Chapter Forty-Six
I let him wait.
I am going to be honest about this because I have decided that I am done lying, and the truth is that I let him stand there for a long time and I could have spoken and I did not.
I count it afterwards on the boards. It is somewhere near two minutes.
He does not move. He does not shift his weight.
He stands in the middle of that floor with his hands behind his back and his eyes on me and he takes every second of it, and I watch a man be refused for a hundred and twenty seconds without being refused, and I do it deliberately, and I am not proud of it, and I would do it again.
Because he has to find out what it is like. He has to stand in the room and not know. He has spent four years making certain that no woman on this earth would ever get to be the one who decides, and tonight he has handed it to me, and I am going to make him hold it in his hands until his arms ache.
That is not love. I want to be very clear. That is a woman getting something back.
And then I hear the other thing.
It has been standing in the room behind me the whole time, the way they do, waiting to be let in, and it comes in now, while a man is standing on a floor in the middle of the night with his hands behind his back.
The trust is done. It is irrevocable and it is not connected to this and it does not depend on it. If you say no to me tonight, the shares stay exactly where they are, and she has them at twenty five, and she never has to hear my name.
“What shares,” I say.
He does not answer.
“Adrian. What shares.”
“It does not matter.”
“Say the number.”
And he says it the way you would read it off a shopping list, in a bored voice, in a room in London, on the fourteenth of October.
“Eighteen point two percent,” he says. “Of the ordinary. It was my father’s block and it has never been out of the family since 1971.”
I put my hand on the trestle.
“When,” I say.
“April.”
April.
I stand in the middle of four hundred and eleven square meters of 1604 with a lamp lying low across it and I do the sum, and I am very good at sums, and it takes me two seconds and I would give a year of my life not to have done it.
April is when a man in a green folder found out he had a daughter.
He got fourteen reports and one photograph of a hand, of a child’s hand, taken from a car by a man he was paying, and he sat in a rented flat with nothing in it and he looked at a photograph of my daughter’s hand.
And then he telephoned a lawyer.
“You had never met her,” I say.
“No.”
“You had a photograph of her hand.”
“Yes.”
“And you gave her everything you own.”
“Yes.”
“Irrevocably.”
“Yes.”
“So that she never has to hear your name.”
“Yes.”
And my hands go.
They go completely, both of them, and there is nothing I can do about it, and I sit down on the stone because my legs have stopped being interested in the argument, and I sit on the floor of my own ballroom in the middle of the night with my back against a trestle and I put my wrists between my knees to hold them still.
He does not come toward me.
He is on his feet in the middle of that floor and he does not take one step, and he wants to, I can see the whole of it, I can see it in the shoulders, and he stands there and he does not.
“You did it in April,” I say. “You did it before Turin. You did it before I said one word to you in this room. You did it before the note and before Perama and before any of it, and you had never met her, and you did not tell me, and if I had said no to you tonight and told Marco to change the locks you would have walked out of that gate and she would still have had it at twenty five and she would never have known where it came from.”
“Yes.”
“She would have been twenty five years old and rich and she would not have had your name.”
“That was the design.”
“And you were never going to tell me.”
“No.”
“Because it would have been a receipt.”
“Because it would have been a receipt,” he says.
I laugh.
It is not a good laugh. It goes up the face of that room and comes back off a ceiling with a hole in it and it sounds like somebody else in the building, and it frightens me more than anything that has happened tonight.
“Do you know what you have done,” I say.
“Yes.”
"You do not. You have no idea. You have handed a four year old the thing that ended us.
That is what is in that trust, Adrian, that is the actual contents.
It is not shares. It is the ninth of November.
It is a folder on a table and a woman in a green dress and a man doing arithmetic in a chair, and you have wrapped it up and put it in a bank and instructed a lawyer to give it to my daughter on her twenty fifth birthday with no name on it.
"And she will open it. She will be twenty five and somebody in an office will hand her a piece of paper with eighteen point two percent of a shipping company on it and she will ask where it came from.
"And you will not be there.
“And I will be.”
He stands on the floor.
“Yes,” he says.
“So you did not remove yourself,” I say.
“You put yourself in her hands and then you left the room, and you have arranged it so that in twenty one years she cannot refuse you, because a man who is not there cannot be refused, and you have done it again. You have done exactly the same thing again. You have found the one place in the world where nobody can look at you while you are being weighed, and you have gone and stood in it, and you have taken a child with you.”
And Adrian Kastellanos, who has not put a foot wrong in a room since he was nineteen years old, says the only thing that could take my legs out.
“Yes,” he says. "I know. I have known it since about the second week of May.
“And I did not undo it,” he says, "because I could not think of a single way to give her the money that did not have me in it somewhere, and I am not clever enough to have found one, and she is going to need it, and I would rather she hated me at twenty five with something in her hands than loved nobody at twenty five with nothing.
“So I did the stupid version. And I will take the twenty five years.”
I sit on the floor of my ballroom with my wrists between my knees.
“Sit down,” I say.
He does not.
“Adrian. Sit down, you have been on your knees for six hours and you are swaying.”
He starts to sit down on the edge of the trestle, and I put my hand out.
I do not do it in the ballroom.
I want to be exact about why, because it is the only decision I make tonight that I make with my whole head.
That room has four hundred and eleven square metres of 1604 in it and a hole in the sky and a man on his knees with a bolster, and if I stand in it one more minute I will start deciding things with the building instead of with my hands.
I go and get the site book.
“Bring the lamp,” I say. “We are going to the gatehouse.”
He carries it across the yard for me and he does not ask why, and he walks behind me and to the left, which is where a man walks who has been thinking about how not to be beside somebody.
The gatehouse is nine feet by eleven. There is a table, and a kettle with lime in it, and a photograph of somebody’s dog that has been there since before I was appointed and that nobody will admit to.
There is one chair. There is a bolster on the shelf that Marco has put there and that I have never mentioned to him.
I put the lamp on the table. I sit down in the chair. He stands.
“Sit on the table,” I say.
“No.”
“It is not a courtesy. It is my neck.”
He sits on the edge of the table, which is not allowed, and puts his hands flat on his knees, palms down, the way he has been doing all night so that I cannot see them.
I open the book at the back, at a clean page, and I take the pen, and I do what I do, which is to write a method statement, because I have never in my life been able to think about a thing until I have written down how it will be done.
I write the date at the top, because I have never in my life started a page without a date on it.
29 August.
And then I sit with the pen in my hand and I do not write the next thing.
Here is what I have not said out loud to anyone, including Ines, including my father, including the ceiling.
I have rehearsed the word no for four years.
I have it built. I have it costed and drawn and it has a specification and I could stand up in any room on this earth and deliver it, and the whole of my life since a Tuesday in Turin with a midwife who spoke no English has been the underpinning of that one word.
I do not have a drawing for yes.
“Nora,” he says.
“Do not.”
“I was going to say that you can put the pen down.”
“I know what you were going to say.” I look at him.
“That is the whole of the problem with you. You have spent nineteen nights building me a door out and you have left it open and you have oiled it, and if you say one more kind thing to me in this room I am going to walk through it and I am going to spend the rest of my life at a kitchen table in Milan wondering what she would have been like if I had not.”
He shuts his mouth.
“You get the hour,” I say.
He does not say anything. His head comes up about two centimeters.
“Do not speak yet.”
“No.”
“Thursday,” I say. "Six until seven. Not seven o’clock and one minute, seven. Here, at the site, in the loggia if it is dry and in the gatehouse if it is not, and never at my flat, not once, not if it is snowing, not if she is ill, not ever.
"You do not bring her anything. Not a toy. Not a book. Not a coin, Adrian, not a stone you picked up on the way, and I know exactly what you are, and I am telling you now that if you ever put an object in that child’s hand the hour ends and it does not come back.
"You do not tell her who you are. Neither do I. She is four and she asks everything and she will ask you inside a fortnight, and when she does you will say one sentence, and I am going to write it down, and you will learn it, and it will be the same sentence every time until I decide otherwise.