The Bookbinder by Pip Williams

Author:Pip Williams [Williams, Pip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I collected every garment I’d been wearing, and Bastiaan watched me dress. I watched him watching. I slowed things down. I went to the mirror and rolled my hair, then I attached my hat. He followed the movements of my hands in the reflection.

‘I have to go,’ I said.

‘I’ll walk with you. I would like to see where you live.’

‘No, there’s still a little light and I’ll need to go at a trot.’

* * *

I’d been gone longer than an hour. Longer than two. The light was fading. When I saw Calliope, my thoughts shifted from Bastiaan to Maude. Where my skin had been tingling it now felt dull. I wondered briefly if Rosie had thought to pop her head in. She would have if I’d asked. Why didn’t I ask? I was so sick of asking.

There was barely light in the sky when I opened the hatch. I guessed it was half-ten. The lamp was cold, I relit it. I picked up Maude’s yellow scarf from the floor, saw her summer jacket on the back of the armchair – she hadn’t worn either to work. The table was strewn with papers and six completed stars, a dirty plate and half a glass of milk, skin already forming.

I picked up the dirty plate and the half-glass of milk and took them to the galley. I added vinegar to the milk, put it aside to sour. I put the plate in the basin, already crowded with the morning’s dishes. A reflection, in the galley window, the image so distorted that not even I could tell if it was Maude or me. It was dark now, pitch black. I’d left her alone too long.

I pulled back the curtain to our bedroom. She could make herself so small, and anyone else might have thought the bed empty, old and lumpy as the mattress was. But I recognised the shape of her. I touched the curve made by her hip and felt my pulse slow. She held the covers tight under her chin. Her breath escaped in rhythmic puffs through sleep-soft lips, cherry-red. I closed the curtain and returned to the galley.

Cherry-red.

I wasn’t ready for bed. I didn’t want sleep to take my waking pleasure and consign it to dream, not just yet. I made a weak tea, and instead of taking it to the table I sat in the armchair, Ma’s chair, solid and sprung. Upholstered in green velvet but worn down to the weave in so many places. It was far too big for our narrowboat, but Ma had refused to replace it with something smaller.

The chair sat on top of a foot-worn rug. I eased off my shoes and rolled down my stockings to feel the uneven pile. Birds and bowers in faded reds, greens, blues – an oasis of imagining, Ma would say as she settled in to read tales from The Thousand and One Nights. We would sit at her feet, Maude lost in the patterns of the rug, me lost in the magic spun by Ma’s voice.

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