Parry preferred not to contemplate the fact that all that was keeping him from a multistorey plummet to the ground was a few worringly thin struts and an architect’s calculations. Nevertheless, while Anna maintained her silence, his thoughts turned repeatedly to the gulf of empty air beneath him, so that there was a literal dimension to the state of suspense in which Anna was holding him.
At last Anna spoke.
“Have you ever done something that you truly, truly regret, Jack?”
The phrasing of the question and the weary wistfulness of its tone took Parry by surprise. If Anna was referring to that thing last night with Reich, as she seemed to be, then she had chosen an odd way to do so.
“I have, yes,” he said. “Many things. Including my behaviour at the party.”
She appeared not to hear the last part. “I remember you telling me once that there’s a lot you did as a London policeman that you aren’t too proud of.”
“Did I?”
“Planting evidence. Lying to suspects, telling them you had incriminating testimony you didn’t have. Getting a bit, I think the word you used was ‘heavy-handed’, in the holding cells.”
“Well, yes, that did happen from time to time. I – we – weren’t above bending the law to suit us. In my defence, I only ever got involved in that sort of stuff with someone who I knew was guilty but I didn’t have enough hard evidence to pin on him and I knew he’d get away with it if something wasn’t done. That was then, that was the way we coppers did things then, had to, and I’m sorry about it, and I know being sorry about it doesn’t make it any better but it does make me all the more determined that the FPP should never be like that. Will never be like that.”
“What I’m thinking of particularly is the Riots. The girl?”
He had forgotten till then that, in the aftermath of sex one night, he had told Anna about the girl. He had had few secrets from her in the confessional of her marital bed. Lying beside her, he had been naked in every way.
“She... yes. She’s the one thing in my past that I will never ever forgive myself for. I mean, God knows how many other people I hurt that day. It took us till midnight to finally bring the whole thing under control, and we only managed that through being even more violent than the protesters. I think things had got to the stage where that was the only way to do it. Even so...”
“Even so, there was no excuse for what you did to her. Even though you had no choice.”
“It was pandemonium, Anna. How I imagine war must be like. At times I felt like I was outside my body, looking down at myself. It was as though someone else was doing these things, these terrible things.”
“Pandemonium,” Anna said, nodding. “That’s it. You think you know yourself, you think you understand yourself, you think you’re in control of all you believe and do, but then when the chaos comes you realise that that’s just an illusion. And a fragile illusion, too.”
“Anna, what’s this all about? Why are we talking about my police career?”
The waiter reappeared, bearing a bottle of mineral water and two ice-filled glasses. A moment later he returned with plates.
“Enjoy your meal,” he said, and left.
Parry eyed the food unenthusiastically. Although his hangover was just about gone, he had little appetite on him. Even if one of his favourite dishes had been set before him – a nice juicy lamb cutlet, for example, or a bubbling lasagne – he would have tucked into it with minimal relish. It did not help, either, that the filou parcels reminded him of Dagmar Pfitzner’s drawstring purse. There was, at least, a helping of wild rice on the side of the plate, along with a heap of salad leaves. He concentrated on those, masticating with herbivore listlessness.
Another long silence stretched, with his question dangling clumsily in the air like some rearview-mirror novelty.
Finally Anna said, “It’s about us.”
“Us.” Parry spoke the word with as little inflection as possible. Inside, a part of him was thinking, This is it, she’s ready to start again. Another part, larger and less exuberant, was thinking, That’s it, it’s all over.
For a second time, Anna wrongfooted him.
“Hector knew.”
The chewing motion of Parry’s jaws slowed to a halt. Numbly he gulped down the mouthful of food.
“Knew?” He kept his voice low; resisted the urge to gesticulate. “When? When did he know? How long for? From the start? Jesus, Anna...”
“Calm down, Jack.”
“I am calm. All things considered, I’m being very calm indeed. But, for fuck’s sake, Anna – your husband knew what we were up to! Your husband, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in New Venice, knew.”
“You’re getting aggressive. I thought this might happen. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. And I’m not getting aggressive.”
“Oh no?” She pointed to his right hand. It was clenched around the handle of his fork, the knuckles bulging like large white marbles beneath the skin.
Parry, forcing forbearance on himself, laid the item of cutlery down.
“All right, I’m a little tense,” he admitted. “But it’s hardly surprising, is it? Hector could have ruined me. Ruined us.”
“Could have but didn’t. And before you say any more, I want you to hear me out. Please. Listen to what I have to say, and then you can be angry or shocked or bitter or whatever you want to be. OK?”
“OK,” said Parry, briskly. “Fine. Go ahead.”
Anna tilted her head forwards a couple of degrees, as though collecting her thoughts. Parry imagined her eyes closing behind the Bononcinis. Then she raised her head again, and he saw himself in each lens of the sunglasses, reflected distantly and darkly.
“It was after,” she said. “After Hector fell ill. After you and I stopped seeing each other. Because of the cancer, Hector and I found ourselves spending a lot of time together – a lot more time than we ever had before. And we found ourselves talking a lot more, too. The way a husband and wife are supposed to talk. You know, two people chatting, saying whatever comes into their heads. Until then everything had been formal between us. Formal and distant. Sometimes we’d barely see each other or speak to each other during the day. Hector would already be working at breakfast. He’d have a portable extension of his home board set up on the dining table and be typing into it or making calls from it while he ate his huevos rancheros. Then he’d go to his study until dinnertime, and then maybe we’d be out at a party or over at friends’ in the evening and it’s just not done, is it, to have a conversation with your own spouse at a social function. Also, he’d be away on business trips a lot. A week could go by and the only contact I’d have with him would be a single phone call, if that. I didn’t mind. I’d accepted when I married him that this was how it would be. We’d had a bargain, of sorts. He was Hector Fuentes, first and foremost. Then he was my husband and Cissy’s father, second. Cissy and I were just two small compartments in his life. Cissy loved him, of course, in spite of how he was. She grew up not knowing anything else about fathers except that this was how they were – aloof, uncommunicative, often absent. It was only when her home-board tuition ended and she went away to school and began comparing notes with the other girls there that she realised a father was supposed to be warm and caring and involved in his daughter’s life. It didn’t make her love him any less, but it did make her a bit sad to think that she was missing out on something – something most of her schoolfriends took for granted. But anyway. This isn’t about Cissy.”
Anna considered the possibility of eating more of her meal, decided against, and took a sip of water instead.
“When he discovered that he was dying, it forced Hector to take stock of his life. I honestly believe he’d thought he was immortal up until then. Invincible, certainly. Finding out that he was just as vulnerable as anyone else, and moreover that it was his own body that was killing him... Well, he took it as a personal insult. No matter how many times Dr
Lü said that his condition was incurable, Hector wouldn’t believe him. He fought against the cancer. Raged against it. He thought that through sheer will, with nothing but the power of his mind, he could beat it. But of course the cancer was in his mind, in a sense, so he was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. The cancer was destroying the best weapon he had against it, his brain. And once he learned to accept that, which in the event he did quite quickly, he turned into another person. He became gentler, more reflective. He started asking me questions. ‘Have I lived decently?’ ‘Have I been a fair man?’ These things suddenly matter when death is breathing down your neck. And it was from there that we began to talk more openly with each other, discussing things we would never have dreamed of discussing before. How we were. How we thought and felt. Things that went to the heart of who we were. Things that came from the heart of who we were. In those weeks, Hector and I grew closer than we had ever been. I’d always admired him. Respected him. I’d had a great affection for him right from the start, and of course he had given me my beautiful daughter, for which I would be forever grateful to him. But it wasn’t until then that I loved him. Really, genuinely loved him. And that, I suppose, was the first time I ever felt guilty about you and me.”
“And so you told him.”
“Not just like that. I didn’t just blurt it out. But as he got iller and iller – is that an English word? ‘Iller’?”
Parry shrugged, not caring.
“As his cancer got worse, anyway,” said Anna, “my guilt got worse, too. It was as though, like him, I had something malignant festering inside my head. And as he got thinner and feebler, I just felt more and more sorry about what you and I had done. I wanted to tell him about it so that I could get it off my chest. I wanted – what is it called in church? Absolution. I wanted absolution from him. And I didn’t want him to die not knowing. That would have been unbearable for me.” She let out a shuddering sigh. “How selfish I am.”
Though he was still angry with her, appalled by what she had done, Parry could not let such self-denigration go uncorrected. “Not at all. You aren’t selfish, Anna.”
“I am. It didn’t even occur to me that I might make Hector miserable by telling him. All I cared about was my own misery. It was the chaos, you see. That pandemonium I was talking about. My life was in turmoil, and I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think straight.”
“There you go. So it wasn’t your fault.”
“All the same.”
A gust of wind caught Anna’s hair and drove a lock of it into the space between her left eye and one hinge of her sunglasses. She pushed the glasses a little way down her nose in order to extricate the errant lock, and Parry was at last given a glimpse of her eyes. They looked tired, and he noticed (it seemed like for the first time) just how embedded in wrinkles they were, not least at the corners, where crow’s feet scored the skin, showing up pale against her tan.
“It must have been three, four weeks before he died,” she said. “He was dreadfully weak. He could barely get out of bed. It was a still evening. I’d been reading to him by his bedside. He liked me to read to him, as you know. Poetry. Short stories. I’d finished a story – Borges, I think it was – and he said how much he had enjoyed listening to it and what a kind and generous woman I was, and that was it. I couldn’t hold back any longer. Out it came. He lay there, listening, not saying anything. I just went on talking, telling him about us. About how we’d met at the Civic Committee. About how we’d arranged our meetings. About what we’d done in the very bed he was lying in! God! But Hector said nothing, just heard me out, and when I’d told him everything and there was nothing left to say, he thought to himself for a while, and then do you know what he said? ‘Thank you, Anna.’ That was all. ‘Thank you.’ And he moved his hand to pat mine. His hand was so thin by then. So feeble. A hand that had once held such power. A hand that had built up an industrial empire. I hardly felt it touching mine. It weighed less than a sheet of paper, less than a moth. Tap, tap. Then it slid back onto the bed, exhausted.”
“There were no repercussions? No recriminations?”
“None.”
“There must have been.”
“He took it with absolute” – she searched for the right word – “equanimity. If he hadn’t been dying, it might have been different. That was partly why I felt it was safe to tell him. He had become such a reasonable, philosophical person.”
“And he never mentioned it again?”
“Never. Not once. He just seemed to absorb the information, accept it, and that was that.”
“That’s a little odd, don’t you think?”
“Not really. He was dying, Jack. I think he had more important things on his mind. And besides, because he and I had never been that close, at least not before those last few weeks, then maybe it didn’t seem like such a betrayal to him. Anyway, I’ve never believed that he was perfectly faithful to me. Maybe he was, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, while he was away on business trips, he didn’t go to bars and pick up floozies and take them back to his hotel. I’ve no proof he ever did anything of the sort, but I strongly suspect he did, and it didn’t bother me. Why should it? Why should I care if every so often he had a discreet little one-night stand? If it was meaningless to him, why should it mean anything to me? And if I’m right about him having these flings, then it would have been hypocritical of him to resent me for being unfaithful to him, and Hector was many things but he was not a hypocrite. So that’s why I think he didn’t mind about you and me. That and, like I said, because he was dying.”
A thought occurred to Parry, and he dismissed it as quickly as possible. Could Anna have initiated the affair with him as a way of getting her own back on Fuentes for his supposed infidelities? He was ashamed even to have had the idea. He knew that Anna had loved him. He believed that implicitly.
“But,” Anna said, “I still felt I had not been properly forgiven. It preyed on my mind all through those last few weeks. Hector was starting to get his affairs in order. That’s such a dark euphemism, isn’t it? ‘Get your affairs in order’. So innocent-sounding, so pragmatic, and yet what it’s really saying is you’re getting ready to die. And that meant there were lawyers coming in and out of his room, and he’d spend a lot of time on his home board, when he could, going over his assets and investments, making sure everything was secure, his finances were in good hands, Cissy and I were going to be well provided for, all that. He seemed to have less and less time for me. He was working, he was sleeping, he was sedated... What I’m saying is that I wanted to talk some more with him about you and me, but I never seemed to get the opportunity. Not only that, I was scared to bring the subject up again. It had taken all the courage I possessed to tell him that one time. I kept hoping he would save me the trouble and bring it up himself, but he didn’t. And the days slipped away, and soon he was just this thin, wheezing thing with tubes stuck into him, this grey-faced, suddenly-old man who needed a pipe down his throat to keep him breathing and who could barely hold his eyelids open, it was so much effort. And I’d lost my chance. I would never hear him say, ‘I forgive you.’”
Her voice went hoarse. She steeled herself.
“Cissy and I sat up with him on his last night. We knew he didn’t have long. All the nursing staff had told us so. Around midnight Cissy fell asleep, right in the chair beside the bed, and I spent the rest of the night talking to him, holding his hand. I doubt he heard a word I said. He would roll his eyes occasionally, move his head, open and close his mouth. He was full of painkillers. Barely conscious. I could almost feel him fading, through his hand. Feel the warmth leaving him. The life. By dawn he was gone. Lying there, so still, so hollow. I disentangled my hand from his and the last words I whispered to him were ‘I’m sorry’. And I went downstairs and out into the garden, and it was a beautiful cool morning, I remember, and there was mist rising from the grass and everything was so quiet. And I wept. Not just for Hector. I wept for myself. Because I hated myself. I hated
myself because the Hector I had got to know while he was dying was a far better man than I had ever believed he could be and if only I had made a bit more effort while he had been alive then maybe I could have found that man earlier. If only I had tried with him, instead of being so damn superficial. I had got everything I expected from him – comfort, security, a family – but I could have had love, too. I could have had it all, and I had just been such a shallow, stupid, superficial fool.”
She might have been crying then. Her eyes might have been moist. Parry had no way of telling. Tentatively he reached across the table to touch her forearm. He allowed himself the briefest moment of contact, his skin on hers, then withdrew his hand.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You know that. He was as much to blame as you. More so. You yourself said how cold he was, how preoccupied. He didn’t let himself be any different until he became resigned to the fact that he was dying. I doubt there was anything you could have done before then that would have changed him.”
“I know.” She heaved in and let out a breath, controlling herself. “I know you’re right. But after he died, after the funeral, for a long time I could feel nothing for myself but utter contempt.”
“It’s natural, isn’t it? Part of the grieving process.”
“Is it? To despise yourself? To feel that you’re worthless as a human being?”
“To regret missed opportunities, that’s for sure.”
“This wasn’t just that. This was about everything I’d done. The way I’d conducted my life. The compromises I’d made to get to where I was. When I was a little girl in Bucharest, we lived in that godawful apartment block. I’ve told you about it, haven’t I? That disgusting place. It was on the edge of a great concrete wasteland, the site of Ceaucescu’s Civic Centre which, thank God, that monster never finished building, and it smelled and it was noisy and it was infested with rats the size of cats and cockroaches not much smaller, and there were five of us – me, my parents, my two brothers – crammed into two small rooms and never any privacy, never any peace. And almost from the day I was old enough to think for myself, I dreamed of a better existence. I dreamed of one day living in a big beautiful house like the type I saw in American soap operas, and having servants and the very best clothes and a husband who adored me and whom I adored. I vowed to myself that that was the life I would have when I was grown up. But of course I had no idea what it would take to get there, what sacrifices I would have the make along the way. ‘Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.’ Isn’t that what they say? I soon learned, the hard way, that I wasn’t going to achieve what I wanted if I wasn’t ruthless. If I didn’t use people. So I did. Men, mostly. I took them for what I could, then abandoned them when they were no longer any advantage to me.”
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