Leaving the shutters ajar, she returned to her seat, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades, and her mother looked up at her, helpless. This was worse, she thought, worse than being nagged about her OCD, or her childlessness, or her single status.
‘Are you all right, Ma?’ she asked, a prickle of anxiety setting up.
Alzheimer’s was what she dreaded: she’d tried to broach the subject with her mother’s doctor, but he’d brushed her off. ‘Grief,’ he’d said brusquely. ‘If she seems a bit vague, or forgetful, or lost, that’s the most likely culprit.’ And it could be a killer too, he’d made sure she knew that. She’d taken Ma in on her return from hospital, and had lingered to ask him one or two things she didn’t want her mother to hear; his hand on her shoulder as she left, though, had been kindly enough, she knew that. The same doctor who had given her her shots and looked in her ears when she was six years old: he probably still thought of her as a kid.
‘And how was your day, dear?’ said Ma, the spoon languishing in her bowl, ignoring the question.
‘Fine,’ said Roxana, staring at her. ‘August, you know.’ She sighed. ‘It’s like a ghost town. And Val’s driving me mad.’ Leaned forward. ‘Since when did you ask me about my day, Mamma? Now I know there’s something wrong.’
‘That Valentino,’ said Ma, contemptuous, and Roxana breathed again. Ma had met Val a couple of times and looked down at her nose at his sharp suits, his aftershave — almost everything about him.
‘Can’t you just imagine him as a child? That kind. Spoiled wouldn’t be the word.’
At this point Roxana might normally have mentioned her own younger brother, apple of her mother’s eye, but she was so relieved at the return of her mother’s sharp tongue that she did not. She concentrated on cleaning her plate scrupulously. It was sage, she decided. Ma had put sage in it. Which wasn’t right.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He asked me for a drink after work.’
And laughed. Her mother’s expression was a picture: the desire to thrust her daughter into a liaison — any liaison — with a man warring with her absolute disdain for Val.
‘It’s all right, Ma,’ she said. ‘He only wanted to manoeuvre me into shutting up early. He’s about the laziest man I ever met.’
‘But surely you can’t do that? I mean — it’s a bank!’
‘Oh, Mamma,’ said Roxana, and sighed. ‘We had three customers all day. We closed up five minutes early, that was it.’
‘So you did go for a drink with him?’ Violetta was looking at her slyly. Perhaps after all she thought Val would be better than nobody.
Roxana folded her arms. ‘A drink, yes, Ma.’
Val hadn’t meant anything by it. She knew he hadn’t. They’d had a nice enough half-hour, though, sitting in a bar just across the river in the Piazza Demidoff. In June and July the place would be so packed you had to walk around the customers in the road; as it was, there’d been a couple of expensive convertibles parked ostentatiously and illegally. Hardly a parking warden about, at this time of year. They’d sat on the terrace under the lime trees outside, though their scent was long gone.
‘You don’t mind?’ he’d said curiously, as the waiter set down their drinks, a cold beer for him, a ruby-red Crodino for her. ‘Stuck here in August?’ Someone had called over to Val, from another table, asking about the weekend, and leaning back in his chair, he called back an answer, shaking his head ruefully.
He’d turned back to Roxana, sipping his beer. ‘Everyone’s off to the seaside,’ he’d said sourly. ‘Elba. Vincenzo’s got a place there.’ Covertly, Roxana had eyed the man who’d called across: tanned, lazily handsome. She’d shifted in her chair.
‘You could go?’ She had wondered what he was still here in Florence for.
Val had shrugged. ‘I agreed to stick around, didn’t I?’ he’d said thoughtfully. ‘Marisa wouldn’t take no for an answer. Very insistent, that she had to get off on the yacht with Paolo.’ He leaned back. ‘Their perfect life.’
‘It’s all right for them,’ Roxana had said. Marisa’d just assumed, in her case. That she’d comply. ‘For the bosses. But just for the weekend?’
‘I’ve got no one to go with,’ Val had said, eyeing her. Then drank a little deeper from the beer. ‘It’s not like it was. You know, the lads, away together for the weekend, the girlfriends come and go. But these days, the girls stick around, wives some of them, by now. It’s the lads that disappear.’
It had been the deepest conversation she’d had with Val since she’d known him. Maybe it wasn’t all roses, being a man about town.
‘Sorry, Val,’ she’d said. ‘What happened to — what’s her name?’
‘Lily?’ Val had given her a sidelong, sardonic look. ‘The American?’
‘If you say so.’ Roxana had only glimpsed her from a distance, now and again, a rangy blonde with expensive clothes. ‘She go back to America?’
‘Greece,’ Val had said briefly, draining his beer. ‘Next stop. On the Grand Tour.’
‘Right,’ she’d said, giving him what she hoped was a sisterly, consoling smile. He’d laughed and got to his feet. ‘Want another?’
Roxana glanced across the table at her mother in the uneven light of the inadequate bulbs. It wasn’t as if she’d never had a boyfriend, for God’s sake; there’d been Matteo at college, only he’d fancied someone else more; that kind of thing happened when you were twenty-two. And then she’d been too busy working — trying to please the boss, staying late; for a while Violetta had even warned her off, thinking there was something going on, telling her he was a married man and she should be careful. And when next she lifted her head from her desk, all the men her age seemed to be taken.
Can’t be helped. Someone will come along. That was Roxana’s mantra.
Roxana didn’t bother telling Violetta any of this; she’d only get the wrong idea.
Instead she stood up and dutifully began to clear the plates. This kitchen, she thought absently, ugh. The wooden units were thirty-five years old, oppressively Tyrolean in style but still, unfortunately, in excellent condition.
At the sink — no dishwasher, of course — she spoke over her shoulder. ‘So what did you get up to today? How far did you get on your walk?’
Violetta was very good about her daily walk, as prescribed — the only thing prescribed, in fact, by the same family doctor. ‘Fresh air, exercise,’ he’d said briskly. ‘Better than antidepressants,’ and Roxana had agreed with him. Violetta would walk up around the side of the Certosa, the pale-walled monastery surmounting its hill beyond Galluzzo, and along the lanes into the countryside. She grumbled that she was turning into one of those old widows from her own childhood, bow-legged in black, searching the hedgerows for sorrel and chestnuts. It was doing her good, they both knew that, and she did come back with a bag of something most times, even if it was only nettle heads for risotto.
But now behind Roxana there was a silence, and turning she saw on her mother’s face only anxiety and confusion. This was new: she’d been vague, there’d been episodes — but this was another thing.
‘Violetta? Ma? I said, how far-’
But her mother’s lip was trembling. ‘I didn’t go out. I — there was the phone call. And then someone came to the door. I didn’t have time. It — it looked like rain.’ She was practically babbling.
‘Looked like rain? What are you talking about?’ Roxana could hear her own fear, sounding like anger, and she tried to soften it. ‘Sorry, Ma. One thing at a time. Someone phoned.’ She came back to the table and sat down; outside a siren wailed, far off in the city, and she reached for her mother’s hand. It seemed to hold no warmth, the fingers no more than skin and bone.
‘There was a message.’ Violetta Delfino stopped.
Roxana smiled steadily into her mother’s eyes. ‘You wrote it down.’
Her mother returned her look. ‘Yes,’ she said, hopefully, then with greater certainty, ‘Of course.’ And made as if to get up, in awkward haste, to fetch the pad they kept by the telephone in the hall. Roxana held fast to her mother’s hand.