Chapter Forty-Eight
ADRIAN
I have prepared for a great many things in my life. Six days in Athens once, for twelve minutes with a minister. Three weeks for a syndicate meeting. I have sat up until four in the morning with a bottle of water and a wall of paper and gone in and taken a room to pieces.
There is no preparing for it. That is the whole of what I have learned.
I wrote lists. I want that recorded because it is humiliating and because a man who will not write down the humiliating parts is doing it again.
I sat at the table in the flat on Via Manzoni with the green folder in front of me and I made lists of things to say to a four year old.
I made a list of questions. I made a list of subjects.
I looked up, on a telephone, at half past eleven at night, what a four year old can be expected to know.
The second Thursday I went in with eleven prepared items and I got through six of them in nine minutes and she went and sat down on a stack of pallets with her back to me.
I stood in a yard and understood that I was performing.
I have performed my whole life. I performed for my father until he had a stroke and then I performed for the men who were frightened of what would happen next, and I have performed in eleven countries, and I am very good at it, and I have never once in thirty six years been in a room with a person who could not be performed at.
She is completely immune. It slides off her like rain off a coat.
She has no idea that she is supposed to be impressed, and there is no mechanism in her for pretending to be, and by the third Thursday I understood that if I wanted an hour with my daughter I was going to have to stop being anybody at all.
So on the fourth Thursday I did not talk.
I signed the book and put a hat on and went and sat down on the step of the loggia, and I did not ask her anything, and I did not tell her anything, and I took a piece of chalk out of the box that lives on the gatehouse shelf, which belongs to the site and stays on the site and is not a gift and is not an object I put into her hand, and I drew, on the flagstones, a section through a wall.
I did not draw it for her. That is the thing.
I drew it because the north wall of the loggia has a crack in it that runs from the sill to the corbel and I have been looking at it for thirteen weeks and I wanted to understand it, and I drew it for me, the way Nora draws, badly, with the levels wrong.
It took seven minutes for her to come over.
She stood at my shoulder and looked at it for a while.
“That is the wall,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You did it wrong. The window is on the other side.”
She was correct. I had it mirrored. I have signed for two hundred million euros with a steadier hand than I drew that wall with, and my daughter, who is four, stood at my shoulder in a yard in Milan and told me it was wrong, and she was right, and I said:
“Yes. Show me.”
And she took the chalk out of my hand.
She has taken it every Thursday since.
That is what the hour is. I want that on the record too, because a man could tell this differently.
A man could tell it as a story about a father and a child and a piece of chalk and it would come out warm, and it was not warm.
It is forty minutes of silence with fourteen minutes of a four year old telling me I have got something wrong, and then eight minutes at the end where she tells me about a thing she has seen, in enormous detail, with no ending.
I will set down what the rest of the week is, because otherwise the hour does not mean anything.
The rest of the week is Gideon Farrell on the telephone about the removal notice and the twenty one days that became sixty because counsel would not let the meeting sit.
It is Sofie Deleu’s people sending me schedules of questions with two hundred and forty items on them, and answering all two hundred and forty, in writing, on a laptop at a table with nothing else on it.
It is a young man with a lanyard in Stratford who telephones every nine days and is always polite.
It is the Revenue, who want the tax on a trust I no longer have the money to pay for, and Gideon telling me there is a way and me telling him not to look for it.
It is a rented flat with a bed and a chair and a green folder in it.
And at five minutes to six on a Thursday I turn the telephone off.
Not to silent. Off. I take the battery of my life out for sixty five minutes once a week and I put it on the shelf in a gatehouse next to a kettle, and in that hour I am not a defendant and I am not a director and I am not the son of anybody, and there is nobody in the world who can reach me.
I have been rich, and I have been the chief executive of a hundred year old company, and I have owned a boat.
That hour is the only thing I have ever had.
There is a woman in a doorway ten feet away for every second of it.
She does not speak. She stands with one hand on the frame of the gatehouse and she watches, and I do not look at her, and I have not looked at her properly since the ninth of September, because if I look at her I will forget the rules, and the rules are the only address I have.
I did not ask her a single question about herself in thirteen weeks. Not one. Not how she is. Not whether she has eaten.
I have wanted to ask her whether she has eaten more than I have wanted anything in my life.
On the fifth Thursday it rained, so we were in the gatehouse, which is nine feet by eleven and has a table in it and a kettle and a photograph of somebody’s dog.
Sophia sat on the table, which is not allowed, and swung her legs, and looked at me for a long time in the way she does, which is the way a surveyor looks at a beam.
“Who are you,” she said.
And there it was.
Nora wrote the sentence in the site book at the back, on a clean page, in the middle of the night on the twenty ninth of August, in that hand, and she made me read it three times before she would let me go home, and I have said it to myself every day since in a rented flat with nothing in it.
I did not hurry it. I did not soften it. I did not put one thing into it that she had not written.
“My name is Adrian,” I said. “I knew your mother before you were born. I asked if I could come here and see you, and she said yes.”
Sophia swung her legs.
“Did you know me before I was born.”
“No.”
“Then why do you look at me like that,” she said.
And I sat on a chair in a gatehouse nine feet by eleven with the rain coming off the loggia roof outside, and there was no sentence written in a book for that one, and there is no sentence anywhere on this earth for that one, and I could not speak.
I could not speak.
I have stood in a fabrication hall in front of three thousand people and been told by a plater that I used him and I answered him inside two seconds.
I sat in a room in Stratford for six hours and answered a young man with a lanyard on the record without a lawyer touching my sleeve.
I have never in my adult life failed to produce a sentence.
I sat there with my mouth open like a boy.
And from the doorway behind me, without moving, without coming into the room, my wife said:
“Because he is bad at talking.”
Sophia thought about that.
“He is very bad at it,” she agreed, and got off the table, and went to look out of the window at the rain, and that was the end of it. The whole of it. Six seconds, and a child was satisfied, and the ground closed over the top of the worst moment of my life.
I did not turn round.
I sat in a chair with my hands on my knees and I looked at the wall of a gatehouse and I listened to the rain, and I understood what had happened in that room.
She lied to our daughter to keep me in it.
She did not have to. That was the door. That was the door standing wide open with the light coming through it, and all she had to do was let the silence run for four more seconds and I would have had to answer, and whatever I said would have been the end of the Thursdays, because there is no true answer to that question that a four year old can hold.
She could have ended me in that gatehouse with her mouth shut.
And instead she put four words in front of her daughter and made them true, because they are true, I am bad at talking, and she made a wall out of them, and she put me behind it.
I have not been given anything in four years. I have not asked for anything and I have not been given anything and I have been extremely careful to arrange my life so that neither of those things could ever be held against me.
At sixteen minutes past six on a wet Thursday in October, in a room with a photograph of somebody’s dog in it, my wife gave me something.
I did not thank her. There is no thanking her for it. It is not on the list of things I am allowed to say and it would have made it a transaction and she would have taken it back.
At seven o’clock I stood up and said, “That is the hour,” and I went to the line and took off the hat and signed out, and I walked to the gate in the rain without a coat.
And behind me, in the doorway of the gatehouse, in a voice I have not heard in four years, a voice with nothing on it at all, Nora Lindqvist said:
“You are getting better at it.”
I did not turn round for that either.
I have replayed it every night since, on my knees, with a bolster in my hand, on four hundred and eleven square metres of somebody else’s floor.