Mapping the Edge

by Sarah Dunant

  Of course. That was the connection between the two. The art. But then it would be, wouldn’t it? After all, art was his work. Buying and selling. So was this about some kind of art scam? Using a tourist–love affair trip as a front for dodgy dealing. But what and how? There’d been no time for him to do any business. They hadn’t seen any art worth talking about (the churches hardly counted; the most exciting thing had been the altarpiece and that had been an “almost” rather than the real thing), and by the time they got back to Florence to catch an early Monday morning plane the weekend would be over. Unless he stayed on and did it then. In which case, why did he need her with him in the first place?

  No, there was something she wasn’t getting here. Her head hurt from trying to work it out.

  Two . . . three . . . The bell in the clock tower echoed into the silence. From across the other side of the square she could make out a low buzzing noise, like a chainsaw starting up in the night. From a small side street opposite a scooter zipped into sight, moving more like a kid’s remote-control toy than the real thing. The driver was a young guy with long hair, his pillion passenger, arms clinging around his waist, a girl in a very short skirt, her thighs bare to the night air. They drove fast right across the middle of the cobbled square, the engine buzzing angrily along the uneven surface, zooming past her and down the street to her left. The noise died slowly behind them. An Italian pair on their way home after a late night. One could only hope that the household wasn’t up waiting for their return.

  She thought of them saying good night on her doorstep, a quick snog before the lights snapped on in a room above. The image brought back her own date, sprawled across a bed in the best hotel room in town. She painted him more clearly in her mind’s eye.

  He liked to sleep on his stomach, that much she already knew: head turned to one side, face half-squashed into the pillow, his breathing heavy. In repose his shoulders and upper torso were chunky with muscle and what was—if you looked hard enough—the beginning of flab. But it still looked good, still offered an invitation to touch. She could feel the texture of his skin under her fingers, strong and supple at the same time, conjuring images of sweat, like beads of water, clinging to it. She ran her eye and her hands farther down his back toward the small of his buttocks, her voyeurism making her gaze cool, almost cruel in its assessment. There were traces of love handles above the hips, the leftovers of all those expensive meals. And she’d seen better asses. In her time. She imagined someone (herself?) slapping him on the buttock. “Come on, boy, wake up here. Start doing your job. There’s a lady here who needs servicing.” As he turned over, groping his way out of sleep, she noticed how his jawline had grown almost slack, and his eyes dull.

  She froze the image and studied it, gorging herself on its grossness as if in some kind of Clockwork Orange aversion therapy. I don’t like your body, she thought. It’s too ripe with its own success. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before. I don’t ache for your hands on me anymore. I’m not even sure I could make love to you again.

  She opened her eyes and the square exploded back into view, calm and silent, confident of the beauty in its age. She felt an almost palpable sense of relief. What is it with you and men, Anna? she thought to herself. Why is it you have such lousy taste?

  She thought herself back to her kitchen table: saw Paul and Michael sitting on one side of it, a half-drunk bottle of wine between them and a game of Clue laid out in front. Opposite them sat Lily, kneeling up on her chair, clasping the dice in her fat little fingers, ready to throw, concentration in capital letters on her face. On the board Miss Scarlett was chasing Reverend Green around the house with a spanner, and the gay boys were having fun watching. There was laughter in the air, and a quiet kind of love. No, it wasn’t true. She didn’t have lousy taste in men. She just picked different ones for the fucking and the fathering.

  Maybe in some bizarre way it suits me better, she thought: feeling both loved and left alone at the same time. In retrospect, she realized that she had been telling the truth about herself that first meeting in the Oxo tower. Not only did she not want a husband, she only sometimes wanted a lover. The worst sin she had committed here was waiting too long to get one, not recognizing the depth of hunger in herself, so that when she did eat she took in too much too fast, then felt sick afterward. It was a common enough female disorder, not knowing how to control your appetite. But given the chance, she could learn. Everyone can get what they want if they want it enough. If they want it enough . . .

  So what was it he wanted? If it wasn’t sex and it wasn’t adoration, what was it about? She didn’t know. But she would find out. As the clock chimed the half-hour she got up from the bench and walked slowly back to the hotel.

  Home—Sunday A.M.

  NEXT TO ME, as if she had heard my thoughts, Lily stirred and turned over, her left arm flopping over onto my chest. Her hand felt cold. I held it in mine for a while, then slipped it in underneath the sheets.

  Above me I caught the creaking noise of bedsprings in the spare room upstairs. I lay and listened. Maybe I’d woken them with my wanderings. The sound stopped. I imagined Mike folding himself around Paul’s body, like two spoons in a drawer. In the dark I looked at my watch. Almost 3:00 A.M. An hour later, European time.

  I closed my eyes and let the dope take me where it wanted. It took me to Italy.

  I imagined her in a hotel room, a man by her side, the phone neglected in the pursuit of orgasm. How good can sex be, Anna? Enough to rearrange your loyalties? Enough to make you forget your home? You tell me.

  I tried again and found her at an airport, dozing uncomfortably in a bucket chair under strip lighting, the flight board silent in readiness for the next morning’s rush. Everybody misses planes. It’s part of life’s rich pageant. But they still manage to talk to the right people, to reassure them back home.

  Finally I caught sight of her in a field of resplendent high-summer sunflowers, her body lying between their fat stalks like a rag doll, the earth around her dark with spilled blood.

  “She sounded sort of . . . sad, like she didn’t want to go. . . .”

  So many stories . . . So many possibilities . . . But then I’m good at make-believe. Always have been.

  For the longest time after she didn’t come home, I thought my mother had been run down by a bus. Well, how do you tell a ten-year-old girl that her mother’s body has been found cut in two on a railway line in Hampshire, a one-way ticket away from home in her pocket? No note, no explanation, nothing, not even the faint imprint of a bruise in the middle of her back where someone might have helped her fall. It didn’t make any sense. She sometimes took day trips when she was off work: checking out the gardens of stately homes for planting ideas, occasionally moving from one to another along a railway line, but with never a hint of Brief Encounter in the station bars. Except, of course, how would we ever know? It takes two to tell, and if one was dead the other might feel shy about speaking. I’m sure my dad must have thought about it; but then, only he would have known if the fault line of their marriage ran through sex or simply destiny.

  In the years that have followed I have wondered if he would have preferred it if they’d never found the body. At least that way he wouldn’t have had to cope with the horror. We could have pretended that she had really gone missing. Had had amnesia, got a better offer from Hollywood, run off with an exiled Hungarian seaman. The late sixties were wild times, after all. But bisected on a railway track? It was so macabre, so final. When did I first learn the truth? Playground gossip, no doubt. I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to any child I loved.

  To redress the balance I wove a little white magic in the night, opening my eyes and bringing Anna into the bedroom, sitting her on the edge of the bed, her eyes bright with laughter.

  “And remember that time you went missing?” I said, and because I was still stoned, I think I might have said it out loud. “Christ, you wouldn’t believe how worried we all were.”

&
nbsp; She laughed. “Yeah. I know. Sorry. Stupid misunderstanding, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Certainly was. Well, just as long as you’re back now.”

  Only she wasn’t.

  “For Christ’s sake, where are you, Anna?” I said into the open air. “What are you doing now?”

  Away—Sunday A.M.

  SHE WAS LOOKING out through a window, the late-afternoon sun cutting a long shadow across the side of her face. She had a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of her head, pulling up a cloud of unruly hair from her scalp underneath. In half-profile there were little lines running from the edge of her nose toward the corners of her mouth, making her look tired, even sad. The cup of coffee in front of her was half-drunk. Her eyes were a long way away. She was thinking of something or someone else.

  Then the mood changed and she was walking across a piazza after a shower of rain, the surface of the stones alive with light, the gleaming white façade of Santa Croce unmistakable in the background. She looked busy, intent, happy almost.

  To the right came another series of close-ups: her with a glass of wine in her hand, talking to someone—a waiter, presumably—then eating in a restaurant. She recognized the blue check tablecloths; it was a place near the Boboli Gardens where she had drunk too much one lunchtime, then had to go back to the hotel for a sleep afterward. Later that same day she had walked through the city before dusk and sat for a while on the steps of the Baptistery. She looked lovely in this picture, fading sunlight the color of honey all around and her black hair fierce against the golden doors.

  Laid out in a photograph album the pictures would be self-explanatory: Anna in Florence. Except you might perhaps add one more word—“Alone.”

  But then, she had been. That was the difference between her and the other woman. (Was Paola really her name?) If the pictures of Paola were more arresting it was not only because she was prettier, but because she had been plucked out of a life, busy, animated, while she, Anna, looked like a woman caught in transit, waiting for something to happen. It was hardly fair. He should have met her at home, where her world was full of friends, crowded places, chattering times. And Lily. How could you make a portrait of her life without Lily? Though you wouldn’t want any such photos taken by him.

  She closed her eyes and fell back on the mattress. The world spun in the darkness and the pervading stink of the chemicals made her feel sick. She pulled herself up onto one elbow and tried again.

  The room was small, the ceiling low. There was no window, and only one door, closed. It was hot, despite the buzz of air-conditioning. A world underground. His world. So where was he? Her head hurt, but the pain seemed a long way away. He had put some kind of rough dressing on the wound. Underneath she could feel a spongy swelling and the burn of broken skin. How much blood had she lost? Did that explain the weakness and nausea, or was it something else? Had he given her another dose of syrup to keep her quiescent?

  Get up, she thought. Get up and get out of here.

  I can’t. I can’t.

  She didn’t want to cry, so instead she looked back at the photos. It was a strange feeling; being surrounded by images of oneself, yet a different self, a self seen through someone else’s eyes. Like having your soul stolen away by the camera. Is this who Anna Franklin really was? So pensive, so sad?

  He had been there all along, it seemed. Or at least since day two. Was that café on the first afternoon or the second? Before or after her visit to Santa Croce? She couldn’t remember. Never mind. How weird that she hadn’t noticed him. Too self-absorbed, no doubt. Not listening to the electricity in the air around her.

  She shifted her gaze to the next wall.

  Where she expected to find mirrors, instead she got beds. She recognized the green cover before she recognized herself lying curled under it. Each shot had been taken from the same place, a vantage point high above, in the ceiling—embedded in the light fixture, presumably. In sequence, they told the story of a night: an arm flung out here, a leg moved there, like one of those children’s books where you flick the pages to make the animal at the corner turn somersaults, or a jump-cut television ad for a sleeping draft or a cold remedy. She looked peaceful, deeply asleep, no hint of the salacious or the erotic about her pose, just the creepy intimacy of surveillance, the blinking eye of a camera shutter. Had this been her sleeping off the drug, or the night after, when she had woken once to find the light on, puzzling as she was sure she had turned it off? Now she understood the composition of noises from last night. He had unlocked the door and driven away in the car because he had known all along that she was awake to hear him. Because all the time he had been looking at her.

  Next came the mirror shots: a creative selection of them. Reading them now made them seem almost prophetic: a madwoman, disheveled and tense, pretending she wasn’t. Even in the shots where the mirror had tempted her into vanity and the smile had arrived, sucking in the cheeks and opening the eyes, the effect seemed disturbing rather than seductive.

  Where she had thought she had concealed doubt, the camera had found it immediately, in the flicker of the eyes, the parting of the lips to pull in a fast breath. Fear leaked out through the pores of her skin. To catch it so acutely would have taken sensitivity and skill. No doubt he would also have caught the next subtle shift of emotion, from fear into fury and sly determination. But there was no record of that shift on the wall. This gallery was selective, the story it told predetermined. She needn’t have bothered with her monologue. He had never believed it anyway.

  The remaining photos took up half of the last wall. He had been working hard, but the clock would have been against him. There had been no time to frame or even properly arrange here, just a run of quick blowups taped to the wall. Obviously he hadn’t made up his mind about the selection yet. Some, the ones taken against the cellar wall, were simple and rushed, a body slumped, head down onto the chest, the wound hardly visible. Others, like those of her in the chair, were almost baroque in their elegance, the angry gash of blood echoing the deep red of her dress, her skin drained, white as an enamel sink.

  From the still life of an ordinary woman in a café to the slow destruction of a special, chosen one. Half a wall left. Room for one more photo shoot.

  She stared at the empty space. Her head was throbbing again, closer now, demanding her attention, willing her to close her eyes and lie down for a while. She lay back on the mattress. Her body gave a sigh of relief. She knew she ought to be doing something, spurred on by the terror that what she was looking at was a chronicle of her own death. But somehow she felt almost disconnected from it, as if whatever drug he had given her to relax her body had relaxed her mind as well. How extraordinary—to be looking at your own death and not to be alarmed by it.

  She forced herself to keep thinking.

  She thought of Lily, and with that a great sweetness flooded through her. She wished she could talk to her, one last time, a few last moments. She felt sure she would know what to say. The right words for the rest of Lily’s life. Love without bitterness.

  It had always been Anna’s fear that Lily would die before she did. That she would open the door to the ultimate nightmare—the uniform on the doorstep and the words “I’m so sorry, Miss Franklin, I have bad news for you.” At least now that wouldn’t happen. On the contrary, her death would ensure Lily’s longevity. Not even a godless universe is capricious enough to deliver the same horror over two generations. One murder would surely prevent another. She felt almost a sense of comfort in the thought. Stella would look after her. As an expert in such particular pain she would know what to do, how to comfort, when to leave alone. Lily would survive. That was all that mattered.

  Was this how Paola had felt now? she thought. Did she keep fighting or did she give up as well? Had she been brought this low by the same means, a set of photos and tales of lost love? Or had she perhaps been the first?

  It must have been so easy. She could see it all now. All you had to do was want it enough. The r
est was planning and luck: the right stranger at the right time, someone with whom you had no connection, someone away from home who wouldn’t be missed or pursued until you and they were a long time gone. She must have fallen into his hands; cheap hotel, obviously alone, no husband or boyfriend, just a guidebook and some rusty Italian. Travelers made such good targets. Any big city would supply the goods. Probably he didn’t always pick Florence; more sensible to cast your net wide, that way it would take a while for the cases to match up. Maybe he let them all call home. Maybe that was one of the identifying features. Or maybe he had got cocky with her.

  Of course, he wouldn’t get away with it forever. They never did. Eventually he’d make a mistake and they’d find him. Find it all: the house, the bodies, the photographs.

  The photographs . . . The ones on the walls were only his selection. There would be others: contact sheets, banks of negatives, film after film, step by step, shot by shot from the sunshine into the dark. Would they show them to the families? You wouldn’t really want them to do that. Or even to have them hung up in a courtroom as evidence. These were not the pictures one would choose to be remembered by. Death was a private thing. Just between the two of you. Like sex or terror.

  She felt a slow pain start to burn inside her stomach, vying for her attention with the lassitude and the throbbing in her head. She looked at the wall and saw her own fear staring back at her and she knew that the drug, whatever it was, was beginning to wear off.

  No, better that they never saw this. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  Away—Sunday A.M.

  SHE STEPPED OUT of her clothes and slid under the sheet next to him, careful to stay on the other side of the bed faced away from him. He didn’t stir. She listened to his breathing: noisy, deep, a man at rest. Even with the distance between them she could feel the heat coming off him. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She was so tired she couldn’t think straight, but neither could she stop thinking. The minutes ticked by. She was still trying when he gave a half-groan, flipped over from the side to the middle of the bed, and, finding her body in his path, threw a lazy arm around her waist. It lay there for a second, leaden, uninterested; then, as if realizing what it had found, the grip tightened and he pulled her toward him.