Home—Saturday early A.M.
AMID THE SCATTERED papers, letters, bills, and newspaper cuttings on her desk was her Filofax. Almost certainly Paul would have been here before me, looking for names and numbers. If he had found nothing, that was because there had been nothing to find. I picked it up and it fell open at the right page of the diary section, a paper clip marking the spot. The week was empty. There was no mention of any trip, no flight details, no hotel, not even the word “Florence.” How could anything be so sudden or so secret as not to be recorded? I realized after a while that I didn’t know what I was looking for.
Children can move as silently as animals when they want to. I heard the breath and found her at my side in the same instant. The shock sent a cold wash through my body. She in contrast was warm, nest-ripe with the milky perfume of sleep.
“Whoa . . . hello there. You made me jump.”
“Stella,” she said, bleary-eyed.
“Yeah. Paul told you I was coming, yes?” She gave a small nod. “You’re up very late.”
“Is it tomorrow yet?”
“No.” I laughed gently. “It’s still the middle of the night.”
“Did you come on a plane with Mummy?”
“Oh, darling, no. I came from Amsterdam. Mummy isn’t home yet.” I put out my arms to her. She hesitated for a moment (I love watching her thoughts move) but stayed where she was. I wasn’t offended. It takes time with Lily. It always has done. Nothing personal.
“Did you just wake up, Lil?”
She shook her head. “I heard a noise. I thought it was Mum.”
“No. Only me. I was looking for something.”
She gazed down at the desk, fingers prodding among the papers. Rushing her doesn’t help. “Mummy went to Italy,” she said after a while.
“Yes.”
“Have you been to Italy?”
“Yes.”
“Is it nice?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes when you go somewhere that’s really nice you don’t want to come home.”
“Oh, I don’t think Italy is nice like that. She just couldn’t get on a plane.”
She frowned. It struck me that although Paul is not a bad liar she hadn’t believed him.
“I know she’ll be back soon; don’t worry,” I said, because that, as yet, was not a lie. “Shall I put you back to bed now?”
She shook her head quickly.
“You’ll get cold.”
She shook her head again, then climbed onto my lap and fitted herself into the curves of my body, inviting the hug. I pulled my arms tightly around her. Before she came along I hadn’t even known how to look after a dog. It’s amazing how children teach you what they need you to know. She was so warm. It was as if her blood was a higher temperature than mine. Do we lose heat as we grow older? I thought of death and its clammy coldness. Vodka. Once it’s warmed the blood, it chills the soul.
“You have to put the light on.”
“Which light?”
“The light in the porch. Mummy might come back and think there’s nobody home.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “I’ll make sure I switch it on.”
“Are you sleeping in her bed?”
“Yes, I am. Paul’s in the other room.”
“So where will Mummy sleep?”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’ll move downstairs if she comes. I can always sleep on the sofa.”
She considered it for a moment, then said, “She won’t know. You’d better leave her a note on the stairs saying that you’re in her bed. So she knows that she has to wake you.”
I looked at her. Whatever your world picture, you still have to get it in order. The only difference is the size of the landscape.
“Good idea. Shall we write it together?”
I spelled out the words for her and she formed each of the big looping letters with great care. In the lamplight I watched her, entranced. Within the peach bloom of her cheeks I could read the outlines of Anna’s sleeker face. She already had her hair, wild coal-black curls, almost too rich and voluptuous for such a little face. Her father was harder to find, but then I never knew him that well.
Lily was still laboring. “Hey, that’s great. You’re really learning fast.”
She gave me a cool sidelong glance. “They’re just letters, Estella. Everyone can do them.”
I made sure I didn’t laugh.
When we were finished I took her downstairs and tucked her in. The room was like a cocoon, the twirling silhouette figures of the night-light sending out wild shadows across the walls and ceiling. She slipped in between the covers and turned away from me, falling almost immediately asleep.
“Do you want a hug?” I whispered close to her ear, but there was no answer.
As I left I pulled the door behind me.
“Leave it open.”
No, not asleep yet.
I did as I was told. I left the note in the middle of the carpet in the hall, in a place where neither Anna nor Lily could miss it. She would be up before either of us, and she had a memory like an elephant. Then, as promised, I switched on the light in the porch. The road outside was still and silent, the houses opposite dark.
I gave up for the night and put myself to bed.
I had to climb in over a pile of books and papers (this part of the jungle Patricia wouldn’t touch). I went through them, just in case. The news went back weeks, left and right, tabloid and broadsheet; the theory being that if you write for newspapers, you should know what the rivals are saying. In practice there are too many words. Most of the papers hadn’t even been opened. Mixed in with the news were well-thumbed children’s books, a clutch of magazines, and a draft of something with pencil marks all over it. An article she was writing. I scanned it in the hope that it might explain everything: some major exposé of a Mafia ring set in Florence selling Italian choirboys into pedophile rings. But it was years since Anna’s bylines had been so juicy, and it turned out to be a piece on the failure of nursery schools to comply with new government literacy targets for five-year-olds.
Yet another article she hadn’t talked about. There had been a time before Lily when Anna’s career had been on the fast track, but in the last few years she seemed to have lost the hunger for it. Single mothers can’t be one of the boys, she had once explained to me. It only hurts if you fight it.
In the bedside drawers I found some pens, an old book of Auden poems, a chewed-up dummy—a relic from the era of sleepless nights and last resorts—and tucked away at the back a compilation of erotic stories. I flicked through them, but they were too literary for my taste, too many euphemisms and soft focus, not enough balls. Not quite Anna’s taste either, from what I remembered. In the early days when I first moved to Amsterdam it used to be one of our regular Saturday-evening pastimes, watching the men watching the prostitutes in their rose-tinted shop windows, trying to work out who was exploiting whom, the different ways that power and pleasure plait together in people’s sexual fantasies. We went there, I remember, one summer’s night soon after Lily had been born. Anna had been carrying her strapped to her chest, Lily’s eyes wide open and surprised in the way that babies often are, blinking in the sights.
I lay looking up at the ceiling. Anna had been missing for one day and almost two nights. It was unthinkable that she should simply have decided to stay away without getting in touch. Which meant that for some reason she couldn’t. From one bed I imagined another: a room in an Italian hospital where a pale woman lay under a sheet, her nose and mouth filled with tubes, her body attached to a monitor, across which a wavy green curve was flattening out into a line, the bleep turning to a high whine as it registered the change. I blinked and the image changed: the same woman but without the screen this time, waking up into a profound silence, in her mind as well as in the room. The next time I looked she was sitting in a chair, her ankles and wrists tied to the legs and armrests, her face bled white by fear, the shadow of another figure projected across her body.
I sat up in the bed and shook the pictures away. Was Paul lying upstairs with his own slide show in progress or was I somehow more prone to this because of my own past? How soon after my mother went missing was she also dead? Two, three days? I couldn’t remember anymore. I’m not sure I ever knew.
Impressive how the cancer cells of your imagination multiply even faster than the ones in the body. But if this is not about accident or crime, then what on earth is it, Anna? Don’t you understand that people are going crazy with worry here?
Away—Thursday P.M.
HER BODY WAS like a balloon blown up with helium gas. Each time she tried to move her limbs she felt herself lifting off the ground, her whole torso rising and turning in a languid slow-motion dance that belied a heaving sense of panic underneath. She needed to see where she was falling, but her eyes kept opening onto darkness. Her breath hurt. The air was heavy, fat with moisture, filling up her nostrils and sucking at her skin. She tried to peel it off her, but the movement only caused her to lift farther off the ground again. She knew she wasn’t properly conscious; she must be waking from some deep sleep or still embedded within it and only dreaming of being awake, but she could not hold on to that fact, nor work out what it was that felt so wrong.
This time as she slipped away, her body rising and rolling in a glorious defiance of gravity, she heard the crunch of gravel, and for a second she saw something—a snapshot of an evening sky, slashes of deep pink against a charcoal-blue wash, like swaths of bright cloth flung out from the bolt across the horizon. Her body felt like the colors, melting and wild. Someone grabbed hold of her arms and she felt herself being yanked back to earth. The velocity of her fall brought vomit to her throat and she knew she was going to be sick.
The darkness returned.
When she opened her eyes again she wasn’t flying anymore. It took her a while to work it out. She was lying horizontal, fully dressed, her body leaden and flat, as if the air above were crushing her down. At least now her brain was functioning. The surface under her was soft, a couch or a bed, and the atmosphere was tame, inside rather than out. Gradually the darkness coalesced into a series of shapes, different densities of black. Directly in front of her she made out a bulky mass, some kind of cupboard or large piece of furniture, and to her right, near the ground, a thin slice of dirty yellow light from underneath what must be a door.
Her head hurt and she needed to urinate, badly. It was hard to think of anything else. She pulled herself off the bed, but her legs were like sponges soaked in water and she had to use the wall as a prop to get herself to the door.
Inside it, a ghostly night-light illuminated a cramped bathroom: tiled walls, a bath, and a marble top with a basin; a neat set of white towels and hotel shampoo and conditioner bottles nearby.
She fumbled with her trouser button to get herself undressed. The urine splashed fiercely into the bowl. She only just made it in time, like a child who waits too long at play, then has to rush to go. A child. Lily. Lily . . . The thought was like an electric shock. Lily. She saw traffic lights, a sign for an airport, a man’s face glancing at her anxiously from the driver’s seat. Then she remembered the flash of sunset, and the vomiting. She pulled herself up from the loo. I’m ill, she thought. I’m ill. But what? And how? And she felt a rush of fear in the bottom of her gut. Her mouth felt as if she had been chewing on gravel. She gulped down a handful of water straight from the tap, but it didn’t help.
In the main room she searched for the light switch, only to be blinded when she found it. She blinked her way back into focus onto a spare, spotless hotel room: single bed, side table, wardrobe, chest of drawers and chair—inoffensive corporate furniture, not unlike the room she had left that morning. One wall was covered by heavy drapes. She yanked them back, half expecting to find a cityscape filled with lights, but instead there was only a window, considerably smaller than the width of the curtains, and blackness beyond. When she lifted the catch the window opened a few inches, then stopped. The air was unexpectedly cool, with a whisper running through it, like the sound of electricity singing through pylon cables. It was as if the world ended behind the glass.
When she turned back, the room appeared less benign. She noticed there was no telephone anywhere, no light by the bed, no leaflets or stationery on the desk. Not a thing, in fact, to identify this as a real hotel at all. Even the walls were bare. So was the back of the main door. No framed room charges or fire instructions. And when she turned the handle it didn’t open. Whatever lock was in operation, it wasn’t on the inside.
The discovery made her frantic. She sifted through the clogged debris of memory and came up with the syrupy coffee followed by sudden nausea and the need to sleep. She saw his face smiling across at her, reassuring, concerned. It couldn’t be . . . it wasn’t possible. Her mind short-circuited to bizarre stories of kidnap, Italian-style; rich magnates or their children held in cellars and losing bits of their anatomy to prod their relatives into vast ransoms. It didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone in their right mind want to kidnap her, an anonymous tourist and single mother with no family and no money? It was all some grotesque mistake.
She threw herself at the door, smashing on the wood with the palms of her hands and shouting at the top of her voice. How long had she been unconscious? She felt sick again and she was sweating heavily. She stopped to look at her watch, but the face was splintered and the time behind it was forever ten to nine. Now it was the middle of the night. But which night? How long had she been there?
She went back to the door with renewed panic, using her fists this time and carrying on until the pain in her head forced her to stop. No one was listening, or if they were, they were choosing not to hear. She was suddenly greedily thirsty. She went into the bathroom and drank more water. She grabbed one of the plastic bottles sitting on the side. Green shower gel, “made in Milan,” bottled by the thousand for any number of hotel chains. Where was she? She felt dizzy. She moved back to the bed and sat heaving, staring at the door, taking deep breaths.
Around her the silence was profound, deeper than the room, deeper than the building. She felt sick and clammy. She lay back and pulled the covers over her. From a vent in the room the air-conditioning kicked in, a low mechanical hum, like a hotel. Like a hotel. At least it wasn’t a cellar. This was the last thing she remembered before she fell back to sleep.
Away—Friday A.M.
ANNA WAS SITTING by the window in a large chair, so deep that its wings seemed to envelop her, cutting her off from the rest of the room, its arms wide enough to use as a table. A glass was balanced on one of them, the liquid alive with bubbles, and there was a towel thrown on the floor nearby.
She was naked, her legs curled up under her, her hair wet, pushed back from her face. Her skin was clear, no makeup, washed clean and shiny like a child’s. She looked tired but composed. She seemed to be staring out at something through the half-open window, but there was nothing to see. In the middle of the night even the city was still. Florence lay below them in the valley, its night-lights like a constellation of stars in distant space. She moved her right leg slightly and her skin made a small sucking sound as the thigh pulled away from the back of her calf. She slid her fingers down the inside of her leg, feeling the sweat that had gathered there. The surface of her skin was alive to the touch. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so aware of her body. No, that wasn’t true. She could remember quite clearly.
Anna saw herself five weeks earlier, returning home to Lily after their first encounter. They had said good-bye to each other in the hotel room in Central London and she had driven back across the Westway in the silence of an early morning, much like tonight’s, hers one of a handful of cars still on the road. She had come into the house quietly: Patricia was asleep upstairs in the spare room, Lily was in her bed. She had been desperate to see her daughter again. Not to assuage any sense of betrayal or guilt, but from the need to hold her in her arms and know that nothing had changed. She would have
liked to have a bath—his smell was all over her—but the pipes ran next to Patricia’s room and would have made discordant music in the middle of the night. She stripped off her clothes, brushed her teeth, and crept into bed, for that second the subterfuge making her feel like an unfaithful lover.
Lily, like a heat-seeking missile, had located her body and moved into it. The cotton nightgown was rumpled up around her waist, and her flesh was warm and soft. Child after adult, female after male, the contrast was profound and delicious. I love you, she thought. What happened tonight doesn’t make any difference. She wanted to wake her up and tell her that. She moved her grip and Lily started to cough, once, twice, then enough to wake herself.
“Mum?”
“Yes, darling?”
“Hello.” And the voice was richly croaky, like dark wood splintered along the seam.
“Hello. You got a cough?”
“Mmn.” She was still half-asleep. But when she coughed again it was more like a bark, the throat angry.
“You okay?”
“I want some water.”
Anna slid out of bed and filled her a glass from the bathroom tap. Lily was sitting up now, eyes blinking open, solemn. She grasped the glass with both hands and gulped it down noisily; Anna could hear the liquid traveling down her throat.
“You smell funny,” Lily said, wrinkling up her nose as she handed back the glass.
“Do I?” Anna had replied, marveling at the radar detection. “It’s hot out. I’ve been sweating.”
“Where have you been?”
“Working.”
“Did you have a nice time?”
“It was all right,” she said as she slid herself in next to her. “Come on now, get back down under the covers.”
“I cried at bedtime, you know.”
“Did you? Why?”
“I missed you.”
“Oh, you silly duck. Patricia was here.”
“Mmmn. She called me a silly duck, too. But she said I could sleep in your bed.”