A Separation

9.

Was that why, in the end, I did not tell Isabella and Mark that Christopher and I had separated—because of her question, concealed as a statement—he died loved—and because of the guilt, the obvious guilt of the living, which does not necessarily fade with time as promised? Even as early as that first visit to the police station, I already knew that I would not tell Isabella, that the moment to tell her would come and go, and I would not speak.

After I identified the body and was told I was free to go, when I stepped out of the police station, Stefano was waiting. The officer had ordered a car to take me back to the hotel. Stefano ran to open the car door, his face growing flushed, as if at the sight of me. When I reached the car he stopped and then gripped my hand in both of his, murmuring some words of condolence that I barely heard, perhaps I heard about your husband or Such terrible news, finally he lowered his head and said only that he was very sorry.

I nodded, I saw that he was in a strange position, caught between genuine sympathy—we were not friends, we had only spent a few hours together, and yet he was essentially empathetic, too human not to be able to imagine what I might be feeling—and some emotion that was more compromised, an expression of relief if not triumph. I did not yet suspect Stefano of greeting Christopher’s death with happiness, I believed him to be a sensitive man, and the contemplation of death in anything but the abstract is difficult even for those who are not terribly sensitive.

And yet it was a solution of sorts, even in my stunned state I was able to see this, perhaps I even went so far as to think, At least someone will have benefited from this, there were upsides and downsides to everything, even the most extraordinary and unhappy events. I sat in the back of the car, I felt at once that Stefano was nervous, he did not know what to say, how to behave around the recently bereaved, unlike his great-aunt, he had no experience in the matter. I don’t know what to say, I am shocked, he said.

I nodded, there was nothing to say in response to his comment, mostly I wished that he would stop talking. But he didn’t. I happened to drive by the place where they found his body, he continued, I was working, the man I was driving was in a hurry, that road is the fastest route between the two villages. As he spoke, I covered my face with my hands. I had a headache, my face was hot. I don’t know where the body was found, I said, they didn’t tell me.

I didn’t realize it was your husband, he hastened to add. The road was blocked and there was a police car, but I didn’t see the body—unbidden, the image rose up, the legs under the tarp, the feet askew, he continued speaking—later I found out who it was, it was a shock, I had driven him a couple of times when he needed a car, he had been in the village for almost a month.

I lowered my hands. It was a moment of strange confirmation, I tried to remember what Stefano had said about Christopher—almost nothing, only that he knew I had been waiting for him. Certainly he had not said that Christopher had been a customer, that he had sat in the back of his car, like I had, as I was doing at that very moment. Still, hadn’t I imagined Christopher riding in Stefano’s car, occupying the space alongside me, the possible synchronicity merely unsettling? Now that Christopher was dead, the link between him and this man suddenly seemed more urgent, unwieldy with possible meaning.

Had Stefano driven Christopher before discovering that he had slept with Maria, or after, or both? Perhaps Christopher and Maria had arranged an inland tryst upon Christopher’s return from Cape Tenaro—a strange location, but not impossible, a walk in the countryside after a drive—and Stefano had followed Maria there, seen evidence of the errant couple together, an enraging sight. And then, once Maria had reluctantly returned home, he might have leapt from the shadows to attack the man who had so carelessly upended his life—people lost their heads, there was some question as to whether it had been a blow designed to kill.

Stefano did not seem aware that he had said anything amiss. How many times had he driven him, I wanted to ask, and when most recently? Perhaps he had even picked up Christopher—Christopher, newly returned from the embrace of the unnamed woman in Cape Tenaro and already in search of another—outside the local bus station, although Christopher would never have taken the bus, the scenario was impossible. Stefano now looked up into the rearview mirror, he had felt that I was watching him.

I looked away. Perhaps Christopher had forgotten Stefano’s name, or perhaps he had remembered and greeted him at the impossible bus station, having been reminded by Maria, she might have mentioned Stefano in a misguided attempt to make Christopher jealous, Christopher who, in my experience, did not get jealous. Perhaps Christopher had even telephoned him—a business card, passed along on an earlier journey—they might have made conversation as they drove, perhaps Christopher had told Stefano details of his trip, his excursion, what were to be his final days, about which none of us knew anything.

Stefano was looking at the road, he had long since fallen silent. This vision—or was fantasy the more honest word, I hardly knew—had left me winded, it suddenly seemed a mere indulgence of the imagination. If Stefano was guilty of this crime, of killing a man, would he have said to me—the widow, the person who should have been most concerned—that he had driven Christopher at all, would he have knit their two histories yet closer? Or perhaps it had been a nervous response, they say that the guilty sometimes wish to be apprehended.

He sat in the front of the car, suddenly an unknown quantity, a physical mass of potentialities. I sensed that he was a man capable of violence, but in itself that is nothing, most men are, and most women too. There was something terrible about falsely accusing a man of murder, even in the imagination. It was an act of speculation that contaminated everything, once seeded, doubt is almost impossible to dispel, I knew that already from my relationship with Christopher, the marriage had died at the hand of my imagination. Still, I could not help myself. I leaned forward and asked, When did you drive Christopher?

Early in his stay, only a couple times. He didn’t use me again, I don’t know why.

He replied promptly, his voice entirely natural, matter-of-fact. He spoke like a man who had nothing to hide and he said nothing further, he must have thought, The woman is in a state of shock, best to leave her alone, there is nothing to be said. I stared at the back of his neck, at his hands on the wheel, again I wondered what he was capable of and then I felt a wave of unguarded emotion. Whatever he did or did not do, his life had been derailed by Christopher’s arrival. I again felt—it was impossible to deny, I recognized it at once—sympathy for the man. The same mechanism of destruction had operated upon my own life, it was something that we shared. I was silent, neither of us said anything further, until our safe arrival at the hotel.

Two mornings later, the day after Isabella and Mark’s arrival, I met Isabella for breakfast. When I arrived, she was seated at a table on the far edge of the terrace, one with unimpeded views of the water. Her back was to me, her body was rigid, she looked like a statue or wood carving, entirely immobile, and although she must have been tired—when she turned, I saw that there were lines around her eyes and mouth, that her delicate face was puffed with strain—she also looked ageless, mummified by the force of her personality.

I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.

After a long moment, she replied—No, you didn’t, or It doesn’t matter—and then slowly turned to face the table. I sat down across from her and ordered a coffee, I saw that her cup was already empty. The waiter asked if she would like another coffee. She nodded, without making eye contact. Only once the waiter had gone did she raise her head and look at me.

I want to apologize for my behavior yesterday. I should never have said those things about Christopher. Mark was very angry with me when I told him.

For a brief moment there was a ghost of coquetry in her manner, as if she were inviting me to imagine the domestic argument between them, the dinner theater of her feminine deference to his masculine authority—Mark was not, in my experience, any kind of a scold—a brief instant in which she forgot her sorrow and was amused.

Another moment and the mirth faded. She frowned, folding her hands in her lap. Her manner was careful, clearly she wished to rectify the impression created by the passions she had expressed the previous day, and about which she was now apparently so contrite.

They aren’t true. And in any case you obviously knew nothing about them.

She spoke with deliberation, nonetheless I was aware that her words did not make much sense, these things that were not true and about which I did not know (how could I have known about them, if they were not true, what would there have been to know about? Or did she only mean that I did not have the false suspicions, had not heard the false rumors?). She looked tired, no doubt she had not slept very well. I looked away.

Let’s not talk about that.

Isabella and Mark also had things to hide, I was not the only one. How unforgivable it would have been, if I had not known. I did not see how I could say to her that her declarations had been no more than the confirmation of what I already knew, what I had willed myself not to know for many years, until it was no longer sustainable or believable even to myself. There were arguments to be made—that monogamy is unnatural, it almost certainly is, but then a good many people manage it or something close to it, at the very least they try. Had Christopher also tried? It was possible, or at least it wasn’t impossible—but it was no longer the time to make those arguments. That had passed.

Isabella did not, in any event, look as though she felt particularly guilty, her contrition was neither a sincere nor a lasting emotion. The waiter brought our breakfast—a large tray covered in toast and orange juice and poached eggs and bacon for Isabella, who ate with startling appetite. I thought her distress might have overcome her appetite but like so many English people she had an excellent and unflagging constitution.

I sat opposite her as she consumed what would be considered a large meal under any circumstances and a positively enormous one given the present situation, her strong teeth crunching through the toast, bacon and eggs. She wiped delicately—the pretense of delicacy after such a display of appetite was absurd, but it was in character, both the pretense and the delicacy—at her lips and then lowered her napkin to the table.

How quickly do you think they will make an arrest?

I was startled by the question. She had not hitherto brought up the criminal investigation, or even the fact that her son had not simply died but been killed, in fact murdered, and there was a hard brightness to her voice that made her seem even more brittle. Usually people have only one unspeakable fact to contend with in these situations, namely the fact of death, but in this case there was the added unspeakable: the violent nature of this death, this killing, this murder.

I don’t know.

What did they say at the police station about the investigation?

I realized then that I had neglected to ask the police chief about the investigation, not even a single question. It was inexplicable, a telling omission, for which I could not account, certainly not to Isabella. How quickly do you think they will make an arrest? I thought again of Stefano, who had reason to hate Christopher and who had driven him, a couple times by his own account. Isabella would be seeking not only justice but vengeance, it is always the mothers who are the most bloodthirsty, and Isabella would expect me, Christopher’s wife, to desire the same.

They weren’t able to tell me very much, I said. The investigation is ongoing.

I understand that. But they must have suspects.

No doubt.

But nothing they could share with you.

I was there to identify the body.

She drew a sharp breath and leaned back into her chair, I reached a hand out to steady her. Her arm was more fragile than I expected, Isabella wore dramatic and voluminous sleeves, you never saw the limbs themselves, only the beautiful sleeves. It took me by surprise, I could have snapped her elbow between my fingers. After a moment, she reached her hand up and gripped mine.

Of course, my dear. That must have been horrid.

Horrid meant nothing as a word, but her voice was faint, I had been right, it would have been too much to ask this woman, who was older than she seemed, to look at Christopher’s body. I was now the one to feel contrition, I had invoked Christopher’s body in order to avert confrontation, this was despicable. Isabella cleared her throat and withdrew her hand, a cue for me to remove my own hand, which I did.

Mark is useful in these situations, any man would do better than a woman—this is Greece, after all. They’re terribly sexist.

She had become solicitous, even maternal. My evident distress, she presumed at the memory of Christopher’s body, had in some way reassured her, as if it were a relief not to dwell on her own turbulent emotions.

We both loved him, she said. That will always be something that we share, no matter what happens.

This was a very personal thing to say, but she was not looking at me as she said it, she was looking over my shoulder, as if watching someone approach. I turned—I thought it might be Mark, or perhaps the waiter—but the terrace was empty, she was staring at nothing. She then turned back to the water, still wearing the same abstracted expression she had worn when proclaiming our shared love for Christopher, as if it were the expression she considered appropriate for talking about love, love and Christopher.

We will need to decide what to do with the body.

I did not want to use the word body and yet I did not know what else to say—it would have been morbid to refer to the corpse as Christopher, it was assuredly not Christopher, but instead an object of decaying flesh and bone, an object of no small horror, it. And yet there was a coarseness to my statement that I did not like, if there had been euphemisms at my disposal I would have happily used them, all of them, as many as required. Isabella nodded.

It—she accepted this dehumanizing word, she reverted to it as I had—will be sent back to London, of course. I cannot imagine cremating Christopher here, much less burying him, what would be the purpose? This is not a place that had any particular meaning to him. He just happened to be here when he was killed. I have no intention of ever returning to this place.

We will need to go to the police station. There will be some formalities.

She frowned.

I think we should send Mark. He can deal with that. Like I said, the Greeks are terribly sexist.

At that moment, Mark finally appeared on the terrace. He was a large and rather impressive man, who took care of his appearance, even now he was dressed like a typical Englishman abroad, in light-colored linens and a straw hat, as if he were mainly on holiday and incidentally collecting the body of his son. Only upon closer examination—as he made his way across the terrace and toward our table—did the grief become visible in his face, and I had a vision of Mark, moving through their apartment in Eaton Square, mechanically packing his bag for a visit he could not have imagined, much less foreseen, one day earlier.

The practicalities of the task would have been a comfort to him, I knew Mark well enough to say that. He would have checked the temperature in Gerolimenas on his computer, he wouldn’t have known the place offhand, he would have had to look it up on a map. Then, he would have taken out his suitcase and placed it on the bed before picking out his shirts and trousers and jackets, enough for as long as a week, because he did not know, at that point, exactly what awaited him in Greece.

Despite Mark’s generally patient nature, I thought the difference in their manner of grieving might easily open up a chasm between the couple, I could imagine his response to Isabella’s grief, he might have thought or even said to himself, Anyone would think from her behavior that Christopher was her child alone. And his mind might have returned to an old and lingering doubt: there was no particular likeness between Mark and Christopher, who looked entirely like Isabella, as if he had sprung from her womb without interference from any third party.

The matter raised certain possibilities, Christopher and even Mark had once said as much, and I remembered thinking it was lucky for Isabella that there hadn’t been anything like paternity tests in those days. Not that Mark would have subjected himself to the indignity of scientific evidence—and Mark had always loved Christopher, this was obvious at first glance. The situation was evidently passable, although Mark might not have come to this position immediately, there might have been a lengthy period during which he had considered leaving Isabella, however inconceivable such a thing might appear now.

But even as he had reconciled himself to the life he shared with Isabella—who had only a brief spate of fidelity that lasted until Christopher was about five, that is to say, of an age to notice—I thought surely the possibility had continued to haunt him, just as it had haunted Christopher, the only infidelity that mattered being the one that may or may not have produced the son. He would not have looked for signs of a current liaison, a betrayal in the present tense, but for remnants of an affair long buried, whose possible evidence lived and breathed and grew before his eyes. For years he would have waited for the phone call, the appearance at the door of a man whose face would finally confirm Christopher’s errant paternity, another man suddenly visible in his son’s features, the stamp of a face that, once seen, could never be unseen again. A man who would then—what? What would Mark have feared?

Perhaps simply that he would be crowded out, as Isabella had crowded him out many times before, as she was doing even now. But that was assuming, assuming the speculation was true. And we would not know, Isabella would never tell, unless she were to make a deathbed confession—whereas there had been no deathbed for Christopher, he had never known for certain, death had taken him, taken all of us, by surprise. I imagined Mark, struck by another wave of unbearable grief, standing in the darkened apartment. In the end there was nothing in the world, he might have thought, so thin, so foolish, as infidelity.

But none of this could be confirmed or even seen on Mark’s face as he made his way across the terrace to the table, his straw hat on his head—he looked merely tired, out of sorts, in mild bad humor. I rose to greet him and he patted me on the shoulder, his manner friendly but absentminded, before sitting down next to Isabella.

We’ve eaten already, I’m afraid, she said.

It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry.

Well, do order something. You need to keep your strength up.

He ignored her but perused the menu with a grumpy expression, no, Christopher’s death had not caused the fissures in their relationship to heal or even temporarily conceal themselves. Over the years I had seen that they had an alarming capacity to be rude to each other, even when they were with others, it must have reached extreme levels when they were alone. He put down the menu and signaled to the waiter, who promptly appeared, Mark had that effect on most people, although not on Isabella, she sniffed and turned her face back to the sea.

I’ve ordered a taxi to take us to the police station, Mark said, once the waiter had gone. We’ll need to make arrangements.

I don’t want to go, darling, Isabella said. Surely there’s no need.

He stared at her for a long moment, as if making some internal calculation, then shook his head and said, Fine. He turned to me. Will you come? Or shall I go alone. I’m happy to go alone.

From across the table, I saw that he had buttoned his shirt up incorrectly, so that the fabric puckered in the middle of the shirt’s placket, an unusual slip in a man so fastidious about his appearance, it was an indication of how distraught he was, he could hardly have looked in the mirror before leaving his room. I was embarrassed, it was as if the man had thrown his arms about my neck and commenced weeping. Mark nodded to the waiter as he brought him his coffee, laid out a little jug of warm milk and a bowl of sugar.

I’ll go with you to the station, I said.

He looked up, startled.

Fine, he said. Good. Thank you.

The pucker gaped even wider as he leaned forward to drink his coffee, holding the cup in both hands. He had large and rather beautiful hands, fine-boned but still masculine, hands that were not in fact unlike Christopher’s, I thought. Isabella took no notice of Mark’s hands, I supposed she’d had a lifetime to notice them.

What will you do while we are gone? Mark asked her.

She shrugged and then gave a little gasp, there is a great deal to arrange, she seemed to indicate, and no doubt this was true, I had already told her, when it became apparent that she wished to take control of the funeral arrangements, that she should feel free to do so. She had appearances to maintain in London, whereas I had none. And she had patted my hand again and said that she thought it best, I was too overwhelmed to take on such a task and besides, I didn’t know the people to contact, it was much easier if she did it.

I’m older than you, she had said, I’m afraid I’ve had recent experience in organizing such things.

And she had paused, perhaps remembering friends, family, recently deceased, the phone call informing you of the bad news, perhaps it was sometimes secondhand—a hushed do you remember so and so, an obituary in the newspaper—in any case, death was all around you at a certain age. Even just an actor you vaguely remembered from the movies, two years younger than you at the time of death according to the newspaper article. However, you would never expect for your own son to die. She had been looking the wrong way, the death she had been watching for had come from behind.

You must get them to release the body, Isabella was saying to Mark. As quickly as possible.

I imagine they’ll release the body when they are ready to release the body, he replied. Have they conducted the autopsy? There was a head wound, Mark said.

Stop! Isabella said, and she covered her ears in a gesture that was childish and somehow offensive, it was hardly a time for such theatrics. But she was right to stop her ears, once she was told the particulars of Christopher’s death, there was the danger that this would become the overriding thing, not just of his death, but of his life. Everything that came before—her memories of him as a child, his wit and exuberance, his charm, even as a child he had been able to charm her—all that would fade, it would pale against the incontrovertible finality of the wound to his skull, the wordless violence that silenced everything else.

As quickly as possible, she repeated, lowering her hands from her head. And we’ll get him back to England. One of the worst things about this whole—she waved her hand through the air, indicating the breakfast table, the terrace, the sea and the sky—situation is the fact that his body is lying in a strange police station in rural Greece. It will be better, I will feel better, once we have him safely home.

Safely home, and then what? But that was not a question they could understand, for Isabella and Mark the course they would follow was clearly demarcated, painful as it was, grief had a familiar path, it was easy to believe in the specificity of one’s grief but in the end it was a universal condition, there was nothing unique about sorrow. Isabella and Mark would return home with their son’s body and they would mourn him, his unnatural death and his too brief life. But what would I do? How and who—husband, ex-husband, lover, deceiver—would I be grieving?