Chapter Thirty-Six
I do not listen to it in the cafe.
She offers. She says, “There is a corner, the machine is loud, nobody will hear,” and I stand up and I put my coat on and I say, “No,” and I hear how it comes out and I put my hand on her shoulder for one second, badly, on the way past, because I do not know how to do the thing that I want to do.
She says one thing at the door.
“Do not do it at home,” she says. “Do it somewhere you can leave.”
So I drive out of Turin.
I get on the A55 going east and then I am on the wrong road and I come off at Rivoli and I go around a roundabout twice and I end up in the car park of a supermarket that is not open yet, at ten o’clock in the morning, in the rain, with a mountain somewhere behind the cloud and a trolley bay and eleven empty spaces.
I plug the telephone into the cigarette lighter with the cable she wound around it.
It takes two minutes to come on. It comes on with a manufacturer’s logo from six years ago and then a photograph of a beach behind a lock screen, and there is no code, she has taken the code off, she has taken the code off for me, and there is one thing on the home screen and it is a folder called WORK and inside it there is a file and the file is called
KM BOARDROOM 14 10 FINAL
and it is sixty one minutes and forty seconds long.
I put both hands on the wheel.
Then I press it.
The first thing is her voice. It is Celine, four years younger, and she sounds like a different animal, she sounds fast and slightly nervous and very young, and she says, “Everyone, I am recording this, it goes in the project folder, if anyone objects I will stop.”
And then, immediately, close to the microphone, so close it distorts:
“Do it properly or do not do it at all. And send the transcript to Ellis so it can be minuted.”
And I have to stop the car, which is absurd, because the car is not moving.
Here is a thing nobody tells you.
You can go four years without a voice. You can go four years and you can be perfectly functional, you can run a site with twenty two men on it and win a Superintendency hearing and put a child through seven fevers, and you think, well, that is over, that is finished, I have taken that off the wall in numbered trays.
And then a telephone in your hand says nine ordinary words in a bored voice at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in a supermarket car park in Rivoli, and you are on the floor of a bathroom in Turin with a shower running hot.
It is not the words. It is the room tone. It is the sound of a room he was in.
I sit in the car park for one minute and forty seconds and I do not hear a thing.
Then I start it again from the beginning, and I listen to all of it, and I do not skip.
Forty two minutes of a boardroom fit-out.
That is what is on the tape. Forty two minutes of the most tedious material on this earth.
Acoustic panels. Whether the table should be one piece, and how you get a one piece table into a room on the fourth floor, which turns out to be a genuine problem and takes fourteen minutes.
A man called Ellis reads out a schedule of rates.
Somebody’s telephone goes off and they apologize twice.
Adrian says no to marble, twice, and the second time he says, “Because it is a room where people are going to be told they are being made redundant, and I am not doing it under marble.”
He is bored. He is impatient. He is not charming, he has never been charming, and about twenty minutes in he goes quiet for a long stretch and I know exactly what his face is doing.
I know the breath. I told Ines about the breath in a bar six days ago and she did not understand what I was telling her.
There is a breath he takes before the second half of a sentence.
It is not a pause for effect. It is a man checking the sum one more time before he commits to it, and I have heard it across a kitchen and down a telephone line from three countries and through a wall in a hotel in Genoa, and it is there, on that tape, all the way through, in every single sentence.
And in the version they played in the ballroom, it is not there.
I knew that in six seconds four years ago and I have never once let myself finish the thought.
At forty two minutes and thirty seconds a woman says, “Signor Kastellanos, forgive me, one more thing,” and it is Celine, and you can hear her getting her courage up, and she says:
“Your mother telephoned the studio. She would like the scheme to go past her before it goes to you. She said the family should be comfortable in the room.”
There is a silence of about three seconds.
Then my husband says:
“She will tell you my wife has no place in this. She will be extremely polite about it. She will say, and she will use these words, that Nora was never going to be one of us.”
A chair moves.
“And before you spend six months of your life on a room in this building, I want you to hear it from me, because you will hear it from her, and you will hear it said kindly, and it is the most dangerous sentence in this company.”
Another breath. The breath.
“Nora is not going to be one of us. She was never going to be one of us. That is the entire reason I married her.”
The rain is on the roof of the car.
“I have been in this company since I was nineteen years old,” Adrian says, "and every person in it is one of us.
My father was one of us and he died at a table in a restaurant opposite a man he had despised for thirty years, and he had spent the whole lunch being charming to him, and that was the last thing he did.
My mother is more one of us than anybody who has ever lived.
I have spent my entire life learning the exact weight of a pause before a word.
“And then a woman from Bergen sat down two seats along from me in a lecture theatre in Rotterdam and asked a question about a pier that nobody in that room was clever enough to ask, and she did not know who I was. And when she found out, she did not care. And in eighteen months she has never once put a pause in front of anything. She says boatbuilder the way other people say doctor, and she watches them do the pause, and she does not flinch, and I have sat at the end of forty feet of my mother’s table and watched her do it and had to put my glass down. ”
Somebody in the room says something I cannot hear.
“No,” Adrian says. “Do not build it for her. Do not build it for me either. Build it for whoever is sitting in it in fifty years. Nora would tell you the same thing and she would say it better and it would take her nine words.”
There is a small laugh in the room. It is the polite kind.
And then, quieter, further from the microphone, a man standing up, a man gathering paper:
“You should meet her. Not for the room. You would simply like her.”
Forty three minutes and fifty one seconds.
I stop it.
I put my head back against the headrest in a supermarket car park in Rivoli and I look at a ceiling of grey fabric with a stain on it from a juice carton in the third year, and I do not move for a long time.
Then I start it again, at forty two minutes, and I listen to it four more times, because I am the kind of woman who reads a survey three times before she signs it, and because I have to be certain, and because I am not certain, and because every time it finishes I have to hear it again to believe that it is not going to say something different.
It does not say anything different.
It says the same thing five times, in a bored voice, in a room in London, on the fourteenth of October, twenty six days before the ninth of November.
And then, at fifty nine minutes and forty seconds, when the meeting is breaking up and there is the sound of chairs and a door and somebody asking somebody about a car, and Celine’s hand is on the telephone to stop the recording, and the file is about to end, there is one more thing.
He is close to the microphone again. He is leaning down to shake her hand, probably. And he says, in a completely level voice, in the tone of a man asking for a document to be sent to the right department:
“And do not send my mother a copy of that transcript. She reads everything.”
The file ends.
I sit in the car.
The rain stops after a while, the way it does in that part of the country, all at once, as though somebody has taken their hand off a tap, and the sun comes through and the car park goes silver and a man arrives and unlocks the supermarket and pushes the trolley bay back into line with his hip.
I put my hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way my father taught me in a Volvo on a wet road above Bergen when I was seventeen years old, because he said that a person’s hands do not lie and a person’s hands should be told what to do.
And I say it out loud, to the windscreen.
“Then you knew exactly what you were selling.”