Mapping the Edge

by Sarah Dunant

  “Mmmn, you’re cold,” he said after a while, his voice muzzy, half-buried between her shoulder blades.

  He had been asleep all this time, hadn’t he?

  She lay still, as if she hadn’t heard, as if she were the one who’d been woken, not him. He ran his hand down over the surface of her left leg. “Freezing.” And he sounded more alert now. “Where have you been?”

  “Oh, just up for a while,” she mumbled. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  There was a pause. The hand kept on moving, methodical rubbing movements, slow warmth seeping into the chill. “Where’s up?” And something in the way he said it made her decide not to lie.

  “I went for a walk. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Silly girl.” He nuzzled himself closer, like an animal burrowing deeper into earth. She felt the bristle of his stubble as he rolled his chin against the skin of her back; the finest of sandpaper, halfway between caress and irritant. Just a few hours ago she had lain next to this man desperate for him to touch her; now it was all she could do not to flinch away as he did so. The hand that had been working her left leg slipped itself deftly in between her thighs. “You should have woken me.” She shifted her legs apart, but slightly, more out of politeness than invitation. “I could have helped you sleep,” he said, the voice blurry but playful now, petulant almost, like a child’s.

  And as he said it she felt his prick stiffen against her left buttock. It sent a small shock wave through her, the line between old lust and new tension too close to call. He mistook one for the other and trailed his hand upward, his fingers meshing into her pubic hair, until he found the moistness underneath. “Mmm. Nice.”

  They lay like that for a while, neither of them moving, almost testing out the air. She thought about the portrait of him she had conjured up in the square, the flesh thick with ego and self-indulgence, then discarded it again. She could embellish it or let it go. Relax, she thought. Night fucks are the great freebies of sex, remember: bodies slipping out to play before the mind has had time to wake up. She moved her legs farther apart. Even bad men can do good things if you let them. “At last,” he muttered, the words almost lost in her flesh. He played deeper, finding the entrance to her, opening it up with his middle finger, testing the temperature inside. She pushed herself down onto his hand, searching for the right pressure. They played for a while, then he slipped his finger out and, pulling her body back and up until the position was right, he slid his prick into her, each move so languid, so careless almost, that they might indeed have still been half-asleep.

  The night sat thickly around them. He let out a long gasp as he pushed in and in the short silence before the next breath she heard the town clock hit the single chime of four-thirty. It would be dawn before long. She felt him moving to and fro, a calculated slowness, each thrust long and careful, savoring the moment. If you didn’t know better you might think it was about art as much as pleasure. But then, like most men with a vocation, he obviously gained satisfaction from his own proficiency. “Come on, Anna,” he said quietly into her ear. At the same time his fingers continued their plucking, searching for the right spot, the right rhythm with which to bring her inside the charmed circle. “You didn’t think you could leave, eh? Time to come home.”

  He knows, she thought suddenly, the realization rushing through her like a shock wave. He’s been awake all this time and he knows that I know. But how could he? It’s not possible. She gave a little laugh out loud, and to her satisfaction heard a throaty darkness in it, the sound pulled from her body rather than her mind. You want me back, lover, you have to find me first, she said half to herself, half aloud. And with her defiance she ignited a flare of desire.

  He felt it too. He pushed himself farther in, and at the same time his fingers found their mark and they both registered her sharp involuntary intake of breath. “There. That’s better,” he said, and the voice was firmer now. He turned his attention from himself to her, playing her more confidently now, connecting the catch in her flesh with that in her throat, perfecting the movement with each repetition, feeling the momentum build. She let him do it. How many times had they made love, he and she? Fifteen, twenty times? Enough for them both to know that she was on safe ground now. In a moment she wouldn’t need him anymore; the dynamic of her own excitement would do it for her, the overwhelming tension of pleasure lifting her inside and out of her body until she was spinning and exploding in space, triumphant, alone, oblivious of him, his work, his vanity, even his pleasure.

  He was waiting for the moment to join her, for her to give him a sign so they could do it like good lovers should, in the perfect gigolo illusion of togetherness, both of them in orbit at the same time. But she wasn’t interested in him anymore, only in herself. As she wrenched her orgasm away from him into herself he realized too late and tried to catch up with a few deep plunges. But she was already gone; and when it was over, and love—or, at least, etiquette—required that she return to join him while he finished the job, she kept herself deliberately away, her mind and her body indifferent to his frantic rising thrusts. Now it was his turn to be too far gone to turn back. Men can fake everything but this, she thought. Even this man. Even when it contains nothing of himself. And the cruelty in her pleasure as she lay there, waiting while he battered himself inside her, both amazed and delighted her.

  When he finally came—a fast, rather scrappy affair—and slid out of her, falling back onto the bed to get his breath back, she lay quietly next to him and thought of Chris and the moment all those years ago when Lily had been conceived. What was it that Samuel/Marcus/Taylor/Irving had said to her about that night as they had lain together on this same bed, swapping secrets in the amniotic fluid of mutual trust less than twelve hours before? “Sounds like you came out the victor in the end.” And she wondered if the same could be said of her now, or if what had taken place was only a temporary victory in a much bigger battle.

  They lay side by side not talking, until after a while he raised himself up onto one elbow and looked down at her. She opened her eyes and met his gaze. “What happened?” he said quietly.

  She smiled. “Nothing.”

  “So where were you?” he asked lightly, and she was sure that they both understood the ambiguity.

  “I . . . I didn’t get back in time. Sorry.”

  “But you did get off?”

  “Couldn’t you tell?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. I got lonely.”

  She paused, despite herself impressed by the honesty. “I went to the town square.”

  If the change of direction disconcerted him he certainly didn’t show it. He made a face. “The town square? That was a long way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You were tired. I wanted to be alone. I needed to do some thinking.”

  “I see. About going home?”

  “Something like that.”

  He ran a finger down the line of her face. “So is that what you were doing? Getting used to having your orgasms alone again?”

  She didn’t break his gaze. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, but without particular malice.

  He laughed. “I’m going to miss you, you know, Anna,” he said quietly. Then: “You do realize that, don’t you?”

  “You’ll manage,” she said.

  He looked hurt. It was almost convincing. “How would you feel if I told you that . . . that I was thinking of opening an office in London?” He paused. “And that if I did, I’d have to come over and live there for six months or so to get it going?”

  She shrugged. “I suppose I’d wonder where you and your wife were going to live.”

  He smiled. “She’s not an Anglophile, I’m afraid. She’d stay at home.”

  She nodded. She watched Sophie Wagner sitting by a phone in a Manhattan apartment, measuring out her life in the spaces between the wrong phone calls. “Why London?” she sai
d. “Why not New York?”

  He frowned. “New York? What made you think of New York?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought the art market was bigger there.”

  He paused. “Not for me. So, what would you think? I mean, if it happened. Would that be excuse enough for me to meet your daughter?”

  “I don’t know, Samuel. I’d have to think about it.”

  “I see.” He nodded slightly. “Well, anyway, it might not happen. It’s only an idea at this stage.”

  Somewhere outside the window a couple of songbirds started up, rash creatures in a country where centuries of epicurean taste had decided that the smaller the bird the bigger the delicacy. Presumably they, too, could read a clock, would know it would be hours before all those brave Italian hunters would be up and about, eager to blow their brains out and roast their tiny bodies on supermarket spits.

  It bestows an unusual and particular confidence, knowing when one is safe from the predator and when one is not.

  “I have to sleep now,” she said, lifting her head up to kiss him gently on the lips. “Just for a few hours.”

  He nodded, but didn’t move, continuing to stare down at her. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again a few moments later he was still looking. She smiled. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just drawing something for memory. You go to sleep now. I’ll wake you when it’s time to leave.”

  “You’re going to get up now?” It was hard to know whether she felt relieved or disturbed.

  “I’m awake. I don’t think I could sleep again. But you can. We’ve got all day. There’s no hurry.”

  “What will you do?” she said, watching him get into his trousers and pull on a sweater, and finding something about the action suddenly unbearably painful, as if a shot of morphine had just worn off and she was plunged again into the raw ache of an open wound. What is this? she thought, frantically. Where did the numbness go?

  “Oh, I’ll go and sit in the lobby for a bit. See if I can catch an early breakfast. Maybe check out the church—the guidebook says it’s a stunner—and find us somewhere to eat lunch.”

  It’s because it’s over, she thought. All of it: the pleasure, the pain, the sex, the seduction, the intimacy, all of it gone in the action of a man putting on his clothes. And because the only thing that isn’t yet over, the betrayal, the double-cross—whatever and whenever it would be—wouldn’t serve to wipe out the intensity of what had been before, however much she might wish it could. And for the split second when she registered that, it seemed almost preferable to make herself believe the lies again and so not let him go.

  He slipped on his jacket as he came to the bed and leaned over her, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Sleep well. See you later.”

  Then, picking up his briefcase, he was up and out of the room.

  She turned over onto her side and lay staring into the room, trying to deal with the pain, to breathe her way through it as she had once been taught to breathe through physical pain, as a way of absorbing and containing it. She focused on the window and the creeping new dawn. As she lay there the pace of change quickened, a gauzy, almost cotton-candy-tinted light seeping in, penetrating and dissolving away the gray, the color as tender and outrageous as a painter’s brush. She had a sudden image of the restored tabernacle Madonna in the church holding the dead Christ on her lap, her robes a bright eager blue against the sallow shade of dead flesh. The painter had captured it so well you could almost feel the weight of his body pinning her down, before in turn he was lifted up and carried into the heavens. Men’s bodies and the various ways in which women are called on to tend to them. It was not the end of the story.

  Home—Sunday

  I WOKE TO an empty bed and the sound of Lily laughing wildly, a jumble of high-pitched cartoon voices around her. I stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Why don’t adults laugh like that? Is it something to do with the size of the larynx or the state of the soul? I felt as if I had been up all night, which, of course, I had.

  In the sitting room Lily was curled under a duvet, a bowl of cornflakes perched precariously on her lap, the Rugrats shining in her eyes. Angelica (my favorite and Lily’s) was throwing another tantrum. I closed the door on her exhilaratingly bad temper.

  In the kitchen Paul was standing alone at the open garden door smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t remember how long ago he had given it up, and this wasn’t the time to ask. He flicked the stub into the bushes as I came in. In happier days it would have been a gesture to drive the boys wild. But Paul was a married man now. And a worried one.

  “Hi. How did you sleep?”

  “Awful,” I said, plugging in the kettle and warming my hands over it like a campfire, until it started to burn.

  “Yeah. Me, too.” He paused. “The police rang.”

  My head jerked up. “When?”

  “This morning—around nine-thirty.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. They’ve checked all the flights for today and tomorrow coming out of Pisa and Florence. She’s not booked on any of them.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

  “But they found where she was staying. Tracked her down through the passport computer details. A Hotel Corri. In Via Fiesolana? Near the Duomo, apparently?”

  “Never heard of it. What did they say about her?”

  “That she checked out on Thursday afternoon, as planned.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No. They assumed the airport. The girl on the desk said she asked her to call her a cab. She doesn’t remember where to. She’s not sure that she ever knew.”

  “But she did see her go?”

  He nodded. I felt myself suddenly tremendously excited. As if somewhere in this one concrete piece of information lay the answer to all the questions. “So all they have to do is track down the cab.”

  He sighed. “It’s not that easy. The cab company the girl rang said it would be a while, and Anna told her not to bother. That she’d get one in the street.”

  “Oh.”

  We sat for a while. Florence in high season. How many cabs? How many drivers? How many destinations in a day? Hold on to what you’ve got, Estella. It’s better than nothing. “But whatever it was, we know that it happened between the hotel and the airport?”

  “Yeah. We know that.”

  “Did you tell them about the phone call?” I said casually as I opened the fridge to get out the milk.

  At least he had the decency to hesitate. “No.” Then: “The milk’s on the table if you’re looking.” I grunted thanks. But I didn’t let him off the hook. “If they had found her name on one of the flights I would have done.”

  “How about the Soulmates column? Did you mention that?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not about a man.”

  “We don’t know that, Paul,” I said patiently.

  “Yes, we do,” he retorted, a flame of indignation rising within it. “I rang the paper this morning. Got the home number of the features editor she does stuff for. She told me that Anna handed in a story two weeks ago called ‘Dating Games’—who you met, if they were kosher, that kind of thing. The Guardian Soulmates stuff was included in it. They haven’t had time to run it yet. I told her to hold it till we knew more.”

  My God. So it was a story. The photos, the circled adverts, the phone bills, all of it. All of it?

  I stirred the milk in and took a sip. The first hit of morning tea: like mainlining lifeblood. It’s not the drug that counts, only the quality of your need for it. Last night’s dope still hung around on the fringes of my mind, playing havoc with the notion of reassurance. “So you don’t think it’s possible that she might have met somebody more serious and decided not to write about him?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I shrugged. “Only because it was you who thought she was distracted. And then there’s Mike’s comments about her appearance. I m
ean, something had changed in her. There has to be an explanation for that.”

  From the hall the sound of canned laughter grew suddenly louder, then came some zip-zappy music for the credits to dance along to. I put my finger to my lips to stop Paul replying. Ten seconds later Lily’s head popped around the kitchen door.

  “I’m still hungry,” she said to anyone who was listening. “Can I have some toast?”

  “Morning,” I said. “Angelica got over her temper tantrum?”

  She nodded. Nothing’s so passé in a child’s life as the last cartoon program.

  “Brown or white?” Paul got up from the table.

  “White, of course.”

  “Butter or margarine?”

  “Margarine, of course.”

  “Marmalade or honey?”

  There was a pause.

  “Nutella, of course,” they said together.

  I was being treated to a floor show. For what purpose?

  “Bring your cornflakes bowl in first,” said Paul.

  “Oooh, not now—it’s Spider-Man next.”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Paaauuul.”

  “Hey—no bowl, no toast.”

  She gave a theatrical sigh and flounced out.

  It struck me that if I hadn’t been there he probably would have given in. Keeping things normal can be tough sometimes. The living room door slammed behind her.

  He got up and started the toast anyway. “You want some?”

  I shook my head. “Has Mike gone?”

  “Yeah, he had an early call.”

  I paused. “Paul?” He looked up at me. “I really like him. I think he’s substantial. A good man.”