the throat and shook him, the other crooked his arm and his fist connected with his assailant’s jaw with a sharp crack. They staggered, locked together, and fell over another table. Glasses fell and smashed, and black spatters of drink marked the floor. The other drinkers stood up or shouted and the barmaid wearily reached for the telephone behind the bar.
He sidestepped away from the fracas, his face expressionless. Rooker had seen too many bar fights; this one was monotonously the same as all the others. He reached the door and walked out into the darkness without looking back. He reckoned that he might as well go home, without thinking of the place in this context as home. It was ten minutes away, back up the hill, but in the opposite direction from the new hotel. He moved unhurriedly, his hands in the pockets of his storm coat, not noticing the cold or that it had started snowing again.
The house was a two-storey building, older than most of its neighbours, with protruding eaves and a little loggia at the front. For the few precious weeks of summer there would be flowers in the blue-painted oil drums that stood under wrought-metal lanterns on either side of the front door, but for now there were only crusts of snow, clinging to dead twigs, and a scatter of cigarette butts. Officially Marta didn’t allow smoking in the house.
Rooker let himself in. In the hallway there was a smell of frying meat, an ornate carved-wood coat-stand and about a hundred framed pictures. Marta loved bric-a-brac. He had had to do battle, when he first rented his room, to get her to remove half the stuff that cluttered it up.
As he put his foot on the first stair, Marta stuck her head out of the door that led to her domain at the back of the house.
‘Qué tal, Rook?’
Marta was enormously fat, but she had a lovely face, with smooth pale skin and sad dark eyes. Her husband had left her and she was on the lookout for a replacement. Rooker greeted her without checking his progress up the stairs.
He rented the upper back half of the house. The windows faced straight out on to a steep rocky slope so there wasn’t much light, but in wintertime there wasn’t much light anywhere so this hardly mattered. He didn’t know where he would be when the summer finally did come, but it was unlikely to be here.
He hung up his coat and unlaced his boots. There was an armchair beside a small wood-burning stove, a bookcase, a table and a couple of chairs, and an alcove with a sink and a basic kitchen. In another alcove was a bed and a cupboard. The bathroom was out on the landing and Rooker shared it with the chef from one of the tourist restaurants, who rented the upstairs front.
‘It’s fine,’ he told Marta when she showed the place to him. And it was fine, once he had made her cart away all the religious pictures and lace tablecloths and wool-work cushions that filled it up. He wasn’t fussy about where he lived, so long as it didn’t take up too much of his attention.
He began to make a meal. There was the remainder of a bean and beef casserole that Marta had pressed on him, so he put the pan on an electric ring to heat it up. There was bread, and a block of strong cheese, and some smoked sausage. Rooker was just putting a plate on the table when he heard the unusual sound of someone ringing the downstairs bell. It would be a friend of Guillermo the chef’s, he thought. Guillermo did have the occasional night off work. Or maybe Marta had found a new boyfriend.
There were voices in the hallway, Marta’s and another. The caller was a woman.
Marta came puffing up the stairs and rapped on his door.
‘Rook? You got visitor,’ she called.
He looked around his room, instinctively checking for anything that might give away something of himself. But the place was almost bare, apart from clothes and food, and a few books on the shelves.
‘Rook?’ Marta repeated. Through the thin wood panels of the door he could hear her breathing, but no sound from the other woman, whoever she might be.
He opened the door. Marta’s bulk almost blocked the aperture.
‘Come up, honey,’ she called over her shoulder in her heavily accented American English. His caller wasn’t local, then.
Light, quick footsteps came up the stairs. Marta squeezed herself to one side and he saw that it was Edith.
‘Ede? Christ. What’re you doing here?’
She brought the smell of cold in with her. There was snow on her shoulders and her hair glittered with moisture. She tipped her head and her eyebrows lifted. ‘What kind of a welcome is that?’
‘What kind of arrival is this?’
Edith didn’t let her smile fade. He remembered how white her teeth always looked against her tawny skin. ‘A surprise.’
‘Damn right it is.’
She was carrying a bag. She let it drop now with a thump. Marta looked inquisitively from Rooker to Edith and back again.
Rooker sighed. ‘Okay. Come on in. Gracias, Marta.’
‘De nada.’ She was offended not to be introduced and further included in the unusual event of her back lodger having a visitor.
Edith hoisted her bag, skipped past her and nudged the door shut with her shoulder. She looked around the room, not missing a detail. ‘So this is home? It’s not all that homely, is it?’
‘It’s not home. It’s just where I live.’
After only two minutes Edith knew they had already got off on the wrong footing. Rooker felt her checking herself and trying a different approach.
‘It’s good to see you, Rook.’
She stroked her hair and settled it so it lay back over one shoulder. He took note, as she intended him to do, of how pretty she was and how small and fragile-seeming. Her feet and hands were as tiny as a child’s.
‘What are you doing in Ushuaia?’
She was still smiling at him. Her eyes danced. ‘You know what I’m doing here. And now that I am here, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’
He was trapped. He looked at the door and at his pan of stew on the electric ring. It was smoking, so he lifted it off. ‘All right, Edith. There’s whisky. Will that do?’
‘Sure.’ She unbuttoned her coat and hung it over the back of a chair, and kicked off her snowboots. She stood in front of the stove, rubbing her hands, then took the tumbler of scotch he handed to her. He poured himself a measure and that was the end of the bottle.
‘Here’s to you and me,’ she said softly and drank. He ignored the toast.
‘How did you get here?’
‘From Buenos Aires, how else? On this evening’s flight.’ The one he had seen coming in to land.
‘Edith, I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know how you found me…’
‘Frankie told me.’
‘She had no right to do that.’ Frankie was an old friend of Rooker’s. She was younger than he was and although he had known her for fifteen years they had never slept together. He liked that, it made her different. Sometimes he e-mailed her
