Sensible idea. “Well, she’s absolutely right, don’t you think?”
“Mmm. We saw a hedgehog once, you know. On the road. When we were coming back from the cinema. It went under the car. We gave it some cat food.”
“Did it like it?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. It wouldn’t come out. We pushed the bowl underneath the car. It was empty in the morning.”
“But it might have been the cat?”
“Yeah.”
The darkness had softened around us, images of Beatrix Potter overlaying those of Stephen King. I glanced at her. There would be no better time than this. “It must have been nice, talking to Mum this evening.”
She said nothing, but gave the smallest of nods.
“You haven’t been worried about her, have you?”
She was silent for a while. “No. But everybody else has.”
I laughed. “Oh, we haven’t been that bad, have we?”
She gave a little shrug.
“You know, I think Paul just wanted to talk to her. Which is why he was upset with you.”
“She said to give him her love. She hadn’t forgotten him.”
“No. What did she say about me?”
“She said—that’s nice.”
“What?”
“I told her that you were here, and she said, ‘That’s nice.’ ”
“Is that all?” I said, and I must have let my indignation show because she squeezed my arm. “She said it in a big voice. Like she meant it.”
I smiled and squeezed her back. Paul was wrong. Lily had talked to her mother. This was no elaborate child make-believe. We sat for a moment, held in the heart of the night. I imagined a campfire and a legion of little furry animals poking their noses out of the gloom. Maybe we tell children bedtime stories to keep at bay adult fear of the dark.
“She sounded funny,” she said at last.
“Funny? How, funny?”
“I dunno.” She gave a little shrug. “When she said good-bye to me, she sounded sort of . . . sad, like she didn’t want to go. It made me cry. I tried to say something, but she wasn’t there anymore. And then Paul shouted in my ear and you all came running out and I got scared.”
I felt a terrible sick lunge in my gut, as if a black hole had opened up and I was being sucked inside myself. Why is it that when the heart hurts most it always tears at the stomach?
“Oh, Lily.” I gave her a hard hug. “Darling. She was probably just upset about missing the plane.”
In the gloom I saw her squeeze her eyes together tight to stop herself from crying. It was a gesture she had perfected when she was first beginning to walk and would fall over a lot. “I don’t think Paul should have shouted at me like that.”
“Oh, he didn’t mean to. You know Paul.” I paused. “Did she hear him shout? Were you still talking to her when he came on the line?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“But she knew you were all right? Yes? I mean she asked you how you were?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I said I was fine.”
Fine. It was Lily’s word for everything: the day, her life, school, everything. Fine. In our time she and I have had complete telephone conversations with her finely monosyllabic. I was so impressed by the technique that I once tried it on a business colleague. It worked quite well. Fine, in fact. But not now.
“I told her you’d won me a duck,” she added because she obviously thought it would make me feel better.
“I didn’t win it. You did that.”
“Yes, but you helped me hold the net.”
“Did you tell her about the panda?”
She nodded.
“Well, I expect that’s why she was sad. She heard about all that and she wanted to be here having a good time with us.”
“Yes.” She thought about it. “I think that’s what she wanted. So why doesn’t she come home?”
“Oh, she will, darling, she will.”
We sat for a while. She extracted herself from my grasp. I couldn’t tell what she was feeling, and I felt suddenly nervous about making a mistake.
“After your mum died—I mean, when you were little,” she said at last, not looking at me directly, but keeping her eyes fixed on the stairs in front, “did you miss her then?”
Did I? I stood in my parents’ room again, staring at my mother’s side of the bed, the cover so smooth and shiny like still water, and for a second I felt the pit open inside me. “Yes,” I said. “I missed her a lot. But, Lily, your mum’s not going to die. She’s just going to be late home.”
We sat for a while. Everything else I could think to say sounded fake and unworthy. I could feel her fingers fluttering in mine. Help her, Stella. Think of a way.
“Do you want to sleep with me for the rest of the night?” I said, giving her a little squeeze. “Do you think that might help?”
I didn’t really expect her to say yes, but she did. I put my arms around her and carried her upstairs.
Away—Sunday A.M.
IN THE MIDDLE of the night he unlocked the door to her room.
She was lying in the bed, her hand curled around the body of the wooden horse. She was not asleep.
After he had left her she had sat replaying the encounter between them like some eager lover trying to decode deeper messages out of a first date. It didn’t work. The more time she spent in his company, the more the ground moved under her feet. The less he said the more she suspected, and the more he confided the less she believed. The woman was real enough. The photos confirmed that. He had had some kind of relationship with her, that much was clear, but surely not the one he was claiming. The old-fashioned courtship, the happy marriage, the sad demise—not even fiction came so sugarcoated these days. So why go to such lengths to convince her that it did? That was the strangest part. All of this—the kidnap, the captivity, the hospitality—all of it spoke of obsession, but with whom? Her or a dead woman? Was she meant as a replacement or merely as a witness? It was almost as if he needed her to believe it before he could believe in it himself. In some way he didn’t even seem that interested in her; he looked through her rather than at her. Did that mean he might keep his word and let her go? Would she keep hers and stay compliantly until he did? The answer to both of those questions seemed obvious.
Either way there would be little sleep tonight. The food had done its work, replacing the lost, spacey feeling of the day with a restless energy. She moved through the room again, searching for anything she might have missed. When she had exhausted the bedroom and bathroom, she had turned out the light and lay under the covers staring up at the ceiling, moving around the rest of the house in her head, testing doors and windows, picking her way through locks and out into freedom, while in her imagination he slept the sleep of the disturbed, curled around bottles of developing fluid in a blacked-out basement.
In her mind she kept coming back to that darkroom. If he spent so much time in it, would he have gone back there now? The depth of his infatuation and the smell of his clothing suggested it might be a habitual haunt. Yet at some point even he would have to sleep—if not there, then somewhere close enough to be able to hear if she became troublesome in the night. The fact that he hadn’t responded that first night when she tried to break down the door didn’t mean that he couldn’t hear, simply that he had chosen not to listen. For some reason it seemed important for her to know where he was, to be able to place him in her mind as he could place her.
So when the key entered the lock in the blackest deepest part of the night her panic was made all the greater from the fact that yet again she hadn’t heard him coming. Did this man really know how to walk on eggshells, or could it be that he had been there all the time, waiting outside the door, his mind keeping pace with hers as it prowled its way toward freedom? The lock clicked free. Her body lit up with fear, a pulse exploding inside her head and her stomach going into spasm. Under the covers her fingers clasped thems
elves around the neck of the horse. She had tried it both ways; grasping the body with the legs as sharp jabbing spikes, or using the head as handle and the body as the cosh. This hold she had decided could do more damage. Somehow she managed to stop herself shaking.
There was silence. Then another small scrape, as if the key was now being withdrawn. She lay rigid, waiting for the door handle to turn. What came next? If this was going to be about sex, he was going to have his work cut out for him. He could have made it easier on himself. A man who could spike coffee must have a dozen tasteful things he could do with red wine or anchovies. Yet she was wide awake now. So was he ready to fight? Was that what he wanted? With all his talk of love among the English verbs, he seemed almost too sentimental for rape. But then what did she know? This was her first weekend away with a psychopath.
She lay and waited.
Nothing happened.
The door remained closed.
Her fingers shivered over the wood. This time she could hear the muffled thud as his feet hit the floor. He was moving away from the door, along the corridor and down the stairs. What the hell was happening here? First he bolts her in, then waits until the middle of the night, unlocks the door, and—what?—just walks away again?
Had he lost his nerve at the last moment? Pulled upstairs by the elevation of his cock only to find that the fantasy couldn’t sustain itself through the time it took to unlock the door? She knew that couldn’t be it. It had to be something else. She toyed with the idea of repentance: their romantic evening opening up a well of empathy in him which in turn freed her and sent him running to the local priest for confession and absolution. It didn’t wash. For all his talk of love and sorrow, this didn’t feel like a pathology that encompassed repentance.
There was only one other answer. It had to be a trick of some kind. Did he want her to wake up and find the door open, so she would come and look for him? Maybe it was a test to prove her compliance, to see if she would betray their agreement and try to escape. So then he could use her broken word to break his own.
In which case she wouldn’t oblige him. Black silence descended again. She lay completely still, her eyes closed, her breathing even. Outside, through the wedged-open window, there was a rush of wind in the pine forest; a shimmering rippling noise, like a wave on a beach, every particle of the sound alive with movement. In the emotional maelstrom of the last two days she had found herself growing almost fond of the sound. Then she heard something else: the distinctive growl of a car engine igniting and catching once, twice in the night, revving a few times before its wheels pulled harshly across gravel then out onto firmer earth and away, the noise eventually dissolving into the night.
Her heart started thumping uncontrollably. There was absolutely no mistaking the story of sound that had unfolded in her ears: first someone had unlocked her door, then someone had driven off into the night. It had to be him. If she had been asleep, probably neither of the sounds would have been loud enough to wake her. But she had not been asleep. She was awake and now the door was open and the car was gone.
She thought back to the confessional booth and a man in tears for a love that had driven him mad. Whatever the answer, she couldn’t simply lie there and wait for him to come back. It spoke too much of being the victim.
She got out of bed and slipped on her shoes. She had slept in her clothes, and the silk dress was scrunched and clinging to her body, its creases scoring uneven latticework on her skin. No time to change now. If she got out of the house she would still have no passport, no ticket, and no money. It didn’t matter. She could walk or hitch her way to freedom. All the rest could come after. She grabbed a jacket from the wardrobe and with the wooden horse still clamped tight in her hand she quietly opened the door.
Nothing happened. No alarm screamed, no lights flashed, no arm shot out of the darkness to stop her. She moved to the top of the staircase. The large hall window let in slivers of light from a young crescent moon above. It broke up the dense dark, but with it came shadow and what felt like movement.
She steadied herself. She could deal with this. Living alone with a child makes one an expert in night paranoia; while burglar alarms can persuade insurance companies, the imagination demands subtler protection. If Lily were here now, she would be too busy containing her daughter’s fears to indulge her own. She formed her empty palm into a fist, imagining the fluttering of a smaller hand in hers. Besides, she said to herself as she walked downstairs, what was there to be frightened of? She already knew that there was no one there.
At the bottom she made straight for the front door. She slipped off the upper and lower bolts and turned the main handle. It stayed locked. She hadn’t really thought it would be open, had she? That would have been too easy. Nevertheless, she turned swiftly back on herself, half expecting to find him standing behind her mocking her naïveté. After forty-eight hours of captivity she was already behaving like a prisoner, nervous of freedom, guilty about moving without chains. She walked swiftly along the corridor, trying each of the doors in turn. She was tired of finding them all locked. As she turned the handle of one of them she threw herself against the wood, using her shoulder as a battering ram. The only thing that gave was her flesh. She accepted defeat and moved toward the living room.
Inside, the air was ink-black. There must be shutters on the windows to create such an intense dark. Should she risk the light? What if he was standing outside watching, waiting for some kind of sign to come back in? With her free hand she felt her way carefully across the room to the table near the fireplace where the telephone had been. Of course it was no longer there. He wasn’t that careless. She moved quickly in the direction of the open window she had remembered from dinner, but as she turned her hip caught the edge of the table and sent it crashing to the floor. The noise was deafening and she heard herself yell out, losing her grip on the horse and feeling it spin away into the darkness. It was okay. It was okay. If the house was empty then no one could be listening.
Still, it increased her sense of urgency. She left the horse where it had fallen and went for the window. When she found it, not only was it locked but there was no handle anywhere, no way to get a purchase on its wooden surrounds. She thought about picking up a piece of furniture and smashing it against the glass, but it wouldn’t make any impact on the shutters outside. The place was impregnable. There was no way out.
She felt shaky, as if the air had grown suddenly cold. Fear rose in goose pimples on her skin. None of this made sense. She was wandering around a darkened empty house in which everything was locked and bolted. Why had he bothered to let her out if there was nowhere to go? Or maybe that was precisely why he had let her out. Because he wanted her to understand how total her imprisonment was. How without his consent she could never get out, even if he wasn’t there to stop her. If she went back up to her room now, would he know? Would there be broken threads across doorways or footprints in flour, so he would have proof that she had roamed and tried to escape?
She realized that even with him gone she was still afraid. How was it that she had become so scared of everything? That must have been why he had singled her out. People like him made a decision in these things. There must have been dozens of English-speaking tourists with dark hair and fair skin in Florence. Yet he had picked her, had detected her vulnerability across a crowded shop, as strongly as if it had been crude animal scent.
She hadn’t always been like this. There had been a time when she used to be able to walk on water, or at least not be frightened of drowning. But somehow since Lily’s birth the world had become an infinitely more threatening place. She had spent so much energy protecting her daughter from life’s fault lines that she had stopped appreciating the beauty of their drop, and so, gradually, had lost her own head for heights. Emotional as well as physical vertigo. Well, she would never walk another cliff edge like the one she was walking now, and if she wasn’t going to fall she had better find her balance soon. She could start by believing she
already had.
If he expected her to escape she would do just the opposite and stop trying. If he wanted her to become frantic she would stay calm. If he was out to play games in the dark, she would put on the lights. She made her way back to the door and located the switch. The room burst into life, tidy, clean, the dinner things cleared away from the fireplace and the dining table, now pushed against the far wall, already laid for breakfast with a thermos of coffee and a basket of bread rolls under a cloth that was still damp. She picked up the bread and squashed it between her fingers. It was stale. So he was running out of fresh supplies. Was that where he had gone, shopping in some distant twenty-four-hour supermarket? It hardly seemed likely. It rammed home the fact that she still didn’t have a clue where he might be.
She started setting the room to rights, recovering the horse from where it had fallen. One of its legs had splintered at the knee joint on impact. Lily would have to bind it up. She was very good at Animal Hospital. Anna pushed the thought aside and moved on to the table. Nearby, on the floor, lay an arc of books that had obviously fallen with it. No wonder the crash had been so loud. She gathered them up. They were English paperbacks, their spines creased with use, their covers giving away their content. Well-groomed women with good-looking open faces set against exotic backdrops, romantic figures: stories to suit the upstairs wardrobe. She checked the inside covers. The last imprint on each of them was dated late nineties. So had this been Paola’s library—now, presumably, meant to be hers? What did he think? That she would spend her days lounging about on the grass reading romance while he lovingly prepared the next meal? Married bliss with a captive.
As she moved away she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror hanging to the right of the fireplace. She hadn’t seen herself properly for three days and the sight shocked her. She looked extraordinary, her face pale and drawn, bits of hair standing up all over the place from the bed, the red dress a creased chaos of silk.
Without thinking, she brought up a hand to smooth her hair, tightening her face muscles out of their frown into an automatic half-smile. Woman’s stuff: the involuntary communication between self and mirror-self. Even in a crisis it worked. She looked better. And felt better, too, more in control.