We drove back along the brown river with three different kinds of silences between us. Istvan’s was practical, regretful, and his face above the steering wheel had settled into a solemn mask, the mask of someone who is used to death and knows how to deal with it. Gertrude was shrouded in electronic smoke in the back seat, which created a halo around her immobile silhouette. I simply said nothing.
Istvan broke it, eventually.
We must inform the parents, no?
Of course, I murmured.
Will you do that or will I?
You have their details? I asked. Give them to me and I’ll call them.
You knew? Istvan looked at Gertrude through the rear-view mirror.
Knew what?
That she was dead? In that small room that she could not leave?
I’m sure all three of us suspected. Even the parents.
But it’s your job to know, isn’t it? All about the dead?
My job is to hold palms, close my eyes, tell people what they want to hear.
But you told him about the room? The small room.
Is just some nonsense I spouted. Came into my head.
So you’re not what they would call psychic, then?
No. There is another word for me. Charlatan.
And she blew the smoke away, waved it from her face with her hand.
Let me out here.
You want to walk?
I have to.
I could see the bridge with the stone angels looming up ahead of us, when he stopped the car. And I felt the need to walk as well.
Let me out here, I told Istvan, and he nodded, as if he understood.
We all need some air, he said. I drive back to office, call the parents?
No, I said. Let me do that.
She was walking by the parapet, and I could see the tourist boats beyond her in the river below. As the car passed me, I drew alongside her. She bent down to the Pomeranian, fixing a small lead to the collar round its neck.
I think Phoebe needs to walk, too.
And we both walked then, slowed to a crawl by the tiny scraping feet of the dog.
You want me to make sense of it for you? I can’t. But all I will tell you is, you are a good detective.
Am I?
Parents asked you to find the girl? You found her. Long before you knew it.
I met her there.
I pointed towards the huge but oddly delicate hawsers of the suspension bridge.
On the bridge?
She had climbed beyond the protective wire. She was in the shadow of the statue of the angel.
And what? You thought she was about to jump? You stopped her.
I tried. She jumped anyway. Then I jumped after.
Was your first mistake.
Why do you say that?
I don’t know. Just a feeling.
And my second?
I don’t want to know either. Can only imagine.
Come, let me show you.
And so I retraced our wet steps, from the river to the small cobbled streets, to the arch, with its almost Moorish tiles, where there was no cello playing.
I walked home with her, through here.
Again I must ask, why?
I told myself I was worried. That she needed a hospital.
You told yourself.
Yes.
We walked through the arch and entered the small, fanciful courtyard.
And then?
We walked up those steps, to her rooms.
She played the cello. She told me she was on sabbatical from the orchestra.
And?
Every time I walked back past, I heard the cello playing.
You hear it now?
I shook my head. I walked towards the steps, which fanned upwards towards the shadows.
Don’t ask me to go up there.
Why not?
Some things I should not know.
She took two steps backwards, into the shadow of the arch. Her legs, with their elegant shoes, stayed in the bright sunlight. She had kept herself well, I remember thinking.
You stepped out of time, no? You did that thing that lovers do. There was no beginning or end. You had met each other in another life.
How did you know?
And she smiled at that.
I was young once.
But she didn’t exist. She was dead.
The loved one never does. We create them, out of some damnable need. And when I think back now, I pity the ones I did it with. I would have torn them to shreds and put them back together again to fit the thing I wanted.
And you, Jonathan, she said, you would have been my type. All those years ago.
How many? I asked again. And she had the grace to smile.
Never ask a woman’s age. Jo-na-than.
And she turned, walked back into the arch, towards the hot band of sunlight outside it.
Do I need help? I called after her.
But she mustn’t have heard. Or if she did, she didn’t want to answer.
I did need help, but I walked up those stairs again, alone. I heard my footsteps echo round the curving walls. The shadows above me seemed darker than before and I heard the sharp scratch of a curtain, pulled. It was the neighbouring woman, I saw, with the dark hair behind the lace and I suddenly understood her trepidation. I would have knocked on her door, but I knew now why not to do so. Any questions of mine would have frightened her. And I felt something deeper than fear, like a piece of ice in my stomach.
The door was barely ajar, the way it always had been. I pushed it gently, and heard the familiar creak. I managed to walk inside then and saw the room, bathed in the sunlight from the window. There was a sofa there, with no cello perched upon it. And maybe there had never been a cello. I opened the door to the small kitchen and there was a dryer there, the orbed glass covered in a fine dust. I knelt down and rubbed my finger off the dust, which must have been several weeks old. There was a pink dress inside, lying like a dead thing at the bottom curve of the stainless-steel tumbler. I thought I saw a face then, distorted in the glass, and jumped backwards, slamming my head against the kitchen door.
I must have been stunned for a moment, because I heard the dryer begin to whirr. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, and it was whirring, manically, then shaking on the bare boards of the kitchen floor, the way unbalanced dryers do. I must have hit a button when I wiped the glass, I thought, and began to press them at random, the wide, worn plastic things, and its whirring grew faster, until I must have hit the right combination, and it gradually began to wind down.
What explanations did I need, I wondered, watching the pink dress float lazily in the last rotations of the tumbler. Maybe I came in alone, wet from the river, maybe I had found this place, this empty hell or heaven. Maybe I had drowned. Maybe I was dead.
I managed to stand and pulled at the kitchen door. It didn’t open for a moment; I had to pull it hard enough to splinter the wood, and there was the room outside again, with the sofa, curved like an enormous reclining nude.
I had touched the dead, I thought, or imagined I had, and there was the smell of soft, loamy clay in the room. I forced myself to walk through it, and looked right into the bedroom.
There was the mattress on the bare boards, with my envelope lying on the sheets. Someone had opened it. And that smell was everywhere now; was it sweat or was it clay or was it something much more intimate, an intimacy that was impossible because the other one was dead? I tried to walk into that room, but couldn’t make it. I saw the crumpled paper I had written on, with my handwriting, the scribbled word: ‘dear’.