Chapter Fifty-Seven
ELENI
The caterers came at half past eleven and there were two vans, which was one more than there needed to be, and I stood at the window of the small drawing room and watched them park and I thought, they have brought two because they were told nine, Charlbury Square, and they have looked up the house.
That is not vanity. I have never once been vain about that house. It is simply that I have known for forty four years exactly what a house does to the people who arrive at it, and I have used it, and I would use it again this afternoon if there were anybody coming.
I did the placement myself, on Friday, at the end of the table, with the cards from the drawer.
There were eleven.
I will set them down, because I have been accused a great many times this year of not being able to say a true thing, and here is one, and there is nobody left to say it to.
Theo. Adrian. Katherine Vane. Michel. Sonia and Andreas Ralli.
Father Christos. Marianna and Effie from the Society.
The cousins in Athens, who are five people and one card, because that is what they are and they have never minded.
And Pavlos, who has done the flowers in this house for thirty years and who I have never once had at my table and who I put on the corner nearest the kitchen so that he would not have to talk to Katherine.
I wrote them in one afternoon and I did not have to look up a single address.
The girl from the caterers asked me at twelve o’clock whether the lady of the house would like the wine opened.
She was about twenty three. She had a box of glasses on her hip and she had not been told anything at all, and she looked at me standing in my own hall in a grey dress with my hands folded and she did not know that I was the lady of the house, and I looked at her for a moment and I thought about how I would have handled that when I was her age, and I decided that she had done it well.
“Open two,” I said. “The white.”
There were flowers on the table in the hall. They came at ten. Pavlos sent them, white, correctly, with everything cut at an angle and the water clean, and there was a card with them, and the card said with respect, and he did not come.
I have thought about that card more than I have thought about anything else that happened on Sunday.
He did his work perfectly and he did not come.
He is seventy years old and he has walked up those steps twice a week for thirty years and I have said good morning to him a very great number of times and I have never once asked him his surname, and on the eleventh of May he sent me the best flowers in London and stayed at home.
Nobody refused.
I want that understood, because everyone will assume there were letters, and that I sat here with a stack of regrets in my hand like a woman in a play.
There were no regrets. Not one person wrote to me and said, I am sorry, Eleni, I cannot come.
Katherine sent a note about a boat we sold in 2009 and did not mention the eleventh of May at all.
Sonia Ralli telephoned me on the Thursday and was charming for a quarter of an hour, and I sat on the stairs with the receiver in my hand and listened to a woman I have known since 1991 not mention it, and at about minute nine I understood that she was never going to, and that this was the whole of the conversation.
It is a very good method. I taught it to half of them.
At one o’clock I sat down.
There is no version of this in which I stand in a hall like a girl. I went into the dining room and I sat down at the end of my own table with eleven places laid on it and the glasses out and the water poured, and I put my hands in my lap, and I sat there.
At five past one the men in the white jackets were in the kitchen and one of them laughed at something and stopped himself.
That is the moment. Not two o’clock. Not the trays going back down the steps. Five past one, and a young man laughing in my kitchen and putting his hand over it, because he had worked out, before I had, what he was standing in.
At half past one the girl came to the door with the wine and did not know whether to come in.
“Come in,” I said. “Pour it.”
She poured one glass. She looked at the other ten.
“Just the one,” I said. “Thank you. It is very good of you.”
She went out and she shut the door softly, the way you shut a door on a hospital room.
I sat at that table for the better part of an hour and I did not weep and I have not wept, and I am going to say the thing now that will make every person who hears it decide finally what I am.
I would do it again.
All of it. The room in London. The recording.
The nine words. The girl in the red dress who was not the point and never was, and who has been called a name in three languages for six years for standing in a doorway because I asked her to, and who I would ask again on Tuesday.
The folder on the linen. The name card in the bin.
I have been asked, by lawyers and by newspapers and once, in this house, in February, by my own son, to say that I regret it, and I have found, every single time, when I go and look for it honestly, that it is not there.
I saved him. He would have handed her the whole of it inside four years and by forty he would have been a very kind man with nothing, and I have watched what happens to kind men with nothing, and there is no woman in England who has watched it more closely than I have.
That is not repentance. It is arithmetic, and I have never once got it wrong.
Here is the one I cannot get to come out.
He stood up in a hall in Milan in front of four hundred people, in nine minutes, with no lawyer and no coat, and he burned every single thing he had, and he did it for a woman who had not asked him to, and it never occurred to him to survive it.
I was twenty two. There was a room, and there were about sixty of them in it, and there were four who could have stood up.
They were all extremely fond of me.
I have never told anybody what was said in that room and I am not going to begin at sixty six.
But I have carried it for forty four years, and I have taken it out at exactly the right moment in front of bishops and prime ministers and my husband and both my sons, and it has worked every single time, and it worked on Adrian in February for about nine seconds.
And then he put it down on my kitchen table and he said, I am not paying it, and he went and got on a bus.
He is the only person I have ever produced it to who understood what it was.
At two o’clock I got up and I went out into the hall and I told the man in the white jacket that there had been an illness and that nobody would be coming, and he said he was very sorry to hear it, and he was, and I gave him a hundred pounds out of my own bag for the girl and he took it and did not want to.
I stood in the doorway of my dining room and I watched two men carry eleven lunches back down the steps of this house under a cloth, and I did not look away, and I want it recorded that I did not look away.
Then I came up here, to the small room at the front where I do my letters, and I put the lamp on, because it was a grey afternoon and I am not going to sit in the dark like a woman in a play.
There was a car on the square.
It was there for about forty minutes and then it went, and it indicated at the corner, properly, the way he does everything.
I did not go to the glass. I sat in the chair with the lamp on and I let my son sit in a car forty metres from my front door and decide not to knock, and I did not make it easier for him, because if he had knocked because I stood at a window then it would have been a thing I did, and it would have been worth nothing, and I have spent my whole life making men do things and I know precisely what it is worth.
He did not come up.
He has a daughter of his own now. He did the arithmetic.
That is the thing they all get wrong about me, every single one of them, and they will go on getting it wrong. They think I want to be forgiven.
I want somebody to stand up.
That is all it has ever been. Sixty men in a room and four of them fond of me, and I have spent forty four years building a family that would stand up, and I built it out of the only material I have ever had, which is warmth, and warmth is a currency, and a currency is worth precisely nothing on an afternoon when there is nobody in the market.
They will say she died alone in that house.
I am not going to die. I have two hundred and ten million pounds in cash in a bank on Lombard Street and a house with nine bedrooms and a key to a garden, and I am in excellent health, and I intend to live to ninety.
I sat in a chair at half past two on the eleventh of May in a room at the front of a house on Charlbury Square with a full glass of white wine and eleven cards on a dining table below me, and I understood, entirely, and without any assistance from anybody, that I am going to be extremely comfortable, and that there is nobody left, and that these two facts have nothing whatsoever to do with one another and never will.
I did not telephone anybody.
I sent one letter. It went to Milan and it took six days and it was addressed to Mrs Adrian Kastellanos, because that is her name, and it said nothing at all in it, and I have wondered since what she did with it.
I hope she read it standing up.