Sandro cleared his throat. ‘And finding it out quicker.’
‘Do you think there’s more to this?’ she asked.
‘Don’t jump the gun,’ he said. ‘We’re not being paid. Call it pro bono for the moment, but if you care about that Frazione of yours – it’s as well to know the extent of the damage. To learn the whole story.’
‘Not always,’ she said before she could think. ‘It must be worst of all for him, don’t you think? For Rosselli. Because if the midwives are feeling guilty – if we’re feeling guilty, for God’s sake – then how must he be feeling? Living with her, sleeping next to her …’
‘All right,’ said Sandro, interrupting. ‘All right. You leave him to me.’ She heard a change in the background sounds and understood that he had come to a stop. ‘I’ve got to go.’
Hanging up, Giuli sat there a long moment, watching the empty swing move with the memory of the child’s weight in the pale smoky air. The trees were still green, the big mediaeval wall glowed pinkish-grey. She looked at the handsome building that housed the Centre and thought, do I have to? And as if in answer, the tinted-glass door swung outwards and there was Clelia Schmidt in sensible shoes, broad in the hip, fair and frowning, handbag clasped against her chest. Giuli got to her feet and Clelia stopped. There was something in the midwife’s face that said she knew what was coming.
Giuli waited until they were both sitting down side by side on the bench.
‘I was going for my lunch,’ said Clelia vaguely. ‘But I’m not hungry today.’ Giuli took her hand.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ said Clelia, and let out a long, ragged sigh. ‘Poor girl.’
Girl. ‘Forty-two,’ said Giuli. ‘Same age as me.’ Clelia’s eyes widened and Giuli could tell she’d thought Giuli older. ‘And me,’ she said wonderingly.
‘Some of us age quicker,’ said Giuli wryly. They both looked down at their hands entwined.
‘It’s so hard to tell, with educated, intelligent women,’ said Clelia, as if picking up a conversation halfway through. ‘They feel the need to hide more. They require more privacy. They can see what the questionnaire is trying to discover, and they can evade answering.’ She faltered. ‘But there was absolutely no sign in her answers to the questionnaire or to my questions that Flavia was depressed. How was I to know?’
‘But you now believe she was?’
Clelia frowned, looking up directly into Giuli’s face with her blue eyes. Giuli felt as though she herself – her thinning skin, her dry lips – were being examined by those clear eyes. ‘I believe – perhaps with hindsight – I do believe she was very unhappy,’ she said finally. ‘Is that the same thing? Don’t we have a right to our unhappiness without some professional diagnosing it as depression?’
‘I see,’ said Giuli, although she wasn’t sure she did. ‘Unhappiness – well.’ She thought hard. ‘I think of that as – as something with a specific reason, a clear source, and as a temporary state. If you’re lucky.’
‘Exactly,’ said Clelia, suddenly energized. ‘I think that was what worried me. That if Flavia’s feelings were diagnosed as depression she might think it would last for ever—’ And her voice broke off. Her face fell. ‘Or that was my excuse. That was why I didn’t push it with her. I was wrong.’
A specific reason. Giuli remembered something. A clear source. ‘You said – back there – you said you weren’t the only professional she was seeing. There was another midwife?’
Clelia didn’t speak for a moment, and when she did, it was hesitantly. ‘Well, I didn’t deliver her,’ she said, and Giuli heard caution in her voice. ‘The child was born in an ambulance, on the way to the hospital. Flavia stayed at home too long, sometimes women do – the child was delivered by the paramedics, in the ambulance bay as a matter of fact.’ She breathed out. ‘But it was all fine. Textbook delivery. Flavia did very well—’ And again she broke off.
An old man shuffled towards them on the gravel of the little square, eyed the space on the end of the bench, looked at the two women and shuffled on past. Thinking better of it.
Giuli waited till he was out of earshot: this seemed suddenly the most delicate ground imaginable. Although the woman was dead, Giuli didn’t want to invade her privacy more than she could help. She frowned. ‘So the other caregivers – you didn’t mean the paramedics?’ Clelia said nothing, not daring even to look Giuli in the eye. ‘Was she – was she seeing anyone else at the Centre? In the other clinics?’
Birth control. Addictions. Sexually transmitted diseases. Jesus God, thought Giuli, catching her breath, thinking of Niccolò Rosselli. Then thinking of the Frazione.
‘I – I don’t know,’ said Clelia, desperately casting around. ‘I can’t say.’
‘The coroner’s officials will come and ask you,’ said Giuli, taking Clelia’s hands again. ‘You know that, don’t you? And you’ll have to answer them.’
‘Will I?’ She looked terrified.
‘Well,’ Giuli said, ‘people have been known to lie to officials of the state. Even in Germany. But I don’t know how advisable it is.’ Clelia pulled her hands away and buried her face in them. ‘I want to help her,’ said Giuli urgently, not realizing until she said it that it was true. ‘She’s dead, I know that, but – if there’s anything I can do to help Flavia, now, then I want to do it. Do you understand that? The coroner’s office has no interest in that. In helping her.’
‘They just want the truth,’ said Clelia Schmidt dully. ‘Poor Flavia. Poor Flavia.’
The truth, thought Giuli with sudden dislike of the whole concept. What good did the truth ever do? She saw the old man on the next bench, fishing for something in a battered shopping bag. A newspaper, a plastic tub, a fork. She saw his anxious old face soften into an expression of contentment as he peeled the lid from the tub and began to eat, eyes half closed in the soft late-summer air.
‘You need food,’ she said suddenly. ‘We both do.’ She nodded across the square to the small old-fashioned restaurant tucked into the corner. ‘Let’s go and sit down and eat, and you don’t need to talk if you don’t want to.’
The two women stood and made their way through the swings to the far side of the square. The old man paused in his enjoyment of whatever the plastic tub contained, and watched them go.
*
At least, thought Luisa as she stood patiently, hands behind her back and waited for her customer to emerge from the changing cubicle, she had not thought about her check-up and her damned breast for a good five hours. On the negative side, she was sure the boiling rage she felt at the memory of almost everything about Maria Rosselli could not be good for her. It was a bit like having the menopause back: poor Sandro, those had been bad years. It was a surprise to her sometimes, even now, that he had stuck it out.
Of course, the years of declining communication preceding it following the death of their only child hadn’t helped. Perhaps it was because they were still of the generation that stuck it out, that didn’t ask for happiness but only stability. She had never thought of leaving Sandro: she had thought of death more often than that. She was pretty sure he’d never thought of leaving her, either.
‘All right, madam?’ she asked brightly into the curtain. ‘Another size?’
The woman was one who was in denial about her measurements: common enough. This one, middle-aged and too thin, thought she was two sizes bigger than she was in reality: most often it was the other way. The answer through the curtain was muffled and non-committal.
Luisa smiled, not thinking of the customer but of Sandro, but when the woman emerged she caught the smile and tentatively returned it.
‘Oh, madam,’ said Luisa in involuntary despair at the gaping neckline that revealed the bones of the woman’s chest, and the customer’s face fell. ‘Please,’ said Luisa, reaching behind her for the smaller size she’d kept ready. ‘For me, try this one.’
How old was this woman? Luisa had known her ten years, off and on, a rare but regular customer, not one
to treat herself. She came in when her husband gave her some cash and told her to make more of an effort; Luisa tried to picture the husband, and failed. The woman was probably only forty-five but looked older: almost anorexic. It didn’t seem right to Luisa that women of forty-five could still have the insecurities and eating disorders of an adolescent. They should feel strong. When Luisa had been a child those women of middle years had held all the power; even she, Luisa, with her silent marriage and lost child, had not been as cowed as this woman seemed. What had changed?
Mutely, the woman took the dress and retreated back into the cubicle. Luisa closed her eyes briefly at the memory of the visible ribs where a cleavage should have been.
She’d looked on the internet during a lull. They had a computer in the shop now – had done for five years – with a program showing the stock levels, and a website for customers to look at catwalk shows and the like. Luisa still marvelled at the way you could type in something like, say, ‘breast reconstruction’ and get pages and pages. Pictures and everything, detailed explanations of what they called the gold-standard procedure, which involved moving skin from your back and took months. She marvelled at the women they photographed, brave enough to stand there in front of the camera for the before and after, some of them ageing like her, their flesh softened and pale. Some of them young, young, and even lovely. Truth to tell, made lovely again, in some pictures, brave enough, too, to get themselves rebuilt without fear of the cancer coming back, should they have the boldness to allow a new breast to appear where the disease had been.
That fear was irrational, she knew. But Luisa had to admit, it was one of the things that frightened her.
The curtain opened again. ‘There,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
The woman was still too thin, but the smaller size made the most of her. Luisa appraised her robustly, the woman’s eyes never leaving her face to actually confirm what Luisa was saying by looking in the mirror, timidly trustful. Perhaps she has no mother to tell her, thought Luisa. Doesn’t her husband say anything nice to her?
Not that her own did so much, but there was a way he looked at her that was enough.
I’ll get the reconstruction, thought Luisa suddenly, out of nowhere.
‘Your husband will be very pleased, I should think,’ she said, but when she turned to look at the woman she didn’t seem to be listening, was in that reverie that fell over insecure customers at the moment of purchase.
‘Poor cow,’ said Giusy ruminatively as the door swung shut behind her. ‘There is such a thing as too skinny. It just looks unhappy, don’t you think? At a certain age. Or ill.’
Luisa, ready to disagree on principle with Giusy, said, surprising herself, ‘Um, hmm, well. Yes.’
‘You’re getting it done then,’ Giusy went on cheerfully. ‘The breast thing? Reconstruction?’
Luisa stared. Could it be that this late in her self-absorbed life, Giusy had taken to empathizing to the point of being able to read her colleague’s thoughts? Giusy licked a finger and turned a page of her magazine. ‘I saw you looking it up on the computer. I’ve heard it’s a piece of cake these days. Our surgeons, they’re the best. Good on you, I say. Life’s too short to shrivel up and hide.’ They were both still turned in the direction of the door through which the skinny woman had left.
‘Yes,’ said Luisa.
She thought she might not tell Sandro straight away.
Chapter Eleven
THE EXIT FROM THE city seemed interminable. Who were all these people, changing lanes at random on the superstrada? The superstrada itself was a joke, too; thirty years on, the Firenze-Pisa-Livorno road still seemed only half built and was potholed to extinction: Sandro felt himself boil up with useless anger. Crawling around temporary barriers and traffic cones through the Isolotto, still crawling on the overpass through Scandicci, the multiplex cinemas and shopping centres crowding in. The grey prison to the left, built like a concrete stadium. Sandro hated Scandicci.
At his side in the battered little car Niccolò Rosselli blinked through his glasses at the road leading away to the west. If you looked far enough ahead, the castles and cypresses came into focus, San Miniato and Vinci, and then umbrella pines and forested hillside. Perhaps that was the trick – and sure enough, as Sandro refocused his gaze, the traffic around him seemed to ease and shift and they were moving again.
He’d found Rosselli more or less where he’d left him, standing in the shuttered gloom of his sitting room, as bewildered as though he’d forgotten who either of them were. It seemed to Sandro that the room was dimmer, as if dust had already settled over it all, dulling the photographs on the pinboard. Had his woman been all that had been animating Rosselli? It fitted with Sandra’s ideas on women, though he was uncomfortably aware that they were old-fashioned views, and Rosselli and Flavia would no doubt have dismissed them.
Although Rosselli had responded to Sandro’s name so far as to buzz him up, he’d stood silent once his visitor arrived. Waiting for the man to say something, Sandro had stepped around him and rested a hand on the chair at the desk. Not quite casually, he had looked again at the photographs pinned behind the computer’s silent screen, the pale, sensual face of the woman being the one that stood out.
You never could make sense of partnerships, was the thought that had come to him. A beautiful woman might not need to be told she was beautiful, or she might crave it. A plain woman might be fearless.
He didn’t wonder much about men; Sandro thought of them as simple creatures, motivated by sex – or call it love – or money, or power. Niccolò Rosselli didn’t seem to fit the rule, though.
A meeting of minds: Sandro supposed that was – had been – the key to Rosselli’s relationship; intellectual companionship, was that it? He found himself covertly considering his own marriage: his and Luisa’s minds met these days, more than they used to, knowing what each other was thinking, but that was a matter of growing into each other, like plants twining together until their separate beginnings are no longer visible. It was more a physical thing, in a way he could not explain, than an intellectual one: a matter of simple proximity, of feeling one’s way in the dark. Even in his short exposure to the partnership of Rosselli and Flavia Matteo, this was not how their relationship seemed to him. There were distances in this apartment, there were shadows.
There was a photograph of Rosselli, frowning intently behind his glasses, under an umbrella pine on a beach with hills behind, looking like he didn’t belong. There was a photograph of Flavia Matteo with a woman with short dyed blonde hair, both smiling broadly. Another of Flavia Matteo in a woollen hat pulled down hard and unflatteringly over the red hair, under a loggia he vaguely recognized from the city, a red slice of the Duomo’s cupola visible behind.
The baby was still absent, Sandro had registered. It had come to him then with painful suddenness that if he and Luisa had had a child that lived, if Luisa had died and left him with a newborn, he would have held on to it every minute he could. And as Sandro had the thought, Rosselli had suddenly taken off his glasses and polished them as he spoke, head bowed. ‘I found it,’ he’d said.
‘You found it?’ Sandro hadn’t known what he was talking about.
‘I found the mobile phone. Our mobile phone.’ He’d spoken flatly.
‘Right,’ Sandro had said slowly. Rosselli had made no move to produce it. Would the police want to look at the phone? Was it anything to do with Sandro, any more?
‘Could I see it?’
He’d not been able to help himself, had he? This isn’t your business, you aren’t being paid, the woman’s been found, he told himself. But he’d had to see. And like Luisa said, if it’s not our business, why does it still feel like it is?
Rosselli had replaced his glasses and scrutinized Sandro as though he were a new species. Then he had crossed to the desk, pulled open a drawer and taken out the phone. Sandro had been able to tell by the way he handled it that he had no interest in the thing, that
it was not, as it was to almost everyone else these days, a talisman and lifeline and fetish. He had handed it to Sandro.
It had been an ancient model, but in good condition; the first thing that had been surprising about it was that it was fully charged. Even if it had been kept turned off, this had seemed improbable for an elderly mobile phone that was almost never used. Sandro had wiped a thumb across the small screen reflexively. Giuli would be the one to look at it and find out its secrets: all Sandro knew how to do was to scroll quickly through the phone book: doctor, lawyer, dentist, mother-in-law, a few miscellaneous names, all women. Wanda, Maria, Anna K. Flavia did use it, then, to keep in touch? So she had friends, old schoolmates, perhaps the teachers she worked with at the school?
Sandro had been halfway through thinking he’d send Giuli to the school, to the Agnesi to find out who might have been her friends, when he’d had to tell himself again, None of your business – not any more. But he’d kept the phone in his hand, had felt it warming from his touch in secret communication.
‘We’d better go,’ Niccolò Rosselli had said, half turning towards the door. ‘Yes, right,’ Sandro had said, and without thinking, or at least without thinking much, without the appearance of thinking, had slipped the mobile phone easily into his pocket.
As they’d wound their way through the clogged backstreets of Santo Spirito, Rosselli had gazed out of the window with a kind of fervour, a kind of longing, or so it had seemed to Sandro as he’d snatched a sidelong glance. They had passed a greengrocer’s Sandro knew to be the best in the city, a shabby little shop, an old woman picking through a tray of figs on the pavement. A huddle of streetsleepers of all varieties, with the knotted and dreadlocked hair of the young revolutionaries, with the bound and battered feet of the seasoned traveller, with the trolleyful of bizarrely assorted possessions of the mentally ill – all queuing outside the side door of a church. Christian charity still existed, then.
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