by Mark McCrum
‘It’s like people who leave a party before it’s over,’ Diana went on, obliviously. ‘All that effort the hosts go to, to make things nice. All the distances people travel to get there. All the effort with dresses and make-up and putting scent on and washing themselves that the guests put in. And then some people turn round, almost before they’ve put their nose through the door, and want to go home. My ex, David, was like that. He’d take one look around. And if there wasn’t anyone in the room he thought might be useful to him, he’d want to be off. “I hate small talk,” he’d say. But as far as I’m concerned, what is small talk anyway? It’s talk. It doesn’t have to be small. As long as you’re interested in other people, you can make it as big as you like. That’s what I always used to tell him.’
‘No wonder he left you,’ said Roz.
There was a short, shocked pause, during which Liam’s loud chuckle could clearly be heard.
‘Now that is just rude,’ said Diana.
‘Excuse me,’ said Roz, getting to her feet. ‘I must be getting to bed.’
‘I really don’t think that was called for,’ Diana said, into the silence that followed her exit.
‘It wasn’t,’ said Tony. ‘But she’s probably under a lot of stress, if she needs to get back to her job and she can’t.’
So what was going on between them, Francis wondered, that Tony hadn’t immediately made an excuse to go after his secret paramour? Too obvious perhaps; better this measured public sympathy.
‘I was only trying to cheer her up,’ Diana said.
Liam was still laughing. ‘Ah, come on, Diana,’ he said. ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist. It’s good to have a bit of conflict from time to time. Otherwise what are you left with?’
Diana didn’t reply. As Liam said the word ‘knickers’ her mouth dropped open, but for a change, no words came out.
They were saved from themselves by Sasha, who announced that she was going to do her party trick, which was to provide on-the-spot character analyses. Her friends in Oregon had told her she was a bit psychic, she said with a giggle. With a little jocular encouragement, Liam went first.
‘So you’re a man of a certain age,’ Sasha began, to laughter from the group.
‘And what age is that?’
‘I don’t know, forty-something …’
‘Keep talking,’ said Liam. ‘I like this analysis.’
‘Maybe fifty-something.’
‘Now I’m not so sure.’
He had probably been married in his younger years, Sasha said, or at least in a serious monogamous relationship. But something had gone wrong with that, maybe because Liam was the kind of guy who always needed new stimuli, new adventures, and he found the idea of staying with one person exclusively a bit boring.
‘How am I doing?’ she asked.
‘You tell me,’ said Liam.
‘It’s very personal,’ said Zoe.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Liam. ‘Who’s to say she’s right? Go on, then.’
Perhaps there had also been a desire, Sasha continued, no, more than that, a longing, to have children, but that had never happened. And that had quietly eaten away at that relationship. Francis wasn’t the only one of the group to surreptitiously check Liam out as the young American said this. The Irishman’s eyes were fixed on Sasha. His demeanour had softened as he listened; he certainly wasn’t disagreeing or objecting. Then again, he did have an obvious soft spot for her.
Since the ending of that long and significant relationship, she went on, Liam had been involved with quite a few women but none of them had really stuck. He had been like a butterfly, flitting from plant to plant, enjoying himself maybe but never deeply satisfied. Meanwhile, on the career side of things, he had been very ambitious about one thing.
‘Yes?’ said Liam. ‘What’s that?’
‘Something serious. To you, at any rate. Maybe it’s the poetry. You’ve always wanted to achieve some kind of greatness, and perhaps that’s there, but there’s also something in you that stops it. It’s like you’re your own worst enemy. There’s some lack of confidence about your own abilities.’
Liam was nodding now, in a way that said, Maybe you’ve got a point.
‘There’s something else there, too,’ Sasha said. ‘Some other big passion. It runs very deep.’ She cocked her head like a puppy as she looked at him. ‘Maybe that’s what messed up the long relationship.’
‘Who knows,’ muttered Liam.
‘Maybe it’s, like, political or something. D’you know what, I think it takes you over at times, it’s almost more important than the other thing you’re ambitious about. Maybe it even is the thing that stops you in the thing you’re ambitious about.’ She was nodding excitedly. ‘Am I right?’
Liam was looking rattled. He laughed a little too loudly. ‘Not bad, Sasha, not bad at all. I’m not saying anything. Maybe you should do somebody else now.’
There was a pause, while they all looked at each other.
‘OK, then,’ said Diana. ‘Do me. I’m quite intrigued to know what you make of an old lady like me.’
Sasha turned and studied her, almost as if she’d never noticed her before.
EIGHT
Saturday 29 September
Francis lay in bed for quite a while the next morning. The sun was bright on the curtains but he wasn’t inclined to move. He didn’t have to – his first teaching week was formally over. This Saturday had originally been scheduled blank. A day for some people to go home and for others to arrive. For those who were booked for the second week, it was, as Stephanie had put it in the first briefing, in her airy, upbeat way, a day ‘to relax, to read, to think, to paint, to walk, to wonder’. She was right about that last: there was plenty of wondering going on now.
Francis had ended up drinking too much red wine, and then when the older ones had gone to bed, he and Liam and Sasha had repaired to drink grappa on the sofa in the side room. ‘I’m not saying you got me one hundred per cent right,’ Liam was telling the young American, ‘but there were some pretty intriguing insights there, given that I hardly know you. Actually, I really don’t understand how you did that. I’m quite respectful of your talent, if it is a talent, you witch.’ He cackled with laughter. ‘As for Diana …’
Sasha had reduced Diana to silence; almost, it seemed, to tears. The small group left around her at the long dining table had watched in quiet amazement as that confident, challenge-all, Sphinx-like exterior had crumpled in the face of Sasha’s apparently innocent analysis. Sasha was so young and breezy, you had to think it was innocent; but maybe, Francis thought, she was a darker spirit than he’d at first judged under that bright, kooky manner.
She had started by telling Diana that she was a very passionate woman. That had gone down well. ‘I am a passionate woman,’ Diana acknowledged. ‘I’m glad someone’s noticed. I’m also – I hope – a kind and friendly woman.’
‘I’m glad someone’s noticed that,’ Liam chipped in.
Diana’s life, Sasha had continued, had held two significant relationships which had absorbed that passion. The first had been a close family relationship, a father perhaps, or a brother. The second had been an adult love, a husband or a long-term boyfriend. With these two comments you could see Diana, initially sceptical, engage. Like most of the others in the party by now, Francis knew about the adult love, but not about the significant family relationship, if there had been one.
Both relationships had gone badly, Sasha said bluntly. The first had always been bad, the second had started out well but had ended in some sort of betrayal. ‘A betrayal you took very harshly.’
Diana’s face was now a picture: of a woman who was sufficiently self-obsessed to want to know more from this seer but didn’t necessarily want her life laid out bare in public.
Francis noticed her wine glass was empty. He leaned over and refilled it with the red she had been drinking.
‘Thank you,’ she said, throwing him a grateful glance. She took an uncha
racteristically big gulp, then fronted up to Sasha again.
‘Go on,’ she said, nodding.
‘Do you want me to? I feel as if I might be intruding.’
‘I’m interested in your take,’ Diana said. ‘On things you have no reason to know anything about. And like Liam, I’m certainly not going to reveal, in any case, whether there is one iota of truth in what you’re saying.’
‘OK,’ Sasha replied. ‘What I do see, though, in both these relationships you’ve had, is a very strong positive energy coming from you. It’s like you’re not the kind of person who lets things get in your way. You try and make things work, whatever. Am I right?’
‘You are right,’ said Diana. ‘I see that as a good thing.’
‘And so, when someone lets you down, you feel it much more powerfully, like, personally maybe. You’re like, I’m not having that.’
‘No.’
‘So you fight it. And if and when you fail to win, you get angry. Very angry, in fact.’
Diana shrugged and smiled thinly. ‘Carry on.’
‘You don’t let go. You try to change things. But if you fail, you don’t forget. I’m guessing that you’re the sort of person who holds grudges. Not about the little things, but about the big things.’
‘Well …’ Diana was on the ropes. As an officially nice person, she certainly wasn’t going to admit to being a grudge-holder. But Sasha was good at this. ‘Maybe grudge is the wrong word,’ she went on. ‘Maybe you’re the sort of person who believes more in fairness. In justice for wrongdoing.’
They were all agog now, watching Diana’s reactions as they flitted across her face, like cloud-shadows over a statue.
‘I do of course believe in fairness,’ said Diana. ‘And in justice. As I’m sure most worthwhile people do.’
‘Of course,’ said Sasha. ‘Though here’s another thing. About you. I think …’
‘Go on …’
‘Ultimately, if something is meant to be, you are wise enough to accept that.’
‘I am.’
And so Sasha had progressed, with a mixture of flattery and apparent insight that had the effect of getting Diana to admit to more and more about her life. It was like watching therapy in action. You could see that for all her stated belief in people holding themselves together, keeping their self-control and dignity, Diana was longing to talk about these issues. Even with this little audience, perhaps particularly with this little audience, she couldn’t stop herself. She was soon back on to David, the man she had spent twenty-five years with, living and working, and yes, his terrible betrayal. ‘With a woman I never even met,’ she said. Then how, after the affair was over, even though she, Diana, had still been single, and had still, yes, loved him, she couldn’t take him back. Because the trust had gone.
These were the repetitions of an old gramophone record, Francis realized, hearing the story again. The ancient vinyl of her pain, to be replayed over and over until even she was bored with the story and eventually it was just scratches and hiss.
At this point, when you could see that Diana’s big blue eyes were glistening, and she was tired and tipsy from the wine, Sasha had skilfully backed off, to focus on her first significant relationship, the close family one.
‘You’re talking about my father,’ said Diana. ‘There’s hardly any point in trying to conceal that now.’ She looked at the attentive little group around her. ‘I suppose we’re all going to get to know each other better now, trapped as we are. Yes,’ she sighed deeply, but it was almost a relieved sigh, ‘he was the other significant man in my life. Significant by being absent, most of the time. And even when present, not really there. In the sense of wanting to spend any time at all with his young only daughter, who admired him and wanted to be his friend so very much.’
‘What was he?’ asked Liam. ‘In the line of work?’
‘He was an artist,’ said Diana. ‘A painter of oils, landscapes, very much like Cezanne in a way. The Scottish Cezanne, some critic once said, and that stuck. At least in his mind. I don’t personally think he had quite the same level of talent, but he was very competent, and he certainly had the necessary self-belief.’
‘Strange that he didn’t want to spend time with you,’ said Sasha. ‘You’d think, being artistic and all that, he’d be, like, sensitive …’
Diana let out an uncharacteristic squawk of laughter. ‘He was sensitive all right. To himself. Cross him or upset him in any way, shape or form, and he’d fly off the handle. But no, not very sensitive to his daughter. Or his wife, for that matter.’
‘And was she good to you, Diana?’ asked Belle. ‘Your mother?’
‘Oh yes. In her way. But I was always only second fiddle to Daddy, the great artist, even if he did treat her appallingly. Shooting off whenever he wanted, having affairs, drinking too much, gambling – oh yes, all that too.’
‘But she stuck around?’ asked Belle.
‘Oh yes. She stuck around. Like glue. Women did in those days. They were bred to be there for their men, however badly their men behaved.’ She turned towards Sasha. ‘This was in the days before feminism, dear, when it was rather a different world.’
‘I’ve read about this,’ Sasha replied, and it was hard to tell how much irony lay under her powerful surface sincerity.
Diana had spoken some more about her father, but then, suddenly, there had come a cut-off point; as if she’d sobered up and realized she didn’t want everyone knowing everything about her. Francis suspected there was another aspect to the story, deeper and darker. Abuse, even? But she’d pulled back, the shutters had come down, and that was that; at least as a public discourse. She and Sasha sat talking together for some while, and it seemed as if the older woman’s antipathy for the younger might finally have dissipated.
Fuelled up on booze, as they all were, there had then of course been a call for Sasha to ‘do’ someone else. She was reluctant. She didn’t like to overdo it, she said. Or get boring.
‘You’re not boring, dear,’ said Zoe. ‘This is the most fun I’ve had in ages. If you don’t want to do one of us, why don’t you do Francis? He’s always a bit of a mystery man. He teaches us and gets us to write lots of pieces about ourselves and our personal lives, but we never ever find out about him.’
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ Francis had said. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing much to say.’
‘You’re a single man in your forties,’ said Zoe. ‘Of course there is.’
‘There probably is,’ Sasha agreed. ‘But I don’t want to upset my relationship with my excellent tutor.’
‘Creep,’ Zoe said cheerfully.
It was nine thirty now, Francis realized. Time to haul himself from the gloom of the curtained bedroom and get going. He needed a shower and then one of those double-shot coffees from the mighty Gaggia; accompanied, hopefully, by a nice ham roll, if there were any left. The police were coming for more questions, and he wanted to be on form; not to get involved, not this time, but to satisfy his own curiosity about the hare they were now undoubtedly chasing.
The unmarked ‘owl car’ of the Squadra Mobile was already parked in the courtyard when he got downstairs. The usual suspects were littered around the courtyard on deckchairs, reading casually, though it was a defiant sort of casualness.
‘Ah, Francis,’ said Diana, cheerfully, as if last night’s revelations had been nothing but a forgotten bad dream. ‘There you are. You’ve missed breakfast, I’m afraid.’
‘Police already here, I see.’
‘Yes, they’re busy doing the staff at the moment.’
‘Fabio …?’
‘He’s off for the weekend. But yes, Benedetta and all the cooks and waitresses. They’re being very thorough.’
Breakfast had indeed been cleared away from the dining hall, but there was still a collection of pastries on display under one of those wire mesh domes that keep flies off food. Francis made himself a frothy-topped coffee and took that and an apricot-jam-filled bombolone out to one of
the deckchairs in the courtyard. There was a choice of sitting near Diana or Tony or Fiona.
He chose Fiona.
‘Good morning,’ he said politely.
‘Morning,’ she replied, not looking up from her book. He decided it would be tactful to leave her to it. He took out Zoe’s memoir, found his place and started reading.
‘How was Gubbio?’ Fiona asked after a couple of minutes.
‘Alarming,’ he replied. ‘I nearly fell off the mountain at one point.’
‘Really? There’s a mountain?’
‘More of a very steep hill that rises up above the town and has a church on top. No, I left the main track up and took a shortcut on a little footpath Gerry had told me about. But I must have got the wrong one, as it led me to a near vertical slope which I slid down for a good twenty yards before being stopped by a rocky outcrop. Anyway, no damage done, apart from scratched wrists and knees.’
‘But you’ve recovered?’
‘I was fine once I’d got back to the main track again. Shaken, but intact.’
‘And what’s the rest of the place like?’
‘Charming. You know, classic Italian town. Up high with narrow old streets. An amazing central piazza, with a great expanse of shiny terracotta tiles. Museum, cathedral. Not a lot of great art, strangely, but I didn’t really have time for that anyway.’
‘I’m sorry we had to miss it.’
This was just politeness, because of course she and her father wouldn’t have had time for sightseeing. ‘So how’s it all going?’ he asked.
‘Slowly. As you’d imagine in Italy. Lots of strange stipulations. Twenty-four hours must pass from the time of death before the body can be prepared for burial or repatriation. That sort of thing. We’ve got most of the logistics sorted now, I’m glad to say.’
‘I thought there was a post-mortem happening.’
‘It’s happened. Yesterday. Not that they release the body in a hurry. We’re hoping to get that back early next week.’
‘Any results?’
‘Not that they’ve shared with us.’
‘I’m sure they will. And then?’
