‘May I just, you know, say goodbye to Roy? May I be with him for just five minutes, Henrietta?’
She does not reply. The coldness has spread to her arms and legs. It oozes over her breasts; it reaches for her feet. In blurred vision she sees the steep cool streets of the town, the laburnums and the blaze of clover in the landscape she ran away to.
‘I know it’s terrible for you, Henrietta.’
Sharon Tamm leaves the room to have her last five minutes. The blur in Henrietta’s vision is nothing now. She wonders if they have buried her dog somewhere.
‘Goodbye, Henrietta. He’s tons better, you know.’
She hears the hall door close as she heard it on the afternoon when the girl came to talk to her, and later when Roy left the house. It’s odd, she reflects, that because there has been a marriage and because she bears his name, she should be less free than the girl. Yet is not the life she discovered for herself much the same as finding someone else? Perhaps not.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, when she brings him a tray. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry about all this mess.’
He cries and is unable to cease. The tears fall on to the egg she has poached for him and into his cup of Bovril. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
Cocktails at Doney’s
‘You’ve forgotten me,’ were the first words Mrs Faraday spoke to him in the Albergo San Lorenzo. She was a tall, black-haired woman, wearing a rust-red suede coat cut in an Italian style. She smiled. She had white, even teeth, and the shade of her lipstick appeared subtly to match the colour of her coat. Her accent was American, her voice soft, with a trace of huskiness. She was thirty-five, perhaps thirty-seven, certainly not older. ‘We met a long time ago,’ she said, smiling a little more. ‘I don’t know why I never forget a face.’
She was married to a man who managed a business in some town in America he’d never heard of. She was a beautiful woman, but he could remember neither her nor her husband. Her name meant nothing to him and when she prompted him with the information about her husband’s business he could not remember any better. Her eyes were brown, domiinating her classic features.
‘Of course,’ he lied politely.
She laughed, clearly guessing it was a lie. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘hullo to you.’
It was after dinner, almost ten o’clock. They had a drink in the bar since it seemed the natural thing to do. She had to do with fashion; she was in Florence for the Pitti Donna; she always came in February.
‘It’s nice to see you again. The people at these trade shows can be tacky.’
‘Don’t you go to the museums as well? The churches?’
‘Of course.’
When he asked if her husband accompanied her on her excursions to Florence she explained that the museums, the churches, and the Pitti Donna would tire her husband immensely. He was not a man for Europe, preferring local race-tracks.
‘And your wife? Is she here with you?’
‘I’m actually not married.’
He wished he had not met Mrs Faraday. He didn’t care for being approached in this manner, and her condemnation of the people at the trade exhibitions she spoke of seemed out of place since they were, after all, the people of her business world. And that she was married to a man who preferred race-tracks to culture was hardly of interest to a stranger. Before their conversation ended he was certain they had not ever met before.
‘I have to say good-night,’ he said, rising when she finished her drink. ‘I tend to get up early.’
‘Why, so do I!’
‘Good-night, Mrs Faraday.’
In his bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking about nothing in particular. Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn’t want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.
He turned the looking-glass light out and got into bed. He read Our Mutual Friend and then lay for a moment in the darkness. He thought of Daphne and of Lucy – dark-haired, tiny Lucy who had said at first it didn’t matter, Daphne with her trusting eyes. He had blamed Daphne, not himself, and then had taken that back and asked to be forgiven; they were both of them to blame for the awful mistake of a marriage that should never have taken place, although later he had said that neither of them was, for how could they have guessed they were not suited in that way? It was with Lucy he had begun to know the truth; poor Lucy had suffered more.
He slept, and dreamed he was in Padua with a friend of another time, walking in the Botanical Gardens and explaining to his friend that the tourist guides he composed were short-lived in their usefulness because each reflected a city ephemerally caught. ‘You’re ashamed of your tourist guides,’ his friend of that time interrupted, Jeremy it was. ‘Why are the impotent so full of shame, my dear? Why is it?’ Then Rosie was in the dream and Jeremy was laughing, playfully, saying he’d been most amusingly led up the garden path. ‘He led me up it too, my God,’ Rosie cried out furiously. ‘All he could do was weep.’
Linger over the Giambologna birds in the Bargello, and the marble reliefs of Mino da Fiesole. But that’s enough for one day; you must return tomorrow.
He liked to lay down the law. He liked to take chances with the facts, and wait for letters of contradiction. At the height of the season there are twelve times as many strangers as natives in this dusty, littered city. Cascades of graffiti welcome them – the male sexual organ stylized to a Florentine simplicity, belligerent swastikas hammers and sickles in the streets of gentle Fra Angelico…
At lunchtime on the day after he had met her Mrs Faraday was in Doney’s with some other Americans. Seeing her in that smart setting, he was surprised that she stayed in the Albergo San Lorenzo rather than the Savoy or the Excelsior. The San Lorenzo’s grandeur all belonged to the past: the old hotel was threadbare now, its curtains creased, its telephones unresponsive. Not many Americans liked it.
‘Hi!’ she called across the restaurant, and smiled and waved a menu.
He nodded at her, not wishing to seem stand-offish. The people she was with were talking about the merchandise they had been inspecting at the Pitti Donna. Wisps of their conversation drifted from their table, references to profit margins and catching the imagination.
He ordered tagliatelle and the chef’s salad, and then looked through the Nazione. The body of the missing schoolgirl, Gabriella, had been found in a park in Florence. Youths who’d been terrorizing the neighbourhood of Santa Croce had been identified and arrested. Two German girls, hitchhiking in the south, had been made drunk and raped in a village shed. The Nazione suggested that Gabriella – a quiet girl – had by chance been a witness to drug-trafficking in the park.
‘I envy you your job,’ Mrs Faraday said, pausing at his table as he was finishing his tagliatelle. Her companions had gone on ahead of her. She smiled, as at an old friend, and then sat down. ‘I guess I want to lose those two.’
He offered her a glass of wine. She shook her head. ‘I’d love another cappuccino.’
The coffee was ordered. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the empty chair beside him. Mrs Faraday, as though she intended to stay a while, had hung her red suede coat over the back of the chair.
‘I envy you your job,’ she said again. ‘I’d love to travel all over.’
She was wearing pearls at her throat, above a black dress. Rings clustered her fingers, earrings made a jangling sound. Her nails were shaped and painted, her face as meticulously made up as it had been the night before.
‘Did you mind,’ she asked when the waiter had brought their coffee, ‘my wondering if you were married?’
He said he hadn’t minded.
‘Marriage is no great shakes.’
She lit a cigarette. She had only ever been married to the man she was married to now
. She had had one child, a daughter who had died after a week. She had not been able to have other children.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She looked at him closely, cigarette smoke curling between them. The tip of her tongue picked a shred of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. She said again that marriage was no great shakes. She added, as if to lend greater weight to this:
‘I lay awake last night thinking I’d like this city to devour me.’
He did not comment, not knowing what she meant. But quite without wishing to he couldn’t help thinking of this beautiful woman lying awake in her bedroom in the Albergo San Lorenzo. He imagined her staring into the darkness, the glow of her cigarette, the sound of her inhaling. She was looking for an affair, he supposed, and hoped she realized he wasn’t the man for that.
‘I wouldn’t mind living the balance of my life here. I like it better every year.’
‘Yes, it’s a remarkable city.’
‘There’s a place called the Palazzo Ricasoli where you can hire apartments. I’d settle there.’
‘I see.’
‘I could tell you a secret about the Palazzo Ricasoli.’
‘Mrs Faraday –’
‘I spent a naughty week there once.’
He drank some coffee in order to avoid speaking. He sighed without making a sound.
‘With a guy I met at the Pitti Donna. A countryman of yours. He came from somewhere called Horsham.’
‘I’ve never been to Horsham.’
‘Oh, my God, I’m embarrassing you!’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Gosh, I’m sorry! I really am! Please say it’s all right.’
‘I assure you, Mrs Faraday, I’m not easily shocked.’
‘I’m an awful shady lady embarrassing a nice Englishman! Please say you forgive me.’
‘There is absolutely nothing to forgive.’
‘It was a flop, if you want to know.’ She paused. ‘Say, what do you plan to write in your guidebook about Florence?’
‘Banalities mostly.’
‘Oh, come on!’
He shrugged.
‘I’ll tell you a nicer kind of secret. You have the cleverest face I’ve seen in years!’
Still he did not respond. She stubbed her cigarette out and immediately lit another. She took a map out of her handbag and unfolded it. She said:
‘Can you show me where Santo Spirito is?’
He pointed out the church and directed her to it, warning her against the motorists’ signs which pursued a roundabout one-way route.
‘You’re very kind.’ She smiled at him, lavishly exposing her dazzling, even teeth as if offering a reward for his help. ‘You’re a kind person,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’
He walked around the perimeter of the vast Cascine Park, past the fun-fair and the zoo and the race-track. It was pleasant in the February sunshine, the first green of spring colouring the twiggy hedges, birches delicate by the river. Lovers sprawled on the seats or in motor-cars, children carried balloons. Stalls sold meat and nuts, and Coca-Cola and 7-Up. Runners in training-suits jogged along the bicycle track. Ho fame a fat young man had scrawled on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of him, and slept while he waited for charity.
Rosie, when she’d been his friend, had said he wrote about Italian cities so that he could always be a stranger. Well, it was true, he thought in the Cascine Park, and in order to rid himself of a contemplation of his failed relationship with Rosie he allowed the beauty of Mrs Faraday again to invade his mind. Her beauty would have delighted him if her lipstick-stained cigarettes and her silly, repetitious chattering didn’t endlessly disfigure it. Her husband was a good man, she had explained, but a good man was not always what a woman wanted. And it had come to seem all of a piece that her daughter had lived for only a week, and all of a piece also that no other children had been born, since her marriage was not worthy of children. It was the Annunciations in Santo Spirito she wanted to see, she had explained, because she loved Annunciations.
‘Would it be wrong of me to invite you to dinner?’ She rose from a sofa in the hall of the Albergo San Lorenzo as soon as she saw him, making no effort to disguise the fact that she’d been waiting for him.’ ‘I’d really appreciate it if you’d accept.’
He wanted to reply that he would prefer to be left alone. He wanted to state firmly, once and for all, that he had never met her in the past, that she had no claims on him.
‘You choose somewhere,’ she commanded, with the arrogance of the beautiful.
In the restaurant she ate pasta without ceasing to talk, explaining to him that her boutique had been bought for her by her husband to keep her occupied and happy. It hadn’t worked, she said, implying that although her fashion shop had kept her busy it hadn’t brought her contentment. Her face, drained of all expression, was lovelier than he had so far seen it, so sad and fragile that it seemed not to belong to the voice that rattled on.
He looked away. The restaurant was decorated with modern paintings and was not completely full. A squat, elderly man sat on his own, conversing occasionally with waiters. A German couple spoke in whispers. Two men and a woman, talking rapidly in Italian, deplored the death of the school-girl, Gabriella.
‘It must have been extraordinary for the Virgin Mary,’ Mrs Faraday was saying. ‘One moment she’s reading a book and the next there’s a figure with wings swooping in on her.’ That only made sense, she suggested, when you thought of it as the Virgin’s dream. The angel was not really there, the Virgin herself was not really reading in such plush surroundings. ‘Later I guess she dreamed another angel came,’ Mrs Faraday continued, ‘to warn her of her death.’
He didn’t listen. The waiter brought them grilled salmon and salad, Mrs Faraday lit a cigarette. She said:
‘The guy I shacked up with in the Palazzo Ricasoli was no better than a gigolo. I guess I don’t know why I did that.’
He did not reply. She stubbed her cigarette out, appearing at last to notice that food had been placed in front of her. She asked him about the painters of the Florentine Renaissance, and the city’s aristocrats and patrons. She asked him why Savonarola had been burnt and he said Savonarola had made people feel afraid. She was silent for a moment, then leaned forward and put a hand on his arm.
‘Tell me more about yourself. Please.’
Her voice, eagerly insistent, irritated him more than before. He told her superficial things, about the other Italian cities for which he’d written guidebooks, about the hill towns of Tuscany, and the Cinque Terre. Because of his reticence she said when he ceased to speak:
‘I don’t entirely make you out.’ She added that he was nicer to talk to than anyone she could think of. She might be drunk; it was impossible to say.
‘My husband’s never heard of the Medicis nor any stuff like this. He’s never even heard of Masaccio, you appreciate that?’
‘Yes, you’ve made it clear the kind of man your husband is.’
‘I’ve ruined it, haven’t I, telling you about the Palazzo Ricasoli?’
‘Ruined what, Mrs Faraday?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
They sat for some time longer, finishing the wine and having coffee. Once she reached across the table and put her hand on one of his. She repeated what she had said before, that he was kind.
‘It’s late,’ he said.
‘I know, honey, I know. And you get up early.’
He paid the bill, although she protested that it was she who had invited him. She would insist on their having dinner together again so that she might have her turn. She took his arm on the street.
‘Will you come with me to Maiano one day?’
‘Maiano?’
‘It isn’t far. They say it’s lovely to walk at Maiano.’
‘I’m really rather occupied, you know.’
‘Oh, God, I’m bothering you! I’m being a nuisance! Forget Maiano. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m just trying to say, Mrs Faraday
, that I don’t think I can be much use to you.’
He was aware, to his embarrassment, that she was holding his hand. Her arm was entwined with his and the palms of their hands had somehow come together. Her fingers, playing with his now, kept time with her flattery.
‘You’ve got the politest voice I ever heard! Say you’ll meet me just once again? Just once? Cocktails tomorrow? Please.’
‘Look, Mrs Faraday –’
‘Say Doney’s at six. I’ll promise to say nothing if you like. We’ll listen to the music.’
Her palm was cool. A finger made a circular motion on one of his. Rosie had said he limped through life. In the end Jeremy had been sorry for him. Both of them were right; others had said worse. He was a crippled object of pity.
‘Well, all right.’
She thanked him in the Albergo San Lorenzo for listening to her, and for the dinner and the wine. ‘Every year I hope to meet someone nice in Florence,’ she said on the landing outside her bedroom, seeming to mean it. ‘This is the first time it has happened.’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then closed her door. In his looking-glass he examined the faint smear of lipstick and didn’t wipe it off. He woke in the night and lay there thinking about her, wondering if her lipstick was still on his cheek.
Waiting in Doney’s, he ordered a glass of chilled Orvieto wine. Someone on a tape, not Judy Garland, sang ‘Over the Rainbow’; later there was lightly played Strauss and some rhythms of the thirties. By seven o’clock Mrs Farady had not arrived. He left at a quarter to eight.
*
The next day he wandered through the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, thinking again about the beauty of Mrs Faraday. He had received no message from her, no note to explain or apologize for her absence in Doney’s. Had she simply forgotten? Or had someone better materialized? Some younger man she again hadn’t been able to resist, some guy who didn’t know any more about Masaccio than her good husband did? She was a woman who was always falling in love, which was what she called it, confusing love with sensuality. Was she, he wondered, what people referred to as a nymphomaniac? Was that what made her unhappy?