“Paul! They’ve got people working on this, out there looking for her. It really could be that she just missed a plane and you didn’t get her message. In which case we’re giving them false information if we don’t tell them.”
“Well, you’ve changed your position since this morning, haven’t you? I got the impression you didn’t think they were doing enough then.”
I sighed. “Yes—well, that’s when you suggested she was disturbed.”
“And we’re still sure that she isn’t?”
I stared at him. “Jesus, Paul. What is this? What do you think is going on?”
“That’s the point, Stella. I don’t have a clue. One minute she’s missing and we’re all freaking out about it, the next minute she’s with some guy because she’s changed her hair color and needs to get laid, the next minute it’s none of those things and she’s on the phone chatting to Lily about coming home but not to us. Meanwhile we don’t know where, who, how, or why.” He shook his head. “I’m just wound up about it, that’s all. And I can’t bear to see Lily in trouble.”
He glanced up at her bedroom window; the night-light was on now, flickering in time to the dancing silhouettes. Mike would be on his way down. What if Paul was right and Lily had made up the call to make us feel better? What if something really had happened to Anna? If it wasn’t her on the phone there could be no other explanation for this length of silence.
The space across the table between us was filling up with the night. I put out a hand and laid it on his. “What do you say we compromise? I’ll carry on thinking she called, you keep thinking she didn’t, but we won’t decide whether or not to tell the police till tomorrow.”
He sighed. “Okay,” he said, giving my hand a brief squeeze back. “I’m sorry, Estella. But this is fucking me about.”
“Yes, I know. I feel the same. Listen, why don’t you get Mike to stay here with you tonight? Lily won’t care and we both know it would be okay with Anna.”
He nodded. Then he said, “You know, I’ve remembered where I saw Chris Menzies.”
“Where?”
“It was reporting on some Mafia scandal in southern Italy. Two, maybe three months ago.”
I frowned. “You don’t think . . .”
“What do I know? But I sure as hell don’t have any other explanation. I mean, I don’t think there’s been anyone else. But I can’t swear to it. These last couple of months have been so busy. And like I told you, I think she has been strange recently. If Mike was right . . .” He trailed off.
I shook my head. “You wait. We’ll tease her about all this when she gets back. Just you see.”
Soon after that we closed up the garden and went to bed. Nobody had called the police.
Away—Saturday P.M.
YOU EAT NOW. We have an agreement, remember?”
The mention of food churned up sour juices in the pit of her stomach, but the sound of Lily was still singing in her head and she was scared of letting him see how shaken she was.
If Anna hadn’t expected her daughter to answer the phone, she’d been even less prepared for the impact of her voice, plucked from a warm bed and bursting with tales of family dinners and a Saturday spent coddled and spoiled. Terrified that if she said too much she might break down and then he would cut them off, she had kept to her word, saying as little as possible, and when the questions came—as she knew they would—making light of missed planes and dwelling instead on her return with promises of pickup from school gates and pizza in front of the TV. It was only at the end, as they said their good-byes and Lily got suddenly needy and tearful, that her own voice grew sticky with pain and he, realizing her distress, brought his finger down on the bar and severed the connection too early.
She gulped back the tears, fury colliding with pain. No, we don’t have any agreement, she thought. It was all she could do not to throw the telephone receiver at his head. Except it wouldn’t do enough damage. She searched the room for something that might. When she found it she could barely keep her eyes off it. A full wine bottle could open a man’s head up if you brought it down with enough force. I don’t care about your sorrow or your grief, if that’s what this is about. You’re a weird, fucked-up man and I’m going to get out of here the second you make the mistake of turning your back on me. Which you will do, as soon as you start to feel more comfortable with me. As soon as . . .
I’m coming, Lily, she thought. I’m coming.
“You’re right.” She took a deep breath. “I need some food.”
He took a plate from the table and knelt down at the tablecloth, careful to keep her well within his sights. He was close enough now for her to catch the scent of him again, the chemical smell mixed with a cloying aftershave, as if too much of one had been applied to disguise the other. She remembered the pine tree in the car, and the carefully ironed creases in his jeans. Mr. Clean, Mr. Tidy. He had given her the shivers from the first moment she had stepped into the car. Why, oh why, hadn’t she stepped out of it again? She stared at the top of his head and tried to imagine glass in the bone, wine and blood matted into the hair. A nasty experience for a man who didn’t like mess. And for a woman who didn’t like violence. Whether or not she could actually do it—hit him with enough vicious power to knock him senseless—she had no idea. For now the fantasy would have to be comfort enough.
He was scooping a little from each of the dishes onto her plate: anchovies, cheeses, peppers, pickles, salamis. Her hunger was getting the better of her. She felt a flood tide of saliva rising in her mouth. He made a move toward the wine. “No,” she said loudly, having to swallow to avoid spitting. “No, I don’t want any alcohol.”
He turned and looked at her. “There is nothing bad in it,” he said quietly. “You agreed to stay. I don’t need to drug you now.”
“I know,” she said hurriedly. “It’s not that. I’m too hungry to drink. It’ll make me sick.”
He put the bottle back on the floor and handed her the plate. “Here,” he said. “Eat slowly.”
He sat back on the sofa and watched her.
She couldn’t wait any longer. The taste of the anchovies exploded onto her tongue, their saltiness so intense that she had to shove in a chunk of bread to mop up her own juices. It was so long since she had eaten it felt like an alien activity. She thought of Lily, shoving in too much food and then grinning across the table at her with her mouth open. She made herself chew slowly until her jaw hurt from the scrape of her teeth. The real flavor started to seep through, sour, sweet, exquisite, overwhelming, flooding her brain as well as her mouth. She closed her eyes to hold it in. Nothing will ever taste this good again, she thought. Every time I sit down to a meal, every time I open a fridge, I will be here, reliving this moment. If, that is, I ever get home to do such things.
She glanced sideways at him. He was sitting absolutely still in his chair, watching. The penetration of his stare was like trying to look into a torch beam. She shifted her gaze away from him, letting her eyes drift to the wall of pictures above the fireplace. Her alter ego was everywhere, smiling and laughing in half a dozen expensive outfits: animated, busy, the hands—nails colored to match the clothes—in conversation along with the mouth. Each of the photos on this wall was carefully cropped so all you could see was her, never the person she was with. Since it seemed logical that he was the photographer, this meant that he must have framed each one with considerable, almost obsessive, care.
Then across the room there were the other, different studies: more intimate, close-ups where she was looking straight into the camera, smiling or simply staring openly, with no sense of self-consciousness. I could never be that at ease with a camera, she thought. Even in repose the woman’s face had tremendous energy and power to it. You could feel how her presence would light up a room. It was hard to imagine them together. Her so vital, him so dead. It seemed wrong that in reality it was now the other way around.
Do I really remind him of her? she thought. Is it as simple and as stup
id as that? What if he actually meant it: three days of talk and companionship and then a lift to the airport, a desperate way to get through a desperate anniversary. He was disturbed enough for that. No doubt about that. Sitting there in the warm evening air, she felt suddenly tired of being scared, tired of the way her body was all knotted and hollow with it. She took another mouthful of food and felt the warmth thaw further into her rigidity.
“You’re right,” she said after a while. “I was hungry.”
“The taste is big, yes? I do this sometimes. Stop eating, then have a slow meal.”
“Do you drug your drink and lock yourself up in a room for days as well?”
“I am happy you picked that dress,” he said, failing or choosing not to notice the sarcasm. “I always like it. Red is your color.”
If I didn’t know better, I might think you were a polite, rather boring man, she thought. But I do know better. And so do you.
“There is polish as well, you know, for the nails. In the drawer by the bed.”
So then she’d be just like the photograph. Perfect in every detail. Is that what he wanted? Oh no, she thought. Not that crazy, please. She took a breath. “You know, we don’t know each other’s names.”
“No,” he said, not taking his eyes off her. “I am Andreas.” He didn’t offer a surname.
“Good. I’m Anna, Anna Franklin. But then you know that already, of course, from my passport. And my daughter is Lily. She’s six years old, almost seven.” She paused. Do you know about children? she wanted to add. About how much they need love and security? How much damage you can do by depriving them of the people they love? But she didn’t. Tread softly, Anna, she said to herself. The more relaxed he becomes the more chances you will have. “What was your wife’s name?”
He didn’t answer immediately, as if he didn’t want to have to admit to the two of them having separate identities. “Paola,” he said at last. “Her name was Paola.”
Paola. Had he used that name two mornings ago? She could no longer remember. “Paola? She was Italian? I thought perhaps she was English.”
He grunted. “Her father was English, her mother was Italian.”
“Ah. So she spoke both languages.”
“Yes.”
“And it was she who taught you?”
He nodded.
“She did a good job.”
He didn’t answer.
“Is that how you met?”
Still nothing.
“Was that here or in England?”
In the next gap between the words, the choral evensong that had been whispering its way through the room drew to an echoing close. With God gone the space was suddenly colder. She registered a tension building up inside him, that smooth fat layer of politeness being eaten away by something. Maybe it was because she was doing the talking now, taking control. Was this how they had been together—he with a ramrod stuck up his soul, she unable to thaw him? It was not inconceivable that she had died to get away from him. Six years in an isolated house in the wilderness. It must have been like being buried alive.
She glanced toward the bottle on the hearth. It was a long way away. Take your time, Anna, she thought. You may only get one chance.
“You know, Andreas, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m scared of you. And when I’m not scared, I’m angry. I want more than anything else in the world to be home with my daughter. But you say that you won’t hurt me, and that if I keep you company for a few days you’ll let me go home. In which case we are going to spend time together. But I can’t pretend to be her. I can only be myself, you understand? And for this to work we are going to have to talk to each other. Otherwise there is no point. Otherwise I might as well go back to the room and stay there.” She paused. “So why don’t you tell me something about her?”
He gave a little grunt, then bent down and picked up the wine bottle from the edge of the grate. She watched it go. Don’t panic, she thought. There will be others. He pulled the cork out and poured two glasses full. He offered her one. She took it this time and scooped a tiny mouthful. Like the food and the clothes it tasted rich. How convenient, she thought, to have enough money to finance one’s madness. It would be interesting to know which side of the family it came from.
“When I saw you in the shop I knew you will be like this.”
“Like what?”
He was still looking down at his glass, as if this conversation made him shy. “Like her. I met her in that shop, the one with the horse.” He shrugged. “It was different then, a serious place, for books, for study. She was just arrived in Florence. She had grown up in London, but her father died and she came home to be near to her mother. We started talking. She spoke so perfectly in English. I knew it from school and from my business. But I wanted to learn more. She offered to teach me. Conversation lessons. I was not a good student.” He paused. “It took me a long time to get better. Long enough time so she will fall in love with me too.”
It was the first time he had said anything that could even remotely be interpreted as humorous. She found herself almost shocked by it. She watched his face carefully. When she didn’t respond he looked up at her and there was a ghost of a smile. Had this been the charm? The shy boy in the big man? It didn’t seem enough. She tried to imagine them together, heads over a book, she correcting his stray words. The secret of a language is in the shape of the lips. Could the repetition of all those precise little English vowels really have driven them into each other’s arms? Why not? His personality was more pursed than extravagant, more English than an Englishman’s. Maybe some people were simply born into the wrong culture, got lost early on trying to form the wrong set of sounds. “So then you married and came here?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a long way from Florence?” He gave a shrug. If he saw the question as probing he didn’t register it. “Very isolated. She didn’t mind that?”
“Not at all. She wanted it. She chose it. She said that the house was full of the silence of women, so it would make a good home. We worked on it together.”
I bet she didn’t design my room, she thought. I bet that came later. “The silence of women.” If the photos were anything to go by she hardly conformed to the pattern herself. It wasn’t the only image that jarred: a woman with that kind of wardrobe shoving plaster onto walls and laying floors? Something not quite right about the thought of all that chipped nail varnish.
“What about children?” she said, already knowing with utter certainty that this man had never been a father.
“Children? No, there was no children.” He paused. “She couldn’t have children.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It was not a problem. It always felt as if we were enough.”
She wondered if Harlequin had an Italian imprint. The picture had so much soft focus in it she was beginning to lose any sense of depth. She saw them going up that elegant staircase together at the end of a long day of do-it-yourself in haute couture, his hand teasing the zip down the back of her dress as she walked: the red sea parting to reveal a vision of white land ready for the taking. But the image choked on its own triteness, and anyway, he seemed more like the kind of man who needed to fold up his clothes before getting into bed. When she tried to push it further her imagination lost the signal, static coursing across the screen. That was the other alarming thing in all of this; there seemed to be no sex in him, or certainly none that she could relate to. Grief can do that, of course, using up all the juice on tears, but that wasn’t the problem here. All she could feel here was sticky sentiment, like the leftovers of a man masturbating into his own hand. And from what she could see, the woman in those pictures would have had no truck with that.
“And you took all these photos of her?” she said to clear her head of the image.
He nodded.
“Is that your job?”
He shrugged. “Sometime. More it is my pleasure.”
“Do you still work?”
“Oh,
yes,” he said. “I have a lot to do.”
She took in the misunderstanding but let it go. The woman sat between them in the room. “She was very photogenic. How old was she when she died?”
“Thirty-six years. These were taken not long before she died.”
“But you have others?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
He gave a shrug, as if the question were too hard to answer.
“Do you keep them—I mean, like this, hanging in other rooms?”
He nodded. Was that what was behind all those closed doors? A house as a museum. No wonder he would be having such trouble forgetting her. “You’re a good photographer.” She paused. “But it must be painful for you, seeing her all around you like this.”
It took a while for him to find the answer. “I think it is worse if she is not here.”
There was nothing to say to that. “Can I see some of the others?”
The question hung in the air. For all his neediness he was not a man to be rushed. “Another time perhaps.”
Tomorrow and the next day, she thought. That’s all you’ve got, remember? Was this what they would do with their time then? Revisit the past through English conversation and admire photos of the dead?
They sat silently for a while, the atmosphere unexpectedly calm between them. In the candlelight his face looked better, almost relaxed. She took another sip of wine. Even on half a glass she could feel it playing games with her head as well as her stomach. One of the candles on the other side of the room flickered in response to a draft through a slice of open window. Was it like the one in her room, doctored to open only a fraction? It didn’t matter. If she got out there she would find herself in the wilderness without money or passport. Not tonight, she thought. Tonight I’m too tired. Tonight let him feel safe with me, and let me sleep alone.
She saw the room above and the lock on the door, and how the chair would be no protection at all if he decided to come in. Except he hadn’t yet and there had been ample opportunity. She thought back to the image of him folding up his clothes. Maybe not all screwed-up men are screwed up about sex, or not in the same ways. Maybe he did it all with his camera. She thought about how many times he must have snapped the shutter on this dead woman called Paola, how many hours he would have spent caressing her face or sliding her body to and fro between his fingers in the developing tray.