Old Habits

The week that followed was the best working week of the entire six months. I am going to set out what we did in it, with the page counts, because the numbers are the only part of it anybody could have seen from outside.

There is a thing that happens to me on the morning after I have said something true. I wake at about five with the whole of the previous evening in the room, every sentence of it audible, and the feeling is not shame. It is exposure in the plainest sense: a man standing in a field. There has only ever been one thing that works on it, and it is a list.

On the Friday morning at twenty to seven, from the flat in Stockbridge, I answered Amalia Sanchis and told her I would do all three events in Madrid with Ximena Belda, the thirteenth to the fifteenth, and I copied in the festival office, and I booked the flights, and I did the whole of it in eleven minutes before it was light.

I had not decided anything for four days. I decided it in eleven minutes on the morning after I read a woman a letter about our daughter in her own kitchen, and then I put the telephone face down and made coffee and understood exactly what I had done and did it anyway.

· · ·Scene break

Friday. Eleven pages. She arrived at nine and I had been there since twenty to and pretended otherwise, and there were two coffees on the desk, hers with the milk in first.

She asked how I was. I said I had slept badly, which was true and which was also, in the way I said it, a small door closing with a hand behind it. She said, “Right,” and got out the grey pencils.

Neither of us said a true sentence that day, and neither of us mentioned that neither of us had. That is how it goes. It does not go with a row. It goes with a man saying he slept badly.

Saturday, nine pages. Sunday I rebuilt the delivery schedule and revised the translator’s note.

Monday, I gave her a document.

I had spent Sunday evening working the three days in Madrid into the schedule: two pages, a revised count per working day, the second pass moved forward four days to protect the end of March, a note on which queries I would answer from a hotel. I brought it up the twenty-two steps and put it beside her coffee at nine.

She read both pages. It takes ninety seconds to read and she took four minutes, which is Elodie reading a document for what is not in it.

“The thirteenth to the fifteenth.”

“Three events. Ximena won’t do them on her own and the press has had them in the diary since November.”

“And you have built it so that it doesn’t cost us anything.”

“It doesn’t cost us anything. Look at the Thursday column.”

“I have looked at the Thursday column.” She squared the two pages against the desk, which is my gesture, and put them under the corner of the box. “That’s very efficient.”

In November, in a restaurant behind the station in Turin, with a plate in front of each of us that the other had ordered, she had said those three words and I had said them back, and it had been one of the four best hours of my year.

I heard what she had just done with them. I sat down on my side of the desk and I heard it, and what I did about it was take the top off my pen and say, “Page two hundred and ninety-seven.”

Monday: eleven pages. Our record was nine, set in October.

· · ·Scene break

Tuesday she asked me nothing about Madrid, and I did not tell her that Sanchis had asked in the same email whether I would be back in the office from April, or that I had not answered that part.

Renzo’s batch came in a day late, and item nine was a question about a word in chapter twenty that was properly hers. I answered it well, in about four minutes, signed the reply from both of us and sent it, and did not walk eight feet round a desk to ask her.

She saw it on Wednesday morning in the sent items.

“You did item nine.”

“I did. You were deep in the chapter. I can reopen it with him if you’d rather.”

“No, it’s right,” she said. “It’s what I’d have said.”

“Then that’s fine.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s fine.”

Ten pages on Tuesday. Twelve on Wednesday. Fifty-three for the week by the Wednesday evening, counting the second pass the new schedule had moved forward, and every page of it good. I have read them since. They are good.

Every part of the machine worked. The coffee, the reading aloud in alternate paragraphs, food at half past one as a point of order and one more sentence and then four more. Anybody looking in would have seen two professionals at the top of their form, and Giulia Ferro would have known from the landing, with the door shut, in about four seconds.

We had been in that room since September learning how to say things out loud, and it turned out that all of it was optional, and that the old way still worked, and that the old way is not a failure of skill. It is a very high-performing system. It ran a marriage for eight years.

· · ·Scene break

Wednesday, page three hundred and two.

Chapter twenty-one, near the end, Nella on the telephone to her sister, saying the only thing she ever says directly about the year of the silence.

Non me l’ha mai chiesto, e io non gliel’ho mai detto, e adesso non c’è niente da dire.

He never asked me, and I never told him, and now there is nothing to say.

Elodie read her English out. She had: He never asked me, and I never told him, and now there is nothing left to say.

Left. One syllable. It is not a mistranslation; you could defend it in a review. What it does is give the sentence a history — something was there once and has been used up, which is sad, and which a reader is permitted to be sad about. Giulia’s is a woman standing in a kitchen with a telephone stating a flat fact in the present tense.

I saw the word go in. I saw her see me see it.

Five months of being told by a dead woman in pencil not to be elegant. One evening, six days earlier, of a woman sitting at her own table with her hands flat on it and nothing ready to say, which is the bravest thing I have been in a room for.

“Good,” I said, and wrote it down, and we went on to page three hundred and three.

If there is a worst moment in this, that is the worst moment. It took four seconds, no voice was raised, and we did nine more pages before we stopped.

· · ·Scene break

Renzo came at half past seven that evening, which is not a time he comes.

He had the Sunday pages with him, marked, and did not take his coat off, and put one sheet on the desk and turned it round so that it faced us, which is his mother’s move.

“Page three hundred and two,” he said. “You have put air around it.”

Nobody said anything.

“I have been reading you two since September. I have been wrong about nine things in ten and you have both told me so. Tell me I am wrong about this one. Either of you. I would honestly rather.”

Elodie put her pencil in the groove.

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “I did it on Monday as well, page two hundred and ninety-eight, the verb in the second clause. He saw me do it both times and said nothing, and this morning he said ‘good’.”

“I did,” I said.

“And he answered query nine without asking me, and I told him it was fine, and it was fine.” She was looking straight at Renzo, because there are things you can say in front of a third person that you cannot say to a face. “We have done fifty-one pages since Friday. It is the most we have ever done in a week. We have not said one true word to each other since Thursday night, and we have had the best week of the project, and if you want to know what your mother’s book is about, that is what it is about, and we are doing it on top of her manuscript in her own study with her cardigan on the chair.”

“It is not fifty-one,” I said. “It is fifty-three including this afternoon.”

She turned round. “Don’t you dare correct the number.”

“I am not correcting it to be right. I am correcting it because it is worse, and if we are going to say it we are going to say the true one.”

“Then say one.”

“I answered the press on Friday morning at twenty to seven,” I said. “Eleven minutes after I got out of bed, five hours after I sat in your kitchen, and I did not tell you for three days, and when I did tell you I did it with a printed schedule, so that it would arrive as an arrangement instead of a decision.”

“I know exactly what you did with Thursday night,” she said, “because I did the same thing. I have been faultless since Friday. I have been the easiest colleague in Europe. I have not asked you one question about Madrid, and I have been keeping a private list of the things I have not asked, and that is not restraint, that is a woman building an account so that she can read it out later.”

“That is the first accurate thing either of us has said in six days.”

“Yes, and you will notice we are saying it to her son.”

“Basta,” Renzo said.

We both stopped. He had gone very still, and something had happened to his face that I did not read correctly at the time.

“Say that again. The part about the true words. Which day did you stop.”

“The seventh,” Elodie said. “Friday.”

“And what you have just been doing. What was that?”

“That was an argument about the two of us,” she said.

“Right,” said Renzo Ferro, and went out into the hall to his bag.

· · ·Scene break

He came back with a padded envelope about the size of a book, brown, sealed along the flap with the transparent tape his mother used for everything, and put it on the desk between our two lamps.

On the front, in the uphill hand:

A R. — dallo loro quando smettono di litigare sulle mie frasi e cominciano a litigare sulle loro. Se non succede, brucialo.

To R. — give it to them when they stop arguing about my sentences and start arguing about their own. If it does not happen, burn it.

Nobody touched it.

“She gave me that on the sixteenth of August,” Renzo said. “In her kitchen. She put it in my hands and said the sentence out loud as well, in case I was too stupid to read it, and then she asked me about my flat and we had lunch.”

“Renzo,” Elodie said.

“I did not open it. I want that said first, because it is the only part I am not ashamed of. It is taped shut now.” He had his hands in his coat pockets. “I have had it in a drawer in Turin since August. I had it in January, when the pair of you sat there and told me a chapter was missing from my mother’s last book, and I said nothing, and went home and went through both wardrobes in that flat in three days.”

“You looked for it,” I said. “Knowing.”

“I looked for it hoping. I wanted it to be in a wardrobe. If it is in a wardrobe it is a piece of paper and I am a man who found a piece of paper. If it is in my drawer, then it is mine to judge, and I have to decide when two people I do not much like have finally started doing what my dead mother wanted, and I am thirty-four, and I did not ask for that, and I have hated every one of you since the autumn. Including her.”

He looked at the envelope.

“I nearly burned it in January,” he said. “Twice. You can have that as well.”

“Why tonight?” Elodie said.

“Because I have come up those stairs every three weeks since September and watched the two of you be immaculate at each other, and tonight I came up and you were arguing about yourselves, in front of me, badly, with the numbers wrong. That is the sentence she wrote on the envelope. I am my mother’s son. You people hand me a document and I read it as written.”

He did not sit down and he did not stay. At the door he stopped with his back to us, which is how he does it.

“There is nothing of hers on it. She told me that in the kitchen, before she asked me about the flat. Forty pages of her handwriting in that book and not one mark on this one, and I have not been able to decide in six months whether that is because she had nothing to say about it or because there was nobody left she was willing to say it to.”

Twenty-two steps, fast.

· · ·Scene break

We opened it at ten past eight with the desk cleared.

Nineteen sheets, typed on one side, no page numbers, no clip, no pencil anywhere on any of them.

The first line is in the first person plural, which she does not use anywhere else in three hundred and eleven pages.

Di quei mesi non ricordo nemmeno una conversazione; ricordo tutto quello che abbiamo fatto.

Of those months I do not remember a single conversation; I remember everything we did.

I read the first sheet standing up with my coat over my arm and got halfway down the second, and then stopped, because of what is on the second sheet, and put it face down on the desk.

Elodie was at the door with her bag on her shoulder. She had read the first line over my arm and then walked away from the desk, which I have never seen her do with a page.

“Not tonight,” she said.

“No.”

“You have a flight at seven.”

“I have a flight at seven.”

We put the nineteen sheets in the middle of the desk with a pencil laid across them, turned off both lamps, went down the stair together and said goodnight on the pavement like two people who had met at a conference.

It had been in a drawer in Turin since August. Her working notebooks had been eleven inches from my left knee since October. There had been four sides of hotel paper in my coat on the hook by that door since January, a folder in a locked drawer in Marchmont for three years, and a folded page in the bottom of a bag since the second of October.

We were not short of documents. We have never once, in the whole of this, been short of documents.