Mapping the Edge Read Online Free PDF

voice scooped bits of her innards out. Then came an address. There was a notepad and pencil by the phone, but she made no move to use them. Forget this and it wasn’t meant to happen, she thought, with one last careless nod to fate.
    In the back of the taxi it was so hot that her skin stuck to the seat through the layer of linen. She hesitated for a moment when he asked her where she was going, then opened her mouth and heard the address sing out, clean and clear, word-perfect. When she inquired how far it was he told her it was in Fiesole, on the other side of the river. She looked at her watch. She would be cutting it fine to get to the airport in time. Maybe she’d have to take a taxi. He would have money. She would borrow from him and write him a check. She opened the window to let in some air, but it only served to funnel the heat back in. A few streets on they drove past the market where she had bargained for Lily’s wooden horse on that first morning. It seemed so long ago. Her fingers closed over the holdall on her lap.

Home—Saturday early A.M.
    P AUL’S FOOTSTEPS WENT up the stairs, then stopped next to Lily’s room above. She must have been asleep, because almost immediately he climbed the next flight. After a while I heard the toilet flush and then a door close.
    If I picked up the phone now might I hear him on the line to Michael? Anna says they keep night hours, regularly staying up till two or three. She says it’s only a matter of time till they move in together. I thought it might make her feel strange, seeing Paul enjoy domesticity with someone else, but she likes Michael, says he’s older than his years and that he doesn’t let Paul get away with stuff. She approves of him. So does Lily, apparently. It seems he has the secret of not trying too hard, and that he knows how to make her laugh. Which in my experience means that she has decided to let him. So does this mean Paul is a man with two families now? Probably.
    I sat and drank in the kitchen. Through the windows I could make out the shadows of the little garden; its patio stones, its borders, its colored climbing frame. It had been such a rubbish dump, a builder’s scrapyard to judge from all the crap we had moved out of it the weekend after she moved in. It had been summer then, too, though nowhere near as hot as now. She had had no money to hire help, so she called in friends; free beer and food and all the pickaxes you could wield. We had filled two skips. Lily was slung in the hammock nailed between the clothesline and the elder tree at the back. Every time she cried whoever was nearest rocked her to and fro. We ate lunch standing up, hunks of bread and cheese and salami. Paul said it looked like a bad Italian movie: sweat, sunshine, and the rich pleasure of working the land. It was one of those days that everyone there would remember, something about the way it summed up a generation and an age.
    Where and who were they now, all those people? Successful enough to have their own gardeners, no doubt. I had liked them well enough then, though they had been her friends rather than mine. Did she still see them? Did they exchange Christmas cards? She didn’t talk about them, or not that I could remember. Come to think of it she didn’t talk about anybody that much anymore, except for Lily of course, and Paul, and more recently Michael. Presumably I would find their numbers in her phone book if I needed them. At what point do you start checking with acquaintances rather than friends?
    I was beginning to hear the vodka talking, the telltale signs of maudlin creeping in, like reaching the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle. In Amsterdam it was nearly three o’clock in the morning and I would be a long time gone by now. Night shadows. I turned off the light and went upstairs.
    Her bedroom was unnervingly tidy, the bed made and the cover unrumpled. It looked almost planned: the room of someone who had