She could have reached the pizza from the sofa if she had really wanted to, but she didn’t. Two slices were left on the plate, the edge of one curling upwards, topped with melted buffalo mozzarella, a few cherry tomatoes roasted dark, balsamic basil and lots and lots of prosciutto sliced thin enough to almost see through. The candles no longer held their heads quite as high as they had at the beginning of the evening, when the pizza was hot and the bottle of wine full, but their flames still flickered gamely, softening edges and corners, taking by the hand the glow of the little lamps hidden beneath the shelves, which gently lit the spines of books, a bronze statuette, a few pieces of pottery that might have been antiques or merely very expensive. Between the logs the embers glowed red and now and then a piece of wood cracked; the room was exactly warm enough for the woman not to feel cold lying naked beneath the thin woolen throw. The dark wooden floor was radiant even under bare feet, the napkin tossed beside the pizza slices was of thick linen. She could still see the man’s movement as he took it from the drawer, the idea of using some paper towel never even occurring to him, and there had been nothing showy about it, only the simple obviousness of a man accustomed to this.
The man was no longer playing with the napkin but with her hair. He lay beside her, half propped against the cushions, and she could see in him the same dull, pleasant satisfaction that had spread through her own limbs.
“So why did you stop, anyway?” she asked, but before he could answer, her eyes caught on a silver cup standing among leather-bound books on a shelf above his head. “Is that yours?”
The man looked back. “One of them.”
She laughed. “There are more? How many?”
“A few…” He winked. “Too many to answer that question elegantly.”
“Oh, so you’re modest too…” she laughed. “Take it down, please, let me have a closer look. Go on… I know you want to.”
The trophy was clearly not new, the little brass plaque on its base had darkened slightly, and bore the name of some long-distance swimming competition, a year, a placing; she kept asking him about the details because she liked listening to him talk about it, with an easy self-assurance that held no conceit, simply rooted itself in the money, success and quality he had been accustomed to all his life. Yes, he swam regularly, he told her enthusiastically, he had entered fewer competitions this year, but he trained every day. He showed her his latest trophy on his smartwatch, a tiny golden cup on the display, a graph beneath it and all sorts of numbers. She narrowed her eyes; her glasses were somewhere in her bag and without them the small characters had become harder to make out.
“Is that two thousand meters? Good God, how many lengths is that in your pool?”
“About forty. See, I did it faster than I did in this race…” He swung the trophy in his hand. “Shame no one saw it. Personal best.”
The numbers glowing on the watch: October sixth, 18:40, 34:18, and beside them the GPS location—the address of the house. She caught the hand he was gesticulating with; around his wrist was a grim black medical Velcro wrist brace. “Looks as though you’ve been overdoing it a little… Hardly surprising, swimming that far that fast… at your age…”
“You’ll laugh,” the man replied proudly. “If I hadn’t already injured it, I might have gone even faster… I love swimming, my pool is magnificent, my father had it built…” It would have been difficult to tell which he was proudest of, his personal best, his pool or his father. “Of course, swimming isn’t the only thing I’m good at…” He put the trophy down and reached for her. “And my wrist doesn’t even hurt anymore…”
The woman slid lower on the sofa. The same boy, she thought for a moment, who had loved showing off exactly like this almost forty years ago…
The logs had burned almost completely away; the candles had gone out long ago. They lay contentedly wrapped in the throw, his skin warming hers or hers warming his, it didn’t matter.
“So why did you stop?” the woman asked again.
“Because I saw you… A woman, alone at a bus stop, beside the main road…”
She took a sip of wine. “And do you regularly pick up women by the roadside?”
“You were standing there with your little girl. I wasn’t going to leave you there, God knows when the bus might come, fields on one side, bushes on the other… Doesn’t bear thinking about.”
The woman laughed. “According to the app, I had twelve minutes to wait.”
“A lot can happen in twelve minutes…” A roguish grin spread over his serious features. “Would you like me to take you back?”
She rolled the wineglass between her fingers. “I’m not sure I’d get into your car a second time… I don’t know what came over me, getting in with a complete stranger…”
“I saw you check the number plate.”
“A lot of good that would have done me if you were an axe murderer.”
“I keep the axe in my other car.”
“That’s what I was counting on, so we got in. You looked normal.”
“Do you think axe murderers have AXE MURDERER written across their foreheads?”
“Don’t be ridiculous…”
The man looked into her eyes. “So, I passed the test.” It was a statement, not a question, and there was admiration in it as much as surprise and satisfaction. For a long moment they looked at one another.
“And then you offered to take me home,” the woman said, “and it took me about ten kilometers to realise you meant yours.”
“You didn’t tell me to change direction.”
“No. I didn’t.”
Again, they looked at one another.
“Meanwhile my daughter spent the entire drive telling you about her spade, which…”
“Marc took away from her,” they said together.
“I heard,” the man laughed. “But I heard something else too. Something I asked you without words, and you answered with a look. Or perhaps you were the one asking and I answered? Or we both asked and answered at the same time?”
This time neither of them laughed, and the woman said nothing; there was no need.
Good thing I had my shoulder bag, she thought, with the maternal survival kit inside, everything from lipstick and toothbrush through spare knickers to the little stuffed rabbit…
Then she put down her wineglass and straddled him.
When the man had been asleep for quite some time, and she too was drifting at the edge of sleep, enjoying the quiet stupor, she remembered what her first reason had been—even before the lightning strike—for genuinely never considering any change of direction at all.
Because they had been going in the right direction. That was why.
She hadn’t recognised the man until they pulled into his drive, and by then it had been clear that they would be spending the night at his place, just as it was clear that even then he had not recognised her. She recognised the brass knocker on the gate, then the gable of the house behind it, exactly as she had seen it every summer throughout her childhood. Her grandparents had lived two gardens away; back then the man had been a teenage boy, while she had been one of the little street urchins. The house was a different colour now, and the windows must have been new, but just as the building of those old summers still plainly hid beneath all the modernisation and maintenance, so did boy with the pool plainly emerge from beneath the frosted temples and handsome crow’s-feet. The boy with the pool… The Pooler, they had called him ages ago. Recognition hit her so suddenly that she was almost certain he had seen it on her face. But the man merely switched off the engine, then asked whether she preferred red wine or white, because that would determine which pizza toppings he recommended…
He hadn’t recognised her, and she hadn’t told him. She didn’t want memories, names… she wanted one intoxicated evening in which it didn’t matter who she was, where she came from, what she was running from, what she was losing, what there would be left for her to hold on to… and the intoxication was only heightened by the knowledge that it was the Pooler’s lips she could feel against her neck and that they were making love on the sofa of the house she had only been allowed to enter as a child after wiping her feet very thoroughly.
Inside, she had stopped for a moment in the hall. On the wall opposite the front door hung a large black-and-white portrait of an elderly man, and she immediately recognised the face she had seen countless times in the garden as a child.
“My father,” the man said.
“You look like him,” she said, considering him, “although I suspect the moustache would suit you less.”
Later, once her little girl was sleeping peacefully upstairs and the two of them were drinking wine over what remained of the freshly baked pizza, the man began talking about the house of his own accord. He told her that both the house and garden had been built according to his father’s wishes, and that it was his father who had put in the competition pool. The woman had heard all of this perhaps a thousand times when they were children, but she didn’t mind; it was pleasant listening to how much pride the man still took in his father… exactly as, as a teenager, he had never stopped boasting about him.
“Although I changed a lot at the company after my father died, I’ve barely touched the house or the garden,” he said, and the woman murmured:
“Some things never change.”
She looked out across the garden over the table. Outside, discreet lights picked out a stretch of path here and there; elsewhere a tree trunk or bush was cleverly lit from below so that the lamps themselves remained invisible. The crowns of the more distant trees rustled above the freshly clipped hedge edging the beautiful soft lawn. It was perfect, manicured, elegant, and the woman herself couldn’t work out what bothered her about the view. Perhaps the balled-and-burlapped plants lined up beside the hedge, the trees standing in tubs and the pallets?
“Though it looks as though there’s some serious work going on out here now…”
“The pool gave up on me, unfortunately,” the man said. “The ground shifted on one side, and the risk became too great.”
That was it, the woman realised; even in the dark she had noticed that there was lawn where the old competition pool had once been. Had she not played here as a child, she would never have guessed there had ever been a pool here at all.
“So, you simply filled the whole thing in?”
“That’s more or less how it ended up.” The man sighed. “And I loved that pool…”
“Then why don’t you have it rebuilt?”
“It wouldn’t be the same… My father had this one built. It was fantastic, groundbreaking…”
“Nothing you have to rebuild is ever quite the same. It might still be good, though…”
The man glanced at her. “Are you saying that because of the divorce?” Seeing the question in her face, he added, “Sorry, you mentioned it in the car… but if you don’t want to, we don’t have to talk about it.”
“It’s all right, it’s just still so fresh…” He didn’t say he was sorry, and she was grateful for that. “I don’t even know what I miss more… Our home, where we drilled the shelves into the wall together, put up the curtain rail together… where we brought our daughter home all those years ago… Or the home I thought we were going to live in together till death did us part… Ah, the whole thing is stupid… Shelves, spaces, walls… Who cares…”
“A flat or a house is only a space enclosed by walls…” The man stroked her hand. “A home is something else entirely… I understand completely. It must be awful to leave your home behind. I could never do it.” And seeing her questioning look, he added, “I’ve sold companies, plots of land, flats before, but I will never part with my home…”
The woman found his attachment to the house heart-warming, and envied him a little for sitting here in it in perfect peace while she didn’t even know where she would be living a month from now… The man caught the bitterness gathering at the corner of her mouth.
“Are you angry with your husband?”
The words burst out of her. “Sometimes so much that I wish, just for one day, he could feel exactly what I felt living with him…” She drained the wine left in her glass. “Would you pour me some more?” she asked, to wash the bad taste from her mouth and turn the conversation elsewhere.
The man refilled it with a smile, they clinked glasses, then he took the glass from her hand, put it down, kissed her, and very soon the woman’s thoughts were somewhere else entirely…
She lay half asleep for a long time. Ever since recognising the house, distant summer images had been floating up inside her: the dazzling blue of the pool, the hot paving that felt heavenly to slide across on wet feet, and of course the teenage boy who was forever talking about his father… His father had built the best pool in the neighbourhood, his father knew how deep the foundations had to go, his father had bought filtration equipment no one else had.
The boy would swim for hours, counting lengths, timing himself so he could boast about that too, and when the younger children grew tired of listening to him, they simply disappeared from him, down into the bunker.
It wasn’t really a bunker at all, but a narrow sunken equipment vault beside the pool. Pipes ran along the walls, the concrete stayed cold even in summer, and the air always smelled damp and chemical. The Pooler never went down there with them. He enjoyed the little kids’ admiration, but had no intention of joining in their stupid little games, and so whenever they had had enough of his endless boasting, they simply slipped down into the bunker, where they were out from under everyone’s feet and no one came looking for them. They scratched their initials into the wall, hid little objects behind the pipes, and competed to see who dared to stay inside longest in complete darkness. The woman remembered, too, how once somebody had shouted into a thick pipe, and the others spent days looking for the other end of it; it became their telephone. She remembered the retaining wall as well, how they lay on their stomachs on the ground at its foot and listened to their friends laughing in the bunker…
The man’s hand slid onto her thigh in his sleep. She still felt that, and then she fell asleep.
When she woke, he was no longer beside her. She listened for a moment, then it became clear he wasn’t in the shower or the kitchen either. It didn’t particularly surprise her. The house was quiet, the fireplace dead, glasses scattered around the sitting room, pools of wax from burnt-out candles, the pizza box. On the kitchen counter, though, in front of the coffee machine, lay a sheet of paper folded in half.
“Had to go. Yoghurt and fruit in the fridge, you’ll find coffee, enjoy your morning. Have a good day.”
There was no signature, no telephone number.
The woman smiled. Somehow it was exactly what she had expected. Polite, thoughtful, and promising nothing further.
Her little girl was still asleep upstairs, rabbit tucked beneath her neck, one leg sticking out from under the duvet. She woke her quietly, dressed her gently, gave her a glass of milk, packed up yesterday’s socks and T-shirt. The car was no longer where they had left it yesterday. They quietly closed the gate behind them and walked all the way from the boy’s gate to the second garden gate along.
This house had belonged to the woman’s grandparents; she had spent every summer of her childhood here. For a while her parents had used it as a weekend house, and for the past few weeks it had been home to the two of them. The bus picked them up and dropped them off two streets away on the way to and from nursery, where the little girl had been welcomed warmly, though Marc did sometimes take her spade away from her.
The woman made breakfast, while her daughter pointed out that it was Saturday, which meant Bluey’s adventures were about to begin, the one thing she was allowed to watch on a screen once a week. At least I can have a shower in peace, the woman thought, and it crossed her mind that only a few months ago, when she had first allowed the little girl to watch cartoons, some part of her had still believed that the hardest thing about raising a child would be remaining consistent about screen time.
The little girl sat down beside her breakfast, and within seconds the outside world ceased to exist for her.
The woman put a capsule into the coffee machine so she could quickly have a decent coffee before her shower, then changed her mind, took her grandfather’s old moka pot down from the top of the cupboard, and while it spluttered, she looked out through the little window at the garden.
Her grandparents’ garden wasn’t lit by concealed lamps, hadn’t been designed by a landscape architect, and no gardener came to clip the hedge into shape. The house had belonged to the family for at least eighty years; some of the trees had already been respectable old gentlemen when that began. It wasn’t a beautiful garden, nor a particularly well-kept one, but life and laughter pulsed through it.
The coffee came through. She picked up the little enamel mug it had dripped into and returned to the window.
No one is going to transplant these plants, she thought. If they sold the house, the garden would go with it, the century-old tangle. She thought of the huge tubs lined up in the man’s garden with trees waiting to be planted, the many root-balled bushes and shrubs, the bags of turf, the freshly tilled earth beneath the new lawn. With money, you could build a finished garden in a very short time; you didn’t have to wait for a little stick to become an oak or stare at a bare wall while wild grapes slowly covered it. But her grandparents’ garden could neither be reproduced nor transplanted with money alone; there was no crane that could lift out more than eighty years, no flatbed truck that could carry them away, even if she wanted it to.
And she didn’t.
She didn’t want another life. She wanted the life she had chosen when she married… not that she had much choice now.
Her daughter laughed. Bluey had completely enchanted her; she plainly didn’t care why they were no longer sitting in their old flat. She’ll think of it, the woman thought, just as the move, the approaching finality of the divorce, the money, the safety, the question marks had come back to her the moment she woke that morning. Bluey would end soon too, and then the child would look around and start asking questions again…
She remembered what the man had said about a home being priceless… She missed her flat, their evenings together, the pencil marks on the doorframe charting their daughter’s growth, the crack in the corner of the bedroom ceiling that had only later become quite so symbolic…
Except that her husband, soon to be ex-husband, had lived in the flat too, had worked himself into the walls and carpets, into the silences that stretched longer and longer, into solitary dinners, into ordinary sentences like “I’ll wait for you outside,” “we’ll talk about it later,” “I know where you go, you know,” or “be careful when you leave work to come home” …
She had been to the police twice because of him, and both times they had listened politely, asked what exactly he had threatened her with, made her repeat the innocent-sounding sentences, then told her to come back if she had reason to.
Outside, the branches of the old trees stirred. Somewhere two houses away stood the man’s house, but she couldn’t see it through her grandmother’s tall, dense thujas.
Absent-mindedly, she picked up her phone, but of course there was no message. She didn’t even know what she expected, whether she expected anything at all.
“That was nice.”
Please.
“Did you get home all right?”
Ridiculous.
The man didn’t even know her name.
But she knew his, so she typed it into the search box and pressed enter.
First came his company, rowing and swimming competitions, the house, then on the fourth or fifth link a colour photograph, the man’s arm resting casually around the shoulders of a dark-haired woman. The article revealed that the photograph was only a few months old, and the pretty brunette was his wife.
“Idiot,” she said quietly, without knowing whether she meant him, the brunette or herself.
Then she shrugged and drank the last of her coffee. It had been one night. She hadn’t known, he was apparently fine with it, why make a problem of it? She had enough problems already.
She opened the next link too.
Because of the family name and the company, the disappearance had clearly attracted considerable press attention; the articles followed the case day by day. There were photographs from Naples, where the woman had spent a great deal of time in recent years. She had returned from there on October third and could be shown to have gone home from the airport—to here, two houses away. On the fourth there was still confirmed activity on her phone, and at noon on the fifth she sent a message. She had a return flight booked for the eighth, which she never took.
By the time they began looking for her on the eighth, the swimming pool had already been filled with earth. The police had searched the property and found no evidence suggesting a crime.
The woman opened another article. This one mentioned the man’s wrist injury, which had been treated on October sixth. The man had said that the previous day the pool structure had unexpectedly failed, its wall probably cracking because of uneven ground settlement, and that his wrist had been injured in the accident. He had drained the water that same day, and the next day he had already called in workmen, who had begun dismantling it.
October sixth…