Cheadle smiles. “She doesn’t have what it takes.”
“I’m sure you understand,” he tells me later, when Anna has left, “that my Russian friends are not the sort of people who would give you something for nothing.”
“No,” I say. “I see.”
“If you feel uncomfortable about it or if it seems too high a price to pay you don’t have to do it. But your visa will be rescinded.”
I say nothing.
Cheadle picks up a big glossy bag off the floor and hands it to me. “Something to wear, when the time comes.”
Inside the bag is a golden dress by a designer I have never heard of and a pair of matching high-heeled sandals. I hold up the dress.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Where’s it from?”
Cheadle shrugs. “Anna brought it.”
/
That evening I sit on my bed and sketch a section of my room — the transom window, the car tires, the cracked yellow wall. It’s my aunt Lottie who first inspired me to draw. When I was a child she showed me her notebooks — she designs costumes for theatre and film — and talked about the importance of recording your ideas and your experiences. Later, I started keeping notebooks of my own. The fluorescent tube light sizzles overhead, its frosted plastic cover filled with dead flies. My door is ajar, and the smell of roasting meat creeps up the corridor and through the gap. Tanzi’s cooking.
Putting my notebook down, I open the silver heart I carry everywhere with me. The two locks of my mother’s hair lie curled into the tiny musty space, one fair, one dark, and I think what I always think: before and after.
There was a period of about a year when it seemed she had made a full recovery. Chemotherapy was over, and the operation to remove a tumor from her ovaries had been a success. Her doctors had found no evidence of metastasis. Apart from the scar on her abdomen and the color of her hair she was the same Stephanie Carlyle. That was how I saw it anyway. But I was only twelve. Looking back, I think she behaved as if her time was limited, the pleasure she took in things disproportionate, nostalgic. Somehow the present was no longer the present; it was already past. She loved Rome as you love a place you’re about to leave. She walked the streets with her face tilted towards a sun she no longer took for granted. She sat on the rounded lips of fountains and dangled her bare feet in the cool green water. She touched every plant she saw, as if hoping to leave an imprint of herself, as if prompting them to remember her. Even the air she drew into her lungs was treated as a luxury. Even the simple act of breathing. Everything was precious all of a sudden, me included. Her love could feel like a weight. Love me less, I wanted to say, though I could never have put such a complex feeling into words, not at the time. She was always drawing attention to the world — the beauty of this, the power of that — when all I wanted was to read my books or think my thoughts. She was exhilarating to be around. She was exhausting. Though she was approaching fifty she didn’t seem to have an age anymore. The gap between living and dying, usually so unimaginably wide, had narrowed to almost nothing. She would not grow any older. The face she woke with every morning was the last face she would ever have.
My poor brave darling.
In her final months she became capricious, and I would sometimes feel she was usurping territory that should have been my own. I was the adolescent, after all. Let’s go shopping, she might say. Or equally, Let’s go to Venice. She appeared to have such energy. Only later did it occur to me that it wasn’t energy at all but hunger. Only later did I realize how hard-won these seemingly whimsical projects were, and how much they meant to her. We often argued. We weren’t always the good friends people took us for.
One Friday afternoon she picked me up from school as usual but instead of taking me home she drove out along Via Nomentana, the road narrowing as it moved northeast, the dusty verges lined with pizza places, umbrella pines, petrol stations, and washed-out pink apartment blocks. There were stalls stacked high with ripe fruit — apricots, cherries, watermelons — and the jammed cars ahead of us sparkled and vibrated in the heat.
I asked her where we were going.
“Switzerland,” she said.
We crossed the border that same night — my mother loved long drives — and by the afternoon of the next day we were walking along the shore of Lake Zurich, the air drowsy, the partially snow-capped mountains showing through the haze like pieces of white lace. She had been an au pair here once, she told me, before she met my father. This was a time I knew nothing about, and could not imagine.
On Sunday she bought a local paper. There was a cruise, she said, with live country-and-western music.
“A country-and-western cruise — in Switzerland!” She was laughing. “You couldn’t make it up.”
On the boat that evening two women stood out from the Swiss holidaymakers. They were both elderly, in their late sixties or early seventies. One had squeezed herself into a backless leopardskin-print dress. Her hair was a frizz of bright-orange candyfloss and she smoked nonstop. Her companion’s dress was made from a shiny electric-green material that resembled satin. They looked like extras from Priscilla Queen of the Desert. By eavesdropping on their conversation we learned they were from Naples.
While we were eating the “English-style” meal — grilled meat, baked potato, baked beans — my mother noticed a Swiss couple pointing at the Neapolitan women and sniggering. Her lips tightened. She put down her knife and fork, rose to her feet, and walked over to where the Neapolitans were sitting.
She spoke to the woman in the leopardskin outfit. “I just wanted to tell you. Stai benissimo.” You look great.
“Sì, è vero,” the woman said. “Hai ragione.” Yes, it’s true. You’re right. She gestured at her friend. “E lei?” And her?
“Anche lei,” my mother said. She looks great too.
Sitting down again and flushed by her behavior — she wasn’t usually such an extrovert — my mother poured herself more wine.
“To Neapolitans,” she said. “In fact, to all Italians.”
“Except Berlusconi,” I said.
We clinked glasses.
Clouds veiled the mountains and the water was dense as mercury. White mansions lined the southern shore. Their decks were made of dark wood and the green lawns sloped down to jetties where speedboats were moored.
After dinner three short men in tartan shirts appeared on a low stage. They played famous songs like “Night Train,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and “California Blue,” and everybody had drunk enough by then to sing along. My mother sang too, one hand pressed to her collarbone. The boat seemed to have speeded up. Lights blinked and glittered all along the edges of the lake.
When the cruise was over we lay on a grass bank and stared up at the stars. The warm, almost brackish air lifting off the water. The tiny lazy waves collapsing …
My mother’s mobile rang. She glanced at the screen and hesitated, then she answered.
“No, we’re in Switzerland,” she said.
“Switzerland?” I heard my father say, his voice so small and pinched it sounded comical.
My mother stood up and walked a few paces. “She’s not going. She’s ill.” She listened again, then said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be home tomorrow.”
“You told him I was ill,” I said when the call ended.
“Well, you are,” she said. “Look at you. You’re in a terrible state.”
We both laughed, then she stared out across the lake into the blackness and sighed. “Perhaps we should go back.”