by Sarah Dunant
“And you?”
“I’ve got to go to Geneva for work. I’ll catch a later flight.”
“Is that where your wife thinks you are now?”
He hesitated, as if the question had surprised him. “Somewhere like that, yes. I told you, those aren’t the kinds of questions that we ask each other. Anyway, I thought this conversation was out of bounds. No families, remember? Your rules?”
When she had first met Chris all those years ago he hadn’t told her about his wife. They had spent the best part of two weeks working together, minds and chairs inching ever closer, with never a word about nappies or prior commitments. When he had finally got around to telling her, he was so apologetic and upset she felt she almost had to comfort him. Her reaction surprised her. She ought to have read the warning signs then: Emotional riptides at play, only strong swimmers should proceed. Except, she had thought that she was. But then most people do—until they drown. She wondered how often he had played that card since. Christopher. She hadn’t thought of him for the longest time. Strange that he should pop up now, when the air was so full of threat and promise.
The restaurant was busy, and the waiter’s English nowhere near good enough to read a tense moment when he walked into it. They sat quietly as he bustled about them. The pasta, the salad, gradually filled up the space between them. He refilled their glasses and sped away.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “Three days is a long time. We’ll probably get tired of each other. We might even quarrel and go home early.” And he smiled.
She smiled back. And as she did so she recognized the way that guilt bled into desire and made it taste even sharper. For years this had been her regular spice. She had assumed that after Lily the taste for it had gone forever. Apparently not.
“Okay,” she said. “When do we set off?”
In the end they didn’t leave the city till next morning. The monks’ cells on the top of the Fiesole hill were pleasantly cool in the midday scorch, but the stones told stories of centuries of celibacy and isolation and the lack of human heat sent them spinning back into each other’s arms. It was as if they had been waiting for an excuse. Rejecting self-sacrifice in favor of greed they played through the rest of the day and into the night and then got up while it was still dark and drove out east into a misty sunrise and the long winding climb up from the valley floor.
Halfway up, the snaking road and the lack of sleep made her carsick, and to keep her mind off her stomach she recounted some half-remembered stories about the countryside. Twenty years before, as part of her Italian journey, she had au paired for a doctor’s family in Florence for two months. The children had had a book she remembered now, handed down from their grandmother: witches and demon tales set in the Casentino forests and full of unlikely conjunctions of fate and furies. There had been one about a young girl who, refusing to go to church, lost her soul down a cleft in the rock face and had to climb down into the center of the earth to find it. Valeria, the six-year-old, had made her read it endlessly, captivated by the mix of disobedience and punishment.
She hadn’t thought of it for years, but the way the road bit into the rock and the land dropped away, sheer and deep as if a meat cleaver had sliced through it, brought it back to her. She couldn’t remember if the story had had a happy ending.
Home—Saturday A.M.
BEFORE WE GO back to the photos, I need to talk about Anna and Chris. It’s only that he kept coming back into my mind, which probably isn’t surprising given that the only other time Anna went AWOL was after they had finished and she was carrying him around like a fishhook in her soul. In retrospect, he didn’t seem worth the pain. But then, in my opinion, they never are.
She had met him the year before I went to Amsterdam when she was working on an exposé about abuse in a local children’s home. He’d been the star reporter on some flash TV documentary that wanted to blow the gaff on the whole thing, but she was the journalist who had done the legwork so they decided to pool the resources and share the credits. A good liberal bleeding heart was Christopher, a man who cared about the state of the world and claimed to adore her, but who could only return her phone calls when his wife wasn’t in the room. Anna thought she was in love. I thought she was in obsession. It was about the only serious disagreement we ever had.
The affair lasted eighteen months. During that time she was the wildest I have ever known her, yo-yoing up and down, happy, sad, happy, sad, desperate. It was almost as if she needed the pain it brought her. Her father had died the year before and I always thought that in some way she was looking for a man to take his place, but that since she couldn’t bear the idea of the betrayal involved she chose one who wouldn’t stay either. She knew it was doing her head in. She broke up with him so often I almost lost count. He only had to snap his fingers and she was back again, waiting in pubs for the evening news to finish, taking rooms in strange hotels in strange places at the deadest times of the week. Still, on balance it could have been worse. He could have left his wife and kids for her and then she would have been stuck with the guilt as well as the wanker. And I think we both know that would have been unbearable, much worse than anything that subsequently happened.
In the end it was left to him to do the right thing the wrong way. One day she rang up his office and his PA (people in the media don’t have secretaries, they only have personal assistants) told her he was too busy to speak to her. No last good-bye, no “Thanks for the memory” or “Sorry it didn’t work out,” just the sound of the line going dead. Maybe God had spoken to him in the night. Or perhaps somebody else spoke to his wife first. Whatever the reason, he became a face on television, and she, rough, tough Anna, who had once had the capacity to eat men for breakfast, became a bit of a basket case.
Because I hadn’t anticipated it, I didn’t notice it straightaway. I had recently moved and was still living out of packing cases, so I wasn’t as sharp as I should have been. Also, I had never felt what she felt. Having watched her go through it, I can’t say I regret that. Between one visit and the next she seemed to have stopped sleeping, stopped eating, stopped doing most of anything except watching the television at around the time the evening news came on. Back in my new house on the canal I would call her at the same time every night just to get her away from the flickering set. “How’s life. Whatcha doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” she would say.
And then you’d hear his voice in the background, droning on about some impending catastrophe in Burundi, or the latest figures on health care funding and a government spokesman’s reaction to it. Like he knew it all. I rang up the TV company once complaining about him, saying they needed more women reporting the news, but what is one voice amid consumer apathy?
And still she kept on pining. Two weeks later she took off. I had taken to calling two or three times a day by then, just to check. But one morning she wasn’t there. No one knew where she was. Not work, not home, not Paul. In the end I got so worried I came back to look for her. When I finally found the hotel name written on a scrap of paper in her desk and rang the number, they told me she was out for the day walking. She called that evening. She sounded almost relieved. I think she was frightened that with him and her father gone nobody could ever love her enough anymore, and this was a way of testing me. What is it with us women? We are new and brave and clever and wild, but we still feed our hearts into the meat mincer of love and then weep and wail when they come out all broken and bloody. Not me, though. If I ever had that potential (which I doubt), then watching over Anna during those times cured me of it forever. It is one of many unexpected things I find myself grateful to her for.
When she came back to London a few days later, she seemed, miraculously, to have made up her mind that life was worth living without him. Whatever flame it was that she had passed through it had successfully cauterized the nerve endings. She even regained some of her old fuck-you jollity, though there were times when I fancied it was bravado rather than fact. To the be
st of my knowledge there was no further communication between them until that final meeting when he, ostensibly, sought her out to say good-bye and when she, at least, got something permanent out of him. Of course, I wondered afterward if that too had been planned. What is that old saying from the world before political correctness? “There’s no such thing as an accidental pregnancy.” Still, there was something about the fervor with which Anna embraced the accident that meant I never quite had the courage to ask. And then, after Lily was born, the question became irrelevant, as if the answer must have been yes, because once she was there, it was obvious that Lily was always meant to exist, that there had been a space in the world waiting for her and all the two of them could do was bow to the imperative of filling it.
And so Christopher was finally eclipsed by his own offspring—a fitting conclusion for a man of such narcissism—and Anna was released from the jaws of the wolf. In the years since then, I have often wondered what it would be like if or when she met someone else who proved important. But it has always seemed to me that she has turned her face against that possibility, too much in love with Lily to bother falling in love with anyone else.
I sat at her desk in her study and tried to imagine myself into her shoes. Sometime last weekend she had made the decision to go to Florence. I went through her desk again, this time with more care. Such work suited my talents well. Slow, steady, methodical. I found bills and notes and paper clippings, some so old that they were fading at the edges. The chaos of Anna’s life was as personal as the smell of her clothes. During the years we lived together there had been firm demarcation lines between her space and mine. I had always envied her ability to operate in the middle of the whirlwind.
Finally, on the back of an envelope in the middle of a set of papers, I found jottings of flight details and prices, the kind of thing you scribble when someone is talking to you over the phone. There was a travel agent she used for Amsterdam, a guy who got her good deals and had managed over the years to fiddle some frequent-flier miles. I found his number, but when I got through he hadn’t heard from her in a couple of months, which meant she must have booked elsewhere. I flicked through her contact book. Maybe there was a connection in Florence I didn’t know about. It was strange to come across my own name there, an address written hurriedly in pencil years ago with phone and later fax numbers added. A sudden thought struck me. If she were in some kind of trouble and for whatever reason felt she couldn’t call home, wouldn’t mine be the first number she’d dial? But when I called my answering machine there were only two messages, one from a colleague inviting me to a barge party for his fortieth birthday and the other from René telling me he was still in Stockholm and would call when he got back.
I returned to my search and in the end came back to that drawer with the Guides and the photos. I laid the pictures out on the desk, like a magazine editor looking for a cover shot. Half a dozen smiling Annas stared out at me, confident, poised. By their side I put the stack of Guardian weekly Guides. There were three or four of them and they dated back over two months. Since everything in them would be out of date the day after they finished why bother to keep them? I flicked through the most recent. It fell open over a rack of staples; I was staring at a densely printed page of what looked like personal adverts divided into columns, with three or four of the entries ringed with black felt-tip. I checked the masthead: soulmates. Soulmates? Then I read the marked entries:
Professional man, likes culture, music and life WLTM lively female 35–45 GSOH, to talk and maybe more. ML 32657.
Sorted, straight, but thinking there must be more to life than this. If you are over 30 and can still walk on the wild side call me on ML 457911.
Solvent successful romantic wants soulmate to watch ER with. If you are same, and under 40, GSOH, I’d like to hear from you. ML 75964.
I checked the other magazines. Each had a couple of ads ringed, and all of them had one thing in common—they were in search of a lively, willing woman under forty. I couldn’t believe it. Anna looking for lovers in a newspaper? It didn’t make sense. I knew about my friend’s love life, didn’t I? Since Lily’s birth there had been a couple of flings, both while she was abroad for work and more recently a one-night stand when Paul had taken Lily to Brighton for the weekend, the last encounter so forgettable that she claimed not to remember a name. We had laughed about her amnesia. But sex through the want ads? It wasn’t the same thing. Even the words smelled of loneliness. Imagine being so needy that you couldn’t watch ER alone. Imagine ringing a newspaper for help. I wouldn’t do it. Maybe that was why she hadn’t told me about it.
A man. Could this really be what all this was about?
Away—Friday P.M.
AT FIRST THE fear had been physical, the slamming of the door registering like a punch right through the middle of her body. She felt herself double up under its force. Snake muscles of panic pulsated around her chest, crushing the air out of her. Even if she’d wanted to she couldn’t have cried out. She couldn’t breathe properly. She could barely swallow. It took all her energy to get herself upright again.
As her body recovered so her mind started to disintegrate, flashing up instant horror scenarios: incarceration, mutilation, slow death, the stuff of a hundred teen-scream movies. But even as she careered toward the edge she knew she couldn’t let herself be undone by secondhand terror, knew that it was imperative that she keep her wits about her if she was going to survive.
She forced herself into the bathroom and put her face under the cold tap, holding it there until the shock of the water had sluiced the panic out of her. She wasn’t dead yet. She held on to that fact like a piece of wood in a tumbling sea. She wasn’t dead yet. She had just had the grotesque bad luck to walk into the fantasies of some nutter who had turned marital grief into a pathology of kidnap. It wasn’t her fault. So now she had two clean thoughts to put against the avalanche of pain. Not dead, and not her fault. She still had some agency here. Once you understood that, you could fight back.
She sat on the loo seat and started to piece together what little information she had. First where, then how. From her shoddy geography she constructed a kind of chronology of the night before. The last thing she clearly remembered was the sign to Pisa airport just before seven o’clock. Then came the end of a sunset as someone pulled her out of a car, either to be sick or more likely because the journey was ended.
At this time of year the light finally died sometime after nine, which meant that between the Pisa autostrada and the house there had been two or three hours’ driving. But in which direction? The only clue was the landscape. The window, which opened enough for ventilation but not for escape, gave out onto further pine forests. Since it seemed safe to disbelieve everything he had told her, his insistence on the coast made her think inland. There was an area, less touristy, to the east of Florence; she remembered visiting it in the height of summer, but she couldn’t remember what it was called. It had been high and forested, a kind of nature reserve that stretched for miles and miles, the nearest thing to a Tuscan wilderness. It had been beautiful there, the altitude and the forests sweetening the air, rejuvenating after the greenhouse heat of the city. Just as now. She remembered someone telling her that the whole region had once been virtually inaccessible, its economy as primitive as its road system, but that with transport improving more adventurous Florentines had started developing summer houses there. By now there must be hundreds of semi-isolated dwellings where holiday populations came and went and where another couple more or less could be easily overlooked.
The act of detection gave her a sense of control, but it also increased her despair. Even if she managed to get out of the house, how would she get herself to an airport and out of the country without money or passport? Step by step. First she had to negotiate the extent of his madness, and how it might be mitigated or assuaged.
Him. Since the panic of the door slam, she had kept him buried. Now she made herself look at him closely. She studied
his face, his rigid body posture, his solicitous manner, his endless, restrained politeness. Observing him gave her a sense of distance and proportion. As madness went, his seemed rather ordinary, the weight of repression almost mundane. How crazy could he be? She couldn’t believe herself to be so out of touch that she would have got into a car with a total psychopath without registering something amiss. Maybe his was the madness of suffering rather than violence. That was something she would have to find out.
It was late afternoon (the sun had dipped below the line of the window and the light was losing its glare) when he came back.
Again he must have climbed the stairs silently because the first thing she heard was the knock on the door, gentle, almost tentative, like a hotel employee checking to see if the guest was there before coming in to turn down the bed linen. She started up from the bed, her eyes racing around for something with which to defend herself, realizing too late why the room had no bedside light or ornaments—nothing, in fact, that could be used as a weapon.
“You are hungry?” The voice, dimmed through the wood, seemed almost genial. “If you stand away from the door I will bring some food in.”
But at the sound of him the calm she had so carefully cultivated deserted her. She had a sudden longing to rush at the door, beat her fists against it, and scream abuse at him like some mad wife in the attic. At the same time she knew that fury would do her no good. It was imperative that she didn’t lose her sense of self, whatever that meant.
If not fire then ice. “I refuse to eat anything until you let me out of here,” she said, impressed by the cold stone in her voice. “Do you understand?”
His answer was silence, a long flat expanse of it, and then, slowly, his steps moving away down the corridor. Thrown by his retreat, Anna tried to pretend that she wasn’t. See, she thought to herself. Our first encounter and I’m still alive. He can’t intimidate me. What next? He wouldn’t starve her to death, surely. There’d be no point in that. She would just have to wait till he came again. Then I’ll be ready for you, she thought fiercely, I know I will.