Initials & Author Signatures

A postcard with a small question

The postcard arrived beneath Nell Iris Vale's door on a Tuesday when she had decided to stop finding reasons to telephone her cousin. Its front showed a red gate standing open in sunshine. On the back, someone had written: Does this still lead to the garden?

Above the question was N. A. Vale, copied from the corner of the picture. The A had an uncertain middle, as though the writer had begun an I and changed direction. Nell held it beside the signature she used on her own letters, N. I. Vale. One small stroke separated a request for her from a request she would have to carry elsewhere.

The address was hers because the old garden booklet had given one place for correspondence. Nell had written its little paragraphs. Nora Ada Vale had drawn the gate, the paths and a watering can large enough to shelter a sleeping cat. They had made it nine summers ago, when the garden was behind the laundry and both cousins lived within shouting distance of its wall.

Now Nora lived across town. Their last conversation had concerned whether a borrowed saucepan was still borrowed after fourteen months. Nell had said she would collect it. Nora had said there was no hurry. They had somehow agreed to wait indefinitely.

The postcard supplied an errand with no saucepan in it.

At the bottom, a second hand had added a telephone number and a name: Rowan. Nell called. Rowan answered over a noise like a bucket being dragged downstairs.

“It's my daughter asking,” he said. “We found the booklet in our new flat. She thinks the picture means we can walk through the laundry.”

“You used to be able to.”

“Well, that makes her extremely pleased with herself.”

They were going on Saturday. Nell said she would ask the illustrator. Afterward she put the postcard into her coat before she could turn asking into another unanswered message.

The hour Nora was home

Nora's building had two front doors. One faced the road. The other faced a passage which looked private until a person had walked halfway down it. Nell tried the road first and met a woman carrying a fern whose leaves occupied the entire stairwell.

“Other side for Nora,” the woman said through the foliage.

Nell went around. Nora opened with a dishcloth over one shoulder and a pencil behind her ear. Her hair was damp. There was a piece of toast on the table bearing the impression of a thumb.

“You found me.”

“There were instructions.”

Nora glanced at the card in Nell's hand. Her smile became the attentive expression she wore when somebody wanted something drawn.

Nell had missed the smile before it changed.

She explained the question. Nora took the postcard, turned it over and looked at her own initials. She did not say anything about how young the drawing looked. Nell had prepared an affectionate remark about the enormous watering can and found nowhere to put it.

“The red gate's gone,” Nora said.

“When?”

“Last year, I think. I saw it from a bus.”

Nell waited for an offer to draw the new one. Nora put the card beside the toast instead.

“I'm home in the mornings now. I clean the tram windows before they go out. Then I draw after lunch, if I haven't fallen asleep in the chair.”

“You could have told me.”

“You could have come for the saucepan.”

Neither said it sharply. That made the words harder to step around. Nell looked at the dishcloth, the half-finished toast, the small stack of sketches held flat by an empty jar. She had pictured Nora waiting in the evenings for the same calls she had failed to make. Nora had been going to bed while Nell was still deciding whether it was too late to telephone.

“Shall we look before Saturday?” Nell asked.

Nora checked the clock. “I can give it an hour.”

Nell almost said that would be plenty. Instead she asked when the hour began.

The route the picture remembered

They took the bus toward the laundry. Nora sat by the window and let her head rest against it without sleeping. Nell held the postcard between them. In the drawing, the gate stood beside a blue rain barrel. Beyond it, three narrow paths crossed in a place where no three paths had ever crossed quite so neatly.

“I made room for the cat,” Nora said, noticing where Nell looked.

The cat had never existed either. It had been added because Nora liked drawing a creature comfortable enough to sleep while people worked around it.

At the laundry, a rack of drying sheets blocked the old passage. A man folding towels said the back rooms were now storage. There was no way through to the garden.

Nell showed him the picture. He looked at the signature first.

“N. Vale. Is that you?”

“The words were mine. The picture is Nora's.”

Nora touched the A with a fingernail. “Nora Ada.”

The man nodded toward the street. “Try the lane after the bakery. They moved the entrance.”

Outside, Nell found herself irritated with him for not knowing more. Then she saw Nora looking at the drawing rather than the closed passage.

“Do you want to keep that?” Nell asked.

“It's someone else's postcard.”

“I meant the drawing. The way it was.”

Nora slid it back into the envelope. “I already have it that way.”

They walked past the bakery. The lane was narrower than Nell remembered, though she could not remember walking down it before. She had assumed a familiar neighborhood would be familiar from every direction.

Halfway along, Nora stopped beside a shallow doorstep and sat down.

“Feet,” she said, before Nell could ask.

Nell sat beside her. A bicycle bell sounded at the far end of the lane. They moved their knees in together and watched a woman wheel a bicycle past without mounting it. There was enough room when nobody tried to hurry.

A garden without its old address

The new gate was green. It stood in a fence which had been patched with three different sorts of wood. A paper notice asked visitors to close it because the latch did not always catch. Nora tested it twice before letting go.

Inside, the garden looked smaller. Then Nell realized she was seeing more of it. The tall hedge had been cut back, the beds had changed shape and the old rain barrel lay on its side beneath a bench. Someone had painted a fish on its bottom, where the fish could only be seen by a person sitting nearby.

Nora went straight to the bench.

“Don't draw it,” Nell said, and immediately wished she had said nothing.

“I was going to sit.”

Nell stood holding the envelope as though it contained an instruction she could still complete correctly. She had brought Nora to answer a question, but she had also wanted the walk to restore something she had not asked permission to want.

“I thought we'd come back and it would feel like before.”

“Which before?”

“When we made the booklet.”

Nora considered the beds. A little wind moved the dry seed heads beside the path.

“I remember you being cross because I missed your paragraph about the compost.”

“You drew a cat over it.”

“I remember.”

Nell laughed. It arrived awkwardly, then became easier. She had kept the summer as a picture of two people naturally finding time for each other. Nora remembered a drawing deadline, bad chairs and a compost paragraph repeatedly shortened to accommodate an imaginary animal.

“I liked it,” Nora said. “I don't want to do it again this afternoon.”

Nell put the envelope down. “All right.”

Across the garden, somebody called for a person named Vale. Both cousins turned. A gardener lifted a glove toward a third person coming from the shed.

Nora leaned back on the bench. “Not even our one small distinction would have helped there.”

They waited while the other Vale fetched a ladder. The name belonged to that errand now. Neither cousin had to answer for it.

Rain on the route home

The first drops made dark circles on the path. Nell reached for the envelope too late. A corner of the postcard had begun to curl. Nora held her coat above it while Nell found the opening, and for several seconds they managed to shelter the picture while getting wet themselves.

“Excellent priorities,” Nora said.

They moved beneath the shallow roof of the shed. The gardener with the ladder offered them the dry half of a folded sack to sit on. Rain tapped the roof with increasing confidence.

Nell checked the time. Nora's hour had nearly gone.

“I'll tell Rowan the new route,” she said. “You don't have to come on Saturday.”

“I wasn't going to.”

The direct answer stung, then relieved her. There was no invitation being accepted out of politeness, no arrival she would have to interpret as proof of affection.

Nora took a pencil from her pocket. On a scrap from an old shopping list she drew the laundry, the bakery and the turn into the lane. She stopped before drawing the garden itself.

“This gets them there. They can look once they're inside.”

She signed N. A. Vale beneath the route, out of habit. Nell watched her add the second dot.

“Will he know which one?”

“You can tell him.”

Nell wrote Route checked with Nora Ada Vale beside it. Underneath she put Questions to Nell Iris Vale and her own number. It was too much writing for a pretty little map. Nobody had asked it to be pretty.

The rain slowed. Nora put the pencil away without offering a new edition of the booklet. Nell did not ask for one. They walked back through the green gate, checking that the latch caught, and passed the bakery just as someone carried out a tray of warm rolls.

Nora bought two. She gave Nell the larger one without inspecting them for equality. They ate standing in the lane because the bag was already becoming transparent with butter.

“Are you busy Sunday morning?” Nell asked.

“Asleep until ten.”

“After ten.”

Nora brushed crumbs from her sleeve. “Not particularly.”

What the visitor asked next

On Saturday, Nell met Rowan and his daughter Pippa outside the bakery. Pippa carried the booklet wrapped in a tea towel. Rowan had the route Nora had drawn, folded so that N. A. Vale appeared on its own little square.

“We've got the right Vale this time,” he said.

“Both of us, for different parts.”

Pippa wanted to know whether Ada was the person who had drawn the cat.

“Nora Ada is one person,” Nell said. “Those are two of her given names.”

Pippa considered this without difficulty. “Does she still draw cats?”

Nell almost gave the answer from nine summers ago. She said she would have to ask.

They found the green gate. Pippa was disappointed it was not red. Then the latch failed to catch, and she became interested in getting it properly shut. Inside, she walked past the bench without seeing the painted fish. Nell nearly pointed it out. She waited instead.

Pippa found a seed head shaped like a small, badly made umbrella. Rowan crouched to look. They remained there for a long time, discussing whether it would protect a beetle. The booklet stayed wrapped in its towel under his arm.

At the bench, Pippa finally saw the barrel's bottom and the fish.

“This wasn't in the picture.”

“No.”

“Good.”

She said it with the satisfaction of a traveler who had discovered something the mapmaker had not promised. Nell sat while Rowan helped his daughter examine the barrel from the end that did not involve climbing inside.

The postcard's question had been answered. Its drawing did not lead through the laundry anymore. It had still brought three people to a place worth looking at. Nell left those two facts together without trying to make either repair the other.

The saucepan, collected

The next morning, Nell went to Nora's other front door after ten. She brought the saucepan home in a cloth bag, which made the fourteen months of not collecting it look rather easy to end.

Nora made tea. There was no postcard on the table and no drawing laid out for approval. Nell told her about the umbrella seed head, the green latch and Pippa's question about cats.

“Sometimes,” Nora said. She took down a sketchbook and showed Nell a page of a cat refusing to move from a tram seat.

It was an entirely different cat. Nell laughed at its offended ears and asked which seat it had chosen. Nora showed her the next page.

They stayed at the table after the tea cooled. Once, Nell reached for her phone to check the time, then asked what time Nora wanted her to leave. Nora said noon. It was nearly eleven. There was enough of the morning left to hear about the tram windows and tell her about a sentence that had taken Nell three days to finish.

At noon, Nell put on her coat. From the stairs she could see the sketchbook still open, its corner signed N. A. Vale. The initials were a useful way to find the drawing's maker. They had not told her which door to knock on, what hour to come, or how long to stay.

“Nora,” she called, before the door closed, “next Sunday?”

Nora checked the little calendar beside the kettle.

“After ten,” she said.

The naming notebook

Retain the full given-name expansion and surname with every compact signature. N. A. Vale points back to Nora Ada Vale in this fictional record; the same string could belong to other real people.

Compare the precise displayed abbreviation. Removing the second initial would make both cousins N. Vale; keeping it does not solve an unknown current address or establish identity by itself.

Write spoken addresses separately from printed signatures. Nell can call Nora at the other front door without reciting the letters from the postcard; a chosen visit is not a request for a new illustration.

N. A. Vale: N. A. Vale links the picture to Nora Ada, while N. I. Vale identifies Nell Iris. The distinction routes a question without supplying a present address, schedule or promise of new work. Keep the surname and an expanded reference. Compare the compact string with its complete names, then try checking a changed route or arranging a visit without a commission.