and made for the little bathroom where they kept their wine supplies. As soon as he opened the door a ripe heady odor from the upturned jerricans rolled past them. Almost tangible, it billowed down the passageway, and washed through the flat. “Keep back,” he said. “There’s glass all over the floor.”
There had been twenty-four bottles, in a cardboard box; even the box was ripped to shreds, and its remnants bobbed on the frothy tide from the jerricans, a scum of yeast and water and half-fermented fruit. Standing behind Andrew, she touched his elbow. “Imagine what it will do for the drains.”
But he was not going to laugh. “I wouldn’t have minded,” Andrew said. “If they’d drunk it. I wouldn’t have minded.”
“I think,” Frances said, “that we have been left a message.”
“Message? Rip off the
“Something like that.”
“I don’t think so,” Andrew said. “I think that all they are interested in, from the Council of Ministers to the common thieves, is just making sure that we rue the day we ever saw this bloody place.”
She looked up into his face. “I thought you said we had to stay at any price?”
“You don’t need to tell me what I said. I said I’ll see the project through. They said they wanted it done and I contracted to do it and I’m not going to be frightened off by the vagaries of my bloody imagination.” Andrew looked dangerous now—mutinous. She recognized his bull-in-china-shop face; as if he had been breathing in the alcohol, or had absorbed it through his skin. She felt afraid of him; of any impulses he might have. A few months ago, it might have made them laugh. She might have described them in her letters home, comically pitiable figures, wringing their hands in this pale pink yeasty sea. But now even above the stench of fermentation she smelled violence in the air, recognized the savage concentration with which the intruder had gone to work, smashing each bottle on the tiles, fragmenting it, and standing finally, one must suppose, with bleeding hands and feet, tidemarked with alcoholic foam.
Andrew laid his arm across her shoulders. “You know those cages,” he said, “in the terrorist trials in Italy, those glass cages they have for the defendants?”
“Yes, I’ve seen pictures of them.”
“No, you haven’t. You can’t take pictures of glass.”
“I’ve read about them.” Reports describe the cage; you believe that it is there; you see the prisoners, their foreheads laid against walls of air, their gestures cut short by invisible fetters.
“You have dozens of people crammed together month after month in those cages,” Andrew said. “The other year two terrorists had sex in the cage, and then nine months later when the trial was still going on the woman terrorist gave birth to twins.”
“Yes, I think I remember that.”
“I keep thinking about those terrorists, I suppose I must have a fellow-feeling with them. They have a kind of parody life inside those glass cages, and I feel it’s just like mine. And the months go by, and I feel I am being convicted of something.” He added calmly, “And that is what I mean, before you ask me, about the vagaries of my bloody imagination.”
She slipped away from his grasp. “I must clear up. I must clean up this mess.”
“I’ll do it. You sit down.”
She went into the living room, to the desk. Some of the drawers had been wrenched out. This had not alarmed them; they did not keep anything of importance there. “They’ve stolen our postage stamps,” she called, and Andrew’s voice came back, very practical now, very matter-of-fact:
“That’s about par for the course.”
One of the drawers had been upended on the carpet. She picked her diary out of the mess. She flicked over the leaves. It was untorn, unmarked. There were no greasy fingerprints on its pages, no smudges that had not been there before. If I were to put my life under scrutiny, she thought, this is where I would start. But she had stopped keeping the diary. The pages had been filled, the space had run out, and now it seemed that events must cease to occur. Could she find anything if she had the policeman’s aids, the magnifying glass, the test tube, the graphite powder that marked the carpets? She had laid the book against her face, as if she might find a scent of something; alien sweat, nitroglycerin, the metal smell of blood.
Daphne telephoned next day, to commiserate. “Still, you were wise not to involve the police,” she said. “They make everything ten times worse. And, as Eric said, you might have ended up in custody yourself. That’s the trouble with this place. Even if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you always feel as if you are.”
Frances said, “Can I borrow Hasan and the office car? The doctor rang me up, they want me to have some kind of tests.”
“I can recommend a gynecologist,” Daphne said swiftly.
“I don’t think that’s what I need.”
“Oh, I see. Nothing wrong, Frances, is there?”
“Probably not.” She regretted beginning the conversation. “Daphne, please don’t tell everybody. Don’t go spreading rumors that I’m ill.”
Daphne sounded startled. “Of course not. I can assure you, my dear, that whatever you chose to confide in me would go no further.”
Liar, Frances thought. “What about the car then?”
“There’s a tiny problem—it’s still at the garage, and when it comes back this man Fairfax is borrowing it. You’ll have to get Andrew to take a couple of hours off during the day.”
“That doesn’t sound a very good idea. About Fairfax, I mean. He’ll get lost. He’s never been here before. Someone should drive him around.”
