by Sarah Dunant
She packed up her suitcase and took it with her as she went. She looked back into the room one more time, imprinting it on her memory: somewhere she wouldn’t want to forget—as long as she didn’t ever have to see it again. She left the door ajar behind her and made her way quietly downstairs.
Her footsteps echoed on the wooden treads. It was a spacious house, old, halfway between a farmhouse and something more pretentious. Beautiful, calm. There was no sign of anyone else living there. The sense of isolation made her nervous all over again.
She left her suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. To each side of her there were a number of closed doors and one, at the end of the hall, open. Another time she might have been curious enough to pry a little, but it somehow didn’t feel right. She made for the light.
It was an extraordinary room, large and open with a stone floor and two long high windows through which the morning sun was pouring. There was hardly any furniture, just an old sofa near an open fireplace, a chair, and a table laid for breakfast, at which he was sitting. The space seemed too big for him, except he wasn’t alone in it. On the walls all around him were photographs, dozens of them, blown up and framed like paintings, every one a study of the same woman.
She was young and attractive, with full black hair like an ink cloud against almost translucently pale skin. In some of them she was talking, animated, busy, apparently ignorant of the camera, in others staring or smiling almost coquettishly straight into it. A good-looking, stylish woman, radiant with life. For the photographer who took them, creating such a gallery had obviously been a labor of love. This couldn’t be him, could it? she thought. At the same time as absolutely knowing that it was.
He rose to greet her. He had changed too: a cotton sweater over a pair of jeans with a pronounced center crease in them and his hair brushed back from his forehead. His eyes looked smaller, and the morning sun picked out a network of lines on his face, two furrows along his brow as deep as the trouser press, making him older than she had thought. He reminded her strangely of Dirk Bogarde after he had given up on the matinee idol in search of roles more complex and more sinister. Something unnatural about the way he held himself . . . She thought of the stain on her shirt, and all those little bottles of hotel glup in the bathroom, and her mind lit up with warning flares again. Even if I’m wrong I have to get out of here quickly, she thought.
On the table was a basket of fresh croissants and pastries with half a dozen kinds of jams and honey, a parody of a perfect breakfast. He guided her to her seat, pulling the chair out for her in a gesture of old-fashioned courtesy.
“You feel better?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good.”
She refused the coffee in favor of plain water, but ate the bread and jams. He watched her, smiling, enjoying her appetite, but saying nothing, as if waiting for her to guide the conversation.
“This is an amazing room,” she said at last as the silence started to draw attention to itself.
“Yes. It was a part of a . . . ah, I have forgotten the word—a religious house, for women—how do you call it?”
“A nunnery?”
“Yes, yes, a nunnery. But in modern Italy, of course, there are not enough such women.”
“Where is it, exactly?”
“As I told you—near Pisa, but more up. In the hills. That’s why it is more cool.” Pisa was near the coast. She couldn’t remember any hills nearby, but Tuscany was full of them and after so many years her geography was decidedly shaky. “My wife and I came here seven years ago.” He gestured around the room. “It is she who make these changes.”
His wife. Once again it was not what she expected. “Is that her in the photos?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
He shook his head, putting his cup down carefully on the saucer. Oh God, she thought suddenly. She’s dead, and that’s what this is all about. His wife’s dead and he’s still in trouble about it.
“She . . . she is not here. She died one year ago.”
Of course. It explained it all, the pictures, the exaggerated gallantry, the weird intensity . . . “I’m sorry, I—”
He frowned. “You didn’t know. She had a—what do you call it?—a lump. On her brain.” He paused, as if waiting for her to supply the word. She didn’t say anything. “It was very sudden. She was in the garden one afternoon and she fell over. They said she does not suffer. It is like she has gone to sleep.”
Just as she had done in the car last night; one moment there, the next slipping into a crack as deep as death. The familiarity of it must have chilled him. Had he been thinking of his wife as he carried her into the house? Was he still thinking about her now, and did that explain the tension in his posture, the strain around his eyes? Repressed grief can be its own kind of poison, a thick vein of rage running underneath silence. Could that explain all this? Maybe, maybe not . . .
“Why didn’t you take me to a hospital?” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Last night, when I was ill in the car, why didn’t you take me to a hospital? Why did you bring me here instead?”
He shrugged. “The hospital of Pisa, she is on the other side of the city. Also, I don’t know if you have insurance. It is expensive. I thought it would be better to bring you here. My own doctor is very good.” She frowned. He poured some water into her glass. “You must have been worried, no? Last night—waking up in a locked room. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine,” she said quickly. Then, as if aware of her bad manners: “I’m sorry about your wife.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. She glanced down at her watch, remembering too late its shattered face. “What time is my fli—”
“Five o’clock. There is plenty of time. Have something more to eat, please.”
But the food was doing nothing for her nerves. She sipped at her water. The house was so quiet. It was hard to believe a major airport was only a few miles away.
“No more? Okay. Shall we go and sit in the garden? It is not so looked after now, but there is a place in the shade where it is very pleasant. Or would you prefer to rest some more?”
She had a sudden picture of a seat under a tree, and a woman falling backward into death. She pushed her own chair back and stood up from the table, the two images clashing fiercely in her mind. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to go to the airport straightaway.” He said nothing. The silence grew. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard her. “I need to sort out the ticket,” she added lamely.
“The ticket is ready,” he said quietly. “I asked them when I called.”
“Yes, but I . . . well, I’d like to get there early.”
In a world where good deeds hadn’t been squeezed out by suspicion his care might have been read as kindness. She risked being rude, she knew that, but she needed to be out of there.
“I see. Very well.” And his voice was mild.
He got up and moved to the other side of the room, to a sideboard with a phone on it. He turned to her as he picked up the receiver. “You are sure you can’t stay longer? You don’t look so well yet. You could lie in the sun, go for a swim in the lake. I still have some of her things. Her costume would fit you, I am sure.” He paused. “I would be happy to have you as my guest.”
He’s a man on the edge of middle age who misses his wife too much, who yearns for company and doesn’t know how to get it. It didn’t have to be sinister. It could simply be sad. The world is full of sadness. Be polite, Anna thought to herself. Be polite and don’t let him know how much he scares you.
“I’d love to. Next time,” she said evenly. “Next time I’d love to stay.”
He went back to the phone. He said hello a couple of times, then sighed and started punching the buttons in an irritated kind of way. He turned to her. “I’m sorry. The telephone. It is not working. It happens sometimes at this time of day. Not enough people to pay the workmen the right bri
be. I will try later. If not, the taxi I booked this morning will be here at four.”
Only this time there was something in his voice that sounded different. The lie seemed to leak like a spreading stain across the stone floor. She felt panic like a swarm of fireflies in her stomach. She thought about walking out of the front door. Without her holdall she could move as fast as he could. Probably faster. There must be a road somewhere. And where there was a road there would be cars, drivers . . . But she had forgotten he still had her handbag. Tickets, passport, money. She wouldn’t get anywhere without them. He was saying something . . .
“. . . the car.”
“What?”
“I said, if it is so important for you to get there now I will take you in the car. But I have to get it out from the garage.”
“Er . . . well, thank you, I mean—” She fumbled, caught again between his solicitude and his creepiness. “That’s very kind. I—”
“It’s not a problem.” He cut across her, definitely cooler this time. “You get ready. I will get the car.”
“If I could have my bag?”
He frowned. “Your bag?”
“Yes, my handbag. You took it last night. It had my address book in it. To call my home?”
“Yes, but I put it with you in your room.”
“Where?”
“Under the bed,” he said rather impatiently. “I saw it this morning there when I picked up the note. You didn’t find it?”
She hadn’t. But then she hadn’t looked that well, had simply pulled the covers over and left it at that, assuming he still had it in his care. She felt her legs go weak. She didn’t want to go back into that room again. She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do.
He walked past her toward the door. For a moment she thought he might offer. “I’ll get the car and meet you outside in five minutes.” And he turned on his heel and left.
She waited till she had heard the front door open and slam closed, then made her move quickly, out into the corridor, up the stairs and into the room. She tried to find a way to wedge the door open, but there was nothing she could use. She went to the bed and flung back the covers to expose the space underneath, keeping one eye on the door and using her hand to try to locate the bag. Nothing. She ducked her head down and looked deeper. Sure enough the bag was there, pushed way back in the dark. She had to get down on her hands and knees and crawl to reach it.
She had got it out and was opening it up when she suddenly heard him. He must have come up the stairs silently. How could he do that? In the split second before it happened, she saw that her ticket and passport were gone and was on her feet moving toward the open door. He got to it first. As he slammed it closed she caught a glimpse of his face. This time he wasn’t smiling.
Away—Friday A.M.
SHE STOPPED TALKING and put the receiver down. In an inner courtyard below the kitchen window, a woman was hanging out washing, using a pulley system to push the clothes farther out into the sunshine. The image echoed a film she had seen somewhere; Italian, black-and-white, fifties or sixties, she couldn’t remember the title.
“All right?” he called from the other room.
“There’s no answer from Patricia’s. I got through to Paul’s mobile and left a message.”
“What about your daughter?”
“I left one for her there, too. She’s crazy about phones. Especially the mobile. Loves all the buttons.”
“Good. So now we can have breakfast.”
“Patricia must have left for Ireland already. I should have talked to her before she went. She’ll be worried.”
“You should have warned them you’d be late.” He stood in the doorway dressed to go out, linen trousers and a soft cotton shirt; casual, deliberately. If she went up to him now and put her hands on the material she would feel money. And behind the money, flesh. A part of her would have liked to go back to bed with him now, but along with the missed alarm the morning had brought with it a renewed fear of her own desire and the damage it could do to both their lives. He took pity on her. “Didn’t you tell me that this guy—what’s his name?—”
“Paul.”
“Didn’t you say that Paul picked Lily up from school on Friday anyway?”
“Yes.”
“So—by then he’ll have got your message and will tell your baby-sitter himself when she calls. What did you say?”
“That I’d missed the plane and I’d be back sometime over the weekend, whenever I could get another one.”
“There you go. Crisis over. Come on, I’m starving, let’s go eat.”
“First I have to book a return flight.”
“Anna!” He laughed. “Our relationship may be almost exclusively carnal, but if there’s one thing you must have learned about me it’s that I can’t function on an empty stomach. It makes me irrational and difficult.”
It had, right from the first phone call, been his humor that had been one of the attractions. She liked the way it earthed the tension in her. “Don’t tell me. You have to go to football matches too.”
He shrugged. “Why do you think I suggested Florence?”
“See. And all this time I’ve been thinking it was about infidelity.”
The café was on the main square. She had powerful memories of Fiesole from twenty years before. She had liked it best in the winter, when the tourists cleared away and the mists rolled in. There was a monastery she used to visit, no longer used by the Church. You could go and sit in the cells, stone bare and cramped, thin windows cut into thick walls with just a cot bed and wooden table as furniture, all preserved exactly as it had been for centuries. She had liked imagining the monks living there in prayer year after year with only God to keep out the cold, until at last their souls flew free through the keyhole window. What at eighteen had seemed romantic now felt rather cruel. But then since Lily, even acts of kindness could make her cry. Add it to the list of ways that children undermine you.
Across the table he was concentrating on his stomach. She studied him studying the menu, as he had done on that first evening when they met. He had warned her then about his obsession with food. She had found it annoying, then funny. Now she simply found it familiar, which was somehow more disturbing. How quickly it happens. They had both been so sure of themselves that night, riding the wave of each other’s confidence. Where he saw a good lay, she saw a good story. Nothing more. A no-risk venture. Easy. What had changed?
Somehow, without her realizing it, this man had walked through the KEEP OUT notices with which she had decorated her life. In the six and three-quarter years since Lily had been born she had got used to accepting that she would never feel this way again. It wasn’t that she was an obsessive mother. On the contrary, she had both the appetite and the capacity to enjoy being free of her daughter sometimes, to play as an adult in a grown-up world. But not this world. Not like this. She had come to believe that the sweet/savage energy of sexual passion had all been torn out of her at the birth, torn out or rechanneled into the deeper passions of mothering. The few men she had slept with since then had been deliberately second-rate, picked more for their availability than their charisma; a way of keeping one’s hand in, checking that the machinery hadn’t gone rusty through underuse. They scratched the itch, and she went back to Lily renewed. She didn’t want for more. She didn’t have the energy for it. Of course there had been times when she had found herself mourning the loss of intensity, but then Lily would walk back inside her head and there would be no room for such nostalgia. How could she have been on guard against something she didn’t expect to feel again? As he had said, it was no one’s fault. What you felt was one thing. It was what you did with it that mattered.
“So, let me tell you about my plan for the weekend,” he said, submerging a hunk of bread into olive oil as an impromptu first course while they waited for the food to arrive. “After we’ve visited your monastery I think we should get out of the city. Drive up into the hills, away from the heat and the cr
owds.”
“Where?”
“Casentino? . . . To the east. Forest and mountains, I gather. My friend—the one who owns the apartment—says it’s one of the less visited regions. Do you know it?”
“The name is familiar. But it’s been a long time.”
“According to the guidebook there’s a ribbon of Romanesque churches that runs along the valley beside it. And up in the hills there is a monastery built on the spot where St. Francis got his stigmata. A kind of cave grotto. The church has got a number of Della Robbias in it. One of the most impressive collections anywhere, by all accounts.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to slide in a bit of work on the side, would you?”
He shrugged. “We can’t fuck all the time, and I thought you said you liked art.”
“I do.”
“Well, then. I’ve already hired a car and booked us into a hotel in a town called Bibbiena. There’s a picture of it in the book. It looks quite unspoiled.”
She paused. “You were very sure I’d agree to stay on, weren’t you?”
“I was very sure I wanted you to. I don’t know if that’s the same thing. What is it, Anna? In London you were up for this. What’s happened?”
She saw last night’s mist like a vaporous quicksand lying across the floor. By the time you realized you were sinking it was too late.
“Maybe I just had time to think.” He had a wife; she had a child and a job. Neither of them had told the other the whole truth about either. Surely the lies would be protection enough. She sat back in the chair and felt the sun run a hot caress over the skin of her left arm. It was all there for the taking. Maybe it didn’t need to be a compromise. It might even be another kind of independence. “What about the flight home?”
“I’ve already done it. You’re booked on the first plane out of Pisa on Monday morning. We can drive straight there and leave the car. You’ll be back in time to pick up your daughter from school. You can leave a message with your friend giving him the flight details before we go.”