Chapter Forty-Six #3
I turn the book round and I sign at the bottom of the page, and I put the date beside it, and I put the pen down parallel to the edge because I have caught it off him and I have never been able to shake it.
And he puts his hand out for the pen, and I pick it up and I hand it to him, and there is a half second in which my fingers are four centimeters from his fingers on a piece of yellow plastic in a dark room at half past midnight, and neither of us moves, and I can hear him breathing, and I want, with everything I have got, to close the four centimeters.
I want it so badly that my whole arm goes hot.
I have not wanted anything like that since I was twenty nine years old in a kitchen in London with a pan on the stove and a man’s hands on the counter either side of me.
I let go of the pen.
He takes it. He signs under my name, in that hand, with that thing he does with the K, and he puts the pen down parallel to the edge of the table, and he does not touch me, and he does not try, and he never once looks at my mouth.
And I hold the line, and here is why, and I am going to say it plainly to myself because nobody else is ever going to hear it.
If I touch that man tonight, then every single thing he has burned was a price.
The note. The fleet. The hall in Perama.
The board and the company and the hands.
It all becomes an invoice, and I become the item at the bottom of it, and in twenty years when we are old and it has gone wrong in some ordinary way, he will not say it out loud, and he will not have to, because it will be in the room with us anyway. I gave up everything and she came back.
I have already been a thing a man weighed once. I was on one side of a scale in a room in London and four thousand two hundred strangers were on the other, and he did the sum in thirty seconds and he got an answer.
I am not going on the scale again. Not even on the winning side.
And I sit in a chair in a nine by eleven room with a photograph of somebody’s dog on the wall, and I look at what I have just done in my own hand, in ink, in a book that will go to an archive one day with my certification stapled behind it.
I have written a man back into my daughter’s life at midnight, on a Wednesday, on a page in the back of a site book, because he asked, and because I have been asked for nothing in four years, and because I am so tired of being the only one holding it that I have started to hear the thing bow.
I close the book.
“Go home,” I say.
He gets up off the table and he puts the hat on at the door, because that is the rule, and he is across the yard and at the line before I get to the doorway.
“Adrian.”
He stops at the line and takes the hat off, exactly, the way I taught him in the first week.
“Six o’clock on Thursday,” I say. “Her name is Sophia. You have never said it out loud to me and you have known it since April, and I want you to say it before you go, because on Thursday you are going to say it to her face and I am not going to watch you hear it for the first time.”
He stands with the hat in his hands in the gateway of the Cassaro Palazzo.
“Sophia,” he says.
And it comes apart in the middle, and he puts it back together in front of me, and it costs him, and I watch it cost him.
He goes.
I hear the car on Via Cassaro and I hear it turn at the top and I hear it stop being a car and start being a sound, and then there is nothing but the compressor in the yard behind the church and a building over my head with four hundred and twenty two years in it.
I sign myself out, because those are the rules.
Then I go back into the ballroom and I put the lamp where he had it, low, across the floor, and I sit down on the stone at the edge of thirty one square meters of terrazzo that nobody on this earth was ever going to pay to see again, and I put my hand flat on it.
It is cold. It is beautiful. There is a Greek key border running along under the north wall in white and red and it was laid by a man in 1604 who did not sign it either.
He is going to want a life. He is never going to ask me for it.
He is going to come here every Thursday for twenty years and sit in a gatehouse with a four year old and never once say the word, and he is going to do it perfectly, because he is the most disciplined man I have ever met and because he has finally worked out that the only thing he has left to spend is time.
And I am going to have to decide.
Not tonight. Not this year, perhaps. But one day I am going to be standing in a doorway watching that man draw a broken building for my daughter, and there will be nobody in the room but the three of us and nothing on the table and no note in a folder and no four thousand two hundred people on the other side of any scale at all.
And on that day it will be mine to give, and it will be the first time in my life that a thing was.
I put both hands on the floor.
“One hour,” I say, out loud, to a ceiling with a hole in the sky. "You get one hour. I am keeping the rest.
“I did not spend four years building a woman out of nothing so that a man could burn down a company and be handed her back.”