A Place for Us

by Harriet Evans

  Karen heard her phone buzz with a text message; she glanced down into her bag, hands trapped, then, with her heart racing, looked up again, trying to seem calm.

  Suddenly she said, “Can I change my mind about my color? I don’t want clear anymore.”

  “Fine. What color you want?”

  Coralie gestured at the wall behind her, where the bottles of polish were stacked in multicolored rows, like sweets. Karen nodded. “Fifth Avenue, please. Third along from the end.”

  Coralie reached around and plucked the third bottle off the shelf, then checked the base. “Yes,” she said, impressed. “Is Fifth Avenue. How you know that?”

  “I just know.” Karen shrugged.

  “Bright, sexy red.” Coralie pulled one of Karen’s slim, tanned hands toward her, unscrewed the white lid. “You going out tonight?”

  “No,” said Karen. “We’re staying in.”

  “Aha!” Coralie smiled. “You want to look good, huh? A night in with hubby.”

  “Something like that.” Karen tried to smile.

  Florence

  “DEAR ME,” FLORENCE Winter said, hurrying along the road, shoving the invitation back into her capacious yet overstuffed straw bag. “What does it mean?”

  She felt upset. Out of the blue here it was, this extraordinary message slapping onto the cold stone tiles of her apartment floor while she was having her coffee. Years ago her brother, Bill, would joke that that was why she’d gone to study in Italy, to drink as much coffee as she liked. He didn’t make that joke anymore—she’d lived there for twenty years. Besides, these days you had to search high and low for a decent tabacchi; everything in Florence was either Irish-themed pubs—the Italians were mad about them, perplexingly—or soulless pizzerie serving an ever-changing carousel of Japanese, American, French, and German tourists.

  Nowadays Florence felt less disloyal about admitting that the worst tourists were often the English. They were either bellicose, obese, annoyed at being in this culturally heavy but entertainment-lite hole, or by contrast desperate to prove they were Italian, waving their arms around and saying grazie mille and il conto, per favore, as if that made them Italian, as if every waiter couldn’t speak English like a native because that was the only way of getting ahead these days. It depressed her, either shame at her homeland or sadness at the world she inhabited. Florence the city, once the noble flower of the Renaissance, was becoming a ghost town, a history-theme-park shell filled with moving shoals of visitors, shepherded along by pink umbrellas and microphones. And still she loved it, with all her heart.

  When she was a little girl, many years ago, she’d asked her father why they’d named her Florence.

  “Because we went there on our honeymoon. We were so happy,” David had told her solemnly. “I made your mother promise if we ever had a baby girl we’d call her Florence, to remind us every day how much in love we were.”

  “Why didn’t you call Daisy that then? She came first.”

  Her father had laughed. “She wasn’t a Florence. You were.” And he’d kissed her on the head.

  When Florence was a little girl, her birthday treat was to go up to London for the day with her father: he was her favorite person in the world. They always followed the same program. First to the National Gallery to look at the Italian Renaissance paintings, paying particular attention to her father’s favorite, The Annunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi. Florence loved the story of the chaste monk who’d run off with the golden-haired nun, and she loved David’s quiet, rapt expression as he gazed at the handsome angel with his thick curls, the graceful arc of Mary’s bowed head as she received news of her destiny. “The most beautiful piece of art in the world,” her father would say every time, visibly moved.

  Then they would walk five minutes up to Jermyn Street and have lunch at the same old-fashioned English restaurant, Brights, where the waiters were all terribly ancient and formal, and the tablecloths snowy white linen. Florence always felt so grown-up, drinking a ginger beer out of a huge crystal goblet and eating a steak the size of her head, having proper conversations with her father. Not talking about Wilbur, for once; everyone always wanted to ask him about that silly dog. When she was out with Pa they always wanted to know if she was Daisy. Florence hated that, though not as much as Daisy would have, if she’d known.

  She could ask him anything at those lunches, so they didn’t talk about boring things like Daisy’s moods or the girls at school or games. They’d talk about things he’d seen on his travels, because he’d been everywhere when he was younger.

  “Before you married Ma and she had all of us.”

  “Ma came too. We were both artists, we wanted to see the world. Then we had all of you. And then we moved to Winterfold. We didn’t want to go away much after that.”

  Florence didn’t really understand why they’d moved to Winterfold, when they could have lived in London. She wanted to live in London, but whenever she asked her father about growing up there, she got the same response: “I never liked London very much.”

  He never talked directly about his childhood. Never said, “Your granny had blue eyes,” or, “We lived on this or this road.” Only oblique references to events that had happened to him. Florence worshiped her father and wanted to know everything possible about him, so she’d draw him out as much as she could. Hear about Mr. Wilson, the art teacher at school who’d let David stay late, given him construction paper and pastels to take home. The boy the next road over who was born without a nose—Pa swore it was true. The time one summer’s morning he caught the train to Bath, then walked for hours until he saw Winterfold, how he’d promised to come back there one day. He loved walking, back then. He’d walk into town and go to concerts at the National Gallery during the war. All the paintings had been taken away, to a cave in Wales, but people played the piano there instead. Once, the air raid sirens sounded and he had to stay there for hours, hidden in the basement with all the others: local office workers, young lovers meeting at lunchtime, posh old men. Everyone was very scared; they sang songs, and one of the posh old men gave David a piece of fudge.

  Years later, Florence was back at the National Gallery, giving an oft-delivered lecture to some students in front of Uccello’s Battle of San ­Romano. Her mind wandered and she found herself working out that her father would have been really quite small during the Blitz, no more than nine or ten. The idea of him drifting freely around town at that age, in the middle of a war too, seemed appalling to her. When she’d mentioned it to him later on, he’d smiled. “I was grown-up for my age. You had a sheltered childhood, Flo.”

  “I’m glad,” she’d said, never happier than when she was safely cocooned away with a book or several books, undisturbed by dogs or family or Daisy’s special treatment.

  And he’d said, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  Florence sometimes wondered now if her childhood had been too sheltered. She was nearly fifty, and felt she should have a better grip on life; yet more and more it seemed to her that life was veering away from her, like a runaway train. The little girl who was too tall for her older sister’s cast-offs, who only wanted to read and look at pictures, was now a professor employed at the British College of Art History in Florence, author of two books, contributor to several more, a visiting professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and an occasional voice on the radio: she’d been on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time last year, only they’d cut most of what she’d said. (When Florence was nervous, she tended to ramble, and it was often impossible to prune the tangled mess of her original point.)

  When she was alone in her apartment, writing or thinking on her own, everything was always clear. It was talking aloud, interacting with people that tripped her up: it was reality she found difficult.

  When Florence had last been back in the UK in July, she had been invited to dinner at the house of her Courtauld colleague, Jim Buxton. Jim was
an old boyfriend of hers from Oxford, still a good, dear friend. He was married to Amna, a professor of Islamic studies at University College London, who spent much of the year in far-flung places like Tashkent, spoke at least six different languages, and was, frankly, terrifying to Florence. They lived in Islington, not far from the center of town, but due to several mishaps including broken spectacles and a flapping boot sole, Florence arrived late and flustered. When Jim introduced her to the other guests, one of them—a well-known editor at Penguin called Susanna—half stood up, shook her hand, and said, “Oh, the famous Professor Winter! We heard you on the radio, talking about Masaccio. I agreed with you broadly, but for your interpretation of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve. It’s simplistic to merely say that—oh!”

  For Florence, still holding her cloth book bag, which passed for a handbag, had simply cut a deep bow (so that her change slid out of her pockets) and backed out of the room, the boot sole folding under and nearly tripping her up. She went to the downstairs bathroom and sat on the lavatory for five minutes. She knew she’d have to apologize when she emerged, could see enough to know that she should explain about the broken spectacles meaning she’d got on the wrong bus, and the unglued boot sole severely impeding her journey; but she couldn’t ever work out a way to apologize gracefully for something so that the moment was forgotten.

  When she emerged, they’d all gone into the dining room, so she’d taken her seat and the other guests pretty much ignored her, but Florence didn’t mind. She almost preferred it that this Susanna person thought she was totally crackers, that they all did. It meant she didn’t have to bother with entangling herself in social situations.

  The next day she’d gone to see Jim in his office.

  “I’m sorry about last night, Jim, about stowing away in your lav. I was in a bit of a flap when I arrived. So was my boot. Ho-ho.”

  And Jim had said with a smile, “Don’t worry. Susanna’s awful. It rather made the evening, I thought.”

  • • •

  Yes, more and more this idea haunted her, the question she couldn’t escape. What was that missing piece, the one she knew existed but couldn’t ever see? What if she’d wasted the last twenty years staring at the same paintings, working on the same ideas, and coming to no worthwhile conclusions? Just shuffling opinions around and about from one journal to another book to yet another set of students, in the same way a banker got paid for moving money about? She loved Florence, but had she stayed here for one reason, and one reason only, for a man who barely cared if she was there or not?

  No, she told herself in her more buoyant moments. He did care. He did.

  Florence hurried over the Ponte Santa Trìnita, barely glancing at the tourists thronging the Ponte Vecchio, crammed with tiny shops like a pantomime set. She was able to block out the modern world, almost too effectively; if Lorenzo the Magnificent had appeared on horseback cantering over the bridge and asked in his best Renaissance Italian if she’d like to accompany him to his palazzo for some wild boar, Florence would not have been surprised.

  She was so absorbed in imagining what Lorenzo de Medici would wear on a normal day out and about in the city—and he did go out and about, that was why he’d been such a great leader, truly Il Magnifico—that, as she turned the corner leading to the college, Florence wasn’t looking where she was going. She felt herself trip on something and then stumble, hurtling to the ground with the curiously drunken sensation of lost gravity.

  “Attento! Signora, please take care!” said an angry voice, one that set her heart thumping as she lay on the cobbles, arms and legs waving in the air like an upturned beetle’s. “É molto— Oh, it’s you. For God’s sake, watch where you’re going, can’t you?”

  Florence scrambled to her feet by herself, as Peter Connolly disentangled the leather straps of her bag from his leg with such force she nearly yelped. “Oh dear,” she said, looking down at the ground. “Where are my glasses?”

  “I’ve no idea.” He was rubbing his foot, glaring coldly at her. “That bloody hurt, Florence. You—” He stopped, looking around.

  The arriving students watched them curiously: Byronic, slightly eccentric, but still impressive Professor Connolly, the one who’d written the unlikely best-seller about the Renaissance that made the Medici into a bawdy soap opera, and got a BBC TV series at the same time—he was famous, their mums watched him! And that weird Professor Winter, mad hair awry, searching for her glasses. The plastic frames were cracked and frequently the sharp wire arms of the glasses slid out if she leaned forward, but she never even noticed. Someone had seen her singing Queen to herself the previous week as she walked past the Uffizi. Singing really loudly.

  Florence’s head was spinning. She looked at Peter, flustered, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. He was so different these days, ever since that damned book had come out and he’d started to listen to the siren call of Fame. All smart and stylish, in a televisually approved rumpled academic sort of way. So very far from the curly-haired, slightly hopeless man she’d once known and loved—loved so much that she—

  “Here.” Professor Connolly pulled her bag back up so it was slung over her shoulder and not hanging off her wrist.

  “Ha-ha! Oh, unhand me, Professor Connolly!” Florence said loudly, putting her hand to her breast, and dropping several items on the ground in the process. She had thought this would sound hilarious, but as so often when some witticism came out of her mouth, it hung there in the air, sounding completely awful. She looked mad, as always, a crazy old hag whom no one had ever loved or could possibly ever in the future love, especially not Professor Connolly, to whom of all people she had once so hoped to cleave herself.

  The professor bent down and picked something up off the curb.

  “You dropped this.” He glanced down nosily. “Nice invitation. Is this your family? Curious way of asking people to a party. What does that bit at the end mean?”

  Florence gently took it out of his hand, biting her lip.

  “Thank you. It’s from my parents. I have no idea what it means. I’ll have to go home for it, I suppose.”

  “Leaving Florence again, Florence?” He gave a small smile. “I must say, we are becoming practiced in the art of missing you.” He rocked on his feet, and tipped his imaginary hat to her.

  “Why, did you—did you need me for something, Pe—Professor?”

  He gave her a look of complete astonishment. “Goodness, no. Why would you think that?”

  Another slight, another little barb, but she was equal to it. She knew his little secret, and she was glad to carry it safe until such time as he felt the need to make use of her again. Florence bowed her head, as though she were a lady bidding farewell to a knight.

  “Then, Peter, I must bid you farewell for now, yet not forever,” she said, though this too came out all wrong. He had walked toward the revolving doors, not even saying good-bye. She hobbled toward the entrance, and as she did she glanced down at the invitation, and the strangeness of it struck her again. Ma wanted them all back.

  Why? Was it Dad? Was it about Daisy?

  And Florence suddenly realized, though she had not considered it until this very moment, that she knew why.

  Joe

  JOE THORNE LEANED his weight on the smooth oak bar, crossed his arms, and looked around him. Midmorning, midweek, he would have hoped the pub would be, well—not crowded exactly, but at least hosting a few old regulars with a pint, maybe a couple of early patrons for lunch. But no. The eponymous tree outside cast only gloom into the room. It was too early in the season for a roaring log fire. The bowls of sweetly salty pork crackling that Joe himself had roasted and stripped that morning stood on the bar, untouched. The barrels were full, the glasses gleaming.

  And the place was empty.

  Sheila Cowper, the landlady, appeared in the doorway of the snug. “Don’t stand there with your arms folded, Joe,” she said brisk
ly, whipping him lightly with a tea towel. “No one’ll want to come in if they look in and see you growling at them like an angry bear. Go and cut up that bread like I asked you an hour ago.”

  “Oh, what’s the point?” said Joe gloomily, though he obeyed her, stomping back into his tiny kitchen.

  He took a newly baked loaf of sourdough, weighing it in his hands. Joe loved bread, loved its smell, its texture. He loved the springy smoothness of newly formed dough, how you could thump the base of a freshly baked loaf, hard, and get a pleasing drumlike sound, how homemade bread had love and care baked into it, like a new life. Joe started cutting slim, even slices, his strong fingers working the knife. Who am I making this for? he found himself wondering. What is the point?

  Six months ago Joe had left Yorkshire, Jamie, and home to come and work for Sheila. She’d spent fifteen years in London working as a manager in various restaurants and had returned home to Winter Stoke the previous year with some cash in her pocket, and the dream of rejuvenating the Oak Tree. She wanted to make it the best place to eat in Somerset, at the same time turning it back into a proper local pub. “Better than the Sportsman in Whitstable, better than the Star at Harome. I want it to get a Michelin star,” she’d told him, and he’d found his heart beating faster. He believed this woman, and though he’d never met her before he was sure she could do it. And Joe, with his training and his track record, had been a shoo-in. At the interview he’d made her pork belly with fennel, accompanied by homemade char siu buns and a cabbage rémoulade, and sea-salted caramel threesome—ice cream with popcorn, toffee pot, and compote with marshmallows. He was a bit over sea-salted caramel himself, but it was all the rage, and he’d known from their phone conversation that she’d like it. Joe could pretty much tell what people wanted to eat.

  It was because he trusted Sheila that he’d taken the job. He couldn’t turn it down, it was too good an opportunity to miss and it was time to leave Yorkshire. If it wasn’t for Jamie he’d have done it years ago. He’d been there all his life apart from his training. Yes, his restaurant had a Michelin star, but he’d learned all he was going to there. The head chef was a psychopath, the old cliché, and it was a joyless place to work, more about assemblage and timings than baking with care, making food with love. Joe cooked to make people happy, not to hear them faint with admiration over his use of nasturtiums in salads or sumac-flavored sorbets or any of the other silly things you had to do these days to be a “hot young chef,” whatever that meant.