“How are you feeling?” he says, patting her hand.
Before, she’s bridled at this question, but with Martin it’s different. She thinks for a moment before she speaks. “I wish I knew. It’s so hard to know what to say. I don’t want to sound too brave, or too pathetic. Half the time I feel numb, which makes it worse when I think about him and the pain comes back.” She pulls a face and watches him fill their glasses. “I’ll survive.”
“It won’t be easy. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“What’s worse is that I feel I’m losing him all over again.”
“How’s that?”
“That last evening,” Helen says, “when you came round for dinner and I went to bed early, do you remember? You stayed for ages after I’d gone. I lay there. I could hear your voices, but not what you were saying. I asked Federico what you’d been talking about the next morning, but he wouldn’t say. It was so unlike him. Sometimes he wakes me up, you know, to tell me what’s been said. He was strange, I don’t know, cagey.” Her voice is urgent.
“Surely not,” says Martin. But she doesn’t believe him. He’s lying too.
“What do you know about this conference?” she says. “Is that what it is, Martin? Is that what he was hiding? He was up to something, wasn’t he?” She pauses. “I’ve found this thing he was writing, called Juggernaut.”
Martin looks relieved – she wonders why – and shakes his head. “I’ve no idea, Helen. He didn’t mention the conference to me that evening. I don’t know what he had in mind. I imagine it was just a conference.” After an awkward pause, he adds: “Juggernaut, did you say? That doesn’t sound like Federico.”
“It doesn’t, does it?” she says. “Fausto says he was planning some surprise. I suppose he may have been. He didn’t say anything to me.” She hears the hurt in her voice and stops, then empties her glass. After a moment, she starts talking again, as Martin fills both glasses up. “Do you think he ever slept with anyone else?” she asks Martin. “Apart from me?”
Martin waves the bottle towards the bar in a plaintive fashion. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “I don’t have any reason to think he did.”
“I know men talk about these things,” she says, although she can’t see Martin and Federico sharing that kind of intimacy, if that is what it is. She can’t imagine intimacy between men somehow. Was Federico ever intimate with Giacomo? Did they talk about me? What on earth would they have said?
“Because I have,” she says. She is close to tears, with relief and shame. She looks away when the barman brings over the bottle and opens it with an ironic flourish. Martin waves him off before he can fill their glasses. “I’ve been an awful wife,” she says. Martin reaches over to stroke her arm, embarrassed, knocking over her glass. He is sweeping the prosecco off the table with the flat of his hand when she says, “I feel I’ve let everyone down. I’ve always wanted to do the right thing and I’ve never really had any idea what that was. Not really. I’ve just flopped round from one thing to another. I’ve never really been convinced by anything I’ve done, whether it was the right thing or not. Is that normal? Not to be convinced? I’ve let people tell me what to do and then when I’ve done it they’ve always been disappointed in me. It’s never been enough. I’ve never been enough.”
She pauses. She wants Martin to speak, rebuff her in some way, but he carries on mopping up the spilt drink with paper napkins from the metal dispenser on the next table. After a moment, she continues. She feels as if she is speaking to herself, which gives her strength.
“Federico always made me feel I hadn’t understood. Years ago, just after we were married, we’d had dinner in this couple’s flat and the woman was sitting at her husband’s feet while he pontificated – I can’t remember what about – and she interrupted him to say she didn’t agree, he was wrong, with this little thread of a voice. It was obvious she’d been steeling herself to contradict him. I think she only did it because I was there, she felt ashamed of him in front of me. He was so boring, so full of himself. A dreadful man. And do you know what he did? He patted her on the head, I couldn’t believe it. He said that she didn’t really know enough to disagree, he’d explain it to her later. She just dissolved, it was awful, this tight little smile, but all she wanted to do was cry. He really thought he was being helpful, you see, and she knew that, really knew it, and there was no way out of it. She was stuck. And I despised her because Federico had never treated me like that; I wouldn’t have let him. I was absolutely convinced.”
She passes her ring finger through the trace of prosecco still left on the surface of the table, licks it dry, then clutches Martin’s damp hot hand in hers. “And now I wonder if I’m any better than she was.” She stares into Martin’s eyes, willing him not to look away. “Did he know, do you think? About me?”
Martin flinches. “I’m sure he didn’t.”
“I see,” says Helen. “I couldn’t bear it if he knew. Not now. Because I can’t explain it to him now.”
“He’d understand.”
“What? That I’d fucked his best friend to give myself a sense of purpose?”
“That’s not the whole truth,” says Martin.
“I’ve slept with Giacomo on and off for years. It started ages ago. But I was already with Federico when I did it. Not slept, exactly. Fucked. We fucked whenever we could, in the kitchen, in the back of cars. I don’t know why, or I didn’t then. I think I do now. I was with him just after Federico was shot, you know. I haven’t told anyone.” Apart from the magistrate, she thinks, with relief, who already seemed to know. And then there’s Giulia, who’s guessed.
She lets go of his hand, leans back.
“I’m seeing the PM tomorrow.”
“I thought you’d decided not to.”
She fights back tears. “It can’t be avoided. I have to face up to things. I spoke to the magistrate this afternoon, you know, the one who’s investigating Fede’s death. I told him the truth. He wants to talk to me again, he says, on Saturday. He was nicer than I’d expected. Compared to Giulia, who isn’t?”
“Well, she’s had a rough time. Exiled during the war, jailed,” says Martin. “Tortured, by all accounts.”
“Giulia the martyr,” says Helen.
“I didn’t mean that.” Martin takes his hand away from Helen’s. “Is that how she sees herself, as a martyr?”
“No. She sees herself as a servant of the constitution, as though the thing has been written in blood. Her blood. Which I suppose it has, in a way; I suppose she does have blood.”
“And a martyred son.”
Helen nods. “Yes, Federico’s the martyr now.” Her eye is attracted by someone entering the room, a thickset man with a shaven head, who glances at them both. For a second she thinks he might be a journalist and she wants to leave, she reaches for her bag on the floor with a brief involuntary shudder. Martin turns round to see who’s there but already the man has gone. She shakes her head. It was nothing.
“I’ve been doing a bit of nosing round,” he says.
She wonders how much more she wants to know.
“A friend of mine had a look at Federico’s cell phone records.” He pauses, lifts his shoulders, his bottom lip jutting out. He’s not looking well, she thinks. His flesh is soft and pasty, like dough that children have played with, that has picked up the dirt from their hands. He needs to comb his hair and change his shirt. Out of the agency, away from his desk, he is beginning to look like a lost old man. It breaks her heart to see him reduced to this, his fingers fiddling with the cigarette pack in the pocket of his jacket like a rosary. And she wonders what he’s done to get this information, not only today but in the past.
“What did they show?” she says.
“His secretary, his assistants. His father two or three times a day. His mother rather less often. You, obviously. A priest.”
“A priest?”
Martin wondered how she’d react to this.
“Yes, not your us
ual PP though.”
“PP?”
“Sorry, my dear. I forget you’ve never belonged to the mother church. Parish priest.”
“I don’t think Federico had a parish priest.”
“Not your parish. Someone in Umbria. Bit of an odd fish by all accounts. His name is Don Giusini. He’s one of these anti-global types. Quite an activist. He got himself into trouble during G8, when they sent the police in to kick shit out of those kids.” He glances across. “I’m surprised you weren’t there.”
“I should have been. I wish I had been.”
“Masochism, my dear.”
“You don’t understand, Martin. I was having a dirty weekend with Giacomo,” she says. “In a convent, of all places.” She sighs.
“Time well spent, I imagine,” he says, giving her a cautious smile.
“It was embarrassing for him,” she says. “When all the trouble blew up he was asked to write a piece about it, his impressions and so on. Except that he didn’t really have any. He could hardly write about what he’d really been doing.”
When her mobile rings, she reaches down for her bag, beneath her chair, pushing aside the printout to retrieve it. She looks at the screen.
“Talk of the devil,” she says.
“Are you alone?” says Giacomo.
“No,” she says, “I’m with Martin Frame. Are you?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’ve been abandoned.”
“Oh dear.”
“I thought perhaps I could come to your place?”
“Yes,” she says. “That would be nice.”
She stands up. “I have to go,” she says to Martin. She looks for her wallet, but he stops her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“No,” she says. “No, I’m not.” She smiles. “You can walk me home if you like.” She touches his cheek. “The air will clear your head.”
PART FOUR
1
Rome, Friday, 4 June 2004
Giulia and Helen are sitting together in the back seat of the official car that Giulia appears to have acquired the right to use, a car identical in every way to the one Federico died against, apart from its colour, which is black. Both women are as close to their respective smoked windows as the width of the car seat will allow, silently staring out at streets deserted of everyone but groups of tourists in shorts and sun hats, at the shuttered and barricaded shops of the Corso, at parched yellow grass as the driver takes them slowly round past the Villa Borghese horse track. Sitting beside the driver in the seat that would have been Federico’s, Fausto throws the occasional glance behind him, but Giulia either doesn’t notice this or chooses not to acknowledge him, leaving Helen to smile at him with a gratitude he can’t quite see.
They are going to look at Federico’s body, laid out in what Fausto has translated as the ardent room, a minor reception room inside the ministry. Helen and Giulia, in agreement for once despite Fausto’s doubts, have refused to consider a space with religious connotations. La camera ardente. The ardent room. “I don’t know what it’s called in English, I’m afraid. I’ve never been to one before,” Helen said in an apologetic way, touched despite herself that Fausto should be using English with her, as though she were a child and needed to be made to feel at home among adults. “I expect it’ll be something to do with morte. Mortuary. Morgue. Something like that.”
“Mortuary chapel,” Giulia announced, reprovingly. “I remember being privileged to attend Churchill’s lying in state, to pay my final respects, my country’s final respects, to a national hero.” She’d looked through Helen’s wardrobe for something suitable, finally settling on a black dress Helen hasn’t worn since singing in a concert more than ten years before, a linen dress that now hangs loosely on her, giving her an unattractively shrunken, gaunt look that seems, nonetheless, to gratify Giulia, who is also, although more stylishly, dressed in black. She must have an extensive collection of appropriate mourning outfits by now, thinks Helen, neatly cut suits like this one; her colleagues and friends, the old republican guard, have been dropping like flies these past few years. One ardent room after the next. How odd that it should be ardent, though; surely there is nothing icier and more indifferent than this trooping past the body of someone dead. Because what she feels most strongly as she sits in the back of the car with her mother-in-law is indifference, not to Federico, not essentially, but to this display, this performance, that she has allowed herself to be talked into by Giulia.
Now, as the car cruises past ranks of mourners and comes to a halt inside the ministry courtyard, Helen’s instinct is to tell the driver to drop the others off and take her home. But it isn’t her car, or driver; she doesn’t have the courage, or the right.
The door is opened for her by a middle-aged man whose anxious, troubled face she recognises, who offers her his arm as she leaves the car and says, in a low voice, as if to remind her: “Remondini.” She nods. Of course she knows him, he worked with Federico. She’s seen him at their flat a dozen times, over dinner, staying on behind when she went to bed and lay there in the dark, not sleeping, wondering when Federico would come to bed and whether it was worth staying awake, knowing that he would wake her in any case, whether she cared or not, to tell her what had been said.
She rests her fingers on his forearm and is about to thank him when her mobile rings. She turned it on in the car, to call Giacomo, who left her flat early that morning, but lacked the courage. “Switch that thing off,” hisses Giulia behind her, but Helen, aware that she is being childish, opens her bag, pulls out the mobile and sees that it is Giacomo calling her. With a protective gesture, Remondini steps briskly between her and the group of people at the door to the room where Federico must be waiting. But, of course, Federico isn’t waiting. Dead men don’t wait.
“I can’t talk now,” she says, giving Giacomo just enough time to say that he loves her before she turns off the phone and replaces it in her bag. She looks behind for Fausto, who walks up sharply beside her and takes her hand in his. He leads her past the waiting people, hardly a crowd, no more than a dozen, who murmur and shuffle away from her, their eyes avoiding hers, as Fausto also moves to one side, to allow her to enter first.
They have put him at the centre of the room, on a table draped with some heavy crimson material. He is out of his plastic bag and lying fully dressed in a coffin and she wonders where the suit has come from as she walks across, Fausto one step behind, Giulia talking briefly to a man she doesn’t know beside the door. It is newer than anything he owns, and more expensive. She looks at this man in his satin-lined box who is no more Federico than the table is, or any piece of wood or marble or made-up flesh, the flesh of some slaughtered animal. She looks at their efforts to make him seem alive and human, the black suit Federico would never have dreamed of wearing, that someone must have bought for him, the tie, the polished shoes more pointed at the toe than he would choose, as though he himself were the mourner and not the mourned, his normally wild blond hair brushed back from his forehead and gelled into place, his lips and cheeks just touched with colour but still clown-like. Oh no, she thinks, this final indignity, this absence, at least he isn’t here to see it, because it is clear to her at this moment that there is no Federico left, no trace of him, even less than yesterday, she realises now, or was it the day before? Two days ago in the morgue, with Giacomo beside her and Federico on a metal tray, like half-wrapped meat. She still hasn’t seen his wound. Perhaps that would make it real for her, some visible damage to the flesh and bone of him. She’s read of grief-torn women throwing themselves into coffins to lie beside the corpses of their husbands and wonders what possessed them. There was a moment in the car when she’d imagined herself seeing him move and crying out, “He’s still alive!” Or she’d kiss him and feel his mouth move against her mouth, respond to it. It wasn’t a thought, nor even a hope, so much as a kind of absence of thought or hope, a wiping out of what had happened, like children when they ask for the same story twic
e because there are no guarantees that, the second time, it won’t have changed.
Only his hands look real, unscathed, his. Expecting to be stopped by someone, some other hand – Giulia’s – reaching out to slap her, she reaches in to stroke one and it is cold, so cold she starts back, a cry caught on her lips. Nothing has changed. Fausto is close enough to whisper that they should go, they’ve stayed long enough, and she is once more aware of the others.
“Where’s Massimo?” she says, looking round.
“Massimo?” says Fausto, glancing behind him. A queue has begun to form at a slight distance from the family party, to see Federico.
“Federico’s driver,” she says, her voice rising. “Why isn’t he here with Federico?”
“Take her out of here,” says Giulia, with a tone of contempt.
“They killed him too, didn’t they?” says Helen. She sounds hysterical, the last thing she wants. She has promised herself she will stay calm.
“You’re all right, my dear,” says Fausto.
She wants to pull away and say I’m not all right, but something prevents her, a sense of dignity if that weren’t Giulia’s preserve. Perhaps of shame. I would make a scene, she thinks, if I were strong enough.
They are leaving the building, Helen one step in front of her parents-in-law, when a man she doesn’t know comes up to her. Younger than Helen, in his thirties at the most, he places himself squarely in her path before anyone has a chance to stop him. He is wearing a black suit and dove-grey shirt. At his neck, she sees a white dog collar. Through the corner of her eye, she is half aware of Giulia urgently summoning help.
The View From the Tower Page 18
