47

 

Fifteen minutes later Elsa was sitting beside Kell in the backseat of a black cab pulling up outside his flat in Holland Park. She paid the driver. Kell walked ahead of her into the building, turning the key in the door, picturing Rachel asleep on Kleckner’s chest, laughing and joking over room service in bed, showering together. He should have been more careful. He should not have let his guard down. People always betray you in the end. Kell himself had betrayed many others.

“Let me help you.”

Elsa pushed open the street door and asked Kell for the number of his apartment.

“Five,” he replied, and they walked upstairs. Kell was wondering why Elsa was following him. What did she want? “You really don’t have to come in,” he told her. “I’m fine.”

“I am coming in.”

As soon as he was in the kitchen, he poured himself a cognac and sank it in a shot. He offered Elsa something to drink, but she was already looking around the flat. He found her standing in the corner of the living room, staring at a shelf of Kell’s books.

“Graham Greene,” she said. “You like this?”

Kell nodded. He had read a Hitchens essay in January that had stripped Greene clean of his reputation. Hard to go back after that. Rachel had given Kleckner Hitch-22 at the birthday party.

“And an Italian book! Di Lampedusa. Il Gattopardo. You have read this?”

Kell shook his head and said: “No, not yet.” Perhaps as many as half of the books in his flat had been bought on a whim or a recommendation and he had never opened them. He was grateful for the momentary distraction of Elsa’s conversation. He took out a packet of cigarettes.

“Do you mind me smoking?”

“Tom, this is your house. You can do what you want.”

He lit the cigarette and fetched two glasses and a bottle of red wine from the kitchen. They were sitting side by side on the sofa facing the television. DVDs piled up on either side. Box sets. Rentals from Love Film. The collected Buster Keaton. Elsa had three earrings in her right lobe, a single stud in the left.

“Are you okay, Tom?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s all right,” she replied, putting her hand on his knee. Kell stared down at the wedding ring on her finger. “I know who the woman was. The woman in the hotel.”

Kell looked at her and felt a shiver of anger, rooted in his own shame. Elsa held his gaze, determined that he should trust her.

“You love this woman, don’t you? You love Rachel Wallinger?”

“Yes, I do.”

He took a sip of the wine, a pull on the cigarette. To Kell’s surprise, Elsa plucked the cigarette from his hand and took two quick drags of her own, tipping her head back and breathing smoke at the ceiling. Her jaw was tensed, her eyes steady, as though she was recalling every love affair, every heartbreak, every moment of passion she had ever known.

“She is—what?—twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

“Thirty-one,” Kell replied.

She passed the cigarette back to him. For an absurd and illogical moment, Kell thought that Elsa was going to ask why Kell had not fallen in love with her. Instead, she said something that took him completely by surprise. “I have met her.”

Kell stared at Elsa.

“In Istanbul. With Miss Levene. With Amelia. I understand why you feel this way. She is very special. Not just beautiful. A rare person. More than simpatica.”

“Yes,” Kell replied, reluctant to pay Rachel any compliment or to acknowledge that he had proved incapable of securing her love. “She is very special.”

“But you feel a fool for losing yourself to her.”

Kell smiled and remembered how much he valued Elsa’s friendship, her habit always of speaking her mind.

“Yes,” he said. “You could say that.”

“Don’t feel that way.” Her reply was emphatic. “Why else are we here? To feel love is to be alive. To let your heart go out to a person you love is the most beautiful thing in the world.” Elsa must have seen something flicker across Kell’s face, because she stopped short and said: “You think I am just an Italian romantic. The stereotype.”

“No I don’t,” he told her, and touched her arm, offering her the cigarette. Elsa shook her head.

“No. No, thank you. Just to taste the tobacco was good.” She stood up and walked across to the far side of the room, staring at another row of books on Kell’s crowded shelves. Seamus Heaney. Pablo Neruda. T. S. Eliot. Auden.

“You keep all of your poetry together.”

It was an observation rather than the start of a new line in their conversation. Kell stubbed out the cigarette. He remembered how close he had come to making a pass at Elsa on a similarly intimate night in Wiltshire when they had discussed Yassin Gharani. She had cooked for him. She had listened to him. He wondered again why she had come to the flat. It would not have surprised him to learn that she was under instruction from Amelia.

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“This has been a very bad night for you.”

“Yes.”

“I am so sorry. I cannot begin to imagine what you must be feeling. But you are feeling. And this is good.”

He could see that she was trying to say something beyond words meant as mere comfort. Something deeper, something about himself. She took down one of the books, as though to give herself time in which to form the correct words. It was Jane Eyre. Kell looked at her and, for a reason he could not properly understand, tried to will himself to find Elsa attractive. But he could not do so.

“When I first met you, I felt that you were closed.”

“Closed,” he repeated.

Smiling, Elsa put the book down on a table in the center of the living room and crouched in front of him, touching both of Kell’s knees for balance. He did not know if she was going to try to comfort him with a kiss, or if she was simply being kind and considerate toward him.

“When we began to talk in Nice, and later in Tunisia and in England, I felt there was a great sadness at the center of you. More than frustration. More than loneliness. It was as if your heart had been dead for years.”

Kell looked away toward the window. He remembered Rachel saying an almost identical thing to him in Istanbul, as they walked hand in hand to the restaurant in Ortakoy. “You’ve been lying dormant.” It had shocked him that she had intuited such a thing, but he had felt the essential truth of the remark as something close to a revelation. Rachel had brought him back to life. He knew that he had been unhappy with Claire in the same way that he knew his own capacity for vengeance.

Now Elsa sat down beside him on the sofa. She put her right arm across Kell’s back, like somebody comforting the bereaved.

“This time,” she said, “when I see you in Istanbul, and here in London, you are a different person. This girl has lifted you up out of your sadness. It must feel like a weight has been around you and lifted off by what you feel for her.”

“It did sometimes feel like that. Yes. It no longer feels like that.”

Elsa hesitated, as if her natural optimism had caught her out and caused her to be gauche. “Of course,” she replied softly. “This is a hell for you. We lose lovers. We are betrayed by them. We must imagine them moving on into new hearts. But to see this with our own eyes, to be confronted by this directly, it must be unbelievable for you. Unbearable.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kell replied and suddenly wanted her to leave.

“Of course you do not know if what you saw was the truth.”

It was not in Elsa’s nature to offer glib consolations with no basis in fact. Kell did not understand precisely why she had said such a thing.

“We all saw the same thing. You perhaps saw more than I did.”

Elsa suddenly stood up, seized the packet of cigarettes from the table beside him. She began to move around the room, smoking, as though pacing out a private thought, a theory, coming to terms with its consequences.

“When I met Rachel, she seemed to be friendly with Amelia.”

Kell looked up. “She’s Paul’s daughter. Amelia was very close to Paul. She probably cares about her.”

“I am sure that she does. That she cares about her. Forget it. Forget what I said.”

“You haven’t said anything,” Kell replied, aware that Elsa seemed slightly agitated.

“That’s true!” she said, forcing a laugh. She was flustered, out of her depth. Elsa leaned across to the ashtray beside Kell and stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “I do not know what I am saying.”

“I don’t know either. Did Amelia ask you to do anything for her that was related to Rachel?”

“No.”

Kell realized that Elsa was lying to him. It was as though she knew something that might put him out of his misery, but was prevented from saying it by official secrecy—by a promise, a commitment to Amelia.

“You have to tell me, Elsa.”

“Tell you what?”

Kell looked at her. Whatever glimpse of whatever truth she had uttered had vanished. In a swift moment Elsa became no more and no less than his friend again, consoling him in a moment of loss.

“You should sleep and come back in the morning,” she said. “Will you do that? I think you need to rest tonight.”

“Yes, nurse,” he replied, adding: “Would you like to stay here?” Kell saw a flicker of disgust flash across Elsa’s face. “There’s a spare room,” he said quickly. “I meant in the spare room.”

“No, I will leave you,” she replied calmly. “Are you sure you will be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m a big boy. I’ve known worse.”

“Then you must have known bad things,” she said.