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‘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?’
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