Free Snowstorms in a Hot Climate by Sarah Dunant Page A

dances and dates tempted others into alternative forms of learning, I went underground. Boys did not interest me. Or that was my story. So, I cut my long blond hair and became a scholar. But Elly never stopped pestering me. And her methods were robust. Once, when the blackness was particularly dense, she marched into my room and announced that according to a book she had just read I was either gay or intellectually overdeveloped. Did I fancy any of the fourth-formers? If not, I would just have to sit it out and wait for my body to catch up with my mind. We found it very funny at the time, although looking back, I see she wasn’t so far from the truth. Certainly things got worse before they got better. And even if she couldn’t always help, she knew how to handle me. There are some things you can’t repay. Now, thanks to her and the occasional man persistent enough to brave the scorn, I have come through. True, I still enjoy work more than sex. But then how much pleasure does Kim Basinger get from reading Anglo-Saxon poetry? I am not so much strange as unfashionable. Yes, I have found a way through. And now I would help Elly to do the same.
    I must have slept, because the next thing I remember was opening my eyes on a room more defined by light. I was coveredin sweat and in need of a drink. I unglued my eyes and pulled myself out of bed, my cotton nightdress sticking to my skin. Outside in the corridor I was halfway to the kitchen when something made me stop.
    Across the hall, through a half-open door, I glimpsed the living room, where a grainy dawn was creeping its way across the wood floor. At the other end of the room, one of the balcony doors was open. I remembered with an absolute clarity that the last thing Elly and I had done was to lock them, because it had occasioned a crack about New York paranoia reaching eight stories high. My stomach turned over. Don’t be foolish, Marla. There must be an explanation. Probably Elly, unable to sleep. I stepped forward with silent footfalls. On a chair I spotted a jacket, pale cotton, and a briefcase. Next to the briefcase a book, with half its cover showing. I registered a bold, black-and-white ink drawing of a hand holding a quill pen: firm powerful strokes like a Dürer woodcut. Stupid the details one’s brain records when it is concentrating hard on something else. Except that something rang a bell. I couldn’t connect what. One thing was clear. This was no burglar. In which case there was only one explanation. Lenny was home.
    My curiosity was enormous. To see him without being seen, watch him in his lair. I edged across the room, bare feet on rug. The floorboards did not give me away. When the balcony was in sight, I stopped. The man sitting out there was in oblique profile to me. He was tall, slender, and very fair, with long legs splayed out in front of him. He was wearing smart leather boots and designer trousers. The storm of hair was almost white. His face, had he turned fully, would have been clean and chiseled and beautiful. Mr. Magnificence himself. There was no doubt about it. The man on the balcony was the man on the plane.
    I stood transfixed, my heart beating so loudly that I was surprised it didn’t disturb him. When I felt more in control, Iturned and glided from the room. I needed no second glance at the book cover. I already knew that the artist was not Dürer but a fellow countryman who, centuries later, dabbled in the same art. The book was Günter Grass’s
Meeting at Telgte
, the novel he had been reading on the plane. What current obsession did this reflect? It took a sturdy mind indeed to find pleasures in the maze of the Thirty Years’ War.
    I sacrificed the glass of water to the cause of security. Back inside my room, I lay awake for what seemed like a small eternity, hearing Elly’s voice in my head. “His other affair he conducts in greater and greater secrecy.” Chicago on shop business? Among his many sins, Lenny was also a liar. What