The old habit of calling on God had not been discarded.
He began to piece out the logic of what had happened. ‘Nina didn’t tell me because it would have made it all harder. She did everything she could to make it easier.’ He looked up at Lottie. ‘I should have supported her. I didn’t.’ He glanced at The Nativity. ‘But it does explain why she disappeared.’ Lottie nodded. ‘And no one knew?’
Lottie said, ‘Marta Livardo did.’ She removed her arm and ticked off the names on her fingers. ‘She told your uncle after Nina was murdered, who must have told the cardinal. When I went to see him he informed me that Nina had been a fallen woman, which is the usual way of putting it.’
He pulled himself upright, walked over to the bookshelves and ran a finger along a line of books. ‘I abandoned the priesthood because I thought I had sinned too badly and let it down. I thought that the mixed-up parts of me would never come together and it would be impossible for me to save souls.’ He glanced around. ‘Which, after all, is the sacred obligation of a priest.’
‘But you also lost your faith?’
A bottle of brandy stood beside the espresso machine and he reached for it, pouring two slugs into glasses. He shoved a glass towards Lottie and leaned back against the shelves.
‘All wasted, wasn’t it? The sacrifice and effort. Carrying the guilt. Worse, Nina’s life.’ There was a pause. ‘She must have suffered. She must have been angry and lonely. And, God forbid, frightened.’
‘I think she was, but I’m not sure why.’ She touched his arm. ‘Look, Nina took her own decisions.’
The brandy did its work and he sounded less riven. ‘Bishop Dino as he was then was an ambitious man. Everyone knew that. He got angry if there was trouble on his doorstop. Beppo warned me.’
‘Did Nina and your uncle meet more than once?’
‘I don’t know. He told me to be wary of her. He said she was a bird of paradise and would fly away.’
She looked again at the painting. Here was the Virgin kneeling in front of her new-born son, endeavouring to make sense of what had happened to her. As Nina would have done?
Medieval women were taught to regard the Virgin’s experience as the most significant event in creation. They would scrutinise a nativity in a book of hours and reflect on the miracle that a mere female could have found such favour with God.
Powerful and suggestive, it was an image used to concentrate a medieval woman’s thoughts and to bend her will into emulating Mary, the perfect woman.
‘Lend me your loupe, Gabriele?’
He opened a drawer and passed it to her.
Bending over the painting, she scrutinised the monk and the girl. Under her brandy-softened eye, their outlines were hazy.
But … it was there, the clue that Nina wanted to leave Leo.
The stick carried by the monk was a large gladioli and clasped tight in the woman’s hand was a narcissus.
She needed a minute or two to think.
Gabriele was saying: ‘Bishop Dino summoned me and demanded that I give her up. He didn’t know we had already parted and told me that he would take steps to make sure that she was kept away.’
‘Not murder, surely?’
‘No.’ Contempt for the cardinal was still there. ‘But he was – he is – that interesting paradox: a man of God with few scruples. He might have said something to someone who took the matter in hand.’
‘You’re not talking about your uncle?’
‘Beppo is a fixer and smoother. He’s not capable of that.’ Gabriele sat down and buried his face in his hands. ‘My child … if it is … had no parents. That’s a heavy, heavy cross.’
Lottie found herself concentrating anywhere but on the painting.
‘I must find him or her.’
The kaleidoscope of conjecture and possibility that was being turned over in her mind came into focus.
‘I can help you, Gabriele.’ Sweat prickled her upper lip and she brushed it away. ‘You know all about the iconography in paintings? Yes?’ She passed over the loupe and pushed The Nativity over to him. ‘The flowers in their hands. What are they?’
‘The narcissus and the gladioli.’
‘Gabriele, if the child … your child … survived, the flowers are the key to where Nina took it. She painted the clue into her picture. The message was meant for you.’
Poleaxed by the shock of the discovery and its implications, Gabriele told Lottie he needed to go away and think. Brandied up, they said goodbye and promised to be in contact very soon.
Lottie understood his need for silence. It was, she told Tom later, a revelation so sharp and loaded that it almost hurt.
‘The monk was holding a gladioli?’
‘What of it?’
‘Listen to me,’ said Tom. ‘I’m going to do a bit of digging. OK?’
‘That would be good.’
A day later, Gabriele made contact and asked to meet Lottie at what she had come think of as Nina’s church.
On her way out of the Espatriati she spotted Mirella, who was searching for something in her bag. Almost certainly she had chosen to do so at the entrance, thereby giving passers-by a chance to admire the silk Pucci pantsuit into which she had been poured.
Lottie waved at her. Mirella’s single-mindedness was an object lesson and it made her smile. Mirella waved back.
It was a hot day and the cool inside the building was welcome. A mass was in train, with worshippers occupying several of the pews. She and Gabriele retreated to the tiny Lady Chapel, whose entrance was partly obscured by a pillar.
They sat facing a small altar dominated by a highly coloured statue of the virgin and a pot of lilies. Votive candles burned on a stand and their smoky, waxy smell mingled with the incense.
‘Lottie, The Nativity… I would like permission to keep this after you have catalogued it.’
‘I won’t be cataloguing it. It belongs to you.’
He nodded and Lottie settled herself to wait.
The church microphones crackled. Mass had finished and the priest could be heard instructing his assistant.
‘Giving up the priesthood was painful,’ Gabriele said at last. ‘Death throes usually are. Losing Nina was one thing, but her death was another. That made it impossible for me. It was difficult for a couple of years, but I was lucky and found another vocation as the so-called book doctor. It has given me much in return. I have not missed the Church.’
‘But I met you here once.’
‘I know. Strange that. You had brought in the painting and it was like … having a disordered stomach. I needed to come here and to settle it.’
‘Why are we meeting here now?’
‘Because …’ He steadied himself. ‘I lied to you when I said I never saw Nina again. I did. One more time. The day she died.’
‘Gabriele…’
‘I’d been lost for months,’ he said. ‘No sleep. No appetite. My will to learn had vanished and my spiritual state was a lost cause. I could no longer see the point of being on this earth. I had sinned in the eyes of God and the Church, given up Nina and distressed my family.’ His lips twitched and a touch of self-deprecating humour crept into the confession. ‘God didn’t see fit to advise me on that one. My uncle did, though. He urged me to keep on in the seminary. He kept dangling the prospect that, one day, I could be a powerful man of God. He said … that even if I had lost my faith, it would be a good life with many compensations if I rose in the hierarchy.’
Not for the first time, Lottie wondered why, if he felt so strongly and ambitiously, his uncle had not chosen for himself the path that he urged on his nephew.
Gabriele read her thoughts. ‘His role was to be the secular arm of the family. Mine the religious. It might have worked.’
He looked up at the chapel ceiling, where plaster cherubs sat on the beams. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting. One day, I woke up and realised I was on my own.’
Lottie knew this was not an easy place to arrive at. ‘Hard but necessary?’
‘Actually, it cheered me. I may have been without the underpinning of my vocation, but I knew where I was at last. I knew never to have expectations of any deity of whatever stamp.’
Lottie extracted the timeline she had drawn up for Nina’s movements from the folder in her bag. ‘Nina left Rome after you broke up, and she didn’t return until just before Prime Minister Moro was kidnapped.’
‘When she first vanished, no one had any idea where she’d gone. I began to look for her in our usual places. I even asked the portiere at her apartment. No help there. A year later, I was still consumed by her and her disappearance. It was almost winter, and I felt so bleak that I walked in here and sat down in a pew over there.’ He pointed. ‘I was struggling at the seminary and everything – body and soul – was out of step. Thinking back, I had probably already decided to give it up, but I had not yet admitted it to myself.’
Lottie thought of what came next: a shuttered, shrouded workshop and the retreat into it.
‘I had got up to leave when I saw Nina coming in through the door … It took me a moment to realise that it was her. When the penny dropped, I was flooded with happiness. I knew she wasn’t religious. In fact, the opposite, and I was gripped by the idea that she had come here because it was where we first met.’
Lottie bit her lip and kept quiet.
Nina had come here to meet Rex.
‘She looked different,’ continued Gabriele. ‘Very thin. Her hair was longer and her coat was too big. She looked so small … lost.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
Gabriele did not reply for a few moments. When he did, it was with a halting admission. ‘I did not move.’
‘Because?’
‘I’ve asked myself that a thousand times. I had longed for her day and night for all those months, but when I saw her in the flesh I was paralysed. But … but …’ He looked past Lottie. ‘But the truth is … I also kept quiet for those crucial seconds because I couldn’t bear to go through it all over again.
‘She didn’t see me. She came here into the Lady Chapel and knelt directly behind a man I didn’t recognise. She said something to him. The pillar was in the way and it was impossible to get a clear view. Then she left and I gathered my wits, followed her out of the church and called her name. She knew at once who it was and turned around. Her face lit up in the way it used to do. I ran towards her but she smiled and shook her head, as if warning me to keep my distance. Then she vanished.’
Lottie knew something about baptisms of fire. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He glanced at her – and Lottie knew he trusted her to listen and to understand.
‘I will never forgive myself for not saying anything to her when I saw her here. Ever.’
‘Did you get a look at the man she was talking to?’
‘Not really. He wore a hat. But no amount of going back over what happened is going to change anything.’ He picked up the timeline from the chair. ‘Lottie, I ask myself every day why I hesitated. Why didn’t I tell her that I was thinking of giving up the vocation? It might have stopped her going out that night.’
Lottie said, ‘Logically, it might not have done.’
‘Logic doesn’t have anything to do with it. I blame myself and that is it.’
‘But logic should tell you that the probabilities tell a different story. Whatever you might or might not have said or done, Nina would still have died.’
He looked around at the edifice that dealt in sin, suffering and the promise of forgiveness. ‘You mustn’t try to exonerate me.’
‘But you must try. As you advised me,’ she said gently. ‘Forgive me, Gabriele, Nina was an independent, professional woman who wouldn’t have taken risks unless there was a good reason.’
He was not convinced.
‘I’ve been thinking over what we talked about by the river.’ She focused on a candle. ‘You might not remember because I was trying to divert you. There was a woman who had a baby and didn’t want it. The baby was given away and put into a care home. Later, she was fostered out to a couple who were kind but alien. As a result, that girl grew up blaming that mother for her sense of unease and her loneliness and thought of herself as a lost child and lived her adult life thinking that there must have been something wrong with her for her mother to have done such a thing.’
As always, disquiet washed through her – rough, stinging, a known antagonist.
‘Then she met someone who issued a simple instruction. “Knock down the wall.”’ She smiled at him. ‘Which was you, as you know. So I will. So must you.’
‘I get it,’ he said.
‘You and I, both.’ The candles on the altar guttered. ‘You made me understand that what my mother did was to do with her, and her predicament, not me. It didn’t make it easier, but it was a good foundation on which to rearrange the mental furniture.’
He shifted restlessly and old secrets and past suffering were obvious.
‘Nina’s death was almost certainly not your fault, Gabriele.’
He cupped his hands, as if her words had landed in them and he was weighing them for size.
‘You have something better to do now,’ she said. ‘It is never too late to find a child. Believe me.’
After a moment, he nodded. ‘So, the search begins.’
At the doorway, they turned to look back down the aisle – and both were summoning the shade of Nina in her overlarge overcoat.
Lottie’s relief on stepping back into the Roman streets was marked. Here, human transactions might be dangerous and complicated but not crushed by the almost impossible demands of a religious vocation.
Back in the office, she booked in Gabriele for a lengthy session to read through Nina’s papers and the notebook.
She felt, she knew, it was crucial that Gabriele made contact with the original. The online facsimile would offer only a fraction of the experience of the real thing. To feel the weight of the notebook, to smell the must and dust of the past, to note its marginalia and inserts, to see where paper clips had left marks on the pages would be to enter Nina’s world.
Just as she, Lottie, had done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Rome
8 May 1978
IT TURNED OUT THE GENERAL LOVED BALLET.
Anyone who loved ballet – any of the arts – must be on the side of the angels, which gave me a meaty conundrum because it was impossible to consider the general anywhere near approaching an angel.
We were going to an open-air performance of Romeo and Juliet in the ruins of a Roman villa. Before that, he was driving me out of Rome to a (indifferent) restaurant in a village to the east of the city. I wondered why. To tap up a contact? To bribe a local police chief (always prudent to have onside)? Maybe to check over an arms cache? What was not in doubt was the general’s deployment of me as a cover. The wining and dining of a woman he was currently bedding looked perfectly normal.
I took a long look in the mirror.
You’re too thin. A stick … Marta Livardo informed me. She should know because, since my return, she has been keeping a closer eye than ever on me.
We speak to each other as little as possible and our exchanges are short and sharp. She looks me up and down in that way of hers – hostile, assessing – and she is bursting to ask, What happened to your baby?
She won’t ever know because I won’t ever tell her.
In my absence, I had asked Marta not to touch anything in the apartment because the dust, disturbed or otherwise, would give me clues if someone had snooped.
Sure enough, the papers in my desk have been rifled through. Marta was not a professional and I left a collection of handwritten poetry that would put her off the scent.
I wish you and I, Maria and Pearl, were dead.
Sappho would know how terribly we suffer …
It was enough to suggest that I loved a woman and it amused me to consider her expression when she realised the implications.
The nights are not easy. Nightmares
prowl around their edges, which is a new element in my life for which I blame what has happened to me. Maternity has opened doors into rooms that are dark and empty and I do not know yet how to furnish them.
I am learning, every minute, every second. Greedily and with dedication.
I have changed. In the past when I was terrified, I used to will on the worst to happen to get it over and done with. Now my fear is of a different order. I tremble to think that something may go wrong and it is a sharper, crueller fear than anything I have ever experienced.
I told myself that my life was shattered when I first came to Italy. Looking back on that episode, I see that it was a test and had nothing on the experience of deep and proper love.
Part of that love is for Italy. It is a country that is far more anti-establishment than I imagined – anti systems, anti elites – which is one of the reasons that socialists and communists have taken such a grip on the politics. I salute that. It is when they run to extremes that the problems begin.
Italy is beautiful. In its art, architecture, style and elegance can be found the secret of living well. They may differ greatly in their opinions but its people understand that instinctively.
My hair is still glossy and my skin clear but there are circles under my eyes and my lips are dry. I must remake myself. Smarten. Visit the hairdresser and the boutiques in the Via del Corso.
My outfit was carefully assembled. Which earrings? What perfume? Which shoes would last a day and into a warm evening without killing me? Which blouse would hide the sweat stains if it became too hot?
After lunch, we walked around the village and, well-oiled and overfed, the general suggested I should go and see a fine medieval wood carving in the church while he smoked.
It was an order.
Indeed, the carving was exceptional. I expended precisely five seconds on it before I nipped down the aisle to the vestry, which had a separate entrance, and prised open the door a crack. From here, I could see the general unpadlocking the door to a brick building opposite the church.
Almost certainly, this was an arms cache. I took a couple of photos, removed the film and sealed it in its tube and slotted another one into place in the camera. Outside, I pushed the tube down into the earth at the corner of a grave under an umbrella pine. Rex would arrange for it to be retrieved later.
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