My Blue Peninsula by Maureen Freely

Author:Maureen Freely [Maureen Freely]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linen Press
Published: 2023-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

Risk

I did manage to make the necessary arrangements to return to Paris later that summer. And I stayed for the better part of a year, reading my way through Karine the Great’s archives, and by way of thanks, giving them some order.

Then, on the day of his inauguration, President Carter issued his amnesty, thus allowing Tallis to return to the US to complete his studies. I went back with him, but because my guardians were heading into a steeper decline by then, I did not return to my own studies for another two years. And it wasn’t until 1986 that I got to the end of them. I was lucky, though. My thesis on the Levantines in the age of Suleyman the Magnificent was picked up by a good publisher.

I doubt that would ever have happened, had Suna and I not kept up our lively back and forth over the intervening decade. She was a proper sociologist by now, and the questions she left in the margins of the drafts I sent her had been merciless. But they’d kept me awake, and forced me to better articulate the question at the heart of the enterprise: how had these ancestors of mine maintained their allegiance to France, their mother country, while serving the commercial interests of a foreign empire?

I was working on the proofs, that summer before you two were born. We were in Lugano, as usual, but the weather had been tricky, and that afternoon we had retreated to the sitting room that – though spacious – seemed cramped and stuffy after the terrace.

I was at one end of the long table, with my proofs. Tallis and Sinan were at the other end, engrossed in a game of Risk that was into its third day. My grandmother was next to me with her sketchpad, and it was not clear to me if she was attempting an abstract expression of her mood, or if she was using the clouds looming over the lake as her subject – if the inky whirlpool beneath those possible clouds could be my Uncle Teddy, taking his speedboat in ever tighter circles, and if the black log on the bottom right of each image might be William Wakefield, who had been standing at the edge of the terrace, watching and smoking, smoking and watching, since lunchtime.

My mother wafted through the room in a silken robe. She had her hair pinned up, presumably to save it from her lime-green face mask. ‘Where is that boy?’ she said. I pointed out to the lake.

‘Honestly!’ she said, as if she were truly exasperated. And I wondered if anyone else ever caught it, that undercoating of delight. I’d never known anyone so grateful to be married into money. I wondered if she pinched herself, every time she woke up.

She bounded prettily across the terrace to wave at her husband-in-name-only, as she liked to call him. ‘Teddy! Teddy! The masseuse is here, and she can’t wait forever!’

Teddy did his usual, accelerating towards the shore as if intending to crash into it.

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