index

I did not discover the door. The boy did. Or he did not. The effect is the same.

An archival box arrived the year after my grandfather died. It was labelled, in his square hand, with my name.

The manuscript itself was the size of a novella. Fifty-three pages of blue-inked script, titled “The Door Behind the Painting.” The protagonist was a boy of ten, who would spend his school holidays in his grandfather’s house, a weatherbeaten wood and cinderblock home with bright ocean light in the front rooms, and faint drifts of sand on faded cork floors. The house, as described, corresponded to the one I had visited in childhood, down to the loose bannister and the dusty bookcase on the landing wall.

The story proceeds without tricks. The boy wanders the house. He is alone in the afternoons: the grandfather insists on “quiet hours” for counting and recording numbers, work that is never specified. The boy whittles a boat’s hull from a carpenter’s pencil, drills a hole for a feather mast and sail, and sets it sailing in a concrete sink. He sneaks stale rock cakes from a low cupboard in the kitchen. One day he notices a nail behind a painting halfway up the stairs. Or, more precisely, he notices that the nail-head is new. The painting, a winter landscape of fields and a black hedgerow, has been rehung.

…