The rental car crosses the bridge from Syracuse to the isle of Ortygia; a baked Alaska of sandstone, melting into a turquoise sea. The outpost of successive civilizations before and since Christ, it has survived sieges and earthquakes and invaders: Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Arabs, Normans, Jews and the Sicilian aristocracy, each disinheriting each other by dismantling their churches. Where grand palm trees lean over the ruins of a Greek temple, they hesitate in their hire car at a roundabout until they are squeezed and harangued forward by a collective will and expelled like a cork out of a bottle through a narrow street of tall buildings into a courtyard.
Astrid spots the hotel’s small sign fixed to the wall. They park alongside green bins reeking of dead fish.
They are graciously received in the marble of the hotel’s reception, upgraded to a room with a sea view, and the young bellboy goes behind the little tin car, beckoning Nick with his hands to a parking space on the promenade.
‘He’s never happier than when he’s reversing into a parking space,’ she thinks, watching Nick in the car. You could drive into a space like that straight – but no, a man has to reverse into it. She stands there grinning as, from a saunter, he breaks into a little run.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
The bellboy shows them how to use the card to access the room and power it. The air conditioning hums. Nick flutters before him with the apology of a mime artist, to show that he has no change to give him.
She goes to the shutters and braces the handle on the double doors. The hum of the air conditioning stops. She tests it again. She shows him how to do it and he does it too and they look at each other.
‘Bloody clever,’ he says and does it again.
She stands on the balcony in the afternoon heat, squinting at the sea, then looks to her right across some seven other similar balconies. Above her and below her, the double-doored balconies are in symmetry. It reminds her of the advert for Chanel perfume in which rouged sirens step out on to balconies such as these and holler elegant abuse.
‘They shout out égoïste in that advert,’ she says to him, ‘those women on their balconies. So French. It would never have worked in England. Can you imagine it? Thirty English women yelling out of their council flats at a bloke.’
‘Oy, shit’ead!’
She laughs. ‘God, Nick, you sound just like Ken.’
He’s standing outside the bathroom, dabbing his sweating face with a hand towel. He pulls the underarms of each side of his shirt to his nose and makes a quizzical face. ‘Oh shit, you are your father,’ she says.
‘’Ark at ’er, going on like a drippin’ tap . . .’
She goes to hang up their fine things, cardigans over the shoulders of dresses, his shirts folded and stacked. She leaves their underwear in the bag and closes it – you never let a cleaner glimpse your smalls.
Then she locates the minibar underneath the television and whips it open. She twists off the top of a small bottle of red wine and takes a glug and hands it to him where he sits on the bed, feet planted wide, happy to watch her.
‘I love minibars.’
‘Twice the price.’
‘Twice the fun. Always tastes better.’
‘You daft cow,’ he says, still in his father’s voice, taking the bottle from her and having some too.
‘It does, though, doesn’t it?’
They finish it off, wipe their lips and jettison the bottle in the bin.
Stepping down the grand chequered stairwell of Hotel des Etrangers et Miramare, she hears the slovenly sound of rubber hitting tile and, with effort, by splaying her toes, keeps the new flip-flops stuck to the soles of her feet and proceeds more discretely. This is Sicily! She has in her shoulder bag a photocopied map of the town and she withdraws it in the lobby and strides into the sunshine. Nick dallies, looking at prints on the walls, detaining her with his exclamations. She wants to ‘be here’, to see and be seen. She has an al fresco Martini in mind, or a Campari and soda down by the water, among the stylish.
The receptionist gives her an encouraging look, as if to say, Go on – the water’s lovely! The bellboy arrives at the electric doors and with a swoop bids her join the outdoors, ‘Prego,’ he says.
‘Prego!’ She knows that one.
‘Have a good day,’ he adds rather too quaintly.
‘Yes, all right, thank you very much,’ she says briskly. He’s seeing Judi Dench not Kate Moss. He thinks she’s past it. She feels for her sunglasses and lowers them like a visor. It spoils her mood. The flip-flops look cheap. She smells of airplane.
Finally, Nick comes loping after her. He wants food; a late lunch or an early dinner. But she wanted to dress for dinner! They turn up the hill, away from the beach, his hand firm on hers, shushing her, enjoining her to come with him his way, and she complains and tries to wriggle her hand out of his. They head across the scorched piazza and dip into a shadowed side street and, with his hand still firmly clasping hers, he indicates to a loafing kerbside restaurateur that they’d be interested in a table. The man extinguishes his cigarette and smoothes down his apron.
‘Please!’ he says, demonstrating the way in.
‘It’s such a nice day,’ she laments. ‘It’s so nice to be away from home, to be in the sunshine, and to be near a beach.’
‘Let’s have some fun. We’re on holiday,’ he says, towing her in his wake.
‘I know,’ she says testily, ‘but why does it have to be your holiday?’
He turns to shield her from the other diners, who are looking their way. His eyes are warm and cajoling. ‘Look, silly billy, let’s eat and have a nice bottle of wine and get this thing off to a good start. Shall we? It’ll be romantic!’
It’s agreeably fetid in the tiny room of five tables. The owner has an easy smile, broad hands, and a grey ponytail. His sidekick looks like a backward yokel from a Pagnol film; he has buck teeth and darts about with extravagant confusion. The owner is decisive; shortly after they have hesitantly pronounced the names of a few dishes, he whisks away their menus with an approving flourish. They have ordered plates to share. Baby octopus, deep fried, followed by spaghetti Siracusana and mixed salads, a bottle of water and a bottle of wine. The wine and water are served immediately.
He says to her, as they shake out their paper napkins, ‘We’ll have to start viewing some places when we get back, sweetie.’
‘Oh,’ she says. Since the lunch at his brother’s he’s mentioned once or twice their moving. He complained that he was sick of the quaintness of their home with its beams. Yet they fell in love with it when they saw it just a year back. It reminded him of Gamekeeper’s Cottage, he said, the home he left at eighteen. Not fit for human habitation, he joked. He’d like something with underfloor heating. Maybe in East Kent for a change. She had decided to follow her mother’s example in man management and neither cross him, nor reveal her hand, immediately. Rebuttals, refusals and difficult things – confessions – were introduced into conversation in company. Her mother did it over a hand of cards, Astrid intends to do it over stuffed mini-peppers.
They clink glasses and drink.
‘Dreadful about Sam and Andy splitting up,’ she says, moving to the mollifying subject of other couples’ problems. ‘No doubt she’ll come to see you soon at work.’
‘Yes, I know. I’d thought of that. I’m not sure I could act for her, though. Really. It’s not that I’d be against him; I’m for the court, really . . .’
Her eyes wander about the room. She strokes her forearms. He has chosen that they should eat, he is choosing where they should live. He has chosen the wine.
‘. . . there is an unspoken obligation within my instructions
– well, I won’t go into it, it’s rather complicated – so although it wouldn’t be like I was really acting against him, however . . .’
‘But it would. Wouldn’t it?’ she says. ‘And once he got a letter, one of those pompous ones . . .’
‘They’re precise, not pompous. You use the word too freely, for things you don’t understand generally, I’ve noticed.’
‘Well, put me in my place, why don’t you!’ she laughs hollowly. ‘Whatever you think, a letter from a solicitor is a pisser for most people. Still, if people didn’t fight and hate, you wouldn’t have a living.’
He looks at her empty glass and purses his lips.
‘I’m lucky. I get to see the best in people,’ she says, reaching for the bottle.
‘You see what people want you to see, Astrid. Or what they want you to see. I provide a rather deeper service. Sometimes people want to divorce, you know. Well, of course you know. They want it more than anything. So as not to live a lie, as the cliché goes.’
‘Oh no, you’re wrong, sometimes I see the real person. I saw you, didn’t I? I saw who you were. You said I did anyway. Or did I see who you wanted me to see? Maybe I’m only just beginning to see the real you.’ She knocks back her wine. Her eyes look sloppy.
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe.’
He can’t wait to try the food, he tells her. He’d been reading about it on the way there in the airline magazine. They fall silent. He points out a framed vintage print for Lavazza coffee. They have the same one at home.
‘Reproduction,’ she says coldly.
On shifting ground, her mind works sideways. ‘That stupid ad. That Chanel thing. It reminded me,’ she says, ‘how I used to want to be beautiful. A star. You know. Someone who flings open doors. With red lipstick.’
‘All girls do. Laura does, I’m sure.’
‘No, she doesn’t. She’s into pet rescue.’
‘Is she?’
Her wrist is loose and the wine glass sways dangerously free.
‘I don’t know, the women when we crossed the piazza, they were just so amazing looking and here’s me well past my best. In flip-flops. Do you know, I can put a day on it. I lost my looks on one day last November. I did. Really. I woke up, looked in the mirror and said to myself, Well, that’s that then. Gone. It’s true. I have to accept it. I have crow’s feet.’
‘Only when you smile.’
‘Oh, thanks a lot. Well, that’s one way of making sure I don’t smile any more.’
He refills her glass briskly.
‘You know, it gets me down; the business of beauty. Bev was doing a pedicure last week and this woman’s toenail just fell off when she was painting it and she ended up holding it. That was funny. It’s good when it’s funny. But it’s not funny enough. They ask you what you know about cosmetic surgery and stuff, our clients, and they all want to change themselves and lately I keep thinking – is this healthy? I mean, do I go with it and form some sort of partnership with a surgeon to do Botox and fillers or do I ignore it? I mean, I can of course completely understand it.’ She sighs flamboyantly. ‘You’re beautiful, was what you said to me in that restaurant, you know, over lunch the first time we went out. That feels like years ago now.’
A plate of baby octopus in pale yellow batter is placed between them; it is piping hot. Nick picks up the half-lemon and looks at her.
‘Want lemon on it?’
‘Whatever you want.’
With his fork he begins to pick poker-faced through the strange shapes and selects the longer limbed of them.
‘Try it, it’s incredible,’ he says and offers her a forkful, tentacles waggling.
She shakes her head.
‘Nice man,’ the owner says, as he empties the last of the bottle into their glasses and nods at Nick. ‘Your husband?’
‘My partner.’
‘Another bottle?’
‘Yes, please,’ says Nick.
‘I hate that word,’ she says. ‘Don’t you? Partner. As if we’re
Starsky and Hutch.’
They eat the rest of the octopus in silence, averting their eyes from each other.
‘Want this last bit?’
‘No, you have it.’
‘No, it’s for you.’
‘No. Thank you.’
When it comes, the spaghetti is as thick as soba noodles, cooked al dente and coated in crushed garlic, anchovies and breadcrumbs. It is a woolly and pungent dish. He keeps his head down. The food is bloody marvellous. He intends to shovel in as much as he can.
‘Why is it that women are only as good as they look, do you think, Nick?’
His mouth is full. He points to it. He has already tried to explain to Astrid that he finds a woman’s face interesting with age. He likes to see life in a face – not as in liveliness, but the life that has happened. When he looks at her, he feels like he has a vantage point in which he has before him both the girl and the woman; he can see how she was and how she will be. While she was off shopping for an anti-wrinkle cream in duty free, he sat at the bar and glimpsed through the glass wall the condemned coming into arrivals up the escalator; a long line of girls with hair in ponytails to the side, glum, treading down the backs of their Uggs, their faces pretty but blank.
‘You must get sick of me asking you how I look! We’re only going next door, you say. Won’t you be cold? Who’s going to be there anyway? That’s what you say, and there I am sleeveless in November, kitten heels in dog’s mess, bulging out of my hipsters. I mean, I wore hot pants to the pub at Christmas. What possessed me? I’m forty! I looked at my skinny jeans on the radiator last week and they looked huge. There was nothing skinny about them. I’m deluding myself, aren’t I?’
He blows out, takes a drink. The fat rises in a frothy belch. He blows out a second time sideways.
‘Speaking of which, I tell you what, Nick, I did laugh a bit to myself at your brother’s house. When you dropped your posh speaking voice! All right, geezer. . .’
He takes a sip of wine. ‘You’ve drunk too much,’ he says to her.
This is the same accusation he levelled at her Wednesday night when she came upstairs to renew their argument. It seems now that the argument is still there, left out on a table like a board game abandoned mid-contest just waiting for the players to resume their seats.
‘You’ve run so far from him, Nick, but you are him. Ever since that lunch, I don’t know, but it’s like he’s possessed you.’
‘Well, you, you’re like your mother, Astrid.’
She’s shocked. They’ve shared jokes about Linda hitherto. There’s much to smile at. Astrid’s mother had long ruled out carnations and gypsophila from her flower arrangements. She gurned at Venetian blinds and built-in garages. She cringed at cladding. She reviled water features and gave short shrift to wallpapers, patterned carpets, and pastels too. She ruled in favour of muted neutrals, and claimed she always had, and she could argue avocado was aqua. She lived in terror of someone breaking in and messing up her cushions. Poor Malcolm, they said. Good old Malcolm, they said. When he met her parents, her father, who’d been a manager of a printing company, made her cringe by saying to Nick, the solicitor, ‘We are only humble folk.’ And since then Nick had taken the mickey out of this, repeating it in a yokel voice and pulling his forelock. ‘He didn’t mean it that way,’ she’d said to him. ‘He meant it as a joke. Isn’t it a quote from a book or something?’ Her father was always talking in quotations, to boost himself. This one had failed him with ghastly irony. Nick harped on about it: ‘We’s only ’umble folk, zerrr . . .’ She loved her father. Her father wrote stories for women’s magazines in his spare time; romances. He put her mother first. He still brought her flowers.
‘You’re obsessed with appearances. Just like Linda. Really. It’s so shallow. You talk about my business but what about yours, love?’
There’s a touch of Ken in the use of the word ‘love’ and it’s this that undoes her.
‘At least my father’s not obnoxious and common! I’m beginning to see a different side of you, and it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.’
Other diners are looking at them.
‘I have no interest in pursuing this conversation,’ he says. He tosses his napkin on to the plate of food he’s been enjoying so much and gets up and goes outside to pace up and down the alley and fume and, in his head, call her stupid and vain and anything else he wants.