CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ADELINA
I get all the way up the path and into the boot room and I take my shoes off and I stand there.
And then I turn round and go back down.
Not to the glasshouse. He is not in the glasshouse anymore, the lights have gone off at the bottom of the garden while I was standing on a mat with one shoe in my hand, and from here I can hear the padlock going back on.
I go down the path in bare feet on wet brick.
He comes up out of the dark about halfway and stops dead when he sees me, because I have got no shoes on in November and he is a man who counts things.
"Adelina."
"Don't start."
"Your feet."
"I know where my feet are."
Here is the thing I worked out on the landing with one shoe in my hand.
He said nothing.
He stood in a shed and told me he wants nothing, and that none of it is contingent on anything I do, and that if I never open that door again there will still be a machine by my brother's bed until he is twenty-five.
And he meant every word of it.
That is what I could not get past on the mat.
It is not a thing a man says. It is a thing a man has decided, on his own, in a room, years ago, and then built a house around, and he has been living inside that decision the entire time I have known him and not once has it crossed his mind that it might be cruel.
Because here is what it actually means.
It means I can never give him anything.
He has arranged the whole world so that nothing I do can reach him, and he thinks that is generosity, and it is the loneliest arrangement I have ever heard of in my life, and I have been in some lonely houses.
So I go down a path in bare feet.
"I want to say one thing," I say, "and then I want you to take me inside, because I genuinely cannot feel my feet."
"Say it."
"You can want something," I say. "You're allowed."
He picks me up off the brick.
He does it without a word, one arm under my knees and one round my back, like I weigh nothing, which I do not, and he carries me up that path in the dark and in through the boot room door and does not put me down.
"Salvatore."
"Which stairs."
"Front."
And he takes the front stairs with me in his arms, past nine doors, and I put my face in the side of his neck somewhere around the fourth one and I do not take it out again.
It is completely different.
I want to put that down because I have had three of these now and they have all been a different thing, and I did not know that was how it worked. The first one was me saying everything out loud. The second one was nine minutes in a car with nothing said at all.
This one is slow, and neither of us is angry, and that is so much worse for both of us that at one point I have to put my hand over my own mouth.
He puts me down on the edge of the bed and kneels on the floor and takes my feet in both hands and just holds them for about a minute until they are warm.
That is how it starts.
A man on the floor of his own bedroom at five o'clock at night with his wife's feet in his hands, not doing anything, not saying anything, with his thumbs going slowly over the arches, until the blood comes back into them.
I am crying before he has got my cardigan off.
"Adelina."
"It's not."
"I know it's not."
"Don't stop."
"I'm not going to stop," he says.
He takes about an hour and a half.
There is no part of it that is fast. He finds the burn on the inside of my forearm and puts his mouth on it, and he finds the eight faded ones that nobody can see, which he has clearly been putting in some order in his head since the night I cleaned his hand, and he goes at me like a man reading something in a language he has nearly learned.
And he talks.
That is the thing I am least prepared for out of all of it.
The man who says four words in a hall, who informs, who has never explained himself once in three weeks, will not stop talking, quietly, into my shoulder and my hair and the inside of my knee, and none of it is filthy and about half of it is and I could not reproduce one sentence of it if you paid me.
I remember two.
One is you've had your hair up all day, which he says taking the clip out.
And the other one, much later, with his forehead on my sternum, is:
"I've never been in a room with the lamp on."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Salvatore."
"Thirty-five years old," he says. "Never once with the light on. That's all. Go back to what you were doing."
I have to put my hand over my own face for a second.
Then I reach over and turn the lamp up, and he lets me, and he does not look away, and I look at him properly for about eleven seconds in a warm room.
"There," I say.
I have to tell him to stop being gentle twice.
The second time he laughs against my hip, which is a thing I did not know was in him, and then he is not gentle, and I put both hands in the headboard and say his name so loudly that I have a genuine thought about where Bruna sleeps.
"Bruna's at the other end of the house," he says, into my thigh.
"Don't talk about Bruna."
"You were thinking about it."
"Salvatore."
"Say the thing," he says.
And I say the thing, and he does it, and it takes a while, and about two thirds of the way through it I stop being able to keep hold of anything at all and he puts his hand flat over mine on the sheet and holds it there.
Afterwards he is on his back and I am half on top of him with my ear over his chest and his heart going underneath it, and neither of us has said anything for about eleven minutes.
His hand is on the back of my head.
Not moving. Just there, heavy, with his fingers in my hair, and every so often his thumb goes once and stops.
And I say it.
I do not plan it. That is the whole trouble with me, I have never once in my life managed to keep a thing in my mouth, and it comes out into a dark room at half past midnight in four words.
"I chose it," I say.
Everything stops.
His hand stops. His chest stops. There is a man underneath me who has completely ceased, and I lie there with my ear on him and I can hear that he is not breathing.
"Adelina."
"I chose it. Not the wedding, I know I didn't choose the wedding.
" I do not lift my head. "But I have chosen every single thing since about the second week and I want that said out loud in this room because you've got a book in a shed with a line in it that says she did not choose it, write that down every day, and you've been carrying that around for three weeks like a stone in your shoe. "
He does not say anything.
"So put it down," I say.
And Salvatore Marchetti lies in the dark under his own wife with his hand in her hair and does not say one word for a length of time I could not begin to measure.
Then:
"Don't say that to me tonight."
I sit up.
"What?"
"Adelina."
"No, say that again, because I have just." I get my hair off my face. "I have just said the single kindest thing I have ever said to another human being and you said don't."
"I know what you said."
"Then."
"Because tonight I told you that I want nothing," he says, "and you went and stood on a mat and thought about it, and then you came back down a path in November with no shoes on.
And I know exactly what that is. That is you finding the need in the room.
That is the same thing as a plate of food in a restaurant and a man's hand in a bowl of salt water at one in the morning. "
I sit in the dark on a bed.
"You think I did this because you looked sad."
"I think you cannot be in a house where somebody is short of something," he says, "and I have just told you, in a shed, that I am short of everything, and you are the most reliable machine I have ever met in my life."
"That's."
"And if that is what it was, then I will take it, and I will be grateful for it, and I am not going to be in a room in six months when you work out what you actually did tonight.
" His hand comes up and finds my wrist in the dark.
"So don't say I chose it to me tonight. Say it in March.
Say it on a Tuesday when nothing has happened and nobody has given anybody anything. "
I pull my wrist out of his hand.
I do not go anywhere. I sit there with my arms round my own knees in the dark and my back to him, and I am so angry I can feel it in my teeth, and underneath that, underneath all of it, about four inches down, there is the worst thing.
He might be right.
I cannot tell. I genuinely cannot tell, sitting on that bed, whether I came down that path for him or because he was short of something, and I have never in my entire life been able to tell the difference, because nobody has ever asked me to before.
"You're the worst man I've ever met," I say.
"Yes."
"Shut up."
And I lie back down with my back to him, and after about a minute his hand comes across the sheet and rests on my hip, and I let it, and that is how we go to sleep.
The phone goes at twenty to six.
Not his. Mine, on the table on my side of a bed that is not mine, buzzing itself sideways, and I have it before I am properly awake because I have been waiting for a phone at twenty to six in the morning since I was fourteen.
"Paola."
"Are you sitting down."
"Paola, what."
"Somebody's been in the house," my sister says.
I put the light on.
"What do you mean somebody's been in the house."
"Michael went over this morning to do the gutters because you asked, he's got the ladder in the van. Front door's fine. Back door's fine. Nothing's gone." She is talking very fast. "The TV's there, Adelina. The TV is still there."
"Then how do you."
"The boiler cupboard's open."
The room goes a long way away.
"Say that again."
"The boiler cupboard on the landing is standing open and all your towels are on the floor," Paola says, "and Michael says the shelf's been cleared right off and there's nothing on it, and I said what was even on it, and he said there's an elastic band on the carpet."
Beside me, Salvatore is already sitting up.
"Adelina," my sister says. "What was in the boiler cupboard?"