‘So, you and he weren’t together.’
‘We’d worked it out, we were going to sell the flat, but we weren’t in a hurry, it was all harmonious. We were really good friends.’
‘Was he going to move in with someone else? Was it Angela Lang?’
She frowned, looked evasive. ‘He had various women he was seeing, no one special. He wanted to be free. I can’t believe he’s gone, it makes no sense to me. I mean, you knew him, he was incredibly optimistic, a cheerful person, total playboy, charmer.’
‘Yes.’
She refilled our glasses, then giving an exaggerated shiver and saying it was chilly, ushered me inside.
I said, ‘Maya’s going to be terribly …’ I couldn’t think how to finish. ‘Has she told you about their projects, the authors?’
‘Some. It all sounds pretty interesting. I’m hoping she’ll tell me more.’
‘They were doing a book about the Czech Republic when he died. Also, you mentioned Angela Lang; there was a man she introduced Aiden to not long ago, a guy she’d come across years back when she was a crime reporter. She’d kept in touch with him after he was convicted of hacking. Did Maya tell you about him? Dominic Hay-Godwin?’
‘A bit,’ I lied.
‘They were thinking tentatively about a memoir — the life of crime, the connections, and the hacking. He was a kind of “identity” apparently, and quite narcissistic, which was a hook to get him talking. Aiden told me about it; I said, Go on, a real-life black hat criminal, how fascinating, meet him, what fun. That was the kind of thing they did.’
Nodding, I was still bewildered by the fact that I couldn’t remember Sophie, yet she was talking to me warmly, as if we were old friends.
‘I’d kind of forgotten about it, but Aiden did tell me the criminal had taken to contacting him — a lot. That it was unnerving.’
I listened. As she talked she played with her necklace, shifted her glass, brushed imaginary crumbs from the table and from her sleeves. Her face was small and heart-shaped, with narrow, intense eyes; she had a slight gap between her front teeth.
‘Angela eventually told him the guy had some Mafia connection. He said maybe she should have told him that in the first place!’
‘Mafia?’
‘Angela often introduced them to weird and wonderful people, like the boy who escaped from Isis. But he decided that last one wasn’t such a good idea.’
She poured more wine. ‘Anyway, Aiden didn’t think there was a book in it.’
‘Well. Talking to the Mafia, how interesting.’
She held up her hands. ‘I didn’t want to know about it. I’m a boring corporate suit. Aiden teased me about being narrow, he called me the bean counter. He always used to tell people that after 9/11 happened I said, Excuse me, but who the fuck are the Taliban? I had no idea. He loved that stuff, but I don’t like hearing about current events, crime, all that. Too depressing.’
I listened. In the distance the faint thumping of a stereo; outside, beyond the window, I could see the cat making its way along the wall in the soft dusk.
‘I’d rather watch Lord of the Rings, read Harry Potter. Life’s real enough.’
‘Sure, of course,’ I said, sipping my wine, unhappy that Maya had been near a dangerous criminal, and it came to me that I had wronged her by allowing her to go to London by herself, I should have followed her, stayed near, I had neglected her, and that was why she was lost.
Sophie was drinking fast. I asked her for a glass of water. She drank and talked, her cheeks grew flushed and she stumbled over the odd word as she told me about meeting Aiden for the first time on Bondi Beach, he a young British backpacker afflicted with severe sunburn and she a commerce student who gave him first aid in the form of cold beer and a room in her rented house around the cliffs at Bronte, summer light through the rattan blind, sex and smoking and cheap wine and in the morning there was an earthquake and a vase fell on his head and gave him a black eye …
I realised that she was actually heartbroken, and sat listening as the sky outside turned black and the streetlights came on; there we were, two widows drowning our sorrows and talking around the gaps in our memories.
She talked about Patrick, strange to hear someone I couldn’t recall telling me about her fondness for him, when I’d come here determined to lie to her that I remembered her husband. And even more odd that she remembered me, or some version of me that she described. Apparently on that Hyde Park night I’d talked a lot about little Maya, who was being babysat by Patrick’s niece, and had argued with someone about climate change, and had gone off at dawn supporting Patrick who’d been crippled after slipping sideways on the dance floor under the weight of Sophie Greenaway.
‘That knee was never the same again,’ I said.
As I was leaving, she kissed me on both cheeks.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, ‘do you want to give this to Maya?’ She pressed something into my hand. ‘It’s Aiden’s, he said it was important.’
It was a plastic object, not much bigger than my thumbnail.
‘Aiden got me to store it at my office. He was going to give it to Angela but then he died. I feel I shouldn’t just chuck it away.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Something to do with their work, presumably confidential.’
I thanked her, and walked back to the Tube.
The night was hot, the air humid. At the entrance to the park a fox turned and looked at me, its wild eyes intent, reflecting light.
THIRTEEN
Mazarine took the tiny plastic object from me, weighing it in her palm.
We were out on the roof terrace. The night air was full of dust and seeds that caught in the throat. She coughed and kneaded the small of her back, listening.
‘Sophie and Patrick danced, they both fell over and he hurt his knee, but I have no memory of her, none at all.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘But her recollection’s so clear. It’s strange — I have a problem with recognising faces. I can sometimes remember them from a photo, but I can’t visualise them. So, if I’ve never seen a picture of you, I have no mental image of your face.’
‘Can you visualise people close to you … your parents? If you try now?’
I closed my eyes, shook my head. ‘No, not at all. The only face I can see is Maya’s. She called it my Bromhead Syndrome. Back home, I used to say a passing hi to a man in the street because I thought he was the cartoonist, Bromhead. Then I found out he wasn’t. The guy must have wondered why I stopped saying hello. I get people wrong.’
She thought about it, shrugged. ‘Okay, sure, some kind of face blindness. Let’s try this thing in the computer.’
I opened my laptop, took the flash drive Sophie had given me, and inserted it. Mazarine drew her chair close to mine and we looked at the screen. A single file appeared with the title Kuznetsov/Idrisov. I clicked on it, and the document opened to a picture of a padlock.
Mazarine fiddled with the cursor. ‘It’s encrypted, locked. Unreadable.’
‘What about the file names?’
‘They’re Russian.’
‘Sophie mentioned the Czech Republic. Nothing about Russia. So, anyway, we can’t read it.’
‘Not without a password, and probably an encryption key. Take it out.’
I ejected the flash drive.
Mazarine got up and took it out of my hand. ‘I need to lie down. My back.’
I switched off the laptop and we went inside, leaving the doors to the terrace open. She lay down, shifting to get comfortable, while I sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Better?’
‘Yes. Russian names, hmm.’
‘What do you mean, hmm?’
She smiled and shrugged, as though acknowledging a foible or eccentricity. ‘I don’t know about Russians. One branch of my family — old relatives — grew up in East Germany, they suffered under the Stasi.’
‘What’s that got to do with Rus
sia?’
‘The Wall had everything to do with Russia.’
‘Anyway, Sophie said Aiden thought the file was important, but it could relate to anything.’
‘She wanted to get rid of it.’
‘Yes, but didn’t throw it in the rubbish. She thought Maya might know what to do with it.’
I sat next to her and she turned on her side, talking. ‘So, she didn’t really tell you anything helpful. Just that they met a hacker, who has some Mafia connection.’
‘That’s pretty much it. And a lot of reminiscing about Aiden. We got through far too much wine.’
Mazarine considered. ‘By the way, what on earth would the associates of a criminal hacker think of him meeting with a journalist?’
‘Sophie said he was narcissistic.’
‘So maybe it flattered him, the idea of a book.’
‘But then Aiden decided it was a bad idea and gave it up. Oh, and the man got a bit insistent. Contacting Aiden.’
Mazarine looked at her fingernails, idly. ‘I suppose the Angela woman put the two of them together, the narcissist and the editor, to see what would come out.’
‘Maybe.’ I was sceptical, resistant to her tone, which I thought owed something to her consumption of crime thrillers.
‘She was looking for a good story herself, I suppose.’
‘Well, she is a journalist. But she’s not a court reporter, not any more, she’s a security correspondent. I can’t see that the flash drive is anything significant. Aiden would have met strange types all the time.’
‘Although, maybe, as an experiment, when you go for your drink with Angela Lang, don’t mention it.’
‘Why?’
‘If you don’t tell her anything, if you don’t say you went to see Aiden’s wife, you can just wait to see what she says.’
‘Okay … I’m just here to research my first novel,’ I said, in a faintly satirical tone.
‘Exactly. A novel set in London and Paris.’
I yawned, stretched out. ‘God. My daughter signs off an email “Warm wishes”? It feels like a nightmare, everything’s wrong, but … if I start screaming no one will hear me,’ I finished up, feebly.
We lay facing each other. Voices came up from the Square, a motorbike droned along the street.
Mazarine said, ‘Close your eyes and visualise my face.’
‘I told you, I can’t.’
She put her hand on my cheek. ‘Try,’ she said.
I closed my eyes. ‘No. You’ve vanished. Completely gone.’
‘Not an inkling?’
‘Just a blank. Sorry.’
‘Open your eyes slightly. Peer through.’
‘Very funny.’
‘What if I kissed you?’ she said.
Did I dream she said that? Mazarine. Did I invent it?
I once asked Dr Werner Bismarck, ‘Do you think I exist?’ Another time I asked him, ‘Am I making myself up as I go along?’ I used to come away from our sessions wondering if he and the room where we met, an office in the back of an old shop, with french doors opening onto a pleasant garden full of flowers, was real only in my imagination. Is that what we were doing, Mazarine and I, making up our own reality as we went along? Lying beside her, I woke in the night and wondered if she was real, but in the morning she rose, large as life, and declared that her back was cured.
‘Take this,’ she said, unscrewing a plastic bottle and handing me a large speckled lozenge. ‘It’s your B group, and three essential oils.’
In the dining hall, to which I was becoming resigned, despite my aversion to its institutional smells and the mounds of congealed food shining under the hot lights, Mazarine’s tone was efficient yet soft, purposeful yet not without a lilting quality, she was all yin and yang as she spooned up her cereal, and I thought of Patrick, of course I did, and eyed her across the table, taking stock of her features: wide mouth, strong cheekbones, thick shiny blonde hair, an expression of confidence and solidity that seemed identifiably European, as culturally anchored and settled as the citizens you see biking through the streets of Amsterdam — Werner Bismarck would have called it a quality of Wohlstand — but then she had something else about her too, a balancing element of humour, freedom, openness.
We’d chosen a table in direct sunlight and it was getting too hot. I stood up.
‘I’ll go and get a coffee.’
‘Another? You just got one.’
I looked down at the full mug. ‘Oh, I don’t remember—’
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
Last night she put her hands on my cheeks and leaned close, moving so her lips were almost but not quite brushing my face and lips, a mime of kissing that seemed to go on for a long time while I, surprised, hot, flustered, reeled with the effect of it, yes reeled is not too strong a word, although of course I was lying down, and couldn’t actually sway or stagger, but my sense of balance went haywire and my head swam. When I thought of it now, the neurons fired up in my brain and my scalp prickled. Even if my mind couldn’t decide whether she was real, my body registered the data; all the nerves in my skin had flared at the expected touch and then she’d pulled away and said in a sighing voice, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be so expressive.’
What she’d left me with was a physical memory of anticipation. Every time I thought of it my nerves flared, waiting for the touch that—
But here she was, sitting down to her boiled egg, telling me she had work to do, client emails to write, but that we should talk before I went to meet Angela Lang at the Rosewood Hotel at six.
She suggested a visit to the Residence’s health club in the afternoon; she thought it would be good for us. It was possible to buy a day pass, and we could use the swimming pool. She wanted to keep up regular exercise, now her back was better. She jutted her chin, all toughness and purpose, tapping her fingers on the table.
We parted in the courtyard. She went up to the Normanby and I sat on a bench in the sun. I closed my eyes, but couldn’t conjure up her face. If I’d seen a photo of her I could possibly have remembered the image, so perhaps recalling an image required one part of the brain and visualisation another? But then remembering a photo itself required visualisation — of the remembered image. So why couldn’t I produce a picture out of my own memory of being face to face? Was this related to feeling I couldn’t ‘read’ women, that I wanted to be friendly yet couldn’t get close?
Well, ask a neurologist, I suppose. Or a shrink: Werner and his talk of openness, perestroika and glasnost. Tear down those walls.
I’d located two new email addresses, friends of Maya, and now sent brief messages from my phone, although remembered that just before she left Maya had told me email was outdated these days, that some of her friends hardly used it, and instead sent messages only through Facebook and Snapchat and other services that would themselves be outdated soon enough. Still, I sent two signals out into the void, explaining that Maya seemed to be incommunicado at this point of her European holiday, and that I had a quick question for her, did anyone have a clue as to—?
After I’d clicked send, a sense of defeat came over me. The silence weighed so heavily it was making me feel hopeless. I ought to be purposeful and orderly like Mazarine, frowning over her sensible breakfast, going off to work on her files. I thought about her concern for her clients, her conscientiousness, the solemnity with which she did the right thing by herself and the world; she had an earnestness that I (the child of Inez) found hilarious and yet another part of my self admired. She had a gallant quality, and then she would break into a smile that was careless, full of good humour and completely devoid of malice. I’d seen the same, almost joyful look on Joe’s face, and understood how Maya had been smitten.
I could try to describe the essence of Mazarine’s personality, but still I couldn’t picture her. I could see Maya and Joe, because I surrounded myself with photos of them, and I remembered those. The brain is a mystery.
I walked to Waterstones, and wandered among shelves
that offered self-help, special diets, pop psychology, advice on giving up smoking, vegan diets, child-rearing, careers. I crossed to the fiction section, dithered, and in the end bought three novels, shrugging at my choices even as I paid for them. Making choices was never my forte; how often I used to turn to Patrick and ask, What do you think? And later, I would put my hand on Maya’s shoulder and say, Which one, darling, the red or the black?
Like her father, Maya would choose at once. Wouldn’t even hesitate.
We met at the Nuffield health club, produced our day passes and were admitted. It was plush, with clean changing rooms and a decent-sized pool and gym, far more luxurious than the chaotic Oasis in Shaftesbury Avenue where I used to take Maya when she was small.
With my back to Mazarine I changed into running gear, and when I turned she was wearing a dark blue bathing suit that suited her full curves and shapely legs. She walked past me with an air of cautiousness, her glasses fogging up in the humidity. There were goose bumps on her thighs.
‘You’re not swimming?’ she said, and looked suddenly shy.
‘No togs.’
‘It’s the best way to keep fit while travelling. Jasmine used to do fifty lengths.’
‘I’ll do the cross-trainer,’ I said, and stupidly mimed the action of the machine. ‘It’s meant to be good for weight loss.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at the floor. A flush spread across her cheeks.
Silence. I stared at her freckled shoulder.
She smiled absently, pushed the glasses up the bridge of her nose and opened the door to the pool. I watched her hesitate at the edge, clasping her hands and shivering before climbing onto the pool ladder, still wearing her glasses.
Three women burst in, doctors, judging by their talk of research and hospitals and labs, two Americans and a Canadian.
I followed them to the gym and was aware of them while I was working on the cross-trainer, their talk, their subtly different accents, their personalities. These details preoccupied me; my workout went by quickly.
I found Mazarine sitting in the changing room, hands on her knees, her face flushed.
Mazarine Page 14
