The Collected Stories

‘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.’