by Sarah Dunant
Since Lily’s birth, Anna had grown used to accepting limitations: things she could no longer do; places she could no longer go; levels of success she no longer had the time or tunnel vision to reach. In many ways it had not been such a loss. She had already begun to feel somewhat dissatisfied with her life, as if the inexorable march of feminism demanded that she always be better or braver than she actually was, not allowing her to rest or take pleasure from what had been achieved. Lily’s arrival had changed all that. The very fact of her daughter’s existence was such a miracle that it seemed to release Anna from any further need to rule the world. She was almost relieved to feel the compulsion gone, the wildness tamed. Now, she felt, she wouldn’t have to try so hard anymore. And that had been true. But nothing lasts forever, and over the last year or so she had slowly come to realize that something inside her was shifting again. Lily would be seven next birthday. Next year she would be in junior school. She already knew how to read, and some nights chose to do it alone, rather than wanting a story. She had friends she visited for the night, a few chosen little girls who giggled and closed the door when you came too close to their games. Of course, when things went wrong—illness or accidents, tears or disappointments—she was still a child, but there was no mistaking the gradual metamorphosis that was taking place underneath. Recently Anna had begun to contemplate a time when Lily would no longer be small.
With it had come a shadowy sense of unease as to who she would be without her daughter’s dependency to define her. The world had not stayed still either. Friends and colleagues had moved on. Paul had Michael; and Stella—well, even Stella had René now. Anna didn’t want a man (at least she didn’t think she did), but she didn’t know if that meant she wanted to be alone forever. She tried work again, started offering features and chasing ideas rather than just taking on what was given. It didn’t work. A story was just that; absorbing enough while she told it but soon gone. Quietly she began to realize that she wasn’t satisfied.
Thus, when she had opened the paper that Saturday and her eye had fallen on the half-page ad for last-minute cheap flights to Europe, she had picked up the phone before she even thought about it. Three days away on the spur of the moment. What on earth had she been hoping for? A shot of memory, some time alone, an adventure? Well, she had got them all now, and more. The question was how would she get out of it.
The first day turned to dusk and eventually to dark. Hunger nudged a place next to apprehension. She drank bathroom water from a plastic tooth mug which she kept by the bed, small sips of it like morsels of food. He didn’t return. Though she was exhausted by an excess of emotion and the remains of last night’s drug, still she forced herself to stay awake into the night. His unpredictability undermined her. At the same time as she accepted that he might indeed be taking her at her word and leaving her to starve, she became equally terrified of what would happen if he came back when she was asleep. She got up and pushed the armchair across the room until its back was wedged under the door handle. It wouldn’t stop him, but it would give her time.
Not till I’m ready, she thought, though she had no idea when that might be.
Away—Saturday A.M.
THE CHURCH, THE third they had visited this morning and the hardest to find, was tucked away behind half a dozen houses at the end of the village. The exterior was austere, its simple stone façade dating from a time when Christianity was still young enough to be modest. It had been locked when they arrived in the late morning, but the sign by the door told of a custodian who lived at the nearby house and could be summoned at any time.
“He’s probably taking an early siesta. Should we wake him?”
She glanced at him. “I didn’t think you could read Italian.”
He shrugged. “Only a few words. Nothing that I would risk out loud,” he said. “You can do the talking.”
When they finally roused him, the custodian appeared almost as ancient as the church itself, back bent like a Gothic arch and eyes as milky as old glass. His mind was active enough though, and once inside the building it was clear he knew his history. It was years since she had heard such a thick Tuscan dialect and she found it difficult to keep up with him. Still, she got the broad bones of it, translating as well as she could as they stood together in the central aisle.
“He says this is one of a series of churches that were built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as part of the Pilgrims’ Way, but that there have been people living in this area since the Romans. The men who worked on these churches were all local, the craftsmen as well.”
“They still had pagan imaginations by the looks of it. Check out those figures on the pulpit.”
The stone relief was crude but gripping: a man seated above a woman, his head in the jaws of a serpent’s mouth and his body distorted, legs splayed so wide apart that his feet reached to his ears and his pubic hair and penis almost touched the wild waves of hair on the woman’s head underneath. Her legs, too, were splayed, curving up toward her body and transforming into fish tails as they went, fins like barbs running down each side.
The old man was talking rapidly.
“He says no one knows what it means. Some say it’s a . . . a field symbol? I think that means fertility. . . . Others think it’s God’s punishment for . . . for something or other—I can’t make out the word.”
“Sin, I expect,” he said dryly, but his attention was already elsewhere. He had walked down toward the nave of the church and was studying the altar. On the wall behind, it was possible to make out some faint patches of color. “Can you ask him about the altar?” But the old man had already spotted him and had shuffled off to join him at the rail, gesticulating and nodding.
“He says there was some question of a fresco on the back wall. So last year they took everything down and that is what they found.”
“Hmmn. The tabernacle’s pretty good too.”
“Tabernacle?”
“The marble box at the back of the altar. It’s where they keep the host. It’s got a rather classy piece on the door. Painted straight onto the wood, do you see? A pietà. The Virgin and the dead Christ.”
“Sì, sì, la Pietà.” The old man nodded quickly and launched into another river of words. She struggled to keep up.
“He says . . . at least I think he says . . . that when they took the . . . the altar down someone thought the painting—the tabernacle painting—was maybe important. Botteno, Bottinno—some name like that? He—” The old man butted in, even faster this time. She shrugged. “I really can’t catch all of this. Something about a daughter, a nun? And a present to the church. He says he always thought it was a great painting. But that when it was . . . restored, yes? When it was restored they found it wasn’t by this guy—whoever he was—after all.”
“Hmm. Shame. Well, whoever did it, it’s a nice piece.” He grinned at the old man. “È bella, la figura de la Madonna.”
“Sì, sì, bellissima.”
Spurred on by what he recognized as genuine interest, the custodian embarked on what was evidently the deluxe tour: a lecture on the wooden cross at the side altar, fashioned from Casentino chestnut, a torch-beam study of the rest of the faded fourteenth-century frescoes, and the story of some noble bones underneath the stone floor: a local aristocrat apparently, someone mentioned by Dante in the Inferno. He ended standing on the gravestone, declaiming what sounded like the relevant part of the original poem.
It was, he explained after he had locked up and they were walking slowly back to his house in the grinding heat, a Tuscan tradition, the learning and reciting of the Divine Comedy by heart. In the past there had been many local people who knew the whole work, but now he was one of the few left. It was clear he rated the loss of this tradition at the same level of perfidy as the inadequate upkeep of the churches.
They shook hands at his door. He held hers only a little too long.
“It was the way you talked Italian.” They laughed about it on their way back to the car. “It was so
sexy.”
“Oh, sure. And you, meanwhile, are a fraud. You didn’t need me at all. You understood most of what he said perfectly.”
“Not really. I just happen to know the word for sin. Anyway, if it had been me doing the translating we wouldn’t have got him out of his house.” He slipped an arm round her waist. “You should have seen his face. When he was talking to you his eyes shone as brightly as when he was reciting his beloved poet.”
“No.” She laughed. “Not quite as bright as that.”
He had parked cleverly in the lee of a large chestnut tree, its full leaf like a gigantic parasol. They took out the map and spread it over the shaded bonnet, plotting the remainder of the day’s route.
Half of her stood next to him, checking roads and the contours, while the other half flirted with the idea of his hands upon her body again. She studied his face, the way his jawbone tightened and shifted as he concentrated. What is it about sex? she thought. What switch does it throw in your head as well as in your body? Six weeks ago she would have walked past this man in the street and not noticed him. Now just the curve of his fingers splayed out across a road map made her fat with desire. It was as if it had nothing to do with him, as if it were her juice lubricating them both. But she also knew that wasn’t true, that somewhere there were two appetites at work here. And in many ways his was the stronger, not just for sex, but for a whole number of things.
They had known each other so little time. If one added it all together—the meals, the phone calls, the grabbed hours in hotel rooms—they had probably spent less than two whole days in each other’s company. What do I really know about you, she thought, save for the fact that you have been married seven years, sell art for a living, enjoy food, and like oral sex as a digestive rather than a main course? For all she knew he might even be lying about the first two. It was easily enough done, as she was well aware. If she found out more, would she like less? Maybe the detritus of everyday detail would muddy the flow of the current.
“What is it?” He looked up, feeling her attention on him rather than the map.
“Nothing.” She shrugged. “Just daydreaming. Tell me . . . did you recognize that painting? The one in the church, on the tabernacle?”
He frowned. “No. What makes you ask?”
“I dunno. The way you looked at it, I suppose. It was like the way you look at a menu when you’re hungry. You obviously thought there was something about it. I wondered what you saw.”
“Probably the same as whoever thought it might be a Bottoni. It had good lines. The composition was very strong, which is important for such a small piece. And the Virgin was beautifully painted, didn’t you think?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. I wouldn’t know what to compare it with. Who was Bottoni, anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know much about him. Not my period. Let’s see. Italian, eighteenth century. Painted a lot of portraits, I think. He’s not known for his religious art.”
“So would that have made it more or less valuable—I mean if it had been by him?”
“More, probably. Certainly more unusual.”
“But it’s not the kind of thing that you’d buy for your work?”
He shook his head. “No. Bottoni is more a collector’s painter. And even if he wasn’t, and the painting had turned out to be by him, you can’t really buy this kind of stuff anyway. It belongs to the Church and it never goes on the market, or very rarely. No—my work is more in the mainstream.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“Like any business. A company comes to me, tells me how much they’ve got to spend. I advise them on what’s coming up for sale, usually through auctions, private collections, death duty sales, that kind of thing.”
“Which is why you’re in London so often?”
“Yes.”
“So why do you live in Paris?”
“Because it’s convenient for all the markets.” There was a second’s hesitation. “And because my wife is French.”
“Ah. I see.” She paused. “Is there a lot of money in it?”
“For me or for them?”
“You I know about. I can read it in your labels. What about them?”
“Well, they wouldn’t be in it if there wasn’t. Yes, there’s money. It’s a growing market. Pension funds, mostly. You’ve probably invested in some of this stuff without knowing it. It makes business sense. Low risk, high profit. Tiger economies can turn into sick cats, shares can rise and fall, but with the exception of a slight dip at the end of the eighties art just keeps on coming. All you’ve got to do is invest wisely.”
“Which is where you come in?”
“Yep.”
“So if that work in the church had been a Bottoni—was that his name?—and you had been able to get hold of it, how much would it have been worth? To you, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s not my field. But an eighteenth-century minor Italian master, unusual work? On the open market, to the right collector . . . two, maybe three hundred thousand.”
“And to you?”
“Depends what I’d done. Maybe twenty percent of that. Though price is also about who’s buying and how badly they might want it. As I say, the Church isn’t usually interested in selling. Anyway in this case they’ve nothing to sell. I doubt there’s much of a market for an almost-Bottoni.”
“Still, you’d think they’d have better protection. I mean, anyone could walk in and carry that off under their arm.”
He smiled. “I would think the security is more sophisticated than it looks. Anyway, I wouldn’t rate the chances of anything getting past Ol’ Rheumy Eyes. So, what do you say? Is art consultancy more interesting than teaching?”
She laughed. “I don’t know. Certainly more financially rewarding. How far do you think it is to the town now?” she added quickly, eager not to get caught in a reciprocal conversation for fear of running out of make-believe. If she had foreseen this that first night in the bar would she have lied more wisely? What would he say if she were to tell him now? No doubt that would depend on what she was going to do with it. And she still wasn’t ready to think about that.
Bibbiena, when they finally arrived, had its eyes tightly closed against the sun, the shops and houses all shuttered up and the main square virtually deserted.
In the hotel she went straight up to the room while he registered them at the desk. The journey had taken longer than they thought, and with the lack of sleep the night before they were both ragged. She put a call through to London but the desk hadn’t connected the phone yet and when they did the number was engaged. She stepped out of her clothes and into the shower.
Out through the bathroom window she could see a piece of a clock tower and a ceramic-blue sky. I want to sleep for a week, she thought. Maybe I’m even too tired to make love. When she got back into the room he was lying on the bed, fully clothed, his eyes closed. She pulled the towel around her and went looking for her holdall. It wasn’t there.
Three bags were standing by the wardrobe; his briefcase, his overnight bag—equally smart, equally anonymous—and next to it a large Victorian-style doctor’s bag made out of the most exquisite Italian leather; supple, elegant, expensive, the kind of luggage one imagined going down on the top deck of the Titanic. It looked full. She crouched by it and fiddled with its central clasp. It sprang open. Inside was her old holdall. She looked up.
“So? What do you think?” He hadn’t opened his eyes.
“Where does it come from?”
“Florence. A shop I know. It’s handmade. I was going to transfer your things directly into it, but, well, I thought it might annoy you.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t buy this for me?” She turned to him. He was feigning sleep again. “Hey, Samuel. Stop playing coy and talk to me.”
He sighed, grudgingly lifting himself up onto one elbow. “It goes particularly well with the towel. You should wear them together.”
“What is this?”<
br />
“It’s a present. You know—as in something that one person gives to another to tell them how much they like them.”
She shook her head. “I can’t accept it.”
“Why not?” And he sounded genuinely surprised.
“Because it cost too much money.”
“How do you know how much it cost? You didn’t pay for it.”
“That’s the point. Listen—I—”
“No, Anna, for once you listen,” he said and this time his voice was more serious. “I sell art, you teach kids. I earn a lot of money, you earn a little. When this thing started between us you made the rules and I agreed to them. We eat in your restaurants because you can’t afford my taste and won’t let me pay for you. When you flew to Florence you stayed in some third-rate hotel because you didn’t have the money for the one I suggested. So instead I decided to buy you a present. I thought about it long and hard. What it could be. I figured you’d probably be offended by clothes, and anyway I’m useless with women’s sizes. You’d never accept jewelry or anything so frivolous. But you arrive with a battered suitcase that’s falling apart and you’re obviously not interested in doing anything about it. So—it seemed a good idea. Don’t worry. It doesn’t change anything between us. You don’t even have to say thank you. All you have to do is use it. And if possible like it.” He paused. “The one thing you can’t do is give it back. Because I had your initials put on it.”
She went back to the case and found them near the clasp, “AR” in long, elegantly engraved Gothic script. How ironic, she thought. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever received and it’s addressed to someone else. Serves me right for my deceit. She ran her fingers across the leather. The surface felt almost as soft as human skin. What did you have to do to a pig to make it feel so good? But there was something else. Something that didn’t make sense.
