A Florentine Revenge Page 2

  So Celia had moved out. Even then, finding somewhere decent in the city had been a nightmare and for one, then two, and what turned into four years she’d endured a succession of short lets and gloomy, airless, mosquito-infested bedsits before giving in, and moving to the guilty comfort of the suburbs. A cop-out, said her friends; premature retirement. But it was so easy. In days Celia found a pretty, modest villa with a new kitchen and a tit of garden, built by a butcher for a son who preferred to travel the world. She was out of the smell and the din and the dirt of the city, the refuse trucks at six in the morning, the wail of sirens, the pollution. She was safe.

  Celia still saw Jo now and again, the odd white hair in her shiny black ponytail these days and still living in Santa Croce, still teaching violin to the small children of the Florentine upper classes and doing some careless proofreading on the side. That was what happened in Florence; you slipped into a comfortable groove, there seemed no need to change things, to progress. The old friends back in London or Manchester who were always restlessly improving themselves, working their way up, getting on the property ladder, going to evening classes to get a law degree or study another language, seemed impossibly, crazily ambitious from this distance. It seemed that in Italy, for the foreigners camping out here at least, there was no need for any of that ambition: you could live pretty well on not much money; coffee and wine were cheap, and the sun was free. Until it all went wrong, of course.

  For Celia it had all gone wrong this summer, fifteen years on, and she supposed that wasn’t too bad a run of luck, for Italy. But it had gone wrong in August, the month in Italy when it was most difficult to set anything right, to have a dripping tap mended, to find a new job or a new flat. After more than ten years happy in her suburban villa, Celia’s landlord had said breezily halfway through July that his errant son was getting married, and he’d need the house back.

  She put out feelers, that was how you had to do it here; asked around. Something would turn up. She begged some cardboard boxes and began to pack ten years’ worth of accumulated household objects, steeling herself against the changes that came over her beloved little house, the pale patches that appeared on the walls as her pictures came down. This is nothing, she told herself. It’s just a house. But the truth was, Celia was right back where she’d started.

  3

  Beate had found Celia the flat in the end, less than a week before time ran out and with the landlord’s son calling every other day to let Celia know exactly when his removal firm planned to turn up. Beate, who had much grander friends than Celia, who had no need to help her out at all, just called her up one evening.

  Half-Italian, half-Swedish, and of unguessable age, Beate was one of those people who always made you feel better, just by saying your name. In the complicated hierarchy of the guides of Florence she occupied a privileged position, and not merely because she had studied fine art at the Accadèmia and history at the Sorbonne; she had something else, too, a quality more rare and sought-after than erudition; something like grace. Tall and dark-skinned, with corkscrew white hair that fell to her elbows and armfuls of bracelets like Nancy Cunard, Beate was recognizable from streets away, never with a gaggle of clients, only ever a select two or three. She would be talking to them warmly in her high, clear voice, her gestures intimate as she laid her long brown fingers on a client’s shoulder or vivid as she swept her arm wide to show the drama of a landscape or the grandeur of a palace.

  When Beate phoned, Celia had that moment walked in after a sweltering day in the city; her heart had just dipped at the sight of the house that was no longer her home, her possessions in boxes next to the door. She let her satchel fall to the floor beside her, sat down, picked up the ringing phone; she could hear the champagne in Beate’s voice and wondered where she was. Like her age, Beate’s financial position was mysterious, a matter of some conjecture among the others – although prestigious, being an accredited Florentine guide was not well paid – but one thing was certain: she had expensive tastes. Tonight, Celia thought from the background sounds, some ululating Moroccan music and the hum of conversation in languid African accents, Beate was probably in the Caffè Maroc. It was one of her favourite hangouts, a private club in the Oltrarno done up to look like a medina, all mosaic tiles and fountains and heaps of cushions. They might even have hookahs; Celia could imagine Beate with a hookah quite easily. She looked at her watch. Even at five on a Monday afternoon.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ Celia sat down at the table, wiped the sweat from her forehead. She’d had a hot day showing fourteen Americans around the Museo della Scienza; no air-conditioning. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you still looking for a place?’ Beate put the question lightly, pretending Celia wasn’t desperate, pretending, kindly, that this was a mere nothing, a tiny favour between friends. ‘I know you don’t want to live in town but – well, it’s a nice area. And if you want it, it’s empty straight away. I don’t know how long for – he’s – what is he?’ Then the line had gone muffled as though Beate had her hand over the phone, talking to someone. Beate’s current boyfriend was an industrialist called Marco, a handsome, silver-haired sixty-year-old. The soft, hoarse voice came back. ‘He’s Venezuelan, Marco thinks. Anyway, he couldn’t renew his permesso di soggiorno, he’s overstayed and you know how that seems to annoy them. God knows when they’ll let him back in and in the meantime, the flat’s there. I think it’s even furnished.’

  A week later, never having set eyes on it before, Celia had opened the door on her new home. The key had been left for her at the bar on the corner, the last in a succession of casually miraculous arrangements, or almost the last.

  Gabriele had offered to bring up her stuff in his van. There was something about Gabriele – perhaps it was because he was from Rome, where they were less fastidious and readier with a smile – but whenever she knew he was to be her driver on a tour – and they’d been to Sicily together, Verona, Elba – she knew she could relax. They simply got on; Gabriele seemed as happy to have her as his guide as Celia was to have him at the wheel, capable, laid-back and cheerful. As she stood there she heard him come up the stairs behind her, three boxes balanced in front of him. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Forza.’ Closing her eyes, willing the key to catch, Celia had turned it one last time and the door opened.

  A corridor with a dusty terracotta floor led away from her, and a shaft of light slanted down from an odd little window high up on the right. She stepped inside, passed a dark bedroom to the left and then saw more windows, more light. And although balls of dust had collected in every corner it had a good smell; clean, empty, as though the Venezuelan had barely inhabited the place. Celia’s landlord, Beate had said, was a bookbinder on the other side of town, and as long as the rent appeared in his account every month, he didn’t care who lived in the place.

  In the kitchen Celia leaned across the table, pushed the window open, and caught a glimpse of a tall, slender bell-tower with cut stone corners and Roman arches. Even before she’d taken in the view, her hand still on the window frame, she heard another window pulled to sharply in response; already she was invading someone’s space. She looked out cautiously to see who it might have been and saw windows everywhere, the nearest practically at her elbow, but couldn’t tell which had been affronted by her presence. Neighbours; she’d never had to think about neighbours before and now she had a dozen.

  She’d been here three months when he phoned, but the place still felt nothing like home, nothing like her place; with the bare terracotta floors and high ceilings it had the empty, impersonal feel of a short let, not much more than a hotel room. Lucas Marsh. Someone had recommended her, he had said, although afterwards Celia hadn’t been able to remember who.

  She remembered liking his voice. It was to be a birthday celebration for his wife, short notice, three weeks, but he said straight away that he’d send her an advance, a generous sum. He sounded like a man used to things running smoothly but he was not rude or bullying, as very wealthy clien
ts often could be. He asked her to draw up an itinerary, made a couple of suggestions that indicated to Celia he already knew the city, and she thought, yes, I suppose I could do that. Straightforward enough, a walk or two – she offered Fiesole and San Miniato – restaurants, the Uffizi. The only tricky request was for a dinner he wanted her to arrange on the Saturday, somewhere private, exclusive, with a good collection of paintings. It would be a challenge. There was only one little thing that had seemed odd to her at the time, and even that was explicable, she supposed. She’d asked how old his wife would be.

  ‘Why do you need to know that?’ he’d asked, and she’d heard something in his voice, an edge, a sharpness, although it had, Celia thought, been a perfectly reasonable question. It had to be a special birthday, didn’t it? Flustered, she’d tried to get out of it.

  ‘I – I didn’t mean, I’m sure—’

  ‘Thirty-two,’ he’d said shortly, and there’d been a pause while Celia digested the information. Not a particularly special birthday, then. When he spoke again his voice was just as it had been to begin with, calm and easy; it wasn’t the kind of voice you said no to. And thinking of the hole in her bank balance moving house had left, and of the bills gathering behind it, jostling, asking to be noticed, Celia had of course said yes. The thing about being a freelance was, you couldn’t afford to turn anything down, whatever kind of funny feeling you had about it. Just another job.

  When Celia tried, later, to recall the precise timbre of Lucas Marsh’s voice, she found it inexplicably difficult. She could only remember, and for some time, the feeling it had given her, that kind of churning in the stomach when you wanted to impress someone and you knew they wouldn’t be easily won over, something complex and guarded in that voice that was intriguing. She began to look forward to the weekend half with unease, half with excitement. Never a good idea to get a crush on a client, not one with a wife, in particular, but still… it wouldn’t be boring.

  4

  The day dawned bright and cold; out at Le Cascine striped police tape fluttered in the wind, strung between trees, and a white polythene tent had been set up in the drained pool. At the entrance to the park, half a mile away, police cars were turning away the vans loaded with cheap clothes, cheeses and hams that were arriving for the weekly market. One of the fighting drunks from the night before had been taken off to hospital to have a cut on his head sewn up, but the other, sober for the first time in years, was sitting in a mobile forensic unit, wrapped in blankets. His hands shook as he drank the glass of tea someone had brought him. ‘Throat cut like a – like a pig,’ he kept repeating, ‘like they wanted all the blood out of him.’ Patiently a stocky policeman, who’d been up since five, sat beside him and waited for him to start making sense.

  Celia could tell the weather had changed even before she opened the shutters, by the quality of the light that spun and danced through the slats. The light changed everything. She listened for the sound of the child crying, but heard only the whine and roar of the morning rush hour on the Lungarno, helmeted girls perched on motorini, delivery vans that had to be out of the city before nine. Celia thought it must be after eight but she didn’t have to get up, not today. She pushed the thought of tomorrow away, into the future, stretched and opened the window.

  It was breezy and cold, but not bitter, not yet. The sky was cloudless and cornflower-blue; Celia looked to the north and saw the hills across the rooftops, visible for the first time in more than a month and rising in shades of indigo, one behind the other. Celia had hardly been here since she moved in, it sometimes seemed, in and out of the city on jobs: Verona, Vicenza, the ducal palace in Mantova, the Palladian mansions of the Veneto, Greco-Roman ruins in Sicily.

  She filled the coffee pot and put it on the stove, and as it began to bubble through, the phone rang.

  The cleaners came in at eight-thirty, and behind long dark blinds pulled down the full length of the plate-glass windows to protect the public from the sight of the shop floor looking anything less than perfect, they went to work. They had a battery of equipment, a dozen different kinds of brush to fit in every cranny, behind radiators, soft cloths, vinegar, bicarbonate, packets and bottles stacked cheek-to-cheek in their plastic buckets. To and fro the team of cleaners moved, synchronized over the dark wood floors and pale, velvet-smooth carpet like a forensic team, sweeping, polishing, vacuuming, picking up fluff, filling scratches in the wood, every tiny scrap of evidence of the previous day’s custom eliminated.

  By the time Luisa arrived for work, usually at nine-thirty, the cleaners would be out at the back changing out of their overalls, having even erased the evidence of their own presence. This morning, though, she’d been early; Sandro’d had a call just after five and he’d been up and out like a shot, not bothering to tell her, naturally, what all the hurry was for. She’d been able to tell from the one side of the telephone conversation she could hear that it wasn’t nice, but was it ever? Police business. ‘Shit,’ he’d said. ‘Shit, shit.’ Then he’d got his uniform on, taken it down from the wardrobe where it had hung every night of their married life, the shirt too tight these days; he hadn’t bothered to shave. Luisa hadn’t been able to settle after that, had lain awake in the bed. Had it been all her fault? Was it his job? It was an evil time of day, she’d decided long ago, that hour just before dawn when the world seemed thin and sour and grey; nobody’s marriage could look perfect in that light.

  It wasn’t a bad marriage, that was what she told herself. It might not have been what she’d dreamed of, gazing into a jeweller’s window at the age of nineteen, but didn’t everyone have to deal with disappointment? Sandro never hit her, did he? Had a steady job. Deep down she knew, though, that if he had been a cabinetmaker or a bus driver instead of a policeman things might have been different; deep down she knew that – what was it, fourteen, fifteen years ago now? – something had changed. She’d been forty, a dangerous age. She could see now that that was the age at which the world begins to narrow for a woman, possibilities shut down, one by one. And there had been a little girl, abused and thrown in the river. You couldn’t talk about that over dinner, could you? You couldn’t go on as if nothing had happened, but that was just what they had done.

  At nine forty-five Luisa gave the window display the once over, then raised the blinds; her first job every day, letting in the light and allowing passers-by their first privileged glimpse in at her merchandise. She thought of it as hers, although she was just as much a servant on the shop floor as the cleaners; she had herself begun her life in this shop, however many years ago – forty, near enough – as a cleaner. It had been different then, though, she thought wistfully. You were more a part of it, everyone in the same little team, and of course the shop had been smaller, more intimate. Carefully Luisa cranked the blind up, and the cold, pale northerly light from the broad street flooded the room.

  When Luisa had first come to work in Frollini it had been a good dress-shop, no more, half haberdashery, half dressmaker’s, with accommodation above. The back wall had been covered in little glass-fronted wooden drawers that slid out to reveal handmade silk lingerie and cashmere twinsets from Scotland. In the window in those days there would have been a handsome wooden mannequin dressed in a tailleur or black cocktail dress, perhaps a pair of shoes and matching handbag. Girls like Luisa out for a passeggiata, seventeen-year-olds in homemade dresses swinging straw bags from the market, would stand at the window and dream of growing up and wearing something so perfect, so sophisticated. Things were longed for, postponed and saved for, and once bought, they were treasured for ever. Not today. Luisa watched as half a dozen schoolgirls sashayed past down towards the Ponte Vecchio, the scuola superiore in low-slung jeans, and clicked her teeth.

  It was a different world, and Frollini was a different place these days, but it wasn’t all bad. The window was a glittering treasure box, chiffon and devoré and sequins all year round, and all colours of the rainbow, cyclamen and emerald and violet. Inside though, as Luisa tu
rned away from the window to examine the cleaners’ handiwork this morning, the room was as pale and empty as a church – that was the style now. A few carefully selected garments – charcoal, ivory, perhaps a tiny splash of colour here and there, just to tempt – hung on rails tucked away into white alcoves, and a long glass display case presenting handbags as though they should really be in the Uffizi ran the length of the room.

  The customers had changed too; they were no longer nit-picking, penny-pinching Florentine aristocrats who complained about the quality of lining fabric and moaned about the demise of the lady’s dressmaker; they came from all over, from Germany and England, Japan and America, and to Luisa they seemed fabulously, stupidly wealthy. They bought up whole window displays, a designer’s entire catwalk output, and left the shop with so many big white ribboned bags they could hardly get through the door. And as a result there was no longer just one Frollini but instead a little chain, four three-storey emporia in choice locations across the city, but this one, the first, the original Frollini, Luisa’s empire, was still the best.

  Luisa looked out into the street. She liked this time of the morning, when she was alone on the shop floor before Beppe arrived to go up to menswear, before Gianna took up her position at the cash-desk. Opposite the shop in the straw market the stall-holders, jackets pulled up around their ears in the morning chill, were wheeling up their stock on trolleys, hanging up handbags and fringed shawls with their long-handled poles. Can’t stand here all day, thought Luisa, reminded of the boxes of her own new stock that had arrived from Milan late last night and were waiting to be unpacked. Work to be done.