All at once, for the first time in almost three decades, Helen and Giacomo find they have nothing to say to each other. Helen looks at her watch. It’s almost noon. She sips her coffee while Giacomo turns on the TV for the 12 o’clock news. The screen fills with scenes of Rome, cordoned off for the demonstration.
“The march,” she says, shaking her head. “I’d forgotten all about it. I was supposed to be helping out.”
“You’re going on the march?” says Giacomo.
“You think I shouldn’t? Giulia went on the military parade, didn’t she?” says Helen. “Of course I’m going. And you’re coming too. For Federico’s sake.”
“Is this what Federico planned? To take part?”
“I think so, yes.” She stands up. “Unless he’d already done something stupid.” She rubs her face with both hands, exhausted, then pushes her hair off her face. “If only he’d spoken to someone. To me.” She looks at Giacomo. “To you.”
He takes hold of Helen, not in a possessive way, his fingers lightly circling her arms above the elbows, and stares into her eyes. “He never forgave me, did he? Not really.”
Helen doesn’t pull away, although she’d like to.
“For taking the blame? Or for taking me?” As gently as she can, she frees herself from him. “There was nothing he needed to forgive,” she says.
4
Turin, 1978
Stefania wasn’t happy. Helen found her waiting outside the building one day, when she came home from work, a wrapped tray of cakes hanging by its ribbon from her finger. While Helen filled a saucepan with water for tea, Stefania undid the ribbon and unwrapped the tray. She started to eat, icing sugar drifting onto her bosom as she licked the cream from the top. She was getting fat, Helen noticed, and wondered for a moment if Giacomo preferred his women fat or thin. Stefania complained that she was having problems at the faculty; she wasn’t being taken seriously in the way the men were. She’d imagined the academic world would be different from everywhere else, that was how stupid she’d been. She finished one cake and started another. They were small and beautifully made, like toys. How good they are at this sort of thing, thought Helen, the little pleasures: cherries drenched in liqueur and wrapped in chocolate, packaged in individual twists of layered paper and foil, like tiny bombs. Then Stefania began to talk about Giacomo, and Helen began to concentrate.
“I thought he had another woman to start with,” she said. She looked hard at Helen. “He doesn’t, does he?”
“Not as far as I know,” Helen said, finally taking a cake. It would take so little to tell her what she and Giacomo had done, but for what? To clear the way for more? Besides, she enjoyed her secret. “Why would he want anyone else? I’m sure you’re enough for him.” But Stefania wasn’t listening.
“He’s hardly ever at home. At work he’s distant, then, when he does show up, he’s always reading or listening to the radio or banging away on his typewriter, stuff he won’t even let me see, although he won’t come out and say so, he just hides it away. He’s been talking about buying a TV, he says I’m elitist for not wanting one, but it’s not that. I just think he’ll end up watching it all the time and ignoring me. What’s Federico like with you? Is he the same? Always thinking about something else?”
“No, not really,” said Helen, although this wasn’t true; the picture Stefania had painted was distressingly familiar. Only her reluctance to play the wounded co-conspirator stopped her admitting it. She loathed the way some women seemed to relish in the sisterhood of suffering, as though the truth of a relationship lay in its failures being picked over with friends. She’d barely seen Miriam since her affair with the manager at Fiat had come to an end.
“And I’d like to know why he needs that other place,” said Stefania, increasingly aggrieved.
“What other place?”
Stefania licked a blob of cream from her thumb. “The one he’s sharing with Federico, near the faculty.” She glanced across. “You do know about it, don’t you?”
Helen’s resolve faded. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” said Stefania, raising her hand to her mouth. “I thought he’d have spoken to you. It’s only for work, I’m sure. You know what it’s like at the faculty, everyone’s on top of everyone else. I shouldn’t have said anything. They haven’t had it for long, I don’t think. I’m sure they wouldn’t use it for anything else.” Stefania took another cake, licked off the cream; she couldn’t conceal her gratification at having told Helen something she didn’t know. Helen wondered how much she suspected, and how this other flat was being paid for.
“He has a study here,” she said. “What’s this other place like?”
Stefania shrugged. “I haven’t seen it. I know where it is, though. I can tell you, if you like.”
Helen rang the doorbell first, to make sure no one was there, then let herself into the flat with the key she’d found in Federico’s briefcase. The light switch wasn’t where she’d expected it to be, to the left. Hearing the noise of someone on the stairs, she hurriedly closed the door behind her and fumbled, like an idiot, like a thief, in the dark, thinking of Federico as he entered this flat, as much his as the one he shared with her on the other side of Turin, his hand reaching out for the light without even thinking. He has two homes, she thought, and she wondered if that was all and where he imagined he really lived: in this place or the place they shared or maybe in his own home, the home of his parents, who continued to pass him money, because how else could he possibly afford to pay this extra rent, as he clearly did? She wondered who he was, and why he’d never told her. Giacomo would never lie to her like this, she thought. Although, of course, he hadn’t mentioned it either.
She found the switch and turned it on, then walked down the hall. Kitchen and bathroom on the left. On the right a living room, bare of furniture apart from an armchair, books piled on the floor beside it. At the far end of the hall a bedroom, a single bed with a dark green blanket tucked in so that she could see the metal frame beneath the mattress. Federico told her he’d been a model soldier, and she could see that from the way his possessions were folded and piled like goods in a shop on shelves along one side of the room, his shoes placed side by side and lined up under the window, their toes facing in. She knew how neat he was, how ordered; but here the neatness seemed as much of a mask as the clothes he wore. Maybe that was too harsh; a sort of self-discipline, an imposition. There was a table against one wall, with a straight-backed chair beside it. She walked across and picked up the first thing that caught her eye, a pad of lined paper, the kind of pad reporters use in films, the spiral along the top. Flicking it open, she found sketches of faces, poorly drawn, diagrams that made no sense at all; there were street maps of places she didn’t recognise; towards the back of the pad a list of names and dates in pencil. Some of the names had crosses beside them, others question marks or symbols that must have meant something to Federico, but not to her. Turning the page, her eye skimmed down until it came to a name she recognised. Eduardo Cotugno. Her kneecapped student. The question mark beside his name had been rubbed out and replaced by a tick. She put the pad down and opened a drawer, her heart beating against her ribs. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, she wanted to distract herself from what she had seen. The drawer contained papers, department business, bills; she saw what looked like a permit to stay and pulled it out from under the other things. It was made out in the name of a man, a German, the space for the photograph was empty. She pushed it back into the drawer.
She only saw the other door as she was leaving. She tried the handle, opened it and found herself in another bedroom, identical to the first. I’m dreaming, she thought, as she looked at the single bed, the desk, the order, and felt her heart pumping as though she’d been running. She walked across to the desk and would have opened the drawer if she hadn’t heard a noise from somewhere nearby, she couldn’t tell exactly where, whether it was inside or outside the flat. She seem
ed to have lost all sense of space. She turned tail and hurried down the corridor. Outside the flat, with the empty lift where she’d left it, she leant against the wall and breathed deeply until her pulse had returned to its normal rate.
Two days later, the police discovered Aldo Moro’s body stuffed brutally into the boot of a Renault Four in the centre of Rome. When Helen asked her students who they thought had done it, they shook their heads. Some of them shrugged. Nobody seemed upset. They agreed the placing of the car, halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communists, was a message. But what did the message mean? she asked. At once they divided into feuding camps. Everything meant something else, it seemed. Then someone came in and told them the lesson had been cancelled because a national strike had been declared. A few nights later, in the English pub, Miriam said, What was the point of that? It wouldn’t bring anyone back to life. Any excuse would do for a national strike, it was a wonder anything ever got done in this crazy country. All they were interested in was death and sex.
She didn’t tell Federico she’d been to the other flat. She felt ashamed, as though she’d done something wrong herself, as though the lies she would always tell, to protect herself from the truth, were worse than his.
Three weeks later, Giacomo was arrested. He was in jail, awaiting trial, when she and Federico married.
5
Helen spots Martha at once, although they’ve rarely met. All their collaboration has been conducted by phone and email. She’s seen her occasionally at press conferences and parties, they’ve chatted a couple of times with glasses in their hands and their eyes not quite on the other, roaming the venue for more congenial company. She’s nothing against the woman, merely a sense that what she offers, beyond an outlet for certain articles no one else would publish, isn’t in Helen’s line. There’s a fussiness about her, an untidiness, the scouring pad of unkempt steel grey hair, over-large hippie-style earrings, a way of positioning herself, face thrust towards the other person, large, nicotine-stained teeth, her lips drawn back, that strikes Helen as aggressive. When Helen steps back, Martha steps forward; she’s the kind of woman who forces other women into corners. Helen has never seen how she behaves with men.
“I’m so glad, and so touched, really, that you’re here,” Martha says. She touches her own heart before patting Helen’s arm with an expression of concern. “I guess what you’re going through must be really hard right now.”
“Yes,” says Helen. “It is.” She turns her face away from the slightly stale odour of Martha’s breath. They are in the office of Futuri Prossimi and it is just as Helen imagined it, identical to similar offices all over the world, post-its curling on the walls and monitors, tangles of wires, anti-war posters, too many ashtrays. She has spent time in rooms like this in Cambridge and London and Turin, even, briefly, in Rome, when she first arrived, before she joined the agency and became a real journalist. Today the office has the air of a party that is due to begin before too long. Twenty, twenty-five people, most of them middle-aged, dressed in jeans and shorts and T-shirts against one thing or the other, some of them witty, some not, more than a few home-made. Helen is wearing a well-cut cotton dress, sleeveless, in an olive green that suits her, and moccasins made from tobacco brown leather so soft it might have been used to make gloves. When did she stop dressing like a student? she wonders. When did she and Federico decide not to wear their beliefs on their chests? Martha’s armpits, she notices, are dark with stubble, which is surely the worst of all options.
Giacomo is talking to some young woman Helen doesn’t know by the door. Martha has taken her elbow and is steering her towards a small wicker sofa piled with books. “We can hide ourselves away here,” she says, shifting some to the floor, pushing others to one side, while Helen tries to catch his eye, attract him across the room to rescue her. She is beginning to wonder what made her come. Martha seems determined to talk about Federico.
“You say he didn’t so much as mention me?” she is saying as Helen moves a book from beneath her leg.
“No,” says Helen. We babble to each other. She must be thinking we had secrets. Well, she’s right. The secrets we shared and the secrets we didn’t.
“He sent me an article,” Martha says. “It arrived the day after he died. I’ve been so busy I didn’t even realise until this morning. I only just had a chance to read it before this whole crowd started turning up. Not properly, I just took a look at it.” She pulls a face. “It’s pretty weird. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’s, well, in a position of power,” she says, investing the last words with a disdain that strikes Helen as cruel, given the circumstances, although she isn’t hurt, merely startled. Martha can’t hurt her.
“What does he say?”
“I haven’t read it properly, so don’t get me wrong, but it’s – oh, I don’t know – it’s like he’s defending the kamikaze.” At this Martha grimaces, as if to say, Haven’t we moved on from martyrdom? It’s so last century. “It’s full of quotations. It shifts, like, from Plato to George Galloway, for Christ’s sake. Voltaire. Angela frigging Davis. It’s like he’s using them all up before he dies.” She covers her mouth. “Oh my God, I am so sorry.”
“Are you going to run it?” says Helen. “In the magazine.” Should I be asked? she wonders. All this – his legacy – will be up to me.
“Use it? You mean publish it?” Martha is astonished. “Are you kidding?”
“Because it advocates violence?”
Martha shakes her head slowly, hair rigid as a wig. “That would be reason enough,” she says. “I mean, we are a voice for pacifism. But it’s just so weird. Some bits of it don’t make sense. It’s like he’s being dictated to by someone he can’t quite hear, if you get me.” She lowers her voice. “Was he, you know, all right?”
“All right? What do you mean?”
“Let me tell you something. Parts of it read like he’s, I don’t know how to say this. Deranged?”
“I don’t suppose you could let me see this article?”
“I’d have to find it,” says Martha, looking away. She hasn’t got it, it occurs to Helen. She’s given it to someone else to read. But surely she must have realised I’d ask to see it? And who would she have given it to? But now she’s confusing incompetence with conspiracy. She’s been with these people too long. She takes a deep breath, then glances round the room.
“I’d very much like to read it,” she says, briefly enjoying Martha’s embarrassment. “Which desk is yours?” She starts to get up from the sofa, but Martha catches at her arm to prevent her.
“By the way, I heard about Martin Frame,” she says. “I’m stunned.”
Helen sits back, her moment of naughtiness over. She ought to be with Martin, she thinks, not sitting in this sad confusion of a room. Who was that woman with him, what was her name? Alina? Is that a Russian name? Where did she appear from? She seemed to know Martin so well. She saw Martin watching her with what looked like love. Well, Martin deserves a little love, she thinks. He seemed so battered and bruised in that hospital bed. She could never be grateful enough, she thinks, glancing towards the door to see Giacomo, still talking to the same girl, gesticulating as the girl laughs.
“Yes,” she says. “So am I.”
“You think it was a mugging?”
“What do you think it was?”
“I’ve never really understood him,” says Martha. “He’s a strange guy. Not bad, heavens, I don’t mean that.” She touches Helen’s knee. “I know you’re not just colleagues.” She waves a hand to silence Helen. “It’s just that he’s so private. Did I say private? If he were a woman he’d be frigid.” She smiles in a confidential way. “I guess he’s just English,” she says, as though this explains everything. Then, to Helen’s surprise, before Helen can say I’m English too, Martha leans in towards her, lowers her voice. “Do you think he’s gay?”
“Martin? Gay? No, I don’t think Martin’s gay,” Helen say
s, annoyed by the cosiness in the woman’s tone, as though they have something in common. “Do you?”
Martha shrugs. “I guess not.” After a moment, as if that subject has been exhausted, she adds: “It certainly doesn’t look like a mugging to me. Is that what they’re saying, that he’s been mugged?”
To Helen’s relief, Giacomo walks across and crouches beside her, resting his hand on Helen’s knee. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” says Helen. “Martha’s just been telling me something else I didn’t know about Federico.”
Giacomo’s eyebrows rise. He glances at Martha, who says, hurriedly: “He sent me a piece he’d written. I only read it this morning.”
“A piece he’d written?” The heat is rising. Helen can feel a trickle of sweat running down her back, oddly cold on her skin. “How much longer do we need to wait?” she says, hearing a note of panic in her voice. The girl Giacomo was talking to has wandered across and is standing half behind and half beside him in a wary, proprietorial fashion. Helen is on the brink of tears. Federico was utterly mad and I didn’t know. What was the word this dreadful invasive woman used? Deranged. My husband was deranged and I didn’t notice. Where was I? Where have I been hiding? Helen and Federico. Stefania and Giacomo. And now Federico’s dead and Giacomo’s dumped Stefania for a woman who seems to have dumped him. And I have dumped Giacomo too, she thinks, while his hand squeezes her knee with an air that might express possession or the desire to comfort her, because she has no idea what he thinks of her, or wants from her any longer, now that she has closed him off. Maybe he loves her as much as anyone has ever done, including Federico, although she doesn’t think so. She can see the girl watching his hand. I don’t miss anything, she thinks, I’m always so observant. So why didn’t I notice Federico was deranged? Because I was being loved by someone else? Because I wouldn’t have accepted it if I had known? Because I didn’t care?
The View From the Tower Page 25
