lying naked in a wood, her even teeth ugly in a rictus, her white flesh as lifeless as the virgin modesty of the schoolgirl in the park. She hadn’t been like a nymphomaniac, or even a sophisticated woman, when she’d kissed his cheek good-night. Like a schoolgirl herself, she’d still been blind to the icy coldness that answered her naivete. Inept and academic, words he had written about the city which had claimed her slipped through his mind.
He left the American Consulate and slowly walked along the quay. The sun was hot, the traffic noisy. He crossed the street and looked down into the green water of the Arno, wondering if the dark shroud of Mrs Faraday’s life had floated away through a night. In the galleries of the Uffizi he would move from Annunciation to Annunciation, Simone Martini’s, Baldovinetti’s, Lorenzo di Credi’s. and all the others. He would catch a glimpse of her red coat in Santa Trinita, but the face would again be someone else’s. She would call out from a
He turned away from the river and at the same slow pace walked into the heart of the city. He sat outside a cafe in the Piazza della Repubblica, imagining her thoughts as she had lain in bed on that last night, smoking her cigarettes in the darkness. She had arrived at the happiest moment of love, when nothing was yet destroyed, when anticipation was a richness in itself. She’d thought about their walk in Maiano, how she’d bring the subject up again, how this time he’d say he’d be delighted. She’d thought about their being together in an apartment in the Palazzo Ricasoli, how this time it would be different. Already she had made up her mind: she would not ever return to the town where her husband managed a business. ‘I have never loved anyone like this,’ she whispered in the darkness.
In his hotel bedroom he shaved and had a bath and put on a suit that had just been pressed. In a way that had become a ceremony for him since the evening he had first waited for her there, he went at six o’clock to Doney’s. He watched the Americans drinking cocktails, knowing it was safe to be there because she would not suddenly arrive. He listened to the music she’d said she liked, and mourned her as a lover might.
Her mother considered it ill-bred to eat sweets on the street, and worse to eat fruit or ice-cream. Her mother was tidy, and required tidiness in others. She peeled an apple in a particular way, keeping the peel in one long piece, as though it were important to do so. Her mother rarely smiled.
Her father, now dead, had been a lexicographer: a small, abstracted man who would not have noticed the eating of food on the street, not even slices of meat or peas from their pods. Most of the time he hadn’t noticed Helena either. He died on her eighth birthday.
Her mother had always ruled the household. Tall and greyly dressed, she had achieved her position of command without resort to anger or dictatorial speech; she did not say much, and what she did say she never found necessary to repeat. A look informed the miscreant, indicating a button undone, an unwashed hand. Helena, possessing neither brother nor sister, was the only miscreant.
The house where she and her mother lived was in a south-western suburb of London. Next door on one side there was a fat widow, Mrs Archingford, who dyed her hair a garish shade of red. On the other an elderly couple were for ever bickering in their garden. Helena’s mother did not acknowledge the presence of Mrs Archingford, who arrived at the house next door when Helena was nine; but she had written a note to the elderly man to request him to keep his voice down, a plea that caused him to raise it even more.
Helena played mainly by herself. Beneath the heavy mahogany of the dining-room table she cut the hair of Samson while he slept, then closed her eyes while the table collapsed around her, its great ribbed legs and the polished surface from which all meals were eaten splintering into fragments. The multitude in the temple screamed, their robes wet with blood. Children died, women wept.
‘What are you doing, Helena?’ her mother questioned her. ‘Why are you muttering?’
Helena told a lie, saying she’d been singing, because she felt ashamed: her mother would not easily understand if she mentioned Delilah. She played outside on a narrow concrete path that ran between the rockery and the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden, where no one could see her from the windows. ‘Now, here’s a book,’ her mother said, finding her with snails arranged in a semicircle. Helena washed her hands, re-tied the ribbon in the hair, and sat in the sitting-room to read
Few people visited the house, for Helena’s mother did not go in for friends. But once a year Helena was put in a taxi-cab which drove her to her grandparents on her father’s side, the only grandparents she knew about. They were a grinning couple who made a fuss of her, small like her father had been, always jumping up and down at the tea-table, passing plates of buttered bread to her and telling her that tea tasted nicer with sugar in it, pressing meringues and cake on her. Helena’s mother always put a bowl beside Helena’s bed on the nights there’d been a visit to the grandparents.
Her mother was the first teacher Helena had. In the dining-room they would sit together at the table with reading-books and copy-books and history and geography books. When she began to go to school she found herself far in advance of other children of her age, who because of that regarded her with considerable suspicion. ‘Our little genius,’ Miss Random used to say, meaning it cheerfully but making Helena uncomfortable because she knew she wasn’t clever in the least. ‘I don’t consider that woman can teach at all,’ her mother said after Helena had been at the school for six weeks and hadn’t learnt anything new. So the dining-room lessons began again, in conjunction with the efforts of Miss Random. ‘Pathetic, we have to say’: her mother invested this favourite opinion with an importance and a strength, condemning not just Miss Random but also the milkman who whistled while waiting on the doorstep, and Mrs Archingford’s attempt at stylish hair. Her mother employed a series of charwomen but was maddened by their chatter and ended by doing the housework herself, even though she found anything like that exceedingly irksome. She far preferred to sit in the dark study, continuing the work that had been cut short by death. In the lifetime of Helena’s father her mother had assisted in the study and Helena had imagined her parents endlessly finding words in books and dissecting them on paper. Before the death conversations at mealtimes usually had to do with words. ‘Fluxion?’ she remembered her father saying, and when she shrugged her mother tightened her lips, her glance lingering on the shrug long after its motion had ceased.
