Linger over the Giambologna birds in the Bargello, and the marble reliefs of Mino da Fiesole. But that’s enough for one day; you must return tomorrow.
He liked to lay down the law. He liked to take chances with the facts, and wait for letters of contradiction. At the height of the season there are twelve times as many strangers as natives in this dusty, littered city. Cascades of graffiti welcome them – the male sexual organ stylized to a Florentine simplicity, belligerent swastikas hammers and sickles in the streets of gentle Fra Angelico…
At lunchtime on the day after he had met her Mrs Faraday was in Doney’s with some other Americans. Seeing her in that smart setting, he was surprised that she stayed in the Albergo San Lorenzo rather than the Savoy or the Excelsior. The San Lorenzo’s grandeur all belonged to the past: the old hotel was threadbare now, its curtains creased, its telephones unresponsive. Not many Americans liked it.
‘Hi!’ she called across the restaurant, and smiled and waved a menu.
He nodded at her, not wishing to seem stand-offish. The people she was with were talking about the merchandise they had been inspecting at the Pitti Donna. Wisps of their conversation drifted from their table, references to profit margins and catching the imagination.
He ordered tagliatelle and the chef’s salad, and then looked through the Nazione. The body of the missing schoolgirl, Gabriella, had been found in a park in Florence. Youths who’d been terrorizing the neighbourhood of Santa Croce had been identified and arrested. Two German girls, hitchhiking in the south, had been made drunk and raped in a village shed. The Nazione suggested that Gabriella – a quiet girl – had by chance been a witness to drug-trafficking in the park.
‘I envy you your job,’ Mrs Faraday said, pausing at his table as he was finishing his tagliatelle. Her companions had gone on ahead of her. She smiled, as at an old friend, and then sat down. ‘I guess I want to lose those two.’
He offered her a glass of wine. She shook her head. ‘I’d love another cappuccino.’
The coffee was ordered. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the empty chair beside him. Mrs Faraday, as though she intended to stay a while, had hung her red suede coat over the back of the chair.
‘I envy you your job,’ she said again. ‘I’d love to travel all over.’
She was wearing pearls at her throat, above a black dress. Rings clustered her fingers, earrings made a jangling sound. Her nails were shaped and painted, her face as meticulously made up as it had been the night before.
‘Did you mind,’ she asked when the waiter had brought their coffee, ‘my wondering if you were married?’
He said he hadn’t minded.
‘Marriage is no great shakes.’
She lit a cigarette. She had only ever been married to the man she was married to now. She had had one child, a daughter who had died after a week. She had not been able to have other children.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She looked at him closely, cigarette smoke curling between them. The tip of her tongue picked a shred of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. She said again that marriage was no great shakes. She added, as if to lend greater weight to this:
‘I lay awake last night thinking I’d like this city to devour me.’
He did not comment, not knowing what she meant. But quite without wishing to he couldn’t help thinking of this beautiful woman lying awake in her bedroom in the Albergo San Lorenzo. He imagined her staring into the darkness, the glow of her cigarette, the sound of her inhaling. She was looking for an affair, he supposed, and hoped she realized he wasn’t the man for that.
‘I wouldn’t mind living the balance of my life here. I like it better every year.’
‘Yes, it’s a remarkable city.’
‘There’s a place called the Palazzo Ricasoli where you can hire apartments. I’d settle there.’
‘I see.’
‘I could tell you a secret about the Palazzo Ricasoli.’
‘Mrs Faraday –’
‘I spent a naughty week there once.’
He drank some coffee in order to avoid speaking. He sighed without making a sound.
‘With a guy I met at the Pitti Donna. A countryman of yours. He came from somewhere called Horsham.’
‘I’ve never been to Horsham.’
‘Oh, my God, I’m embarrassing you!’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Gosh, I’m sorry! I really am! Please say it’s all right.’
‘I assure you, Mrs Faraday, I’m not easily shocked.’
‘I’m an awful shady lady embarrassing a nice Englishman! Please say you forgive me.’
‘There is absolutely nothing to forgive.’
‘It was a flop, if you want to know.’ She paused. ‘Say, what do you plan to write in your guidebook about Florence?’
‘Banalities mostly.’
‘Oh, come on!’
He shrugged.
‘I’ll tell you a nicer kind of secret. You have the cleverest face I’ve seen in years!’
Still he did not respond. She stubbed her cigarette out and immediately lit another. She took a map out of her handbag and unfolded it. She said:
‘Can you show me where Santo Spirito is?’
He pointed out the church and directed her to it, warning her against the motorists’ signs which pursued a roundabout one-way route.
‘You’re very kind.’ She smiled at him, lavishly exposing her dazzling, even teeth as if offering a reward for his help. ‘You’re a kind person,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’
He walked around the perimeter of the vast Cascine Park, past the fun-fair and the zoo and the race-track. It was pleasant in the February sunshine, the first green of spring colouring the twiggy hedges, birches delicate by the river. Lovers sprawled on the seats or in motor-cars, children carried balloons. Stalls sold meat and nuts, and Coca-Cola and 7-Up. Runners in training-suits jogged along the bicycle track. Ho fame a fat young man had scrawled on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of him, and slept while he waited for charity.
Rosie, when she’d been his friend, had said he wrote about Italian cities so that he could always be a stranger. Well, it was true, he thought in the Cascine Park, and in order to rid himself of a contemplation of his failed relationship with Rosie he allowed the beauty of Mrs Faraday again to invade his mind. Her beauty would have delighted him if her lipstick-stained cigarettes and her silly, repetitious chattering didn’t endlessly disfigure it. Her husband was a good man, she had explained, but a good man was not always what a woman wanted. And it had come to seem all of a piece that her daughter had lived for only a week, and all of a piece also that no other children had been born, since her marriage was not worthy of children. It was the Annunciations in Santo Spirito she wanted to see, she had explained, because she loved Annunciations.
‘Would it be wrong of me to invite you to dinner?’ She rose from a sofa in the hall of the Albergo San Lorenzo as soon as she saw him, making no effort to disguise the fact that she’d been waiting for him.’ ‘I’d really appreciate it if you’d accept.’
He wanted to reply that he would prefer to be left alone. He wanted to state firmly, once and for all, that he had never met her in the past, that she had no claims on him.
‘You choose somewhere,’ she commanded, with the arrogance of the beautiful.
In the restaurant she ate pasta without ceasing to talk, explaining to him that her boutique had been bought for her by her husband to keep her occupied and happy. It hadn’t worked, she said, implying that although her fashion shop had kept her busy it hadn’t brought her contentment. Her face, drained of all expression, was lovelier than he had so far seen it, so sad and fragile that it seemed not to belong to the voice that rattled on.
He looked away. The restaurant was decorated with modern paintings and was not completely full. A squat, elderly man sat on his own, conversing occasionally with waiters. A German couple spoke in whispers. Two men and a woman, talking rapidly in Italian, deplored the death of the school-girl, Gabriella.