by Sarah Dunant
“You sleeping in the spare room?”
“Yep.”
That left Anna’s bedroom. “Does Lily know I’m here?”
He nodded. “After I spoke to you I told her you’d be coming for the weekend.”
“Do you think she’ll mind if I sleep in Anna’s bed?”
“If she does she probably won’t tell you.”
“No.” She wouldn’t. Some people say that only children are good at keeping their own counsel. I would know about that, of course, though I don’t always feel like talking about it. Like Lily. But then that’s a long story. . . .
He was standing by the table as if there was something more to say. I pulled the bottle toward me. His eyes followed the movement. I’ve seen you legless enough in your time, mate, I thought. I suggest you don’t make a thing about it. “It’s a tradition,” I said. “Friday night. She wouldn’t want her absence to spoil it.”
He shrugged. “You know me. One man’s abuse is another man’s pleasure. Sleep well.”
“I will. And, Paul,” I said firmly, “don’t worry. There’ll be a reason why she hasn’t called. She’ll be back tomorrow, I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure, too.”
Away—Thursday P.M.
ANNA TOOK THE stranger’s advice and got to the Central Station with time to spare. But although there were a number of market stalls laced around the outer edge of the square, there was no sign of any Senegalese boys selling horses. The discovery annoyed her. She should have bought it when she had the opportunity. It was too late to go back to the shop now. She would have to risk finding something suitable at the airport.
She ran up the stairs into the entrance. The central hall, with its fake monumental architecture, was choked with people. Along the left-hand wall ran a set of ticket windows, all of them sporting queues three deep, the occasional Florentine lost in a mass of tourism, the seasonal crush of the long vacation. Thank God she had got here early. She joined the shortest line (which wasn’t short at all) and checked the timetable board high above her. It told her that the last train to Pisa Central had left twenty-five minutes before. There was no 6:00 P.M. service listed. The next airport train was at 7:00 P.M., an hour and a quarter away and too late for her to make her flight. She looked around for an information window, but was concerned about losing her place in the queue, which was already stacking up behind her.
She was frantically thinking about buses when a voice behind her said: “Hello?”
She turned to see the man from the shop that morning standing before her, his jacket off and a worried look on his face.
“Oh, thanks God, it is you. I am so pleased to find you. I have been looking all over the station. You remember me, yes? From the shop this morning?”
“Yes. Hello. What—?”
“I am so sorry. There is a change with the trains. There is no more six o’clock service to Pisa airport now. They are running on—what is the words?—summer times. I did not realize.”
“You came all this way to tell me that?”
He laughed. “No, no. A friend was going to Rome. I brought him to the train, but when I checked the board I remembered what I said to you.”
“So I can’t get to the airport from here?”
“Not in time for your plane, no. Your flight is—what—eight o’clock, you said?”
“Seven-forty-five. How about a bus?”
He made a clicking noise between his teeth. “No. There is a—how you say?—a dispute. The drivers for the airport don’t go. They want more money. There is a sign outside. You must have passed it. That’s why there are all these people.”
“Why don’t they run more trains?”
He said nothing, confining himself to one of those gestures that tell, in any number of languages, of the unfathomable stupidity of the authorities. No trains or buses. If she missed this plane it would be a nightmare: The flights were packed, it had been a stroke of luck to get space on this charter as it was. But if she took a taxi from here it would cost a fortune. She would have nowhere near enough Italian currency to cover it. She looked around for an exchange office.
“Please . . .”
In her anxiety she had almost forgotten he was there.
“You must let me help. I have my car outside. The autostrada is quite fast and we can get there in one hour. Plenty of time, yes?”
She shook her head. “It’s okay, I’ll take a taxi. But I have to change some money first.”
She was already moving away, but he stepped into her path. “Signora. Please. This is my fault. I give you the wrong information and now you are in trouble because of me. Let me help. I live near Pisa. I go that way now. The airport, it is not far from my home. Please. Let me help you.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t think of refusing. On the contrary, the advice she had already drilled into Lily—never accept anything from anyone you don’t know—she had taken instinctively. But there was another imperative at work here: the need, this time, to accept the kindness of strangers. After all, wasn’t that partly why she had come back, to rediscover some spontaneity in herself, some sense of the possibility of life? “Only connect.” Like many grand-tour teenagers she had first come to Italy with A-level E. M. Forster novels singing in her head, sporting his exhortation to life as a badge of romantic courage. Twenty years on, it might seem cheap to apply a literary aphorism to something as mundane as a lift to the airport. Nonetheless—
“Well,” she said. “If you’re sure it isn’t out of your way . . .”
Away—Thursday P.M.
THE MESSAGE LIGHT was flashing at the bottom of the phone, a small foggy yellow button, on/off . . . on/off, like a shallow-water warning to sailors coming too close to the land. She had seen it from the moment she opened the door, but she had been waiting so long that now it was here she suddenly couldn’t bear to go near it. Instead she busied herself with last-minute packing. Even as she was in the bathroom gathering up her toothbrush and creams she could feel it pulsing on and off through the wall in between. It’s too late, she thought. You’ve left it too late. The spell is broken. I’m going home now. I’m going back without meeting you. It’s better for everyone this way.
She picked up her bag and walked to the door. She still had plenty of time. The flight didn’t go till after seven. She could answer the message and still make it out of there. But somehow she knew that the temptation would be too great. She closed the door and walked down the corridor, the key clasped in a tight fist in her jacket pocket. The light would continue to flash as she took the lift downstairs to the desk, then out to the foyer and to the street to hail a taxi to the station. Soon after it would stop, as her checkout registered and the phone wiped itself clean in preparation for the next guest. The message would be lost. Gone. Over. No meeting. It was that simple.
As she stood waiting for the lift, it seemed to her that her life had become like a puzzle from a children’s book: a figure—her—standing at the corner of the page with a set of different paths snaking out away from her, interweaving and overlapping until one emerged onto a cliff edge and a sheer drop, and the other to a green and pleasant land. Heidi has to take her grandfather’s flock up to the summer pastures. Which path should she choose to avoid disaster?
The lift came. The doors opened. And closed again.
She turned back along the corridor, her fist uncurling from the key.
As the message activated in her ear she closed her eyes and listened as his voice scooped bits of her innards out. Then came an address. There was a notepad and pencil by the phone, but she made no move to use them. Forget this and it wasn’t meant to happen, she thought, with one last careless nod to fate.
In the back of the taxi it was so hot that her skin stuck to the seat through the layer of linen. She hesitated for a moment when he asked her where she was going, then opened her mouth and heard the address sing out, clean and clear, word-perfect. When she inquired how far it was he told her it was in
Fiesole, on the other side of the river. She looked at her watch. She would be cutting it fine to get to the airport in time. Maybe she’d have to take a taxi. He would have money. She would borrow from him and write him a check. She opened the window to let in some air, but it only served to funnel the heat back in. A few streets on they drove past the market where she had bargained for Lily’s wooden horse on that first morning. It seemed so long ago. Her fingers closed over the holdall on her lap.
Home—Saturday early A.M.
PAUL’S FOOTSTEPS WENT up the stairs, then stopped next to Lily’s room above. She must have been asleep, because almost immediately he climbed the next flight. After a while I heard the toilet flush and then a door close.
If I picked up the phone now might I hear him on the line to Michael? Anna says they keep night hours, regularly staying up till two or three. She says it’s only a matter of time till they move in together. I thought it might make her feel strange, seeing Paul enjoy domesticity with someone else, but she likes Michael, says he’s older than his years and that he doesn’t let Paul get away with stuff. She approves of him. So does Lily, apparently. It seems he has the secret of not trying too hard, and that he knows how to make her laugh. Which in my experience means that she has decided to let him. So does this mean Paul is a man with two families now? Probably.
I sat and drank in the kitchen. Through the windows I could make out the shadows of the little garden; its patio stones, its borders, its colored climbing frame. It had been such a rubbish dump, a builder’s scrapyard to judge from all the crap we had moved out of it the weekend after she moved in. It had been summer then, too, though nowhere near as hot as now. She had had no money to hire help, so she called in friends; free beer and food and all the pickaxes you could wield. We had filled two skips. Lily was slung in the hammock nailed between the clothesline and the elder tree at the back. Every time she cried whoever was nearest rocked her to and fro. We ate lunch standing up, hunks of bread and cheese and salami. Paul said it looked like a bad Italian movie: sweat, sunshine, and the rich pleasure of working the land. It was one of those days that everyone there would remember, something about the way it summed up a generation and an age.
Where and who were they now, all those people? Successful enough to have their own gardeners, no doubt. I had liked them well enough then, though they had been her friends rather than mine. Did she still see them? Did they exchange Christmas cards? She didn’t talk about them, or not that I could remember. Come to think of it she didn’t talk about anybody that much anymore, except for Lily of course, and Paul, and more recently Michael. Presumably I would find their numbers in her phone book if I needed them. At what point do you start checking with acquaintances rather than friends?
I was beginning to hear the vodka talking, the telltale signs of maudlin creeping in, like reaching the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle. In Amsterdam it was nearly three o’clock in the morning and I would be a long time gone by now. Night shadows. I turned off the light and went upstairs.
Her bedroom was unnervingly tidy, the bed made and the cover unrumpled. It looked almost planned: the room of someone who had packed knowing that she was going to be away for a long time. Then I remembered that Patricia would have been here since, would have hoovered the floor, hung up the clothes, and generally cleared away the worst of the mess naturally associated with Anna’s lifestyle. I opened up the cupboards to reassure myself. A great crush of clothes burst out at me, bringing with them the unmistakable scent of her, leftover perfume and body smell mixed together. A person’s smell: it is such a powerful statement of them. I turned, almost expecting to find her standing behind me. But she wasn’t there.
I went into her study next door. It was a mean little space, the famous “extra bedroom” of estate agents’ jargon, in this case not helped by all its furniture: a desk, a filing cabinet, a computer terminal, and everywhere paper and books. Not even Patricia would or could penetrate this jungle.
I sat at the desk and switched on the light. If there was something to find it would surely be here somewhere. I sat back in the chair. On the notice board above the desk a group of photos was pinned at eye level. There was a picture of Lily in a playground, hands up above her head, caught in the split second of pure exhilaration before the descent down the slide. Then one of me looking younger and more serious with a baby, the baby, in my arms, and then Paul and an older Lily sitting opposite each other in some American fast-food diner, both in profile with their mouths open, teeth sunk into two gigantic hamburgers. The year before, Anna had done a freebie fly-drive travel piece for the paper, about Montana, and Paul had joined them on his way from L.A. and they had spent a week touring the Rockies. The last picture was of the three of them sitting on the bonnet of the car with the desert stretched out behind them, grinning into the lens in a delayed-action shot: happy family on vacation, seeing the sights, clocking up the miles, spending nights in motels where they slept three in the bed, curled around each other like the petals in the inside of a flower bud. Spot the difference between this and the perfect family. No sex please, the man’s gay. Well, why not? Why should the hand that rocks the cradle always be attached to the penis that helped put it there? As surrogate fathers go Paul had turned out to be better than many originals. And anyway, I know enough couples who hardly bother to have sex anymore.
Just to prove the point, at the corner of the notice board, stuck at an angle as if it was only just clinging on, was a fading snapshot of Elsbeth and George in their garden in Yorkshire, the frost about to come in. They couldn’t have been more than sixty-five when the picture was taken, but you could already sense the bony guy from The Seventh Seal lying in wait for them behind the shrubbery. By that time she had already taken to finishing off his sentences for him. They were sewn so tight together you couldn’t get a breath between the stitches. Some might think it sweet. I thought it hell. But then I suppose I have a vested interest in not believing in happy families. He died the year after. As far as I could see it was his only strategy for getting away from her. To get her own back she followed him a year later. If she’d stuck it out a bit longer she would have seen her grandchild, though it occurred to me at the time that the lack of an identifiable father would probably have killed her anyway. Anna thought later that it was the loss of both parents that had made her want the child. That may be true, though I always felt it had more to do with Christopher and the affair from hell. But even within best friendships there are some places you learn to tread lightly. And once she’d made up her mind, the decision wasn’t something that one could challenge.
I remember the day she told me. It was a Saturday morning and I was in the kitchen making my first cup of coffee. I was ten months into Amsterdam. I’d found a good dope source and a bicycle lock that worked. My apartment had pictures on the walls and I was beginning to feel that I might have a life here rather than just another job. It still didn’t mean I was ready for anything. I didn’t quite take it in when she first said it. I suppose it’s a question of hearing what you want to hear. Or not.
“You still there, Estella?”
“Yeah. I’m still here. When did you find out?”
“I did the test last week.” She didn’t say anything for a moment. “But I think I’ve known for a while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I suppose I didn’t know what to say.”
And the way she said it made my mouth go dry. I already knew who the father was, of course. That was the reason she hadn’t told me. It had to be. “What happened? Did Christopher find he’d left a couple of videos at your place and come back to collect them?”
“It wasn’t like that. He’s going abroad. It was a way of saying good-bye, that’s all.”
And how many times does that make, I thought, but didn’t say. I had disliked this man for so long by then that I could no longer work out if it was because he was a schmuck or because he had made Anna so unhappy. Every time she had stopped seeing him I
celebrated; the last time must have been six months before, and because it had been such a dramatic and painful severance I had really come to believe it was the final one.
“What are you going to do?” I said at last, and the pause that followed had been so long that I remember I had had time to spoon in the sugar and stir it.
I also heard her take the breath before she spoke. “I’m going to keep it, Stella.” She faltered. “Not because of him. I want a baby.”
Four words. That’s all it took. I want a baby. Anna would be thirty-three next birthday. I’d known her since she was nineteen, and in all that time I had never heard the slightest ticking of a biological clock. In the silence on the other end of the phone I knew that’s what I was hearing then.
“And how about him? He’s up for two families, is he?” And I know it was cruel, but I didn’t like the fact it had taken her so long to tell me, and I needed her to know that.
“Don’t be mad at me, Stella. This is hard enough as it is. It’s got nothing to do with Chris.”
I caved in immediately. “I’m sorry. What does he say? Have you told him?”
“No. And I’m not going to. He’s not going to be here. He got the correspondent’s job in Washington. That’s what he came to tell me. They leave next week.” And I remember thinking hallelujah. Now we wouldn’t have to watch his mug on our nightly TV screens. Instead we’ll just be spotting the jigsaw pieces of his features in his child. “I’m going to have the baby on my own. Though I was hoping you and Paul might want visiting rights.”
“God, Anna,” I said at last, because this was one of those times when you had no option but to tell the truth. “I’m not even sure I like children.”
“That’s because you’ve had no practice. You’ll like this one. I promise.”
* * *
And she was right. I did. We all did. Though when I thought about it later, even the glory of Lily couldn’t take away from the fact that she had chosen to keep it from me for so long. However much you love someone it is only right that you should acknowledge their failings, and I suppose it was around this time that I accepted that Anna—who had always had a particular talent for telling the necessary lies of life, to tutors about exam papers, employers about deadlines, or lovers about endings—could also be economical with the truth when it came to me, her closest friend.