Fifteen minutes in bed in the quiet of earliest morning, a delicate mechanism affording her a leisurely adjustment to the passing of time. One hand on her stomach, the other under her head: an attitude of surrender to an unknown love, of a lover at a loss. She had no commitments, nothing more to prove, it all lay behind her, youth, marriage, motherhood. All there was now was the war, and a black boy who had unaccountably come into her life. Should she go and see him later on, or should she leave him alone? Matteous was no longer a child, and she not his mother, though it seemed a lot like it at times. Emma had grown up so fast that Kate had hardly had a chance to be a mother. Now, at fifty-four, she wondered what on earth she had spent all that time doing. For some reason everything had seemed to happen at high speed. Like watching the water drain out of a basin when you pulled the plug. The little whirlpool at the plughole, that was where she was now.
Somewhere in the neighbourhood a clock struck six. In Berlin the day would also be beginning. Their clocks were an hour ahead, of course, so Carl would be on the train by now. Matteous would still be asleep, she imagined. And so would Oscar, almost certainly. She did not think about Oscar very much lately. She registered this as a curious state of affairs, not as a cause for concern. They lived their lives much as sparrows perching on the same clothes line: fairly content, fairly tame. Their embrace seemed to have lost its necessity, and the distance between Berne and London did not make them yearn for one another. This suited Kate quite well, it was just fine. Eros had never played a big part in their lives, which was probably true of a lot of people. The years before Oscar did not count, for they lay dormant in her core. Or as good as dormant. Sometimes, rarely, very rarely, they came back to her in a dream or in her fifteen-minute reverie upon waking.
There had been a change over the past months, since she had met Matteous. It happened several times that she was jolted awake by the crash, her heart thumping. The terrifying crash. After the fear came the memory, and with the memory the pain. She was eighteen again and just married. She was back in Rome, holding hands with him as they wandered through the old city. He was working on the Roman Forum excavations, his “never-ending dustpan-and-brush project”, as he called it. One of the most talented archaeologists of his generation, older than her by ten years: Roy de Winther, Winther with an
Kate had covered it all up, stowed everything away in sealed packages wrapped around by the new life she found herself leading after the catastrophe. Four years of undivided devotion should be enough to keep the machines of memory in fuel forever. But the machines had let her down, the memories of those days began to fade, or were quickly pushed out of sight. She had proved able to make his body vanish, and forget his love. Concrete it over.
But nothing vanishes for good. Not the train journey, which was Roy’s last. From Milan to Rome and her. The crash had to have been horrific, the newspapers carried pictures of great mounds of twisted steel, of flames and chaos and passengers trapped in the wreckage. Sixty dead. Roy was mentioned by name in the reports. She still had the newspaper somewhere. Stored away, like all the rest.
