My Grandfathers Study
For most of the first twelve years of my life, the door to my grandfather's study in our house in South C was closed, and when he went into it he closed it behind him, and when he came out of it he closed it behind him. The door was made of a dark wood with six panels and a brass handle that had been polished so many times by our house-help Mama Esther that the metal beneath showed through in the places where her thumb had gone. I had, by the time I was twelve, a detailed theory of the room, based on the sounds that came out of it in the evenings and the smell that came out of it in the mornings, which was a smell of old paper and of a particular cologne my grandfather had worn since, he said, his time in Scotland in 1962.
The theory had many components. The room contained, in my version, a rifle from the war. A box of letters from a woman who was not my grandmother. A typewriter. A globe. A number of framed photographs. A bottle of whisky at a level my grandfather measured. Several locked drawers. A cat, possibly, although we did not officially own one. I had, over the years, refined these components in conversation with my cousin Kevin, who had a study theory of his own and who had argued, for some time, for the presence of a safe behind a picture, although he had later withdrawn this in favour of a trapdoor in the floor.
I was allowed into the study on the afternoon of my