Chapter 24
ROSALIE
Hanno calls on the Thursday and says, "Come up."
That is all. Two words, and then he waits, because he knows what he has said.
Nineteen years and I have been up that lane perhaps four hundred times and not one of them was because somebody asked me to come. You are taken, or you are delivered, or you come back at the end of a job because that is where the beds are. Nobody is invited.
"When."
"Tomorrow. There is no hurry, Rosalie, take the whole day."
"Why."
"Because you asked me about Wisteria," Hanno says, "and I have decided that you should see for yourself rather than take my word for it. I think that is fairer. Do not you?"
I tell Cesare.
I tell him in the kitchen at seven in the morning standing up, and it takes about eleven seconds, and when I have finished he does not say one of the four things I have answers ready for.
He says, "What do you need?"
"Nothing."
"Rosalie."
"I need the car and I need you to not follow me, and I need you to understand that if anybody from this house comes within a mile and a half of that gate they will see it for four minutes before it arrives."
"I know about the four minutes."
"Then say it."
"I am not going to follow you," Cesare says. "Nobody is going to follow you. I want you to take the rifle and leave it in the boot, not because you will need it, but because you will drive better knowing it is there."
I look at him.
"That is the correct answer," I say.
"I have had three weeks to work out what the correct answer is," he says, "and I have got about nine of them and no others."
The lane is a mile and a half and it is exactly as long as it has always been.
Open ground on both sides, ploughed and frozen and flat as a table.
A single line of poplars along the east side that are too thin to hide anything and always have been.
The gate at the end, which is not locked, which has never been locked, because a locked gate is a thing somebody notices from a road.
I drive it at thirty and I watch the mirror the whole way.
Nobody behind me.
He did what he said. Of course he did what he said. I have had three weeks of him doing what he said and I am still checking the mirror, and I will still be checking the mirror in a year, and I would like somebody to tell me at what point that stops.
The glass roof comes up over the ridge.
There it is.
Two hundred and eleven panes. The long low run of the propagation wing on the north side, whitewashed to the sill and glass above it, and the main house behind, and the water tower, and the four minutes of open road behind me now spent.
I have not been here since the twelfth of October.
I get out of the car in the yard and the cold comes off the ground the way it does here and the whole of me knows it, the smell of it, the frozen mud and the glasshouse smell that never goes even in winter, and something at the base of my spine goes quiet and obedient in a way I have not felt in three weeks.
Twenty six seconds.
That is how long it takes this place to put me back.
Hanno is in the office and does not get up.
He is exactly the same. He has been exactly the same since I was seven, which cannot be true and is true; grey, unhurried, a cardigan, a desk with four things on it arranged at right angles.
"You look well," he says.
"Where is she?"
"Sit down."
"Hanno."
"Sit down, Rosalie, you have driven two hours." He gestures at the chair. "She is at breakfast. It is twenty past nine. You know where she is."
I sit down.
We talk for forty minutes.
That is the punishment and it takes me about twenty of them to work that out.
He asks after my health. He asks about the rib and whether it was stitched properly and by whom, and I say a doctor, and he says, "Mm," and does not press it.
He asks about the Orsini house, and the council, and Bregman, and whether the marriage has caused difficulty, and every question is exactly the question a good handler asks an asset in the field and there is not one thing wrong with any of them.
He offers me tea.
He gets up and makes it and sets the cup down on the desk in front of me and steps back, and goes and sits down, and I look at the cup for a second and a half too long.
"Ah," Hanno says.
Nothing else. Just that.
He has watched me for nineteen years. He knew about the taking before I did.
He has never once handed me anything directly in my life and I have never once wondered why, and I sit in a chair in a cold office and understand, in about a second, that the reason a man in a house on a river learned it in a day is that it was designed to be learned.
"Where is she," I say.
He takes me to the propagation wing himself.
We go the long way, past the boiler house and the yard, and he talks the whole time, pleasantly, about the roof and the cost of the roof and a man who is coming in the spring about the roof.
At the door he stops.
"You have four minutes," he says. "Not because I am unkind. Because at half past ten she has an appointment and I will not have it moved."
He opens the door for me.
He does not come in.
It is warm.
That is the first thing and it stops me in the doorway like a hand on my chest.
The heating is on at twenty five past ten in the morning, which does not happen, which has never happened, and the whole long room is warm all the way down, and there are nine beds and every single one of them is made.
The second bed from the end has a coat laid across it.
Green.
Too big for her. Down past the knee, with buttons that do not match the cloth, and it has been laid out flat on the counterpane the way you lay out a thing that somebody is going to be pleased about.
I stand in the door of a room I have slept in for nineteen years and I cannot make my legs work.
"You came."
Wren is sitting on the end of her bed with her boots on.
She is up. She is dressed. Her hair is done and she has got it off her face for the first time in four years, and she stands up when she sees me and comes down the aisle between the beds at a half run, talking, because she is always talking.
"They said you were married, is it true, is he old, Marigold said he is forty and I said no because you would not, Rose, you would not, and there is a coat, did you see the coat, it was on the bed when I woke up and nobody has said anything about it but everybody knows what it means and Hazel has not spoken to me since Tuesday which is fine because Hazel is like that. "
She stops in front of me.
"You look different," she says.
"I do not."
"You do. You look."
She cannot find it. She stands there with her mouth slightly open, breathing through it the way she does, nineteen years old with her hair off her face, working at it.
"Warm," she says. "You look warm."
I have four minutes and I use them badly.
I want that in the record. I have run this conversation on a roof in a terrible chair eleven times in the last four days and I have had a version of it ready since Tuesday, and none of it comes out.
What comes out is:
"You are not ready."
Her face does something.
"I am ready."
"Wren."
"I am ready, I have been ready since the summer, I did the Kortrijk assessment in eleven minutes and Hanno said nobody has done it in eleven minutes since you.
" She is smiling. That is the thing I have to write down and then never look at again.
She is smiling. "I did it faster than you.
He told me. He said, Wisteria, she did it in twelve. "
"He lied to you."
"Why would he lie about eleven minutes?"
Because the number does not matter. Because there is no assessment on this earth that tells you what happens in a room, and because I did it in nine, and because I have never once told her that, and because he knew I had never told her.
Four seconds. That is all it takes.
He knew one true thing and he used it.
"Listen to me," I say, and I take her by the arms, which I have not done in four years, which we do not do here. "When you go out. Whatever it is, wherever it is. There is a moment about two thirds of the way through where it is going to be going well and you are going to think this is fine."
"Rose."
"That is the moment. That is where it goes. Not the start. Everybody survives the start." My hands are too tight on her and I do not loosen them. "When you think this is fine, you leave. Straight away, no matter what is unfinished. Do you understand me?"
"You are frightening me."
"Good."
She hugs me.
She does it the way she does everything, at speed and without asking, and her arms go round my neck and she is warm and she smells of the same soap this building has used since before I could read, and I put my arms round a nineteen year old girl in a warm room under two hundred and eleven panes of glass.
Over her shoulder I can see the fourth pane from the east end.
The crack in it is shaped like Portugal.
It has been shaped like Portugal since I was small enough to lie on my back and look at it and think it was a country, and I told a man about it on a bathroom floor three weeks ago while he was putting a needle through me, and I have no idea why I am thinking about that now.
"Wren."
"Mm."
"Do you have a coat."
"What?"
"Before. Did you have one before the green one."
She pulls back and looks at me as if I am simple.
"No," she says. "Nobody has a coat. You do not need a coat, you never go anywhere."
Hanno is in the yard by the car.
He does not say anything about the four minutes, which I have overrun by nine, and he does not say anything at all until I have the door open.
"Rosalie."
"Do not."
"Twelfth of December," Hanno says. "That is all I was going to say."
I stand with my hand on a car door in a yard I know better than any place on earth.
"She goes out on the fourteenth," he says.
I drive the lane at ninety.
Not because it helps. Because there is open frozen ground the whole way and nobody on it and I want the four minutes to be over faster than four minutes, and the poplars go past like a fence, and I get to the road and pull in and sit there with the engine running.
Then I take the phone out and I look at it for a while.
I do not call him. I do not know what I would say and I would not be able to say it, and there is a thing in my chest doing what it did in the dark when I said her name, and if I open my mouth in a car on a verge it is going to come out and I will not get it back in.
So I put the phone away and drive two hours.
He is in the yard when I come in.
Standing in the cold with no coat on, which is the whole joke, and I get out of the car and he does not ask me anything, and I walk into him and put my face in the front of his shirt.
He puts his arms round me.
He does not say it will be all right. He does not say anything at all for about four minutes, in a cold yard, with a hand on the back of my head.
Then he says, "How long."
"The fourteenth."
"Of December."
"Yes." My voice is doing something. "Two days after."
"After what?"
"After the day I do not kill you," I say into his shirt. "He put them two days apart. He did that on purpose. That is not a coincidence, Cesare, that is a man showing me a calendar."