Chapter Forty-One #2
"And on Thursday morning your wife is a woman who was destroyed by her mother in law.
Not by her husband. She will read it in the newspaper and it will be the first true thing she has been given in years, and she will have it by breakfast, and she will not have to wait for a trial or a regulator or a document with a clause number in it.
"And the yards keep the note, which I will not call, and never was going to call, and I will sign whatever undertaking you like to that effect and I will sign it in front of any man you name.
You keep the fleet. You keep the crews at Piraeus.
You keep the chair, because there is no board on this earth that removes a chief executive after his mother has stood in a newspaper and said she did it to him.
“And that girl in Turin gets her name back on a Thursday instead of in fourteen months and a courtroom, and she gets it from the person who took it.”
She stops.
She has stopped in exactly the right place. She has always known exactly where to stop.
And I sit in a chair in my mother’s morning room with a folder in my lap, and I am going to be honest about this, because I have not been honest about anything for four years and I have discovered that it is the only currency I have left.
She almost has me.
It is better. That is the appalling part.
Every single thing in it is better than what I am going to do.
It is faster and it is cleaner and it costs a hundred and forty crewmen nothing and it costs twenty two thousand shareholders nothing, and it puts the truth into Nora’s hands on Thursday instead of in a paragraph on page three of a newspaper in a bar, and I have wanted that for four years the way a man in a corridor wants morning.
I sit there and I want it so much that my hands go cold.
“And what would it cost,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“Say the number.”
“There is no number, Adrian.” And she goes puzzled. Her forehead moves. She is genuinely, entirely at a loss, and she has never once in her life been able to act, and that is the horror of her. “You are my son. What on earth do you imagine I would want.”
And there it is.
“You would want nothing,” I say. "That is exactly right. You would want nothing at all, and you would give it to her for nothing, and she would have it from you, and she would know for the rest of her life that the woman who took her name is the woman who handed it back.
"You would be the one who did it.
"She would be standing in a building in Milan with her name in her hands and your fingerprints all over it, and she would never once be able to put it down, and in twenty years, when my daughter is grown and asks her mother how it ended, the answer would have you in it. It would have you in it forever. There would not be one room in the rest of that woman’s life that you were not standing in.
"And you would not have asked for a thing. You would simply be owed.
“That is not a confession, Mother. That is a purchase. It is the same purchase. You are sitting in a chair with a piece of paper telling me what it will cost, and this time the price is that I let you buy her, and I have thirty seconds, and you have counted them, and you have been counting them since I came through the door.”
The clock in the hall.
My mother looks at me for a long moment and something goes over her face that I have seen once, at twenty two, in a photograph, on a step in Athens, in a black coat.
“You have got very hard,” she says.
“No.”
“No?”
“I have got very slow,” I say. “You gave me thirty seconds. It has taken me four years.”
I open the folder. I put the letter on the table between us, the one Gideon drafted, and it is four lines long, and I have signed it, and she does not pick it up.
“There is one more,” I say.
“Yes.”
"The note is called. It cannot be withdrawn. You will be paid at par in twenty one days and the security over Perama and Elefsina is discharged forever, and it can never be pledged again without a vote of the whole company, and I have already had that written into the articles.
"You are about to be a very rich woman.
“And you will never again have a single thing to sell me.”
She sits in her chair by the window with her hands in her lap, and she does not argue, and she does not weep, and she does not reach for a telephone, and she is sixty six years old and the size of a bird and she is the most frightening person I have ever been in a room with.
“You have been very careful,” she says at last, “to take nothing I need.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
And I do not have an answer for her that I want to give, so I give her the one that is true.
“Because I am not doing it to hurt you,” I say. “I would like to. I have wanted to since I was nine years old and I have never once found the place where it would land. I am doing it because you can do it again, and because you would, and because I would let you.”
And Eleni Kastellanos smiles at me across a coffee tray in a house I am cancelling.
“You are doing it,” she says, “so that somebody will look at you.”
“Yes.”
She stands up.
She goes to the door and she opens it and she calls Anna in to take the tray, because there is a tray, and it must be taken, and my mother has never once in her life left a thing on a table.
She does not touch me. She has not touched me since I was nine.
“You should have left it where it was,” she says.
The fifth was Stratford. I walked into a building in the east of London on a Tuesday morning with Gideon Farrell on one side of me and a box of documents on a trolley, and I sat down in a room with a young man with a lanyard, and I self-reported.
It took six hours. He was polite and thorough and about thirty one years old, and at four in the afternoon he asked me why I had come in voluntarily, and I said that I had signed six sets of accounts, and he said, yes, but why have you come in, and I did not have an answer for him.
The insurers voided the directors’ policy nine days later. Retrospectively, back to 2011, for non-disclosure. Ellis forwarded me the letter without a covering note.
I read it in the back of a car on the way to the airport, and it was two paragraphs long, and it was the first document in the whole of this business that frightened me, because it meant that from that afternoon there was nothing standing between me and any of it.
No cover. No indemnity. No block of shares. Nothing in my hands at all.
And I did not tell her.
That is the part I want on the record, because it is the only part I am not ashamed of.
I was on that site every single day. I signed the book at half past seven in the morning and I put a hat on before the line and I stood in the sala grande of the Cassaro Palazzo and I did what clause seven allows me to do, which is to speak to the principal architect about structural or fabric integrity, and nothing else, ever, for any reason.
On the Thursday she came down off the boards with lime on her forearms and stood in front of me and looked at me for about six seconds.
“You look like a man who has had bad news,” she said.
I have played that back a great many times. There was a way to answer it. There was a whole life in the six seconds after that sentence, and I could feel it standing there in the room with us, and all I had to do was open my mouth.
“The northeast quarter,” I said. “Rosa wants the Piacenza lime and she is right, and you have not signed the variation.”
Nora Lindqvist looked at me for a moment longer.
“No,” she said. “I have not.”
And she went back up the ladder.
That was the closest I came. I want it written down that I got that close, so that nobody ever tells me later that it was easy.
Gideon rang me that night from a car park in Chelmsford.
“You have no insurance,” he said. "You have no shares.
You have no indemnity, and by Friday you will have no company.
There is a house in Athens which is mortgaged and a flat in London which is sold and a boat which is sold, and the Revenue wants the trust tax in five months and I do not know where you are getting it.
“So I am going to ask you the question I have wanted to ask you since the back of a car on a ring road in Milan. What is left, Adrian?”
I sat in a rented flat with nothing in it and looked at a green folder on the table with fourteen reports in it and one photograph of a hand.
“The hour,” I said.
“What hour?”
“I have not asked for it yet.”
The crews go at seven.
I stand on the stone at the north end of the sala grande with a hat in my hands and I listen to twenty two men go out through a gate, and I hear Marco say something to somebody about a load on Thursday, and I hear a van, and then the building lets its breath out and there is nobody in it but me.
She went at six. She went past me on the loggia with a roll of drawings under her arm and she said, “The permit is on the table,” to nobody in particular, and she did not look at me, and she has not looked at me since the night she told me what I was.
I have been standing on this floor since half past ten this morning.
I have been standing on it because there is nothing else to do with a day when a man has no company and no shares and no indemnity and no house, and it turns out that the thing you do with such a day is that you go and stand in a room where a woman is working twelve meters over your head, and you say nothing, and you go home.
But tonight I am looking at the floor.
It is under my boots. It has been under my boots every day for thirteen weeks and I have never once looked down, and I looked down this afternoon because a man from the scaffold firm dropped a spanner and it rang.
It rang wrong.