The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  Jackson looked bleary. ‘Not at the school, she said. It was kids’ stuff, she said.’

  ‘OK,’ Iris said. ‘Let’s say I believe you. So what was she excited about? Who was she going away with? Some kind of – painting holiday?’

  Now Jackson looked really uneasy. ‘I dunno,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ said Iris, and she made an effort to speak calmly. ‘OK, I’m not making this up, this isn’t all in my head. She told me she was going to stay with friends in Greve for a couple of days. Only the friends never invited her, they’re not even there. I called them.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘So she was planning something for that couple of days. She had to be going somewhere.’

  He looked away. ‘With the new guy, maybe?’

  ‘A new guy none of us has got a single peek at. This top-secret new guy – come on. You know what Ronnie was like, she couldn’t keep quiet if her life depended on it.’

  And they both stared at each other again. ‘Maybe this guy was different,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘Come on, Jackson. Did she say anything about where she was going? Did you – did you leave with her? You never told me what you did, the rest of the day, did you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I left her there,’ he said quietly. ‘She said she wanted to do her face. Didn’t want me looking over her shoulder.’ That sounded like Ronnie, all right, hours in the bathroom and a rubble of open pots and dried-out brushes left behind.

  ‘That’s the last time I saw her.’ He didn’t say any more; Iris supposed she had to believe him.

  The place was silent, outside the light yellow and soft. In front of them the glasses were empty suddenly, and the waiter was there; she shook her head minutely and he took the glasses and retreated.

  And then Jackson was speaking again. ‘There was a bag,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘There was – like an overnight bag, just in the hall.’

  ‘A bag,’ said Iris. How could she have been so stupid? There had to be a bag. ‘So where’s the bag now?’

  Because it could explain everything, couldn’t it? Ronnie could have all kinds of stuff in that bag, her phone, money, it could be why she hadn’t bothered to be back in touch. And what if – her mind ran on, what if all this was an elaborate game, to throw them off the trail, to wind them up – Ronnie’d ditched the handbag because she had the other bag all along? One of Ronnie’s little games. But – any number of questions jostled in her head, all those buts – still she wanted to go and look, now. Wanted to find that spot where the cats lay curled in the grey dust, sleeping in the sun; if there’d been another bag, a holdall, then they’d have found it, but still. Iris wanted to see that place for herself.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  All Lucia Gentileschi’s Composure was gone. She met Sandro at the door and he could see immediately that she was lost; she had not been prepared for this. This was what grieving was like.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said gently, guiding her back into her own sitting room. ‘Sit down.’ He glanced around and the first thing he saw was the desk in the corner, its rolltop thrown back and drawers pulled open, a pile of papers strewn on the wide leather-covered surface where Claudio Gentileschi would have done his writing, signed his letters, paid his bills.

  Lucia saw him looking. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s it, that’s where I found it –’ and she started up.

  ‘No,’ said Sandro, ‘wait,’ because he had a sudden vision of the self-contained Lucia Gentileschi throwing herself on the papers like some Indian widow on a pyre, soaking them with tears, hurling them around the room. He found he couldn’t bear such a vision of chaos and disarray; this was what grieving was like.

  ‘What did you find?’ he asked gently, holding tight to her hand, as much to hold her there as to comfort her.

  She looked about her distractedly, avoiding the mess at the desk, looked down at her hand in his. She sighed, and her shoulders dropped; her hand relaxed.

  ‘Bills,’ she said simply, ‘I looked at the bank statements, and there were standing orders to pay bills I couldn’t – couldn’t understand. Every month not one but two payments to Fiorentinagas, to Enel, to – to the acque – to. . .’

  She rose and fetched something from the desk, set it in his lap. The same computer printouts he received at his own expense from the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze every month, full of maddening inconsistencies he then had to sort through himself – why have they charged me for this, what does that mean? In the end he always thrust them at Luisa to unravel. The figures swam before his eyes, and Sandro frowned to force himself to focus. She was right; this wasn’t just bank chiselling, a few euros here and there for taking money out of the wrong cash machine, it was just as she had said, two of everything. Gas, water, electricity. As if he was running a parallel household; could there be any other explanation?

  He looked into Lucia Gentileschi’s face. ‘Your husband always handled the bills,’ he said. ‘You never saw them – before.’ And she nodded dumbly, her face somehow contracted with pain. She drew a swift breath.

  ‘He had another place,’ she said. ‘Didn’t he?’ She held his gaze. ‘Another life.’

  Sandro stared down at the statements again, so as not to have to answer. Stared hard.

  ‘There’s no telephone bill,’ he said, slowly, grasping at straws, but then he saw something else. ‘These sums are tiny. Barely more than the standing charge, look.’ He held the paper up to her and she winced, then steadied, and looked. She put her finger to the paper, running down the column, conceded a tiny nod.

  ‘Small,’ she said. ‘Smaller than our apartment’s bills, yes.’

  ‘A fraction,’ said Sandro, running his finger up to the other figure, and before he could stop himself, ‘and there were only two of you.’ He leaned in to make sure she knew what he was saying. ‘If the gas bill for you two is, say, a hundred and fifty euros, then this other bill, thirty, that doesn’t support another human being, does it?’ She stayed silent; he didn’t know what she was thinking.

  ‘Are you worried he had another woman?’ he asked bluntly. ‘That something might have happened with another woman that made him kill himself?’ She stared at him unblinking. ‘Did you ever have reason to believe he was unfaithful to you?’ This was the standard phraseology; the answer was almost never to be trusted. Except in this case, he believed her.

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘That’s why – well. I can’t understand this.’

  In discomfort Sandro stood up then, paced to the wide window, a single piece of glass. The rain seemed to have stopped, for the time being; above the rooftops to the west he saw a golden line of sun between banks of purple cloud, like a blessing, a reprieve. He swivelled, taking in the panorama, thinking of Claudio Gentileschi installing this wall of glass. You could see the greened copper dome of the synagogue, the backs of the vast piles of the Piazza d’Azeglio, the skeletons of trees in the gardens, the distant green and terracotta of Fiesole. Think.

  He frowned a moment as something came back to him, some crazy thing the autistic boy had said. ‘You don’t have a dog, do you?’

  Lucia Gentileschi looked at him blankly. ‘A dog? No. Claudio was. . . nervous of dogs.’

  ‘Look, Lucia,’ said Sandro, leaning forward with urgency, ‘this isn’t a matter of another life, another. . . family. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but we’ll find out, all right?’

  Again Lucia Gentileschi made that gesture of crossing her hands in her lap, calming herself. She opened her mouth, hesitated. ‘Yes,’ she said, and for a second allowed herself to close her eyes.

  ‘Shame there was no phone bill,’ said Sandro, thinking. ‘In a way. If there was a number, we could trace – we could find this place. This – whatever it is.’ But as he said it he felt a chill. Because they didn’t know what they would find.

  Silently Lucia Gentileschi got to her feet and crossed to a wide teak sideboard. She reached into a drawer and took out a plain metal r
ing holding three keys; they clinked as she lifted them for him to see.

  ‘Wherever it is,’ she said, ‘whatever it is. I think these are the keys.’

  It wasn’t until they got to the spot she was looking for, up under the low grey sky, that it occurred to Iris that this might not be a good idea. She thrust the thought down, concentrated instead on her triumph at getting up there, getting in past the woman at the gate who told them they only had forty minutes, then we close, who’d clearly not wanted to let them in at all. At making their way up here through the narrow, claustrophobic alleys, some of them almost dark, there was so little light left in the sky and the hedges were so high and overgrown.

  Behind her all the way she had heard Jackson’s laboured breathing; too many cigarettes, too many late nights. And it was when they stopped that the sound of his breathing worried her in a different way. It was suddenly, sharply, a reminder that she was alone here with him. Why had he come? She didn’t know if he liked her or hated her.

  When he arrived beside her, she turned away a little to look around, surveying the wide horizon. The city was laid out in front of them, red and grey, domes and loggias, hills in the distance and just along the horizon to the west there was a line of light coming out from under the cloud. Closer there were the backs of ordinary buildings along the Via Romana, built into the side of the gardens; a balcony here, a broken pane of glass there. Did their inhabitants slip out on summer evenings and have a quiet drink, the Boboli their private back garden? She leaned to get a better look.

  ‘Iris,’ Jackson said, and there was something in his tone that made her not want to turn and look at him.

  ‘Mmm?’ she said, fixing on the last of the sun.

  There was a crackle of sound in the air suddenly, an announcement in Italian. Iris looked for the source and saw that there were loudspeakers fixed to tall poles here and there. She listened, something about sunset; the announcement came again but was no more intelligible. She knew it must be something about the place closing, but when? She looked at her watch; they’d only been here ten minutes, maybe fifteen. No problem.

  ‘What?’ she said, turning to Jackson, more fierce than she meant to sound, to stop that stupid anxiety.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he said.

  ‘We’re looking for – we’re looking for Ronnie,’ she said. ‘For her stuff, anyway. In case there’s anything else.’

  ‘It was here?’ he asked, looking around. It needed work, Iris realized, to know whether people were telling you the truth or not. And probably experience, which she did not have much of.

  ‘I think so,’ she said, but she knew it was the place.

  There was a horseshoe-shaped green amphitheatre behind them, terraced in box and grass; either end of the horseshoe ran into high-hedged alleyways, dark and narrow, and they stood at one of these ends, where three little rows of vines had been planted inside a box hedge. This was what she remembered, the vines, and the narrow, dark space between hedges where the cats had lain, curled in the shafts of sun, and there had been plastic bowls of food set out by someone. The woman who fed the cats had found the bag. The ground wasn’t dusty now, it was soaked, and there were no shafts of sun.

  Reluctantly Iris stepped out of the last of the green evening light, and into the dark between the hedges. Jackson was right behind her, she realized; she stopped, letting her eyes accustom themselves to the dark.

  There were sounds, tiny drippings from the leaves; she could feel them on her face. Lower, lighter sounds still, the sound of leaves settling, something moving low and light among the undergrowth. She held her breath, but she could still hear Jackson’s. ‘Iris,’ he said; his voice was in her ear, and without his face to look at she heard the panic in his voice just as she’d heard it on the telephone. She held up a hand to keep him quiet; they were here to look, even if he was scared. Even if there were still things he hadn’t told her. Even –

  Putting out a hand to pull a branch out of her way Iris felt another scattering of cold drops on her face and arm and let out an exclamation; below her line of vision something ran, over her feet. Cat. She knelt.

  They seemed dense and solid, these hedges, but kneeling there, quiet, Iris saw that they were hollow inside, and no leaves would grow in here, in the dark. Of course; it was like that at home, in France, the scrub across the hillside below the house was scraggy and thin. It came back to her in a rush; hiding inside a myrtle bush, spiky and scented, she had been perhaps nine years old and hiding from Ma. Then it had been hot, the air full of insect sounds; she had seen a viper. Or perhaps it had been a stick, but it had still sent her running out, screaming, into Ma’s arms.

  Now Jackson was standing over her; she tried to ignore him. Looked along the ground, wishing she’d brought a torch, because she did have a torch, one of the things Ma had taught her, always take a torch, a penknife, a piece of cord, for tying stuff up, holding your suitcase together if a lock breaks. Good old Ma, who knew how to take care of herself after all, and Iris, despite all the disastrous men.

  There were dead leaves everywhere, prickly, shifting and settling in the half-light, under the dripping. Except where there weren’t any, a dry, bare patch further inside the hedge; on her knees Iris edged closer to it. Skirting a cat bowl in which a clump of swollen pellets floated, giving off an unpleasant smell. She swallowed, pinched her nostrils against the smell.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ said Jackson, his voice steely with impatience. ‘There’s nothing here. If there was, the police would have found it, wouldn’t they?’

  Iris snorted, thinking of that policeman casually stabbing at Ronnie’s computer.

  ‘Were you a MySpace friend?’ she asked, over her shoulder. ‘Could you access her page?’

  There was another crackle from the loudspeakers.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jackson, wary. ‘Come on, come out.’ On all fours Iris looked across the gravel where there were no leaves; it was level, there were no bodies buried here, no overnight bags resting against the wiry trunks. She worked her way back again, on hands and knees.

  ‘All right,’ she said, putting a hand back on the ground to steady herself, the other hand up for Jackson to pull her up. Something sharp on the ground dug into the fleshy part of her hand and she exclaimed, pulling the hand up and overbalancing.

  ‘Hey,’ said Jackson, pulling her upright. He was surprisingly strong, both arms around her to stop her falling.

  ‘OK,’ she said breathlessly, holding the sore hand away from him. There was something funny in his expression, his face very near to hers. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I gave her this guy’s number, a while ago,’ said Jackson, abruptly. ‘And that morning, when we were having our little drink, she said she was going to meet him. I had the impression that was her plan right after I left.’

  ‘A guy?’

  ‘A painter guy,’ said Jackson reluctantly. ‘I met him in some bar. Old guy’.

  Iris frowned at him, not understanding. Ronnie wasn’t interested in old men. ‘Rich?’ she asked. ‘What do you mean? Famous?’ She could just about imagine Ronnie being interested in that, in going away with someone like that. Just to say, afterwards.

  Jackson let her go. Her hand was hurting, a splinter or a thorn still stuck in there; Iris rubbed at it without looking.

  ‘I didn’t know too much about him,’ said Jackson. ‘Only he could sure draw, he was down by the river there, with a sketchbook one time. I bought him a drink.’

  ‘On the river? You mean on the Ponte Vecchio?’ Iris was disbelieving; there was a string of iffy tourist artists set up down there; in fact, Florence was full of people sketching or painting or setting up easels.

  ‘Further along,’ said Jackson. He laughed, not very convincingly. ‘I was checking out the wild side, one time. San Frediano, Santo Spirito. Off the beaten track.’

  ‘Florence doesn’t have a wild side,’ she said, mocking. ‘You’re kidding.’

  Uncomfortably Jackson said, ‘
Well, I was only looking. It’s all kinda safe, over this way.’

  ‘You mean you were looking for – ah, stuff? Um, dope?’ She didn’t even know the words. Jackson looked at his feet. ‘Maybe,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing big time.’

  ‘Right,’ said Iris. ‘With Ronnie? For Ronnie?’

  ‘Nah, no, no,’ said Jackson. ‘She didn’t – not really – she wasn’t into that stuff. Maybe a bit curious.’ He looked at her and sighed. ‘This sounds worse than it is, Iris. A couple joints – I don’t really –’

  ‘All right,’ said Iris impatiently. ‘You know, it isn’t any of my business, as long as you didn’t get Ronnie into anything –’ He was looking at her with a new look in his eyes; it might almost be unhappiness, or guilt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it,’ he said, ‘I think maybe I did.’

  ‘You went looking for – for dope and you found this painter guy? Was he also a drug dealer, the old guy?’

  ‘No,’ said Jackson with impatience, ‘you’re kidding, I mean, no way. We got talking on the river, he was drawing. . .’ He hesitated, as if trying to remember. ‘A bird, some bird down there in the water, a big white bird. Then before I knew it, it was like I couldn’t stop him talking – he had real good English – like he’d been saving it up years and years, his life story.’ He blinked; Iris looked at him, waiting. He went on.

  Iris found herself listening. The old man seemed real to her; it was a good story.

  ‘It got cold, y’know – this was just, like ten days ago, remember that day it turned cold?’ Iris nodded.

  ‘So I could see he was real cold, kind of blue, almost, and we went in this bar, by where he’d been drawing, and I bought him a drink. And he gave me his number, that was all.’ He caught a look in Iris’s eye, for which she was already ashamed. ‘Nothing like that,’ said Jackson coolly, as if something like that could have happened to him once upon a time. ‘He was kind of strange but, y’know, I think he just wanted to talk. It was like he’d never talked to anyone before.’ He looked at her earnestly. ‘And his drawings – well. You think Massi’s good? He’s nothing. You had to see ’em. That’s what I said to Ronnie.’