Part 23 (2/2)

'It's only I promised her when you said that last night. She said you were kindness itself.'

This spoiled everything. I'd so much wanted things to go nicely. I'd wanted it to be a pleasant day for Aimee and her uncle; I'd wanted to get to know Mr Riversmith better; I'd wanted the General and Otmar to go on pulling themselves together, benefiting from the diversion; I'd wanted everyone to begin to be happy again.

'It's peculiar, Quinty, for a maid to mix with house-guests.'

'I know. I know. We're servant cla.s.s. All I'm saying is, since the misunderstanding is there let it stay. It would be a terrible disappointment for the poor creature. She was ironing her clothes till the small hours.'

So in the end I gave in, even though I felt acutely embarra.s.sed. I resolved to apologize to our guests well, at least to Mr Riversmith and the General when a suitable moment arrived. I am servant cla.s.s myself, as Quinty well knows, but with everyone waiting I didn't want to explain that naturally there was a difference.

'Sorry,' he said again.

I did no more than shake my head at him. Rosa Crevelli had been watching us, gauging the content of our exchanges. I saw him glance at her, and the pout that was just beginning to disturb her sallow features turned into a smile. I approached the others and quietly suggested that Aimee and the maid should occupy the two rear seats, which are a feature of the car, the long middle one folding forward to allow access. Otmar, Mr Riversmith and I occupied this centre section, the General sat with Quinty in the front.

'Andiamo!' Quinty exclaimed as he engaged the gears, his sombre mood of a moment ago quite vanished. 'We're on the off!'

The sky was empty of clouds. The morning air was cool and fresh. As we drove, I pointed out distant hill-towns and avenues of cypresses for Mr Riversmith's benefit. Sometimes I indicated a church or, if none loomed near, a roadside cafe or a petrol station, knowing that for the stranger everything is of interest. Mr Riversmith nodded an acknowledgement from time to time, appearing otherwise to be mulling over matters he did not share. 'Magnificent, this car,' I heard the General say. Now and again Otmar turned round to exchange a word with Aimee.

'You may find it strange,' I remarked to Mr Riversmith, for what I had touched upon the day before had been on my mind in the night, 'that we should be going out on a jaunt while still in the grip of the horror that has torn our lives asunder.'

He shook his head. In a conventional manner he said it was a sign of healing and recovery.

'We long to escape our brooding, Mr Riversmith. We st.i.tch together any kind of surface. But when we look into our hearts we see only a grief that is unbearable.'

I chose those words carefully, and did not add that the loss I'd suffered myself had been far less than that of the others because I'd had far less to lose. I didn't go into detail because it wasn't the time to do so. All I wished to make clear was that when, today, he observed his niece and Otmar and the old Englishman he was observing a skin drawn over human debris. Mr Riversmith said he wouldn't put it quite like that, but didn't offer an alternative form of words.

'I just thought I'd mention it,' I said, and left it at that. The debris of our times, I might have added, but I did not do so.

When we reached Siena, Quinty parked just inside the city gates, positioning the car beneath a tree to keep it cool. When he had raised the canvas roof and locked it into place we set off to walk to the cafe in the Piazza del Campo, where we were to breakfast. It was quite chilly in the narrow streets we pa.s.sed through.

'I must apologize,' I murmured in a private moment to Mr Riversmith.

'I beg your pardon?'

I smiled, indicating Rosa Crevelli's presence with a sideways glance. There is something of the gypsy in Rosa Crevelli, which was considerably emphasized by the vivid green of her dress and her lacy stockings.

'I beg your pardon?' Mr Riversmith repeated.

I said it didn't matter because the moment had pa.s.sed and we could now be overheard. He said yes when I asked him if his wife would care for this city, if the grey alleys in which its natives moved like early-morning ghosts would impress her. When finally we reached our destination the contrast was startling: a bright blaze of suns.h.i.+ne was already baking the paving-stones and terracotta of the elegant, sh.e.l.l-shaped concavity that is the city's centre. Would that, I wondered, impress Mrs Riversmith also?

He didn't reply directly. In fact, strictly speaking, he didn't reply to my question at all. 'Dr Innocenti gave my niece this guide-book,' was what he said, and handed the volume to me, unopened.

The great tower of the city-hall rises imperiously to claim a dominance against the plain serenity of the sky. I glanced through the guide-book when we'd settled ourselves at a table in the shade of the cafe's awning. Chattering in Italian, Quinty and Rosa Crevelli shook the waiter's hand. Noisily they ordered coffee and brioches. 'The journey's perked her up,' Quinty whispered when he saw me looking at them.

'This is very pleasant,' the General said.

'Yes, indeed,' Mr Riversmith agreed, somewhat to my surprise since he had been so taciturn on the walk from the car.

When the coffee came I drew his attention to an entry in the guide-book about the Palio the horse-race that takes place each summer through the streets of Siena and around the slopes of the Campo where we now sat. I read the entry aloud: that the race was an occasion coloured by feuds and sharp practice, by the vested interests of other cities and the jealousies of local families, that it was wild and dangerous.

'You'll notice the decorated lamp standards,' Quinty interrupted. 'Tarted up for the big day.'

I wore my dark gla.s.ses, and from behind their protection I observed my companions while Quinty continued for a moment about the lamp standards, prompted in what he was saying by the maid. I observed the nervous movement of Otmar's fingers and the twitch of anxiety that caused him often to glance over his shoulder, as if he distrusted his surroundings. The old man's masking of his anguish remained meticulously intact. Aimee examined the pictures on the little sachets of sugar that had come with our coffee.

'The Sienese are renowned for the macaroons they bake,' I remarked to Mr Riversmith. 'Those ricciarelli ricciarelli we have at tea-time.' we have at tea-time.'

'Yes,' he said.

Later, on the way to the cathedral, we called in at a travel agency, where he confirmed with the clerk the details of the flight back to Pennsylvania. The booking was made for four days' time, I myself gently pressing that Mr Riversmith should allow his jet-lag to ease before rus.h.i.+ng off. 'I expect you've thought about how Aimee'll settle with you,' I said when these formalities were completed and we were on the street again. 'You and your wife.'

Again there was the tightening of the lips, the sharp, swift nod, another silence.

'Tell me about your sister,' I invited, tentatively, as we moved on.

Before I'd finished speaking Mr Riversmith stopped in his walk. He turned to me in a deliberate way and said that every time he looked at Aimee he was reminded of his sister. Aimee had Phyl's hair and her eyes and her freckles. I said yes, I knew, but the observation was ignored. Then, to my astonishment, while still standing on the street, the others now far ahead of us in their climb to the cathedral, Mr Riversmith related the history of the family trouble there had been. His sister had been particularly fond of his first wife. His second, the one called Francine, had somehow discovered this, had even learnt of Phyl's repeated endeavours to bring the two together again. A couple of months after he married Francine she and Phyl quarrelled so violently that they had avoided speaking to one another since. He had taken Francine's side and Phyl hadn't forgiven him. The ugly breach that followed accounted for the fact that her children were unknown to him; he remembered his brother-in-law Jack only from the single occasion he'd met him. A dozen times Mr Riversmith had apparently been on the point of writing to Phyl to see if amends might be made. But he had never done so.

'Naturally, I was apprehensive, coming out here,' Mr Riversmith confessed. 'I'd never even seen a photograph of my niece.'

All the fustiness had gone from him. For the first time he appeared to be a normal human person, endeavouring to contribute to a conversation. He was not a loquacious man; no circ.u.mstances in the world would ever alter that. Yet this moving little account of family troubles had tumbled out of him in the most natural way hesitantly and awkwardly, it's true, but none the less naturally. I was aware of a pleasant sensation in my head, like faint pins-and-needles, and a pleasant warmth in my body. My first concern was to throw the ball back.

'Aimee didn't know she had an uncle,' I pointed out. 'So if you and Francine imagine you were condemned in her eyes by your sister that wouldn't be correct.'

He appeared to be taken aback by that. He even gave a little jump.

'Of course you weren't condemned,' I repeated. 'Your sister had a generous face.'

He didn't comment on the observation. I asked when he'd last seen his sister and he said at their mother's funeral.

'A long time ago?'

'1975.'

'And your father? Yours and Phyl's?'

Again there was surprise. The father had died when Phyl was an infant, and I imagined the household that was left, he taking the father's place, much older than the sister. I imagined him mending things about the house the way his father had, cultivating lettuces and eggplant. I wondered if Phyl had thought the world of him, as younger sisters in such circ.u.mstances often do.

'Don't feel guilty,' I begged, and told him how the General hadn't been able to respect his son-in-law and could not find the courage to walk into an empty house or even to cope with solicitors he whom courage had so characterized. I mentioned Otmar's Madeleine.

While I was speaking I recalled a dream I'd had the night before. At once I wished to recount it, the way one does, but Mr Riversmith being the man he was, I found myself unable to do so. As you've probably deduced by now, dreams have a fascination for me. The Austrian ivory cutter and, come to that, Poor Boy Abraham used regularly to seek me out in order to retail a dream, and occasionally I would pa.s.s on what I'd dreamed myself. This one, in fact, concerned Mr Riversmith and might indeed have interested him, but still I felt inhibited. In it he was a younger man, little more than a boy. He was repairing a kitchen drawer that had fallen to pieces in Phyl's hands, the sides dropping away from one another as if the glue that held them had become defective. He sc.r.a.ped away a kind of fungus from the joints and placed the drawer in clamps, with fresh glue replacing the old. 'You're clever to do that,' Phyl said, and the wooden slat of the kitchen blind tapped the window-frame, the way it did in even the slightest breeze when the window was half open. I longed to ask him about that as we climbed the hill to the cathedral, but still I held my peace.

The others were by now out of sight. We found them waiting for us on the cathedral steps, and with Dr Innocenti's guide-book open the General led the way into the wasp-like building, reading aloud about the floor and the carved pulpit. When we had exhausted the marvels of this most impressive place and had visited the little museum near by, we made for the picture gallery proper. To my considerable relief, Quinty and Rosa Crevelli had disappeared.

In the quiet of the gallery I would have liked to pursue my conversation with Mr Riversmith, but as we made the rounds of the pictures he fell into step with Otmar and the General, leaving me for the moment on my own. Aimee had wandered on ahead.

'Look at this!' I heard her cry in another room, and a moment later we were all congregated around the painting that excited her.

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