Authors: Christobel Kent
Now a figure in a brown and yellow polyester uniform appeared at the glass doors to the Palazzo San Giorgio and stiffly Lino leaned forward to admit him. He looked down at a registered envelope, and signed for it.
‘Popular guy,’ said the courier. ‘Third time this week, isn’t it?’
Sandro saw that the slim envelope, plastered with labels, was addressed to Ian Cameron.
‘Personal shopping,’ said Lino. ‘In a limousine. Not all the husbands were delighted.’ He flapped the envelope against his knuckles. ‘This one, for example.’
‘Looks like business,’ said Sandro, nodding down at the envelope.
Lino looked at him, impassive. ‘I’d stay off that subject if I were you,’ he said. ‘He likes those letters placed in his hand by me – or the courier – and no one else. I’m not making that mistake again.’
‘Mistake?’
‘A week or so ago I gave Vito one of the letters – well, he offered. Said he’d seen Cameron on the terrace and he’d take it to him. Half an hour later Cameron comes storming in and threatens to have me fired.’ He allowed himself a smile. ‘Touchy subject. He calmed down in the end. Miss Cornell . . . well, she defended me.’
Well, thought Sandro. Good for her. ‘Quite right too,’ he said.
Lino shrugged, still looking ahead, just a shade weary now. ‘They’re from a legal firm,’ he said, in an undertone, then looked back at Sandro. ‘That it?’
‘You know how it is, Lino,’ said Sandro. ‘The more you know you shouldn’t be asking questions, the more questions you seem to think of.’
There was the sound of hurrying feet in the corridor and both of them turned suddenly, to be faced with the maid Alice, her cheeks pink. When she saw Sandro her hand flew to the crucifix at her neck and then he remembered. Mariaclara.
‘You all right?’ His voice was gruffer than he intended.
She looked flustered. ‘I was going to ask Lino something,’ she said. They stood, expectant. ‘Did Miss Morris go with the others? So I can let myself in to do her room.’
Lino shook his head. ‘I don’t know if they even asked her,’ he said.
The girl was already backing down the corridor. What was she scared of? Him?
Luisa thought it might be someone who worked there, didn’t she? A waiter spitting in the soup. Did Van Vleet put his old magazines out for the trash, did he leave them in his wastepaper basket, for the maid to empty?
‘Hey,’ Sandro called after her. ‘I want to ask you something. About the recycling.’
And then, perhaps with the last of the alcohol departing his system, the fog in his head cleared and what Mariaclara had said returned to him.
He knew
, she’d said. He knew it wasn’t me, because he knew who took the bracelet.
The face that appeared in the corridor in response to his call was not the maid’s but Alessandra Cornell’s, and it was stiff with disapproval. ‘You wanted to talk to me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps somewhere more private?’
*
‘Back here at three?’ the driver said, squinting up into the sunshine from the leather-padded driver’s seat of the limousine, and from where she stood, outside the arched white marble monstrosity that was the Chianti Outlet Village, reluctantly Luisa nodded. The smoked-glass window rose electronically and he disappeared, smile, sunglasses, peaked cap and all. Take me with you, she thought. I’m too old for this.
In the sun Luisa turned to face her clients.
She’d stared at the back of the driver’s head for the entire journey, wishing she’d been smart enough to slip into the front seat beside him from the outset, no questions asked. It should have been a nice drive, half an hour down the bumpy potholed Siena
superstrada
under the hills. The green cool of ancient forests, and the handsome old villas looking down through their cypress avenues; a chance not to have to think. About the women behind her, about Sandro walled up in the Palazzo San Giorgio. About who had put that dirty magazine in his briefcase, and why.
But the young one – Mrs Van Vleet – had insisted Luisa sit in the back of the limousine with them. She looked pale and frightened, as if the others might turn on her, and she set herself beside Luisa, who tried not to think about what Sandro had told her, about the husband, and his hookers. No wonder she looked miserable. Luisa wondered if the other women knew.
‘It’s not like you’re our servant,’ Therese Van Vleet said, trying to smile.
Luisa had caught a look then from Magda Scardino, settling herself on the leather seat opposite, that implied something quite different.
Don’t get any ideas
. Magda Scardino wasn’t interested in getting to know other women. It turned out what she was interested in was money – and was careless about disguising it, with only women present. She also wanted Luisa to know her place.
‘What kinds of discount can we expect?’ she’d asked before they’d even left the city’s limits. ‘I mean, presumably we have you with us to negotiate a little something extra?’
Lady Fleming –
Juliet
, she’d said,
call me Juliet
, taking Luisa’s hand briefly in her small dry paw, but of course Luisa would call her Lady Fleming, even if not out of propriety, for she wasn’t a Juliet – also opposite Luisa on the other jump seat, had looked amused.
From Luisa’s other side came a small sound almost of distress and Luisa turned in her seat. ‘Really, Magda,’ the engineer’s wife said, tugging nervously at her sleeves. It was a warm day but she had a blouse buttoned to the neck and wrist: a Puritan sort of thing perhaps. Were the Australians Puritans? ‘I don’t think. . .’ before tailing off under Magda Scardino’s look of undisguised contempt.
‘It’s what she’s here for, Marjorie,’ Magda Scardino said. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘I suppose I might even treat myself to something,’ said Marjorie Cameron, brightening.
‘Oh, Marjorie.’ What was in the tone? Exasperation? Pity? Magda Scardino didn’t seem the pitying kind.
Luisa gave them all her card, to cover the awkward moment. Frollini had had them made for her last year, when they’d gone
to New York for the shows, the one and only time. ‘It’s got my mobile number on it,’ she said. ‘If you need me once we separate. And you can show it to the
vendeuses
– the saleswomen – if I’m not there. For the discount.’
She didn’t catch Magda Scardino’s eye.
Carved out of a hillside just north of Siena, the mall was . . . perhaps not grim exactly, to most eyes, but Luisa’s heart sank. They were on the edge of a discreet light-industrial area, landscaped with cypresses and box and a few roses about to come into flower, but all of it newly planted, the trees spindly, the box stunted. They went inside through a grandiosely vast arched entrance, a security guard hefty in a black suit and tie hardly giving them a glance. A long hall stretched out in front of them, almost empty, with shops’ glassed-in boxes opening to either side. What if Frollini sent her to work in a place like this? Luisa in one of these faked-up cubbyhole shops, Sandro at the door in a cheap black suit. The whole thing horrified her. Was it snobbery?
It had been expensively constructed, of polished marble and speckled terrazzo; the roof was vaulted in a style supposed, Luisa decided, to suggest a cloister. There was at least some natural light, through inset windows high up: a glimpse of the sky, cleared to pale blue after the night’s rain.
They entered the first shop, where handbags costing two months’ salary were ranged in an interior that was meant to look like an English country house, Luisa guessed. She spotted the manageress and, leaving the four women to wander through the cavernous interior, nabbed her behind a counter full of scarves. Best to sort out the discount before anyone got to the till – and
after an hour in the car with them, Luisa found she needed to put some space between herself and the ladies of the Palazzo San Giorgio.
The manageress was agog when she heard where they were from. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ said Luisa. ‘You know how the rich get rich. Tight, all of them. Except maybe the Russians.’
Suppose it wasn’t a servant of the Palazzo playing dirty tricks. Suppose it was a guest? It might even be one of these women. She watched them move through the shop.
Juliet Fleming was looking at ties, very methodically. It was quite obvious to Luisa that Lady Fleming had not the slightest interest in shopping. Her clothes were transparently bought by mail order and she’d been wearing the same thing since she was twenty years old, but more significantly there was no trace of the chemical response that after thirty years on a shop floor Luisa could almost smell. Nor was she one to follow the herd. So what was she doing here?
To Therese Van Vleet on the other hand, shopping clearly came easily enough: she had separated herself from the others, and was looking through rails and cabinets mechanically. The manageress had fixed on her – the most stylish of the four – as her best hope, but as she watched, Luisa heard the manageress sigh, and silently agreed. Therese Van Vleet’s heart wasn’t in it. Sandro thought the magazine was her husband’s: he’d told Luisa as much on the phone. ‘I’ll sort it,
cara
,’ he’d said, but he’d sounded distracted.
And then Magda Scardino marched up and before they knew it had two saleswomen bringing out bag after bag after bag. Therese Van Vleet wandered away, murmuring something
about coffee. Not understanding, as Luisa and certainly Juliet Fleming did, that this was a game, Marjorie Cameron started to offer suggestions – to another look of scalding disdain from Magda Scardino.
‘Tell them I’ll take those three for an extra ten per cent,’ Magda said, her breath on Luisa’s cheek, like a lioness’s.
Juliet Fleming bought no handbag, nor did she buy a winter coat, a summer coat or a day dress. She didn’t even seem bored; she simply evaded attention in each shop while Magda bartered and bullied and the Cameron woman clung obstinately, like an unwanted child. Then, to Luisa’s astonishment, in the last shop – which specialised in eveningwear, rails and rails of floor-sweeping chiffon and stiff satin – Marjorie Cameron bought a cocktail dress.
It was dark red and cut low on the bosom, and when she came out of the changing room in it even Magda Scardino was taken aback. Marjorie Cameron had a surprisingly good figure, and her skin looked soft under the lights, even if above the rich fabric her face was too bare, her hair too formless. The dress had chiffon sleeves and, flushing under the gaze of the other women, she was back to tugging at them, as though trying to hide herself. To everyone’s surprise, though, when she came back out she hurried to the cash desk with the dress, even before Luisa could negotiate the price with the saleswoman. She paid what was on the ticket, Magda pushing her way to the till too late to insist on her haggling, and Luisa saw something pass between them. Magda annoyed, Marjorie Cameron quietly determined.
‘But what will Ian say?’ Magda Scardino was being vindictive, no two ways about it. Because the Camerons were a couple for life?
Marjorie squirrelled the bag behind her, flushed. ‘It’ll be very useful,’ she said. ‘He likes me in red.’ The atmosphere was poisonous.
‘I think we need something to eat,’ said Luisa hurriedly.
Upstairs, the bar was done up like Florian’s in Venice, all wooden panelling and gilt mirrors. Magda parked herself at a table without ceremony. Marjorie Cameron hovered beside her, waiting in vain to be invited to sit, eventually clearing a place for herself among the heaped bags and Scardino’s discarded layers. With relief, Luisa went to the bar. It wasn’t until she’d placed their order and exchanged a weary smile with the woman behind the bar that she realised Juliet Fleming had followed her.
‘Funny, isn’t it,’ Fleming said, nodding at the table where Marjorie Cameron was leaning forwards, hands in her lap, in an attitude of mute supplication while opposite Magda Scardino ignored her, examining herself instead in a small mirrored compact. Cameron took out a mobile phone and shyly set it on the table. Luisa was surprised to see that it was the most expensive one there was, the top version of the magic phone she and Giuli had talked Sandro into. Everything else about the woman was so modest, so muted; Luisa had had the firm impression Ian Cameron quarrelled with her over every expense. But then she remembered the children, scattered across the globe: it would be how she’d keep in touch. Perhaps he allowed her that.
Juliet Fleming spoke an excellent Italian, although like a certain kind of old-fashioned visitor she made no effort at all with her accent. It was a kind of arrogance, Luisa had always thought, although she supposed that it might also be modesty.
‘Funny?’
‘Their little sado-masochistic relationship,’ Fleming said. ‘It looks so one-way, doesn’t it? Unrequited love. She wants to
be
Magda, do you see it? But you notice Magda doesn’t ever quite dismiss her.’
She held Luisa’s eye, mischievous.
Sado-masochistic
, thought Luisa, startled and entertained at once. She wondered, looking at that particular shade of Juliet Fleming’s hair – the colour almost completely gone from it, the grey just turning to translucent white – how old she was, to be so bold and curious. The same age as me, almost exactly, Luisa decided.
‘Whisky,’ said Juliet Fleming to the woman behind the bar. ‘Please.’ And smiled, becoming unexpectedly charming suddenly. It was just after midday: smelling the alcohol, Luisa became aware of how very different this woman’s life must have been from hers, and yet they were the same age. Was Marina Artusi right? Juliet Fleming didn’t exactly look like an alcoholic to Luisa, but maybe there were all sorts. Alcoholics were bad news, she knew that much. They were reckless, they were dangerous. They could be vindictive.
‘Five years in Saudi Arabia,’ said the diplomat’s wife, lifting her little glass in salute, giving the bottle’s label a quizzical look. ‘Not a drop.’ Luisa saw something in her eyes that was not about pleasure or nostalgia. It was more as if the alcohol was a regime or a medicine.
‘She’s like that with men, too, of course,’ said Fleming, and Luisa knew they were still talking about Magda Scardino. ‘We have a word for it in English. Brazen.
Di ottone
, it means literally, made of brass. But also shameless, also one who can get away
with any atrocity.’ The smile returned abruptly and with it the charm, lighting up the quiet, anonymous little face. She set down the glass. ‘It has a number of associations, and they all fit Magda Scardino.’