So Australian. ‘Am I all right? Yes, I suppose I am, my dear. We are all quite used to obituaries by now.’ She stood very straight and bit her bottom lip hard.
‘This isn’t just any old obit though, is it?’ said Delia.
Annabelle wandered to the window. Not just any old obituary. In the distance, thunder rolled.
It was nearly three years since Annabelle had seen Enrico and they did not part on good terms. He had been in Florence for something to do with the byzantine terms of his father’s will and the trust. It was Annabelle’s eightieth birthday and he’d insisted on taking her to lunch. He had something on his mind. We must talk, he said. Yes, she said. We must talk.
Always thin, Enrico was gaunt. His abundant white hair, still worn longish and brushed back, gave him the look of an aged lion. It had lasted him surprisingly well, given the high widow’s peak and his father’s early baldness. His eyes were unnaturally huge in the light refracted through the thick glass of his round spectacles. He was fading, like the Cheshire Cat. Soon there would be nothing left but his smile. It hurt her heart. Although he and Roberto had just completed a long walk in the Dolomites. He was actually as dogmatic and energetic as ever, despite being, surely, one of the last smokers in Australia – he had already been outside four times for a cigarette, cursing the recent laws that had finally arrived even in Italy. He was, as always, elegant and dashing in a soft linen jacket and open-neck shirt.
Too much wine loosened tongues. Too much talk. Too many words. Once words break free they cannot be reined in. Words traded, bartered, lying like stones on the table. For hours, they sat at the vast expanse of glass at the back of Omero’s. Annabelle gazed out over the Tuscan countryside, which looked as if peace had reigned there forever. Rolling green hills, bosomy folds etched with the darker green of Cypress pines; improbable, a child’s drawing of trees and hills. Le dolci colline. The sweet hills of Florence. Sweet now, gentle now, but fertilised for aeons with real blood and real bone. It was only since the 1970s that Tuscany had suddenly become the must-see tourist destination. Until then it had been just one more of the poorest regions in Italy, the glory days of the Grand Duchy a long way in the past. It was as if Tuscany had been reinvented with mass travel. In a sense, she supposed, that was true. She couldn’t remember using the word much: Firenze, Florence, you said. Or San Casciano. Or Impruneta. Chianti, never, unless you were going to drink it.
She played with her unsalted bread, picking bits from the dry centre and rolling it into doughy balls on the tablecloth.
‘Tuscany, nowadays, is a sort of construct,’ she said, turning back to Enrico.
He took a deep swig of his grappa and refilled the small glass.
‘Spare me the philosophical meandering, Stella,’ he said. ‘You always overthink everything. You and your fucking secrets. Where do we go from here? Are you or are you not going to come back with me? You cannot be worried about incest by our age. You worry too much.’
‘And you do not worry nearly enough.’ The tremor of Annabelle’s hand rippled the surface of her wine.
Neither had touched the artful dishes that had come and gone across the table. The second wine bottle was empty. For a long time she stared at his hands, spread on the stiff white cloth. He had her father’s hands – large, capable, smooth and very brown, with short practical nails. Workman’s hands, not the hands of an academic. Ernest Hemingway once said Mussolini had feminine hands. Enrico was missing two fingers of his left hand at the first joint, from when the grenade exploded while he was priming it. He remained intractably left-handed. His hands were still beautiful. ‘When I die, I will have loved you all my life,’ he had once told her and, in his own way, he had. In his own way.
‘We are too old to begin again.’ She looked up from the table, directly into his eyes. She could see herself reflected in the heavy lenses. ‘Acqua passata. Too much water under our bridge.’
‘Well, fuck you,’ he said and walked out. Leaving her to pay the bill.
Her throat ached. Nothing changes.
Rome 1943
The gilded cage
Clara was ready before her mother’s knock at the door. She gave a last check in the full-length mirror, pleased by the fall of the soft wool of her navy pleated skirt. She squirted one more spray of Arpège between her breasts – not too much. She replaced the tasselled, crystal perfume bottle, gathered her bags and descended the curve of the staircase to the foyer, where her driver, cap in hand, chatted with her mother. The keys to her beloved Alfa hung forlornly among the keys on a board by the front door. Ben had bought it for her and she loved it. The car sat, shrouded and on blocks, in the garage. Rationing. No petrol, no tyres. She nodded graciously, at the ‘Buon giorno, Signora’ from the driver, who followed her to the gravel drive where the taxi waited.
Surely, it would not be long before she would drive herself again. Still, she had to admit she did not mind the extra attention, the cloak-and-dagger ride from the family villa to Palazzo Venezia. The police escort, the clandestine messages at each checkpoint, the changes from taxi to motorcycle sidecar and back to a taxi, exhilarated her. The furtive entry from via Astalli through the courtyard and up to the Cybo apartment in a private lift had an air of the cinematic about it and she did love the cinema. It was an exciting punctuation to what could otherwise be endless hours of boredom. Please let Ben be in a good humour, she thought. Today, she was not feeling up to dealing with his behaviour if he was out of sorts. Which was more and more often lately.
Entering the wide double doors of the Zodiac Room, she sagged beneath a wave of fatigue. She had not fully recovered from the last miscarriage. Hormones, her father said, hormones were the cause of the debilitating blood loss. Whatever hormones were. In the reflection in one of the many tall gilt mirrors, her stomach was completely flat. That was something. Ben hated her to be fat, but he did not like thin women either so she had better be careful. She cupped her breasts in her hands; they were still nicely full. To her left on the sideboard were three dressmaker’s boxes. She wandered over, lifted the lid of the top one, flicked the pale blue tissue paper aside, let the lid drop. Not even new frocks could hold her interest today. Perhaps she was coming down with something. She massaged her temples. She fingered the pearl rosary in the pocket of her skirt but did not feel like starting a rosary either … one decade perhaps … but even that seemed too long today. At the small side table, she stood on one leg and flipped through Ben’s copies of Plato and Socrates. The books were much-thumbed, the pages dog-eared and covered in Ben’s annotations. Socrates was in Greek so she could not read that and though the copy of Plato was in Italian, it may as well have been Greek – it gave her a headache. Ben was so clever.
Careful not to smudge her make-up, she put her fingers to her temples again and massaged them gently. Ben hated her to wear makeup. Dirtying your face, he called it. It was the same with perfume. He liked the hair of her armpits and between her thighs to smell just a little. Not too much. To smell natural, but Claretta had her wiles and her ways. You had to be careful to look as if it were all natural. Really, it took much longer to look natural. She clicked her tongue: tsk tsk.
Clara regarded her reflection again. Apart from the minor distortions of such old glass, she was happy with what she saw. No grey hair yet. That was a relief because when her mother was her age, nearly thirty, she already had fine filaments of silver in her black hair. That could look very elegant … but not yet. She was glad her face was oval – wasn’t that supposed to be the perfect shape? She wandered across the room to the high step at the windows giving onto the lush garden of the internal courtyard. Her world began and ended these days with this room and that view. Last summer and the secret trips to the seaside seemed a lifetime away. Outside, the light had changed. Autumn, already mornings were chilly, dark. The leaves were turning too. She shivered. Behind her, the door opened but the footsteps were not Ben’s. Quinto Navarra entered, carrying the tea tray. He smiled