It is a miracle

It is the last weekend before the schools reopen. Let’s call it the feast of the First Harvest. Everyone is celebrating, with wine and schnapps and shellfish, with paper hats and Chinese lanterns. But what good is any of that if you have no children? And no friends.

‘We should have thrown a party,’ Sara says to Thomas, her partner. Thomas smiles and says cheerfully, ‘We are throwing a party. At each other.’ He picks up his wine glass and pretends to toss it to Sara. She raises hers and says, ‘Cheers’, not for the first time this evening.

Thomas is wearing a baggy yellow T-shirt printed with a photograph of a moose and the words ‘Cheer up! Everything will be ok!’ A few years ago the company that insures his car gave their customers badges and T-shirts and caps decorated with this silly mantra. Thomas wears the T-shirt whenever he’s in festive mood, and at many other times as well.

‘Two’s company!’ He pats Sara on the bottom. He has hung Chinese lanterns on the porch and has put on an Abba cd in the living room. He forgot to the get paper hats.

‘Yes,’ Sara says wanly. Sometimes she finds Thomas’s proverbs and maxims comforting, wise and profound. At other times, they annoy her to death with their unbelievable predictability. Thomas is not unaware of the range of her reactions but he loves his clichés far too much to abandon even a single one. On the contrary, he is constantly adding to his collection, savouring particularly trite specimens.

He squeezes her arm and chuckles.

She pushes his hand away. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she says.

‘What, now?’ Thomas is taken aback. It’s almost nine o’clock and he’s just about to cook the crayfish.

‘Just a quick dip.’ Sara is pleased. It’s not easy to dent Thomas’s complacency. ‘My last evening here!’

She slips down the path to the lake before he can stop her. Not that he would. Not that he would dream of it. He looks after her for a few seconds, bemused and as hurt as he ever can be, and then he finishes setting the table for dinner.

The mosquitoes bite. They are mustered in smudged clouds over the reeds, ready to stab as soon as she approaches the water’s edge. But Sara takes off her old robe, hangs it on its hook at the edge of the dock, and lets them do their worst. She’s well sprayed with insect repellent, so that only the bravest, most relentless, monsters succeed in puncturing her skin. Still, they hover around her, as always at this time of evening, making her itchy, until she slides from the wooden steps into the soft, cold water and swims away from the shore.

She swims out into the lake, keeping her head above the water so that she does not lose a second of the sunset – the sky behind the dark fringe of trees on the western shore is a lovely orangey colour. It looks edible, like a dark chocolate filled with sweet cream. She’d love to eat it or grasp it or somehow hold onto it, but as she swims towards it the colour melts away and vanishes much faster than you’d think it could.

The lamps are already lit in some of the lakeside cottages, and on many docks summer torches flicker. She can hear feathery music floating across the water from someone’s garden, its source sheltered by reeds, by trees. All around the lake, the parties are starting.

Her movements are lazy as the evening, and the water laps against her skin. A small fish jumps, plopping close to her with a quick, quiet flip, a surprisingly comforting sound. She feels a kinship with the fish; she feels a kinship with the water itself, and with the colours and the rhythms and the sounds of the evening. Only when the sun vanishes behind the black spiky rim of the forest, and the moon – full – takes its place in the dark blue sky, does she turn and swim back to the shore, faster than she had swum out.

Their torch is lit on the porch when she returns, and she can see candles flickering on the table there. The flames keep the mosquitoes at bay.

‘We can eat whenever you’re ready,’ Thomas says, as she passes into the house, wrapped tightly in her robe. He is happy again and has decided to forgive and forget, as usual. It’s going to be ok.

‘I won’t be a minute.’ Sara pats his head. Swimming always lifts her spirits and she knows he likes having his hair ruffled.

She flip-flops into the bedroom and pulls on loose cotton trousers and a muslin shirt with long sleeves. Her wet hair she pulls out of its band and brushes quickly, then ties back up again, in a tight, mean little black knot on top of her head. In the small mirror she looks worn and old, although her body feels rejuvenated after the swim. How she feels is not necessarily how she looks any more.

They sit on the wooden porch, overlooking the unkempt garden and the long, narrow strip of white flowers and long grass and reeds that stretches down to the lake. Ten o’clock and it is quite dark, just the flicker of lights on the docks and the ripple of moonlight on the black water relieve the heavy velvet autumn dark. The music is louder now, and occasional bars of laughter come floating across the lake, like silver canoes of joy.

But the bulging red eyes of the crayfish stare accusingly at her over the edge of the white dish. She eats them purposefully. Little Turkish crayfish, frozen until an hour ago, they consist mainly of shell; you have to bulk out the fish with bread and butter and salad, and wash it down with plenty of white wine, to make a meal of it. Their music – it’s still Abba, ‘Dancing Queen’ – plays at a low volume in the background. The mosquitoes buzz around but don’t descend onto the table; the Chinese lanterns grin, yellow and blue and red, from above.

Sara eats and drinks, and thinks that although the food is good and the setting lovely, although she likes sitting here with Thomas, she feels she would just as soon be reading, or watching television, as being here, pretending to have a party. And she knows he feels exactly the same. But it’s the harvest festival and they are obliged to celebrate it just like everyone else. As the level of the wine decreases, their mood lifts; they feel better, they talk more. By the time they have drunk two bottles and the moon has moved around to the side of the house, they feel they really have had a party, as good a party as anyone could wish for. Then they tumble happily into their separate beds.

Thomas is a writer; every Christmas, without fail, a new work appears and sells about five thousand copies, after which it disappears without trace. In addition to the royalties, he gets a grant from the Writers’ Union, which supplements his income, and as a result, he is reasonably well-off. How he can find topics for so many books – most of them novels – is a mystery to Sara, since he has difficulty in coming up with new topics of conversation, at least with her. They have been together for ten years and have grown so alike that people sometimes ask if they are brother and sister.

Sara works in a library. She has been working in a library, the same library, for fifteen years, ever since she arrived in this country. Initially, the work was very challenging: she had to master the language, and she had to take a course at the university, for two years, which she managed to do while working thirty hours a week in a supermarket, stacking shelves. The transition from supermarket to library was gratifying, was wonderful, when it came. She does not stack shelves in the library. She doesn’t even catalogue books; that’s all done centrally these days. Her days are spent talking to the customers, the readers, about books, and other things. Many of the readers are old people who want to tell her about their grown-up children or their illnesses, to hint at the condition of their routine bodily functions or to discuss their plans for the important calendar festivals, such as Christmas or Midsummer or the Harvest Moon.

Sara’s library encourages this sort of thing. It is furnished with sofas and easy chairs, and a pot of coffee is always at the ready, so some old folks spend a good part of their day with her, drinking coffee and chatting. Her function is as much social worker as librarian. But there is, of course, more to it than that. She checks books in and out; she decides what to display on the ‘New Books’ rack; and she organises things: lectures, book clubs, storytelling sessions. Readings by popular writers – or not so popular writers who happen to be local.

It was in this way that she met Thomas, who came to read from his latest novel before Christmas one year. Only about five people came to the reading. So afterwards, Sara treated him to a glass of sherry and home-made marzipan biscuits, even though she would have preferred to go home. He talked to her about his life. He had just come back to town from his summer cottage on the lake, where he had been the only resident at this time of year. The lake was frozen, the garden snowed up, and the house heated by a huge log fire.

This all sounded very romantic to Sara. She pictured sitting by the fire, with the flames flickering like friends and casting interesting shadows on the walls. In her picture, she was reading and listening to classical music. There were candles, and mulled wine, and Christmas was in the air. Thomas was not actually in this scene but, then, she hardly knew him at the time.

A week after the reading fiasco, he telephoned her, and they ended up spending Christmas Eve together. Sara could not return to her own family, since they did not celebrate this feast, and she had no plans of her own. Neither had Thomas. The reason was, he had been divorced less than a year – news that surprised Sara, who could not picture him married. His parents were dead and he did not feel like inflicting himself on his sister and her family, just because he no longer had a wife (the sister had invited him).

He treated Sara to pickled herring and meatballs and cold beer, in his flat, which was full of books and smelt musty. No decorations. Not a tree, or even a card. No fire. But one large window overlooked the river. The trees on its banks were festooned with lights, which glittered like stars against the black sky. Sara munched her meatballs and thought of the cottage by the lake.

The relationship prospered. Now she and Thomas have a house on the outskirts of the town, perched on a rock among pine trees, and a view of a lake from the kitchen window: this country is full of lakes. You can’t get away from them. Everywhere you go, there is a lake, glittering like a knowing eye at you from among the rocks and the dark trees.

She still works in the library, spending much of her time there, while Thomas sits in his own library at home, typing up his novels.

Sara feels her heart sink when she drives out of the cottage garden and honks goodbye to Thomas, who stands beside the flagpole, flapping a big white handkerchief in big childish waves. Now that she is leaving, a gush of love overwhelms her. Both he and his cottage, which is ramshackle, like an abandoned magpie nest in its untidy cluster of trees, grab at her heart. Sadly, she makes her way along the narrow dirt track that connects the lakeside to the main road, sneaking hungry looks at the neat summer houses, all with lacy white facing boards and fancy porches, baskets of nasturtiums and late roses. They’re sweet, but she hasn’t felt particularly drawn to them during the past month, as she cycled along in her shorts and T-shirt, inwardly contemptuous of the whole place, its ritualistic certainties, its bourgeois safeness. Everyone rushes down here the day before Midsummer’s Day, like migratory birds, or clockwork toys controlled by some remote authority. They stay for at least a month if they’re workers, for three if they’re pensioners, which a lot of them are. But what do they do once they get here? Go for a walk or a cycle. Some of them swim. There are occasional gatherings, which you’d hardly call parties: coffee and seven kinds of cake in the afternoon; sometimes someone has a birthday and then there’s wine and smoked salmon, seven kinds of salad. They like to count things, and measure: their lives are measured in walks and cycles; summer succeeds summer, they come to the cottage in June, they return to the city in August, they come to the cottage in June. Then one summer they’re too old to drive and they stay in the city for the summer. And then – very soon after this, because what is the point of living if you can’t go to the summer house? – they die.

So what’s wrong with that? she’s thinking now, as she leaves it all. The petunias and the fresh paint, the woodland walks? Now it all seems like the very pinnacle of civilisation. Peaceful and harmonious, warm and luminous, it is heaven on earth. She can’t stand the idea of going back to the bustle of the city. It is still summer, but autumn will descend very soon. Quick like a curtain it will fall and the iron-cold fogs of November will put a lid on the year and usher in the snow.

Lucky Thomas, whose work allows him to milk every last drop of summer, to stay here in the country, walking in the woods and swimming in the lake. At night he will light his candles and listen to the lap of water on the shore and the buzz of the mosquitoes. All for another month, at least.

If he loved her, wouldn’t he sacrifice that and come home with her? Now?

She’s there, home, by mid-afternoon, and she is opening the windows to let the fresh air into the living room when Lisa, her friend at work, telephones and asks if she can call around.

‘Yes,’ says Sara. ‘Of course.’

It’s an unusual request. Normally she chats with Lisa only at work – at coffee breaks, sometimes during lunch time in a café. They don’t visit each other’s houses. In fact, unarranged visits by anyone are rare in these suburbs.

Lisa’s life is dominated by her two children, who are in their early twenties. They are students and whenever Sara has met them they have been taciturn, sulky even. But Lisa adores them and spends most of her life rushing around looking after them, although that is not how she sees it herself. ‘I’ve got to hit the supermarket,’ she cries, as she dashes out of work five minutes early. Or ‘There’s a mountain of washing to be done!’ More often than not, she is rushing home so she can give one of the children a lift somewhere. An unpaid chauffeur, that’s what she is. She doesn’t mind. Even though she claims to be feminist and liberated and assertive, she admits to being an unpaid chauffeur, an unpaid cook, an unpaid washerwoman and unpaid charwoman, as well as a badly paid librarian. ‘How long can it go on for?’ she asks good-humouredly. ‘I thought I’d be pursuing my hobbies as soon as they got to be fifteen! I thought I’d be doing the round-the-world tour, and writing a novel!’ But it’s pretty clear to Sara that Lisa has no real wish to do hobbies. She thrives on all this rushing around, juggling, hard work. She enjoys grumbling about the children, and Anders, her husband, or ex-husband – he left, or was turfed out, years ago. They got a legal divorce but never quite separated. ‘He never darkens my bed!’ Lisa says, waving her hands in the air to underline her words. He never darkens her bed but he darkens her kitchen door almost every day, and eats dinner with his ex-family five days out of seven.

Such arrangements are not common, but from her chats in the library, Sara knows that odd arrangements are on the increase. Separated couples do not make the clean break that was de rigueur in the past. Now it is all right to re-create a domestic limbo, to bring the new partners home to the old partners, to realign the family players into a formation that looks like a ménage à trois, or à quatre, or à dix. High drama is out of fashion. Nobody screams, ‘Betrayal!’ They regroup, grinning and murmuring, ‘Think of the children!’

Lisa is short and roundly built. She keeps her fair hair tied in a bun on the top of her head and, of course, she has a fringe. Surprised blue eyes. Face pink as a cupcake. She doesn’t have a new partner, as far as Sara knows. But she could have; she’s attractive enough, in mind and body.

Lisa looks calm and relaxed when she arrives. She bounces into the cool, dim hall.

‘Welcome back!’ she laughs. ‘Was it good?’

‘Very good,’ says Sara.

The sun is still shining, so they go to sit at the back of the house, on a terrace overlooking the suburban valley. Sara’s house is built on the side of a steep enough hill, one of many houses scattered among the trees. All the gardens are nature gardens: patches of hillside. They aren’t separated by fences, but everyone knows exactly where their boundary is, and they never step over it.

They drink a glass of champagne, which seems appropriate for such a sunny, glowing afternoon, and suits Lisa’s clothes. She is dressed in a very summery, girlish outfit: a long, flowery cotton skirt, a pink top with lace around the neckline. Also, a straw hat with a floppy brim and a small white daisy in its pink band. She is tanned, and she has lost weight since Sara last saw her, about six weeks ago. Her whole appearance suggests that she has good news, and the hat hints at what the good news involves: love.

‘I got married,’ Lisa says. She smiles and raises her glass.

Sara’s face does not drop but her response is slower than it might be. She forgets to raise her glass as she stares past Lisa’s hat at a blue hydrangea down at the end of the garden and takes a few seconds to let this information sink in.

‘Congratulations!’ She jumps up, all smiles, and kisses Lisa on the cheek, which smells of Chanel No. 5, not a perfume Lisa ever wore before. (She used to smell of washing powder and sweat.) ‘That’s wonderful!’ She sits down again and gulps some wine. ‘Who is …’ How do you best put it? The lucky man? ‘Who … em … is it?’

It occurs to her that it could just be her former husband. Remarrying your ex is an event that occurs among the children of the old library users; three or four of her regular readers have experienced this over the past few years (they, the old mothers, don’t get invited to the second weddings, which are very low key). But would remarrying Anders call for such a physical transformation? The perfume, perhaps. But would marrying your ex call for a hat, with a flower in the brim? Probably not. Anders would think that hat was silly.

‘He’s someone I met on holiday,’ says Lisa. ‘You remember, Kirsten and I went to Turkey?’ Kirsten is the younger daughter; she’s doing media studies, like most people’s younger daughters. ‘To a resort on the Black Sea. Well, she made friends with some young folk at the hotel and I was left to my own devices most of the time.’ That would be Kirsten all right. ‘Pottering around the bazaar, sitting on the beach in solitary splendour. Well, I often had to eat alone! You know how it can be for single ladies!’ She giggles gleefully, no longer one of them.

‘Oh yes.’ Sara sees, incongruously, a boiled sausage in a nest of sauerkraut. ‘I know, all right.’

Lisa pauses and looks at her, smelling a story. But she is too eager to tell her own to delve.

‘I was sitting outside a restaurant, eating lunch, happy as a clam. It doesn’t bother me to be alone, especially during the day.’

Sara laughs.

‘I mean, eating during the day. Eating dinner at night in a hotel is different. I don’t like being alone for that. You know what I mean.’

Sara nods.

‘Anyway, there I was, sun and wine, sardines and bread. This man came up to my table and asked if he could join me. The tables were otherwise full. Cheeky devil, I thought, but for some reason, possibly wine-induced, I said yes. Anyway, one thing led to another and now I’m married. To someone I picked up in a restaurant. It’s unbelievable.’

The only unbelievable part of the story is that he married her, Sara thinks. Suddenly she remembers a woman she knew when she lived in London, before she came here. Sara was teaching then, and this woman was a fellow teacher, one of the single ladies who seemed to be so numerous back then – now she knows that they seemed numerous in schools and hospitals and libraries because they were the only women who had jobs. The married ones were all at home, glad to be there and smug about it, too, as she recalls, since marriage was still considered a victory for a young woman, her passport to economic security and a good life, an escape from the schools and the offices.

This woman – whose name was Bridget – began to joke about having married the school gardener, who was called (incredibly) Paddy. Maybe the conjunction of the names planted the idea in her head? Bridget described the wedding in great detail: what she wore (an off-the-shoulder cream silk dress, a cream hat with a silvery veil and mauve flowers), what he wore, what they ate (roast lamb with mint sauce, sherry trifle or strawberries and cream for dessert). The honeymoon was in Tenerife and they had put a deposit on a dinky little house in Wimbledon.

The story went on for weeks, becoming more elaborate, and more embarrassing for everyone in the staffroom. Their main concern was Paddy, that he should not get wind of it – it wasn’t likely, since he never came to the staffroom, having a shed in the grounds, where he stored his tools and drank his tea. But it turned out that Bridget was the person they should have been worried about. One day she didn’t come to work. She’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills. At the funeral they shrugged and said they’d never suspected that she was depressed, she always smiled so much and loved a joke. She drank, of course, some added, as if that explained a lot.

So did Lisa. Maybe she is making it all up.

‘He’s called Tacumsin,’ she is saying. ‘He’s divorced and is a lawyer.’

Sara wants more specific details. She asks where the wedding took place.

‘In the registry office in this city,’ says Lisa, seeing her game. ‘The marriage is as valid as boiled potatoes.’

‘So, has he moved in with you?’ Sara feels more concerned, not less.

‘No,’ says Lisa. ‘I’m going to move in with him. In Istanbul.’

What about your job and your precious children? Sara needs to know. Not to mention your friends, your country, your home? And that now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t ex-husband of yours?

‘It’s ME-time!’ Lisa closes her eyes and smiles in the direction of the sky, where the sun is beginning to sink into the velvety trees. She opens them wide and speaks quickly. ‘I’ve already handed in my notice to the library, so there’s no need to worry about that. The kids will stay in the house here; I don’t need to sell it and they can look after themselves, really.’

So. Tacumsin is not a con man, after your house and salary, and access to the best social welfare system in Europe?

‘He’s rich,’ Lisa says. ‘Isn’t it lucky? He’s got a big apartment in Istanbul and a summer place by the sea. His former wife took their house, which is a kind of palace.’

‘Have you seen the apartment?’ Sara doesn’t have to ask about the palace.

‘I’ve seen the summer apartment,’ Lisa says. ‘Sara, don’t be so suspicious! He’s bona fide. He loves me! I know it’s hard to believe.’

Sara murmurs something, which Lisa doesn’t pay any attention to.

‘I’m a big girl, I can look after myself,’ she says. She gives Sara a big kiss on the lips and hugs her. ‘Look, you come and see the apartment for yourself. And meet Tacumsin. Come around Christmas, do a bit of shopping. How about it?’

‘That would be lovely,’ says Sara, with as much enthusiasm as she can muster.

‘I am so happy,’ says Lisa, and she laughs aloud, a laugh of pleasure and triumph. Or bliss.

Sara doesn’t ask what age this man is, or what he looks like or what he’s like in bed. But the last she can guess.

In the spring of this year, Sara went alone to a strange restaurant. This was in a city in the south, in another country, where she attended a conference on the digitisation of library records. For the past two years, digitisation of library records has been the main topic at all the library conferences. Sara doesn’t find it very enthralling as a subject. (Why can’t they just copy the books, instead of talking about it as if it were rocket science?) But she goes to the conferences because she likes the free trips to nice cities. She goes to three or four a year, and has seen most of the capitals of Europe, and a few others, in this way, at the expense of the nation. She always stays on for a few days after each conference to look around. This she was doing on the occasion in question, keeping to her room in an old hotel in the centre of the old town. The hotel was described as ‘charming’ on the Internet, which seemed to mean there was old furniture in the bedrooms – one baroque chair in a dusty shade of pink in hers; the head of the library had a grand piano in his, apparently, and a four-poster bed. There were faded old prints on the walls. Also, the hotel had literary associations: in the lobby hung a portrait of a famous writer who liked to stay there: Franz Kafka.

Some of the other librarians had stayed on after the conference, too, and were visiting a Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, about an hour’s journey from the city. Sara decided to forego the experience. She wasn’t attracted to concentration camps, as tourist destinations, and this wasn’t one of the well-known ones. She’d never heard of it, in fact. So she spent her free morning tramping around the museums and art galleries. These were many and magnificent and had been built by the emperors to store the collections they had taken from other countries, sometimes looting, sometimes buying (at cheap prices). She had seen the feather headdress with which Cortez had been presented by a great Mexican king. And, more oddly, a reconstructed house from Greenland. It was part of the Inuit collection. Just a little wooden house, not an igloo, probably something made from a pre-fab in a packet and put up by some Greenlander in the 1950s or thereabouts. It was of Scandinavian design, a bit like the summer houses around Thomas’s lake, or a bit like their garden sheds. Just one room, with a range and a few sticks of furniture, some pictures of Christian saints, the kind you see in Ireland.

Thomas wrote a historical novel about it, Greenland, about a Norse settlement that had died out in the Middle Ages, nobody knows why. Sara had visited the site of the settlement with him. Brattahlid; now it has an Inuit name but she and Thomas called it by the Old Norse one, which is easier to remember. At Brattahlid people live in concrete apartment blocks, which look as if they were built by some Soviet apparatchik who’d strayed over from Siberia. But there had been a village with a little shop, so maybe there were some small houses, too. Thomas had been very excited by the place, and she had become infected by that. She’d read all about the old settlement, and the new settlement, too. She could have written a book about it herself, by the end of the visit. But she didn’t. She has always believed she could write a novel, if she wanted to; she watches Thomas doing it, it looks easy enough, easier than lots of things. But she has never bothered. Why should she? There are enough books in the world – thousands, that nobody ever reads, in the library where she works.

She hadn’t thought about the Inuit for years. The sight of that little house, so humble and simple, in this museum, transformed from basic cabin to work of art by virtue of a change of venue, was deeply moving. Her interest in the people of that bleak, icy country revived.

But not for long. As is the way with such moments of inspiration, in museums, her profound feelings were replaced by more mundane considerations the second she stepped out the door. Lunch. She wanted to eat some local dish – her colleagues had eaten at an Italian restaurant, a Greek trattoria, a French bistro, but hadn’t tried the native cuisine. Maybe with good reason – the city is famed for its cakes, not its dinners. But there was an old-fashioned, stodgy-looking restaurant near the museum, and she decided to try that, now that she was alone.

When she stepped inside, she knew she had made a mistake. It was a dark, cluttered room. Thick curtains shut out daylight and the place looked smoky, even though nobody was smoking. The tables were covered with heavy green cloth, the walls panelled with dark wood. It looked more like a pub than a restaurant, but it was crammed with people eating. Waiters ran around frantically, balancing trays and plates heaped with food. Sara decided to leave, to go back to the Italian place in the hotel. But before she could escape, a waiter came and insisted he could find her a table. He asked her to sit on a sofa near the reception desk and she felt obliged to obey him. Five minutes went by. Eventually, another waiter came and smiled as he pushed Sara towards a table. It wasn’t empty. Would she mind? She would, but she agreed, anyway, and next thing found herself seated opposite a man who was eating some sort of stew, not presented with any attempt at style. She buried her head in the menu and ordered what looked like the most local dish; the menu was handwritten and the writing wasn’t very legible, apart from which she only understood some of the words. She also ordered a glass of wine – the man had one.

He gave her a friendly smile. That is where she made her first mistake: she returned it.

He looked like the kind of food she was looking for: local and authentic. Black hair, skin like polished copper. His shirt was snow white, with billowing sleeves, framed in a waistcoat of black boiled wool, or felt, which was the most typical cloth of the country. Sara could only see him from the waist up, so unfortunately could not take note of his trousers: probably not made of leather, probably perfectly ordinary black trousers, or jeans, although knee breeches would have complemented the folksy look of the waistcoat. He was like a woodcutter in a fairytale; he reminded her of Red Riding Hood’s father. This country was rich in fairytales, forests and wild animals, abandoned children. Looking at him, sipping his glass of white wine, you could see where those characters had come from.

But he turned out to be foreign, like her, not authentic at all. Of course, a real local would never wear a waistcoat like that, off the stage, an outfit redolent of peasants and opera and folk dances, which probably real peasants had never worn. (They’d never have managed to get the shirts white enough, would they? Without extra strong detergent and top-of-the-range washing machines. Peasants washing in wooden peasant tubs, by peasant mountain streams.) He came from Italy; he had come up for the weekend.

Italy. Sara is no racist. But she knows what Italian men can be like when they come across a single woman; she’d been to Italy more than once. She smiled tightly, she tightened the muscles in her legs, she crossed her arms across her breasts, squashing them.

He didn’t notice. He often came to this city, he was telling her, as if she’d asked. He loved it here.

‘And how about you?’ he asked. What was she doing?

Sara made up a story. She said she was attending a conference of writers; that she was a writer of detective novels. In the nick of time, she prevented herself from saying she was going to give a reading later on that afternoon – he might want to come and hear her. So she said she had a meeting in half an hour and had just slipped out for a quick bite to eat.

He nodded and she could tell he didn’t believe her.

Her glass of wine came and he looked at it slowly. If you drink wine, they assume you’re up for anything; it gives some sort of message, like red trainers (though what message, precisely, they give, she isn’t sure – she just knows it’s safest to avoid wearing them). Hump him, she thought, taking a large gulp. It was cold and dry and fruity, and there was about half a pint of it in her glass. They served wine as if it was lemonade here.

Her food arrived.

An enormous boiled sausage, pink and fleshy, draped itself over a mountain of pickled cabbage. They both stared at it, speechless. Obscene. Grotesque. Pornographic. These were a few of the adjectives it triggered, in Sara’s mind. He returned to his stew, which had looked repulsive but now moved down several notches on the disgust register – his bowl of brown mess was positively prim by comparison with Sara’s plate. She glanced around at the nearby tables to see if everyone was staring at her lunch in shock. But no, most heads were bent over their own plates, most mouths were masticating energetically. And she saw that most of the food looked nearly as disturbing as hers. The tables were crowded with oversized sausages, shanks of bloody lamb, robust bony ribs. A big grey fish with its head still on stared wildly up from the silver plate where it waited to be eaten, like a witch waiting for the torch to light the faggots.

No attempt had been made to disguise the food, to make meat look like chocolate buttons or vegetables like garden flowers. It all looked like what it was, which was something you might give to a not very fussy cat.

Sara sliced a bit off her sausage and told the woodcutter that she was married. She isn’t married, since Thomas doesn’t approve of it (any more – he has one wife already, anyway). But, what matter, she might as well be. The woodcutter was married, too, he is quick to assure her. And, better than that, he has a daughter aged twenty and a son aged twenty-two. To cap these impeccable credentials, he mentioned that he was a medical doctor; he named the city where he lived, in northern Italy – a serious, respectable, working city, not an operatic set of a place, a tourist postcard, not Venice or Florence. He went on and on, entertaining her with the details of his autobiography in broken but exceedingly fluent English. (Can it be both broken and fluent? Ungrammatical, she means. Lack of grammar seldom stops anyone who knows enough words to tell their story.) She began to dig into her sausage. It tasted much better than it looked. It tasted great, in fact, and so did the cabbage. Sara launched a serious assault on both. She realised that she hadn’t had any real vegetables for days – just the odd lettuce leaf, or half tomato sculpted to the shape of a red star, decorations rather than food. Now she really appreciates this cabbage patch on a plate, which this interesting restaurant had provided her with. Her body was screaming for iron and, needless to say, she was constipated, as she always was, at conferences.

The woodcutter ordered a bottle of wine, for both of them. Sara shook her head; he was going much too far. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The waiter colluded with him, filling her glass against her wishes. Of course, once it was there, she drank it. Who cares? she thought. I’m practically an alcoholic, anyway, and here I am in a restaurant that looks like an opium den, surrounded by fifty people stuffing themselves with schnitzel and strudel.

The waiter smiled triumphantly whenever he passed their table, keeping an eye on the wineglasses, planning to refill them the second it was needed. He looked pleased with himself, smug in the knowledge that he had brought two lonely people together, got a little je ne sais quoi started in his section of the restaurant. Maybe he was some sort of matchmaker, on the side?

Mr Riding Hood was separated from his wife. Sara presumed this was true. On the other hand, if you’re chatting up a woman, presumably you don’t tell her you are happily married. She was beginning to find it difficult to grasp exactly what he was saying. His English deteriorated as the meal continued and the level in the wine bottle sank. That’s how it is as often as not when you’re speaking a foreign language. It’s great for the first five or ten minutes and then you get tired and it’s downhill all the way. He knew no German and Sara had only a few words of Italian, so English it had to be. He stumbled now when he came to a preposition; he tripped over certain phonemes and floundered in tenses. But the words kept coming, a jumble of episodes and characters and feelings. She let herself drift away. She hadn’t asked him to talk to her, why should she exert herself? His voice, and the German sounds all around her, the clatter of cutlery and china, floated into her ears like a bizarre concerto, played by characters clustered in some quirky corner of a painting by Brueghel. She closed her eyes momentarily, to let the music blend.

When she opened them, the waiter was removing her plate – empty. She ordered coffee.

His wife threw him out. It wasn’t clear if this had happened yesterday or at some other time in the distant past. He was now reduced to one tense, the present. ‘I try to love her, and I love life,’ he was saying. Or, actually, ‘Wine, life, I love. Women!’ He mentioned Homer and added that he was reading the Odyssey at the moment. Sara presumed he said this to impress her, thinking she was the kind of person who would appreciate an Odyssey reader. She had read it once but didn’t remember most of it. Circe, he was thinking of, perhaps. Penelope at home, weaving and waiting. The subtext was that he had been unfaithful to his wife, who did not wait but who tossed him out, and now he was here trying to get over it, flirting with strangers whom he encountered. Adventure.

‘Oh dear,’ said Sara. He looked woebegone. She started to comfort him, in case the story was true, and he had been recently thrown out of home. ‘Can’t you phone her?’

‘I phone. I write letters. I write my daughter a long letter saying I am sorry, I love her …’

Then he revealed Exhibit A. The letter. It was long, several pages long. So it was true. True that he had been writing a letter, anyway. She took a good look at it. Handwriting on pale blue paper, certainly a personal letter, not something he had written to the tax commissioners or somebody.

‘It’s going to be ok.’ She remembered the words on Thomas’s T-shirts. ‘Everything will be ok. Your daughter is twenty. She knows you love her.’

He looked puzzled, and then stared into Sara’s eyes – he was very skilled at eye contact. It was not clear to Sara that he understood exactly what her words meant, but he understood that there was something new in the air over the table: the soft air of goodwill replaced the sharp scepticism that had filled the space between them before.

‘My daughter I love,’ he said, and she suppressed the urge to correct the word order. Wouldn’t it be as easy to say ‘I love my daughter’? But, on the other hand, why should he?

‘And she loves you,’ she said gently.

It was undoubtedly true. Their fathers they usually love, daughters, and he looked like a nice one. Sara began to wish he was her father. That would have made her Red Riding Hood, but no matter. Her own father had been more like the wolf. But he was dead, she didn’t have to worry about him any more.

‘You think?’

He was sincere now, and vulnerable. Sara could appreciate how beautiful he was. He could have anyone. She imagined his wife: one of those polished marble women, smooth as moonlight – beige cashmere, fine leather boots, chunks of gold here and there. One of the Paolas or Claudias you see gliding along the street in Florence or Rome, looking like visitors from another, more finished, planet than ours. Why would the husband of a woman like that flirt with a woman like Sara? She was never any beauty, and now she’s fat. Or fattish. At best she must look like a woman of substance, togged out in her conference gear: the black suit, diamond earrings, good leather bag. She probably looked … mature. And sometimes a man finds that appealing – especially just after he’s been kicked out by a woman who does not look mature, who looks like a sophisticated princess. At times like that, a man likes a woman who does not remind him of his daughter. Sara wasn’t old enough to be his mother; he was older than her, in fact. (He’d told her his age – there wasn’t much he hadn’t told her at this stage.)

Sara was draining her coffee.

A surprising thing happened.

The woodcutter started to cry.

Sara was startled. Very. So, of course, she again grasped at her usual philosophical resource in times of acute need: Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘Everything will be ok!’ She read the useful slogan off the picture of his yellow chest – in her mind – doing a simultaneous translation as she uttered the timeless, consoling words. Then she paraphrased them in a few different ways. ‘Everything will be all right. Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine.’

But he went on crying. Tears poured down his lovely bronze cheeks, plopping into his wineglass, where they splashed, plip !, raindrops falling into a pond.

She reached across the table and ruffled his hair. It was very soft and not as thick as it looked from her side of the table. She repeated the mantra: ‘Everything will be ok!’ She gave it another good ruffle. ‘Just telephone your daughter. She will understand. And you will see her on Monday.’

He began to dry his eyes with his table napkin. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I do not know why …’

Words failed him and a few more tears fell into the glass.

‘It’s fine,’ said Sara. ‘A good cry does you a power of good.’

Her mother used to say that, back in Dunroon, when Sara was a child. She had not heard the phrase in about thirty years.

The woodcutter smiled and dried his eyes. He poured more wine for both of them – he’d somehow ordered a second bottle when she wasn’t looking, the sneaky devil. But now she didn’t even make a token protest.

‘It is a miracle.’ He was quite composed now, his old self and more.

Sara just drank her wine.

‘In all this huge city, I meet you.’ He looked at her with admiration.

‘Well,’ said Sara modestly. She didn’t know what to say.

‘How many people in this city?’

She hadn’t a clue. But he did.

‘About two million,’ he said. ‘One million, two million.’ So he didn’t really know. But, lots. ‘And I sit here and you come here and you are the one person in this city of two million people I can talk to! Yes, it is a miracle!’

He threw up his hands to emphasise the wonder of it all. She smiled in spite of herself. She had been called various quite nice things in her life, but never before described as a miracle. It was nice. Very nice.

His English had picked up again. The crying had empowered it, as it does – it gave him an injection of renewed linguistic vigour. And other vigour.

He pushed his card into her hand.

‘Please meet me for a glass of champagne later,’ he said. He mentioned a wine bar which she had heard of, because it was famous. ‘That is what we drink here, for an apéritif.’

‘I’ll be at the conference,’ said Sara. ‘I can’t really meet you.’

He ignored her.

‘Six o’clock,’ he said. ‘Just a nice glass of champagne.’

Sara laughed.

‘I won’t be there!’ she said, getting up and leaving the table.

He was laughing, too. Either he didn’t hear her, or he didn’t believe her, or he didn’t care one way or the other. All of these possibilities existed.

They told her at the desk that he had paid for her lunch, and she had to put up with that. She didn’t want to go back to protest. She wanted to get out of the restaurant as fast as she could, and back to her hotel, and she didn’t want him to follow her and find out where the hotel was. As soon as the thick door closed behind her she ran as fast as her legs would carry her and did not stop until she was in the lobby of her own hotel, under the portrait of Kafka. Even there, the receptionist smiled in a knowing way and she felt mistrustful of him and of the entire staff of the hotel.

And from then on everyone in the city seemed to look at her in an odd way. She got knowing glances when she was sitting alone in one of the coffee houses, drinking a tiny cup of coffee and eating rich cake and cream. Women, perched at tiny delicate tables, would look at her and then at one another, and smile, as if sharing a joke, or a secret. It happened when she was walking around the cathedral square, a tourist among many. One of the natives – you could tell them, they often wore little green hunting caps, with a feather in the brim – stared questioningly at her. It could hardly be the colour of her skin, she thought – they had plenty of dark-skinned women here. Was there something about her clothes?

They knew something about her that she did not know herself.

So it seemed. So she was glad to get away, after one more day of it, glad to get home, or to the place she now called home.

In the place she now calls home, in that city, there is a famous amusement park, prettily spread over the slopes of a gentle hill. You can go there even if you don’t want to go on the rides, just to walk around, to listen to the fairground music, to eat in one of the many restaurants. To enjoy the special fairground atmosphere, which is different from any other mood, in its combination of smells and music and laughs. The smell of summer grass. The screams of blissful terror. The warm sun on your skin.

Sara has not been there for years. But now, after the champagne, Lisa gets a whim; she wants to visit the fairground to celebrate her marriage; she wants to have fun in the sense this city understands it. And she wants to go immediately, because in a few days she will be leaving to join her husband and she seems to suspect that she may not return for a long time. She wants to go to the fair, tonight.

The Teacup. The Flume. Grandfather’s Motor Car.

They’re the easy ones.

The Ghost Hotel. The Hangover. Mount Everest.

They stroll through the fair. It’s dark but still warm. The coloured lights twinkle and the tinkling music sparkles in the air. There aren’t many people around; tomorrow the schools open, and so do many workplaces. Half the population will be back to work after the long summer holiday. It feels like the height of summer, but this is the night when people are gearing up for winter. Going to bed early, packing their bags and lunch boxes, like squirrels are packing their dens with nuts against what’s ahead.

Sara and Lisa sit in a Teacup, on a merry-go-round that moves at about a kilometre an hour. It’s usually patronised by toddlers, and the occasional granny. Tonight Sara and Lisa are the only passengers. The boy who collects the money doesn’t bat an eyelid as he takes their cash and starts the machine. They revolve slowly and don’t talk because the music is so loud. Sara is bemused, but Lisa smiles and looks around at everything, as if she is memorising what she sees.

‘Let’s try Mount Everest’, is what she says, the minute they get out of the Teacup.

The roller coaster. A kilometre of track, swooping and looping and soaring high above the fairground. From its cars people scream in a mixture of delight and terror. Little faces far away, mouths open and eyes closed, being shuttled up and down the steep track, looping the loop, turned upside down for seconds at a time. Little faces with closed eyes and screaming mouths belonging to people who are eighteen years old, max.

Could even they enjoy it?

Sara has never gone on even the easy roller coaster, the Mountain Train, which is cushioned by trees and shrubs and pretends to be a precipitous version of a country railway.

She is disbelieving.

‘Let’s!’ says Lisa. ‘Just once in our lives.’

She persuades her.

How?

Sara has never once in her life wanted to go on any roller coaster. She has visited this amusement park often, with Thomas, with visitors from Ireland. Her nephew from Dublin went on Mount Everest – he was thirteen at the time. He came off, trembling and white as a ghost, weakly protesting that ‘It was cool’. Sara hadn’t been able to watch while he was on the thing.

And now she finds herself standing in the queue – long, since this is the most spectacular, the most scary, the most popular ride. She is handing over a lot of money to the girl in the ticket office, a brusque and impatient individual who, when Sara hesitates as she clambers into the car, tells her to hurry up, in a cross voice. Sara is fastening her harness, listening to Lisa say, ‘I always wanted to do this but this is my first time.’

Slowly the car climbs up the first track, a few metres at a time, as other customers embark. By then they are close to the top of the first loop, and although they have inched their way up, Sara is already frightened. She can’t bring herself to look at the ground, about thirty metres beneath. She flies half a dozen times a year, she has climbed mountains ten times higher than this roller coaster, she is perfectly safe, strapped into a little steel car on a machine that has been tested and double tested by health and safety inspectors in this country, probably the safest country on the planet. She tells herself this, and other things: you have to do it once, you have to take the risk, it will do you good. But she feels more terrified than she has ever ever felt.

Abba sings. ‘Dancing Queen’. She can just hear it, mixed with the laughter, the shouts.

Once she was attacked by an Alsatian dog as she walked in the country, back in Ireland. He pulled her around by her coat-tails for a minute or perhaps an hour – when you are frightened, you move to a different clock, or to a timeless state, as close as you get to experiencing infinity. Eventually, the dog bit her neatly on the calf and ran away.

While he had been assaulting her, she had thought of people ripped apart by dogs in Nazi concentration camps, and she had waited for the dog to bite her eyes or her cheeks or any part of her body. But, like a Christian confronted by a lion in the circus, she had not lost her head. Far from it. Her mind worked hard, on a strategy for escape; and she was still working on that when the dog bit her – harmlessly, it hardly even hurt.

This is a thousand times worse.

She is strapped in. There is no point in planning an escape because she cannot get out. The machine, the person who operates it, is in control. All she can do is repeat to herself that hundreds of people go through this every day. Everything is going to be ok, everything is going to be ok.

But even Thomas’s mantra does not console her.

A whistle sounds. Her blood curdles and the pace quickens. It is still slow as they mount the crest of the first hill but then they hurtle down the other side at a speed that makes her want to die. Then they race up the next slope. She glances at Lisa, who is smiling, just as she smiled in the Teacup. Is it a fixed grimace? Is she pretending?

Down they go, like a stone falling over the side of a cliff into the churning sea.

Oh God, oh God! I say. I don’t believe in God. My family converted to the Church of Ireland soon after they came to Ireland from Lithuania and I am an atheist. This is ridiculous, I say, soon it will be over and you’ll be glad that you did it. It tests your courage – which is lacking. When you get off, you won’t worry about anything ever again – maybe that’s why people do it. They ascend Mount Everest, strapped into a steel box, to put everything else in perspective? Words fail me.

I can’t open my eyes but I can’t close my ears and everyone is screaming. As we hurtle up slopes and are flung back down, the air is rent with bloodcurdling screams. Screaming must make it easier. I try to scream but I can’t. Words fail me, screams fail me.

Now we’re looping the loop.

I am the dancing queen.

We are upside down, we are defying gravity, my hair is hanging down over my face. And now I scream, I scream Lisa screams we all scream. Make it stop God make it stop.

It stops.

The machine stops.

The timbre of the screaming changes from one of pretend terror to a real scream of fright. Because the machine stopped in mid-flight. Every car is frozen exactly where it happens to be, on the slope, on the crest, on the loop.

Sara and Lisa are upside down on the inside of the loop. The harnesses are secure and the car locks to the track by a magnetic force, so they don’t fall to their deaths. But they are upside down and the blood is going to their heads.

‘Hey? What’s happening?’

They can still talk.

‘It’s broken down,’ says Sara calmly. It is not nice being stuck upside down on a roller coaster, but it is marginally better than being in motion. Her prayer has been answered. ‘I’m sure they’ll fix it soon,’ she says consolingly. She notices that Lisa’s hat has disappeared. It obviously fell off when they looped the loop.

Abba have stopped singing. In fact, a hush has descended on the entire amusement park and up here in the air Sara feels enclosed in a silence as comforting and mysterious as the silence of the seabed.

She begins to get a headache.

A voice booms out and says that the roller coaster has stalled due to a mechanical fault. The fault will be fixed as soon as possible. There is no danger, do not panic. We apologise, we apologise.

‘It’s like an announcement on a train,’ Lisa says.

‘Except we’re upside down. How can we not panic?’

‘We’re not quite upside down,’ Lisa points out. It is true. They are slightly left of centre on the inside of the loop.

‘I’m more upside down than I ever was before in my life.’ Sara makes a face. ‘I don’t like it. I’m starting to feel sick.’

More announcements.

They can’t fix the fault. The air rescue service has been called, the fire brigade. Help is at hand, be patient.

Do not panic.

Do not panic.

‘Why don’t they send an angel around with free drinks?’ says Lisa. She looks different, upside down, with her hair floating in the air – her hair looks more plentiful and thicker, and with her pink cheeks, she looks younger than her upright self.

‘Do I look different, this way round?’ Sara asks.

‘Ten years younger,’ says Lisa. ‘It suits you.’

‘Hm,’ says Sara. ‘I must do it more often. I must practise walking around on my hands.’

Sara is sick and dizzy but she is not in the least bit frightened.

On his way back to Italy, the woodcutter planned to visit the Nazi concentration camp.

‘Why?’ asked Sara.

It was where her colleagues at the conference had gone, and she had wanted to ask them the same question. It had irritated her, although she did not understand why, that they were all so eager to go to the concentration camp. Hitler had lived in this city for years as a young man, and, although it was a city alive with music and art, with psychology and culture, with architecture and every aspect of civilisation, it was this one fact, this aberration, that obsessed the librarians. They went to the Jewish Museum, they had to go the concentration camp, they were prejudiced against the citizens in a visceral way. ‘They look like woodland animals, in those little hats,’ a woman from the children’s library in Birmingham had said. ‘Their fur coats, their little noses.’

You would think the English had an unblemished history, free from guilt.

‘It’s good to get close to the concentration camp,’ said the woodcutter, or words to that effect. ‘It is good to feel it in the heart. You read about it, it is different. You do not feel until you go. To the place.’

‘I suppose so,’ nodded Sara. Thinking, voyeurism. Vulgar. Like visiting those medieval torture museums that have sprung up all over the place, in any town with any pretensions to a medieval origin. Tourists like to visit them, too, to gawk at the rack and the thumbscrews between their morning swim and their cappuccino on the terrace. They contemplate, not the sins of the politicians or the religious zealots, but the pain of the martyrs. Misery likes bedfellows. Misery likes greater misery. Tasting terrible pain in the safe confines of a museum puts personal suffering into perspective. It’s all relative. Healthy people make these comparisons all the time, weighing a divorce against execution in the gas chambers, chronic arthritis against the Iron Maiden. ‘Musha, it could be worse,’ Sara’s mother had said. Often. That’s why the woodcutter is going to Mauthausen now, the weekend after his wife has turfed him out. He’s going to contemplate something worse than being dumped by a donna in cashmere.

Naturally, Sara kept all these thoughts to herself.

‘Also,’ said the woodcutter, ‘I am a Jew. My family was hidden in a convent during the war. An Irish priest helped them – Father O’Flaherty, I think. Have you heard of him?’

‘No,’ said Sara.

‘Some of them were sheltered in Italy. But some of them went to Mauthausen.’

‘Did any of them survive?’ Sara was feeling sick.

He shook his head and said neutrally, ‘Mauthausen was a Level Three camp. Nobody survived.’

When she met Thomas in the library, he had read from a thriller, an excerpt about a woman who is strangled and then tied to a kitchen chair, in a sitting-up position. When the detective arrives, he thinks the woman is alive, in her kitchen, reading the paper or something. Sara found it hard to envisage. Wouldn’t she have looked dead, somehow, even after a few days, even if the job of tying her to the chair had been skilfully done? Life departed so rapidly from everything, once dead. How would a detective not see death in the back of a head? In an arm or a leg? The details were ignored in the novel and Thomas made the scene sound convincing enough.

Thomas read the grisly passage in a low key, ironic tone, and went on to read even more graphic horror scenes. The five old ladies who constituted his entire audience listened with polite attention, and smiled and clapped their hands when he had finished. Then they lined up to get books signed and to thank Thomas for coming to the library. He was friendly and grateful. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming. Thank you for listening.’

What Sara knew about Thomas when he phoned to ask her to dinner was that he had written some nasty, and apparently not very popular books, mostly about murdered women.

The amusement park management brings everyone to the hospital for a check-up, then sends them home in taxis. It’s after midnight by the time Sara reaches home. She sees the message light flashing on her phone. There is no message, but she guesses Thomas has been calling, wondering where she is. He never leaves messages. She telephones the cottage. No reply. She leaves a message summarising what happened.

Then she writes an email to Ernesto, which is the woodcutter’s name.

Dear Ernesto,

You may remember me? I am the woman who had lunch with you in Vienna last March. You told me about your divorce. I have been thinking about you and wondering how you are.

She deletes ‘wondering how you are’, which is a bit Hiberno-English and would confuse him. She replaces it with a full stop and ‘I wanted to say hello. How are you?’ Then she continues.

Thanks for everything. The lunch and the conversation. It was a miracle.

I am sorry I did not meet you in the wine bar. But please write to me. Please tell me about Mauthausen.

My family is Jewish, too. Was. Until a generation ago. I forgot to mention that, when we were talking.

All the best,

Sara Feldman

She puts the letter in her draft folder, as she has been advised to do with emails. Leave them, reread them before launching them into the ether.

Then she writes another email, to Thomas, telling him about her misadventure on the roller coaster, and Lisa’s marriage, and the trip back from the cottage. She tells him the house has not been burgled, the grass is not too long, the asters and the goldsturm have come out in the garden. She says everything is ok.

This email she sends immediately. The rule about keeping it for a day does not apply to things you write to your partner or loved one. You can tell them anything.