both eyes completely could you see all the stars. Measurements beyond the visible have shown that the two parts of Mizar, Mizar-A and Mizar-B, are themselves what are known as binary stars, each comprising two separate stars appearing from a distance to be one. As we look closer and closer we see more and more, but not if we only look directly.

When Yulia and her friend stood at the front door for the first time the things that stuck in my memory were things from the periphery of my vision, not the things I looked at directly. The blue door fame. The trees. The snowflakes. But as with Mizar and Alcor, if I turn my eyes slightly away now, the small things that were at the centre become clear at the periphery. If I focus on the wallpaper in the hallway I can see Yulia’s shadow pass across the pattern. If I focus on the carpet I can hear the sound of her footsteps. In the glass doorway of a display case I see the dark reflections of both girls. If I concentrate on Yulia’s friend, Yulia by her side begins to fade into visibility. I look at the pale brown fabric of the arm of Ricky’s duffel coat, and I see pressed up against it the arm of Yulia’s coat as the girls stood pressed together side by side in the hallway. I look at Ricky’s wellington boots, green and unremarkable with drops of water catching the light from the hall, and I see not one pair but two, identical. There are Yulia’s boots. And the light changes as Ricky moves forward into the house, leading the way and letting light from the lamps in the porch outside the house spill back onto Yulia. And then they are both in front of me, walking away ahead of me along the hallway into the house and that first moment is gone, with only its edges preserved. I remember Rollei, disappointed coming back from the doorway towards me, and the Russians, afterwards, going into the hallway away from me, but the moments in between have been eaten away like water-damaged film. Yulia, Ricky and I must have spoken; I would have shown them to their rooms, given them keys and explained about the bills and the shared spaces. But none of that survives.

That evening, when I went as usual into the kitchen to sit with Rollei and tell him about my day, he was not there. In our places were Yulia and Ricky, already eating, talking brightly to each other, looking up as I came in, smiling at me. I remember that moment clearly. They were sparkling. Glowing. The kitchen that had been so full of shadows and silence was transformed as though by some exotic light. As though the room were filled with small stars. Twin stars. Binary stars. Stars that filled the periphery of your vision. Stars that remained visible even when you looked directly at them. Ricky jumped up and stepped over to the range. “We made you some”. Yulia, still sparkling, said “it’s good” and jumped up too, to fetch the bowl that Ricky had filled and to put it on the table at the vacant space closest to me. “Try it. Ricky’s new recipe”.

As I took my seat I looked up at Ricky to indicate my polite interest in her new recipe and to show my appreciation for her inviting me to share it. In that kitchen I had grown accustomed to making myself understood with a look, or a change of pace. Ricky beamed back, clearly understanding what I meant to convey, but my glance slipped off her as she lowered her face again to the table, and I found that I was looking at Yulia, as she looked back at me.

Yulia Paola was sweetness and light, sparkles and joy, rainbows and laughter. Every word that she spoke, every look that she cast across the room, every one of smiles with which she punctuated her sentences was filled with melody and delight. Everything she touched glowed and reverberated with an exultant echo of her. I was very young, and my vision my have been blurred, dazzled by Yulia, but that was how she appeared to me on that first evening. It was as though an angel had been washed up on my beach. An exotic angel with a strange name and an accent from beyond the edges of anywhere I had been. An angel whose name was spelled entirely in letters that I had never seen before. I learnt quite soon that the sound of her name rhymed with the Russian word for “I love you”, and the two words ran very well together in my mind.

That night, Rollei did not appear in the kitchen. I thought of calling up to him and asking him to come down, but even though part of me wanted him here, to be involved, to see this angel from the sea and to share this miraculous transformation of our dark subterranean world into a world of starlight and wonder, part of me knew that this was alien to him. This would be too bright, too quick, too clear for him to call home. And I realised what he must have said as he had turned from the Russians at the door and walked past me back into the house, which was the last moment that I had seen him. He had not said “two”, as I had thought. He had said “you”. In one moment he had seen what the Russians would bring, and they were not bringing it for him. They were bringing it for me. And for the first time I thought back to the lesson that Rollei had taught me on our walk to the beach a few days earlier. As we stood in the wind and faced into the spray, and as the gulls had called and the waves tolled like bells he had said the same thing. “You. This is you.”

The next morning was the first time that Rollei announced his entrance onto the day’s stage with that exuberant lunge, part stepping part falling from the bathroom onto the landing, half dressed but in full voice declaiming from James Joyce, and from the Tridentine Mass, “Introibo ad altare Dei. I will go in to the altar of God. Who giveth joy to my youth.” and then, into the silence: “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”. A pause, with chin down, wavering like a tree about to topple. And then the characteristic turn like a tanker, and he walked, sober, towards his room whispering “grievous fault, grievous fault.” I was at my usual place in the sitting room where I wrote, and although I could not see his performance I heard clearly but decided to say nothing. I am not sure whether he knew that I was there. Yulia and her friend had left the house hours earlier to go into the University. Yulia waving and laughing, calling “Good morning” from the doorway as she passed, her friend Ricky smiling but more serious walking slightly ahead. On week days Ricky always came out of her room first, knocked on Yulia’s door, and led the way as they passed the doorway of the kitchen where, usually, I was having my breakfast at the time they left. If I moved to the window to watch them as they left the house, as I always did, I saw them turn right at the end of the drive, Ricky usually talking and Yulia smiling, laughing in reply. They were both studying for Master’s degrees at the University and throughout that winter they had classes every weekday morning, and so already in those first few days our new pattern was established where Rollei and the Russians occupied two separate worlds within the house, with me as the only common point. I was always up first, feeling that I worked bet in the quiet hour before anybody else was awake. Next Yulia and Ricky passed through briefly as they set off. Then I would go out myself either for a short walk through the woods and up the hill or for a longer expedition to the beach. Then after I was back in the house and working at my desk in the sitting room, Rollei would erupt into his belated start of day. Hearing his declamations of Joyce, or Auden or Proust I put the kettle on to boil, ready to make him coffee when he appeared in the kitchen as he always did just a few minutes later. From that point on, our late mornings in the kitchen over coffee and toast took the place of the evenings we had previously spent together. Sometimes Rollei would take out the chess board ad we would make a few moves, but now we spread the game over days or even weeks, keeping the board on the dresser beside the kitchen door in between the days when we played, and sometimes when Rollei fetched the board there was dust on the pieces and we had forgotten our strategies and plans. Rollei always won. He could see further ahead than me. His strategies burned more slowly, and completely. Even as the winter progressed, and the intervals in the kitchen between Rollei’s violent emergence into the day and his descent towards the smoky lunchtimes on Union Street became shorter, I always felt that Rollei could see more than me. Perhaps that is why I followed him a few steps into those lunchtime bars, and stood watching as he drifted, or on bad days careered into those afternoons where I lost sight of him. Occasionally I would here him mumbling up the stairs and into his room long after I was in bed, but usually he was far away and out of sight from early afternoon one day until mid morning the next. I had no idea how he spent that time, or how he managed to complete whatever work he did at the University.

Initially, all the time that I was with Yulia I was also with Ricky, as the two were inseparable. Ricky always seemed to be doing several things at once so that her attention to me and Yulia was diluted by her reading, or cooking, or writing a letter, or working on one of the tiny pieces of fabric that she used to design and decorate. Gradually, as the winder drew on, Ricky sometimes came out from her room before tea just a little later, or withdrew to bed just a little earlier, and Yulia and I started to spend a little more time alone.  Because it happened so gradually it seemed entirely natural, and went virtually unnoticed, as gradual changes tend to do for those people who are close to them. Only if you look away for a while and then look back do you notice the hour hand moving. If you watch it directly you cannot see the motion, cannot see the change, cannot see time moving. It was clear to me that Ricky was taking great care of Yulia, ensuring her safety, her happiness, the smoothness of her passage through those weeks when she was starting at the University, starting at the house, starting to know me. At first I was not sure that Yulia herself knew this, partly because all our conversations were very light, partly because with Ricky sitting alongside us it was a hard topic to raise. As Ricky’s supervision grew less thorough, the little glances that Yulia cast her way, almost conspiratorial, as Ricky said goodnight and left us in the kitchen together, or as Yulia and I set off together on a short walk to the shop on the corner of King Street or to the woods overlooking the house at sunset, suggested that she understood that she was being trusted, given some leeway, being let go to explore a little on her own. In one way it struck me as strange, because the two girls were of a similar age, but their relationship was almost that of mother and daughter, with Ricky taking the role of the wise, steady, reflective guiding hand. That role of monitor, guide and carer never completely faded, but by December, and throughout winter into spring, Yulia and I, almost like children under Ricky’s watchful but tolerant care, became not just friends but fellow adventurers embarking on our tiny expeditions and explorations. A trip to fetch pink cinnamon buns from the Auld Toon Café. A journey along King Street for tubs of ice cream and packets of crisps. A voyage downstream to the coast to bring back little yellow shells and shards of wave-worn wood for Ricky to weave into her tiny fabric squares. We were like children set loose to collect whatever treasures they chose.

Of all those excursions my favourite were the afternoons when we ventured as far as the Inversnecky Tea Rooms on the Esplanade. I catch my breath in nostalgia even now, decades later, remembering those afternoons. We thought we were at the edge of the world, looking out to sea and surrounded by people from another world. This was not the University, and it was not the sheltered woodland valley where our house maintained its tightly local sense of private space. These were not people who knew us or cared about the little things we cared about. These were real people, people with lives that had already started, people who were living in the place where they would always live. People who had arrived and begun, not people like us who were training, waiting, living temporary lives. Ephemeral lives that we knew would end, or change into something completely new at the end of the next summer. Our whole existence for that year was like a journey without a destination. We were rootless and adrift and without concern. We sat in the Inversnecky Tea Room with mugs of Tea and bacon sandwiches on white bread and we watched the real people as though we were watching a show, or creatures in a zoo. And we would walk home side by side so close that are arms touched as we walked, and tell Ricky about everything we had seen. And the next morning I would tell Rollei about the people and the beach and the way we walked and the way the man behind the counter made the bacon sandwiches. And I would remember the lesson that he had started to teach me on the expedition that he and I had made on the day before the Russians had come, and I would remind him of that and tell him the other things that I had seen, that I had learnt from him. I was starting to try and hold my two worlds together, and to hurt neither of them.

At the Inversnecky Tea Rooms we were far away, and like explorers stranded for a winter at the Pole we shared deep secrets and invented legends of our own. We sat facing each other in the window and we watched as dusk turned into darkness on a grey December afternoon. Between each sip of tea, between each sentence that she spoke, Yulia looked out towards the sea and each time saw a little less the shrinking  world outside and more the inside world reflected in the glass. Herself, our table, me, fluorescent light that spilled across the café from the counter, shining on small tables with bright covers and fat bottles of brown sauce, and on the blue linoleum floor that seemed old fashioned even then but all the same was part of what made Inversnecky feel so rich to us. By that fluorescent light at that small table as the window misted up she showed me how to write her name the Russian way, with her finger on the glass in letters that the English language did not share, and when we went outside and looked back at the window, the name looked much the same to me inside out and back to front. She laughed, and spelled it out again in words I could not understand, the names of letters that I did not know. And I reminded her of what she had told me once before, that her name rhymed with how the Russians say “I love you”. And I did.

CHAPTER 7

As we walked along the esplanade, with the sea in the darkness to our right and the lights of Aberdeen swinging around behind us on our left, Yulia took my arm in hers and told me for the first time about her past. She told me that she took my arm that way because her mother takes her arm like that to tell her the stories of their past, to remind her of where she came from as they move from place to place. Like tiny jewels in the darkness Yulia started to spread out in front of me the places she had lived before, the people she had met and left behind, and the people who had stayed with her. Her mother, living now in London. The home in Denmark where they used to live. The woodlands and fields around the house in France where she grew up with her Russian family. Her grandmother, who took them into France and discovered there that she had been lied to and had nothing. Yulia’s story grew like a map, starting with us on the Esplanade at the centre of it all and slowly working outwards in space and backwards in time. The tiny jewels of people and places were like the tiny yellow shells that Ricky wove into her fabric squares, or like the stones and shells that represent the islands and the stars in the traditional maps of Pacific islanders. But these jewels that Yulia spread out for me floated in the darkness in front of us as we walked, evaporating into the mist, their calls fading into the sound of the crashing waves as Yulia’s story moved from one to the next. These jewels and shells were in her heart, not in her pocket or on woven fabric squares. She could show them to me for a moment but there was nothing that I could touch or hold onto. Stories that you hear in the dark are more magical, but also more ephemeral than those you hear in daylight. When you tell a story in the dark you tell it more with the memories of what you have felt than with the memories of what you have seen. It is easy to take in as though they were your own somebody else’s recollections of things that they have seen; the imagination considers that to be part of its job. When somebody describes seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Berlin wall we can see the pictures and we remember the view years later almost as though it were our own. Visions of the heart do not work that way, and they cannot be so easily shared. When somebody tells you how it felt to see those things your heart struggles in vain to make those feelings your own. I was aware of this as Yulia told me the strange story of her grandmother leaving Smolensk. I could hear the story, but I was not hearing it all.

This was the same lesson that I had learnt from Rollei, or at least a part of that lesson. As I lay in bed that night after hearing Yulia start to tell her story, thinking back over how she had started to draw for me the fabulous jewel-covered map of how she came to be here I was drawn to the connections between what Rollei had said on my walk with him, and what Yulia had said on my walk with her. The only real connection was me. Rollei had told me what he could see when we looked together at the same view. Having seen his point of view I then started to look differently when I looked out at other views. We learn how to see, and we see more ourselves, if we learn how other people see, and remember how things look from their point of view. Each of us has only a small view of the world and we see only in a certain way unless we teach ourselves, or teach each other, to see things in other ways. To see the world that other people see. So when I then looked with Yulia at the view that she laid out for me, I saw it not only through her eyes and through my own but inevitably through the eyes of everybody else who had taught me how to see. What we see depends partly on the people with whom we have looked at things before.

Perhaps it was because he was seeing with the heart that Rollei kept his eyes tight shut as he recited the lines from Eliot and Proust, Neruda and St. Exupery, and the other explorers through whose eyes, or whose hearts, he tried to show me his world. As he and I had walked towards the beach on that earlier day, when I had set out to show him all the things that I had found in my expeditions from the house, he had clearly understood the nature of our excursion. I showed him the paths that I took through the woodland and he picked up dead leaves as I instructed, crumbling them between his fingers and smelling the dust as I did. I showed him the view from the top of the hill back across the roof of our house past the University to Aberdeen beyond and he turned with me slowly to follow the line of the horizon as I did around to the east and the north, where tiny grey ships and rigs far out at sea held his attention as I pointed them out. He lowered his chin and looked at me, and I led the way down past the river and the bridge and the houses along Donmouth Road to the beach and the sea. I showed him the little yellow shells and the gulls and the coil of rope half buried in the sand. I pointed to the new crack in the concrete at the collapsing wartime defences, and the new shoots of spiky grass that were sprouting on the dunes. He allowed me to show him all these things and he didn’t speak other than, sometimes “I see” or “indeed”. He did not interrupt my story. He did not draw onto my map as I rolled it out for him. He did not criticise the colours on my flag. But as we reached our farthest point and turned back, he reached out and briefly put his hand against my arm to stop me as I started to walk away and lead us home. He said: “my turn”.

On the walk back to the house, retracing the steps that we had taken on the way out, Rollei spoke more that I had ever heard him speak before. In fact, I think that in that hour he spoke about three quarters of all the words I ever heard him speak. Years later he would say much more, but then it was in writing, in long letters from India addressed to me in Oxford. In writing he could express his ideas fluently, but in speech, at least in all the circumstances where I was with him in Aberdeen, he was not eloquent in any conventional sense but spoke in fragments and running his own words into those of the authors who provided him with the exact turn of phrase or the precise example that he needed to make or illustrate each point. “You see the beach” he said as let go of my arm having prevented me from leading the way back home. He scooped up a handful of sand and held it out until I looked at it. “Your beach: sand and shells and gulls and waves and sky.” He lowered his chin in his characteristic way. He remained silent for a moment as a windswept woman with a windswept dog walked by. She looked up and smiled as she passed. I smiled back and said hello. Her dog yapped and skipped and ran ahead. Rollei kept his chin down but looked at her across the top of his glasses. He looked from her to me and raised his chin in a question. “Yes,” I said, I have seen her here before. We say hello. I think she lives in one of the houses on Donmouth Road.” He looked again at the handful of sand, and said: “You only told me about the sand, not about the shepherdess.” I could sense that he was about to quote something that would make me feel embarrassed about not having heard of the particular author wrote it. “Place a mark on your map,” he said, “for the woman with her dog.” He closed his eyes and recited a version all his own of what Antoine de St Exupery had written about how a young pilot was taught what were the important things to place on his navigation chart: “Exactly where she stood I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers. Remember the serpent in the grass, that brook at Motril. It lies in wait a thousand miles from here not marked on your map but waiting to catch your wheels as you come in to land. Watch out for the sheep. Watch out for those three orange trees.” From that day onwards, whenever I mentioned the beach to Rollei he said “where we saw the woman with the dog?” and I said “yes, exactly there.” And now my beach is sand, and shells, and all the rest, and also the woman who walked past with the dog and smiled. I would not have included her in my list. I took the woman and the dog for granted. Rollei took the sand and the shells and the sea for granted, but took note of the woman with the dog.

As we walked off the beach and back onto Donmouth Road I expected Rollei to ask me where I had thought the woman might live. He did stop me as we came towards the road, but that was not the question that he asked. He stopped us at a point where the path leading off the beach ran through a narrow gap between two sections of a dune, partly overhung with the branches of an apple tree that leaned out from the first property beyond the beach. It was a tight, scruffy spot from where there was no clear view of the beach, the road, the river or the sea. There were the tangled remains of a wire mesh fence and a broken concrete post. A “Keep Britain Tidy” bin had lost its bottom to rust and its post to rot, and lay forlorn. It was a dead patch between the beach and the road that I had walked through a hundred times. Rollei said. “You never mentioned this place. Why did you not tell me about this?” He turned back towards the sea and walked back a few dozen paces beyond where the path opened out onto the beach. At the narrow section the sand had been damp and trodden hard, but here, just a few steps away the sand was deep and soft and had that dimpled pattern like a carving of the sea, impressed by the passage of hundreds pairs of feet. Further out onto the beach, especially down towards the river where the sand had been flattened and wet by the tide, individual tracks could be traced out onto the beach. At first there were too many to tell which might be ours, which were those of the woman we had seen with the dog, or how many altogether there were. But as Rollei retraced our steps further and further out onto the beach the tracks disentangled, and when we were almost back at our furthest point it was clear which were our tracks. Rollei said “Two” and started back towards the path. Another set of tracks joined ours, made by somebody in rough-soled boots heading out towards the north. Rollei said “three.” He worked back towards the path, at first counting in each track as it joined our route but falling silent as we approached the end of the beach and it became impossible to separate all the tracks. Standing back at the gap between the dunes, where the path crossed the broken fence and led onto Donmouth Road he pointed to the trampled sandy floor and said “All of them. Every track is here at this one place”. As he spoke, the woman with the yappy dog came up behind us from the beach. “Hello again” she said. “Hello” I said, and Rollei this time smiled at her as well. The little dog yapped twice and ran ahead, his claws imprinting tiny scratch marks in the hard-packed sand. Rollei watched the woman walk away and turned to me. “You see?” he said. “We knew they would come”. We walked forward onto Donmouth Road and saw the woman and the dog going into one of the houses. “There,” I said, “she must live there.” Rollei said “perhaps” and walked on. As we approached the house where we had seen the woman go in with the dog, the woman came out again, this time without the dog. She called back into the house as she pulled the door shut behind her “I’ll come for him again tomorrow. Same time.” She got into a van out side the house and drove away. Rollei looked at me. “The dog lives there. Not her.” I looked at the house and from the upstairs window, sitting on the window shelf the little dog looked out over our heads across the river to Seaton and Pittodrie. “He’s looking at the sunset” I said. Rollei shook his head. “He’s listening to the football. And marking you on his map.” The wind shifted slightly and carried with it the sound of a referee’s whistle and a suddenly restless crowd from the stadium at Pittodrie. It shifted back and the sound was gone. The stadium lights cast a glow into the dusk. I looked back up at the dog, but the curtains in the room had closed, so he could not see us as we walked on up the road towards the bridge and Rollei started to recite the lines from Proust about how we each must learn to see the world through a thousand other people’s eyes. We must have looked an odd couple to drivers on the main road as we stood waiting to cross. Rollei in his tweed suit and mackintosh with his umbrella furled, eyes closed, head tilted back. Me beside him, watching as he remembered the words. “The true voyage of discovery” Rollei shouted against the traffic, “is not seeing new lands but seeing through new eyes.”

CHAPTER 8

Sometimes I was surprised at Yulia’s capacity to remain light in the face of darkness. Sometimes it seemed almost to be wrong that she could laugh away some of the sadnesses that she described in her story. Perhaps, I thought, it was just her way of coping. And slowly I started to see Yulia’s responses to every situation, her replies to every question, as though they were not a genuine reflection of her real thoughts but simply an now instinctive response that deflected every difficult notion with a smile, every painful memory with a laugh, every challenging question with a joke that changed the topic of conversation, or a suggestion for an activity that distracted us from whatever we had been talking about a moment before. Gradually I started to treat the girl I spoke to and walked with as though she were hiding the real Yulia, somehow covering for something that Yulia had done, or something that Yulia did not want to face. In one way this made me sad for Yulia and for the pain tat I supposed must lie behind her behaviour, but at the same time it made me resentful that what she had shown me, what I had so quickly fallen in love with, for all that I knew what love was then, had been false. Perhaps not a deliberate lie, but a façade. A dishonesty. I think of Rollei’s quotation from Forster and apply it to Yulia. Her life, though vivid, was largely a lie. Even to herself. I had said something similar to Ricky at the time, just as our lives in Aberdeen were starting to spiral towards the end of the year and the end of our time together. Ricky said: “No, she is not lying. She is hiding”. I did not ask what Ricky thought Yulia was hiding from, because I thought I knew. But everything I knew of Yulia had come to me from Yulia. It was only later that I realised, of course, that therefore everything from which Yulia was hiding would have been missing from the stories that she told me. She had told me everything that was unimportant, but nothing that really mattered.

The more that I started to be annoyed by those same characteristics that I had initially found so beguiling in Yulia, her gaiety, her easy charm, the more that I started to turn towards Ricky. Initially I turned to her as a source of support or confirmation as though I needed an ally in my journey away from infatuation. “Why is Yulia behaving like that? How can she say that? Surely she would not have said that when we first met.” Later I turned to her for advice, and finally for comfort. I thought of Ricky almost as an antidote to Yulia. Where Yulia had always been light and capricious, Ricky had been grounded and reliable. Where Yulia said everything that it occurred to her to say, and told me everything, or so I thought, about her past, Ricky was slow to speak about herself, but listened well when others spoke. Where Yulia was quick to make a decision and quick to change her mind, Ricky was deliberate, and once she had agreed to something I knew that it would happen. That had never been the case with Yulia. Yulia was quick to say “we will come back here every week, and drink tea watching the sunset. Tomorrow certainly we must go together to the botanical garden. I will bring you back chocolates from the meeting at work.” Little things, but things that were as likely to be forgotten as completed. Little promises meant nothing to Yulia. She had lived her whole life as the victim of little promises broken or forgotten.

On Wednesday evenings Yulia and Ricky attended an evening seminar at the University where guest speakers from other institutions would come and give a talk, and answer questions, about their research. All of the postgraduate students, those studying for masters’ or doctoral degrees, where required to attend these seminars, and they were also attended by some of the undergraduates. After the seminar there was a reception with wine, and some of the staff and students would go out for a meal with the visiting speaker. On one occasion a little after Christmas, at the point when Yulia and I were at our closest and just before I started to pull back from the feelings that had started with our afternoon walks to the Inversnecky Tea Rooms, Ricky suggested that perhaps I would like to come with them to the seminar because it was about some topic that she thought might interest me. I can hardly now remember what the topic was, but certainly it was nothing that I can imagine Ricky really thought would be close to my heart. They studied in the Environment department, doing a course in environmental management, and the seminars were on topics such as land drainage, electricity pylon design or the environmental implications of oil pipelines. My interest was in travel writing, mountains and the Arctic. I assumed that Ricky was inviting me for Yulia’s sake, as she must have realised by then that we had become close and enjoyed spending time together. Perhaps, in her role as benevolent supervisor of Yulia’s activities she thought the time was right for me to see another part of Yulia’s life, and for Yulia to introduce me to what she did, and who she knew, at the University. So on Wednesday afternoon I set off from the house around dusk, turned right from the end of the drive and walked across the park and past the cathedral to the university. I was to meet them in the Senior Common Room, which was a rather grand name for a large but somewhat desolate building that housed a huge canteen and a small bar. At the edges of the canteen, along the high windows that ran down each side of the building, space had been set aside with comfortable chairs and low tables where people could meet and talk, read while drinking coffee from the canteen, or, as was the case now for me, just sit and wait for an appointment or for the arrival of friends. It quickly became clear from the conversations around me that other small groups were gathering in advance of the seminar: friends and colleagues meeting here for a drink or a snack before going to the department, or just meeting so that they could walk across together and arrive as a group. I was quite early, and I saw several people come out of the department and cross the road to the common room, meet with friends or collect something from the counter and then go back. It was quite late, just before the time the seminar was scheduled to start that Yulia ran out from the department, calling back to somebody in the doorway who I could not see, and came over to fetch me. She was out of breath and laughing that it was time to go.

After the seminar Yulia, Ricky and I walked back to the house together, talking a little about the seminar but more about some of the people that I had seen. When Yulia took me at the last moment into the lecture hall Ricky had saved two seats for us on the end of a row, and it was clear that we were joining a group of their friends stretched along the row. I was right at the end, on the aisle, and could not see them all well, and at the end of the talk Yulia drew me away quickly with Ricky, to beat the rush, she said, but as we walked home she described them one by one in their seats along the row. She also described some of her tutors, who she had pointed out sitting near the front as we arrived, including her main tutor, who had introduced the speaker. For each of her friends Yulia told me their name, where they came from and whether they were studying for a masters or a doctoral degree. And for each one she had a short story that made her laugh as she told it. “The third one was Maurice, from Lyon. He is doing a PhD on the French railway network. He learnt English before he came to Aberdeen, but nobody told him how they speak English here and he cannot understand what anybody says. He speaks mainly to foreigners, who speak English the way he learnt it.” Yulia laughed, and I laughed too. Ricky looked at us both and smiled but, as usual, she looked as though she had other things on her mind at the same time. Yulia said “You must come again next week. We can go together every week”. She laughed again and didn’t wait for an answer.

The next week I waited again in the canteen across the road while groups gathered in advance of the seminar. Two of Yulia’s friends that I remembered from the time before, Maurice from Lyon and a striking girl in a denim skirt whose name turned out to be Rona, from Inverness, came in and recognised me. They came to sit with me, starting the assembly of their group at my table. After a while, when there were five or six of them, they stood up and made to head off to the department. “Come on”, said Rona, “let’s go” and touched me on the shoulder as she stood up. “I’d better wait for Yulia,” I said. “You go ahead.” As I watched them go I noticed Rona look back from the doorway, and I pretended to be looking past her towards the department. Yulia was running out as she had last week, at the last minute. As she crossed the road she stopped for a moment and talked to Maurice, and I went out to join them. The time we went into the lecture room as a big group, and in the crowd I was separated for a moment from Yulia and Ricky. I stood aside for a second to let somebody pass. Yulia was behind me and Ricky was behind us both talking to somebody I did not know. Rona was suddenly at my side: dark curly hair, green eyes and a huge purple shoulder-bag. “Come on,” she said. “in this one!” and following Maurice who had gone in ahead of her she pulled me with her into the row of seats. Yulia had turned, and came in behind me, and Ricky took the seat on the aisle.

The next week, I arrived at the canteen just a little earlier. Rona arrived early, too, and we sat together for a while. I joked about her bag, lying that it was the only way I recognised her. She asked me what I was reading, and I showed her the copy of “Wind, Sand and Stars” that Rollei had given me after our walk to the beach. She said she knew it. I was impressed. When Maurice and the others arrived we walked over to the department together and met Yulia and Ricky in the lecture room. Yulia was actually a little late. I sat next to Rona, Ricky sat next to me and Yulia took up the seat on the aisle. It probably is not necessary to tell the whole of this story. By this time it was nearly Easter, and I was away from Aberdeen for two weeks. During those two weeks my phone calls and cards back to Aberdeen were directed to Rona, not to Yulia. I had imagined that it might be awkward living in the house with Yulia after it became clear that I was seeing Rona, but that was because I had imagined that my rapidly flowering friendship with Yulia, which in my own imagination had rocketed and exploded in the sky like a firework, had been as momentous for her as it had felt to me. Perhaps she simply hid her feelings, but more likely her friendship with me was not as unique for her as it had been for me. She had no doubt met many people like me, had many friendships like that. I had met nobody like Yulia and never had friendship such as my friendship with her. I was young. Everything was new. But even as that first burst of the firework faded it still seemed unquestionable to me that something special had happened. Ricky said what she had said before: “Yulia does not lie, she hides.” I had no idea what Yulia really felt about our friendship, and I knew that I had no idea. Sometimes I wondered whether I should not say so much about Rona when I talked to Yulia and Ricky, but then I said it anyway. But Yulia was laughing and talking, sitting with me sometimes doing her work at the table where I sat to do mine. She asked what I thought of the film that Rona and I had been to see, and she sat on our row at the Wednesday seminars. There was no sign of anything wrong, and I did not know enough to know whether I had done wrong. For all that I thought I had learnt the little lesson that Rollei had taught me on the beach, I had learnt nothing; not even the size of the lesson. Lessons like that are not learnt at the point when they are delivered. They are like messages posted into time. Like stones sinking slowly to the sea bed. Like firework rockets not yet burst shooting skywards in darkness. One day I might learn to see what is hidden in the heart, but not yet. For now I see only what is plainly written on the face, and Yulia’s face gives nothing away. Ricky’s face, also, gave nothing away, but I was not even looking in that direction.

CHAPTER 9

After I left Aberdeen I tried to keep in touch with Rollei but it was hard. I would send him letters occasionally from the various places where I lived over the next few years, and cards from places I visited, always ending the card, as a private joke in recollection of the cards we used to get from Lachlan the landlord, with the words “please arrange”. I received nothing in return. Whether I moved around too much for Rollei to keep up with the correct address, or whether he did not care to continue what I had really thought was a friendship, or whether in those years after I left Aberdeen he sunk deeper into those dark bands running beneath the visible bands of the rainbow I did now know. Then, many years after I left Aberdeen I received a letter from Rollei. It was one of those strange air-mail lettergrams: a sheet of ultra-thin blue paper with printed spaces for the sender’s address and the destination and lines dividing the sheet into thirds and demanding the user to fold here, tuck here, moisten and affix here. Rollei had clearly struggled with some of the instructions, and spilled out of some of the printed boxes that had entreated him to “write only inside this box”, but nevertheless was writing more like the Rollei that I knew on the walk from the beach, or the Rollei I imagined giving lectures at the University, than like the Rollei I remembered from our troglodytic evenings before the Russians came or from those sad afternoons where I lost his trail after lunch in the bar. The Rollei that wrote from India was a cleaned-up Rollei. A neat and tidy Rollei. As I read his words on the thin blue paper I did not see him lunging out of the bathroom with his glasses askew, I saw him in his tweed waistcoat with his umberella, standing on Donmouth Road,  looking over his glasses at me and reciting T.S.Eliot. But in his first letter from India he was not reciting T.S.Eliot. He quoted only E.M.Forster and the New International Version of the Holy Bible: Numbers: chapter 6 verses 24-26. I had to look it up. “The Lord turn his face towards you.” He quoted Forster’s “A Passage to India” partly to describe where he was, because he was writing from a place called Ootacamund, in the Nilgiri Hills, which had been used, just at the time that he was arriving there, as a filming location for the David Lean film version of Forster’s book. Rollei seemed quite impressed that some of the staff at the school where he was now working (my imagination reeled at the vision of Rollei in the guise of school teacher!) had acted as extras in the film. He also quoted from the book to begin his explanation of how he came to be in India. I imagined the old Rollei, eyes closed, declaring at the start of his day: “his life, though vivid, was largely a dream”. So said Forster of one of his characters, and so Rollei now characterised his life in Aberdeen when I had known him.

When I first moved back to Oxford after leaving Aberdeen I lived in a shared house in Harley Road, off the Botley Road, out beyond the station, heading west. In some ways it was rather like the house in Aberdeen in that there was a shared kitchen and sitting room, and private rooms for each of the tenants. In most other respects it was completely different from Aberdeen. It was a neat, light, suburban semi-detatched house surrounded by others of its type, and I shared it not with Russians and a wild Belgian Scot in a three piece suit but with a quiet school teacher called June, whose fiancé would visit on alternate weekends and who brought exercise books home to mark each afternoon. There was no third floor, no balcony, no woodland paths behind the house, and no dark shadows in the kitchen. There was a river, but there was no beach and no wild North Sea. But rather as it was in Aberdeen I could walk out of the house and decide whether to turn right, or left. I nearly always turned right, and headed into town. I lived in that house several times. There always seemed to be a room free when I needed it there, and all of of my times at Harley Road were like breaks, pauses between storms, during which I was able to unpack, take stock, and regroup. It was while I was living in Harley Road for the second time that I started to receive Rollei’s letters from India, and perhaps that is part of the reason why, in my memory, the houses in Harley Road and in Aberdeen feel closely linked. A lot had happened to both of us since we were in Aberdeen, but Rollei’s letters closed the distance and helped me to make sense of those events. Rollei did not write very much about Aberdeen, preferring to look forward into his new life rather than backwards into his old, but whenever I wrote to him about something from the past that I was thinking of, he always managed, in his roundabout way, to advise me on by visions of the past while talking only about his visions of the future.

This correspondence was strange for me, because the Rollei that I had known in Aberdeen was only the quiet, ineloquent Rollei. The Rollei that wrote from India was clearly showing more of the side of him that I had not seen, but that had earned a reputation amongst his students and colleagues for words that were fluent as well as insightful. But Rollei himself had clearly changed as well, or at least revealed even to himself things that had been well hidden, or not acknowledged before. It is no small step from part-sober historian with a penchant for the smoke-filled bars of Union Street to missionary schoolteacher in the hills of southern India

Rollei had stayed alone in the house in Aberdeen after I left. The Russians had both left just a few days before me, although by then we had stopped calling the “the Russians”, at least to their faces. To Rollei and me they were always “The Russians”, simply because Lachlan the landlord had called them Russians in his post card telling us that they were due to arrive, and it had been fully six months before it became clear, as Yulia started to tell me her story, that it was a story too complicated to be summarised simply as “I am Russian”. Yulia was as much Spanish as Russian, held a French passport and had lived the largest part of her life in Denmark. Ricky, although entirely Russian by birth, was entirely Danish according to her papers. On the day of our walk to the beach I had suggested to Rollei that the point of his lesson was that we see different things if we look from different points of view. He had lowered his chin and look at me across the top of his glasses and said, “What we see depends only in part on what is actually there.” Certainly when we looked at the Russians we saw very little of what they actually were for those first six months. As their story began to become clear to us in the Spring, we were already on the steep path towards the moment that we would all part to go our different ways. I often think of Rollei at that point when I left him in the house for the final time as being like the Captain of a doomed ship, standing on the bridge watching the last of the lifeboats pull away. I was on that lifeboat. Ricky had been on the one before. Yulia had left, with her mother, a week earlier. I last saw Rollei standing in the window at the front of the house on the top floor, on the landing in front of what had until that moment been my room. He was not waving as I waved at him. As you will have imagined, he was standing with his chin lowered, looking at me across the top of his glasses as I turned right at the end of the drive, rucksack on my back, and walked away. When we do that, we think we know all the things we are walking away from, but years later we will notice that the things we really left behind were not the things that we were thinking of at the time. Sometimes, the things that we will miss most of all are things that we hardly notice when they are there. That’s one of the reasons that it is not always possible to write your life history as it happens, as though it were a diary. It is why a published diary is much less than the story of a life. As things happen, it is hard to judge which ones matter; which ones will last. If you had asked me as I left Aberdeen that morning what it was that had just ended, what it was that I had just left,  I would probably have listed the girl who I had met after I finished seeing Rona, Rona herself, and of course Yulia. Those three were uppermost in my thoughts as I walked the familiar route down College Bounds and Broad Street to the train. Rona, because she had the same effect as staring at the sun: the image stays with you for a long time, and your sight may be permanently damaged. The girl who I was with after I stopped seeing Rona, because it was only yesterday that she had said her piece and let me go. Yulia, for reasons that I still cannot clearly understand. Perhaps it was because, of all the people I was loosing, it was she who, at the time, I thought was most lost.

The last time that I had seen Yulia she had been in the carriage of a train departing Aberdeen station, as I was now. I had been standing on the platform. Ricky was beside me. Ricky took a photograph as the train pulled away, as Yulia laughed and waved through the window at us. I have a copy of the photograph. It shows Yulia inside the train, partly obscured by the reflections on the glass. The reflections are out of focus but clearly show Ricky, with the camera to her eye, taking the photograph, and me, beside her, watching Yulia as she left. It is not possible to tell from the photograph what expression is on my face, but I remember the moment exactly. This moment is not like the one where Yulia and Ricky arrived, when I could recall only the edges of the image and nothing from the centre. This moment of Yulia leaving I remember in every detail from the edges of the frame to the very centre. I asked Rollei, years later in one of my letters, whether perhaps I only thought that remembered the moment so well simply because I had a photograph. Rolei replied, in his oblique way, by sending me a photograph of where he was in India and asking me about the scent of the tree that had been behind him as he took the photograph, the house of the man whose arm was visible at the edge of the frame, and the colours of the sunrise that had occurred the day before his photograph was taken. I wrote back to say that I could not tell him those things about his photograph, but I could tell him such things, and more, about my photograph of Yulia on the train. I remember what Ricky was saying as she pressed the button. I remember the whistle and the flag and the guard’s shout, and the pigeon settling in the girders and the way the train jerked once before it started, rolled backwards slowly for a second, and then started again, finally, without pause or recall, and you were gone.

Ricky took my hand in hers and we stood together watching from the platform as the train carrying Yulia away disappeared around the long curve at the end of the station. As the sound of the train slipped into the distance and was gone the station was silent. There were no other trains on any of the platforms. There were no guards, no passengers, nobody moving luggage, nobody calling instructions, greetings, warnings or farewells. It was as though there was nothing more to be said. Ricky kept hold of my hand, and I kept hold of hers as we turned and walked in silence out of the station. We walked up Bridge Street and on to Union Street still in silence, but instead of turning right and following the obvious route home I drew Ricky across Union Street and along Union Terrace gardens, then across Rosemount Viaduct and into the Art Gallery. The Art Gallery was always my oasis, and I felt that both Ricky and I at that moment needed a moment of calm. The gallery was quiet. We sat side by side on an upholstered bench in front of a painting of a woman carrying a child, with another, older child following her across a sandy heathland with dunes behind and the glint of the sea in the distance. I said that it reminded me of the Dunes north of Aberdeen. Ricky said that it reminded her of Jutland, in Denmark where she came from. The painting was called “Maternité”. I looked at Ricky beside me, and she was crying. I said nothing. We were still holding hands.

“My parents were Russian,” said Ricky, “but I was born in Denmark, in a place that looked like that. If ever you see the Skagen paintings of Peder Kroyer, that is where I grew up. My parents were killed when I was very young. Yulia’s mother, who was a friend of my mother and father, took me in and looked after me as though I were her own. Sometimes she even told people that I was Yulia’s sister, because it was easier than explaining the truth. Yulia is as much my sister as a real sister could be. I was two years old when she was born and I have seen her almost every day for my whole life”. She thought of the train that had carried Yulia away just an hour earlier. “We have never been so far apart as we are now. I had a child when I was sixteen years old. I do not know where she is now. She was taken from me.”

When I looked back on that conversation later, turning it over and looking for clues, I thought of a hundred questions that I should have asked, a hundred feelings that should have struck me, but at the time I was so preoccupied with the loss of Yulia - my own loss of Yulia - that Ricky’s loss did not penetrate the mist of my own confusion. Ricky’s story, her revelation of her past, was so enormous that I could not grasp it. It conflicted with so much of what had happened in the previous week that I could make no sense of it. Yulia’s mother had come to Aberdeen and taken many of Yulia’s things away, but had given no indication that Ricky was anything more than her daughter’s friend. Yulia had been offered a new post working with a department of the University in Melbourne, Australia. It was a move that would take her to the other side of the world from her mother, and from Ricky who had now announced herself as Yulia’s sister, but there was no sign, to me as I watched her packing and planning, of the enormity of this break. For all they showed, these might have been two friends who met at the start of the year, shared a house, and then moved out into their separate lives when the year ended. Up until that moment in the art gallery, an observer looking in on those last few days, and watching as Ricky and I were left on the platform as Yulia was carried away, could as easily have thought that it was Ricky and I who were the old friends, saying goodbye to somebody we had met and spent time with, rather than that Yulia and Ricky were sisters, and that I was little more than a stranger to them both. The most important things are often the things least emphasised. Some things are too important, too big, and leave no visible footprint at all.

Sometimes, when something bad is happening, people ease the pain by telling stories of worse things that have happened to them in the past. Sometimes, when things are going badly and the world seems dark, the weight is lifted by a sad event which, as it passes and moves behind us carries with it some of the clouds. The awful loss of Yulia on the train to Heathrow seemed to free something up in Ricky that enabled her, required her, to tell me her story. To lay out her map, which I could place alongside the map that Yulia had drawn out for me on our walks in the dark, and try to piece together. But I was still piecing together my own map. I was still dazzled from looking into my own sun, and my heart was young and small.  And yet Ricky still held my hand, and even though I did not understand most of what she said, I did understand that saying it was helping her. When we got back to the house, quite late that night, after a long and circuitous journey around Aberdeen and around Ricky’s history, Ricky went directly through the house to her room at the back. Rollei was in the kitchen and he lowered his eyes as she passed, but raised them again as I went in and sat opposite him at our table. Wise old Rollei knew better than to ask. In the remaining week that Ricky and I and Rollei were all together Ricky and I did not speak about our conversation from the day that Yulia left. For both of us, I think, it seemed too big to talk about. Almost too big for me even to see. And we were both busy. Ricky preparing for her own departure and me working to finish the job that I was working on before my own time ran out.

When my own train pulled out of Aberdeen station and I saw the platforms slip away behind me I was not thinking very much of Rollei, or of Ricky. I was still thinking of the blinding sun, and behind it the sparkling stars and Yulia’s laughter. I saw my own reflection in the glass, and remembered our reflections in the window of the Inversnecky Tea Rooms, and the reflection of my own face in the window of Yulia’s train as it pulled away. It was several weeks later when Ricky wrote to me in Oxford, and sent me the photograph of Yulia in the train. Standing alone in the hallway of a terraced house in south Oxford looking at the photograph I remembered how Ricky had stood beside me on the platform in Aberdeen.

CHAPTER 10

When I left Aberdeen I was for several weeks technically in between jobs. Mine is not the sort of work where I have to arrive at an office for nine o’clock or wait for the whistle to sound at five, and usually being without a commission or a contract would not stop me from working, but on this occasion I took every advantage of the excuse to do no work. I was staying in Oxford again, house sitting for friends who were away for the summer, and metaphorically, if not physically, I had a lot of baggage to unpack. My physical baggage was unpacked and sorted in the space of twenty minutes. Most of what I owned had been in my rucksack when I walked out of the house at Bridge of Don, and the few things that I couldn’t carry with me had been dropped off in Oxford a week earlier by one of Rona’s friends who had been driving south. I had not yet reached the stage where I started to accumulate belongings. But my metaphorical baggage would take longer to organise. I was in a small terraced cottage on one of the little streets in New Hinksey, off the Abingdon Road just south of the river; about ten minutes walk from my old familiar territory around St Aldates and Christ Church. I still had friends in Oxford from what I foolishly thought of as “the old days”, but at first I went out of my way to avoid seeing them. I was happy to spend some time alone. I felt almost as though I was in recovery after the adventure that had been Aberdeen. Just as the mind is supposed to need sleep each night in order to process the events that it has experienced during the day, so too on a longer scale we need times of relative calm and inactivity to process, sometimes consciously but often in the background, the experiences of the previous weeks or months. While I had been in Aberdeen there had not been a great deal of processing time: the whole year had been a jumble of experiences. Even the order of events was barely clear in my head, let alone the significance of different events or how they would all fall into place, some falling only into memory, others staying current and becoming part of my future as well as my past.

I spent a lot of time over the long warm days of July walking up Whitehouse Road and through Grandpont park, up the river past Osney Mead and all the way up past the allotment gardens and onto Port Meadow. The weather was settled for the whole long, dry month and I would sit in the sun by the river at Godstow Lock, or come back by Kingston Road and across to the Parks and watch the cricket, or read on the banks of the Cherwell as the punts came past at a pace as leisurely as my own. There was no hurry at all that month, and slowly everything found its place. There was Rollei, waiting for me when I arrived, showing me my name on a card that Lachlan had sent saying “please arrange”. There was our dark winter kitchen and Rollei’s lesson on the beach. Then came the Russians, and the evening that I thought I had fallen in love at the Inversnecky Tea Room. And here was Rona, blinding me like the sun just as Yulia’s light became so thin that for a while I lost my faith in it. Then everything started to fall apart: Yulia was offered a post in Melbourne; Ricky announced that she would be returning to Denmark; Yulia’s mother visited for several days and arranged the transport of both girls’ belongings; and then I was standing on the platform holding Ricky’s hand and realising that I wished it was Yulia’s hand.

And now as those pieces solidified in their positions and I started to add details that made sense of the big picture that I had created to hold my memories, I found myself sitting on a padded bench in another museum, looking at another painting. After the river and the meadow and the park and the walk through town I often found myself at the Ashmolean Museum, more often than not sitting in front of Pissaro’s “Tuilleries in the Rain”. In 1899 Camille Pissaro had rented an apartment overlooking the Tuillerie Gardens in Paris, and had painted a series of canvasses from the window of the apartment. The one in the Ashmolean showed the view on a bleak winter day, with figures hurrying past beneath umbrellas. There are just a few leaves left on the trees and the spires of a church in the background point up into a cold sky. The view reminded me of Aberdeen: the trees were the colour of Aberdeen’s trees and the sky was the colour of Aberdeen’s sky. Perhaps that was Rollei there with his umbrella. Perhaps that girl there is Yulia. No, it can’t be Yulia because where is Ricky? Sometimes paintings do for us what dreams can do, helping us to make sense of the stories we have been part of. By imagination we start to make sense of memory. We organise the chaos of the world into a pattern that we can draw into a map. We embroider into small silk squares the moment when the firework burst into the dark sky, the moment when we looked directly into the sun, and the moment when the train went out of sight. And then we do not have to hold those moments every day at the very front of our heart. We can keep them in their neatly labelled draws and pretend that they make sense.

It was just as I had reached this point that Ricky’s first letter arrived, with the photograph from the station, and suddenly once again none of my memories from Aberdeen made sense. My immediate response was to walk up the Abingdon Road to Christ Church and start knocking on the doors of old friends. If Aberdeen made no sense, why should Oxford? I felt as though I was jumping back in. Opening another bottle. Taking a deep breath and carrying on. It was the end of summer. It was time to start work again. I moved out of the house in New Hinksey and I moved for the first time into the house in Harley Road, the same house that I would return to years later after my time with Ricky in Denmark and Greenland. On the wall directly in front of me as I sat at my desk I pinned the photograph that Ricky had sent. It was right at the front of my heart, so it might as well be right there on the wall. Filing it away with a careful label had not helped. That was another lesson learnt.

CHAPTER 11

The summer that I spent beside the river in Oxford, Ricky spent beside the sea in the North of Denmark. Back at home amongst her friends and what little was left of her family she had dropped the anglicised version of her name and was herself again: Rikke. It surprised her how much difference it made, that change in the spelling of a name. Rikke felt like a completely different person from Ricky. The interlude in Aberdeen seemed like exactly that, just an interlude. Nothing in Aberdeen had been real, not even her name. At least, not until near the very end. Just as things seemed to be coming apart, at the last moment they had seemed to be coming together. Then they were gone, and Rikke awoke, Rikke once more, in her home by the sea in Jutland. As I spent weeks trying to make sense of my year, Rikke was spending those same weeks trying to make sense of hers. But also she was trying with difficulty to adjust to a life in Denmark that was much changed from the life she had left behind to go to Aberdeen with Yulia the year before. The most obvious, and immediately painful change was that Yulia was no longer with her. Before Aberdeen they had been inseparable for as long as Rikke could clearly remember. Yulia had struggled with the decision to study in Aberdeen partly because of the impact she knew her departure would have on Rikke. When she decided to leave, it was as though Rikke had been told that Yulia was suffering a terrible sickness and would soon be lost. Rikke fell into mourning at the thought of losing her companion, her sister. Rikke had often thought that when something dies there is a short period when it comes back, or when nobody notices that it has gone, before it finally and irretrievably does go. Sometimes this period of reprieve is in a dream, sometimes it is in reality, and looking back on her year in Aberdeen from the beach at Skagen Rikke thought of her time in Scotland with Yulia as that period of reprieve, after Yulia had been lost, but before she was finally gone. It had been a last minute idea of Yulia’s mother that Rikke should travel with Yulia, join her on the same course and spend the year away from Denmark. It would solve many problems. It would mean that Yulia was not alone away from home, something about which her mother was very concerned. It would mean that Rikke was away from the scene of the trauma of the preceding year. And it would save Rikke from the pain of separation from Yulia. In fact, it did not save Rikke from that pain, but it delayed the pain and made it easer to bear a year later when Yulia moved on to her next position in Melbourne, where Rikke would not follow. By that time Rikke had sensed that she was at the point of losing Yulia, and that she was in that period of reprieve that she had sensed before amongst the other losses that she had suffered in her short life. There was no more shock that she could feel beyond that which she had already felt. Sometimes when a death comes it comes late, and we have already accepted it, or even recovered from it.

When Rikke returned to Denmark, without Yulia, she came back to a home where the clock seemed to have been turned back not to the moment when she had left but to a point a year earlier than that. It was as though everybody had been asked to say nothing about that previous year; as though they had been asked to pretend that nothing had happened. And this was exactly the case. All of Rikke’s friends, all of her family, worked hard to say nothing about the subject that most of them thought about every time they were with her. For Rikke, there was nothing else to think about. While she had been in Aberdeen, in a strange place, without context, without reminders, her struggle, although never far from the foreground, was at least masked and made to feel somehow remote, dream-like, by distance and by her inability to take any action. Being in Aberdeen was being in exile. But in exile her determination, although held at bay for the year, steadily grew. It was this determination, this steadily growing plan, that made it easier to let go of the things that had mattered to her before. It made less shocking the loss of Yulia. It made less strange the return to a home where everything was the same but totally changed. It made less urgent the need to understand what feelings she had been starting to develop in Aberdeen. All that really mattered, the plan that had been growing piece by piece in her mind as she waited out her exile, the goal that now focussed her attention into a long-term strategy, was the need to find out what had happened to her daughter.

Without Yulia, with the memory of everything that had happened leading up to and immediately after the birth of her daughter, and with the awkward silence that enveloped every encounter with friends, neighbours and family as the only topic that needed to be discussed was the one topic that could not be spoken about, Skagen quickly became intolerable to Rikke. There was no reason to stay there. She could do more, and do it with less interference from friends who thought their efforts to obstruct Rikke’s plan were for the best, if she moved away. At the point in late summer when I moved from one side of Oxford to the other and moved into Harley Road, Rikke moved from one side of Denmark to the other, and rented a tiny apartment in Copenhagen. The apartment was on a fourth floor in Vesterbrogade. It was not an especially nice area, and it was noisy sometimes at night, but it was cheap. She got work at first as a waitress in a bar on Nyhavn. It did not pay well, but it was easy work and gave her time to find her feet without having to worry about the stress of a more demanding job. She did not tell anybody that she had degrees in environmental science, and she did not tell anybody that she was the orphaned child of exiled Russians looking for her own lost child, who had been stolen from her by the family of the child’s father. She told nobody anything. Except me. She started to share her plans in letters to me. She said at the outset that she did not necessarily even expect me to read them, but that it would help her if I would allow her to write them. She wanted to tell somebody what she was doing, but it had to be somebody who would not judge or interfere. She said that I didn’t even have to pretend to care, but that I just had to be there for her to send letters to. Just as I had been there, she said, for her to walk back home with after Yulia left Aberdeen on the train. We both remembered that day very clearly. I held the photograph in my hand as I read Rikke’s letter about it. And of course I cared. And I promised not to judge or interfere. I was still young, and for a while I thought I could keep my promise because I had said that I would. But you cannot always tell how things are going to turn out.

At the moment that I was standing in the kitchen in Harley Road holding the picture of Yulia on the train, Rikke was walking through Kongens Nytorv on her way to work, and the woman who had acted as her mother for most of her life, Yulia’s mother who had stayed with us in Aberdeen for a few days to help arrange Yulia’s transfer to Australia and Rikke’s return to Denmark, was also in Copenhagen, just a few kilometres from Rikke, having told her nothing, waiting at the airport for a plane to Aberdeen, where she was going back to see Rollei. Had we known, either me thinking about Rollei or Rikke thinking about her mother, we would not have believed it possible. A month later, when Rikke did find out and wrote to tell me, she repeated what she had many times heard me say: you cannot always tell how things are going to turn out.

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CHAPTER 12

When I had first met Rikke, or Ricky as I had known her then, I thought of her only as Yulia’s friend and saw her only in the context of how I saw Yulia. Yulia was at the centre of my view, Rikke at the periphery. But it is at the periphery that the details persist and grow more rich in the memory over time, developing slowly like photographic film. The memories at the centre arrive all at once, sometimes completely burning out the picture so that nothing remains, such as the moment when I first saw Yulia in the doorway but can remember only the door frame with blue paint and the snowflakes. Those memories at the centre then gradually fade or are replaced by imagination and invention, and as they do so the other memories, the memories at the edge, begin like faint stars to emerge in the pale sky at dusk, their light becoming visible only as the sun sets, and seeming to grow brighter as the darkness falls deeper. So as the memory of Yulia faded over several years into uncertainty, the memory of Rikke, fuelled by her letters, became sharper and brighter. These memories that emerge from the as the light fades may no less be grown from imagination, and in the case of my recollections of Rikke that imagination was supported, directed, by the emerging knowledge of a new Rikke, the Rikke of Copenhagen and the letters, whose image was growing into and then overtaking the remembered image of the Ricky I had known in Aberdeen. But as the new Rikke gradually, letter by letter, month by month, became established in my imagination, that image was underpinned always by two completely clear and honest recollections. The first was of Ricky in the kitchen at Aberdeen taking care of Yulia but with an expression on her face that, at the time I could not understand. The second was of Ricky at the station watching Yulia depart, and in the art gallery telling me about her past, which explained the expression that I had seen in her face those months before. Those were the images of Ricky that I had in my mind as I read her letters. Those and the blurred image of her reflected in the train window in that photograph, her face hidden by the camera. Those were the images that I had in my mind as I walked through the arrivals gate at Copenhagen airport two years later, about to see Rikke for the first time since she had left Aberdeen.

The people who turn out to be the ones who keep returning and stay with us longest are often not those who we expected to see again. That can be true for individuals over a lifetime, and also for whole families over generations. The chain of relationships that leads back from Rikke and Yulia follows a twisting path through Europe and through history to two families living unaware of each other in Smolensk between the wars who would never have imagined that they would within three generations be joined together through the person of a Danish girl living in Copenhagen, with no trace of them left in Russia. Yulia’s grandmother Alyona had departed Russia in a cloud of lies and misunderstandings during the chaos of Hitler’s war. Alyona, an anxious woman with tiny hands had come from a poor but artistic background, and before the war began had been harbouring great hopes of a future in the ballet for her young daughter, Yulia’s mother. Everybody said what a wonderful dancer she was, what a star she would be. How proud any of the great ballet companies would be to take her on. For a small ballet school in a poor part of a provincial town it was a great thing to have such a star, such a prodigy, and so to enhance their own prestige they told the story of how great this young girl was. And the local officials repeated the story to enhance the prestige of their local party, and the town boasted of the great young dancer who was rumoured to be emerging from one of the local schools. Alyona, blinded by her love and her hope, believed what the stories said. She believed that if only they could escape this poor town, this war, this country, then their future - her daughter’s future as a great ballerina - lay to the west: in Paris. But in Paris after the war many great and painful truths became clear. One of these was that the child prodigy from Smolensk was a fiction, an invention. When she danced in Paris, there were no party officials to make up stories. Yulia’s mother was not a ballerina after all. She would say, when she told the story, that being no ballerina in Paris was at least more honest than being no ballerina in Smolensk.

Neither of them had paid much notice to the encounter, but Rikke’s grandmother had once met Alyona and her daughter in Smolensk before the war. Rikke’s grandmother, Elizaveta, had seen the prodigy dance, and said to Alyona “you should be very proud”. Alyona had barely heard Elizaveta’s comment, because it not Elizaveta, but her husband, whose decision it would be as to whether the girl would be sent to Moscow. But the decision would not be made that day, and before any decision was made they were all engulfed by a different story as war began. Alyona and Elizaveta never met again, but their daughters were thrown together in Paris after the war. Elizaveta was by that time dead. Alyona, worn out by the trials of exodus and resettlement, and disillusioned by the discovery that the promise of her daughter’s future had been a myth, rarely left the small apartment that she shared with her daughter. By contrast, her daughter, Yulia’s mother, was unmoved by the discovery that her dancing was not to be her path to a glorious future, just as she had been unmoved in Smolensk by the dawning realisation that it might be. She was happy to dance, but she was also happy not to dance. Life is what it is, and we do what we can do. Wars come, lives change. We live in Paris now, she would say to her mother, our old life is gone. I am not the little dancer from Smolensk any more. I won’t be that. Do not call me that. I am French, and you must call me… she hesitated for a long time, looking out of the window that faced out towards the Tuillerie Gardens. They had been lucky to take this apartment. “I shall be French” she said, “and I will call myself Juliette. And so she did. Her name became a statement of what she was, and what she was not. I am not the little dancer who was lied to in Smolensk and fled during the bombs and starvation. I am Juliette. Thirty years later when I met her for the first time, as she strode into the house Aberdeen, that was her first assertion; the first thing I ever heard her say. The first thing that Rollei ever heard her say: “I am Juliette”. She never did, while I saw her, but she gave every impression that she felt she should hold out her hand to be kissed as she said her name. There was drama and grand style, a projection of confidence, an enormous edifice of complex defences in that simple assertion. I am Juliette, because I have chosen to be.

CHAPTER 13

Myths persist, however much they are denied. An hour after I landed in Copenhagen I was sitting with Rikke in a tiny bar at the corner of Vesterbrogade and Viktoriagade, near her apartment. Rikke said “Our mother was a ballerina; she could have been a great ballerina if it had not been for the war.” Rikke hardly ever mentioned her own parents, and she spoke of Yulia’s mother, Juliette, as though she really were her own. She spoke of Alyona, Yulia’s grandmother, always as “Grandmother Alyona”, never as “Yulia’s grandmother” or “Juliette’s mother”. She, too, was maintaining an edifice in defiance of history.

Rikke’s earliest memories, other than those which she would not admit, were of time spent in Grandmother Alyona’s apartment in Paris, looking out over the Tuillerie Gardens. By that time, Juliette had moved to a house on the edge of the city, and that is where Yulia and Rikke spent most of their time, but for both of them some of the richest memories, as well as those of the woods and gardens around Juliette’s house, were those of the strange, antique apartment where Alyona lived out her confused, nostalgic, imaginary Russian life. Whereas her daughter had survived by denying her Russian past, Alyona survived, in her way, by clinging to it. Clinging to her daughter the ballerina who had been on the brink of greatness before Hitler’s war. Clinging to the news from Russia after the war: Smolensk, hero city. And those were the stories that she told to her two granddaughters - her daughter’s daughter and the other child. The girls were still young when Alyona died, but the anxious old Russian with the tiny hands had passed on to them the stories of where the family came from. These were the stories that Juliette, ignored, denied, and chose to forget, but the myths and the truths, jumbled together in the old woman’s confused and confusing stories became embedded, burnt, planted into the little girls. As they grew up, when their mother - Yulia’s mother - would not tell them stories of the old days as Alyona had done, the girls would repeat the stories to each other. On some days Yulia would play Alyona’s part and tell the stories to Rikke, but on most days it was Rikke who would take the role of Grandmother Alyona, and would tell the old stories, over and over again, to little Yulia. As they grew older and were no longer little girls, and as the became teenagers, and young women, still they would tell each other the old stories. Yulia would gaze at Ricky as she had used to gaze at her grandmother, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, as Ricky retold in Alyona’s voice the story of the ballet, the story of the bombs, the story of starvation and the story of Smolensk: Hero City. But of all the stories the one that Yulia loved best was the story of how her mother was the star of the ballet school, the darling of the ballet master, the prodigy destined for Moscow, the most accomplished dancer of the age. Sometimes, when they were sure that their mother could not hear, they would shut the door and speak in a whisper, and call their mother in the stories by her Russian name, the name that Alyona had given her and that she had then denied. It was a special name, a name that could be spelled correctly only in the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, in the Russian way.

The moment when Alyona’s daughter stood at the window and decided that she would be called Juliette was the moment that Alyona stopped moving forward through time and became anchored entirely in the past. And as she set her anchor down in those firm-setting sands she sent out ropes and chains to fix herself to the things that she knew she would always recognise. Alyona stood in the darkness behind her daughter as Juliette looked out across her new world, and she made her one last bargain before she started her decline. To Juliette the bargain seemed a good one, because she was young and despite her strange history she still could not imagine that things might not turn out the way she expected. There may be life to come that was not as she had intended. And so she agreed to her mother’s bargain. Alyona agreed to let her daughter become Juliet on the strict condition that if one day Juliette herself had a daughter, that daughter must be given Juliette’s old Russian name. She must call her daughter Yulia. At that point Juliette was sixteen years old. The war was over. Paris lay before her. It was many years until she would ever have a child, and if the child was to be called Yulia, very well.

Sometimes things do not turn out as we expect, but sometimes they do. Juliette was right to think that it would be many years before she had a child. Alyona waited twenty years before she was able to say: you promised me that the girl will be called Yulia. Juliette, looking out of that same window where she had made the promise, said “I know. I remember”. And she had turned to Alyona and asked: “Do none of the daughters in our family have fathers?” Alyona had not replied, but wrung her tiny hands. The two women, mother and daughter, each remembered their lost husbands. Nearly 30 years later, Juliette’s adopted daughter, Rikke, looks out of the window of the bar on Vesterbrogade, and tells me about her lost husband. Unlike Alyona and Juliette, Rikke does not regret the loss. “I call him my husband” she says “but he was never that. We did not marry. I thought for a few weeks when we first met that I was in love, and I thought that he loved me as well. It is an old story, and I should have known the end before it started. I do not say that I should not have let it start, because I do not regret that I had a child. I regret only what happened to my daughter, and that I was not able to stop it. But I will find her.”  

Rikke smoked small Turkish cigarettes. She smoked them continuously as we sat in the bar, sometimes lighting one, leaning it against the ash tray, letting it burn completely away without putting it to her lips and then lighting another. I had never seen her smoke in Aberdeen. Looking at Rikke now I could barely recognise the girl I had known, the young Russian, those few years before. She still had the same short hair, but cropped more severely now, strikingly blonde above a high necked black jumper. Dark denim jeans turned up at the ankles, revealed small feet in flat black cotton pumps. Sitting opposite me looking sideways out of the window into the traffic and pedestrians on Vesterbrogade, she was like a tiny dark sea bird with a golden crown staring out onto rolling waves, waiting for a break in the wind, waiting for something on the horizon, but not really expecting it to come just yet. She knew that this was a long game, and she was patient.

Everything that is deeply lost appears again for a moment before it finally disappears for the last time. It goes, it comes back for a moment, and then it goes for good. Sometimes that interval when it has returned can last for many months, or years. Rikke told me again, over Turkish cigarettes and Danish akvavit, the story she had told me in her letters of how her daughter was lost for the first time in France, when the girl’s father’s family claimed custody and took her to Denmark. Rikke, Juliette and Yulia followed and fought a legal battle for her return, and settled in Denmark. The girl’s father gave her up, and for four years Rikke lived with her daughter, with Yulia and with Juliette on the Jutland coast. Rikke smoked another cigarette. She could not tell me face to face how her daughter had been taken again, stolen back by the father, and vanished. So we just watched the traffic and the to and fro of pedestrians.

I never asked Rikke about the inconsistencies in the stories that she told me, in the map of her history that she folded out for me like the flag of her cause. They did not matter. Time is the greatest myth of all. None of us know the order in which things really took place. That is why the pursuit of history is a doomed endeavour. Rollei taught me that. It had become clear as I had started to receive Rikke’s letters and tried, at first, to piece together the timeline of the events she described, that Rikke’s history moved at different rates, and sometimes in different directions, from the steady flow of time that most stories pretend to be true. And when I tried to place her story side by side with the history that Yulia had given me in Aberdeen, stitching the two together, edge to edge, like those small silk squares, they would not fit. They both seemed fluid, changing size and shape, always true but never the same. Events that must have happened in Paris are thrown into the story against the seaside in Denmark. Moments from childhood are recorded on the same page and in the same voice as moments from later life. Sometimes I think she confused herself with Yulia, and Yulia with Juliette. But these were just details, and did not affect the direction, the outcome, the tone, the colour of the story. The threadbare patches, the poorly stitched seams, the two pieces of fabric placed upside down, do not break the pattern but are part of it. Reality, said Rollei, is a bundle, not a list.

The culmination of each story, at each moment, is now. No story is ever unfinished. The finish is always upon us but always rolling forwards with us. We are always at the end. Always at the now. The now as I sit in the bar at Vesterbrogade watching Rikke smoke her final cigarette before we walk back to her apartment is the culmination of everything up to that point. Rikke is the embodiment of her own disjointed story. The story barely hangs together by the threads spun into it by Rikke, by Yulia, by their grandmother Alyona. The reality of it all includes the myths and the lies, the false memories and the denials. The now as Rollei closes his eyes and shouts Proust above the traffic to start teaching me how geography and history both work. The now as Yulia, on a train heading south in the dark, remembers Rikke taking her photograph from the platform. The now as I sit in the Ashmolean Museum, in front of “Tuilleries in the Rain”, holding Rikke’s letter telling me about grandmother Alyona’s apartment overlooking those same gardens in Paris after the war. The now as Juliette chose her name, to become French, promised her child’s name to be Russian, changed somebody else’s orphaned child’s name to be Danish, so she would fit in. Each of those moments was the end of the story that led up to it, complete and without a single flaw or gap. It is only as we try to recreate, to remember, to tell the story as a list that everything breaks down and seems unfinished. And so, as Rikke and I walked through Copenhagen in the dark, because she had told me the story, because she had put it into words again and put the words in order, it now seemed unfinished. We each of us in telling ourselves our history each day make it unfinished, so that we carry on. The belief that time is true is our greatest mistake.

CHAPTER 14

If I was any help at all to Rikke when I first visited her in Copenhagen it was simply as somebody to whom she could tell her story, and somebody who had shared a little of the time she had spent with her sister Yulia in that last year before she moved to Australia. But when I left Rikke and returned to Oxford, both our situations were unchanged, and we both felt, for different reasons, that we were still at the beginning of unfinished journeys. Rikke, at least, knew what she was looking for. I, on the other hand, had no idea. By this time I had lived in Oxford for several years, doing a little writing, a little teaching, a little travelling. It was a soft kind of life. I had a number of friends from undergraduate days who had stayed in the system, worked their way up, and were now in teaching or research posts in the University. Through them I picked up occasional jobs as a guest speaker for a society or a guest writer for a college paper, and gradually established a sort of niche, a routine, a network that kept me busy, kept me employed, and made me feel almost as though I was a part of that city’s strange and ancient academic world.

I moved around a lot, sometimes staying in rented accommodation, sometimes house-sitting or sharing, sometimes having periods of college accommodation included within short contracts. But always I was at least moving forwards in time, day by day. I fell in with different crowds. I made friends with the Musicians from Christ Church: a rowdy bunch who kept wearing their white bow ties, undone and loose around their necks, for a little too long after each performance. They taught me Palestrina, Bach and Sinatra. I was a friend, for a while, of the History set at St Hughes: girls who were not as serious, in the end, as they appeared upon first acquaintance. For one long winter I lived in a set of rooms in Christ Church, one of Oxford’s most spectacular colleges, and standing in for one of my academic friends while he was away on a six-month placement I saw academic life from a whole new perspective. It was the first time that I had been in a job where other people treated me as though I were the grown up one. Up until then I had always been the new one, the young one, the trainee, the student. Suddenly for those six months I had people treating me as the tutor, the teacher, the expert, the person in charge. It was another myth, but if people treat you as a teacher you start to behave as one. Eventually perhaps some people will start to believe the myth, but I was not at that stage yet.

My friend Dave Cline, who I had known since we were at school together and always joked that I was officially his oldest friend, had come up to Oxford as an undergraduate a year before me, while I took a year out after school to work, earn a little bit of money, and travel. Dave said it had not made much difference as I had not worked much, did not earn a lot of money, and never travelled further than Doncaster. Dave was one of those characters who slide through life on a surfboard of confident success. He worked hard for it, but whether it was through hard work, through good luck, or through an engaging combination of good sense and kindness that made people want to help him, Dave always seemed to be quietly, politely, modestly winning at everything. He had always been a sensible middle-of-the-road kind of boy at school. When I first knew him he was about 13 years old and remarkable for always having trousers just an inch or two shorter than would have looked alright. He must have been growing fast. He was gangly and loping, always smiling even when he frowned, and never visibly upset even when, occasionally, older boys made fun of his gawky, geeky looks. He acted as though it was all part of the game. His expression always seemed to say “no harm done; it will all turn out OK in the end”. Dave and I came up through school together because we were the only two boys who chose our particular combination of option classes. At the start of our third year at school, there was Dave in my Geography class. There he was again in History. There he was again in English. We lived in different parts of the city and rarely saw each other outside school, but for five years, every class, every day, Dave and I worked happily side by side. So when we were both at Oxford, even though we were by then in different years of study following my year out, it was natural that we kept in touch, went out occasionally for a drink, sometimes sat together watching cricket, and mixed a little with each other’s  friends. After we graduated Dave stayed on to do a PhD, got a job as a Postdoctoral research assistant, and eventually, in his matter-of-fact way, was offered a junior lectureship to step into the exact role that was conveniently being vacated by the retirement of his PhD supervisor, a senior academic with a stellar international reputation and a truly splendid set of rooms in Christ Church. The rooms went with the post, and Dave walked into them, as he walked into all the other things that worked out just right for him, with genuine appreciation. He was living in those rooms three years later when the opportunity arose for him to spend six months as a visiting lecturer in Chile, and Christ Church said that he could take on the Chilean post as long as he found somebody to cover his extremely light commitment to undergraduate teaching while he was away. Christ Church, indeed the whole academic world, was much more relaxed even that short time ago than it is now, and certainly within the peculiar, insular world of Christ Church there was no real stipulation as to exactly what qualifications would be required of the person covering for Dr Cline, just so long as they were able to teach his weekly tutorials. I assured him that I was. I had no idea whether it was true, but I assured him anyway. Everything always worked out OK for Dave, I reasoned, so this was bound to work out OK too. I also promised to water his plants and look after his cat. I promised to do whatever it would take to live in those rooms for the winter while he was away.

As part of what he called my “training” Dave made sure that I knew a few of my neighbours and some of his friends and colleagues around Christ Church. For domestic matters, a Mr Donovan who would come to clean the flat each morning was to be my source of all advice. For anything to do with Dave’s work in the college other than routine teaching matters I was to consult a certain Dr Hugo Wheat, whose precise role was never quite clear to me but who seemed, from Dave’s description of his duties, to be a sort of benevolent deity in a ragged gown. He had rooms in Canterbury Quad, and Dave hinted that if ever there were any domestic matter so serious that Mr Donovan could not make arrangements for me, Hugo would be my man. In my imagination Hugo took on the persona of a Godfather figure, who would call in favours as required to ensure my wellbeing, but to whom I would myself then be permanently and terminally indebted. For a cup of sugar, a tea bag, or somebody to talk to if the students had been mean to me, I was introduced to Dave’s immediate neighbour, a scholar of European literature whose rooms were directly opposite Dave’s and whose front door was precisely two paces directly in front of his own. When he knocked on her door to introduce me there was a long delay before she answered, and Dave whispered conspiratorially in my ear “she’s thinking about it… it’s fifty fifty”. From his description I expected somebody quite elderly, but when the door opened it revealed a woman of about Dave’s own age. About my age. She looked as though we had disturbed her at work, and while she was polite she was not as friendly as Dave had suggested she would be and did not really strike me as a person whose shoulder I would cry on about students being mean. Dave said “she’s wary of strangers. Like a cat.”

Dave’s rooms, my rooms, were on the ground floor of the Meadow Buildings, a long Victorian gothic block at the south end of the college. Everybody referred to their college apartments as their “rooms”, but Dave always called his rooms his “flat”. People at Christ Church seemed quite often to be adamant about the correct way of referring to things. For example, it was well known, apparently, that Christ Church should not be referred to as a college. It was indeed one of the Oxford colleges, but it was also the cathedral: Aedes Christi - the House of Christ. Christ Church people called it simply “The House”. It was one of the last colleges to admit female students, and the tradition persists of referring to all the students as House Men. When I was there as an undergraduate, notices of instruction or advice posted in the rooms were always addressed to “Gentlemen of the House”. When women were first admitted, some of them quite enjoyed the idea that they were “Gentlemen”, but others strongly resisted and were proud to be part of the movement for change, progress, in the ancient but evolving system. From the rest of Christ Church, the Meadows Building could approached by way of tortuous stone passageways beneath the Great Hall, past tiny medieval quadrangles dwarfed and overshadowed by the spire of the cathedral that formed the core of Christ Church. The passageways opened out into another small quadrangle the far side of which was made by shadowy north face of the Meadows Building. Never seeing direct sunlight the north face was green with moss and cast a damp shadow across the long narrow quadrangle keeping it in perpetual gloom. At the far east end of the quadrangle, the short side of the rectangle was made by the wall of one Christ Church’s many hidden and secret gardens. There was a wooden gate built into the wall which, when open provided a quite magical view from the darkness of Meadows Quad into the bright green mowed and manicured sunlit lawn, like a view into a secret fairy world. It was like looking out from Gormenghast into Wonderland. The gate was normally kept closed, and that little bit of Christ Church remained almost exclusively Gormenghast.

The rooms in Meadows were arranged in staircases, each staircase with a door at the foot of the dark north face. Dave’s staircase was the first, at the end right next to the magical doorway into the croquet lawn garden. Entering the stair, his was the door immediately on the left on the ground floor, which opened onto an enclosed entrance corridor of which all of his rooms were arranged. His rooms occupied the whole of the end of the building, with a large living room and an equally large kitchen looking out to the south, over the meadow itself, and with a study and two bedrooms and a bathroom facing out to the north, into the dark quad. The Kitchen, and the largest bedroom, occupied the two outside corners. The kitchen windows opened to the meadow in one direction and along the track towards Magdalen College and the botanical garden. The largest bedroom shared that same view towards Magdalen, and in the other direction looked out along the wall with the magical gate. On the occasions when the gate was open it was possible to sit in bed and see diagonally through the gate and into the garden.

Dave had already departed for Chile on the day that I arrived in Christ Church with the key to his rooms. I had moved out of Harley Road two weeks earlier, leaving all my things at Dave’s, and had been staying with another old friend in Staffordshire, working with him on an idea that we had for a project up there. It was the very end of September and as I had looked at my diary while I waited for my train to move me on through Stafford, towards Wolverhampton, Birmingham New Street, Leamington Spa, Banbury and eventually Oxford, which I was starting to think of as home, I realised that I would be arriving back there right at the start of the gloriously named “minus-1th week”, the week before before the University term started. The term weeks are sensibly labelled first week, second week, and so on, and the weeks before term are numbered in reverse. When I was an undergraduate most people referred to noughth, minus-first, and minus-second week for the weeks ahead of term, but I delighted in calling them nougth, minus-1th and minus-2th. It always amused me immensely to make sure that I had my dental check-up every year in minus-2th week. Here I was again in minus-1th week, but this time I was there in real style: no longer just a student but a real pretend stand-in Oxford Don!

We don’t always notice the little recurring motifs that randomly punctuate our lives, but sometimes in a moment of perfect calm or utter panic one will become clearly visible, and we will recognise it like a familiar face in unfamiliar surroundings. In the moment of total calm that overcame me as I stood outside the door to Dave Cline’s rooms in Christ Church, I noticed the deep blue paint on the woodwork of the door and frame. The door itself was a rich, deep, polished gloss, but in places around the frame the paint was slightly chipped, revealing older paint below, a slightly paler, duller shade of blue. The stair was all quiet, but as I turned the key and opened the door there was a deeper silence inside the inner hallway, so that walking into the rooms was like stepping through an airlock into a deeper, thicker atmosphere. The hallway was lit up by two shafts of mote-filled sunlight slanting through the two doors from the sitting room and the kitchen on the right hand side of the corridor. The front door closed itself behind me on a slow spring, the airlock was closed and the silence was accentuated by the slow and counter-timed ticking of two heavy clocks somewhere behind the shafts of light. I was at the bottom of an ocean, in a vault, a hundred miles beneath the surface of a soundless planet. I had never heard such peace. My steps were muffled by thick carpet as I walked along the corridor and turned to look into the living room. It was flooded with afternoon sunlight sloping through the windows and ricocheting off bright fabrics, glass-fronted cabinets, shelf after shelf of multi-coloured books, and the warm polished wooden surface of a huge writing desk in the window. It was a vision of heaven. It was heaven. I looked back along the corridor to the door with the blue frame. All I needed was an angel. There ought to be an angel.

CHAPTER 15

I thought the first thing I should do was write a note to Dave and post it through to his address in Chile, just to let him know that everything was OK. In those days we still did things by post. Nowadays in the same situation a modern-day Dave would expect an e-mail or a text on the day of my arrival. In those days, my Dave expected nothing for a week or two and then would be delighted if a letter or a post card were to arrive. So I sat at his grand desk in the window and I wrote. But I did not write “Dear Dave…”. I wrote “Dear Yulia”. It was several years at this point since I had written to Yulia, and longer than that since she had written back. We had never exactly stopped being friends or fallen out of touch, and sometimes, when the memory burst in, carried on a shaft of light or a snowflake or the blue wooden frame of a door, she was as sparkling in my memory as she had been in my young eyes in Aberdeen. But even as I write the card that flash of memory starts to crystallise into reality, and I never finish writing because I know that the Yulia to whom I have anything to say is not the Yulia who would receive this card through the post. If Yulia ever was what I imagined her to be, she cannot be that now. She was my new adventure, and you cannot be a new adventure more than once or for very long at a time.

I took another card. A more realistic one. I wrote “Dear Rikke”. As had become usual, I told Rikke what I thought was everything. Whereas in the beginning it was I who listened to Rikke telling me everything in her letters, now things were more evenly matched. She still wrote and told me about Copenhagen, Jutland and her continuing belief that she could find her daughter, but my letters back were now more than polite encouragements to her. I had started to tell her my story, for what little it was worth, just as she was telling me hers. In that winter at Christ Church in Dave’s rooms, writing on his grand desk, my letters were black ink on lined paper. As the years passed they would become pixelated courier font on a flickering screen and then smooth verdana and arial. The things we wrote about would also change, as would the news that we would have to share, but on that afternoon in my new rooms with the sun streaming over my shoulder onto lined paper resting on a wooden desk, writing with my favourite fine-nibbed drawing pen I told Rikke about Dave, about Christ Church, about the sunlight slanting through the windows, about the silence and about the flaking blue paint around the doorframe. And I told her how the blue paint reminded me of Aberdeen and that first day when I saw her. As I wrote, I remembered again that moment with the centre burnt out and the detail clearly visible at the edges. I still could not clearly see Yulia’s face, but I could see Rikke. I could see Rikke’s face, and suddenly that was what seemed important.  For years I had thought that the important part of the image had been lost, but the important part of the image was at the edge. Sometimes, often, what we most need to see is not the thing that we look at directly. Without even knowing it, sometimes we look away, so that the important things are safely at the periphery of our vision, where they will last.

Finally I wrote to Dave. I told him to take his time and not to hurry back. “Chile needs more people like you, right now” I wrote, “and I’m covering for you here.” At the bottom I added a PS: “Could do with an angel. Please arrange.” I wondered if he would remember me telling him about Lachlan’s post card instructions. Of course he would: Dave remembered everything. With easy efficiency Dave had left me clear, written instructions for every aspect of what I needed to do in covering for his absence. Whereas Lachlan always wrote “please arrange”, Dave’s instructions typically began with “I have arranged…”. He had arranged for everybody to know who I was and what I was doing, so that the porter at the gate needed no explanation of why I was walking through as though I lived there and the cleaner, letting himself in on my first morning greeted me immediately by name, asking whether I had yet heard if Dr Cline was safely arrived in Santiago. Dave had also made sure that I knew to refer to the cleaner as the “scout”. In the distant past, scouts would serve almost as butlers: laying fires, making breakfasts and carrying messages. Those days were long gone, but as with so many things in Oxford the names and titles persisted, carrying with them some of the intimations of old relationships but none of the responsibilities. Dave Cline was the sort of person that everybody was always happy to help, and Mr Donovan, the scout for Dave’s staircase was one of the more traditionally minded scouts who felt a sense of pride in fulfilling the role in as complete a way as circumstances allowed. Some of the scouts on other staircases took a much narrower point of view and completed exactly the duties specified in their contracts. Had Mr Donovan been one of those I would have seen him for no more than a few minutes each day. However, Mr Donovan’s goal each morning was not to complete his work as quickly as possible so that he could get home in time for lunch, but to complete his service as fully as possible, so that he could go home comfortable in the knowledge that he had done his best. Done his duty. Different people gain their self respect and sense of completion in different ways. Dave was in Chile doing research in some kind of urban sociology, writing academic papers, winning government research grants, developing a professional reputation and quite accidentally making new friends everywhere that he went. Rollei eventually found his route to salvation led into the Nilgiri Hills. Rikke and I were still searching, or at least, in my case, wandering aimlessly and being quite open to a concrete goal if one came along. It appeared to me that the most satisfied of all of us was Mr Donovan the college scout. I had never known anybody who seemed as much “in place” as he seemed at Christ Church. Looking back now, I wonder whether my own sense of comfort with Mr Donovan’s position was based on his fulfilment of a stereotype. When Dave had written in his instructions that “Mr Donovan, the scout, will attend to any other issues or queries” I formed a mental image of inter-war domestic service, P.G.Wodehouse, “Upstairs Downstairs”, and “Remains of the Day”. Mr Donovan, although he was half a century more up to date than any of those, stepped exactly into the pre-cast image that I had made for him.

Mr Donovan was of indeterminate late middle age, perhaps sixty years old. Not tall, but very upright. Square faced, with squarely cut white hair: short back and sides. Pale eyes. Always shirt and tie: white shirt, dark tie. Grey trousers, shiny black shoes. When I first saw him he was in the dark green traditional butler apron that he wore to do his cleaning work. When he finished his cleaning, and when he was engaged in any other of the many activities that he classed amongst his duties, he wore a dark jacket. I don’t think he actually did wear a waistcoat with a fob watch, but in my imagination he may as well have done. He did insist on calling me sir, however much I asked him not to. Most of the scouts were finished by mid morning and were gone. For the most part they were invisible around the college other than in their stairs while they were cleaning. Most of them were “cleaning ladies” who had husbands and children to get home to. Christ Church was their morning job. There were exceptions to that pattern, of course, but I soon realised that none was so exceptional as Mr Donovan. Throughout the day and into the evening he was ever present throughout Christ Church in a dozen roles, official and otherwise. He was among the staff serving lunch and dinner in the Great Hall. He was sometimes engaged in opening or closing the college gates at the appointed times. Sometimes has was to be found doing some particular task in the library, or the picture gallery, or the senior common room. Often it was unclear exactly who it was that had delegated the task with which he was involved, and as Mr Donovan was well known for his discretion it was not always easy to elicit information from him about who had given him his instructions, or even what those instructions precisely were. He was always meticulously polite in evading the request for details, and one always ended the conversation feeling that Mr Donovan had told you everything that you had asked but that somehow you still had no idea why he was there in the library or the cathedral, or who it was that has asked him to do whatever it was that he had been doing. Sometimes I saw Mr Donovan about town, scurrying on some mission or engaged in some transaction, and he would say “Good morning, Sir” or “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it, Sir?” and scurry on about his business. Late into the evening after dinner in the Great Hall was finished Mr Donovan could sometimes be identified moving quickly between the patches of lamplight in the quadrangles, emerging from the labyrinth of passageways beneath the hall and round the kitchens, disappearing into a doorway in Kilcannon or slipping through Canterbury Gate and out along the cobbles of Merton Street. It was never clear whether Mr Donovan had any life at all outside of Christ Church, and whether when he departed through Canterbury gate late in the evening it was to some home life that I could not imagine or whether even through the night he continued in his never ending round of tasks, missions and duties.

Mr Donovan started in the stair at 7 a.m., sweeping and mopping the staircase, cleaning the tall windows that let in light from the huge sky over the meadow, or polishing the frames around the doors. At the start of the day he cleaned the frames, but not the doors themselves, for fear of disturbing the occupants. After 8 a.m., or later if Mr Donovan was involved with the team serving breakfast in the Great Hall that day, he would start his rounds of each set of rooms. Dave’s rooms, my rooms, were always first on Mr Donovan’s round. He said that he did the staircase first, working top to bottom, then the rooms, working bottom to top. First it was Dr Cline, then Dr Gilman, and then up the stairs to the other rooms. If I was sitting in the kitchen with coffee or breakfast while he worked Mr Donovan would enlighten me with news from around the House, the city and the wider world. His news was always news, not gossip, and usually included a subtle element of advice or recommendation. “I hear the Quartet in the Music Rooms next week is likely to be exceptional. I can get you tickets if you wish”. If Mr Donovan did not offer to find tickets, or make a reservation, or at least give you advice about the best route or the best place to sit, then probably the event was not worth considering. It occurred to me that if Mr Donovan was offering to find tickets or make reservations for everybody on the staircase then there was little wonder that he was constantly in action making arrangements around the city. When I wrote to tell Rikke about Mr Donovan she joked that it sounded as though I had an ideal new house mate. “Much better for you than old Rollei” she wrote. She was remembering the dark Rollei, whose face she saw as the door opened on her first arrival at the house in Aberdeen. That was not the Rollei I thought of when I looked back. I remembered the Rollei who showed me that different people, looking out of the same window or into the same face, see quite different things.

CHAPTER 16

The most important of my official duties in Christ Church while I covered for Dave Cline’s absence, in fact my only official duty, was to give weekly tutorials to about twenty students, who I would see in small groups of three or four. Dave’s instructions were clear but relaxed, giving me a framework to cling to but also giving me a huge amount of freedom to do as I pleased. It was one of Dave’s great strengths that in a single instruction or request he could both provide the guidance and support that you needed to be able to do what was required, but also provide sufficient flexibility and freedom that you would feel you could do it in your own way and that the outcomes would be to your credit, not his. Dave never seemed to seek credit for anything and was happy for the good outcomes of things in which he was involved to be attributed to others. Perhaps because people always gave him the credit he deserved, he never seemed to feel the need to fight for it. Or perhaps because he never fought for it, people gave him his due. Dave had told me that the tutorials were to be scheduled for a minimum of one hour each, but that it was OK to run them longer, or shorter, if I thought that would be better for the students. The students had been arranged into groups of three or four, but I could change those groups, and see the students individually or in larger sets if I preferred. There was a broad indication of the kinds of topic that were likely to be relevant, but as these tutorials were very much independent of the lecture course and intended as a broad grounding in academic skills, I could largely do with them whatever I wished, so long as it fell within the broad remit of their degree course. These were Oxford Geography students, so more or less anything would be within the broad remit of their course. When Dave had said this he had the same expression combining a smile and a frown that I had seen a thousand times since we were 13 years old. It meant, all at once: this is fun, this is difficult, the world is strange, and don’t worry, it will all turn out to be OK.

My own training had not been to the same level as Dave’s. I had no PhD and the publications in my name were not by any means academic, but I had been through this same tutorial system myself, I was “a Gentleman of the House”, and I had been personally vouched for by Dr Cline who assured the Dean and Chapter that I was entirely competent, wholly reliable, and exceptional in my field. We had decided that it would be better if he could get away without specifying exactly what field that was. My plan was to do much what my own tutor years before had done: let the students lead the way, and steer them gently with encouragements from behind. There were set readings for each week, which Dave had provided in advance to ensure some basic connection to other work that students were doing, and the students had been given an essay to write in advance of each tutorial. Dave’s essay titles were like his other instructions in that they felt more like requests than requirements and they gave the students a framework but a great deal of flexibility. It was hard to predict exactly what they might come up with, and so my plan of following their lead made perfect sense. At some other institutions, where students have less sense of their own direction, such a teaching plan might not work, but I was confident that my House Men (and Women) would lead me on the path that my music friends had taught me about: the “path to righteousness and all that other jazz”. I think the man who gave me that line stole it from Sinatra, but given the nature of the company that I was able to keep it is entirely possible that Sinatra stole it from him. My tutorial students were not of that vintage, so I kept the Sinatra references to a minimum.

It was in my first tutorial that I met my first princess. In fact I met two princesses in that first tutorial. The first, who I call a princess, was really not one, but she behaved so much like one that I called her that, and thought of her as that, from the moment that I first saw her. Her name was Clara. The second was a tall and exceptionally slim girl with a pale, round face and long, straight auburn hair, who was not yet a princess but would, years later, be married to a prince, and so properly deserves the title more than the first. Her name, the future princess with the long, straight, auburn hair, was Jeannette. Also in that first group of students were Matthew Alexander, who was the kind of young man who preferred that people used his full name rather than calling him Matt or Alex; Christopher, who was happy to be called Chris but somehow seemed to deserve the full extent of his name; and Johnny, whose name was actually an extension rather than an abbreviation, his parents having christened him Jon, but Johnny having turned out to be so much cooler than that. Matthew Alexander wore a blazer and already knew that he was destined for a career in business. Christopher was the son of a bishop and knew that wherever he was destined it should be somewhere surrounded by art, literature and music. Johnny was the rebel, of course, although it is hard to sustain the image of rebel from inside one of England’s most elite institutions. Johnny did a good job. He taught me that there are many different ways to rebel, and many different things to rebel against. Each of those five students taught me a great deal, and helped me on my own journey. When Dave came back from Chile I told him that I felt that way, and asked if it was a problem that I had probably learnt more from his students than they had learnt from me. We were sitting in The Bear, a pub just around the corner from the Canterbury Gate entrance to Christ Church. Dave said “That’s the way it is supposed to be. We let them teach us, because the best way to learn something is by trying to teach it to somebody else”. It was around that time that I started keeping notebooks to write down the sensible things that people said to me. What Dave said that evening in The Bear was one of the first things I copied down into the first of those notebooks. We let them teach us, because the best way to learn something is by trying to teach it to somebody else. And Dave had let me try to teach things to his students, which was the best way for me to learn.

I held the tutorials, as Dave told me that he always did, in my rooms. The big sitting room with its two huge settees accompanying arm chairs was ideal for the kind of conversational work that tutorials involve. Dave had explained to me that students arriving for scheduled tutorials would knock on the big blue front door and then just walk on in, so as long as I had left it unlocked I didn’t have to get up and open the door every time a student arrived. At any other time, of course, the students would knock and wait, but for the tutorials it was usual for them to knock and enter once the start time arrived. On the occasions where one tutorial was scheduled immediately after the other, incoming students could arrange themselves around the huge kitchen table in the adjoining room while the outgoing students finished their session. It was an arrangement that made the two main rooms a strange, half-public sort of a space. Dave used the other rooms, the bedroom and the north-facing rooms on the opposite side of the corridor as his wholly private spaces. One of those was a cosy study, and another was a small guest bedroom into which Dave had piled a lot of his climbing gear to free up space in the main bedroom, which he had insisted I must use while he was away. One thing that Dave had not explained was that a small number of his students, with his consent, had got into the habit of arriving early for their sessions, going directly into the kitchen and making tea or coffee before the tutorial was due to start. After it happened for the first time and I wrote to him about it, he wrote back to warn me that if I ever them round for an evening seminar or for any kind of social function, those students were likely to arrive as much as several hours early to help him set everything up. Dave had that kind of effect on people, even his students. It seemed like a good idea and I was more than happy for it to continue while I was in Dave’s rooms, but it had come as a bit of a surprise on the first occasion it happened, which was the occasion when I met my first princess.

Clara knocked very softly on the blue front door, so softly that, working at the desk in the window of the sitting room, I did not hear her as she opened the door and stepped into the deep warm silence of the thick-carpeted hallway. My desk was beneath the window, facing into the room at the corner furthest from the door so that light from the window spilled over my shoulder onto the desk. I could see across the room both through the connecting door into the kitchen and through the door into the hallway. It was a sunny afternoon and pale shafts of light traversed the room as they had the first time that I saw it, sparkling on shiny surfaces and settling in the rich colours of the settee and the carpet. One spear of light fell directly on the open doorway into the hall, and cast a narrow shard of brightness into the dark recess. I could see the doorway only from about waist height upwards because my view across the room was partly blocked by one of the big settees, and so it was only from the waist up that I saw the figure of a girl as she appeared to glide like a mirage across the dust-sparkling shard of light in the hallway. Because of the brightness of the one slant of light, it was hard to see clearly into the shadows. As she passed the doorway, half lit and half hidden by the light, Clara’s face was turned towards me. On this occasion, the centre of the image remains clear in my memory. Clara looked at me as if I were the strange new creature in her forest. She peered through the shafts of light as though they were branches. She moved silently, sliding across my line of sight in a moment. In a second she was gone. I imagined that if I went to look there would be no footprint, but perhaps a single feather.

The spell was broken as Clara, having bypassed the sitting room and entered the kitchen by its rear door directly from the corridor, started to clutter away the silence with running water, tea spoons in mugs and the click of the electric kettle. At the same  moment there was a louder sharp one-two knock on the outer door and in burst Cool Johnny with a “hey!” He too came past the open doorway but, glancing in and seeing me without another group, stopped in his tracks and instead of walking past came straight in, hand outstretched in greeting. He said “Hey!”. I said “Hey.” He said “You’re not Dave, man.” I said “No”. I fully expected him to say “cool”, but he retrieved the situation by saying nothing. By that time Jeannette and Matthew Alexander had followed him in, and they all trooped through into the kitchen. I followed them through, and as Clara the forest princess poured hot water onto instant coffee in mugs of many colours I sat at one of the eight chairs around the long kitchen table. I thought I was imposing some element of authority by sitting at the end of the table rather than on one of the sides. All four students, still standing close to the work surface at the other end of the kitchen, mugs and spoons in hand, stopped what they were doing at looked at me. “We don’t do it in here” said Johnny. “Are we going into the room?” said Jeannette with the long, straight auburn hair. I noticed she called it simply “the room”. To the students there was simply “the kitchen” and “the room”. I said “Let’s do it here. Let’s not go into the room.” Johnny bounced down into the chair directly opposite me at the other end of the table and said “cool!” I just smiled, and decided that I had plenty of time.

I had other groups of students, but perhaps because Clara, Johnny, Jeannette and Matthew Alexander were the first students that I met they were the group that I thought of most especially as being “mine”. Although the four students in that first group were all quite different from one another, they were all of the same type: students who are interested and interesting. Students who want to do their best and do not fool themselves that they already are. Students who really want to learn, and are willing to think. When I say that to people outside academia they often seem surprised and ask whether, surely, all students are not like that. Don’t they all want to learn? Aren’t they all willing to think? And I say that, no, even in Oxford not all the students are of the type that I was lucky enough to have in that first tutorial group. For that particular group I made sure that I was free for the hour in advance of the session, just in case they wanted to turn up early, and I left my schedule clear after the session so that it could run on if we wanted it to. Johnny and Clara in particular fell into the habit of coming very early, and we would sit together in the kitchen with coffees for perhaps half an hour before the other two arrived. Sometimes we talked about the work, but more often I just let them talk. One of the things I learnt from Rollei was that you can learn a lot about somebody by just letting them talk.

CHAPTER 17

On one occasion Johnny came even earlier than usual, and it was clear that he had something on his mind. I let him make coffee, and we sat together at the kitchen table. It turned out that he had just split up from his long-term girlfriend of six weeks and was, he said, “totally gutted” because it was all his fault. I said that things were rarely all one person’s fault. He thought about that for a minute, holding his coffee and looking out onto the meadow. “No,” he said “when you are dumped by an angel, when you are let go by sweetness and light, you have done it all wrong. You can’t blame an angel. It’s like failing at the Ten Commandments and then saying it was because the commandments were wrong, that it was the commandments’ fault. You can’t do that. It’s your fault”.

What he said struck a deep chord with me. In Aberdeen I had been in love with an angel of sweetness and light. When I was young like Johnny, although not so cool, that had been me: dumped by the angel of sweetness and light. So, had it been all my fault?

Why did I wait for Yulia in the canteen over the road and wonder why she was not coming over until the last minute, when I could, instead, have walked over to meet her? What if Yulia was in the department wondering why I was waiting for her over the road, making her come to fetch me out of there, when I could have come and collected her from where she was waiting. Why did I never go up to her office? And she would have seen my becoming friendly with Rona and the others, talking with them over the road before the seminar, taking my seat with them in the lecture room. So perhaps what I had interpreted as Yulia being cool was in fact Yulia being hurt, and I could not see it. And so it is, when you look back at history through different eyes it all changes. I look back at Yulia through the sad young eyes of totally gutted Johnny, and I learn from him that it was all my fault. Yulia folding away her map of the stars, Yulia answering the advert for a post in Australia, Yulia sitting on the other side of the train window as Rikke took that photograph and the train curved around the bend and out of sight. It was all my fault, because when you get dumped by an angel of sweetness and light it is always your fault.

They say that there are no coincidences, but it is not true. They are all around us, all the time; thousands of them every day. Only occasionally do they seize us and make us notice them. Since I left Aberdeen I had written to Yulia only a handful of times. At first I did not write very much because I was sure that Yulia’s interest in me, whatever that had been, had faded to nothing towards the end of our year together. This was confirmed in my mind by the brief responses, or sometimes no response, that I received to my letters. Later I did not write because I started to prefer the Yulia that was in my memory to the Yulia of the real world who was distant in every sense. Hearing from the real Yulia, on those occasions when I did, disturbed the image of my remembered Yulia, who still walked along the Esplanade in the dark and was the prospect of everything I had believed was to come. On the evening after my conversation with Johnny it was perhaps a whole year, or more, since I had written to Yulia. It had reached a point where I thought I might never write again. Yulia had settled permanently in Melbourne, and for both of us Aberdeen was increasingly of the long ago past. We had said all that there was to be said. Until Johnny’s lesson taught me that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps there was something that I ought to say. So I started, once again, “Dear Yulia…”

It was a hard letter to write, and although in the end it was only a few sentences it took me several days to think through exactly how they should be worded. There were questions, there were apologies, there were clarifications sought and offered. Above all there was uncertainty, but there was an undercurrent of - and it took me by surprise as I realised it - an undercurrent of hope. I barely knew what I was hoping for, but somewhere at the back of everything, behind what I was writing, I caught myself sensing irrational but undefined hope. I was close to finishing the letter when one of those unbelievable, unbearable coincidences seized me and tore to pieces everything I planned to say. The first occasion in years that I was writing to Yulia was the first occasion ever that Rikke telephoned me from Copenhagen. Before that we had only ever corresponded by post, but never before had either of us had anything so terrible to have to say.

Eventually it becomes too late to apologise. Too late to ask the questions that you should have asked earlier. Too late to hear those stories again or see the map of stars rolled out one more time in the dark. And sometimes it becomes too late long before you ever imagined that it might. And as you put the telephone down after that call and look around the room nothing at all has changed. The light still slants across the room and bounces off the polished wood. The figures walking past the window on their way around the meadow or along the path to Magdalen have not heard the news and do not break their stride. Mr Donovan will still arrive at 8 a.m. and the performance in the Music Rooms will not be cancelled. But I will not see Yulia again, and Rikke, who had already lost a daughter, had now lost a sister too. Some things when lost can be searched for. Other things, once lost, are gone. Some things come back for a short while before they finally disappear for good, but if that were to happen with Yulia now it could only be in dreams: my dreams and Rikke’s.

I said that I would fly right away to Copenhagen, but Rikke said no. She was flying to Melbourne and meeting her mother there. Suddenly the distance that I had never closed between myself and Yulia, the separation that we had never dissolved, seemed immense. As her family travelled to her from around the world I was left on the outside with my apology, my explanation, my great correction to the wrong that I had done Yulia left unsent and unsendable. Some distances cannot be closed.

Some things are too important to talk about or to write about. Too big to touch, or hold, or even think about. We have to put them away. When Mr Donovan asked, as always, “How are we today, sir?” I said that I was fine, and that the frost looked beautiful on the meadow. When Johnny cruised in ten minutes early for our tutorial and started making coffee, I talked to him about essay deadlines, lecture topics, and his decision about a new tattoo. Nobody can ever see what is in your heart. And where in our hearts do we put the things that we ourselves do not want to see but cannot throw away? Those things stand like monsters in our hearts, filling the space, blocking the light, dulling the sound, and we walk around them, averting our eyes, until we begin to accept that they are normal. And then years later we live with monsters in our hearts that we have forgotten are there, but which we have to walk around each day. We squeeze our life around the gaps between the monsters. Until our hearts are full. I thought that Rikke’s heart must by now be entirely filled with monsters.

CHAPTER 18

Some people can see the monsters in their hearts. Rollei had seen the spaces filling up. He could hear the sounds becoming dull, sense the light starting to fade. After I left, he stayed alone in the house in Aberdeen and his rainbow grew darker as his monsters grew bigger. Juliette, mother to Yulia and adopted mother to Rikke, was also able to see the monsters in her own heart, and people who recognise their own monsters often learn to recognise when other people have the same misfortune. Although they had given no sign, when Juliette came to Aberdeen for those few days to arrange for her daughters’ departures, she and Rollei had each recognised that the other had dark spaces in their heart much like their own. There was no obvious outward similarity between them. They had responded in different ways to their particular demons: built their own walls and passageways, fashioned their own weapons, fought their silent wars in their own ways. But they each recognised something of themselves in the other. So when Juliette had written a short letter thanking Rollei, in his capacity by then as the sole occupant of the house, for the hospitality that she had received during her visit, it was only partly a genuine thank you and partly an excuse to sustain the contact that she had made with Rollei. Had she asked me at the time I would have said that Rollei would never write back to her. Indeed, at that time and for several years after I would write periodically to Rollei and receive no reply at all. It was only after his move to India that he started to write to me, and it turned out that the move to India grew out of the conversations he had by letter with Juliette, to whom he did write back, immediately and at great length.

When we each look at the same person we see entirely different things. I used to think that this was because we looked from different points of view, but now I think that it is because each person is many people and most of us can only see one at a time. The Rollei that I saw was not the one that Juliette saw. Rollei’s Juliette was not mine, nor her daughters’. This Juliette that wrote to Rollei and became his friend would never have existed without Rollei. Her Rollei existed only because of her. We create each other.

Rollei and Juliette corresponded for a year. Then they started to exchange visits: Juliette to Aberdeen and Rollei to Jutland. By that time Rikke had moved away from Jutland to Copenhagen, and Juliette preferred to keep her relationship with Rollei, if not exactly secret, at least unmentioned. This was the time when I, too, started to visit Denmark quite frequently, as I was seeing Rikke in Copenhagen. This was in the period when I was living at Harley Road for the first time, before I took on my role covering for Dave Cline at Christ Church. By the time I started at Christ Church, by the time of Yulia’s death, Juliette had told Rikke about her relationship with Rollei and was on the brink of embarking on a new life with him. This was when both Rikke and I knew only the old Rollei of our Aberdeen days, and we marvelled, incredulous, at how the flamboyant history lecturer prone to bouts of drunken despair might be in any way compatible with the cosmopolitan Parisian Russian. But that was because we did not see the monsters that they shared. Even the largest monsters can become invisible when they hide in someone’s heart and we look away.

When Yulia died, and Rikke flew to Melbourne, Juliette was already there, and Rollei was there with her. Rollei, who had turned his back on the Russians when they stood at the doorway and the taxi pulled away in the first flakes of snow, was in Melbourne with Rikke at Yulia’s funeral, while I was not. When Rikke spoke to me briefly on the telephone to say that it was done, and told me that Rollei was there, I thought: was this the moment that Rollei had seen when he opened the door? As he walked back past me in the corridor, saying that this was for me, did he mean this? Did he foresee this terrible misdealing of the cards, this great misstep, this transposing of our positions? I realised even as I thought these things, walking around Christ Church meadow in the dusk, that they were absurd, but I could not dismiss them. In just the way that I had lost Yulia at the very moment when I was about to try and set things right, in just the way that the one person who could answer my question was taken at the very moment that I thought to ask it, so too with Rollei, I could tell from Rikke’s description that it was too late now to ask him about that day in Aberdeen because the Rollei that Rikke met, as though it were for the first time, in Melbourne, was the new Rollei. The old Rollei, for whom, suddenly, I had urgent questions, was gone from me as well.

After Yulia’s funeral, Rollei and Juliette returned together to Aberdeen and Rikke stopped over in England to see me on her way back to Denmark. She came for just three days to stay with me in Oxford. She was exhausted from the shock, the despair and the enormous journey, and she slept for long periods, in the guest bedroom overnight and on the long settee throughout the day. The slanting light from the meadow settled on her in the afternoon as I worked at the desk in the window and Rikke slept, or briefly woke and talked about Yulia, Juliette, Rollei, and details of Julia’s life in Australia that she had discovered for the first time only after Yulia’s death. I think the hardest part of it all for Rikke was the realisation that finally, after all the years when she and Yulia had been as one, in the end, without Rikke having even realised it, Yulia had grown up, grown away, grown apart, and started a life that did not include sharing every excitement, every sorrow, every day with Rikke. In that trip to Australia Rikke lost Yulia twice. She lost Yulia, but she also suddenly realised the gradual loss that had been happening over the preceding years. The Yulia that she had thought was still there, turned out to have vanished without Rikke noticing. And when she noticed, it was too late to talk about it to the Yulia who had taken her place because she, to, now was gone. No death is ever just one death.

Rikke returned to Copenhagen, and I remained in Oxford. Everything appeared to be as it had been a month before, and the letter that I had almost finished writing to Julia was still amongst the papers on my desk. What does one do with such a letter? On the afternoon that Rikke left, after I walked with her to the station I did not go back towards Christ Church but carried on along the Botley road as far as the river, and then turned along the riverside path up towards Port Meadow. I walked all the way up to the Godstow Road, then across to the Banbury Road and back through Summertown. It was a long walk, and it was dark before I got back into town. I came back into Christ Church through Canterbury Gate and Peckwater Quad. Light from the library windows shone out across my path. Everything was as it always was. As I walked through the passageway beneath the Great Hall back to Meadow Buildings figures in gowns were starting to emerge from the formal sitting of dinner. It was later even than I had thought. I paused for a moment in the darkness of the short stone passageway and was struck suddenly by an overwhelming sense of the everyday, of the usual, of people coming and going as they always did, of everything being exactly here and exactly now. Suddenly all my imaginings of Australia and all my memories of Aberdeen and even my strange friendship with the Russian Danish Parisian girl who was searching for her stolen daughter seemed like stars painted on a child’s high bedroom ceiling: both remote and unreal. One can wake, look at them for a moment and fall back to sleep.

I stepped out of the passageway into Meadows Quad and walked directly to my rooms. Quickly, as when pulling off a sticking plaster, I went straight to my desk, took the letter that I had written to Yulia, and without even glancing at it I tore it in half, tore in again, screwed the pieces into a ball and threw them into the kitchen bin. I walked straight back out of the flat and into the staircase, and I pulled the big blue door shut behind me. I did not want to go back inside. I stood with my back to the door, and for a moment I leant against it. Then I walked up the short flight of stairs to the first half-landing, and looked out through the tall windows onto the meadow. In the darkness I could see nothing but the reflection of the staircase behind me. I turned, walked back down the stairs, and knocked on the door directly opposite my own. I knocked on Sandra Gilman’s door.

CHAPTER 19

After the first occasion when Dave had introduced me to Sandra Gilman at her door before I moved in, I had seen her on only a few occasions, but had started to feel that, as Dave had predicted, she was no longer thinking of me as a stranger and a threat, but more as a curiosity, and eventually a fixture in the daily round of the college.  I thought that it might only have been because Dave had asked her to do so, but on my first night Sandra had knocked on my door before dinner, asked whether I knew the arrangements, and said that I could walk over with her if I wished. As it happened, I had already made arrangements to eat with my old house mate from Harley Road that night, but I thanked Sandra very much for her kind offer and said that I hoped to take her up on it another night. She did not knock on my door the next evening, but when I saw her around Christ Church or in the town during the following days I very much had the feeling that she was fulfilling a continuing role in my induction as Dave’s stand in, subtly checking that I was getting on OK but not wanting specifically to ask me anything or to offer me any particular help or advice. When Dave wrote back in response to my “settling in OK” letter, in which I had joked about needing an angel, he said “Sandra will be your guardian angel, don’t worry.”

Sandra did not look like a guardian angel. She looked like a shy academic. She normally dressed in a knee-length grey skirt, white blouse and brown cardigan. Her mouse-brown hair was often loose about her shoulders when she was out, but usually tied back or pinned up when she was in her rooms. She did not smile without good cause, and I had not yet seen her at a point where she felt there was good cause. Her expression was neutral, perhaps even guarded. Her paces were short. Her fingernails were chewed. Who ever had a guardian angel that chewed her nails? Dave, in his letter, said that I should go and ask her for that cup of sugar or that tea bag, and that she would be pleased if I did, but somehow the weeks passed us by and I never knocked on her door. Nevertheless, as I continued to encounter her in the stairway or in the Quad, and as we exchanged progressively longer pleasantries about the weather, the students or whatever news that I had received from Dave in Chile, I started to see Sandra not just as somebody who was known to Dave, but as somebody who was known to me. I started to wonder about her chewed nails and her short paces. And then. all of a sudden, I was ripping up Yulia’s letter, I was pulling closed behind me a lost part of my old life,  I was standing in the stairway, and I had just knocked on Sandra Gilman’s door.

As on that first day with Dave, there was an extended pause after I knocked the door, and I envisaged Sandra making up her mind one way or the other. Fifty-fifty, Dave had said. There were no spy-holes in the doors for occupants to see out into the stairway, but I wondered whether, like the cat to which Dave had compared her, Sandra could sense without looking who was on the other side of the door. Without any sound of footsteps approaching the door opened suddenly and abruptly, and Sandra was there, slightly out of breath as though she had rushed to get here from a great distance. Standing suddenly close to me she seemed shorter than I imagined and remembered. She was tucking a stray strand of hair back into a clip at the side of her head, and held a hairgrip between her lips. As she took it out and placed it somewhere behind the clip her mouth relaxed, for the first time that I had seen, into a smile. “Hello!” she said, and made a funny little movement tipping for just a moment onto her toes and then dropping down again, almost as though she had noticed that I had noticed that she was not as tall as I thought. I looked down as she did it and saw that her feet were in their brown woollen tights but without shoes. I had imagined, from what little I had seen of her previously, that Sandra would have been one of those trivially neat and organised people who put everything immediately in its place as soon as they have finished using it, but I saw that her shoes had been left carelessly at the side of the hall where she had evidently kicked them off when she came in. Over her normal skirt and blouse she was still wearing the formal black gown that was a requirement for the later sitting of dinner in Hall, and I realised that she must have returned to her rooms just moments before I had arrived. Given that she always seemed to move quickly and quietly around college, I wondered whether perhaps she had come in just seconds ago, and seen me on the half landing in front of her, looking out at the meadow. So she did know that it was me at the door. Again, she seemed to know what I was thinking and she said “I knew it must be you.” I said: “Dave told me to come and ask you for a tea bag”. “Ha!” she replied, swivelled her stockinged feet on the carpet and turned away back into the flat. “Come on in”.

I followed Sandra into the flat and as I turned to push the door closed behind me I noticed that the inside of the door, and the wooden frame around it, had both been painted a rich, dark, cream colour. The entrance hall, like Dave’s, was really no more than a corridor, but with better placed lighting and more sympathetic decoration the atmosphere was quite different. “Nice flat” I said. “It’s just the same as yours,” she replied “only a bit smaller”. As she walked ahead of me she shrugged out of the gown and flung it casually to the side of the hallway where it fell alongside the shoes. The corridor actually felt larger than Dave’s, and as the gown hit the carpet I realised that Sandra’s hallway had no furniture in it at all, and the few things that were in it - mainly shoes and coats - were all on the floor. I glanced through the first open door as I passed it and noticed that Sandra’s equivalent of Dave’s spare room was also virtually empty. Sandra by now had gone out of sight ahead of me into the kitchen and called back “I hope you don’t really want a tea bag?” I caught up with her and as I turned through the kitchen door Sandra was leaning with her back to the widow looking back at me across a room that was clearly in the process of being packed up into boxes and bags. I said “You’ve packed your tea bags?” She said “Dave was winding you up, or trying to wind me up. He knows very well that I never have tea bags.” She reached down to her side without taking her eyes away from mine and with a theatrical flourish opened a cupboard door to reveal a colourful collection of tins, boxes and packets. “I don’t do tea bags,” she said. “I dodo tea!” I stepped forward, tipping my head down to see into the cupboard. “Indeed,” I said, “I can see that you do do tea!”. I looked back up at Sandra and saw that she still had that relaxed smile. She did that funny little up and down on her toes again, and said “Shall we have a cup of tea?”

Sandra in the flat was not what I had expected. When Dave first introduced us she seemed cautious and even a little severe. When I had seen her around college subsequently she was polite but businesslike. I had expected her to be sharp and angular in a neatly organised box, everything in its place doing as it had been told under Sandra’s efficient and demanding academic and logical rule. Even though I had started to see the chinks in my own image, starting to wonder about the chewed nails and the tiny footsteps, I had still never felt the urge, or summoned the courage, to knock on that door until, in a moment of chaos my actions went ahead of my mind and I found myself realising that I had done it. As I stood in the kitchen and Sandra filled a kettle I thought that she was less surprised than me at my being there. I said “How did you know it must be me?” “Oh, I just had a feeling it would be you when you knocked.” She looked over her shoulder, not giving anything away. “Sit down. Move a box.”  As she spoke, she moved more quickly than me and moved half packed boxes from two of the chairs at the kitchen table, motioning me into one of them and sitting in the other herself. “I’m packing” she said. “So I see” I replied. “Are you moving?” “Not far. Only into the next staircase. These rooms were only temporary. In fact, I think the next one is temporary, too. They don’t seem to know where to put me.” I raised my eyebrows and made a little grimace that was supposed to say “Yes, I understand completely, it’s terribly inconvenient” but which probably said, more truthfully “I really have no idea how the accommodation here works”. She continued: “I don’t have a lot of my own things here. The furniture is mostly the college’s but they have started taking some of that out and they are going to do a big decorate and refurnish before the next person moves in. This is my last night here.” “And you weren’t going to tell me you were moving?” “I’d have left you a note. Although, you haven’t shown any sign of needing me for anything up to now.” She was still smiling. I checked. She was not sharp or angular, although she did seem logical and well organised. Her shoes and gown were exactly where the furniture would have been to house them, had the furniture not been removed already. Her collection of teas, the last thing that she would pack, was very neatly stowed. She didn’t ask me what tea I would like. She decided that herself. “In fact,” she said, I wouldn’t have left you a note. If you hadn’t come round tonight I would have come round to you tomorrow and asked if you would help me move.” I thought for a moment that the mask of logic and organisation was slipping, if she was leaving it till the last day before asking for my help, but I was wrong and she was ahead of me again. “I knew you would be free. You are always free on Wednesday mornings.” She brought two cups of tea to the table and sat down. “And your friend has gone away again now, hasn’t she?” She smiled her relaxed smile, but this time there was a tiny little bit of a question in it. I answered: “What kind of tea is this?” She said: “It’s Russian”.

CHAPTER 20

The next day I helped Sandra move her things to her new room. There really was not very much, and I don’t think she had actually needed my help. I wondered whether she really had been planning to ask for it, or if she had said that to recover from not having told me earlier that she was moving. I caught myself doing what I had done before: questioning the motives behind acts that probably had no motive. But at least by now I had learnt to catch myself, and stop myself. I said: “I don’t think you were really going to call on me to help you with this.” She said, looking back over her shoulder as she carried an armful of books up the stairs ahead of me, “No. I only said that to make you feel better!”. We both smiled. I said “Are you always this honest?” She said “No. But I will tell you when I am not being”. I could not see her face as she said that, but I thought that she sounded as though she was not smiling as she said it.

The rooms that Sandra was moving into were much smaller than those she was moving out of, so it was a good job that she did not have a great many boxes to move. She had been allocated a pair of student rooms on the second staircase in Meadows Building. Normally the rooms would be shared by two undergraduates, each with a private room but with both of those rooms situated off a tiny shared inner hallway behind an outer door onto the staircase. As a staff member, albeit a junior staff member who was being unceremoniously rebilletted at irregular intervals, Sandra had at least been allocated both rooms in the set. They were on the first floor. Entering off the staircase into the inner hall, the door directly ahead lead into a modestly sized room facing onto the north side of the building, looking out over the dark quadrangle and, diagonally, over the croquet lawn behind the magical gate. This had been furnished to serve as a bedroom and included a tiny en-suite shower and WC. The other room, the door of which was immediately on our right as we entered the inner hall from the staircase, was a large room with tall sash windows looking out to the south across Christ Church meadow. The windows opened onto a tiny stone balcony, leaning out towards the meadow. The room was usually arranged as a large bed-study room for a student, but for Sandra’s occupancy had been arranged as a spacious study-sitting room. A door which I took to be a store cupboard opened up to reveal a tiny sink area that was the closest that the rooms offered to any sort of kitchen facility. I now understood why Sandra had packed a lot of her kitchen items into a box that went straight to storage. There were shared very basic kitchen facilities higher up the staircase, and larger bathrooms on each landing, but as the staircase was mainly occupied by students these shared facilities would not appeal to members of staff temporarily assigned to the staircase. I said: “You’ll have to use my kitchen.” She said “That’s what I was banking on.” We had opened the sash window and stooped through it to step out onto the balcony. There was barely room for two of us out there, as we stood looking across the meadow to the river in the distance. I glanced across at Sandra and thought to myself “I only really met you yesterday.” Still looking out at the meadow, as if she had heard my thoughts Sandra said “It’s a good job I met you.” I said “Stop doing that!” “What?” I didn’t reply and we went back to looking out over the meadow until Sandra said. “I’ll unpack the kettle. Let’s have a cup of tea.”

By the time we had unpacked a little and Sandra had made tea, the light was beginning to fade. Sandra liked to use table lamps, desk lamps, side lamps - all sorts of lamps, but most of these were still in boxes so I turned on the main room light: a single bulb with a plain fabric shade hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Sandra raised her hand to her eyes “Ow! Bright!” The lamp shade was wider at the bottom than the top, designed to cast the maximum light from the bulb downwards and outwards into the room, but it did the job too well. I turned the light back off, pulled a chair underneath it and climbed up to remove the lampshade. In a shower of dust I turned it upside down and replaced it so that the wide end pointed upwards, casting most of the bulb’s light onto the ceiling from where it was reflected down more comfortably. “Nicely done!” said Sandra.

If you happen to walk past Meadow Buildings even now, quite a few years later, you can see from outside, looking up at that room, that the lamp shade is still upside down.

Having changed the lamp shade on that first day, I don’t think I ever saw that light turned on again. By the following evening Sandra had transformed the room with an array of small lamps, and she only ever used those. There were lamps on shelves, lamps on the table, lamps on the floor behind the settee that cast a soft glow onto the curtains when they were drawn at night, and there was a desk lamp angled like a crane to cast its light onto something that I had never seen in anybody’s rooms before: a personal computer. “I haven’t got it connected properly yet” said Sandra. “Connected to what?” “Connected to the internet. I’d be lost without my e-mail. They don’t have regular phone lines in these student rooms. They put me in a special extension, but it needs a different connector. I should be able to get one today and I’ll in touch with everybody again. You should get one.” Sandra paused for just a fraction. “You could keep in touch with your friend.”  Looking back from where we have now arrived it is hard to remember, even though it was only a few years ago, the first time we heard these terms that are now so much a part of everything we do. How many of us remember the first e-mail that we sent or received? What was the first document that we word processed rather than writing or typing? I had seen computers in Yulia’s department, - I involuntarily correct myself - in Rikke’s department, in Aberdeen, but somehow then I had blinked and missed a huge leap in the technology, and in the use of the technology away from work, that somehow had passed by everybody that I knew. Rikke and I had never thought of keeping in touch this way. Dave had never mentioned e-mail or computers, and there was no indication in his rooms that he ever used them. Sandra said “You wait. Soon this will be the way we all keep in touch.” It seemed terribly unlikely.

Sometimes we don’t recognise the first moment. Sometimes we don’t hear the rising tide or see the first leaf fall. Sometimes we don’t see the first snowflake. Sometimes we notice the first raindrops, but we have no idea how long the rain will fall or how heavy the storm will be. Sometimes we see things beginning over and over again that never complete. Sometimes seeds lie dormant for many years before they grow. On other occasions a seed bursts into life and sends out shoots that spread and branch and sow new seeds that do the same and a forest appears as if by magic. The forest can appear a long way away from where that first seed fell and sent out runners. The day after I saw Sandra’s computer I ordered on of my own. Within a week I had one just like hers set up on Dave’s desk. It was a strange time: I was writing letters by hand to send by post to ask people whether they had a connection to which I could send them e-mails. I was in the middle of writing to Dave, asking exactly that, when Sandra came in to use my kitchen, as she had started to do on most afternoons. Sandra suggested that we could send an e-mail to the Department in Chile where Dave was working, asking for our message to be passed on to him. They might have a shared computer that he can use, or the secretary might act as a messenger. “Worth a try,” said Sandra. “Fifty-fifty, as Dave would say.” I looked at her. “Yes, he does say that. But then he also said I should ask you for a tea bag.” Sandra was kicking off her shoes and walking through into the kitchen. She called back: Dave is a very wise man.”

I do remember the first e-mail that I sent, because it was that e-mail to the Department in Chile, which Sandra and I composed together. When it was ready I said “now what?” Sandra took my hand, moved it over the keyboard and pressed my finger down with hers onto the return key. “There!” she said. Welcome to the new world.” It was like a tiny miracle to me that, just an hour later, as the smell of baking began to emanate from the kitchen, and with my half-written letter to Dave still on the desk, his reply to our e-mail arrived. “A new world,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. This is a new world.”

Later that evening, after Sandra had left, I threw the unfinished and now obsolete   letter that I had been writing to Dave into the bin. Had I sent it, that would have been the last letter I ever sent him: every time I have written to him since then has been by e-mail. I’m not sure now that I can remember the very last letter that I actually did send to him. It must have been from Christ Church in the weeks before I knocked on Sandra’s door, but I cannot remember it. The last time that we do something is often even harder to notice than the first time. Certainly for the routine, everyday things, few of us know for sure that this is the last time. When we had watched Yulia’s train pull away we knew that we would not see her for a long time, but we did not know that this time would be the last. After throwing out Dave’ last letter I took another sheet of paper, and started, as I had done so many times before: “Dear Rikke…”  I told her about my long walk back from seeing her off at the station, throwing away my unfinished letter to Yulia, knocking on Sandra’s door and how I felt I was making a new friend, and finally, but most of all, about the computer and the e-mail. I said that it was like the start of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” where the boy was taken by his father for the first time to see the wonder of the age.  “You wait,” I said, “soon this will be the way we all keep in touch.” I was about to add “that’s what Sandra thinks”, but I decided not to. In fact, I wondered whether I should have written so much about Sandra. But I sealed the envelope and posted it off.

CHAPTER 21

Throughout the rest of that winter and into the spring I continued to live my strange unsettled life in Oxford. I was living in another man’s flat, doing his job, teaching his students, making friends with his friends. I spent time with Sandra but somehow we both kept each other, certainly not at arm’s length, but at a distance apart that made it clear to each of us and to people who knew us that we were just friends. We tip toed towards the edges of something else, but we never quite reached the point where we could take that final step. I kept in close touch with Rikke, writing most weeks and sharing my news; sharing her long, slow disappointment at the lack of any real progress in her search for her lost daughter or the man who had taken her. I was still unclear, despite having spoken to Rikke about it many times both face to face and by mail, as to exactly how the girl’s father had been able to take her away, why there had been no legal recourse for Rikke, or how he had been able to disappear with her so completely that Rikke could find no trace. Although Rikke and I had become close friends, with her, too, as with Sandra, there was an element of distance as though we maintained between us a thin, transparent but impenetrable space.

Dave returned from Chile in March, and I returned to the house in Harley Road. Sandra was moved once more to a different set of rooms in Christ Church, this time to a more permanent place in Canterbury Quad. Rikke was still based in Copenhagen, but was now working for an environmental management organisation doing a mixture of private and government contracts. It was at this point, just after I moved into Harley Road for the second time, that I received the first letter from Rollei in India. This was the first time since I left Aberdeen several years earlier that I felt as though I knew for sure where everybody was. But even as I thought that, and started to count them off one by one, I realised that my list was not complete, and that some of the people who still figured large in my memory and imagination were now irretrievable in the past. Not only Yulia, who was lost forever, of course, but others too. Wild, wild, Rona, for example. Whatever became of her, I wonder. Lachlan the absent landlord, whom I had never even met, still featured in my conversations, and had given me a phrase that some other now took to be my own: “please arrange”, I would say, and laugh, and nobody would know the joke. Rollei’s letters were little help in retrieving this lost past, as his view was firmly fixed forwards now. Rollei, at a missionary school in the Nilgiri Hills of South India, with Juliette the mother of Rikke and Yulia. Juliette whom Rollei now called his Parisian Angel. Rollei the missionary, with an angel of his own. What was it that Sandra had said? “It’s a new world”. And from a bed-sit in the front downstairs room of a house in Harley Road, Oxford, I was slowly coming to terms with it.

My life in Oxford at that time was very social, but I can’t remember any occasion when anybody came into that little bed sitting room. Sandra, Dave and several others I remember having tea or coffee in the kitchen at Harley Road with me many times, and there were a dozen or more houses, flats and college apartments around the city where I met friends and colleagues, sometimes even the old students from Dave’s group, for all manner of activities and events, private or public, personal or professional. But that front room was a sanctuary, and even though I did not deliberately keep it private or secret, I was happy for it to stay that way. Perhaps that was another reason why the house reminded me of the house in Aberdeen. The Aberdeen kitchen, before the Russians arrived, and the front room at Harley Road, both had a feeling of being somehow at depth, submerged and remote. Sitting in that room with Rollei’s first letter in my hand, looking back, I wondered at the picture of myself in this cavern, in this submarine, deep beneath the surface swell, troglodytic as I had once feared Rollei would become, while Rollei was in the hills with his angel. Dave had told me, perhaps not realising the seriousness of my plea, that Sandra would be my guardian angel, but that had never quite been so. What was this invisible impenetrable film between Sandra and myself, I wondered.  And when I thought of Sandra, my thoughts immediately slid onwards to Rikke: what was the invisible, impenetrable layer that seemed to fall always between Rikke and me? And the more I considered Sandra and Rikke the more I realised that my relationships with both of them had come to be defined as much by the unidentified issues, or attitudes, or circumstances that were keeping us at a distance as by those that drew us together. Like magnets arranged in such a pattern that they can neither move closer together nor move further apart. Fixed in position by an unseen force.

One evening in the summer I went for a meal at Christ Church with Dave and the four students who had been in my first tutorial group: Clara who should have been a princess; Cool Johnny who had unwittingly motivated me to write, too late, to Yulia; Jeannette who would one day really be a princess; and Matthew Alexander, who still wore a blazer on most occasions, including this evening. As usual, Cool Johnny was lamenting the loss of his most recent conquest. As usual, he blamed himself. As usual, we tried to reassure him that probably it was not all his fault, but as usual he easily convinced us that of course it was. He even used the almost the same expression that had struck me so forcefully two years earlier: when you are let go by an angel, it was you who did something wrong. You can’t blame the angel. When he had said that to me the first time, it made me reconsider the way that my friendship with Yulia had ended, and whether that the reasons for that might have been my fault. This time, while we sat around Dave’s big kitchen table after dinner, Cool Johnny said: “I don’t know what I do to them.” Clara who should have been a princess raised both eyebrows as if to say that she did not believe that Johnny did not know. She said “We all know what we do. Unless we choose not to look.” Dave turned to me and said: “that’s the question you once asked me. Where in our hearts do we put the things that we don’t want to see?” For a moment I was taken aback both because Dave had remembered that and because it seemed to be right at the boundary between what was OK and what was a bit too personal for a conversation with students. But then, this was not a tutorial, I was not their tutor, and we had all had a lot to drink. And it seemed too personal to me only because I was quite sure that, in that place in my own heart, I had put some things. Once they are there, you cannot see them; but they are still there. I said: “Even if you can’t see the monsters that you hide in your heart, you can hear them.” I had been looking down at the drink I was holding in my hand as I said that, but as I raised my eyes I looked up straight into Clara’s eyes, as they looked straight into mine. The conversation turned quickly on around me, but for a moment I did not hear it. I did not hear Dave as he politely edged the conversation back from the boundary that he realised, with his perfect judgement, was about to be crossed. I did not hear Jeannette say “Coffee?” or notice as she stood and gathered empty dishes from the table. I noticed Clara’s eyes, and nose and lips, and the way her hair fell, and the expression in her face, and I had no room to take in more. I was fully aware that this was a new monster, and that I had to make a decision where to put it in my heart.

Dave said “Come on, comfy chairs!” and we all moved through to the other room. Suddenly, despite all the other things that had happened in that room, as I walked through into the sitting room from the kitchen, that sitting room had become simply the room in which I had first seen Clara. I looked at the desk where I had been sitting and I looked at the doorway that she had walked past, and I remembered the scene in every detail, every sparkling mote of dust in the slanting sunlight, the dappled shadows, the rich colours. And Clara’s expression as she floated, glided past the doorway. It was exactly the expression that I had seen again a moment ago in the kitchen. Fear and curiosity. But this time, tonight, there had been something more. I was sure of it, but at the same time, as I knew I always did, I began to question the motives behind what was said, or how a look was passed. Sitting round the room on Dave’s huge settees everything was back to normal. Clara and Jeannette were talking together about another friend who I did not know. Dave and Cool Johnny were laughing about some exploit that Johnny was recounting, and Matthew Alexander was in the kitchen taking a surprisingly long time and making an extraordinary amount of noise putting together six cups of coffee. It was over, I thought. And I think that in one way I was pleased.

The students left one by one for various other engagements, and by ten o’clock Dave and I were alone with what we called our “closing drinks”. He said “I always try to make it clear that these evenings are exactly that: evenings”. He did not want to encourage them to stay too late, or to confuse that difficult boundary between a friendly Oxford tutor and an enthusiastic Oxford student. “If they want to stay up drinking all night they have their friends for that kind of thing he said, “They don’t need me for that!” I replied: “Drinking all night is a thing of the past for me”. I took my empty glass through to the kitchen and thanked Dave for another good evening, collected my coat from the hall, and left through that blue-framed door. Closing it behind me I stood gain in the stairway, looking across at what had used to be Sandra’s door. I wondered whether to walk over to Canterbury Quad and call on Sandra. It was late. I thought “it’s fifty-fifty”. I had not made my mind up as I stepped out into Meadows Quad. I thought perhaps I’d walk that way and see what happened when I got to Canterbury. I turned left out of the door from Dave’s staircase to walk along the back of the building towards the centre of Christ Church, and as I reached the entrance to the next staircase a figure stepped out exactly as I passed, bumping into me, heels clattering, perfume, long hair, gripping my arm to prevent herself falling. It was Clara.

“Oh!” She said. “Hello!”

Even at the time, it was obvious that Clara was not really surprised to bump into me. Sometimes it may be foolish to question motives when there are none, but sometimes motives are clear, and are legitimately to be questioned! Her expression as she looked up at me outside her staircase was no longer fear and curiosity. Her expression now was almost defiant, as though to say “what are you going to do about this?” As she steadied herself and had clearly regained her balance, she continued to hold onto my arm with two hands, and manoeuvred in such a way that I suddenly we were standing arm in arm.

“Hello indeed” I said. “Are you going out?”

“No” she replied “Not exactly” I was just going to walk around the Quad once for some air. Are you going that way?”

There was no other way to go, since we were at one end of the college and the open exits at this time of night were all at the other end, and so, unexpectedly, I was walking through Christ Church arm in arm with a girl who should have been a princess.

Clara said “You know that it was not an accident, don’t you, me bumping into you?”

“Really?” I said.

“Don’t be silly” she replied.

I was pleased that she had not tried to pretend. She had not tried to fool me. What princess would do such a thing? “So why did you do that?” I looked across at her and she looked back.

“I wanted to talk some more” she said. “About what you said before. About where we put things that we don’t want to see.”

“Do you have things that you want to hide?”

“No, I don’t think so, but how would I know. But you looked as if you had hidden something. I had never thought of hiding something from myself.”

“You are only ten years old. What could you have to hide?”

She hit me on the shoulder with a small clenched fist, then put it back around my arm. “I am twenty three, and I have lots of things that I could hide.”

We walked through the passageway into Tom Quad and slowly around the edge, and Clara the twenty-three year old princess told me all the things that she would hide. They were small, pale things, most of them; poorly sorted and unlabelled. She set them out before me as we walked in the dark, and on my right I could hear the waves crashing against the sea wall, and I could smell the salt air blowing off the North Sea. I could hear the boats in Aberdeen harbour sounding their horns to welcome in the New Year. In the knuckles of Clara’s fingers beneath by own against the fabric of my sleeve I could make out the maps in shells and sticks that steered islanders to their Pacific homes. I could see the mist on the windows of the Inversnecky Tea Rooms. I could see Yulia writing the Russian characters of her name. I could feel my monsters pressing at the inside of my heart, catching at my breath.

Clara was saying “…where should I hide those?”

I thought back over the small secrets she had given me to care for. I thought about what she wanted me to say. I thought about what I wanted her to think of me for saying whatever I would say. I said. “Hide them in plain sight, Don’t hide them in your heart. Leave room in your heart. Don’t fill all the spaces with secrets and monsters.”

I looked at her to see her expression. We had circumnavigated Tom Quad several times, taken a tour around Peckwater and returned to Meadow Buildings, We were standing at the foot of Clara’s staircase where she had bumped into me half an hour earlier. Clara still held my arm in both of hers, and she was looking down at the floor as she spoke.

“Don’t fill all the spaces with monsters” she repeated after me. “Alright,” she said, “I won’t.” And she kissed me very quickly on the cheek. She let go of my arm and stepped into the brightly lit doorway. “Would you walk me up to my room, please?”

Sometimes we have to make very important decisions very quickly without warning. Sometimes we can see how important those decisions are. Sometimes, even just a few seconds before the moment of decision comes we are still not quite sure what the question will be, or even whether it might pass by without pausing. As I followed Clara up the stairs to the first floor I knew that one of those moments might be about to burst over us. Sometimes we notice the coincidences that surround us. This was certainly one of those occasions. Clara stopped on the first-floor landing and turned into what was, for me, Sandra’s room! This was where I had helped Sandra to move in when I was staying in Dave’s flat. Sandra’s rooms had been converted back into a pair for two students and Clara had the large front room with the balcony leaning over the meadow. She unlocked the door and walked in, switching on the light as she entered. As the light came on I looked up and saw that the shade was still hanging upside down as I had arranged it for Sandra. I stood in the doorway. Clara called back from inside the room: “would you like a drink?”

Sometimes, when that moment comes to make the we have been anticipating, decision, we can break it into a series of small decisions. We can fall one step at a time. We can drown sip by sip. I stepped in and said I would have a quick drink just to see me on my way. Clara opened the sash window and stepped out onto the small stone balcony. It was dark across the meadow but the reflections of a few lights off the river made their way up to us. I stepped through onto the balcony and Clara handed me one of the two glasses that she was holding. As I looked down to take it from her she looked up. It was the second decision. The second sip towards drowning. In my whole life I have never felt anything as soft as Clara’s lips.

On that same balcony in a previous winter in the afternoon sunlight I had not kissed Sandra when I knew of no reason not to, and but now in the warm summer darkness when I knew of many reasons I should not, I kissed the girl who should have been a princess, and I allowed her to kiss me, and we could both feel the monsters pressing at the insides of our hearts and we could both hear our different oceans, and we each felt our own guilt. And so we sipped but we did not drown. Later, as I walked down the stairs and out into the quad it occurred to me that there could be many types of angels. I walked across college towards Canterbury Gate, although that was not my most direct route home. Going that way took me past Sandra’s rooms in Canterbury Quad, and as I walked through Peckwater and approached Canterbury I recognised again, suddenly, that the moment for a decision was about to arrive. I stood for a moment outside Sandra’s door. There was no sound or light from inside. It was late. Fifty-fifty, I thought. I turned away, and walked back to Harley Road.

CHAPTER 22

Throughout this period Rikke and I were writing to each other regularly, and later during that summer I received a letter from her asking whether I would like to visit Copenhagen again before the winter and whether, if I were free, I would like as part of that visit to go with her on a short trip that she was going to make for her work. She had been asked to go to Greenland for a few days to talk to people there about the possible environmental implications of some work that was being planned on a bridge spanning a river close to the international airport at Kangerlussuaq. Because it was an unusually remote assignment and nobody else from the office had been free to go, Rikke had been offered expenses for a travelling companion to accompany her on the trip. I had not realised previously that Denmark had such close ties with Greenland, but looking into it after reading Rikke’s letter I discovered that Greenland had once been a Danish colony and although it now had Home Rule it was still part of the Danish Kingdom and was networked into the Danish economy for most of its business links. The company that Rikke worked for had a long track record of environmental consultancy work in Greenland, and Rikke had now reached a level within the company that placed her as a reliable representative on site visits such as this. She had been to the site on two previous occasions with senior colleagues from the company, but this was her first trip as the senior (or only) representative. I could tell from the tone of her letter that she really did not want to make the trip alone, so I agreed to go with her.

I knew nothing about Greenland, but I thought there might be some special preparations or equipment needed and I knew that one question would lead to another, so rather than write a letter back to Rikke I telephoned her that night. As we talked about the plans, and it became clear that I might have more questions, Rikke said: “why don’t we e-mail?” She had never picked up on my comments about e-mail when I told her about Sandra’s computer or the fact that I had started talking to Dave by e-mail, but she said that she had started using it for work and although she did not have a computer at home she could talk to me about the Greenland trip from her work computer. Rikke was very methodical, and it made sense that she should divide her life up in this way. Certain things for one room, certain things for another room. Certain messages by one route, other messages by a different route. Work, home. Friends, strangers. The search for her daughter, everything else. I think that after Yulia’s death I was the only person who spanned several of Rikke’s categories. I was a friend, but I was also party to at least some of what was going on in her search for her daughter. I was part of her non-professional life, but now I was becoming involved in a tiny way in a part of her work.

Thinking back over the different situations in which I had known Rikke, I could see that she had been different in each setting. In Aberdeen with Yulia, in Aberdeen after Yulia, In Copenhagen preoccupied with her daughter, in Oxford just spending time with me at Dave’s flat. And when I flew out to Copenhagen for the trip to Greenland, the Rikke that met me at the airport was another slight variation on all the Rikkes that I had known before. She still had the short-cropped hair, but this was the Rikke of work, in a smart business suit and looking very… I struggled to characterise the look, and then realised, she looked very Scandinavian. “I thought you might not recognise me” she smiled. She gave me a hug, and I had the strange feeling of homecoming that sometimes occurs when we see again a friend or relative who we used to see a lot but who we  have spent time away from. I had known Rikke a long time by now, and she had been part of the background of my life whilst many things had happened. At least one of the monsters in my heart was the same as one that was in hers. It suddenly seemed right to say “Of course I recognise you. I will always recognise you.” She kissed my cheek and took my arm, and we walked together to take the bus into the city.

Rikke no longer lived on Vesterbrogade. Now she had what we called a “real job” she had moved to a nicer apartment on Havnegade, looking out across the water. From this new place the bars around the corner were more salubrious than the one we used to frequent at Vesterbrogade, and we were within a few minutes walk of the smart but tourist-filled restaurants of Nyhavn, and beyond that the Amalie Gardens on the waterfront and the long promenade out towards the castle and The Little Mermaid. In the evening, after we had eaten, we took that long walk and shared each others news. We had not seen each other since Rikke was in Oxford after Yulia’s funeral, so there was a lot of catching up to do, and then we had to start planning for Greenland. “But that can wait until tomorrow” said Rikke as we walked, and she patted my arm as she held it. “We can talk about Greenland tomorrow.” We walked in silence for a while as dusk started to fall and the first lights came on. And then I said: “You have never told me your daughter’s name.”

For a moment Rikke continued to walk in silence. I carried on: “Whenever you mention her, you call her your daughter but you never use her name.” Rikke said: “I never know what name I should use. The name I gave her was disapproved of by almost everybody that I knew, including my mother, and especially by the father and his family. When they took her away, I am sure that they will have given her a new name, and even while she was with me only Yulia and I called her by her real name. Everybody else used some nickname or other. I doubt that my daughter remembers her real name. I have no idea what she is called.” We continued in silence for another while, up along Larsens Plads and into Nordre Toldbod. We stood at the railings for a moment looking out at the water. I said: “What is her real name, the name that you gave her?” Rike hesitated, and then said: “I called her Yulia, spelt the Russian way, like our Yulia.” As she said “our Yulia” she looked at me, but neither of us spoke and the tide ran out into the darkness.

The phrase turned over in my mind: “our Yulia”. Like a shared secret; a shared fragment of the past, joining the two of us together, me and Rikke. Both of us had been in love with her. We met by spending time together with her in that kitchen in Aberdeen, and we lost her together and the day that we walked back from the station and sat in the art gallery. But more than that, Rikke’s expression as she said “our Yulia” and looked at me was a recognition that I, as well as she, had suffered that loss, but also a suggestion that she had known all along, before I did and more than I did, how much Yulia would mean, and now had meant to me. I remembered Rikke’s expression in the kitchen in Aberdeen as she watched me with Yulia, and the expression said: you will love this girl, I know you will. And I remembered all the months and years since I saw Yulia, and was living my mixed up life in Oxford, and knew now that Rikke had been thinking all along: one day you will realise how much you miss her. And then at the moment of Yulia’s death, as I was writing to her for the last time it came true. And now, leaning on the railings at Nordre Toldbod, Rikke’s expression said: now you understand; now we both know; now she has become our Yulia.

CHAPTER 23

The bridge that Rikke’s company had been commissioned to inspect was at a place called Kangerlussuaq, which is at the head of a long fjord on the west coast of Greenland just above the Arctic Circle, on that strip of land between the ice sheet to the east and the ocean to the west. Kangerlussuaq used to be the site of an American Air Base but at the time I was there with Rikke the airport had been transformed into a civilian operation and served as the main point of arrival for international flights into Greenland. Feeder flights then ferried travellers on to smaller airfields around the country. There were no roads between any of the towns. The sea was frozen for large parts of the year. Transport was a challenge. The airport was really the only reason for Kangerlussuaq to exist. There are not many sites in Greenland with enough flat land to build a long runway. Even at Kangerlussuaq the runway was barely long enough to make it easy to land without burning out the brakes. The sole function of the settlement at Kangerlussuaq was to service the airport and the facilities associated with it. Later on, the place would become important as a scientific centre, but the facilities there when Rikke and I stepped off the plane were limited. The total population was only a few hundred.

Our accommodation was a twin room in what was officially the “Hotel” but was in fact just an extension to the airport terminal building. Few people ever came specifically to stay in Kangerlussuaq, but accommodation was necessary for the many occasions when the flight from Denmark brought travellers in but local weather conditions prevented flights going out to Sisimiut or Ilulissat and so the travellers were held at the airport pending their onward connections. When we arrived the weather was good, flights were all running, and the prefabricated units that made up the single storey hotel extensions were deserted. Good weather here in early September means clear skies and rapidly falling temperatures. The edge of the ice sheet was just visible about twenty miles away on the horizon, and the cold wind drifting in from that direction hinted at much deeper cold to come as winter fell in. 

Rikke’s mission was to talk to several local people about issues connected to the possible rebuilding of a bridge that led across a river that ran through Kangerlussuaq into the fjord. The river was fed by meltwater from the ice sheet, and prone to occasional floods that had, over the years, weakened its foundations. Engineers would be making technical recommendations later on, but Rikke’s job was to identify any additional concerns that would be known to locals but which might be missed by a standard engineering survey. And so we went to meet a number of people with impressive sounding titles. I was especially pleased with the title of the first man we met, who was the “Lufthavnschef” - the Airport Chief. Rikke spoke to everybody seriously and at length while I, with my elementary Danish, listened politely but struggled to understand what was being said. During the afternoon of the second day of interviews we were in one of the little prefabricated houses that were kept off the frozen ground on short stilts, talking to a man called Axel, whose job I was a little unclear about, but who seemed to be involved in recording the water levels in the river. My attention had drifted as I was unable to follow the conversation, but Rikke turned to me and spoke in English. “Axel has been telling me how his wife found her sister, from whom she had been separated for many years, using the internet”. Axel spoke just a little English but tried to join in: “My wife. The internet”. His wife was at work, so could not tell us her story, but Axel invited us to come back in the evening for a meal and to talk with his wife. Rikke protested that we could not impose on them, but Axel insisted that it would be a rare treat to be able to spend time with somebody new. “We do not meet new people here these days” he said. Stepping out of his house into the bleakening Arctic autumn afternoon I could understand why that might be. This was not a place that one would choose casually to live in.

Axel’s wife was part Dane, part Greenlander. Her father had been a Danish builder who settled in Greenland for several years after the war. Her mother, a native Greenlander, had been a schoolteacher whose new school was being built by a team of Danish builders. After the school was built and the builders moved on, one builder stayed behind and married the school teacher. They had two daughters. As they grew up, one daughter dreamed of the world her father described that he had left behind in Denmark. Parks, farms, trees, and the life of the city. The other daughter dreamed of the old days that her mother described from when she had been a girl. Traditional Greenlandic culture, living with the land, telling the old stories. When their mother died, their father moved back to Denmark and one daughter moved with him. The other daughter stayed in Greenland to work in remote areas recording and preserving the ancient traditions. There was no postal service to remote areas in Greenland in those days, and they lost contact. Twenty years later, the daughter who moved to Denmark had married a man called Axel, and his work called them back to Greenland, to live at the air base at Kangerlussuaq. This daughter had given up hope of finding her sister again, but at Kangerlussuaq she had access to the internet for the first time and she started to search. At first she searched for her sister by name and found nothing. Then she searched for everything that there was about the preservation of traditional Greenlandic culture. She found an article that mentioned a woman from the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk, the capital, who had worked for many years travelling to remote settlements and collecting stories about the old times. The article did not give the woman’s name. Axel’s wife had telephoned the museum to ask who the woman was, and whether she might be able to help locate her sister, and she found that she was speaking to her sister. I missed many of the details of the story, because Axel spoke little English and his wife none. Rikke was translating key points for me, but I could tell that she was transfixed not by the story of Axel’s wife and her sister, but by the parallels with her own situation. She was searching for a lost daughter, but had not been searching with the help of the new and expanding internet.

When Rikke and I talked through the sisters’ story back in our room that night, and Rikke filled in the parts of the story that I had missed, we were both struck not only by the opportunity offered by the internet to go searching for things that have been lost, but by the subtle ways that searches might be constructed. Rikke’s daughter could have any name. She could be living anywhere. All we knew for sure was her age, but even that could have been disguised with a forged document somewhere as part of the deception to keep the girl hidden. “Yulia” I kept correcting myself. I wanted to get out of the habit of calling her “your daughter”. I wanted to use that name. I wanted the name to have a person to go with it again. And that person was part of my Yulia, but also a part of my Rikke. There had been no sign, no clue for ten years. If Rikke’s mother had ever known anything about what had happened she had repeatedly vowed that she did not. After ten years of searching Rikke had made no progress, but here was a new lead, or, at least, a new tool to help in the search. We lay together side by side on top of one of the beds, hand in hand, both excited to be talking about different ways in which we might develop this new opportunity. Searching for one teenager, when all we know is their age and the approximate colour of their skin, hair and eyes, when they could be anywhere, doing anything, under any name, should not have given us the optimism that it did, but for that night in Kangerlussuaq, we were optimistic. I had never seen that expression on Rikke’s face before.

After our few days in Greenland I had to return almost immediately to Oxford. I had some work for which the deadline was approaching, so much as I would have preferred to stay longer with Rikke at her new place on Havnegade, I collected my things and transferred back to England the next day. Rikke moved forward with our internet plan astonishingly fast, and by the time I got back to Harley Road there was an e-mail from her saying that she now had the internet at Havnegade. Finally, I thought, the new world has come into its own. I wondered whether to walk across to Christ Church and tell Sandra that her prediction had come true, and Rikke and I were now communicating by e-mail. It was a sign of how many things seemed to be changing that I decided against a walk to Christ Church. I opened up the internet and looked at the search screen. Where would one begin a search like this? I had no idea. I changed my mind, shut down the computer and picked up the telephone. “Dave? Drink?” So I walked across to Christ Church after all, but I went straight to Dave’s rooms, and I went in through the front gate into Tom Quad, not through the Canterbury Gate.

When I called on Dave I really wanted to talk through with him everything that had happened. I didn’t tell him everything in my life, for example I had carefully not mentioned what had happened with Clara after the evening when Dave had invited me to join his group for a meal and drinks. Some things are best left unmentioned. Not forgotten, but unmentioned. But I did like to run ideas past him, share new problems, and let him shine that clear light of friendly common sense that he shone so well. However, before I could begin with my story, he began with his own. “I’m really glad you called” he said “I didn’t want to disturb you on your first night back but I was going to ring you in the morning for a chat. You’ll never guess what’s happened; you’ll never guess what they want me to do!” He did not give me a chance to guess before he told me. His project in Chile had been such a success, not only in terms of his research but in terms of developing links between the institutions, that he had been asked whether he would like to return to Chile on a more long-term basis to establish and lead what made sound almost like an outpost of Oxford University of the campus where he had been working in Chile. He would still be involved in the same research, but mainly he would be trying to establish more formal and more substantial collaborative operations between the two Universities. It was a huge opportunity. He was going to do it.

“Chile? But to stay forever?” I said, incredulous. “Well,” he replied, “not necessarily forever, but for a couple of years at least until the new centre gets established, and longer if it goes well and if I want to stay. They are calling it a “long term secondment. But here’s the thing.” He looked serious. “This is an opportunity for you as well if you want it. You’ve already shown that you can stand in for me. They are going to need someone to do that again. But this time it would be a long-term job. Not necessarily permanent, but long term, and it could turn into something permanent if you wanted it to and if Chile works out for me.”

“So I could be you?”

“You could be me”.

“I could never be you”.

“Yes you could, but better still you can be you, but doing this job, in this flat again, if you want.”

Sometimes things come back again just before they disappear for good. Perhaps it works the other way around as well, I thought. Perhaps things come for a short visit, then go away again for a while before they come back to stay. Perhaps that little dream six months in Dave’s flat before was just the taster. Then it went away. Now perhaps it was coming back. I did not hesitate for a second. I said “OK, when will you be leaving?”

He raised his glass, and I raised mine back.

“To Chile!”

“To Chile!”

CHAPTER 24

It is well known that time does not always pass at the same rate. Sometimes we feel it falling past like rain, sometimes like snow. Sometimes it stands still and we can walk around it as we would walk round an exhibit in a museum, considering a moment from every angle while it is at rest. Sometimes different people together in the same place can feel time moving at different speeds. If the difference becomes to great the two people lose sight of each other; lose the sound of each other. Creatures that live faster, lighter lives than ours become invisible to us, and we to them. When we are just a short way apart, when our times are close but not exactly matched, the difference is like an invisible but impenetrable barrier that keeps our lives from touching although they meet.

Another autumn and much of another winter came and went as Dave made ready for his move, and it was the start of Trinity Term before I moved back into his rooms at Christ Church. This time, though, they really were my rooms. Although Dave was officially on a secondment, it was seen as being such a long term role that it was treated as being to all purposes permanent. It was my name, not his, on the list of occupants of Staircase One. All the empty spaces from where Dave’s things had been removed were now mine to fill. The college furniture and fittings were still there, but when a person moves out of a place, even a place that has its own things, they leave a lot of spaces. Mr Donovan was still in post and much the same as ever if a little older and, I noticed, just a little slower. He remained a source of all wisdom, but his trousers were less sharply creased than I remembered, and he started his duties just a little later in the day. I saw him less around the college and the town, and hardly ever after dark.

When my first tutorial groups arrived, I was pleased to get back into the grand adventure of encouraging them to learn, but missed my old original group of four. They had graduated and moved on, although Dave had told me that Clara, the one who should have been a princess, the one who I did not tell Dave, or anybody, that I had kissed on the little stone balcony leaning out over Christ Church Meadow in the dark, was still in Oxford working as a research assistant in the Pitt Rivers Museum. I had meant to look her up and call, but I never had. Sandra said that Dave was wrong, and that Clara was in Japan. Of Cool Johnny and the others Dave had left no news. He had said: “the new lot will be just the same, you’ll see. And the next lot after that. There are only a few types of student, and after a few years you see the same types coming back with new faces. There will be another Johnny, another Clara. In the end you’ll start to get them mixed up in your memory, and some of them you will forget. You will see the name on a list and ask yourself - who was that? Which one was Matthew Alexander? And that girl who really did go on to be a Princess - what was she called? And if you don’t happen to see those names on a list they will be gone.”

Sometimes, though, we do remember. We take souvenirs. It might be a photograph or a piece of jewellery. The danger then is that in the end all we really remember is the souvenir. The memory that we think we have is really just a memory created from the photograph. Sometimes the souvenir might itself be a memory, and although the memory of a moment or an event will change and become untrue over time, the memory of a touch or of a texture never will. The memory of touch persists, because at the moment of the touch time was moving at exactly the same rate for both people. When I said this to Dave I did not mention the texture that I remembered of Clara’s lips, or how I felt in her knuckles and fingers the maps of Pacific Ocean and sky that I had felt before in another girl’s hand in Aberdeen. And even as I had remembered those textures and those hands my memory was drawn back to the feeling of Rikke’s hand on my arm at Nordre Toldbod. I realised that the invisible film between us had dissolved at that point. We had been in exactly the same time.

On the night that I moved finally into my new rooms, again, in Christ Church I e-mailed Rikke as I did most days to tell her I was there. I said it felt bigger now that it was all mine. I hesitated for only a moment before writing “It would be big enough for two”. It was late, and when she did not reply I could not know for sure whether she had not read the mail or had read it and chosen not to say anything in return. I decided to go out for a walk through town, only as an excuse to delay the moment when I should turn off the computer and go to bed. I would just give Rikke a little while to reply, if she was still up.

In all the places I had lived, I had always liked to take many short walks throughout the day. In Aberdeen I used to walk out along the river to the beach. In Oxford in the past I used to walk a lot across Port Meadow and north along the Thames. Now that I was at Christ Church I started to find new routes to suit the different times of day. Even when I walked alone, I found now that I took a different companion with me as I walked. Who was beside me would depend on where I walked. As I walked a night time circuit of the quad, or through to Peckwater and back, it would be Clara at my side and we would talk about the monsters, great or small, imaginary or real, that we liked to tell ourselves we had hidden in our heart. If I walked out further, perhaps down to the river and then along the tow path, it would be the old Rollei who pointed to things I had not seen, or described in ways that I had not expected the things that I had seen. But these were companions from the past, long gone, and in keeping them with me I was slowly making them become me, absorbing them into myself so that the memories of them faded and started to dissolve. When I walked in the darkness, and heard the sound of the sea, even if it was really the sound of distant traffic or the wind in the trees, it was Yulia that I walked with, proclaiming her great map of life on the Esplanade, but when I turned to look at her, just as when I threw my memory back to that first moment when she came to the door in Aberdeen, I can no longer see her face.

As I walked back through the passageway towards Meadow Buildings, deep in those thoughts, I almost bumped a figure walking the other way in the half light: it was Sandra. For a moment we were both startled, and she said “I just knocked on your door, but I thought you must have gone to bed. “No I was just out for a walk. Hello!” “Hello! I thought it was today you were moving back. Sorry it’s late but I just wanted to come and say, well, hello!” “It’s not that late. Come on back. We can have my Housewarming drink together.” Sandra smiled and briefly lifted herself onto her toes, turned with me and we walked together back to my flat. “Do you have tea?” she asked, and I stopped abruptly. I did have tea. I had bought tea, not tea bags, especially when I did shopping to set up the new flat. I had not thought of it at the time, but of course I had bought tea. I said “Of course I have tea. You don’t do tea bags, after all, do you?” She laughed “No indeed I don’t do tea bags. Well remembered.” “Of course I remember”.

As we walked into the flat, Sandra noticed straight away that I had a new laptop. It was open on the desk, wide awake and casting a pale light into the corner of the room. Quickly, I noticed that there was no reply from Rikke waiting for me, and was surprised by my own reaction. Half an hour ago I was anxious to get a reply, but suddenly now I was pleased to shut the laptop lid knowing that there was no reply, and that probably Rikke had gone to bed before getting my last message. It could wait. That was something to think about again tomorrow.

Sandra had walked straight through to the kitchen and, filling the kettle, called out “I’m loving what you’ve done with the place”. I followed her through and could barely see her behind the boxes piled up on the table and around the room. “I’m unpacking!” I said. “Yes”, she replied, “but everything seems to be in the kitchen”. “Well it will have to be the comfy chairs, for us, then.” “OK” she beamed and swept past me into the sitting room, bouncing down onto one of the big settees with a flourish like a little girl dressed up in grown-up clothes and staying up late after the party. “I’m exhausted” she said, and allowed herself to topple sideways on the settee, kicking her shoes off and swinging her feet onto the chair in a single fluid movement. It was unusual to see her indoors with her hair still down. She usually put it up as a deeply ingrained habit as she entered a building, and let it down when she went out side. It always seemed to me to be the opposite of what a woman would do, but when I had said this to her once, Sandra had said “Well that shows how much you know!” and we had left it at that.

“I’ll make your tea” I said, and walked back through to the kitchen. I heard her murmur something behind me but the sound was drowned out by the boiling kettle. I turned it off and called back “What?” but there was no reply. I spooned tea into the pot, poured on water and carried the pot back through to the front room. Sandra’s eyes were closed, and her hair had fallen across her face. She was dressed, as usual, in brown woollen tights, dark skirt, white blouse, brown jumper. I sat down beside her on the settee and said “Nobody can fall asleep that quickly”, but she did not reply. She really was asleep. Quietly, I moved the strand of hair from across her eyes as she would have done herself had she been awake, and I looked at her sleeping face. Relaxed, without either the stern expression that she adopted when she was out and about around college or the quirky grins and ironic laughs that scurried across her face in conversation, she was quite, quite beautiful. I had never really noticed that before. It is funny the things that we sometimes fail to notice.

CHAPTER 25

When I got up the next morning, Sandra was gone. After she had fallen asleep I had sat with her for half an hour, dozing in and out of sleep myself, before going to my bed. I did not hear her leave. She had neatly folded the blanket that I had laid over her, and left a little sticky-note on it saying “Thank you. Good morning. You still owe me a cup of tea!”

I opened up the laptop. Still no reply from Rikke. This time, again, I was disappointed rather than relieved. Mr Donovan arrived with his brushes and bin-bags. I made coffee and started to negotiate with the contents of the boxes piled up in the kitchen. Since I had been in these rooms before I seemed to have accumulated a lot more of what Sandra called “stuff”. Books, maps, letters, Records that were becoming obsolete, CDs which were not yet at that stage, videos (becoming obsolete) and DVDs (not yet). Looking at the half emptied boxes it struck me that, like Sandra, I had accumulated a lot of table lamps over the years. Also a lot of pot plants, mostly given to me as leaving presents, repeatedly, by my former house mate the school teacher from Harley Road. I spent the morning distributing all the “stuff” to appropriate cupboards, walls shelves and surfaces, periodically checking my e-mail. About mid-morning there was a knock at the door and I shouted “Come in!” I was folding cardboard boxes in the kitchen, and as I walked out into the hallway to see who had arrived I heard Sandra’s bright “Hello?”

“Oh my Gosh” she said, “I’m so sorry about last night. I don’t know what happened. Everything was fine then I just closed my eyes for a second and that was it. I woke up and the sun was coming up.” It was late” I said “and I must have been extraordinarily boring!” She punched me on the arm as she pushed past me into the kitchen. “Still loving the new look” she said as she picked her way through half empty boxes and scrumpled paper packaging, piles of books, and all the rest. “You really do have too much stuff, you know. You need to simplify your life”. Just as she said that, the computer in the other room made a little beep to tell me that mail had arrived. “You are absolutely right” I said. “I really need sorting out”. Sandra peered around a pile of empty boxes at me, with a little grin. “I’ll sort you out” she said. “Not today though, you’re on your own. I’m going up north to see my parents for the weekend. When I get back I expect to see this place ship shape and sorted out!” She did the little bounce onto her toes, and with her chin pointed up in what I knew she thought was the style of a strict school teacher, she strutted towards the door. As she passed she reached up planted a soft kiss on my cheek. “I’ll see you on Monday” she said, and was gone. As the door closed behind her I noticed that the frame had not been painted since I was last there. I was almost as though the door, even the inside of the door, was part of the outside world.

I went over to the laptop. There was a message from Rikke. She said she was at work, and told me what she was doing. She did not mention my previous message until right at the end, when she said: “it would be nice to see Oxford again and to see you in your ‘new’ flat now that it is really yours. If it is big enough for two, can I come and visit? I have time off saved up, so I can come anytime. If you are not busy, I could come for next week. I can finally meet your friend Sandra, perhaps.”

What was it that Sandra had said? I need to simplify my life. Sandra was like Dave in being able to see unerringly to the heart of every issue. And now, suddenly, she was at the heart of every issue for me. I did not know whether she would be able to check her e-mails from her parents’ house, or if she might still be in college, but I e-mailed her just in case. “Guess what? Rikke is coming for a visit next week. You will finally be able to meet her.” I did not get a reply, so I assumed Sandra had already set off. I still did not get a reply that evening, so I assumed she was not checking her e-mails while she was away.

Rikke arrived on the express airport shuttle on Monday around noon. It was raining, and we spent the afternoon in the flat. I had unpacked and sorted all my things, and Rikke walked through the rooms commenting here and there on books or records that she noticed, on the spaces on some walls that called out for a big painting or a wall-hanging, and on the way that the rooms were so different now that they were me, not Dave. Not just mine, she said, but me.

“I have never really seen you like this, in your own place” she said. “I have never seen you so…” she struggled for the right word… “so settled down”.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise: “I don’t feel settled down!”

“Oh, you do. There is something different now; you are different even if you cannot tell. You seem less lost than you have always seemed before. Before, you have always seemed as though you were living in a strange place, but here you seem as though you are just living, and the place is not strange. You seem now as if you are at home. I have never seen you here before.”

We were in the sitting room, one of us on each of the huge settees. I looked around and thought about what Rikke said. Was I at home? “I suppose I am” I said. But looking around, although I could understand what Rikke must mean, I still felt that the picture, the story, this sense of home was incomplete. “But it doesn’t feel finished, yet.” I said.

“I don’t know that it is ever finished” said Rikke. “We are never finished, are we?”

She looked out of the window. It had stopped raining. “Let’s go for a walk before it gets dark” she said “and then we can settle in all hyggelig for the night”. I loved that word, hyggelig, that the Danes have. It means, roughly translated, cosy, but it carries much more baggage and implication than the English word. It means happy, warm, safe, with friends. Thinking about what Rikke had just said, it occurred to me that hyggelig also had an implication of what, in the broadest sense, we mean by “home”. I moved to stand behind Rikke and looked past her to the misty meadow outside. I placed my two hands on her shoulders and kissed the back of her head. “You know that I love you, don’t you?” I said.

“Yes, of course.” Rikke kept her face to the window, and did not turn to look at me. “I know. And I love you. But you know, don’t you, that this is not my home?” She turned past me, keeping her eyes down, and we left the flat in silence. There is a long avenue, lined with trees, that runs from Christ Church down to the river. Crows called from the tree tops. A girl in a blue track suit was jogging up the track, probably returning from the boat sheds and an afternoon practice. Dusk was falling and mist was rising from the wet ground. Rikke and I made a meandering path around the puddles that had formed along the avenue. We each walked with our hands in our pockets, each with our own thoughts, until we reached the river. Then Rikke said: “After we went to Greenland, when we came back to Copenhagen, I nearly asked you to stay.”

“I would have said yes”.

“I know. That is why I could not ask. Sometimes we have to make decisions for each other. We have to look after each other.”

She took my arm in hers and looked at me in the way I remember she used to look at Yulia in Aberdeen, as though she was hiding a great secret to keep her safe; hiding a knowledge of the future so that life could carry on. Quiet expressions of sadness and comforting. She looked up at me and said:

 “We are each other’s guardian angels, aren’t we?”

She patted my arm and pulled me onwards along the path beside the river. The path looped up around the meadow towards the botanical gardens and back to Christ Church, bringing us right past the windows of my rooms at the end of the Meadows Building. We had left lamps on, and from outside as dusk gathered into darkness, the room looked warm and cosy. Rikke said “You know, hyggelig really means with friends. I would very much like to meet your friends. You should call and see if Sandra is free to come round. We should meet.

“Yes,” I said. “You should meet”.

CHAPTER 26

Sometimes, things work out better than you expect. Although Rikke and Sandra had not met, and had each been building a picture of the other in their imaginations based only on what they heard from me, and although my own relationship with each of them was coloured and conflicted by my relationship with the other, the atmosphere as we sat around the big kitchen table and drank coffee while pots simmered and ovens baked was, exactly, hyggelig. It did not seem as though they had only met that day. There was no evident tension about the overlaps between our separate lives. When Sandra had knocked on the door my arms were full of wet plates and the kettle was boiling and something was spilling over on top of the cooker, so Rikke had run to open the door. It had taken them longer to make their way through to the kitchen than I expected, and when I put things down, turned things off, dried my hands and stepped out into the hall I found that Rikke and Sandra had gone straight through into the sitting room and were together on the big settee, deep in conversation. Rikke held both of Sandra’s hands in hers, but as I came through the door they pulled apart a little and she let her hands drop. They both looked across at me and Rikke said “we were warning each other about you”. I could tell from both their expressions that they were not about to tell me what they had really been saying. Whatever it was, they had set each others minds at rest more effectively than any introduction by me was likely to have done.

Over dinner Rikke explained to Sandra some of the background to her search for her missing daughter, and told us both about her efforts to search the internet using the ideas we had got from talking to Axel the river-level measurer in Greenland and his wife. Rikke had initially tried searching for every possible combination of her daughter’s real name, other names in Rikke’s and Yulia’s families, and names that her new family might have created based on their own background. But it was a huge and futile effort. Every search returned either millions of possible leads or none at all. Rikke still had not fallen upon a piece of luck as Axel’s wife had done.  Sandra listened to Rikke’s story with deep, intense concentration. I thought that this must be how she is with her work. She was treating Rikke’s search as a research problem. She was trying to formulate a research strategy, to piece together a research design. Sandra the literary scholar was joining the team. Rikke sensed it too, and reached across the table to place her hand on Sandra’s, saying “It is starting to seem that it is impossible, but I cannot stop”.

“No,” said Sandra, “nothing is impossible. Eventually, everything shows up on the internet if you know where to look. We just need to work out about where to look. My research is all about finding subtle links between different texts, and this is exactly the same sort of problem. We need to find something that will link the thing we cannot see to something else that we can see. We then use the thing we can see to lead us back to the thing that has been lost. We cannot see your daughter, and even if we saw her we would not recognise that it was her. But if she were to create something that only she could create, or touch something in a way that only she could do, then if we sensed the touch we would know that she was there.” Sandra at this point was talking almost to herself, thinking out loud. Neither Rikke nor I really understood what she had in mind, but we did not reply.

For the next hour Sandra quizzed Rikke on tiny details of the years that she had her daughter, young Yulia, living with her as a child; when really they were both children. What stories did she tell her about the past? What dreams for the future did she share with her? Rikke repeated the stories that I had heard from her and from the Older Yulia, our Yulia before. The little girl’s great grandparents in Smolensk before the war. Alyona’s dream of the Dance. Juliette who could have been the star of Moscow but chose to be French and later gave Rikke her Danish name; chose for her to be Danish. Rikke repeated all these stories but here around the table in Christ Church, with Sandra taking notes, the stories were not a rolled out map of the stars, not a flag of history and dreams. They were a role call, a catalogue, a list that Sandra recorded without passion, only with concern. As I watched her, the professional, at work, I understood that this was really a new step in Rikke’s search. Rikke had been searching with her heart, but the heart does not always see clearly, in spite of what St Exupery tried to teach me. Sometimes, when we are searching for things that are visible in the world, we need to search with our eyes. People say that tears can blur the vision of our eyes, but tears can block entirely the vision of our hearts.

At the end of the week, Rikke returned to Copenhagen. I knew that I would visit her there again, and that she would visit me here, but our visits would always be just visits. Sometimes it is enough to stand close together and not touch.

Rikke continued her searches, repeating the same inquiries, contacting the same embassies, hoping that something might change. A new name might appear on a list. Some young woman might have registered an inquiry about her mother, whose name she did not know but whose family came, long ago, from Russia. But nothing changed.

Sandra commenced her own line of inquiry, and approached the problem from a different direction. Based on everything she knew about the child’s early life with Rikke, Sandra searched for somebody else who was telling that same story. She searched for stories about mysterious grandparents who had left Smolensk after the war. She searched for stories of broken dreams in the Paris Ballet. She searched for stories of lost childhoods on the Danish coast and she cross-referenced, correlated and coordinated all her  She trawled her contacts throughout the academic world in Europe, Asia and the Americas for people who had heard other people talking about yet other people who were investigating such stories. But nothing came.

Sometimes, things don’t immediately work out as well as you had hoped they might. Sometimes, things take a long, long time. Sometimes, they never happen at all.
While you are waiting, other things happen. Things change. Things move on. Most of us grow gradually less young. Time passes, at its many different rates. Sometimes, eventually, things that have been lost try to make themselves become found again.

CHAPTER 27

“I found her!”
“What?”
I was woken with a start as Sandra had let herself into the flat and burst into my bedroom as I slept.
I covered my eyes as the light flicked on “What time is it?”
“Two o’clock. Sorry.” She flicked the light back off. “I think I found Yulia. Get up!” She flicked the light back on and went through into the sitting room, turning on the lamps and opening up the laptop. As I pulled on a jumper I heard the kettle being filled, and when I came into the room Sandra was at the desk, with the laptop turned round to face me. “Look. You look at this. I’ll make tea.”

Sandra had opened a page from the University of Chicago announcing the papers that would be delivered at a conference on “Oral Histories of Childhood” the following summer. Sandra came back with two mugs: one tea, for her; one black coffee, for me. She leant over the laptop and clicked a link to bring up the summary of one of the papers, saying “Look at this”. We read it together in silence.

“Julia Betteridge, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, UK. Memory and imagination in childhood reconstructions of family oral histories. Children who grow up in families with strong oral history traditions have been assumed to inherit and potentially transmit accurate reconstructions of recalled events. However, where oral histories are complex, children’s’ ability to process factual information may be overwhelmed by their propensity to construct imaginary contexts. This study uses an analysis of the author’s own childhood case history to assess this hypothesis…”

The summary then proceeded to retell in all its essential details the story that Rikke had told us about her daughter’s early life, but from the girl’s own perspective, written after twenty years of being assured by her real family that all these things were dreams and imaginings. The summary included references to the “imagined” childhood on a beach, the confused and contradictory matters of whether a grandmother had perhaps been a great ballerina in Smolensk, and the dream of being told that her grandparents had been killed in a terrible accident. It was from these details that Sandra’s searches had pulled up this page. I read to the end of the paper’s summary: “It is concluded that childhood memories are extremely unreliable in children how have experienced substantial displacements such as transnational migrations. In such cases, reality, genuine oral history and false imagined memories can become inextricably conflated, and the child becomes an entirely unreliable reporter of their own history.”

We read it several times, through and through, in total silence.

“So, if this is her,” Sandra said, “she thinks that her memories of Rikke are false, and that the family who took her away from Rikke are her real family. She must have been told that they moved between countries when she was young, and she attributes her false memories to a child’s confusion and imagination.” She paused for a minute, with a professionally critical expression on her face. “Well if that’s her conclusion, her research is evidently deeply flawed!”

My main worry at this point was not about the flawed research strategy of this Julia Betteridge. I said: “What are we going to tell Rikke?”

“Are we going to tell Rikke?” said Sandra.

“We have to, surely?”

“No,” said Sandra, quite firmly, “I really don’t think that would be the best approach. Rikke would certainly want to contact her immediately, and Julia would not believe in her. It would be a disaster. Even if Rikke didn’t scare her off, we can’t let Julia’s family know that we, Rikke, has found her. Think about it, they have been hiding from Rikke for twenty years. We have to do this carefully, and for now it’s best if Rikke isn’t involved. And the only way she will stay not involved is if she doesn’t know.”

“Honesty is always the best policy.”

“Shock, engendering disbelief and mistrust, is rarely the best strategy.”

“I will not be able to keep it secret,” I said. “I won’t be able to lie. I can’t hide this from her.”

“It won’t be for long. I’ll work quickly, I promise. I’ll contact this Julia tomorrow. Leave it to me, then it won’t be you who is hiding things from Rikke.”

Sandra said that she would work quickly, but she also chose to be subtle, and subtlety takes time.

CHAPTER 28

I know it may seem mean, but I am not posting the last chapter here in the public online version just yet. If you want to see it, I am happy to give a copy to everybody who sponsored me. Otherwise, the full copy will be available somewhere after I have gone through it and tidied it up.

Why have I not put up the last chapter? Partly because I am thinking of extending the last chapter that I wrote and developing the story further, so I don't want to "close it off" publicly yet. If anybody does want to see it, and wants to read the whole thing in this "original" state, I'll be happy to give a copy of the last chapter to anybody who sponsored me!