Mapping the Edge (8 page)

“Why didn't you take me to a hospital?” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Last night, when I was ill in the car, why didn't you take me to a hospital? Why did you bring me here instead?”

He shrugged. “The hospital of Pisa, she is on the other side of the city. Also, I don't know if you have insurance. It is expensive. I thought it would be better to bring you here. My own doctor is very good.” She frowned. He poured some water into her glass. “You must have been worried, no? Last night—waking up in a locked room. I didn't mean to scare you.”

“It's fine,” she said quickly. Then, as if aware of her bad manners: “I'm sorry about your wife.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. She glanced down at her watch, remembering too late its shattered face. “What time is my fli—”

“Five o'clock. There is plenty of time. Have something more to eat, please.”

But the food was doing nothing for her nerves. She sipped at her water. The house was so quiet. It was hard to believe a major airport was only a few miles away.

“No more? Okay. Shall we go and sit in the garden? It is not so looked after now, but there is a place in the shade where it is very pleasant. Or would you prefer to rest some more?”

She had a sudden picture of a seat under a tree, and a woman falling backward into death. She pushed her own chair back and stood up from the table, the two images clashing fiercely in her mind. “Actually, if you don't mind, I think I'd like to go to the airport straightaway.” He said nothing. The silence grew. It was almost as if he hadn't heard her. “I need to sort out the ticket,” she added lamely.

“The ticket is ready,” he said quietly. “I asked them when I called.”

“Yes, but I . . . well, I'd like to get there early.”

In a world where good deeds hadn't been squeezed out by suspicion his care might have been read as kindness. She risked being rude, she knew that, but she needed to be out of there.

“I see. Very well.” And his voice was mild.

He got up and moved to the other side of the room, to a sideboard with a phone on it. He turned to her as he picked up the receiver. “You are sure you can't stay longer? You don't look so well yet. You could lie in the sun, go for a swim in the lake. I still have some of her things. Her costume would fit you, I am sure.” He paused. “I would be happy to have you as my guest.”

He's a man on the edge of middle age who misses his wife too much, who yearns for company and doesn't know how to get it. It didn't have to be sinister. It could simply be sad. The world is full of sadness. Be polite, Anna thought to herself. Be polite and don't let him know how much he scares you.

“I'd love to. Next time,” she said evenly. “Next time I'd love to stay.”

He went back to the phone. He said hello a couple of times, then sighed and started punching the buttons in an irritated kind of way. He turned to her. “I'm sorry. The telephone. It is not working. It happens sometimes at this time of day. Not enough people to pay the workmen the right bribe. I will try later. If not, the taxi I booked this morning will be here at four.”

Only this time there was something in his voice that sounded different. The lie seemed to leak like a spreading stain across the stone floor. She felt panic like a swarm of fireflies in her stomach. She thought about walking out of the front door. Without her holdall she could move as fast as he could. Probably faster. There must be a road somewhere. And where there was a road there would be cars, drivers . . . But she had forgotten he still had her handbag. Tickets, passport, money. She wouldn't get anywhere without them. He was saying something . . .

“. . . the car.”

“What?”

“I said, if it is so important for you to get there now I will take you in the car. But I have to get it out from the garage.”

“Er . . . well, thank you, I mean—” She fumbled, caught again between his solicitude and his creepiness. “That's very kind. I—”

“It's not a problem.” He cut across her, definitely cooler this time. “You get ready. I will get the car.”

“If I could have my bag?”

He frowned. “Your bag?”

“Yes, my handbag. You took it last night. It had my address book in it. To call my home?”

“Yes, but I put it with you in your room.”

“Where?”

“Under the bed,” he said rather impatiently. “I saw it this morning there when I picked up the note. You didn't find it?”

She hadn't. But then she hadn't looked that well, had simply pulled the covers over and left it at that, assuming he still had it in his care. She felt her legs go weak. She didn't want to go back into that room again. She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do.

He walked past her toward the door. For a moment she thought he might offer. “I'll get the car and meet you outside in five minutes.” And he turned on his heel and left.

She waited till she had heard the front door open and slam closed, then made her move quickly, out into the corridor, up the stairs and into the room. She tried to find a way to wedge the door open, but there was nothing she could use. She went to the bed and flung back the covers to expose the space underneath, keeping one eye on the door and using her hand to try to locate the bag. Nothing. She ducked her head down and looked deeper. Sure enough the bag was there, pushed way back in the dark. She had to get down on her hands and knees and crawl to reach it.

She had got it out and was opening it up when she suddenly heard him. He must have come up the stairs silently. How could he do that? In the split second before it happened, she saw that her ticket and passport were gone and was on her feet moving toward the open door. He got to it first. As he slammed it closed she caught a glimpse of his face. This time he wasn't smiling.

Away—Friday
A.M.

S
HE STOPPED TALKING
and put the receiver down. In an inner courtyard below the kitchen window, a woman was hanging out washing, using a pulley system to push the clothes farther out into the sunshine. The image echoed a film she had seen somewhere; Italian, black-and-white, fifties or sixties, she couldn't remember the title.

“All right?” he called from the other room.

“There's no answer from Patricia's. I got through to Paul's mobile and left a message.”

“What about your daughter?”

“I left one for her there, too. She's crazy about phones. Especially the mobile. Loves all the buttons.”

“Good. So now we can have breakfast.”

“Patricia must have left for Ireland already. I should have talked to her before she went. She'll be worried.”

“You should have warned them you'd be late.” He stood in the doorway dressed to go out, linen trousers and a soft cotton shirt; casual, deliberately. If she went up to him now and put her hands on the material she would feel money. And behind the money, flesh. A part of her would have liked to go back to bed with him now, but along with the missed alarm the morning had brought with it a renewed fear of her own desire and the damage it could do to both their lives. He took pity on her. “Didn't you tell me that this guy—what's his name?—”

“Paul.”

“Didn't you say that Paul picked Lily up from school on Friday anyway?”

“Yes.”

“So—by then he'll have got your message and will tell your baby-sitter himself when she calls. What did you say?”

“That I'd missed the plane and I'd be back sometime over the weekend, whenever I could get another one.”

“There you go. Crisis over. Come on, I'm starving, let's go eat.”

“First I have to book a return flight.”

“Anna!” He laughed. “Our relationship may be almost exclusively carnal, but if there's one thing you must have learned about me it's that I can't function on an empty stomach. It makes me irrational and difficult.”

It had, right from the first phone call, been his humor that had been one of the attractions. She liked the way it earthed the tension in her. “Don't tell me. You have to go to football matches too.”

He shrugged. “Why do you think I suggested Florence?”

“See. And all this time I've been thinking it was about infidelity.”

The café was on the main square. She had powerful memories of Fiesole from twenty years before. She had liked it best in the winter, when the tourists cleared away and the mists rolled in. There was a monastery she used to visit, no longer used by the Church. You could go and sit in the cells, stone bare and cramped, thin windows cut into thick walls with just a cot bed and wooden table as furniture, all preserved exactly as it had been for centuries. She had liked imagining the monks living there in prayer year after year with only God to keep out the cold, until at last their souls flew free through the keyhole window. What at eighteen had seemed romantic now felt rather cruel. But then since Lily, even acts of kindness could make her cry. Add it to the list of ways that children undermine you.

Across the table he was concentrating on his stomach. She studied him studying the menu, as he had done on that first evening when they met. He had warned her then about his obsession with food. She had found it annoying, then funny. Now she simply found it familiar, which was somehow more disturbing. How quickly it happens. They had both been so sure of themselves that night, riding the wave of each other's confidence. Where he saw a good lay, she saw a good story. Nothing more. A no-risk venture. Easy. What had changed?

Somehow, without her realizing it, this man had walked through the
KEEP OUT
notices with which she had decorated her life. In the six and three-quarter years since Lily had been born she had got used to accepting that she would never feel this way again. It wasn't that she was an obsessive mother. On the contrary, she had both the appetite and the capacity to enjoy being free of her daughter sometimes, to play as an adult in a grown-up world. But not this world. Not like this. She had come to believe that the sweet/savage energy of sexual passion had all been torn out of her at the birth, torn out or rechanneled into the deeper passions of mothering. The few men she had slept with since then had been deliberately second-rate, picked more for their availability than their charisma; a way of keeping one's hand in, checking that the machinery hadn't gone rusty through underuse. They scratched the itch, and she went back to Lily renewed. She didn't want for more. She didn't have the energy for it. Of course there had been times when she had found herself mourning the loss of intensity, but then Lily would walk back inside her head and there would be no room for such nostalgia. How could she have been on guard against something she didn't expect to feel again? As he had said, it was no one's fault. What you felt was one thing. It was what you did with it that mattered.

“So, let me tell you about my plan for the weekend,” he said, submerging a hunk of bread into olive oil as an impromptu first course while they waited for the food to arrive. “After we've visited your monastery I think we should get out of the city. Drive up into the hills, away from the heat and the crowds.”

“Where?”

“Casentino? . . . To the east. Forest and mountains, I gather. My friend—the one who owns the apartment—says it's one of the less visited regions. Do you know it?”

“The name is familiar. But it's been a long time.”

“According to the guidebook there's a ribbon of Romanesque churches that runs along the valley beside it. And up in the hills there is a monastery built on the spot where St. Francis got his stigmata. A kind of cave grotto. The church has got a number of Della Robbias in it. One of the most impressive collections anywhere, by all accounts.”

“You wouldn't be trying to slide in a bit of work on the side, would you?”

He shrugged. “We can't fuck all the time, and I thought you said you liked art.”

“I do.”

“Well, then. I've already hired a car and booked us into a hotel in a town called Bibbiena. There's a picture of it in the book. It looks quite unspoiled.”

She paused. “You were very sure I'd agree to stay on, weren't you?”

“I was very sure I wanted you to. I don't know if that's the same thing. What is it, Anna? In London you were up for this. What's happened?”

She saw last night's mist like a vaporous quicksand lying across the floor. By the time you realized you were sinking it was too late.

“Maybe I just had time to think.” He had a wife; she had a child and a job. Neither of them had told the other the whole truth about either. Surely the lies would be protection enough. She sat back in the chair and felt the sun run a hot caress over the skin of her left arm. It was all there for the taking. Maybe it didn't need to be a compromise. It might even be another kind of independence. “What about the flight home?”

“I've already done it. You're booked on the first plane out of Pisa on Monday morning. We can drive straight there and leave the car. You'll be back in time to pick up your daughter from school. You can leave a message with your friend giving him the flight details before we go.”

“And you?”

“I've got to go to Geneva for work. I'll catch a later flight.”

“Is that where your wife thinks you are now?”

He hesitated, as if the question had surprised him. “Somewhere like that, yes. I told you, those aren't the kinds of questions that we ask each other. Anyway, I thought this conversation was out of bounds. No families, remember? Your rules?”

When she had first met Chris all those years ago he hadn't told her about his wife. They had spent the best part of two weeks working together, minds and chairs inching ever closer, with never a word about nappies or prior commitments. When he had finally got around to telling her, he was so apologetic and upset she felt she almost had to comfort him. Her reaction surprised her. She ought to have read the warning signs then: Emotional riptides at play, only strong swimmers should proceed. Except, she had thought that she was. But then most people do—until they drown. She wondered how often he had played that card since. Christopher. She hadn't thought of him for the longest time. Strange that he should pop up now, when the air was so full of threat and promise.

The restaurant was busy, and the waiter's English nowhere near good enough to read a tense moment when he walked into it. They sat quietly as he bustled about them. The pasta, the salad, gradually filled up the space between them. He refilled their glasses and sped away.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Three days is a long time. We'll probably get tired of each other. We might even quarrel and go home early.” And he smiled.

She smiled back. And as she did so she recognized the way that guilt bled into desire and made it taste even sharper. For years this had been her regular spice. She had assumed that after Lily the taste for it had gone forever. Apparently not.

“Okay,” she said. “When do we set off?”

In the end they didn't leave the city till next morning. The monks' cells on the top of the Fiesole hill were pleasantly cool in the midday scorch, but the stones told stories of centuries of celibacy and isolation and the lack of human heat sent them spinning back into each other's arms. It was as if they had been waiting for an excuse. Rejecting self-sacrifice in favor of greed they played through the rest of the day and into the night and then got up while it was still dark and drove out east into a misty sunrise and the long winding climb up from the valley floor.

Halfway up, the snaking road and the lack of sleep made her carsick, and to keep her mind off her stomach she recounted some half-remembered stories about the countryside. Twenty years before, as part of her Italian journey, she had au paired for a doctor's family in Florence for two months. The children had had a book she remembered now, handed down from their grandmother: witches and demon tales set in the Casentino forests and full of unlikely conjunctions of fate and furies. There had been one about a young girl who, refusing to go to church, lost her soul down a cleft in the rock face and had to climb down into the center of the earth to find it. Valeria, the six-year-old, had made her read it endlessly, captivated by the mix of disobedience and punishment.

She hadn't thought of it for years, but the way the road bit into the rock and the land dropped away, sheer and deep as if a meat cleaver had sliced through it, brought it back to her. She couldn't remember if the story had had a happy ending.