Lucca had never heard of Forster or Isherwood, but she enjoyed listening to his Cambridge accent and being looked at by his green eyes. Giorgio talked at length of the homeless Isherwood, who had cast off the chains of his bourgeois English childhood in favour of the decadent Berlin of the Twenties and later, when the Nazis took power, had fled to California where he flirted with Hinduism. His identity had no solid foundation, said Giorgio, because he had cut off one anchorage after the other, as he gradually realised in his life the sentence which commenced his Berlin noveclass="underline" I am a Camera.
When he spoke to her it was as if an ancient eccentric world had bred this charming, grown-up boy to open itself to her through his words and his wise eyes. He spoke to her as you speak to someone you have known for a long time. He listened attentively to her account of the course of her young life, and gently, so that she should not be embarrassed, he showed her how to eat a lobster without cracking it into a thousand orange pieces. She felt she had found a friend. She had never felt like this with a man, certainly not with the boys of her own age, but she felt safe, for Carlo was always there to remind her that Giorgio could not possibly intend anything but simply sitting together chatting and listening and laughing.
Why didn’t she stay the night? They were all lounging on separate sofas drinking green tea, which Carlo prepared on a charcoal pan on the huge stove. Yes, why not? Carlo showed her the way to a room with a four-poster bed similar to the one she had seen in the film the previous afternoon, in the suburban cinema where her father worked. A towel, a toothbrush and a kimono were laid out, as if it had always been intended that she should stay. When he waved goodnight she laughed at the affected waving movement he made with his fingers, and he smiled back companionably and closed the door behind him.
She slept until late into the morning. When she opened the shutters she looked out over a jumble of tiled roofs, a sea of stiff, terracotta waves. Her bag was on a stool beside the window. She heard a faint chinking behind her back and turned round in a fright, as Carlo put a tray with a cup of coffee on the bedside table. Today his kimono was mint green with yellow flowers. The blue cat jumped onto the bed. He picked it up by the scruff of the neck and carried it out. She found Giorgio in the kitchen. He had been to fetch her bag in the morning and paid for her room at the boarding-house. She asked if he had kidnapped her. He smiled. Had he? The green eyes looked at her inquiringly.
That day they took her with them to the Uffizi. She didn’t like to say she had been there the previous day. And it was completely different from when she visited the museum with her father. She had felt almost choked by all the pictures she hadn’t looked at properly. Giorgio reassured her, they would only do one floor. You could spend a lifetime at the Uffizi, he said. So you had to choose what to miss, he went on with a smile, art or life outside. He was dressed in white again, and Carlo wore black silk pyjamas. She took pleasure in noticing how the tourists stared at the tall slim girl laughing with the white-clad aristocrat and their bleached muscular friend.
Giorgio wanted to show her one of the rooms with altar pieces from the early Renaissance. He spoke of the pure, stylised severity in the presentation of the faces, the figures and the folds of the clothing, and he told her of the Byzantine influence. Carlo went on ahead. She stopped before one of the numerous paintings of the Madonna and Child. She was not sure but she felt she recognised the picture from the postcard she had been staring at in the train, the only clue she had in the search for her father. She gazed for a long time at the pale young woman’s face with its faintly blue tinge, introspectively dreaming as if she had forgotten the child in her arms, surrounded by the faded and mottled gilding that was cracked into finely branching lines. The gold melted before her eyes and flowed over the woman’s face. She made haste to dry her eyes with the back of her hand, but Giorgio had seen. He laid a hand lightly on her shoulder and smiled, fixing her eyes with his. It’s nothing, she said.
He took her arm and led her out into the gallery that ran the whole length of the building. She caught sight of Carlo at the end, in silhouette against a high window, he stopped and turned towards them. Giorgio let go of her arm. It’s strange, he said, as they went on. He looked up from the tiled floor and lowered his voice. You look like my sister… When they came up to Carlo she noticed he avoided her eyes. He put his head on one side and said something in a querulous voice that made Giorgio laugh. The poor man is about to pass out with hunger, he said. But they had probably had enough pre-Renaissance for one day.
They went into an expensive restaurant, an old-fashioned, formal place where the white cloths swam like ice floes in the quiet semi-darkness. When they had ordered Carlo got up and left the table with a remark that sounded ironical, almost taunting. Lucca asked what he had said. He says he’s jealous, smiled Giorgio. But she wasn’t to believe it. Carlo was wild about her, and he feigned jealousy purely for his own enjoyment. He gave her a long look and suddenly stretched out a hand, stroked her loose hair back from her forehead and gathered it into a knot in his hand at her neck. There really was a faint likeness, even though she was fairer. He shook his head in wonder and let go of her hair. Of course it was just an idea, but he couldn’t help thinking she might have grown to resemble Lucca.
She asked him to tell her about his sister. He fidgeted with the heavy cutlery. There had only been a couple of years between them, they had been like twins. They had always been together and told each other all their thoughts. When they were in the country they found hiding places in the trees so the grown-ups could not find them, and at night they crept into each other’s rooms. The first to wake up had to wake the other one so they were not found out. The wine waiter brought them a bottle. Giorgio looked dubiously at the label and asked the waiter a question or two, then with a resigned expression let him open it.
It had been like being cut in two, he went on, when their parents sent him to England. Carlo came back. He put his head on one side, rested his elbows on the table and laid his fingertips together as if he was listening with interest, but Lucca could see he did not understand anything Giorgio said. Giorgio took no notice of him. He had not only lost part of himself, he had also torn his sister apart and gone away with one half of her. He paused and pushed the foot of the wine-glass back and forth on the cloth. She had drowned during a holiday on Elba when she was fourteen. If only he had been there… It was an accident, but he had never forgiven their parents. After the funeral he went back to England and stayed there. He interrupted himself as he raised his glass and smiled at them.
It really was like being kidnapped, a fairy-tale flight from everything she knew. Every day they went out in the black Ferrari, driving along winding roads between terraces of vines and olive trees up to mountain villages surrounded by high walls. She was shown round medieval monasteries with cool vaulted ceilings, where water dripped in the gloom, and they sat over lunch for hours on sun-dappled terraces with views over the mountains. She drew her hair back from her forehead and tied it in a pony-tail. She had not worn a pony-tail since she was a child, she usually let it hang free. She could see Giorgio noticed it, but he made no comment.
She thought about what he had said when he lifted the hair from her face, that she resembled his little sister, his idea of what his sister might have looked like. If she had lived she would have been about Giorgio’s age now, a grown woman. Lucca could not visualise her own face in ten or twenty years. As a child she had often asked Else what she would look like when she was grown up, but Else had merely shrugged her shoulders. Time would tell, but she would probably look like herself. Lucca hadn’t believed her. After all, Else had changed over the years, since she was young, driving through Italy in an open sports car unaware of what the future would bring. Was it just age that made the difference, or was it something else?