Chapter Four
Turin. Five weeks after London.
The floor is not level.
I noticed it the first night and I have not been able to stop noticing it.
The room is three meters by three and a half.
The slope runs from the window wall down toward the door, and the woman who lived here before me folded a cigarette packet and wedged it under one leg of the table to stop it rocking, and I have left it there.
It works. Somebody solved a problem in this room before I arrived.
I find that I need that more than I would like to admit.
I am sitting on the floor because there is one chair and my coat is on it.
The money is in front of me on the tiles.
A hundred. A twenty. A ten. A five. A two. And coins, which I have counted twice, and which come to three euros exactly, because I spent the rest on bread.
One hundred and forty euros.
Rent is paid to Friday. After Friday it is two hundred a month for this room and the use of a kitchen that smells permanently of somebody else’s fish.
The landlady is called Signora Comini and she did not ask me for a document, and that is the most generous thing anyone has done for me in my life, and she will never know it, because I did not thank her, because I did not trust the shape my mouth was going to make.
I have crackers. I have a jar of instant coffee I am not drinking, because the smell of it makes me put my head against the cold tap and stay there.
Beside the money there is a folder.
Cream. Silver clip. It has been in the bottom of my bag for five weeks and it has taken the shape of the bag, and I have not opened it since a waiter stepped out of my way in a ballroom and said he was sorry.
I open it now.
The annulment is on top. Three pages, and the language is beautiful, that is the thing nobody warns you about, the language is elegant and it is trying to be kind. The parties acknowledge that no valid marriage subsisted. Somebody was paid to write that sentence and they wrote it well.
Underneath it is the other document.
A deed. Not company paper. No letterhead at all, which is itself a decision, made by somebody who understood exactly what a letterhead is.
It offers me three hundred thousand pounds sterling in return for my signature on the annulment and my silence, in perpetuity, on matters relating to the family and its business, and it is executed at the bottom in a small upright hand that does not touch the line above it.
Eleni Kastellanos.
Not her son. Not her son’s company. A woman who sits on no board, who holds no office, who is not an officer of anything, buying the end of a marriage with her own name on the receipt.
Three hundred thousand pounds is on the floor of this room, and there is a hundred and forty euros next to it, and the difference between those two numbers is a pen.
I put the deed down. I put the money on top of it so it will not curl.
Then I take out the receipt.
Bread, tomatoes, a toothbrush, two euros eighty. On the back of it, in pencil, in my own hand, a London telephone number and two words.
K. Rowe.
I rang from a phone box on Via Nizza with a paper cup of water in my other hand, because I had been sick twice that morning and I did not trust myself to speak without it.
I gave the switchboard my name. Not the name on the folder.
My name. Nora Lindqvist. And I said I had a document with a signature on it, and I described the ballroom in ninety seconds, and I did it flatly, the way you report a fire.
A woman rang the box back nine minutes later. Nine minutes. I was still standing in it, holding the door open with my foot, and a man outside was waiting to use it, and when it rang he looked at me and then he looked away and went to find another one.
She said, “Do not send that document to anybody else.”
She said, “Do not sign it. Do not cash anything. Do not write to any member of that family, and if a journalist finds you, and one will, you say nothing at all, not even no comment, because no comment is a comment.”
And then she said the sentence I have been carrying around in my coat for five weeks like a stone in a pocket.
“The signature is the case.”
She was not excited. That is what convinced me. She was tired, and she was competent, and somewhere in London a woman was standing in a corridor telling a stranger in a phone box in Italy the truth, and she said it would take three years and it would be ugly and we would probably win.
I borrowed a pencil from the man who had been waiting and I wrote her direct line on the back of my shopping.
Three years.
So.
I turn the annulment over. The reverse of page three is blank, and I have a pencil, and I have a floor, and my father used to say that a thing which is not on paper is not a decision, it is a mood.
I draw a line down the middle.
On the left I write what it costs.
Three years, and that is her estimate, which means five.
A courtroom in a country I do not live in.
Depositions. Lawyers at four hundred pounds an hour who will be paid out of a settlement I have not got yet, which means somebody funds it, which means somebody owns a piece of me.
Journalists at the door of whatever room I am living in by then.
Every dinner in that house for two years read back to me by a man in a wig.
And did you find the seating arrangements humiliating, Mrs. Kastellanos.
My father’s trade, said out loud in a courtroom in the way they say it, with the little pause in front of it.
And on the day it ends, if it ends, I am a woman who won.
That is the whole prize. A woman who won.
On the right I write the other column.
There is nothing to write.
I sit on a sloping floor in Turin with a pencil in my hand and I cannot fill in the second column, because the second column is not a list, it is a person, and she is the size of a fingernail and she is in me right now and she has no name.
So I write down what I have instead.
A license I can convert in Italy in two years if I work. A language I speak badly and will speak well by autumn, because I always do. Hands that can read a wall. A trade nobody in that ballroom would have called a trade.
And under it I write the number.
Two hundred a month.
And I sit there and I look at it, and I understand, with total calm, the way I understood in a ballroom that it was happening to me, that there is not enough of me for both.
There is one of me. I am twenty nine years old and I weigh not very much and I have been sick every morning for nine days and I am one person, and I cannot spend the next five years in the past and the next five years in the future at the same time.
Nobody can. That is not courage. That is arithmetic.
I get up.
The landing has a payphone bolted to the wall next to a poster for a dance school that closed. I have a coin in my hand. I have had it in my hand since I stood up and it is warm.
I dial the number off the back of the receipt.
It rings twice.
“Rowe Callender, good afternoon.”
The corridor smells of fish and floor polish. Somewhere below me a door opens and a television gets louder and then quieter.
“Hello?”
I am holding the receiver so hard my thumb is white across the scar.
“Is anyone there?”
I want to be precise about this, because I have been precise about everything else.
I do not cry. I do not put my hand over my mouth.
I stand in a corridor in Turin with a telephone against my ear and I listen to a woman in London say hello into a room with a good carpet in it, and I let her say it twice, and I take the whole of it in.
Then I put the receiver down.
It goes down quietly. That is what I remember. I expected it to make a noise and it does not make a noise, it just goes back into the cradle the way a tool goes back in a drawer, and the coin drops into the return with a small bright sound and I pick it up and it is still warm.
I go back into the room.
I put the deed in the folder and the folder in the bag, and I do not burn it, and I do not tear it, because a woman who tears something has to decide it again every year for the rest of her life, and I am only going to decide this once.
There is a tin on the windowsill. It had pastilles in it. It is empty now.
I take the ring off.
It comes off easily, which is the last insult of the whole business, and I put it in the tin and I put the lid on and I put the tin on the shelf above the sink, and I do not look at it again for a long time.
Then I sit back down on the floor.
I put my palm flat on the tiles, on the cold, in the low corner where the slope runs out, and I close my eyes, because looking is for people who have not done this long enough.
The break is never where the failure started. Further back, Nora. Keep going.
Under the tile there is screed. Under the screed there is a joist, and it is undersized, and it has been dropping for sixty years, and everybody who has lived in this room has stood in it every day and never once thought about the beam.
I take up the pencil.
At the bottom of the page, under the empty column, I write one word.
July.
And I put a box around it.