by Sarah Dunant
Six months later I came to London for the birth and Lily entered a world where she had a godmother who was closer than a blood relative, and a surrogate father who was better than the real one would have been.
As for my own biological clock, well, either I’m hard of hearing or it had stopped before it started. For as long as I can remember I have had no wish to have a child. Nothing personal, just a healthy form of self-absorption that allows for no competition. In fact, for years I didn’t even think much of the idea of having a man—well, not in any serious way. As far as I’m concerned this was less to do with emotional damage than with the pleasure of my own company and the need for the toilet seat to be in the right place when I came to use it. There is a theory, of course, that children who lose their family early in life are frightened to make one of their own for fear of further loss. There is, however, another theory that says more or less the opposite. For myself, I have no time for theories, life being complicated enough without them. Whatever the reason, the lovers I specialized in were mostly short-term leases (Amsterdam was particularly good for this), boys on the move with passports stuffed with visas. If it lasted a month it was too long, after which they would set off for somewhere else and I would return to my old ways, happy in my aloneness.
In essence René has done nothing to disturb that, though in age and work he is at least my equal. The first time we met was before Lily was born. He was in town for a conference and we spent the night in his hotel, during which it did occur to me that I might be using him to compensate: a last-ditch attempt to get my own womb full to join hers. But when we got down to it, it didn’t feel like that at all. Later when he put his head on my stomach to rest for a moment, I asked him if he could make out the sound of anything ticking in there, but only because I was absolutely certain there was nothing to hear. The next morning I cycled into work reveling in how beautiful the city was, and how much I loved my singular self within it.
I didn’t see him again for six years. Then four months ago I picked up the phone to find him at the other end. He was living in Amsterdam now and wondered if I was free. So we picked up from where we left off: occasional sex, conversation, and a mutual need to lead separate lives. He spends much of his time traveling (aid consultancy is a mobile business), while work, Lily, and the need for my own space keep me occupied, too. If we tried to get any closer I suspect we would end up further apart. I count it as one of the success stories of my life. I also like its symmetry. So now Anna and I both have alternative families. I think the world needs more of them.
I turned my attention to her desk.
Away—Thursday P.M.
HIS CAR WAS astonishingly clean and sweet-smelling: no sweets wrappers, no sticky fingerprints, no split-open tape boxes, no bits of broken plastic from McDonald’s toys, none of the detritus that came from small fingers and a rushed lifestyle. Instead there were wiped surfaces, shiny footmats, and a small paper tree swinging from the mirror, giving off a faint tang of chemical pine. Behind the driving seat there was even a coat hook for his jacket. A man without children, that was Anna’s first thought.
He pulled away from the curb. Someone honked him. He flattened his hand on the horn back, then apologized. “I am a very safe driver, don’t worry. We are maybe one hour away from the airport, though there will be worse traffic now because of this.”
On their left they passed the market stalls. Scarves, posters, wallets, T-shirts. No horses. He glanced at her. “You must be angry, yes? First no horses, then no train. The Africans are usually here. I don’t understand why they are not.”
“It’s all right,” she said, letting her head fall back against the headrest. “It’s more important that I catch the plane.”
“Of course. Oh, I forgot—you like cappuccino?”
“Er—yes.”
“Good.” He motioned to a brown paper bag sitting on the seat behind her. “You have sugar?”
“Yes—but . . .”
When she didn’t take it, he lifted one hand off the wheel and reached back to get it himself, then handed it to her. “Please.” He seemed slightly flustered, as if she was somehow not reading his behavior signals correctly. “It’s still hot, I think. I got it for my friend to take on the train, but he didn’t want it. It’s a shame to waste it, no?”
As he said this it struck her that he might be gay. That would explain the spotless car, the classy clothes, and the almost exaggerated politeness. Anna thought about Paul and the way he had embraced her child-filled chaos. Maybe there was something about her that attracted gay men. No doubt a lack of predatory sexuality, she thought, almost ruefully.
“Please?”
He was proffering the drink, and it was clear that he might in some way be put out if she refused. In the hollow between the driver and passenger seats there was a shelf with cup holders. She dug out the polystyrene containers with their generous share of napkins, took the lid off the one without the letter “z” scratched on it, and slipped it into the hole for him. Then she opened the other and started to drink. She made a small face.
“You don’t like it?” he said anxiously. “It has too much sugar?”
“I don’t know. There’s a funny taste. What is it?”
“Ah. The almond flavoring maybe. It is a syrup they use sometimes. Very popular now. Always we have America pushing at our feet. It is good, I think, no?”
“Yes,” she said. In fact the flavor was a little strong for her, but in the stale heat of the car she was in need of the lift of caffeine. She drank it quickly.
“So.” He had pulled up at a set of traffic lights. A phalanx of people surged across the road, office rush hour and the opening of the shops after siesta. Florence at its craziest. He smiled at her. “Now you can relax.” He sounded like a host at a dinner party. “I will get you there in good time.”
“It’s very kind of you.”
“Not kind. It is—how do you say?—the littlest I can do.”
“The least.”
“Least? Yes, yes of course. The least I can do,” he said, pleased with himself, the word stretching out like a long smile.
They fell silent. After a while the congested medieval streets of the center gave way to wider, more relaxed boulevards, then to sprawling industrial outskirts. Italy was as new as it was old, as ugly as it was beautiful. Anna had always liked that about it, had found it reassuring. She tucked the empty container carefully back into the bag, observing the house rules of tidiness. He was still drinking, lifting the cup from the holder and taking a series of small sips, as if the liquid was still too hot to drink comfortably.
She glanced across at him. In the shop the face had seemed too broad to be that interesting, but in profile it took on more definition, the features etched rather than drawn, as if someone had dripped acid onto soft stone, the hand hesitating over certain key contours. Where she had first thought forties, now she was not so sure. He might be older; it was hard to tell. There was a quality of containment about him that made it difficult to determine what lay behind the politeness.
Maybe he wasn’t gay after all. She thought of his life trailing out behind him, like smoke from a plane exhaust. She saw them intersecting, two silver trails in an empty sky. Merging, then passing. Except, wasn’t it ships that passed in the night? She tried to re-form the image but realized that she had lost it. She felt suddenly rather weary, worn out by travel and the demands of politeness.
“So you like horses.” They were almost onto the autostrada now, filtering into heavy traffic all moving at speed.
“Oh, it wasn’t for me. It was for my daughter.”
“Your daughter?” And he seemed surprised. “You have a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“I . . . er . . .” And this time he went looking for words. “You don’t look like a mother.” It wasn’t immediately evident that this was a compliment. Could this be some kind of elaborate pickup? she thought. If so, would she be annoyed or flattered? “How old is she?”
“Six. Nearly seven.”
He drove for a bit. “You don’t buy her guns?”
“Guns?”
“Isn’t that what women do now? To make their children without . . . without sexism.”
The sheer naïveté of the remark made her laugh. Someone had once bought Lily an electric car, all fast chrome and flashing lights. She had played with it twice, then left it to rot under the bushes where it had crashed in the garden. “She doesn’t like guns. Or swords. They bore her. Some things you can’t change.”
He nodded, as if that idea pleased him. “And your husband? Does he agree?”
“I don’t have a husband. I’m a single parent.” She added the last sentence with a touch of defiance, just in case the listener might see fit to quarrel with this vision of the world.
“I see,” he said. “That is all right for you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”
“And your daughter, where is she now?”
“She’s with a baby-sitter, a friend.”
Talk of Lily made her want to be home. It was always worse on the return journey, as if she were a homing pigeon fixing on its spot, the emotional radar kicking in. She looked at her watch. Twenty to seven. There was a one-hour time difference. Lily would be home from school now, though Patricia and she would have probably stopped off at the park to play for a while first. In England it would be light for hours to come.
Not so here. Already there was the hint of twilight in the air. She would take off into a Mediterranean sunset, and arrive into northern light. It was over. No adventure, no change. So be it. It had been a romantic notion, anyway. Plane tickets don’t alter your life; they just transport it somewhere else. For real change you need to be braver—or more foolish. She felt her eyes closing with an enveloping tiredness. She tried to rouse herself into conversation. They were in the middle lane of the freeway, both sides still heavy with traffic. She looked at her watch again. Almost 7:00 P.M. now. Her check-in time was already past.
“Don’t worry,” he said, in answer to the unasked question. “We are not far. See?”
In the distance she saw a set of signs coming up on the grass verge, one to the right bearing the symbol of an airport, a set of silver wings already airborne. She felt herself suddenly nauseated, as if the sight of it had given her a kind of instant vertigo. She fumbled with the door controls.
“I’m sorry, I have to open the window a little. I need some fresh air.”
He glanced at her quickly. He pushed a button and her glass slid silently down. A wall of fume-clogged air hit her, worse than the recycled atmosphere in the car. She felt her eyes water with its toxicity. She tried to close the window. Again he did it for her.
“I’ll turn up the air-conditioning. We’ll be out of the traffic soon. Why don’t you lie back and shut your eyes? We’ll be at the departure terminal in ten minutes.”
She wanted to tell him that she was okay, that it was just a touch of travel sickness and all she needed was to be out of the car, but then she began to feel decidedly worse, as if her brain were filling up with poisonous fog and she was drowning in it. She put her head in her hands; then, when that made her feel sicker, she did as she was told, leaning back against the seat rest and letting the darkness flow in. She closed her eyes. She might even have moaned. The last thing she heard was the click of his traffic indicator signaling their way right across the freeway toward the airport lane.
Away—Thursday P.M.
THE ROOM WAS generous, its proportions dating from a time when the wealthy saw fit to have a reminder of heaven above their heads. The ceiling would have been a fresco originally, baby-fat cherubim flitting around the Holy Trinity, rearranging their robes, punching exuberant little fist-holes into the cloud cover while a chariot of aspiring mortals—generals and nobles of the house—stood watching from the side. But fashion and time had long since wiped out such sensibilities; the ceiling was now a barreled expanse of grubby white, grubbier at the edges where decades of dust had coated the cornice gray.
The floor looked original: worn yellow ocher tiles with a geometric border, chipped in places. In contrast, the rest of the decor was jarringly modern: a scarlet sofa like Warhol’s pouting lips, and across the room a table of white wood with a vase of wooden bird-of-paradise flowers from Peru. On the end wall two arched windows were taking the brunt of the late-afternoon sun, slatted blinds slicing prison bars of light across the tiled floor.
They stood with the stripes between them, the distance significant, uneasy. They seemed the perfect transient occupants for a room where no one lived, or at least left little evidence of living. His suitcase, black, executive, leaned against the sofa; her tatty holdall sat by the door like an old dog patiently waiting for its owner to leave.
“Where have you been? You told me you’d be here on Tuesday.”
He clicked his tongue. “No, Anna, I said I’d let you know. I always knew I might not be able to get away that soon. I rang you in London on Monday to tell you, but you weren’t there.”
“I’d already left,” she said quickly. “You didn’t leave a message, did you?”
“No. We agreed I wouldn’t do that. But I left one at the hotel on Tuesday. Didn’t you get that?”
“No.” She thought of the reception desk and the stream of ripe young girls who always looked as if they had something better to do. “It wasn’t the world’s most efficient hotel.”
“You should have stayed somewhere better. I told you I’d pay.”
“I thought we’d been through that one. I don’t accept your money,” she said quietly, glancing around. “What is this place, anyway?”
“It belongs to a friend. He works for one of the multinationals, but he travels most of the year. He doesn’t spend much time here.”
“Does he know?”
“That I use it occasionally? Yes. That I’m here with you now? No.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“Away. Somewhere else. It’s not important where.
“What about you?” he said after a while. “What did you say?”
“Oh, I made up some stuff about work. But I told them I’d be back tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, I know. But that was the plan, remember. You said Tuesday.” And she gave a little shrug.
“Well, you can call them later. Have you changed your flight?”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“That’s what they always say. We’ll use my card. There won’t be any problem.”
“No, you didn’t hear me, Samuel. I said I can’t. I can’t do it. That’s what I came to tell you. I’m not staying; I’m going to go back tonight as I promised. I’d already decided that before you called.”
He paused. “And is this decision about home or about us?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably both.”
“I see. So why are you here now?”
“You didn’t leave a phone number on the message. I thought I should at least tell you myself.”
He smiled as if to make it clear that he didn’t believe her, but it didn’t matter that much. “Well, so now you have. Thank you.”
An unexpected breeze came through the half-open window and rippled across the blinds. The shadow stripes on the floor seemed to grow and shrink with the waves of light. She knew it was her turn to talk, but she didn’t know what to say.
“I thought we’d worked all this through, Anna,” he said gently. “I thought what was happening between us was okay.”
“Yeah, well, so did I. But it isn’t.” And her voice was suddenly fierce. “I shouldn’t be here. If I stay any longer I’ll miss my plane.”
“Listen,” he said, so quietly she had to strain to hear him. “This isn’t your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. It just happened.”
She shook her head. “That’s not true. We made it happen.” She made an angry noise in her throat. “Do you do this?” she said suddenly. �
��Is this what you do? In the past, is this what you do?”
He laughed out loud. “What—you want me to lie to you as well as her? Okay. Yes, I do this all the time. Start something casual and then push it till it gets out of hand.” He stopped. “You’re not the only one who thought about not coming, you know. This one has broken my rules too.”
“I thought you said there were no rules. Wasn’t that what you told me on that first night?”
“Yeah, well: you know first nights. . . . Come on, Anna, don’t make me the bad guy in this. It’s not how it is.”
She closed her eyes. “Shit,” she whispered.
She didn’t move. What was she waiting for? For him to touch her? If he did, would that make her go or stay?
He shook his head. “I can’t do it for you. Do you understand? That’s not how it works. You have to make up your own mind.”
Time passed. She took a step toward him. If she didn’t get back that evening Patricia would take Lily home to stay with her. She would read her a bedtime story and take her to school next morning and Paul would pick her up, as usual. Lily would be fine. She was a happy little girl whose life was filled with people who loved her. She would make recompense later. To everyone. After all, it was only a night or two. And everybody deserves pleasure sometime, a chance to store up summer heat for winters ahead.
As they came into each other’s physical orbit the heat of their skins burned off the remaining layer of conscience. The air relaxed. Her holdall remained where it was on the floor, the airline ticket tucked coyly into the side pocket.