The tightrope walkers, p.25
The Tightrope Walkers, page 25
‘This is better too,’ she muttered to herself, avoiding the line of waiting horse-drawn cabs that smelled so strongly and the postcard sellers and the groups of pilgrims and tourists. She liked the curve of the colonnade and the grace of its pillars and spent some time standing in the sun looking at it before walking up the incline to the vast basilica itself.
Inside she was once more struck with a mixture of boredom and distaste. The heavy grandiosity of the interior left her cold and she disliked both its brownness and the appalling power that it represented. Her elder sister had often said that Flixe was too lazy and comfortable ever to be angry, but some things had always roused her ire: tyranny, waste and hypocrisy. In the echoing, gilded, marble-lined basilica, remembering what she had read of the history of the Catholic Church, she felt surrounded by all three.
Distressed and feeling as though she had been discourteous by standing in someone else’s church criticising it, however silently, she turned to leave, only looking to her left by chance. There, with a ring of people nine deep in front of it, she saw Michelangelo’s Pietà. Someone she had talked to years before in London had sneered at the statue and told her that it was derivative and devoid of any genuine creativity, but she had always found photographs of it desperately moving. Joining the rest of the tourists, she thought that the statue expressed precisely what she wished the vast church might have done. There was pain in it and most terrible sorrow, but there were sacrifice and tenderness and forgiveness, too.
Flixe must have spent longer in St Peter’s than she realised, for the sun was much less hot when she emerged and it no longer made the pale stone pavement dazzle. Walking painfully back across the Tiber to her hotel, she decided to buy some postcards for her children. She had heard that the Italian post was terribly erratic and although there seemed little point in sending things that might arrive long after her own return to England, she wanted some contact with them.
She found a shop and spent some time picking the most appropriate cards. For Andrew she chose one of a Bernini statue of David she had not yet seen. Unlike Michelangelo’s version, Bernini’s was not languidly confident, but furiously determined. The curve of his compact, muscular body as he drew back his sling was masterfully achieved, and the intense frown on his angry young face reminded her of her son. For Fiona the Pietà seemed best and for Sophie a bulging-cheeked angel from a painted ceiling in a Renaissance palace somewhere in Rome. For Nicholas, her youngest and most vulnerable, she chose an endearing picture of a monkey reaching up for some fruit, which was apparently a detail from one of the wall paintings in the Palazzo Borghese.
Having bought them, she took them to a small café, where she ordered a cup of coffee and sat down at a small table to write to her children. The coffee came in a tiny cup and the first mouthful was so strong that it gave her an almost physical jolt. Her eyes widened and she sat awhile tasting the richness before picking up her pen.
By the time she reached the hotel she was limping, aware that there was a growing blister on her right heel, and very tired. At the reception desk they said something to her in Italian, which she did not understand, but she managed to ask for the key to the room, and let herself in to its welcoming coolness in relief.
Having partly opened the shutters to let in some light, she ran herself a tepid bath, added some scented oil, undressed and lay down in it, too tired even to wash. Memories of Peter came flooding back and she let them do with her what they would as she fell asleep.
She opened her eyes to see George sitting on a stool watching her. Dressed in a loose tropical suit of buff linen and a cream shirt with an olive green tie, he looked like the archetypal Englishman abroad, both distinguished and detached. He was smoking and as he saw her eyes opening he smiled, his well-shaped mouth widening and his clear grey-green eyes crinkling at the corners.
Flixe’s mind had been so full of Peter and the children all afternoon that the sight of George was a shock. Pushing herself up, she wiped a wet hand over her eyes.
‘Have I been asleep?’ she asked, the words slurring slightly.
‘Yes. You must have worn yourself out, you poor thing.’
‘How long?’
‘I’ve been here about ten minutes. I was going to wake you when I’d finished this.’ He stubbed the cigarette out in a glass ashtray that stood beside the basin. ‘Are you all right? You look … what’s that word of yours? Ah yes, bothered.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, swallowing and wanting to brush her teeth, ‘just a bit startled. I felt as though I’d shut my eyes for a minute and then there you were, as though you’d dropped from heaven.’ She shivered suddenly, aware that the water, which had been pleasantly cool, was now uncomfortably cold, and saw that the skin of her fingers was puckered into squashy ridges. ‘Ugh. I’d better get out.’
George collected one of the bathtowels, which were more like tablecloths than towels, and stood by the side of the bath holding it out. Flixe got out and he wrapped the towel around her, hugging her. It felt so comforting that she pushed aside the shock she had felt at his presence and put her arms around his neck. He bent to kiss her ear.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured a little later. ‘I must be making you all wet.’
‘I love water trickling down my back,’ he said, laughing, as he kissed her lips.
Flixe took her arms away and rubbed them on the towel.
‘You must be cold,’ he said, ‘I should have thought. It was just so lovely holding you that I forgot I was meant to be drying you.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Flixe, touching his face. ‘You’ve lost your tan.’
‘Some time ago. Do you mind?’
‘No, although it suited you – made your eyes look paler and more dazzling. But I was just thinking what a pity it is that you have to be stuffing away indoors in this lovely weather.’
‘It’s worse that I’m stuffing away indoors when I could be with you,’ he said, making a face of exaggerated regret. ‘All day I kept finding that my concentration on the learned papers was slipping as I thought of you. Did you have a good time?’
‘It was odd,’ said Flixe, vigorously rubbing her chilled body on the towel, ‘and faintly disturbing.’
‘Oh, my dear.’ He brushed the damp hair away from her face and looked carefully at her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, but a bit … strange. I don’t feel quite myself.’
‘You don’t seem it either. I’d put it down to your sleeping in the bath. Come and lie down for a moment.’ He reached for the other towel and swapped it for the damp one, wrapping it round her carefully.
Together they walked through to the bedroom, which seemed warm to Flixe after her cold bath. George whisked the heavy silk counterpane off the bed and urged her to lie down.
She was afraid that he wanted to make love and she did not want to be ungenerous enough to refuse and yet it was the last thing she wanted just then. They lay down together.
‘You’re going to crumple your smart tropical suit,’ said Flixe as he put his arms around her again.
‘That doesn’t matter. Lie still.’ He stroked her hair and occasionally brushed her forehead with his lips and she quite quickly realised that he was making no demands of her at all. She said nothing and allowed herself to relax into the peace of his gentleness.
‘Thank you,’ she said much later when the strangeness of her mood had passed and neither the contrasts between him and Peter nor his dealings with Ann Kirkwaters seemed important any longer. ‘That was remarkably kind.’
‘You’ve nothing to thank me for at all,’ he said, kissing her lips briefly. ‘But you must be getting hungry. I’ll have a quick bath and change out of these and then we’ll find somewhere to sup. All right?’
‘Lovely,’ she said, rolling on to her back and pushing the hair away from her face. ‘I’ll tidy myself up.’
He disappeared into the bathroom, leaving her to wonder how much he had understood or guessed and whether he had minded her withdrawal from him.
They chose a simple-looking restaurant close to their hotel and ate remarkably well. As the mixed antipasto was followed by veal cooked with sage and wine, Flixe began to revive and by the time they were sipping a sickly wormwood-flavoured liqueur with their coffee, she was laughing at George’s stories and capping them with some of her own. Eventually as they walked back to the hotel arm in arm, he said: ‘Do you regret coming here?’
‘No. It’s good to be away from everything – and here with you.’
He laughed at the polite afterthought, but his amusement seemed kind and Flixe walked closer to him, feeling his fingers tightening slightly on her arm.
‘That’s all that matters,’ he said and asked her no more questions. As soon as they were safely inside their room, he took her in his arms again. This time it was not comfort Flixe felt as he kissed her but pleasure. A moment later George lifted his head and laughed.
‘You are the most adorable woman to kiss,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come to bed?’
‘I should like it enormously,’ she said with truth. He escorted her to the big bed with some ceremony and kissed her as he laid down against the pillows.
Much later Flixe said: ‘I feel extraordinarily equal making love with you. It’s a delight.’
‘I’m glad, Felicity.’ He let his head drop on to her shoulder. ‘You make me feel very … very privileged.’
She stroked his hair, feeling the soft fineness of it beneath her fingers. He pushed his head nearer her neck and let his eyelids close.
‘I trust you,’ he murmured. A moment later his breathing changed and Flixe realised that he was asleep.
Chapter Sixteen
Flixe woke the following morning in a state of happiness that seemed like a reward for the months of endurance. Despite the big blister on her heel and a strange aching stiffness in her calves from the long walk, she felt physically healthier than she had been for a long time, with her skin sleek and smooth and her head absolutely clear. She had managed to ignore the part George had played in Ann’s life and she in his, and found herself simply enjoying the sensation of his long body in the bed beside her. Dangerous though she knew it was, she could not help thinking that life would never again seem unendurable.
That day she dropped her sightseeing plan completely and, as she tasted the variety that Rome offered, solitude, which had frightened her in the months immediately after Peter’s death, came to seem almost attractive against the background of George’s certain friendship.
Ignoring the important sights and letting herself absorb the charms of simply wandering about the streets of old Rome, Flixe sat down in the sun for an ice or a drink whenever she felt like it. Without any more agonising she let herself walk at whim, frivolously enjoying all sorts of things, from the wonderful open colourfulness of the Quirinale to the rougher charms of the narrow red streets of Trastevere, looking sometimes, at others simply sitting and feeling. The sun shone all day. A certain power that had been missing returned to her and she began to think about her London life with a new, almost detached, resolve.
Her loathing of the political work she had been doing no longer seemed a failing and the possibility of giving up the safe seat that Gerry and Julia had found for her became increasingly alluring as the day went on.
It was only after lunch that Flixe realised that if she threw away everything they had done for her they might be angry enough to withdraw the financial support that had made her life just manageable. Thinking of what it could be like without their help, Flixe shivered, but even that prospect was not as terrible as the thought of struggling on in the constituency, working to become something she simply did not want to be. Even the thought of the freedom she might achieve was enough to make her walk more lightly and smile more easily as she wandered about the city.
In the early evening, she returned to the hotel to bath and change her cornflower-coloured skirt and paler blue shirt for a short, simple, lime green linen dress edged with white piqué that Ming had lent her. Her hair seemed to have become even more blonde in the sun and her skin had begun to tan. With a little make-up to enhance its new colour and a pair of big dark glasses worn on the top of her head to keep her hair out of her eyes, she decided that she looked both attractive and fashionable. Taking pleasure in her own appearance again was new and she walked cheerfully across the river to meet George as he emerged from his conference.
His eyes crinkled into the smile she was coming to know well and he told her that she looked ravishing. When he had introduced her to a few of his fellow Englishmen at the conference, he took her across the road to the small, exquisite, Renaissance Villa Farnesina, which stood just opposite the imposing bulk of the Corsini palace and had been specially opened for the conferees.
As they wandered through the painted rooms, admiring the ceiling that Raphael had designed, laughing at the distorted perspective of the trompe-l’oeil frescoes in the Salone delle Prospettive upstairs, and wondering how anyone could have gone to bed in a room so closely decorated as Alessandro Chigi’s, Flixe realised that George was not concentrating.
‘You seem abstracted,’ she said, leaning out of the window and looking out at the formal garden with its dark-leaved orange trees heavy with fruit. ‘Is there some trouble?’
‘No trouble,’ he answered, ‘but I keep thinking about something that one of the delegates raised this afternoon.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I’d like to talk to you about it if it wouldn’t bore you.’
Flixe turned, her face warm with pleasure. ‘Me? Really?’
‘Very much. You’re so sensible and … so knowledgeable about the things that matter.’
After the previous day’s sense of failure at her inability to appreciate the great and famous sights of the eternal city, Flixe was delighted.
‘Shall we discuss it over a drink?’ she asked and, when he agreed, suggested that since they were so close they should find somewhere to sit in the square outside Santa Maria in Trastevere.
It was a charming place, perhaps even pleasanter than the Piazza Navona, which she had liked so much. They ordered a bottle of cool white Fiorano, a wine that the guidebook informed them was made just outside Rome and rarely drunk anywhere else. With it they were offered dishes of fat green olives and small salty biscuits.
Flixe tasted the wine and leaned back in her chair, enjoying the way the evening sun caught the gilded mosaics above the entrance to the church and the easiness of a world in which you could sit and drink on a pavement out of doors at the end of a day.
‘You do look increasingly wonderful each day.’ The slight surprise in George’s deep voice made her smile.
‘I’m relaxing,’ she said, ‘and my face has always looked better when it’s a bit sunburned. But you wanted to talk about something more important than my face.’
He looked for a moment as though he were going to make some extravagant compliment, but then he wrinkled his nose and grinned instead, which pleased her. For Flixe one of George Mayford’s great charms was the casualness with which he treated their affair. There was no lack of concern or generosity in him, but he did not load their cheerful, friendly sensuality with any weight of demanding emotion. The fact that he had had plenty of practice no longer seemed distressing. He had made it clear that it had been important for him to free himself from his other commitments before entangling himself with Flixe and that was enough for her.
‘It is simply,’ he said, wondering why she was smiling in that vague, inward-looking way, ‘that one of my colleagues raised the old question of the differences in men’s and women’s brains.’
Flixe’s gaze focussed and the dreamy smile was overtaken by something different, tarter.
‘Oh yes?’ Her voice was cold. ‘That old chestnut. I think their different habits might be a more fruitful topic than their brains.’
‘And he asked again,’ said George, acknowledging her dig with the slightest of smiles, ‘why there have been no great women painters, musicians or poets. It’s all right: you don’t have to look so furious. I know perfectly well that there have been some, but there are very few and it cannot just be that they are judged more harshly. Have you any idea why women are generally less creative than men?’
Flixe, who had been amused by his defensiveness, had to suppress her immediate irritation at his last question. She tried to control her crossness as she remembered the way her elder sister’s furious feminist tirades had always raised her hackles and made her want to dismiss ideas with which she actually agreed.
‘I think,’ she began with polite tentativeness, ‘that there’s nothing fundamental … no, it is fundamental; there’s nothing congenital that prevents women from creating great poetry, music or painting. Without wanting to sound as though I’m whining, I’d say that it’s because we have so many different things to do.’
Seeing a slight film of withdrawal glazing over George’s eyes, Flixe smiled to herself.
‘Listen: you have only to watch a man – or perhaps a woman like my sister Gerry – in the kitchen. They can wash up perfectly well, they can be brilliant cooks, but they can only do one thing at once. Any mother has had to learn to cook meals for each different section of her family while she listens for the baby crying, pays attention to the school-children’s account of their day and makes appropriate comments while still thinking of ways to give her husband the attention he needs when he comes back from the office wound up to a pitch of tension that makes him snap at the children and look as though he hates her.’
‘What a nightmare!’ George’s eyes were no longer glazed, but laughing.
‘It is sometimes, and people like my sister Gerry or even Julia Wallington, whom you haven’t yet met but who’s my greatest friend, are so successful in their work partly because they refuse to do it. And because they refuse, people criticise them for disloyalty to their families. They can concentrate so intensely in the middle of ordinary life that they simply do not hear a question addressed to them. Whereas the rest of us are like … oh, like an advent calendar.’
