I Cannot Get You Close Enough Read Free Page A

after them. Pity, flattery, charm, whatever it takes. She can fake it when she needs to.”
    â€œWell good luck to you.” Amalie raised her glass. “I’ll keep my eye out here for anything that might help you.”
    â€œYou’re helping now. You’re helping by trusting me.”
    â€œDon’t forget to have them send the books around. The ones you wrote. I’ll tell you what I think of them when I get through.”
    â€œOh, don’t do that,” I answered. Then I laughed out loud. “Oh, please don’t do that to me.” The sun was moving down the sky behind a bank of scattered clouds. The redbird deserted his post for a tree. Amalie and I carried the glasses inside and closed up the flat and walked out onto the street. I was slightly drunk and reasonably amazed to have had such a good time. Good old universe. I squeezed Amalie’s hand and walked off down the street in the direction of Queen’s Square, where I hoped to find a taxi. I knew she was watching me and I sauntered as lightly as possible, wanting to give her every last bit of whatever it was she had found in me to like.
    I flew to Stockholm the next day to see my Swedish publisher. When I returned to London I went back to Sheila’s flat and found it vacated. “She came three days ago, with a man from Germany I’ve seen before,” Amalie informed me. “She got it out of me you’d been here and she said she was going to the States. She said to tell you hello.”
    â€œWas she angry with you for letting me in?”
    â€œNo. I think not. She was showing off for the man, if you want my opinion. Being very cordial to me, she was. I helped her pack up her things and she paid me very well. Also, she left the rent for the rest of the month. You aren’t looking for a place, are you?”
    I considered it. “Is the phone still connected, in her name?”
    â€œNo, they came and took that out the day she left.”
    â€œI have a place, thank you. Let’s have tea,” I added. “Sometime soon. It was nice talking with you last week. A good memory.”
    â€œWe’ll do that then.” She smiled and I saw the girl she must have been, in a war with Germany, with hair that wasn’t gray and those eyes.
    â€œDid you wear a cap?” I asked. “A hat. With your uniform in the war?”
    â€œOh, did I ever,” she laughed. She squeezed my hand. “Did I ever wear my brave chapeau.”
    So I had found Sheila’s lair but no Sheila. Sheila had flown the coop, gone home to start her court proceedings. Still, I had that afternoon in a walled garden with a British heroine and I remembered it. Every time I have seen a bird sitting on a post I have thought of Amalie, her brave life and her eye on the redbird in the garden. Maybe that’s why Daniel fell in love with Sheila, to watch her. Because she seemed a different species. A beplumed helpless starving little bird. Skinny little bones and thin white skin covered with dimity and lace and figured silk, rings on her fingers, Capezio sandals on her toes, sashes and Peter Pan collars and cashmere and tweed and in the summer off-the-shoulder blouses and that red-and-yellow sundress with the tie on one shoulder and the other shoulder bare. Perhaps it was the plumage that fascinated him. That a human being was willing to devote her entire life to getting dressed. Perhaps that was her fascination. Or perhaps it was the face that stared out from underneath the hairdos and rose on its neck above the finery. That face in the middle of that perfection. That unsmiling unhappy pleasureless little perfection of a face. (Which later became beautiful in Jessie.)
    Maybe Sheila was the last victim of the Victorians. Their very last devotee and victim.
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    Anyway, my brother Daniel loved her. “She’s got him,” I told Phelan, one summer when he was visiting. “She’s got him just where she