Sun at Midnight. Rosie Thomas
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was enormously fat, but she had a lovely face, with smooth pale skin and sad dark eyes. Her husband had left her and she was on the lookout for a replacement. Rooker greeted her without checking his progress up the stairs.
He rented the upper back half of the house. The windows faced straight out on to a steep rocky slope so there wasn’t much light, but in wintertime there wasn’t much light anywhere so this hardly mattered. He didn’t know where he would be when the summer finally did come, but it was unlikely to be here.
He hung up his coat and unlaced his boots. There was an armchair beside a small wood-burning stove, a bookcase, a table and a couple of chairs, and an alcove with a sink and a basic kitchen. In another alcove was a bed and a cupboard. The bathroom was out on the landing and Rooker shared it with the chef from one of the tourist restaurants, who rented the upstairs front.
‘It’s fine,’ he told Marta when she showed the place to him. And it was fine, once he had made her cart away all the religious pictures and lace tablecloths and wool-work cushions that filled it up. He wasn’t fussy about where he lived, so long as it didn’t take up too much of his attention.
He began to make a meal. There was the remainder of a bean and beef casserole that Marta had pressed on him, so he put the pan on an electric ring to heat it up. There was bread, and a block of strong cheese, and some smoked sausage. Rooker was just putting a plate on the table when he heard the unusual sound of someone ringing the downstairs bell. It would be a friend of Guillermo the chef’s, he thought. Guillermo did have the occasional night off work. Or maybe Marta had found a new boyfriend.
There were voices in the hallway, Marta’s and another. The caller was a woman.
Marta came puffing up the stairs and rapped on his door.
‘Rook? You got visitor,’ she called.
He looked around his room, instinctively checking for anything that might give away something of himself. But the place was almost bare, apart from clothes and food, and a few books on the shelves.
‘Rook?’ Marta repeated. Through the thin wood panels of the door he could hear her breathing, but no sound from the other woman, whoever she might be.
He opened the door. Marta’s bulk almost blocked the aperture.
‘Come up, honey,’ she called over her shoulder in her heavily accented American English. His caller wasn’t local, then.
Light, quick footsteps came up the stairs. Marta squeezed herself to one side and he saw that it was Edith.
‘Ede? Christ. What’re you doing here?’
She brought the smell of cold in with her. There was snow on her shoulders and her hair glittered with moisture. She tipped her head and her eyebrows lifted. ‘What kind of a welcome is that?’
‘What kind of arrival is this?’
Edith didn’t let her smile fade. He remembered how white her teeth always looked against her tawny skin. ‘A surprise.’
‘Damn right it is.’
She was carrying a bag. She let it drop now with a thump. Marta looked inquisitively from Rooker to Edith and back again.
Rooker sighed. ‘Okay. Come on in. Gracias, Marta.’
‘De nada.’ She was offended not to be introduced and further included in the unusual event of her back lodger having a visitor.
Edith hoisted her bag, skipped past her and nudged the door shut with her shoulder. She looked around the room, not missing a detail. ‘So this is home? It’s not all that homely, is it?’
‘It’s not home. It’s just where I live.’
After only two minutes Edith knew they had already got off on the wrong footing. Rooker felt her checking herself and trying a different approach.
‘It’s good to see you, Rook.’
She stroked her hair and settled it so it lay back over one shoulder. He took note, as she intended him to do, of how pretty she was and how small and fragile-seeming. Her feet and hands were as tiny as a child’s.
‘What are you doing in Ushuaia?’
She was still smiling at him. Her eyes danced. ‘You know what I’m doing here. And now that I am here, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’
He was trapped. He looked at the door and at his pan of stew on the electric ring. It was smoking, so he lifted it off. ‘All right, Edith. There’s whisky. Will that do?’
‘Sure.’ She unbuttoned her coat and hung it over the back of a chair, and kicked off her snowboots. She stood in front of the stove, rubbing her hands, then took the tumbler of scotch he handed to her. He poured himself a measure and that was the end of the bottle.
‘Here’s to you and me,’ she said softly and drank. He ignored the toast.
‘How did you get here?’
‘From Buenos Aires, how else? On this evening’s flight.’ The one he had seen coming in to land.
‘Edith, I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know how you found me…’
‘Frankie told me.’
‘She had no right to do that.’ Frankie was an old friend of Rooker’s. She was younger than he was and although he had known her for fifteen years they had never slept together. He liked that, it made her different. Sometimes he e-mailed her from the locutorio off the main street. Frances was married to a chiropractor she had met at a Jerry Garcia memorial concert, and now lived in New York State with him and their three children. It still surprised Rooker to think of Frances with children, but all the evidence was that she had put her wild days behind her and settled down to being a wife and mother. He liked getting her e-mails about what the kids were up to and the latest funny thing the baby had said. Ross, her husband, was dull but decent.
‘Well, she did.’
He kept his anger in check. Frankie had always liked Edith, out of all Rooker’s girlfriends. And Frankie had his postal address, because she had sent him a book on his birthday. It was The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It stood on the shelf behind him now. He had read some of it.
‘Rook?’ Edith breathed. She put her glass on the table and came to him, holding out her hands. When he didn’t take them she grasped the front of his shirt and lifted herself on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the mouth. She tasted of whisky.
‘Don’t do that,’ he ordered. He disentangled himself from her grasp and turned away. The room was too small, there was nowhere to get away from this.
‘I love you,’ Edith said, in a new jagged voice that was raw with accusation.
‘No, you don’t. You’ve just forgotten.’
He hadn’t forgotten. The last time he saw her was in Dallas. He had arrived in Dallas as a pilot for an air charter company but that job had stopped working even before it had started, so he was filling in on yet another building site. Edith had found work as a dancer. They had been living together, an arrangement that only lasted a few weeks this time, and they had gone out drinking one night.
Edith always set out to attract attention, particularly from men in bars, and that night was no exception. She was wearing a tiny skirt that showed her toffee-coloured thighs and a stretchy top that exposed most of her breasts. Before they left the apartment she was shimmying around in front of him, laughing too much and darting hard little glances at him from under her eyelashes. Rooker knew that even if he had loved her, even if he smothered her with enough admiration and affection to suffocate them both, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Edith. She was born to be dissatisfied and doomed always to want more than she could get. If she had him, she wanted other men as well, for reassurance. If she didn’t have him she wouldn’t stop wheedling and threatening and seducing until he gave way to her. They had already split