A Separation(34)

But I only went into his computer weeks, months later, whereas the June issue of the London Review of Books I saw perhaps only a few days after his death, or rather, after I was informed of his death. By that point Isabella had arrived. I had called her from the police station, after I had seen Christopher’s body, laid out on a steel table, the entire thing covered with a sheet, including the face. This unnerved me yet further, although there was no reason why I should have expected the body to be arranged any differently, for the sheet to be drawn up to the shoulders for example, as if he were lying in bed, he looked as if he were sleeping.

He did not look as if he were sleeping. His face, when the police officer drew the sheet back, was fixed in the same expression as I had seen in the photographs—again, a trick of the imagination, which is always stupid and slow in such situations, I had thought his face would be different, look different, but it was exactly as in the photographs, the eyes askew, the mouth propped open. And yet the wound at the back of his head, with its black crust of blood, was larger and more open than I had expected, it seemed to be ongoing, as if it were continuing to cause distress, as if he were still experiencing pain, right there in front of me.

I turned away from the table. As he drew the sheet up again, the police officer said he assumed the body would be shipped back home rather than buried or cremated here in Greece. I nodded, although in truth I did not know, I had not the least idea what Christopher would have wanted, I could not believe he would have wanted anything at all. You will need to inform the embassy, the body will need to be embalmed, the sooner the better, the police officer said. There are procedures. I nodded again and said that as soon as Christopher’s mother arrived we could proceed, and he turned away, satisfied.

He did not ask why it required Isabella’s arrival, perhaps to him, this deference to the mother seemed only natural. At any rate, she arrived soon enough. Isabella and Mark took the first flight out of London, the very next morning. Isabella’s manner, when I called her from the police station, was strangely calm. She said, Oh no, and then was silent for so long that I thought she must have fainted. I said her name several times and then Mark took the phone and I had to say it again, Christopher has been found dead, he is dead. In the background, I could hear Isabella sobbing, a low and terrible sound. I pressed my hand to my mouth. There was a thud, as if she had collapsed to the ground. I closed my eyes. I’m going to have to call you back, Mark said, I will call you back.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I stood at the hotel gate as the car drove up, Mark and Isabella sitting frozen in the back. They must have instructed the driver to make good time, it was only a little past noon. When she got out of the car Isabella did not look at me but looked around her, at the road, then up at the hills and the sky, as if trying to understand what had drawn her son to this place. I watched her from the gate, one hand shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. The temperature was dropping by the day, I saw that Isabella and Mark were wearing light coats, they had clearly checked the weather forecast before packing, despite their distress. Nevertheless, the sun was still bright.

At first, Isabella seemed to look at the landscape around her with an expression of bemusement—the mystified expression with which a beautiful wife confronts the face of a vulgar mistress, the face of her betrayal—but gradually I realized she was looking not with wonder but with hatred, the same enmity the wife always comes to feel for the mistress. She would hate this place for the rest of her life, until the day she died. As I stepped forward with my hands outstretched—we embraced, but cautiously, as though we were both incalculably fragile—I understood that although she had always hated me, her hatred had now dissipated and found another object. I had taken him away from her but never completely, not like this.

Almost the first thing she said, once she had been shown to her room and the door had closed behind us (she had sent Mark out on a mission, obviously invented, to the local chemist, she claimed to be suffering from upset stomach, from nausea, motion sickness from the drive), was, Why did he come here? She was standing by the window, Kostas had put Isabella and Mark in a suite, although not the one that Christopher had occupied. I looked at her, I couldn’t remember the last time we had been alone with each other. She looked back at me, for a moment it was as if the primary relationship were between us, the men having died or been sent away. Perhaps now that was true.

I don’t know, I said. I didn’t find him in time, I was too late.

She shook her head, the muscles around her mouth tightened. It would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants.

I was stunned, I had never heard her use such vulgar language and I had never heard her speak about her son in such aggressive and critical terms. She spoke not as if he had died but as though he had merely run away, as if she would be giving him a lecture upon his eventual return, I saw that she was in a state of complete denial.

She stood by the window, she was staring out at the water with a fixed expression, a woman filled with rage, at the situation, at the place, at the fact of her son’s death, which she could not accept. At her son, who’d had the audacity to die on her, to put her in the unnatural position of outliving her only child, the nightmare of every mother. It was horrifying to look at her face, which had collapsed beneath the grief she was unable to directly express, I was entirely sympathetic to her predicament, and yet as she continued to speak, I wished she would stop.