Chapter Thirty-Five
She stands up when I come in.
She does it too fast, and she knocks the table with her hip and the coffee goes over the saucer, and she says, “Oh,” and puts her hand flat on the marble to stop the spoon, and then she looks up at me with her hand still on the table and the whole four years is in her face at once.
Celine Marchetti is thirty four years old and she is not beautiful.
I want that written down, because I have had a beautiful woman living inside my head since the ninth of November and I have fed her every day for four years, and she is nothing like this.
This woman is small and she has cut her own hair, you can see where, and she is wearing a grey work smock with a pen clipped in the pocket, and two of her fingernails are stained a color I know, which is madder, because I have taken madder off a wall.
Her hands are ruined. Not like mine. Mine are ruined outward, the way a mason’s are. Hers are ruined inward, cracked across the knuckles, because she washes them twenty times a day for a job that will not let her wear gloves.
“You are Nora,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I know what you look like.” She hears it and closes her eyes for half a second. “That came out badly. Sit down. Please sit down, I am going to be very bad at this and it will be worse if you are standing.”
I sit. She sits. She puts both hands around her cup and she does not drink from it.
“I am going to say the whole thing,” she says, “in the order it happened, because I have been assembling this for four years, and if you interrupt me I will lose it and I will not get it back.”
I have twenty one questions in a notebook in my bag.
“Yes,” I say.
“I met your husband once.”
She does not look at me when she says it. She looks at a point on the marble ten centimeters in front of her cup, and I understand, watching her, that this is the sentence she has said in her head every morning for four years while the water ran over those hands.
“On the fourteenth of October. Fourth floor of an office on Leadenhall Street, eleven in the morning, sixty one minutes. Four other people in the room. His brother came in at the end and did not sit down. I have the calendar entry and the visitor badge and the invoice.”
“Sixty one minutes.”
“I know it is sixty one because I recorded it.”
She takes her hand off the cup and puts it in the pocket of the smock and puts a thing on the marble between us.
A telephone. Five or six years old, the screen cracked across one corner in a star, a charging cable wound around it twice. It has the dull look of a thing that has been in a drawer.
“I record client meetings,” Celine says.
“I have done it since I was twenty three. I cannot take notes. I have never been able to take notes, I get three words behind and then the page is a field of nothing, and at university a woman in the disability office told me to record everything and transcribe it at night, and I have done exactly that for fifteen years and it is the only reason I have a career.” She has gone slightly red.
“Had. It is the only reason I had a career.”
“You told them you were recording.”
“It is in the first ninety seconds of the file. I say it out loud, I say it every time, and your husband said, and I can quote it because I have heard it four thousand times, he said, Do it properly or do not do it at all, and send the transcript to Ellis so it can be minuted.”
She turns the telephone around so the cracked corner faces her.
“That is the recording that was played in that ballroom,” she says.
“It is my file. They cut nine words out of the middle of it and put those nine words on four hundred speakers, and they did it with a file my own firm had, because I had followed my own procedure like a good girl and uploaded it to the project folder on the Friday.”
“How did they get it.”
“They bought us.” She says it without any weight at all.
“In the second week of November the Kastellanos family office acquired sixty percent of a design consultancy in Rome with fourteen employees. It was so small that nobody in London wrote a line about it, and it happened three days before the gala, and my managing partner is a man called Paolo Ricci who has a daughter with a heart condition and an apartment he cannot pay for, and I have never once been able to hate him properly and I have tried very hard.”
The bar makes coffee behind us. The machine is loud. Somebody laughs at the counter.
“The dress was green,” she says. “I did not choose it. It came to a hotel room in a box with a card and the card said it was from the client, and I thought, they are seating me at a centenary because I have done the boardroom, and this is what these people do, they put you at a table and take a photograph and it goes in the annual report. I was thirty. It was the largest thing that had ever happened to me. I rang my mother from that room and told her to look for me in the newspaper.”
She picks the spoon out of the saucer and puts it back on the marble, precisely, and squares it, and something goes over the back of my neck, because Eleni Kastellanos squared a hat on a pallet three days ago.
“There was a man at the door with a running order,” Celine says. “He had a headset. He said, when the music changes, walk to the front and take the seat with your name on it. And I said, which seat, and he looked at his paper and said, the second one, and he did not look up.”
“It was printed,” I say.
She looks at me for the first time in six minutes.
“Yes.”
“They printed a place card with your name on it.”
“They printed it six days before,” she says, “in a batch, with the others, on a proof, and I have a copy of that proof, and it has a pencil mark in the margin, and I have spent a great deal of money finding out that the pencil belongs to a woman who cannot bear a thing to be crooked.”
And there it is, on a marble table in Turin, in the rain, at half past nine in the morning.
She holds her cup and she does not cry, and I understand slowly that she is not going to, and that she has not for a long time, and that the crying happened somewhere else, years ago, in a room with the door shut.
“You want the rest,” she says. “I will do the rest quickly.”
“You do not have to do it quickly.”
“I have never once been allowed to do it slowly.” She says it with the first flash of anything like temper, and it is a relief, and then it goes. “I am sorry. That was not for you.”
She puts one finger on the telephone.
“I lost the job in January. Not for cause. There was a restructuring and I was restructured and it was done by a lawyer who was very kind to me. I went back to my father’s house in Bari for five months, and my father is a man who reads three newspapers and he had read all three of them, and we did not speak about it once, and then in June he said one thing to me in a kitchen and I got on a train that night and I have not been back. ”
“What did he say.”
“He said, the family has been very patient with you.” She looks at me. “He meant his family. He meant himself and my brother and my aunt. He had spent five months being patient with me for something I did not do, and he wanted me to notice.”
The rain comes harder on the arcade outside.
“I was engaged,” she says. “That went in the March. He was not cruel. He was worse than cruel, he was fair. He sat in a car outside my mother’s flat and explained to me very reasonably that he believed me and that it did not matter what he believed, and he was right, and I have never got out from under how right he was. ”
“Your mother.”
“Died two years ago in April. And the notice in the paper had my name in it, and somebody rang the funeral director to complain. Somebody rang a funeral director in Bari, on a Tuesday, to complain that a homewrecker had been named in a death notice.” She lifts one shoulder.
“So I kept her name. Marchetti. It was hers before it was anybody’s, and it is the only thing left that they have not taken off me, and I work in a cold room in Turin on a fifteenth century orphrey with a hole in it that I have been closing for nine months, thread by thread, and it is the best work I have ever done and nobody will ever know I did it. ”
I put my hands flat on the marble.
“Why did you never go to a newspaper.”
“With what?” She says it gently. “A woman nobody has heard of says the richest family in Greek shipping made her a whore for one evening. I had a recording that proved they cut a sentence in half. I did not have a reason, Nora, and without a reason it is only a woman complaining that her file was edited, and they would have printed my photograph again, and I would have had to see it again, and I could not.” Her hand goes to the cup and comes away.
“And then in the second year I found the reason. And by then it was worse, because by then I understood who was actually carrying it, and it was not me.”
She reaches into the smock again and puts down a plastic wallet. It is the kind you buy in a supermarket, four for a euro, and it has been opened and closed so many times that the punched holes have torn.
“The fee came from a company in Vaduz,” she says.
“Nine thousand euros, paid to my firm, described as a consultancy disbursement. I kept the advice, because I keep everything, because I am a conservator and it is a sickness. And two years ago I paid a lawyer here in Turin six thousand euros that I did not have, in installments, over fourteen months, to tell me what that company was.”
She slides the wallet across.
“It has held one asset since 2011,” she says.
“A subordinated note, callable on demand, secured against the Hellenic yard assets of Kastellanos Maritime. It is held personally. The personal holder is a woman of sixty six, and if she calls it, the yards at Perama and Elefsina go into the hands of a bank in a fortnight.”
I do not open the wallet.
“Four thousand two hundred people,” I say.
And Celine Marchetti puts her cup down and looks at me, and her face does something I am not ready for. It is not triumph. It is not relief. It is not the face of a woman who has just been believed after four years.
It is pity.
“He told you,” she says.
“His mother told me. On Monday. Sitting on a stack of pallets in my yard.”
“Ah,” she says, very quietly. “Yes. She would.”
And she reaches across the marble table and puts her cracked hand over mine, and I let her, and I have not let a person do that since a woman in a chemist in Turin showed me how to make steam in a bathroom.
“I am not sorry for myself,” Celine says.
“I want you to hear that from me, because you are going to try to be sorry for me in about two minutes and I want to get in front of it. I lost a name. It is a bad thing to lose and I have grieved it, and I am thirty four and I will be all right, and there is a girl in that archive who is twenty two and thinks I am the best hands in the north of Italy, and some days I let myself have that.”
She takes her hand back.
“You lost a marriage,” she says, “and they did not even let you keep the reason. They gave you the wrong one, and you have carried the wrong one for four years, and I have known it the entire time, forty five minutes down a railway line.”
“Then why did you not tell me.”
And Celine Marchetti looks at the rain on the arcade.
“I sent it to you three times,” she says.
The bar makes coffee. Somebody laughs.
"The first time was the March. A padded envelope, a copy of the file on a stick, six pages, to your practice on Via Tortona, addressed to Nora Kastellanos. It came back to me in nine days. There was a line through your name and somebody had written not known at this address, and I understood, and I did not blame you, and I threw up in a bathroom at my mother’s flat.
“The second time I put my own name on the back, so you would know it was not from them. That one came back in six days. Same line. Same hand.”
She stops.
“And the third time,” I say.
“The third time I did not send it,” Celine says.
“The third time I came. In the second year, in the October, I took the eight forty from Porta Nuova and I stood on Via Tortona with the envelope inside my coat from half past eleven in the morning until ten past four in the afternoon, and at ten past four you came out of that door with a pram.”
The rain runs off the edge of the arcade.
“And you were laughing,” she says. "You had the handle in one hand and a roll of drawings under your arm and you were laughing at something, and I stood on the other side of a street in Milan and I looked at you, and I thought, she has built it.
She has built the whole thing out of nothing and it is standing.
“And I got back on the train,” Celine says, “with the envelope still in my coat, and I did not send it again, and I have hated myself for that for two years, and I am telling you now so that you know there is nobody in this story with clean hands. Not one of us. Not even the ones who were only trying to be kind.”