That was where things had stood when I met Renata at my mother’s funeral a week later.
Needless to say, she hadn’t been remotely ‘grateful’ at having her author’s misstep of twenty years back brought to her attention (or, more accurately, shoved in her face). I suspected she’d have pressed ahead with the book if it hadn’t been for the thought of her dear departed Otto turning in his grave. I don’t think she was afraid of public opinion, but she’d been devoted to her husband; they’d built the Whitethorne Press together, and it was surely the case that he wouldn’t have wanted her mixed up with an admirer of some member of Hitler’s inner circle. I pictured her in that little office I’d visited in my twenties, sighing heavily amid the stacks of manuscripts as she weighed her options and made her reluctant decision to ditch Julia’s ill-fated memoir. Well, Sir Alec Rosedale had judged his opponent nicely. But he was known for that, of course.
I saw him at the funeral and again, later, at the reception we gave at my mother’s house. He and Gabriella were standing at the back of the drawing room by the old Dutch spinet my father had rescued from a burning building during the War, talking with a group of other elderly people.
My instinct was to avoid him if I could. Not that I’d taken Renata’s side against him – I was trying to maintain a scrupulous neutrality – but on a personal level it would have felt treacherous to have a friendly conversation with him, having just parted from her.
But Gabriella spotted me, her angular, well-preserved, carefully made-up features lighting up in an oddly excited smile. She tugged at her husband’s arm and he too smiled when he recognised me – less dramatically, but still with an odd eagerness, as if we were much better acquainted than we really were.
Detaching themselves from their group, they squeezed through the packed room towards me. There was no possibility of avoiding them.
After offering their condolences, they brought the subject around to Marco, telling me how pleased they were that he and I had become such good friends, and how deeply touched Marco had been by my support.
Gabriella did most of the talking. Even though she’d spent most of her long life outside the world of fashion, she was still invested, in my eyes, with the glamour from her distant past as a runway model. Her firm, balletic gestures and severe upright carriage were impossible not to notice, as she stood before me, wafting a strong scent of roses. She wore a tailored jacket of ruched black chiffon with a large emerald brooch that brought out the grassy green of her eyes; the same colour that glinted, in certain lights, among the browner hues of her son’s. Her voice had the trace of a Milanese accent, its liquid sibilants and refined vowels giving it a sort of furtive, corrupted, beguiling sensuality.
‘Marco says you’ve been a brick, an absolute saviour. He speaks of you often. I can’t tell you how grateful we are. Of course, we all feel very sad for this crazy woman, don’t we, Alec? And I hope she’s getting the psychological help she so obviously needs. But as a mother, I can tell you there were times when I wanted to go to her house and strangle her!’
Alec stood beside her, nodding at intervals, frail-looking with his wisps of spun-sugar hair and shrivelled pink cheeks, but with a gleam of alert intelligence in his eyes. His wren-like face had always had something impish about it, I remembered; an air of mischievous innocence that, from the research I’d done on him for my unwritten book about these characters from my parents’ world, belied a ferocious legal mind and a willingness to go to unusual lengths to win a case. Perhaps because I knew this, I had an odd feeling that under the appearance of a fragile old man conserving his energies by letting his younger wife do the talking, the reality was closer to that of some discreetly powerful sovereign carefully monitoring an ambassador to whom he had entrusted a precise and delicate task.
Caitlin and our children, who’d flown in the day before, came up, and I introduced them. Again the Rosedales’ faces brightened with intense, eager smiles. Gabriella gushed over my son and daughter, complimenting us on their looks. Even Alec became effusive in his mild fashion, spreading his hands and making an elegant speech to the effect that even though both my parents had sadly departed, he hoped the younger generations would maintain the tradition of family friendship with the Rosedales, especially now that Marco and I had become so close.
The vague discomfort I felt throughout all this I attributed, at the time, to my lingering sense of treachery towards Renata. Later, after confirming with my siblings that the Rosedales had indeed never been especially close friends of my parents, I wondered if the whole exchange hadn’t been contrived as some kind of performance on their part – a piece of theatre for the benefit of the various social circles represented in that room, engineered to demonstrate that our family was firmly in the Rosedale camp, just in case Marco’s story got out.
No doubt I was guilty of some grandiosity myself in this conjecture. But it played into something I’d been thinking about ever since my conversation with Marco on the phone. He’d been elated, understandably, and I didn’t begrudge him that. But it was obvious to me that he didn’t seriously believe Julia was any kind of closet Nazi or anti-Semite, and that he knew he’d won his battle on what amounted to a clumsy choice of words. I didn’t even mind that, in itself. What bothered me was that he seemed perfectly okay with it. I wanted him to at least put on a show of wishing he could have had an opportunity to win by fairer means. But apparently it didn’t trouble him in the least that the question of what happened in that hotel room had been answered by means of legal transactions and manoeuvres, aided by a threat of blackmail, rather than the diligent proving or uncovering of an objective truth.
I thought of that glib remark of mine that Marco had latched onto back in the spring: the onus of belief is on the believer. It wasn’t actually something I believed at all. If anything, the opposite. I was, in my heart of hearts, an absolutist. Reality, for me, wasn’t a ‘construct’ arrived at by some Darwinian battle of competing human interests and ideas. It wasn’t a prize awarded to whoever fought hardest, or dirtiest. It was something that existed outside the human mind, and independently of it. Whatever happened between the couples in those rooms – Marco and Julia in Belfast, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, at the Sofitel in New York; Assange and the Swedish women – was an actual occurrence, fixed in time and unchangeable; not some quantum state of infinite potentiality. I couldn’t accept those stories as variations on Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead simultaneously until its box was opened; their protagonists at once guilty and innocent, victim and false accuser. Nor could I accept them as fables on the limits of the knowable. The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of ‘belief’.
I was still ruminating on these thoughts a couple of days later, when the phone rang in my mother’s living room and to my surprise I found myself talking to Julia Gault.