The Missing Chapter

I found it because I was two months early with the paperwork, which is the only useful thing I have ever got out of being the way I am.

The third week of January. We were on page two hundred and fifty-eight and we had been on page two hundred and fifty-eight, in one form or another, for most of two days, because the middle chapters of that novel are where Giulia stopped being funny in a way she never entirely recovered from. Twenty-seven pages in a fortnight. In November we had done that in four days.

So on the Tuesday evening, while Elodie was down at the university doing the two hours a week they pay her for, I sat in the study with the lamps on and began assembling the delivery package, because a manuscript does not arrive at a publisher as a pile of paper and a good intention. It arrives with a schedule. Pages, chapters, word count, the translator’s note, the list of proper names, the queries still open. Morag’s file has the codicil and the schedule Giulia signed with it in January of last year, which describes the property being disposed of, because a will that leaves a thing has to say what the thing is.

La casa a due porte, it says. A novel in twenty-two chapters. 311 pages.

I typed that into my table of contents, and then, because I am the sort of man who checks a number he has just typed, I went through the typescript with a pencil and counted the chapter breaks.

Giulia did not number her chapters. She never has, in any book. She leaves four blank lines and starts again, and her Italian publisher puts the numbers in afterwards and she complains about it in interviews. The whole of her working typescript is one continuous run of pages, one side of the sheet, numbered top right, from 1 to 311.

I counted twenty-one.

I counted them again with the pencil on the desk and my finger on the sheets, and then a third time going backwards from the end, which is a thing you learn to do with anything you have counted twice.

Twenty-one.

· · ·Scene break

Elodie came back at half past six with snow on her shoulders and I was standing at the desk with the whole typescript in eleven stacks across it, which she took, correctly, as information.

“What’s happened?”

“Twenty-two chapters,” I said, and handed her the schedule.

She read it. She looked at the stacks. She did not ask whether I had counted properly, which is the kind of thing that will keep a marriage alive for about fourteen years.

“Where,” she said.

“That’s the thing. I didn’t know either, until I looked for the join.” I moved two stacks apart. “Page one hundred and eighty-six.”

Page one hundred and eighty-six is the end of the chapter where Nella’s neighbour dies and the funeral is described in nine lines and Nella does not go. The last sentence of it is about the lift in the building being out of order. Page one hundred and eighty-seven opens in the following spring with Nella buying a lemon tree in a pot and being short with the man who sells it to her.

Eight months pass in a white space. We read it in December. We both read it in December, out loud, in alternate paragraphs, and neither of us said a word about it, because Giulia does that. She has always done that. She takes out the year that the reader has been waiting for and hands you the lemon tree instead, and half her reputation is built on the nerve of it.

“It’s an ellipsis,” Elodie said. “It’s her best move. It’s the move everyone steals.”

“Query seven,” I said.

She stopped.

Renzo’s batch from the fifteenth of December, pages 180 to 200, item seven: p. 187 — “quel mercoledì”. Which Wednesday? There is no Wednesday. E. says the antecedent is the funeral. The funeral is on a Friday, p. 185.

We had spent about forty minutes on it before Christmas. Elodie’s position was that Nella is being loose, that people are loose about days, that the whole point of the lemon-tree paragraph is a woman not being precise for once in her life. My position was that Giulia Ferro did not write a demonstrative adjective without an antecedent in thirty years of publishing, and I had lost that argument because under the memorandum that chapter was hers.

We had written to Renzo: deliberate. Nella’s vagueness is characterisation.

“It isn’t characterisation,” Elodie said, very quietly.

“No.”

“It’s a pronoun pointing at a chapter that isn’t there.”

She sat down on Giulia’s reading chair, in her coat, with the snow still on it, and after a moment she said something in Italian to the window that I am not going to record, and then: “Ring Morag.”

· · ·Scene break

Morag Reyburn takes a telephone call at seven in the evening the way other people take one at eleven in the morning, which I have always assumed is either formidable or very sad.

“I’ve counted twenty-one,” I said.

“And the schedule says twenty-two.”

“It does.”

There was a pause with paper in it. “Then I would start by telling you what I received, because that is the only part of this I can actually swear to. On the twenty-sixth of September, Renzo Ferro brought me one bundle off the desk in that study, which my trainee and I counted between us, twice, and initialled: three hundred and eleven sheets, typed on the recto only, numbered continuously, no gaps in the numbering. I copied the whole of it for the file and gave the original back to him, and he put it in a box and carried it up to you on the Monday, and the copy is the one on your desk with my initials in the corner of every fortieth page.”

“Then it was taken out before the pages were numbered.”

“Or it was never in. Mr Arrieta, she signed that schedule in January of last year, and she went on working until June. You are treating a description as an inventory. It is a description. She told me the book was twenty-two chapters because on that day she believed the book was twenty-two chapters.”

“She was specific about punctuation in a legal document,” Elodie said, from across the desk, loudly enough.

“She was,” Morag agreed, entirely unbothered. “Which is why I will write to the archive in Turin and to Renzo, and why I will not be telling either of you that it doesn’t matter. What I will say is this. The codicil gives you the manuscript. The manuscript is the three hundred and eleven pages in that room. Whatever is not in those pages is not your obligation and its absence is not your failure, and if it turns up in March I will tell you what it means then.” Papers again. “You each have one veto per chapter. I’d observe that neither of you can veto a chapter you haven’t got.”

She rang off.

“There’s a second thing,” I said, “and it’s mine, and it’s petty, and I’d like to say it before it occurs to you and you enjoy it. The alternating final cut runs by chapter. Chapter one yours, chapter two mine, and so on. If there is a chapter missing at page one hundred and eighty-six, then from page one hundred and eighty-seven to the end of the book, every call either of us has made has been made by the wrong one of us.”

Elodie put her hand over her mouth. It did not work.

“Eleven weeks,” she said.

“Nine chapters.”

“Nine chapters of you being extremely correct about whose turn it was.”

“I’m aware. I’ve drafted the note to Morag in my head and it is a humiliating note.”

“Send it in the morning,” she said, and was already writing. “The archive’s been through,” she said. “Box nine is forty sheets and I looked at every one of them. Renzo has the flat in Turin. There’s her laptop, which Renzo has had since October and which he says is a hundred and nine drafts of a short story about a bus.”

“There’s the possibility she burned it.”

“There is that.” She put the pencil down. “Is there anywhere else? Anywhere at all. Somebody she’d have given it to.”

And there it was.

· · ·Scene break

I want to be accurate about what happened in the next four seconds, because there were four of them and I used them.

In the first one I thought: no. In the second one I assembled, fully formed and ready to deliver, the sentence not that I know of, which is a true sentence, because I do not know what is in that box. In the third one I heard myself about to say it, in the voice, the complete and reasonable one, and I could see the whole of the rest of the evening arranged neatly behind it — the work resumed, the queries updated, the two of us going down twenty-two steps at eight o’clock having had a productive and difficult day.

In the fourth one I thought about a woman on a stone stair saying I will not spend the winter working out from the way you square a page whether you’ve had a bad morning.

“I’m going to use mine now,” I said.

She looked up. “It’s half past seven.”

“I’m aware.” I put my hands flat on the desk. “Giulia posted a box to my flat in Madrid on the twenty-ninth of August. Her handwriting on the label, from Turin. It arrived while I was at the funeral. There’s tape across the lid with one letter on it. I have not opened it. I had it sent on to Stockbridge in October and I have moved it four times inside that flat and I have not opened it, and I have known about it since the day of the will reading and I have not mentioned it to you, and I know that that is the sentence, so that is the sentence.”

The sash window did the thing it does when the wind gets behind it.

“How big,” Elodie said.

“Shoebox. Slightly deeper. It’s heavy for the size.”

“Papers.”

“It’s papers. I’d know the weight of papers anywhere.”

She nodded slowly, once, twice, and picked up her pencil, and I stood there with my hands on the desk and waited to be asked why, which was the question, and which I had spent about ninety seconds on the way to that sentence preparing an answer to.

She did not ask.

She wrote p. 186/187 — CH. XIV ABSENT (?) on the query sheet in her own hand, and underlined the question mark, and then she said, without looking up: “Renzo’s coming Saturday about the line at two seventy-one. He can be told about this at the same time, and he should be told by you and not by Morag, because he will take it better.”

“Elodie.”

“Mm.”

“You can ask me.”

“I know I can.” She squared two of the stacks together, which is my gesture, not hers, and which I have never once seen her do in eleven years. “It came to you. She addressed it to you. She sent it to Madrid in August, which means she did it when she knew, and she did not send it here, where we would both have been standing in front of it in October, and she was a woman who thought about where a thing would be opened.”

“That’s an argument.”

“It’s not an argument. It’s a reason for me to shut up, which I am short of, so I am using it.” She turned page two hundred and fifty-eight round. “Corrado’s paragraph. We’ve got forty minutes before the shops shut and I want the second clause.”

We did two pages. They were good pages. I did not think about the box once, which is not true; I thought about it on a cycle of roughly ninety seconds for two hours and translated perfectly well the whole time, which is the exact skill this entire book is a complaint about.

· · ·Scene break

The let in Stockbridge has a bedroom with a bed and a wall and about a foot of floor between them, and the box had been under the bed since the ninth of October.

I got in at ten past nine. I did not take my coat off. I pulled it out, and put it on the table in the front room under the light, and sat down on the other side of the table and looked at it.

Brown board. Her writing on the label, going uphill, my name and the Madrid address and the postcode wrong by one digit, which is how she wrote it for eleven years and which I used to correct on her Christmas cards. A strip of masking tape across the lid.

One character on the tape. M.

I have run an office. I have negotiated three contracts in a language I learned at thirty-four. I organised a funeral in four days from a hotel room, including the flowers, including the Montale, including somebody’s flight from Berlin, and I did all of it well, and everybody said so.

I sat in a rented room in a foreign city and was stopped by three inches of masking tape, and I want to be accurate about this as well: I did not open it that night.