There are certain possessions which, having remained in oneβs keeping for a sufficient number of years, cease altogether to be possessions.
They become evidence.
A record may accomplish this transformation as readily as a letter, a lock of hair, or one of those dreadful little mourning brooches in which the dead are expected to remain tastefully arranged beneath glass.
Saul gave Mathilde Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
It was the only gift he ever gave her which she had actually wanted.
This is, she observes now, a rather melancholy sentence.
At the time, however, it was nothing of the sort.
It was merely a record she loved, placed into her hands by a man she loved, and the universe, being notoriously deficient in manners, supplied no warning whatsoever.
No pale child appeared beside the phonograph.
No raven struck the window.
No ancestor materialised at the foot of the stairs and announced, in a suitably grave voice:
You will wish to retain this particular exhibit.
Life seldom possesses the decency to label its evidence.
Mathilde and Saul were very young when they began.
Young enough that twenty years did not seem an actual quantity of time. Twenty years belonged to widows, old houses, governments and people who complained of their knees.
They married quickly.
They made a family.
And then came the great procession of ordinary life.
Babies.
Houses.
Illnesses.
Deaths.
School meetings.
Shopping lists.
Waffles.
Black coffee.
Children who had the audacity to become taller than their mother.
Christmases arrived, disgraced the sitting room and departed again. Tuesdays passed without distinction. Photographs accumulated in drawers and boxes, each offering the same peculiar testimony:
These people were here together.
Photographs are accomplished little liars.
They can establish that five people occupied the same room.
They cannot establish that those five people inhabited the same family.
For many years, Mathilde believed she and Saul were accumulating a shared history.
She knows now that they were sometimes constructing two histories beside one another.
Hers contained Saul everywhere.
His contained Mathilde rather selectively.
This has proved among the more difficult discoveries.
Not the whoring.
Not the swindling.
Not the drinking.
Not even the lies.
Those things, dreadful though they may be, possess the courtesy of being concrete. They have dates. Transactions. Letters delivered by couriers. Hand-written tabs.
One may arrange them into columns.
One may colour-code them.
One may, when sufficiently furious, discover that grief has a remarkable aptitude for bookkeeping.
No.
The harder discovery was considerably quieter.
Mathilde had spent years witnessing a man who had gradually ceased witnessing her.
She knew how Saul took his coffee.
She knew the particular character of his restlessness.
She knew the rhythms of his mornings, the things that amused him and those that irritated him. She knew what frightened him. She knew the small alterations in his behaviour when he was tired. She knew what he wished other people to believe about him.
Most importantly, she knew the minute betrayals of face and manner which appeared whenever the man he wished to be mistaken for the man he actually was.
Mathilde had paid attention.
This was love, according to Mathilde.
Not sweets.
Not declarations.
Not expensive little trinkets presented on ceremonial occasions as proof that one had remembered the date.
Attention.
I see you. You exist here.
Somewhere during their long history, Mathilde began to disappear from Saulβs field of vision.
The peculiar thing was that she did not disappear from his life.
Quite the contrary.
She remained exceedingly useful.
She was the mother.
The historian.
The keeper of dates.
The finder of lost objects.
The rememberer of promises.
The interpreter of silences.
She was the woman capable of explaining Saul to himself whenever he found himself bewildered by the consequences of having been Saul.
Mathilde existed.
Increasingly, however, she existed in the manner of a household apparatus.
Essential.
Frequently employed.
Rarely contemplated unless something had ceased functioning.
There is a cruelty particular to being indispensable and unseen at precisely the same time.
Now Mathilde looks backwards and sees her younger self standing at the entrance of this enormous history, entirely ignorant of what awaits her.
And curiously, she does not wish to warn her.
This surprises Mathilde.
She does not wish to seize the girl by her shoulders and command her not to marry Saul.
She does not wish to furnish her with a dossier from the future, though such a dossier would be regrettably substantial.
She would not whisper names.
She would not provide dates.
She would not tell the girl where to look.
She would not even save her.
For the girl will have children for whom she would walk willingly through fire.
She will know enormous love.
She will know enormous grief.
She will discover, much to her astonishment, that grief is survivable.
She will become peculiar in several delightful ways.
She will become difficult to frighten.
She will become a woman whom Mathilde rather likes.
No.
If granted an audience with that younger creature, Mathilde thinks she would simply sit beside her.
She would play that tune on the gramophone and remember.
Perhaps there would be tea.
Perhaps something medicinal from a brown bottle containing sufficient opium to kill a modern horse.
And after some time, Mathilde would say only this:
Pay attention.
Not because something terrible is coming.
Something terrible is always coming.
So is something wonderful.
So is Wednesday.
Pay attention because this is not the rehearsal.
This strange, untidy, beautiful thing occurring around you is your life.
