Philippe looks across the Avenue du Président Kennedy to the Île aux Cygnes. From this height the Eiffel Tower is visible in its entirety so that it looks like one of the models sold by hawkers below the real thing. A mint-green Line 6 metro train crosses the Pont de Bir-Hakeim. They must have come for another reason. If he can think of that other reason before they reach the apartment then they will not say that Maja is dead. It is like avoiding the lines between paving stones. But he cannot think of any other reason. If there were any other reason they would be talking to his lawyer, to his accountant or to Hervé. The Seine is a ribbon of pitted khaki sliding west. The glass door opens and Hervé leads them out onto the balcony. The man is an officier de la Police Judiciaire. Black uniform, two chevrons. He has unnaturally pale skin and a mole like a squashed sultana on his cheek. There is a portly woman standing just behind him in a dowdy beige jumper and a purple windcheater.
People do not enter Philippe’s private space unasked. It is the job of Hervé and other members of staff to prevent situations like this occurring. The officer introduces his colleague. She is from the bureau d’aide aux victimes. This is not possible. Philippe’s mother died instantly of a heart attack while skiing in Lech Zürs. His father spent his last month in a villa in Kefalonia where he could be lifted in and out of the sea by nurses. Philippe is not so naive as to believe that money can alter the brute facts of life but he has always assumed that it can postpone and ameliorate.
The officer apologises for being the bearer of bad news. He flips open a little notebook to check the facts. “The plane struck a farm building.” The woman is openly admiring the view. Or is she merely avoiding Philippe’s glance? How could she be of assistance to anyone? Hervé asks about the other passengers. The policeman explains that both the pilot and the young boy are dead. Philippe is glad. He would not be able to bear the knowledge that Viktor had killed Maja and that he or his son had survived. The woman turns back towards him and tilts her head to one side in order to seem sympathetic. She is a fatter, older, less attractive version of a TV presenter whose name Philippe cannot remember. His own thoughts seem to belong to someone else, running like ticker tape under the scene in front of him.
“She was trapped in the wreckage.”
Ten storeys below, a barge is being hauled upstream, water pleating around the tug’s snub bow. Why are they telling him these details?
“The good news, however…” The policeman pauses and takes a breath. “I’m sorry. That was badly phrased.” He takes another breath. “Your daughter is alive.”
Philippe holds the brushed steel rail and looks down at the moat of thorny shrubs that separates the building from the pavement. He had forgotten completely that Maja was pregnant. How is that possible? Steam drifts from a sunken grille. Did she give birth before she died, or did they hack at her like meat to save the child? If he were to lean a little further out then gravity will simply take over. It would be the easiest thing in the world. It would be like falling into bed.
Hervé drives. He is Philippe’s factotum and bodyguard, one of the few people who will remain close to his employer as everyone else is discarded over the next few years. Philippe does not want to spend three hours in the presence of someone he does not know and he is in no state to drive himself. He watches the cruel countryside reel past. Shock is the wrong word. He is outside his body, airborne, cartwheeling, blank. They had decided on a name but he will not say it, even in the privacy of his own mind, for fear of making her real. He does not want a daughter, but neither does he want her to die. He wants to turn back time and trade her for Maja. What if the child was starved of oxygen? What if she is brain-damaged? What if she is crippled?
Hervé pulls out and overtakes a Dentressangle eighteen-wheeler, a loose tongue of dirty orange canvas flapping so rapidly along its flank that it sings. Hervé is six foot four and seventeen stone and carries no fat. He wears, always, a white shirt under a charcoal suit with no tie. His shaved head shines like a polished apple. He wears Wood Sage & Sea Salt cologne by Jo Malone. He has no interest in other people except insofar as it impinges upon his own plans, needs and well-being. He listens, mostly, to seventies and eighties disco, of which he has an encyclopedic knowledge—Rose Royce, A Taste of Honey, the Love Unlimited Orchestra. He is polite and attentive to those to whom Philippe needs him to be polite and attentive. There is a set to his face, however, when he is displeased which is sufficiently unsettling for him to have needed to resort to physical violence on only two occasions. Nikki, Philippe’s secretary, is fairly sure that he would kill someone if asked and feel no compunction.
The Commissariat in Boulogne occupies one corner of a down-at-heel crossroads opposite a tattoo parlour. Inside, a man in a hi-vis, lemon-yellow tabard and a pirate’s hat is complaining drunkenly about his landlord. A rank cheesy stink rolls off him. He is ushered from the building by a portly policeman who has donned a pair of disposable blue gloves for the purpose.
Philippe hasn’t stood in a queue or waited in a public place since Cambridge.
They are taken to the morgue where Philippe identifies Maja’s body. She looks as if she has been flailed. He has always scorned the idea of a soul but the body feels…empty. He will have the same thought about the Alfama apartment, about the Dubuffets, about the sweetbreads and sea lettuce at Mirazur, about Tribune Bay, as if Maja were the lamp that previously lit the world.
At the hospital his daughter is asleep in a box of transparent plastic. There are two hand-holes on the side which makes Philippe think of gloved scientists manipulating plutonium rods from behind leaded glass. A cannula disappears under a Swiss cross of Micropore tape on the back of each tiny hand, giving her the air of a resting puppet. Hervé takes a photograph for the passport. A nurse places her gently in Philippe’s arms. He has never held a baby. She has his skin colouring—suede, coffee. Wisps of damp black hair on her head. She opens her eyes. They are astonishingly dark. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. The nurse gives him a bottle of formula milk and he feeds her. Angelica. He will call her Angelica. He will never remember the name he and Maja chose.
Hervé books them into a modest hotel in Château Cléry while Angelica is observed overnight. Philippe has never stayed in a three-star establishment before. Hervé hires nurses and initiates the passport application process. He calls Maja’s father in Gothenburg and tells them the terrible news. He says that Philippe is too upset to talk at the moment. He tells Mr. Söderberg that he and his wife now have a granddaughter and he hopes that this is some small compensation for the loss of their daughter. Mr. Söderberg sounds woozy. Is it possible that he is drunk? Hervé calls the Beaufours.
The following morning Hervé meets the private nurse. Côte d’Ivoire, he guesses. Her name is Océane. She is tall and strikingly good-looking. Philippe will not want the company of someone so extravagantly blessed. Hervé gives her two hundred euros in cash and tells the agency to send someone plain. He buys baby clothes, baby food, a car seat at an Intermarché, jobs well below his pay grade but he wants to keep the circle tight.
Medical checks are running late so Philippe and Hervé sit in a hospital waiting room. Philippe keeps forgetting that Maja is dead, then remembering, the same sick lurch every time. An obese crone pads past in slippers and polyester gown, pushing a wheeled stand from which a bag of pale yellow fluid dangles and sways. A tattooed woman has her head bandaged in a way that Philippe has only ever seen in cartoons.
They return to the ward but the chef de clinique is still busy. Philippe is shocked at how much waiting there is in the world of ordinary people and at how difficult it is to do. There are five other incubated babies on the ward. Four are premature—small, wrinkled creatures who could be sleeping in a hollowed oak in a fairy tale. They lie on cashmere blankets and wear tiny, hand-knitted woolly hats. One is Indian, he guesses, or somewhere thereabouts. Long, silky black hair on its shoulders and arms.
An interne appears after twenty-five minutes and says that there is some remaining bureaucracy to be gone through. What he does not say, because the situation is difficult enough already, is that this concerns the need for confirmation of paternity. Hervé gives the man a card and says simply that Philippe’s lawyer will be in touch. Then they take Angelica and leave, displaying a presumption so free of doubt that it leaves no opening for disagreement.
Philippe insists that they drive to the crash site. Hervé thinks it unwise but rations his absolute prohibitions to maintain their force. He sits in the car with the baby. Philippe walks down the muddy lane to the farmhouse. He will notice later how dirty his shoes are and think of this as a penance. The farm building of the police report is a tall, cylindrical silo of black corrugated iron. It has been hacked through the middle and now slumps sideways like the bashed-in hat of a nineteenth-century pantomime villain. There are gouges in the earth where the plane was presumably dragged prior to being lifted onto a flatbed truck and driven away. He pictures it in a hangar somewhere, men in rolled-up sleeves taking photographs and jotting down readings taken from smashed dials. She wouldn’t have known a thing. Is that true? There are dark stains on the earth, some fluid which last night’s rain has not washed away. Oil? Fuel? Blood?
An old woman is yelling at him. She belongs to another world. Overhead, the sky is uniformly blue, only two parallel contrails smudging and sliding. A railway for angels. There is nothing here for him.
In the car Hervé receives a phone call from Paris. There are journalists at the apartment. He must find somewhere else for Philippe and Angelica to stay until the passport comes through.
They meet the new nurse at the hotel. She looks as if she works on the checkout at Carrefour—forties, heavyset, the ghost of a tattoo on her right forearm. Agathe Guérin. Philippe feels both relieved and jealous of the ease and warmth with which she handles his daughter, the fluent, unaffected nonsense she talks. Un, deux, trois, allons dans les bois. Quatre, cinq, six, cueillir des cerises…
Philippe says he wants to see the ocean. Memories of childhood, perhaps, or simply the comfort of having a whim indulged. They leave Angelica with Agathe, and Hervé drives them to Fort-Mahon-Plage where they stand on the promenade in bright sunshine and a cold wind. Hardy families hunker under umbrellas hammered into the sand. Far off, the gaudy blades of five land yachts—pink, white, orange, orange, white—scoot over the flats. What if he left it all behind—the money, the houses, the investments, the artwork, the travel? What if he took a job and he and Angelica lived in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable town? A boy stands on the beach staring at him. It is Rudy. If Rudy is alive, then it is possible that Maja is alive. He turns to get Hervé’s attention but when he turns back to the beach the boy has gone. He is suddenly frightened that Rudy has re-materialised in the hotel and is planning to do some terrible harm to Angelica.
“We need to get back.”
They move into a large villa near Cavaillon. Hervé hires a cook, a housekeeper and three more local nurses to work eight-hour shifts. Much as he loves Angelica, Philippe’s own parents were neither very attentive nor very affectionate and he has a limited appetite for baby talk. He does not know how to be a father. He spends much of his time engaged in the raw act of grieving. He thinks about Maja perpetually—scenes from their shared life, scenes from TV dramas, nightmare images of her death, nightmare images of Angelica’s birth. Sometimes he hears her voice and turns to see an empty doorway or a bird at the poolside. He had a gallstone four years ago in New York, a pain so all-consuming it rendered him briefly blind. This time there is no morphine. He must get down on all fours and ride it out. Hervé says that he can source medication but Philippe fears that it is only the pain that stands between himself and a great void into which he might tumble irretrievably.
There are obituaries in the New York Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung. She has two pages in Aftonbladet. He reads them over and over. He saw her first in The Forest, a television series at which he would have scoffed had it starred anyone else. He watched both seasons in a fortnight, telling himself it was a childish infatuation till he googled her and watched an interview in which she quoted Christopher Smart at length, in English as fluent as his own. For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way…He flew to Stockholm to see her in John Gabriel Borkman at the Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern and waited at the stage door with flowers like it was 1954.
He has arranged his life so that there is nothing he needs to do. Housekeepers look after all five properties. Nikki oversees the housekeepers, pays bills and runs maintenance. The accountancy firm retained by the family, Maines, subcontract an investment manager, Quadrant, to run a portfolio on a medium-risk basis that steadily outpaces inflation. He was in the tea business for seven years till rising Indian labour costs required him to tell lies and hurt people, actions which his partner Lem called deal-making and streamlining and which came to Lem as easily as breathing so that he slipped into that big leather chair on Portugal Street as if Philippe had merely been keeping it warm for him. And now? How does one conjure those engaging, complex, necessary tasks which give one’s days shape and meaning from within a life of such ease?
He watches an episode of The Forest on DVD every night. It has dated terribly, but it is a magic box which still contains Maja and she is alive and she is young and she is beautiful. Hervé reorders all the books Philippe left in the teetering pagoda by his bed in Winchester, but Philippe can read nothing denser than Fred Vargas and Arnaldur Indriðason, good vanquishing evil in three hundred and fifty easy pages. There are bicycles in the shed. He goes for long rides. Sometimes he has to stop at the side of the road and weep. He floats in the pool and is badly sunburnt. He longs for some more serious ailment.
He returns none of the calls, emails or letters from friends and acquaintances offering their condolences. It is not that he dislikes the idea of seeming weak, or calling upon the kindness of equals; it is simply a transaction he has never learnt. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they are not friends in the way that others might understand the word. He has never lived in one place. He moved school every two years—Sir James Henderson, the Institut Auf Dem Rosenberg, Aiglon, Phillips Exeter…When relationships, political climates or tax regimes became uncomfortable he moved on, as his father had done, as his grandfather had done. In his adult life he has chosen to spend time with people of similar tastes whose company he enjoys. Why would one do anything else? When those people have difficulties—a serious illness, drug addiction, a teenage child in trouble with the law—he has given them the space he would have wanted in a similar situation. He realises now that he loved Maja because she was the only person he needed. It seems obvious in retrospect, as do many of the hard lessons he is learning.
The French air-accident investigation closes, offering no challenge to what seemed, only hours after the crash, to be the obvious explanation. The coroner passes a verdict of death by misadventure, the police case is closed and Maja’s body is released.
Hervé arranges a funeral in Gothenburg. It is a shambles. No press are invited but the information leaks and there is an unseemly scuffle involving a photographer and Maja’s brother. When Maja’s mother is presented with Angelica she collapses, the way people do in films when given shocking news. Maja’s father, Hervé now sees, is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s which accounts for his seeming drunkenness during that first phone call and his failure to pass on the vital message. The old man spends a great deal of time at the reception asking for Teddy Lindholm, a name his wife does not recognise. He goes missing at one point and is discovered round the back of the building, kneeling beside a dead thrush and weeping. Maja’s agent delivers a dreary eulogy which sounds like her Wikipedia page, to an audience which contains two Oscars, three Oliviers and a Knight of the Realm. There is unremitting rain throughout.
Philippe is pleased. Maja’s death itself was a shambles and a shambolic funeral feels right. Besides, he has never greatly liked her family. Brewers and soldiers. Her cousin is an MP for the so-called Sweden Democrats. Bevara Sverige Svenskt and everyone else can fuck off. Her father was the only one he had liked. That rebellious twinkle. Court-martialled for putting two cats and a lit Catherine wheel inside a tank containing a senior officer. His Alzheimer’s, thankfully, preoccupies Maja’s mother enough to stop her trying to pin Philippe down about arrangements for seeing Angelica before they slip out to the idling limousine.
Antioch was designed by Amyas Connell in 1937 for Philippe’s grandfather and named after the ancient city on the eastern end of the Turkish Mediterranean coast. Occupying fifty-five acres of land, it sits in a saddle between two wooded hills above the village of Braishfield, eight miles west of Winchester. The office and the staff accommodation are shielded by trees at the boundary of the property so that even from the roof garden of the main house no other buildings are visible. The shield of the hills creates a sweet spot where the average temperature is always a couple of degrees higher than the surrounding countryside and cheeringly un-English palms grow happily around the long sloping lawn. On sunny days it is possible to think that one is in the Loire, if not quite Provence.
Connell was a disciple of Le Corbusier though the master’s hard lines have been softened a little here. There is a good deal of concrete and many straight lines and semicircles, but everything is painted white and there are big windows so that the effect is more Riviera than Cité Radieuse. The house is Grade II listed and every few months a bold architectural twitcher will wander up the drive which remains without electronic gates because Philippe thinks the fashion vulgar. He returns to the house five weeks after the funeral when Nikki assures Hervé that even the most persistent journalists are long gone. He will remain there with Angelica for eighteen months.
Before Maja was killed Philippe read widely, travelled frequently and collected art, each activity a manifestation of the same hunger for the world, as if the planet itself were a great feast to be greedily eaten. The Milky Way seen from the doorway of a yurt in Elsen Tasarkhai, the Modigliani portrait of Soutine, Leigh Fermor’s Danube…the dividing lines between the world experienced and the world described so porous that sometimes he could not remember whether he had seen a place, a painting or a building through his own eyes or through someone else’s words. He reads easily in four languages and can carry on rudimentary conversations in seven, though he always found those languages and their respective literatures more fascinating than their living speakers, using ramshackle modernisations of Latin and Greek, for instance, which confused and amused interlocutors in Italy and Greece. But now? Those paintings, those temples, those archipelagos, those tiny planes dragging their red ribbons across so many pages of the atlas, seem like the kind of cheap trick a conjurer might get away with at a children’s party to disguise the fact that there was in truth no magic in the world.
He cannot travel without Angelica. Even in London he is beset by nightmares of her being lowered into a bath of boiling water by an idiot nurse, or rolling off a table and cracking her head on the kitchen floor. Two days in Bonn are a torment. Nor can he travel with a nurse in tow, his wife’s absence mocked constantly by a dowdy stand-in, tarnishing the golden memory of one country after another. So he hunkers down and lets the world’s callous carnival carry on beyond the trees.
Every so often the senders of the unanswered calls, emails and letters turn up without an invitation, because they happen to be passing, because they genuinely care or because they are intrigued. Philippe assumes that they have all come to see Angelica. She is a thing of such wonder to him that she must surely be a thing of wonder to everyone, so she is brought out by one of the nurses while Philippe and his visitors are served tea and cake and try to keep the conversation afloat. One day Hanneke, Viktor’s widow and Rudy’s mother, knocks at the door. She has tried to contact Philippe repeatedly and polite rebuffs from Hervé and Nikki have not reduced the frequency of her attempts. Paola, the current housekeeper, gives her the same story she gives the journalists who turn up every so often: Philippe is living in Turkey. He watches from an upstairs window as she walks towards the white Range Rover parked askew on the gravel. He expects her to sit behind the wheel and gather herself before putting the car into gear and departing. To his surprise she opens the passenger door and takes out a small red fire extinguisher. She walks over to his Mercedes and swings it into the centre of the windscreen which slumps into a target of frosting. He doesn’t understand. Surely it is he who has the right to be angry. She leaves the fire extinguisher protruding from the rectangle of shattered glass and drives away and Hervé’s instinct not to press charges is correct because it is the last time she attempts to make contact.
Maja’s mother telephones on several occasions, wanting to arrange a visit so that she can see her granddaughter again. Hervé pencils in some vague dates which are never firmed up. She is, he guesses, increasingly preoccupied with her husband’s deteriorating condition. For whatever reason, she finally stops ringing.
Maja’s death has become, for a small number of people, an obsession, fostered and sustained by the Internet which, to Philippe, seems like nothing more than a great machine for connecting the deranged and angry people of the world. So, five mornings a week Angelica goes to a local nursery under an assumed name. After she leaves the house, Philippe swims one hundred and fifty anaesthetic lengths. He cannot imagine talking to anyone about his sadness. He does not want the burden shared or halved. He could no more give away this hurt than he could give away Maja’s clothes, her piano, her awards. He plays the music she once loved (Simon Boccanegra, Tristan und Isolde, Káťa Kabanová…) on the speakers built into the walls of the house and pretends that she is in a nearby room. He sees Rudy sometimes, standing at the end of a corridor, or in the gloaming under the palms. It does not surprise him. It seems natural that biology and physics have been fundamentally altered by the same impact that shattered his heart.
He goes for long walks on the Downs where Maja used to ride. The Clarendon Way, Ashley Down, Beacon Hill. Inhuman nature calms him with its long, slow rhythms and its million different greens, the wind in the long grass, buzzards overhead. He doesn’t see Rudy out here. The boy is an indoor phenomenon, a product of those vibrations human beings leave ringing in bricks and glass and steel.
Angelica toddles, then walks. She speaks late and her first word is “water” and Philippe is unaware of how peculiar this is. She hears her father talk about the paintings on the walls of the house and describes her first pictures—a forest of Twombly-esque loops—as “abstrack.” She likes all fruit except oranges and hates all vegetables except spinach. So she calls orange a vegetable and spinach a fruit because she likes categories not to overlap. For several years she will call the uncomfortable overlapping of categories “making things brown” because it is what happens when coloured paints are allowed to mix. She gives her twenty-two soft toys names which begin with successive letters of the alphabet, from a rabbit called André to an orang-utan called Very Very. She likes Barbapapa and Madeleine and Dear Zoo and Peepo! She likes Le Renard et l’Enfant and The Incredibles and Le Petit Poucet. Her baby-fat falls away. She is tall for her age and skinny with it, that same dark skin which surprised him in the hospital in Boulogne set off now by glossy, mahogany hair. Philippe could gaze at her for ever, but to other adults her looks can be disturbing, the darkness of those extraordinary eyes, so dark you feel as if you are looking into someone not at them. Philippe explains to Angelica that her mother acted in films and on television, that she was loved by people who had never met her, that she flew away and didn’t come back. These things fuse in Angelica’s mind so that she will always think of Maja as a faerie figure borrowed by the physical world before she was called back home.
Philippe owns houses in Sri Lanka, Berlin and Skiathos. They are rented out, less to save money than to keep the staff on their toes. The villa outside Antakya remains empty. He cannot bear the idea of anyone else inhabiting what has always been thought of as the ancestral home. The family has owned the estate for as long as written records exist, so it is said. According to their own private myth they have been there since Antakya was Antioch, since Antioch itself was founded, surviving all the subsequent revolts, sieges, conquests and earthquakes. In the very centre of the house is a low-lit room where archaeological relics from the city’s early days are kept behind glass—bowls, amphorae, seven Roman dice, two vanishingly rare Domitian Tetradrachms from the city’s mint, a substantial piece of mosaic flooring which should technically be in the Hatay Museum. Is the story true? Perhaps it matters only that this is a family which has always prided itself as part of a global aristocracy, doggedly secular but with Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots, citizens of the world not in aspiration but in simple fact.
Angelica’s birthdays are simultaneously anniversaries of Maja’s death. Philippe ignores both. On her third birthday, however, Paola the housekeeper starts a tradition of taking her to Legoland in Windsor, and Philippe is too preoccupied with his own memories to be haunted by images of his daughter falling from a roller coaster or being abducted by a stranger.
The fourth Christmas after Maja’s death Philippe tries to make up for his self-absorption by throwing a party for Angelica and a few friends from the nursery. The temperature drops unexpectedly the night before and by the time guests arrive there is snow on the palms and on the grass, fat flakes against a dark, pearly sky. If the noise of their shrieking is any measure the children are clearly enjoying themselves, sweeping from room to room in a raucous shoal. Only one girl stands apart, walking the room the way a cat does, following some kind of path invisible to everyone else. She climbs up and sits on the wide white mantelpiece at one point, like a presiding sprite, until her mother lifts her down for jelly, and Philippe can’t suppress the suspicion that she has some connection to Rudy, an emissary, a lieutenant. Hervé is not at ease among children. He hovers at the periphery only because the event carries so much potential for disaster. Two fathers start talking to Philippe without introducing themselves and he realises, belatedly, that he met them at local events years ago, when Maja was still alive. A number of the parents have clearly tagged along only to see the house and the grounds and spend the entire time looking over the children’s heads and out of the windows as if they are thinking of buying the place. One has to be extracted from a bedroom. The children eat Würstchen im Schlafrock and mini-pizzas with pineapple and ham. They drink magic punch containing gummy bears in ice cubes. They play Snake’s Tail and Pass-the-Parcel and Chinese Jump Rope. Nikki has hired Safari Sam who brings a boa constrictor, an iguana, a tarantula, a fat, black millipede and twelve cockroaches which the children are encouraged to place on their faces in order to horrify their parents. One of the fathers has to sit in his car for the best part of an hour until he is certain that the animals have gone.
The whole event has the heightened colours of a folk tale, as if it is taking place inside one of those houses that spring up on the solstice, at which the weary traveller knocks and is asked inside to find a blazing fire, fine food and sweet wine. Angelica is happy and Philippe cannot imagine anything better than being here, now, with these people, his sadness gone, his wanderlust stilled, the snow, the palms, the music. But as always happens in the folk tale there comes a point where abundance tips into surfeit and the faintest of shadows falls. He is resentful of all these people who seem capable of making his daughter happy in a way that he cannot. He is frightened that they will spirit her away, not today and perhaps not literally, but that they will spirit her away nevertheless.
He asks Paola to bring the party to a sharp close at the prescribed time, but it is one of the few occasions when she stands her ground. This is Angelica’s day and she is enjoying herself. Hervé extracts Philippe on the fictional pretext of an important phone call, and ushers him into the upstairs study whose windows look onto the unpeopled white woods at the rear of the house and from where the noise of the party is faint enough to be covered by the Juilliard’s rendering of Bartok’s third string quartet. Before Hervé leaves he glances out of the window and sees, on the strip of snow-covered lawn that separates the gravel path from the beginning of the trees, a roebuck, motionless, fox-orange. He waits for it to spook and bolt, its white rump flashing as it vanishes into the foliage, but it remains completely still. The two men watch it for a minute, two minutes, three. Philippe wonders if the animal is sick. It reads like a symbol of something, though what the meaning is he has no idea. Perhaps it is this insolubility that will keep the image bright in Philippe’s mind for such a long time afterwards. Hervé wonders if the deer believes that it will remain unseen as long as it doesn’t move. If this is true then they are scaring it. Hervé turns away and heads back to the party and when he glances from the staircase window the animal has gone.
When does Philippe’s touching move from innocence into something more sinister? Is he conscious of having crossed a line at all? Or was the way he held her and played with her compromised from the beginning? If Philippe gives it any name, he calls it love. He cares for her unconditionally in a way that no one else will ever be able to care for her. They need one another, more even than he and Maja needed one another. She is made from his body, from Maja’s body. How could there be a boundary of any kind between them? The only woman he ever truly loved was torn violently from him and, in return, he was given this gift. Sometimes, he palliates the recurring nightmare of the crashed plane by thinking not that Angelica looks like Maja but that in some obscure way Angelica is her mother, that in those terrible final seconds some vital spark jumped between the dying and the living body in order that it might remain in the world. Nor, as she gets older, will he be able to bear the thought of sharing Angelica with another man. The pictures, the sounds, the sensations this possibility brings to mind make him nauseous. And it is a dangerous world out there, especially for a young woman as innocent as his daughter. Who else could protect her in the way that he can protect her? He will refrain from full intercourse until she is fourteen. He thinks of this as a kindness.
Does he know, in some corner of his mind, that what he is doing is wrong? Or, if you have never been forbidden absolutely, if you have never been harshly criticised by someone whose opinion genuinely matters to you, if you have never had to face the consequences of your own mistakes, does the quiet, critical, contrary voice at the back of the mind grow gradually quieter until it is no longer audible?
Angelica does not resist his advances. Sometimes he must cajole, but he never needs to threaten. That, surely, is sufficient confirmation of his integrity. That, surely, is the measure of any relationship.
The staff both know and do not know that something is not right. Hervé does not care greatly. He has little sympathy for Angelica. Hervé, though Philippe would be shocked to know it, has little sympathy for either of them. In truth Maja’s death pleased him, giving him a problem sufficiently complex to tax him at long last. When he is off duty, in the company of his partner and his friends, he does vicious and accurate impressions of the family and their circle. His lack of concern is precisely why he is good at his job. His objectivity is never clouded by emotion of any kind. Nikki cares but she took the financial bait laid by Andrew Maine and was shown evidence of her clumsy embezzlements at a meeting of which Philippe knows nothing, a meeting where Andrew made a theatrical show of sliding a sealed brown envelope of incriminating documents into a safe. It is something he has done quietly on behalf of many wealthy clients, a trick learnt from his father—simple, deniable and, so far, infallible. Her loyalty, he hopes, is now guaranteed.
The cooks, the housekeepers, the cleaners, the gardeners…some can’t quite put a finger on the problem, some are more convinced, but what can anyone do with such information beyond sharing it with friends and family who pass it on in turn to friends so that it merges with the vapour of fantasy which always surrounds the rich, powerful and reclusive.
Nevertheless, Philippe treats Angelica during the day with an affected coolness and never touches her until the staff have retreated from the main house. He makes sure that she always returns to her own bed. He tells her that it must remain their secret, that other people might not understand. He tells her that those people would be jealous if they knew and would try to separate the two of them, that this life of ease and luxury would then come to a terrible, crashing close. He invokes the ghost of Maja and imagines her casting a posthumous blessing on their union.
There are close calls. When she is six years old a teacher finds her rubbing a doll between its legs, saying, “Do you know how much I love you?” He does something he rarely does and attends a meeting on his own behalf. He is offended by the suggestion of impropriety. You stroke dogs because you love them, you stroke cats because you love them, you stroke people because you love them. How is a girl as young as Angelica meant to know that certain areas of the body are out of bounds? They are reading their own prurient narratives into events of no consequence. Nevertheless he withdraws Angelica and they move to a rented penthouse apartment in Vancouver.
The class is on a trip to the zoo in Aldergrove when Angelica sees a gazelle with an erection and says, “It’s like Papa.” The head of her new school is more insistent and less willing to bend to Philippe’s argument that Angelica is simply pointing out that men have penises. They leave Canada. Back in Winchester he removes Angelica from formal education altogether and arranges for tutors to teach her at home. She is eight years old. He tells her that she is so far in advance of other children academically that she needs personal attention and work tailored to her own special talents. She has spent so much of her life around adults that this is largely true, and already other children are aware of something different about her, something which makes them instinctively keep their distance. Consequently she is untroubled by the prospect of a solitary life, and the flattering suggestion that this is happening because of her intellectual superiority only sugars a pill she was already happy to swallow.
Philippe never imagines that he will be found out, that he will be charged with wrongdoing. Such things are inconceivable. And that anxious thrum which runs constantly like the vibration of a ship’s engine in the walls and floors? Those moments when you are woken in the small hours by the conviction that a stranger is walking up the stairs…are they not universal feelings? Are they not simply the price of being human?
She takes it as normal at first, what her father does to her. How would she know any different? She accepts, too, his insistence that she keep it secret and not discuss it with anyone. This is not a threat. It is simply the way things are. Some of the things he makes her do are disgusting and some of them are painful, but so many things to do with the human body are disgusting and painful and must simply be borne. Only as she gets older is there a growing sense of something wrong.
Her father does not allow her to watch TV and there is no Internet access in the main house. Indeed, she has been taught to think of the Internet as dangerous. It matters little. She has grown up knowing that problems will always be solved and questions answered by kind and efficient staff. She has no mobile phone and no friends she might call. She reads newspapers and magazines from an early age, but those occasional horror stories she cannot help but notice about sick men who prey on children bear no relation to her own experience. They are stepfathers, teachers, neighbours, strangers. Her father doesn’t hit her. He doesn’t lock her up. He loves her. He tells her so repeatedly.
She tells no one about her unease. Her father is a good man. People respect him. She has never heard him criticised. He is the biggest thing in her life. It is not possible that he is in the wrong. So it must be she who is at fault, and the fact that she doesn’t know in what way she is at fault only makes the growing unease harder to bear. Who in any case would she tell? She is close to some of the staff, the housekeepers in particular—Paola, then Naomi who cycled to China, then Mariam the mountain climber from Tbilisi, then Dottie who can juggle and wears heavy-metal T-shirts under her uniform—but they are employees and seldom stay long, sensing, like so many of her father’s employees, something deeply out of kilter.
She knows, too, that her father’s threat is real. If someone outside the family learns of their secret then this charmed life might indeed come to an end—whatever food she wants cooked whenever she wants, clean clothes every day, new clothes every few months, endless hot baths, a wooded garden where this world and the other world merge so effortlessly one into the other, the fact that they can open the atlas at random and, by the following evening, be looking at the marble caves of General Carrera Lake, or cruising through the Qutang Gorge on the Yangtze. Above all she would miss the library at Antioch.
If she and her father were separated, if she were placed in the care of strangers and forced to live elsewhere, then how would she survive?
Fourteen, fifteen. She never fights, never complains. She allows these things to happen, and the gap between acceptance and encouragement is a very narrow one. The longer it goes on the more she feels like an accomplice. Sixteen years without a complaint. Is that not tantamount to saying that you enjoyed it, that you wanted it?
So she reads. For company, for solace, for escape. She reads beyond her years. She has fewer languages but she shares the omnivorous hunger her father once felt for the written word. At the same time she has retained a child’s ability to sit still for long periods and lose herself entirely in a fictional world. Not children’s books, not contemporary novels. She does not want to be mocked with visions of other lives she might be leading. Nor does she read poetry. Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge. Her favourite stories are the old ones, those that set deep truths ringing like bells, that take the raw materials of sex and cruelty, of fate and chance, and render them safe by trapping them in beautiful words. And every night, when her father comes to her room, she recites silently to herself the magic words which bring one of these other worlds into being and wanders there, far from the body he is using for his pleasure.
She watches Arjuna string the great steel bow and fire an arrow through the eye of the mechanical fish to win the hand of Draupadi. She travels for a day with Gilgamesh along the subterranean Road of the Sun under Mount Mashu to the Garden of the Gods. She smiles at Rumpelstilzchen spinning himself into angry pieces. She is frightened by the knight who rides into the court of Genghis Khan on a magical bronze horse, bearing a mind-reading mirror, a ring that translates the language of birds and a sword whose deadly wounds can be healed only by a touch of the same sword.
She has no one with whom she can share these stories. She is both teller and listener. She forgets, sometimes, where the page ends and her mind begins. She recounts these tales to herself in idle moments, inevitably changing them a little every time and comes to believe, in some occult way, that these are stories of her own invention, that she is bringing these lives into being, as if she is one of the Fates, those supernatural women who make and cut the thread of life. She is the abducted Helen sitting high in the Trojan citadel weaving her great purple web of double fold, the tapestry which describes the many battles of the horse-taming Trojans and the brazen-coated Achaeans, so that it is hard to tell whether she is simply describing the scenes far below her chamber window or whether she is creating them. Who in any case can say what is real? The Trojan War, Helen’s tapestry or this other quiet room in which we are re-creating those scenes in our own minds?
There are darker tales about women who weave stories. Arachne the shepherd’s daughter, for example, who boasts that her extraordinary handiwork is not a gift from the gods but something she has taught herself. She challenges the outraged Minerva to a contest and two looms are strung so that they may compete against one another. Minerva begins, weaving a picture of the twelve Olympians seated in their majesty watching Minerva herself strike the ground with the tip of her spear so that the olive tree is born. In the corners of the picture she depicts mortals who have been transformed as punishment for defying the gods—Haemus and Rhodope who became mountain ranges, the Queen of the Pygmies who became a crane, Trojan Antigone who became a stork, Cynaras whose daughters were turned to stone.
Arachne responds with a weaving which shows Jupiter taking the form of a bull to rape Europa, the form of an eagle to rape Asterië, of a swan to rape Leda, of a satyr to rape Antiope, of a shower of gold to rape Danaë, of a speckled serpent to rape Ceres…
Seeing that the work is better than her own, Minerva tears it to shreds and beats Arachne with her boxwood shuttle. Too proud to endure this humiliation, Arachne hangs herself, but Minerva refuses to let her die and transforms her into a spider, for ever dangling from a rope, for ever weaving, punished by metamorphosis exactly like the characters depicted in her own tapestry.
The house is cleaned scrupulously and Angelica is no more likely to stumble across a cobweb than she is to stumble across a dead mouse, but she finds them in the garden sometimes, strung between branches, picked out early in the morning by the tiniest drops of dew which hang from the individual filaments, and she wonders every time whether they were made by a woman who was punished for telling the truth.
Old friends have largely given up trying to stay in touch. There are fleeting encounters in hotels and restaurants, but Philippe takes her to hotels and restaurants less and less frequently once she becomes a teenager. Her gawkiness has gone, she has become a young woman and it is painfully obvious to him that when she walks into a room, men turn to look at her and have trouble looking away. Sometimes they tell him how attractive she is. Sometimes they say this to Angelica herself. They do not spell it out but they are saying, I want to have sex with your daughter. Angelica cannot understand this. Dangerously naive, she is flattered by their attention. She acts as if she were living in a fairy tale, as if she were a princess and these were her admirers. Sometimes she responds in a way which could be described as flirting, if she knew what flirting meant. He finds it unbearable, though what he finds most unbearable is a possibility he hardly dare articulate, that she is looking for a white knight, someone to hoist her onto his saddle and bear her away.
So they holiday in isolated locations, they stay in cities where he knows no one, they stay at home. Stories circulate, nevertheless, about the aloof but radiant daughter of the famous mother, the stories made more compelling by their sinister footnotes. Angelica rarely speaks, it is said. Some suggest that she is unable to speak. Is it possible, in spite of her beauty, that she has a learning difficulty, or a brain injury as a result of her traumatic birth? Others, who have heard her speak, say that she is shockingly naive, an unnerving mix of sophistication and childishness. Might she be mentally unwell? It would not be wholly surprising given her motherless, hermetic upbringing. Some wonder if there is a nastier story, though it is rarely spelled out any more clearly than in remarks that it’s not quite right for a father to keep a daughter so close. To be explicit would be to say that one knows but does nothing. Far easier to dismiss it as baseless innuendo and bored gossip.
Bobby Koulouris is an art dealer, in twentieth-century prints mostly—Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Louise Bourgeois…He sells work to Philippe and, occasionally, buys work from him. He is as near to a genuine friend as Philippe has and these transactions are as much conversation as commerce. He has a reprobate son, Darius, of whom he despairs and about whom he has complained on many occasions, a vain, idle boy who was thrown out of two schools, turned up his nose at university, flirted sporadically with paid employment and now leads a life of dissipation among minor European aristocracy and trust-fund beneficiaries of equal vanity and idleness. Predictably, he has no interest in art, and rejoices in his ignorance. But when his father dies unexpectedly of pneumonia in Laos, Darius takes it upon himself to go through the contents of his father’s apartments in Athens and Berlin where work rests on its journey from seller to buyer, intending to squirrel away a few valuable pieces with no paper trail. In doing so he stumbles on an exchange of emails between his father and Philippe in which his father says that he is hopeful of getting his hands on a complete signed set of Hockney’s Brothers Grimm fairy-tale etchings which Darius has been looking at only moments before and has, uncharacteristically, recognised.
Remembering the stories about the elusive and beautiful Angelica and thinking that he can both solve a mystery and have himself a small adventure, he rings Philippe on the private number known only to a very small number of people. Philippe ignores the first three calls but Darius is persistent and when he finally picks up, Philippe’s annoyance is undercut immediately by the news of Bobby’s death. Darius moves swiftly to capitalise on his advantage and says that he will by very happy accident be passing through Hampshire in the next few days and will drop a set of prints off, politely drawing the call to a close before Philippe can demur.
Philippe no longer feels the same hunger for the pictures—he no longer feels the same hunger for any pictures—but there will be some satisfaction in the purchase, given that he already possesses complete sets of the Cavafy and the Rake’s Progress. It seems, too, like a small, belated recompense to a friend whose final communications he left unanswered.
Three afternoons later Darius comes to a halt in a white BMW 3 Series with an ostentatious little skid on the gravel outside Antioch, sporting an elderly, sun-bleached, denim shirt and a hundred and seventy-five thousand euros’ worth of art slung over his shoulder in a portfolio, for all the world as if he were carrying a few watercolours of New Forest ponies he’d knocked off that morning.
Hervé walks out onto the drive to give the interloper the once-over and to allow the interloper to give him the once-over and take on board the knowledge that Hervé will be somewhere in the building for the duration. Judging the young man harmless he leads him inside.
Philippe has not done the appropriate calculation and when Darius turns up, Philippe discovers that he is a decade younger than expected. His swagger is a surprise, too, just self-mocking enough to charm everyone apart from the person who was the centre of attention before Darius walked into that particular room. He shakes Philippe’s hand with a grip halfway between exuberant and overpowering and Philippe feels that he is being bested in a contest whose rules are not wholly clear. He considers saying that he has to leave post-haste to deal with some unforeseen business complication but he imagines this supremely confident young man fixing him with a wry stare and simply refusing to believe him. As they walk through the house, however, Darius makes enthusiastic and knowledgeable remarks about the work of Amyas Connell (“He was born in New Zealand, if my memory serves me correctly”) whom he googled over a pub lunch en route, so that by the time they are being served with a pot of first flush Darjeeling and slices of rhubarb-and-pistachio cake, Philippe is rowing back on his presumptions. He asks the obligatory questions about Bobby’s death and Darius lingers a little on the ghoulish details.
Angelica hears the soft rip of gravel when Darius arrives and goes to the window to look, visitors being a rare entertainment. The young man who gets out of the sports car and removes a portfolio from the boot is more entertaining than she could have hoped for. He is clearly not someone employed by her father—a lawyer, a banker. He is utterly uncowed by the house and garden and looks, for all the world, as if he might own the place. Is it possible that he is a friend of the family?
His looks are unimportant. He is young and wealthy, he comes from the Great Elsewhere and there is a dash about him which suggests that in his company anything might happen. But on top of these things he happens to be almost comically handsome—slim hips, a wave of thick hair the colour of black coffee, a feline ease in his own body. She has read about Lydia Bennet’s elopement with George Wickham, about Marie Melmotte falling for the rakish idiot Sir Felix Carbury but she knows little of the world and it is often hard to recognise stories when you find yourself inside them, so that by the time she has found Darius and her father sitting in the slatted sunshine of the roof terrace she is already in thrall to an imagined future in which he takes her away from all this, and the knowledge that the fantasy is ridiculous does nothing to sour its addictive sweetness.
Philippe’s hackles rise as soon as she appears. If he had known a little more about Darius in advance he would have explicitly excluded her from the meeting. He says, without thinking, “You shouldn’t be here,” taking her subservience for granted. This, he will realise later, is the mistake that changes everything, goading her in front of Bobby’s son.
There is a moment of stillness. A woodpecker rat-a-tats somewhere in the garden. Darius says, to Angelica, calmly but brooking no contradiction, “Sit down with us. I’ve heard a great deal about you,” and Angelica thinks, for once, to hell with her father. She pours herself a cup of tea and takes a slice of cake and it is hard to tell whether her hands are shaking from excitement or fear, because she looks at Darius and knows that they are in league together against her father.
“Where do you go to school?” asks Darius, though he is pretty sure from what he has heard that she hasn’t been allowed near a school in a long time. “Or university?” There is something sexual and yet utterly unsexual about her that puzzles him. She doesn’t look sixteen. She looks twenty. Or twelve. And the rumours about her looks are true. Those extraordinary eyes.
“I don’t go to school.”
“So you’re stuck here with your old man.” He looks at Philippe and gives him a warm, knowing smile which both men know is a provocation.
“Darius’s father died a couple of months ago,” Philippe says to Angelica, trying to regain control of the situation. “Robert Koulouris? I’m sure you remember him. Darius has thoughtfully delivered some artwork which Robert was tracking down for me.”
Darius is not looking at her father. Darius is looking at Angelica. She is drunk with attention. There is something in his expression that she has never seen before at this close a range, something anarchic, something joyous. He likes her a lot, she can see it and feel it. She has no idea how these things work. What if they jumped into the car, span on the gravel, roared down the drive and never came back?
Darius says, “You should come for a drive.” Can he read her thoughts so clearly? “It is the most glorious day. We could be at the seaside in an hour.” He has no idea how long it would take to get to the seaside, nor what constitutes the seaside in these parts. Donkey rides and deckchairs? An oil refinery?
Angelica takes a little breath to control her voice before saying, calmly, “I would very much like that.” She can tell him on the way. Not the truth—she will never be able to tell him the truth—but some close cousin of the truth. Just enough to let him know how grateful she is and to guarantee that he does not bring her back.
But Darius’s sexual interest is already waning. He can see that she is needy and fragile. An hour in her company might be diverting, but three would be purgatory. Angelica’s feelings, however, are neither here nor there at this point. It is her father’s reaction that is driving this little drama. Darius might know nothing about Kokoschka or Balthus but in his own way he’s as good a salesman as his father and unwilling to walk away from any encounter without believing himself the winner.
Philippe says, “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
Angelica says, “Why not?” Her giddy imagination is running away with itself. She is picturing herself and Darius in front of a log fire in Norway or the Highlands of Scotland, one of those cold, damp locations her father hates. Outside the window a great blade of silver water lies between foggy mountains. Darius’s arm is around her shoulder.
Philippe is not used to being angry, let alone having to control that anger in front of people beyond the household. He wants to call Hervé, but to do so would be an admission of defeat all too visible to this strutting little cockerel. “Now you must leave us.”
Angelica feels close to weeping. The gift is being taken away before she can open it. “Papa…”
“Be quiet.” He stands up.
Darius performs a little pantomime of shifting his sitting position, leaning back in the chair to make himself even more comfortable. Philippe calms himself. The boy will take his time but he will go. There is nothing for him here.
“Papa, why are you doing this?” Angelica has so few weapons at her disposal.
“Your father is jealous.” Only when Darius says the word, the precise word—not protective but jealous—does he realise how accurate it is. Sexual jealousy. It is like reaching into a dark box and touching something cold and clammy and alive.
“Mr. Koulouris…” It sounds wrong. “Darius…” Philippe moves a little closer so that he is only a centimetre from the toes of Darius’s polished, conker-brown Chelsea boots. Has Philippe misjudged this? Might it end in a physical fight?
Darius looks at Angelica. She is on the edge of tears. This is not the kind of adventure he wanted. Something is very wrong in this house and if he stays any longer he will become entangled. He gets to his feet. “Philippe.” He turns from father to daughter. “Angelica…It has been a pleasure.” He holds her eye to make it clear that this sentence is addressed to her alone. “I am very sorry I cannot stay any longer.” He turns back to her father. “I will leave the prints with you. Let me know if you change your mind. I’ll send you an invoice later.” It is an excellent final gesture—cavalier, trusting, unruffled, unanswerable. But he needs to leave before Angelica spoils it by breaking down. “I can find my own way out.”
He drives to the seaside. No oil refinery, no donkeys, no deckchairs. Lepe Country Park—some cars, a row of Scots pines, a grey sky and a welcome cold wind to clear his head. There is a boxy, baby-blue café with big rectangular windows onto the beach. He buys himself a mug of what his English friends call builder’s tea plus an egg-mayonnaise sandwich. He needs a levelling dose of a normality he would usually despise. He will not let his worst imaginings come into focus. It is a thing that happens in boarding schools and broken homes. It does not happen in his social circle.
He books a room at the Viceroy in Winchester. Provincial tea-room rococo, though the clientele leave something to be desired. There is a difference between dressing casually and dressing badly and the world has become blind to the distinction. There are two men in the bar wearing Arsenal shirts in some ghastly synthetic material. His bedroom looks onto a lawn where three putti urinate into a circular marble trough, buffeting an empty Carlsberg can back and forth. He showers, changes and goes downstairs. The menu is trying a little too hard (he has wood pigeon with asparagus, peach and seaweed) but proficiently done. After supper he sits on a bench at the far end of the lawn smoking Sobranie Black Russians. He had imagined emailing friends, sticking a few photos of the fabled house—maybe even the fabled siren herself—on his private Instagram account, then, given the almost certain absence of local nightlife, getting a decent sleep before his early flight back to Athens. He wishes now that he had driven straight to Heathrow and was airborne so that the matter was definitively out of his hands. But a teenage girl is suffering and he finds that for once he can’t walk away. That desperate look she gave him as he turned and left. He had acted dishonourably and far from being a victory his departure had in fact been a shameful admission of defeat.
He throws back a double espresso to counteract the Malbec and only when he is in the car does he begin to wonder precisely what he is going to do when he arrives at the other end. He has not answered the question by the time he parks on the public road by the end of the drive. Everything is submarine, the colours going out one by one as the world sinks into the dark. He will ask to talk to Angelica alone. And if Philippe will not allow that…? The gravel on the drive is ridiculously loud under his boots, so he slips into the trees. A large cobweb wraps itself around his face. He flinches and brushes it away. When his heart has slowed he continues up the slope, a steady zigzag between the soft pine trunks, relying almost entirely on touch to navigate. There are long slashes of mauve sky up ahead. He steps onto the lawn. Four lemon rectangles burn like open stove doors in the silhouette of the house. Palm leaves are black swords overhead. He can smell gorse, creosote and septic tank. He keeps to the edge of the grass, ready to slip back into the trees if his movement triggers a bank of floodlights. He ascends the twelve concrete steps. The only noises are the hush of his breath and the faint scrape of grit under his feet.
He jumps again. Angelica is sitting on the patio with her back against the wall in the wedge of shadow between two big lit windows. Her head is in her hands. She is not taking the night air; she has been thrown out, or she is hiding from her father. “Hey!” he whispers. No reaction. He says it again, more loudly this time. She looks up, gasps and scrabbles crab-wise away from him. He steps into the light. “Angelica. It’s me.” He holds his open hands wide. “I really didn’t mean to scare you.” She settles. He takes a few steps towards her and crouches, as if she is a cat he doesn’t want to startle. “I came to say sorry for earlier.” He pauses. Saying sorry is not what he came to do. He must think clearly. He may have very little time. “I wanted to make sure that you were all right.” He sits himself against the same wall, a metre or so away from her, companionable he hopes, but not intrusive. He can see now that she is very much not all right because there is a sticky wound on the side of her head. She has tucked her hair behind her ear to keep it away from the drying blood. “He hit you.” There is only the faintest human glow from over the hills. They could be a hundred miles from anywhere.
“I fell over.”
“He hit you.” He says it more gently this time, meaning, You can tell me.
But it is the truth. Philippe never hits her. He is not stupid. He came to her room an hour or so after Darius had gone. He called her a whore, a bloody idiot. She said nothing. She never says anything. Her tactic is always to make herself small and quiet and wait for the storms to blow themselves out. Her father apologised. He said he was angry and shouldn’t be taking it out on her. He said that it was his own fault for letting that jumped-up coxcomb into the house. He said, “We’re safe now,” and put his hands around the back of her neck and tried to kiss her.
When her father had forced Darius to leave the house earlier in the day he had thrown away something precious. He had made it clear that he would do everything in his power to prevent her having the thing she wanted more than anything in the world. Emotions had churned inside her which she could neither name nor vent. It had been like having a high fever. She had scratched at her arms with her fingernails and there was some comfort in the pain and the puffy wheals she raised and the blood which began to flow when she had finally broken through the skin.
So, later, when her father tried to kiss her she squirmed away, something she had never done before. He gripped her upper arm and hissed, “You have no idea what is at stake here,” the anger he had graciously put aside now roaring back unchecked. She twisted free a second time, stumbled and banged her head on the wooden column at the corner of the bed-frame, blacking out briefly and coming round with her face pressed against a bloody carpet.
Now Darius has returned and far from being pleased she is frightened and confused. These shocks and reversals are the stuff of other people’s lives. What is he doing here? Her father is inside the house doubtless trying to clean her blood from the carpet right now, ineptly, with a bowl of soapy water and tea-towels in the hope that the staff won’t realise what it is.
“Angelica…?”
She touches the wound on the side of her head. “This doesn’t matter.” She must seize the moment. It has been sixteen years coming and if she loses her chance now it may never come again. “You’re going to help me.” It is part desperate plea, part simple demand. She does not recognise her own voice.
“Yes. I’m going to help you.” What in God’s name has he got himself into? He must think this through, and think it through fast. He will take her to a hospital. There must surely be one in Southampton. A friend-of-a-friend, Francine, is a criminal barrister in London. He can get her number easily enough. She will help, or she will know who can help. “Come on. We can do this.” He holds out his hand.
To her surprise, Angelica starts to cry. “I thought you’d abandoned me.”
Darius feels a sudden, stabbing doubt. Is she unwell in her mind? Is the wound something she did to herself, perhaps? Is it possible that she is hidden from the world because she cannot cope with the world?
But she gathers herself, takes hold of his hand and gets to her feet and says with complete clarity, “I know that this will be difficult and dangerous for you, but I really don’t think I can stay here any longer.” She cannot be passive. This is the moment upon which her entire life pivots. They will do this together, she and Darius. They can make it happen. “We have to move quickly because if my father isn’t looking for me now then he will be looking for me very soon.”
Darius cannot see her face. It is too darkly silhouetted against the light of the window, but he hears her sudden intake of breath and knows that something is wrong before he hears the soft click of a latch behind him followed by the snaky hiss of a sliding door. It must be her father. Who else could it be? He turns slowly, to demonstrate that he is unfazed. It is a mistake. Philippe has already swung something high above his head and Darius has time only to lift his right arm to protect himself. The object above Philippe’s head is the cast-iron poker that stands beside the wood fire in the living room. He brings it down as hard as he can and they all hear Darius’s upper arm snap under the impact, halfway between the elbow and the shoulder, the dog-leg of the broken bone clearly visible inside his shirt. There is no pain yet but he can no longer move the arm. Philippe hoists the poker for a second blow. Angelica cries out, “No!” and time slows, the way it slows during all terrible events—the car upside down in mid-air, the child falling from the balcony to the street. She sees Darius step backwards but cannot warn him in time and must watch as his foot misses the edge of the concrete patio; he loses his balance and, unable to put his arms out to save himself, he tumbles and rolls down the grassy slope to the flat of the dark lawn. Her father pauses briefly then runs down the slope after him, carrying the poker.
Darius is tougher than his foppish good looks suggest. Three teenage boys who tried to separate him from his wallet and phone in the Marais the previous year beat a bruised and bloody retreat, but right now he is on his back and one limb short and he has never encountered someone this determined to hurt another human being. He can hear Angelica screaming. She sounds as if she is a very long way away. Philippe stands over Darius, gathering himself for a decisive second blow because this preening little shit is trying to destroy two lives for no other reason than the fact that he cannot have Angelica for himself. He is the reason Philippe cannot let her go out into the world, the kind of man who thinks he can take anything he wants. Philippe’s anger is exhilarating.
Angelica yells, “Papa, stop! Please stop!”
Darius kicks hard at Philippe’s ankle and the older man topples sideways. Darius lifts himself with his good arm and scrabbles to his feet. The pain is starting to arrive and he must carry his broken arm as if it were a basket of eggs. He pauses. He is dizzy. If he runs now he will fall over. He must not look at his arm. Philippe is getting to his feet. Dizzy or not Darius has no choice. Zigzagging but upright, he runs towards the palms and pines. He reaches the edge of the lawn and realises that returning the way he came earlier in the evening is foolish. He does not know the garden as Philippe doubtless does. It is too late now. He enters the dark between the trees and after only a few paces, runs smack into a trunk and is hurled sideways onto the ground. And now the pain decisively arrives. It is hot metal poured into the broken bone. His eyes are full of fizzing light, like an old TV between stations. He is briefly absent from the world then returns to hear the soft crumple of feet on pine needles. He can see nothing. He knows only that Philippe is very near. Seconds pass. The poker does not descend. Has Angelica’s father seen sense or is he pausing to take careful aim? Darius has no easy way of standing up without rolling onto his front and making himself even more vulnerable. He tries to speak but when he fills his lungs he feels the broken bone-ends grate against one another inside his upper arm and the sensation consumes him utterly.
“You arrogant little shit,” says Philippe. “You are so proud of yourself. You understand nothing. About me. About my daughter.” He takes a big breath and Darius knows that he is raising the poker high over his head as if it were an axe and he were preparing to split a log.
She is briefly in hell. She is going to see her father murder Darius by smashing his head open in front of her and she cannot prevent this from happening. Darius’s arm is broken horribly. There is no way he can win any kind of fight. Then her father falls and Darius gets to his feet and it seems to Angelica that he stands a chance of getting away. But her father is on his feet, too, and Darius vanishes into the trees at the bottom of the garden and her father vanishes into the trees at the bottom of the garden. Then there is silence. The world is perfectly still. Were it not for her thumping heart she could have simply stepped outside to take in the night air. Darius? Her father? Did any of that happen? She feels embarrassed, as if she were recounting the events to a fourth person and they were smiling indulgently at her overheated imagination. Such things are not possible, not in a place like this, not to people like them.
She looks up. The clouds have cleared to reveal a moon only a couple of nights away from fullness. The craters, are they extinct volcanoes or dents left by meteorites? She knew once but she can no longer remember. If only her heart would stop beating so fast. A fox barks in the distance. Darius had come to take her away. She cannot connect this fact to anything.
Then she hears the noise, a damp thunk from the trees at the bottom of the garden. There is a second thunk, then a third. They could be the sounds of a poker striking the trunk of a tree. They could be the sounds of a poker being stoved into a human head. She doubles over and throws up onto the patio. It is the strangest thing. She doesn’t feel sick. She doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t think. Her body is reacting to something which her mind is refusing to accept.
After a long time the dark at the end of the lawn thickens to the figure of a man walking slowly towards the house. Might it be Darius?
It is her father. If Angelica were a different woman she might run, but running is a skill she was never allowed to learn. Running means having somewhere to run to. She cannot picture herself elsewhere and alone. Beyond those dark hills right now it might as well be Nunavut. It might as well be the Skeleton Coast. Rusted hulks and sun-leathered corpses. It might as well be Pentapolis or Ephesus.
A terrible sadness presses upon her, as if she were lying beneath a mattress and stones were being laid on top of the mattress. She is so profoundly tired. She uses a sleeve to wipe a final strand of sick from her mouth.
Her father walks up the concrete steps holding the poker. His white shirt is ripped and soiled. He is going to kill her, she is convinced of this. She hopes only that he does it quickly. “Go to your room.” She will look back and think of this as the greater cruelty, letting her life carry on precisely as it was before. She does not move. “Go,” he says, more sternly this time. She turns and steps through the glass door. Her father follows her into the house. She heads into the hallway. As she climbs the stairs she hears her father say, into his phone, “Hervé? I need you to do something for me…Yes. Now.”
She opens her bedroom window and leans on the sill. The light of the full moon throws a black silhouette of the house over the rear lawn, and in the centre of the silhouette lies a skewed trapezium of room-light, and in that skewed parallelogram lies the silhouette of a girl. It is impossible to tell which of them is more real, the flesh or the shadow. Bats slip through the dark, too fast for the eye to follow, their nights ablaze with squeaks and echoes. The world of sound which sits inside the world of light. Nothing happens for a long time. In the distance she hears tyres on the gravel. Doors slam. Silence. Doors slam again. Tyres on gravel.
Darius is dead, or he escaped and ran away. She does not know which is more terrible. The police will not help even if they are asked. Like doctors, like lawyers, the police are functionaries. She has seen it happen before. The law bends before wealth. It is the way the world works. She tries to cry but she feels scraped out, raw and empty.
It is the first night in a very long time that her father does not come to her room. She should feel relieved. Instead she feels scared and abandoned. She is disgusted with herself for feeling this. She cannot sleep. The wound on the side of her head has scabbed over but the pain still pulses in time with her heartbeat. She turns off all the lights and squats in the space between the cupboard and the wall, hugging her knees and rocking gently back and forth to calm herself. The house clicks and creaks. The fox barks again. Shreds of moonlit cloud change shape as they track across the uncurtained window. Every so often the wingtip navigation light of a plane passes in the opposite direction and she has the same thought she used to have as a small child, that it is her mother, made into a star by God.
Dawn comes. The staff arrive at eight. She feels drained and wretched but safe enough now to go downstairs for breakfast. She tells Dottie that she fell in the bathroom and banged the side of her head the evening before. Dottie nods. Anyone else would know that Dottie is sceptical about this story, but Angelica has never learnt to hear the conversation which runs beneath a conversation. She eats scrambled eggs on sourdough toast and drinks a black coffee. She says that she has a headache. Dottie gives her two paracetamol. Her father enters the room and Dottie slips away, saying she has chores elsewhere. He tells Angelica that he is very sorry but he does not say precisely what he is sorry for.
He comes to her room in the evening. He undresses her. He says he loves her. She leaves her body behind. It is only an animal which houses the mind after all. She enters that foggy border country between dream and story. She is seated high in the citadel, far above the armies at war on the plain below. She is weaving another world. And right here, in the very corner of the tapestry, is Darius, clamping his injured arm to his side as he jogs down the drive to the main road where he is very nearly hit by a clanking farm pickup and trailer which squeal to a skewed halt in front of him. Sheep bleat. Hooves scrabble on metal.
A twig snaps nearby. The two men freeze. Darius is on the ground. Philippe stands with the poker raised above his head. The dark between the trunks is absolute. Another twig snaps. Someone—or something—very large is standing very close to them. There is a smell of burnt hair and cellar damp. There is deep, regular breathing like that of an iron lung. The thing is too big to be human, though surely even the biggest stag would have bolted by now. Darius does not care what it is. The only thing that matters is Philippe’s distracted attention. He grabs hold of a low branch with his uninjured left arm. There is a wall of flame he can pass through if he pushes himself hard and moves fast. He grunts like a weightlifter and hoists himself. The pain is spectacular. He is on his feet. He clamps his broken arm to his side and steps between the trees. He is on the gravel. He jogs towards the main road.
He will not be able to drive. He is five miles out of Winchester and it is nearly midnight. He will have to knock on someone’s door or hide in a field. As if in answer to his desperate need, however, the hedge on the far side of the road begins to glow. He picks up speed in case he is too late, reaches the gates, runs into the road and is very nearly hit by a clanking farm pickup and trailer which squeal to a skewed halt in front of him. He hears sheep bleating and the scrabble of hooves on metal. The driver leans out of the window—cigarette, baseball cap, some kind of sore at the corner of his mouth. “Get in, then.” He sounds like a tired father retrieving his teenage son from a party. Darius cannot persuade his left arm to give up its role of splinting the right in order to open the passenger door, so the driver gets out, shaking his head wearily. There are little furred faces behind the barred air vent at the back of the trailer. “There you go, mate.” The driver takes a last drag on his cigarette and pings it into the rural dark. Darius swings his legs one by one into the footwell. The farmer slams Darius’s door and walks back round the mud-spattered bonnet. Through the driver’s window Darius sees a shape moving rapidly towards them down the drive. Whether it is Philippe or the unseen creature intent on doing to him what it has very possibly just done to Philippe he doesn’t know. The farmer climbs in, slams his own door and restarts the asthmatic engine. Something bloody and terrible looms briefly on the far side of the man’s baseball-hatted head, the ill-tempered gears mesh and they pull jerkily away, the sheep scrabbling and bleating behind them.
The driver glances across at him and laughs wryly. “Looks like you’ve had a bit of an evening.”
Darius wonders if the man has been drinking. “Thank you. Thank you for stopping.” He leans back against the burst leatherette headrest, detaches himself from the world and is aware of very little beyond the flaming circle of his hurt until he is stretchered into a curtained bay in A & E at Southampton General. Hoops scoot noisily along a metal rail and a plump nurse leans over him. Her hair is purple and she has shaved three little stripes into her left eyebrow. Darius looks around. The only traces of his Good Samaritan are a faint smell of dung and some agricultural stains on the chinos draped over the orange plastic chair together with his shirt which seems to have been cut off. Two hundred pounds from Louis Vuitton.
The nurse says, “What happened to you, then?”
He says, “Someone tried to kill me.”
She says, “That’s not nice, is it.”
He wonders if it is a regional thing. She administers four squirts of nasal diamorphine and a doctor appears. The man is a mad professor—bald pate, curly hair, round glasses, a Polish accent or somewhere thereabouts. He examines the break in Darius’s arm, nodding appreciatively so that Darius feels obscurely proud of having sustained a proper injury. He should get in touch with the police but the diamorphine is kicking in and time has turned to toffee. Another nurse appears with a trolley. They are going to plaster his arm prior to surgery. He is given a mask and told to breathe in as hard and as frequently as he can while they align the bone, so he sucks and blows and sucks and blows and a great white balloon lifts him into the air so that he is looking down on the whole world as if it were the largest and most detailed model train-set in history. Far below a tiny Darius is lying in a tiny hospital bed. The tiny mad professor hauls on the wrist of the tiny Darius the way a stevedore might heave on a rope to bring a tug alongside a jetty while the second nurse wets strips of plaster in a kidney-shaped metal bowl of water and wraps them around the tiny Darius’s upper arm. It reminds Darius of making papier mâché at school. “Nearly there.”
Then the mask is removed and the air goes out of the balloon and Darius descends rapidly and the two Dariuses are recombined and he feels really very sick indeed. He vomits into a bowl of cheap grey cardboard a nurse is holding under his chin. Wood pigeon, asparagus, peach and seaweed. He loses track of time. At some point he is given a pre-med then taken into surgery where the mad professor is arguing with another doctor about whether Real Madrid or Bayern Munich are going to win the UEFA Champions League. The other doctor slides a cannula into the crook of the elbow of Darius’s unbroken arm and suggests he count from ten to one which Darius had assumed happened only in films. He reaches seven and instantly he’s coming round, terrified that the anaesthetic hasn’t worked and that they are about to cut him open; but the ceiling is different and the room is different and his arm is now sealed inside a tube of petrified slate-grey carpet. There is a third doctor but he’s wearing black and smells of wood sage and sea salt. A faint alarm sounds in the back of Darius’s brain. He fights his way through layers of milky sleep. He can’t remember how you tell your body to sit up. Shaved head, white shirt, grey suit. The PA-cum-bodyguard who met him on the drive. Sweet Christ. Suddenly he is awake. The man has unscrewed the top from the suspended bag of saline and is topping it up from a small brown bottle.
Darius swings his plastered arm. It is no more than a rudimentary flipper but it is heavy and it is hard. The stand topples and the cannula is yanked out, the long tube flicking towards the ceiling like a fishing line being cast, an arc of bloody fluid airborne in its wake. The shaven-headed man is unfazed. Darius swings his arm again but the man steps back the way you would step back to avoid your shoes getting soaked by the next wave on the beach. “I’ll see you later.” He turns and leaves the room.
The pain in Darius’s arm is very unpleasant indeed. He remembers that there is a poker-shattered bone inside the plaster. He waits for the pain to ebb a little. The room spins the wrong way, not roundabout but ferris wheel. He grips the steel rail until it slows down and comes to a halt. His other arm is bleeding where the cannula was ripped out. There is an empty bed to his right and two against the opposite wall. There are many medical machines of incomprehensible function. There is a low, scientific hum. The bladder of saline continues to empty itself onto the tiles. He stands up, wobbles, sits down, waits, stands up again and takes a few careful steps across the wet floor. Using his only functioning hand he removes a small red fire extinguisher from its wall-holster. It is the only object in the room that comes close to being a weapon. He listens for a few moments at the room’s only door then opens it onto an empty corridor. Voices far off, the buzz of a striplight. There is a window onto some dead plants in a drab little courtyard. It is daytime. Many hours must have passed while he was unconscious. There are five ghastly abstracts on the wall—slashes of orange on blue backgrounds, slashes of blue on orange backgrounds. He turns two corners and finds himself on the hospital’s main thoroughfare. Oncology and Paediatrics. Threadbare dressing gowns and white coats. Three elderly ladies with identically bandaged ankles cackle together like witches. No shaven-headed man. He stands the fire extinguisher against a wall and wipes the blood from his leaking arm. His car keys and his wallet are in the pocket of his chinos. God alone knows where the chinos are. Now is not the moment for worrying about such matters. Now is the moment for getting away from this building as fast as possible. He will get a taxi to the Viceroy. He will borrow the fare from the hotel reception. He will do all this wearing nothing but a backless cream hospital gown. He remembers the man with the shaved head, the utter blankness of his expression, the little brown bottle. He has no choice. He strides confidently through the main doors of the hospital onto the forecourt.
Harbour Cars. A triple-masted schooner in silhouette behind the name on the passenger door. It costs thirty pounds on top of the meter to override the driver’s qualms about giving a lift to a manifestly crazy person, but the Viceroy rises in Darius’s estimation when they lend him the cash without so much as a raised eyebrow. He is walking across the hotel lobby, however, when he glances into the lounge and sees, in the bay window, the shaven-headed man selecting a scone from a mini-ziggurat of silver traylets being proffered by a waiter. The man looks up. That same blank stare. No surprise whatsoever. Five, six seconds. The man looks back to the table and charges his knife with butter. Darius runs up the stairs, locks the door of his room and sits on the bed. He has a passport but no wallet. His car is ten miles away, the keys are ten miles in the opposite direction. Two men want to kill him. One is very rich, the other is possessed of borderline supernatural powers. A jackdaw sits on a branch which bobs and sways outside the window. Black body, little grey hood, half nun, half pilot. It twists its head, its tiny eye glints and Darius finds it hard to shake the suspicion that the bird is trying to deliver a message of some kind. He rubs his face. He will call his father’s lawyer. He needs to be on home turf. The two of them will put aside their deep historical differences because there are more important things at stake. Stephanos will book him a flight. Security, too. Several large, trained men will stay with him until he boards the plane. It is something he did for Darius’s father on occasions. Even Philippe and his henchman can’t bring down an Airbus. Once he is in Athens he will be safe.
He stands and walks to the table where the hotel phone squats like a black toad. He is about to lift the receiver when he glances down at the urinating putti and sees the most extraordinary thing.
He hoists the sash and whistles ineptly. Helena breaks off from conversation with her two nautical colleagues, looks up, tilts her head sideways in the manner of a dog analysing a faint but interesting sound and is doubtless about to make some dry quip about her friend’s unclothed state and broken arm when Darius puts a finger to his lips and beckons her silently upstairs, raising nine fingers for the room number. Helena does an aye-aye-captain mini-salute in return and flips her cigarette into the fountain.
She is wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt—I stole my sister’s boyfriend, it was all whirlwind heat and flash…—and khaki utility-trousers with square black knee patches and more zips than necessary. She has nut-brown skin and blonde hair so salt-stiffened and wind-tangled that she appears always to be squinting into bright sunlight and a strong headwind. She does not acknowledge the serendipity of their vanishingly unlikely meeting. She would approach an alien invasion or a flat tyre in the same way. She is picking up a refitted wooden schooner for a wealthy client whose name, for once, she genuinely cannot share. “The Porpoise. 1972. Three masts. No fibreglass. Twenty-four metres. Five cabins. New engine. Not fast, but she is bloody lovely.”
It is some measure of the unexpectedness of Darius’s story that Helena keeps one eyebrow raised for a good five seconds before saying, “I think we can solve this problem.”
Helena helps the injured Darius into his warmest clothes—ripping yet another Louis Vuitton shirt to accommodate his plastered arm—and ten minutes later the two of them are walking swiftly downstairs while Hervé’s attention is diverted by Helena’s colleague, Anton. Hervé, however, is unconvinced by the large Russian man who claims to recognise him. “Frankfurt, perhaps. Did we meet in Frankfurt? Were you in Frankfurt in April?” The man is blocking Hervé’s view of the hotel lobby and Hervé very much wants to keep an eye on the hotel lobby. There is a rapidly escalating altercation which involves, in its final stages, a pot of scalding tea, upturned furniture and a pastry fork which has, thankfully, been dulled by a century of parkin and Chelsea buns. It ends with Anton running from the hotel entrance, hand clapped over a bloody neck wound, with Hervé in pursuit.
Anton yells, “Go!” and throws himself through the open back door of the rented Toyota Yaris. Marlena, who completes the party, whoops excitedly, Helena puts the car into gear and the shaven-headed man thumps the roof so hard that the dent is visible from the inside. They pull away and take several corners almost but not quite on two wheels before joining the M3 and heading south to Poole Harbour.