The View From the Tower by Charles Lambert

to retrieve it.
    “I’m so sorry,” Helen says.
    Giacomo walks over and lifts Helen up from the chair to clasp her to him, a clumsy rather formal embrace. Yvonne strides to the door, aggrieved, then leaves the room. Helen resists the urge to push him away before easing herself from his grasp as gradually as she can. “I’m so sorry,” she says again.
    “Don’t be sorry. You need to cry,” Giacomo says.
    “Have you cried yet?” says Helen, not meaning to be cruel, although she realises as soon as she has spoken that what she is doing is measuring his loss against hers. “Did you cry when they told you?”
    He shakes his head. “I can’t believe he’s dead. I haven’t seen him for what, three years? Since Corsica that summer, when Stefania was so unhappy. That dreadful dinner, do you remember? Except in the papers, of course, unavoidably. On the news. And once or twice in corridors in Brussels. The last time was maybe six months ago, but he was with these people, I don’t know, the usual hangers on, ministry people, they weren’t my type. I should have spoken to him then.”
    “You weren’t to know,” says Helen. She reaches in her own bag for a tissue, hearing what she has just said, playing it back in her head. You weren’t to know. I wasn’t to know. We weren’t to know. These are the words they’re expected to use, words made for occasions like this. She wonders how many more times she’ll come out with them during the next few days. After crying so much, she feels curiously light, as though she could float off at any minute; light but without enough energy to walk unaided. She’d forgotten about Corsica.
    “He’d stopped to buy Stilton, you know, for this evening. For you, really, he remembered how much you liked it. I said I’d do it, but he loves running errands like that, it distracts him from his work. And I think it was a way of showing that he was happy you were coming to the house after all this time. He wanted to buy it himself. He was outside the shop when they shot him. I wonder where it is.”
    She looks at Giacomo, sitting on one of the hotel room’s single beds. Once again, she remembers Martin asking her if Giacomo might have known what Federico was doing that morning, and shivers at what this means. He is fiddling with his mobile now, the way they all do, men and children, the girls as bad as the boys. At first she thinks he’s sending a text to someone. But she can tell from the rhythm of his thumbs as they tap on the keys that he’s playing a game. The snake that eats itself. The mobile beeps. She waits for him to stop.
    “Where what is?”
    “The Stilton.” She stares down at his hands, large, strong, tufts of coarse hair between the knuckles; strong hands that have never, despite their strength, really worked. They are folded round the phone, which is small and metallic and looks like a toy. A rich man’s toy, because Giacomo will be rich by now, his books, his lecture tours will have seen to that. They are all rich, more or less. Only Federico has resisted – the trappings at least. “It must be somewhere. In a box. It’s probably an exhibit.”
    “I suppose it is.” Once remembered, she can’t stop thinking about it. She could so easily have gone, she had nothing else to do this morning. She could so easily have said, as he climbed into the car and picked up his papers, No, I’ll get the cheese. And he might have said, yes. And he would still be alive. Now she has something new to feel guilty about.
    “I’m sorry, Helen,” Giacomo says in a voice so low she barely hears him.
    “But why should you be sorry?” Is he talking about what he did to me this morning, she wonders.
    “You know what I mean,” he says. “I’m sorry, that’s all. For everything. For everything that’s happened. I loved him too, you know that. I know we’ve had problems recently, and in the past, but he was my oldest friend. My only friend, really. Apart from you.”
    To Giacomo