Luisa averted her eyes, not wanting to bring bad luck; how did she know, anyway? And was it her business? She busied herself removing the protective polythene and layered tissue from the green dress, stroking the emerald-green silk, separating the layers of fine tulle underneath. She held it out across her arm for Celia Donnelly to see and watched as, unable to stop herself, the girl reached for the garment.
‘It was the green?’ Luisa said, not sure if they’d specified. The red, she realized belatedly, would have been the more obvious choice; she’d just taken the green because she liked it better.
‘Oh yes, the green,’ said Celia, holding the silk between both hands.
‘Come with me,’ said Luisa, and she had to stop herself taking Celia Donnelly by the hand. ‘No hurry’ She pulled the heavy velvet curtain across the changing booth and turned back into the room to attend to her other customer.
‘These, and these, and these,’ said the woman Luisa could only think of as Biancaneve, Snow White, setting three pairs of shoes side by side on the suede bench. The glittering bronze slippers lined with rose-pink leather; slender-heeled, bottle-green boots, and the last pair pointed and embroidered, silver thread on red velvet and a tiny curved heel like something that might have been made for an eighteenth-century French courtesan.
‘Ah, these are wonderful,’ said Luisa impulsively, her approval for once unrestrained. ‘Perfect.’ She took each pair and repacked them in their rustling paper nests, a felt bag laid across the top. Little Snow White, easing her arms back into the scarlet coat, paused.
‘My husband will be here in a moment,’ she said. She seemed nervous. ‘I’ll just wait, to show them to him.’
Inside the narrow cubicle Celia carefully removed boots and socks, reluctantly peeling away the soft warmth of trousers and sweater. She felt chilly and vulnerable; she was very pale. It was down to a summer’s constant work, days on coaches with no time at the beach this year, but she was hardly a sun-worshipper at the best of times, had that annoying northern skin that only burned and peeled, much better left marble-white. With apprehension she pulled the layered dress over her head and for a moment was blinded by a cloud of silk and net, in her nostrils the elusive, delicious scent of the loom, the workshop, the dressmaker finishing the last hem and ribbon by hand. The smell of something new and precious. It slid over her ribs, settled at her waist as though it had been made for her.
‘How are you doing?’ She heard Emma Marsh’s voice through the curtain. ‘Mm,’ Celia said uncertainly, looking around for a mirror in the cubicle but finding none, and she realized with a sinking heart that she would have to come out. She looked down at herself. The brilliant green, as clear and bright as moss under water, made her pale skin look strangely luminous. She pulled back the curtain.
They turned to look at her, Luisa at the cash-desk and Emma pensive on the leather bench with a pile of shoe-boxes beside her. Luisa opened her mouth but said nothing, a wistful expression on her face. Emma looked up and smiled with such unforced pleasure that Celia wondered whether that anxious look might have been a figment of her imagination. Celia stood there awkwardly, embarrassed. Luisa came over and Celia felt the saleswoman’s cool hands on her shoulders, adjusting a strap, pulling gently at the satin ribbon around Celia’s waist, smoothing something she couldn’t see at the small of her back. Then gently she turned Celia towards the mirror that covered one wall.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Guarda che bella che sei. Look, how beautiful.’
Celia looked. She barely recognized herself; she seemed so naked, her pale shoulders gleaming under the spotlights. She turned a little in front of the glass, looking at herself as though she was someone else; she felt buoyed up, breathless.
‘It’s not me,’ she repeated to herself. ‘Is it?’ And she saw Emma Marsh smile at her.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘You must have it.’
Celia was about to remonstrate – the cost, the impracticality – when she felt a draught. The door opened inward to admit a customer; he stood in the corner, a tall, dark figure, a shadow Celia couldn’t quite make out immediately. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the spotlights, and seeing the gesture Emma turned to follow her gaze. Lucas Marsh stood in the doorway. His face was pale and set, and there was a dark glitter in his eyes, something indefinably wild about his appearance. Instinctively Celia took a step back, wanting to cover herself.
‘Darling,’ said Emma, and she got to her feet; he stood still, but allowed her into his side, a small, bright figure against his sombre height, leaning up to press a kiss into his cheek. Beside her Celia detected some subtle shift in the atmosphere and turned slightly to see Luisa scrutinizing Lucas Marsh with a puzzled expression. She frowned as though she was trying to place him, shook her head a little as if to reproach herself for some mistake. She had turned quite pale, and if she’d known Luisa better Celia might have asked her, laughing, if she’d seen a ghost, rather than Lucas Marsh, standing there with his arm around his wife.
At the Palazzo Ferrigno everything was going exceptionally smoothly; in the kitchens not only had the dinner for Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh been largely prepared, but in anticipation of the following week a thousand tiny canapés – quails’ eggs in aspic, miniature rolls of vitello tonnato, beef carpaccio – were ready and waiting in the cavernous cold-store below the kitchens. The ancient staterooms had been aired and dusted and the staff had gathered in the kitchen for their own early lunch of pasta, meat, and a salad of winter puntarelle lightly dressed.
At one end of the long table, the chef, sous-chef, housekeeper and two maids sat at the oilcloth, eating fastidiously; at the other, the four handymen in their brown overalls were methodically putting away penne in meat sauce. Three of the handymen and the maids would now depart for the weekend, and two waiters would arrive at six for the evening’s service. The place ran as smoothly as clockwork; everyone knew the tasks that awaited them, down to the last fruit-knife to be polished.
The administrator stood and served herself, surveying her table, thinking of this evening. She would stay to meet and greet these two, Mr and Mrs Lucas Marsh; she was intrigued by them. She wanted to know what they were like, to witness their appreciation of the Madonna, to tell them its history. She didn’t think any more of the overalled workman she had encountered in the Titian room; she’d long since decided he was just curious, admiring the proportions of the room, and why not? She told herself she had to relax about the foreign workers they had to employ these days – they worked hard, they were cheap, and she must stop thinking of them all as potential burglars, casing the joint. She didn’t notice that he was not at the table, but his absence should have been surprising, certainly to the housekeeper who was responsible for taking on casual labour. Even foreign help was entitled to sit down for lunch, they were all workers together, but if the man had appeared none of them would have recognized him, for the simple reason that he was not, nor had he ever been, on the payroll at the Palazzo Ferrigno.
17
After they’d gone Luisa tidied away the shoes in a kind of trance, repacking the toes with tissue and putting the right pair in the right box, then taking them carefully downstairs to the storeroom, each box in its proper place. All the time the two of them danced a kind of slow waltz in her head, the pretty little dark-haired wife, the tall, pale, handsome husband. Little Snow White, Emma he’d called her, kissing the top of her head absently, as though she were a child. Too young, must be the second wife, Sandro said she was finished, the first one, hadn’t he? He’d paid with a platinum card, his signature small, neat and definite. Lucas Marsh.
‘What was all that about?’ said Gianna as the door closed behind them.
‘Nothing,’ said Luisa, straightening the dress rail where the green silk had hung, trailing its ribbons to the floor. ‘Nothing. I – I thought I recognized him, that’s all. One of those faces.’ Could she be sure, after all this time? The answer was no, of course. But it couldn’t be just coincidence, either.
The day after Bartolo’s murder. And in the pit of her stomach she knew this wasn’t good for Sandro, this was as bad as it could be.
I have to speak to him. She turned to reach for the phone, but behind her the door opened and a couple came in, a young woman with a curtain of shiny black hair, her older boyfriend. They went upstairs to menswear, and she knew without even applying herself consciously to them that he would be looking for something short and tight and glittering so that some of her youth might reflect on him. She calculated, watching them ascend.
‘Listen,’ she said carelessly to Gianna, ‘they’ll be a while up there, won’t they? You’d better go for lunch now. You haven’t had a bite since you arrived.’ And overtaken by an access of fondness as she saw Gianna’s expression, a mixture of exasperation and bemusement, she patted the younger woman on the arm. ‘Go on.’
She waited until Gianna was buttoned up and out of the door, then waited a little longer as she came back for a pack of tissues and her cigarettes. Then she was out again, around the corner in the whirling snow and cut of sight to her usual haunt, an awful place that did novelty low-calorie salads for tourists, bean sprouts and passion fruit, and a hit of espresso to take the taste away afterwards. Gianna needed to keep her figure.
Listening to be sure they were busy upstairs – the conversation had entered an earnest phase – Luisa sipped behind the till and dialled Sandro’s number. As she listened to it ring she gazed, unseeing, out through the plate glass at the dark figures moving to and fro in the snow. When at last Sandro answered she could hear the crackle of a police radio in the background; he must be out in the squad car.
‘Where are you now?’ she said. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Sort of,’ said Sandro, and she could hear wariness in his voice. ‘I’m with Pietro, out near the airport, but he’s not in here with me. We’re on a tip-off. There’s some guys, a gang of Ukrainians we’ve been monitoring. They were seen in Le Cascine – oh, I’ll tell you later. What is it?’ He sounded nervous, and Luisa pictured him out there in the city’s bleak hinterland, the light industrial units and trailer parks, and for a heartbeat she wondered if he was safe.
She swallowed. ‘It’s him,’ she said, and suddenly she felt as though she couldn’t get enough breath to say the words, now that she’d got this far. ‘I’ve seen him. The girl’s father is here.’
There was a long silence, an urgent crackle in the background. ‘What?’ said Sandro urgently. ‘What did you say?’ Luisa couldn’t speak, her breath had all gone. Could I be making a mistake? She thought of the father of the murdered girl as she had seen him all those years ago, his wife beside him with her face in her hands, his face preserved for ever in the single snatched newspaper shot, pale and gaunt with loss. He had hardly changed. Every line and shadow in his face etched there by that week of waiting had been preserved, had deepened over the fifteen years that had passed. No. ‘I know it was him. He calls himself Lucas Marsh, but it’s him, and he’s staying at the Regale, I heard them talking.’ The words were tripping over themselves now but still Sandro was silent.
‘Sandro? I’m not imagining it.’ Her voice was firm. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes, ’ said Sandro, and he sounded defeated. ‘I know. I know he’s here.’
They hurried north in the snow; it whirled and danced in the sombre streets, white against the towering dark facades. Celia had her umbrella up in an effort to protect her clients but it was little use; the soft, insinuating flakes found their way underneath it, settling on her collar, tickling, damp and cold. It lifted her spirits, all the Same, there was something exhilarating about all that motion in the still air, all that bright white in the winter grey.
‘It’s rather late,’ said Lucas Marsh; he seemed distracted, and he was walking very fast, tilted into the snow with his hand tight on his wife’s arm. ‘Can we just press on, go straight there?’
‘You don’t need to eat?’ Celia looked at Emma Marsh’s pale face. ‘I think…’ She hesitated, and abruptly he came to a halt, stepping back into a doorway and drawing his wife into his side and out of the snow.
‘What?’ he said, but Celia had the impression he was hardly listening; he seemed to be looking around them, over Celia’s shoulder, searching for something. Had he seen someone he knew? The streets were almost empty; it was after one and the shops were closing, the restaurants filling up. And the visibility was poor – the movement of the snow, thicker than ever now, confused everything. She thought she saw a figure standing across the road, a man with his hands in his pockets in a dark coat, but when she blinked to see more clearly there was no one.
‘Emma – Mrs Marsh, she…’ She hesitated again not wanting to offend him by pointing out his responsibilities to a cold, tired, pregnant wife.
‘Oh,’ he said, refocusing, deflated. ‘Yes, of course’ He rubbed her shoulder distractedly. ‘I’m sorry. Do you know somewhere – where we could eat quickly? Nowhere…’ He put a gloved hand to his forehead as though to help himself formulate a plan, and he looked almost in pain with the effort. ‘Nowhere grand, a quiet place, something out of the way.’ He looked into his wife’s face, his head tilted a little, anxiously regarding her. ‘Sorry, darling. I thought – I thought we could just get on, then get back to the hotel early, you could have a rest then? Before dinner?’ Celia saw Emma Marsh struggling to regain her spirits, her lip trembling a fraction.
‘Yes,’ she managed. ‘Yes, of course. I don’t want to spoil my appetite. But maybe just, just a little, you know, something hot. Sit down for a minute.’
‘I know somewhere,’ said Celia quickly, wanting to stop this, feeling a stir of anger with Lucas Marsh for not being able to see how desperately tired his wife was. What was wrong with him? She had to get Emma Marsh into the warm. ‘Down here,’ she said, and tugging them after her she turned left, then right into the Via dei Tavolini and the Cantinetta di Verrazzano.
Half baker’s, half wine bar, the Cantinetta was Celia’s standby; she knew every café, every corner bar where you could sit down at no extra cost, where the rest-rooms were clean, and this was one of the best. Comfortable booths, good coffee, a wood oven at one end that could cook you alive in the summer but on a day like this… as long as it wasn’t too crowded. They pushed the heavy glass door and a gust of warm, yeasty air, the smell of new bread and wood smoke and wine, enveloped them. It was very full.
Along one mirrored side opposite the baker’s counter stood wooden benches, each one fully occupied by elderly locals. They were sitting bundled in their winter coats and drinking wine or caffè latte, eating pastries or slices of schiacciata, the hard Tuscan flatbread, with unhurried gusto. Celia edged past them, her charges in tow, to the back of the long, narrow shop where it widened to accommodate six or seven marble tables in a cramped, wood-panelled tea room. As they arrived a couple stood up to leave, a pair of women in swinging furs, leaving behind them discarded coffee-cups that looked to have sat there empty for some time. It was an old-fashioned place, somewhere the locals could serve themselves then sit and gossip at leisure without fear of being chivvied for their table.
‘Will this do?’ asked Celia anxiously; it was difficult to read Lucas Marsh, to know if this was what he had wanted.
‘This is fine,’ he said with a hint of weary gratitude she hadn’t heard in him before, as though he’d let down some kind of defence, as though at last they needed her. ‘Just the kind of thing I meant.’ He looked around the tables quickly, then down the length of the baker’s counter to the window, across the sea of green loden and felt hats, the stiffly permed, spun-gold hair and furs of the women. What he saw seemed to satisfy him. With a little sigh of relief Emma subsided on to the wooden bench and pulled off her gloves.
‘I’m starved,’ she said, but she smiled, and Celia saw the colour was returning to her cheeks in the warm.
‘I’ll get us something,’ said Celia briskly. ‘Is that all right?’
Lucas Marsh sat beside his wife. He looked tired
. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Fine, anything.’ His hand went an inch across the table and rested against his wife’s; it was as though he didn’t want the gesture to be noticed. Not a demonstrative man. Celia found it hard to read him; he seemed so tense, and she wondered if he was always like this. Perhaps it was the baby, or maybe the meeting had gone badly this morning. ‘A bit of local colour,’ he said to Emma. ‘Sorry it’s not a proper restaurant. I just—’ He stopped.
‘It’s lovely,’ said Emma quickly. ‘I’m glad we came. You choose for us, Celia, yes.’ She threaded her fingers through his and he looked away. Suddenly feeling superfluous, Celia crossed to the counter by the wood oven where a queue had formed. It was busy. The burly baker, his forehead beaded with sweat, was scattering olives, shards of artichoke heart and pork fat and little bitter salad leaves on to the rounds of dough, shovelling them in and out of the blazing oven as fast as he could. Celia glanced back at Lucas and Emma Marsh; their hands were still folded tight across each other’s on the table but they were not talking, and Lucas Marsh was still looking away from his wife, his face set and pale.
Celia thought, not for the first time, how odd marriages could turn out to be, how mysterious, and how apparently lacking. Why, if Lucas Marsh was not a voluble man, didn’t Emma at least fill the silence now they were alone together, talk to him until she got something out of him? With Celia she had turned out to be so open and spontaneous; certainly, compared to many of her wealthy clients, Emma had appeared impulsive and ready to confide. But with her husband it was as though she felt she had to be circumspect, as though she had to restrain her own natural interest in him. Was there something even Emma was afraid to discover about Lucas Marsh? It wasn’t Celia’s idea of a marriage, but then, perhaps that was why she was still single. The queue shuffled forward and as Celia moved on automatically, deep in thought, she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up: there was Beate, her face flushed and bright. Behind Celia in the queue someone grumbled.
A Florentine Revenge Page 16