“Non devi parlare inglese per me,” said Helen. She listened to herself, appalled. You needn’t speak English for me. How prissy she sounded, how middle-aged. She heard her mother’s voice again. Already he’d rubbed her up the wrong way.
Giacomo grabbed her round the waist and dragged her into a stumbling dance around the kitchen. “Parli un italiano perfetto,” he said, grinning with delight. But he continued in English. “You’re wonderful. Fede’s lucky to have found you.” He held her so close his breath was in her face; it smelt of coffee and aniseed. She wanted to let him lead her, but also to push him off. Already, he’d begun to scare her. She didn’t know what he’d do next.
They stayed in that evening. They ate pasta with oil and garlic, and bread and salami, and drank Barbera from plastic bottles. They listened to Giacomo, who seemed possessed, crouching forward, hands clasped together in earnestness or spread out with the palms turned up, as if he could weigh the world; swinging back until she thought the chair would collapse beneath him; laughing at odd intervals, his eyes bright with tears he didn’t bother to wipe away. When they’d eaten, he emptied his bags on the kitchen floor to show them what he’d found. Music tapes, painted flutes, scraps of embroidered and woven cloth, those peg-like worry dolls, sweaters of heavy musty-scented wool with geometric designs and tassels. Helen had thought, disappointed, but this is tourist stuff. You’re nothing more than a tourist. And then he dug down deeper. Beneath his screwed-up T-shirts and underpants were posters and pamphlets, cyclostyled on coarse grey paper, crumpled and ripped, books with their covers torn off and their dog-eared pages scored with question marks, exclamation marks, doodles. He pulled it all out, the fabulous mess of his last nine months, waving it in their faces until Helen was exhausted.
“They could be arrested at any time, they live with it, so everything they do has meaning. They live and eat and breathe politically. They love politically. There’s a grace to them, it’s extraordinary. You can’t believe it unless you see it, unless you feel it. We’re dead here.” The tears were pouring down his face, his voice was breaking. “They aren’t just empty gestures, Federico,” he said. When he stood up and began to pace from one side of the kitchen to the other, Federico reached out for his arm. For a second, Giacomo seemed to want to shake him off, but let himself be held. His hand came out to Helen’s shoulder and she, too, stood up and allowed herself to be drawn in by both men’s arms.
He moved into the second bedroom that night. The next morning, when he came into the kitchen and found Helen and Federico drinking coffee, with Helen about to go to work, he picked up a cup and poured some coffee, then sat between them, closed his eyes and sighed. “Home,” he said, his legs stretched out beneath the table. Helen glanced across at Federico, but he was reading a pamphlet and didn’t look up. Ten minutes later, as she left the flat, Giacomo was fidgeting and playing with a packet of Nazionali he’d pulled out from his pocket.
The first few days he was in and out of the flat, looking people up, his pockets jingling with telephone tokens. He washed his clothes, one by one, in the bathroom basin, hanging them on a string above the bath. Helen tried to do them for him, but he refused.
“It’s not because I’m a woman,” she said, irritated. “I mean, that’s not why I’m offering.”
He grinned. “I didn’t think it was. It’s because you’re good. You’re a good person, Helen.” She couldn’t tell if he was teasing. She wasn’t sure if he was right. What she’d wanted was to take possession of her flat again, against the intruder. It was unsettling to find him there when she got back from Fiat with some bread and ham for her lunch; she was never sure whether to share it with him. If she did, she felt exploited; if she didn’t, she felt mean. Either way, he never seemed to notice. Often he had bags of fruit he’d throw down on the table, the oranges or pears spilling out. She’d grab them as they rolled, then take one into her bedroom to eat.
Sometimes he’d follow her in and give her newspapers to read, Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua. She cast a glance at the closely printed pages and smudged photographs, stumbled through a paragraph or two of jargon-ridden prose, then put them down, defeated. She didn’t believe anyone could really care enough to read that kind of stuff until she heard, one morning as she waited for the tram that would take her out to work, two women old enough to be her mother, the day’s market shopping jammed between their feet, debating the legitimacy of the use of arms. How easy it is to understand that sort of Italian, she thought – legittimo, uso, armi – and, at the same time, she wondered what crazy world she’d woken up in, where old women talked about something other than the weather and the price of washing powder; talked about the right to kill as though it were as normal as queuing for a bus – more normal, because no one in Turin ever queued for anything. She understood then what Giacomo had meant and wondered if what she wanted was to be part of it; if what she wanted was to be alive as they were alive, or seemed to be, and not just looking in through glass. She described the women to Federico over dinner that evening, hoping he’d be amused, but he couldn’t see why she had thought them so surprising, so worthy of mention. We’re not in the Home Counties now, he said, and she felt both abashed and exhilarated, as though she had opened the window wide and breathed in a lungful of cold, clean air from the not-so-distant mountains. But she still didn’t know where she stood. And she was glad that Giacomo hadn’t been there to hear their conversation.
6
Giacomo has taken Helen away from the agency and back to his hotel. There’s no point in hanging around here, he said, and, because she didn’t know what else to do, she followed him down the stairs to the waiting taxi. Now she’s in his room and already she’s regretting it. Yvonne, Giacomo’s new French wife, is sitting on the arm of one of the chairs by the hotel room window, looking uncomfortable. She doesn’t belong here either and she knows it, thinks Helen, and because she can’t stop thinking, and can’t control her thoughts, she imagines Yvonne in the room with them this morning, watching as Helen and her husband were making love and Helen’s own husband was dying in a hospital no more than half a mile away as the crow flies. Because Helen has already done the calculations, measured the distance between where she was and where she should have been. That’s what she was doing when the police were asking her questions, working out how much time she would have needed to get to him before he died.
Yvonne has barely looked at Helen since she came into the room and was introduced. She’d taken both of Helen’s hands in hers in a gesture that struck Helen as ecclesiastical, as though she were performing a benediction of some kind. That’s what Giacomo did this morning, Helen finds herself thinking. Perhaps it’s a French thing he’s picked up. Yvonne is tall and thin, not the type Giacomo normally chooses. She wonders for a moment what Federico will think of her, whether she’ll appeal to him, then remembers Federico is dead and flinches as if she’s been slapped across the face. She lets this knowledge seep into her once again, this sense of being here and not here, as though she is also in a place in which Federico is still alive. If only she knew where it was.
Giacomo offered to take her home, but she couldn’t bear the thought of being there, not yet, not by herself. Come and meet Yvonne, he said. It will pass the time. I know, he said, I know, when she said these words back to him. It will pass the time. In the taxi, she sat in the back, her hands pressed between her knees, until Giacomo put his arm round her shoulder and pulled her in. He smelt of some male perfume he’d put on since that morning, heavy with musk, almost unpleasant. She stared ahead, not sure if she was grateful to him, nor what she wanted. At least he didn’t ask her how she felt. What will she say when she’s asked; because she will be. Widows are. She’d never known him so silent. And now they are back in his hotel room with its soundproof windows on the Via Veneto, and Giacomo’s wife is staring at her with a mixture of pity and resentment.
Giacomo goes across to the door and lets in the waiter, with his neat white jacket and shining metal tra
y. Helen watches him as he places three small cups and a sugar bowl on the table and waits while Giacomo signs a chit, carefully looking at no one in the room, his eyes fixed discreetly on Giacomo’s hands. He knows about Federico, it occurs to Helen, it will have been on the 1 o’clock news; maybe there was a news flash, there usually is for events like these. Everyone will know by now. She feels exposed. When he glances across at her on his way out she realises, with horror, that he might have seen her here this morning, alone in this room with Giacomo. Hotel staff know everything. She can’t believe how stupid she’s been, to have lied to the police. She was scared, and guilty, and had no time to think. A lie of omission, she thinks, does that count as a lie? She will have to say something to Giacomo when she has the chance.
Giacomo picks up a neatly folded newspaper from beside the television, mercifully turned off.
“Time for a cabinet reshuffle,” he says. “Apparently.” He opens the paper to skim the second and third pages, then throws it on the bed, his patience exhausted. “There’ll be political mileage to be made out of this morning, that’s for sure, though who’ll be making it is anybody’s guess. All of them, probably, one way or another. Squabbling over the bones like slum dogs. I don’t know how you can live here, Helen. This shabby little theatre.” He shuts up, as though he’s only just realised how cruel this sounds. But Helen isn’t hurt by Giacomo, she’s known him too long for that. Besides, she’s barely listening. She’s watching Yvonne open her handbag and shake out two small pills from an ornate filigree box into her hand, then drop them into her coffee; that must be how she keeps so thin. Helen can’t imagine what Giacomo sees in her. She certainly isn’t Federico’s type. Turning her head, she watches Giacomo spooning sugar into his own cup, stirring it, slugging it back. “At least the coffee’s still good,” he says, to no one in particular. Giacomo has always envied Federico his ability to eat what he wants without getting fat. And not only that; his seriousness, his determination. His wife. He’s envied Federico, punto e basta. Helen knows this; she’s always known it. It must have been hard for him to live with his envy, his sense of failure when measured against Federico, when everyone imagines him a success. Which is one of the reasons she still cares for him.
“I suppose they left you alone,” Giacomo says.
“Left me alone?”
“The police.”
Yvonne is watching the lines of cars sweep past beneath the window, her empty cup cradled in both hands. “They drive like lunatics here,” she says.
“What do you mean? Left me alone about what?”
“You know, that business from the past. They didn’t rake it up, I hope.”
“It was thirty years ago, Giacomo. Things have changed since you left.” Although maybe this isn’t true. Maybe nothing has changed at all. Except that this time they are the victims. This time it was Federico’s turn to be shot.
“And the fact that I’m here today?”
“Is coincidence.” She glances at him, remembering the look on Martin’s face when he asked her who knew about the Stilton. “Isn’t it?”
Giacomo sighs. “Of course it is. You know as well as I do this conference was all Federico’s idea. It’s part of his grand plan to rehabilitate me in Italy.”
What does this all matter to me? thinks Helen. Martin only made things worse, his silence, his sympathy when all she could feel was guilt and horror and loss. How vain Giacomo’s become, though. One day she will tell him about the evening when Federico talked about his plans for the conference and she, half-joking, suggested Giacomo – he is an economist, after all, in spite of everything – and Federico shrugged, but didn’t answer; she wasn’t even sure he’d heard. That was what made her insist Giacomo be invited, until Federico had finally given in; that, and the fact that she and Giacomo could be in Rome together for a few days. She hadn’t been told about Yvonne at that point; if she’d known she would never have suggested he be invited. Federico had said, “He won’t accept, Mura won’t want to dirty his hands with anything so practical.” But he had. “I’ll bring my brand new wife with me for your approval,” he’d said, and this was the first they’d heard of her.
“You don’t suppose it will go ahead?” Helen says.
Giacomo glances round the hotel room, as though he has misplaced something but can’t remember what. “The conference? I don’t see why not. People still have to reconstruct Iraq. Sooner or later.”
“And you’re still prepared to speak?”
He shrugs, and she sees at once that of course he is prepared to speak. “He wouldn’t appreciate it if we didn’t, after all his work,” he mutters after a moment, preferring not to meet her eyes. Helen feels some shell enclosing her begin to shiver and crack, as though under pressure not from within herself, but from outside. She lifts both hands to her face and rubs her eyes, which are dry and sore from the hotel’s air conditioning.
As if on cue, Yvonne stands up and announces she needs fresh air. “I suppose I am allowed to leave?” she says to Helen, as if she is being held in the room against her will. Helen pulls a face. “I’m sorry you have to be involved in all this,” she says.
“Were they unpleasant?” Giacomo asks.
For a moment, she can’t think what he means.
“The police, Helen.” He sounds exasperated. Yvonne continues to stand beside the door; she seems afraid to leave them alone together. Helen sighs. If only she knew.
“Oh, yes, the police. They were fine.” How different they were from the ones she remembers in Turin, when she’d been dragged in and held for hours and finally released after threats of expulsion from the country; their bullying, their indifference, the pall of smoke in the room. And no women in those days; all men, their jackets off, their shirts lifting out of their belts, their collars undone. Always the odour of stale male sweat and that sexual insolence men in authority had, as though they assumed you would rather be fucked by them than anything else in the world, as though they were holding something back they thought you wanted. Thank God they were gentle with her this time. It’s only now she remembers that this time she’s done nothing wrong. Martin asked her the same question, she thinks. Does everyone think I’m guilty?
“Did they say who might have done it?”
She shakes her head.
“What did they want to know?”
“They asked me if anything strange had taken place this morning, or last night, in the last few days. If there was anything I could remember that seemed out of the ordinary.”
“And was there?”
“Of course not. You know Federico,” she says. “Besides, if anything suspicious had happened when I wasn’t there he wouldn’t have told me. He never did. I told them that. He kept me out of that side of it. He lived with all this security fuss by pretending it wasn’t important. The escort, the risk. It gets so boring after a while, Giacomo. Living with fear.” She pauses. “Some of them were so sweet. We made friends with one or two. You know Federico, how he loves talking to people, finding out about them. Massimo, the driver this morning, he was our favourite. We know his family, his wife, his mother; he’s got two little girls. She lives near Latina, we spent a Sunday there a couple of months ago. She sends us olives and wine and cheese. They all know how much Federico loves that sort of thing.”
And now, for the first time, as if Massimo’s death has broken the shell that encloses her, she starts to cry. Since she was told the news, five hours ago, she has spoken to the police, to Martin, to her parents-in-law. She phoned them from the taxi. “I’m with Giacomo Mura,” she told Giulia, immediately wishing she hadn’t. “Federico’s old friend,” she added, which only made things worse. She turned off her mobile after that because there was no one else she wanted to talk to, not now, not yet. And throughout all this she hasn’t cried once. She has felt detached and wondering, an observer to what should be grief and yet somehow isn’t, is puzzlement and disbelief and, more than anything, guilt and a sense of being soiled. She has waited to cry li
ke this and now, in the end, it has come. And she doesn’t know who it is for.
She cries, she is loud and messy, her saw-like gasping for breath, her face screwed up, her mouth down-turned and open like that of a tragic mask. Yvonne moves back from the door and stands behind her, one slim hand on her shoulder, the slightest possible physical contact required to indicate that she is not alone. Giacomo, slumped on the farther bed, seems incapable even of this.
Later, when she is calmer, Helen will wonder if Giacomo was constrained by the presence of Yvonne. She’s jealous of the woman, although she has no right to be, and knows it. Because all Helen wants is to be held by Giacomo, as she was held in the taxi, when they were alone. To be held and comforted by someone who knows her almost as well as she knows herself, someone with whom she need hide nothing. But this doesn’t happen. She cries until her throat begins to ache with the effort of it, retching sobs from deep within her that physically exhausts her. She cries until the tears run dry, and continues, tearless, her eyes staring blankly into the meaningless room of this luxury hotel Federico’s secretary has booked for Giacomo and Yvonne, seeing neither of them, seeing no one. Yvonne produces a small white handkerchief from her bag and Helen looks at it, now in her own hand, as if she’s been given some fabulous artefact from an alien culture, then crumples and drops it to the floor. Yvonne, with a barely audible whine of complaint, stoops to retrieve it.
“I’m so sorry,” Helen says.
Giacomo walks over and lifts Helen up from the chair to clasp her to him, a clumsy rather formal embrace. Yvonne strides to the door, aggrieved, then leaves the room. Helen resists the urge to push him away before easing herself from his grasp as gradually as she can. “I’m so sorry,” she says again.
“Don’t be sorry. You need to cry,” Giacomo says.
The View From the Tower Page 4
