Angels of the Flood (13 page)

This is my city, she thought, stepping carefully to avoid yet another hole in the ground, yet another heap of rubbish and muck. If she ever came back, the place would be buzzing with tourists and traffic; it would be bright and confident again, but now it was deserted. This wounded, suffering city felt as if it belonged, just for a little while, to her and the others who had come to help save it.

That evening the only people still on the streets were two or three prostitutes, each one immaculately turned out even on a chilly January night, and surrounded by acres of mud. There was one in particular they’d come to recognize who usually stood with her little dog two streets away from their lodgings. They’d dubbed her the duchess because she had especially aristocratic bearing, even for a Florentine prostitute. There’d been some thought of clubbing together and giving Hugo an hour with her as an early nineteenth-birthday present, but he admitted to Kate that the prospect alarmed him as much as it excited him. Kate smiled at her as she passed.
‘Buona notte.’
But the woman ignored her.

On the corner of the next street, under one of Anna’s fuzzy dandelion lights, stood a prostitute who seemed to be having trouble with a punter. It looked like they were arguing. Kate saw the woman gesture, as though turning him down, and start to walk away, but he moved quickly after her, out of the circle of light, and grabbed her by the arm. She spun round and struggled to shake herself free, but he was too strong for her. She was yelling at him, but still he didn’t let go.

Kate wavered. Her instinct was to run and help, but the world of the Florentines was foreign to her, especially the world of the prostitutes.

And then she gasped. Not a prostitute. Not even a stranger.

Francesca.

Kate broke into a run. She was furious. Italian men could be a nuisance sometimes, but she’d never come across one as persistent as this. How dare he! Her feet skidded on the slippery surface of the street. She was trying to remember the Italian for ‘Go away!’ but her mind was dulled with anger, so she yelled, ‘Leave her alone!’

Startled, the man released Francesca’s arm.

‘Leave her alone!’ she shouted again. ‘Go away!’

Francesca and the stranger turned, their faces blank with surprise. Then the man asked Francesca a question in Italian. She answered in English, ‘Kate is my friend.’ He nodded, and peered at Kate curiously. On closer inspection he looked much more studious and good-looking than the kind of youth who usually hassled them.

It occurred to Kate that the situation might not be as straightforward as she’d imagined. She asked, ‘Are you okay, Francesca?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

The man started to talk to Francesca rapidly, but Kate said firmly, ‘I’ll walk home with you.’

‘Okay. Thanks.’

Kate put her arm round Francesca’s waist, but the stranger had not given up entirely. He caught Francesca’s wrist and forced her to face him. That was when Kate remembered her limited Italian. ‘
Va via!’
she shouted at him.
‘Bastardo!’

She was totally unprepared for his reaction. He broke off in mid-sentence and stared at her, then turned questioningly to Francesca. Suddenly the two of them burst out laughing. Kate felt like a fool.

‘What’s going on, Francesca? What’s the big joke?’

‘Oh, Kate, my dear Kate. You are wonderful. I love you, truly I do.’

As explanations go, it wasn’t much help.

‘Who is this man?’ she asked.

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Francesca turned to the stranger and spoke to him in Italian. It sounded like they were making some kind of deal. He looked serious, checked one or two points with her, but this time when she and Kate started to walk away, he made no attempt to stop her.

‘Who was he?’ asked Kate again.

‘Just a friend of my family’s,’ she said. ‘My parents aren’t too happy about what I’m doing so they got him to make me come home. But I won’t. Florence is my home now, with you. Do you realize, Kate, this is the second time you’ve rescued me? You must be my guardian angel.’

When they reached the end of the street, Kate turned. The stranger was still standing where they had left him, under the fuzzy cone of light, like a single figure in a spotlight on the stage. Even at this distance, his whole way of standing spoke of utter desolation.

But Francesca offered no further explanations. Kate knew better than to question her. No one could clam up faster than Francesca when the questions got personal. But when they got back to the room they shared with Anna, she found one of Francesca’s phoenix earrings was missing.

‘It must have fallen off while I was running to help you,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll go back and hunt for it.’

Francesca smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Kate, it’s a phoenix. It will rise from its own ashes, you’ll see.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I can always have it copied,’ said Francesca.

O
NE GOOD THING ABOUT
the flood, the roads round Florence were still much emptier than usual. As he drove away, Mario Bassano tried not to worry about what would happen if his little Fiat broke down. He’d only had it six months, almost the first thing he’d purchased for himself since he qualified as a doctor, but it was elderly and temperamental. Money was in short supply, even though he’d qualified: he had his younger brothers to support as well as a pile of debts to pay back. It would be years before he’d be in a position not to worry about repair bills, let alone afford to buy a car that was new.

But his mind was too full for him to worry about his little car for long. He was thinking back, as he so often did after seeing Francesca, to the first time they’d met. If she hadn’t been crying, he would probably never have plucked up the courage to introduce himself. Four years ago he’d been in his final year of medical school, more at ease with cadavers than with attractive young women. His natural reticence was compounded by his poverty: with no spare cash even to invite someone for a cup of coffee, he’d learned to make do without female company, most of the time. Until he saw Francesca.

She’d been seated on a bench in the sunshine in a little park the middle of Padua, not far from the medical school. It was a warm afternoon, sprinklers were turned on in the flower beds and the air was sweet with the scent of freshly clipped box. People were criss-crossing the park on the gravel walks, casting curious glances at the girl seated on the bench, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was completely still in her grief. Mario recognized the relaxation of utter despair.

He was not the only man to have spotted her. Like sharks scenting blood, half a dozen off-duty
Alpini
from the nearby barracks were circling her bench at a slight distance, tossing vacuous remarks in her direction to see if she was interested. She didn’t notice them at first, but when two passed within a couple of feet, leaned in her direction and both said,
‘Ciao, bella,’
she jerked back her head, appalled at the invasion of her privacy.

Mario went straight over and sat down beside her. ‘Pretend you are pleased to see me,’ he said. ‘If they think we are friends, they will leave you alone.’ Then he added simply, ‘You are unhappy.’

His voice must have reassured her. Without turning to look at him, she said, ‘I don’t have a handkerchief.’

He fished one out of his pocket and handed it to her, then stretched his legs in the sunshine, leaning back as though he’d just joined an old friend. Or a girlfriend. He tried to look relaxed, but his heart was thumping. She dabbed at her tears, then turned to thank him. That was when he first noticed her amazing eyes. It felt like a revelation, though what was being revealed, he had no idea. Later, he often wondered if he’d known in that moment, when she’d handed back his threadbare, much washed and ironed handkerchief, that his life had been changed irrevocably. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe he simply recognized great beauty when he saw it.

He couldn’t remember what they talked about. She was obviously confused and vulnerable, so he spoke calmingly as if she were a child facing painful treatment or a relative bracing themselves to hear bad news: those situations he knew how to deal with. He learned she’d left her home in Verona the day before, after a row with her parents. She told him she was twenty-one, though later he discovered she was only seventeen. He told her he was from a village in the south, which was true, and that he was twenty-four, which was not, but he wanted to make their ages seem closer. In fact he was twenty-seven.

When Francesca finally stood up, she swayed like someone about to faint.

‘Are you ill?’ This was something he could deal with.

‘No, just hungry, I think.’

Apparently she’d spent the previous night wandering near the bus station and hadn’t eaten for over twenty-four hours. She’d left her Verona home in a hurry and without any money, so he took her to a nearby restaurant and watched while she ate pasta followed by steak and green beans.

‘Why aren’t you eating?’ she asked, when he ordered her single meal.

‘My landlady will have food waiting for me,’ he said.

She accepted his explanation, never guessing his landlady was a fiction and that her meal was taking up all the money he had for the entire week. But for once being prudent, which normally absorbed so much of his energy, was no longer important. He’d have happily starved for a month just to see the way her lips curved into a smile when she thanked him. By the time they stood up to leave the restaurant, Mario Bassano was in love for the first time in his life.

He persuaded her to go back to her parents by promising to meet her again on his afternoon off the following week. Through that summer they met twice every week. As Mario slowly came to understand what had driven her to run away from home in the first place, he was appalled: it had never occurred to him that wealth and misery might be such close bedfellows. He planned a future in which they might be together always. But Francesca was not prepared to wait. One afternoon she turned up at the house where he was renting a small room. She had a suitcase.

‘I’m never going back to my parents,’ she told him. ‘From now on I want to be with you.’ He took her in his arms, then made the hardest decision of his life and told her she must go home.

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you love me?’ she demanded.

‘You know I love you. I will always love you, but this is impossible. You must go back to your parents.’

‘I’d rather die.’

He pleaded with her, but she was adamant. ‘I want to live with you always,’ she told him. ‘Isn’t that what you want too?’

‘But we can’t live together until we marry.’

‘Then let’s marry.’

‘I can’t support you.’ But Francesca, as he knew already, had no idea what having no money meant. Her parents claimed to be poor but lived like lords. She accused him of being mercenary, then she took a heap of jewellery from her bag and said they could sell it and live on the proceeds. Mario knew even less about jewellery than Francesca did about being poor, but he guessed that what she had was worth more than he could make in a year. Eventually, worn out by arguing and misery, they fell asleep in each other’s arms on his narrow bed. They had never yet made love and that was the only night they spent together. Mario was traditional enough to want his wife to be a virgin when they married and one day, when he was a qualified doctor and his debts were paid off, he intended to marry Francesca. Until then, he had no alternative but to wait.

Her father, hammering on the door at four o’clock in the morning, had his own interpretation of events. Seeing the rumpled sheets, his precious daughter and a stranger both in their underclothes, he was not inclined to be charitable. He called Mario every vile name he could think of, and then, when it became obvious that Mario was unlikely to hit back, he punched him on the jaw and dragged his daughter, still protesting violently, outside to the car.

Mario did not see Francesca again for three years. At first he wrote to her every day, but then, getting no reply, he went to her home and waylaid one of the maids as she went shopping. He was desperate for news. Where he came from in the south, unmarried girls who brought dishonour to their family were treated harshly, sometimes even killed. And he’d heard enough from Francesca about her parents to know that in their own way they were quite as ruthless as the most primitive village family. At first the maid was too frightened to speak at all, but eventually he won her over. She told him Francesca had been sent away to America. To college, she thought it was. Or some kind of school. At first Francesca had refused to go, but then she’d fallen ill. She was shipped off while she was too weak to put up any resistance.

Mario was frantic. He refused to lose Francesca without a fight. It must be possible to persuade her family they’d misjudged him. After the way Signor Bertoni had insulted him, Mario decided to concentrate on Francesca’s mother. From what Francesca had told him before she vanished, her father’s bravado that night had been quite out of character: the real power in the family lay with her mother.

Mario happened to meet Signora Bertoni at a fund-raising function. She knew who he was at once, but was less hostile than he’d expected. She was gracious, even welcoming after a while, but far too wily to let him know where Francesca was. Quite by chance, one afternoon when he was visiting and she was called out of the room, he happened to notice a letter concerning Francesca written by the director of a place called Maple Grove in Connecticut. Not a finishing school at all, as her mother had implied, but a psychiatric clinic. He was horrified: he’d thought the days when daughters who disobeyed their parents were diagnosed as mentally ill were long gone. He memorized the address and, as soon as he got home, he wrote to her there. Two months later, he received his reply. He also made discreet professional enquiries which eventually led to the director of the clinic reluctantly agreeing to let her come home.

When Francesca finally returned to Italy, in December 1966, just over a month after the flood, it was Mario, now a fully qualified but still very junior psychiatrist, who met her at the airport. He drove her home, but refused to come in and meet up with her family again. He loved her as much as ever, but he was realistic enough to recognize it was going to take time for them to get to know each other again. Just as she had changed during her years in the States, so he’d changed from the diffident young medical student who had first found her on the park bench in Padua. While she’d been away, he’d learned that a good-looking young doctor is particularly attractive to middle-aged women with neglectful husbands and too much time on their hands.