The Drowning River (29 page)

‘We went to his flat,’ said Sophia, looking as though the tears might bubble up again at any moment. ‘I – we were there the whole afternoon.’ She swallowed.

‘What time did you meet him?’ Iris tried to remember; once Antonella had gone – about ten-thirty? Earlier? – the session with the potter had lost momentum somewhat. She’d begun demonstrating her techniques of painting on terracotta and had seemed oblivious to who was or was not still there. Students had drifted off, started looking around her garden.

Sophia looked guilty; ‘I left at midday,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe even a bit before. I went to his place.’

‘Where does he live?’ said Iris, feeling stupid.

‘Oh, he’s got a big place,’ said Sophia, brightening. ‘All to himself. On the Piazza Signoria, didn’t you know? Overlooking the Uffizi, actually.’

‘Was he there when you arrived?’ Trying not to think of how much
money that meant Jackson’s parents must have; one of the most famous views in the world. Iris could hear herself, steely.

‘Yes,’ said Sophia, like a nervous child.

‘What’s his place like?’ she found herself asking; heard a bitter note in her voice.

‘Messy,’ said Sophia, with an unhappy attempt at a smile. ‘There always seemed to be a pizza box under the bed.’

Ugh, thought Iris. Sophia looked at her imploringly, her eyes brimming.

‘No, I didn’t mean -’ Impatiently Iris burrowed in her bag again, but the tissues seemed to have disappeared and all she came up with was the watercolour set that had been in Ronnie’s weekend bag. How had that got there?

‘Ah!’ It was a soft sound, and it came from Hiroko; she put out a hand to the box of paints and without thinking Iris surrendered them. ‘They’re Ronnie’s,’ she said.

Sophia sat up, and leaned to look, too. ‘Zecchi,’ she said. ‘They’re the honey-colours from Zecchi, 150 euros for a set like this, forty-eight colours. Don’t you remember the visit to Zecchi? Massi told us, if you want the best, you should buy these.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I had to buy the Windsor and Newton travel set, because Mummy said it was a ridiculous waste of money.’ She frowned. ‘Don’t remember Ronnie buying anything. She seemed bored.’

‘It was the first day, wasn’t it?’ said Iris, ‘she wasn’t in love then.’ And that was when the solution popped into her head, as simple as that. It – he – had been staring her in the face.

‘I have the small set,’ said Hiroko, bobbing her head, ‘Forty-five euros. They are the best.’

Iris held out her hand for the paints, and got to her feet. ‘I’m going to see Jackson now,’ she said.

The Women’s Centre in the corner of the Piazza Tasso had a dirty yellow facade with peeling stucco and a smoked-glass door. Peering through it, Luisa could see posters, warning against HIV and hepatitis
and unprotected sex, in various languages, a row of plastic seating, a scuffed reception desk. This was the place Giulietta was so proud to be working in; she had beamed as she indicated it to Luisa. And Luisa did admire her, even if it was not in a way she could express. ‘Great,’ she said.

But they weren’t here to visit Giulietta’s place of work. It was next door they were interested in; Claudio’s other life, his bolthole, his hiding place. All of a sudden, Luisa was reluctant. They looked up at the grubby frontage, no sign of life, all the shutters closed. Beside the battered front door were six bell-pushes; no brass nameplates here, but an accretion of punch-tape or faded paper strips stuck down with yellowing sticky tape one on top of the other, half the names out of date, probably. Gentileschi did not figure among them; that would be too much to hope for.

‘We should wait for Sandro,’ said Luisa, taking out her phone and staring at it in vain. They’d shot out of the Kaffeehaus, down the wide cypress avenue and out at the Porta Romana. Even as they emerged Luisa thought, trying to make some kind of route map in her head, if it was Claudio, hustling the girl out here on the quickest route to his bolthole, that smashed urn was right out of his way. They came out on to the busy ring road then round to the Piazza Tasso. It had been perhaps forty minutes since she’d texted him this time but they weren’t really into this texting thing, her and Sandro. He might not be picking them up at all, for all she knew.

She looked at Giulietta for confirmation. ‘Don’t you think? He should be here.’

Hunched in the drizzle, Giulietta shrugged, shifting her feet impatiently. They turned their backs on the door and stared out into the rain.

It was not the kind of place you’d expect to find a respected architect, thought Luisa; it was an ugly little square, and the buildings were all alike, two or three storeys, grubby with fumes from the
viale
that ran along the south side. In the centre was a battered and graffiti’d kids’ playground ringed with stunted trees, empty save for a bullnecked dog, lowering its haunches on to the scrubby grass and staring at them balefully as it did so.

‘I like it down here,’ said Giulietta defensively, as if reading Luisa’s thoughts. ‘It’s real.’

Luisa nodded without agreeing; Giulietta had spent her childhood in a prostitute’s walk-up on the Via Senese, a mile to the south, so it might even look pretty to her. And although Luisa knew Sandro was coming around to having his office down here – she’d found it for him, after all – she reserved judgement. It felt irretrievably malign to her, down at heel and resentful. And behind them, overlooking this grim little place, was Claudio Gentileschi’s secret place. With growing apprehension, she turned back to face the door again.

‘OK,’ she said.

‘We can ring all the bells,’ said Giulietta promptly, raring to go. ‘I’m always doing that when I can’t find my key. People don’t mind. Well, some of them do – but –’

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Luisa with a calmness she didn’t feel. ‘I’ve got the keys.’ And out of her bag she pulled the envelope containing the cuttings and reports and, at the bottom, the keys she’d dropped in at the last minute, because it was better to have everything together.

Giulietta stared, shook her head in disbelief. ‘You had the keys all along.’

‘I wanted to wait for Sandro,’ said Luisa, not meeting her eye. Not wanting Giulietta to know she was frightened. And suddenly she was very frightened.

At first the Yale key refused to go in, but she knew she wasn’t off the hook, it was just her stupid hand. Giulietta guided it in, and they were in the hallway. Narrow, poky, and bare; a heap of junk mail in the corner and the smell of unemptied bins.

‘What floor, d’you think?’ whispered Giulietta.

‘I’ll try the first,’ said Luisa, because surely no one could live at street-level in a place like this, with barred windows and no light. It would have to be the
piano nobile,
although that was a misnomer if ever there was one, and she guessed the back rooms, for peace and quiet and a better view than that squatting ugly dog. And she was right; the wide flat square key slotted in, Luisa pushed against the sprung lock, turned, and it opened in front of them.

Braced in anticipation of a sound, pleading, scuffling, shouting; for the ugly traces of violence or abuse or imprisonment, Luisa held her breath. But there was nothing. The place was empty, of humanity at least.

As Luisa stood, Giulietta came in beside her, and together they took it all in. It came to Luisa that she stood there as a substitute for Claudio Gentileschi’s widow; that she was looking at this place, her dead husband’s secret life, through that woman’s eyes. Had she been betrayed here?

If it was, it wasn’t the kind of betrayal Luisa recognized. This was not a love-nest, or a bigamist’s cosy second family set-up.

It was a single, large room and, against the odds, it was beautiful. Even on this grey, terrible day, it was full of a pale northern light. And as for the more common kind of betrayal, well, there was no bed, to start with. There was a small sink in one corner, beside the single large window; the sink seemed to be very dirty, spattered with something, and there was a cheap white cupboard fixed to the wall above it; a single, fluorescent pink Post-it note stuck incongruously to it. A tall wooden contraption Luisa didn’t immediately recognize leaned, folded, against an ancient, filthy sideboard. The old red cotto of the floor was as spattered as the sink, and papers lay about underfoot, as if a wind had blown in at the window and sent them flying, only the window was closed. In the corner opposite the sink stood what looked like a huge dead tree branch, scraps of silvery dried leaf clinging to it. What kind of place was this?

Giulietta let out a short laugh and pointed at the branch. ‘I saw him dragging that up here,’ she said. ‘He found it on the riverbank. He was always scavenging down there. It was, like, his world.’ She fell silent.

‘Why?’ said Luisa, still trying to make sense of the place, the combination of disarray and abandonment. Had someone been living rough in here, squatting? Her phone rang.

‘I’m in Piazza Tasso,’ Sandro said. ‘Where are you? What the hell’s going on?’

Taking One Look Around the filthy room, Sandro began to laugh, but it wasn’t a happy sound.

‘God, I’ve been stupid,’ he said, and he saw Luisa frown at him. ‘It’s a studio,’ he went on patiently. ‘This place was his studio, where he came to be a painter.’ He squatted, and scraped with a nail at the spatter marks on the floor. ‘It’s paint. What did you think it was?’ Luise shook her head, still pale.

‘I didn’t know what to think,’ she said sheepishly.

Sandro sat back on the battered floor; there was nowhere else to sit. Outside the tall window the sky was a grey so dark it was almost black; he realized that by now he had almost ceased to notice the rain. It might never stop.

‘Keys,’ he said, holding out his hand, and Luisa dropped Claudio’s keys into his palm. Something about the action set up that ticking again at the back of his mind; he looked down at the keys, trying to work it out. Hand out, keys dropped in.

Front door key, Yale key, key to the postbox. He frowned, thinking of the pile of mail on the floor. No postbox.

‘This is a, a what d’you call it, then,’ said Giulietta, gingerly attempting to unfold the easel that was the first thing Sandro had
seen on entering the room.

‘Easel,’ said Sandro. ‘Is this it, then? Just the one room?’

‘Far as I know,’ said Luisa. ‘No doors leading anywhere else, anyway.’

Sandro weighed the keys in his hand thoughtfully, then put them in his pocket.

He did a 360-degree turn, slowly; no keyholes or padlocks to be seen. He leaned down and picked up one of the dusty sheets of paper scattered around the floor. He’d thought they were blank, scrap paper blown around the place by a draught but in fact the one he was holding was what looked like the beginning of a drawing of a woman’s head, no more than a few lines in a kind of fine reddish chalk. A woman with her hair pinned up, something familiar or ancient about it. The pose, maybe.

‘He was good,’ he said, not really thinking because if he thought about it he would have said, How the hell would I know if it was any good? I’m a policeman. Ex-policeman. But it seemed beautiful to him. It was something he’d like to have on his wall, even unfinished.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Luisa. ‘Why would he keep this a secret from his wife, though?’

Sandro sat back against the wall and looked at her; as so often happened, Luisa had got straight to the point. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it doesn’t make sense. Unless, well, some men have the need for, I don’t know, compartments in their lives, something just for themselves. . .’ He ran out of steam under the look she was giving him. Why would he keep a painting studio a secret from his wife, who admired his work?

‘Ow-w.’ Giulietta had pinched a finger in the easel. Painfully Sandro got to his feet. Luisa was already there, holding the thing while Giulietta extracted her digit, wincing. She looked like a drowned rat in a borrowed mac three sizes too big for her; underneath it Sandro could none the less see she’d got dressed up a bit, for Sunday out with him and Luisa. Fine little dysfunctional family they made; poor Giuli.

He sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t see why it should have been such a big secret, ten years here. It’s not like Lucia’s the kind of woman to call it a waste of time, art.’ It didn’t make sense.

‘You don’t think he brought women here, then?’ said Luisa dubiously.

‘Models?’ said Sandro. ‘Maybe.’ But he couldn’t imagine it; the place reeked of solitude to him, one man’s lonely presence.

‘Well, if he’d been bringing women up here we’d have known about it, don’t you think,’ Giulietta interjected, rubbing her finger. ‘No one at the Women’s Centre would have had any time for him if he had. He wasn’t that kind of bloke.’

Sandro nodded, looking at the door of the filthy old sideboard that had swung open, released when the easel had moved. He knelt to look inside. At first it seemed empty, and then he saw something in a corner, thrust out of sight. It was a small stack of sketchbooks, four or five of them, green cloth board covers dark and greasy with age.

Opening one gingerly, he saw that every page was covered with drawing. And not just any drawing; it was so dense and detailed that every centimetre of white space was filled, with line after line, cross-hatching and shading and here and there small splashes of colour; it somehow made him think of a tattoo. A row of bunk beds and a face like a bony gargoyle’s peering out from under a thin blanket; a skeletal figure naked to the waist in ragged trousers, washing at a bucket. Like a tattoo of scenes from Dante’s
Inferno,
page after page after page of the wretched, of devils and goblins in human form, in serge uniforms or paupers’ rags. He closed the book, feeling the greasy covers between his hands, and thrust it back into the pile.

‘Drawings from the war,’ he said, catching his breath; he felt as though he’d been holding it since he’d opened the small book. This was what Iris March had said, wasn’t it? When he’d told that American boy the story of his life in a bar, of drawing in the camps. God only knew how those sketchbooks had survived the war and made it back here, to lie unopened in this secret compartment in Claudio Gentileschi’s life.