Chapter Thirty-One
ADRIAN
She did not wait three days. She did it in two.
Stefan came for me on the Thursday evening.
He did not ring first and he did not knock, he simply stood in the courtyard of the building on Via Manzoni where I have kept a flat for thirteen weeks, and when I came out at half past nine he opened the door of the car and said, “Sir,” and did not look at me, and his hands were not steady, and Stefan has driven my mother through two funerals and a stroke.
The plane was at Linate with the steps down.
We came into Holland Park at one in the morning and there was one light on in the whole of that house, in the garden room, which is glass on three sides, and from the drive it looked like a lantern standing in a black field.
She was sitting at the table with the deed in front of her.
Not a copy. The engrossment, the good one, seventy pages, bound at the corner, and it had been executed in Jersey at four o’clock that afternoon and it should not have been in London and it should not have been on that table, and I stood in the doorway of my mother’s garden room and understood that there is no piece of paper on this earth with my name on it that she cannot have on a table by nightfall.
“Sit down, Adrianos.”
I sat down.
She had her reading glasses on. She turned a page. She had a pencil in her hand and there were marks on the margins, small ones, the way she marks a menu.
She read for six minutes. She let me sit there. I let her.
Then she took the glasses off and folded them and put them in her lap, and she looked at the deed rather than at me, and she said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, the way you would ask a housekeeper about the milk:
“How old is she?”
“Four.”
“Four.”
“She will be five in August.”
And my mother sat very still.
I have seen that woman take a telephone call about a man dying under a crane in Perama and go straight back into a lunch.
I watched her at my father’s graveside for forty minutes in the rain and she did not put her hand on the coffin, she put her hand on the rail of the grave machine because it was in the wrong place and she wanted it moved.
She put her hand flat on the table.
“August,” she said.
I did not say anything. I sat opposite my mother at one in the morning and I watched her do the arithmetic, and she did it in about six seconds, because she is faster than I am and always has been, and I saw the moment she arrived at the answer, which was November, and a folder, and an anteroom, and a room with four hundred people in it and a woman walking out through the middle of them with her head level.
Her face did not move. That is not the same as nothing happening.
Something went out of it. The color went out from underneath, the way it goes out of a wall when the water finally reaches it, and my mother sat in her own garden room in the middle of the night, sixty six years old, and became for about six seconds a woman I have never met.
“She was in the room,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She was carrying my granddaughter across that floor.”
“Yes.”
The clock in the hall struck the quarter. She did not look up at it.
Then my mother stood, and she left the room.
She did not excuse herself. She walked out of her own garden room at one in the morning and left seventy bound pages on a table in front of a man she had flown across a continent, and I sat there for six seconds and then I went after her.
She was in the room on the second floor.
The door was open, which it never is, and the light was off, and my mother was standing in the middle of the carpet in front of a piano that nobody has played since my father died, with her arms at her sides, doing absolutely nothing.
Not crying. My mother does not cry. She was standing in a kept room in the dark in the middle of the night like a woman who has come upstairs for something and cannot remember what.
I stopped in the doorway.
“Go down,” she said.
“Mother.”
“Adrian. Go down.”
There was a moment then. There is always a moment with her and I have never once taken it, in thirty six years, and I did not take it that night either.
“I was twenty two,” she said, to the piano. “I have told you that. I have never told you what I was carrying.”
The housekeeper dusts those keys on Thursdays.
There is not one grain of anything on them.
I stood in the doorway of that room and I looked at the back of my mother’s head and I did not ask, because I have been trained since birth not to ask, and because some part of me that I will answer for one day did not want to be given a reason to be sorry for her.
She turned around and she was perfectly composed.
“Your tea will be cold,” she said, and she came past me and went down the stairs.
I had come to London expecting rage. I want that put down, because it is the measure of how little I have ever understood her.
I sat on an aeroplane for two hours preparing myself for the worst evening of my life, for the voice she uses twice a year, for the sound of a woman who has been crossed, and I had my hands ready for it, and I would have taken it, and some part of me that I am not proud of was looking forward to it.
She did not raise her voice once.
“What is her name,” she said.
“No.”
“Adrian.”
“No.”
“You put it in a deed,” my mother said gently. “It is in this document nine times. I am not asking you because I need to know. I am asking you because I would like to hear it from my son.”
And there is nothing to be done with that. There has never been anything to be done with that.
“Sophia,” I said.
She said it back to herself, once, under her breath, and she looked out of the black glass at a lawn nobody could see, and she was quiet for a long time.
Then she put her glasses back on.
“You have settled the whole block,” she said.
“Eighteen point two. Irrevocable, discretionary, no protector, an independent trustee in Jersey, and a covenant that no Kastellanos instrument may ever require her to change her name.” She turned a page with one finger.
“You have not reserved a single power. You cannot vote it and you cannot revoke it and you have not made one hour of contact with that child a condition of any part of it.”
“That is correct.”
“You have made yourself a poor man in an afternoon.”
“Yes.”
And my mother nodded slowly, and she said the thing that I have not been able to get out of my head since, and she said it warmly, with her whole heart, with pride.
“That was beautifully done.”
The room went strange around me.
“You have put a four year old girl above the line of a hundred year old company,” she said, “in a document that no court on earth will ever unpick, and you have done it in forty eight hours without a leak and without asking anybody’s permission, and if you had done one thing like it when you were thirty I would not have had to do what I did in that ballroom.
” She turned another page. “Do you know what you have made her, Adrian? You have made her the largest single voice in the family. At four. That girl in Milan is now a Kastellanos in the only way this family has ever recognized anybody, and you did it yourself, and I did not have to lift a finger.”
“No,” I said.
“Darling.”
“That is not what it is.”
“I know that is not what you meant it to be,” she said, and she reached across the table and put her hand over mine, and it was thin and dry and warm and I did not take it away, and I have thought about that every day since.
“You meant it as a payment. I know you did. You have been trying to pay for four years and there is nothing to pay, and you have finally found a sum large enough to hurt, and you have handed it over, and you feel better tonight than you have felt in four years. I am not mocking you. I am your mother. I am telling you that what a thing is meant to be has never once, in the whole history of this family, been the same as what it is.”
She let go of my hand and picked up the deed and squared it against the table, aligning it, because she cannot bear a thing to be crooked.
“She will fight it,” I said. “Nora will not take it.”
“She cannot refuse it. That is the beauty of your document, and I do not think you understood it when you signed it.” My mother stood and went to the window. “It is irrevocable. There is nobody to give it back to.”
“Mother.”
“You have chained your daughter to this name with a chain that no living person can cut, including you, including her, including me, and you did it because you love her, and it is the finest piece of work you have ever done.” She put her hand flat against the black glass for a moment, and took it away, and there was a print of it there.
“You are so much more like me than you can bear, Adrianos. It is going to be the tragedy of your life.”
I stood up.
“Stay away from her,” I said.
“From which one?”
“From both of them.”
My mother turned around. She was smiling, and it was not a cruel smile, it was the smile she gives Stefan when he brings the car round in the rain, and I have loved that smile since I was six years old and I would give a great deal to have never seen it.
“What are you going to do,” I said.
“I am going to go to Milan,” she said, “and I am going to be kind to her. And you will not be able to stop me, Adrian, because you have never once in your life been able to stop me being kind to somebody.”