Two Hundred and Six: Return of Souls

Two hundred and six letters. Every one of them burned.At nineteen, in a hot kitchen, Anne said the unforgivable thing to her grandmother and walked out of the house and never went back.For the next four years the old woman wrote to her every week. Two hundred and six letters. Not one of them arrived. Every one was taken from the letterbox before Anne came downstairs, and burned - and the old woman knew it, and she knew who was burning them, and she put her coat on and walked to the post box anyway. In February. In the rain. With a toothache.Because you do not have to feel love to go to the post box. You only have to go.Anne dies at sixty-three, alone in a hospice, her hand held by a night nurse she met four days ago.And she is not permitted to rest.She is taken somewhere that is not a place, and shown her life - all of it, and not the version she told herself.The man who never lied to her, never hit her, never raised his voice, and destroyed her anyway. The four pounds she put on a supermarket counter on a wet Tuesday and had forgotten before she reached the car park - and the woman on the other side of that counter, who had already chosen the Thursday. A husband of twenty-two years who told her, dying, at two in the morning, that living with her had been like living in a house where somebody had left the back door open."Twenty-two years. I've been waiting to get robbed. And you never did. Isn't that funny. The door's been open the whole time.""And nobody ever came in."She opened her mouth to tell him the truth. And what she said was: "Do you want some water?"And then they ask her to go back.Two Hundred and Six is a novel about the wound of Separation: about the difference - the two most different things in the world - between loving someone and letting them in. It is about a woman who could not receive love, and counted instead of feeling, and assumed all kindness had a price. It is about what is still alive under the thing you buried when you were nineteen.And it is about a door that was never, at any moment, in forty-four years, locked.Book Four of the Nine Paths to One cycle. Complete in itself.For readers of The Remains of the Day, A Little Life, Piranesi, and Journey of Souls.