Notorious (26 page)

‘My mother-in-law,’ says Rosza. ‘The Count’s second wife. That’s her daughter Agnieska. A pigheaded girl.’

‘My father’s younger sister,’ Pietr says to me. ‘She was the only person my mother could never bend to her will.’

‘She was too much like her brother,’ says Rosza.

Pietr says slowly, ‘A solitary.’

I touch Agnieska’s white hair. ‘Striking.’

‘Her hair darkened when she got older,’ says Pietr. ‘I wonder if Father – if his would have darkened, later.’

In the silence, I open another album. More shots of the family and servants at work in the garden. There were hedges, a fishpond, a maze, views of a lawn sweeping down to a tennis court, a bench with an elderly woman sitting under a huge spreading oak tree; servants carrying trays which glinted sunlight in silver out to a long table under a marquee.

A baby started to appear, a child with gleaming hair who gradually became a slender boy with a wistful expression, a youth with the same expression, a young man in boating clothes, overalls, riding outfits. He seemed happiest next to one of the glinting cars which gradually shrank over the years to become a sleek, bullet-shaped convertible. But the colour of his hair didn’t change. It was an impossible shade of silver – the colour of light reflected off the small statuette of the winged woman on the bonnets of the cars behind him.

‘My father,’ says Pietr.

‘Czeslaw,’ says Rosza. ‘My husband.’

She looks at her watch. ‘You should show her.’

Pietr beckons me to the window. The rain has cleared the air. He points. At first I see nothing but the dark trembling carpet of sea.

A light beams across the water. It winks three times and stops. A long pause, it winks again.

‘The buoy,’ says Pietr. ‘The rocks are deadly if you don’t know the coast.’

‘Something to swim to if a boat goes down,’ says Rosza, bringing me a small cup of coffee. I thank her but say, ‘Not at night.’

She nods. ‘Hot milk, that is best for you.’

I look out to the flat, shifting darkness. I imagine my boat breaking up, the sound of creaking timber, cracking ice, the slow descent to the bottom through dark green water and clinging seaweed.

‘I’m surprised you don’t have a lighthouse here,’ I say.

‘There’s been talk for years,’ says Pietr. ‘But with so little traffic it’s not worth the expense.’

‘It’s mostly local fishermen,’ says Rosza, ‘trying for extra on the table.’

We look at the light sending its long wavering beam across the black water. The sea rolls over and over in a steady rhythm. The wind has dropped.

‘Another quiet day tomorrow,’ says Pietr.

SATURDAY

I
t rains again the next day; hail coming down irregularly. We stay in the warm living room. Rosza spreads her accounts on the corner table, the smoke curling up from her cigarette. Pietr and I sit on the floor and play card games. I surprise myself that I can laugh so much.

When I come down for lunch, they are nowhere to be seen but the door behind the staircase is open and I guess they are downstairs.

A sixth sense warns me not to go down. I go into the living room and kneel on the sofa and stare at the clouds drifting past.

When they come in, Pietr is holding a map. He drops it next to me as he goes to mix a drink.

I expect them to say something about Devlin but over lunch they discuss the flooding in the next village, a shipwreck off Trepani. After the first course, Pietr unfolds the map. ‘Have you seen one of these?’

‘It looks like a satellite map.’ I search for the misty outline of the house on Devlin’s map. I find it, a speck next to a vast mass of blurred shadows and peaks. Something which looks like the desert but is not.

‘Not land?’ I say.

Pietr nods. ‘The sea. Another country entirely.’

I trace a path through the dark valleys and troughs, the ripples sweeping across from Africa.

‘The old philosophers believed that reflections double the world,’ I say. ‘Water creates another world in the sky, a world peopled with shadows and thoughts.’

Rosza looks at me curiously. The water streams down the windows. I feel the house swimming through its oceans of water and wind. I think, Water is the greatest kingdom; it absorbs everything without killing it like fire. Water is my substance.

‘It is as important to us as any estate,’ says Pietr.

‘You talk like a fisherman,’ says Rosza.

‘You never like coming down off the mountain,’ says Pietr.

‘I always thought water was an invitation to be consumed,’ I say.

‘I always thought if you gazed too deeply at dark water it was like a dark mirror. It revealed what was inside you,’ says Rosza.

We look at each other in strange sympathy.

‘I pity you both,’ says Pietr, ‘if you ever find yourselves in the desert.’

Rosza taps the map. There is a signature I know in the bottom corner.

‘Your father’s map,’ says Rosza.

‘My father was no fisherman,’ I say. ‘His interests were – ’

Rosza moves her hand across the deep blue to where a lighter mass shows on the far side of the sheet.

‘Africa,’ she says.

WEDNESDAY

I
tell Devlin that on the days when I don’t see him, I take long walks by myself. It is partly true. Often after lunch, I follow the back path through the woods. Usually I won’t go far, sometimes only to the road or down to the pool. Sometimes Pietr comes with me. More so, after he gives me the camera.

On that afternoon, when Rosza has dozed off over her knitting, I go to my room and find something wrapped in black velvet on the bed. I pick it up – it is heavy, a hard skeleton of metal. Under the velvet is an old Hasselblad camera, the kind that you open with both hands, like opening an accordion, so that the heavy metal lens pushes forward like the flowering heart of a silver rose.

Pietr is in the garage, bent over the engine of a vintage car, under a bonnet that folds up and back. He says, ‘My father meant to take the camera with him on the last trip to Paris. But he left it and my grandfather gave it to me.’

I grip the leather case.

‘You can use my darkroom,’ says Pietr. ‘Whenever you want.’

‘Thank you.’ I feel the deep, warm cracks made by harsh sun and mountain rain.

Pietr says, ‘Photos on these old cameras have an entirely different feel.’

‘They capture ghosts,’ I say. ‘That’s what my art teacher used to tell us.’

He stands for a moment, a spanner in his hands. Outside, the rain falls in sheets. ‘Another bleak December,’ he says, ‘another morning marooned in rain.’

I look across the courtyard to the drop over the valley. The clouds rush past, blown upwards, rising at an angle, colliding and merging and dissolving.

‘It seems odd to see you with a spanner,’ I say.

He stares at the tool as though he has forgotten what it is for, turning it over in his long delicate hands.

‘I like the focus on detail,’ he says. ‘Having a hobby is a form of unconsciousness. I would have liked to have been a mechanic.’ He shrugs.

‘Devlin needs a hobby.’

‘He needs an outlet,’ says Pietr. ‘For his disillusionments.’

‘That supposes he had illusions to begin with.’

‘There is nothing as dangerous as an idealistic man in the process of becoming a cynic,’ says Pietr. ‘The rage overwhelms him.’

‘So it is better to . . . ?’ I say.

‘Be disillusioned young,’ says Pietr. ‘It becomes part of you, like dragon scales.’ He bends over the car again. ‘Sometimes I think I only took this up,’ he says, ‘because I thought it brought me closer to my father.’ He wrenches at something under the bonnet. ‘Stupid,’ he says.

I say, ‘The last time I saw my father was in the courtroom. With all the public gawkers.’

Through the doorway, the trees slap against the hillside, the winter light struggles through the rain. The air is the colour of grey water.

I make a decision. ‘You know this is all a public relations exercise.’

Pietr stays bent over the engine.

‘The Americans need scapegoats,’ I say, ‘for the missing art from the Baghdad Museum, for all the other – ’ as always I find it hard to say the words – ‘the lootings.’

‘That is what my mother thinks.’

‘You don’t seem worried.’

‘We’ve got insurance,’ he says. ‘It’s just a matter of letting the right people know.’ He straightens and says, ‘Does Devlin know about Poland?’

‘I don’t know about Poland,’ I say. ‘What is Poland?’

Pietr says, ‘The insurance.’

He takes me back to the house. I automatically turn to the living room but he crosses the lobby to the rear of the staircase and I realise that he is going to show me the rooms below.

He unlocks the door with a small silver key and we go down. As he unlocks the right hand door, he catches me looking at the door on the left.

‘Is this the – ?’ I can’t remember whether I have been told about the cellar or not.

‘The cellar,’ he says. ‘Not very interesting.’

‘Yes,’ I say after a pause. ‘Stefano mentioned it.’

He motions me in. The light falls on his hair; the fine cheekbones make luminous shadows. So unlike Devlin’s ravaged darkness.

I move past him into a small, windowless room with grey concrete walls. There is another desk, one I hadn’t seen through the doorway, and a felt board on which were pinned maps of the local coast, and computer print-outs of what look like weather maps and shipping lanes to Africa. The third wall has floor-to-ceiling shelving. A very wide steel box, the height of a man, lines the last wall. It makes the room look like a bunker.

Pietr pulls out a narrow drawer in the steel box. The interior is lined with red velvet raised in small ridges like tiny red waves. In the padded troughs are rows of crusted rocks, some small, some the size of marbles. ‘Uncut sapphires,’ he says. ‘Ilakaka roughs. Not so pretty to look at.’ He pulls out the drawer above. On the velvet are cut squares of dull gleaming blue, like sea water in a bottle. They catch the light in uneven patterns so the colours seem to shift in a minute universe of swirls and clouds.

‘Cut sapphires,’ says Pietr. ‘The business runs on these. You would think it would be diamonds. But no. These are the workhorses of the industry.’

He closes the drawer and opens the next. Dull green glitters. Emeralds.

‘Madagascar, old earth, new gem rush,’ he says. ‘Basaltic sapphires formed in the volcanoes to the north. Emeralds in the east were hurled up when superheated water broke through the earth’s crust and the mountains rose. And in the centre of the region, pegmatites: long rich veins of hardened magma studded with aquamarines. Left totally undisturbed for a millennium. Imagine the animals that must have roamed there: elephant-birds ten feet tall, gorilla-sized lemurs. Even now, war, poverty, bandits keep it isolated.’

He says, ‘We lease open-cut mines and try to convince the locals that when they dig holes thirty feet deep into soft clay earth they need to put in retaining walls.’

He says, ‘You mightn’t believe me but we’re better than most bosses.’

He takes a lumpy stone from the scattered mix in the next drawer. Tawny red flares through crevices in the stone’s crust. ‘Garnets,’ he says. He picks up another and holds it to the light. It glows a deep scarlet.

‘Cheap but popular.’ He closes that drawer and pulls out a lower one. The padded velvet here is a royal blue with small mounds of cut stones in each section. He picks up a blue stone which is perfectly clear.

‘You want me to say this is the best?’ I say.

He nods.

‘It is too perfect. Too cold.’

He smiles. ‘You’ve got an eye. It’s synthetic, heat treated. You can tell it apart from the real thing because it is flawless. No cracks, no discoloration. No personality.’

He picked up a deeply glowing brown stone with traces of toffee yellow.

‘The locals call this beerite,’ he says. ‘It’s cut from a locally made and cast beer bottle. The cooling method gives it that unusual colour. They sell sack-loads to the tourists.’

‘You wanted to know about my business,’ he says as we climb the stairs.

‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘You need to know,’ he says, ‘why the Americans are still taking an interest.’

‘You’re using the same route my father used.’

‘Not to move anything else. I’ve told my mother that. Just stones from now on.’ He stops abruptly. ‘Yes, we’re not declaring, avoiding the tax. But we’re also not – ’

‘Looting,’ I say. ‘Plundering.’

‘Yes.’

I face him. ‘You know all I want is to find out what happened to my brother?’

He nods. ‘Anything else is . . . irrelevant.’

FRIDAY

I
go down to the lake to wait for Devlin. The sun sidles behind dark clouds in the lowering sky. There is thick grey mist in the air but the rain has stopped. The branches are hung with frozen tear-drops. Inside one, a small beetle looks at me with pleading eyes. A tiny being trapped in ice. I try not to see the obvious symbolism. I go past the beetle. The ground is hardening: it is growing another layer the way animals grow a layer of fur. An ice beast.

After three steps, I go back and crack the ice on the branch with my fingernail. The beetle drops, groggy, to the ground and crawls away, leaving a silver trail of water in its wake.

I wait an hour for Devlin.

Every few minutes, I get up, stamp my feet. This must be what old age feels like: the legs that refuse to work, the coldness in my knuckles, the ache inside my chest.

He had told me that it would all be all right. I knew he was lying to me. Yet I had desperately wanted to believe him. It was too intoxicating, the feeling of finally being able to rely on someone else. Of not being alone.

But now, when I want to conjure up Devlin telling me it would be all right, instead I see a world where fish beat their heads against glass, where the sky is black, the grass is white. I try to find a positive image to counter the rising panic. I make an image of myself reading a book and the book says,
I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart
.

It’s going to be all right, I say to myself fiercely. It’s going to be all right.