Chapter 25
CESARE
She comes back wrong and she stays wrong for three days.
Not quiet. She has always been quiet. This is something else and I have no word for it and the best I can do is that the woman who came out of that car in my yard has been running on a lower setting ever since, and everything she does she does correctly and none of it costs her anything.
She eats. She eats immediately, when food is put down, without the pause.
She sleeps. Straight through, both nights, on her own side.
She answers questions. All of them, promptly, in full sentences, and she does not count a single exit in seventy two hours.
On the second evening Teodoro comes into the kitchen and says something appalling about a man at the port and she laughs at exactly the right moment and exactly the right volume, and he laughs back, and goes out, and does not notice anything.
I notice.
It takes me until Sunday to understand what I am looking at, and when I do I have to go and stand in the yard.
She has gone back to being equipment.
That is what it is. It is not sadness and it is not withdrawal, it is a woman doing a thing she has done since she was seven, which is become the correct object for the room she is in, and she is very, very good at it, and I have never seen her do it before because she has never once done it in this house.
She is doing it now because she was in that building for four hours on Friday and it put her back, and she has not come out.
Twenty six seconds to put her back.
Three weeks to get her out, and she got herself out, and I have no idea how she did it the first time.
On Sunday I take the car keys off the hook and say, "Come out with me."
"Where?"
"Nowhere."
She looks up from the table.
"That is not an answer."
"No," I agree. "Get your jacket."
We drive.
That is the whole of it. I go out of the yard and along the river road and past the freight yards and out under the ring road, and then I keep going, north, on a road that does not go anywhere in particular, and she sits in the passenger seat with her hands on her thighs and does not ask me again.
For the first forty minutes I say nothing at all.
That is deliberate and it is the hardest part, because everything in me wants to open the thing up, and I have watched her for three days and I know exactly what happens if I open the thing up: she will answer.
Fully. Correctly. In complete sentences, in the flat voice, and she will be gone for another week.
So I drive.
At forty minutes I say, "I can cook four things."
She turns her head.
"What?"
"Four. That is the whole list and I want to be honest about it because I have been passing myself off as a cook in that kitchen for three weeks and you are the only person who has not worked it out."
"You made a thing with tomatoes on the ninth."
"That is one of the four."
"You made it again on the seventeenth."
"Yes," I say. "I did. And on the twenty second, which I was hoping you had not counted, and which you have, obviously, because you count everything."
The road goes on. Flat fields, a line of pylons, a farm with a dog in the yard that comes out at the gate and does not bark.
"What are the four," she says.
I do them in order.
The thing with tomatoes, which is not a recipe, which is what my mother did when there was nothing, and which is mostly bread.
Eggs, which is not a dish and which I am counting anyway.
A fish thing that takes two hours and which I have done perhaps nine times in my life and never well.
And the fourth, which is a soup that is genuinely good, and which I learned from Ottilie standing at her elbow when I was eleven, in the four months after Ines, when neither of us could be in a room with our father.
I get to the fourth and I do not stop and I do not make anything of it.
"That is the list," I say. "Four things. Everything else in that kitchen since you arrived has come from Nonna, or from the woman who does Thursdays, or out of a shop, and I have been putting it on plates and letting you assume."
"Why?"
"Because you eat when I cook and you do not eat when other people cook," I say, "and I worked that out on the fourth of November and I have been quietly committing fraud ever since."
She laughs.
It is not the four second one and it is not the nose thing. It comes out sideways, once, and she puts her hand over her mouth and then takes it off again deliberately, which is new, and which she has started doing in the last week.
Then she says, "Say the soup one again."
"The soup?"
"The four months after Ines. You said it in the middle of a list. You did that on purpose."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because if I had said it on its own you would have had to do something about it," I say, "and you have been at about forty per cent since Friday, and I did not want you to have to spend any of it on me."
The silence goes on for eleven minutes.
I know because I look at the clock at the start of it, out of habit, because I am the sort of man who looks at a clock, and because I have decided to let it run as long as it wants to run.
At eleven minutes she says:
"There is a boiler house."
"All right."
"Behind the propagation wing, on the west side, and it is the only building on that site with a wall you cannot see from the lane.
" Her voice is different. It is not the flat voice.
It is quicker and slightly higher and it is the voice she uses about gutter brackets.
"It has a coal door that has been bricked up since before I was there, and the brick is bad, and I have been looking at that brick since I was fifteen. "
I do not turn my head.
"Go on."
"You cannot get nine girls out through it.
That is not what it is for. It is four feet by three and you would have to go one at a time and it comes out at the bottom of the yard where the water tower is.
" She has her hands off her thighs and she is doing something with them in the air, laying out a floor plan, which I have never seen her do. "But you could get in."
"In."
"One person. At night. Without the four minutes, because the four minutes are the lane, and the boiler house wall is not on the lane, it is over the back and there are two hundred metres of hedge on the other side of it."
"And then what?"
"I do not know," she says. "That is as far as I have got. I have had it for eleven years and I have never once said it out loud, and I have never been able to work out the second half, and I am telling you because I have got as far as I can get on my own."
I pull into a lay by outside a village with a church and nine houses in it.
I turn the engine off.
Then I stay in it. Engine off, parked, and I do not get out.
I want to record what that costs because there is nobody to tell and it should be somewhere. It is four minutes and my hands are on the wheel the whole time and there is a sound in my ears and I do it.
She notices at about ninety seconds.
She does not say anything. She turns her head and looks at me and then looks out of her own window and puts her hand, palm down, on my thigh, and leaves it there, and does not look back.
We stay like that until it stops.
"You cannot sit in a parked car," she says, afterwards.
"No."
"Since the fourteenth of March."
"Since the fourteenth of March."
"You have been doing it for three weeks anyway," she says. "In the yard. Every time you bring me home. You sit there with your hands on the wheel and I get out and I go inside and I have known since the sixth of November."
I look at her.
"You have known for a month."
"Yes."
"And you have never said."
"No," Rosalie says. "Because you did not tell me, and it was yours, and I was not going to take it off you.
" She takes her hand off my thigh. "That is what people are supposed to do.
I have been working it out. It has taken me about three weeks and I think I have got it, and I would like you to tell me if I have got it wrong. "
I do not have anything.
I am a grown man who runs a family and talks other men out of their own money in forty minutes without raising his voice, and I sit on a verge in the middle of nowhere and cannot produce a single word.
"You have not got it wrong," I say, eventually.
"Good."
"Rosalie."
"Do not."
"I am going to."
"I know," she says. "That is why I said do not."
I do not say it there.
I want to be clear about this because of what happens on the twelfth.
There is a version of that afternoon where I say it, and there is a version where I tell her the whole of it, the folder and the three instalments and the note inside the cover, and I do neither, and I have four separate reasons and all four are a coward's.
What I actually say is:
"Show me the boiler house."
"What?"
"Not today. Draw it. Tonight, on the table, on paper, all of it, every wall and every door and every distance you have got in your head, and I will get Teodoro up and we will sit in that kitchen until it is light.
" I start the engine. "You have had the first half for eleven years.
You are not going to find the second half on a roof on your own, because there is no second half that one person does, and there never was, and that is not a failure of yours. It is arithmetic."
She sits very still in the passenger seat.
"Say that last part again," she says.
"It is arithmetic."
"No. Before."
"There is no second half that one person does."
She turns and looks out of the window for the rest of the drive and does not say another word until we are past the ring road.
Then, somewhere on the river road, without turning round:
"Two hundred metres of hedge," she says. "And a bad brick. And there is a dog."
"A dog."
"There has been a dog since September. It is not a problem, it is a spaniel, somebody's idea of security." A pause. "I am telling you about the dog because I have never told anybody about the dog."