I saw the grass above the pebbles at the back of the beach, high, pulling in the last of the light. There were two white farmhouses in the distance but I didn’t care, because at this time, no one would see me. The low spring tide had been dragging the stretch of sand out further and further and now the space between the shore, where I stood, and the grass, appeared endless.
Walking along the edge of the sea I was waiting for night time, the way one might wait impatiently for a train.
Turning towards the grass, I made my way across a film of water, then passed pools and dips, no rocks, just hollows in the sand, with the sound of the shifting waves behind, and the breeze. I picked my way across the pebbles and went up to the high ground. I sank my body down like a block being lowered into cement, closed my eyes and willed the night to harden and set around me.
I first saw her in a blue wrap-around dress, patterned with little white horses, in the open corridor of the arts faculty of the University of Bergamo. She was passing through the shadows thrown from the stone columns of the colonnade around the gravel square. Light, shadow, light, shadow, light. She smiled at me. Her smile was sun-drenched, the light made her squint slightly and she looked across the stone flags to where I was sitting on a wall. She kept smiling and it grew bigger in each section of sun, out of the flash of each shadow, her beautiful lips opening, and her white teeth and tongue for a moment in the light.
The dress wrapped around her breasts tightly, clung to her waist and then fell down to her knees, swaying as she moved. A neat bow at the small of her back kept the whole thing together. She passed like that, as soft voices spilled out of the big open windows of the library, and she disappeared again like a song on a summer night.
She came up to me after class, two hands clinging to one side of her stiff green satchel, her bare feet in black sandals, her hips spreading underneath the skintight middle of that dress, and asked if I was English.
We stood for a long time trying to talk. I could barely focus on her for more than a few seconds without the trembling tenderness I had felt after she walked passed sinking into a sense of violence, of taking her, opening her and staying there. I had shuffled down from the wall and the smell of the old stone baked for months in the summer sunshine held us there like the promise of a half drunk bottle of wine between two new lovers.
It was the end of September and I had moved to the small town forty miles outside Milan to study for a year. At the beginning, in the evenings, we would walk along the old walls of the town, which sat on a hill. We walked into dusk, watching the plain start to twinkle and the air above it turn a shade of purple. We pulled words out of ourselves, the chucky blocks of a sentence, smoothened by the fading light and the hot air, and the knowledge that soon we would kiss.
She told me about her father, who she said was mad, and her mother, who was so generous, she had deleted herself.
‘Deleted?’
‘You, know cancelled out.’ She threw her hand forward from her throat, matching the air as it left her lips. ‘Cancelled out,’ she repeated. ‘She is full of everyone else.’
At the beginning our conversations had the habit, because of my bad Italian and her bad English, of hitting on the nub of things, almost accidentally. We didn’t have the words to speak around them, and in those first few months her mind was appearing to me as a figure being cut from stone.
I flew back to London as term finished before Christmas, but returned on Boxing Day so we could spend four days in Florence together. Late one night in Florence, we wandered back to our room through empty streets, tucked into each other, the cold moonlight resting on the slow flowing Arno behind us, walking in the sureness that we would fuck and lie together, loose and in love. It was as if the terror of anything beyond us, or after us was not there.
She said to me that night, do you think that love is to be forever alive in one moment? But that moment is left in a place, so later, someone else might walk through it and feel the same, but we are not there?
When the year finished in Bergamo, I returned to London to finish my degree and she stayed in Italy to finish hers. A year later, she flew to me, so we could be together.
During our year apart I visited her every month. On the first flight back out to see her, I stared at the laminated emergency instructions on the back of the airplane seat in front of me and decided that I would marry her. Loving her was buried in the curled cartoon in brace position. I needed to be written into her. Give her my name, put our names together somewhere so everyone could see them. That night we drove up to the little town, to our favourite place where they served cool beers in big oval glasses, and spoke, and kissed, and made plans for the next few days, plans which tumbled around us that weekend, as they did every month.
Until ten months ago I wouldn’t have been able to say what we did that year, month after month. I could say that the seasons sang from her skin under the strange light of the arrivals hall, but it was as if I had forgotten everything else, that the details were irrelevant. But since last June, I have been carving out the seconds. I have searched for every little thing that was part of our life together, resurrecting days and nights, obsessing over lost hours – the day of her cousin’s Holy Communion, her father’s efficient happy movements around the Sunday table, how she rolled her eyes and nodded when I told her she should slow down on the tiny roads of the town where we fell in love. And her body, the curl in the side of her mouth as she waited for me to finish saying something but wanted to kiss, her thighs, the inside of her thighs, the sacredness of easing her quietly onto the bed in her house on a cold November night, the air still smelling of her mother’s delicious casoncelli.
When she arrived in London I had been renting a studio apartment on the ground floor of a big white town house on Holland Road. A Croatian man in his late fifties rented the other room downstairs. I saw him with different women, always versions of each other. Heels, long coats, messy hair, small mouths, something secretarial, and I always thought they were there on some sort of official business. For a long time, I had presumed the room was a flat, or at least, similar to mine with a sofa, table, desk, and a mezzanine. But one Thursday morning, as I left, a woman was stepping out into the corridor from his room, the door hanging open, and I saw the unmade single bed, in the middle of the room with barely space to walk either side and the edge of the shower, just like ours. Hot, sex air crept out into the corridor. The man suddenly appeared, and we caught eyes before I had time to look away. He pursed his lips, nodded and made a theatrical gesture towards the woman to lead the way.
Now, lying in the darkness, with the sound of the waves, I often think of those papery secretarial women. Elena is gone, and they are still here.
We lived in that godforsaken apartment for eight months. I had a job working as a junior reporter on a local London paper and she had found work in a pub just down the road. The flat was too small for us. We shared the toilet with the Croatian and his women, and as summer came, the place was unbearably hot. Elena’s shifts started in late, just as my day in the office ended, so I would go and drink in the bar in the evenings to see her.
I knew she missed Italy, although she would say, how will we grow together if we don’t make space in ourselves, and parcel some things in the past?
But we were struggling in her uprootedness, and deep down, we knew somehow, we were going back to Italy, that she would be pregnant in Italy, near her mother and her sisters and the big green fields near her house. Her mother didn’t work and her father had a job in the local council in the village where they lived outside Bergamo. Both her parents had cried when she told them she was moving to England, and they had visited twice.
‘They love me, and they love you,’ she said, as we watched them shuffle towards security at Gatwick Airport.
Her mother made me feel important in a way that belonged to the Mediterranean. She hung on sentences as if all my plans, even just for the evening, were part of a great master plan and her daughter had been the missing link, now, thankfully slotted into place for a future that was certain and wonderful. She would fill my wine glass up at dinner, ignoring my refusals for more because she believed I would never get drunk.
On the last night she was alive Elena went for drinks alone, without me, because she was meeting people from work, and we had agreed, lying above the sheets on the mezzanine the night before, both slightly diagonal, our four feet entangled in a way that had become strangely satisfying because it was too hot to hold each other, that it would give her a chance to chat to some of the girls who were becoming her friends.
I came home from work that evening to find Elena standing at her rail of dresses choosing an outfit. I kissed her neck, and asked where her blue dress with the white flowers had gone. She hadn’t worn it since she had moved to England.
Her arms stopped on the hangers for a second. She raised her eyes to the wall above the rail without turning to me, and said, they are horses, they are white horses, perhaps they look like flowers to you.
I didn’t answer her, but said I’d leave her be to get ready and go get dinner. I never saw her again. Neither of us had wanted to spend the night without the other, I know that now. But the busy road outside and the millions of different voices pouring over the imaginary city walls, made us feel inclined to believe that separateness, an uncoupling sometimes, would give us more control over our lives. Elena wanted to feel powerful again, I sensed this and I knew that she still found no meaning in the details of things in London.
In the two photos from that night, she is wearing the blue dress with the white horses. It was June and warm, and in one she is standing on the edge of the group holding a glass, her bag hanging over her shoulder, head tilted almost onto the girl beside her, smiling, her big, reassuring, beautiful smile. In the other she is talking to a man, standing outside the bar, and they are both turning towards the camera. They were mid conversation – and it was taken at nine thirty. She left the pub at ten, alone, and early. She hadn’t text me all evening. I knew it was because of the dress, and somehow that little mistake captured the unease of our busy lives in London and in love.
In leaving Italy, she had left her perfect witnesses. Her mother and her sisters lived in the detail of her, and she in theirs.
I was willing her to come home early so we could make love and I could say sorry, and explain that that she filled me up and cancelled me out and sometimes that made me blind. That night as I waited for her I questioned how much longer I could feel this in love – we had been together for three years – and the feeling of tenderness and violence, the smell of the stones in the sun from our first meeting had crept under my skin, so that the intensity of it clung to me.
I wonder if she heard the commotion as a white van left the road on London Bridge, and swerved wildly into people as she pushed open the door of the bar. She must not have heard the cries or thuds of the bodies when she turned the corner out of Borough Market. I know now the men from the van ran towards the market, three of them, holding twelve inch knives and began to slice into the people as they came. One of those men fixated on her. She buckled onto the concrete as the blood came from her stomach and the chest - there where wounds on her arms and hands as she tried to stop the knife. And he silenced everything, every detail, every smile, every move, as simple as the way she slipped between the wall and a chair at her Sunday afternoon home in Italy.
The terror of that night when they took knives into the street has entered me. I am waiting for the feeling to crack, for a shard of light to break through, or the grace of white horses to thunder, like her smile in the sunlight. I am waiting for something old, ancient even, to answer the terror of having loved and lost her. The flight of a flock of birds thrashing around might relieve me for a moment, although last night I became jealous of the rocks on this coast, how fixed they were, how old, the sureness of the caresses of the lapping tide and I just felt worse for being so fragile. So, in searching, I have reached the sea, to lie on the grass where nothing matters but the promise that the light will fade and come again.