He imagined her with some man she’d picked up. He imagined her, satisfied because of the man’s attentions, tramping the halls of a gift market, noting which shade of green was to be the new season’s excitement. She would be different after her love-making, preoccupied with her business, no time for silliness and Annunciations. Yet it still was odd that she hadn’t left a message for him. She had not for a moment seemed as rude as that, or incapable of making up an excuse.
He left the cloisters and walked slowly across the piazza of Santa Maria Novella. In spite of what she’d said and the compliments she’d paid, had she guessed that he hadn’t listened properly to her, that he’d been fascinated by her appearance but not by her? Or had she simply guessed the truth about him?
That evening she was not in the bar of the hotel. He looked in at Doney’s, thinking he might have misunderstood about the day. He waited for a while, and then ate alone in the restaurant with the modern paintings.
‘We pack the clothes, signore. Is the carabinieri which can promote the inquiries for la signora. Mi displace, signore.’
He nodded at the heavily moustached receptionist and made his way to the bar. If she was with some lover she would have surfaced again by now: it was hard to believe that she would so messily leave a hotel bill unpaid, especially since sooner or later she would have to return for her clothes. When she had so dramatically spoken of wishing Florence to devour her she surely hadn’t meant something like this? He went back to the receptionist.
‘Did Mrs Faraday have her passport?’
‘Sì, signore. La signora have the passport.’
He couldn’t sleep that night. Her smile and her brown, languorous eyes invaded the blur he attempted to induce. She crossed and re-crossed her legs. She lifted another glass. Her ringed fingers stubbed another cigarette. Her earrings lightly jangled.
In the morning he asked again at the reception desk. The hotel bill wasn’t important, a different receptionist generously allowed. If someone had to leave Italy in a hurry, because maybe there was sickness, even a deathbed, then a hotel bill might be overlooked for just a little while.
‘La signora will post to us a cheque from the United States. This the carabinieri say.’
‘Yes, I should imagine so.’
He looked up in the telephone directory the flats she had mentioned. The Palazzo Ricasoli was in Via Mantellate. He walked to it, up Borgo San Lorenzo and Via San Gallo. ‘No,’ a porter in a glass kiosk said and directed him to the office. ‘No,’ a pretty girl in the office said, shaking her head. She turned and asked another girl. ‘No,’ this girl repeated.
He walked back through the city, to the American Consulate on the Lungarno Amerigo. He sat in the office of a tall, lean man called Humber, who listened with a detached air and then telephoned the police. After nearly twenty minutes he replaced the receiver. He was dressed entirely in brown – suit, shirt, tie, shoes, handkerchief. He was evenly tanned, another shade of the colour. He drawled when he spoke; he had an old-world manner.
‘They suggest she’s gone somewhere,’ he said. ‘On some kind of jaunt.’ He paused in order to allow a flicker of amusement to develop in his lean features. ‘They think maybe she ran up her hotel bill and skipped it.’
‘She’s a respectable proprietor of a fashion shop.’
‘The carabinieri say the respectable are always surprising them.’
‘Can you try to find out if she went back to the States? According to the hotel people, that was another theory of the carabinieri.’
Mr Humber shrugged. ‘Since you have told your tale I must try, of course, sir. Would six-thirty be an agreeable hour for you to return?’
He sat outside in the Piazza della Repubblica, eating tortellini and listening to the conversations. A deranged man had gone berserk in a school in Rome, taking children as hostages and killing a janitor; the mayor of Rome had intervened and the madman had given himself up. It was a terrible thing to have happened, the Italians were saying, as bad as the murder of Gabriella.
He paid for his tortellini and went away. He climbed up to the Belvedere, filling in time. Once he thought he saw her, but it was someone else in the same kind of red coat.
‘She’s not back home,’ Mr Humber said with his old-world lack of concern. ‘You’ve started something, sir. Faraday’s flying out.’
In a room in a police station he explained that Mrs Faraday had simply been a fellow-guest at the Albergo San Lorenzo. They had had dinner one evening, and Mrs Faraday had not appeared to be dispirited. She knew other people who had come from America, for the same trade exhibitions. He had seen her with them in a restaurant.
‘These people, sir, return already to the United States. They answer the American police at this time.’
He was five hours in the room at the police station and the next day he was summoned there again and asked the same questions. On his way out on this occasion he noticed a man who he thought might be her husband, a big blond-haired man, too worried even to glance at him. He was certain he had never met him, or even seen him before, as he’d been certain he’d never met Mrs Faraday before she’d come up to him in the hotel.
The police did not again seek to question him. His passport, which they had held for fifty-six Hours, was returned to him. By the end of that week the newspaper references to a missing American woman ceased. He did not see Mr Faraday again.
‘The Italian view,’ said Mr Humber almost a month later, ‘is that she went off on a sexual excursion and found it so much to her liking that she stayed where she was.’
‘I thought the Italian view was that she skipped the hotel. Or that someone had fallen ill.’
‘They revised their thinking somewhat. In the light of various matters.’
‘What matters?’
‘From what you said, Mrs Faraday was a gallivanting lady. Our Italian friends find some significance in that.’ Mr Humber silently drummed the surface of his desk. ‘You don’t agree, sir?’
He shook his head. ‘There was more to Mrs Faraday than that,’ he said.
‘Well, of course there was. The carabinieri are educated men, but they don’t go in for subtleties, you know.’
‘She’s not a vulgar woman. From what I said to the police they may imagine she is. Of course she’s in a vulgar business. They may have jumped too easily to conclusions.’
Mr Humber said he did not understand. ‘Vulgar?’ he repeated.
‘Like me, she deals in surface dross.’
‘You’re into fashion yourself, sir?’
‘No, I’m not. I write tourist guides.’
‘Well, that’s most interesting.’
Mr Humber flicked at the surface of his desk with a forefinger. It was clear that he wished his visitor would go. He turned a sheet of paper over.
‘I remind sightseers that pictures like Pietro Perugino’s Agony in the Garden are worth a second glance. I send them to the Boboli Gardens. That kind of thing.’
Mr Humber’s bland face twitched with simulated interest. Tourists were a nuisance to him. They lost their passports, they locked their ignition keys into their hired cars, they were stolen from and made a fuss. The city lived off them, but resented them as well. These thoughts were for a moment openly reflected in Mr Humber’s pale brown eyes and then were gone. Flicking at his desk again, he said:
‘I’m puzzled about one detail in all this. May I ask you, please?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Were you, you know, ah, seeing Mrs Faraday?’
‘Was I having an affair, you mean? No, I wasn’t.’
‘She was a beautiful woman. By all accounts – by yours, I mean – sir, she’d been most friendly.’
‘Yes, she was friendly.’
She was naïve for an American, and she was careless. She wasn’t fearful of strangers and foolishly she let her riches show. Vulnerability was an enticement.
‘I did not mean to pry, sir,’ Mr Humber apologized. ‘It’s simply that Mr Faraday’s d
etectives arrived a while ago and the more they can be told the better.’
‘They haven’t approached me.’
‘No doubt they conclude you cannot help them. Mr Faraday himself has returned to the States: a ransom note would be more likely sent to him there.’
‘So Mr Faraday doesn’t believe his wife went off on a sexual excursion?’
‘No one can ignore the facts, sir. There is indiscriminate kidnapping in Italy.’
‘Italians would have known her husband was well-to-do?’
‘I guess it’s surprising what can be ferreted out.’ Mr Humber examined the neat tips of his fingers. He rearranged tranquillity in his face. No matter how the facts he spoke of changed there was not going to be panic in the American Consulate. ‘There has been no demand, sir, but we have to bear in mind that kidnap attempts do often nowadays go wrong. In Italy as elsewhere.’
‘Does Mr Faraday think it has gone wrong?’
‘Faraday is naturally confused. And, of course, troubled.’
‘Of course.’ He nodded to emphasize his agreement. Her husband was the kind who would be troubled and confused, even though unhappiness had developed in the marriage. Clearly she’d given up on the marriage; more than anything, it was desperation that made her forthright. Without it, she might have been a different woman – and in that case, of course, there would not have been this passing relationship between them: her tiresomeness had cultivated that. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ her voice echoed huskily, hungry for friendship. He had told her nothing – nothing of the shattered, destroyed relationships, and the regret and shame; nothing of the pathetic hope in hired rooms, or the anguish turning into bitterness. She had been given beauty, and he a lameness that people laughed at when they knew. Would her tiresomeness have dropped from her at once, like the shedding of a garment she had thought to be attractive, if he’d told her in the restaurant with the modern paintings? Would she, too, have angrily said he’d led her up the garden path?
‘There is our own investigation also,’ Mr Humber said, ‘besides that of Faraday’s detectives. Faraday, I assure you, has spared no expense; the carabinieri file is by no means closed. With such a concentration we’ll find what there is to find, sir.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do your best, Mr Humber.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He rose and Mr Humber rose also, holding out a brown, lean hand. He was glad they had met, Mr Humber said, even in such unhappy circumstances. Diplomacy was like oil in Mr Humber. It eased his movements and his words; his detachment floated in it, perfectly in place.
‘Goodbye, Mr Humber.’
Ignoring the lift, he walked down the stairs of the Consulate. He knew that she was dead. He imagined her lying naked in a wood, her even teeth ugly in a rictus, her white flesh as lifeless as the virgin modesty of the schoolgirl in the park. She hadn’t been like a nymphomaniac, or even a sophisticated woman, when she’d kissed his cheek good-night. Like a schoolgirl herself, she’d still been blind to the icy coldness that answered her naïveté. Inept and academic, words he had written about the city which had claimed her slipped through his mind. In the church of Santa Croce you walk on tombs, searching for Giotto’s Life of St Francis. In Savonarola’s own piazza the grey stone features do not forgive the tumbling hair of pretty police girls or the tourists’ easy ways. Injustice and harsh ambition had made her city what it was, the violence of greed for centuries had been its bloodstream; beneath its tinsel skin there was an iron heart. The Florentines, like true provincials, put work and money first. In the Piazza Signoria the pigeons breakfast off the excrement of the hackney horses: in Florence nothing is wasted.
He left the American Consulate and slowly walked along the quay. The sun was hot, the traffic noisy. He crossed the street and looked down into the green water of the Arno, wondering if the dark shroud of Mrs Faraday’s life had floated away through a night. In the galleries of the Uffizi he would move from Annunciation to Annunciation, Simone Martini’s, Baldovinetti’s, Lorenzo di Credi’s. and all the others. He would catch a glimpse of her red coat in Santa Trinità, but the face would again be someone else’s. She would call out from a gelateria, but the voice would be an echo in his memory.
He turned away from the river and at the same slow pace walked into the heart of the city. He sat outside a café in the Piazza della Repubblica, imagining her thoughts as she had lain in bed on that last night, smoking her cigarettes in the darkness. She had arrived at the happiest moment of love, when nothing was yet destroyed, when anticipation was a richness in itself. She’d thought about their walk in Maiano, how she’d bring the subject up again, how this time he’d say he’d be delighted. She’d thought about their being together in an apartment in the Palazzo Ricasoli, how this time it would be different. Already she had made up her mind: she would not ever return to the town where her husband managed a business. ‘I have never loved anyone like this,’ she whispered in the darkness.
In his hotel bedroom he shaved and had a bath and put on a suit that had just been pressed. In a way that had become a ceremony for him since the evening he had first waited for her there, he went at six o’clock to Doney’s. He watched the Americans drinking cocktails, knowing it was safe to be there because she would not suddenly arrive. He listened to the music she’d said she liked, and mourned her as a lover might.
Her Mother’s Daughter
Her mother considered it ill-bred to eat sweets on the street, and worse to eat fruit or ice-cream. Her mother was tidy, and required tidiness in others. She peeled an apple in a particular way, keeping the peel in one long piece, as though it were important to do so. Her mother rarely smiled.
Her father, now dead, had been a lexicographer: a small, abstracted man who would not have noticed the eating of food on the street, not even slices of meat or peas from their pods. Most of the time he hadn’t noticed Helena either. He died on her eighth birthday.
Her mother had always ruled the household. Tall and greyly dressed, she had achieved her position of command without resort to anger or dictatorial speech; she did not say much, and what she did say she never found necessary to repeat. A look informed the miscreant, indicating a button undone, an unwashed hand. Helena, possessing neither brother nor sister, was the only miscreant.
The house where she and her mother lived was in a south-western suburb of London. Next door on one side there was a fat widow, Mrs Archingford, who dyed her hair a garish shade of red. On the other an elderly couple were for ever bickering in their garden. Helena’s mother did not acknowledge the presence of Mrs Archingford, who arrived at the house next door when Helena was nine; but she had written a note to the elderly man to request him to keep his voice down, a plea that caused him to raise it even more.
Helena played mainly by herself. Beneath the heavy mahogany of the dining-room table she cut the hair of Samson while he slept, then closed her eyes while the table collapsed around her, its great ribbed legs and the polished surface from which all meals were eaten splintering into fragments. The multitude in the temple screamed, their robes wet with blood. Children died, women wept.
‘What are you doing, Helena?’ her mother questioned her. ‘Why are you muttering?’
Helena told a lie, saying she’d been singing, because she felt ashamed: her mother would not easily understand if she mentioned Delilah. She played outside on a narrow concrete path that ran between the rockery and the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden, where no one could see her from the windows. ‘Now, here’s a book,’ her mother said, finding her with snails arranged in a semicircle. Helena washed her hands, re-tied the ribbon in the hair, and sat in the sitting-room to read Teddy’s Button.
Few people visited the house, for Helena’s mother did not go in for friends. But once a year Helena was put in a taxi-cab which drove her to her grandparents on her father’s side, the only grandparents she knew about. They were a grinning couple who made a fuss of her, small like her father had been, always jumping up and down at
the tea-table, passing plates of buttered bread to her and telling her that tea tasted nicer with sugar in it, pressing meringues and cake on her. Helena’s mother always put a bowl beside Helena’s bed on the nights there’d been a visit to the grandparents.
Her mother was the first teacher Helena had. In the dining-room they would sit together at the table with reading-books and copy-books and history and geography books. When she began to go to school she found herself far in advance of other children of her age, who because of that regarded her with considerable suspicion. ‘Our little genius,’ Miss Random used to say, meaning it cheerfully but making Helena uncomfortable because she knew she wasn’t clever in the least. ‘I don’t consider that woman can teach at all,’ her mother said after Helena had been at the school for six weeks and hadn’t learnt anything new. So the dining-room lessons began again, in conjunction with the efforts of Miss Random. ‘Pathetic, we have to say’: her mother invested this favourite opinion with an importance and a strength, condemning not just Miss Random but also the milkman who whistled while waiting on the doorstep, and Mrs Archingford’s attempt at stylish hair. Her mother employed a series of charwomen but was maddened by their chatter and ended by doing the housework herself, even though she found anything like that exceedingly irksome. She far preferred to sit in the dark study, continuing the work that had been cut short by death. In the lifetime of Helena’s father her mother had assisted in the study and Helena had imagined her parents endlessly finding words in books and dissecting them on paper. Before the death conversations at mealtimes usually had to do with words. ‘Fluxion?’ she remembered her father saying, and when she shrugged her mother tightened her lips, her glance lingering on the shrug long after its motion had ceased. ‘A most interesting derivation,’ her father had supplied, and then went on to speak about the Newtonian calculus. The words he liked to bring up at mealtimes had rare meanings, sometimes five or six, but these, though worthy of record, had often to be dismissed on what he called the journey to the centre of interest. ‘Fluxion, Helena, is the rate at which a flowing motion increases its magnitude. The Latin fluxionem. Now flux, Helena, is different. The familiar expression, to be in a state of flux, we know of course. But there is interestingly a variation: in mathematical terms, a drawn line is the flux of a point. You understand that, Helena? You place a dot with your pencil in your exercise-book, but you change your mind and continue the dot so that it becomes a line. With flux remember our pleasant word, flow. Remember our good friend, fluere. A flowing out, a flowing in. With fluxion, we have the notion of measuring, of calculation.’ Food became cold while he explained, but he did not notice. All that was her memory of him.