Chapter Twenty-Nine
ADRIAN
I did not turn the lights on.
I came into the flat on Via Manzoni at twenty past eight in the evening and I shut the door behind me and I stood in the hall in the dark, and I stood there long enough for the timer on the stair light outside to go off, and then it was properly dark, and I still did not move.
I have had that flat for thirteen weeks.
There is a suitcase in the bedroom that has never been fully unpacked.
There is a bowl on the table by the door with two euro coins in it and a site pass with my name typed on it by a twenty nine year old engineer who does not like me, and a spare key I have never given to anybody.
That is the whole of it. Three objects in a bowl.
I went in and I sat down at the table and I put the pad in front of me.
It was a hotel pad. It had come with the flat, it had the name of a management company printed at the top of it in gray, and I had used it for nothing in thirteen weeks.
I took out a pen and I squared the pad to the edge of the table, because I cannot bear a thing to be crooked, and I have never once in my life wondered where I got that from and I know exactly where I got it from.
Then I ruled a line down the middle of the page.
I am going to tell this properly, because it is the only night of my life I would defend in front of anybody, and because I do not come out of it well, and because the two of those are the same sentence.
I ruled a line down the middle of a page, and I put a heading on each side of it, the way I have done since I was nineteen years old in a drawing office in Piraeus with my father standing behind me, and this is what the headings said.
On the left, I wrote: THE BLOCK.
On the right, I wrote nothing.
I sat there for a very long time with a pen in my hand.
Because here is what I could not put on the right hand side. I could not put her name on it. Not because I did not know it, I had known it for nine hours, I had said it to a woman on a staircase and I had said it to the inside of a car and I had said it in a lift. I could not write it in a column.
The moment it goes in a column it has a value.
And I know what happens to things that have a value, because I have spent my entire adult life in the room where that happens, and I am better at it than almost any man alive, and on the ninth of November four years ago I stood in an anteroom with a folder in front of me and I put a woman in a column, and the column did what columns do.
So I did not write it.
I sat at a table in a rented flat in Milan and I put the pen down and I would not write my daughter’s name on the right hand side of a line.
And the sum did it anyway.
That is what I want understood. I did not do it. It ran. It ran on its own, the way water runs, the way it has run in me since I was fifteen years old, and it took about thirty seconds, because it always takes about thirty seconds, and it laid the whole thing out on that table without my consent.
Eighteen point two percent, personally held.
Ninety days from a hostile bid. My mother and I are above the line together and neither of us is above it alone.
If I hold the block, I vote the block, and the bid fails, and the company stands, and the Hellenic assets stand, and the note in Vaduz stays in a drawer in a country nobody goes to, and the yards at Perama and Elefsina go on turning a gate every morning for four thousand two hundred people.
If I settle the block on a child, an independent trustee in Jersey votes it, and a trustee has one duty on this earth and it is not to me, and if the bid is good for the girl the trustee takes the bid, and the yards go to a breaker in the same quarter.
Four thousand two hundred people on one side.
One girl on the other.
It is the same sum.
I sat in the dark in a flat on Via Manzoni and I looked at a piece of paper with a line down the middle of it and I understood that God, or whatever is doing this, had handed me the identical sum a second time, with the identical numbers in the identical places, and was waiting to see what I would do.
And the arithmetic is not broken. That is the thing nobody says.
There is nothing wrong with the arithmetic.
It is correct. It has always been correct.
It was correct in an anteroom in London with thirty seconds on the clock and it was correct at a table in Milan with the whole night in front of me, and it gives the same answer, and the answer is: keep the block.
Keep the block. Defend the company. Do the sensible thing.
I picked the pen back up.
And I did not finish it.
I have never in my life not finished a sum.
I want that written down in the flat legal way, because I have done nothing else worth writing down.
I have finished sums that took a year. I have finished sums with men shouting on both sides of me.
I finished one in thirty seconds with my wife standing twelve meters away waiting for me to stand up.
I sat there with the pen in my hand and I did not write the number.
There is a blank line on that page where an answer should be, and it is the only honest thing I have ever produced.
Theo came at ten past midnight.
He did not ring first. He came up the stairs and he knocked twice, and I opened the door and my brother was standing on the landing in a coat with a bag still in his hand, off the last plane, and he looked past me into a dark flat with one man and one table and one pad in it, and he came in and put the bag down and did not take the coat off.
He found the light. He always finds the light.
He read the pad standing up, with his coat on, without touching it, the way you read a thing you already know the shape of.
Then he went to the cupboard and got out the bottle that came with the flat and he poured two, and he put one in front of me, and he did the thing he does, which is that he did not drink his.
“Say it,” he said.
“I am settling the whole of my personal holding on her. Irrevocable. Independent trustee. No protector, no reversion, no conditions, no contact rights, nothing that depends on the conduct of any living person.”
“You do not vote it.”
“No.”
“A man in St Helier votes it.”
“Yes.”
“And if the bid is good for the child, the man in St Helier takes the bid.”
“Yes.”
“And the yards go.”
“They may go.”
“Say it properly, Adrian.”
I looked at my brother across a table in a rented flat at midnight.
“The yards go,” I said.
And Theo sat down.
He sat down slowly and heavily, in his coat, the way our father used to sit down, and he put both hands flat on the table on either side of a glass he had not touched.
“Four thousand two hundred people,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You have got nothing to say to that.”
“No.”
“You have got no defense.”
“I have not got one line of a defense,” I said.
“I have been telling you for four years that I chose them. I did not choose them. I chose the sum, because the sum was the only thing in the room I knew how to hold, and I have been dressing that up as a sacrifice ever since, and you sat in a restaurant four streets from her building and you took it off me and I have not been able to put it back on.”
Theo did not say anything.
“So there is the sum again,” I said. “It is the same one. Same figures. Same side of the page. And it gives the same answer, Theo, that is the part I need you to understand, it is not a difficult sum and it is not a close one, it comes out for the yards and it comes out for the yards by a long way, and any man in London would sign it in the morning.”
“And you are not going to.”
“No.”
“Because it is wrong.”
“Because I am not going to price her,” I said.
The refrigerator came on in the kitchen behind me and ran and stopped.
“That is not a moral position,” Theo said quietly. “You know that. You have not saved anybody. You have not stood up for a principle. You have simply moved who you are willing to lose.”
“Yes.”
“You have moved it onto four thousand two hundred people who have never heard your name.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have moved it. That is the whole of what I have done and I am not going to make it look like anything else. I have got no speech, Theo. There is no version of this where I am a good man. There is only a version where, for once, I did not open the envelope.”
Theo looked at the pad.
He looked at the line down the middle of it, and the words THE BLOCK on the left, and the empty half of the page on the right where a name should be and is not, and the blank line at the bottom where the answer should be and is not.
Then he picked up his glass and he drank it.
My brother has not finished a drink in front of me in nine years.
He turns them by the stem. He puts them down.
He puts money on a table he does not need to put money on.
He drank that one straight down like a man in a bar in Piraeus, and he set the glass on the wood and he pulled the pad across the table toward himself.
“Give me this,” he said.
“It is nothing. It is not finished.”
“I know it is not finished,” Theo said. “That is why I want it.”
He tore the page off. He folded it in half and in half again, and he put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and he buttoned the coat over it.
“One day,” he said, “somebody is going to stand up in a room and say that my brother calculated. They will be right. They will have all the paper they need and they will be right about every page of it.” He stood.
“And I am going to take this out of my pocket, and I am going to show them the one where you did not.”
He picked up his bag.
At the door he stopped, with his hand on it, the way a tired man’s hand goes on a rail.
“She is going to hate this,” he said.
“I know.”
“It is going to land on her kitchen table like a house falling on it and she is going to hate you for it in a completely new way, one you have not been hated in yet.”
“I know,” I said. “It will not require anything from her. Not a signature. Not a word. Not an hour. She can hate it for nothing.”
Theo stood in the doorway of a rented flat at half past one in the morning and looked at me for a long time.
“Ring Gideon in the afternoon,” he said. “Not tonight. If you ring him tonight your voice will do what it is doing now and he will not draft it, he will get on a plane.”
Then he went down the stairs, and the timer light went off before he got to the bottom, and I heard him go the last flight in the dark without slowing down.
I did not go to bed.
I stood at the window of that flat with the lights off and my hands behind my back, which is how I have stood for six hundred hours on a stone floor in a building I do not own, and I watched Via Manzoni go from black to gray to that color it goes at about half past five when the first van comes.
I have made a great many decisions in my life and I have slept after all of them.
At about six a woman came out of the building opposite with a child on one hip and a folding pushchair under her other arm, and she got the pushchair open with one hand, on the pavement, without putting the child down, in about six seconds, and she was gone up the street before I understood what I had just watched.
It is a thing they do every morning. Nobody writes it down anywhere.