Chapter Fifty-Six
The card comes to the site office in Milan on the last Tuesday in April.
It is cream. It is hand laid. It is the kind of thing you buy from a shop with one name on the door and no prices in the window, and I have held about four of them in my life and every single one of them came from that family.
I stand in the site office with my hard hat still on and I look at that for a long time.
She could have written Signora Lindqvist. She has written Signora Lindqvist on nine documents that I have seen with my own eyes. She has written it to lawyers and she has written it to newspapers and she wrote it to a court in London and lost.
She has written Mrs Adrian Kastellanos because it is true, because we never finished it, because the annulment was never completed and I have been that woman on paper for nine years, and she knows I will notice, and she knows I will know why, and she is telling me that she can still put her hand on the one thing I have never sorted out.
It is the last knife she has got and she has sent it four hundred miles at her own expense to touch me with it once.
Inside there are twenty two words.
Sunday the eleventh of May. Lunch at one. Nine, Charlbury Square. It is a long time since anybody sat at this table.
There is no telephone number. There is no address to reply to. There is a house.
I do not tell Adrian for two days.
I know exactly why I do not tell him and I am not proud of it.
I do not tell him because there is a part of me, small, four years old, extremely well fed, that wants to see what he does, and I have to stand at a window in a site office on a Wednesday and take that part of myself by the back of the neck.
So on the Thursday, when he signs out at seven o’clock and puts the hat on the peg, I put the card in his hand in the yard.
He reads it. It takes him about three seconds.
Then he gives it back to me.
“Do you want to go,” I say.
“No.”
“Adrian.”
“I have been,” he says.
He does not tell me anything else about it that night and he does not tell me anything else about it ever, and the whole of what I know about that Tuesday in February I know from Gideon Farrell, who told me one sentence in a corridor a year later because he had had a glass of wine, and the sentence was, he took a bus.
Theo comes to Milan on the second of May for the handover of the Fondazione papers, because he is the chair of a company that no longer owns this building and there are eleven signatures still to unpick, and he sits in my kitchen on a Friday night and eats two plates of pasta and lets my daughter show him a scab.
He has a card. Of course he has a card.
“Eleven,” Theo says. “She sent eleven. I know because I know who she would send them to and I telephoned nine of them.”
“Who.”
“Me. You. Katherine Vane. Michel. The Rallis. Father Christos. Two women from the Hellenic Society. The Athens cousins, who are one card. And a man called Pavlos who has done the flowers in that house for thirty years and who I do not think she has ever spoken to about anything except lilies.”
“And.”
“Nobody is going,” Theo says.
He puts his fork down.
"That is not a decision anybody has taken, Nora.
That is what I want you to understand about it, because I have been sitting with it for a week and it is the worst thing I have ever been near.
Nobody has decided anything. Nobody sat in a room and agreed to punish her.
Katherine has a board on the Monday. Michel is in Singapore.
Father Christos is eighty and he does not travel.
The Rallis simply did not answer, and when I telephoned Sonia she was perfectly pleasant to me for twelve minutes and never once mentioned that there had been a card, and I understood, at about minute nine, that she was never going to mention it, and that this was the entire conversation.
“There is no conspiracy,” he says. “She is just not worth the Sunday.”
I do not say anything.
“Say something,” Theo says.
“What would you like me to say.”
“I do not know,” he says. “Something. Anything. You are allowed to be glad.”
And I sit in my own kitchen in Milan with the plates on the table and my daughter asleep in the next room and a cream card in the drawer under the tea towels, and I try to find it, honestly, I go and look for it, and it is not there.
I am not glad. I do not feel anything at all, and that is not strength and I am not going to dress it up as strength.
It is simply that I have four hundred and eleven square metres of floor and a certification in July and a five year old who needs shoes, and there is not one hour in my week with that woman’s name in it, and there never will be again.
That is the whole of it. That is the entire revenge, and it took no effort whatsoever, and I did not plan it and I could not have stopped it.
I did not answer her.
That is all I did.
Theo drives to London that weekend. He does not tell me he is going to and he does not tell Adrian, and he does it, and he tells me about it in September in a car in Bergen and then he never speaks about it again.
He got there at half past eleven. There were two vans on the square, caterers, and he watched two men in white jackets carry trays up the steps of number nine, and there was a girl with them with a box of glasses.
At one o’clock there was nobody.
At half past one there was nobody.
At two o’clock the two men in white jackets came back down the steps of that house with the trays, and Theo Kastellanos sat in a car forty metres away on Charlbury Square with his hands on the wheel and watched them load a lunch for twelve people back into a van, covered, untouched, and drive it away.
He sat there for another twenty minutes.
He could see the window of the small drawing room, the one at the front, on the first floor, where she does her letters and where there is a chair.
He says he could not see whether she was in it.
He says the light was on and it stayed on and he watched that window for twenty minutes and nothing moved in it at all.
And then he started the car and he drove to the end of the square and he indicated, properly, the way he does everything, and he went home to his wife in Barnes and he cried in a car outside his own house for a quarter of an hour before he went in.
He did not knock on the door.
I want it written down that he wanted to.
He wanted to more than anything in his life, and he is the good one, he has always been the good one, and he sat in a car on that square for forty minutes with his hand on the door handle and he did not do it, because he has a daughter of his own now and he did the arithmetic.
That is the thing nobody will ever understand about how it ended.
Nobody did anything to her. Not one person.
There was no court and there was no bailiff and there was no morning when a man came to the door with a paper.
She has two hundred and ten million euros in cash in a bank on Lombard Street, which is more money than anybody in that family has ever had in their own name, and she has a house with nine bedrooms in it and a garden key and a kitchen she has learned to use.
She has everything.
She just has nobody to spend a Sunday with.
The chair in the loggia of the Cassaro has a cracked leg.
It has had a cracked leg since June and Marco has been going to fix it since June and there is a war between us about it that we both enjoy, and it rocks about two millimetres on the flag, and it has been rocking under my elbow for nine months.
On the Sunday, in the afternoon, I go into the site office and I get the card out from under the tea towels and I take it to the loggia and I fold it in half and then in half again.
It is a hundred and ten gram card. It is hand laid. It is the best paper made in England.
I put it under the short leg and I set it with the heel of my hand and I sit down on that chair in the yard of the Cassaro Palazzo with a cup of coffee at five past one on the eleventh of May.
It does not rock.
It is a good shim. It will take the load and it will not compress and it will still be under that chair in ten years, and everybody who sits in it will sit level, and not one of them will ever know that it is there.