Read Online Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson - Free Book Online

chance to pack. She had taken almost nothing with her – none of her shoes, for instance, and she had always loved shoes. He had bought many of the pairs himself, of course. After she had gone he couldn’t bear to look at them, and yet, at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. Whenever a pair of shoes caught his eye, he remembered something that had happened – a dinner party, a walk in the mountains, a game oftennis. He remembered their life together, and how happy, how very happy, they had been. There were some shoes that she hadn’t worn at all, that she’d been saving for a special occasion, perhaps, and it saddened him still more to think that she would never even put them on. Then, as he lay in bed one night, unable to sleep, the idea came to him: he would turn the shoes into a book.
    â€˜What do you think, Tom?’ he said. ‘Am I mad?’
    Just then I saw my mother’s bare feet on the road, and they were wet, and the pink polish on her toenails was chipped. I had to push the image swiftly to one side. Instead, I concentrated on the book in front of me. I concentrated hard. I could make out eyeholes now, and buckles too, and half a strap. And there, round the middle of the book’s wide spine, was a section of the famous silver sandal. On the back, a hiking boot revealed itself. Then a plimsoll, an espadrille – a flip-flop. I began to get an almost visual sense of who Jean Parry had been.
    â€˜It’s like a photograph album,’ I said.
    â€˜Yes,’ Victor said in a strange loud whisper. ‘Yes, that’s right. Clever boy.’
    I asked him what was inside.
    The story of his wife’s first life, he said, the one she had lived before she was taken. Each chapter was narrated by a different pair of shoes. He had given the shoes voices. He had let them speak. It was heretical, of course, in that it celebrated the world that had existed prior to the Rearrangement. On the evidence of this book alone he could probably be imprisoned – or, worse still, transferred to the Green Quarter, where almost everyone wrote books, apparently. ‘So don’t say anything.’ His eyes darted into the gloomiest corners of the room, as if government officials might already be lurking there. ‘Not a word.’
    For the first time I realised the extent to which Victor had been on guard against me ever since I had appeared on his doorstep. The absent-minded, ghostly quality that had characterised so much of his behaviour may well have been rooted in the grief he felt over the loss of his wife, but he had also been intent on concealing the outer, more complex edges of his ownidentity. He had seen me as an intruder and also, potentially at least, as an enemy. It must have been exhausting, I thought, to have had to keep himself so hidden, while at the same time being compelled to work, to live, to function normally, but then I suspected that he, like so many others, had become used to leading a double life. The Rearrangement had created a climate of suspicion and denial – even here, in this most open and cheerful of countries. People had buried the parts of their personalities that didn’t fit. Their secrets had flourished in the warm damp earth, and it was by those secrets that they could be judged and then condemned. In showing me the book of shoes, Victor had placed his life in my hands. He had decided to have faith in me, and I determined, from that moment on, that I would never disappoint him or let him down.
    By the time I turned fifteen I was two inches taller than Marie, and every now and then people would mistake us for lovers. Since my experience in the railway carriage, I had imagined all kinds of closeness with Marie, but never that. I had so many pictures of her stored inside my head, some real, some invented. They weren’t wrong, just private. When we were seen as a couple, though, I felt as if someone had found