looked up, and smiled.
“Well, Ben,” she said without much inflection. “Long time, no see. What made you wait so long to come by?”
“You mean you knew I was here?”
“Of course. Your mother wrote and told me.”
“I didn’t know you were in touch.”
“Not often, but occasionally.”
Putting down her secateurs, she wrapped her arms around her waist, under her breasts. “Well, you’ve grown up,” she said. “Every day you look more and more like your father.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”
“Don’t you mean you weren’t sure you’d want to see me}” But then she smiled again, and invited me inside.
I couldn’t go. I was late for class. Still, I let her press me into accepting an invitation to tea that afternoon. “Tea” seemed very unlike Anne. After my classes were finished I returned to the dorm, showered, changed my clothes. For some reason it seemed important that I make myself as presentable as possible. I arrived at her house like a suitor, or the son of an old friend pressed by his mother into service. I had bought flowers. Once again, she was wearing a sundress—a different one, red with large gold poppies on it. To my surprise she kissed me on the cheek, and then she led me inside.
From that day forward, Anne and I were friends—real friends—and during my Bradford years I visited her often. It turned out that the facade of the house—which she and Boyd had bought with the advance for Gonesse, just after their marriage—was deceptive; once you got through the door, depths of space were revealed at which the view from the street barely hinted. There was a big living room with lots of books in it, and also a sort of garden room that opened onto the backyard, with French doors looking onto a rose garden even more exuberant than the one in the front. This was where we would sit and talk on the occasions when I visited her. We’d drink tea, and she’d ask me about my life, if I had any girlfriends, how my writing was going. She never touched me, as in the old days. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed.
It took three of these little teas before the subject of her husband, and the notebooks, even came up. And when it did, she was the one who brought it up. I wasn’t entirely sure that I was glad. After all, to talk about the notebooks was to admit that they were real, and now that Jonah Boyd was dead, the fact that I still had them in my possession, cramped within their brick prison like the kidnapped girl in the movie, made me more uneasy than ever. Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have ever said anything about them. But Anne was always braver than I was.
I remember that the weather was glorious that day. In addition to the tea, which was Earl Grey, and headily aromatic, there were cookies that she had baked herself. Oatmeal cookies. I loved oatmeal cookies. Under different circumstances—at home, for instance—I might have scarfed down the whole plate in a minute flat. Yet that afternoon I felt that I should be polite. No doubt this had something to do with Anne’ amazing transformation from slattern into the shimmering, almost haloed creature who now sat before me. I took one cookie, ate it as slowly as I could, and looked her in the eye.
“So have you still got them?” she asked.
I pretended ignorance. “Got what?” I asked.
“The notebooks, of course.”
I returned my attention to the plate of cookies. Nine remained.
For some reason I now felt that I could take a second cookie, and I did.
“Yes, I’ve still got them,” I said after a bite.
“I suppose you’d like to know why I never got in touch with you.”
In fact I didn’t particularly. Still, I couldn’t very well just tell her to cease and desist. So I nodded, and took a third cookie, and arranged myself into a posture of listening.
Though I can’t be sure, my guess today is that I was the first person—perhaps the only person—in whom Anne ever confided any of it, the story of what: had happened in the years between her visit to Wellspring and her husband’ death. “No doubt once I’m dead, I’ll rot in hell,” she said very matter-of-factly, as she sipped that delicious tea in that beautiful garden room on that sunny afternoon, with the roses outside the window and those cookies enticing me