Page 35 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
How did he know what the chess piece could do? How did he know about it if he hadn’t seen it before?
Those questions, and the image of Frank in his chair reading, shook loose a memory from deep within her mind, something she had known once but had put aside as unimportant. Something only her mother could tell her.
She hurried away, heading home.
Alone with Memories
At home, Magda changed out of her wet clothes, dried herself off, and pulled on something more comfortable—a soft wool sweater, pyjama bottoms, and big fluffy socks, the sort of clothes she wore during long days of writing. From her bedroom she went straight to her study. The leaden sky made the day feel miserable, so she switched on the desk lamp to provide some cheer.
The study was where she wrote her novels. It was a square room lined with bookshelves and with a large window looking out over the back garden. Many author copies of her own books filled three of the shelves, but the rest of the space held the books Magda and her mother had collected over the years. It had always felt right to Magda that this was where she now wrote, where she did the thing she loved most in the world.
As she stood by the desk, just enjoying the view from the window and the familiar smell of the room, she remembered thinking about her next novel on the Star Ferry in Hong Kong. That all seemed so long ago now, like a different world, where she hadn’t seen a man being shot to death in front of her, where Frank was still the reassuring if occasionally grumpy, steady presence in her life.
How quickly things can change. The familiar becoming so alien. Maybethat’s what my next novel should be about? Someone who thinks they know exactly what their life is about, until they discover they don’t have a clue.
She sighed and cast her eyes around the bookshelves. At the far end of one of the shelves on the right-hand wall her eyes caught sight of something that felt like a punch to her gut, that made her cough air out into the room: a collection of Tintin graphic novels in a single volume. She walked over and pulled it out, flicking through the pages for a few moments, running her eyes over the colourful cartoons and thinking about James again.
Immediately she saw him thumping against the glass, falling to the floor. His motionless face-down body was etched in her mind.
Stop, you’ll just get upset again.
She pushed the volume back into its place and turned her mind to the reason she had rushed home.
On the opposite wall, on the top shelf above her writing desk, Magda still kept her mother’s journals. She had eight volumes in total, hardback A4-size notebooks that spanned the entirety of Imelda’s adult life. The only journal missing was the one Imelda had been carrying with her when she died—that had never been recovered after her mother’s fall, something that still pained Magda. She had often wondered what stories that missing journal would have told, what adventures her mother had been on before her death.
Magda reached up and took down the last three journals and pulled out her chair to sit at the desk, in the circle of warm light from the lamp. She started flicking through the pages, scanning for the entry she vaguely remembered.
After her mother’s death, ten years earlier, Magda had spent days reading through the journals, delighting in the memories that Imelda had captured over the years. Each book was densely packed with neat text interspersed or surrounded by intricate sketches of places Imelda had been, or silly things such as a flower that had grown in the garden, or a picnic Magda and her school friends had had one summer’s day. There were even sketches of Magda herself, as a toddler and then as a child, a comical little figure with a mop of bright red hair and glasses on her face.Her mother had written about her as “the podgy carrot-top” and “the sturdy little troublemaker.” In the days of grief after her mother’s death, Magda had laughed through her tears as she read those descriptions for the first time. She had never read the journals when Imelda had been alive; her mother had never offered them, and Magda had never thought to intrude on her privacy. But in the long days of grief following her mother’s untimely passing, Magda had wanted to hear Imelda’s voice again in her mind. So she had pored over the journals, reading about Imelda’s long walks around London, her dinners with friends, and the paintings she had been working on at various points in her life. Imelda had written about the holiday they had taken to France when Magda was just ten years old, the ferry crossing to Calais and the weeks spent driving aimlessly around the French countryside. Magda had forgotten all about that trip and when she had read her mum’s lengthy entries it brought back those golden, summer days, the smell of fresh crusty bread and her first ever sip of wine from her mother’s glass at a restaurant in the countryside. She had cried tears of happiness and loss, revelling in the sweet moments she had shared with her mother and despairing that she would have no such sweet moments again.
Now, alone in her study in her mother’s large house, struggling still to comprehend the meeting with Frank, not to mention everything else that had happened, Magda felt adrift, the certainties in her life now seemingly insubstantial and unreliable. She had come in search of a specific entry she half remembered, but immersing herself in Imelda’s writings calmed her a little, just as Henrietta’s embrace the previous evening had soothed her.
She flicked through the pages of the first and second volumes, seeing lots of happy memories, being reminded of things she had forgotten, but not finding what she was looking for. She found it in the third volume, about halfway through the book. It was a sketch in black ink, taking up most of one of the pages of the book, a drawing of Frank as seen through the window of Bell Street Books as he sat reading behind the counter, just as Magda had seen him a couple days previously and just as she often thought of him. She touched the sketch lightly with thetips of her fingers. This was the Frank she knew, in his bookshop, in his chair, not the angry man she had seen today in Regent’s Park, the man who had stopped the world to prove a point.
She turned her eyes to the text around the picture, reading her mother’s memories. Imelda had made an unplanned visit to Bell Street Books, surprising Frank while he had been reading an old notebook full of drawings and text. This was what Imelda had sketched, and clearly it had held some importance for her to have bothered with the drawing.
Frank was in the window in his chair. He was so distracted he didn’t see me at first, but I had a good nosey at what was holding his attention, and it was a notebook of sorts, full of text and drawings, and when I looked at it, I got a strange tingly feeling, like I knew I was looking at something important. I saw him turn a few pages, and on each page, there was the drawing of an item, and lots of text all around it in dense, black ink. I saw a drawing of what I think was a knife. And there was a page with a drawing of a ring of some kind. And the last page I saw, before Frank spotted me, seemed to have a drawing of a chess piece, one of those castle ones that sit on the corners when you set up the board.
Magda lifted her eyes from the page, staring out to the grey sky. She had remembered right: there was a drawing of a chess piece in the book that Frank had been reading. Why had that not come back to her sooner?
Exhaustion, jet lag, mind too full of James Wei. Take your pick.
She dropped her eyes back to the book to read the rest of the entry.
And then Frank saw me, and he got all coy about it. By the time I’d made my way into the shop the book was out of sight. It took me a while to get him to admit what it was—the Society Catalogue (I have made it a proper noun because it seems to warrant it), a description of all the items in the Clockwork Cabinet. WOW! I didn’t even know such a thing existed. You’d think we other members of the Society would know about that. But Frank was all funny about it. He doesn’t want members to know what magical items we have. He worries we might betempted to play with them... I suppose I can see his point... but I also want to play with the magical items... And I also note that he was browsing the catalogue himself, like he was interested in playing with the magical items.
Magda slumped back in the chair, her mind digesting this information, seeing new meanings in the entry.
If there was a catalogue describing all the items that the Society possessed and that catalogue included a chess piece, had Frank just forgotten that? Otherwise, why had he sent her to Hong Kong?
If the Society already held a rook, was the one she had retrieved a different magical item? Or was it the one that was in the catalogue?
Or was the catalogue a lie? Was Henrietta telling the truth when she said the Clockwork Cabinet was empty? Frank had seemed to confirm as much when Magda had spoken to him earlier, but he hadn’t answered clearly. Frank never answered questions definitively.
Everywhere Magda looked there were mysteries and lies, and Frank was the only one who had the answers.
She resolved to herself that she would tackle him that evening. At the meeting of the Society, she would force him to tell her everything.
The Butterfly Man (2010)
