A Separation(39)

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.