‘So looks were everything, after all,’ Claire proposes.
The taunt is ignored. ‘She didn’t have a great deal to offer,’ he says, as if Ms Ottaviano and he had signed a contract which she had somehow breached. ‘Robert was greatly impressed, however,’ he goes on. ‘They had a brief fling – and I do mean brief. He has a weakness for pretty faces, and Laura does have an exceptionally pretty face.’
‘She does,’ she agrees. There follows, as though taking issue with something she’s said, a disquisition on the illogicality of what he alleges to be a widespread prejudice against the beautiful: some people resent it, he tells her, on the grounds that beauty is an unearned quality. It’s gratuitous, an unfair advantage, like being born into a rich family. Yet we esteem the virtuosity of musicians, the prowess of athletes, the brilliance of scientists – they are gifted, we say. ‘So some gifts are good and some bad,’ he concludes. ‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’
She is not inclined to debate the issue, and they walk in silence for the whole length of a street. He is breathing heavily, as they go up a rise towards the cathedral, but suddenly he asks: ‘What did you make of Teresa?’
‘I liked her,’ she answers.
He looks askance at her, and gives her a mischievous smirk. ‘Neither do I,’ he says. This is intended to elicit more honesty, but she says nothing. ‘It’s not going to last much longer,’ he goes. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘That’s a shame,’ she remarks. Her soft-heartedness amuses him; he gives her a small and patronising smile. Fortunately, they are now at the cathedral square; the steps are completely covered with people and the doorway is jammed.
But the museum will be quiet, he tells her, and he leads her to the museum entrance. Inside, he takes her immediately to Mister Buoninsegna, leading the way in a sort of solemn hurry. They enter the room of the great painting. He presents it to her, arm extended: ‘her majesty the Maestà’. Clearly, she is required to be dumbfounded, but she isn’t. It’s a sizeable and beautiful object, without question. Her spirits, however, are not rising to the occasion. And perhaps that’s what’s wrong: the encounter has been turned into an occasion. It would have been better to come across the picture on her own, rather than like this.
‘What do you think?’ asks Gideon.
‘Amazing,’ she says.
She is aware that he is looking at her; she keeps her eyes on the picture until he looks away. Saying nothing, he sits down; he removes his hat, places it on his lap, and rests his hands on it; he looks like a man in church. Paralysed with astonishment, his gaze is locked onto the figures of Mary and Jesus, as if the picture were a pane of glass and the holy Mother and Child were sitting on the other side of it. Yet he’s seen this picture dozens of times before, so this must be a pretence for her benefit. Without being asked, he identifies the figures in the foreground: they are Siena’s patron saints – Ansanus, Savinus, Crescentius, Victor. When the painting was first installed in the cathedral, he tells her, the whole city came to a standstill: shops were closed, and a vast procession, headed by the bishop and the city’s governors, accompanied the Maestà from the Campo to the church, as every bell in the city rang out. She nods, and it appears that this is enough for him. For five minutes more she remains there, out of politeness to Gideon and politeness to the painting, then she goes off to explore the rest of the museum. She doesn’t say anything as she leaves, and neither does Gideon.
Half an hour later, she returns to the room of the Maestà. Gideon is still there, hands on hat, straight-backed, staring. If this is a simulacrum of concentration, he’s going to inordinate lengths to sustain it. She stands to the side, just close enough for her presence to be registered in the edge of his vision, and he does not move. He genuinely doesn’t know that she’s there: she looks at him, and for a moment she feels envious. When she sits beside him he turns to her and says, as if resuming a conversation that had been broken off only a minute ago: ‘Did you go out on the wall?’
‘What wall?’ she answers.
‘The Facciatone,’ he says. ‘It would have been the new facade of the cathedral, had the building been enlarged as planned. Highest point in the city. Marvellous view. I’ll show you.’
He leads her through the museum to a room in which a queue is forming; they join it, and ten minutes later they are conducted out onto the wall. It’s terrifying: a narrow walkway with an inadequate parapet, and a very long drop to the street on each side. Gideon sets out, hands in pocket, as though walking along the corridor of his apartment rather than along a pavement that’s above the roofs and barely wider than a plank; after half a dozen paces he realises that she’s not following; he returns for her, hand outstretched. His expression isn’t cajoling; it isn’t sympathetic; it isn’t in any way mocking, though she knows she must look stupid, clutching the wall; in fact, there is no expression on his face and he doesn’t look at her as he offers the hand to hold. Walking across the wall, his gesture says, is simply something that has to be done; his hand, when she seizes it, is as strong as stone. At the midway point of the wall he pulls her closer, clamping her arm to his side. ‘OK?’ he asks.
‘Never better,’ she answers.
‘We’re perfectly safe,’ he tells her. ‘We’ll go inside in a minute. But you can’t come to Siena and not see this.’ He points out the various landmarks; when he turns round to face the cathedral, he puts an arm across her back, and for an instant she is reminded of her father, the way he would put a hand on her back as they prepared to cross a road together, even when she was a teenager. In single file, Gideon leading, one hand held back for her to grasp, they creep towards the exit; as soon as they are indoors, the hand is disengaged like a lock. Gideon announces that he intends to spend another hour in the museum.
They reconvene at six o’clock, on the Campo. On the drive back to Castelluccio, after they have passed a dead animal on the road, he tells a story, about his Uncle Martin – not a real uncle, he explains, but a relative on his father’s side; he was never entirely clear what the connection was. ‘Uncle Martin lived near Croydon,’ he tells her, ‘and he owned an old Bentley, a fantastic old thing, with fragrant leather seats and a huge wooden steering wheel. One day he took us for a spin in the countryside, David and myself,’ he goes on, with – for the first time – a vestige of affection in his pronunciation of the name. ‘We never forgot it. A Sunday afternoon; roads quiet; sunny; woodland and meadows; and all these rabbits dashing across the tarmac. And every time a rabbit ran out, Uncle Martin would swerve to avoid them, and the big old Bentley would swing across the road.’ He mimics this experience of his boyhood, swaying happily from side to side as they descend towards Castelluccio. ‘But years later, after Uncle Martin had died, my father told me one evening that Uncle Martin had been – and here I quote – “the most miserable sod in Britain”. His exact words. “Not an ounce of kindness in him,” said my father. So I told him that wasn’t true – he’d been kind to the rabbits. And my father laughed his head off: Uncle Martin hadn’t been trying to avoid the rabbits – he’d been trying to hit them.’ He smiles delightedly at her, and shakes his head in wonderment at the naivety of his young self.
5.6
Filling her glass, he beams at Claire and says: ‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’
‘A nice afternoon,’ she agrees.
‘What did you do?’ asks Robert.
‘We did the wall,’ Gideon answers.
Claire sets her face in a rictus of terror.
‘Exhilarating,’ Robert sympathises.
‘And we paid our respects to the Maestà,’ Gideon goes on, giving Claire her cue with a look.
‘We did,’ she says.
‘A beautiful thing,’ says Robert.
‘Very,’ she says.
Gideon, she can tell from the way he’s looking at the water as it fills his glass, is not going to let her get away with so feeble an answer, but Robert rescues her with: ‘And what else did you see?’
‘We
saw Laura Ottaviano,’ says Gideon with glee.
‘Always worth seeing,’ Robert responds, ignoring the jibe. ‘You went to the cathedral, I suppose?’ he says to Claire.
‘Too busy,’ she says.
‘Packed,’ Gideon confirms.
‘So I went into the old hospital.’
‘Santa Maria della Scala,’ says Gideon, as if it were important that she should give the place its full name.
‘Then the Palazzo Pubblico. I didn’t have enough time to see it properly, but I saw the knight on horseback.’
‘Guidoriccio da Foligno,’ Gideon clarifies.
‘Guidoriccio da Fogliano,’ says Robert, exaggerating the correction.
‘And the other Maestà,’ says Gideon.
‘Indeed,’ says Claire.
Soon Gideon is expatiating on the other Maestà, a monologue that modulates into a lecture on aspects of the iconography of Christian art of the late medieval period. A variety of eloquent gestures are demonstrated, culminating in an impersonation of the Virgin in Simone Martini’s Annunciation, which involves delicate hands crossed fearfully on the chest and a sudden backward slide in his chair. The chair legs shriek on the floor tiles; Claire starts at the sound; and Gideon, affecting to be concerned that his performance – enthusiastic to the point of campness – has alarmed her, puts a hand on her shoulder for a split second. She glances at the hand, then at Robert, who raises an eyebrow by a millimetre or less, with a similarly brief and barely measurable uplift of one corner of his mouth.
And a few minutes later, interrupting himself, he touches the back of her hand lightly, making the minimum contact, to say to her: ‘You should take a look at Volterra – shouldn’t she, Roberto? Strange place – very distinctive atmosphere. Louring. Tell her about Volterra, Robert.’ He is standing up now, because he has to say hello to someone at another table: it’s Luisa Fava, with her son and daughter-in-law.
Robert duly tells her a few things about Volterra, but she’s distracted by Gideon, who is directing some exuberant bonhomie at the young man and his wife. The former, though his mother seems enchanted, has the demeanour – as Claire remarks – of a man who has been cornered by an untalented busker. With a kiss of the hand for Luisa, Gideon returns. It’s not yet nine-thirty, but he must get back to work now, he explains, to make up for lost time. ‘Take my car tomorrow,’ he tells Claire. ‘Call round for the keys, before nine.’ Money is handed to Robert, and – with a detour to hug Cecilia – he departs.
5.7
Within a few weeks of taking up residence in Castelluccio, Gideon had established his routine: every morning, whatever the weather, he would set off for a walk shortly after seven o’clock, and shortly before nine o’clock he would return. One cool Wednesday morning in the May of his first year in Castelluccio, he strolled out through the Porta di Volterra in sunshine, prepared for the forecasted rain: he wore a loden cloak that a German client had sent him as a Christmas gift the previous December, and carried a Piganiol shepherd’s umbrella, another gift, with wooden ribs that no gust could buckle. The sky duly blackened, but with unforeseen suddenness; the rain, predicted to be heavy by midday, was torrential by the time Gideon approached the Porta di Siena; and a strong and cold wind had arisen – a wind powerful enough to evert the flimsy umbrella being clutched by the old lady who had taken shelter against the wall of the town gate, with a wicker basket full of food at her feet. Chiefly by means of mime, Gideon proposed that he should carry the basket home for her, and that she should walk beside him, in the shelter of his mighty umbrella, after swapping her saturated coat for his impermeable loden cloak. She assented; he took the sopping coat and draped his cloak over her shoulders, fastening the chain at the neck; approvingly she stroked the cloth. Threading a narrow but by no means feeble arm under his, she regarded the inundation with a huge smile, seemingly delighted by the adventure of crossing the town in this deluge. Already Gideon had taken a liking to her: she was a lively old character, and handsome. The thin nose and sunken cheeks gave her face the severity of a portrait of a Roman matron, yet mischief seemed to lurk in the large grey-yellow eyes. ‘Andiamo?’ she chivvied him, delivering a nudge to the ribs; and then, in a voice that could have come from Cheltenham – ‘Shall we go? I live in Via Sant’Agostino.’
Thus did Gideon make the acquaintance of Elisabetta Perello, on whom he had at once made as favourable an impression as she had on him. Well-mannered, awkward, and – underneath the Bavarian cloak – rather ill-kempt, Gideon conformed to her image of the quintessential Englishman, and Elisabetta Perello was, as soon became apparent, as ardent an Anglophile as one could hope to find. Her husband, who had died only a year earlier, and whose portrait – a sepia image of a young man in uniform, his face asserting a high consciousness of duty through the set of the jaw, the clarity of the gaze, the marmoreal fixity of the lips – Gideon noted and praised on entering the living room of Elisabetta’s apartment, had served alongside English soldiers and had come to admire the qualities that he had observed in many of them: they were great stoics and comedians, Marco had said, and as brave as the ancient Greeks.
Elisabetta invited Gideon to wait until the rain – now clattering on the road with a noise like ball bearings in a drainpipe – had passed. She made tea for him (Twinings English Breakfast), and by the time he left, an hour later, he had learned the salient facts of Marco’s career and Elisabetta’s life. Her Marco had fought with the Corpo Italiano di Liberazione on the Gustav Line, and then, with the Cremona Gruppo di Combattimento, had been attached to the British V Corps in the battle of Rimini. Rimini was Elisabetta’s city, and it was near Rimini, after the fighting was done, that she had met Marco: she was in a ditch, with her two brothers, removing the serviceable parts from a German motorbike, and Marco jumped in to lend them a hand.
She told him she had a boyfriend, and he gave her a smile and said he might have to do something about that. He shook hands with her brothers, and away he went, back to Castelluccio. Many months later, on a Sunday afternoon, there was a knock on the door and there was Marco, on his motorbike, with flowers in his hand. He had ridden more than two hundred kilometres to see her, so she had to talk to him, he said. So they went for a walk with one of her brothers as chaperon, and three hours later Marco rode back to Castelluccio, saying he would like to talk to Elisabetta again very soon. He kept coming back: every two or three weeks he would set off from Castelluccio after Sunday morning Mass, and they would go for a walk, eventually without any brother, and in the end she said she would marry him.
They set up home in Castelluccio, living for the first year with his parents. The Perello family had been in Castelluccio for many generations, and Marco’s father had a shop on Piazza Santa Maria dei Carmini selling hardware and household goods, a shop that Marco’s grandfather had opened. Marco would have liked to teach English for a living: he had learned some of the language while he was in the Cremona group, and after the war had applied himself with diligence to making himself proficient. Courting Elisabetta, he would recite to her, as they walked along the shore at Rimini, dozens of lines of poetry – mostly Shakespeare – which, he later confessed, he did not entirely comprehend; and Elisabetta was appropriately impressed, though the English language sounded to her, at the time, like the grumbling of Marco’s motorbike in neutral. Teaching English, however, was not a possibility: the family business had to be run, and Marco was happy enough to work for his father.
At this point in the story, Gideon let it be known that he too was the son of shopkeepers. Elisabetta, charmed by this affinity between her Marco and the Englishman, enquired as to how, in that case, he came to be living here, and Gideon answered in such a way as to emphasise not the unattractiveness, to him, of a career in shopkeeping, but the irresistible allure of Italy for someone in his line of work; and thus he revealed his vocation to Elisabetta with a modesty that further beguiled her.
‘I did wonder,’ said Elisabetta, indicating the spots of paint on the lower reaches of his
corduroys. If ever he felt the need to invest in a new wardrobe, she told him, he should visit her daughter Luisa and her son-in-law Aurelio, who owned the clothes shop on the Corso; she’d make sure he received a discount, she promised, and Aurelio, the son and grandson of tailors, would make sure that the fit was perfect. She was as good as her word. One week later, Gideon presented himself to Aurelio Fava, whose greeting suggested that his mother-in-law had made him out to be a man of immense reputation. A summer jacket and linen trousers were purchased at a much reduced price, and altered for a minimal charge. And Gideon was introduced to the plump and serene Luisa, who bore no immediately discernible resemblance to her mother but was no less to Gideon’s liking, and in turn was as beguiled by the cheery and dishevelled artist as her mother had been. Thereafter, nearly every item of clothing bought by Gideon was acquired from Aurelio and Luisa.
And so Elisabetta Perello became, in the space of an hour, his second friend in Castelluccio, and Luisa and Aurelio Fava, in the time it took to be measured properly for the first time in his life and to buy his jacket and trousers, became the third and fourth.
Nostalgia Page 17