The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  As if she knew what he was thinking, Luisa said, ‘How would you have done it?’ Her voice was rough; she was still angry with him for putting her through those twenty-four hours of worry, just for that thought passing through his mind. ‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ he said quietly. ‘I would never have done it.’

  She said nothing. He shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘Not pills,’ he said uneasily. ‘Something very quick. Instantaneous.’ She knew they were both thinking about his gun, police issue. ‘But we’re not talking about me, Luisa. I would never do it.’ Her hand lay on the table, and for a moment he laid his hand on top of it.

  What he did not add was that he would not have taken pills, but neither would he have filled his pockets with stones and walked into the muddy Arno below the shacks and tipped rubbish of the Lungarno Santa Rosa. Down in the muck with river vermin swimming over you. He would never have done what Claudio Gentileschi had done.

  Pietro had called back, eventually.

  ‘The guy was a serious depressive,’ he’d said. ‘I’m sorry, Sandro, we talked to the doctor. He fought it all his life; he must have just got tired of fighting.’ Sandro heard him let out a heavy sigh. ‘You know – the camps. He was in the camps, that kind of thing – well. I don’t think they ever leave it behind.’

  Sandro knew Pietro was thinking of that writer, who’d been in the camps, written about the camps, then thrown himself down the stairs in Turin forty years on. But Pietro’s assumption niggled at him; no two men are the same, not even if they’ve survived the same horrors. He said nothing.

  Pietro went on, earnest. ‘Maybe something happened, some little thing, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, who knows? Come on, Sandro; you know as well as I do. It happens all the time. Suicide.’

  There’d been a silence then. ‘First job, eh?’ Pietro said, trying to buck him up. ‘Nice one, Sandro, you’re back in the saddle, anyway.’

  They’d finished by making their usual arrangement to meet. Sandro knew Pietro was trying to convince him he’d got a future, but perversely it had the opposite effect; the kinder Pietro was, the more he remembered he could have lost his friend his job. For a whole day after Sandro had gone AWOL – with a loaded police gun – Pietro had scrambled to cover for him. Had lied for him; could still be disciplined for it, too, if anyone in the system took against him.

  ‘I’m not saying people don’t commit suicide,’ said Luisa, now standing to clear the plates. ‘I’m saying the ones they leave behind don’t want to believe it. I’m saying that it’s natural to deny it.’

  Sandro nodded, but he wasn’t sure if Luisa would say the same, had she met Lucia Gentileschi. They couldn’t have been less physically alike – he thought this observing Luisa at the sink, her hair as black and glossy as when he’d first met her, her shoulders plump, hips wide and strong – but Claudio Gentileschi’s widow was a woman in the same mould as Luisa herself.

  ‘They said he’d killed himself?’ he’d asked her as gently as he could, sitting there with her straight back in the room filled with pale November light. She seemed to be permanently bracing herself against something. ‘You don’t believe them?’

  She took a while before answering him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, no, I don’t, of course I don’t believe them, that is my first reaction. I knew him, you see. . .’ And at this her voice faltered, then recovered. ‘They – you – didn’t know Claudio.’ She nodded. ‘But I can see that perhaps, under the circumstances, I’m not thinking clearly.’ Sandro saw her eyes, fixed on some point through the window behind him, intent. ‘I have to be sure, you see,’ she went on. ‘I need to be convinced. Because I cannot – I can’t. . .’ She gave a little gasp, drawing breath in. ‘I can’t really stand to think that he was in pain. Or that he was frightened.’

  ‘No,’ said Sandro, feeling a tightness in his own throat. ‘Of course not.’ He still didn’t know what she wanted of him. Lucia Gentileschi turned her head a little to transfer her gaze from the window at last to Sandro. He wanted to look away, as if from something very bright, but he did not.

  She went on, determined. ‘The police won’t tell me that, of course; it isn’t part of their job to find that out, I suppose they aren’t like doctors, or priests. Or perhaps they think it wouldn’t be good for me to know the truth.’

  Despite himself, Sandro nodded minutely; he knew well enough how much was never told to relatives. His heart sank at the thought that he was being offered an opportunity to make amends, to handle it right, this time; the problem was, he had no idea if he could manage it. What if the truth was intolerable? But Lucia Gentileschi – he couldn’t imagine ever being able to refer to her by her first name, or to use the informal, tu – was still looking at him, and now he could see that if anyone could handle it, she could.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘he was missing for a whole day. Eleven hours unaccounted for. The last time I saw him was at eight, when he left our apartment to buy the newspaper; they said he died at about seven in the evening.’ She paused; her eyelids fluttered. ‘They found his body the following morning.’ She took a sip of the water she still held in her hand, dutifully. All Sandro could think of was the night she must have spent without her husband; the first night alone in fifty years. How long it must have seemed.

  And now sitting in his own warm kitchen and going over it again he understood what Luisa was saying; the night he’d stayed out, and those hours she hadn’t known if he was alive or dead, would not be easily forgotten. He stood up and went to the sink and folded his arms around her from behind, warm and solid against his chest, and for a second he felt her lean back against him.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Luisa sounded distracted, as if the feel of his arms around her shoulders had reminded her of something else entirely. He set his cheek against her hair, breathing in her smell.

  ‘I’m going to see her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In her – their apartment.’ He sighed, thinking of all the things Claudio Gentileschi’s wife had told him, and the things he had deduced without being told. That he had been a proud man; an intellectual, an artist. A loving man, though not good at expressing himself. A man who’d had dark moods but had been good at controlling them. A man who’d known that he was losing his faculties. And then there were those missing hours, Gentileschi’s last hours on earth, the absence that his wife could not ignore. ‘I need more information,’ he said. ‘I need to find out about the husband, of course. And I need to find out about her.’

  And as he thought of Lucia Gentileschi and what she did and did not know about her husband, he became aware of Luisa’s hand on his, how cool it was in spite of the kitchen, and how she was not letting go as he would otherwise have expected.

  ‘Luisa?’ he asked.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, without turning her head to look at him, and he knew she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. ‘I went to the doctor today.’

  Chapter Six

  When Iris Woke The next morning, nothing was familiar about the room in which she found herself. Another kind of dark, strange place: but this was definitely not the Piazza d’Azeglio. Even in the dark she knew that; the bed was low and hard, the thin light was more diffuse, the smell was different, a spicy, unfamiliar scent. And it was warm.

  Then she remembered.

  Hiroko’s flat had not after all turned out to be in the streets and streets of dull apartment buildings out past the station, but buried in a narrow alley beyond the big Victorian covered market. It had been a longish walk from the school, and it was dark by the time they got there.

  Paolo – they seemed to be on first-name terms now, that hour with the police, talking about where the bag had been found, that terror she’d felt and he’d seen had shifted things somehow – had offered to escort her back to the flat in the Piazza d’Azeglio to get some things. ‘I don’t know, toothbrush, nightclothes?’ he had said, seeming nervous, and she’d found herself feeling sorry for him. This kind of thing co
uldn’t be good for the school, and she wondered what he would find to say to Ronnie’s mum. She felt stunned, herself, unable to think.

  They’d found a number for the Hertford house in Greve very quickly; it had taken the taller carabiniere, who Iris thought was the senior officer, a couple of minutes on his mobile. On autopilot Iris had found herself wondering if all foreigners maybe had to register with the police, but then of course even if you looked in the phone book, there’d only be one Hertford in Chianti, wouldn’t there?

  It had been a moment’s relief, to see the policeman’s face when the number came through, a breakthrough. The carabinieri were both very dark-skinned, with stubbled chins and black eyes and thick southern accents. The tall one wrote the number on a piece of paper Massi pushed towards him, squinting down his long nose. ‘Artfoord,’ he pronounced triumphantly, ‘Ecco’.

  They existed, then, at least, these friends of Ronnie’s mother Serena in their castle. Iris wondered if it was a real castle or if it too had been built out of glass and rotting wood by an experimental architect. Probably the real deal, knowing Serena and her Georgian farmhouse surrounded by yew trees with the gallops running for miles; again Iris’s stomach churned, at the thought of Serena this time, and what she would say.

  They looked at her, then at Massi, then all three of them looked at Iris.

  ‘Should I do it?’ she said, nervous to the point of hysteria. ‘You want me to phone them?’ At least she’d be doing something. Massi pushed the phone across the table to her, and the carabiniere handed her the number.

  At least it rang; the long Italian tone that never sounded anything like a telephone’s ring to her. It rang a long time; Iris was about to put the phone down, feeling tears of frustration pricking at her eyes, when it was snatched up and someone shouted, ‘Pronto?’ Her heart sank, it was Italian, and a thickly accented, bad-tempered Italian at that. Female.

  But Iris hadn’t given up. ‘Potrei parlare con i signori Hertford per piacere?’ she got out, with some effort.

  ‘Eh?’ There was a cavernous, echoing sound to the voice; Iris, holding tight to the receiver, imagined a baronial hall. If this was a housekeeper she wasn’t very welcoming.

  ‘I signori Hertford?’

  Massi gestured to her for the phone, but she persevered. ‘E la casa degli signori Hertford?’

  Perhaps hearing the desperation in her voice, the housekeeper, or whatever she was, seemed to relent. ‘Si,’ she said. ‘Ma gli signori non ci sono. Sono in Inghilterra da un mese’. And then Iris had given up, handing the phone dumbly to the long-nosed carabiniere.

  They weren’t there. The Hertfords existed, they had a house in Greve and therefore probably were Serena’s friends. But they hadn’t asked Ronnie out there for the week, nor even for a day, because they’d been in England for the previous month and were still there now.

  After talking to the housekeeper for another five minutes, the policeman had hung up. The place was shut up for the winter, he said. There’d been no one there, no teenagers, no house parties, not even unauthorized ones. No Ronnie.

  There was a silence, then Massi and the carabinieri talked among themselves about how to proceed. Massi seemed serious, but he didn’t betray any panic, for which Iris was grateful. Ronnie, she thought, where are you?

  As they talked, Iris listened but they talked quickly, and she found the accents hard. ‘What – what do they think has happened?’ she asked quickly, at the first opportunity.

  ‘They’re not sure,’ said the director, carefully.

  ‘I know that,’ said Iris. ‘But what do they think?’

  ‘Iris,’ said Massi, and she had the impression of being deflected. ‘I think first we need to talk to Ronnie’s mother. Perhaps – well, it’s possible Ronnie may have phoned her. And then perhaps – well, other friends.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Iris, trying to stay calm, trying to be reasonable. ‘Of course.’ But the panic she’d felt at the sight of that fine dust in Ronnie’s bag was still there; it wouldn’t be held down. She forced herself to say it.

  ‘But do they – they’re worried, aren’t they?’

  And reluctantly Massi met her eye. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s four days. If Veronica’s mother has heard nothing, either – well. I think they have to take it seriously.’

  She was grateful for the way Paolo pretty much forbade her to go back to the flat on her own. ‘If necessary, you can sleep here,’ he said, and she could see he was worried, too. About her, as well as Ronnie. ‘There is a fold-out bed in the office.’ But Hiroko inserted herself into the conversation at that point.

  ‘I have a bed in my apartment for visitors,’ she said in her polite, quiet way. ‘It’s no problem.’

  They had walked along the Arno in the dark, the lights coming on in the big, fabulous apartments overlooking the river. And then they’d turned north and dived into the maze of narrow streets and cold, dark facades heading off towards the station, with Hiroko leading the way as she took small determined steps, occasionally looking anxiously at Iris with her pale, closed face. The more she walked, the colder Iris felt, and she wondered if it was some kind of shock reaction. Florence had never seemed like a sinister place to her before, but now she was scared; every shuttered window, every heavy door, every overflowing dumpster looked frightening to her in the sparse streetlighting.

  Now in the soft, warm gloom of another unfamiliar apartment, Iris stared at the ceiling in the dark. It had been stupid of Ronnie to go away with that bar owner, hadn’t it? What had his name been? Josef. Ronnie’d hardly known him. But when she’d got back and gone over it all with Iris in the freezing kitchen with a cup of tea, Iris had to admit that some of what she’d felt had been jealousy. Because she didn’t know if she’d ever dare to do such a thing.

  The flat was quiet but not silent; as she lay still, not wanting the day to begin, Iris could hear small, measured kitchen sounds; things being put away, or set out, very carefully. She’d gone straight to bed the night before, apologizing, suddenly unable to keep her eyes open. Hiroko had pulled out the futon in her sitting room, showed her the tiny bathroom, and disappeared, and overwhelmed with voiceless gratitude Iris had fallen deeply and mercifully asleep.

  Now, though, she could feel the beat of her heart accelerate as the anxieties clamoured to be heard. The first problem was marshalling all the facts. Iris had always been good at that, good at homework and revision and sorting out the essential from the insignificant, but here and now she felt as if her head was stuffed with cotton wool, her eyes swollen with crying. What else had the police said? They’d asked which other students on the course had known Ronnie. Traude and Hiroko had hardly even spoken to Ronnie since she’d been there; Sophia had twittered nervously to the policemen in her British Council Italian for twenty minutes.

  ‘What did you say?’ Iris had asked her.

  ‘Well, I told them she enjoyed going out, you know, she had hundreds of friends, but I hadn’t seen her with any – any special friend.’ Sophia pushed out her lower lip, like a baby. ‘Maybe I should have told them about Jackson? But they weren’t – you know.’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘You don’t think? Jackson?’

  ‘No,’ said Iris frowning ‘I don’t think so.’ She hesitated, unwilling to decipher why she was resistant to the idea. ‘Jackson was here yesterday, wasn’t he? But there must have been someone. She wouldn’t plan to disappear for days on her own.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Sophia. ‘But at the party – if she had a boyfriend you’d think she’d have invited him to the party. Gosh, I would.’ She looked pensive.

  Sophia was living with an Italian family; even Iris had scorned the protectiveness of Sophia’s mother, the curfew arrangements and Alice bands and pastel jumpers, the packages of food her Italian family sent her to school with. It looked only sensible now, she reflected, with a twinge of envy.

  ‘And she can’t have – been – well, abducted,’ Sophia had said, as if it had only just occurred to her. ‘Do they
really think that? I mean that would be just – it would be – no! Don’t you think maybe she’s sitting in a swanky hotel with whoever he is and he’s bought her a new bag and a new phone and she’ll turn up tomorrow or something and she’ll wonder what all the fuss was about?’ Then she’d let out a hysterical sound, half giggle, half shriek.

  For a second, Iris had let herself believe it. Why not? She imagined this boyfriend, with unlimited money for honeymoon suites and new handbags. Why wouldn’t Ronnie have phoned, though? Maybe she wouldn’t have; not just to let them know she’d lost her bag.

  ‘Maybe,’ she’d said.

  Sophia had been at the Halloween party, hadn’t she? But she hadn’t stayed long; she’d been collected by the father of her Italian family, from the door, at ten. She’d been funny at the party, gazing round-eyed as Ronnie had strung some boy along; secretly, Iris knew, Sophia idolized her. ‘She’s so good at everything,’ Sophia had said, watching Ronnie blow smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘Don’t you think they think she’s the best of us at drawing? I’m sure she’ll get more into the end-of-term show, more than any of us.’ And Iris had stared at her, wondering how anyone could be so deluded, even if Ronnie had developed a belated interest in doing well. Maybe it was because Sophia was so hopeless at it herself.

  As she lay in the dim grey light, just remembering the conversation made Iris blush. What a bitch I am, she thought. It doesn’t mean anything, just because Antonella put my drawing up on the wall. What makes me think I’m so great? Maybe Ronnie was good after all.