death, which was so new, / she could not understand that it had happened. And seeing her like that, something broke in me, a little valve that could no longer hold back such pressure, and I began to weep. I thought about what Gottlieb had said. Perhaps it was time to revise after all.
That night, back at home, I made myself a supper of fried eggs and ate them listening to the news. Earlier in the day, General Pinochet had been arrested at London Bridge Hospital where he had been convalescing after back surgery. A number of Chilean exiles, victims of his torture, were interviewed; celebration could be heard in the background. The boy, Daniel Varsky, came back to me briefly, vividly, as he had stood that night at our door. I switched on the television to follow the story, and also, I suppose, to see if there would be any report of the fire, or the woman from Slough, but of course there wasn’t. Images of Pinochet in military uniform, saluting his army, waving from the balcony of La Moneda, were interspersed with blurry footage of an old man dressed in a canary yellow shirt semi-reclining in the back of a car driven by Scotland Yard.
There was an old feral tomcat who sometimes stalked our garden and knew to come to me for food. At night he screamed like a newborn. I left a bowl of milk out to let him know I was back again. But he didn’t come that night, and in the morning a dead fly was floating belly-up in the bowl. As soon as it turned nine, I took out our old address book filled with Lotte’s handwriting and found Gottlieb’s number. He answered, full of cheer. I told him about my trip to the Brecon Beacons, but not about the fire; I didn’t want to disturb the silence around it, I suppose, or betray it by turning it into a story. I asked if I could come by to speak to him in person, he expressed his enthusiasm, called to his wife, and after a muffled pause he invited me over that afternoon for tea.
I spent the morning reading Ovid. I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. At a little after three I set off across the Heath to Well Walk where Gottlieb lived. The windows were decorated with his grandchildren’s paper cutouts. When he opened the door his cheeks were ruddy and the house exhaled a smell of allspice, like those sachets women put in their lingerie drawers. So good of you to come, Arthur, he said, patting me on the back, and led me to a sunny room off the kitchen where the table was already set for tea. Lucie came in to say hello, and we talked about a play she had seen at the Barbican the night before. Then she excused herself, saying she had a friend to visit, and left us alone. When the door closed behind her, Gottlieb took his glasses out of a small leather case and put them on, glasses that magnified his eyes many times their normal size, like the eyes of a tarsier monkey. The better to see me with, I couldn’t help but think, or to see through me.
What I’m about to tell you might surprise you, I began. It surprised me when I discovered it myself, some months before Lotte died. Since then I haven’t grown any more used to the idea that the woman I lived with for nearly fifty years was capable of hiding from me something of this scale, a secret that I have no doubt remained a vivid and haunting part of her inner life for all those years. It’s true, I said to Gottlieb, that Lotte rarely spoke about her parents murdered in the camps, or about the childhood she was exiled from in Nuremberg. That she displayed a capacity, even a talent, for silence perhaps should have alerted me to the possibility of other chapters of her life she might have chosen to withhold from me, to sink deeply into herself like a wrecked ship. But, you see, the subject of her parents’ fate and the loss of her former world were known to me. She had managed to communicate these nightmarish parts of her past at some point early on in our relationship in the form of a shadow play, without ever dwelling