Читать книгу Innocence - Julian Barnes - Страница 13

7

In the following year, after she had left school for good, Chiara asked her father for ten thousand lira and went to a small dressmaker, recommended (as a relation by marriage) by the barber in the courtyard. Even here she met with some opposition.

‘Yes, but no one else is wearing them like this, it will have no style, think how it will look from the back.’

‘I shan’t have to see it from the back,’ said Chiara. If there’s something hopelessly wrong with me, she thought, it might as well be wrong the way I want it. Really all I need is not to have to worry. For the first time in all eternity I shan’t be at school in May. I shall go to the Maggio Musicale, I shall go to every concert, I shall listen to every note.

The two dresses, one black and one white, were brought round to 5, Piazza Limbo by the dressmaker in person. ‘I have told the Contessina that I have done my utmost, but she must wear something round her neck.’

‘Oh, no one will look at me.’

‘Think a little,’ said Maddalena. ‘You must have noticed that during a concert people have nowhere to look and stare first of all at the ceiling, then at their hands, then at the four corners of the hall, not, for some reason, at the performers, then finally at each other’s clothes. Certainly the black dress would look better with my diamonds.’ Giancarlo, who had come into the room, pointed out that she no longer had any.

‘I give you my word of honour,’ said Chiara, ‘I’ll go to the Central Market tomorrow and get some beads, some black glass beads, I like them.’

‘They would not be suitable,’ cried the dressmaker. ‘They would not be real.’

‘Well, but glass beads are real.’

‘So are diamonds,’ said Giancarlo, ‘not more or less real, but equally so.’

There was a small diamond necklace which had belonged to Cesare’s mother, and which had been deposited, when she died, in a bank in the Via Strozzi. Either Chiara’s father or her aunt must have given Cesare a hint on the subject, because he wrote (he was not much of a letter-writer) to her to tell her that he remembered the necklace, but had forgotten where it was; she could have it, if she wanted it. ‘He means, I suppose, that he will arrange about the insurance if you want to take it out for some concert or other,’ said the Count. ‘Meanwhile, your aunt keeps talking about these two dresses of yours.’

‘Does she think they’re ugly?’ Chiara cried.

‘She wonders whether they will make you happy.’

The necklace arrived from the bank in a canvas package, sewn up with linen thread. It had not been opened since 1943, when poor Aunt Lisa had died from dysentery. When Chiara had undone the thread she found a sealed envelope addressed to Cesare, in Aunt Lisa’s handwriting, which she put back at once.

The little diamonds, square-cut, glittered valiantly, each with its outer and hidden inner drops of pure light. Annunziata, who had seen them before, was disappointed. She remembered them as larger, and making a better effect.