Same Table

The stair up to Giulia’s flat is stone, worn into shallow dishes by two hundred years of other people’s feet, and it turns twice before the door. I counted the treads on the way up, which is a thing I do in buildings where I am not certain of my welcome. Twenty-two. I was early by eleven minutes, which is also a thing I do, and I stood on the landing with a paper bag of pastries I had bought on Broughton Street because arriving empty-handed felt like a position I would have to defend.

I was forty-one years old. I had organised my life so that very little in it could surprise me before ten in the morning, and I had flown from Madrid on the Friday, taken a short let in Stockbridge with a view of a wall, and spent the weekend reading the will twice through, as instructed, finding nothing we had not been told. Giulia had been thorough in the way that only a person who has decided something long in advance can be thorough.

Elodie arrived at two minutes to nine with her own key and did not use it, because I was standing there with the door already open.

“You’re early,” she said.

“I’m punctual. It reads as early to people who are punctual differently.”

She looked at the paper bag. She did not comment on the paper bag, which I registered as a decision.

The study was exactly as Morag had promised and worse than I had prepared for. Nobody had touched it. There was a cardigan over the back of the reading chair with the shape of Giulia’s shoulders still in it, and a cup on the windowsill that somebody had at least had the decency to empty, and on the desk a half-done crossword in Italian with a biro lying in the fold, and the room smelled of paper and cold coffee and the particular dust that comes off forty years of the same books.

The desk was a single slab of oak, long enough for two, with a shallow groove running down the middle of it where a person could lay a pencil. Two chairs. Two lamps, angled from opposite sides. Two banks of drawers, one under each place. She had it built the year we married, which was eleven years ago now — Elodie was twenty-seven, I was thirty — and she used to say she had built it as a warning.

Elodie put her bag down on the left, which had been my side in every room we ever worked in, and then saw me notice, and did not move it.

“Fine,” I said.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“I said fine.”

“You said it in the voice.”

“There is no voice.”

“There’s a voice,” she said, and sat down on the left, and took out a pencil case, a legal pad, two dictionaries she did not need and a small steel ruler that I had bought her in Turin in a year I was not going to think about at nine o’clock in the morning.

We worked well for nineteen minutes. I want that on the record, because of what happened in the twentieth.

Giulia’s novel is called La casa a due porte, the house with two doors, and it is three hundred and eleven pages about a marriage that ends twice, once quietly and once in a kitchen, and the first chapter belongs to the wife, whose name is Nella. It opens on a Tuesday morning in a flat in Turin with the boiler out. It is very funny for two pages. Then it stops being funny with no warning at all, which is a thing Giulia could do and almost nobody else can.

We read the first paragraph aloud in Italian, because that is how you begin; I read it, then Elodie read it, and hearing her read Italian after three years did something to the back of my neck that I elected not to examine. We agreed on the first four sentences in four minutes. We agreed on the fifth in one. She caught a verb tense I would have taken on trust and I caught a repetition she had already caught and was too polite to mention twice, and for nineteen minutes it was the easiest work I have done since the divorce, and I was aware, all the way through, of being handled kindly by a woman who had not decided yet whether to be kind.

The sentence was this.

Nella piangeva dentro la macchina del caffè, in piedi, con il cappotto ancora addosso; non era una cosa che si potesse raccontare dopo.

Nella crying into the coffee machine, standing up, still in her coat; it was not a thing that could be told afterwards.

“Semicolon,” Elodie said, writing.

“In your text, by all means.”

She stopped writing. “Meaning what, in yours?”

“In mine it becomes a full stop. Spanish takes the semicolon badly. It reads as a man announcing that he has been to university.”

“It reads as the mark she used.”

“She used it in Italian, where it is a normal domestic object. In Spanish it is a piece of furniture nobody sits on.”

“Then sit on it,” Elodie said. “It’s load-bearing.”

“It’s a mark.”

“It is the whole event.” She put the pencil down in the groove, which I understood to be the equivalent of another woman standing up. “With a semicolon, the crying and the not-being-able-to-say-it are one thing happening at one time. She is inside the sentence while it is true. Put a full stop there and the crying finishes, and then a narrator arrives, some sensible woman with a clipboard, and tells us it could not be told afterwards. You have moved the whole paragraph two feet to the left.”

“I have punctuated it in the language I am being paid to punctuate it in.”

“You have made it tidier than she wrote it, which is exactly the thing everybody will do to her now that she can’t get up and stop them.”

“That is a large accusation for one mark.”

“It’s a small mark. That’s why it’s the one worth having the argument about.” She folded her arms. “I’m not angry. I’m annotating.”

“You are doing both at a speed I would call unusual.”

“‘Unusual’ is doing a lot of work there.”

“I chose it for that reason.”

The thing about arguing with Elodie is that she does not raise her voice, she raises her precision, and the temperature of a room goes up anyway. We went at that semicolon from every side either of us had. She quoted the rhythm of the clause back at me twice, in Italian, with the beats marked on the desk with two fingers, and she was right about the rhythm, and I knew she was right about the rhythm at roughly minute eleven and kept going for another eight minutes, because there was a version of that argument that ended with me saying you are right out loud in that room, and I could not find my way to it.

At the end she said: “Read it again with the full stop and tell me you can’t hear the difference.”

“I can hear the difference. I am telling you the difference costs less in Spanish than the awkwardness costs.”

“Costa meno,” she repeated, flat. “You’ve been doing contracts too long.”

“Somebody in this room has to be able to read a contract.”

Which was unfair, and landed, and I watched it land, and neither of us said anything for a moment.

I looked at my phone, which I had put face down on the desk at nine o’clock because I had noted the start time, the way I note start times.

“Nineteen minutes,” I said.

“What?”

“We have been at this for nineteen minutes. The semicolon. Nineteen.” I turned the phone round so she could see it, which I regretted immediately, because she laughed — one syllable, entirely against her will, with her hand over her mouth as if she could get it back in.

“Dio,” she said. “Nineteen minutes.”

“Twenty, now.”

“Don’t. Don’t put it in minutes, it’s humiliating.” She pushed her chair back and looked at the ceiling, still laughing in that annoyed way. “Six months of this. She knew. She sat in that chair and she pictured this exact morning and she thought it was funny.”

“She thought it was instructive.”

“She thought it was funny and she wrote ‘instructive’ in the codicil so it would hold up.”

I took the pastries out of the bag then and put them on the crossword, because I had noticed she had not had breakfast, and because I wanted something in my hands. She took one without looking at me and ate it over the page like a student, which is what she has done with every pastry she has ever been given in her life, and I looked at the top of her head for slightly too long and then went out onto the landing and rang Morag Reyburn.

“Mr Arrieta.”

“We have a problem that isn’t a legal problem and I would like to make it one.”

“Go on.”

“The codicil says the same pages. It doesn’t say who decides what the page says when we read it differently. We can produce two translations without agreeing, but we cannot agree about what the Italian is doing without a procedure. I would like a procedure.”

Morag made a sound that in a less expensive office would have been a laugh. “There is already a procedure. The schedule with the codicil. You each get one veto per chapter, not per sentence. She was very clear about the sentence part. I did wonder why.”

“Now you know.”

“Now I know.” Papers moved. “What are you proposing?”

“Alternating final cut. Where we can’t agree on what the source means — not on how it lands in her language or in mine, but on what it actually says — the call goes to one of us, and it alternates by chapter. Chapter one is hers, chapter two is mine, and so on. In writing. Signed by both of us and lodged with you, so that neither of us can decide in month four that we never agreed to it.”

“You could simply take turns without involving a solicitor.”

“We could not,” I said.

There was a pause with something friendly in it. “I’ll draft it as a memorandum this afternoon. It isn’t strictly necessary.”

“I’m aware.”

“Mr Arrieta, may I ask you something outside the file? You have given the first chapter to her.”

“Chapter one is the wife’s chapter,” I said. “It’s the right way round.”

I stood on the landing after she rang off and understood, with the mild distaste I reserve for seeing my own habits from the outside, that I had just spent nine minutes building a small machine whose only purpose was to make it unnecessary for either of us to say I would rather you decided this one. I have built a great many of those machines. There is a whole marriage of them, somewhere behind me, still running in an empty house.

Then I went back in and told her, and she read the terms twice and said, “Fine. Chapter one is mine. The semicolon stays,” and I said, “In your text,” and she said, “In her text,” and that was the first thing we settled properly.

Renzo Ferro came at half past two without ringing ahead, which was his right; it was his mother’s flat, and his key. He was thirty-four and had his mother’s forehead and none of her appetite for being liked, and he stood in the doorway of the study with a document box under one arm, looking at the two of us on either side of the desk his mother had built.

“You’ve moved the chair,” he said.

“The chair was at the wrong height,” I said. “I’ll put it back before we go.”

He came in. He looked at the page on the desk, upside down, the way anyone does, and he read enough of it to see which paragraph we were on, and something in his jaw changed.

“That’s the espresso machine.”

“It is,” Elodie said.

“She wrote that woman crying into an espresso machine on purpose.” He set the box down on the desk hard enough to rattle the pen jar. “It is undignified and it goes on too long and every single person who has ever read it has wanted to move it or shorten it or make her cry somewhere with better light. Don’t you dare fix that.”

Elodie did not move. “We spent twenty minutes this morning on the semicolon in that sentence,” she said. “Ask him. He timed it.”

“Nineteen,” I said.

Renzo looked between us. It is a strange thing, watching a man decide in real time whether he has walked into the room he had prepared for.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

“On the mark,” Elodie said. “Not the crying. Nobody is touching the crying.”

“Right.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’m going to read every page. Both languages. I’ve a colleague who can do the Spanish for me, so don’t think the Spanish is the quiet one.”

“I would be disappointed if you didn’t,” I said, and meant it, and he heard that I meant it, and disliked that slightly less than he had expected to.

At the door he stopped and said, without turning round, “She talked about you two constantly. It was extremely boring.” Then he went down the stone stair, fast, the way a man goes down stairs when he does not want to be followed.

The box on the desk had a strip of masking tape across the lid with her handwriting on it. Not a title. Not a date.

Le pagine con me dentro — the pages with me inside them.

Elodie put one hand flat on the lid and left it there, and neither of us opened it, and it sat between us for the rest of the afternoon while we finished the wife’s first paragraph in two languages, and I went down the twenty-two steps at seven with my coat over my arm knowing exactly what was in that box, because Morag had told us in her office a week ago.

Forty pages of a dead woman’s handwriting, addressed to us by our initials.