The moon, which just a moment ago had been straw-coloured, when she looked at it now was paling, as if it had been subjected to immersion in some fast-working chemical. Again the scent of lime came to her, and with it the quickening sense of a whole world astir and on the move. Small nocturnal creatures, destructive in fact — but so what — were nosing in around the fleshy roots of her iris. A cat was on the prowl — or was it a fox? Other lives, intent on their interests. Invisibly close and companionable.
She felt settled, wonderfully so. And by a situation that on another occasion or in a different mood might have alarmed her. Why hadn't it? She did not know and did not need for the moment to ask. What she needed now was to tumble into her bed and sleep.
She was alone because she chose to be. Later it might not be possible, she knew that, but for the time being she could manage, and it was what she preferred. She had worked through her period of rage and hard words, but wasn't sure she could trust herself, just yet, with others.
Each night at seven she boiled herself an egg or heated a pan of soup, and at half past, right on the dot, Gianfranco rang. She was comfortably settled in her routine.
No, she told him, everything was fine, just fine. Marisa came to clean each morning. Corrado looked after the orto and the pool.
Gianfranco, she knew, was nodding, but what she could hear in his silence, even at this distance, was the terrible humming of anxiety in him, the fear that there was something — there was always something— that she was holding back. She raged up and down beside her kitchen cupboards, the receiver tight in her fist. But her voice when she spoke was soothing (or so she hoped).
“No, no,” she cooed. “Gianfranco! Darling! I'm perfectly okay, I promise I am. Stop fussing.”
She gave a little laugh that was meant to assure him that this, like all the other things he fretted over — the boys, his office, money, the house — was nothing, he was being silly.
He said goodnight, made her promise to ring if there was the slightest problem, the least change.
Then waited, as he always did, for her to reconsider and tell him the bad news. She refrained. And in fact there was none.
At last, on his third goodnight, he rang off.
She gave a subdued scream of a theatrical kind — seeing herself in a jokey, self-dramatising way helped to keep up her spirits — and sat down hard on a stool.
But it was over. She was alone again. Free. The whole night before her.
She thought sometimes that she would like it if Tommy was here; Jake, her second son, was mid-Atlantic somewhere on someone's yacht. There were afternoons when she found herself gazing out of her window and wishing she could just call down to the terrace, where, his mobile on the glass-topped table within easy reach, Tommy would be lazing on a daybed. She would get him to come up then and put on one of the Roy Orbison albums she liked to listen to only when he was here. Or wishing that she would look up, having caught a scent, and find him there in the doorway of her room, filling its space with his hungry presence.
What she meant was, she would like it for about five minutes. Any longer and she would discover all over again the things about this favourite child that exasperated and enraged her.
The way he stalked about, clutching his mobile like a small instrument of torture. Waiting pathetically for someone to call.
And when he gave in at last, and himself did the calling, the way he pursed his lips at the thing, as if it was a mouth; arguing with his ex-wife and sounding so mild and reasonable, or sweet-talking some girl he'd picked up on the train. Then, the moment he hung up, going glowery and dark again, casting about, like the bewildered four-year-old she saw so clearly at times in the big unhappy man, for some mischief he could get up to that would make someone pay.
Somebody, it didn't matter who.
She had been paying for more than thirty years.
Well, she could do without that just for the moment. What she needed, just for the moment, was solitude, and blessd, blessd routine.
Three days each week she went up to Siena for her chemo. They taped a plastic bubble like a third breast to the soft flesh below her shoulder and it fed mineral light into her at a slow run. The nausea it left her with was like space sickness. As if they were minerals from another planet, changing her slowly into a space creature who would be free at last of the ills of earth.
Well, she knew what that was code for!
Between visits she wore a holster packed with a flattish canister that for twenty-four hours a day played with the weather of her body — its moods, her dreams; filling her mouth with the taste of metals straight off the periodic table, getting her ready for the thing itself — the taste of earth.
For Siena she had a driver from the village and a big old Audi. Soft-leathered, air-conditioned. She sat in magisterial coolness, closed off from the straw-coloured, treeless hills, the vine rows where the grapes, as yet, were like hard little peas, but swelling, swelling towards October.
At intervals along the highway, black girls in six-inch heels toting fake Gucci handbags paced up and down in the dust. Some of them in skintight leather miniskirts, others in gold Lurex pants tight at the ankle. In the middle of nowhere! With nothing in sight but oakwoods or a distant viaduct, they paced elegantly up and down beside the hurtling traffic, in a tide of ice-cream sticks, paper cups, dried acacia blossom.
She watched them from the closed-off sanctuary of the car, and sometimes, to pass the time, kept count. On long car journeys in her Queensland childhood, she and her brother had watched for white horses. The appearance in the timeless Tuscan landscape of opulent, overdressed black girls seemed no less marvellous.
They came from as far away as Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, these girls, and drove out here in taxis to wait for the long-distance lorry drivers. Their managers (or so she had heard) were women: big African mammas who were also witches and used old-country spells to keep them in fear of their lives, or their children's lives, but to be doubly sure held their passports — a modern touch. In bodies that seemed entirely their own, and giving no hint of being fearful or enslaved, they walked up and down as if the dirt under their heels were the paving stones of some fashionable piazza in Florence or Milan.
She watched them. Hard not to envy, whatever the facts, the grace and assurance they brought to this new version of pastoral.
Till one of the lorries, with a whine of its air brakes, came powerfully to a halt, and the driver — the god — stepped down.
Her own body was not her own. In some moment of ordinary distraction, while she was on her knees in the rose bed pulling up weeds, or waiting idly for the kettle to boil, her mind God knows where, her body had taken a wrong turning, gone haywire, and now did exactly as it pleased. It was like being in the hands of a loony housebreaker who did not have your interest at heart. Who had moods and notions of his own. Was savagely perverse, and curious to see how far he could push you. And was there at every moment, making his obscene, humiliating demands. To get away from him she read, or rather, reread. Chasing up old friends in the pages of her favourite books to see how she or they had changed over the years, or to rediscover, with a little shock of affection, the earlier self who at sixteen or thirty had first been touched by them.
Effi Briest, who was in favour of living, poor girl, but had no principles. Mrs. Copperfield, one of the two Serious Ladies, who had always wanted to go to pieces. Gratefully she went back to them. And found herself, towards midnight, with her book in her lap and her glasses at the end of her nose, listening impatiently for the familiar clap-clap of the filter boxes and the arrival of her intruder.