‘What are you doing?’ I ask, one evening, lying beneath him.
‘Measuring.’ His face is serious. His hand is his ruler. He has stretched his fingers out, thumb to little finger, he places it over my throat, my waist, my hips.
‘Your findings, Mr Prior?’
‘Your waist is the span of my hand.’ He strokes my legs all the way down to my feet. ‘I can fit your ankle in my hand.’
‘Your conclusions?’
‘You’re entirely captivating. You’re extraordinary. You’re beautiful. Everything about you is beautiful.’
I flinch.
‘What’s the matter?’ he says.
‘Don’t say that.’ I pull the sheets over me.
‘What?’
‘That everything about me is beautiful.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Mama used to say that to me.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Do you think about her? Because I think of her all the time.’
His face changes, surprised at the sudden turn in conversation, and then he sighs. He pulls on his boxers, his T-shirt, sits at the foot of the bed. Discussion about my mother inappropriate while we are both naked. ‘I think of her every day.’
‘What do you think?’
His shoulders slump. ‘I think about how long I waited for her by the pool. How I went to the room to check on her. The sound of the telephone.’ He puts his hands to his temples, presses. ‘It was hard to understand, the nurse only spoke Italian, but finally, I got it,Incidente,incidente, she kept saying. Later, I wondered if I hadn’t been so dense, if there hadn’t been traffic, if I got out and ran, would those seconds have made a difference? Would I have reached her before she—?’ His hands are over his mouth and I am sobbing, I asked him for his thoughts but now, I can’t bear to hear them.
‘Sorry, sorry—’
‘It’s my fault,’ I say, ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘If there are things you want to know, you should ask, I want you to ask.’ He grasps my forearm. I put my hand over his. ‘There are good memories too. I think of the first time I heard her play the violin.’
‘The Tchaikovsky.’
‘I’d never heard anyone play like that.’
‘She plays that for auditions. She chose that to impress you.’ Then, I stop. Because she did impress him and he impressed her,they’d still be together if not for the accident, not him and me. And then, I ask the question, the question I think about in the darkest part of the night while he sleeps beside me. ‘What would have happened if she’d lived? To us?’
‘There’s no point thinking like that.’
‘But I do. I think about that all the time. If she hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have happened. What does that mean? Did we want her to die?’ My nose is wet, I am crying, I keep trying to wipe my face clean but it is slick. ‘Sometimes, I hate myself, hate what we’re doing. Because it only happened because she died.’
He holds me then, tight, as if to still my heaving ribs, the shudders rippling through my shoulders. ‘Stop, my darling, stop, it’s not true,’ but I don’t know what he is denying: the bad part of myself; us; the undeniable sequence of events that have led us here. Perhaps he is just saying words to comfort a child, a rhyme, a lullaby.
‘I wish I wasn’t her daughter,’ I say into his shoulder.
‘I know.’
‘I wish I was someone else.’