‘Did you tell your family that you were coming to see me here?’
‘I can do what I like. I’ve left school now.’
They went down to the street, Chiara rather cautiously because she had put on a pair of new shoes which did not go very well with her coat. Once in the street she was graceful. At the plane-tree, as though it had been prearranged, she stopped, and so did he, an armslength away. Here, in the open air, he might have come to his senses, but didn’t.
‘What do you mean by coming here like this?’ he repeated, in pain and fury.
Now at last she believed it, and made off, quick as a shadow, down the Vicolo dei Semplice. ‘It’s only the second time we’ve met,’ he said out loud, and then shouted: ‘Come back! I’m saying what I don’t mean!’ Nobody bothered to look at him. It wasn’t unusual, in that quarter, for someone to shout in the street. He felt like beating his head against a lamp post. Then he had to go back. He had forgotten, after all that, to lock up.
23
At via Limbo the telephone, enshrined in a kind of marble grotto in the vestibule, could be overheard by almost everybody in the apartment. Privacy had not been thought of when it was installed, admiration, rather, for a modern improvement. Chiara had something to hide from her father, the fact that she was unhappy.
She took her aunt’s Topolino, which had been left in the courtyard, and drove up to the Ricordanza. The sensation of being high up, above the city, in the dark night air, was exhilarating. She went round to the side gate and saw that the lights were on in the gardener’s house while the radio murmured a long list of winning lottery numbers. She rang the outer bell, which was inside the open stone mouth of the statue of a garden god. One year a bird had nested in it and she remembered being lifted up to feel the waiting warm young birds.
The gardener’s wife had been her friend ever since she could tell one human face from another.
‘Giannina, let me in.’
Giannina was moving on the other side of the wall.
‘Contessina.’
‘Giannina, let me into the house, I want to telephone.’
‘The electricity’s off in the house.’
‘I know. Give me some matches. I want to telephone where no-one can hear me.’
Giannina opened up. ‘Well, you’re seventeen.’
Chiara kissed her. ‘Nearly eighteen.’
‘Where are your own keys?’
‘I forgot them, I’ll remember them next time.’
They went together up the rising path to the back of the house. The slope of the ground was so acute that although the front door stood at the top of a gracious double flight of steps, at the back you went straight into the old kitchens. Inside the air, and the smell of the air, was not so much stagnant as disused and resentful of disturbance.
Chiara went straight into the salone, not caring whether Giannina was following her or not, and put a call through to London.
‘Where are you speaking from?’ asked Barney, as clear and as like herself as if she had been in the next room.
‘Oh, from home, from Florence.’
‘You’d better make the call as short as possible, as your father’s practically penniless.’
‘Barney, please come.’
‘What’s wrong? Is it this man? Doesn’t he want to see you?’
‘He doesn’t know that he does.’
Barney paused, saying, ‘Don’t rush me, I’m just turning it over in my mind.’
Chiara waited in the half-dark. The immense shutters, half folded back, laid a ladder-like pattern of cloudy moonlight across the floor.
‘Barney, please come. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Listen, it’s this way. I’ve absolutely got to go to Painstake, that’s a house, it’s the name of a house in Norfolk, it’s near Flitcham, no really it’s nearer to Castle Rising, that won’t mean very much to you, because there’s somebody I’ve met who’s been asked there for the shooting. You know the shooting’s quite different here from the way you do it in Italy.’
‘I suppose it’s much the same from the bird’s point of view.’
‘Is anyone listening to you?’
‘I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Well, get this into your head, this man I’m talking about who’s been asked to Painstake, I’ve decided he’s the one, he’s definitely my He. Now, over here you can go out with the guns all day and keep walking with the one you’ve decided on, even if you’re half drowned in mud, and by the end of the day he has to notice you, he just has to get the message.’
‘But Barney, everybody notices you, they can’t help it.’
‘All I want to know is whether you’ve understood me so far.’
‘I have understood you.’
‘Then you can see that I’ve got to go to Norfolk.’
‘Please come, Barney. Think.’
‘I have been thinking. I’ve been thinking while we’ve been talking, so as not to let the charges mount up. Until you get a bit less helpless I’ve got a duty towards you. I’ll let you know my flight and you can collect me from Pisa on Monday. Then I’ll be able to get back to England the week after to deal with this He.’
24
Giancarlo was a little disconcerted. Probably (forgetting how often he was away himself), he imagined that now Chiara was home at last she would not feel the need of an English visitor quite so soon.
‘You’re taking the Fiat to Pisa? You want to get there by nine in the evening? It seems a very ill-thought-out scheme. Where will you dine?’
‘I suppose Barney will have something on the plane. You know I don’t mind whether I have anything or not.’
‘Shall I like this friend of yours?’
‘I hope you will, I’m sure you will.’
‘Does she speak clearly?’
‘She has a strong character.’
‘Oh, if that’s all! It’s to be regretted, however, that your aunt isn’t here.’
‘Barney knows Aunt Mad, she came and took us out from the convent on one of the feast days. And she knows some people called Harrington who did over one of the farm houses near Valsassina. She says the Harringtons would never forgive her if she set foot in Italy without going to see them.’
‘In that case it’s strange, perhaps, that she isn’t staying with them on this occasion.’
‘She’s always so busy. She’s only coming to us now because I particularly wanted someone strong-minded.’
‘Well, you can take her out to visit them, and of course if you’re going in that direction you must both go and see Cesare. You know that I didn’t mean and couldn’t mean that Miss Barnes wouldn’t be extremely welcome. When I said that it was a pity that your aunt wasn’t here, I only meant that unfortunately I shall have to spend a few days in Rome, next week, so that you will be entirely in the hands of Annunziata. Absurd that I’ve only just remembered it.’
He had always treated memory as a matter of convenience. So, too, it seemed, was old age. Chiara, out of love and exasperation, had tried as a child, and sometimes even now, to discount the evidence, telling him, for example, that his sight was as good as ever. ‘You forget what you want to and see what you want to.’ Giancarlo took a different viewpoint. The great advantage, he claimed, which made him inclined to welcome decay, was that the substitutes were such an improvement on the originals. Glasses were stronger than eyes, and replaceable. ‘Frescobaldi told me that he experienced the greatest happiness of his life when he got his first false teeth. They eat so rapidly nowadays at the Frescobaldi that one is often home by ten o’clock.’
Giancarlo could see that his daughter was in a perilously nervous state, but he was too humble, where she was concerned, to imagine that he could be of any use. That was why he emphasized the symptoms of his own decay.
25
Barney came into the apartment in via Limbo like a train drawing up at a platform, but ready, after refuelling, to take off again immediately. Her flight had been delayed and i
t was nearly midnight. She wanted a bath, and the sonorous iron pipes of the piano nobile groaned and reverberated in the hard duty of hauling the hot water from the trembling boiler.
‘She’s used to having one, she thinks showers are weedy.’
‘Of course, my dear. I only want you to reassure me that Miss Barnes’ visit will make you happier.’
Chiara went into the bathroom. In the sarcophaguslike expanse of marble, facing the great brass taps inscribed Installazione Niagara, Barney lay unperturbed. Her ample body had turned rose pink.
‘I say, Cha, I hope you’re not short of water. You run out of it here sometimes, don’t you?’
‘It’s sometimes cut off in the afternoon in summer.’
‘Why don’t you have smaller baths, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For that matter, why doesn’t Florence have a proper airport?’
‘I don’t know, Barney. I don’t care.’
‘You ought to take an interest in these things.’
‘Listen. Last Tuesday I went round to his consulting-room.’
‘Did he ask you to?’
‘How could he? I’ve only just come back. As soon as I could I went there. I waited till it was seven, when he stops work, then I went up the stairs to the office and he drove me away as if I was a criminal.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I went home, I came back here. What else was there for me to do?’
‘Did he call anything after you?’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
Barney hauled out the strange old bath-plug, which was shaped like a narrow iron bottle ready for the last messages of the drowning. Then with a great broadbreasted heave she stood up. The waters surged together and she stepped out.
‘He must have been deeply disturbed,’ she said. ‘You’ve disturbed him deeply, dear girl.’
‘But what am I to do, Barney? Here I am, I’m eighteen, nearly eighteen, and every minute of my life is being wasted, there’s not a single second ticking away now that isn’t being wasted. It’s all wasted unless we can be together and unless he’s happy.’
‘The Happiness of Dr Rossi,’ interrupted Barney. ‘Film neorealistico, con Marcello Mastroiannie Maria Schell.’
‘Why did I ask you here? I hate you.’
Both girls had to shout above the heartbreaking sobs and bass growls of the ebbing bathwater.
‘In ten years he’ll be an Older Man. Of course, that suits some people. But you don’t know him. He may have leches on everyone he meets.’
‘That doesn’t worry me,’ Chiara said. ‘All I want to know is this: is it possible for anyone to want something and then refuse to take it, not for a good reason, but for no reason at all?’
Barney was putting on a man’s striped nightshirt which came halfway down her glowing, faintly hairy calves. On the face of it she looked an unlikely adviser in matters of the heart.
‘I shall have to meet him, of course, first of all so as to sum the situation up.’
‘But that’s exactly what you can’t do, I can’t ask him here, not after he turned me out like that, and I can’t ask him to meet me anywhere else.’
‘Well, your aunt, the one who isn’t here now but presumably will be some time or other, or your father, for that matter — what about them, don’t they know this Rossi man?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Barney turned in all her striped majesty on her much slighter friend.
‘Chiara, you’ll have to be completely frank with me. This man won’t do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s common, isn’t he?’ said Barney.
Like a trace of flame, Chiara sprang to life. ‘I told you that in Italy nobody thinks like that.’
‘Well, I’m in Italy now, and after I’ve seen him I shall give you my considered opinion.’
‘I don’t need your opinion, Barney! I’m not buying him from a shop!’
‘The signorine are disputing with each other,’ said Annunziata, marching into the salotto. ‘Their voices are raised.’
‘What’s the time?’ asked the Count.
‘Nearly one o’clock.’
‘She is my daughter’s guest.’
‘Let’s pray they don’t do each other an injury.’
The next morning Barney, trained for field sports, got up early and went immediately to the kitchen. There Annunziata, as she had done for the whole of her working life, was heating up the remains of yesterday’s tea in a saucepan. Barney pointed out to her, in the convent’s serviceable Italian, that she must never on any account do such a thing again. Annunziata asked whether the signorina intended to take the work of the kitchen upon herself. ‘Watch me carefully,’ said Barney, pouring the reddish-green liquid into the sink. ‘That might have poisoned us all. Probably though they wouldn’t have arrested you, because you didn’t know any better.’ ‘I say, your housekeeper person ought to be grateful to me,’ she told Chiara, who had spent a white night, half way over the threshold of sleep.
‘Honestly, I think you’ve been rather thoughtless, Barney. Annunziata can’t change now, she’s like the nuns, and then she’s done so much for us, she hid things for us during the war up at the Ricordanza, and let people take the pictures, mostly the Piero da Cortonas, which no-one ever looked at anyway.’
‘What people?’
‘Well, everybody who came took something.’
‘She did that for the personal advantage of your family, which shouldn’t have been considered in wartime. Did she shelter British prisoners of war when they were on the run?’
‘I think she sheltered anyone who needed it.’
‘Good show,’ said Barney. ‘Lucky, though, she didn’t poison them with the tea. That would have gone against her.’
* * *
Difficult though it was to worst her in a direct encounter, Barney, at going on nineteen years of age, could be taken in quite easily. She was taken in by the Count, who chose for those particular few days one of his easiest impersonations of himself. He became a bewildered survivor of a world grown hard to understand, with little Edwardian mannerisms learned from an English nanny and governess, when in point of fact he had had neither. Chiara, who did not quite understand that the old, as well as the young, have to defend themselves, regretted the apparent necessity of all this. She still assumed, as a child does, that those whom she loved must love each other.
The Count took the first opportunity to ask Barney whether her parents, Colonel and Mrs Gore-Barnes (about whom he was mildly curious) would like their daughter to visit the galleries, and perhaps some private collections. Barney was up to this, because she had been made to spend four, no, five terms at Holy Innocents studying art history. They had had Miss Peach, a lay teacher, for Italian and art studies, and Miss Peach had given them a list of all the artists worth remembering, with the good things to look out for in one column, and then another column for their faults, so that a balance could easily be struck.
‘What were the faults of Leonardo?’ the Count asked.
‘Occasionally morbid and unwholesome subject-matter,’ said Barney.
‘Shadows too dark.’
‘Botticelli, insufficiently interested in colour.’
‘Raphael, no faults.’
‘The Peach was always on at Chiara to address the class, because she was Italian, and the Peach wasn’t sure of her pronunciation, and thought Chiara might catch her out somewhere. It was a bit like being in a lion’s cage, if one of the lions looks tricky you must never turn your back on it.’
‘I know so little of lion-taming,’ said the Count.
‘Oh, horses are much the same, if you’ve had anything to do with them.’
‘The horse, if I may say so, has the habit of obedience.’
‘My father was in the Italian cavalry,’ said Chiara.
‘Then you’re redundant, Count, rotten for you.’
Chiara looked restlessly out of the windows at t
he pure white autumn sky.
‘Miss Peach might have trusted me,’ she said.
They returned to the question of the study of the history of art. In truth the Ridolfi had nothing much to say about it, having absorbed it without the necessity of learning anything, rather as Barney had absorbed her ideas of weediness or of tea-making. Paintings, in one house or another, in one church or the next, had been favourites or unfavourites with Chiara all her life (just as domestic animals had been with Barney), known as only children can know their familiars, seen year by year, as she grew taller, from a different level of vision. But the Count, hoping to have struck lucky with his subject, went on: ‘It has always seemed to me that one of the mistakes made in these courses of study lies in giving so much attention to the great men. There are many delightful things by quite unknown artists, little country things. I hope, Miss Barnes, that while you’re here my daughter will take you over to her cousin’s farm. There’s a wedding-chest there painted with a design of Love Tamed by Time — it’s only a pity that the companion piece, Time Tamed by Love, seems to be missing — and then there are the so-called dwarfs at the Ricordanza. I don’t mean that these things are great treasures, quite the contrary, that is just my point, they are small things, local things, which would be given no doubt a considerable list of faults.’
‘I’d like to see the farm,’ said Barney. ‘How many acres?’
26
Maddalena was in Vienna, visiting some relatives even older than herself. She received a letter from a friend in Florence. ‘This English friend of our little Chiara — people who have seen her have telephoned and told me that she is a giantess, one metre eighty at least from her heels to the crown of her head, on a level with men, plum-coloured, with great bright eyes and strong white teeth. You won’t think me interfering if I say that she sounds more likely to lead than to follow.’ Mad tore up the letter, reflecting that Giancarlo, after all, was at home.
Chiara, however, was at that very moment driving her father to the Central Station. The car breathed faintly of the eau-de-cologne which he sometimes used, and there was the unsettling smell of leather luggage.
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