Mapping the Edge Read Online Free PDF Page B

packed knowing that she was going to be away for a long time. Then I remembered that Patricia would have been here since, would have hoovered the floor, hung up the clothes, and generally cleared away the worst of the mess naturally associated with Anna’s lifestyle. I opened up the cupboards to reassure myself. A great crush of clothes burst out at me, bringing with them the unmistakable scent of her, leftover perfume and body smell mixed together. A person’s smell: it is such a powerful statement of them. I turned, almost expecting to find her standing behind me. But she wasn’t there.
    I went into her study next door. It was a mean little space, the famous “extra bedroom” of estate agents’ jargon, in this case not helped by all its furniture: a desk, a filing cabinet, a computer terminal, and everywhere paper and books. Not even Patricia would or could penetrate this jungle.
    I sat at the desk and switched on the light. If there was something to find it would surely be here somewhere. I sat back in the chair. On the notice board above the desk a group of photos was pinned at eye level. There was a picture of Lily in a playground, hands up above her head, caught in the split second of pure exhilaration before the descent down the slide. Then one of me looking younger and more serious with a baby,
the
baby, in my arms, and then Paul and an older Lily sitting opposite each other in some American fast-food diner, both in profile with their mouths open, teeth sunk into two gigantic hamburgers. The year before, Anna had done a freebie fly-drive travel piece for the paper, about Montana, and Paul had joined them on his way from L.A. and they had spent a week touring the Rockies. The last picture was of the three of them sitting on the bonnet of the car with the desert stretched out behind them, grinning into the lens in a delayed-action shot: happy family on vacation, seeing the sights, clocking up the miles, spending nights in motels where they slept three in the bed, curled around each other like the petals in the inside of a flower bud. Spot the difference between this and the perfect family. No sex please, the man’s gay. Well, why not? Why should the hand that rocks the cradle always be attached to the penis that helped put it there? As surrogate fathers go Paul had turned out to be better than many originals. And anyway, I know enough couples who hardly bother to have sex anymore.
    Just to prove the point, at the corner of the notice board, stuck at an angle as if it was only just clinging on, was a fading snapshot of Elsbeth and George in their garden in Yorkshire, the frost about to come in. They couldn’t have been more than sixty-five when the picture was taken, but you could already sense the bony guy from
The Seventh Seal
lying in wait for them behind the shrubbery. By that time she had already taken to finishing off his sentences for him. They were sewn so tight together you couldn’t get a breath between the stitches. Some might think it sweet. I thought it hell. But then I suppose I have a vested interest in not believing in happy families. He died the year after. As far as I could see it was his only strategy for getting away from her. To get her own back she followed him a year later. If she’d stuck it out a bit longer she would have seen her grandchild, though it occurred to me at the time that the lack of an identifiable father would probably have killed her anyway. Anna thought later that it was the loss of both parents that had made her want the child. That may be true, though I always felt it had more to do with Christopher and the affair from hell. But even within best friendships there are some places you learn to tread lightly. And once she’d made up her mind, the decision wasn’t something that one could challenge.
    I remember the day she told me. It was a Saturday morning and I was in the kitchen making my first cup of coffee. I was ten months into