‘What about all this?’
She made a moue.
‘Oh, that’s play, not work.’
He walked about through the throng of figures inclined in a variety of life-like poses. One costume in particular caught his eyes, a clinging cardigan of stretch panne velvet textured to resemble suede and dyed in clashing patches of brilliant primary colours. He had seen it before, and not on a mannequin.
‘Do you really make them all yourself?’ he asked.
‘Of course! I used to have little dolls, but that was too fiddly, so Raimondo got me these.’
She pointed to a male figure on Zen’s right.
‘I made that outfit last year. It’s based on something I saw in a men’s fashion magazine Raimondo left lying around, a leather blouson and jeans. I thought that was a bit boring, so I let those panels into the suede to reveal a false lining made of blue shot silk, which looks like bleached denim. The slacks are in brushed silk, mimicking the suede.’
Zen looked at it admiringly.
‘It’s wonderful.’
Her pixie face collapsed into a scowl.
‘ He doesn’t think so.’
‘Your brother?’
She nodded.
‘I’m surprised he agreed to let you come, actually. I think he’s a bit ashamed of my dolls. When I told him what Ludo had said about the magazine when he phoned last week, Raimondo got terribly angry.’
Zen gazed at the stretch panne-velvet cardigan, his mind racing. Was it possible?
‘And where is he now?’ he asked.
‘Raimondo? Oh, he’s away in Africa, hunting lions.’
Zen nodded sagely.
‘That must be dangerous.’
‘That’s just what I said when he told me. And do you know what he replied? “Only for the lion!”’
He looked at her, and then at the mannequins. The contrast between their astonishing garments and the woman’s shapeless black apparel, imbued with the heady reek of the living body within, could not have been more marked.
‘Do you ever wear any of the clothes yourself?’ Zen asked.
She frowned, as though he’d said something that made no sense.
‘They’re dolls ’ clothes!’
‘They look quite real to me.’
She shrugged jerkily.
‘It’s just something to keep me amused while I’m ill. When I get better again, and Mummy and Daddy come back, we’ll put them all away.’
He gestured around the room.
‘What a huge house!’
She looked at him blankly.
‘Is it?’
He was about to say something else when she went on, ‘Daddy used to say it was like a doll’s-house, with the windows and doors painted on the front.’
‘Why is it like that?’
She made an effort to remember.
‘It happened in the war,’ she said at last. ‘A bomb.’
‘Ah. And do you and Raimondo live here all alone?’
‘No, he’s got a place of his own somewhere. He doesn’t want to catch my illness, you see.’
Zen nodded as though this made perfect sense.
‘Is it infectious, then?’
‘So he says. He told me that if he stayed here any longer he’d end up as crazy as I am. That’s why Mummy and Daddy left, too. I drive people away. I can’t help it. It’s my illness…’
Her voice trailed away.
‘What is it?’ asked Zen.
She stood listening, her head tilted to one side. He peered at her.
‘Is something…?’
‘Ssshhh!’
She started trembling all over.
‘Someone’s coming!’
Zen strained his ears, but couldn’t detect the slightest sound.
‘It must be Carmela! I don’t know what’s happened! The opera can’t be over yet.’
She clapped her hands together in sheer panic.
‘Oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?’
Zen stood looking round uncertainly. Suddenly Ariana looked at him intently, sizing him up.
‘Take off your coat and jacket!’ she hissed.
She darted to the mannequin near by, removed the blouson he was wearing and tossed it to Zen. Then she bundled up his overcoat and jacket and stuffed them hurriedly under a chair. Feeling absolutely ridiculous. Zen struggled into the blouson. Ariana snatched a sort of fisherman’s cap off another dummy and put it on him.
‘Now stand there and don’t move!’
There was a sound of footsteps.
‘Ariana? Ah, there you are!’
Zen recognized the voice at once. Indeed, it seemed as if he’d been hearing nothing else for the past week. The speaker was out of sight from the position in which Zen was frozen, but he could clearly hear the tremor in Ariana’s voice.
‘Raimondo!’
‘Who were you expecting?’
‘Expecting? No one! No one ever comes here.’
You’re overdoing it, thought Zen. But the man’s brusque tone revealed no trace of suspicion.
‘Can you blame them?’
The woman moved away from Zen.
‘I thought you were in Africa,’ she said. ‘Hunting lions.’
He laughed shortly.
‘I killed them all.’
Zen’s posture already felt painfully cramped and rigid. To distract himself, he stared at the costume of the mannequin opposite him, an extraordinary collage of fur, leather, velvet and silk apparently torn into ribbons and then reassembled in layers to form a waterfall of jagged, clashing fabrics.
‘Did you see Ludo?’ the woman demanded suddenly.
The eagerness in her voice was unmistakable.
‘Cousin Ludovico?’ the man drawled negligently. ‘Yes, I saw him.’
‘When? Where? How is he? When is he coming back?’
‘Oh, not for some time, I’m afraid. Not for a long, long time.’
His voice was deliberately hard and hurtful.
‘Did a lion hurt him?’
She sounded utterly desolate. The man laughed.
‘What nonsense you talk! It wasn’t a lion, it was you. He can’t stand being around you, Ariana. It’s your own fault! You drive everyone away with your mad babbling. Everyone except your dolls. They’re the only ones who can put up with you any longer.’
There was a sound of crying.
‘I hope you’ve kept yourself busy while I’ve been away,’ the man continued.
‘Yes.’
‘Then stop blubbering and show me. Where are they? Upstairs in the workroom?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on then.’
Suddenly the man was there, close enough for Zen to touch. The woman followed, her head lowered, sobbing. She gave no sign of being aware of Zen’s presence.
‘I’ll have to keep an eye on you, Ariana,’ the man remarked coldly. ‘It looks to me as if you might be going to have one of your bad patches again.’
‘That’s not true! I’ve felt ever so well for ages now.’
‘Rubbish! You have no idea whether you’re well or not, Ariana. You never did and you never will.’
They went out of a door at the far side of the room, closing it behind them. Zen hastily removed the blouson and cap, retrieved his coat and jacket and put them on again. The gallery was as cold and silent as a crypt. Zen tiptoed across it and pattered downstairs to the hallway, where he opened the wooden door set in the painted gate and let himself out. The fog was thicker and denser by now, an intangible barrier which emerged vampire-like every night, draining substance and solidity from the surroundings to feed its own illusory reality. Zen vanished into it like a figment of the city’s imagination.
7
Zen’s hotel was next to the station, a thirty-storey tower topped with an impressive array of aerials and satellite dishes. The next morning, shaved and showered, his body pleasantly massaged by the whirlpool bath, clad in a gown of heavy white towelling with the name of the hotel picked out in red, he sat looking out of the window at the streets far below, where the Milanese were industriously going about their business beneath a sky of flawless grey.
Opposite Zen’s window, a gang of workers were welding and bolting steel beams into place to form the framework of what, according to the sign on the hoarding around the site, was to be another hotel. Judging by the violence of their gestures, there must have been a good deal of noise involved, but within the double layer of toughened glass the only sounds were the hiss of the air conditioning, the murmur of a newscaster on the American cable network to which the television was tuned, and a ringing tone in the receiver of the telephone which Zen was holding to his ear.