The Medici Mirror

by Melissa Bailey

  Back at my flat that was just what I was worrying about. Having a good evening. To distract myself I tidied up. I cleaned the bathroom, hoovered the carpets, put my clothes in the wardrobe and changed the bed sheets. Just in case. With that done, I set the table in the kitchen, then sat down, opened a bottle of wine and pondered my menu and its ingredients. I chopped fish, washed and sliced vegetables, blended garlic, ginger and spices and prepared as much as I could. Then I sat quietly and drank a glass of wine, studying the photograph on the wall behind the table.

  It was a black and white collector’s-edition print, the faint black scrawl of the photographer’s signature visible in the bottom right-hand corner. Elmer Batters. I moved nearer. I never tired of looking at this image. Two feet, shot from below, were poised on the edge of a sofa. One foot draped over the other and black stiletto sandals, with thin high metallic heels, dangled tantalisingly from the toes, as if they were about to fall to the ground. The left foot was covered with a translucent black stocking through which the three smallest toes were visible. The right was bare but the toes were more obscured. There was a beauty, a symmetry to this photograph that usually calmed me. But right now it wasn’t working its usual magic.

  I drank another glass of wine and there was still no sign of Ophelia. I paced around the kitchen, then opened the French doors into the garden. I breathed the air tinged with the scent of hyacinths growing in pots on the patio. Then I went back to the table and sat down. I was a ball of anxiety. Finally, the doorbell rang. I checked myself out in the hallway mirror before I answered. I practised a smile. Keep it natural, relaxed, I told myself, and opened the door.

  ‘Hi,’ said Ophelia. Her hair was tied back and her skin looked paler than it had the day before. She looked tired and somehow smaller. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve had a frantic day.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Come in.’ I took her coat, hung it in the hallway and then wandered back into the kitchen.

  She took off her shoes and followed me. She was wearing a green blouse and a knee-length black skirt that showed off her slim calves and ankles. Her bare feet were a shock of white moving against the dark slate of the kitchen floor.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough trainers there?’ She gestured back to the rows of shoes lined up in the hallway.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I replied, distracted. ‘I just can’t seem to stop buying them.’

  ‘Wow. You must have about twenty pairs.’

  I nodded and then added, ‘I walk pretty much everywhere,’ as if by way of justification.

  When Ophelia reached the table I poured her a glass of wine. ‘Cheers,’ she said and took a sip. ‘Hmm, delicious.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad you like it.’ I paused as I took another mouthful. I savoured the taste. It was delicious but I was going to have to pace myself if I didn’t want the food to be a disaster. ‘Do you want to sit down here,’ I pointed to the table, ‘while I get started on the food?’

  ‘Sure, what are we eating?’

  ‘I stopped at the fishmonger’s on the way home and bought loads of stuff. So I thought we’d have fish curry. Sound okay?’

  ‘Sounds wonderful.’ She smiled at me again and took another sip of wine. The green blouse complemented her eyes and the paleness of her skin.

  I swallowed and tried to get focused. It was a problem I’d been having all day.

  ‘So you like to cook?’

  I nodded. ‘I love it. It relaxes me.’ Just by saying the word, something in me shifted. I felt less anxious. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, too,’ she said, smiling.

  We looked at each other for a moment and then I turned, opened the fridge and took out the fish. I could feel her still watching me.

  ‘So, your day was hectic. What happened?’

  ‘Urgghh. Just a job that I’m working on. The location’s dreadful, the set’s a disaster. It’s turning into a nightmare . . .’

  As she talked I got started. I fried up shallots and aubergine and then added my blended paste of spices along with coconut milk and fish sauce. While the rice simmered on the hob, I added sea bass and salmon to the coconut curry. Then I dropped in some prawns, scallops and razor clams. In the final couple of minutes, I fried some samphire and spinach in garlic and butter. In short, I cooked up a storm. If she didn’t enjoy this meal, I would eat my whole stockpile of trainers.

  ‘This smells amazing,’ said Ophelia, cutting through my thoughts. ‘Can I help with anything?’

  ‘You could light the candles on the table,’ I said, handing her some matches. ‘Then I think we’re pretty much good to go.’ I poured the curry into one bowl, rice into another and vegetables into a third and walked back and forth with the food to the table. Finally, I grabbed a couple of plates and sat down.

  ‘This looks great,’ said Ophelia, hovering over the food bowls and breathing in deeply.

  ‘Well, I hope you like it.’ I served her some rice and curry, then helped myself. Finally, I raised my glass. ‘To you and to a better day tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’ She smiled. Then she nodded towards the Batters print on the wall. ‘That’s an amazing image, by the way.’

  I gazed at the dangling stiletto shoes for a moment.

  ‘Not many people are aware of the work of that photographer.’ Ophelia was smiling at me in a knowing way.

  I didn’t really want to get into this conversation but it looked like I was going to have to. ‘Maya, my wife, bought it for me a long time ago. I still love it, all these years later.’ I smiled, waving my fork towards the image. ‘For the record, she wasn’t into feet as much as him.’

  ‘I don’t think many people were into feet as much as him.’ Ophelia’s eyes twinkled.

  I laughed. ‘No, I guess not. Maya used to say that feet tell stories, leave clues behind. Their mark upon the earth, if you like. She noticed them a lot.’

  I crunched into a mouthful of samphire and felt its salty sharpness on my tongue. The last thing I wanted to do was get into another discussion about my wife. I wanted to leave all trace of her and the footprints she had left upon my life behind.

  I looked at Ophelia, still studying the print. ‘So,’ I said, ‘tell me more about yourself, your family, if that’s not too nosy of me.’

  The small scar above her lip twitched slightly and she hesitated for a moment. ‘No, I don’t mind telling you,’ she said at last. She took a sip of her wine. ‘Where to start, that’s the problem.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps with my father.’ She nodded, then smiled faintly. ‘He was English, through and through, terribly eccentric. He grew up in London but the sea was always in his blood. And so, eventually, he became a marine biologist. Cetaceans were his thing.’

  ‘Cetaceans?’ I had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘From the Greek, ketos and the Latin, cetus. You can see I had it drummed into me as a child.’ She smiled. ‘For the uninitiated, it means whales, dolphins and porpoises.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘They were his specialism. So we lived all my early life by the sea. Mainly on small islands or beaches.’

  ‘Wow, fantastic. That’s every kid’s dream.’

  ‘I guess so. And it was idyllic for a while. It feels very dreamlike now, you know, looking back. My father worked a lot. He always seemed to be out in the boat, or writing up reports or studies. So my mother mostly took care of me. I have wonderful memories of her. She was Italian, warm, beautiful, always smiling.’ Ophelia paused and took another sip of her wine. ‘She died when I was six. She’d been ill for a long time, but I was too young to know and of course no one told me. She had a heart condition which grew progressively worse.’

  I stopped eating and looked at Ophelia. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it. In fact, I like to talk about her, I like to remember.’

  I nodded. ‘Then tell me something about her.’

  She thought for a second and la
ughed. ‘Strangely enough, I remember her feet. They’re one of my clearest memories.’ She took a mouthful of fish and chewed slowly, savouring the memory in her mind. ‘I remember sunlight on water, a twinkling blue and the impression of my mother’s feet in the sand. Big and bold. Their outline was strong and smooth against the dampness of the beach.’ She took a clam from her plate, pulled it open and ate it. ‘And I stood in an imprint, looking down at my mother’s toes. Then I bent over and followed their mark with my fingertips. Softly, gently.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I remember reciting a nursery rhyme.’ Then she laughed, a slightly shrill, embarrassed laugh. I thought of her young, thin voice on the wind. ‘This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed at home.’ She pulled a strand of samphire from the bowl and held it between her fingers. ‘I remember feeling safe in the sunlight, watching my mother walk ahead. I remember it clearly. The smell of the salt in the air. The taste of it on my lips. The suck of wet sand against my own feet. Now and then my mother turned and smiled at me, standing in her foot’s imprint, delicately tracing in the sand. Then she would turn back and walk on. But I stayed exactly where I was until the tide came in and washed the footprints away.’

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then I got up from the table and opened another bottle of wine.

  ‘For some reason, I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. I guess I never really ever stop thinking about her.’ Ophelia paused. ‘It was incredibly difficult for her to be gone. Suddenly, to just be gone.’

  I really couldn’t imagine. ‘It must have been terrible.’

  She nodded, swirling the wine around in her glass, looking at it as she did. ‘I feel the sense of loss, perhaps as much now as I did then. It reaches out to me.’ She looked up suddenly and met my gaze. ‘I’m sorry, that probably sounded ridiculous. It’s hard to explain. The pull of what’s lost.’

  ‘Yeah. But I think I understand.’

  She looked at me for a long moment and then she smiled. ‘Maybe you do.’

  ‘So what about your father? How did he cope when she was gone?’

  Ophelia let out a sigh. ‘He worked a lot. He had no choice. But now he was the one who read me stories, cooked and cared for me as well. In one way, I saw more of him than ever. But in another, I saw less.’

  She paused. She looked like she was striving to find the right words.

  ‘Something was different. He changed. He looked the same as my father. On the surface. But it wasn’t him. Underneath, in the darkness, deep within him, he wasn’t himself, he was someone else. Grief pulled him apart and filled him with emptiness. He wasn’t the same man.’

  I reached for my wine again and drained the glass. Then I refilled both our glasses. Now we were partway through the story I realised it was no fairy tale.

  ‘For a while, we moved. I think that helped him a little. We hopped from one continent to another, one country to the next: Greece to Australia, Fiji to California, Hong Kong to the Philippines. We moved six times in six years.’

  I raised my eyebrows and let out a faint whistle.

  ‘Yes, it was pretty insane. We were like nomads, rootless, forever shifting.’ Ophelia had stopped eating and was looking at her hands, palms down, pale and flat against the dark oak of the table.

  ‘I didn’t realise it at the time but I know now that it was my father’s way of trying to outrun the past, to stay one step ahead of the memories of my mother. I think he knew that if they caught up with him, if he let them in, they would fill up the empty spaces inside him and he would disappear under their weight.’ She paused to take a sip of wine. ‘But you can’t run away from things for ever, can you?’

  I sighed quietly and nodded. I had to agree with her. In the end, the things you ran away from always seemed to catch you.

  ‘My father died not long after we moved to the Philippines.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ There it was again, another sorry. ‘Really, you don’t have to tell me this if it’s too much.’

  Ophelia smiled softly. ‘Thanks. But, like I said, it was a long time ago. What difference does it make if I tell you now or later? It’s the same story. It’s not too hard to hear, is it?’

  I shook my head as I pushed away my plate. ‘So how did it happen?’

  ‘We were living on the western island of Palawan in the Philippines. It’s a stunning place, clear water, and jungle cascading right to the beach. And beneath the sea are nearly eleven thousand square kilometres of coral reefs. Activity near the reefs was what my father was interested in.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, one day he went out to sea and never came back. The weather was bad, he should never have gone in the first place, but there was no reasoning with him. There were terrific storms in the north and about a week after he went missing his boat was found washed ashore, mangled and broken up. There was no sign of him. The officials concluded that he had been thrown overboard and drowned.’

  I didn’t want to say again that I was sorry so I said nothing.

  ‘So that was the way he died. The legally determined, authorised version, anyway. But I always felt that was only a part of it. On another level, he had finally surrendered to what had haunted him most and disappeared in its grasp. He was finally free. That’s what I think.’ Ophelia picked a prawn from the bowl and pulled it from its shell. ‘So it’s not a sad story. Not really.’

  Maybe, I thought. Maybe not. The whole story seemed deeply tragic to me. But maybe she had to take solace where she could find it. That I could understand. ‘But it must have been hard to handle when you were so young.’

  ‘Hmm. I think for a long time I didn’t understand it properly. I still imagined that my mother and father would come walking back into my life. I had problems working out what was real and what was not.’ She laughed. Then she became serious once more. ‘Even as an adult, it’s hard enough. I still grapple with it from time to time.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I have always remembered what a local man in Palawan once told me. His tribe believed that those who died at sea were transformed into mythical creatures, sea nymphs and mermen of the deep who were made of the ocean and could swim like the fish. Once a year, for one night, they could return to the land and walk upon it like they used to.’ Ophelia’s eyes sparkled in the flickering candlelight. She looked beautiful. ‘Do you think that could be true?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered finally. ‘I guess it all comes down to what you believe in the end.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’ She smiled at me suddenly and there seemed to be a new lightness in her expression. ‘So that’s it. The whole story. I came to England then to be with my grandparents. The rest is history. So, tell me about the factory. What are you planning to do there?’

  For a while we talked about the renovation and my ideas for the conversion. I told Ophelia about Tara, her abrasive confidence and her perfect breasts. We laughed and then fell into silence. As we picked at the remains of the food I wanted to say something else but I couldn’t think of anything. Eventually, she put down her fork and looked at me.

  ‘Do you ever dream?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘You know. When you sleep do you have dreams?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I replied. ‘But it’s pretty unusual if I do. What about you?’

  ‘Yes, I dream a lot. And a lot about my parents. Can I tell you something, something I don’t really share that often?’

  ‘Of course. You can tell me anything.’ And as I said it I realised that I meant it.

  ‘Well, I say it’s a dream but it doesn’t feel like a dream. It always feels very real. Like I am there, invisible but watching.’ She paused, seemingly perplexed. ‘But then I realise that I can’t have been there. No matter how real it felt, it must have been a dream.’ Pause. ‘So, it’s night-time, but out of the darkness a long beach appears, stretching on and on into the distance, so far that I can’t see its end. The moon rises, large in the sky, and casts a pale reflection on the sea. Waves wash quietly agai
nst the sand.’ Ophelia smiled faintly. ‘Can you imagine it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So, a woman walks along the shoreline. Slowly. From time to time she turns and smiles at the person following in her wake. Her feet make patterns in the wet sand. The person behind her follows her trail, touching the images she has left behind with his fingers. It’s my father. He smiles at my mother. He has found her in this ancient place of memory and desire. He has come here for this one night in the year, to be with her in the moonlight, before his bones are returned to coral and his blood to salt water. As he follows her along the beach, gaining on her ever so slightly, my father also turns. Although there is no one there behind him, he looks with longing at the place that he has come from. A tear creeps down his cheek. Then he smiles, slowly turns and walks on.’

  5

  Chateau de Blois

  June 1543

  CATHERINE WATCHED THE flickering candlelight dance around her bedchamber. But she could not focus on the patterns of light and shade. Her gaze slipped and shifted to the green velvet curtains hanging down from the corners of the four-poster bed, then moved to the heavy embroidered tapestries against the wall beyond. But she could not connect with their beauty, their colourful splendour, could not hold any particular thought in her head. She was distracted, nervous, keen not to say or do anything that would intensify the distance she felt already between herself and Henri. She looked down at her hands, spread out on the bed sheets, and moved slightly on all fours to adjust herself. Hearing her husband manoeuvre himself behind her, she felt a bloom of desire hit her. Despite the ignominy of this position, she could not help but feel aroused. She turned her head to meet her husband’s gaze, but his eyes were averted, his face devoid of expression. Then she felt him grasp her shoulder and, abruptly, push inside her. She squeezed her eyes tightly together, trying to imagine his face in front of hers, rapt as he stared at her, as she had seen him gaze upon another. She tried to imagine his breath, hot against her neck, his hands upon her breasts, his sweat binding them together, his need intense, urgent. And in the darkness behind her eyelids, beyond her sight, she could almost imagine it, could almost spin the shadows into reality. But, even there, something jarred. With each indifferent thrust, her fantasies became harder to sustain until finally they too slipped into darkness and dissolved entirely. She opened her eyes, felt the rhythmic slap of her husband’s body against her own. The noise echoed like a shot in the silence that otherwise fell between them. Catherine closed her eyes once more and waited for it to be over.