Kathryn Bromwich, the author of At the Edge of the Woods, is a writer and editor based in London. Outside of fiction, she covers music, film, TV, books, art and more. She is currently the commissioning editor of The Observer and her writing has appeared in Little White Lies, Dazed, Vice, Time Out and The Independent.
Her novel is an absolute stunner about a woman living in a cabin in the woods of the Italian Alps. Bromwich follows the narrator’s life with beautiful writing that pairs well with the stark and unsettling plot that unfolds.
At the Edge of the Woods is available now. You can read an excerpt from chapters 10 and 11 below.
“You should get a dog,” says Vincenzo one afternoon, striking a match to light a cigarette as he leans on the windowsill, gazing at the gray skies outside. He looks pale in the harsh mid-winter light, deep shadows under his eyes.
He is right, of course, but I resent the tone he has taken: proprietorial, masquerading as protective. It’s a tone I’ve heard many times in the past, though not from him.
I say nothing, so he turns around, looking at me. “It’s not right, you know.” He paces around the small room, spilling ash on the ceramic tiles. “You living alone out here. It’s dangerous.”
“The big bad wolves?” I ask, flatly.
“Wolves, yes—I know you’re not being serious, but they kill people in the woods here every year. Lightning, I don’t know. What if there’s a fire?”
“I’m not sure being in the village would make me burn any slower.”
I am being facetious, but I am aware of the dangers. It’s not that I haven’t thought of them before; I have evaluated the trade-off and made my decision accordingly.
“People in town talk about you,” he offers at last. “Men talk about you. I’ve heard them, joking about how you live out here, all alone.” He pauses. “Joking about the things they would do to you. I hate it.” If I weren’t so annoyed, I’d want to comfort him; he appears truly distraught.
“I didn’t realize you cared so much what people in town thought,” I say, and turn back to the book I’d been reading.
“And I didn’t realize you cared so little about what I think. Or about your own safety,” he mutters, grabbing his things and pulling the door shut behind him as he leaves. I know he didn’t mean it to sound like a threat, but I can’t shake a disquieting feeling for the rest of the day.
***
He brings me flowers; we make up. I promise him I’ll think about getting a dog. We go for long walks along quiet paths, away from prying eyes. He brings me a small wooden carving of a seabird made by his carpenter friend. We talk about our childhoods.
Then, a few weeks later, seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of dinner, he brings up my husband; another rumor that has made its way into his ear.
“Do you really want to have this conversation?” I ask.
“Yes,” he asserts. “I want to know who the woman I’m sleeping with is married to.” His nostrils flare slightly as he speaks, something I have never noticed before.
“What do you want to know?”
“His name. What he does. Is it true he’s some kind of nobleman?”
I let out a bitter laugh. “There is nothing noble about him. He was an awful man, in the distant past, and I’m never going to see him again.” I put my fork down, my body tense. “Look, I don’t want to talk about him. I’m here with you now.”
We change the subject, but Vincenzo is irritable for the rest of the night. Later I lie awake in bed, now too narrow for us both, unable to sleep until dawn starts to break. The next day, we quarrel again.
***
This time, he does not return for more than a month. At first I am furious with him, filled with an ugly, acrid hate that surprises me; I don’t sleep, I barely eat, I can’t focus on anything I read. The ferocity of the feeling dissipates after a few days, and is soon replaced by a gentle longing which sharpens until I am sick with regret. I start to dream about him, and when I wake I feel certain that he is about to walk in through the door, as if I could will him into returning with the intensity of my thoughts.
There is something so undignified about this state, veering wildly between anguish, fury and self-condemnation as I used to do in my youth, when I would excoriate myself and my actions with a cruel, insistent clarity. And yet part of me furtively regards these extremes of emotion as a tonic, an abrupt end to the amorphous numbness that had engulfed me for the best part of a decade. This feeling of loss, keen though it is, contains both pain and pleasure.
I go over each argument in my head a hundred times, trying to get to the bottom of why these issues caused us to disagree so vehemently; he was not, after all, being unreasonable. I conclude, as I am wont to do, that it is I who is in the wrong, that it is my misbehavior that is causing the rupture, that it is I who must capitulate. But I can see no solution; we both know that our arrangement is only possible because it is secluded from the world. I had been naive enough to hope that things could continue as they had been, day-to-day. But no matter what you do to keep them at bay, the past and the future have a way of closing in, of constricting the air out of the present moment.
***
I watch the clock, encased in its smooth cherry casket, as the minute hand finally clicks into place: midday. It rings twelve times and I shudder at its doleful tones, a sonorous clang that sounds like church. Today, though, it denotes freedom.
“You heard the bell,” I say. “Time to clear away your books.”
Enrico and Alberto pretend to fall onto the table, marionettes released from above. They emit a series of groans, a display they repeat at the end of every lesson and which invariably continues to amuse them. While their dedication to this joke is superior to any they exhibit toward the contents of the class, I admire the tenacity.
“Very funny,” I laugh, not insincerely. “But next time I expect all the biology homework to be completed—no excuses.” I ruffle the hair of the youngest, Alberto, whose head remains prostrated in front of him. Meanwhile, Enrico has disappeared from the room without tidying the desk, so I begin to pick up pencils and loose papers.
“Oh, leave it,” I turn to find Mrs Barbieri leaning on the doorway, watery eyes emerging from a face like a startled owl. “I’ll make them do it later, otherwise they’ll never learn.” Her voice is high but quiet, a resigned semi-whisper. A cream-collared olive dress encloses her throat, a row of pearly buttons running from chin to waist.
“Thank you,” I smile, and reach down to pick up my bag.
“Won’t you stop for a coffee?” She tilts her head to one side, sparrow-like now.
“Of course.” I know it’s code for the exchanging of my stipend in the kitchen, and an excuse to demonstrate her complicated new coffee-maker.
“Bye, Alberto. See you next time.”
“Bye, signora Mantovani.” He jumps up to give me a timid hug, then runs after his brother. The table now appears even more chaotic, the sole point in the fastidiously taupe room to contain dashes of red and blue and yellow, heaped together at incongruent angles. Thick-framed windows peer through from behind unyielding curtains, a suggestion of sky just visible above the roofs outside. Porcelain knick-knacks, white and gold, beam at me from every available surface: small dogs, piglets, farmers entwined mid-dance with crooked smiles and dots for eyes. A shudder passes through me, as though from a draft; for a second, my skin feels like ice.
I am glad to leave the sitting room behind for the corridor, a cool and calm oasis, until we enter the kitchen, suffused with the aroma of cauliflower boiling on the stove. “Are you sure you can’t stay for lunch?” inquires Mrs Barbieri, a necessary charade.
“No, really,” I demur. “That’s so kind of you to offer but I’ve got an appointment in town.” An unconvincing performance, I admit, but hopefully sufficient for the intended purpose.
She blinks at me several times, as if assessing the plausibility of my excuse. After a moment—and a soft “Ah!”—she turns her attention to the coffee. I sit at the table, perched as lightly on the edge of a chair as I can.
While the children have given up on the initial volley of impertinent questions about my life, their mother continues to attempt new ways of inveigling me to disclose personal details. “I really don’t know how you manage,” she begins, solicitude itself. “Up there in the woods. Especially in the winter.”
The kitchen maid busies herself with lunch preparations, looking warily on as the lady of the house struggles with the coffee-maker, a task she is intent on completing unassisted.
Mrs Barbieri fills the bottom half of the metal pot with water, then adds ground coffee to the filter, covering the counter with a generous sprinkle of dark powder in the process. She combines the two containers, then fits on the top half of the pot and positions the contraption onto the heat.
“It’s perfectly fine,” I assure her. “It’s only a small room, so it’s easy to keep warm. And there’s plenty of wood around to put in the stove.” I don’t go into how exactly the wood gets chopped, to spare her the mental image of me wielding an axe.
She gazes down at the coffee pot, cooing with concern. “Honestly, my dear,” she says, gazing into my eyes. “If there’s anything we can do, will you let us know?” She stands up straight, remembering who she is. “I know my husband would be more than happy to help.”
The coffee has taken on a distinctly burned smell, so she frowns at it for a minute until a thin trickle of steam starts to rise from a hole in the side of the machine. “There we go,” she exclaims. The final step, seemingly her favorite, is picking up the whole thing with an oven mitt and turning it upside down, which she achieves with aplomb. “Ecco fatto!” she cries, triumphant.
As the water percolates, she excuses herself from the room and goes to find her purse. I hear fumbling, then knocking, and then the sound of a muted conversation through the wall. The maid and I smile at each other, the cauliflower and charred coffee mingling potently in the air. For a second it looks like she might be about to say something, then thinks better of it.
After another minute, the Barbieris surface together from the corridor, the husband bearing a brown leather wallet.
“How are you today, signora Mantovani,” he booms, reaching out a large hand, which feels warm and clammy as I shake it. Behind him his wife is arranging the coffee cups, which clink in their saucers as she pours the murky liquid.
“Not too bad, thank you. Enrico and Alberto are making great progress in their work,” I half-lie.
“That’s good to hear.” His expressive eyebrows do a little dance over his sad, friendly eyes. He reaches into his wallet to rifle through some bills. “Thank you for all you’re doing for them.” He passes me the money, then clasps my hands in his. “If there’s anything we can do,” he adds, his wife’s words echoing in his like a shadow. “We’d love to help.”
***
Later that day, I feel on edge. I have an early dinner, polenta with foraged mushrooms, and add a few pieces of wood to the stove. It’s a drizzly, dismal evening, a forceful wind whistling outside, spattering drops of rain onto the windows. I stuff a blanket along the bottom of the door in an attempt to keep the air out, but sharp blasts creep in from unseen crevices.
At one point I think I hear something unusual, so I get up and look outside the window. I have recently come to regard the bushes and trees that surround the house with some suspicion: while I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary, I am convinced I have heard things—footsteps, branches creaking in an unsettling way. Could there really be men lurking in the shadows there? I think about the Barbieris’ concern, about what Vincenzo told me. I try to imagine the things that have been said about me in town; after I have come up with a few possibilities, I try to forget them.
Once I’ve finished the meal, I wash the plates and pans and go over my diaries from the day, in which I had been making notes about leaf patterns. I start to shiver, a feeling of cold coming over me despite the heat from the stove. I add a bit more wood and watch it burn, entranced by the dancing orange glow enveloping the logs. My shivering intensifies, and as I stand up I realize I am dizzy. I wrap myself in a coat and huddle on the bed; my mind feels torpid, lost in impenetrable fog.
I long for Vincenzo’s touch, his warm body, his gentle teasing. His visits are rarer now; we have stopped arguing, but there is less joy in our encounters. The last few times he has come by have been late at night, usually after he has been drinking; once he was so inebriated I turned him away. In any case, tonight it is too early for him to appear at my doorstep; his shift won’t end for hours.
My eyes feel like they’re burning, and a wave of fatigue washes over me. I set about changing into my nightclothes but find I don’t have the energy to do so: no matter, my day clothes feel cocoon-like, so I wrap them tighter around my body. I put out the light, lie down on the bed and close my eyes.
I drift in and out of sleep, dreaming about the beach. I am at my parents’ house, although it isn’t quite, and I can hear seagulls squawking. I go out of the front door and instead of the usual patio I find that I’m back in my primary school, its dilapidated classrooms eerily empty. I step outside and hear birds all around, though none whose call I can identify. I walk past the sports ground and find myself drawn to the forbidden enclosure at the back, where children used to claim they had seen a statue of the Madonna weeping blood. As I approach, I peer through the trees; I can just about see a shape starting to materialize when I hear a loud crack that startles me awake.