The Girl of his Dreams

10

Downstairs, they filed outside, none of them saying a word. They walked back to San Giacomo dell'Orio and headed across the campo. When they entered the narrow calle that would take them back towards Rialto, Brunetti saw Paola, who was walking in front, glance over her shoulder, as if to check that none of the other people who had been at the meeting were behind them. Seeing no one, she stopped, turned and approached Brunetti. She bent and rested her forehead against his chest. Voice muffled by the fabric of his jacket, she said, ‘I am the only one who can make myself want to do the good of putting alcohol into my body. I will run screaming mad if I do not have that goodness. I will perish, I will die, if I do not have a drink’

A deadpan Nadia put her hand on Paola's shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. ‘I, too, want that goodness’ she said, and then to Brunetti, 'and you can do one

good thing by saving this woman's life, and mine, by finding us a drink.'

'Prosecco?' he suggested.

'Heaven will surely be yours,' Nadia agreed.

Brunetti, not to put too fine a point on it, was astonished. He had known Nadia for years, for almost as long as he had known Vianello. But it had been a formal sort of knowing: telephone calls when he was looking for her husband; requests for information about people she might know. But he had never seen her as a person, a separate entity with a spirit and a mind and, it seemed, a sense of humour. She had always been, in a way he was embarrassed to admit even to himself, an appendage to Vianello.

Paola, he knew, spoke to her occasionally, met her now and again for a coffee or a walk, but she never told him what they talked about. Or he had never asked. And so here she was, after all these years, a stranger.

Rather than reflect upon this, Brunetti led them into a bar on the left and asked the barman for four proseccos. When the wine came, they did not bother with toasts or the business of clicking their glasses together: they drank it down and set the glasses back on the counter with relieved sighs.

'Well?' Vianello asked. None of them believed this was a question about the quality of the wine.

'It was all very slick,' Paola said, 'all very "touchy-feely", as the Americans would say.'

'All very positive and heart-warming,' Nadia added. 'He never criticized anyone, never talked about sin or its consequences. All very uplifting.'

'There's a preacher in Dickens,' Paola said. 'Bleak House, I think.' She closed her eyes in a way long familiar to Brunetti, who could all but see her leafing through the thousands of pages that lay stored in her memory.

She opened her eyes and said, ‘I can't remember his name, but he has the wife of Snagsby, the law stationer, in thrall, and so he's a permanent guest at their dinner table, where he spends most of his time spouting platitudes and asking rhetorical questions about virtue and religion. Poor Snagsby wants to drive a stake through his heart, but he's so much a prisoner of his wife that he doesn't even know he wants to do this.'

'And?' Brunetti asked, curious as to why they had all been taken to dinner with this Snagsby, whoever he was.

'And there is a sort of generic resemblance between him and the man we just listened to – Brother Leonardo – if that's who he was,' Paola answered, reminding Brunetti that Signora Sambo had not bothered to use the man's name, nor had anyone in the room used it during the evening.

'Nothing he said was in any way exceptional, just the same sort of pious platitudes you get in the editorials in Famiglia Cristiana’ Paola went on, leaving Brunetti to wonder how on earth she could be familiar with them. 'But it's certainly the sort of thing people like to hear,' she concluded.

'Why?' Vianello asked, then waved to the barman, passing his hand over the four glasses.

'Because they don't have to do anything’ Paola answered. 'AH they have to do is feel the right things, and that makes them believe they deserve credit for having done something.' Her voice deepened into disgust and she added, 'It's all so terribly American.'

'Why American?' Nadia asked, reaching for one of the fresh glasses the barman set on the counter.

'Because they think it's enough to feel things: they've come to believe it's more important than doing things, or it's the same thing or, at any rate, deserves just as much credit as actually doing something. What is it that poseur of a president of theirs was always saying, "I feel your pain"? As if that made any difference to anything. God, it's enough to choke a pig.' Paola picked up her glass and took a hefty slug.

'All you've got to do is have the proper feelings,' she went on, 'the fashionable sentiments, and make a business about how delicate your sensibility is. And then you don't actually have to do anything. All you do is stand there with your precious sentiments hanging out while the world falls over itself applauding you for them and giving you credit for having the same feelings that any sentient being would have.'

Brunetti had seldom seen Paola respond so savagely. 'My, my, my’ he observed and took a sip of his prosecco.

Her head whipped towards him, her eyes startled. But then he watched her play her remarks back and take another hefty swig before saying, 'It was exposure to all that goodness, I think. It goes right to my head and provokes the worst parts of my character.'

They all laughed and the conversation became general.

'I'm always nervous when people don't use concrete nouns when they speak’ Nadia said.

'It's why she never listens to politicians’ Vianello said, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her closer to him.

‘Is that how you keep her in thrall, Lorenzo?' Paola asked. 'You read her a list of nouns every morning?'

Brunetti glanced at Vianello, who said, 'I'm not a big fan of preachers, myself, especially when they make it sound like they aren't preaching.'

'But he wasn't preaching, was he?' Nadia asked. 'Not really.'

'No’ Brunetti said, 'not at all. But I think we should remember that he saw four people there he had never seen before, and it might be that he was keeping things light and general until he found out who we were.'

'And I'm the one with the low opinion of human nature?' Paola asked.

'It's only a possibility’ Brunetti said. 'I was told that there is generally a collection, or at least people pass him envelopes, but there was none of that tonight.'

'At least while we were still there’ Nadia said.

'True enough’ Brunetti admitted.

'So what do we do?' Paola asked. Turning to Brunetti, she said, 'It will put our marriage in serious peril if you ask me to go again.'

'Peril peril, or pretend peril?' he asked.

Brunetti saw her lips draw together as she considered how to answer him. 'Pretend peril, I suppose’ she finally admitted, 'though the thought of having to go again would drive me to drinking the cooking sherry in the afternoon.'

'You already do’ he said, putting an end to the discussion of Brother Leonardo.