The Map of Us: The most uplifting and unmissable feel good romance of 2018!. Jules Preston
as the Azores and then disembarked, tired and disillusioned.
Violet offered him a better cabin, but he would not leave the comfort of the shore. She made him the Captain of a merchant ship. And a smuggler. And a retired Admiral. But he would not go. He found cheap lodgings and ate plump grilled sardines and drank green wine, and as the sun dipped he stood on the harbour wall and wondered what it was he would do next.
Violet sent off for a book to keep up with him. It was in Portuguese. Things could not continue this way.
She gave him boots. They were stolen from his companion in the cabin. She had invented them. They were hers to steal. They did not fit, so she wrote that they were another size. That was better. He liked the boots more than he had liked the food onboard ship. He went for a walk to try them out.
Violet left him to walk in stolen boots for some time. She did not want a repeat of his disastrous voyage at sea. He was not turning out to be the man she had thought she imagined. Not at all. He had a mind of his own and a temperament that was combustible and a face she had not yet had the delicacy to finalise. His stride was long, and he had the hands of a violin player, or perhaps a pianist, and a voice that had not yet been tested. It was not until he had gone some several miles into an unwritten wasteland that she realised she had sent him on his way without a name. It was an oversight that she sought to quickly remedy.
Violet thought of her father, but his name would not do. He was a cruel man who had shunned her and stayed away and led a life elsewhere that did not include a daughter who could not walk far and whose frailty was a downright disappointment. She did not wish to recall his name. Or the name of her brother who pinched and pushed and kicked and dropped things from a height. Sharp things. Heavy things. Just because her legs did not work did not mean that she could not feel.
There were other names. Many. She wrote a list. And all the while a man with an uncertain face walked away from her into a shapeless void that had not yet been typed.
Violet’s house had four floors and an attic. It was detached and made of hard white bricks and was surrounded by a large garden that was already beginning to look unkempt and overgrown. There were 93 steps inside. The staircases were narrow with painted banisters and fluted spindles. Some of the spindles were broken or missing. The staircase from the ground floor to the first floor was carpeted. The rest were bare boards. The carpet was held in place by brass stair rods made by Galbraith & Sons of Edinburgh. That would be his name.
The washbasin in the first-floor bathroom was manufactured by Arthur & Co. It sat on a cast iron stand and had a white marble surround. There were 14 steps and a small landing between the ground floor and the bathroom. It took Violet five minutes to reach it. She clung to the banister. The paint had worn off in places. There were many layers of paint hidden beneath. Violet hoped to see them all one day. That would be his name.
And so Arthur Galbraith was born. Not exactly born, but brought into the world of imaginary existence. He was the child of a brass stair rod and a first-floor washbasin with a marble surround. They represented the outer limits of Violet’s universe. A name should mean something. His seemed apt somehow.
Violet had been thinking about Arthur Galbraith’s face again, but she was yet to be convinced by any of the faces she had devised. None of them would do. She did not ask his opinion, for he had already shown himself to be difficult and ill-tempered when it came to making a choice.
Her problem was further complicated by a small technical matter. Almost every element of his face had an ‘e’ in it somewhere and the ‘e’ on her borrowed turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter often stuck. There was an ‘e’ in ‘nose’ and ‘ear.’ There were two in ‘eye’ and ‘eyebrows’ and cheeks’ and ‘teeth’ and ‘forehead.’ It was infuriating. Every time she would have to press a small button and the top of the Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter would pop open automatically, making the interior of the machine accessible. Then she would unstick the ‘e’, replace the top, press the backspace key and start again.
Only Arthur’s chin and mouth and lips were immune from the lengthy and annoying process. But they were not a place she cared to start. She knew something of chins and mouths, but a man’s lips were unknown to her. She found herself thinking about them far more regularly than his nose. Did it matter what an imaginary explorer’s lips looked like or felt like? She would never be kissed by such a man – and ‘kissed’ had an ‘e’ in it.
Violet set Arthur Galbraith to walk upon the Great Moor. It was a place of beauty and sadness and longing and hope and regret and joy, and it would take a lifetime to walk, for some things are not as simple as distance and direction.
Arthur put his boots to good use. They were no longer stolen. They were his. He had rock and peat and plain earth beneath his feet. He had a long stride, an unknown purpose and a Great Moor stood before him. Unexplored. Uncertain. A place without a map. He would be its pen.
And as he walked a face emerged. Not a face that Violet could have imagined. It was his face. It was his to choose. And strong hands not meant for instruments and a voice that said little that it did not mean.
The son of a brass stair rod and a washbasin finally appeared on a hilltop overlooking the Great Moor and looked south and east and north and west and decided to refuse the stars their steady counsel and let love guide him. He had a long road ahead. Not straight or flat or without discomfort.
And that is where Arthur and Violet and a turquoise blue Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter began their journey together. Almost touching. Merely the distance of paper apart.
Matt called the day after our meeting in the wine bar. The fate of the three-seater sofa was still preying on his mind. The whole 10.37am thing had rather overwhelmed the conversation.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’
I knew who it was. We had been together for five years. Married for three. Just because we were separated now didn’t mean that I would suddenly forget, even if I wanted to.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Sorry about last night.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I wanted to see where this was going before I said anything more definite.
‘Are you busy?’
This was a typical Matt tactic. He liked to make sure that I was in the middle of doing something so that I’d have to stop doing it and give him my undivided attention. I made a mental note to find some way of quantifying his approach in a graph.
‘Just stuff,’ I said, trying not to be curt.
‘I wanted to talk to you about the sofa,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’ He said.
‘Because you always want to talk about it,’ I said.
‘Oh’ he said. He sounded small and distant and brittle.
I sighed. I couldn’t help it. This was getting ridiculous.
‘You