‘Don’t make a decision now. Think about it tonight and tell me in the morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘And if you decide not to stay, I want you to know that wherever you go, whatever you do, if you need somewhere to stay, you can call me, yes? If in the end you go back to London –’
‘I –’
‘I know, I know,’ he stops her, but he cannot look her in the eye. ‘But if you do, say you do, and you need somewhere to stay, you can ring me, at any time. You have my number in London, yes?’
‘Yes. I have it.’
‘Don’t lose it, will you? Any time. You call me.’
‘Thank you. Yes. I understand.’
He puts a hand to his chest, over his heart, and clutches at it. She starts to get up, but he gestures her to stay where she is, smiling like a man ignoring a pain. The hand moves inside his jacket and comes out with an envelope. Holding the envelope in his open palm, he looks at it as if deciding what to do. ‘Please,’ he says at last, putting it on the box beside her. ‘I’d like you to take this,’ he tells her, withdrawing a step.
Inside the envelope there is money, a little book of banknotes. There is as much money here as she has saved in all her months of working, perhaps. ‘I cannot have this,’ she says, holding the envelope out to him, but he keeps his arms crossed, looking at her as if he is thinking of something he has done that was wrong.
‘Take it,’ he says. ‘I want you to.’
She peers into the envelope. Never would she have thought that she could hold so much money and think it useless. ‘I cannot take it,’ she says.
His eyes and mouth tighten, almost angrily. ‘Take it, please,’ he repeats. ‘If not for yourself, then for your family.’
‘It is too much,’ she says, but his hand is now reaching back, for the door. He turns away from her and she calls: ‘Mr Caldecott?’ She smiles at him, but he does not smile. His eyes waver from her and she kisses him, once, on the cheek.
He blinks, looking at her from very far away. ‘Goodnight, Eloni,’ he says, touching her arm, then he has gone.
She turns off the light and lies on the mattress, thinking of home. In her mind she sees her parents, sitting at the kitchen table with the coffee pot between them, and it is as though she is a small girl again, lying in her bed at home, seeing them through the open door of her bedroom. The full moon burning above the mountains, brighter than any lamp, she sees that too, and the silver roofs in the moonlight, and the shadows that the moon casts on the steps, shadows as delicate as dust. She remembers walking with Filip at night and talking of their plan, by the American plane, which was so hot in the afternoon sun that she blistered her hand on it. She sees the bats swooping above the stack of chairs outside the café, and the hanging sheafs of tobacco leaves, and the boxes full of springs and tubes and switches in her father’s workshop, and she knows that her home is not her home any more. Because of her, the workshop has gone, and even if the fire had not happened the town could not be home now: she has left it, and it can never again belong to her. She sees her parents at the table, looking at her as if she were someone pretending to be their daughter. She imagines being too ashamed to speak, and doors shut against her, and people turning their backs on her, and then she is thinking of the night she fled from London, walking past houses that were jammed together in a street which led to another street which looked the same and led to more streets which looked the same, as if the roads and houses grew out in front of her as she walked, so she could never come to the end of them. The darkness in which she is lying is as black as the darkness inside a lorry, and the smell of cardboard is the smell of a lorry’s cargo. Now she remembers the room in Mr Caldecott’s house, the carpet in that room, and Mr Caldecott that first morning, with his tie knotted so neatly, like a seashell. The air smells of cardboard and in the darkness she sees the tattooed man. She hears him arguing with Francesc in another room and sees the unlocked door again, the door that is the one chance she has, and she creeps through the unlocked door, down the stairs and into the street, but the door and the street lead nowhere, they lead here, back into darkness. Crying soundlessly, she sees the rusting ship on the beach at Sarandë, its hull being chewed by the sea, sinking day by day under the sand.
Blurrily he thinks of Eloni, of the Greek woman who probably isn’t Greek, and he wonders if she is here illegally, and whether Malcolm is in love with her, and whether his daughter is resentful of that affection, or is simply resentful of his absence, questions that an instant of sight might resolve, a glimpse of Malcolm’s way of looking at Eloni, of Stephanie’s way of looking at her father, but he has faces for none of them, not even imagined faces, and there are few faces in his memory now, and those that remain are fading, irreversibly, inexorably, so now the faces of his parents, of Charlotte, have almost dissolved, and when he thinks of the house in which he grew up he knows that the carpet in this room was red, that the curtains in that room were green, but he doesn’t see them any longer, he knows only these propositions about them, and in time every other residue of sight will be lost, in time the image of the wall around the building that might have been the Oak will have been destroyed, with the image of the circle of grass and the gate and the motorbike, and the memory of everything he ever saw, all will be lost to him and no new image will ever replace them. There will be no image of Claudia, never an image of Claudia, but he can hear her voice, her words, and he can hear the crunch of the switch of the lamp beside her bed in Recanati, the rough ceramic lamp with the thick vellum shade, which stands on the wooden chest that’s been waxed and polished to such a slickness that it feels like a box of waxed glass, and he can hear the sticky clack of tyres on the cobbles of Via Antonio Calcagni, but the faces of his parents have almost gone, as has the face of Paul Mortimer, yet his shop is still there in his mind, the wall of hammers and saws and the reels of chains and the little buckets of hooks and bolts and screws that make a taste of brass congeal on his tongue when he thinks of them, and it exists now in his mind, the Mortimers’ shop, with its birdseed smell and vapours of glue, as it existed when he stood in the street with Charlotte, although for Charlotte, seeing what was there, it was not there, or not so vividly there perhaps, in the stable world of the visible, where your place is fixed by a constant horizon, where continuously you know where you are, amid buildings or hills that stand where they stood the day before, and you project yourself out into the world, the inexhaustibly replete and ever-changing world of the visible, where every passing person’s face is different, but their footfalls are not, and his only constant is himself, the prison of himself, held fast with himself, within himself, receiving whatever comes to him, living in his consciousness, living in time, and in time that lacks the punctuation of day succeeding night succeeding day, unaffected by the sight of change, an oceanic time, in constant motion forwards and back, where distant days rise in a wave and collapse on yesterday, on today, the days surging and merging, mingling the library in Recanati and the faces of his parents and the hill above Gengenbach, and suddenly it seems important that he should remember the names of the friends who had been with him that day in Gengenbach, so he tries to recall them but they will not appear, and he raises hand to face, clamping his fingers over his eyes to put a stop to his thoughts.
He listens, and hears a rumour of cars on the bypass, a clatter of a metal lid, leaves hissing in the garden. There is a wisp of the perfume of roses. Below his room a deep-voiced man is talking. He talks for a minute or so, pauses, then the rumble resumes. A sash window rattles. He reaches for the recorder: ‘Nel fior degli anni estinta,’ Claudia reads, ‘Quand’è il viver più dolce, e pria che il core | Certo si renda com’è tutta indarno | L’umana speme.’ He turns the machine off. Nel fior degli anni estinta: I perished [died] in the bloom of youth [when I was young]. Quand’è il viver più dolce, e pria che il core: When life [living] is sweeter [At that time when life/living is sweeter], and before the heart [one’s heart]. Certo si renda com’è tutta i
ndarno | L’umana speme: Becomes sure [Is sure/Is certain/Knows certainly] that all human hope is vain [the vanity of human hope]. He turns the machine back on, and lets Claudia read him to sleep.
twenty
Breakfast is finished and the tables have been cleared. Malcolm stands in the doorway, looking at the sunstruck patch of vermilion carpet, at the white glow of the tablecloths by the window, at the pieces of dust glittering in the sunlight, and as he looks at the empty room he seems to hear, very distantly, the hubbub of last night. It is like a last echo, an echo that isn’t real, then the kitchen door swings open and Eloni rushes out, carrying a black plastic sack. From table to table she hurries, removing the flowers from the vases, dropping them into the sack. She nods at him and he nods in reply.
He passes the Randall Room, where Jack Naylor is standing in front of the picture of the country wedding, with his bag between his feet. His arms are crossed and his head tilted to one side, and he is smiling at Lily Corbin. ‘Thought I’d say goodbye to the old girl,’ he says. Content, he picks up the bag and jams it under his arm. ‘This is it, then,’ he says.
‘It is, Jack.’
‘Well, I’ll be off now. I think I’ll go out this way,’ he says, pointing to the terrace, and together they walk out, down the steps, across the grass, not talking. At the top of the drive Jack halts crisply, as though this were the designated spot for their parting. His handshake is strong, brief, an unsentimental parting. ‘I’m obliged,’ Jack says.
‘Stay in touch,’ he says, though he knows, they both know, that it’s unlikely that they will meet again.
Jack does not reply. He turns and walks down the drive, clutching his bag to his armpit, his head up, as if setting off on a long day’s hike to a peak he can see over the garden wall. A taxi is coming through the gate. ‘That will be for me,’ sighs Mrs Neary, on the steps behind him.
For a full five minutes Stephanie stands in front of the bathroom mirror, casually observing herself, as if she might catch herself out if she waits long enough, might notice the inadvertent flicker of the eye, of the mouth, that would give her away. Leaning on the sink, she scrutinises the eyes of the girl in the mirror. She looks the same as she did a day ago, she tells herself, and then her gaze strikes the scar on her arm and it seems strange to her, like a tattoo she doesn’t recognise.
She punches the pillows back to plumpness, tightens the sheets and wipes them smooth, raising air that has a faint smell of David’s skin. With a suspicious eye, with her father’s eye, she examines the room for clues. Assured that there is nothing to betray them, she goes out. All along the corridor swags of sheets and towels lie outside the open doors. On a whim to explore the building, she walks away from the stairs, past a room in which one of the chambermaids is smoking a cigarette by the window, and comes to a fire door. Beyond it stretches another corridor, closed by another door, which opens onto the iron steps of a fire escape. Above her head the steps twist up to the roof, and she climbs up there, to a sort of catwalk that broadens into a platform beside a chimney, and here she stops. She can see the town, the church in the High Street, the side streets making a pattern like ribs, the thread of the rail line visible all the way to the horizon. Below her the trees seem to breathe in and out in the breeze, swelling and shrinking a little, and the paths of the garden have a symmetry she hadn’t noticed before. Miles away, apparently motionless, a hot-air balloon hangs below the clouds. A car is driving away from the hotel. It passes through the gate, flashes under the trees on the hill, disappears, appears again briefly at a gap between buildings, disappears for good. Hoping that David will appear, she stays on the platform until it’s nearly time to meet up with Mr Morton.
She descends the fire escape, goes back through the door. At the end of the corridor, by the inner fire door, Eloni is about to step into a room that has no number on it. ‘Hi,’ she says and Eloni stops, holding the handle, giving her what might be a scowl, or might be an effortful smile. ‘Good morning,’ she says, seeing over Eloni’s shoulder a mattress on the floor and a clock set on top of a cardboard box. It is more a cupboard than a room, and seems to have no window. Backing away, Eloni closes the door, giving a last glimpse of a dress hanging from a shelf of paint tins.
Shocked by the sight of the windowless little room, she stands in the corridor for a minute and then, aware that no sound is coming from inside, that Eloni is waiting for her to go away, she returns to her room. She picks up her bag, checks the bed once more and goes downstairs. From the bottom of the stairs she sees, through the front doors, her father outside on the porch, doing his servile stoop for the glum old couple, and what she feels is distaste, nothing stronger than distaste.
Searching for Stephanie and Edward, Malcolm looks into the Randall Room and there they are: Edward sitting in a whicker chair, which has been turned away from the windows, and Stephanie standing in the centre of the room, beneath the chandelier, to which her face is lifted, but her eyes are shut. He pauses by the open door, watching them.
‘No?’ Edward coaxes.
Stephanie’s eyelids tighten in concentration. ‘Perhaps,’ she says.
‘Listen,’ Edward tells her, folding his arms.
‘I am,’ she replies. Her eyes relax but do not open, and her head tilts down, as if in deep thought. ‘There’s something there, possibly,’ she says. ‘But I’m not sure if I’m imagining it.’
‘Move forward a little,’ Edward suggests.
With her eyes still closed, Stephanie takes a step towards the door, and another, as though walking on slippery stones. She stops, her mouth open slightly, in an attitude of suspense and again she cranes her neck. ‘No,’ she says, disappointed. ‘I can’t hear it.’ Then she opens her eyes and sees him.
‘The taxi’s here,’ he tells them.
‘We’re ready,’ she says, and she smiles at him with a new frankness, as if in acknowledgement of his understanding, and acceptance, of her affinity with Edward.
‘Homeward,’ Edward announces, reaching for Stephanie’s hand.
Arm in arm they follow him out to the hall, where David is talking to Annie in the doorway of the office. Looking up the stairs, Annie leans towards David and laughs at his remark.
‘We left our bags there?’ Stephanie queries, pointing to the desk.
With a touch on the shoulder for Annie, David steps forward. ‘I’ve taken them out to the car. Yours and Mr Morton’s,’ he tells her, then turns to open the door for them.
‘Thank you,’ says Stephanie, leading Edward out onto the porch.
‘Not at all,’ David replies, bowing stiffly, at which Stephanie smiles.
‘Thank you,’ adds Edward.
‘Not at all,’ David repeats, bowing to Edward also. As soon as they have all passed through, he skips down the side steps to get the car doors open.
At the taxi Edward stops and offers a hand. ‘Thank you, Malcolm. It’s been most enjoyable.’
‘It’s been my pleasure. And perhaps we’ll meet again.’
‘Perhaps we shall,’ says Edward. ‘I hope so.’
Stephanie, scanning the garden over the roof of the car, makes no response. Taking Edward’s elbow, she curves her hand in the air above his head and assists him into the back seat. ‘In all right?’ she asks, before closing the door. She turns round, wiping an invisible mark from her sleeve. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Time to go.’
‘Well. Thank you for coming,’ he says, putting his hands on her shoulders.
She does not move closer. Rather than embrace him, she pats him on the ribs. ‘Great party,’ she smiles.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It went well, I think.’
‘Very well.’
The driver’s fingers are fidgeting on the steering wheel. David opens the door on the other side of the car.
‘Ring when you get back?’
‘Not crossing the Sahara, am I?’
‘No, but I’d like –’
‘We’ll speak soon, OK?’ she tells him, as if she were the pa
rent and he the child.
‘OK.’
‘OK,’ she says, tugging her hair, then she walks round the back of the taxi.
‘See you in London,’ he calls to her.
‘Look forward to it,’ she calls back, ducking into the car.
David slams the door and the taxi moves off. As it turns onto the drive Edward says something to Stephanie; she looks back and waves.
Half an hour later the Sampsons, the last of the guests to depart, have driven away. From the garden he goes down the steps into the basement, to see how things are going in the laundry room. He had expected to see Eloni, but she is not here. He returns to the hall, where Annie is sitting on the stairs, talking to David, with an unlit cigarette between her fingers. Already David has discarded his tie. Seeing him approach, Annie stands up, pocketing the cigarette. ‘Rooms all done?’ he asks her.
‘All mine are.’
‘Good. Good.’ He looks at David, who is trying to cover his open collar with a hand. ‘Could you start closing all the windows on this floor?’ he requests, then asks Annie, ‘Eloni’s still upstairs?’
‘Suppose so. Want me to get her?’
‘No no. It’s all right. Could you give David a hand?’
He walks past every room on the first floor, opening any that have been left shut. Eloni is in none of them and she is not in any of the bedrooms above. From the end of the last corridor he can see that the door of the storeroom is ajar. The light in the room is on, but he can hear nothing. He walks towards the open door, slowly, straining to hear something, expecting to hear the sound of crying. He pushes the door and sees a square of folded sheets on the mattress. On top of the boxes lies the folded quilt. The wire hanger shines above it. He stands in the doorway of the empty room, remembering the kiss, and it seems to him that he has made a grievous mistake, but he does not know what else he could have done.
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