Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

The room altered before Tooly, its occupants assuming the forms they exhibited when first she’d encountered them: young, cocky, vulnerable. They were drunk tonight, capable of viewing only themselves in blurred magnification. Listening, nodding, laughing, she had two epiphanies, and couldn’t decide if they were contradictory: that she could never belong to this milieu, which was beyond her understanding and experience; and that she could master all these people.

GRAFFITI BLOTTED OUT the train window, so she had to peer through scrawl to view the outskirts of Rome gliding past. The express to the coast picked up pace through the sun-bleached Lazio countryside, past thirsty vineyards, camper vans in empty fields, ragged horses in minuscule paddocks. Every few minutes, litter increased on the tracks, climaxing at the next station.

At Anzio, she lugged her bag off the train and crossed an empty boulevard, following a cobbled lane that descended toward the sea. The vacation apartments were shuttered, summer high season yet to arrive. She strode through a ghost town.

The building lobby was cool marble. A breeze wafted through open windows in the stairwell. In a week, there would be the cacophony of family chatter here, stairs gritty from beach sand, slapped with wet sandals. At a third-floor door, she knocked. From the other side, a voice responded in English—“Yes, yes, coming! Don’t leave!”—as if Tooly might otherwise spin on her heels and run.

Merely opening the door, Sarah burst forth in a gush of personality, posing three questions and hearing none of the answers. Her warmth was evident, as were the physical changes since their last encounter, her features assuming an increasingly manly configuration as she neared her mid-fifties, despite evident attempts to cling to earlier decades, with dyed strawberry-blond hair down to her waist, a Mickey Mouse halter top, and pendulous earrings that stretched her lobes, like two hands waiting to drop their luggage.

“Let me give you a kiss,” Sarah said.

“Let me come in first,” Tooly replied.

“How are you? Make your cheek available — I’ll give you a peck. Stuff all over my hands.” She held up her fingers, sticky with dough. “I must warn you, the place is a disaster area.” Yet the apartment — airy, with turquoise tiles and French windows — seemed perfectly neat. “Come,” Sarah said, turning with difficulty toward the kitchen, her right leg treading awkwardly.

“You all right?”

“It’s just my hip,” Sarah said, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb. “Have I really not seen you since my car accident? That’s ten years ago now. They can’t seem to fix me. Did you notice right away?”

“Only because I’ve known you so long.”

“Hmm,” Sarah responded, staring a little too long. “Liar.”

Tooly deposited her bag by the door, taking a moment to gather herself for more Sarah, who insisted on immediately giving a tour. Guest bedrooms radiated off the living room, everything furnished in a seaside theme — a glass vase filled with dried starfish and cockleshells, a menagerie of ships in bottles, the walls nautical blue, decorated with childish paintings of red yachts on green seas under pink skies.

Sarah flicked a switch that sent the terrace shutters grinding upward, midday dawning in the salon. “Damn this thing,” she said of the slow-rising contraption, and wrenched apart the French doors — such a hungry, insatiable welcome. “Go out, look.”

The view gave onto other holiday apartments much like this one, with gaps between the structures offering glimpses of the Mediterranean, waves cresting soundlessly.

“Come see what I’ve made. Or should I keep it a surprise? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face? You’re not happy to be here. I can tell.”

“I flew halfway around the world to be here.”

“I have been so so so so so so so looking forward to you coming,” she said, grabbing Tooly’s hand. “To show you where I live — the town, too. There’s this restaurant we can try on the waterfront — I’ve been wanting to go for ages. The best in Anzio, and I never get to try it. Only thing is that we have to be gone from the apartment by next weekend.”

“Sarah, I’m not staying.” Coming here was worth it, Tooly reminded herself. Just be patient — you rushed Sarah at your peril. Survive a few hours, get what’s needed, then get out. “I have a hotel in Rome booked for tonight.”

“I don’t charge for rooms here. Pick whichever you want. Which do you like? Are you hungry? How was the flight?” Sarah kept posing questions like this, never allowing for answers: where Tooly lived now, what she did, who that man was who had phoned. It was Fogg who had found her, having dialed various scratched-out numbers in Tooly’s old phone book before achieving the desired combination of a working line and a respondent who didn’t hang up. This led to another number, then a third. Several calls later, he reached Sarah.

“Had a lovely Welsh accent,” she said. “And he’s your guy?”

“No, no. Just works for me.”

“Sounded yummy. I picture him as a rugged man of few words.”

“Yes, Fogg is exactly like that.”

Although Sarah passed to other questions, Tooly answered those that had been asked and forgotten, describing the bookshop and life in her village. Caergenog never felt as if it were her village when she was there, but very much so when she was away. She mentioned her classes: drawing badly and playing music worse. (Sarah laughed — people often responded that way when Tooly mentioned the ukulele.) She hurried her answers, since Sarah exuded such impatience, fidgeting, longing to speak again, only to ask something else.

“And you cut your hair short. Why?”

Tooly mussed it. “Easier to deal with.”

“Bit severe, no? Is that the impression you want men to have?” Sarah nibbled orange polish off a chipped fingernail, her lashes lowered, baring violet eyelids like two little plums. She looked up. “You aren’t at all interested in what I cooked?”

They entered the kitchen, which smelled of lemon zest, whipped cream, vanilla extract. “Can I see?” Tooly asked.

“No! Don’t look in the oven!”

Tooly made as if to dodge around and peek.

“Don’t!” Sarah said, giggling, unable to spin because of her bad hip, instead grabbing Tooly’s shirt. “I’ve made tons of everything, so I want you to overeat. Promise you will. Time?”

“It’s about noon.”

“Been up since dawn.”

“What for?”

“Well, you were coming.” She opened the fridge, unloaded plate after plate. “And potato salad, too. You remember who absolutely adored potatoes?”

“I do.” She wished Sarah hadn’t alluded to Humphrey, which punctured the illusion of travel, that places you left just stopped in your absence.

Sarah continued, “I bought fish. Sogliola . What’s that called in English? I never remember fish names. Anyway, it’s the most expensive they had, so I got two. Look, each has both eyes on the same side of its head.” She unfolded the waxed paper to display two soles.

“Four eyes, staring at us.”

“Did I show you my new glasses yet?” Sarah disappeared into her bedroom and returned holding spectacles. “Unattractive, aren’t they.”

“Can’t tell if you don’t put them on.”

Sarah did so.

“They look fine.”

“The same as Sophia Loren wears,” Sarah noted, gaining confidence. “The saleswoman told me that. Must admit, they do make everything clearer.”

“That’s often a benefit.”

“Try them on.”

Tooly obliged.

“I hate you — you look beautiful. I’ll never be able to wear them now.” Sarah valued looks above all other human traits, perhaps because she’d chanced into good ones, a corruption more dangerous than riches, given that the body’s wealth always runs out. Her wearisome preoccupation had led Tooly to vow never to care about presentation. But it hadn’t ended up quite so. She did have preferences: a distaste for tended beauty; a fondness for scruffiness, for the sort of men Sarah would have considered unkempt peons; and a strident neglect of her own, admittedly ordinary, endowments.