Collected Stories

Cocktails at Doney’s

‘You’ve forgotten me,’ were the first words Mrs Faraday spoke to him in the Albergo San Lorenzo. She was a tall, black-haired woman, wearing a rust-red suede coat cut in an Italian style. She smiled. She had white, even teeth, and the shade of her lipstick appeared subtly to match the colour of her coat. Her accent was American, her voice soft, with a trace of huskiness. She was thirty-five, perhaps thirty-seven, certainly not older. ‘We met a long time ago,’ she said, smiling a little more. ‘I don’t know why I never forget a face.’

She was married to a man who managed a business in some town in America he’d never heard of. She was a beautiful woman, but he could remember neither her nor her husband. Her name meant nothing to him and when she prompted him with the information about her husband’s business he could not remember any better. Her eyes were brown, domiinating her classic features.

‘Of course,’ he lied politely.

She laughed, clearly guessing it was a lie. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘hullo to you.’

It was after dinner, almost ten o’clock. They had a drink in the bar since it seemed the natural thing to do. She had to do with fashion; she was in Florence for the Pitti Donna; she always came in February.

‘It’s nice to see you again. The people at these trade shows can be tacky.’

‘Don’t you go to the museums as well? The churches?’

‘Of course.’

When he asked if her husband accompanied her on her excursions to Florence she explained that the museums, the churches, and the Pitti Donna would tire her husband immensely. He was not a man for Europe, preferring local race-tracks.

‘And your wife? Is she here with you?’

‘I’m actually not married.’

He wished he had not met Mrs Faraday. He didn’t care for being approached in this manner, and her condemnation of the people at the trade exhibitions she spoke of seemed out of place since they were, after all, the people of her business world. And that she was married to a man who preferred race-tracks to culture was hardly of interest to a stranger. Before their conversation ended he was certain they had not ever met before.

‘I have to say good-night,’ he said, rising when she finished her drink. ‘I tend to get up early.’

‘Why, so do I!’

‘Good-night, Mrs Faraday.’

In his bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking about nothing in particular. Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn’t want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.

He turned the looking-glass light out and got into bed. He read Our Mutual Friend and then lay for a moment in the darkness. He thought of Daphne and of Lucy – dark-haired, tiny Lucy who had said at first it didn’t matter, Daphne with her trusting eyes. He had blamed Daphne, not himself, and then had taken that back and asked to be forgiven; they were both of them to blame for the awful mistake of a marriage that should never have taken place, although later he had said that neither of them was, for how could they have guessed they were not suited in that way? It was with Lucy he had begun to know the truth; poor Lucy had suffered more.

He slept, and dreamed he was in Padua with a friend of another time, walking in the Botanical Gardens and explaining to his friend that the tourist guides he composed were short-lived in their usefulness because each reflected a city ephemerally caught. ‘You’re ashamed of your tourist guides,’ his friend of that time interrupted, Jeremy it was. ‘Why are the impotent so full of shame, my dear? Why is it?’ Then Rosie was in the dream and Jeremy was laughing, playfully, saying he’d been most amusingly led up the garden path. ‘He led me up it too, my God,’ Rosie cried out furiously. ‘All he could do was weep.’

Linger over the Giambologna birds in the Bargello, and the marble reliefs of Mino da Fiesole. But that’s enough for one day; you must return tomorrow.

He liked to lay down the law. He liked to take chances with the facts, and wait for letters of contradiction. At the height of the season there are twelve times as many strangers as natives in this dusty, littered city. Cascades of graffiti welcome them – the male sexual organ stylized to a Florentine simplicity, belligerent swastikas hammers and sickles in the streets of gentle Fra Angelico…

At lunchtime on the day after he had met her Mrs Faraday was in Doney’s with some other Americans. Seeing her in that smart setting, he was surprised that she stayed in the Albergo San Lorenzo rather than the Savoy or the Excelsior. The San Lorenzo’s grandeur all belonged to the past: the old hotel was threadbare now, its curtains creased, its telephones unresponsive. Not many Americans liked it.

‘Hi!’ she called across the restaurant, and smiled and waved a menu.

He nodded at her, not wishing to seem stand-offish. The people she was with were talking about the merchandise they had been inspecting at the Pitti Donna. Wisps of their conversation drifted from their table, references to profit margins and catching the imagination.

He ordered tagliatelle and the chef’s salad, and then looked through the Nazione. The body of the missing schoolgirl, Gabriella, had been found in a park in Florence. Youths who’d been terrorizing the neighbourhood of Santa Croce had been identified and arrested. Two German girls, hitchhiking in the south, had been made drunk and raped in a village shed. The Nazione suggested that Gabriella – a quiet girl – had by chance been a witness to drug-trafficking in the park.

‘I envy you your job,’ Mrs Faraday said, pausing at his table as he was finishing his tagliatelle. Her companions had gone on ahead of her. She smiled, as at an old friend, and then sat down. ‘I guess I want to lose those two.’

He offered her a glass of wine. She shook her head. ‘I’d love another cappuccino.’

The coffee was ordered. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the empty chair beside him. Mrs Faraday, as though she intended to stay a while, had hung her red suede coat over the back of the chair.

‘I envy you your job,’ she said again. ‘I’d love to travel all over.’

She was wearing pearls at her throat, above a black dress. Rings clustered her fingers, earrings made a jangling sound. Her nails were shaped and painted, her face as meticulously made up as it had been the night before.

‘Did you mind,’ she asked when the waiter had brought their coffee, ‘my wondering if you were married?’

He said he hadn’t minded.

‘Marriage is no great shakes.’

She lit a cigarette. She had only ever been married to the man she was married to now. She had had one child, a daughter who had died after a week. She had not been able to have other children.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She looked at him closely, cigarette smoke curling between them. The tip of her tongue picked a shred of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. She said again that marriage was no great shakes. She added, as if to lend greater weight to this:

‘I lay awake last night thinking I’d like this city to devour me.’

He did not comment, not knowing what she meant. But quite without wishing to he couldn’t help thinking of this beautiful woman lying awake in her bedroom in the Albergo San Lorenzo. He imagined her staring into the darkness, the glow of her cigarette, the sound of her inhaling. She was looking for an affair, he supposed, and hoped she realized he wasn’t the man for that.

‘I wouldn’t mind living the balance of my life here. I like it better every year.’

‘Yes, it’s a remarkable city.’

‘There’s a place called the Palazzo Ricasoli where you can hire apartments. I’d settle there.’

‘I see.’

‘I could tell you a secret about the Palazzo Ricasoli.’

‘Mrs Faraday –’

‘I spent a naughty week there once.’

He drank some coffee in order to avoid speaking. He sighed without making a sound.

‘With a guy I met at the Pitti Donna. A countryman of yours. He came from somewhere called Horsham.’

‘I’ve never been to Horsham.’

‘Oh, my God, I’m embarrassing you!’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Gosh, I’m sorry! I really am! Please say it’s all right.’

‘I assure you, Mrs Faraday, I’m not easily shocked.’

‘I’m an awful shady lady embarrassing a nice Englishman! Please say you forgive me.’

‘There is absolutely nothing to forgive.’

‘It was a flop, if you want to know.’ She paused. ‘Say, what do you plan to write in your guidebook about Florence?’

‘Banalities mostly.’

‘Oh, come on!’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll tell you a nicer kind of secret. You have the cleverest face I’ve seen in years!’

Still he did not respond. She stubbed her cigarette out and immediately lit another. She took a map out of her handbag and unfolded it. She said:

‘Can you show me where Santo Spirito is?’

He pointed out the church and directed her to it, warning her against the motorists’ signs which pursued a roundabout one-way route.

‘You’re very kind.’ She smiled at him, lavishly exposing her dazzling, even teeth as if offering a reward for his help. ‘You’re a kind person,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’

He walked around the perimeter of the vast Cascine Park, past the fun-fair and the zoo and the race-track. It was pleasant in the February sunshine, the first green of spring colouring the twiggy hedges, birches delicate by the river. Lovers sprawled on the seats or in motor-cars, children carried balloons. Stalls sold meat and nuts, and Coca-Cola and 7-Up. Runners in training-suits jogged along the bicycle track. Ho fame a fat young man had scrawled on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of him, and slept while he waited for charity.

Rosie, when she’d been his friend, had said he wrote about Italian cities so that he could always be a stranger. Well, it was true, he thought in the Cascine Park, and in order to rid himself of a contemplation of his failed relationship with Rosie he allowed the beauty of Mrs Faraday again to invade his mind. Her beauty would have delighted him if her lipstick-stained cigarettes and her silly, repetitious chattering didn’t endlessly disfigure it. Her husband was a good man, she had explained, but a good man was not always what a woman wanted. And it had come to seem all of a piece that her daughter had lived for only a week, and all of a piece also that no other children had been born, since her marriage was not worthy of children. It was the Annunciations in Santo Spirito she wanted to see, she had explained, because she loved Annunciations.

‘Would it be wrong of me to invite you to dinner?’ She rose from a sofa in the hall of the Albergo San Lorenzo as soon as she saw him, making no effort to disguise the fact that she’d been waiting for him.’ ‘I’d really appreciate it if you’d accept.’

He wanted to reply that he would prefer to be left alone. He wanted to state firmly, once and for all, that he had never met her in the past, that she had no claims on him.

‘You choose somewhere,’ she commanded, with the arrogance of the beautiful.

In the restaurant she ate pasta without ceasing to talk, explaining to him that her boutique had been bought for her by her husband to keep her occupied and happy. It hadn’t worked, she said, implying that although her fashion shop had kept her busy it hadn’t brought her contentment. Her face, drained of all expression, was lovelier than he had so far seen it, so sad and fragile that it seemed not to belong to the voice that rattled on.

He looked away. The restaurant was decorated with modern paintings and was not completely full. A squat, elderly man sat on his own, conversing occasionally with waiters. A German couple spoke in whispers. Two men and a woman, talking rapidly in Italian, deplored the death of the school-girl, Gabriella.

‘It must have been extraordinary for the Virgin Mary,’ Mrs Faraday was saying. ‘One moment she’s reading a book and the next there’s a figure with wings swooping in on her.’ That only made sense, she suggested, when you thought of it as the Virgin’s dream. The angel was not really there, the Virgin herself was not really reading in such plush surroundings. ‘Later I guess she dreamed another angel came,’ Mrs Faraday continued, ‘to warn her of her death.’

He didn’t listen. The waiter brought them grilled salmon and salad, Mrs Faraday lit a cigarette. She said:

‘The guy I shacked up with in the Palazzo Ricasoli was no better than a gigolo. I guess I don’t know why I did that.’

He did not reply. She stubbed her cigarette out, appearing at last to notice that food had been placed in front of her. She asked him about the painters of the Florentine Renaissance, and the city’s aristocrats and patrons. She asked him why Savonarola had been burnt and he said Savonarola had made people feel afraid. She was silent for a moment, then leaned forward and put a hand on his arm.

‘Tell me more about yourself. Please.’

Her voice, eagerly insistent, irritated him more than before. He told her superficial things, about the other Italian cities for which he’d written guidebooks, about the hill towns of Tuscany, and the Cinque Terre. Because of his reticence she said when he ceased to speak:

‘I don’t entirely make you out.’ She added that he was nicer to talk to than anyone she could think of. She might be drunk; it was impossible to say.

‘My husband’s never heard of the Medicis nor any stuff like this. He’s never even heard of Masaccio, you appreciate that?’

‘Yes, you’ve made it clear the kind of man your husband is.’

‘I’ve ruined it, haven’t I, telling you about the Palazzo Ricasoli?’

‘Ruined what, Mrs Faraday?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

They sat for some time longer, finishing the wine and having coffee. Once she reached across the table and put her hand on one of his. She repeated what she had said before, that he was kind.

‘It’s late,’ he said.

‘I know, honey, I know. And you get up early.’

He paid the bill, although she protested that it was she who had invited him. She would insist on their having dinner together again so that she might have her turn. She took his arm on the street.

‘Will you come with me to Maiano one day?’

‘Maiano?’

‘It isn’t far. They say it’s lovely to walk at Maiano.’

‘I’m really rather occupied, you know.’

‘Oh, God, I’m bothering you! I’m being a nuisance! Forget Maiano. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m just trying to say, Mrs Faraday, that I don’t think I can be much use to you.’

He was aware, to his embarrassment, that she was holding his hand. Her arm was entwined with his and the palms of their hands had somehow come together. Her fingers, playing with his now, kept time with her flattery.

‘You’ve got the politest voice I ever heard! Say you’ll meet me just once again? Just once? Cocktails tomorrow? Please.’

‘Look, Mrs Faraday –’

‘Say Doney’s at six. I’ll promise to say nothing if you like. We’ll listen to the music.’

Her palm was cool. A finger made a circular motion on one of his. Rosie had said he limped through life. In the end Jeremy had been sorry for him. Both of them were right; others had said worse. He was a crippled object of pity.

‘Well, all right.’

She thanked him in the Albergo San Lorenzo for listening to her, and for the dinner and the wine. ‘Every year I hope to meet someone nice in Florence,’ she said on the landing outside her bedroom, seeming to mean it. ‘This is the first time it has happened.’

She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then closed her door. In his looking-glass he examined the faint smear of lipstick and didn’t wipe it off. He woke in the night and lay there thinking about her, wondering if her lipstick was still on his cheek.

Waiting in Doney’s, he ordered a glass of chilled Orvieto wine. Someone on a tape, not Judy Garland, sang ‘Over the Rainbow’; later there was lightly played Strauss and some rhythms of the thirties. By seven o’clock Mrs Farady had not arrived. He left at a quarter to eight.

*

The next day he wandered through the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, thinking again about the beauty of Mrs Faraday. He had received no message from her, no note to explain or apologize for her absence in Doney’s. Had she simply forgotten? Or had someone better materialized? Some younger man she again hadn’t been able to resist, some guy who didn’t know any more about Masaccio than her good husband did? She was a woman who was always falling in love, which was what she called it, confusing love with sensuality. Was she, he wondered, what people referred to as a nymphomaniac? Was that what made her unhappy?

He imagined her with some man she’d picked up. He imagined her, satisfied because of the man’s attentions, tramping the halls of a gift market, noting which shade of green was to be the new season’s excitement. She would be different after her love-making, preoccupied with her business, no time for silliness and Annunciations. Yet it still was odd that she hadn’t left a message for him. She had not for a moment seemed as rude as that, or incapable of making up an excuse.

He left the cloisters and walked slowly across the piazza of Santa Maria Novella. In spite of what she’d said and the compliments she’d paid, had she guessed that he hadn’t listened properly to her, that he’d been fascinated by her appearance but not by her? Or had she simply guessed the truth about him?

That evening she was not in the bar of the hotel. He looked in at Doney’s, thinking he might have misunderstood about the day. He waited for a while, and then ate alone in the restaurant with the modern paintings.

‘We pack the clothes, signore. Is the carabinieri which can promote the inquiries for la signora. Mi displace, signore.’

He nodded at the heavily moustached receptionist and made his way to the bar. If she was with some lover she would have surfaced again by now: it was hard to believe that she would so messily leave a hotel bill unpaid, especially since sooner or later she would have to return for her clothes. When she had so dramatically spoken of wishing Florence to devour her she surely hadn’t meant something like this? He went back to the receptionist.

‘Did Mrs Faraday have her passport?’

‘Sì, signore. La signora have the passport.’

He couldn’t sleep that night. Her smile and her brown, languorous eyes invaded the blur he attempted to induce. She crossed and re-crossed her legs. She lifted another glass. Her ringed fingers stubbed another cigarette. Her earrings lightly jangled.

In the morning he asked again at the reception desk. The hotel bill wasn’t important, a different receptionist generously allowed. If someone had to leave Italy in a hurry, because maybe there was sickness, even a deathbed, then a hotel bill might be overlooked for just a little while.

‘La signora will post to us a cheque from the United States. This the carabinieri say.’

‘Yes, I should imagine so.’

He looked up in the telephone directory the flats she had mentioned. The Palazzo Ricasoli was in Via Mantellate. He walked to it, up Borgo San Lorenzo and Via San Gallo. ‘No,’ a porter in a glass kiosk said and directed him to the office. ‘No,’ a pretty girl in the office said, shaking her head. She turned and asked another girl. ‘No,’ this girl repeated.

He walked back through the city, to the American Consulate on the Lungarno Amerigo. He sat in the office of a tall, lean man called Humber, who listened with a detached air and then telephoned the police. After nearly twenty minutes he replaced the receiver. He was dressed entirely in brown – suit, shirt, tie, shoes, handkerchief. He was evenly tanned, another shade of the colour. He drawled when he spoke; he had an old-world manner.

‘They suggest she’s gone somewhere,’ he said. ‘On some kind of jaunt.’ He paused in order to allow a flicker of amusement to develop in his lean features. ‘They think maybe she ran up her hotel bill and skipped it.’

‘She’s a respectable proprietor of a fashion shop.’

‘The carabinieri say the respectable are always surprising them.’

‘Can you try to find out if she went back to the States? According to the hotel people, that was another theory of the carabinieri.’

Mr Humber shrugged. ‘Since you have told your tale I must try, of course, sir. Would six-thirty be an agreeable hour for you to return?’

He sat outside in the Piazza della Repubblica, eating tortellini and listening to the conversations. A deranged man had gone berserk in a school in Rome, taking children as hostages and killing a janitor; the mayor of Rome had intervened and the madman had given himself up. It was a terrible thing to have happened, the Italians were saying, as bad as the murder of Gabriella.

He paid for his tortellini and went away. He climbed up to the Belvedere, filling in time. Once he thought he saw her, but it was someone else in the same kind of red coat.

‘She’s not back home,’ Mr Humber said with his old-world lack of concern. ‘You’ve started something, sir. Faraday’s flying out.’

In a room in a police station he explained that Mrs Faraday had simply been a fellow-guest at the Albergo San Lorenzo. They had had dinner one evening, and Mrs Faraday had not appeared to be dispirited. She knew other people who had come from America, for the same trade exhibitions. He had seen her with them in a restaurant.

‘These people, sir, return already to the United States. They answer the American police at this time.’

He was five hours in the room at the police station and the next day he was summoned there again and asked the same questions. On his way out on this occasion he noticed a man who he thought might be her husband, a big blond-haired man, too worried even to glance at him. He was certain he had never met him, or even seen him before, as he’d been certain he’d never met Mrs Faraday before she’d come up to him in the hotel.

The police did not again seek to question him. His passport, which they had held for fifty-six Hours, was returned to him. By the end of that week the newspaper references to a missing American woman ceased. He did not see Mr Faraday again.

‘The Italian view,’ said Mr Humber almost a month later, ‘is that she went off on a sexual excursion and found it so much to her liking that she stayed where she was.’

‘I thought the Italian view was that she skipped the hotel. Or that someone had fallen ill.’

‘They revised their thinking somewhat. In the light of various matters.’

‘What matters?’

‘From what you said, Mrs Faraday was a gallivanting lady. Our Italian friends find some significance in that.’ Mr Humber silently drummed the surface of his desk. ‘You don’t agree, sir?’

He shook his head. ‘There was more to Mrs Faraday than that,’ he said.

‘Well, of course there was. The carabinieri are educated men, but they don’t go in for subtleties, you know.’

‘She’s not a vulgar woman. From what I said to the police they may imagine she is. Of course she’s in a vulgar business. They may have jumped too easily to conclusions.’

Mr Humber said he did not understand. ‘Vulgar?’ he repeated.

‘Like me, she deals in surface dross.’

‘You’re into fashion yourself, sir?’

‘No, I’m not. I write tourist guides.’

‘Well, that’s most interesting.’

Mr Humber flicked at the surface of his desk with a forefinger. It was clear that he wished his visitor would go. He turned a sheet of paper over.

‘I remind sightseers that pictures like Pietro Perugino’s Agony in the Garden are worth a second glance. I send them to the Boboli Gardens. That kind of thing.’

Mr Humber’s bland face twitched with simulated interest. Tourists were a nuisance to him. They lost their passports, they locked their ignition keys into their hired cars, they were stolen from and made a fuss. The city lived off them, but resented them as well. These thoughts were for a moment openly reflected in Mr Humber’s pale brown eyes and then were gone. Flicking at his desk again, he said:

‘I’m puzzled about one detail in all this. May I ask you, please?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Were you, you know, ah, seeing Mrs Faraday?’

‘Was I having an affair, you mean? No, I wasn’t.’

‘She was a beautiful woman. By all accounts – by yours, I mean – sir, she’d been most friendly.’

‘Yes, she was friendly.’

She was naïve for an American, and she was careless. She wasn’t fearful of strangers and foolishly she let her riches show. Vulnerability was an enticement.

‘I did not mean to pry, sir,’ Mr Humber apologized. ‘It’s simply that Mr Faraday’s detectives arrived a while ago and the more they can be told the better.’

‘They haven’t approached me.’

‘No doubt they conclude you cannot help them. Mr Faraday himself has returned to the States: a ransom note would be more likely sent to him there.’

‘So Mr Faraday doesn’t believe his wife went off on a sexual excursion?’

‘No one can ignore the facts, sir. There is indiscriminate kidnapping in Italy.’

‘Italians would have known her husband was well-to-do?’

‘I guess it’s surprising what can be ferreted out.’ Mr Humber examined the neat tips of his fingers. He rearranged tranquillity in his face. No matter how the facts he spoke of changed there was not going to be panic in the American Consulate. ‘There has been no demand, sir, but we have to bear in mind that kidnap attempts do often nowadays go wrong. In Italy as elsewhere.’

‘Does Mr Faraday think it has gone wrong?’

‘Faraday is naturally confused. And, of course, troubled.’

‘Of course.’ He nodded to emphasize his agreement. Her husband was the kind who would be troubled and confused, even though unhappiness had developed in the marriage. Clearly she’d given up on the marriage; more than anything, it was desperation that made her forthright. Without it, she might have been a different woman – and in that case, of course, there would not have been this passing relationship between them: her tiresomeness had cultivated that. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ her voice echoed huskily, hungry for friendship. He had told her nothing – nothing of the shattered, destroyed relationships, and the regret and shame; nothing of the pathetic hope in hired rooms, or the anguish turning into bitterness. She had been given beauty, and he a lameness that people laughed at when they knew. Would her tiresomeness have dropped from her at once, like the shedding of a garment she had thought to be attractive, if he’d told her in the restaurant with the modern paintings? Would she, too, have angrily said he’d led her up the garden path?

‘There is our own investigation also,’ Mr Humber said, ‘besides that of Faraday’s detectives. Faraday, I assure you, has spared no expense; the carabinieri file is by no means closed. With such a concentration we’ll find what there is to find, sir.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do your best, Mr Humber.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He rose and Mr Humber rose also, holding out a brown, lean hand. He was glad they had met, Mr Humber said, even in such unhappy circumstances. Diplomacy was like oil in Mr Humber. It eased his movements and his words; his detachment floated in it, perfectly in place.

‘Goodbye, Mr Humber.’

Ignoring the lift, he walked down the stairs of the Consulate. He knew that she was dead. He imagined her lying naked in a wood, her even teeth ugly in a rictus, her white flesh as lifeless as the virgin modesty of the schoolgirl in the park. She hadn’t been like a nymphomaniac, or even a sophisticated woman, when she’d kissed his cheek good-night. Like a schoolgirl herself, she’d still been blind to the icy coldness that answered her naïveté. Inept and academic, words he had written about the city which had claimed her slipped through his mind. In the church of Santa Croce you walk on tombs, searching for Giotto’s Life of St Francis. In Savonarola’s own piazza the grey stone features do not forgive the tumbling hair of pretty police girls or the tourists’ easy ways. Injustice and harsh ambition had made her city what it was, the violence of greed for centuries had been its bloodstream; beneath its tinsel skin there was an iron heart. The Florentines, like true provincials, put work and money first. In the Piazza Signoria the pigeons breakfast off the excrement of the hackney horses: in Florence nothing is wasted.

He left the American Consulate and slowly walked along the quay. The sun was hot, the traffic noisy. He crossed the street and looked down into the green water of the Arno, wondering if the dark shroud of Mrs Faraday’s life had floated away through a night. In the galleries of the Uffizi he would move from Annunciation to Annunciation, Simone Martini’s, Baldovinetti’s, Lorenzo di Credi’s. and all the others. He would catch a glimpse of her red coat in Santa Trinità, but the face would again be someone else’s. She would call out from a gelateria, but the voice would be an echo in his memory.

He turned away from the river and at the same slow pace walked into the heart of the city. He sat outside a café in the Piazza della Repubblica, imagining her thoughts as she had lain in bed on that last night, smoking her cigarettes in the darkness. She had arrived at the happiest moment of love, when nothing was yet destroyed, when anticipation was a richness in itself. She’d thought about their walk in Maiano, how she’d bring the subject up again, how this time he’d say he’d be delighted. She’d thought about their being together in an apartment in the Palazzo Ricasoli, how this time it would be different. Already she had made up her mind: she would not ever return to the town where her husband managed a business. ‘I have never loved anyone like this,’ she whispered in the darkness.

In his hotel bedroom he shaved and had a bath and put on a suit that had just been pressed. In a way that had become a ceremony for him since the evening he had first waited for her there, he went at six o’clock to Doney’s. He watched the Americans drinking cocktails, knowing it was safe to be there because she would not suddenly arrive. He listened to the music she’d said she liked, and mourned her as a lover might.