‘I am Morandi,’ he says. ‘I have your friend.’ Esmond looks out towards the ambulance parked on the gravel. ‘She will need some care. Normally I would not have wanted her to leave so early, but these are special circumstances, no? She is still losing blood. Rather a lot of blood. Will you help me get her inside?’
Ada is trying to step from the back of the ambulance, her face lifting towards the light. Her cheeks are heavily bruised and one ear is bandaged. Her left hand is wrapped in plaster. Esmond rushes towards her. ‘Ada!’
‘You shouldn’t be walking,’ Dr Morandi says.
They sling her between them and carry her up to the bedroom, where she lies down in obstinate obedience, burrows beneath blankets, and pulls the sheet up over her head. They go back downstairs and stand by the ambulance.
‘She needs to stay in bed indefinitely. Plenty of water to drink and change the dressings every day. Here’s a bag with bandages, some pills to help with the pain. You mustn’t be surprised by the amount of blood. It’s normal. She’s given birth, you know. In all but name.’
‘But— the baby?’
‘I’m sorry. At twenty weeks, there was no chance. We didn’t even try.’
The doctor gets back into the ambulance and pulls away. Esmond stands in the driveway for a few moments, overcome by a heaviness so complete it almost crushes him. He goes up and sits beside the bed, watching the slight rise and fall of the covers, sending all his love and pity towards the hidden, sleeping figure, so as not to think of himself.
When he pulls back her clothes that first night, he cannot believe that a body that looks like this can live on. There is barely a patch of skin that is not broken or bruised. The bruises are like clouds at sunset: billowing purple, magenta and yellow. One on the inside of her thigh is exactly the colour of the water in the pool — spring-green. The fingernails of her left hand are missing and the wrist is broken. When he changes the dressing on her ear, he sees that the lobe has been ripped away from the skin. He bathes it in iodine and she winces. Her stomach is soft, the skin there like a balloon as it begins to deflate. They look down at her body together, and there is fascination alongside the horror.
She first speaks to him on the second day, when he and Tatters come up the stairs with a bowl of soup. The dog lies looking up at her as Esmond spoons it between burst lips. When it is finished, she says ‘Thank you,’ very softly. He is amazed that she hasn’t cried. While she is sleeping, he sits at the table in the kitchen with his head on his arms, or throws himself on the divan in the drawing room and sobs and howls, Tatters pressing a rough tongue against his cheeks.
On the third day, she sits up and fixes him with her green eyes. Her voice when it comes, is unchanged, surprising him. ‘After they got rid of the baby—’
‘Was it—? Did you—?’ He looks at her and is silent.
‘After they got rid of the baby, they had to clear other stuff out of me, a hurried operation before they got me out of the hospital. I remember Morandi saying, This is going to hurt. But it didn’t, not at all, and I’d be surprised if anything does again.’
‘Because of what Carità had done to you.’
‘That? Nothing. Do you understand nothing?’ She burrows beneath the covers again and he resumes his helpless bedside vigil.
The days pass and the bruises lose their brilliance. The blood which had flowed so thick and red between her legs that he’d quickly used up the bandages and had resorted to tearing up George Keppel’s Turnbull & Asser shirts for dressings, slowly abates. He brings the gramophone up to the room and they sit in darkness, her head in his lap, listening to Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, the Goldberg Variations, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Still, she doesn’t cry. After dinner, which he carries up from the kitchen, his powers of culinary invention increasingly tested as the garden turns in on itself for winter, they sit on the bed and stare at the triptych.
With a choir singing Rachmaninoff’s Alleluias in the background, he tells her the story of the triptych, of Filippino Lippi’s life, of the painter’s dissipated father. With the covers pulled up, her head in his lap, he speaks for hours, thinking back to his father’s gallery in the chapel at Aston and the stories Sir Lionel had told him about Filippino. He calls to mind lines from Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, from Vasari and Cellini. That which he cannot remember, he invents, hoping that a story, even one as melancholy as this, might reach her in a way he cannot.
*
He tells her of the vagabond priest, Fra Lippo, the greatest painter of his day, a rogue, a libertine. He’d made a teenaged nun pose as the Madonna, had locked the doors of the cathedral. Nine months later our hero, Filippino, was born.
The atmosphere of his youth was rich with the scent of gesso and tempera, with the sound of apprentices grinding pigments, stretching cartone, hammering gold leaf. Sandro Botticelli, Lippo’s most gifted pupil, was often there, helping the older Lippi, schooling the younger. When Fra Lippo was poisoned by his brother-in-law, dying on the floor of Spoleto cathedral, Filippino went to live with Botticelli in Florence.
Botticelli introduced Filippino to Lorenzo de Medici and very soon the young man with the famous name was commissioned by Florentine bankers to decorate family chapels, wedding chests, tondo portraits of wives and mistresses. As he turned eighteen, he was able to call upon the city’s greatest artists, Verrocchio, Perugino, Ghirlandaio.
Filippino was certain he’d eclipse even his father, whose name trailed like a ghost behind him. He was, after all, Filippino — Little Filippo. In 1483 he completed the frescoing of the Brancacci Chapel that had been halted sixty years earlier, when his father’s master, Masaccio, was struck down by the plague. At twenty-five he was painting himself into history, onto the walls of all of the city’s most magnificent churches.
But life was chaotic. He’d inherited his father’s love of wine and women. The days began to darken. Botticelli’s great love, Simonetta Vespucci, died of tuberculosis and he fled to Rome. Filippino was passed over for a number of major commissions, left others unfinished, drowning himself in the city’s fleshpits. There were love affairs that ended in rows. His closest friend, Betto Pialla, was arrested for sodomy and hung on the strappado at the Murate prison. Filippino spent a night in debtor’s gaol before Verrocchio bailed him out. His work became obvious, slapdash, cynical. There were new painters appearing whose work made Filippino’s seem stale and outmoded — Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence, Bosch and Dürer abroad.
Botticelli returned to Florence, Esmond continues, and painted three masterpieces: Primavera, The Birth of Venus and Diana and Actaeon. Each of them used as the principal character the face and body of Simonetta, whom Botticelli said he saw in his mind clearer than any living person. Filippino’s old master was a mournful, bitter figure now, caught up in his memories of his dead lover, his increasing religiosity, his professional rivalries.
He reaches out for Ada and takes her hand. The world grew darker still, he says. The priest Savonarola came to the city, preaching from the Book of Revelation about the horrors to come. He was followed by keening, dead-eyed acolytes, the Weepers. Black-coated Officials of the Night rounded up prostitutes, cutting their noses off to mark them; homosexuals were beaten and dragged through the streets. Women were no longer encouraged out; when they did leave their homes, the new city frowned upon colour, decoration. The world of twill and lawn and damask and brocade became dull overnight, all prompted by this flat-faced monk in his Fra Angelico-frescoed cell in San Marco. I’m not an artist, just a humble craftsman, Filippino would say when people asked him what he did.