Chapter 9
The Wrong Name
He didn't remember crossing the room.
Afterward, when he tried to piece it together for Dr. Sorel, and for a policewoman with tired eyes, and in the long hours of the nights that followed, he found a gap between the step he took beside the lectern and the moment he stood at the edge of table nine. It was empty. He had no memory of the waiters, the palms, the faces turning. He knew only that at some point the floor had been a long way off, and then it was under his shoes. The white cloth was in front of him, the lemon tree was brushing his shoulder with its glossy leaves, and the woman in the green dress had risen, a little unsteadily, to her feet.
She stood straight, with her hand on the back of her chair.
She was shorter than he'd expected. That was the first thing he noticed, in the one second he allowed himself to notice anything: a quarter-inch, no more, a matter of the slope of the shoulders. And she was thinner. And in her hair, near the temple, which in the lamplight had looked so exactly dark brown, there was a single thread of white that he knew had not been there at the funeral.
The funeral, he thought. The word went through him slowly, like a splinter working its way out.
"Isabel," he said.
It came out as a whisper. It was the word he had said into pillows and ceilings and the high echoing air of a flat for six months, and it fell into the Orangery with a small soft sound, like a coin dropped on carpet. The man in the velvet jacket stopped talking. The old lady in lilac turned her head. At the next table a fork was laid down.
The woman said nothing. Her face had gone quite white.
"Isabel." He heard his voice shake. "It's me."
"I'm sorry," she said.
It was a low, clear, slightly husky voice, with a trace of something northern in the vowels. It wasn't hers, and it was hers. He stood absolutely still while the sound of it went through him like a current through water, because it was the right voice played on the wrong instrument, a violin made from a different shelf of the same wood. It was close. It was so close that he heard in it, for an instant, how she might have sounded if she'd grown up somewhere else.
"I'm sorry," said the woman again, more carefully. "I think you've mistaken me for someone."
"Do you remember me?"
"I don't—" She drew in a breath. He saw her hand on the chair-back tighten until the knuckles stood out like pale stones. "No. I'm afraid not. I'm so sorry. I don't think we've met."
"It's Callum."
"I don't know anyone called Callum."
"You do." He took a step nearer. He didn't know he was doing it. "Isa, it's Callum. It's Cal. I've been—" He stopped. He heard what he was about to say, and it was absurd, and the absurdity of it hung in the warm air like smoke. I've been looking for you. "Everyone said you were dead."
There was a small sound at his right shoulder. It was a gasp, the kind a person makes when a dish falls, and he didn't turn to see who had made it.
The woman in green had closed her eyes.
For a moment, with the faint pulse beating in the hollow of her throat and her lashes dark against her cheek, she looked so completely like Isabel asleep that he swayed on his feet. Then she opened her eyes, and they were frightened and clear and not his wife's at all. They were a lighter gray than Isabel's. Or they were the same, and the fear had changed them. He couldn't tell. He had never seen those eyes afraid. Isabel had been angry in front of him, and tired, and grieving, but never once afraid of him. With a slow cold drop in his stomach he realized this was what was making him doubt his own senses: the fear. It was the one expression she had never had.
"My name," the woman said, with great clearness, the way you speak to a child or a dog, "is Nora Albright."
He stared at her.
"Nora," said the woman. "Albright. I live in Carrow. I teach at a drama school and I do voice work. I'm here tonight because I'm helping the Society with the dinner. I'm so sorry for whoever you've lost." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word and recovered. "But I'm not her. I really am not."
"Mr. Wray?"
Sir Gilbert Pownall had arrived at his elbow, huge and pink, one hand held out in a gesture that was half greeting and half restraint. His other hand was on Callum's sleeve. He was smiling, but the smile had set, and his small blue eyes had gone round and worried.
"Is everything quite all right? Mr. Wray? Miss Albright is one of our, she's helping with the arrangements, you know. She's—"
"Her eyebrow," said Callum.
He said it before he knew he would. He was looking at the woman's face, the long dark level brows, the left one in particular, a fine dark arc, perfectly smooth. His whole attention had gone to it. He could feel it narrowing round that one small place like a lens.
"Her eyebrow, I'm sorry, what?"
"There was a scar." He was speaking to no one, in a flat, quiet voice. "In the left one. Here. About a quarter of an inch. It went right through the hair. She fell off a wall when she was nine, in her father's garden, and hit a flowerpot." He raised his hand and didn't touch his own face. "You could see it when she was angry. It went white."
The woman's hand went to her eyebrow.
She did it without knowing. Her fingertips touched it lightly and came away, and she looked at them, and then at him, with an expression he couldn't read. It might have been confusion. It might have been something else. It crossed her face and was gone.
"I don't have a scar," she said.
"No."
"I'm sorry."
"No." His voice was thin and steady. "You're not her."
It was the strangest feeling he had ever had. He had said it with perfect calm. He had found the place on the canvas where the picture didn't quite agree with the original. A quarter-inch of white. A small careful carelessness. The painter's own mistake, which a forger would have left out. The knowledge went into him not as relief, not as grief, but as a kind of dizziness, because in the same moment he understood that it proved nothing. It proved only that the woman in front of him had no mark. A missing mark could be a plain fact, or an accident, or a tube of makeup. It didn't explain why he couldn't take his eyes off her face.
A copy is always more careful than the original, he had told a hundred students.
Look for the carelessness. That's where the person is.
And what he saw, across the shining cloth, in the lamplight, was that she was looking at him now exactly the way Isabel used to when she was about to tell him something she was afraid of. A quick glance to the left. A lifted chin. The tip of the tongue touching the corner of the mouth.
"Please," said Nora Albright, in a low rapid voice no one else could hear. "Please. Stop looking at me like that."
There was a silence, and he realized it had spread.
The whole middle of the Orangery had stopped. A man with a tray stood holding it in the air. Two women had turned in their chairs. On the stage the trio, which had played bravely on through the first minute, faltered and ended, and the cellist set down his bow with an awkward clatter. Beyond the lemon tree the lamps shone on a ring of curious faces, a pink one, a gray one, an old painted one, all turned toward him with the same polite, hungry interest. He saw himself in the glass wall behind them, a tall gaunt man in a dark suit standing too close to a woman with his hand lifted in the air.
He lowered it.
You don't cross the street, said Dr. Sorel's dry voice, from far away.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
It was a ridiculous thing to say. It was the only phrase he had. He felt it leave his mouth like a stone, and heard it fall, and saw the woman in front of him flinch.
"I beg your pardon," said Callum again, to Sir Gilbert, to the room. "I've made a mistake. I'm so sorry. I took her for someone. A friend." He swallowed. "It was the light."
"My dear fellow." Sir Gilbert's voice was loud and hearty and on the edge of cracking. "Of course. Of course, of course. These things happen. Margaret! Margaret, get Mr. Wray a brandy."
"I don't need—"
"A brandy. Sit down, old man. You've been on your feet all evening. It's the heat. It's very hot in here, I always say so, I've said it for twenty years." He was steering Callum, firmly and kindly, by the elbow. Callum went. He felt the room close behind him like water. As he passed the end of table nine he turned his head once and looked back over his shoulder.
The woman hadn't moved.
She stood where she had stood, in the shade of the lemon tree, her hand on the back of the chair. The man in velvet had half risen and was saying something kind. She wasn't listening. She was looking after Callum with her lips a little parted, and in her face, in the lamplit gloom, was an expression he turned over in his mind for the whole of that night and for many nights afterward, and couldn't name.
It wasn't fear. It wasn't anger. It wasn't even the cool, embarrassed puzzlement of a stranger approached at dinner.
It was recognition.
It lasted no more than half a second. Then she looked down, picked her napkin up from the floor, folded it in four, and laid it on the tablecloth with a slow, steady, careful hand.
And she sat, and picked up her glass of water, and didn't look at him again.
He drank the brandy.
He drank it in the corridor outside the Orangery, in a stiff gilt chair under a portrait of a Victorian lady with a fan. The doors to the dining room were shut behind him, and the murmur of the dinner was starting up again, uncertain at first, then louder, a rising confused tide of talk. Margaret Pownall had brought the glass. She was a small kind woman in a purple dress, and she hadn't said a word. She put the glass in his hand and sat on the next chair, upright, with her bag on her knees, and for some time they sat there in silence like two people in a waiting room.
"I lost my husband's brother," she said at last, to the portrait. "Years ago. In a boating accident. I used to see him in the bank. The same hat."
"I'm sorry."
"I thought I'd gone mad. Gilbert said it was quite natural." She patted his knee, absently, twice. "It does stop. They say it stops."
"Does it?"
"I'm afraid I don't know. I only say what they say." She stood up and smoothed her dress. "I'm going to tell Gilbert you've gone to lie down, and that the speech was lovely, and that no one is to say a word. You go to your room. You have a good sleep. In the morning it'll all be quite different."
She went in. The doors sighed and shut.
He sat a while longer in the corridor under the painted lady, the empty glass between his hands.
Nora Albright, he thought.
He turned it over. It was an ordinary name. It had an ordinary, northern, practical sound, two plain words, like something sold in a shop. He said it aloud, once, softly, and listened to it come back off the paneled walls. Nora Albright. He was sure he had heard it before. He couldn't think where. It sat at the back of his mind with a faint familiar weight, like a coat he had put on in a dream.
He got to his feet. He walked down the corridor to the lift and pressed the button and stood waiting with his back to the brass door, facing the long mirror on the opposite wall. In it a tall, tired man in a dark suit looked back at him with a face that wasn't quite steady.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he did what she had taught him. He turned and put his forehead against the cool brass and shut his eyes, and didn't look at the other one, behind the first, going all the way down.