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‘Come into the living room,’ she says. ‘I have something to tell you.’
In the hearth, the embers have all but died out. Samantha throws a few balls of newspaper onto them, pushes them down with the fire iron, adds some twigs when the flames come. Not the way Peter would want her to light a fire, but Peter is not here, is he? She puts a small log on, then another. When the fire is going again, she sits top to tail on the sofa with Aisha and tells her about her last day with Professor Bridges.
She reiterates what Aisha and the others already know. She tells Aisha that she knew he was in trouble when he complained of terrible thirst on the way to the Mouth of Truth. She tells Aisha that this was because he’d drunk an entire litre of red wine at lunch.
‘But it’s also because …’ She sits up a little, coughs into her hand. ‘It’s because when he went to the loo in the restaurant, I emptied a large dose of Ecstasy powder into the carafe.’
Aisha’s brown eyes widen. ‘What? How?
‘In the hustle and bustle,’ Samantha tells her. ‘I mean, it was so noisy in there. I had the powder in this miniature shampoo bottle, a travel one, you know? And what with the waiters shouting to each other, the door to the restaurant kitchen being open, the chefs swearing and the pans clanging and God knows what … There was some crappy music playing through the speakers, the other diners were looking out onto the Piazza della Verità, or into each other’s eyes, or discussing the next sight on their agenda or whatever, so yeah, I just poured it in. I even had time to pick up the decanter and give the wine a good swill.’
‘You drugged him?’ Aisha’s eyes are round with what looks like wonder.
‘I’d been drugging him pretty much since I found out he was drugging me. Well, us.’
‘What?’ The incredulity on Aisha’s face is gratifying. It makes up for that awful moment when Samantha watched her run away down the riverbank, believing their friendship over.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The day you and Jenny told me, I thought, me too. I knew he was spiking my wine and that he had been all along. I wasn’t even surprised, just kind of depressed. And so I thought, if he could drug women to make them more affectionate, compliant, whatever, it was only fair to do the same to him. Marcia scored me some pills; I ground them up. It was easy. And he really was much more pleasant, for much more of the time.’ She smiles.
‘Oh my God. You never said.’
‘Well, no. And don’t you say anything either … ever.’
Aisha shakes her head. ‘Of course I won’t.’ She bites her lip, meets Samantha’s eye. ‘So … so did he really die of a heart attack?’
The subtext is deafening.
‘Yes,’ Samantha replies.
Aisha presses her mouth tight. When she speaks, it is a reverent whisper. ‘No, I know, but, you know, why marry him? Why organise a big secret surprise honeymoon?’
‘Did I kill him? Is that what you’re saying?’ Samantha shrugs. ‘Marcia told me some Ecstasy users take four or five pills a night. I wasn’t sure about the dosage. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wanted to keep him pleasant, but yes, I admit that when I tipped that powder into his wine, I wanted him to suffer. I saw the damage he’d done to all the women in his life. And I wanted to do him damage right back. I wanted to freak him out. I wanted to look into his eyes and see fear, make him understand how it felt to be powerless. I wanted to take the power back. And when I got home, I was going to file for divorce on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty. I wasn’t about to leave Emily destitute, Aisha. I needed the paperwork. So I needed him to believe in my warped truth for a change. I kept thinking about Lottie and others like her and thinking that men like him do this stuff all the time and that it’s the women who go underground, the women who hide away and become lonely and poor, and it’s the women who are silenced by shame. And I thought, what the hell, you know? That’s why I took him to the Mouth of Truth. I wanted him to know that I was on to him.’
Aisha nods.
‘But I didn’t know he was taking Viagra,’ Samantha adds.
‘But did you … want him dead?’
A different question. Samantha shakes her head. ‘He was a monster, a beautiful monster. He was ugly on the inside. He raped a child, ruined her physical and mental health and walked away without a care. The burden of shame was all hers, poor girl. He made you have a termination when you thought you were about to start a family. He was cheating on you with Jenny, and when you both dumped him, he panicked and took advantage of my naïvety and weakness to tie me down because, finally, he realised he needed security. He was cheating on me out of nothing more than habit, must have controlled and abused God only knows how many women over the years, all the while proclaiming his feminist credentials, his refusal to objectify, when in fact that was all he did. That was all he ever did, wasn’t it?’
Aisha nods but says nothing. She doesn’t need to.
‘So, to answer your question,’ Samantha says, ‘I spiked his wine. I threw the little plastic bottle into the Tiber when we walked over the bridge to the church, told him it was a message, a secret wish for our marriage. I knew I’d committed a crime against him. I didn’t intend to kill him but yes, maybe I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad that I looked into his eyes and saw fear – that was what I wanted. I like to think he took a good look into my eyes, saw his hideous reflection and it killed him.’ She exhales heavily. The words are shaping her thoughts as they fall. ‘Look, I’ve never done anything big in my life. It was about taking back power, not just for me but for you and Jenny and Lottie – for all of us. It wasn’t about him, Aish. It was about us.’
‘Yes.’ Aisha is looking at her intently. Telling her all this tonight could be a mistake, but not telling her means living with this loneliness for ever. And she has been so lonely, in her subterfuge and secrets. They all have. They have been behind a wall. And why should women, why should anyone, live behind walls?
‘I tell you what pissed me off more than anything else,’ she says as they begin to make a move back to bed. ‘What really did it for me in the end.’
Aisha leans in, the firelight flickering in her huge brown eyes. ‘What?’
‘The bloody hair dye.’
Forty
After Aisha has gone back to bed, Samantha returns to Peter’s study to turn off the lamp. The notepad is where she left it, the faint marking of words scrawled across the page. The glimmer of unease returns. She checks that Aisha has gone up, then takes a pencil from the pot – everything in its place and a place for everything – and sits down. Her heart is beating with a strange familiar presentiment, a one per cent of feeling she will from now on know better than to ignore. She runs the pencil lightly over the scribbles, the lead flat on its side. There are crossings-out … there are a lot of crossings-out, but what emerges is a draft of a pastiche of a poem she has seen before, in a hand she recognises absolutely. A familiar unfamiliar villanelle. She rubs the blunt edge across the looping indentations, her throat closing.
Do not go blindly into that bright light.
