Mapping the Edge

by Sarah Dunant

  He smiled as their eyes met. She smiled back, because somehow it felt aggressive to refuse, then turned her attention back to the horse. She was imagining it gift-wrapped, Lily’s little fingers poking and prodding, locating the sharp ridge of the legs, yelping with delight as she recognized what it was.

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked up.

  “You are staying next door, yes? At the Hotel Corri?”

  “Yes.” The hotel then, that was where they had seen each other.

  “You are English.”

  “Er—yes.”

  “You like this horse?” He pronounced the last word with a touch of the guttural, as if he expected to get it wrong and was compensating already. Oh, I see, she thought. He’s a salesman. She gave a polite little nod, then looked back down at the figure.

  “But this is a crazy price for such a thing.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Eighty thousand lire. It is—how you call it?—stealing. They sell these in the market for under half the price.”

  “Do they?”

  “Of course. They don’t come from Italy. They are African. The boys from Senegal have them on their stalls. You don’t see them?”

  “No.”

  She had seen the boys, though. Beautiful young men, their skin gleaming like polished coal under the sun, startling in a city where the predominant color palette was burnt ocher and gold. Their presence was one of the many ways in which Florence had changed since she was first here so long ago. If now was then, would she have wanted to woo one of them rather than the olive-skinned young Romeo she had pursued through that teenage summer of Italian verbs and Dante? Maybe not. These tender young men seemed in more need of money than of love, their goods carefully laid out on brightly patterned lungis: soapstone figures and heavy carvings from the bush. She had seen elephants and the occasional wild cat but no horses. Surely she would have noticed.

  “Of course,” he said, “it is your choice. But you would save a lot of money.”

  His English was good, far better than her Italian, eroded by decades of neglect. She couldn’t decide if she was flattered or irritated by his pinpointing her so clearly as a woman traveling on a budget. Maybe the hotel had given her away, the lower end of the scale, though—God knew—that didn’t exactly make it cheap. “Actually I’m leaving Florence today. I probably won’t have time to get to the market.”

  “Ah. You go back to England?”

  “Yes.”

  “And from where do you fly? Florence airport or Pisa?”

  “Pisa.”

  “At what time?”

  She hesitated. “Er . . . around eight o’clock.”

  “Okay. The reason I ask is because of the trains. You must catch the six o’clock. It is direct to Pisa airport and will get you to the plane in good time. Also I make you a suggestion. You get to the station early and there in front of the main entrance you will find some of these boys with their horses. Very cheap. And then you will have a good buy, an easy journey, and enough money for an espresso and a pastry at the airport.”

  She laughed, charmed despite herself. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. It was a gesture that on an Englishman would have sat too theatrically. Here it seemed no more than what was called for. “It is nothing. Just a—how you call it?—a tip for the day. Have a good journey home.”

  She started to thank him again, but he was already turning away, his attention on something else. She was sorry she had been so standoffish now. It struck her that this was part of her problem. She had got so used to having her defenses up over the years that she had started to read kindness as manipulation. She should learn to trust people more, to take the time to enjoy them. She took one more look at the horse, but her mind was made up and she left soon after, without having bought anything.

  A few moments later the man went up to the cash desk and laid down two fifty-thousand-lire notes. Next to them he placed the wooden figure of the horse. As the sales assistant picked it up he leaned over and said something to her. She reached underneath the counter and took out a length of silver wrapping paper.

  Away—Thursday A.M.

  THAT THURSDAY, ON her last morning in Florence, Anna didn’t leave the hotel at all. Instead she breakfasted upstairs, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  The room was small and stuffy, with a window that looked out on a dingy inner courtyard and allowed for no wind, a place to sleep in rather than to live, cheap, although in high season it wasn’t. She lay on the bed and watched the ceiling fan rotate lazily.

  Eventually she got tired of waiting and fell asleep fully dressed on the bed. When she woke, bruised and confused from dreams she could barely remember but that she knew involved her in some vast and silent danger from which she couldn’t save herself, she rang through to the switchboard in case she might have missed a call. But there had been none. Why hadn’t he rung? Had something happened to stop him getting away? He was now two days late. It didn’t make any sense.

  To begin with she hadn’t minded the silence. On the contrary, she had found herself grateful for the space. She had come out a couple of days early deliberately, needing to be calm when he arrived, so that she would know what to say and not allow herself to be blown off course by desire. She had used the city to center herself. She walked for hours, choosing routes away from the tourist haunts, to churches that only rated a sentence in the guidebooks, squares that history had largely passed by. In every place she could feel echoes of her younger self; eager, unformed, and in love with a city and her own sense of omnipotence within it. The idea of this earlier Anna was so powerful that once she thought she might even have seen herself, small and plump with funky look-at-me sunglasses and cropped punk hair—but it was only an illusion of fashion, evidence that the wheel was turning ever faster somersaults into retro.

  It was one of the things she liked about the city: the way it vibrated with conflicting styles. Middle-aged Florentine women gilded and painted against age brushed shoulders with the latest breed of hippie travelers, the boys studded and tattooed, the girls with bare midriffs and backs the color of roasted chestnuts, their stick-thin bodies still clinging to childhood. It was holiday season and the surrounding countryside was full of local fiestas. A buskers’ paradise. But they always came back to Florence. In the mid-morning heat you could find them at a pump by the side entrance of the Duomo, guys with dreadlocks thick as bead curtains stripped to the waist and washing themselves like puppies, water splashing everywhere.

  She stood and watched them, mesmerized. They awoke a vivid memory in her of a night many years before, when she had been traveling and arrived back from Rome to find the hostel she had been staying in full. She had ended up sleeping on the steps of the Baptistery, then washing in the bathroom of a café nearby. It seemed inconceivable that she could do it now. Where had all those years gone? Places, people, lovers, jobs, Lily. The neck of the hourglass seemed to have widened since Lily, time gushing away more like liquid than sand. These Duomo kids were probably nearer in age to her daughter than to herself. How did that happen? It didn’t seem possible.

  Lily. She hadn’t thought of her much in these last few days. In her guilt she realized that the connection between them was becoming fainter. She had called home the night she had arrived, but Lily had been engrossed in a video and didn’t want to talk. She could hear her munching on potato chips, her attention elsewhere, still following the pictures on the screen. She was having a good time. She didn’t need her.

  Except, of course, she did. Before this thing with Samuel had threatened to blow her world apart, Lily’s presence had vibrated inside her whenever they had been separated. She had imagined the bond between them as a kind of emotional chewing gum; the substance of love stretching out, malleable, tensile, pulling ever thinner until the moment when you choose to loop it all back into your mouth and chew it together again. But was there a chance that if you stretched it too far it might snap? Was that what the pursuit of t
his obsession was doing—weakening the thread?

  In the hotel room the hours bled away. He wouldn’t come now. A part of her felt almost relieved. Whatever his excuse, this would be the beginning of the end. If she were going to make the plane she would have to leave by mid-afternoon. She had had the desk clerk check the times. The trains to Pisa turned out to be erratic. Not all of them went directly to the airport. The five o’clock would be too early, the seven o’clock too late.

  She had already packed, the clothes folded away, the wooden horse she had found in the market on the first day rolled carefully inside a T-shirt to protect its sharp edges from damage in the overhead locker of the plane. At least Lily would know that she had been thinking of her. She zipped up the holdall and got off the bed. He would not come now, and she needed to get out of there. Maybe it was for the best. She left her bag on the bed and went down to the hotel lounge to get something cold to drink.

  Home—Friday P.M.

  I AM GOOD in a crisis. Something about my DNA. I caught the last shuttle by twenty minutes, but even with all the right connections the journey from Amsterdam to West London took three and a half hours. Still, I didn’t allow the time to unravel me. No sir. Instead I spent the trip constructing scenarios of her homecoming. If Anna hadn’t come back when she said she would, there had to be a reason. The most likely was that she had called to say she was delayed but that the answering machine hadn’t taken the message. She was probably on her way even now. I pictured her getting out of a taxi, bursting through the front door, throwing down her bag as she ran upstairs to Lily’s bedroom to wake her up to say good night . . . I did such a colorful job with the pictures that I had to call Paul from the Heathrow arrivals hall just to check I’d got it right. He answered on the first ring. He was still waiting.

  I took a taxi. London was even warmer than Amsterdam. The grass on the motorway verges was dry as a bad perm and the air rotten with exhaust fumes: the sort of day where emergency departments would have been counting out the oxygen masks as the asthma patients checked in. Halfway to Chiswick the sky got so heavy that it cracked open and a wall of rain came down. The road steamed like a hot plate as the water hit and the windows of the cab instantly misted up.

  England. I had forgotten how dramatic weather could be.

  By the time we got to her road the shower had passed, soaking up the worst of the heat. Out through the window the air smelled of green. I hauled myself out of the cab. Paul must have heard the engine because he opened the door before I had time to reach the bell.

  He beckoned me inside with a finger on his lips and a quick gesture upstairs. On the first landing Lily’s door was ajar. I nodded and we moved quietly down to the kitchen. First things first. I rescued my London bottle of vodka from the freezer (a ship in every port) and poured us both a drink. He refused his. It made me look at him more closely. In his time I have seen Paul drop-dead gorgeous enough to turn every head in the room, but he was not at his best now. His skin had a tight, ironed-on quality to it—Christopher Walken in one too many psychotic roles—and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. He looked as if he wasn’t sleeping well. But whether from sex or worry you can never tell with Paul.

  “Still nothing?”

  “Not a word.”

  “What have you told Lily?”

  “That she missed the plane and she’d be back when she could get another one.”

  “Does she believe you?”

  He shrugged. “What’s not to believe? Why else would her mother not be home when she said she would?”

  He sat down at the table and closed his eyes for a second, using his thumb and middle finger to massage into his eye sockets. No, I thought, not sex this time. “Have you been here all the time?”

  He shook his head. “Patricia, the child minder, called me this morning. I pick Lily up most Fridays anyway, but Patricia had to go to Ireland today for her niece’s wedding this weekend and obviously she was beside herself that Anna wasn’t home.”

  “When exactly was she due back?”

  “Yesterday evening.”

  “You called the airport?”

  He nodded. “All the flights from Florence came in on time. No cancellations, no delays. They wouldn’t give out passenger lists.”

  “Florence?”

  “Yep. That’s where she went.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  He shrugged. “Search me. The last time I talked to her was last week. She didn’t say anything about going away. Apparently she only asked Patricia to baby-sit two days before she went. Patricia thinks it was something to do with work, but when I called the paper this morning the features editor said she didn’t know anything about it and neither did anyone else.” He paused. “I thought she might have said something to you.”

  But she hadn’t. The vodka slid from cold to hot down my throat. I wanted another one. I was trying to remember our last phone call, two—no, three—weeks before. She had been busy, something about an article she was working on but she didn’t tell me what. She had sounded, well, a little distant, but I had put it down to work. She’s always expended too much energy on such things. Unlike her best friend. But Florence? If she had known she would have told me. No question. Though it had happened before I met her, I knew all about Florence. Everybody has a story of being eighteen and the city which you finally grow up in, or at least that’s what you’d like to believe happened. She hadn’t been back for years. If she had been going to Florence she surely would have told me. “What about a contact number?”

  “She left a number, but Patricia thinks she must have taken it down wrong. When I called this afternoon I got some woman running a dress shop.”

  “Still,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would she just not come back? She’d know Patricia was going away. You’re sure she didn’t leave any kind of message?”

  “There’s nothing on the machine.”

  “Maybe it didn’t record.”

  “And maybe she didn’t ring.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while. “I’ve been waiting till you got here. . . .” He paused. “I’m wondering if we should call the police.”

  “It’s too soon,” I said. Though I had no idea if it was or wasn’t.

  He shrugged. “If she’s not here by tomorrow morning that makes two nights. I don’t see how we can avoid it, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t see how we can avoid telling Lily if we do.”

  “So what do you suggest? Are you ready to move in here and field the questions till she turns up again?”

  “Wait a minute, Paul. You’re not saying you think this is deliberate?”

  “No. I told you, I don’t know any more than you do. I think it’s suspicious, that’s all. She doesn’t say anything to anyone about going in the first place—I mean, not to you or me. She just walks onto a plane and doesn’t come back. I think if we don’t hear from her by tomorrow we have to assume something’s happened to her.”

  “Like what?”

  “Jesus, Estella, I don’t know. Like . . . something.”

  Something. Take your pick. I read a statistic the other day that on average around the world 2,090 people die in traffic accidents every day. There must be another statistic about how many of those are in a foreign country at the time. But morgues have regulations whatever the culture, and where would her passport or credit cards be if not in her handbag? Forget it. Anna wasn’t the kind of woman to die under a bus in a Florentine side street. That couldn’t happen to her. Or to me. What do they say about lightning not striking twice in the same place? Or within the same family. My family. I felt myself oddly reassured by superstition.

  Through the open kitchen door we both became aware of the guttural sound of a diesel engine in the street. I glanced down at my watch: 12:48 A.M. Last planes from Europe are usually in by 10:00 P.M. But not everybody flies. What if she had stayed on, then found that all the Friday planes were full and she had to go overland? I had a sudden ridiculous Vera Lynn im
age of her, standing full into the wind, looking out to sea as the ghost-gray shadows of the Dover cliffs loomed into view. Then from Dover to London on a slow train. Or even, if it was too late, a taxi. Outside, the engine was still turning over while someone paid their fare and got out their house keys. We heard a door slam, then another. After a while the taxi drew away. We deliberately didn’t look at each other. How long could we wait?

  He sighed. “How long can you stay?”

  “As long as it takes,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Mike has tech rehearsals over the weekend. First preview on Tuesday.”

  It wasn’t really an answer, but it helped to get away from it for a while. “How is he?”

  How long had this one been? It had to be nearly a year now.

  “Mike? Fine. Great. Busy. How about you? How’s work?”

  I shrugged. “You know the tax business. Moving A to B to avoid paying C. To my surprise, I appear to be rather adept at it.”

  “That’s because it’s not your money.”

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “Anyway, you’re looking good on it.”

  I tapped the glass. “Must be the stimulants.”

  “She’s probably got some dope somewhere if you want.” Like many people he’s amused to think of lawyers breaking the law. He doesn’t seem to understand it’s an occupational hazard. In fact, as gay men go Paul is in many ways really rather straight, which is one of the things that makes him so charming. I wondered if he was as diligent toward Lily now Mike was on the scene. In the past he always kept them separate, the boys and girls in his life, but from what I’d heard from Anna this one was different.

  “Thanks, but I’ll stick to what I’ve got.”

  We sat for a while longer, but it somehow made it worse, waiting together. He stood up from the table. “I’m going to go to bed.”