Chapter 28
ROSALIE
"You cannot drive."
"I can drive."
"Rosalie. You got in the car on Sunday and Cesare drove, and you got in the car on the fourteenth and Cesare drove, and on Friday you drove two hours to a place you will not name and you came back with the wing mirror folded in.
" Teodoro puts the keys on the kitchen table and does not push them at me.
"Which means you clipped something. Twice, probably, because you folded it back out and it is not sitting right. "
"It was a gatepost."
"It was a gatepost," he agrees. "Both times?"
"Once."
"Rosalie."
"The gatepost is very close to the gate," I say.
So we go out to the car park behind the freight office at half past nine in the morning on a Wednesday, because he has decided, and because I have discovered over five weeks that there is no method available for stopping Teodoro Orsini once he has decided.
It is empty except for a skip and a pallet stack and two hundred metres of cracked concrete.
"Right," he says, getting out. "Swap."
"I do not need to."
"Get in the driver's side."
"I have driven four hundred times."
"You have done it four hundred times fast, in a straight line, away from something," Teodoro says, over the roof of the car, "and I would put money on you never once having reversed into anything on purpose."
He is right and I hate it.
Here is the truth, which I have not said to anybody: I was taught to drive in nine days when I was seventeen by a man whose entire brief was get her out of a place. Straight lines. Speed. Not stopping.
Nobody taught me to park. Nobody taught me a three point turn, or a hill start, or what to do at a junction where everybody is being polite, and I have spent nine years arriving at things at the wrong angle and leaving very quickly and nobody has ever once been in the car to see it.
"Mirror," Teodoro says.
"It is fine."
"Adjust the mirror."
"The mirror is fine."
"Rosalie, you are five foot six and my brother is six foot two and he drove this car last, so unless you have grown in the night the mirror is not fine, and I want you to look at it and tell me what you can see."
I look at it.
I can see the inside of the roof and a small triangle of sky.
He is a terrible teacher.
I understand this within about eleven minutes and it takes me until the end to understand that he is being terrible on purpose.
He talks continuously. He talks about the concrete and about a cousin who failed his test four times, and he asks me questions in the middle of manoeuvres and then tells me not to answer them, and at one point he says, "Left," and I go left, and he says, "No, I meant left as in correct," and I nearly put us in the skip.
"That was you," I say.
"That was entirely me."
"You said left."
"I say a great many things," Teodoro says. "The trick is to stop believing all of them, which everybody in my family worked out by about nineteen."
At eleven o'clock he makes me reverse round the pallet stack fourteen times.
Fourteen. He counts them out loud, the way he counted the photographs, and by nine I want to put him through the windscreen and by twelve I have got it, and on the fourteenth I do it in one movement without stopping and he says nothing at all.
I look over.
He is sitting in the passenger seat with his arms folded looking straight ahead.
"What."
"Nothing."
"You have gone quiet. You do not go quiet."
"I am having a moment," Teodoro says. "It will pass. Go round again."
At half past twelve we are on the ring road.
He has not warned me. That is his technique and it is deliberate and I only work it out afterwards: he said, "Left at the end," and I went left at the end and I was on a slip road doing sixty with four lanes of freight either side of me before I understood that I had been handled.
"You put me on the ring road."
"I did."
"Deliberately."
"Yes."
"I could have said no."
"You could have," he agrees, "and then we would have had to have a conversation about why, and I would rather you were simply doing it."
I drive the ring road at sixty with both hands on the wheel and my jaw shut, and after about four miles I realise I am doing it correctly, and that the correct way is not faster, and that nobody is chasing me.
"Slow down."
"I am at sixty."
"Everyone is at fifty. You are in a queue, Rosalie, and you are three feet off the back of a lorry and there is nowhere to go and you are still doing sixty, and it is because you have never in your life driven anywhere you were not leaving."
That is when he stops the joke.
I want to be exact about where it happens because it is the only time I have seen him do it. We come off the ring road at the second junction and pull into the forecourt of a place that sells tyres, and he says, "Stop here," and I stop, and he does not get out.
He undoes his seatbelt and puts his hands on his knees.
"Right," he says. "Two minutes, and then we will go and get something to eat and I will not do this again."
"Do what."
"Talk to you seriously. I do not enjoy it and I am not good at it and I want you to know that I have been working up to this since the tenth of November."
My hands go flat on my thighs.
"My brother has not slept through a night since he was eleven years old," Teodoro says.
"I know."
"You do not know the whole of it. You know because he told you, and he told you the tidy version, which is the version with a car in it.
" He is looking out through the windscreen at a stack of tyres.
"There is a longer version and it involves our father, and I am not going to tell you that one either, because it is not mine. "
"Then why are we here?"
"Because he has slept through the night twice this month," Teodoro says.
The forecourt is very ordinary. There is a man in overalls doing something to a wheel and a radio going somewhere and a sign about winter tyres.
"Twice," Teodoro says. "The nineteenth and the second. I know because I ring him at half six most mornings about the manifests and he answers on the first ring like a man who has been up since four, and twice this month he has answered on the sixth ring sounding like somebody's uncle."
"That is not."
"I have been doing that phone call for nine years.
Twice. In a month." He turns his head. "I am not going to say the thing everybody says, because you would take it badly and it is not the point anyway.
The point is arithmetic. He is thirty four and he has had two nights in twenty three years and both of them happened in the last four weeks, and I would quite like there to be more of them, and that is the whole of my position. "
I look at the tyre stack.
"There is more," I say.
"There is not."
"You have been working up to this since the tenth and you have spent four minutes of it, and there is more."
Teodoro breathes out.
"Whatever you are going to do to him," he says, "do it before Bregman does."
I go very still.
"Say that again."
"You heard it."
"Teodoro. Say it again, exactly."
He looks at me, and something crosses his face, and I watch him hear his own sentence about four seconds after everybody else in the car has heard it.
"Ah," he says.
"Yes."
"That came out."
"It did."
"I meant it kindly. I want that noted." He rubs his face with both hands.
"I meant: Bregman is going to come at him in February and it is going to be ugly and there is a version of my brother that does not survive being alone through that, and I would like the other version, and you are the reason there is another version. That is what I meant."
"I know what you meant."
"But you heard the other thing."
"Yes."
"Because there is a contract."
The radio goes on somewhere behind us.
"He told you," I say.
"He has never said one word about it." Teodoro puts his hands back on his knees.
"You came up a wall in November with a rose in a tube and nobody in this family is stupid, Rosalie, and I have known there was a live contract since about eleven o'clock on the third and I have not said it out loud in five weeks because he did not want it said. "
"And you have been sitting next to me in a car."
"Yes."
"For four hours. Teaching me to reverse round a pallet."
"Yes," Teodoro says. "Well. It needed doing."
Neither of us moves for a bit.
"Does Ottilie know?"
"Nonna knows everything and says nothing, which is not the same as knowing.
" He shrugs. "I have stopped trying to work out what is inside that woman.
When I was fourteen I found out she had been running the Vroom Street house accounts for thirty years and nobody had ever told me there were accounts. "
"Does she know about the rose?"
"She was at the council. Everybody at that council knows about the rose." Teodoro looks at me. "Why?"
"No reason."
"That is not a thing you say."
"It is a thing people say."
"It is a thing people say," he agrees. "It is not a thing you say, and I would like it minuted that I noticed."
We sit in a tyre forecourt.
"Can I ask you something," Teodoro says.
"Yes."
"Do you like it?"
"Like what?"
"Any of it. Him, the house, Nonna, Sunday, the whole apparatus." He is not joking and he is not being kind either; it is the flattest I have heard him. "Because I have watched you for five weeks and I cannot tell, and it is the only thing about you I cannot tell, and I am very good at this."
I look at the man in the overalls doing something to a wheel.
Here is what I have. A terrible chair on a roof.
Eggs, put down and stepped back from. A woman in Ghent who lies about pastry.
A photograph in an inside pocket with two lines of ink on the back of it.
Eleven cousins who think I am funny. A rifle I have not fired.
A hatch that no longer squeaks. A man who crouches so his eyes are lower than mine.
Thirty seven days.
"I do not have anything to compare it to," I say.
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one I have got. I have never liked anything.
" My hands are flat again. "I did not know that was a thing that could be tested until about the fourth of November and I have been running the test ever since, and I do not have a result, and when I have one you will be the second person told. "
Teodoro looks out of the windscreen for a while.
"That will do," he says.
Then he says, "When is it?"
I could lie. I want to write that down honestly: there is a version where I say a date that is not the date and he takes it, because he is not a professional and he likes me and he wants it to be all right.
"The twelfth," I say.
"Of December."
"Yes."
"That is nine days."
"Yes."
Teodoro nods slowly at the windscreen.
"Right," he says.
And then he does the thing that I have thought about every day since, and which I did not deserve, and which I will never be able to pay back.
He does not ask me what I am going to do.
He does up his seatbelt, and he says, "You are still not indicating early enough, we will do that after lunch," and points at the road, and I put the car in gear.