Mapping the Edge

by Sarah Dunant

  His head fell to one side and almost immediately his breathing evened out, his arm around her body turning dead and weighted in sleep.

  “Don’t wear yourself out, lover. . . .” The words were like barbed wire; whichever way you tried to pull them out, they tore their way further into the skin.

  She lay inside the grip for a while, poking at her ego to assess the level of damage. A memory like a smell wafted into her mind: a moment from the end of her affair with Chris.

  The worst had already happened, the Dear John bit delivered through a stunted phone call and a brush-off from his secretary. She had been nursing the wound for ten days, by which time it was clear it had gone septic. It was then that she had decided to call him at home. He hadn’t been there. Instead she had listened to his voice on an answering machine inviting messages for him and his family. She had sat in shimmering silence failing to do as he asked and speak after the beep. It had been the longest forty seconds of her life. She had felt like a child whose sense of self hadn’t been sufficiently nurtured by its parents, from whom something vital had been withheld, something that at this moment would have sustained her, instead of ripping open her stomach and pouring her insides onto the floor.

  That phone call had proved the beginning of a violent downward spiral that had ended six weeks later on an achingly cold lakeside beach outside Windermere: her crouched against the wind holding both hands deep into freezing water and watching the skin bruise with the cold till it was the color of the blue-black pebbles beneath them. In that instant she had realized that she was either going to get over this or she wasn’t. That it was as simple and as apocalyptic as that. Her choice. And suddenly what had felt impossible became almost easy. She had removed her hands from the water, sucked her fingers back into life in her mouth, and walked back up to the hotel, where a message from Estella had been waiting at the front desk and from where the world started again, with Anna as a stronger pulse-beat within it.

  Then and now. The left side of her body was gradually going numb under his armlock of sleep. But she wasn’t going with it. She shifted herself in his grasp, and when he didn’t wake she pulled up his hand and slid herself out from under him. He grunted heavily, like a prodded animal, then flopped over to one side and sank further into the deep. By the time she had dressed and rescued the torn piece of paper from the wash bag in the bathroom, it was clear that he was underground, sleeping as still and deep as rock strata. It was time to find out who this lover of hers really was.

  Home—Sunday A.M.

  I LAY WITH her until her breathing grew even and I was sure she was asleep. I studied her face in the gloom: the exquisite way her cheeks curved and plumped right up to her eyes, how the lashes lay like black little fans upon them. If you looked carefully you could see her eyelids twitch occasionally, as if she were a cat dreaming of flightless birds. She was utterly calm, utterly quiet. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong even in her dreams.

  If my father had let me sleep in his bed after my mother’s death, might it somehow have helped us both? He must have thought about it. I suspect he was too shaken by his own sense of devastation and the fear that having me next to him at night would only have rubbed salt into the wound. In my twenties I went through a period of thinking that it meant he didn’t love me enough, but I’ve felt more benign toward him in recent years. At times of stress you do what you can. It is not your fault if that isn’t the same as what you should. With Lily there beside me now, I think I understood how he must have felt. Her very calm made me more agitated. Her sleep made me more awake. My body felt as if there were a fire inside it, small flames of panic flaring up and scorching me awake, however many times I tried to throw a blanket over them. The infinite beauty of a sleeping child. As an adult, I found it almost unbearable.

  I tucked the sheet around her and went downstairs to check that the phone was still on the hook. The dial tone was noisy in my ear. I rang my own number to see if there were any messages. René had called from Stockholm to say he’d be back on Monday; could we make a date for next week? Would I leave a message on his answering machine? His voice took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about him since last night, as if what was happening here was my real life and he only an occasional sideshow. I realized that I wasn’t sure if he and I would survive this crisis, even though it had nothing to do with him. I couldn’t even feel disturbed by the thought.

  Above me I heard the attic door open and the heavy tread of footsteps on the stairs. “Anna?” Paul’s voice, whispered, tense, from the middle landing.

  I walked into the pool of light at the bottom of the hall so he could work out his mistake himself. “No. Sorry, Paul. It’s me. Stella.”

  “Stella,” he repeated flatly.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “It’s okay. I thought . . . What time is it?”

  “Three, three-thirty? I couldn’t sleep.”

  Behind him Lily’s door was open. I saw him turn to check on her.

  “She’s not there. She’s in with me. She woke up about an hour ago.”

  “What happened? Did she have a nightmare?”

  “No. I don’t think so. She was just awake. She needed a bit of reassurance, that’s all.”

  “You should have called me.”

  “I don’t think it would have helped. We had a chat and I put her into Anna’s bed.”

  “What about? What did she say?”

  “Nothing, really,” I said, aware that I should be giving him more, but unwilling to recount a conversation that contained so much of my own pain. “We just chatted.”

  “Did you talk about the phone call?” And it was clear from the edge in his voice that he was worried that it hadn’t been him on the stairs in the darkness holding her hand.

  “A bit.”

  “And?”

  “She still insists that she talked to her. I must say I believe her.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I would like to have heard it too.” He stood for a second, not willing to leave it, but not willing to push it either.

  I thought about telling him not to worry, that we were in this together and there was no way anything would come between us. But to say that would have been to acknowledge the fact that something already had, and once out in the open, it would be neither easily forgotten nor quickly resolved.

  “You can talk to her about it in the morning,” I said mildly. “She’s bound to be up before me. Listen, I’m sorry I woke you. I hope you sleep all right.”

  “Yeah.” He gave a small grunt. “You, too. You’ve left the answering machine on, right?”

  I checked the little light under the hall telephone. “Yep. No problem.”

  I stood and watched as he climbed back up the stairs. He left their bedroom door open this time.

  The encounter had done nothing to help me sleep. Even the house seemed alive with anxiety. I made my way quietly upstairs into her study and over to the filing cabinet by the wall. I pulled out the top drawer and stuck my hand down the back of it, feeling my way until I found what I needed: a small plastic bag strip-sealed along the top. Inside there was a clump of grass and a packet of papers. Enough dope for a couple of emergency spliffs.

  Even with Anna gone, her hospitality remained. Though she herself no longer really smoked—not since Lily (she had been afraid that being stoned she wouldn’t know how to cope in a crisis), it was a long-standing tradition that she always kept a stash for the nights when I needed to feel at home. I could only hope it would do the trick for me now. I cleared a space on her desk and started on the ritual: separating out the seeds from the leaves and crumbling them carefully like a dynamite trail along the middle of three gummed papers. And as I did so I thought about Paul’s suppressed aggression on the stairs and how he and I had coped so well over the years, all things considering. Surely it wouldn’t fall apart now. There was too much past to support it.

  Anna and I had already been best friends for years when she first met Paul in the
mid-eighties. They’d even slept together once, I seem to remember, before discovering that they did much better out of bed than in. A year or so later, when Paul had his road to Damascus about such matters, it was Anna he talked to first and the result was that while he became exclusively, triumphantly gay, they became even firmer friends. It’s hard now to imagine that they had ever been lovers, though the occasional echo of intimacy filters through their irritation with each other as well as their affection.

  He had really proved his worth during the cataclysmic times of Chris and their aftermath. I think in some ways he may have been more help to her than I, his energetic promiscuity better able to empathize with her sexual meltdown than my ignorant anxiety was. Then, after Lily was born, he was also there. He had the knack of ringing just at the moment when the going got tough, as if he could hear those vibrating angry-bee cries clear across the West London night. He was the first to discover how much Lily liked the car, how she would instantly fall asleep on the second turn around the Hogarth roundabout, even if she had an equal tendency to wake up again on the straight stretch of Chiswick High Road home. And she in turn got used to seeing his broad good-looking face as he strapped her in and out of her car seat late at night.

  For a while we provided between us something of a triangle of care. I was the first to fade away. International law firms have little enough truck with the legitimate kind of parental leave, let alone the nonparental type. I kept up a weekend schedule for a while, but in the end we all got tired of the disruption—it is, I discovered, not possible to live in two places at once—and I reverted to a monthly and then three-monthly cycle.

  As I rolled the spliff between my fingers I tried to remember how excluded I had felt by that discovery. But the truthful answer is, as far as I can recall, not at all. I had always been the least adept at the baby stuff, more frightened of the right way to pick her up, less able to cope with the tears or the demands. Maybe biological time clocks also bring with them an ability to tell the time. And anyway, as was already becoming clear, we had got better and better as she grew older.

  Words proved our breakthrough. We seem to share a verbal gene, Lily and I, and have always found it easy to chatter, even about the most mundane and meaningless of things. While her first word—“Mummy”—was directed at Anna (“Paul” was harder to say than “Daddy” and took much longer to perfect), her first phrase—“Cup of tea, cup of tea, cup of tea”—was kept for me when I walked in for one of my quarterly visits one afternoon and put on the kettle. And from then on the more we talked the more we discovered we liked each other.

  As for Paul—well, he, too, has achieved something unique, and because of that over the years I have grown to respect him very much. But I cannot say that were the two of us to find ourselves together on a desert island one of us wouldn’t choose to swim. Nothing personal, you understand, just something about not being soulmates. Given the pressure we were under at this moment it was not, therefore, surprising if we were feeling the strain. But we would come through it. Of course we would.

  I had a sudden flash of the three of us, Paul, Anna, and me, all sitting in a church pew together years from now watching proudly as Lily stood at the altar, all grown up and gorgeous in some fancy frock with a hunky man at her side. Father and mothers of the bride. Outrageous. Camp.

  The image shifted. Paul and I were still together, but this time the service was different. On the altar there was a flower-laden coffin next to a discreet oven door, and the third figure in the pew was Lily, sitting between us, each of her hands held tight in one of ours. Except that when you moved the camera into close-up you could see how we were trying to pull her in different directions.

  The image did not bear thinking about.

  I took the coward’s way out and lit the spliff.

  The sound of the grass crackling against the paper created a familiar static in the night silence. The very act of pulling the smoke inside relaxed me, triggering a Pavlovian memory of release, like the pleasure of taking off a pair of shoes that are too tight. From my lungs the smoke song started filtering up into my head. Brain-talk. It wouldn’t be long before we were singing in there, too.

  I like being stoned. It has always been a mystery to me why some people are so scared of it. When I first discovered it in my teenage years I was still shadowboxing with my mother’s absence. Dope achieved more than therapy ever could. To begin with, it made me laugh. It made the world absurd, rather than just plodding and flat, and, wonder of wonders, it made my own mind more interesting as it got looser. And as it got looser, so my mother started to find her own way in. I don’t know quite how or when it happened, but I discovered that I was thinking about her. And that rather than being a black hole of memory, she began to take on substance, to have a form and a personality. I found myself studying photographs of her, imagining her face in movement and wondering what her voice would have sounded like, what she might have thought about the Bay City Rollers, or Watergate, the maxi skirt or the end of the Vietnam War. I practiced these topics on her, along with my own responses, and then sometimes, when I felt more confident, I tried them again on my father. Of course I never told him where I had got it all from. That would have been cruel, since his pleasure in my newfound voice had so much to do with his worry about my previous silence.

  I daresay it had its dangers. No doubt it could have all gone horribly wrong, grown into obsession and psychosis; a child on drugs resurrecting her dead parent for company. But it never felt like that to me. After a while she sort of faded away (I suppose my own life took over and I found other people to talk to, other ways to spend my time), but afterward I felt as if I had known her a little better, even if she had been constructed of smoke rings. Since then, dope has always been somewhere where I go to be at home, where I can feel looked after, or maybe where I have just learned to look after myself.

  Now even the smell of it reminds me of solitude, of time then and time now, years of Friday nights spent in my Amsterdam apartment sitting on the floor by the open windows on a summer’s evening after my phone call to Anna, some concert or opera on the airwaves, BBC Radio 3 sneaking its way onto my foreign dial like a subtle cultural imperialism. I turn up the stereo and let it take over the space inside my head as well as the one in the room. I love the fact that I know nothing at all about classical music. I like the way it rolls back away from us in time, like a country whose history I have never learned. It is one of the things that make me feel really good about the idea of growing old: that there will be so much time and space to discover it in.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, when I paint this fantasy I am always alone in it, a teenager grown old, with no need of anyone else to share it with. Not lovers. Not even best friends.

  But what about Lily? What would happen to my life if Lily had to be included in it? If Anna really didn’t come home and we—me or Paul—were left holding the baby?

  “She sounded funny. . . . When she said good-bye to me, she sounded sort of . . . sad, like she didn’t want to go.”

  Her words on the stairs came back like a sudden howl round in my head.

  Just occasionally dope can let you down, can curdle contentment into paranoia, pleasure into palpitations.

  I stubbed out the joint and made my way back to the bedroom, to check she was all right. Somewhere in the middle of an Italian night Lily’s mother was in some kind of trouble, and there was nothing, nothing I could do to help her.

  Away—Sunday P.M.

  AT FIRST SHE just wanted to smash it. To pick up the table and hurl it at the mirror, watch it plunge in glorious slow motion through the glass wall into the room behind, watch him and the camera reel to the ground, showered with glass, shards of it everywhere, in the lens, in his eyes.

  The need was so great that she had to dig her fingernails hard into her palms to stop herself from doing it. Where would it get you, Anna? she thought fiercely. Nowhere. What would you do next? Climb through the hole to finish him off? Even if you inca
pacitated him enough to get away there would still be no way out. Don’t waste the chance. For once you know more about him than he does about you. Keep it that way. Use it, make it play.

  She made herself walk over to the table and pour a cup of coffee from the flask. The very domesticity of the act, the mixing of the milk and the stirring of the sugar, earthed her a little. She went back to the books, selecting one with a glamorous blond woman on the cover, red dress, red hat, her face bathed in a rosy light. The title was Memory and Desire. It was heavy, a weighty story inside here. She opened it and read the first few lines.

  From the vantage point of the mirror he would have her perfectly in shot now, the light a halo behind her head. It would make a good photo, warm, relaxed, convincing. She let him have his fill of it. Then, after a while, she put down the book and yawned. It wasn’t fake. Her body was greedy for the oxygen it gulped in. She got up and moved casually past the mirror, then stopped, as if her own reflection had caught her attention again.

  She turned into it, as if she was surprised to find herself there, as if there was something worth seeing. She indulged her vanity more fully now, lifting up her hair in one hand and holding it on her head, studying the change it made in her face. She sucked in her cheeks, then checked what might be a blemish on her chin, careful not to get too close in case she should find herself able to spot the joins. She sighed. What was it Stella had said to her? That she had had an impressive ability to spin a good lie. The truth, but nothing like the truth, so help her God.

  She kept on looking.