Evangelista's Fan (11 page)

Not that she regrets the passing of that bit of her life. Not at all. And now, as she feels a sweet sleep coming near, waiting, coming nearer, she thinks, not for the first time, I only endured it for so long for the sake of Nico.

She knows she's slept for a few minutes but no more. She's warm. The pain in her head hasn't diminished. She lies very still.

She's been woken by something she can't identify. She raises her head, just an inch or two off the pillow, and listens. She can hear the rain on the window and the distant traffic of the boulevard. They're utterly familiar sounds and yet it seems to Marianne as if she hasn't heard them in conjunction with each other for a long, long time. It's as if there's been some vacant space between her and them. In a busy life, do you stop hearing the ordinary, the everyday? Or do you hear so much, so continuously, that half of it goes unregistered?

Marianne lowers her head onto the soft pillow. And she thinks, it was the past that woke me. I was dreaming about my parents, Otto and Lucie, dreaming myself back in our old apartment that smelled of pipe tobacco and cake baking. I was in my child's room and it was the sound I could hear from my child's bed that woke me up. It was one of those noises that used to come from the unoccupied room.

Marianne's room was at the end of the corridor. It had a small window that looked out over a courtyard, where a rusty fountain splashed during heatwaves and was silent the rest of the year. Hers was the ‘last' room in the flat. The lives of their neighbours began on the other side of her wall. Their names were Joseph and Joanna Stephano. You could hear them from the bathroom, which was next to their kitchen. You could hear a kettle whistling and crockery smashing on the tiles and their voices shouting. (‘
Why do they quarrel so?
' says Lucie. ‘
It's just their nature
,' says Otto.) But in her little bedroom, Marianne hardly ever heard them. So she'd worked out that the room next to hers was empty. It may have been a guest room where no guests ever came, or a fusty dining room that was never used, or even a box room kept closed and locked. And yet it had a function. Just one. It was where Joanna Stephano came to cry.

Marianne thinks, certain sounds from the past are never forgotten. You come out of an important three-day conference and the crying of Joanna Stephano returns to you more clearly than the voices of the conference speakers. Once, it continued most of the night. You sat up and tapped on the wall, very lightly. You wished you'd learned Morse code so that you could send a message of consolation. At dawn, you heard Joseph Stephano start to call Joanna's name and, after that, you went to sleep.

But then. You heard something else. Later that same year or in the year that followed, when you would have been nine. Something that you never understood. Or did you? Was there an explanation which you once knew and have now forgotten?

It was a noise like a door creaking, a sound out of a Gothic tale. A creak, a squeak, wood against wood, wood against iron? Something opening, slowly, slowly. You heard it in the middle of the night. It woke you and you listened and you thought, what if the thing that's making this sound were to come through from the unoccupied room into my room?

Later – how much later? – Otto knelt down and held her and said: ‘
Try to forget it, Marianne
.' In fact, she remembers now, Otto and Lucie kept on saying this: ‘
Try to forget it, sweetheart. Put it out of your mind
.' But what were they talking about? Were they talking about the thing that caused the noise that night or about something else? What happened to Joseph and Joanna Stephano? Marianne is sure that in that building, somewhere in her childhood, there was another event. It took place on the stairs. Did it? On the dark stone stairs? If Otto and Lucie were alive, Marianne would call them up and they would remember, but Lucie has been dead for four years and Otto for two. Marianne is alone in her apartment. The time of families is gone.

Marianne is wide awake now. She decides she will go and make the tea, even eat something, perhaps, and then come back to bed, switch on the early evening news. She reaches out and puts on the bedside light. She sits up. The room is painted yellow. There are yellow and blue drapes at the window. On the opposite wall is an oil painting of a naked woman on a hard chair.

She looks at these things: the yellow walls, the curtains, the picture. She looks at the lamp she's just switched on. She looks at the book beside the lamp and the digital alarm clock on top of the book. She looks at the duvet, which is blue and white cotton.

She remembers how her room looks. The walls are beige, the curtains white. By her bed is a photo of Nico.

She is in bed in someone else's apartment. This is not even her city. It used to be her city, but it isn't any more.

Marianne fights her way out of the bed and snatches up her skirt. The digital clock on top of the book says 18.49. Along the boulevard, the traffic will be heavy now, bringing people home from their offices and one of these people will be the owner of this apartment. In moments, now, she will hear the elevator stop on the second floor and hear the rattle of the elevator grille.

The elevator . . .

Marianne pauses in her dressing. The elevator is hers. No.
Was once.
That feeling of foolishness. She knows the elevator like she knows her own car.

She's trying to straighten the bed. The bed is warm from her own body. Then she searches for her spoiled shoes. She's swearing under her breath to stop herself from crying.
Something has happened to send me mad. I'm as mad as a mad cow. I'm in someone else's apartment and at this very moment the owner of the apartment is parking her car under the cherry trees
.

Wait.

She knows the cherry trees. She knows the elevator. She had the keys to the apartment with a brown label attached to them.

Marianne wipes her face with her sleeve. She stares again at the room.

And then she sees it: hiding behind the yellow walls is the ghost of her old room, the bedroom she shared with Paul for fourteen years. She had walked a mile through the rain, believing she was going home. She'd become, in a few hours, just like one of her patients who believe that a hospital ward is a university or a room in a sheltered house an Italian
pensione
. So she knows it now without any doubt: something has occurred in the last twenty-four hours to cause this damage. But she has no recollection of what it is. The one and only clue to it could be the surgical gloves.

She puts on her mac and grabs her briefcase. She goes out of the flat and slams the door behind her. As she tries to run down the stairs, she remembers how Nico used to race the elevator. But she hadn't really liked the game. She worried that he'd fall and gash his head on the stone.

She goes into the first café on the corner of the boulevard. She chooses a quiet table and orders coffee, not tea, and bread and soup and a glass of cognac. She asks the waiter to bring her four aspirin. The café is busy and she sits back on the banquette and closes her sore eyes and listens to the noise of conversation and laughter. She wishes her feet were dry and that the pain in her head would go. She remembers saying one day to Petra: ‘I've always sympathised with the men and women in legends and fairy tales who sell their mules and their souls for trivial things.'

She could almost sleep, here in the warm café, lulled by arrivals and departures. But her food comes and wakes her. She takes the aspirin and begins on the soup, then the bread, then the coffee. She eats and drinks it all together – soup, bread, coffee, cognac. She can't remember when her last meal was or where.

When she's eaten and drunk everything, she leans back against the leather of the banquette and lights a cigarette. Out in the shadowy past, Otto, survivor of the death camps, says: ‘
People never think, when they're in a warm café, about the possibility of certain things. They don't consider that there could be bodies in the river, that bread could one day be scarce. To have these realisations, they have to go out into the street again.
'

Marianne will have to go out into the street again. She can't sleep on the café banquette, but by leaning against it she's located the source of her pain. There's a lump on the crown of her head and a scab of blood in her hair. At some time between the second day and the last day of the conference, she fell and hit her head or someone hit her. This, at least, it is now possible to assume. And there is also a second assumption. She no longer lives in this city and therefore must be staying at a hotel or with old friends. In her briefcase is her address book containing the names and addresses of all her friends in the world. Some are as far away as Japan and Australia, but most are still in Europe.

A man's voice, not Otto's, interrupts and says: ‘
I used to get off on Europe. You know?
'

An American voice?

And then?

A hand, broad, tanned, heavy. An expensive wristwatch with a platinum bracelet. She takes the hand in hers? The hand takes her hand?

The voice again: ‘
What are you doing, doctor? What the fuck are you doing?
'

Has she invented or dreamed the voice and dreamed the hand?

The food and drink and the aspirin and now the cigarette have soothed Marianne a little. It will be possible now – will it? – to search carefully through her bag and her briefcase, to find out where she's staying. Then she'll go there and sleep and hope to wake with her memory intact.

She calls out to the waiter. She's called so loudly, people in the café turn and stare at her. She has had to call above the angry American voice. ‘
Don't do this! Goddammit, don't do this to me!
' The waiter looks startled and comes to her at once. She orders more coffee and another cognac. She apologises for shouting. The waiter removes her soup plate. Marianne places her handbag on the café table.

There are eight small compartments in the bag. Marianne searches them all. She finds three half-used books of matches, some Irish currency, a restaurant bill dated 19 April and a train ticket from Berlin to Brussels. There's no hotel key or key card. Her only discovery is that there is blood on the surgical gloves, more on the right-hand glove than on the left.

She drags her briefcase onto the seat beside her. She lights a second cigarette and snaps the case open. There is her conference file and on top of this a map of the city, unopened. She used to live in this city and didn't believe she'd ever need a tourist's map. She used to park her car every night under the cherry trees.

Her coffee and cognac arrive. She opens the conference file and takes out her notepad. On the top sheet she's written, in a hand almost unrecognisable as hers:
In the US, an estimated four million people over 65 have diet-deficiency-induced abnormalities of bone matrix. Bones often fracture simply from body weight itself. People fall
The rest of the page is blank except for some figure-of-eight doodles and two words:
cinema
and
Pieter
.

Marianne rubs her tired eyes. Pieter is one of her patients. Pieter sits on the balcony of the nursing home, painting watercolours of the sky, which he gives to her, one by one. About once a month, he begs her to sleep with him. He's ninety-one. Sometimes, he shows her his penis and tells her it is ‘perfectly good'. She tells him gently that it's against the rules of the home for the doctors to sleep with the patients. She admires his sky pictures and brushes what's left of his hair.

He says: ‘Being alone. You wait. You wait till you know what it is.'

‘I
am
alone, Pieter,' she replies. ‘It's my choice to be alone.'

‘No,' he says, ‘I mean really alone. You wait and see.'

Thinking about Pieter has frightened her. Not just the fact of Pieter and his life closing with these sad last requests, but something else. It has to do with the hand on hers, with the American voice. She has done something to Pieter. She's hurt or betrayed him in some way. Of this she is now certain.

She's still searching through the contents of her briefcase, but doing this absent-mindedly now. She wonders if she should call Petra. See whether Petra can explain to her what's happened, tell her what she's guilty of. ‘
Darling
,' says Petra softly, ‘
the past is always with us. At all times. It was you who taught me that.
'

Then, she finds it. A key to a hotel room. It has a number on it: 341. Marianne turns it in her hand. Modern hotel keys are plastic and operate a computerised lock. The name of the hotel is not on the key.

She struggles for an image of the hotel. A revolving door? A foyer with jewellery and scarves in a glass case? Staff in uniforms? But what comes to her is an amalgamation of all her journeys in Europe: a doorway in a Berlin street, a view onto a Paris courtyard, a Spanish room maid, the sound of a tram in Vienna. Petra seems to be with her in each of these places. ‘
Information
,' says Petra, ‘
is no longer a problem in the Western World. The sources of information are always somewhere to hand.
'

Marianne goes back to the conference file. Tucked into the conference notes is a letter of welcome from the organiser:

Marianne drinks her cognac. Why, she thinks, do certain drinks seem to warm your heart?