Читать книгу Tales of Persuasion - Philip Hensher - Страница 8

‘No, I don’t speak the lingo at all,’ she would say. ‘Just bono giorno, honey, bono sera, that’s all it takes. What’s the point? They rob you anyway, rob you blind. Take Paolo …’

Those Florentine afternoons. And afterwards I was always the same. Some people are always on stage. Most are destined always to be in the audience. Realizing it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.

I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.

It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.

‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’

(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)

‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.

‘I hope so too,’ I said.

After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.

‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.

In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.

‘I’ve found out about the FW,’ Margaret said one day, popping her head round the door of my office. ‘She’s not an FW, a footballer’s wife, I mean. She’s a lettrice.’

‘A what?’ I said.

‘A lettrice in the Italian department of the university,’ Margaret said immaculately. ‘The equivalent of a lectrice in French, Lektorin, I believe, in German. She’s come to teach them Italian.’

‘It’s not a big department,’ I said. In the museum, we liked to think we had a relationship with the university that extended to sending Christmas cards to given departments, as long as no Bunsen burners were involved, at which point snobbery came into consideration. We did not know them, but we went to their concerts and we very well might have known them personally. Margaret, for instance, constantly referred to the professor of English literature, a man she had never spoken to and who was not called Percy as ‘Percy’.

‘No, it’s not,’ Margaret said. ‘She’s the first time they’ve been able to afford a lettrice – they’re cock-a-hoop about it.’

‘Where does the budget come from, though?’ I said knowingly.

‘They’ll have got sponsorship from an Italian company,’ Margaret said. ‘Fiat, no, I tell a lie, it’s Buitoni.’

‘They make ravioli,’ I said.

‘They’re sponsoring all sorts, these days,’ Margaret said. ‘The Hallé had a bel canto evening in Manchester and there was a reception at the town hall here after – the whole orchestra went. Oysters, I heard, the cor anglais player was laid prostrate for a week.’

‘Only to be expected,’ I said.

‘But they’ve funded a lettrice for the Italian department here as well,’ Margaret said. ‘I found out she’s called Silvia. Do you think they’d be interested in giving us money, Buitoni, I mean?’

‘What for?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, that’s your pigeon, isn’t it? Something Italian. Futurismo. Let’s have a meeting. She’s living with the professor of theology. She comes from Cremona. Ah, la bella Italia,’ she finished, clacking her hands in the shape of imaginary castanets, for some geographically inaccurate but festive reason.

‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, giggling.

‘You know who I mean, the Australian professor of theology, not that there’s more than one,’ Margaret said. ‘Renting a room off him. Must dash.’

She dashed.

As often happens in life, once you have acquired a certain body of information about a thing, a place, a person, it is impossible not to enter into a more active relationship with them. Once Margaret had told me all of this about Silvia, it was inevitable that I would meet her very soon. It is something to do with the quality of the gaze. Once you know that a woman lives in the spare room of the Australian professor of theology, that she comes from Cremona, a town that, though famous for violin makers, only called up in my more slapdash mind the idea of a vast pudding, creamy and lemony at once, a city, more realistically, of pale yellow churches surrounded by a perfectly circular crimped wall, the warm colour of baked pastry … To be in possession of all this knowledge, both factual and fanciful, and yet to know that she knows nothing about you, not even your name, such a situation must engender a curious, knowing, unequal gaze.

I finally met her in the museum. Having seen her only at concerts, I stared somewhat, trying for a second to establish her context. She was looking with apparent enchantment at a glass case of ammonites. She felt my gaze; she looked up.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You go to concerts, don’t you? I recognize you.’

So we started to become friends. Three days later, we were sitting in the museum café.

‘But you work here?’ Silvia said. ‘That’s marvellous. I love this museum, so wonderful. In Italy we don’t have these things, so beautiful, you know?’

A day or two later we were standing, as we had arranged, in front of a stuffed model of a sabre-toothed tiger. It had been patched together forty years ago out of old bits of dog and plaster fangs. Its skin was split and leaking kapok. Its fur was bald and patchy. Underneath, a handwritten notice in fading ink told us that possibly ten thousand years ago this animal had possibly roamed the countryside hereabouts, possibly.

‘Look, a woolly mammoth,’ Silvia said, moving on. ‘Or the tooth thereof. You would not know that I was not English, yes?’

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘But you really like all this stuff?’

‘Oh, yes, lovely,’ Silvia said. ‘Where do you live? You live alone?’

‘Quite near here,’ I said. I went on to tell her – there was not much to tell, but I told her about the rented flat at the top of a big Victorian house, converted for four single people by the Irish doctor who owned it; the dingy communal spaces, with the floral wallpaper no one had chosen, the half-dead spider plants, the solitary undusted china ornaments, Irish cast-offs, a chipped and smiling Edwardian lady in her china skirts at each turning of the stair, the mail for departed tenants piling up in the hall.

‘Oh, that sounds nice,’ Silvia said dismissively. She abruptly looked at her watch – ‘Heavens,’ she said. The watch was so tiny and so heavily jewelled you could not imagine using it to tell the time from, but Silvia said, ‘I nearly forgot. I call my mother.’

‘Not in the museum,’ I said, gesturing at the woolly mammoth’s tooth. But no one was around, and Silvia whipped her mobile phone out pooh-poohingly.

‘Mamma,’ she said. ‘Come stai? … Bene, bene. Fa freddo – sta piovendo … Si, si, sempre. E Papa? … E Luca sta bene? … E Luigi? … E Roberto? … Mauro anche? … Massimo? … Va bene, va bene, ci parliamo domani, va bene? … Ciao ciao, Mamma.’

She switched off. I later learnt that Silvia made this exact phone call, at exactly the same time, every single day of her life. She said that it was raining in England, she found out what the weather was like in Italy, and she asked after the health of her father and, in order, her five unstoppable brothers, Luca, Luigi, Roberto, Mauro and Massimo, twenty-two years old down to five, before promising to telephone at the same time the next day for the same purpose. It seemed strange to me, who in the English way called his mother once a fortnight or so. I rarely had much more to say than Silvia, but the embarrassment happened much less frequently. Silvia, I guessed at the time, might be homesick. That was not, however, the case.

And a week or so later, sitting in a pub in the early evening, she continued this conversation about her room and told me about the Australian professor of theology. For some reason, I had thought that he was a single man, but I learnt that he had a wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. By the end of that evening, Silvia had invited me to dinner, the day after next, at their house.

‘I would say tomorrow night but, you know, it’s not my house. I can’t tell them until tomorrow morning, I need to give them a day or two, you understand? Listen, you like Italian food? I cook you an Italian dinner.’

All afternoon the next day I felt feverishly burgeoning, down in my windowless office at the museum. I felt like a nineteenth-century girl in a Swedish film, throwing off my corsets and discovering my sexuality.

‘We missed you,’ Margaret said, sidling through the door with a clipboard.

‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘It was the— Christ, what was it?’

‘The education and outreach committee’s budget meeting,’ she said. ‘It’s been in all our diaries for weeks.’

‘I knew there was something,’ I said.

‘There was indeed,’ she said. ‘There was something, you’re right there.’

‘That’s a catastrophe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.’

‘You’ll get the minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’

Of course she was right: people missed meetings all the time. It wasn’t that she was concerned about me. She could just tell that something new had come into my life; it would have taken a bright guess to alight upon Silvia, but Margaret, hovering in the door of my office, could tell it was something of that sort. She just wanted to know. I just wanted not to tell her.

The professor of theology was called Professor Quincy. He lived, I discovered, in an absurd villa in the opulent inner suburbs of the city. The street was lined with vast, ancient beeches, never intended by the Victorian planners to grow to such a size. Their foliage met and struggled overhead, and the pavement writhed and buckled over the roots like a late chapter of Moby-Dick. In other cities, to live in a Victorian house of this sort would require some wealth. These houses had been built for ruinous, grasping magnates, but a hundred years on, few people in the city had much money at all, and they were lived in by mere professors of theology. Quincy’s house had crenellations, battlements in the local orange stone, stained glass in the oddest places. In the street, two small girls were playing an unnecessarily picturesque game of pat-a-cake, slapping each other’s palms fiercely. As I passed them, they stopped and silently watched me. Silvia had given me the address, but had not offered to pick me up and take me there. I rang the doorbell, holding a box of chocolates and a bunch of carnations, which, I realized too late, were artificially dyed into lurid colours, the sort that would probably last in the recipient’s second-worst vase for several weeks.

A dog hurled itself at the other side of the door, yelling furiously. I stepped back into the neglected border, tangling myself in some dead vines. As I was pulling my foot out, a shape appeared through the stained glass, a feminine shape, though too short and dumpy to be Silvia’s. The girl – the Quincy daughter, it must be – rattled the door free from its chains. It swung open. I quailed back. The dog, still bellowing with rage, threw itself past me and ran directly to the front gate. It continued barking at the street, which was empty of anyone except the two small girls, who ignored it.

‘He does that,’ the girl said. ‘He wants you to think he was barking at something behind you all the time. It’s really that he doesn’t want to offend you, but the temptation to bark, it’s just too much for him. He’s called Joseph. He’s got very good manners, really. He’ll come back when he thinks he’s made his point.’

‘Hello,’ I said, going in. The hall of the house was red as raw liver, the heavy, elaborate wallpaper torn away into yellowing scars and hung randomly with pictures, knocked off the level by the passing human traffic: cheap old prints, a painting by a child, solidly framed, a watercolour of Derwentwater, a disconcerting and conical nude that might be of either sex – the acquisitions of rainy days, the findings in junk shops, the exhibitions of local painting groups, of arguments concluded with a dashing purchase. Something was clinging about my feet. I looked down. It was a man’s walking sock. I kicked it off discreetly, trying to appear as if I were shaking myself from rain.

‘Are you a friend of the Lettuce?’ the girl said. ‘Silvia, I mean. We call her the Lettuce because she’s a lettrice, sorry, not very funny, I know. I’m Natasha.’

‘I’m Mark,’ a medium-sized boy said, hanging over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’

I introduced myself.

‘Why have you got flowers? You’ve not come for dinner, have you? No one said anyone was coming for dinner.’ The boy came downstairs, slouching from side to side.

‘Yes, they did,’ Natasha said. ‘Silvia said, this morning.’

‘Oh,’ the boy said. He approached me, looked at me with amusement and, with a considered gesture, wiped his wet and dribbling nose noisily along the sleeve of his home-knitted red sweater. I looked at his clothes, and at Natasha’s, with compassion. They were the clothes of the children of theology professors the whole world over. ‘I’m precocious. Do you know what that means?’

‘I would say that being able to describe yourself as precocious at your age is a fair definition of it.’

‘No,’ Mark said. ‘That’s not really correct. That would be an instance of precocity, and not a definition of it.’

I agreed.

‘Come through,’ a voice called. I followed the children into what proved to be the kitchen. I wondered whether I was expected. From the ceiling, what seemed to be a week’s washing was hanging on a wooden frame, the frills and collapses of much-washed intimates like some natural phenomenon of drip and accretion. On the kitchen worktop, a pile of unsorted socks threatened to fall into a bowl of salad. The only orderly thing in the kitchen seemed to be five neatly labelled recycling boxes, and they were near overflowing.

‘Hi,’ I said. Silvia was at the stove. You noticed the things of the kitchen before the people in it.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, half turning from the pot she was peering into. ‘You found the house.’

‘Yes,’ I said. For some reason, I could not walk forward and offer her the awful flowers. With the terrible clarity of a crashing driver I envisaged the small but ugly scene as Silvia accepted the dyed carnations from my hand and I struggled to remember what on earth you say when handing over such a thing, and I stood there mute. But then Natasha took it from my hand, gently but persuasively, and removed it, and I never saw it again.

In time other people came in, and sat at the table. ‘This is my mother,’ Natasha said; she seemed to have taken over the job of hostess. Conversation of a sort came and went. ‘This is my father,’ she said.

‘We’ve never met,’ I said firmly to the professor, bedraggled from some labour in the study, or so it seemed. ‘But I know you by reputation.’

‘Admired him from afar,’ Mark said. ‘Stalked him for months, drawn by an inexplicable fascination.’

‘You can behave yourself,’ the professor said. ‘Company.’

‘This,’ the girl said, with pained distaste, ‘is my brother Kevin.’

‘I prefer to be called Benedict,’ the boy said, coming in through the garden door. He was dressed unusually for a seventeen-year-old, in a striped boating jacket and a lopsided bow tie. I wondered what school he went to, and whether he risked such an appearance in the playground. ‘After the saint and founder of the well-known order.’

‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.

‘How long is this going to go on for?’ Natasha said.

‘The Church has endured solidly for two thousand years,’ Kevin/Benedict said. ‘I see no reason why the name Benedict should not endure one more human lifetime.’

‘Yours, Mummy, he means,’ Natasha said.

‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said.

‘He got religion,’ Natasha said. ‘He went to the church down the road, the ordinary one, and got religion. He was always awful, you know. But then he decided that wasn’t religion enough for him. So he went on to another church, which was more religion. And then he ended up on his knees dreaming of the day when he can suck the Pope off.’

‘Natasha,’ Professor Quincy said.

‘Well,’ Natasha said. ‘And it was then that he got the voice to go with it.’ It was true that Kevin/Benedict talked in a way unlike the two other children, who had a faint, attractive Australian hovering in their voice. Kevin/Benedict was conspicuously posh in his manner, sounding as if he were working up to announcing Saint-Saëns on Radio 3 in hushed tones. ‘It won’t last. He’s signed all sorts of pledges, alcohol, smoking, chewing gum, but they won’t last and then he’ll not be religious any more. Temptation, you see.’

Kevin/Benedict lowered his head, faintly smiling, pustular. He looked like the Book of Job, and you could imagine him spottily going to and fro on the earth, walking up and down on it, forgiving everyone in a pimply manner.

‘Would our guest like to say grace?’ Kevin/Benedict said.

I looked at him with astonishment.

‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said. I agreed. I had never said grace in my life, and had probably heard it said no more than ten times. ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t know what would be the appropriate thing.’

‘Well, shall I?’ Kevin/Benedict said.

‘If you’re quick about it,’ Silvia said. ‘My pasta doesn’t wait for no one, not God, neither.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ Kevin/Benedict began. The rest of the family began eating, and, after a moment, so did I. ‘Thank you for a delicious dinner, which we can eat, conscious of the fact that many in this world, many even in this city, not a mile from where we sit, have no ravioli to eat, nor sugo all’amatriciana –’

‘Very good, Benedict,’ Professor Quincy said, through a mouthful of dinner.

‘– with which to adorn their ravioli, and so we give thanks that we are so fortunate as to enjoy the fruits of the pasta-maker and the mincing machine, free of worries, and taking pleasure in good company, and new friends around the family circle –’

‘He means you,’ Silvia said. ‘No, don’t use the bread, bread with pasta, that’s terrible, terrible.’

‘– and thinking all the time of how through the good things of the table our different lands and cultures are brought together in happiness and enjoyment in the unity of mankind and the love of God, amen.’ He opened his eyes and raised his head, murderously. ‘You’ve all finished.’

‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘I was hungry. I wasn’t going to let it go cold.’

‘I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said conversationally. ‘It must be of considerable antiquity.’

‘Yup, must be,’ Natasha said.

I was smiling and nodding like crazy at Professor Quincy. I had been aiming the observation at the professor of theology.

‘Pa,’ Mark said.

‘Hmm?’ Professor Quincy said. ‘Oh – you said something. Sorry, you were saying?’

‘I was saying, I wonder where the practice of saying grace comes from,’ I said.

‘Oh, right,’ the professor said, swatting a fly circling his head. ‘It was one of those English things where you’re really asking some kind of question. I thought you were just talking.’

Silvia got up, collecting the plates, as if inadequately appreciated. I was rather hoping for some more pasta. It was jolly good. My thanks were effusive, and strange at this family kitchen table.

‘Grace, Pa,’ Mark said.

‘Are we still talking about grace? To tell you the truth, I’m off work, chum,’ the professor said. ‘I like to stop the theologizing at six, if I can. Let a fellow eat his grub. I’ve met people like you before, think I like theology so much I want to talk about it all the time. What’s this, Silvia?’

‘Agnello,’ Silvia said, bringing a vast and incinerated joint, perhaps a shoulder, to the table, half buried in carrots.

‘Looks yummy,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t like theology at all. You want to know how I got lured into it? I’ll tell you.’

‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said, but rather with relish, and the children’s eyes were shining. You could tell this was their favourite performance.

‘Do tell,’ I said.

‘You start off in year nine at school,’ Professor Quincy said. ‘And they say to you, “All right, what do you want to do? Do you want to go on with history, or do you want to do Sanskrit – because the Sydney public schools, they offer that now, these days – or do you want to be doing biblical studies or RE, as they’d be calling it? Now I tell you, I grew up in Australia, you know. So history in Australia is not much to be writing home about. And my old mum – your granny in Sydney who killed the funnel-web with the ping-pong bat, kids, I’m talking about – she said, “Do what you’re good at. A qualification’s a qualification.” So I do RE and I get the top marks in it because, to be frank with you, it’s not all that difficult to do well in RE. Well, the school says to me, “Do what you’re good at,” so I carry on with the old RE, and before you know it, there I am at Sydney University, which is one of the most distinguished universities in the world, as I’m sure you know, because you don’t strike me as one of those stupid snobs that England specializes in, and my degree, blow me down, it’s RE still, only they don’t call it that by now. It’s called theology.

‘Now my professor-lady at Sydney University, she takes me under her wing, because I’m a bright lad, and I pick up the old Hebrew for the Old Testament, and I pick up the old Greek for the New Testament, and she says to me, “What about taking it a bit further, because you know, my dear, it fits you for all sorts of things a degree in theology? And I say, “Like what?” And she says, “Well, you could become a priest,” to which I say, “No, thanks, love.” And I say, “Like what else?” And she says, “Hmm.” And it turns out that the other thing it turns you out for, fits you for marvellously, it’s doing more degrees in bloody theology. So then she says to me, “I’ve got an idea for something you can write about for your doctorate, son.” So, being a bit wet behind the ears, I say, “What’s that, then?” And she says, “Well, I reckon that there’s this book in the Bible called the Book of Kings – I don’t expect you to know of it, son – and I reckon, if you look at it, there’s bits that’s been written by one fellow and bits that’s been written by another fellow. Well,” she says, “I reckon that the bits that were written by the other fellow, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were written by a woman and not a fellow at all.”

‘So I says, “Why do you think that, then?” And she says, “You go and write your thesis and tell me why. And I tell you what, call the first fellow P and the other fellow Q.” So there it was, and here I am, and for thirty years, I’ve been writing about this nutty old girl called the Q narrator in the Book of Kings and no one else believes in her, and if she existed, I don’t know why you’d think she was a woman, and if she was, I guess she was fairly typical of her time and place, which means that she struggled with a major facial hair problem and took a bath maybe once in her life, like by accident. And she seems a bit slow on the uptake, because I tell you, the bits she wrote, she’s missed the point a bit, I reckon. And it’s taken me thirty years to work out that I hate a prehistoric old girl called Q who never existed, and I hate the Book of Kings, and I hate theology and, son, I’m not that keen on God in the first place. You ever think, we all end up doing the one thing – the one thing, mind – guaranteed to make you want to puke every day of your life?’

‘Yay,’ Natasha said. ‘Listen to your father, Kev. He knows about God.’

‘But God knows more about him,’ Kevin/Benedict said, placing his knife and fork fastidiously parallel.

Mrs Quincy put her knife and fork down too, in a furious clatter. ‘If you don’t stop it now, this second,’ she said, with real venom, to her son, ‘you can go and sit on the naughty step.’

Professor Quincy’s story – obviously a much-repeated one – had cheered him up. It cheers most people up to tell the story of their life, particularly if you can reduce it to well-paid catastrophe. He set about his lamb, now rather cold-looking, with beard-smearing gusto.

‘No no no no no no no no no,’ Silvia said. ‘You can’t say everyone hates what they do. Look at him. He works in the museum, he loves it.’

‘I don’t love it exactly,’ I said, unheard. ‘My job. That was a lovely dinner.’

‘The naughty step,’ Natasha said, in stages. Her face was purple; she had been in choking hilarity for a minute and a half. ‘The naughty step.’

‘The naughty step,’ Mark said, in solemn tones. ‘Do you hear that? Kevin?’

‘Benedict,’ Kevin/Benedict said, all fight out of him.

The next morning I lay in bed, listening to the radio wind itself up into early fits of irritation and denunciation. The specific repetitions of government ministers wound in and out of my dreams as I dropped in and out of thin layers of sleep, and the faces of old friends looked into my eyes, telling me with concern about dangers to the environment. I thought about the night before. Silvia’s vividness had been lost somewhere in that family, and her spotlit personality subsumed in the execution of her fine national dishes. Most of what I had said to her had been mere compliments on her cooking. I might as well have told her how well she managed to be an Italian woman. But perhaps that was right. I realized, after all, that I had no concept of Silvia apart from her nationality. She was just Italy in Yorkshire, an idea complete enough in itself that it sounded like the title of a symphonic poem by Delius. No nation is as interesting as a human being. So I was late in the museum, and Margaret, loitering round the eland in the foyer with a pen on a string round her neck, had a word for me. ‘So we’re friends with the professor of theology now,’ she said. ‘Eating dinner round there. You live dangerously, I must say.’

There was an unexpectedly hostile glitter in her eyes. She’d been preparing herself to coruscate lightly over the details of my expanding social life.

‘Dangerously?’ I said.

‘I’ve heard they use the dog’s basin as a pudding bowl,’ Margaret said. ‘If there’s more than a given number of guests. It’s said that many an unwelcome guest’s found “Bonzo” written at the bottom of the cherry trifle when, naturally, it would be too late to do anything about it.’

Sherry trifle, I silently and irritably corrected. ‘No, it was very nice. Silvia cooked. It was very good.’

Margaret, huffing off, was premature in her suggestion, but after that evening, I did rather take to the Quincys. Less predictably, they seemed rather to take to me. I did my grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s, a branch I’d always thought far too big for my bedsit needs. Like a child, I went up and down every aisle, even the sock aisle, generally finding something necessary in each one, and a few days down the line generally throwing out a pile of decaying compost, the evidently perishable remains of my excessive shop.

Going round a supermarket, one too big for your needs, is like a sad evening in front of the television, hurtling through the channels and seeing the same faces recurring, harassed and increasingly familiar. The OAP you greet absently like an old friend by the time you reach the whisky was a new face as recently as the organic peas. A White Queen-like figure was floating in and out of my awareness at the far ends of aisles, only doubtfully recognizable. But I did know her: it was the professor’s wife. She was only vague because she was out of her initial context. I was standing in front of the milk display when Mrs Quincy hailed me, coming alongside with a gigantic and nearly filled trolley, like a docking liner.

‘You look lost and confused,’ she said, hoisting four six-pint cartons of milk into her trolley, the shopping of a materfamilias with milk puddings to make.

‘I was looking for milk,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re in the right place,’ Mrs Quincy said.

‘No,’ I said. I gestured feebly. ‘I only want a pint of milk. Just for my cup of coffee in the mornings. They’ve only got enormous ones.’

She admitted this to be true. There were the gargantuan cartons suitable for her needs, but nothing smaller.

‘Well, that’s no good,’ she said. She looked around for an assistant. ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes. I mean you. Yes. Hello. Thank you.’

The assistant who came over unwillingly was a tall youth. He might have been a sixth-former doing a holiday job.

‘Do you really not have any milk,’ Mrs Quincy said, ‘in any size smaller than this? My friend here only wants to buy a single pint.’

‘It’s really not that important,’ I said, Mrs Quincy contradicting me. ‘I could buy a pint at the newsagent’s round the corner.’

‘At considerable inconvenience to yourself and some increased expense, I imagine,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Pay no attention. Now. Do you have one-pint sizes of – what, full-fat milk? You should drink semi-skinned. You get used to it in no time at all, three weeks, max.’

‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

There was a pause before the boy realized we were waiting for his answer.

‘We’ve run out,’ he said. ‘The delivery comes at three, I think.’

‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘How can you have run out? I want to talk to the manager. Fetch me the manager immediately.’

The boy disappeared.

‘The trouble with the English,’ Mrs Quincy said very distinctly, attracting some attention from passing shoppers, ‘is that they never complain. Or they never complain at the right time. They sit around whining endlessly when nothing can be done about a problem, and then when they’re offered the chance, they sit quietly. I’ve often noticed it. If you don’t say anything, you don’t get anything.’

‘How’s the professor?’ I said, in order not to respond. ‘And the children? I so enjoyed dinner the other night.’

‘Oh, God,’ Mrs Quincy said cryptically. ‘Here he comes.’

She meant the manager, not the professor. The manager looked, frankly, too grand to be troubled with these things. He was approaching in his suit and tie, the original boy tagging along behind, his face purply embarrassed. He had never had to ask the manager anything directly before, and was now wondering, I guessed, whether he should have done so. But Mrs Quincy had worked herself up into a lather over someone else’s dairy purchases, and she was going to have her moment.

‘I understand that there’s a problem here,’ the manager said.

‘There is a problem,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘Now, look at these shelves. You have six-pint containers of milk. You have four-pint containers of milk. And those are very well and good for someone such as I, with a family who drinks milk all day long. But look again and ask yourself whether you see single pints of milk. No. You do not. And for many people a single pint of milk is what they need. Now, this is my friend and he lives on his own. He lives in a bedsit. He has few friends and he never cooks. He lives on takeaways and similarly unhealthy things. But he likes a cup of coffee in the morning or sometimes a cup of tea. And it takes him probably five days to finish even one pint of milk. What is he going to do with a gigantic carton like this? He would never finish it. He would find it turning to cheese before he was halfway through it. And he’s paid four times as much as he wanted to for it, which, considering that he’s living on a very restricted budget, is not a trivial matter. Listen to me. Where are the single pints of milk for the single lonely people in this town? Where are they?’

‘We’ve got delivery problems,’ the manager said, as I made faint noises of demurral and objection to this poignant but honestly insulting account of my life.

‘What rubbish,’ Mrs Quincy said. She was delighted. ‘Now come along with me. Have you finished here? Will you ever. Do your shopping.’ (Over the shoulder.) ‘Here. Again?’

‘Well,’ I began, drawn along in Mrs Quincy’s wake.

‘The thing is,’ Mrs Quincy said, once we were in her car – it seemed a done deal that I was being whisked off by her, though whether she was generously offering me a lift home or abducting me was unclear, ‘Silvia’s really a sort of family. Well, not family at all. But Richard, my husband, you know, she’s the neighbour of a cousin of his in Florence.’

‘In Florence?’ I said. ‘I thought she came from Cremona.’

‘Comes from Cremona, ran away, very naughty, but it’s all made up now, lives in Florence in a flat next to Aunty Paulina. I say aunty, but let me get this straight. Richard’s sister’s second husband, his stepmother, it was her niece. Half-niece, is there such a thing, because of course their mother, who was married to the stepmother’s brother and used to be a McIntyre, one of the Mount Isa McIntyres, if you can imagine such a thing, she met a Melbourne dentist and moved to Melbourne with relief and married him, and that was Paulina’s father. Didn’t work out but she stayed on in Melbourne, can’t think why. This is all ancient history now, though. Paulina must be sixty if she’s a day.’

‘Look out,’ I said, as Mrs Quincy jumped a red light.

‘Oh, they get out of your way,’ Mrs Quincy said, on this occasion correctly. ‘Well, Paulina gets in touch out of the blue in July, which is very odd, because the only occasion we ever hear from her is Christmas, a card and a bottle of fruit in mustard-flavoured syrup, which no one will ever eat and you can’t in all conscience give it to anyone else, they’ve been piling up in the larder for years. Not even to a jumble sale. I tried.’

‘So you heard from Paulina,’ I said, seeing that Mrs Quincy had lost her train.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Quincy said. ‘And she says her next-door neighbour, a nice girl, she’s coming to England and not just England, to here, to be a lettuce in the university as the kids will insist on saying, not funny, and can we help her find somewhere to live? So Silvia comes and we let her have the top floor because, frankly, we just don’t use it. I can’t even remember the last time I went up there. The children tell me she’s made it quite nice now. And, as you see, she’s no trouble and she cooks up a storm, so she stayed. She was in West Side Story.’

‘Silvia?’ I said.

‘No, Aunty Paulina,’ Mrs Quincy said. Then – she must have told this before, and often been told in response that her listeners had been in Oliver!, back at school – she said, ‘The real one, I mean. The famous movie. Here we are.’

We were at the Quincys’ house. I went in, carrying half of Mrs Quincy’s bags and my own one; she was talking all the way. And I stayed all afternoon.

Silvia’s hours at the university were irregular, and when, over the next three months, I saw her or I did not see her, it was when I was at the Quincys’ house. I learnt more about her from Mrs Quincy and from Natasha than I did from our occasional independent outings. I did not suggest going to a concert with her. I knew that Margaret could hardly cope with my defection from her side to Silvia’s, and with Margaret I contrived different outings altogether. With her sensible shoes on, Margaret came with me on buses out to the national park and hiked in well-planned ways. We hiked not there and back, but in great twelve-mile circuits round entire dales, with a stop in a pub halfway round, greeting all other walkers on the way, if they seemed from their dress to be taking it as seriously as we were.

Silvia’s clothes alone would have disbarred her from any such outing. Our dates tended to be cultural, short of Margaret’s territory of the concert hall. The heavily subsidized theatre in the town was safe, a concrete bunker with an apron stage and, every so often, Sir Derek Jacobi. It changed its offering only every six weeks – a period that thoroughly exhausted the fascination the city might have cherished for Goethe’s Egmont, say. There was a university theatre, taken up with student productions and local amateur dramatic societies. The cinema of the town fastidiously refused ever to screen anything that had cost its makers less than thirty million dollars. We managed, somehow, though we left a lot of offerings halfway through.

It was over dinner after one of these unsuccessful outings that Silvia made her point. The offering had been a number about people falling in love against the odds and having to run through cities before being reunited at the check-in desk. We had stayed to the uplifting end. Silvia was silent and scowling all the way to the restaurant.

‘I’m going back to Florence the week after next,’ she said, not quite looking at me.

‘Not Cremona?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My flat in Florence. It’s empty over the summer. I’m going there.’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘You like Mrs Quincy, and you like Natasha, isn’t it?’ she said, quite emphatically.

The restaurant was Italian, after its own fashion. It was not my choice – I would have hesitated to suggest it to Silvia. Even more oddly, we had been there before, and she had spent the whole evening denouncing everything about it, from the waiter’s pronunciation of bruschetta to his kindly suggestion of a cappuccino to finish with. ‘They’re catering for what people want,’ I had mildly protested. ‘There’s no point in being Tuscan purists round here.’ But it was a terrible restaurant; everything, to the outer limits of plausibility, had been improved with the addition of cream, and unfamiliar foodstuffs had crept into unlikely dishes. In all of this I had been instructed by Silvia – I mean, I wouldn’t have known that rule about not having pineapple with pasta – but her mood of denunciation this evening was only encouraged by the restaurant. Its purpose was directed straight at me.

‘No, not yet,’ she said to the waitress, returning to her theme.

‘No, we’re not ready to order,’ she said again, five minutes later. ‘And the other thing …’

‘Listen, I will call you when we’re ready,’ she said, still later, as the waitress sauntered over.

‘All the same to us, love,’ the waitress said. ‘We’re not busy. I’m enjoying it, to tell you the truth.’

But all the same, when we were done, I had agreed to come with Silvia to Florence in two weeks’ time. The denunciation, I had been expecting for some time – the slammed door of the Quincys’ kitchen, the scowls and the increasingly rebarbative style of her outfits when we met. I hadn’t been prepared for this outcome.

The promise was easily made but, after all, I had a job. Silvia, so emphatic about my job at first, seemed to be under the impression that, like the university’s academic staff, I was going to take off for three months in the summer. The best I could manage was a fortnight, and that, I was given to understand, was quite a favour at such short notice. Margaret, when she heard of it from some other source, obstinately asked me, quite near the beginning of one of our hikes in the country, if I would like to go on holiday with her, if, of course, I hadn’t made other plans for the summer with any other person. My explanation cast a pall over the day; something I think she might have foreseen. It was all so tiring.

Silvia’s attic at the Quincys’ was an island of lucid clarity in that stormy household: a neat bed, two handsome chairs, some pretty pictures against a colour she’d chosen herself, and a small bookcase carrying her fifty favourite books. So it was not a surprise to discover the airy, even elegant quality of her flat in Florence. It was at the top of a modern building, with terraces the size of half a tennis court, crowded with pelargoniums, bright as a seaside landlady’s garden. Inside, in pockets of air-conditioned cool, austere long chairs of chrome and leather treacherously invited the act of reclining. It was on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of one of the hills that rise and surround it. The geography of Florence, as I soon discovered, kept the worst of its weather unchanging and building, stiflingly, from one week to the next all summer. There were other things about the flat to be discovered. The building was at the very end of a long-buried and nearly mythical river, the Affrica; and if there was no way of our detecting it, the river was clearly an object of fascination to millions of mosquitoes, which had an ancestral habit of following its course all the way from the Arno to Silvia’s building, then staying exactly where they were for the whole summer. I became familiar with great generations of mosquitoes as the weeks passed, thwacking at my own head in the middle of the night, sometimes in Silvia’s spare room, sometimes not.

‘And of course there’s Paulina next door,’ Silvia said. ‘But I expect you know everything about her.’

Quickly, we settled into a sulky routine. Silvia had, in the past, spent a good deal of time playing the guide, she said. (She meant: pushing visitors around Florence with an out-of-date guide book.) So the first day, she came out with me, showed me the crucial bus, and took me briskly to four asterisked treasures.

‘Duomo,’ she said.

‘David of Michelangelo, great masterpiece of Italian art,’ she said.

‘Out here in the rain?’ I said. ‘When it rains?’ (It was actually oppressively hot.)

‘In Florence, it never rains,’ she said. ‘Look, beautiful sunshine. Englishman, wanting his rain. Where’s your umbrella and your bowler hat, Englishman? No, it’s not real, anyway. The real one it’s inside Accademia, up that street. We don’t have time.’

‘Uffizi,’ she said. ‘Look at the queue!’

‘And Ponte Vecchio,’ she said, the unopened guide book firmly in her hand.

‘I see,’ I said. That evening, she phoned up all her Florentine friends at length, and complained with great gusto about me. She spoke in Italian; I understood quite well enough. After the first day, I left the flat in the morning and dutifully visited churches, palazzos, museums – more museums; I started with the postcard sights and steadily worked my way downwards. In time, I surprised the attendants of museums named after nineteenth-century Englishwomen, residents of Fiesole, with an unaccustomed ring on their doorbell. How Silvia passed her time, I don’t quite know. I returned to the flat after an invariably unsuccessful sort of tourist lunch, often a sandwich at a bar by the bus station, a one-armed bandit’s electric fanfares in my ear. The afternoons, she was incommunicado, and I read. We met at six each day.

‘You know a funny thing,’ she said, when we were settled in a bar the third night. ‘I asked an English boy to stay here last year, and at the end I said to him, “What do you like most in Florence?” Because, of course, I think maybe he’s going to the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, maybe. But he says, “Most of all, I like the bars, where you go, you buy a drink, there’s nice little bits of food there you can eat, it’s all free.” You English! Crazy for something free, always, always.’

I laughed politely, but I rather agreed with last summer’s Englishman. The bar was laid out with such substantial nibbles, as Margaret would have called them, I was rather wondering in my impoverished way whether we could get away with not having dinner. Not the least of the issues that had arisen was that Silvia, considering the fact that I was saving on hotel bills, clearly thought that I ought to buy her dinner every night at a restaurant of her choice.

But that night I finally met Paulina. Silvia, I divined, had decided to keep her from me: enough of my friendship with the Quincys, or any potential one with their sister’s second husband’s stepmother’s half-nieces. The door to the flat next door was open when we got home, though inside there were no lights. It was a stifling evening. A languid wail came out of the open door, followed by a middle-aged woman emerging from the darkness in aquamarine kaftan and turban.

‘Oh, not again,’ Silvia said.

‘Oh, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘Be an angel. You know how hopeless I am. And I’d ask Paolo, honest to God, but—’

‘It’s not very difficult,’ Silvia said.

‘You say that, but— Well, hello there, I’m Paulina, how do you do – you remember, honey, the last time I somehow managed to put everybody’s lights out, it was simply a disaster,’ Paulina said. She had a curious voice, emphatic on each word, and with an accent not quite American, not obviously Australian. She could have been the product of a thorough elocutionist in any one of a dozen colonies. ‘You see,’ she explained confidentially, as if I were alone, ‘the lights here, they sometimes go out for no reason at all, and I know there’s something terribly simple you need to do in the basement …’

‘There’s just a switch, that’s all, and you pull, no – what is it you do with switches? You turn, you flick – is that right? You flick it and then it’s all OK, it’s simple,’ Silvia said, almost jumping up and down with rage.

‘Thank you a cartload, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘I know you don’t mind one bit when I need you to help me out.’

‘You, come with me,’ Silvia said. ‘Then you know what you need to do in case it happens again.’

It was as simple as Silvia had said. Paulina must have been some kind of genius to make a mess of it.

‘So that’s Paulina,’ I said, down in the basement.

‘Yes,’ Silvia said. She was decisive on the subject. And when we got back upstairs, Paulina’s light was restored.

‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you,’ she said effusively, looking me up and down openly. ‘Come in and have a drink. I’ve got …’ her voice sank seductively ‘… I’ve got some Campari.’

‘Perhaps some other night,’ Silvia said.

It seemed to me, as the days went on, that the only understanding I had had of Silvia disappeared in her proper context. If in England she possessed a vivid and fascinating character, in Italy it was clear that I had not got much beyond discovering her to be Italian. In Italy, her reality dissolved, like a glass full of water in the ocean. I had no access to her real character, not having had the practice at reading it. It was partly my fault, for being satisfied with an exoticism that, after all, was banal even in Yorkshire. But partly, I think, it was hers, since in Yorkshire, in the Quincys’ house above all, she defined herself so entirely by what she was not as to appear nothing but an embodied foreign culture. In Italy, having nothing much in her repertory to fall back on, she settled for being sulky. So it was, inevitably, that at a loose end in Florence, I found someone who was conspicuous in her culture, like a photographic negative of Silvia clacking noisily down the aisle of a concert hall in England.

The next morning, as I was leaving Silvia’s flat, I saw that Paulina’s door was open again. Round the door unfurled a long white arm, like the frond of a fern, followed by Paulina’s head, the hair braided and twisted. Inside, the curtains were still drawn; she was in her peignoir.

‘Honey,’ she said huskily, her voice lowered for the sake – I guessed – of Silvia, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’