The Tenth Gift Read Free Page B

confront. The pressures of Anna’s work made this easier than it might otherwise have been, and I had become a master of excuses in avoiding dreaded tête-à-têtes and dinners à trois. Racked by the knowledge of how I was betraying her, day by day, hour by hour, I found I could not bear her company. She was so happy, and only I knew the truth that would render that happiness rotten and hollow.
    Now that Michael and I had come to an end, I wasn’t sure I could ever endure to see her again.
    The day after our breakup, exhausted by weeping, I took myself out of London for a week to walk the cliffs of the south coast, feeling much of the time like throwing myself over them, but never summoning the courage. I left my mobile phone behind in the Putney flat, to ensure I did not weaken and call him. Instead, in the time when I was not stalking mechanically along footpaths, impervious to the magnificent scenery, I devoted myself to a new embroidery design I had been meaning to start for some weeks.
    It was for a wall hanging, and therefore to be worked on stout linen twill, in colored wools rather than silks. Ever since the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, this type of work has been known as crewel work, from the old Welsh word for
wool.
Which seemed fitting. I would spend many bitter hours playing on the unfortunate pun in my head as I stitched. Crewel world, crewel fate, crewel to be kind, crewel and unusual … I could go on but won’t. I had already marked out on the fabric a coiling monochrome pattern of stylized acanthus leaves picked out with flares of color where flowers burst through the foliage. Very traditional in style, after the Flemish Verduretapestries I’d seen in the Victoria & Albert Museum, the delicate in-filling of the leaf design inspired by the filigree of Venetian needlepoint lace. It was a large piece, and would easily cover the space where the beautiful, framed black-and-white photograph of Michael had hung in my bedroom. This, I had ceremonially burned in the back garden before leaving the flat, but the wall annoyingly retained its ghostly shape, and it would be a constant reminder of the absence of both man and picture.
    Embroidery is an improbable hobby for someone as disordered as me, but it’s the very precision of it that attracts me, the illusion of control it offers. When engaged in stitching a new pattern, I can’t think about anything else. Guilt, misery, longing all flee away, leaving just the beautiful little microcosm of the world in my hands, the flash of the needle, the rainbow colors of the thread, the calming exactitude of the discipline. It was the wall hanging that saved my sanity in the days following our breakup.
    I returned to London a week later, somewhat restored to myself, to find my answering machine flashing crazily.
You have twenty-three new messages
, the digital voice informed me. My heart thumped. Perhaps Michael had had second thoughts about finishing the relationship, perhaps he wanted to see me. I pushed this possibility firmly away. He was a bastard and I was well rid of him. Before I could backslide, I deleted all the messages. If there had been anything crucial, the caller would phone again, I reasoned. I knew that if I so much as heard Michael’s voice, my resolve would crumble.
    I walked into the bedroom, where all was still in the disarray in which I had left it: the bed unmade, discarded clothes scattered across the room. I cleared everything away, filled the washing machine, and came back to make the bed.
    The book Michael had given me lay in the tangle of sheets. It weighed beautifully in my hand, its soft calfskin cover warm, as if it were still alive. I opened it at random, folding the ancient paper back with care, and was confronted by a pattern for a slip: a delicaterepeated motif of a twining vine designed to be executed in black-work that the author suggested “would doe beste in a quaife or a caule, or to edge a handcarcheef.” The rest of his