The Keeper of Lost Things(15)
That evening, Laura picked at her supper in front of the television. She wasn’t really hungry and she wasn’t really watching the flickering screen. Giving up on both, she unlocked the door and stood out on the cramped balcony of her flat looking up at the inky sky. She wondered how many other people in the world were looking up at the same vast sky at that exact moment. It made her feel small and very much alone.
CHAPTER 10
The midnight summer sky was a watercolor wash of darkness with a glitter of tiny stars thrown across it. The air was still warm as Anthony walked down the path toward the rose garden, inhaling the rich perfume of the treasured blooms that he had planted all those years ago for Therese, when they first moved into the house. He had been to the post box, his footfalls echoing softly through the empty streets of the village. The letter posted was the final full stop to his story. His solicitor would pass it on to Laura when the time came. And now he was ready to leave.
It had been a Wednesday when they had moved into the house. Therese had found it.
“It’s perfect!” she had said.
And it was. They had met only months earlier, but they had not needed an “approved” passage of time to bind them to one another. The attraction was instant; illimitable like the sky that hung above him now. At first it had frightened him, or rather the fear of losing it had. It was surely too potent, too perfect to last. But Therese had absolute faith. They had found each other and that was exactly as it was meant to be. Together they were sacrosanct. She was named after St. Therese of the Roses and so he planted the garden as a gift to her. He spent October in Wellingtons trenching the ground in the new beds and digging in well-rotted manure while Therese brought him cups of tea and unstinting encouragement. The roses arrived on a dank, foggy November morning, and their fingers, toes, and noses froze as Anthony and Therese spent the day setting out and planting the garden around a perfect patch of lawn. But the washed-out palette that painted the November landscape was rainbow-tinted by the descriptions Therese read aloud from the labels that named every rose. There was pink and fragrant “Albertine” to climb over the trellis archway leading to the sundial; the bloodred velvet “Grand Prix,” the pure white “Marcia Stanhope,” the flushed copper “Gorgeous,” the silvery-pink “Mrs. Henry Morse,” the dark red “étoile de Hollande,” “Mélanie Soupert” with pale yellow petals suffused with amethyst, and the vermilion and old gold of “Queen Alexandra.” At the four corners of the lawn they planted weeping standard roses—“Albéric Barbier,” “Hiawatha,” “Lady Gay,” and “Shower of Gold”—and when it was all done and they stood close together in the spectral drear of a winter twilight, she kissed him softly on the lips and placed something small and round into his cold-bruised hand. It was a picture of St. Therese of the Roses framed in gold metal and glass in the shape of a medallion.
“It was a gift for my first Holy Communion,” she said. “It’s for you, to say thank you for my beautiful garden and to remind you that I will love you forever, no matter what. Promise me you’ll keep it with you always.”
Anthony smiled. “I promise,” he solemnly declared.
Tears scored Anthony’s cheeks once again as he stood alone among the roses on a beautiful summer night. Alone and bereft as he remembered her kiss, her words, and the feel of the medallion pressed into his hand.
He had lost it.
It had been in his pocket as he stood waiting for Therese on the corner of Great Russell Street. But she never came, and by the time he got home that day, he had lost them both. He went back to look for the medallion. He searched the streets and gutters, but he had known that it was a hopeless task. It was as though he had lost her twice. It was the invisible thread that would have connected him to her even after she was gone, but now it was broken along with his promise to her. And so it was that he began to gather other people’s lost things; gather them in and keep them safe, just in case one day, one of them could mend a broken heart, and thus redeem a broken man. But had he done enough? He was about to find out.
The grass was still warm and smelled like hay. Anthony lay down and stretched out his long, dwindled limbs toward the points of an imaginary compass, ready to set his final course. The scent of roses washed over him in waves. He looked up at the boundless ocean of sky above him and picked a star.
CHAPTER 11
She thought he was asleep. Ridiculous, she knew, but the alternative was unthinkable.
Laura had arrived at her usual time and, finding the house empty, assumed that Anthony had gone for his walk. But an insistent unease was tapping on her shoulder. She went to the kitchen, made coffee, and tried to ignore it. But the tapping grew faster, louder, harder. Like her heartbeat. In the garden room, the door to the outside was open and she went out, feeling as though she were walking the plank. Anthony lay covered in rose petals, spread-eagled on the dew-soaked grass. From a distance he could have been asleep, but as she stood over him, there was no such comfort. His once blue eyes, still open, were milky-veiled, and his mouth gaped breathless, hemmed by purpled lips. Her reluctant fingertips brushed his cheek. The tallow skin was cold. Anthony had gone and left behind a corpse.
And now she was alone in the house. The doctor and the funeral directors had come and gone. They had spoken in hushed voices and dealt with death kindly and efficiently. It was their livelihood after all. She found herself wishing that Freddy had been there, but it wasn’t one of his regular days at Padua. She sat at the kitchen table watching another cup of coffee grow cold, her face scorched red and tight by angry tears. This morning her whole world had blown away like feathers in the wind. Anthony and Padua had become her life. She had no idea what she was going to do now. For a second time she was completely lost.