“What?”
“To that end,” he repeated, ignoring her, “Professor Connolly has appointed Dr. Talitha Leafe to assist us in the art history faculty. I know the pair of you will work extremely well together. She’s extremely talented, very enthusiastic—her specialties are Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli—”
Florence felt like Alice, tumbled down a hole and out into a world that made no sense. “But—that’s my specialty.” She pointed above him. “Look! Look at the book behind you on the shelf ! Studies in Benozzo Gozzoli and Fra Filippo Lippi, edited by Professor Florence Winter! That’s why you employ me, George. You don’t need this—Tabitha Leaf ? I’m—”
“Talitha Leafe,” George broke in. “Tally,” he added, unnecessarily.
Florence narrowed her eyes, trying to think clearly. So this was it. She knew they couldn’t fire her on account of her age, because last year they’d tried to get rid of Ruth Warboys, an excellent ancient history professor, and replace her with a twenty-four-year-old boy with slicked-back hair who had a Twitter account. Ruth had hired a lawyer and kicked them down the street, and the twenty-four-year-old had not been heard of again. Young blond WASP boys were right up Professor Lovell’s alley, Florence knew: she and George had been at Oxford together, and she remembered the time he’d turned up for a formal hall with a black eye, the result of some misread signals from a fellow choral society member at Queen’s College. George was peculiarly arrogant about his own chances. Florence had noticed that unattractive men often were.
But girls, girls like this Talitha—Talitha?—Leafe, that wasn’t his area of interest. It just didn’t add up.
“We have discussed this at length, Professor Connolly and I. And we also feel the burden of your extra work at the Courtauld, not to mention your penchant for traveling to conferences, as well as your . . . your behavior, well—it might all be compromising you a little.” Professor Lovell shifted in his chair.
“My behavior?” Florence said, astonished.
“Come on, Florence. You must know what I mean by that.”
“No, I don’t.” She screwed up her nose.
“You are a little—unpredictable. Particularly of late.” George tapped his Adam’s apple. “And you have become something of a talking point, with various insinuations . . . and so forth.”
“Insinuations?” Florence could feel a watery sensation flooding her body, making her head spin. “Do elucidate, George, please. I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”
Professor Lovell bared his teeth with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Come now, Florence. I’m afraid the facts about your workload speak for themselves.” He added, in what was clearly supposed to be a kindly tone, “Perhaps you’ve simply taken too much on, my dear.”
“What about Peter taking on too much?” she demanded. “Since the TV series and that book, he’s never here. And he makes mistakes. I don’t make mistakes. You can hardly castigate me when your head of department has taken it upon himself to become a media personality, George.”
“That is an entirely different matter,” squeaked George. “The Queen of Beauty is an enormous hit. The value to us of Peter being a . . . a . . . ‘media personality,’ as you put it, is incalculable.”
“He didn’t even get the date of the Bonfire of the Vanities right!” Florence said, trying to stop her voice from rising. “He was on some silly BBC breakfast program and he couldn’t say when the most notorious event of the Renaissance took place!”
“A lapse,” George said, irritated. “Live television, Florence. He got it right in the book, didn’t he?”
“Of course he got it right in the book!” Florence shouted, and then stopped abruptly, and the two of them stared at each other, eyes wide.
Don’t say it. Just leave it well alone. She bit her tongue.
“You may scorn it, but what Peter’s doing is the future, Florence. Times are tough and your jetting off to London every two months to give up your best research to the Courtauld is not particularly collegiate, is it?”
As news of Florence’s Courtauld appointment had come through, it emerged that Professor Lovell had applied for a similar post at the same time—but without success. His specialty—Holman Hunt—was out of fashion. Florence loathed Hunt, and found it rather satisfying that George couldn’t understand why no one else was as interested as he in hyperrealistic, moralizing paintings of symbolic goats, fallen women, and ghastly pink and blue babies.
She could see very clearly what this was all about. They were scared of her, so the old boys’ club was closing ranks. She reminded herself of what she did, in fact, know, the damage she could do if she just opened the hatch and gave her craziness full rein. She could hear the words forming.
You know I wrote most of Peter’s book for him. You know if I were to tell anyone, it’d be a scandal big enough to close down the college.
And yet she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t brave enough. Was she? She wished she had a coffee. She always thought better after coffee. She sat silently, almost slumped in her high-backed chair, listening to George’s reedy, precise voice.
“This isn’t immediate. We’d want to see a change come January 2013. Dr. Leafe is getting married at Christmas, of course, and she starts here in the New Year. She would very much like to meet you, work out a way in which the two of you—”
Florence stood up abruptly. “Is that the time? I have to go. Do forgive me. I have a meeting with . . .” She stared up at the ceiling, trying to sound calm and steady. “Rat controllers. I have rats. Well, George, I shall consider what you say and get back to you.”
Professor Lovell stuck his fat lower lip out. “I shall be in touch, if you are not.”
Florence put one trembling hand on the door and took a deep breath. “Well, we shall talk anon, no doubt, though I warn you I intend to defend my own patch extremely vigorously. Incidentally, your desk has woodworm. Good-bye!”
She even managed a cheery nod as she exited.
• • •
She ran until she was out of breath. It was only when she reached the other side of the river that Florence stopped and realized she was shaking, head to toe. She disliked confrontation, almost as much as she disliked mice. She had eschewed teaching and become an academic for that very reason, only to find out too late that the world of academia was like fourteenth-century Florence, riven with internecine strife, internal politics, and wordless betrayal. Increasingly these days it reminded her of growing up with Daisy, where she didn’t know the rules and couldn’t work out when the attack would come. At least the Florentines occasionally massacred each other at Mass to clear the air. Much more straightforward than all this creeping aggression and stress, which ate away at her, like waiting for one of Daisy’s little plots to explode.
Talitha Leafe. What kind of name was that? With a thrill, Florence wondered if this was a legitimate inquiry she could make of Peter.
“Oh, Peter,” Florence said aloud, scuffing one worn shoe on the ancient cobbles. Every single moment of those few weeks that hot summer were imprinted in her mind like an album of holiday photos, one she could flick through whenever she cared to, which was often. And she always felt quite the woman of the world when thinking about him, about what had happened. She liked acting as though things were normal around him, in front of other people especially. The idea that people might be gossiping about them thrilled her. Professor Winter and Professor Connolly? Oh, yes. Apparently they had a fling a few summers ago. He was mad about her, I heard. Yes, that was how she wanted people to think of her. Florence Winter: dashing, mysterious woman of letters, academic, passionate lover, brainy, vital woman of today.
Something touched her leg; Florence jumped, then realized it was her finger. Her skirt had a hole in the pocket. She scraped her nail on her naked skin. Her legs were hairy; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d shaved them. Say if she were
to meet Peter, right here, walking down the street, as had happened that Tuesday in January. He’d been on his way to dinner with friends in the Oltrarno. Niccolò and Francesca, she’d remembered their names, looked up their address.
Say they got talking, then she asked him up for a glass of wine. They’d sit on the roof terrace, a tiny space no bigger than a picnic blanket, looking out at the Torre Guelfa and the Arno. Say they laughed about George and his peccadilloes, the way they used to before Peter started freezing her out, treating her like she was an embarrassment. Say then that he put his hand on her knee as she said something funny, and laughed. “Oh, Flo.” He always used to call her Flo, and it reminded her of home. “I miss you. D’you miss me?”
“Sometimes,” she’d say, smiling just a little archly at him; she didn’t want to seem girlish.
And say he simply took her hand and pulled her into the bedroom, peeling off her clothes one by one, and say they made love in the warm, terra-cotta–colored chamber, the sound of the evening bells in the distance, the sheets rumpled, their faces rosy and glowing with pleasure. . . . Say it were to happen, well, he wouldn’t care, would he? He hadn’t cared before. It had been so lovely, like that. . . .
Florence peered up at the blue sky, framed by the black, shadowed buildings, her hands pressed to her burning red face, a secret smile playing on her lips.
Someone laughed, and she looked up, almost surprised. Two spinsterish tourists, British, she knew it, were staring at her. She hurried on.
• • •
Florence lived on the top floor of an old palace, now divided into apartments, on the Via dei Sapiti. Her apartment had once been a prince’s chamber, and when she’d moved in ten years ago there had been several old pieces of furniture that no one had ever claimed and of which Giuliana, her landlady, professed to know nothing. Florence liked to think they might have been there for centuries; that perhaps some scheming nobleman had hidden letters in the wedding chest, or a knife under the great wooden chair.
She closed the huge wooden door on the outside world, feeling quite light-headed. She needed coffee, that was it. She wandered into the tiny kitchen. It had a plug-in gas ring, an espresso maker, some dusty packages of pasta and tomato purée, and a vigorous, thickly scented basil plant flourishing, against all odds, on the windowsill. Like the Boccaccio story of Isabella and the pot of basil, which, alas, always reminded her of yet another awful Holman Hunt painting. It was so typical of someone like George. How could you live here, among this great art, and still admire Holman Hunt?
Florence set the battered Bialetti on the gas ring, and flung open the warped doors that led out to the terrace. She breathed in, as the golden evening sun fell on her tired face. She could hear children playing in the street outside.
It was moments like this that she realized how much she loved it here. The sun, the smells, the feeling of being alive, of possibility. When she’d first arrived on a sabbatical, twenty years ago now, she hadn’t intended to stay. But her brain worked here, like being plugged into the right socket. How she longed for Italy when she was back in England, where the damp and the gray seeped into her bones and made her feel wet, woolly, soggy. She didn’t want to end up like Dad, clawlike hands, pale and gasping for sunshine, or like Ma, shut up, closed off. It was here she had discovered who she was.
Waiting for the coffeemaker to boil, Florence put the books she’d brought home on her desk, staring at the frieze of The Procession of the Magi, which she’d Blu-Tacked up there herself many years ago. She shivered suddenly, thinking about her meeting with George. Florence was no good with instant reaction; she needed to go away and sift through the data presented to her.
Think about it later, she told herself. She’d leave if she had to. Why was she staying here at this second-rate college, humiliated by men who weren’t her intellectual equals? Why did she care so much?
But she knew the answer. Peter. She would always stay while he was here and she thought he might, one day, need her again. Sometimes she wondered if she’d deliberately made him into the engine that kept her pushing along, and now it was too late to admit she was wrong. Florence stared at the pictures she’d pinned up, scanning them for something, some message. Her eye fell upon the only one
in a frame—the reproduction of her father’s favorite painting, The
Annunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi, which they’d visited every year for her birthday. She gazed at the angel’s calm, beautiful face. Something important, buried deep in her consciousness, was tapping at the edges of her weary brain. A thought, a memory, something that needed to be salvaged. She looked at the boy again, at the shaft of light on Mary’s womb.
What’s going on?
The coffeepot rattled on the gas ring, the black liquid bursting like oil from the funnel. Florence poured the coffee, and as she took the first scalding sip the doorbell rang, so shrill and unexpected she jumped, and the cup trembled, spilling half the contents onto the floor.
“Bugger,” Florence said under her breath. She went over to the door, frowning; her fairly eccentric landlady had a habit of waiting until Florence had been back for half an hour, then stomping upstairs, demanding a translation of something, an explanation of something else, an argument with someone.
But it wasn’t Giuliana, and as she opened the door her face froze.
“Florence. Hello. I thought you’d be in.”
“Peter?” Florence clutched the door. Had she conjured him up by thinking about him? Was he real? “What are you doing here?” And she smiled, her eyes lighting up.
“I had to see you,” he said. “Can I come inside?”
SHE KNEW HIM so well, every inch of him committed to memory for years now through intensive recall and daydreaming. It was often a surprise to her, as now, to note that he was wearing something she didn’t recognize. Florence smiled at him as she held the door open, noting the squeak of his new shoes, the faint scent of aftershave. He had made an effort.
“I was just having some coffee.”
“Of course you were.” He gave a little smile.
She blushed; he knew her better than anyone, she knew it.
Peter cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you, Florence. Have you got anything to drink? I mean, some wine?”
“Absolutely.” Florence shoved her hands in her pockets, to stop herself fidgeting, and went into the kitchen. “A lovely Garganega, delicious, just like the one we—”
Just like the bottle we had at Da Gemma that evening, when you had the lamb and I had veal. We did drink an awful lot, then we argued about Uccello and kissed afterward for the first time, and you were wearing that tie with the tiny fleurs-de-lis on it, and I had the blue sundress on.
“Sounds delicious. Thanks, Flo, old girl. Listen, I’m sorry to burst in on you like this. . . .” Peter followed her into the kitchen. He hesitated. “God, I haven’t been here for a long time. Lovely place you have. As they say.”
He gave a little snort and she did too, almost unable to believe this was happening, that this was real time, instead of some elaborate fantasy she had constructed. It’s not, is it? Am I completely crackers?
Part of her wasn’t sure she should trust him. But she also knew he still felt something for her. She was sure of it. And even if he slapped her now, or told her he’d been married for ten years and wanted her to be godparent to his child, even if he urinated on the floor, she could still say that he’d been here, still have some fresh memories to add to that photo album in her head. In fact, she thought wildly as she ushered him out onto the tiny terrace with a soft push on his back, nothing she owned or thought or had meant as much to her as this, this moment right here.
Peter sat down, folding his gangly limbs into the chair. Florence watched him. Though his mind was the most precise she had ever come across, his body, like hers, seemed constantly to take him by surprise. She put the scratched old tumblers down on the
rickety table, and handed him a bowl of olives. He took one, chewed it, threw the pit over into the street.
“Bloody tourists,” he said, as the babble of Japanese from below momentarily stopped.
Florence handed him a glass. “Salute,” she said.
“Salute,” he answered, and he clinked his glass to hers. “To you. Good to see you, Flo.”
“And you, Peter. We’re quite the strangers these days.”
“I looked for you yesterday. I wanted to ask you about an inscription in Santa Maria Novella.”
“Oh? You should have called me.” She wanted to sound beatific, happy, self-contained, a woman with her own life yet who would always, always be waiting for him.
“Yes. Perhaps I should have.”
There was silence then. Florence stuck her finger through the hole in her pocket again, arched her back, and wondered if she could quickly excuse herself to shave her legs. Always be prepared. Her brother, Bill the Boy Scout, lived by this motto and had tried to impress it upon his chaotic sisters, to little effect.
The bells from over the way rang out, a loud metallic clamor. The sound of a police car faded away in the distance. She breathed in the warm, petrolic, pine scent of evening.
“I miss you, Peter,” she said eventually. “I’m sorry. I know there’s other things going on, but . . . I do. I wish—”
And she reached out to touch his arm.
It was as though she had flicked a switch. Peter jerked his head up and swiveled toward her. “This is what I mean, Florence. That’s why I need to talk to you. It’s got to stop.”
“Talk to me . . . about what?”
“You. You . . . and me. This lunatic idea you have that there is something between us.” His jowly face was suddenly taut, and he jabbed a forefinger at her. “The hints, the insinuations you’ve been making to people. I know you told the chap from the Harvard Institute we’d had an affair. Dear God, Florence! And the Renaissance studies seminar group. One of them asked me if it was true. I tell you, I will sue you for slander if this goes on.”
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