The Portrait E-Book

Ilaria Bernardini

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'A gripping story of love, death, art and deceit' - Sofka Zinovieff, author of Putney An internationally renowned writer, Valeria Costas has dedicated her life to her work and to her secret lover, Martìn Acla, a prominent businessman. When his sudden stroke makes headlines, her world implodes; the idea of losing him is terrifying. Desperate to find a way to be present during her lover's final days, Valeria commissions his artist wife, Isla, to paint her portrait - insinuating herself into Martìn's family home and life. In the grand, chaotic London mansion where the man they share - husband, father, lover - lies in a coma, Valeria and Isla remain poised on the brink, transfixed by one another. Day after day, the two women talk to each other during the sittings, revealing truths, fragilities and strengths. But does Isla know of the writer's long involvement with Martìn? Or that her husband had chosen Valeria for the years ahead? Amidst their own private turmoil, the stories of their lives are exchanged - and as the portrait takes shape, we watch these complex and extraordinary women struggle while the love of their lives departs, in an unforgettable, breathless tale of deception and mystery that captivates until the very end. 'A stunning "pas de deux" that is enchanting, thrilling and incredibly moving.' Marie Claire Italia

Leseprobe

THE PORTRAIT

Ilaria Bernardini is a bestselling Italian author and screenwriter. Her work has appeared in magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. The Portrait is her debut English-language novel. Ilaria splits her time between Milan and London.

THE PORTRAIT

ILARIA BERNARDINI

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Ilaria Bernardini, 2020

The moral right of Ilaria Bernardini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Quotation from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, copyright © Rebecca Solnit 2005, reproduced by permission of Canongate Books

Lyrics from ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Coehn, copyright © 1992 by Leonard Cohen, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Internal design by Ben Cracknell Studios

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 91163 040 1

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 91163 042 5

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 76087 659 3

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Leo

I never did know where I was,even when I was home.

Rebecca Solnit,

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

All human knowledge takes theform of interpretation.

Walter Benjamin

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen

ONE

Martìn and Valeria were lovers. They had been for the better part of their lives. But six days after his stroke, Valeria still had no access to him. She was in Paris, climbing into her car and attempting a smile at her driver. She indicated that she was on the phone and whispered, ‘Home, please.’

Dimitri nodded and Valeria unbuttoned her coat. It felt good to be in the warmth again.

‘No more photos, Joe,’ she said. Valeria pictured her agent rolling his eyes. ‘I’m getting too old for this.’

Perhaps she had a fever. Her eyes were watering. She wanted tea. An aspirin. Pamela would be at home waiting for the daily debrief. Good. Or not? Debrief – awful. Not being alone – good. And that pile of letters, when was she going to read them? She could burn them all. Or chew them. She could ask Pamela to chew them for her.

‘It’s not going to go down well with the publishers,’ Joe said.

‘I know. So here’s my plan: I’m going to have my portrait painted and we can use that for the book instead.’ Valeria wanted to cry. But she didn’t want to cry lousy flu tears. She wanted to sob and she wanted to scream. Now? No, poor Dimitri.

‘Are you aware of how pompous this will appear? No need to answer. Any painter in particular?’

‘Isla Lawndale. I admire her work.’ Valeria felt guilty as she uttered the name. Her fingers passed across her mouth to erase it. Entering Martìn’s house through the lie of a portrait? The idea was idiotic.

‘Should I have heard of her?’

‘She lives in London. She was a performance artist, then became a painter. I don’t know her personally but I can provide you with more details if needed.’

‘And would you like to sit for this portrait in London or Paris?

‘Can we stop with the “this portrait” attitude, Joe? London. Please make sure you express my admiration to her.’

‘It’s in the diary: admiration. Oh, and they keep calling about that jury. Toronto. Will you accept?’

‘Not now, sorry.’

‘It’s a very important prize,’ Joe pressed.

‘Listen, it’s just bad timing. Something is not—’ What was she doing? Another lie?

‘Something is not what?’

‘I really can’t, Joe. Speak later.’

‘Any title yet?’

‘Speak later, Joe.’

Valeria ended the call and closed her eyes. The car moved slowly through the traffic. It was in that same car that she had learned about Martìn’s stroke and about his coma. Why wasn’t she in London? She tried to calm herself down by breathing more steadily. It was a grey day and Paris was packed with cars, umbrellas and livid Parisians. Was she the reason why that man with the long coat looked so disgusted? She was disgusting. Valeria’s heart rate began to increase. She went back to her controlled breathing. She opened her eyes and saw Dimitri picking his nose. She coughed and he stopped. How old was Dimitri? Her age? Fifty-five? She never spoke Greek with him and hopefully she never would. Greek was forbidden.

In Greece, when she was twelve, her nearly fourteen-year-old sister Sybilla had died.

‘We are leaving Rhodes and never coming back,’ her mother Theodora told Valeria after Sybilla was gone. Valeria cried. They had already moved back to Greece from England because Valeria’s father had disappeared on them. Now Rhodes was home, happiness, friends. It was her connection to Sybilla.

‘I can’t be here ever again,’ Theodora said.

‘But it’s our home, it’s where you come from, where we all come from! That’s what you said when we left England and our father,’ Valeria shouted.

‘Well, Greece is not home any more.’

‘How is my dad going to find us?’ Valeria said.

‘You have to be looking for someone to be able to find them.’

Valeria’s father, Julian, had been a mediocre British writer. He had met Theodora at university in London and their fling had led to having Sybilla. Julian had disappeared a first time when their daughter was a month old and had returned at some point for just enough time to get Theodora pregnant again. When, twelve years later, Sybilla got sick, her mother would exclaim to the world that she wasn’t going to tell him. He was the one who shouldn’t have left. Valeria thought it was stupidly vengeful of her mother to not let him know about Sybilla’s sickness. Even though he was a pathetic father, Julian would have definitely come to see his dying daughter. He wasn’t a monster.

Valeria downloaded her emails without opening any of them. The screen made her nauseous. The name she wanted to see wasn’t there.

‘Are you going to go to Rhodes this year, madam?’ Dimitri asked.

‘Not anytime soon, no. You?’ she heard herself asking back.

‘I hope so. And not in August, when the meltemi wind is too strong.’

Had Martìn chosen Dimitri on purpose? Not sure. She didn’t even know if some sort of event had led to Martìn’s stroke and to his coma six days earlier. And if the fact that they had moved him back to his family home meant that he was going to recover or to die. Where would her devotion go if he died? Devotion was all of her life. Martìn was all of her life.

‘I’m devoted to you,’ she’d told Martìn in New York. They were in a restaurant, a private dining room, he was holding her thigh under the table. When was it, ten years ago?

‘You are devoted to yourself,’ he’d replied, ‘Sometimes you kiss me, but this is just because you like to kiss.’

Back home, a flat in the Latin Quarter that she had decorated thinking about Martìn’s tastes more than hers, Valeria sat on the sofa, her coat still on, rain still on the coat. This would have been the perfect moment to call him. The morning about to end, the rain gushing outside, Martìn’s voice as a mellow soundtrack. He was generally in a good mood and he was always available, even if he was in Shanghai, London or New York. Or if Valeria was the one in Shanghai, London or New York. He was there even though he had a wife and three kids, and he had been for most of Valeria’s adult life. How had they done it?

‘How are you?’ her assistant Pamela asked from the sofa beside her. Valeria hadn’t noticed her come into the room. She was beautiful. Young. She was wearing a tight turtleneck and the shape of her body, even with a sweater and jeans over it, seemed obscene. The red lipstick made her even more inviting. Did Pamela know Valeria’s secret?

‘I was feeling faint during the interview. I might have caught the flu,’ Valeria said.

‘I’ll get you an aspirin and make you some tea.’

‘Thank you, Pam.’ Pam? When had she ever called her Pam? Never. She imagined Pam—Pamela’s perfect body naked, her skin so white. She pictured her in that same kitchen, doing the same things she was probably doing right now, but without her clothes on. Imagining her from the back, fresh and gently open, was superb.

When Valeria interviewed her three years earlier, Pamela’s beauty had put her off. Why would she want to see such a gorgeous girl every day, a constant reminder of her own vanishing beauty? But Pamela turned out to be funny, sweet, committed. Oxford, with a masters from Columbia. She was a fan of Valeria’s work, worldly, with a strong mind. She completed the test on Valeria’s sample paragraph perfectly. Fact check, no pointless comments, one suggestion on a single sentence. Her intervention was always minimal and gently attuned to Valeria’s voice. She was British, which was helpful given the fact that Valeria wrote in English, and she would always give Valeria’s stories one last proofread. Plus, Valeria couldn’t bring herself to be the kind of woman who would turn down another woman because of her looks. That would have been completely antifeminist. So Pamela became her personal assistant. Sometimes, but not very often, they went out for a drink and she was now closer to being a friend. Even if in Valeria’s world it meant that Pamela wasn’t a friend at all. Looking at Pamela’s body and lips came to be Valeria’s daily struggle, to enquire about her promiscuous life just another one of her addictions.

Valeria woke up to the sound of the teacup being placed on the crystal table before her. Opening her eyes was sad. With a glorious woman to stare at, and sad.

‘Sorry,’ Pamela said.

‘It’s all right.’

Pamela scrutinized her list. The short story for Balloon Magazine – second draft. Radio 4. They had to choose the songs. Oh, and then the Aix-Marseille Université contract. Also, she needed to draw up a book list in two weeks’ time for the course she would be teaching there.

‘It’s in two years!’ Valeria sighed. Would she even be alive in two years? If she was alive in two years, would she be more or less desperate than now? And what about Martìn in two years? Would he still exist? And the world? What with climate change, jellyfish becoming every second more and more poisonous, the disappearance of the bees, terrorism, the old and the new cancer, the old and the new fascism, melancholy?

‘Oh, wait wait wait!’ Pamela said. She stood up and ran into the studio. She was back in seconds. ‘Ta-dah! Japanese!’

The Japanese translations of her books were always Valeria’s favourite. Bodasha had the best covers and the most refined paper. Valeria caressed the book. She smelled it.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ Valeria murmured and tried a smile. ‘This must be . . . The Hawk? Let me see. So the last word of The Hawk was “fear”. There it is, “fear”, in Japanese.’ In her hands the book appeared less beautiful, so she put it on the table. The word ‘fear’ in Japanese looked like a sweating house. It was becoming more enormous by the second.

When Pamela left, Valeria attempted to write. She typed. Deleted. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t real. Nevertheless, she remained at her desk for two hours. When two hours had passed, she spent another one on her monthly column. Then, she sent it over to Pamela for fact-checking, thanking her for the hot tea and care.

It was dark when Valeria changed into her tracksuit and went for a run, music in her ears, a woollen hat on her head. The air was crisp. She switched to a fast walk. She wanted to sweat. She wanted her heart to beat faster. She wanted a title for the new book. She wanted to be hugged. She wanted Martìn. And, fuck, she needed Isla Lawndale to accept her request. The park was misty. Dogs and runners looking melancholic in the same way. She started to run. Her breath began to shorten. She found herself on her knees. With the wet stones under her and the rain pounding over her, Valeria started to scream.

TWO

Valeria woke up in the middle of the night. She took a pill and woke up again in the middle of the morning. The darkness of the sky was pretty much the same. When the phone rang she was having a second cup of coffee. The pill-induced cloudiness had to leave her. And Martìn had to survive.

‘Isla Lawndale has declined,’ said Joe.

‘Fuck! Did she say why?’ Valeria asked. She was holding a coffee in one hand and flicking through a bunch of envelopes with the other. She cradled the phone between her head and shoulder. She was, as always, looking for handwritten letters, their promise that they could be more interesting. Those from Julian, her father, she wouldn’t open anyway.

‘She said she hasn’t painted in years,’ Joe said. The line was cracking. Or was it her heart? Valeria imagined Martìn in his bed, his face paralysed.

The first time she saw Martìn Aclà he was wearing sunglasses and wouldn’t take them off. She had seen herself reflected in his mirrored lenses. Her curls, her green eyes. She had also discovered that she was smiling.

‘That’s it?’ Valeria asked Joe.

‘She thanks you. Loves your work. First thing she said when she heard your name was “Wow.” I think she felt guilty about saying no, so she told me that it’s a really tough time for her right now – her husband is going through something, a sickness, I think. From what she was saying it sounded like he had a stroke. It was an intense call. A long one, too.’

‘What did she sound like?’

‘Sweet. And a mess. She said she was looking for dope in her daughter’s bedroom. She swears quite a lot. I looked her up online. Did you know that her last painting, an unfinished portrait of her husband, sold for thirty-five thousand pounds ten years ago at Christie’s?’

She did. More precisely, the portrait had been sold for £34,500. Flipping the envelopes, Valeria realized that the letter she was holding was an invitation to Pamela’s wedding. She dressed Pamela’s body in a bridal dress. Synthetic silk. Sweat. She imagined the false flu she’d come up with not to attend. She hid the invitation under a table book.

‘I didn’t,’ Valeria said, and felt her voice breaking again. Yes, it wasn’t the bad phone line, it was definitely her.

‘Anyway, I know you’re disappointed. I’ll find you someone better,’ said Joe.

There was no one better and it had to be her. Valeria hung up and tried to picture Isla Lawndale in her daughter’s room. She wasn’t just looking for dope. A diary would have been perfect, with all the clues on how to deal with all the problems. Isla was probably terrified that her daughter, Antonia, might commit suicide. As Valeria knew from Martìn, Antonia self-harmed, but would suicide be something she would ever really think about? Antonia would often tell Martìn she detested her body for being bulky and hated her family’s lifestyle. Did the Aclàs have a ‘lifestyle’? Antonia often repeated that they did, and that it was a pathetic one. Knowing all of this, knowing Antonia and the exact words she had shouted, without ever having met her, reminded Valeria of all her responsibilities.

Valeria went to her studio. She opened a Word document and drafted her apology for not going to the Toronto festival. In between the lines, the apology was to Joe, too. She then revised the first page of her piece for Balloon. The idea had been sitting in her memos, jotted here and there, for years. It was a true story that Martìn had once told her, about four sisters drowning in a river in France. One after another, trying to save each other from the current, they had been dragged away by the water. Martìn and Valeria had spent dinner wondering why there wasn’t a name for losing a child if losing a husband made you a widow and losing a parent made you an orphan. Valeria had pointed out that some say there is no such word because the death of a child is too awful to put into words. Martìn had said that it was much more painful not to have a word because this would force parents to use more words: I did have a child but he died.

Writing wasn’t working, she couldn’t concentrate on the story. All Valeria wanted to do was figure out a new plan for the portrait and for being allowed into Martìn’s house. Figuring out a plan always felt like being with Sybilla again. Like that day in the woods, when they were nine and seven, and had burned a pillow and a blanket. The pyre had been epic but what justification could they come up with for such a random act? After a long debate the random fire became the ‘fire to celebrate the life of a little dead bird’ and only out of laziness did they decide not to kill one really.

‘You’ve been brave,’ Theodora told her daughters.

‘I’m way braver than you,’ Sybilla whispered to Valeria.

‘The fuck you are,’ Valeria replied, even though it was true.

Valeria sat on the bed in her Paris apartment, tried mindful meditation. Those who say they manage not to engage with their thoughts lie, she thought. The new book was going to be out in months and there was still no title. Isla Lawndale didn’t want to paint her. The love of her life, the man who had been her man for the last twenty-five years, might be dying, and she couldn’t reach him. What was a lover, and a lover of her specific kind, supposed to do in a situation like this one? She’d had to learn about it from the radio!

She was used to hearing Martìn mentioned in the news and not always for good reasons. He was powerful, wealthy, and by virtue of the fact that his businesses were so diverse, was often exposed to media scrutiny. When they attacked him for the China scandal, she was terrified. And another time, when a kid lost his arm and an eye in one of his factories, she was devastated. But that morning six days ago, she’d realized abruptly what the radio was saying: ‘During a speech to investors at the Baumont Hotel, the Argentine business magnate, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Martìn Aclà, aged sixty-four, collapsed. His condition worsened on the way to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a stroke.’ Martìn’s life was then condensed into what sounded like an obituary. Actually, it sounded concerningly similar to the Wikipedia page that Valeria had looked up so many times. They didn’t forget to mention his long-lasting, unbreakable marriage that had given him three children and the fact that his twin brother Rami had died from a food allergy when they were twenty-three. This time too the details were repeated, while Valeria was vomiting in Paris.

Incapable of letting the meditation work, Valeria opened her computer and wrote an email to Isla Lawndale. She told her that she imagined the portraiture process to be intimate and exposing. Discovering her face in a sort of confession was what she was looking for, but it was also what she feared the most. She was ready to sit, but only for Isla. She told her about a portrait of her own mother she had in front of her right now. It had been painted in Italy, and Valeria explained why as a young girl she had hated her life there. She remembered the sittings for the portrait, the chalk on the floor. The painter would sketch every day and she would sit in the same patch of sunlight. Valeria wrote that only by staring at the picture could she feel the same boredom and the same pain she’d felt back then. Those were sad days. She was heartbroken and treated her mother terribly. She still felt guilty, but she was well aware of why she’d been so angry. Valeria chose words and created arguments that she imagined would sound similar to those Isla and her daughter Antonia might have.

She wrote for hours, editing, moving sections, unable to let this letter – and her last chance – go. She added the story of her mother being an orphan, the fact that you could see it, or maybe she could see it, in this portrait. Theodora had lost her parents when she was seventeen. She had lost her only love when she was twenty. In her thirties, she had lost her first daughter, Sybilla. All of it, and all days and nights in between, lived in that face, in that one picture. Valeria signed off – with all her wishes and hopes. She stood up, incapable of pressing the send button. She looked around her room and wondered if she should pray to some invented god just to give the whole scene a better ending. She drank some water while looking at the empty space where supposedly she’d been staring at the portrait of her mother. It was, in fact, pure invention. There was no portrait. The painter in Rome was invented too. Some parts of his habits were stolen from a Lucien Freud essay Valeria had once read. Apparently, her memory was better than she thought.

Valeria left the house in her tracksuit. When she entered the park it was dark. A man was lying on his stomach, his filthy coat leaving his back uncovered. Valeria could see his arse. She moved closer to him to see if he was still alive. He reeked of alcohol. His hands were twitching on the ground, as if he were attempting to swim. Was he dreaming of drowning?

‘Are you OK?’ Valeria asked.

The man didn’t answer. He continued to swim, or drown. She stood there for a while before deciding to look for help. But what if he was a refugee, escaped from somewhere? Oh God, maybe he was finally out of Aleppo! She didn’t want to put him in danger with a policeman so called for an ambulance instead. She explained in French and very slowly to the woman at the end of the line where she had found the man.

‘I have to go. I don’t feel safe,’ then added, ‘And I’m very cold.’ The sentence would have been a good summary of her current existence. So she repeated it in English, just to give it another go.

As soon as Valeria reached the street, she felt calmer. Spotting the lights of a café, she went in and ordered a glass of wine. Paris outside the windows was about to liquefy. Thank God she couldn’t see any angry Parisians from there: too late, too cold, too wet. Just how horribly had the poor man from Aleppo been treated by other human beings? She hoped his swimming would keep him on the surface of life.

While sipping her wine, the sirens of an ambulance broke her heart. She wasn’t responsible for the swimmer any more. Now all she wanted was to enter the Japanese character for the word ‘fear’ and sweat in there. She would sweat it all out. Fear, happiness, love, pain. The Greek, the Italian, the French, the bloody English too. There would be nothing left apart from a shiny puddle of her sweat.

‘May I steal a cigarette?’ Valeria asked the bartender.

Smoking under the awning, under the rain, under the entire universe, felt apocalyptic. The moon, the stars, her loneliness, were squeezing her. When was she going to see Martìn? She stepped back out into the rain and walked into the apocalypse. At home, she sent the email to Isla Lawndale Aclà.

THREE

Valeria married young. She was finally out of Theodora’s grip and about to graduate from Columbia. She had just received a scholarship, two of her short stories had been published, another one had been shortlisted for the Young Writers’ Award. Patrick Toyle was her non-fiction teacher, she was his second student wife. He was fifty-two, she was twenty-two.

‘Cliché, but not with you, Valeria. I was waiting for you,’ he would tell her. Valeria knew this too was a cliché, but she liked very much being this specific one.

The two of them went to lectures, concerts, book launches. At dinners he would hold onto her under the table and Valeria was always excited to have his hands on her skin. Once he brought her to orgasm, stroking her through her stockings, during a faculty dinner. At the same time he was keeping up an entire conversation about meta-something literature and pop-something, post-something culture. Back then, all this felt amazing. Even the boring post-, pop-, meta- discussion – something, it turned out, he would like to repeat quite often. He would also tell her about his childhood in Nebraska, and to Valeria it always sounded like a soothing song she was learning better with each play, imagining his past becoming hers too. He would use fascinating new words, agnition, heuristic, weltanschauung, and she felt lucky to be married to the smartest man she had ever met. Patrick taught graduate and undergraduate classes and was a contributor to various magazines. He had travelled around the world, he spoke Spanish and French. He also had a large jolly family that Valeria worshipped. Whenever they spent time with them in Nebraska, Valeria would say, ‘Let’s move here. I’ll work somewhere, you’ll work somewhere. We’ll be fine.’ He was very jealous. She wasn’t jealous at all. ‘Your body is mine,’ he would tell her. She would always smile and say, ‘Yes, it is.’

The wedding had been small, just the two of them and a couple of friends as witnesses. Valeria called her mother that afternoon to announce she had married Patrick. Theodora told her that the previous night she had dreamt about Sybilla giving birth to twins.

‘She had the face of a ten-year-old but her body was that of a woman,’ Theodora said.

Valeria hadn’t expected Theodora to bring Sybilla up, because she never did. So they both went silent, then said goodbye. Valeria added, ‘I love you.’ She didn’t get an ‘I love you too’ back, but she whispered it to herself, in Theodora’s voice.

That evening she and Patrick hosted a small party at home. There were speeches about how their love was unique. They kissed and danced. Dawn arrived with one more cigarette, one more song, one more kiss. Their song was ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. Other clichés, which she loved, ‘I was waiting for you,’ Patrick would repeat every day, and was never embarrassed to sound tacky. ‘Come home,’ he would tell her with the sexiest voice. ‘Come home to me.’ She always did, because for the first time since Sybilla’s death she liked what it meant to have a home.

The marriage lasted less than three years, which was enough time for Patrick to feel the urge to write an essay about Valeria once she became famous. Ironically, the essay was dedicated to Valeria with his much-used phrase, ‘I was waiting for you’. But during the marriage there was very soon another non-fiction student, Sophie. And yet another, Monica. There were many other women and girls. In truth, there was so much fucking around that it wasn’t as painful as if there had only been one lover. Too many eyes, ears, mouths, names: it was like one single monster woman.

‘Don’t leave me,’ Patrick had implored.

The divorce was dealt with by lawyers from afar, while Valeria went on a six-month pilgrimage around Europe before settling in Holland for another six months. It was hard to stop loving Patrick and to stop loving the word ‘home’, but in a tiny bed-and-breakfast facing the North Sea, she completed the first draft of her first collection of short stories, Black Bread.

Back in New York, Valeria wasn’t married any more and she was the literary talk of the town. Her collection of stories was represented by the powerful agent Marion Latsey. Valeria had met her through Patrick years before and, even in the depths of her anger towards him, she still felt grateful for the introduction. She had even thought of thanking him and as Theodora had taught her, she rehearsed a sentence that she never actually said.

‘I’m very grateful for having met you, Patrick. As I tell everyone, maybe love or sex wasn’t the best with you, but I was very lucky to find you.’

The buzz was that Black Bread was going to be a very special debut and that there was going to be a competitive auction among potential publishers. Before the auction deadline, Valeria found out that Marion Latsey had been sleeping with her ex-husband. So she fired her swiftly and ended up with the virtually unknown Joe Riddle. She had met him at a book launch and overheard a conversation he was having with a senior agent about a French author, famous for being bizarre. Joe seemed kind. No gossip or nasty words, only compassion and a clear respect for the author’s work. She sensed his sweetness and thought it would be easy to trust him. Also, he looked so goofy in that oversized yellow jacket.

Valeria was trying to write when her phone lit up. Outside still rain. And pain, everywhere. The word ‘Mum’ on the screen was shiny. What time was it in India? Her mother knew so little of her life. She knew so little of hers. When Sybilla was still alive they used to share breakfasts, beds, days. They used to walk around naked in the same house and to know each other’s intimate habits; how Sybilla would always leave half of her toast in the morning or how Theodora brushed both her daughters’ hair every other night, the recurrent nightmares they would have. Now, many years later, Valeria and Theodora were two ageing women living very far away from one another. There were only the phone calls and once a year they would meet up for a short holiday together somewhere in the world.

Valeria didn’t pick up and tried to go back to writing. She reread bits and moved a few things around, but the focus had gone and she was back to the thought of Isla and the portrait. When she bought the Isla Lawndale years ago, she didn’t tell anyone. Not even Martìn. It was expensive. But the way in which the artist depicted her husband was very powerful. Part of the picture was still charcoal, half of the left eye never coloured. The rest of the face and the shoulders were delicately painted in earthy, vivid colours, making the whole portrait warm. It was winter in the painting. And it was night. The artist created day paintings and night paintings, something Valeria knew because she had found an article about Isla Lawndale in a niche indie paper called ArtGeist. The piece had been written by a friend of Isla’s. Her name was Sasha Liebski. It was an intimate piece, very revealing about Isla’s art and life. The title was ‘The Making of Eyes’.

Sasha Liebski described the artist’s journey as a ‘pioneer’s vision’, with compulsion and repetition as the main tools of her process. Valeria, reading the article, and annoyed by the bad, pretentious writing, had focused on the artist’s self-portraits, based on photos taken in a photo booth. There were twenty of them in the magazine, but it was noted that the artist had done more than a thousand such works, ‘impersonating more than a thousand different women’. These performative journeys clashed with Sasha’s description of Isla as a well-to-do Londoner, who had been brought up in a wealthy, conservative American family and was now married to a billionaire. ‘What is it that you are looking for?’ Sasha Liebski asked. The question, the author wrote, had been asked at dawn, after an endless dinner in a skyscraper. ‘I’m looking for the most persistent performance ever,’ Isla Lawndale answered.

When Valeria decided to buy the painting by Isla Lawndale, she knew that financially it made no sense. Isla never became more famous than she was that day. No other reviews appeared. She never had another solo show or important auction. Valeria didn’t expect to pay as much as a five-figure sum, the highest estimate at Christie’s had been £9,000. But there had been another bidder on the phone who wouldn’t let go, so the price became ridiculous. Valeria didn’t care about the bad investment. There was something secret in the portrait, and she wanted to be part of that secret. She also wanted to be able to look at Martìn, and study his face over and over again. Had he and Isla kissed during the sittings? Had sex? Anytime Valeria looked at the portrait, it was evident that this wasn’t just a man or a woman dealing with the process. It was a husband looking at his wife. Isla looking at Martìn. Martìn at Isla. It was about closeness. And distance, of course.

FOUR

Without Patrick Toyle in her life, Valeria could write day and night. She didn’t have to eat with anyone, she wasn’t supposed to wait for anyone. She was diligent, obsessive, disciplined. Her first collection of short stories was a success. Her second, To the Light, even more so. Fame wasn’t expected but it didn’t really surprise her either.

With things turning out well, her father’s unsuccessful career would sometimes come into her mind. Despite the shame for feeling such sentiments, she enjoyed making the comparison. Was she a better writer than him or was she just luckier? Valeria quickly understood that her career would also require plenty of travelling and she relished the semesters she spent teaching at universities around the world. She was invited to teach at NYU, then at the Sorbonne, and had said yes within minutes on each occasion. She’d also accepted a few residencies that helped her become even more prolific. For one, she spent a year in Berlin. For another, six months in Tuscany. She spent three months in the north of Iceland. The mornings there were dark and writing came easy in the void. Towards the end of the third month, she ended up having boring sex with another author, but more importantly she ended up finishing an entire collection of short stories. The collection was titled Between. With Between she toured the world and she had no need to ask permission to take up any of these opportunities: she had no kids, no husband, no family. Very often this felt great and, since he had appeared in her life, Martìn was always glad to cross the globe to meet her if it was doable, or to call her every night and morning if they were apart.

Her short stories from around the world appeared in magazines and travel guides – being from nowhere became one of her distinctions, her independence one of her strongest qualities. She was once asked to speak on a feminist panel about choosing such an autonomous life, and found herself crying at the end of it. By then she believed she was special too. She won prestigious awards for her writing and the news had always arrived when she was in countries unknown to her, surrounded by unfamiliar people. When she finally moved to Paris to have a place to call home, she published a collection of poems on the theme of roots. All the interviews she gave around the book focused on this theme and the reason behind her decision. The decision was, in fact, made mostly for Martìn. She wanted to give him a home to come back to and a place where he could imagine her being. Even if he had another home, a wife, a growing family.

By then, several of Valeria’s works aroused controversy and received mixed reviews because of their subject matter and her increasingly objectionable protagonists. She published the first story of her fifth collection, ‘Secret’, as a single piece for The Serpentine. It featured a suburban couple that deliberately kill a woman. A reviewer for the Literary Journal described it as ‘a dirty and foolishly grotesque collection’. Writing in The Mono, on publication of the collection, a revered writer described it as ‘A masterpiece. Her short stories have a profound, obscure, secret brilliance’. The Revolution review said: ‘“Secret” is the total theorization of love and the horror that comes with it. Valeria Costas can’t be compared to any other writer. No one else is quite as comfortless and amusing and delicate all at the same time’.

By then, her work had been translated into twenty-six languages.

Valeria knew that going for a run today would be impossible. She had no strength to do so. But still, after the writing and with Martìn occupying her every thought, she had to get out of the studio. Could she succeed in being out of her body too? It was becoming an older body and living in it became less appealing with every day. If Martìn wasn’t going to touch or see that body any more, was she still going to want to live, walk, write? Martìn could see her as she had been in her thirties and forties, this was one of the gifts that came from loving each other for almost three decades. She was not her age for him, she was for him all ages she had been and all ages she was going to be, in an indistinct blur of love and compassion.

She dressed in jeans and a turtleneck. She picked the jumper because of Pamela but it didn’t look as good on her. She chose warm boots, her warmest coat and a big woollen hat.

Outside the wind was strong. The radio had said a storm was going to hit Paris during the night. Valeria went to the Rive Gauche and kept walking along Rue de l’Université. She took her phone out of her pocket. Last time she heard from Martìn it was just before the conference at which he had collapsed.

‘Can’t wait to see you. I love you,’ Martìn had said. ‘I miss you.’

‘Can’t hear you very well, but I love you too,’ were Valeria’s last words to Martìn.

They weren’t the best words ever but they weren’t too bad either. Was his wife in charge of his phone now? Valeria’s name on Martìn’s phone was Charlie Brown. Martìn had told her that they, like Charlie Brown and Lucy, were the protagonists of one of the longest-running comic strips in history. Valeria clicked on Martìn’s contact information. His phone was off but the attempt to call him excited her. She saw Charlie Brown walking beside her. She smiled at him.

‘Martìn, can you hear me?’ she murmured. She held onto the phone, her fingers tight around it. ‘I don’t know how to do this and I don’t know how to reach you. But I am writing every day just like I promised. Do you remember the wind on Broadway? We were laughing, bent over trying to beat the weather.’ Suddenly, Valeria was crying again. ‘Are you dying, Martìn? There are so many things I must tell you. . . I lied so much. About big and tiny things. You know that time in Berlin when I joined you? I told you that I’d gone to the museum and had lunch with my publishers? Well, I was in our room all day, pretending it was our home. Didn’t see anyone, didn’t go anywhere. Why are all these memories coming back like this now? I’m struggling with the language too. I’m mixing them up, I’m all mixed up. I’m sure that if you die I’ll die with you. Pamela will find me dead in my studio.’

Valeria’s phone started to ring.

‘You’re telepathic,’ Valeria said, looking at the name on the screen.

‘Dinner tonight?’ Pamela asked.

Before Valeria hired her, Pamela had been temping at a favourite restaurant of Valeria’s. It was there that they first met and Valeria was never sure it hadn’t all been planned. People did things like that: spy, lie. She did, for sure. Just look at the portrait plan.

‘Maybe she wanted to be my friend, so she chose the restaurant I love, and then ten days after we meet, she applies for the assistant’s job with the perfect CV for me to make it impossible to say no,’ she’d told Martìn.

‘Great one,’ Martìn had said. ‘Write it down.’

She did. It was a short story about a girl working on and off in restaurants. In her story, Pamela was slightly older, but otherwise it illustrated her assistant’s life exactly as she had told her: in the kitchens, with the clients, her usual siesta in one of the five-star hotel rooms upstairs when they were empty. There was some mention of her relationship with Benoit – François in the story – and of her many lovers. Valeria included her ways of speaking and her bouncy ponytail. She then published the story in Balloon Magazine and when, months later, she finally got round to hiring Pamela, she didn’t tell her about it. She could never anticipate whether those kinds of things angered the real protagonist and didn’t want to risk not being able to publish a story.

‘I’m in Rue de Rennes. Is Zazou OK for you?’ Valeria asked.

‘Give me twenty minutes,’ Pamela said.

Valeria kept walking, the air biting. Seeing herself in the display window of a lingerie shop was shocking. She was decrepit. Her curly hair that used to be brown and beautiful wasn’t even curly any more. Her lips were losing tone like all the rest of her body. The sight of bras and sexy underwear mixed with her reflection was disturbing. Valeria particularly hated a pair of purple silk panties before her. She wanted to destroy them. She remembered what her mother used to say about ageing women. ‘There is a specific day – it could be a Tuesday – when men stop looking at you. You are, from then on, officially invisible. It happens in one second and it lasts for ever.’ In some lights Valeria could still pull it off. But it wasn’t real. She probably looked older not younger. Cigarettes. Wine. All the frowning while writing. How would Sybilla have aged? Valeria entered the boutique and bought the panties.

‘They’re for tonight,’ she told the salesgirl.

The tiny smile she received back was devastating.

Sybilla would wake her up in the middle of the night not wanting to sleep alone. She would sneak into Valeria’s bed, get under the covers, squeeze her.

‘Idiot,’ Valeria would say. Sybilla didn’t mind being called an idiot. She’d laugh.

Walking together to school would often include a secret swim. The salt on their bodies would make them itch for the rest of the day. They made bets for the first dive of the season and the last one. They made bets if the weather was horrible and the currents were dangerous. They’d hidden a towel in a cave, but most of the time the towel was damp and stank.

‘I’d rather die of pneumonia than dry myself with that thing. It smells like puke,’ Sybilla would say.

After the swim they would try to warm up by jumping on the spot and rubbing their skin. Often they were late for school and had to run the rest of the way there. On free afternoons, they’d sometimes look for spring waters in the valleys and on weekends they’d try to drag Theodora to their most recent discovery. Theodora would moan. But when Valeria and Sybilla won her over, they would walk with her through forests of Cyprus pine. They would cross citrus orchards, vineyards and olive groves, sure of themselves, proud, incredibly happy. Theodora carried a bag with everything they could possibly need. Once in, she was properly in.

‘How did you find this place?’ Theodora would ask. It was as if there were infinite numbers of ‘this place’ on the island and her daughters could find them all.

The three of them would splash in the water for the entire day. Theodora would scrub them with sea salt, put egg yolks in their hair, brush it through with vinegar. She would rinse them and rub their skin with olive oil. They would soak endlessly, their skin becoming red.

‘I love you girls,’ she’d repeat over and over on the way back.

‘We love you too,’ they’d say. But they always changed the subject as fast as they could because they were afraid she would start talking about their father: the world love was always associated with him and complaints like, ‘Your father should be here too.’ Saying these things would mean that all their efforts had been useless and Theodora would sink into her melancholia again. For this same reason, when Valeria met her father on Hampstead Heath many years later, she didn’t tell Theodora. Nor that with him she went into great detail about Sybilla’s pain: it took more than twenty minutes – it took all of her life lived so far – to map her sister’s suffering and let her father know the way in which Sybilla had died.

Valeria dedicated her collection, You, to the memory of Sybilla. As soon as she saw it in book form, she wanted all the copies back, to erase Sybilla’s name. Instead, journalists started digging up her past and asking about her dead sister.

‘You probably need to talk about her,’ Martìn suggested.

They were in a secret place. He had called it secret so it was secret for Valeria too. Martìn would often come up with proposals like, ‘Lausanne in three days?’ Or ‘Tonight I’m in Bruxelles, can you eat with me?’ So that night they went to the countryside, a hideaway close to the commune Villepinte in the Paris suburbs. Valeria drove herself there. Martìn came with a driver, who he dismissed.

‘You’ll have to drive me back,’ he told Valeria as they smoked a cigarette together while watching the driver leave. ‘I’m half blind at night.’

Heading back to their table, Valeria noticed that Martìn was limping.

‘You limp,’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ he smiled. ‘What makes you think I do?’

At that time Valeria was enjoying substantial press attention and Martìn had read one of the reviews that alluded to Valeria’s childhood.

‘It must be hard to live it over and over again,’ he said, ‘But maybe you want it to be this way.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I hate it.’

They then had a confused argument. Or at least, Valeria had one with him and told him that she lived it over and over again because of a shitty collection of shitty short stories. But what could he possibly know about it? And it was at that point that Martìn told her he had lost his twin brother Rami and that Valeria was very beautiful with all the tears on her face. But she had some snot blowing out of her nostril.

‘Well, I might have snot coming out of my nostril but you limp,’ she said to Martìn.

She cleaned her nose and looked at him provocatively. She thought, Very beautiful? What with his face, and this closeness?

‘It’s too easy to only want to know about other people’s limps. What about your limp?’ he said.

‘You always do this, repeat a part of my question in the form of a question to me. It might sound super smart but it’s just annoying.’

‘I think you really do limp,’ Martìn said. And he smiled more.

Valeria was playing with the idiotically expensive purple panties on the table when Pamela arrived at Zazou. She was wearing a gigantic coat and black boots with heels. People turned their heads to look at her. It was clear that Pamela enjoyed her entrances. Valeria and Pamela shook hands and when Valeria smelled her perfume, she felt more together. They chose red wine and binged on that, eating only bread with butter.

‘If it’s OK, you do the talking and I’ll just look at you,’ Valeria said. ‘I may also close my eyes to listen more carefully.’

‘Story of my life,’ Pamela laughed. ‘Will you also keep playing with those panties? Just so I know.’

Valeria nodded and Pamela started with her latest chronicles. If Pamela was inventing, she was good at it. She never mentioned her wedding, and for this too, Valeria was grateful. And if Pamela was just feeding Valeria’s hunger, she knew her tastes very well. She was a cheater, a flirt. But also, she was hilarious. Just to balance such fun raunchiness, a few times Valeria had come up with invented tales of her own. In reality, they were always about Martìn. She just picked a new name for him and backstories to play along. But because she had changed four or five names, Pamela thought that Valeria was similar to her. Free and curious. Sex came in such ways with such life and such soul. But in truth, Valeria couldn’t have been less curious. She was also nearly thirty years older than Pamela, another difference Pamela never seemed to notice. It was flattering, in a way, but completely blind in another. Men still wanted Pamela a lot.

‘I’m in a sentimental coma,’ Valeria said. The word coma arrived unasked and so strong, it made her hate herself. She saw Martìn in his coma. She saw herself in a coma. She had to run to London. ‘Can we leave?’ she asked Pamela.

‘What about the storm?’

‘Let’s face it,’ she said.

The following morning the storm over Paris was still raging when Valeria woke to the sound of Joe calling her from downstairs. The housekeeper must have let him in. While dressing, she tried Martìn’s phone again. Still off. She had to get rid of this new addiction. Along with the sleeping pills. The cigarettes. The red wine. She brushed her teeth and rinsed her face. How did the night end? You didn’t say anything too personal, right? she asked herself before joining her agent in the living room.

‘You look rough,’ Joe said. ‘Is it the flu?’

‘It’s the wine from last night.’ Valeria broke an aspirin with her teeth.

‘One of your songs for the radio show could be “Perfect Day”, by Lou Reed,’ Joe said. ‘You used to listen to it a lot when we first met.’

Valeria heard the song as if Lou Reed was there performing it in the room for them.

‘I was using it to write a short story. The one about the divers from the national team that highjack a plane.’

‘“Forever Yours”. That story should be a movie.’

‘Did you really just say that?’

‘I didn’t.’

While looking at the usual pile of letters, Valeria noticed there was a new one from Julian. Fuck.

‘I underlined a sentence as something that could be interesting for the title: “when looking up to the stars”,’ Joe said.

‘It doesn’t sound like me,’ Valeria said, slipping the letter in the drawer with all the others. ‘Too gooey.’

‘Well, it’s you. It’s in your story “Mr and Mrs”.’

‘Used alone it sounds romantic. The sentence in my story has the opposite intention,’ Valeria raised her voice.

‘But—’

‘I’ll erase it from the book too.’

‘Jesus, wow,’ Joe said after a pause and they both started laughing.

Joe had to take a call and Valeria found herself a comfortable position on the sofa to enjoy the presence of Joe and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Joe was holding his phone in front of her.

‘I haven’t got my glasses on,’ Valeria said. ‘Are you showing me a boyfriend, a text, a sunset, what?’

‘It’s an email from Isla Lawndale. She is saying yes.’ Valeria looked at Joe and saw the boy he had been. She saw him being seven years old and she saw his bruises. She heard him saying, ‘I’m sorry’, and she heard all the helpless kids of the world saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ When he had told Valeria his story on a flight to Mexico, she had cried, then immediately thought about how to use it. But as soon as the flight was over, Joe made her promise that she would never write it down. Valeria promised and while promising, she thought that if for any reason Joe were to die before her, she would write it. In the hotel room she jotted down the few details she didn’t want to forget, and when she returned from the literary festival, the memo, scribbled on the hotel’s letter paper, was archived with all the others.

‘What does the email say?’ Valeria asked. It was nine days since Martìn had collapsed. Seven days in which all the things that had happened to her hadn’t been narrated to him. After twenty-five years she didn’t know how to handle the silence. What if Isla was saying yes but not for three weeks?

‘Ready?’ Joe asked.

‘Ready,’ Valeria whispered.

Dear Ms Costas and dear Mr Riddle,

Thank you for your messages. I’ve had a change of heart and I’m willing to work on Ms Costas’ portrait. I would be available to begin work immediately. I would like us to work every day, at my home, until we are finished.

I’m afraid I have no idea how long the process will take. Should you still like to have the portrait done by me, then it only remains for us to find our way.

With best wishes,

Isla Lawndale

PS: Ms Costas will you please bring along a picture of your mother’s portrait? I’m very curious.

‘Why are you crying?’ Joe said.

‘I’m just tired, sorry,’ Valeria said. She sat motionless, the sun outside shining brightly, as if to celebrate the moment.

‘Staying in London is going to be expensive,’ Joe said.

‘I’ve got a friend whose house is free. It’s near them.’ ‘Near them?’ Joe asked.

‘Near Isla and her family.’ Why can’t I just keep my mouth shut? Why do I even speak?

‘How do you know where she lives?’ Joe asked.

‘Someone that knows someone who knows. . . Listen, I can’t remember everything that happens to me. I just know it,’ Valeria replied. ‘She lives near Holland Park. I guess that was easy information to keep.’

Holland Park was true. The friend’s free house was a lie. Valeria was going to find something tonight online. She didn’t want to stay any further than ten metres from Isla’s house in Ilchester Place. She knew the address by heart. She knew the street by heart too, from Google and from reality.

‘The Moscow conference is a two-thousand-dollar gig, Valeria,’ Joe said.

‘I’ll fly in and out,’ Valeria answered, ‘Same thing with Stockholm. Please, now reply to Mrs Aclà that it is a yes. For Monday.’

‘What do you mean you will fly in and out from Moscow? And Mrs who?’

‘Sorry, I meant Ms Lawndale,’ Valeria said. Fuck!

That night, after writing and after running, Valeria lay on her bed with the computer on her lap and searched online for Martìn Aclà. Nothing new came up. The same articles and pictures appeared on the screen. The ambulance outside the hotel. Martìn collapsing at the conference. Again, Valeria watched the footage. She watched it and rewatched it until she noticed that he had peed his pants. She paused the video and ran her fingers over the dark pixels.

FIVE

While Valeria was packing her things for London, she received a call from her mother but didn’t pick up.

She laid the clothes on the bed before starting to fit them into the suitcase, stopping halfway through to jot down the outline of a short story she wanted to go back to, once the one about the drowning sisters was finished.

Ex-husband decides not to go to a party with the new girlfriend he loves. Eats alone in a restaurant. By coincidence meets ex-wife. She joins him. They order too much food. NEVER mention their children. They spend the night together – walk the city, eat again at a diner at 4am – and at dawn they decide NOT to have sex.

Valeria filed the piece of paper before returning to her packing.