by Sarah Dunant
Immediately to the right was a portrait of Paola staring directly into the camera, also smiling. They must have been lovers by now for her to allow such an intimate exchange with the lens, both inviting and ignoring at the same time. Maybe she had liked it. She was clearly a woman who had an understanding of her own power. The mystery was why she should want to give it to him.
Anna glanced back from the photo to the mirror again. Was it just obsession warping his vision, or were they really alike in some ways, the two of them? No. Not when you thought about it. To start with, the woman in the photograph was prettier than she was, a broader forehead and a wider mouth, which made the smile more entrancing.
Anna returned to her own image, fine-tuning the smile, trying to get it to mimic the photo, to see if she could understand what it was he might have seen in them both. Lily had once caught Anna at this mirror game, demanding to know why it was she always changed her face when she looked at her own reflection. At the time she had been mortified, as if she had been caught in some trick of gender, guilty of inadvertently passing on the sin of female vanity to the next generation. Since then she had spotted Lily at it herself; that shy, sly collusion with the glass, practice for the years to come. Ah well, she had thought. Maybe it is bigger than both of us. All of us . . .
She looked back at the photo. And suddenly she understood it. Of course. Why hadn’t she seen it before? The familiarity was not about their looks but their pose. The woman in the photograph was coming from the same place she was: the way she held her head on a slight tilt, the ghost of a smile, half coquettish, half confident. A woman playing with her own image. A woman oblivious of the camera lens. A woman looking into a mirror. Alone.
She dropped her eyes, so they wouldn’t give away what her brain was thinking. She feigned interest in the room again, glancing casually around the walls, reading the gallery of photos differently now. In the first section a young woman was caught going about her everyday business in public places, laughing and chatting with companions who were no longer there. As they were excluded, so she was enlarged; the devious art of the telephoto lens.
In the second gallery she was on her own: the public face now engaged in private business, charming itself, checking its own attractiveness in a mirror. Subject and object at the same time. And meanwhile, the journey from the one to the other had taken place without any bride in between. No wedding shots or formal portraits, not a single photograph that showed the two of them together, no proof at all that in fact they had ever been intimate in each other’s company.
Paola. His dead wife? Or just some interesting-looking woman plucked from the crowded streets of Florence into a house, a room, and a mirror?
Like her.
Now.
Away—Saturday P.M.
BACK IN THE bedroom the sound of the telephone wasn’t coming from by the bed. Its tone was different too, more singsong, more like the warble of a mobile, only muffled. As it rang for the third time she traced it to the wardrobe.
There was nothing hanging in there but his linen jacket: too hot to wear, too smart to be left crumpled in a suitcase. In the inside pocket she found the handset. She pulled it out and it lay in her palm, so tiny and precise that you could almost imagine it as a medical accessory in some state-of-the-art heart surgery. The ringing had stopped now. The caller, unable to connect, was no doubt leaving a message.
She frowned. He hadn’t said anything to her about having a mobile. If he had, she would certainly have asked to use it to call home while they were traveling, rather than having to wait until they reached the hotel. Maybe its reach didn’t extend that far, though given the international map of his working life that seemed unlikely. Or maybe his wife checked the numbers on the bills. “She knew about the others. She doesn’t know about you. . . .”
She studied the dialing bar. Sure enough, a small icon had already lit up, alerting him to the missed call. Nine-thirty on a Saturday night. You don’t want to know who this is, Anna, she thought. It’s nobody’s business but his. But the intensity of their mutual confession had done its work, acting as a slow burn into her conscience, making the need to know as powerful as any niceties of privacy. She accessed the answering service from the menu and an electronic voice in her ear instructed her as to what to press to hear the missed call. Her fingers darted over the numbers. Maybe she just needed to feel guilty about a second family.
Sure enough it was a woman. “My wife is French.” But this accent was American:
“Hi. Just to let you know, I spoke to our client this afternoon and while he’s real excited, he’s also impatient. Me, too, eh? Can’t wait. I just want to check everything’s okay on your end and that you made all the connections and can still get her back here as planned. I told him by the end of next week. I’m assuming we’ll be home and dry by then, yeah? I can’t tell who I want to see most, you or her.
“Oh, and speaking of people missing you, a Sophie Wagner phoned the office while you were gone. St. Petersburg, I seem to remember, right? Luckily she didn’t have the right name and I took the call. You don’t know how she got this number, do you? I wouldn’t like to think you were getting careless.
“Anyway, let me know when you’re getting back in. And don’t wear yourself out too much on the job, all right? Remember, lover, you’ve got commitments elsewhere.” And the voice splintered into laughter.
The message ended and the automated voice asked if she’d like to delete it, save it, or hear it again. She switched the phone off, then on again, checking to see that the message remained. He would never know she had heard it. She stood staring down at the receiver in her hand.
It’s work, she thought. The woman is his partner, someone who knows him well enough to be rude, ruder even than his wife. But when she tried to swallow she found she didn’t have enough saliva to complete the action. Whom was she kidding? “Me, too, eh? Can’t wait. . . . speaking of people missing you . . . Remember, lover, you’ve got commitments elsewhere. . . .” Even without the words, the voice was a giveaway. The way it wiped its feet on the name “Sophie,” the teasing insolence that comes with the confidence of sex. If this woman worked with him, she also slept with him. And it didn’t sound like a one-sided arrangement.
She glanced across the room and saw herself lying on the bed, her limbs tangled together with his, his fingers in her crotch, his face studying hers as he watched her orgasm build. You come differently with somebody you trust. The air in the room was thick with his protestations of honesty and intoxication, with images of French wives no longer fucked and the confession of a sweetly painful mutual sense of risk. “You know as well as I do what’s happening here, Anna. The longer we play around the more dangerous it gets.” She felt suddenly sick, as if a dredger were at work at the bottom of her stomach, scraping deep into a flesh floor of memory and humiliation. Except why would he do such a thing? Why bother himself with exhausting lies when all the time he had some other woman—not even his wife—billing and cooing into his inside jacket pocket?
She reran the call in her head. And where did she, Anna, fit into all of this? Was she the “her” they were referring to, the “her” who should be back next week? Surely not. In which case she had to be the job that he shouldn’t wear himself out on. And what about Sophie Wagner and St. Petersburg? Did that mean another hotel room somewhere, with the imprint of tangled bodies on the bed?
She remembered him standing with her in the corridor that first night in the London hotel, waiting for the lift to come, repeating her phone number back to himself. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he had said as he kissed her good-bye, not offering his own number in reply. And he had called, the very next morning, warm and eager for more. “What if I need to get in touch with you in an emergency?” she had asked him later. “I’ve got an answering service,” he had said. “I’ll let you have the number.” But somehow they had never got around to it. He had always called her, though he had never left a message, only ever spoken to her direct. Wa
s there a reason for all that? “Luckily she didn’t get the right name,” the woman’s voice had said. His name, presumably. Maybe if you don’t know someone’s number, you don’t know who they really are.
The dredger was at work again, slicing into nerve ends concealed in the mud. She tried to steady herself. So this lover of hers had other lovers, other agendas. So what? In a way, so did she. She was the one who had gone through the want ads in search of a story. This wasn’t like her and Chris. She had some agency here, some power. But first she needed to know what she was dealing with. She needed to talk to Sophie Wagner, whoever she was.
She looked at the phone in her hand. A traveling man would take his own directory of numbers with him. She looked at her watch. Almost 9:40. He was already impatient with her absence. She didn’t have a lot of time.
She locked the door from inside. Sitting on the loo, she started work on the phone. The menu offered her up a directory of most-used numbers. She started punching buttons to check each of them. As they came up she realized she had nothing to write them down with. Lifting the hygiene wrapper off the tooth mug, she used it as her paper, grabbing a lipstick pencil from her makeup case as a pen. The first few numbers had no names attached. Presumably these were the ones he used all the time, and he didn’t need to be told who they were. She wrote them down anyway. Two of them had a European prefix (not France) and one was in Italy.
Then came two with names attached. One sounded Russian but she couldn’t be sure because she didn’t know any East European prefixes, the other was American. Both men. She was writing so fast the tip of the pencil snapped off on the paper. She was moving to the door to get a better implement when she heard a knock on the outside door.
“Anna?”
On the little phone screen the name “Sophie” had flipped up followed by an initial “W.”
“Anna?”
Then a number that she recognized as American. Area code 212. Manhattan. She frantically scrawled it down, what was left of the pencil crumbling completely under the pressure, so the last two digits were barely legible. 87. 87.
The knocking got louder. She heard him rattling the door. “Anna. Anna, are you in here?”
“Yep. Hold on a minute, I’m on the loo.” She stuffed the piece of paper deep into her wash bag on the basin, zipping it closed. Then she flushed the toilet. “Just coming,” she shouted over the noise of the cistern. She slipped the phone back in his jacket pocket on her way to the door.
“Sorry,” she said as he stepped inside.
“What’s with the lock? You all right?”
“Yes, fine. I was wandering around naked and they came in to turn down the bed.”
“What have you been doing? I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”
“Oh . . . I . . . I kept trying to get through to London, but it was engaged.”
“But I thought you said you’d spoken to her?”
“I wanted to add something. Anyway, it’s done now. You must be starving.”
“I gave up, it was getting so late. We’ll have to find somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry. We can go straightaway. I’m ready now.”
“Really.” He gave a slight frown, taking hold of her hands and turning them over until her palms were facing upward. “What have you been doing to yourself?” he said, shaking his head in mock astonishment. “You look like a bride at a Hindu wedding.”
She stared down and saw a crisscross of rust-colored streaks like henna stains running through her fingers and onto the palms. “Oh, it’s lipstick pencil. It broke.”
“Before it got to your lips, I see,” he said. He put out a finger to her mouth, running it along her bottom lip, then prodded it inside. She caught at it with her tongue and pulled it further in. He smiled. “You’re almost enough to put a man off his dinner. Compliment. Eh? Come on. Let’s go eat.”
On his way out he plucked his jacket off the hanger. Was it her imagination, or did he slip his hand inside to check the phone was still there?
It took a while to find a restaurant that was willing to serve them so late, and once they found one it seemed easier to eat than to talk. And drink. The wine was his second bottle, her first. He went to the loo halfway through. Whether he picked up the call, it was impossible to tell. When he came back she decided to poke a little, just to see where it might go.
“Can I ask you something?” she said casually as she reached for the wine. “What will your wife be doing tonight? Do you know?”
“My wife? I don’t have a clue. She’s probably out with friends.”
“What’s she like? Does she look at all like me?”
“No. No, she doesn’t look anything like you. Anna?”
“I was wondering what language you spoke when you were together. Is her English as good as your French?”
He frowned and put his fork down on his plate. “What happened here, Anna? Did you get mad with me because you felt homesick?”
I wish you were more stupid, she thought. I could find it easier not to want to fuck you. “Why does it make you nervous, Samuel? It’s just curiosity.”
“No, it’s not curiosity. It’s picking at the scab. I don’t want to talk about her anymore. I don’t want her at the table. I want to be with you. We don’t exactly have a long time left.”
“One day, two nights. It’s enough.”
Enough for what? But he didn’t pick up the gauntlet.
“Okay. So tell me what you’ll be doing in Geneva next week.”
He shrugged. “Same as usual.”
“Which is . . .?”
“Going to see a man about some paintings.”
“When will you be in London next?”
“Er . . . I’m not sure. Maybe week after next.”
“Week after next? And will that be about work or pleasure?”
He held her gaze. “I suppose that depends on whether you forgive me for whatever it is I seem to have done.” She shrugged, as if she didn’t understand the comment. He put out his hand across the table and covered hers. His touch was very warm. You could see how one could mistake it for feeling. “I shouldn’t have left you,” he said quietly.
“When?”
“In the room, making the call. You’ve been traveling without me. And I can’t get to where you’ve gone.”
She stared at him.
His attention was like a search beam, throwing light into the darkest of corners. She dropped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I think I’m just tired.”
He released her hand and topped up her wine. “Yeah, well that makes two of us. Why don’t we just relax, eh? We’re both slightly out of tune. Too much sex and too little sleep. It’s a recipe for madness.”
She smiled. Whatever it was that was going on here, it wouldn’t do to have him too suspicious. “You’re right.” She sat back and sipped at her wine. “Sorry.”
He finished his own glass and refilled it immediately. “You know, I keep remembering that old man today,” he said after a while, staring into the red of the grape. “I keep seeing his face light up when he was delivering that Dante. It was great.”
“Better than the tabernacle painting?”
He didn’t answer immediately, as if he was conjuring up the image again, checking it over. He shrugged. “In my line of work, you’ve seen one Madonna, you’ve seen them all.” He took another long slug of the wine, drinking it more like water than alcohol, as if he were now the one who was too tired to care.
“You don’t believe that.”
He grinned. “No, you’re right, I don’t. But you can get oppressed by old paint at times. The flesh is a long time dead.”
“Is that why you like the live stuff so much?”
The remark seemed neither to offend nor to surprise him. He gave a deep smile, even a mildly drunk one. “Yeah, I suppose. Something like that.”
And as he said it, she knew that she wanted him to make love to her again, and that whatever the possible deceit and the double-crossing, right at th
at moment it didn’t matter.
Back at the hotel again she undressed while he used the bathroom.
When he emerged, she was sitting on the bed flicking through late-night Italian TV with the remote. He threw himself on the other side next to her with a long groan. “God, I’m bushed,” he said, the words broken by a long yawn as he put out a hand and casually ran it down her back.
She turned to look at him: his body was splayed out on top of the covers, his cock curled and cozy, already settled in for the night, evidently uninterested in her presence. From the depths of the wardrobe a snaky American voice insinuated itself into her ear. “And don’t wear yourself out too much on the job. Remember, lover, you’ve got commitments elsewhere.” What else could it refer to but her? What other job was there?
He caught her watching him and smiled lazily. She lay back on the bed next to him. Suddenly their very closeness seemed strange. She felt aware of her own nakedness, like Eve after the apple. She wanted to get up and go somewhere else, curl up in her aloneness and fall asleep. But she also wanted him to make the first move, to prove that whatever it was that was happening between them, it was about desire as well as work.
She flicked off the TV. They lay for a moment in silence. She ran a teasing finger down his chest. “Hmm. Nice.” He opened an eye. “You’re gorgeous,” he said absentmindedly, and pulled her toward him, cupping her inside the crook of his arm as if he were cradling a baby, removing her hand from its exploration as he did so. They lay there glued together, unmoving. It was clear he would soon be asleep.
“Do you want to make love?” she said, trying to sound casual, but the words stuck in the air, harsh and exposing.
He laughed lazily, seemingly oblivious to both her anger and her fear. “Oh, Anna. Though thou art as lovely as the dawn, I’m afraid I’m finished for the night. You should have got me before the second bottle of wine. It’s all that driving. I have to sleep.” And he pulled her closer to him, as if the smother of the embrace would be its own fulfillment. She lay there, her head on his chest, his heart beating a staccato bass track in her soul. He must have registered her tension because he gave her a little squeeze. “Tomorrow we’ll have breakfast in bed. Eh?”
