Mapping the Edge (23 page)

Home—Sunday
A.M.

N
EXT TO ME
, as if she had heard my thoughts, Lily stirred and turned over, her left arm flopping over onto my chest. Her hand felt cold. I held it in mine for a while, then slipped it in underneath the sheets.

Above me I caught the creaking noise of bedsprings in the spare room upstairs. I lay and listened. Maybe I'd woken them with my wanderings. The sound stopped. I imagined Mike folding himself around Paul's body, like two spoons in a drawer. In the dark I looked at my watch. Almost 3:00
A.M.
An hour later, European time.

I closed my eyes and let the dope take me where it wanted. It took me to Italy.

I imagined her in a hotel room, a man by her side, the phone neglected in the pursuit of orgasm. How good can sex be, Anna? Enough to rearrange your loyalties? Enough to make you forget your home? You tell me.

I tried again and found her at an airport, dozing uncomfortably in a bucket chair under strip lighting, the flight board silent in readiness for the next morning's rush. Everybody misses planes. It's part of life's rich pageant. But they still manage to talk to the right people, to reassure them back home.

Finally I caught sight of her in a field of resplendent high-summer sunflowers, her body lying between their fat stalks like a rag doll, the earth around her dark with spilled blood.

“She sounded sort of . . . sad, like she didn't want to go. . . .”

So many stories . . . So many possibilities . . . But then I'm good at make-believe. Always have been.

For the longest time after she didn't come home, I thought my mother had been run down by a bus. Well, how do you tell a ten-year-old girl that her mother's body has been found cut in two on a railway line in Hampshire, a one-way ticket away from home in her pocket? No note, no explanation, nothing, not even the faint imprint of a bruise in the middle of her back where someone might have helped her fall. It didn't make any sense. She sometimes took day trips when she was off work: checking out the gardens of stately homes for planting ideas, occasionally moving from one to another along a railway line, but with never a hint of
Brief Encounter
in the station bars. Except, of course, how would we ever know? It takes two to tell, and if one was dead the other might feel shy about speaking. I'm sure my dad must have thought about it; but then, only he would have known if the fault line of their marriage ran through sex or simply destiny.

In the years that have followed I have wondered if he would have preferred it if they'd never found the body. At least that way he wouldn't have had to cope with the horror. We could have pretended that she
had
really gone missing. Had had amnesia, got a better offer from Hollywood, run off with an exiled Hungarian seaman. The late sixties were wild times, after all. But bisected on a railway track? It was so macabre, so final. When did I first learn the truth? Playground gossip, no doubt. I wouldn't want the same thing to happen to any child I loved.

To redress the balance I wove a little white magic in the night, opening my eyes and bringing Anna into the bedroom, sitting her on the edge of the bed, her eyes bright with laughter.

“And remember that time you went missing?” I said, and because I was still stoned, I think I might have said it out loud. “Christ, you wouldn't believe how worried we all were.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I know. Sorry. Stupid misunderstanding, wasn't it?”

I nodded. “Certainly was. Well, just as long as you're back now.”

Only she wasn't.

“For Christ's sake, where are you, Anna?” I said into the open air. “What are you doing now?”

Away—Sunday
A.M.

S
HE WAS LOOKING
out through a window, the late-afternoon sun cutting a long shadow across the side of her face. She had a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of her head, pulling up a cloud of unruly hair from her scalp underneath. In half-profile there were little lines running from the edge of her nose toward the corners of her mouth, making her look tired, even sad. The cup of coffee in front of her was half-drunk. Her eyes were a long way away. She was thinking of something or someone else.

Then the mood changed and she was walking across a piazza after a shower of rain, the surface of the stones alive with light, the gleaming white façade of Santa Croce unmistakable in the background. She looked busy, intent, happy almost.

To the right came another series of close-ups: her with a glass of wine in her hand, talking to someone—a waiter, presumably—then eating in a restaurant. She recognized the blue check tablecloths; it was a place near the Boboli Gardens where she had drunk too much one lunchtime, then had to go back to the hotel for a sleep afterward. Later that same day she had walked through the city before dusk and sat for a while on the steps of the Baptistery. She looked lovely in this picture, fading sunlight the color of honey all around and her black hair fierce against the golden doors.

Laid out in a photograph album the pictures would be self-explanatory: Anna in Florence. Except you might perhaps add one more word—“Alone.”

But then, she
had
been. That was the difference between her and the other woman. (Was Paola really her name?) If the pictures of Paola were more arresting it was not only because she was prettier, but because she had been plucked out of a life, busy, animated, while she, Anna, looked like a woman caught in transit, waiting for something to happen. It was hardly fair. He should have met her at home, where her world was full of friends, crowded places, chattering times. And Lily. How could you make a portrait of her life without Lily? Though you wouldn't want any such photos taken by him.

She closed her eyes and fell back on the mattress. The world spun in the darkness and the pervading stink of the chemicals made her feel sick. She pulled herself up onto one elbow and tried again.

The room was small, the ceiling low. There was no window, and only one door, closed. It was hot, despite the buzz of air-conditioning. A world underground. His world. So where was he? Her head hurt, but the pain seemed a long way away. He had put some kind of rough dressing on the wound. Underneath she could feel a spongy swelling and the burn of broken skin. How much blood had she lost? Did that explain the weakness and nausea, or was it something else? Had he given her another dose of syrup to keep her quiescent?

Get up, she thought. Get up and get out of here.

I can't. I can't.

She didn't want to cry, so instead she looked back at the photos. It was a strange feeling; being surrounded by images of oneself, yet a different self, a self seen through someone else's eyes. Like having your soul stolen away by the camera. Is this who Anna Franklin really was? So pensive, so sad?

He had been there all along, it seemed. Or at least since day two. Was that café on the first afternoon or the second? Before or after her visit to Santa Croce? She couldn't remember. Never mind. How weird that she hadn't noticed him. Too self-absorbed, no doubt. Not listening to the electricity in the air around her.

She shifted her gaze to the next wall.

Where she expected to find mirrors, instead she got beds. She recognized the green cover before she recognized herself lying curled under it. Each shot had been taken from the same place, a vantage point high above, in the ceiling—embedded in the light fixture, presumably. In sequence, they told the story of a night: an arm flung out here, a leg moved there, like one of those children's books where you flick the pages to make the animal at the corner turn somersaults, or a jump-cut television ad for a sleeping draft or a cold remedy. She looked peaceful, deeply asleep, no hint of the salacious or the erotic about her pose, just the creepy intimacy of surveillance, the blinking eye of a camera shutter. Had this been her sleeping off the drug, or the night after, when she had woken once to find the light on, puzzling as she was sure she had turned it off? Now she understood the composition of noises from last night. He had unlocked the door and driven away in the car because he had known all along that she was awake to hear him. Because all the time he had been looking at her.

Next came the mirror shots: a creative selection of them. Reading them now made them seem almost prophetic: a madwoman, disheveled and tense, pretending she wasn't. Even in the shots where the mirror had tempted her into vanity and the smile had arrived, sucking in the cheeks and opening the eyes, the effect seemed disturbing rather than seductive.

Where she had thought she had concealed doubt, the camera had found it immediately, in the flicker of the eyes, the parting of the lips to pull in a fast breath. Fear leaked out through the pores of her skin. To catch it so acutely would have taken sensitivity and skill. No doubt he would also have caught the next subtle shift of emotion, from fear into fury and sly determination. But there was no record of that shift on the wall. This gallery was selective, the story it told predetermined. She needn't have bothered with her monologue. He had never believed it anyway.

The remaining photos took up half of the last wall. He had been working hard, but the clock would have been against him. There had been no time to frame or even properly arrange here, just a run of quick blowups taped to the wall. Obviously he hadn't made up his mind about the selection yet. Some, the ones taken against the cellar wall, were simple and rushed, a body slumped, head down onto the chest, the wound hardly visible. Others, like those of her in the chair, were almost baroque in their elegance, the angry gash of blood echoing the deep red of her dress, her skin drained, white as an enamel sink.

From the still life of an ordinary woman in a café to the slow destruction of a special, chosen one. Half a wall left. Room for one more photo shoot.

She stared at the empty space. Her head was throbbing again, closer now, demanding her attention, willing her to close her eyes and lie down for a while. She lay back on the mattress. Her body gave a sigh of relief. She knew she ought to be doing something, spurred on by the terror that what she was looking at was a chronicle of her own death. But somehow she felt almost disconnected from it, as if whatever drug he had given her to relax her body had relaxed her mind as well. How extraordinary—to be looking at your own death and not to be alarmed by it.

She forced herself to keep thinking.

She thought of Lily, and with that a great sweetness flooded through her. She wished she could talk to her, one last time, a few last moments. She felt sure she would know what to say. The right words for the rest of Lily's life. Love without bitterness.

It had always been Anna's fear that Lily would die before she did. That she would open the door to the ultimate nightmare—the uniform on the doorstep and the words “I'm so sorry, Miss Franklin, I have bad news for you.” At least now that wouldn't happen. On the contrary, her death would ensure Lily's longevity. Not even a godless universe is capricious enough to deliver the same horror over two generations. One murder would surely prevent another. She felt almost a sense of comfort in the thought. Stella would look after her. As an expert in such particular pain she would know what to do, how to comfort, when to leave alone. Lily would survive. That was all that mattered.

Was this how Paola had felt now? she thought. Did she keep fighting or did she give up as well? Had she been brought this low by the same means, a set of photos and tales of lost love? Or had she perhaps been the first?

It must have been so easy. She could see it all now. All you had to do was want it enough. The rest was planning and luck: the right stranger at the right time, someone with whom you had no connection, someone away from home who wouldn't be missed or pursued until you and they were a long time gone. She must have fallen into his hands; cheap hotel, obviously alone, no husband or boyfriend, just a guidebook and some rusty Italian. Travelers made such good targets. Any big city would supply the goods. Probably he didn't always pick Florence; more sensible to cast your net wide, that way it would take a while for the cases to match up. Maybe he let them all call home. Maybe that was one of the identifying features. Or maybe he had got cocky with her.

Of course, he wouldn't get away with it forever. They never did. Eventually he'd make a mistake and they'd find him. Find it all: the house, the bodies, the photographs.

The photographs . . . The ones on the walls were only his selection. There would be others: contact sheets, banks of negatives, film after film, step by step, shot by shot from the sunshine into the dark. Would they show them to the families? You wouldn't really want them to do that. Or even to have them hung up in a courtroom as evidence. These were not the pictures one would choose to be remembered by. Death was a private thing. Just between the two of you. Like sex or terror.

She felt a slow pain start to burn inside her stomach, vying for her attention with the lassitude and the throbbing in her head. She looked at the wall and saw her own fear staring back at her and she knew that the drug, whatever it was, was beginning to wear off.

No, better that they never saw this. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

Away—Sunday
A.M.

S
HE STEPPED OUT
of her clothes and slid under the sheet next to him, careful to stay on the other side of the bed faced away from him. He didn't stir. She listened to his breathing: noisy, deep, a man at rest. Even with the distance between them she could feel the heat coming off him. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She was so tired she couldn't think straight, but neither could she stop thinking. The minutes ticked by. She was still trying when he gave a half-groan, flipped over from the side to the middle of the bed, and, finding her body in his path, threw a lazy arm around her waist. It lay there for a second, leaden, uninterested; then, as if realizing what it had found, the grip tightened and he pulled her toward him.

“Mmmn, you're cold,” he said after a while, his voice muzzy, half-buried between her shoulder blades.

He had been asleep all this time, hadn't he?

She lay still, as if she hadn't heard, as if she were the one who'd been woken, not him. He ran his hand down over the surface of her left leg. “Freezing.” And he sounded more alert now. “Where have you been?”

“Oh, just up for a while,” she mumbled. “I couldn't sleep.”

There was a pause. The hand kept on moving, methodical rubbing movements, slow warmth seeping into the chill. “Where's up?” And something in the way he said it made her decide not to lie.

“I went for a walk. I didn't want to disturb you.”

“Silly girl.” He nuzzled himself closer, like an animal burrowing deeper into earth. She felt the bristle of his stubble as he rolled his chin against the skin of her back; the finest of sandpaper, halfway between caress and irritant. Just a few hours ago she had lain next to this man desperate for him to touch her; now it was all she could do not to flinch away as he did so. The hand that had been working her left leg slipped itself deftly in between her thighs. “You should have woken me.” She shifted her legs apart, but slightly, more out of politeness than invitation. “I could have helped you sleep,” he said, the voice blurry but playful now, petulant almost, like a child's.

And as he said it she felt his prick stiffen against her left buttock. It sent a small shock wave through her, the line between old lust and new tension too close to call. He mistook one for the other and trailed his hand upward, his fingers meshing into her pubic hair, until he found the moistness underneath. “Mmm. Nice.”

They lay like that for a while, neither of them moving, almost testing out the air. She thought about the portrait of him she had conjured up in the square, the flesh thick with ego and self-indulgence, then discarded it again. She could embellish it or let it go. Relax, she thought. Night fucks are the great freebies of sex, remember: bodies slipping out to play before the mind has had time to wake up. She moved her legs farther apart. Even bad men can do good things if you let them. “At last,” he muttered, the words almost lost in her flesh. He played deeper, finding the entrance to her, opening it up with his middle finger, testing the temperature inside. She pushed herself down onto his hand, searching for the right pressure. They played for a while, then he slipped his finger out and, pulling her body back and up until the position was right, he slid his prick into her, each move so languid, so careless almost, that they might indeed have still been half-asleep.

The night sat thickly around them. He let out a long gasp as he pushed in and in the short silence before the next breath she heard the town clock hit the single chime of four-thirty. It would be dawn before long. She felt him moving to and fro, a calculated slowness, each thrust long and careful, savoring the moment. If you didn't know better you might think it was about art as much as pleasure. But then, like most men with a vocation, he obviously gained satisfaction from his own proficiency. “Come on, Anna,” he said quietly into her ear. At the same time his fingers continued their plucking, searching for the right spot, the right rhythm with which to bring her inside the charmed circle. “You didn't think you could leave, eh? Time to come home.”

He knows, she thought suddenly, the realization rushing through her like a shock wave. He's been awake all this time and he knows that I know. But how could he? It's not possible. She gave a little laugh out loud, and to her satisfaction heard a throaty darkness in it, the sound pulled from her body rather than her mind. You want me back, lover, you have to find me first, she said half to herself, half aloud. And with her defiance she ignited a flare of desire.

He felt it too. He pushed himself farther in, and at the same time his fingers found their mark and they both registered her sharp involuntary intake of breath. “There. That's better,” he said, and the voice was firmer now. He turned his attention from himself to her, playing her more confidently now, connecting the catch in her flesh with that in her throat, perfecting the movement with each repetition, feeling the momentum build. She let him do it. How many times had they made love, he and she? Fifteen, twenty times? Enough for them both to know that she was on safe ground now. In a moment she wouldn't need him anymore; the dynamic of her own excitement would do it for her, the overwhelming tension of pleasure lifting her inside and out of her body until she was spinning and exploding in space, triumphant, alone, oblivious of him, his work, his vanity, even his pleasure.

He was waiting for the moment to join her, for her to give him a sign so they could do it like good lovers should, in the perfect gigolo illusion of togetherness, both of them in orbit at the same time. But she wasn't interested in him anymore, only in herself. As she wrenched her orgasm away from him into herself he realized too late and tried to catch up with a few deep plunges. But she was already gone; and when it was over, and love—or, at least, etiquette—required that she return to join him while he finished the job, she kept herself deliberately away, her mind and her body indifferent to his frantic rising thrusts. Now it was his turn to be too far gone to turn back. Men can fake everything but this, she thought. Even this man. Even when it contains nothing of himself. And the cruelty in her pleasure as she lay there, waiting while he battered himself inside her, both amazed and delighted her.

When he finally came—a fast, rather scrappy affair—and slid out of her, falling back onto the bed to get his breath back, she lay quietly next to him and thought of Chris and the moment all those years ago when Lily had been conceived. What was it that Samuel/Marcus/Taylor/Irving had said to her about that night as they had lain together on this same bed, swapping secrets in the amniotic fluid of mutual trust less than twelve hours before? “Sounds like you came out the victor in the end.” And she wondered if the same could be said of her now, or if what had taken place was only a temporary victory in a much bigger battle.

They lay side by side not talking, until after a while he raised himself up onto one elbow and looked down at her. She opened her eyes and met his gaze. “What happened?” he said quietly.

She smiled. “Nothing.”

“So where were you?” he asked lightly, and she was sure that they both understood the ambiguity.

“I . . . I didn't get back in time. Sorry.”

“But you did get off?”

“Couldn't you tell?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. I got lonely.”

She paused, despite herself impressed by the honesty. “I went to the town square.”

If the change of direction disconcerted him he certainly didn't show it. He made a face. “The town square? That was a long way.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn't you wake me?”

“You were tired. I wanted to be alone. I needed to do some thinking.”

“I see. About going home?”

“Something like that.”

He ran a finger down the line of her face. “So is that what you were doing? Getting used to having your orgasms alone again?”

She didn't break his gaze. “Don't flatter yourself,” she said, but without particular malice.

He laughed. “I'm going to miss you, you know, Anna,” he said quietly. Then: “You do realize that, don't you?”

“You'll manage,” she said.

He looked hurt. It was almost convincing. “How would you feel if I told you that . . . that I was thinking of opening an office in London?” He paused. “And that if I did, I'd have to come over and live there for six months or so to get it going?”

She shrugged. “I suppose I'd wonder where you and your wife were going to live.”

He smiled. “She's not an Anglophile, I'm afraid. She'd stay at home.”

She nodded. She watched Sophie Wagner sitting by a phone in a Manhattan apartment, measuring out her life in the spaces between the wrong phone calls. “Why London?” she said. “Why not New York?”

He frowned. “New York? What made you think of New York?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. I thought the art market was bigger there.”

He paused. “Not for me. So, what would you think? I mean, if it happened. Would that be excuse enough for me to meet your daughter?”

“I don't know, Samuel. I'd have to think about it.”

“I see.” He nodded slightly. “Well, anyway, it might not happen. It's only an idea at this stage.”

Somewhere outside the window a couple of songbirds started up, rash creatures in a country where centuries of epicurean taste had decided that the smaller the bird the bigger the delicacy. Presumably they, too, could read a clock, would know it would be hours before all those brave Italian hunters would be up and about, eager to blow their brains out and roast their tiny bodies on supermarket spits.

It bestows an unusual and particular confidence, knowing when one is safe from the predator and when one is not.

“I have to sleep now,” she said, lifting her head up to kiss him gently on the lips. “Just for a few hours.”

He nodded, but didn't move, continuing to stare down at her. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again a few moments later he was still looking. She smiled. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Just drawing something for memory. You go to sleep now. I'll wake you when it's time to leave.”

“You're going to get up now?” It was hard to know whether she felt relieved or disturbed.

“I'm awake. I don't think I could sleep again. But you can. We've got all day. There's no hurry.”

“What will you do?” she said, watching him get into his trousers and pull on a sweater, and finding something about the action suddenly unbearably painful, as if a shot of morphine had just worn off and she was plunged again into the raw ache of an open wound. What is this? she thought, frantically. Where did the numbness go?

“Oh, I'll go and sit in the lobby for a bit. See if I can catch an early breakfast. Maybe check out the church—the guidebook says it's a stunner—and find us somewhere to eat lunch.”

It's because it's over, she thought. All of it: the pleasure, the pain, the sex, the seduction, the intimacy, all of it gone in the action of a man putting on his clothes. And because the only thing that isn't yet over, the betrayal, the double-cross—whatever and whenever it would be—wouldn't serve to wipe out the intensity of what had been before, however much she might wish it could. And for the split second when she registered that, it seemed almost preferable to make herself believe the lies again and so not let him go.

He slipped on his jacket as he came to the bed and leaned over her, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Sleep well. See you later.”

Then, picking up his briefcase, he was up and out of the room.

She turned over onto her side and lay staring into the room, trying to deal with the pain, to breathe her way through it as she had once been taught to breathe through physical pain, as a way of absorbing and containing it. She focused on the window and the creeping new dawn. As she lay there the pace of change quickened, a gauzy, almost cotton-candy-tinted light seeping in, penetrating and dissolving away the gray, the color as tender and outrageous as a painter's brush. She had a sudden image of the restored tabernacle Madonna in the church holding the dead Christ on her lap, her robes a bright eager blue against the sallow shade of dead flesh. The painter had captured it so well you could almost feel the weight of his body pinning her down, before in turn he was lifted up and carried into the heavens. Men's bodies and the various ways in which women are called on to tend to them. It was not the end of the story.