After this Kathy got into a ding-dong with an artist, a sculptor in leather sandals who had at some point in the evening cut his leg. Blood was pouring down his ankle, but nobody else seemed to have noticed, so Kathy kept quiet. They argued about Wordsworth and Europe. Kathy had really quite passionate feelings about what he was saying and why it was wrong. The rosé had got into her and made her snappy. She felt strongly and with conviction that British people had always hated Europeans. Like Anne Boleyn. Nobody liked that Frenchified bitch. She was also certain that the Field of the Cloth of Gold was central to her arguments though to be honest she couldn’t actually remember its purpose or participants. Anyway, her husband leant over the table and said not even very gently you are completely wrong, and since he genuinely did know everything she was quite happy to relinquish the argument and move on to another one, about publishing. Here she was on much stronger ground, though by now the alcohol had kicked in and everyone began repeating themselves and drawing irrational conclusions.
They left early. They were meant to go to a serious dinner but her husband had begun to complain tragically and with feeling about a nausea he believed related to the lunchtime pork so in the end they didn’t attend, which made them both feel like absolute crumbs. Kathy didn’t sleep. She moved beds twice. A hornet was stuck on the inside of the insect screen. The air conditioning was revolving the air in the room without actually cooling it. In the morning her husband woke up and said I dreamt every time I rolled over I had to give you a little disintegrating box. It was hot, it was perfect, it was nearly right now.
Breakfast. Three triangles of watermelon, one cup of coffee, one pot of yoghurt, one small jar of honey. That’s how it went. Other people ate strawberry crostata or wholemeal croissants or heaven forbid eggs five ways and a selection of meats. The toga people were emerging, hungover and victorious. Hello Harry, hello Lordy. I woke up and I’ve got a stye. Bloody painful. No I’ve never had one, how have I bloody well got one today. They had conducted their festivities in a tent on the terrace. It was still there now, empty and doleful, poles festooned with ivy and small pale flowers. They were talking about the tower block that had burned down. I was coming along the Westway and there it was, all blackened said the stye woman. How many people died, eighty, eighty-five. But they don’t know yet. Fire that hot you don’t get bodies. What about bones. I think they do it by the teeth. Kathy’s husband pushed several grapes into his mouth at once. He was listening to a different conversation, between a guest and an Italian lawyer. I was brought up Catholic, Opus Dei, I know what it’s like, the lawyer said. Mafia, the guest said and the lawyer shrugged hugely.
On a sunlounger a few minutes later, Kathy assessed her life choices. Not bad. She was forty, she had a small diamond on her right hand, she was looking at a mountain, no one currently was in her way. She was completely alone, but utterly surrounded. Last night, before going out, she’d had a serious conversation with her husband about marriage. I don’t like proximity, she told him. But why he kept saying. What’s the source of that feeling. It wasn’t a feeling that had a source, except in the way the source of hay fever is flowers. It was just she kept sneezing, it was just that she needed seven hours weeks months years a day totally alone, trawling the bottom of the ocean, it’s why she spent so much time on the internet. So you like talking but you don’t like it when people talk back her husband said rudely, but that wasn’t quite it. She just didn’t know how to deal with someone else being there, especially asleep. She was right on the edge of the bed, she was doing her best. In two weeks she’d make official promises, in language as embarrassingly hewn and potentially hubristic as the Labour manifesto Ed Miliband had had carved into stone. Where was that stone, she wondered. Had it too been turned into tarmac? Were all the roads in England composed of memorials that had become publicly toxic? She looked on the internet. The EdStone was in the garden of the Ivy. I promise to control immigration, I promise homes to buy and actions on rent, with this NHS I commit to time to care, I wed a country where the next generation has higher living standards than the last. How long did they think it could go on for. Kathy wanted the NHS forever obviously, but she was fairly certain that by the time she was an old lady they’d be eating out of rubbish dumps, sheltering from a broiling impossible sun. It was all done, it was over, there wasn’t any hope. The week before she left Britain an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf and floated away. The Gulf of Mexico was full of dead fish, there was a trash heap circulating in the ocean that would take a week to walk across. She tried to limit her husband’s addiction to the tumble dryer, she never flew to anywhere more than eight hours away, but even lying here on her back she was probably despoiling something. What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn’t help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest.
Because she’d dreamt about him, Kathy had emailed her previous lover. She kept it light, she wanted him to know she was having a good time. Hot in Tuscany she said sunnily. Come see us when you’re back. Last time she’d seen him was in the bar of a cinema. She’d drunk beer, he’d drunk coffee. I have to go he said, I’m having tea with the King of Spain. She was suspicious but when she got home she Googled and the King of Spain was definitely in town. That had been several weeks ago, and her email was only two sentences long but nevertheless her ex responded as if she’d been ceaselessly badgering him for the past three months. He expressed ignorance about her region of Italy, concern about the wildfires and then told her he would see her in the autumn. Disappearing now, he concluded. Kathy had made a career an entire life an art out of continual disappearances and she was incensed at being upstaged. I’m IN ANOTHER COUNTRY she shouted to her husband. I HAVE ALREADY DISAPPEARED. Why does he always try and OUT-DISAPPEAR ME. She really was angry. Why are you so feverish about Sébastien, her husband asked reasonably. She tried to explain, it wasn’t that she missed him exactly, or that she liked him exactly, more that she felt continually outmanoeuvred. She’d once made a film with a man with whom she was/wasn’t having an affair. It was called Blue Tape. She had been a paragon of invincibility she hadn’t given a half a quarter an eighth of an inch. She’d had all the cards, she sucked the man’s cock while he stuttered and stumbled and then she directed him through a passable hand job, not like that, not like that, faster, higher, more precise. At the end he was a wreck and she sat on the couch composed and triumphant, that she thought now was a successful relationship.