“Calm down,” he says.
“I’m perfectly calm. I’m leaving.”
“Leaving what?” he says. He can’t help it, he loves a risk.
“Don’t tempt me, Jacques.” She uses the French version of his name, which he hates, playing with the clasp on her bag, clicking it open, clicking it shut. “I’ve told the man at the desk to send someone to pick up my luggage and arrange for it to be taken to the airport. Now I expect you, or someone else, I don’t really care who does it, to change my flight.”
“You can’t go now,” says Giacomo, grinning. “You’ll miss the reception. You know how much you want to press the flesh of Mr Bush. Besides, things are just beginning to get exciting.” He points towards the television screen. With obvious reluctance, Yvonne turns her head. What she sees is a woman dressed in black, in late middle age, screaming and waving her fist at the camera as it backs away. She wrinkles her nose with distaste.
“You know who this is, don’t you?”
“Some dreadful peasant,” sniffs Yvonne.
“On the contrary, she’s the mother of Federico’s driver, the one that was shot. She’s accusing the government of his death. She says it was all a plot. Her son had already warned her something like this might happen. There’d been talk at the ministry. Voices in corridors, and car parks presumably.”
“Only in Italy,” says Yvonne.
“Well, naturally, a government as blameless as the one you have in France wouldn’t dirty its hands with anything as sordid and demeaning as murder.” He shudders.
“France is
civilised
,” says Yvonne, incensed. “That may not seem much to you, Jacques, as an
Italian
, but those who are born and bred in France know how to appreciate it. It’s in the air we breathe.”
“I don’t believe it.” Giacomo rubs his hands together in a parody of glee. “We seem to be about to have a political argument. Of a sort.”
“You amuse yourself,” says Yvonne, with hauteur. “No one else.”
The screaming woman has been replaced on the screen by a man with the melancholy face of a clown.
“He’s one of the PM’s right-hand men,” says Giacomo. “Ex-communist, apparently. Priceless, isn’t it?”
When Yvonne comes down with her case twenty minutes later, Giacomo is fast asleep on the same sofa. Someone has turned the sound off but the news is still on and she sees the face of her husband’s dead friend, his hair too long, at some meeting or other. She wonders what he saw in Helen. The taxi arrives before she has a chance to wake Giacomo and tell him what she thinks of him, which is probably just as well.
8
Helen has left her car in Via Giulia and is walking without any clear sense or purpose, walking in a way that is as close to running as she can manage without drawing attention to herself. She walks beneath her building, but doesn’t go in. No one in the street below is waiting, no journalists, no cameras, and this surprises her, but also leaves her with a sense of loss she can’t explain to herself without feeling uncomfortable, as though she needs the attention of the world to still have Federico belong to her. Without it, she’s on her own.
She sees a group of teenagers tapping in text messages a dozen yards ahead of her as she strides across the square and down to the Lungotevere, sweating a little because the air is still warm this late in the evening and she is moving more quickly than she normally does alone; alone, she likes to dawdle, observe, eavesdrop. Sometimes she finds herself adjusting her step to that of a couple talking half a yard in front of her, to hear what they might be saying, almost unaware of what she is doing. She has heard extraordinary things like this, intimate things, and told them to Federico that same evening, amused to see his shock. “People don’t talk like that,” he’d said once when she’d told him about a conversation she’d overheard between lovers, about what they’d do to his wife, to her husband, if they had the chance, appalling forms of torture that sent the couple into fits of laughter until they became aware of Helen, staring into a shop window, her shoulder almost touching the shoulder of the man; aware that she too was laughing. “You’ve got no idea what people say,” she said. “You spend too much time at your desk.” Will she ever have that kind of conversation with Giacomo, she wonders. Whenever he enters her head, he comes in company; he comes with a sense of guilt she can’t shake off.
She stands at the top of the steps that lead down to the river, hesitating. This is the walk she has taken with Federico a hundred times, heading west towards the sea as the river does, not only on summer evenings like this one, but whenever they needed to get out, when his work was going badly or she needed comfort for some disappointment: a friend’s disloyalty, a contract falling through. It was always empty at night, which was what he loved, the silence apart from the low rush of the water, the patches of darkness, the feel of the stone and short uncared-for grass underfoot. They would walk without talking until things fell back into place.
Now though, alone, she has no desire to be alone. The papers are in her bag, but she can’t bear to look at them again, not yet; perhaps she never will be able to. She walks a hundred yards or so, then turns back towards the centre, down Via Arenula towards Largo Argentina. She is trying not to think, but can’t; trying only makes it worse. She can’t not think about what she has read, and what Federico meant. Because she is no longer sure of anything. When a police car goes past, its siren blazing, followed by a dark blue van and a second car, she finds herself on the brink of tears.
At Largo Argentina, she waits for the traffic to let her through then stops beside the wall. She stares down into the brightly illuminated ruins to watch the cats preen and sleep, as close to the heat of the spotlights as they can get.
“Hello.”
Startled, defensive, ready to snub whoever has interrupted her thoughts, she turns and sees Martin beside her, in his old cream suit and panama, for all the world like someone out of a film. He is with that friend of his, the bookseller. The one she calls the Sad Man.
“Hello,” she says back, relieved. She leans forward to be kissed by Martin, then gives the other man her hand. He takes it, gives it a brief shake, looking uncomfortable. “I’m so sorry about your husband,” he says, then looks at Martin. “I’d better be off.” Before either of them has a chance to speak, he has gone.
“He’s probably the last person I spoke to while Federico was still alive,” she says, watching him as he hurries away. She can’t get over the sense of fracture, the before and after of it all.
“Should you be out like this?”
“I’d go mad in the house.”
“You haven’t been by yourself?”
“Giacomo stayed,” she says. She will tell him what she has found, she decides, but not yet. First, she would like a drink. “You didn’t come round, did you? I thought you might.”
Martin shakes his head.
“Giulia found us in bed this morning,” she says. To her surprise, her voice comes out over-loud and on the edge of breaking. She doesn’t know whether she wants to giggle or cry. I’m hysterical, she notes. I can’t go on like this.
“In bed?”
“Together. We hadn’t done anything, honestly, but she doesn’t know that. Now she thinks I’m a whore, on top of everything else.”
Martin takes her elbow. “You need a drink, my dear,” he says. His voice is slightly slurred, she wonders how long he’s been drinking. She realises she has just told Martin that she and Giacomo have slept together, and feels relief. Martin is her oldest friend in Rome, which makes him her oldest friend in the world apart from Giacomo, and friend’s not the word for what Giacomo is, though she can’t think of any other, whatever word Giulia might choose. She lets him lead her back towards the river, turning left into the road that will take her to her own house. More police –
carabinieri
, this time – are standing in a small group at the corner. She wants to point them out to Martin, to see if he’s also noticed how many armed men are out this evening. But almost at once he is guiding her into the back room of a bar she’s never used, where Martin is clearly known. They sit down at a table in the corner, Martin taking off his hat and placing it on the chair beside him, Helen wondering if he’ll be driving home to his place near Latina that night or staying in Rome. He’s in no condition to drive, she thinks, as he orders a bottle of prosecco for them both. Perhaps she should offer him a bed. Then Giulia can find her with another man.
“How are you feeling?” he says, patting her hand.
Before, she’s bridled at this question, but with Martin it’s different. She thinks for a moment before she speaks. “I wish I knew. It’s so hard to know what to say. I don’t want to sound too brave, or too pathetic. Half the time I feel numb, which makes it worse when I think about him and the pain comes back.” She pulls a face and watches him fill their glasses. “I’ll survive.”
“It won’t be easy. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“What’s worse is that I feel I’m losing him all over again.”
“How’s that?”
“That last evening,” Helen says, “when you came round for dinner and I went to bed early, do you remember? You stayed for ages after I’d gone. I lay there. I could hear your voices, but not what you were saying. I asked Federico what you’d been talking about the next morning, but he wouldn’t say. It was so unlike him. Sometimes he wakes me up, you know, to tell me what’s been said. He was strange, I don’t know, cagey.” Her voice is urgent.
“Surely not,” says Martin. But she doesn’t believe him. He’s lying too.
“What do you know about this conference?” she says. “Is that what it is, Martin? Is that what he was hiding? He was up to something, wasn’t he?” She pauses. “I’ve found this thing he was writing, called Juggernaut.”
Martin looks relieved – she wonders why – and shakes his head. “I’ve no idea, Helen. He didn’t mention the conference to me that evening. I don’t know what he had in mind. I imagine it was just a conference.” After an awkward pause, he adds: “Juggernaut, did you say? That doesn’t sound like Federico.”
“It doesn’t, does it?” she says. “Fausto says he was planning some surprise. I suppose he may have been. He didn’t say anything to me.” She hears the hurt in her voice and stops, then empties her glass. After a moment, she starts talking again, as Martin fills both glasses up. “Do you think he ever slept with anyone else?” she asks Martin. “Apart from me?”
Martin waves the bottle towards the bar in a plaintive fashion. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “I don’t have any reason to think he did.”
“I know men talk about these things,” she says, although she can’t see Martin and Federico sharing that kind of intimacy, if that is what it is. She can’t imagine intimacy between men somehow. Was Federico ever intimate with Giacomo? Did they talk about me? What on earth would they have said?
“Because I have,” she says. She is close to tears, with relief and shame. She looks away when the barman brings over the bottle and opens it with an ironic flourish. Martin waves him off before he can fill their glasses. “I’ve been an awful wife,” she says. Martin reaches over to stroke her arm, embarrassed, knocking over her glass. He is sweeping the prosecco off the table with the flat of his hand when she says, “I feel I’ve let everyone down. I’ve always wanted to do the right thing and I’ve never really had any idea what that was. Not really. I’ve just flopped round from one thing to another. I’ve never really been convinced by anything I’ve done, whether it was the right thing or not. Is that normal? Not to be convinced? I’ve let people tell me what to do and then when I’ve done it they’ve always been disappointed in me. It’s never been enough. I’ve never been enough.”
She pauses. She wants Martin to speak, rebuff her in some way, but he carries on mopping up the spilt drink with paper napkins from the metal dispenser on the next table. After a moment, she continues. She feels as if she is speaking to herself, which gives her strength.
“Federico always made me feel I hadn’t understood. Years ago, just after we were married, we’d had dinner in this couple’s flat and the woman was sitting at her husband’s feet while he pontificated – I can’t remember what about – and she interrupted him to say she didn’t agree, he was wrong, with this little thread of a voice. It was obvious she’d been steeling herself to contradict him. I think she only did it because I was there, she felt ashamed of him in front of me. He was so boring, so full of himself. A dreadful man. And do you know what he did? He
patted
her on the head, I couldn’t believe it. He said that she didn’t really
know
enough to disagree, he’d explain it to her later. She just dissolved, it was awful, this tight little smile, but all she wanted to do was cry. He really thought he was being helpful, you see, and she knew that,
really
knew it, and there was no way out of it. She was stuck. And I despised her because Federico had never treated me like that; I wouldn’t have let him. I was absolutely convinced.”
She passes her ring finger through the trace of prosecco still left on the surface of the table, licks it dry, then clutches Martin’s damp hot hand in hers. “And now I wonder if I’m any better than she was.” She stares into Martin’s eyes, willing him not to look away. “Did he know, do you think? About me?”
Martin flinches. “I’m sure he didn’t.”
“I see,” says Helen. “I couldn’t bear it if he knew. Not now. Because I can’t explain it to him now.”
“He’d understand.”
“What? That I’d fucked his best friend to give myself a sense of purpose?”
“That’s not the whole truth,” says Martin.
“I’ve slept with Giacomo on and off for years. It started ages ago. But I was already with Federico when I did it. Not slept, exactly. Fucked. We fucked whenever we could, in the kitchen, in the back of cars. I don’t know why, or I didn’t then. I think I do now. I was with him just after Federico was shot, you know. I haven’t told anyone.” Apart from the magistrate, she thinks, with relief, who already seemed to know. And then there’s Giulia, who’s guessed.