Page 15 of Love Walked In

“Pardon, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, my voice trembling a little.

Mari looked up from the pastel de nata in her hand. “No, it’s fine,” she said quickly. Too quickly? She looked at Graham with raised eyebrows, and he nodded, straightened up, and wandered past me with an easy “Hiya.”

What would it take to have that kind of silent communication, where the twitch of an eyebrow and a nod became sentences and paragraphs? My sisters had it, too, and it always made me feel like I was standing on the other side of a glass window.

“Are you OK?” Mari asked me, her head tilted.

No, I thought. I’m not all right, because when I saw Graham leaning toward you and heard you moan with pleasure, I wished I could shatter that window.

But I barely knew what to do when I got close to someone.

I didn’t share my smiles easily like Graham and Mari did, didn’t wear my confidence like a broken-in leather jacket.

Didn’t have confidence in the first place.

When I moved through the world, I crept instead of swaggered like the two of them did.

Then why was I jealous? Because Mari had given me that bit of quiet insight in the garret, talking about falling-apart books and daydreaming about a storybook London. Because she’d let me hold her while she cried. Because she’d asked me to stay.

“Hello, grandson,” Judith’s warm voice said behind me, and I turned around, grateful for the interruption to my thought spiral. She was carrying a basic ivory-colored archival box under one arm, leaning hard on her stick.

“Hi, Judith,” I said, bending to kiss her cheek and take the box off her at the same time.

“Good lad,” she said, reaching up and patting my cheek. “And hello, Mari,” she said over my shoulder. “I’m so glad to see you’re feeling better. Leo was worried about you.”

Mari raised her eyebrows at me. “Yeah, he’s been really helpful. I appreciated him nursing me when things were really bad.”

“Nursing you?” Judith said to me with a hint of a smile. “Well, isn’t that sweet of him.”

I could see the matchmaking cogs turning inside her head. “It wouldn’t do for an employee to catch pneumonia.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” she said, mischief all over her narrow features. She pointed at the box. “Your mother got that out of the loft for me. Still smells like Alexander’s Cafe Cremes, doesn’t it?”

I put my nose closer to the cardboard. She was right, it gave off the aroma of the cigarillos that Alexander had loved to smoke for half his life.

He’d quit when I was still young, but the sweet, toasted scent drifted through my early memories of him.

I closed my eyes for a second, missing that feeling of being embraced, of knowing that he would make everything all right, no matter what.

All I’d had to do was listen and follow.

“I’m sorry,” Judith said, tight with pain, dragging me back to the present. “I can’t bear the thought of the stairs today, so could we look at these somewhere on this floor?”

“Of course,” I said immediately. Some days her medicine helped more than others.

I led her into the break room, Mari following behind, and placed the box on the tea-stained table.

Judith pulled off the lid, revealing leather-bound photograph albums. When Mari and I lifted all six of them out, loose photographs drifted to the bottom.

Mari brushed her hand over one of the covers. “Dusty,” she said. “No one’s looked at these for a while, I guess?”

“No,” Judith said. “I only remembered yesterday that we had them, and they’re not the kind of thing that David ever wants to look at or talk about. You’ve seen how he can be.”

I sighed. Dad had always treated Judith like an imposition.

He was swift to correct anyone who used the word “stepmother,” snapping back “father’s wife” instead.

Which was in some ways fair, because Dad had been eighteen and she’d been twenty-four when she married Alexander.

Judith was nothing but cordial to Dad, but whenever he spoke to her, he still sounded like that bitterly resentful teenager.

“Bless Alexander,” Judith said briskly, “he took the time to write everyone’s names and the dates, so we should be able to make a timeline.

” She started sorting the loose photographs into piles, telling us names and contexts.

“Some of them he took,” she said. “Some of them I did. And here’s a set of professional ones, from the fiftieth anniversary party. ” She handed me a gold-engraved album.

“It was the seventies, ” Mari said in wonderment, leaning in next to me. When I breathed in, I could smell a burst of ripe mango, an instant dream of white sand and turquoise water.

It was criminal, having shampoo that smelled that delicious.

Mari poked me in the shoulder. “Turn the page.”

“Bossy,” I muttered, hoping she hadn’t noticed me blushing.

“Takes one to know one,” she muttered back.

I snorted, but straightened my face at Judith’s speculative look.

The photographs had a yellow-brown haze over them, like cigarillo smoke had permeated the film.

I flipped through groups of white men talking to each other, recognizing Alan Sillitoe, Keith Waterhouse, Ted Hughes.

Occasionally I saw my teenage father in the background, hands in the pockets of his wide-lapeled suit and expression sulky.

“Were there any authors there who weren’t white men?” Mari asked Judith.

Judith’s mouth twisted. “Yes, but only a few. It was all very much a boys’ club then.

” She reached over and turned the pages.

“Ah, here’s one,” she said, tapping one of the photos.

“Elizabeth Jane Howard. She would have been there as Kingsley Amis’s wife, even though she was an author in her own right.

” She chuckled a little. “She actually kept doing brilliant work long after they divorced, and she wrote her finest novels when she was well into her sixties. Something for the rest of us to remember.”

I leaned in close to study the photograph.

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s silver hair was in a smooth chignon, a striking contrast with her cobalt-blue dress.

In contrast, the young Judith wore a flowing poppy-red caftan revealing quite a bit of cleavage.

Shiny dark brown hair cascaded over her shoulders, her eyeliner was coal-black and Cleopatra-thick, and her pale fingers held a cigarette in a long black holder.

“Wait, that’s you,” Mari said to Judith admiringly. “Damn, you were a fox back in the day. The cigarette holder is fire.”

“Why, thank you,” Judith said, preening a little.

“Though I won’t linger on it so my grandson doesn’t die of embarrassment.

Smoking was such a filthy habit, anyway.

Everything in those days was under a haze of tobacco.

” She shook her head. “But I do miss that red dress. I felt so powerful when I wore it.”

Mari looked again at the photograph. “Who’s he?” she said, tapping the face of a very young man in the background, with dark blond hair that needed a trim and light blue eyes.

Was that a blush on Judith’s cheeks? “That’s Tommy Clifford. Or Cliff Thomas, as he’s known these days.”

Mari and I looked at each other, equally astonished. “I saw posters for his new book in the airport. He’s a huge deal in thrillers here, right?” Mari asked.

“Very much so, yes,” Judith said. “Writing about gangsters and spies made him a good living.”

Mari tilted her head. “Do you think he’d come speak if we asked?”

Judith pursed her lips. “If you’d asked me that before recently, I would have said absolutely not.

He and Alexander had a terrible falling-out shortly after that picture was taken and I haven’t seen him since.

He lives in a cottage near Frome, and as far as I know, he’s a bit of a recluse.

” She thought for a moment. “But maybe enough time has passed now.”

I’d heard Judith sound wistful before, but it was always when remembering something lovely my grandfather had said or done.

We’d never spoken about how blustery Alexander could become when he’d felt someone had wronged him, how some editor or salesperson could go from being a friend to persona non grata in a mere moment, the way the London weather flipped from sunshine to thunder clouds and back again.

Mari looked at me. “Where is Frome and how do we get there?”

I could see a plot forming in the swirling green of her eyes. “It’s in Somerset, the West Country. We’d get a train from Paddington.” But I had to be the voice of reason. “Perhaps we should get in touch with his agent, first?”

Mari ignored me and turned to Judith. “Alexander and Tommy fell out, but you didn’t fall out with him, did you?”

Now Judith was blushing fully. “We’ve occasionally corresponded.”

“So you have his address.”

When Judith nodded, still blushing, I blinked at the revelation that my step-grandmother had a life that didn’t involve my family, a life that might have involved longing glances, flirtation.

Then Mari poked me in the shoulder. “No agent required. We can mail him a note to let him know we’re coming and that if he doesn’t want to meet, he can call the store and tell us. ”

I had to shake my head at Mari’s audacity. “That’s forthright of you.”

She shrugged cheerfully. “We have reclusive writers in California, too. Suzanne and I realized that the best way to handle them was for contact to be opt-out, not opt-in.”

Judith grinned at her, an expression I hadn’t seen on her face in forever. “I knew we did the right thing, asking you here.”

For the first time since the day Mari arrived, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Judith. Mari had enough courage for the both of us. I was… in awe of her. “I suppose we’re going to Somerset, then,” I said wonderingly.

“Road trip! Or train trip!” Mari said, holding up her hand for a high five, and I shook my head but slapped her hand anyway. The thrill I felt afterward was just a little chemical zing, the sense that the game was afoot. Not Mari’s laughing eyes making me feel just that little bit braver.