101 Pieces of Me (27 page)

I bent down, started to roll up the note, but stopped, and held out it to him. “Show me.”

Sighing, he rolled the note, put it to his nostril and bent over the powder. And at that moment, Aidan stepped from between the rocks, his camera round his neck and a flash bulb held aloft. Before David could move he had taken a photograph. Then, for good measure, he took another, of David’s horrified face, and another, of David’s arms looming towards the camera as he tried to wrench it from Aidan’s hands.

For the second time, I watched them fight. This time, though, Aidan had the upper hand. On his side he had the darkness, David’s drug-addled state, and his faithful accomplice. I picked up the specially sharpened penknife Aidan had tossed beside me on the stones, cut the leather strap of the camera and made off with it, up the path, back to the road and, I hoped, the motorcycle Aidan had left hidden in the trees.

A
s soon as the buildings of Castiglioncello began to appear on the road, I stopped the motorcycle, turned off the engine and pushed it through the blackness of the early hours. It was hard work; though it wasn’t a very big machine, and I had practised pushing it, by the time I wheeled it into the courtyard I was exhausted. The ride had chilled me; the sweater Aidan had left with the motorcycle had been little protection over my thin party dress, and the headache that had plagued me all evening still gripped my skull. All I wished for was a bath and bed. But before I could enter the flat, I had to do what Aidan and I had agreed.

I opened the door of the lavatory we shared with the couple upstairs. It was inconvenient having to come down to the courtyard every time we wished to use it. But for our purposes tonight, it was a godsend. Once I was inside and had shut the door, I was in utter darkness.

The sleeves of Aidan’s sweater covered my hands. I shook them back, carefully rewound the film and removed the spool. I had practised this, too, in the dark, twenty or thirty times. Then I took an oilskin packet of the kind fishermen use to store their hooks, pushed the spool of film into one of the compartments and folded the packet. I tied it as securely as I could, climbed onto the lavatory seat, reached up and hid it in the cistern.

Then, trembling with relief, I pushed the motorcycle into the neglected shed behind the building and padlocked it shut. Then, with the key in my hand, I tiptoed up our stairs and into my bedroom. I had not the energy to heat water for a bath. I lay down fully dressed, with the smell of the smoke on Aidan’s sweater in my nostrils and the calling of early-morning seagulls in my ears, and fell into a death-like sleep.

I
awoke to an empty apartment. I did not need to look at my watch; the height of the sun told me it was too late to go to my Italian class even if I had wished to. I wandered through rooms shaded and striped by the shutters, thinking about Aidan. His plan had been to get away from the beach as fast as he could, negotiating the coastline back to Castiglioncello in the hope that David would not be able to do the same. I imagined David, beside himself with rage, weaving his way up the path to the road. Had he gone back to the villa, collected his car and driven to wherever he was staying, his brain fuzzy, his body grazed from the stony beach where he had struggled with Aidan?

He definitely would not have reported the incident truthfully, if he reported it at all. Perhaps he would explain away his appearance by cursing that madman Aidan Tobias, who had turned up out of nowhere and attacked him
again
! Aidan had impressed upon me the importance of hiding the roll of film and, when they were printed, the photographs. “David Penn’s got contacts everywhere,” he had explained. “I wouldn’t put it past him to get us burgled.”

When I had bathed and dressed, I stepped into the white light of mid-morning and crossed the road, intending to visit the bread shop and maybe pick up a punnet of strawberries from the fruit stall.

But I had hardly reached the opposite pavement when I saw something that brought me to a halt. Aidan, who should be busy on location at this time, was standing on the corner. Hatless, with a cigarette dangling from one hand and his jacket from the other, he gave me a sheepish smile.

“Got the prints,” he said. “Got the sack, too. Again.”

I
bought the bread and strawberries and some pastries, and Aidan and I walked through the bleached streets to our little green-tiled courtyard and up the steps to the apartment. It was cool enough, but Aidan went straight to the bottle of water he had left packed in ice from the ice van that morning and poured us each a glass. “Let’s pretend this has got a shot of whisky in it,” he said, and we drank.

“May I see the photographs?” I asked impatiently. “How did you get them done so quickly? And, for that matter, why have you been sacked?”

He put down his glass. “Actually, that’s all one question and all one answer. I sneaked into the darkroom to develop the photographs instead of getting ready for my scene. Of course, in came the cinematographer, who guards that darkroom as if it were his only child, or possibly his wife, and bawled me out.”

“That’s hardly enough to
fire
you, though, is it?”

“Ah. Well, I was already on my fifth or sixth warning. You know what I’m like, bored to death with it all. Gio kept letting me off, as I’m a sort of friend, but even he had to give in when the cinematographer, the costume lady, the AD and even the old codger who makes the coffee started to moan about me.” He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a white envelope about the size of an ordinary letter. “By the time they’d finished arguing, I’d managed to get these photographs done, so when Gio came and said it was the last straw, I scarpered before they could change their minds.”

He laid out the photographs on the table: David about to sniff the cocaine; David holding his hand in front of his face, though not succeeding in hiding it; David lunging at the camera with rage in his eyes. I looked at them, and the world swam. I blinked away the inexplicable tears. “They’re perfect, Aidan.”

He gathered them and put them back in their envelope. “I wouldn’t have got them at all if you hadn’t done your bit so superlatively well.” He held up the envelope. “Got the negatives in here as well. I’ll put them in a bank deposit box.”

“Aidan…” I began. There was a confession on my lips; I wasn’t sure whether to make it. But even if I regretted it afterwards, I could not be anything but truthful to a man who had bared such painful truths of his own. “About doing my bit superlatively well.”

He was puzzled. “Yes?”

“When I was with David, it was strange. It was confusing. It was as if I saw two people.”

Aidan was frowning, but his eyes willed me to go on.

“I’m not explaining this very well, am I? What I mean is that I wasn’t repelled by him. The moment I saw him I remembered how much I … felt for him.”

“And?” said Aidan, still watching me, still frowning.

“And so it wasn’t superlative acting or anything. He believed me because the emotion I felt was actually that – emotion. I was even nearly crying. On the beach, when he kissed me, I was sure I’d be repelled. But I wasn’t.”

Aidan’s head went down; his hair flopped over his forehead. Incongruously, I decided he needed to go to the barber. “So you are still in love with him,” he said in a small voice. “Is that what you are saying?”

“No, not at all! I just needed to tell you the truth. I was unprepared for the rush of memories and recognition of what he looks like and everything that I felt in that moment. But when he kissed me I felt nothing, Aidan,
nothing
! And then it all came back – the way he duped me, his infidelity, his treatment of your mother, his lies… Please, believe me, my love for him has passed. It’s dead.”

W
hen Aidan had put the photographs back in his pocket, he waited a few moments in silence. Then he came closer to where I stood by the table. “Clara, are you crying?”

“No, of course not.”

I looked up at him. The muscles of his face and neck had tensed, as if he were bracing himself for something. But his eyes were full of tenderness. Hoping he would not see how affected I was, I said, “You told me once that my life has changed too much for me to go back to my Welsh valley and marry a farmer. And it has.”

Without speaking, he took me in his arms and held me to his chest, his chin resting on the top of my head. We stayed like that for a long time. Then I drew back and lifted my face, and looked into his. The very first time I had seen him, on the set of the film, I had thought how actorish his face was – sharp-angled, with the intense look so necessary for the screen. And sitting beside me when I had collapsed on his stairs, he had looked at me as if every memory, every thought, the essence of his being was concentrated in that moment. He was careless, it was true, but his carelessness did not carry irresponsibility with it. He knew what was morally right and did it.

He put his cheek on mine. “Clara … please answer me one question,” he began, but I put my finger on his lip.

“Shh. I know what you want to ask, and there is no need. I am where I wish to be. I will never go anywhere else unless you want me to.”

He kissed me, and I kissed him. It was not like those kisses with David in hotels and taxis, which had been frenzied, guilty, a means to an end. It was like being swept up and kept aloft by a current of feeling. We kissed and kissed. Flies landed on the strawberries and pastries, but we were too preoccupied to brush them away. I could not predict what would happen when David saw the pictures. But today, Aidan and I were safe in our little room, behind the shutters while the sun beat down outside, and the little fountain played in the courtyard, and the world was at peace.