Paul noticed the little pile of coins on the wooden stand by the front door, but couldn’t at first think what was unusual about them. There might have been seven or eight pounds there; a few one pound coins then all of the smaller denominations down to half a dozen pennies. There was a five centime piece and a black sixpence at least fifty years old. He couldn’t make out the date in that dimly lit place. What was it doing there, that untidy pile?

Then he recalled the change box. Whenever his father came into the house he would empty his pockets of change, decanting the unwanted coins into a metal, silver-coloured trinket box that had sat in this place. His mother had used the change to pay tradesmen who came to the door; the newspaper, the milk and sometimes Paul had been given money from it to run an errand. Once, or twice, Paul had taken money from the box without permission and had spent a guilt-stricken day and night, waiting to be discovered, before he had returned those coins. What a coward he had been. And to think that now everything in the house was his, soon would be. But the box was gone. Obviously someone had taken it, moved it. His mother had not risen from her bed, so far as he knew, for three years and his father had been dead for twenty-five.

Paul swept the coins into the palm of his hand and dropped them into his pocket. They were much too heavy to be comfortable. Straightaway he was wondering how to get rid of them again.

*

When Paul was a little boy, he wanted to run away from this house. He had run away once. He had saved a weeks’ worth of chocolate bars and taken a bottle of lemonade and two rounds of bread and butter from the kitchen. He had sneaked out after breakfast with his supplies in his school satchel. He had also taken two comics, an account, pulled from his shelf at random, of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole written for children and a pair of his father’s cuff-links decorated with his initial. B.

He had spent a hot morning and hotter afternoon in and around the terrifying air raid shelter at the top of the paddock next to their field where he had eaten all of his chocolate, been sick and bitten by a horse-fly. He had blown away dandelion clocks and untangled cobwebs from his hair, then wreathed himself with sinewy convolvulus. He chased butterflies, dragonflies and bees. When he got back, in what at that age he considered to be the evening, contrite, tearful, his leg badly swollen from the bite and expecting he knew not what punishment for he had never been punished, he found that his father was completely unaware that he had ever been out of the house. He had thought he must be reading somewhere. His mother had wondered why he had not come in for his lunch but then had been distracted by a telephone call and forgotten all about him.

Now he was a man and he had not slept in this house for a decade. He felt shipwrecked here.

*

Paul’s father had sometimes written to his mother in French. Paul didn’t know why. They were love letters, quite passionate in a lyrical way, but there were no prying eyes to blind. His French was really quite childish, or hers.

—Je suis monté à bord du navire mais je ne veux pas partir.

Paul read that sentence over and over. He liked to revisit his father’s very legible, patient hand, and he liked that odd note of unfamiliarity that was struck by seeing the foreign words the hand had formed. Paul copied these words onto an unused page of one of his father’s notebooks. His own handwriting looked very much like his father’s. He read the sentence again, as written by himself and felt momentarily haunted. But there was something else compelling about that sentence. It seemed to Paul to be an emblem of his father’s relationship with his mother.

They had been a very passionate couple. They had conducted their marriage like a twenty-year affair. Paul had not found it easy to be an only child of parents like that. A number of their friends, those who knew them less well, thought that they didn’t really get on at all. They appeared to quarrel so often, tetchy. A combination of mad inventor and witch. Some even thought they only stayed together for the sake of their son. What a joke. Paul had lived like a stowaway in his parents’ love, a love unlike any other that he had ever met in his life.

He was not reading his father’s letters properly, as he sat in the old man’s library, he called it, sometimes his laboratory. He was flicking through them, scanning them, looking for a reference to himself. A mention of his name; our son, my son, our child. He was not really disappointed to find only a very few and all of these practical and perfunctory afterthoughts. In truth, he was not looking for his name, he was confirming his confident suspicion that he would not find it. He had been a missing child before he went missing.

What did puzzle Paul, having looked through many drawers, files and folders, largely unopened since his father had died, was that he could not find his mother’s letters to his father. It was inconceivable that they would have been lost and if his mother had ever taken letters from the library, surely she would have taken them all, or his to her in preference to her own to him. Paul looked for a long time and had to make up his mind to come back and look again with fresh eyes, because he could not find them.

*

On the first night that Paul slept again in his old room, he dreamed of his mother. He had been looking through that volume of Scott’s desperate adventure once more. He had marked his place with a postcard of a painting of Turner’s that he had sent his mother from Switzerland and picked up again among her papers in her drawer. Lake Lucerne, moonlight, the Righi in the distance, 1841. He used it because it was the same colours as the book’s old cloth binding, but he had put it down somewhere and couldn’t find it and now could not find his place either. It was hard to know whether this, the turning impatiently through the unrecognised but familiar pages, was what he did before falling asleep or was the beginning of the dream.

He was in the orchard, not really an orchard, just a few fruit trees in the garden, planted by his grandfather, but they called it that. He had climbed into an apple tree, like a boy, but he felt as big as a man, too heavy, bursting his way through the little branches, not supple nor physically brave enough. His mother stood below the tree and the twigs he broke off blew into her face and stuck in her hair. She was the mother of his childhood, younger then than Paul. She is distracted, always looking up at him but then looking away as though expecting someone to arrive. Paul is handing fruit down to her, lovely red apples, but there is something not right about them. All of the apples are made of wood. They are like beautifully made toy apples with the paint worn and faded on them.

Then Paul is a little boy, really little now, making his way through the groaning wooden house, like the ghost of his young self. It is night and he is wearing his pyjamas. He walks up the broad panelled staircase, although it is not obvious at first why he has been downstairs, with its massive balustrades of dark wood, cornices above the doors ornamented with carved fruit and flowers and broad seats in the windows. He is timid but apparently determined. He walks into his mother’s room and sees her in bed as she is now, helpless, unmoving, very old or with a body that is as good as very old indeed. Paul pleads with her. He tells her that he is unable to sleep. That he cannot bear that. He holds in his hand the old bread knife with the red wooden handle that he had seen earlier that day—this must be the reason he has been downstairs, to the kitchen, in his dream. He says that he will kill himself if she does not allow him to sleep. It is not clear whether he will stab himself in the stomach with this weapon or draw its blade across his wrists. In either case, it is a hopeless instrument. It has a blunt end and its edge is dull. He would struggle to find an artery with that. His mother gives no indication that she is speaking, but Paul understands that it is so,

—Go back to bed. Don’t be a fool. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Go back to bed.

Paul picked up the keys from his bedside table and found he had only one key in his hand, the others still lay there like a childish diagram of a flower, four key-shaped petals with no heart. The key-ring was gone. He could not remember what it had been like. Just a plain metal ring, silver? Split rings. You can buy them in packs of one hundred.

Paul caught himself looking around the floor where it might have fallen before he saw how nonsensical that was. Nothing but what was impossible could have happened to it. The one key he now held between his fingers was not his key at all. It was the key to his father’s laboratory.

*

Claudine wanted to see him. She was the nurse who looked after his mother for much of the day-time. She always seemed to be there to Paul, the only nurse whose name he knew. Claudine was, he thought, from the Dominican Republic. He was not entirely sure why he thought he knew that. He must have seen some papers at some time.

Paul had been wanting to speak to Claudine. About the missing things. Nothing of value had gone missing so far. Nothing that was either valuable or very useful. He felt as if he were being tested. If he did not notice these things then he might not notice others or not care or not like to say. So he was wrong-footed when Claudine said she had lost a brooch and had he seen it.

—It is just a pretty little thing. Blue and white glass cut to look like stones. It was my grandmother’s.

Paul didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to admit that he was disconcerted by Claudine’s race. It so happened that Paul had found small occasion to speak to black people except when they served him in shops. But he was grateful to Claudine. She was smart and professional and he thought his mother fortunate to have her to look after her. Although he was worried about what went missing.

—Is it valuable?

He had not listened properly.

—Oh not at all. Except to me. I’ve asked the other girls. I thought you might have picked it up thinking that it belonged to the house. In the shape of a flower.

Paul shook his head.

—I’m sorry.

Claudine tipped up her chin.

—Vex, she said, to herself. Her eyes were moist.

Paul wanted to suggest something but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t too stupid to say. He thought of his mother. She could not at all be responsible for these things.

*

When his father died, Paul had thought his mother would go mad. Some women take to their beds, but she had stalked the house and garden as though really looking for her husband. She seemed to be actually angry with him. Paul had blenched when he had looked into her furious face and she had turned away from him as from an enemy not worth hurting. It never seemed to occur to her that Paul might grieve too and so perhaps had taught him not to. There was no room for any sorrow in that house but hers.

She would have been happy to climb on her husband’s pyre. It would have been a mercy to let her do it. That wooden house would have made quite the conflagration. Paul had no idea, no memory even, of what it had cost his mother to find a way back to the world but he felt that he would have had to pay some of that price himself. He couldn’t think why it was that he could not recall his mother’s return to normal life, unless it was that this had not in fact happened.

Paul went to see his mother every day and sat and read to her or just sat with her, just read. Books from his father’s library mostly; French novels, quite technical texts when he could find one that might reasonably be read aloud, Jung. They had shared these miscellaneous interests with one another, mother and father.

He stumbled his way along the stairs trod with confidence in his dreams. She slept in a room panelled with dark wood, sleeping is what she ever did. Her bed was a four-poster and of course wooden. Paul had come back to this place from a world of steel, concrete and glass and he felt that his mother was already in her coffin and he was in there with her. Now, she was a woman of paper and bone. Her grey hair, once blonde, thin as gossamer combed every day by Claudine. She had the face of a woman recently drowned. Sand-ruined, salt-eaten. Shrivelled. Her skull was as thin and fragile as an urchin picked up on the beach. She lay quite still but for her shallow breaths so obviously numbered. She was close to transparency. A bright light might vanquish her.

Every day, Claudine put fresh flowers from the garden in the room. She picked pretty things on her own, and because she was foreign she did not know a flower from a weed, Paul thought. Today there was convolvulus which he had once brought home from his adventure in the air raid shelter, to propitiate a mother who was not there.

He told his mother that he missed her. He did not know if that were true until he heard himself say it. He needed to hear what it sounded like. He would stand over her and wait for her to open her eyes and then wait for the life to glimmer into them and then he would speak to her,

—It’s me. I have been here all this time. I am always here.

He thought he could see her pale blue eyes, much paler now than they ever used to be, sparkle to life. But he knew how to damp that spark.

—It’s Paul, your son.

Paul took one of his father’s clean notebooks and began a list of all the things that were going missing in the house. He included Claudine’s brooch without being quite sure. Firstly, he noticed that the clock in the hall had stopped working—his father had wound that clock twice a week for twenty years. When Paul opened the case, it was like looking into a robbed tomb. It had once bristled with a fantastic armoury of metal. He did not know what pins and wheels had gone but that clock had been disembowelled.

There were framed photographs of his parents’ wedding over the cold fireplace in her room. Paul thought they must have faded suddenly, but when he examined them, he saw that the glass had been taken from them all.

Some of his father’s things; a cuff-link, just one, a tie-clip which Paul might have taken for himself, but he never wore a tie. He supposed he would wear one on the day he buried his mother. The pins and needles his father had kept, for some reason, in a never-used ash tray.

There were books he could not find on the shelves. These books had left gaps in the rows as though they had run away without their shadows. They could be lying elsewhere in the house, perhaps where his father had carelessly put them down years ago, not realising that he would never take them up again. Some of the books were quite valuable, Paul thought.

He stopped short of accusing Claudine, realistically, even in his own mind. She would not have known which books to take. And these other things. How could he accuse the woman of stealing such absurd objects?

He looked at his own watch, a gift from his parents. He was sure, although he could not be sure, that it had once had a second-hand.

He dreamed once more of his mother. He was a child again. He was in his mother’s room but he could not see who was in the bed, because he was on his hands and knees. He was sure that his mother was there, his young mother, who could naturally step down from that bed if she chose—but Paul felt he was safe from detection as he was so stealthy. He crept toward the bed but he did not want to get into it, under it. The fire crackled behind him which meant he was certainly in the past but it warmed him no more than a memory of a fire would have done.

Under his mother’s bed was his clockwork train set. A great gift from his father one Christmas. Miles of expensive labyrinthine track meant that the set took ages to assemble and then was so expansive that Paul’s own room could not accommodate it. It had to be stored, largely intact, under his mother’s bed and slid out onto the great Persian rug before the fire where it could be wound, signalled and directed for hours of automatic fun. Of course there were many occasions on which Paul was forbidden this room and therefore, incidentally, his wonderful toy. Now, in this dream, he would take this pleasure despite the fact that the bed was occupied, for his cunning was invincible. He could hear nothing from the bed except perhaps the faint rustling of his mother’s paper limbs.

He had his locomotive in his hand. Olive-green. His father painted Paul’s initials on its flank in gold letters, that distinctive hand. Paul took the key, his face scrunched as though that might deaden the clicking of the clockwork and turned one delicate revolution. Nothing.

The key simply turned, silently, gripping the air. The case of the train, its shell, came away in Paul’s short-fingered hands to reveal its own hollowness. The locomotive was empty of machinery as though its innards of cogs and cranks had been spirited away. An incredible and unbelieved-in telekinesis.

Claudine needed to see Paul once more. He was afraid she might say that she was going to leave, but it was not that. Claudine was worried.

—Your mother has a stone, in a ring I think, or bangle, perhaps a pearl, most beautiful, which shines like burning blue ice.

He was amused by her enthusiasm for this jewel but he could not remember it. He didn’t take much notice of these things.

—A gift from my father no doubt.

Claudine looked even more upset.

—But where is it now? I saw it just one time and now it is gone.

—It must have been there always if it was there once.

Claudine shrugged.

Paul thought she might be throwing sand in his eyes; the thief who reports the crime first. He thought he would be able to make her give herself away now if only he could think of the right thing to say.

—I never saw her wear such a jewel.

But why would he have?

—A lovely stone. I couldn’t understand that I had never seen it before, never noticed it.

—Did you ever find your brooch?

She shook her head, but as if to say that such a thing could not matter compared to this.

—There will be an inventory I think. Somewhere. It will be insured if it is of any real value.

—Such a sweet lady, your mother. So lovely.

He didn’t know what Claudine could mean. His mother looked shrink-wrapped in transparent skin. There was nothing inside her. She never moved, never spoke. He thought this was Claudine’s only way of being sad.

*

Paul thought he had seen Claudine’s jewel, the pearl she described, his mother’s, not her own brooch. Ice-blue. Burning. He was too surprised to move towards it when he was sure that it was really there. He saw it, he might say, hovering in mid-air, but then really quite close to the old dark oak chest of drawers. He strode towards it, that lovely light, a will o’ the wisp and saw it was right there, on the drawers, an inviting loop, like a tropical butterfly, just landed, winking. But then it faded and was gone. The light of another life that had shone on this world and was now extinguished. It burst like a bubble of foam, sank like a cooling ember. He could not help but reach for it even though it was too late. Such a lovely thing. He remembered Claudine’s words.

He crouched now before the chest and saw that all of its handles had gone. Furniture built like a battleship, father said. It had been made from an old tree he had had cut down in the garden. How to open these drawers? Had the handles always been gone? He could not think how that could be so. Paul did not know what was in the drawers. Old clothes or just as likely nothing. He was torn between imagining that missing things were there and that things that were there were missing. Ice-blue pulsed before his eyes. Hummed there. The vibration still felt after the sound had died. This, at last, was the horror of loss.

*

For one last time Paul dreamed of his mother. This time he wasn’t there. He could see but he was not present, neither the little boy nor the grown man. He heard a noise from his mother’s room. He had no ears but he heard this noise. Mechanical certainly, but no mechanism it was easy to guess at. A drone, perhaps, that might have been a voice. A whistle that could almost have been a keening, but low, secretive, doing its best to dip below the radar. Even so, it woke Paul who was not listening with ears of flesh.

There was a light too, seeping into the corridor, beneath his mother’s door, an electric blue, smouldering. A cold light, but one that might burn as very cold things do. Paul knew what was happening to his mother. She was leaving. She was disappearing. She had begun to glow with that colour. Bonds were being broken, fronds snapped. His mother was a cloud of blue powder ready to be blown away, a bluebell wood on a frosty morning. She was lost in an aqueous haze, mirage of water. Paul woke from this dream and knew it for a dream but he also knew that if he were to go now into his mother’s room, she would, in the most important sense, not be there.

Paul lay in his bed relieved that it was all over. He did not feel loss, a deprivation. This old wooden house now felt more vivid than it ever had. He wondered if he might do something for Claudine, who would be upset. Offer her a keepsake. After all, he felt badly for her concerning the missing brooch.