Mapping the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page A

authorities. No trains or buses. If she missed this plane it would be a nightmare: The flights were packed, it had been a stroke of luck to get space on this charter as it was. But if she took a taxi from here it would cost a fortune. She would have nowhere near enough Italian currency to cover it. She looked around for an exchange office.
    â€œPlease . . .”
    In her anxiety she had almost forgotten he was there.
    â€œYou must let me help. I have my car outside. The autostrada is quite fast and we can get there in one hour. Plenty of time, yes?”
    She shook her head. “It’s okay, I’ll take a taxi. But I have to change some money first.”
    She was already moving away, but he stepped into her path. “Signora. Please. This is my fault. I give you the wrong information and now you are in trouble because of me. Let me help. I live near Pisa. I go that way now. The airport, it is not far from my home. Please. Let me help you.”
    It wasn’t that she didn’t think of refusing. On the contrary, the advice she had already drilled into Lily—never accept anything from anyone you don’t know—she had taken instinctively. But there was another imperative at work here: the need, this time, to accept the kindness of strangers. After all, wasn’t that partly why she had come back, to rediscover some spontaneity in herself, some sense of the possibility of life? “Only connect.” Like many grand-tour teenagers she had first come to Italy with A-level E. M. Forster novels singing in her head, sporting his exhortation to life as a badge of romantic courage. Twenty years on, it might seem cheap to apply a literary aphorism to something as mundane as a lift to the airport. Nonetheless—
    â€œWell,” she said. “If you’re sure it isn’t out of your way . . .”

Away—Thursday P.M.
    T HE MESSAGE LIGHT was flashing at the bottom of the phone, a small foggy yellow button, on/off . . . on/off, like a shallow-water warning to sailors coming too close to the land. She had seen it from the moment she opened the door, but she had been waiting so long that now it was here she suddenly couldn’t bear to go near it. Instead she busied herself with last-minute packing. Even as she was in the bathroom gathering up her toothbrush and creams she could feel it pulsing on and off through the wall in between. It’s too late, she thought. You’ve left it too late. The spell is broken. I’m going home now. I’m going back without meeting you. It’s better for everyone this way.
    She picked up her bag and walked to the door. She still had plenty of time. The flight didn’t go till after seven. She could answer the message and still make it out of there. But somehow she knew that the temptation would be too great. She closed the door and walked down the corridor, the key clasped in a tight fist in her jacket pocket. The light would continue to flash as she took the lift downstairs to the desk, then out to the foyer and to the street to hail a taxi to the station. Soon after it would stop, as her checkout registered and the phone wiped itself clean in preparation for the next guest. The message would be lost. Gone. Over. No meeting. It was that simple.
    As she stood waiting for the lift, it seemed to her that her life had become like a puzzle from a children’s book: a figure—her—standing at the corner of the page with a set of different paths snaking out away from her, interweaving and overlapping until one emerged onto a cliff edge and a sheer drop, and the other to a green and pleasant land. Heidi has to take her grandfather’s flock up to the summer pastures. Which path should she choose to avoid disaster?
    The lift came. The doors opened. And closed again.
    She turned back along the corridor, her fist uncurling from the key.
    As the message activated in her ear she closed her eyes and listened as his