Chapter Fifty-Five
ADRIAN
She wrote to me nine times.
They came to Gideon’s office because there is nowhere else on earth to send anything to me, and he sent them on to a rented flat on Via Manzoni in a brown envelope with a compliment slip in it, and he never once told me what he thought of them.
I opened all eleven. I want that recorded, because it would be a better story if I had not.
They are very good letters. My mother writes the way she talks, which is warmly, and briefly, and with one thing in it that goes under the ribs and is not mentioned again.
In eleven letters she does not once say that she was right and she does not once say that she was wrong, and a man who had never sat across a table from her would read them and think, here is a woman who has been broken open, and he would be entirely wrong, and he would send flowers.
The eighth one has a line in it that is nothing but a fact.
The house is very quiet on Thursdays.
She knows about Thursday. Of course she knows about Thursday. It was in a newspaper in October with a photograph of a gate.
I did not answer any of them. Then in the second week of February I sent four words on a card, and the four words were, I will come once, and I went to London on a Tuesday, in the middle of the day, so that there would be nothing in it that anybody could call an evening.
Charlbury Square has forty one houses on it and a garden in the middle with a lock on the gate.
My grandfather bought number nine in 1971 out of a shipping year that men still talk about.
My mother has lived in it since 1982. I was carried out of a car and up those steps when I was six days old, and I have a key to that garden on my ring and it is the only key I own.
There were no cars.
That is the first thing. It sounds like nothing.
There have been cars outside that house my entire life.
A car at eight in the morning and a car at eleven, a girl from an auction house on a Tuesday, a man from the church committee who came every Advent with a folder, and on Thursdays six or seven of them at a time, and the street looked like an embassy.
I stood on that pavement at twenty past twelve in February and there was a builder’s van outside forty one and a nanny with a pushchair going up towards the main road, and there was nothing outside number nine at all.
I knocked. There is a bell and I did not use it.
She opened the door herself.
I had not prepared for that. I had prepared for a great deal, in a flat, at a table, at four in the morning, which is what I do. I had not prepared for my mother to open her own front door in the middle of the day in a blue cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
“Adrian,” she said, exactly as though I had come for lunch. “You are early. Come in, it is freezing.”
There is a hall in that house that is nine metres long with a table in it, and there have been flowers on that table twice a week since I was a child, from a shop on Kensington Church Street, and they came whether anybody was coming or not.
There were flowers on the table.
They were dead. Not old. Dead, in the water, the leaves gone black under the line and the smell of it in the room, and she walked past them and did not look at them, and I understood in that hall in about a second and a half that she had put them there herself and that nobody had come to take them away.
The post was in a basket on the floor. It was the kind of post that comes to a house whether anybody in it is alive or not, which is the electricity, and the water, and a bank, and a charity that does not know.
She made coffee. It took her six minutes, in a kitchen the size of my entire flat, and she did it well, and I stood in the door of it with my coat on and watched my mother work a machine she has certainly never touched in her life until this year.
Then she sat down at the end of the table with her hands round the cup and looked at me, and she was, God help me, delighted to see me.
“Sit.”
“No.”
“Then stand,” Eleni said pleasantly, “and I will look up at you, which will be very expensive for your neck and free for me. Tell me about her.”
“No.”
“Adrian.”
“I am going to tell you what I came to tell you,” I said, “and then I am going to go, and I would like you to hear it properly, because I am not writing it down and I am not coming back to say it again.”
And she put the cup down and folded her hands and gave me her whole face, the way she does, the way she has done to prime ministers, and there is no one alive who has been given that face and not felt like the only man in the world.
“Of course,” she said.
So I did it.
I told her the trust is closed. It cannot be opened. Gideon has the deed and an English court has already looked at her application and put it in a bin, and there is no second application, and if there is, it will be defended, and she will lose, and she will pay for both sides.
I told her that I am not a director of anything and I am never going to be a director of anything again and that there is a young man in Stratford with a lanyard who telephones me every nine days and that I answer him.
I told her she is not going to see Sophia.
She started to speak. I did not let her.
“Not this year,” I said. "Not next year.
Not when she is nine, and not when she is fifteen and angry with us and looking for somebody who will tell her that her parents are fools.
You are not the door out. There is no door out.
When she is grown she may do as she likes and I will not lift a finger to stop her and I will not say one word against you, and if she is standing in a room with you when she is thirty then that will be her business, and I will not be in it.
“But you will not have her while she is small,” I said. “You are not going to get to do it twice.”
And my mother sat at the end of a table in a house with nine bedrooms in it and she did not cry and she did not shout, and she played every card she had, in order, in about six minutes, and she played them beautifully.
The money first. Two hundred and ten million euros, back out of a vehicle in Vaduz that no longer has anything to hold, sitting in cash in a bank on Lombard Street, doing nothing, which for a woman like my mother is the same as being on fire.
“It is yours,” she said. “Say the word this afternoon and it is yours by Friday. Not a loan. Not a structure. I will sign it across and I will not keep a pound of it, and you may put it in the sea if you like, and I would rather you put it in the sea than leave it in here with me.”
“No.”
“You are living in a rented flat. You are working with your hands.”
“Yes.”
“Adrian, they are your hands,” she said, and there it was, one true thing, said warmly, and I stood in that kitchen with two fingernails that are never coming back and I felt it go in exactly where she aimed it.
Then the sacrifice. She has held that one for four years and it is the only card she has ever really had.
“I saved you,” she said. “You may hate me for the method. You will not sit in my kitchen and tell me I was not right. She would have taken you apart. Not out of malice. Out of being what she is, which is a woman who cannot be owned, and you were twenty nine and you would have handed her the whole of it, the company, the yard, the name, everything three generations of us put in the ground, and you would have done it gladly, and by forty you would have been a very kind man with nothing.”
“Yes,” I said.
She stopped.
“I would have,” I said. “That is the first true thing you have said in this house in four years and I have thought about it every day since July. She would have taken it apart. She would have taken it apart with love and I would have helped her, and I would be forty, and I would have nothing, and I would have her.”
I put my hand flat on the back of a chair.
“That is not a warning,” I said. “That is a description of the best life I could have had, and you took it off me, and I let you.”
And then she played the last one.
She stood up and she went to the window with her cup, and she looked out at the garden of Charlbury Square, and she said it in the same voice she uses for the weather.
“I was twenty two,” she said. "There was a room. There were about sixty of them in it and there were four who could have stood up, and they were all fond of me, and every one of them liked me very much.
“And nobody stood up.”
The rain came on the glass.
“You did it for her,” Eleni said. “In a hall in Milan, in front of four hundred people, in nine minutes, for nothing, and you lost everything you had, and it did not even occur to you to survive it. I have been doing arithmetic for forty four years, Adrian, and you did not do any.”
She turned round and she looked at me and her eyes were completely dry.
“I would like you to understand,” my mother said, “that I have waited my entire life for somebody to do that, and it was you, and it was not for me.”
And there it was. On the table. The only thing she has ever had that was actually true, produced at the end, out of the sleeve, at exactly the right moment, the way she has produced it to bishops and to my father and to me, and it is a receipt, and she has been presenting it to people for forty four years, and I am the last one on the list.
“No,” I said.
“Adrian.”
“I am not paying it.”
And I did what I came to London to do, and it took six seconds, and it is the only cruel thing I have ever done in my life on purpose.
“I am not going to hate you,” I said.
She looked at me.
"You would like me to. I know exactly what you would do with it.
You would take it away with you and you would have it in the house and you would look at it, and it would be a thing between us, and there would be letters, and there would be a lawyer, and in nine years there would be an afternoon in a garden somewhere where I forgave you and we both cried.
“I am not going to hate you and I am not going to forgive you and I am not going to argue with you and I am not going to think about you,” I said.
“You are not going to be anything. You are going to be a woman I used to know who lives in a house in London, and I am going to be extremely well, and you are going to hear about it from other people.”
I picked my coat up off the chair.
“Goodbye,” I said.
She followed me down the hall past the dead flowers, and she did not touch me, and she opened the door for me herself because there is nobody in that house to open a door, and she stood on the top step in her cardigan in February with her arms folded against the cold.
“Adrian.”
I was at the railings by then.
“Adrian,” my mother said again, across a public square in London, in the voice she used to call me in with when I was six years old and it was getting dark.
I did not turn round.
I walked up to the main road and I stood at a bus stop with a woman and a boy in a school uniform, and I got on a bus, and it took forty minutes to get to the station and it cost me one pound seventy five, and nobody on it knew who I was.
Forty four years. She was twenty two.
I did that arithmetic on the top deck of a bus on the Bayswater Road and I have not been able to stop doing it since, and I have never asked her, and I am never going to ask her, and there is nobody left alive who would tell me.