The sun cast a needle of light across the floor. I gazed at it, thinking.
‘I guess that’s the one they’ll be wanting to win, then.’
We sat together on the sofa, the morning light streaming in through the glass, sending shadows of the spiky plants across the terrace. I held her close, trying to take it in, and to work out a rational way forward, how to deal with the facts she’d laid out, the possible implications of the story she was telling me, and the prospect, floating around the edges of my consciousness, that our situation could be more difficult and uncertain than I’d thought. I’d had an idea for a novel about tracing connections; here were threads so complex and implausible they were as fine as the lines on a dragonfly’s wing.
Sitting with my arms around her, holding her close, I listened to the clock ticking in the silence.
I said, ‘This all seems quite unreal, somehow.’
TWENTY-TWO
The knock on the door made us both jump. Our eyes locked, we sat without moving for a moment, and I saw it register in Mazarine’s eyes that a key was being inserted into the lock and the door was opening, a flash of apprehension and nerves, a reflex working of her mouth that was almost a horrified laugh.
A woman’s voice spoke in the singsong you hear in hotels every morning when the maids open the door and call out, Housekeeping.
They came in, a man and a woman, with their mop and buckets; we heard low voices, the jingling of keys, a hacking smoker’s cough.
There was a little mutual mime of reeling back in surprise as we faced them in the hall, followed by pleasantries as we edged past, I in my underwear, Mazarine in Raoul’s bathrobe, the man looking discreetly away, the woman eyeing us with wary stillness.
We got ourselves dressed and went wordlessly down to the foyer, where we stood for a moment at a loss, before I said I wanted to buy breakfast in the mall, since I was ravenous and dying for coffee. Mazarine, with a put-upon look, zipped her jacket against the chill and followed me, not speaking. Under a hard blue sky, the air was sharp, and there was a dazzling clarity as we crossed the park, through pools of light and shade under the trees. A ragged man zigzagged between the paths, eyeing us disconcertingly from behind tree trunks, giving me a feeling of being stalked.
I waited for Mazarine. ‘The way the cleaner looked at us with such suspicion, did you notice?’
‘Mm.’
‘I wonder whether there’s a psychological legacy of the bad regime, like a sort of collective memory of damage.’
Mazarine gave no sign of hearing me, only followed, tugging on the zip of her puffer jacket, her nose pink with the chill.
I looked for the zigzagging man, who’d paused and was standing in a shaft of cold morning sunlight, his head cocked, listening to some far-off sound.
She cleared her throat and said wearily, ‘I think there probably is. I had a friend who’d spent time in Romania. He said he got tired of living there because people were so terribly suspicious of one another, it was wearing.’
‘Completely the opposite of New Zealanders, I guess. We’re so goofy and open and trusting.’
‘Although, touch wood,’ she said.
I paused, trying to get at it. ‘There’s a sadness here,’ was all I could come up with, which didn’t seem adequate to cover the complicated atmosphere of the place, the edge in the air, the natural beauty and vibrancy tinged with the memory of trauma and cruelty, of the blank spaces that had opened up beside the living, outlines once occupied by loved ones now disappeared.
Mazarine didn’t reply. She glanced away, treating what I was saying as irrelevant, which wasn’t unreasonable, given the significance of what she’d just related about Mikail. As we reached the edge of the park and headed for the mall, I saw how my mind was circling around what she’d told me, and instead of considering it properly was jumping away from it.
She caught up with me and squeezed my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Do you agree we won’t tell anyone what Emin told me?’
‘About the file? Yes, sure.’ I looked across the park.
‘These people, Mikail has passed information about them, crossed them. Do you understand, Frances?’ Her fingers dug into my arm.
‘Yes. No. Okay. I understand.’
A pause, for a moment I looked beyond her, into the branches of a winter tree, the myriad black lines.
‘What about Emin?’
She shrugged.
I tried to frame it. ‘If you don’t know how Emin fits in, with his “hidden life” as you called it, even if he’s devoted to Joe, do you trust him not to … how can I put it? Not to do anything to hurt Mikail, or you, or us?’
The word ‘hurt’ seemed wrong, too much, but she frowned, her expression serious.
‘He would never “hurt” Joe and Maya, and they’re completely uninvolved in Mikail’s doings. For the rest, I can’t be absolutely sure,’ she said.
‘Is it some sort of risk for us that we know these facts? If they’re true?’
‘If they’re true, what do you think? It’s better not to say anything about it. No communication about it anywhere, nothing.’
We had to wait for Patio Bullrich to open, and when it finally did we were freezing. In a café on the top floor, which she regarded as ruinously expensive, we faced each other over our coffees. She folded her hands around the cup, warming them. I had a feeling of being watched, but when I checked, no one was paying attention.
‘Whatever happens—’ I wanted to tell her I loved her as much as I loved Patrick and Maya, that we must stay together, no matter where we ended up.
I thought of Emin Khasanov, banging his closed fist on his chest, looking at her with hating eyes and saying her name, the curse and tribute in it.
‘Whatever happens, Mazarine—’
Her expression was unreadable, her eyes glittered, then she gave me such a beautiful, hard smile, I caught my breath.
‘Frances … on verra,’ she said.
The cleaners had gone, leaving the apartment spruce and smelling of disinfectant, not that they’d had much work to do since I, with my compulsive tidiness, straightened every room as I was leaving it, like an animal covering its tracks.
Mazarine said she had a headache, and lay down with one of her mother’s crime novels, while I sorted my clothes and packed my suitcase. She had slung her bag on the sofa in the living room. I opened her make-up purse, fished for the compact with the broken mirror, and located Mikail’s tiny flash drive where I’d seen it, taped to the inside of the lid.
In the afternoon, I went out walking by myself, leaving her to rest. The sky still held its brilliant hardness and clarity, and the air was tinged with a smell of burning. The shadows of the trees stood out in sharp relief in the iron light.
I got the feeling of being watched again, and felt an instinctive yearning to find a hill, some high vantage point, which was barely possible in the flat terrain. I circled the Presidential Palace and stopped at a park, one end of which consisted of a small monument, and a platform overlooking a long slope towards the river and the Women’s Bridge.
A woman passed me, asking in a gentle voice, ‘Are you from here? What’s this monument for?’
I shook my head, no idea, and turned away. I heard her low voice behind me: ‘Do you remember?’ I faced her and noticed her very thin arms; was it the same woman who’d fallen on the Avenue Manuel Quintana? I went nearer.
Her soft voice reminded me paradoxically of Inez, bringing the usual twinge of sadness; it opened some portal in my mind, and the narrative thread of memory led me back through ancient scenes, transported me to the sunny room in Menton, and all the way to the Minotaur, the old man’s shaky hand reaching for the wrapped parcel I was dutifully holding out, Inez’s tense voice in the background: ‘He’s barely coherent. But there is a resemblance — that mouth.’
His benign expression, the glint in his faded blue eyes, and the word I was sure he uttered as he took the present, so close and quiet I couldn’t doubt he was s
peaking to me, only me, his granddaughter, so they said.
‘Spasibo,’ he whispered.
Much later, I brought food and sports drinks to Mazarine, who was asleep on her back with the book resting on her nose.
In the silence, I could hear her mother’s clock ticking in the kitchen, and the sounds of the street below, a noisy car engine, the local dogs barking in a raucous group as the evening walker returned them from their airing in the park. The low sun had turned the wall of the building across the street into an oblong of golden light. The street was already in shadow, two policemen strolling along it, their guns held loosely across their bodies.
I sat at my laptop, working until late, and when Mazarine called out I went to bed, waiting for her while she spent time in the shower. She paused in the doorway, towelling her hair, wearing Raoul’s comically short robe, then felt for the switch, and the lights went out. The sudden blackness opened up around us, and I reached for her and held her as though my future I depended on it, my unreliable narrator, my Ariadne; if I lost the thread connecting us, all my selves would disappear.
It was a tiny, rhythmic sound that worked its way into my dreams, so gradually that I might not have heard it but for the fact that it stopped and started up again, and abruptly I found I was standing in the bathroom in the light cast by the small bulb in Raoul’s shaving mirror. I raised my eyes and looked at my reflection: straight brown hair, brown eyes, my mouth turned down at the corners in an expression of weariness, and then the dark bloomed around me, and I was in a space so large it had to be the living room, yes, now I could see the grey light coming faintly through the skylight, but I had no memory of slipping away from Mazarine’s warm body in the bed.
Following the noise, I reached down and groped for my bag, seeing the glow inside it. My phone was lit up and vibrating; I realised with a shock that the screen was displaying Maya’s name and photo, and when I snatched it up to answer, I was looking at the image of my girl’s face, animated and smiling in its box of light.
‘Mum! Frankie!’ she said. ‘Hi!’
My head was spinning, oh my darling my joy.
‘Oh, my god,’ I said, and kept repeating it, and a stream of other broken, inadequate phrases. ‘I’ve been so worried. Where have you been? Where on earth have you been?’
She said, ‘Mum! All is well!’
I laughed at my girl’s comic way of talking, all in exclamation marks.
‘Where are you?’
‘Mum! Calm down!’
‘Where are you?’
She said, ‘Mum! We’re in Auckland! Um, Max is shacked up in my bedroom, possibly with a girlfriend, which is unacceptable! Just saying?’
‘Oh, sorry! He’s house-sitting.’
‘Anyway, we’ve just visited Inez.’
‘Is Joe with you?’
‘Yes!’
‘Where have you been? Where have you been?’
‘It’s a long story …’
I looked at her moving image, the grainy distortion of the FaceTime call as she veered near the camera and zoomed away again, and I thought of the photo I’d kept with me always, the shot of us by the pool in France, I holding the edges of the plastic box into which she had clambered, the tiny girl with her dimpled elbows and knees, her grubby, suntanned, fidgeting feet. I remembered the warm, animal smell of her hair, and Patrick walking towards us holding the camera, a real camera not a phone in those days, and Maya’s high voice, calling. It was a blazing August afternoon, siesta time, and she’d summoned him from the cool shade of the veranda with her shouts, ‘Quick, Daddy! Look where I am!’ His sleepy, affable reply, ‘I’m on my way, yes yes yes.’
In the photo, I saw not only Maya’s face but the reflection of Patrick’s in it. It was a picture of my girl reacting to her father as he arrived at her command, her face lighting up with the current that had always sparked between them, the intense communication that was the opposite of the void. The child’s self is formed by relating; without mirroring, the self grows in fragments, and struggles to connect. The photo was a portrait of connection, Patrick and Maya shaped by each other, and I, holding the box and smiling, was the backdrop to that beautiful thing. All this went through my mind in an instant as I looked at the small, bright screen in my hand, and I said:
‘Tell me, darling, where have you been?’
‘Well, Joe’s father Emin, who is quite weird, paid, paid, for me and Joe to go to a few places, and sort of wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
‘Good of him,’ I murmured. ‘And Mikail, the brother, where’s he?’
Her image veered and zoomed, she seemed to be shrugging, there was an upturned palm. ‘I don’t know. I only met him a few times. He came to London once, Aiden introduced him to Angela Lang so she could interview him. He was so uptight he wouldn’t actually talk to me. Because I’m a woman. You know?’
‘Interview him?’
‘About life in Brussels, in his Muslim district. The prejudice.’
‘I’m so sorry about Aiden.’
Her image froze for a moment, her voice faded out, then returned.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m here!’
‘Oh, thank goodness. But why didn’t you contact me? Why the long silence?’
She seemed to say, ‘Were you worried?’
My tone was strangled, ‘Well. A bit. Actually, very …’ Suddenly I felt like shouting at her. Throwing or breaking something.
‘I was upset about Aiden.’ An aggrieved note: she was signalling, You should sympathise.
‘Oh god, yes, I’m sorry. It must have been terrible.’ I willed her not to have registered my anger and hurt.
‘But then Emin said Mikail was in trouble over a family debt and that Joe and I should disappear for a while. Joe says they’ve got some complicated extended family, and that Mikail must have seriously annoyed them, so we should do what Emin said, disappear in case there was fallout — we were on our summer break anyway. I didn’t like it, it was horrible. After Aiden died everything seemed strange, so I believed it, but we argued about it. In the end, I emailed you.’
I grappled with her explanation. Did it make sense, could she really not have let me know more? She seemed to believe the story about a debt, not to know what Mikail had really done. And she’d been unnerved by the death, thrown off course anyway. But I couldn’t tell, I yearned to be in the same room, to see her face properly, to hear her voice without distortion. I needed someone I could ask, What does that mean, what does it really mean?
‘What have you been doing, Mum?’
‘Doing? Oh, a bit of research for my novel. I’ve finished now, I’ve got what I came for. Although,’ I added, ‘some of it’s too implausible to use.’
I peered at the screen, trying to make out her expression.
I thought I heard her say, ‘I saw Nick.’
‘Nick? When? Where? Oh, can you hear me?’
There was static on the line. I moved the phone around. ‘Hang on.’
‘Mum, wait, I need to tell you—’ She lowered her tone, as if solemn, glanced sideways, the image of her face came closer. ‘I think Joe and I are possibly going to end up just friends.’
‘Oh, really? Why?’
‘It’s complicated!’
‘Of course, but did you say—’
She whispered, ‘I was a bit put off by Emin, to be honest. Does that seem wrong?’
‘No, not at all. You have to trust your instincts. But are you okay about it, not sad?’
‘Yes! All is well!’
There it was, her broad, beautiful smile.
I laughed with the joyful shock of it, holding the small rectangular box of light that framed her, the glossy blackness all around. I felt the tears coming as I put my fingertips on the screen, touching her loved face, connected at last, and I called out in the darkness, ‘Mazarine. Come here, quick, hurry!’
Because Mazarie could help me, couldn’t she, to interpret what was coming at me across thousands of miles, t
hrough the black void of space, Mazarine could look and listen and tell me I hadn’t lost the thread that linked me to Maya, that I hadn’t failed in the one thing that—
‘But where are you, Mum?’ she called, in her tiny, faraway voice. ‘Where are you? Where are you?’
‘We’re on our way,’ I told her. ‘We’re halfway home.’
Anna Devine, a young New Zealand painter living in London, has two chance encounters that set her on a search for answers. Can she really ‘see’ her new city properly? Can she reconcile family life and art? Her search leads her into past mysteries of her troubled family and her brother’s death, and towards future complexities: infidelity, dangerous freedoms, and a whole new eye on her foreign city.
In Auckland, in another time, Justine Devantier is reading a novel in order to find out about its author — and possibly about herself. And in a fictional city a man looks for a woman he knew long ago.
At the core of this intricate plot is British novelist Richard Black, who may hold the strands that bind all the protagonists together.
Grimshaw’s brilliantly drawn characters walk through her foreign cities in different guises. She gives us a ‘true’ story, a fiction, a love story, a story of family connections lost and found, and a dazzling ride through the creative process — its practitioners, its casualties.
Opportunity
A man confronts death after an operation, a secretary uncovers her boss’s secret shame, and in a house in Auckland an elderly woman is writing the last book of her life, one which, she says, contains all of her crimes. How are the characters connected and who is writing the stories?
Each of these astute stories is rich in vivid insight into a diverse range of lives. Together, they form a unified whole. Opportunity is a book about storytelling, about generosity and opportunism; above all it is a celebration of the subtleties of human impulses, of what Katherine Mansfield called the LIFE of life.
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