The Faces of Angels (53 page)

The doors hiss and snap and I realize I've missed my stop. I get off at the next one and walk back through Santo Spirito. In a couple of hours Pierangelo will come to fetch me. It's time to pack my bags and leave.

As I let myself in and come through the archway, I glance up at our French windows and almost believe I see a figure, a shadow behind the white-linen panels. If Gabriel's right, it's not a trick of the light, but Billy, looking down at me. I don't know what will happen to her things. I suppose someone will come for them. And for her. Her mother's apparently terrified of flying and refuses to get on a plane, so maybe her aunt Irene, or her cousin Floyd, who bet her when she was eight that she wouldn't eat a fly, will come instead. She did eat the fly, incidentally, and made Floyd pay her, despite the fact that she threw up. Personally, I think she'd rather we talked about that at the Remembrance than Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Sun darts between clouds as I come out of the portico and hear the noise. It unwinds in the warm spring air, and, unsure of what it is, I stop, listening. It's a low whine that spools down into the courtyard, and although I have never actually heard ‘keening' before I know instinctively that that's what this is; an incoherent call of distress, grief and pain, all mixed up. Looking up, I also know what I am going to see. Two storeys above, Sophie's windows are open.

I start to walk on, to bow my head and plough past, telling myself that whatever it is, it's none of my business. But then I stop. This sound is not made by Little Paolo having a tantrum. This is a noise so anguished only an adult could make it. Sophie. I remember the look on her face the first time I met her, the loneliness that was so obvious and familiar it might have been my own. The door to their apartment is only a few feet away, in the corner opposite ours, but I've never been through it. I have no idea what's on the other side.

Their vestibule is much smarter than ours. There are no scuff marks on the marble stairs or scratches on the elegant curve of the banister. There's no elevator either, and when I look at the ground-floor door, which on our side would lead to the storage rooms under Signora Raguzza's, I see that it's propped open, revealing a dark passage. The wine cellars and back entrance that Sophie mentioned. Suddenly it dawns on me that they own this whole side of the building. Billy was right, Big Paolo's cashmere does indicate serious real estate.

I climb the stairs as quietly as I can, as if I'm trespassing, which is how it feels. The first flight is shiny, polished marble. Above, they rise in carpeted flights to what are probably bedrooms. On the first landing huge double doors stand open. The noise is louder now, coming from inside, but when I step in I don't see anyone. The room is vast, spanning the width of the building, four windows on one side looking out on the courtyard, four on the other staring across the side alley. Signora Bardino's whole apartment could fit in here. Groups of brocade chairs and two uncomfortable-looking silk sofas are arranged around tapestry rugs. Bowls of flowers sit on low tables, and there are portraits, one of Paolo in a sailor suit looking creepily like the Romanov children in those pictures they took just before they shot them, and one of an idealized Sophie in a pink ballgown. At the other end is a grand piano and a formal dining table with eight chairs, and beyond that an open doorway to the kitchen, where Sophie is sitting beside an open window with her head in her arms, making that awful noise.

‘Sophie?'

I whisper, partly because I don't want to alarm her, and partly because I feel like I shouldn't be here at all, and at first I think she hasn't heard me. Then she looks up.

Her face is pasty. There's a red blotch on each of her cheeks, making her look like a clown or a Raggedy Ann doll, and her colourless blonde hair is matted to her forehead.

‘I hate him,' Sophie announces, looking at me as though it's perfectly normal for me to be standing here. ‘I just fucking hate him!' Then she puts her head down in her arms and starts crying again.

I don't know what to do. I'm not good at this sort of thing, and I wish Billy was here. Or Pierangelo, or Henry. Or Mamaw. Or Ty. Or virtually anyone but me. Finally I pat Sophie's shoulder as if she were a horse in a petting zoo, and make the sort of noise Mamaw used to make when I was sick or having a tantrum, a kind of low, out-of-tune hum.

Sophie's skin feels hot under her linen shirt and she doesn't stop crying, even when I crouch down and put my arms around her shoulders. The damp clamminess of her cheek meets mine, and her soft, sweaty hands reach out and hold on to me. We stay like this until my knees hurt. Until my body is as hot as hers, and the side of my face and neck is damp with her tears. Then, little by little, Sophie's shoulders stop shuddering and the awful mewing sound withers to nothing but wheezy breaths of air.

‘I'm sorry,' Sophie says finally. ‘Oh God, I'm so sorry.' She pushes herself away from me, and rubs her eyes, which are redrimmed and swollen. Her lipstick is smeared too. ‘I must look a fright.'

In this second she sounds terribly English, and the laugh she gives is fake and half-hearted, like a bad imitation of Mrs Miniver. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and looks at me. ‘I'm pregnant again,' she says, ‘and, to make it worse, that bastard I'm married to says if I don't have it, he'll take my son away.'

‘What?'

There's a letter lying on the table beside a vase of irises. Sophie nods towards it.

‘I told him I didn't want another baby, not with him. He's been bonking his secretary for years,' she adds, as if it's an afterthought. ‘Not that I even care about that. I know he doesn't love me, so what does it matter? He can fuck the silly cow stupid for all I care. I told him that. I told him I didn't care, but I wasn't going to stay with him and have another baby since he doesn't give a damn about me. And he says if I don't, he'll have me declared unfit or crazy or something, and stop me seeing Paolo.'

I stand up, feeling a little woozy. And I thought my marriage had problems.

‘All I want to do,' Sophie is saying as though it's obvious to the whole world, ‘is take Paolo and go back to England. I don't want to stay with him!'

‘Can he do that? Can he take your son away from you like that?'

‘According to his
avvocato
, yes.' She pronounces the Italian for lawyer so it sounds like ‘avocado', and flicks the letter contemptuously with her fingers, sending it sailing to the floor. ‘Apparently he can do any bloody thing he pleases. And I pay for it!'

I bend down and pick the letter up. The paper is heavy, and engraved with the heading of a law firm in the city.

‘That's why he really doesn't want me to go,' Sophie adds. ‘He doesn't give a toss about me, or Paolo. Never has done. He just doesn't want to lose the money. And he'd quite like another carbon copy of himself, he has a right to that, he says. To His Baby. That's what he calls it, by the way: His Baby. As if I don't even exist. I hate him,' she says again. ‘I just fucking hate him.'

Her pretty round face is transformed with a bitterness that seems so uncharacteristic it's almost more disturbing than her crying.

‘And do you know what my priest said?' Her voice rises with outrage and I feel my stomach sinking. I start to say I probably do, but Sophie's there first.

‘When I told him about the affair, about the bonking and the secretary, he told me my fucking marriage was fucking sacred, no matter what my fucking husband does, and that I should find room in my heart for forgiveness. No matter what. Have you noticed how it's always women who have to summon up forgiveness? I pointed that out, and all he said was that if I left my marriage I ran the risk of being “removed from God's grace.” Removed from God's grace are the words he actually used. As if I were a chair or a sofa. Can you believe it?'

I nod. I could tell her that virtually the same thing was said to me, and is probably said to thousands of other women on a daily basis, but Sophie doesn't want me to talk, she just wants me to hear. I put the letter on the table, trying not to read the two neatly typed paragraphs and the flourished signature.

‘I'm a Catholic,' she adds. ‘I mean, I already was, I didn't become one when I married Paolo. So it's not as if I haven't thought about this. I have. I'm not entirely stupid.'

‘Have you told your priest yet? That you're pregnant?'

‘God, no!' she says, and bursts into tears again. ‘I know what he'll say, so I can't!'

Sophie wipes at her eyes with her sleeve and I look around the beautiful room and try to think what Mamaw would say or do. There's a shiny copper kettle sitting at the back of the huge six-burner stove, and when I go to lift it up, it feels full.

‘I don't believe God really feels that way,' I say. ‘That's just the interpretation of men. God's better than that. He has to be.'

I'm not sure if I'm saying this to try to comfort her or me, but in either case Sophie doesn't reply. Just at the moment I doubt she's up for hearing a defence of God. As far as she's concerned, right now he's probably just another rotten man. She watches as I turn on the gas. ‘Second drawer on the left,' she says, before I can ask.

The teabags are Earl Grey, and I wonder if she has them sent from home. I don't even like tea, but making it seems like a good idea, especially since she's English. From what I can remember of
Masterpiece Theater
, they use tea for occasions like this.

While I'm reaching for two of the mugs that hang on hooks under the cabinets, Sophie gets up and goes into the other room. A second later she comes back with a bottle of whisky in her hand.

‘Only reason to drink tea, really.' She seems to be recovering, and she pours a stiff two fingers into each of the mugs.

‘Personally, I think tea's filthy stuff,' she announces. ‘But my mother keeps sending me the fucking bags in hampers from fucking Fortnum's, as if there's no proper food in Italy.' Sophie injects ‘fucking' into her sentences like a schoolgirl who's just discovered it's a very bad word.

She looks at me and laughs. The sound has a high, slightly hysterical edge to it, and I wonder if this is the first time she's opened the whisky bottle today.

‘That was the idea, you see,' she says, ‘when Mummy sent me to art college. That the combination of being Catholic and my bank account would net me a fancy Italian and spare her the awfulness of having to wheedle me a receptionist's job at Christie's. I mean, look at me. I could hardly be expected to compete in London, could I? Everyone there is thin.'

She flumps down in one of the kitchen chairs and fiddles with a stem of iris. ‘Of course, Mummy'd have liked a defunct title thrown in,' she says. ‘You know, a contessa or marquesa, or something. That was a bit of a disappointment. But Paolo was the best I could do. Not that Sassinelli isn't a good name. Very Florentine. Very noble. A bunch of them died with the Pazzis. He was just too handsome.' She rubs her hands across her eyes. ‘That was my mistake,' Sophie announces. ‘I should have gone for someone short, and fat, like me. Then at least I wouldn't be such a joke.'

‘You're not a joke.' I'm appalled at this. ‘And you have Paolo. And,' I point out, ‘your husband's affair isn't your fault.'

‘Oh yes it is.' She looks up at me, her face suddenly older. ‘It always is,' she says. ‘At least partly.'

As she speaks, I remember what Billy said the night we saw them on the bridge, and turn away so she won't see my face.

‘I have a friend in Geneva.' Sophie chews on one of her pink nails. ‘I could just take Paolo and go,' she says. ‘Leave the son of a bitch without his son or his baby.' There's a trembly defiance in Sophie's voice. She looks up at me. ‘He couldn't stop me,' she insists. ‘The children are mine too. He couldn't stop me taking them.' But she doesn't believe this for a minute, and neither do I. Big Paolo could stop her. And he would.

I start to point this out, trying to put it tactfully. ‘Sophie,' I say, ‘I really think—' But I get no further, because there's a crash in the other room.

Sophie lets out a little shriek and I almost knock one of the mugs onto the floor. In one motion, we turn towards the door, both of us certain that Big Paolo will be standing there, glowering, and threatening to—what? Kill us? Have us locked up? But the doorway's empty. I actually heave a sigh of relief, and Sophie starts to laugh.

‘My God,' she says. ‘Look at us.' Finally she gets up and ventures out among the brocade sofas and cut flowers. When she returns a second later, she's carrying a grocery bag and laughing again.

‘Culprit!' Sophie announces, holding up a can of tuna. ‘It rolled down the stairs. I've started using Dinya for extra little jobs, and when she heard you she must have bolted. The poor thing's incredibly shy and she doesn't speak English.' Sophie dumps the bag and can on the table. ‘Actually, she doesn't really speak Italian either,' she adds. ‘Raguzza Minor says that's why she gets along so well with his mother, can't understand a word the old bat says.'