and find a restaurant.
She stared at the notes in the envelope, each bundle held in a paperclip, with a white sheet of paper beneath it. French francs, one said, and a much bigger bundle of Italian lire.
Had they made a mistake? Why on earth would they give her that much money?
‘Under the terms of the late Mrs Malaspina’s will, we are directed to defray all necessary expenses for your journey to Italy,’ the grave lawyer in London had told her. ‘We shall give you here in England the maximum you are allowed by government regulations to take out of the country. Obviously, once you are on the other side of the channel, out of the sterling area, such restrictions do not apply, and our colleagues in Paris will ensure that you have enough money to continue on your way to Italy.’
‘But who is Beatrice Malaspina? There must be a mistake. I’ve never heard of her.’
There had been no mistake, the lawyer assured her. Her name, her full name, her address, even her parentage, daughter of Terence Swift, all of it was perfectly correct. The Marjorie Swift that Beatrice Malaspina, the late Beatrice Malaspina, had summoned to Italy was quite definitely her, not some other Marjorie Swift.
She had given up wondering why. Brief fantasies of the white slave trade flashed through her mind, and then she’d laughed at herself. She’d never been the sort to appeal to any kind of white slaver, and now, well past thirty—admit it, nearer forty—skinny and grey after the last few difficult years, she wouldn’t fetch sixpence on any slave market.
A scheme, a touch of spivvery? What would be the point? She had nothing that anyone could swindle her out of. Less than a hundred pounds in the world, and that would be gone by the end of the year, and then, horror of horrors, unless a miracle happened, she would be back once more in the office job she’d sworn never to take again.
Always supposing she could find any such employment. Who would want to employ a woman no longer in the first flush of youth, and a woman moreover who hadn’t had a proper job for more than ten years? The familiar fear flooded over her, but she pulled herself up. A week ago, she had never heard of Beatrice Malaspina; a week ago, she had no more idea of being in Paris than of finding herself on the moon. Where there was a will, perhaps there was an inheritance, although why a total stranger should leave her so much as a Bible was beyond her.
Unconsciously, as she thrust the key into the lock, and fought the warped door, ideas began to creep into her head. Mistaken identity? Clichéd, but then everything was a cliché until you wrote it afresh. Wills? Murders were done for wills. And mystery, the mysterious woman summoning the English spinster.
She put her suitcase on the rickety stand provided for it, took off her coat—once good, now threadbare—and removed her hat. She washed her face and hands in the basin, supplied with a mere trickle of water, but enough for her purpose. Then, in a moment of bravado, she took out a powder compact, and sponged the last few grains on to her cheeks.
That day in Paris brought Marjorie back into the human race, that was how she saw it. The next morning, the memory of a meal such as she hadn’t had for years still in her mouth and in her mind, she woke early, and set off to walk the Paris streets. She stopped for a café au lait and a croissant, the buttery pastry melting in her mouth, a taste so delicious that it almost hurt senses dulled by the last few years of darkness and fear and despair. How could she have thought of leaving it all? Of never again greeting glad day as the sun rose over the Seine, never feeling a taste explode in her mouth, never greedily gulping down coffee, hot and black and bitter.
She walked along the left bank, over the bridges, across the Ile de la Cité. In her mind was the France of Dumas, an untouched world of swords and kings and musketeers, not the rundown shops and streets in front of her eyes. Flaubert would provide a more realistic model, but no, on that day she saw Paris through the eyes of a Romantic, not a realist.
And so the evening brought her, weary, but with an underlying sense of happiness that was so unfamiliar she didn’t trust it, to the Gare de Lyon, to catch the overnight Paris-Lyon-Nice train.
On which the French lawyers had booked her a compartment, a bed in a Wagon Lits carriage; a luxury beyond her imagining. She pinched herself as she sniffed the clean white sheets, jumped guiltily as the conducteur put his head round the door to enquire if she wanted anything, and then made her pillow wet with tears.
Tears for what, she asked herself, as she turned the damp object over and gave it a defiant punch. For the girl she had once been? For the fact that she was, despite her best efforts, still alive? That someone, even someone she knew no more than the man in the moon, had cared enough to leave instructions and money for her to travel in this quite unaccustomed comfort? Tears of relief for being away from her wretched life in England, of gratitude for the exquisite omelette she had eaten at the station before getting on the train, of anger at herself that she should be grateful for such tiny things.
Les petits riens, she told herself as she snuggled luxuriously into her berth. The train seemed to echo the words, petits riens, petits riens. It was the little nothings that made life worth living, in the end.
Then she mocked herself for thinking such nonsense. The petits riens were all very well, but it was the greater things of life that caused all the trouble, and they pushed everything else out of the way, crashing in on one’s dreams and delights, and turning happiness into misery.
In the next compartment, George Helsinger wasn’t asleep. He preferred wakefulness to sleep whenever possible, only succumbing to slumber when tiredness simply became too much for him. For sleep brought dreams, and these were dreams he could do without. It was odd, that he, the least violent of men, should have become involved in the most violent act humanity had ever wreaked upon itself. And that even ten years later, his guilt and sense of moral failure should still haunt him in this way.
Pure science, that was what his life was about, so how had it ended up with nothing pure about it, and a bang that changed the course of the world? Nothing, now, would or could ever be the same again. He marvelled at how people went about their daily lives as though nothing were different, as though it had merely been another bomb among the tens of thousands, a bigger bomb, but still just death and destruction falling from the sky.
But it changes everything, he wanted to tell people. Only no one wanted to hear what he had to say. It was over now, past, history, what was done was done, and hadn’t that act of extreme violence brought an end to all the other violence, and wasn’t that a good outcome? And if they now all lived under its shadow and threat, well, wasn’t all life a risk?
He had found recently, as he lay in a state between wakefulness and sleep, a zone where the bad dreams and memories were kept at bay, that prayers from his youth came traipsing into his mind. He had, he would have said, long put the fathers and their rigorous, prayer-filled life behind him. He had become a man of science, had turned his back on God, had played God. Along with his fellow scientists.
Yet here were those words, filling his brain with their remorseless repetitions. The Kyrie: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Hail Marys—how long was it since he’d said a Hail Mary? Yet the words were there as though they’d never left him: Ave Maria, gratia plena. Blessed art thou…
Was he losing his wits? Was he going to end up in a mental asylum? He’d heard rumours about some of his fellow scientists, that they’d gone bananas; well, many of them were bananas to start
