The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “That’s better. Yes?”

  And his nerve failed him. No words would come out. He glanced down. Tugged awkwardly at a torn cuticle. Rubbed his left ear.

  Anna took a quick look over her shoulder. Quesnel was talking to one of the residents. The other two residents were deep in conversation by the table.

  “I have a feeling,” she said, “that what I am about to say now could make our lives incredibly complicated.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t say it.” But he wanted her to. Christ, he wanted her to!

  “You’re right. Perhaps I shouldn’t.” She drew a breath. “Jack, you know who I am. What I am. And I know who and what you are. Both of us have positions in life. A lot to lose. And yet...”

  All at once Parry was flooded with a sense of certainty, of serenity, such as he had not felt in a long time.

  “Who cares?” he said.

  “Really?” Her eyes were wide – not with surprise but with amazement.

  And he thought, How incredible that she should be amazed. This extraordinary woman. Anna Fuentes! And who am I? Nobody special. And yet she’s amazed.

  And if he had not been in love with her already, he would have fallen in love with her then.

  In a low voice she told him where to be, when to be there, how to get in.

  And three nights later he found himself at the side gate to the Fuentes compound. It was cool for June. A million stars scintillated overhead and the smell of the mainland – dust, earth, pollen – was thick in the air, borne over the city by the imbat, the local summer wind which blew onshore during the day then turned at sunset, like a tide, to blow offshore throughout the night. Behind him, canal waters gently lapped as, with tentative, half-disbelieving fingers, he inserted into the gate’s lock the key that Anna had sent to his apartment. The gate unlatched itself. The gate swung open. With an anxious glance over his shoulder, he ventured in.

  Her directions had been simple. Go left. Follow the path towards the house.

  The path emerged onto a stretch of lawn. Ahead was the house, its white-stuccoed walls looming in the darkness, its ribbed red roof-tiles seamed with moonlight, its louvred window-shutters sealed. He set off across the grass. His breath was coming in spurts, worry and anticipation together constricting his chest as he neared the house step by stealthy step, with doubts assailing him all the way, a series of what-if? scenarios parading through his brain, taunting him, leering. What if, for all his caution, someone had spied him entering the compound? What if Hector Fuentes had unexpectedly curtailed his business trip to Bilbao and come home, not leaving Anna enough time to send a warning? Or what if Fuentes were to return, equally unexpectedly, in the next few hours and discover Parry on the premises? All the household domestic staff were supposed to have gone home for the evening, but what if for some reason one of them had stayed behind, unbeknownst to Anna? Any of a dozen things could go wrong. Was he really prepared to jeopardise everything he had, just for this one woman? One woman whom, when all was said and done, he hardly knew?

  What if he had made a mistake? What if this entire escapade was based on nothing more than a dreadful misapprehension on his part?

  Then there she was, waiting for him on the terrace that fronted the south-facing side of the house, looking out for him, hugging herself, expectant. And as he came close he saw that her big dark eyes were thrilled and fear-filled, just as his own must be, and then she caught sight of him and let out a held breath and smiled, and oh Lord, he knew then that anything was worth her, any risk was worth this prize!

  “You came,” she said.

  “I know,” he grinned. “I must be crazy.”

  They kissed. Kissed again. Kissed. Clumsily at first, but then with greater sureness, greater urgency.

  “What are we doing?” she said, pulling her head back, breathless.

  “Does it matter?”

  He felt the press of her body against his. He felt recklessness and arousal surging up together at once, two heads of the same beast.

  She stepped back. She took him by the hand. She led him inside. Upstairs.

  That first tryst had become the paradigm for the rest, the theme that each subsequent one had followed with minimal variations. He and Anna would bide their time until Fuentes went abroad on business somewhere and Cecilia was off at her boarding school in Geneva, and then Parry would enter the compound under cover of darkness and make his furtive approach across the garden to the house, and Anna would be there to greet him, and both of them would head indoors and upstairs to the bedroom to tumble into the heat and sweat and fervour of lovemaking...

  ...and afterwards there would be stillness, perhaps a gentle breeze lifting and impregnating the bedroom’s muslin curtains but other than that no movement, just a man and woman entwined in postcoital languor beneath a cotton bedsheet, bodies warmly fused by perspiration and exhaustion, each murmuring to the other in the silence, soft sentences, verbal caresses...

  ...and beneath it all, like a rheumatic ache, there would be the knowledge that he could not stay. Each time, Parry longed for nothing on Earth so much as to fall asleep in Anna’s embrace, but it would have been unwise to push their luck. And the knowledge of the necessity of leaving would intensify and grow more painful with every second that passed, as the time until he must make his departure slipped by with unkind swiftness...

  And he remembered how, between trysts, he might see Anna on television or read about her in the lifestyle section of the New Venice edition of the Resort-City Clarion, and more often than not she would be on her husband’s arm, radiant beside him, the very epitome of the multimillionaire’s wife, and he would feel an unavoidable stab of jealousy for Hector Fuentes, who was better-dressed and more sophisticated and far wealthier than he could ever hope to be and who – worse – could have Anna to himself whenever he wanted, could be seen out with her whenever he liked and bask at all times in the simple, miraculous fact that she was married to him and he to her.

  Parry would feel this, but he would also feel, in his marrow, a quiet, ferocious glee, because he knew that there was a part of Anna to which Hector had no access. The part she had bequeathed him. The hidden part of her that prompted her to tell him time and time again that she loved him, truly loved him, that he was the man her husband could never be...

  And the man who could never be her husband. For Anna had made it plain the very first time they slept together that she would not leave Fuentes for Parry. He could not reasonably expect her to, she had said, and of course she was right. She had Cecilia to think about. She had obligations, responsibilities. She had a standard of living that nobody in their right mind would sacrifice, not even for love. It would have been outrageous for him to ask her to do so. Unconscionable.

  But that did not stop him asking. Again and again, with a bull-headed, near-masochistic persistence. Anna, leave him. Anna, forget the thousand-and-one reasons why you should stay with him. Anna, come and live with me. She could only refuse, but he would ask anyway, wanting to hear himself say these things, and wanting to hear the note of strained, bitter regret in Anna’s voice as she replied no, no, no...

  Then Fuentes had fallen ill. A brain tumour. The best and most expensive oncologist in the world, Lü Pu-We, was flown over from Shanghai to attend to him. The prognosis was bleak. The tumour was inoperable. It had lurked undiscovered in Fuentes’s head for too long, and was now too large to be removed safely. Nothing could be done for him except to make his last few weeks as comfortable as possible.

  Anna told Parry, by telephone, that they must not see each other.

  Of course not. He understood. She must look after her husband. He was her priority.

  A month later he bumped into her at – of all places – the Chopin Mall, which, painfully punsome name notwithstanding, was one of New Venice’s smarter retail arcades. He had gone there for one of his regular visits to Britten’s For Britons, an emporium where expatriates could stock up (at regrettably high prices) on homeland staples su
ch as Cheddar cheese and Marmite and pork sausages and decent tea. Anna had gone there to browse in a vintage bookstore. Hector liked her to read to him, she said, and she had been trying to find him something unusual and undigitised. She looked wan, worn, weighed-down. Parry suggested they go for coffee.

  “Someone might see us,” she said.

  “So what? This was a chance encounter, and we know each other from the Civic Committee, don’t we?”

  She seemed too exhausted to submit any further protest. She seemed, in fact, grateful for the offer.

  At a café overlooking the Eighth Canal, Parry drank tea while Anna, between sips of espresso, told him of the hell she was going through. Her husband was losing control of his bodily functions, and that was awful, but there were round-the-clock nursing staff on hand to deal with such things. What was worse, as far as she was concerned, was the way he was losing weight so rapidly, visibly shrinking from day to day. Dr Lü had told her to expect this, but still, it was as though the cancer was literally eating away at him from the inside, sucking at him like some horrible parasite, hollowing him out. Her only consolation that Cecilia was away at school and so was being spared the sight of her father’s slow, inexorable decline. “With any luck,” she said, “he’ll be gone before term ends. Is that an awful thing to hope for?”

  Parry assured her that it was not.

  “You know, I can’t stop blaming myself. Hector had been behaving erratically for a while. Short-tempered. Forgetting things. Dropping things. I should have forced him to go and see his doctor, but he kept insisting he was all right. That’s his way. Nothing could ever go wrong with the great Hector Fuentes. But I should have ... should have...”

  She began to cry, and Parry passed her a paper napkin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I know it’s not my fault, not really. I’m just being stupid. But thank you for letting me unburden myself like this. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. Perhaps ... perhaps we might do this again some time?”

  And so they began to meet in public places – as friends, nothing more – even as Fuentes’s condition worsened and the strain on Anna intensified. Towards the end, she became quite haggard and was sometimes scarcely able to string two sentences together, yet she was always grateful for Parry’s sympathetic ear and Parry was always pleased to be able to lend it to her.

  Fuentes died on a Saturday in April.

  The funeral took place the following Tuesday. Parry was among the mourners, as was Quesnel. Quesnel was there because it was only right and proper that the city’s FPP commissioner be on hand to pay her last respects to one of New Venice’s most prominent and eminent residents. When she asked Parry why he was there, he fluently offered the excuse he had come up with. Someone had to keep an eye out for camera-hacks, didn’t they? After all, the official news networks might always respect the privacy of individuals, but some of those e-ther journalists weren’t so honourable, and it seemed a good idea to have a senior FPP officer on hand to intervene in case one of them tried to take footage of the ceremony and the Crystech Caballero’s grieving relatives.

  The service was held at White Quays, on the rim of the North-East District. The Quays was a fanned array of ctenoid jetties where rich folk berthed their pleasure yachts and cabin cruisers, immense spaceship-sleek vessels whose names – The Lucky Toss, Filthy Lucre, My Peccadillo – attested to a casual smugness about money. It was a breezy, balmy spring day. Clouds at full sail scudded across the sky, their shadows rippling after them over a finely-striated sea like an expanse of etched green glass. A spare mooring had been set aside for the ceremony, and the majority of the mourners stood on the dock and looked on as, on the deck of a flat open barge, a Catholic priest intoned the last rites before a dozen members of Fuentes’s immediate family. In front of them, Fuentes’s body lay linen-wrapped inside a canoe-like shell of amethyst-coloured crystech.

  As the service concluded, a crystechnician stepped forward, unscrewed the lid of the soundproofed canister he was holding, and offered the open canister to each family member in turn. Each delved in and took out a handful of whitish-mauve granules, which he or she then scattered in sparkling drifts over the body. Anna and Cecilia were the last in line. This was the first time Parry had ever seen Anna’s daughter in person, although from conversations with Anna he felt as though he knew her. She was some fifteen metres away from him and wearing a veil, but he could none the less make out dark-rimmed eyes and a face devoid of all expression. Unlike Anna, who looked tired and resigned, Cecilia had not had to watch Fuentes degenerate day by day, although she had been there at the end, helping her mother keep vigil through her father’s last days and final night. Anna had begun to grieve for her husband before he was even dead. Cecilia had yet to overcome the shock of bereavement. But she was young. Youth meant resilience. She would come to terms with her loss soon enough, perhaps sooner than her mother did.

  When the last handful of crystech seeds had been scattered, the crystechnician approached Fuentes’s body with a portable tone-generator. Kneeling, he aimed the directional speaker at Fuentes’s granule-sprinkled remains and adjusted the pitch and envelope controls. With a twist of a potentiometer dial, a high clear whine began to emanate from the tone-generator, and all at once the crystals began to grow. Jewel-like clusters blossomed on the body, swelling up more rapidly where the granules were more densely sown. Like a gardener tending a plot, the crystechnician moved back and forth with the tone-generator. Where growth was happening too slowly, he stimulated it with blasts of sound at increased volume. Where it was happening too quickly, he inhibited it with stabs of white noise. The crystal clusters were by now extending glittering, spiky tendrils towards one another like frost in fast motion, coalescing, encasing the body and thickening upwards. Eventually Fuentes’s mortal remains were sheathed evenly from head to toe in a block of gleaming transparent violet. A final sharp blurt of white noise terminated the growth altogether, and the job was done. The barge’s engine started up, and soon Fuentes was being ferried out to sea and his final resting-place. Only his immediate family would be present as, somewhere out in international waters, his transparent coffin was eased overboard to slip beneath the waves.

  It was later that day, at the wake at casa Fuentes, that Parry and Cecilia actually met. Having offered formal condolences to Anna, he stood in a corner sipping a glass of white wine and debating whether to stay or go. Quesnel, to his relief, had elected not to attend the wake, otherwise he would have been hard pushed to justify his presence there as well. In her absence, however, there was no one he knew there, apart from Anna. Then Cecilia approached him – drawn to him, she would later say, through a combination of compassion and curiosity: she did not like to see people on their own at parties and she wondered if this FPP officer was the same FPP officer who, according to her mother, had been a pillar of strength during the past few difficult months.

  They hit it off straight away. Cecilia, red-eyed and desolate, nevertheless had enough of her customary spark about her to find Parry’s simply-expressed sympathies touching and his obvious respect for her mother endearing. “Ma says she really needed a friend like you,” she told him.

  “She flatters me.”

  “She says you’ve been her knight in shining armour.”

  “I’ve only done what anyone would have done.” He felt a fraud as he said those words. He had only done what anyone would have done who was keen to appear supportive and caring. His motives had been anything but unselfish.

  “All the same, I think I’ll have to call you Sir Jack from now on. Like a knight. If you don’t mind.”

  And that was how he became a favourite of the daughter as well as the mother.

  Things between him and Anna did not change straight away. He had not expected they would. She observed her period of mourning and behaved as a recently-widowed woman should. Each time they met for a drink or dinner, however, he was pleased to note that a little bit more of her old self was co
ming back. Each time, she was a little bit more the Anna she had been before her husband’s illness. And each time he was encouraged that soon, soon, they would be able to pick up again where they left off.

  A few weeks after from the funeral, the blow came.

  It came one night in a crowded restaurant. Anna said she been putting off telling him. She said that she had been meaning to say what she was about to say for some while but each time she had tried to broach the subject, something had prevented her. The moment had never seemed quite right. She wanted him to be her friend, she said. She valued him highly as a friend. She knew her daughter liked him, too. Cissy spoke with amusement and pleasure about the e-communications the two of them had begun sending to each other, with their cod-Arthurian language and sentiments. And she and he could carry on with these public meetings, of course. She enjoyed them greatly. She loved his company.

  “My company,” he said in a high, hoarse voice that he scarcely recognised as his own, “but not me.”

  “That’s not it,” she said, and her gaze was both tender and bitter. “That’s not it at all. You ... you wouldn’t understand if I told you why, so it’s better that I don’t. Please, Jack. Will you please just accept what I’m offering?”

  “There’s no alternative?”

  “No.”

  “Until when?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I’m not promising you a when.”

  “But there might be?”

  “Jack. I can’t give you a why, I can’t give you a when. I’m simply asking you, as someone whom I ... I respect highly – will you just be a friend?”

  And of course, in the end, he had said yes. He had had to. A little of Anna was better than nothing of her at all.

  Thinking about these things now put Parry in a sullen and disconsolate mood. He could not summon the enthusiasm to resume his sit-ups. All at once his apartment – the spacious weight of living alone – seemed oppressive, and he felt acutely his isolation as a permanent resident in a city of transients. Ninety per cent of New Venice’s population was in a constant state of flux, tourists and Sirens and Foreigners coming and going. He was one of those rare people who had chosen to live here full-time, and now he was conscious of them all around him: strangers, a relentless, friendless surge. Suddenly he craved company. He picked up the phone and dialled Johansen’s number. Not at home. He did not leave a message. Anna? No.