When I thought about that night in Rome, I had convinced myself that I had been overtaken by a brief fantasy, a sudden rebellion. I had known him for an outsider as soon as I looked at him, with his beautiful face and his worn suit, and I knew that it had to be him. But it had started then – something over which I had no control. And then something that came very close to happiness.
Could it have become love? I think so, if it had been given its proper chance. I believe it could have been there, waiting for us. Handing over that jewellery in the pawnshop – understanding as I did that it represented the renouncement of my old life with all its wealth and comfort – was surprisingly easy. Relinquishing the possibility of that new life with him … that was the wrench, the thing that sits inside me now like grief.
But I need to be someone who can survive on her own. I don’t know exactly when I decided it had to be just me. Certainly it helped my decision, when he struck Earl Morgan, and I realized how reckless he might be. But I think it was even before that, when he first suggested it. I knew how I would do it, too. I’d use the pills I was meant to take, to help me sleep. They would knock him out for the right period of time, prevent him from coming under suspicion.
I tried to explain it in the note I wrote him, in the back of his notepad. But once it was done I knew I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t risk my husband finding it, and understanding what I had done. I ripped it out and took it with me, to dispose of in the water.
My destination is a beautiful place – the sort of village in which one might decide to live, even if one was not running away. The foothills of the Alps, with the highest of the peaks still holding that faint tracery of white, a permanent reminder of the winter. But the air is warm, and the light peculiarly bright. It is difficult to imagine the green swards in the valley concealed by snow.
The first shop I come across is a patisserie, and all at once I am ravenously hungry. Until now it has been all about the escape: but now my stomach protests. I have not eaten for twenty-four hours. I buy a loaf of bread, which I take around the corner to a bench and eat like an animal, ripping into it with my teeth. When I think of what those New York acquaintances would think, if they could see the refined Stella Truss now, it makes me smile. When I have taken my fill, I go back into the patisserie, and give his name – counting on it being a small enough place that the woman will know him. She looks at me curiously as she gives her directions. This is apparently not a place used to visitors. I hope she does not remember too much of this. I keep my head bowed.
I am confused, at first, by the appearance of an elderly man at the door. My first thought is that he bears a passing resemblance, but can’t be the same man. Then I realize that it is him. I can’t believe how he has changed. I should have been prepared for this, I know – and yet I am not. My memory has kept him preserved in time, in the same way that it has my father. Would my father be similarly aged had he stayed alive? Impossible to imagine it.
But despite the changes in my own appearance, and the more profound changes in me, he recognizes me straight away.
‘Can it be you,’ he says, moving towards me, ‘little Estrella?’ There are tears in his eyes. ‘I had assumed … I had thought, oh, a terrible thing—’ He speaks in Spanish, and the sound of his voice, unlike everything else about him, is exactly the same.
‘It is me.’ I wait for Aunt Aída to appear behind him, too, but the corridor remains empty.
‘Where—’
‘In Madrid,’ he says, quietly. ‘In the house. There was nothing I could do.’
‘Tino,’ I say, and can’t say any more – but it is enough. My uncle knew him, and loved him, and seeing the shock of it hit him now makes it all new. I loved my aunt. I have come ready with questions, with accusations, ready to lay my pain before him, but now I know that there was great pain for him, too.
He holds out his arms to me and I go toward him, this familiar stranger. And I breathe in the coffee-and-tobacco scent that is so like my father’s, and find that I am crying.
After what could be minutes or hours, he ushers me in, and as we move through the chalet I see that he has filled it with memories of Spain. On the walls are photographs, old posters advertising the toreadors. And there is a photograph …
I look away.
‘It is my favourite photograph of us,’ he says, behind me. He smiles. ‘Of course, sitting next to your father always made me appear fatter and balder than ever.’