Angels of the Flood (7 page)

Simona seemed puzzled. ‘Are you sure? The last person who looked at them insisted they were just nineteenth-century copies.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Oh… just a dealer.’

‘Barzini?’

‘No. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does, Simona. It matters about a million pounds worth.’

Her eyes widened with shock. ‘As much as that?’

‘I did some research for you,’ said Kate, wondering how Simona could have been so ill-informed about one of her pictures. ‘A painting a little bigger but done at about the same time was auctioned recently for £480,000. Yours would fetch at least a quarter of a million.’

Simona’s shock was genuine enough, though she tried hard to hide her feelings. ‘Well, fancy that,’ she said with phoney brightness. ‘What about the first one you got? The Daughter of Time? That was undervalued too?’

‘Sure it was. By about £400,000 at least.’

‘Holy saints…’ For a moment or two her gaze was distant, then she forced herself to say lightly, ‘Lucky for me you came, eh?’

‘Why? Who’s been giving you bum advice, Simona?’

‘Oh… It must have been a mix up. But…’ She and Kate had been moving slowly towards the door. Suddenly Simona gripped Kate by the arm and stared intently into her eyes. ‘Kate, I need to ask you a favour. It’s important. You mustn’t tell anyone about this. Not about the details I added in, and not about the value of the paintings. Promise?’

‘Maybe—if I had some idea what this was about.’

‘You will. But right now, you have to promise. So far as anyone else is concerned, you just happened to be passing this way and thought you’d drop by and… don’t mention the paintings. I didn’t tell anyone I sent them to you. Please, Kate, you have to promise me. It’s important.’

If Kate had needed a reminder of what it was like to enter the Bertoni world, she had it now: that looking-glass world of secrets and deceits, that giddy sensation of taking part in a drama where none of the other players could spare a moment to tell her the script.

They were inside the hall now. It was cool and dark, with stone floors and patterned rugs and a huge vase of white lilies. It smelled the way old houses smell when there’s an army of servants to polish and dust and clean, where every surface glows. An old dog, large and pale as a polar bear but much friendlier, had padded over to investigate, its nails clacking on the stone floor.

Kate told herself that if she went along with Simona’s demands, she’d discover the reason behind all this sooner. ‘All right,’ she said.

‘You promise?’

‘I said all right, didn’t I?’

‘It’s just that it’s so important. Remember, you just happened to be passing and dropped in. Nothing to do with the picture. I do have reasons, Kate. I don’t want the staff, or my mother or… or… or Mario…’ she added the name to her list with studied casualness, ‘or anyone else to know.’

Kate reached out and gripped the edge of an old oak table. ‘Mario?’

‘Yes.’ Simona looked away, reaching down to fondle the dog’s ears. ‘I know, Rollo, it’s hot, isn’t it?’

‘Mario Bassano?’

‘That’s right.’ And then, with deceptive sweetness. ‘Do you remember him?’

Kate felt as though someone had just kicked her in the stomach, but she was getting the hang of the Bertoni conversational style. ‘I—I suppose so. He was a doctor, wasn’t he?’ She forced her fingers to release the edge of the table and returned Simona’s smile with one just as artless. Just as phoney.

Mario Bassano.
Il dottore.

Surely it wasn’t possible for a name to have such an impact after all these years—was it? But yes, obviously it was: the answer was there in the sudden rush of adrenaline, her quickened heartbeat.

‘That’s right,’ said Simona. ‘He still works as a psychiatrist two days a week.’

‘And you see him?’

‘Most days. I could never have set up the Fondazione without him. He’s been wonderful, just like he always was.’ Her praise came out sugared and false.

Kate was still having trouble getting her head round this. Mario was someone who belonged so deep in her past, his memory was so tangled up in those forgotten young girl’s dreams of happy-ever-after and first love and infinite possibility, that the person she’d become was finding it hard to imagine a world in which Mario Bassano still walked and breathed.

She was aware that Simona was studying her reaction closely, but she was at a loss for words.

Simona said smoothly, ‘I’m expecting him any time now. He usually joins me and my mother on a Friday evening. So you’ll be able to see him again.’

This was altogether more than Kate had bargained for. She said, ‘I don’t know how long I can stay.’

Simona smiled, the smile of someone who’s just played their trump card so the game has fallen out exactly as intended. An old woman had emerged from a room at the back of the house. Simona spoke to her in Italian, then turned back to Kate. ‘I told Angelica to put your case in the blue bedroom. We’ll phone Signor Barzini now and tell him about the painting and then we can go on the terrace and have a drink.’ Her long eyes shone with triumph. ‘You must be tired after your journey. Now you can relax.’

Relax? It was a long time since Kate had been so strung out, every nerve humming with tension. All this was Simona’s fault. She reminded Kate so powerfully of the friend she had loved and lost. For a moment Kate was overwhelmed with an unreasoning hatred of Simona for having survived and aged when Francesca’s life had been cut so brutally short. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. If only Francesca had survived—the two of them could have been talking now, instead of this infuriating younger sister with her mysteries and her neatly booby-trapped surprises.

Simona’s smile faded. ‘Kate, are you all right?’

‘Yes, I suppose… it must be the way you remind me of Francesca. I wasn’t prepared for that. It’s the family resemblance, perfectly natural, but still—’

‘I remind you of Francesca?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much.’ Ridiculously, Simona’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You’ve no idea what it means to me to hear you say that.’

Kate’s irrational dislike had subsided as quickly as it arose, but she remained annoyed with her hostess. The Fondazione might be an admirable achievement, but Simona was clearly neurotic and Kate could think of many ways she’d rather spend an evening… but then she thought of Mario, and her curiosity about him was reason enough to stay a little while longer.

M
ARIO BASSANO HAD TRAVELLED
a long way in his life. As everyone knows, the first necessity for a long journey is comfortable footwear, and, like many people who’ve grown up in poverty, Mario had a weakness for fine shoes. Each spring and autumn he had two pairs hand-made for him in Milan from supplest calf leather that whispered onto his feet. As soon as they were scuffed or beginning to wear at the heel he gave them away. That glue smell of the cobbler’s evoked all the misery of his childhood: cast-offs that never fitted, cramped and painful feet. In addition to his twice-yearly order at Salvini’s, he found it hard to resist impulse buys. The more expensive the shop, the more tempting the purchase. That was how he’d been seduced that afternoon, when his work at the centre was finished, by a pair of tan loafers, exquisitely topstitched and outrageously priced.

Shoes were his only real indulgence. His domestic arrangements since his separation from his wife were simple, some might say austere. His clothes were expensive but not ostentatious. The car he was driving now, as he turned off the
autostrada
and began the slow climb into the hills, was a two-year-old Audi, satisfying in its performance and speed, but hardly an extravagance considering his position.

As the road narrowed he changed down from top gear, good driver and good car making the transition smooth as silk. Mario derived sensual pleasure from the action. It therefore troubled him, as he pressed his left foot on the clutch, that the rim of his tan shoe rubbed slightly against his heel.

He was irritated. Unless the shoes were perfect from the start, he’d get rid of them. He pressed a button and the car filled with the cool, mathematical perfection of Bach. After a week of listening to troubled voices—anguished, angry, suicidal, psychotic—he slipped gratefully into a sphere of luminous harmonies and order. He couldn’t analyse why the music was such a reliable palliative: it was one of his many regrets that his early years had been too crammed to allow more than a cursory knowledge of musical theory.

Dr Bassano’s patients would have been surprised to know the extent of his anxieties and regrets. He knew they regarded him as a paragon of wisdom and calm. Nowadays, that went with the job. Doctors, especially psychiatrists, had replaced priests as idealized male figures. When the psychiatrist in question was, like Mario, good-looking, courteous and kind, then it was hardly surprising if most of his patients, and a good number of his co-workers, fell in love with him at one time or another.

He was aware of the devotion. Sometimes it was irksome; more often he felt humbled by the gulf between what people saw in him and the truth he knew about himself. He did his best to live up to their expectations. No doctor more conscientious or hard-working than he. Or more self-effacing. He was at pains to keep secret the fact that for the past twenty years he had worked without remuneration at the Mission for Santa Cecilia. Let the spoiled contessas and the bored wives of industrialists subsidize the human flotsam that washed up daily at the doors of the good sisters.

About ten minutes from the motorway he saw the side road that led to his apartment in Montombroso. More than anything he wanted to go home, shower and change and have a long cool drink. It had been a demanding week and the heel of his new shoe was definitely rubbing.

He drove straight on. For him, duty did not finish with the end of the working week. There were his two daughters to consider and his estranged wife. There was the Fondazione, now reaching the end of its tenth season. There was Simona.

Recently, he’d been more than usually concerned about Simona. Most probably she was unsettled by having her mother come to live at La Rocca—after all, the two women had never had an easy relationship. He’d lost count of the times Simona had vented her rage over her mother to him. ‘That bitch! I hate her! Why doesn’t she die?’ But Mario knew that hate between parents and children is never a simple thing: love damned up, polluted, driven off course, turned back on itself—but always some remnant of love. Even if, as Simona’s for her mother, it felt poisonous as hate.

Whatever the reasons, he’d been anxious about her. She’d done so well since she got the idea for the Fondazione. It had turned her life around and she had found a serenity that had been missing before. He’d been pleased for her, and proud. This past ten years, busy and productive, had lulled him into a false sense of security. Even now it was hard to put his finger on the problem—it wasn’t like the violence of the past. He’d become aware of her lack of attention, a sense of distance, a hint of secretiveness. If anything, he found this more worrying than the problems she’d had before. Her present behaviour, elusive and private, was a mystery. And Dr Bassano did not like mysteries.

He crossed over the narrow bridge and followed the road that ran along beside the river until the turn-off by the abandoned lodge. This approach to Bertoni land was always a kind of pleasure. From far off there was the first sight of the bare dog’s tooth of the summit, the ancient tower of La Rocca just visible below. Then, as you got closer, the high point was obscured by trees as the countryside became deeply wooded and mysterious. It wasn’t until halfway up the drive that the Villa Beatrice came into view, pale and serene, like a light shining from the edge of the mountain. And always as he drew closer, there were two sensations coexisting inside him: a sense of homecoming, but also the feeling that prison gates were closing behind him.

Five thirty on a Friday: Simona was usually still busy at the Villa Beatrice. Mario pulled over, but there was no sign of her. He learned from Magda, one of the administrators, that an Englishwoman had arrived earlier and that she and Simona had gone up to La Rocca. Simona had left orders she wasn’t to be interrupted unless there was a real emergency. He tried to remember if Simona had said anything about friends coming at the weekend, but he was fairly sure there’d been no such plans. Tomorrow the Villa Beatrice would fill with all the visiting dignitaries who were joining them to celebrate the end of the tenth season. Simona usually tried to keep her diary clear for a few days beforehand.

He drove thoughtfully the last half mile to La Rocca. After the public elegance of the Villa Beatrice, every bush clipped, every terrace swept in honour of the ceremony the following day, La Rocca was private and remote. By the time he got there, the sun was casting long shadows across the forecourt. A noisy swarm of swifts, like a hail of black arrows, was circling the tower, making that high-pitched excitable noise that was so much a part of summer evenings at La Rocca. He got out of the car, stooping briefly to pat Rollo’s pale back. Now that the sun was less hot the old dog had moved from the cool hall into the fresh air. He checked the cars on the forecourt; they were all familiar. The visitor must have left hers at the Villa Beatrice. Mario walked round the outside of the house to the terrace under the vine where Simona usually entertained guests at this time of day.

He was right. The two women were seated in a pair of enormous wicker loungers, champagne flutes in their hands. He heard their laughter before he saw them, and recognized the sharpened gaiety of two people who are striving to appear friendly.

Simona saw him first. The Englishwoman, whoever she was, had her back to him and all he could see was the top of her dark head above the high wicker rim of the chair.

‘Mario!’ said Simona. ‘Punctual as always!’ She looked up at him, her eyes shining with amusement and what looked to him like triumph. ‘I told Kate you’d be here on time. You remember Kate Holland, don’t you?’

A cold-water shock of recognition. Yes, he remembered Kate Holland all right. How could he forget? He was furious at Simona for not having warned him in advance. He didn’t like surprises at the best of times, especially not one like this when he was already exhausted from his long week. He walked casually across the terrace and found himself staring down into a face that was instantly recognizable. Her dark hair was untouched by grey—which could have been thanks to a good colourist—but her brown eyes still had that unnerving directness, a kind of transparent honesty which he’d once found so attractive, but alarming also. He realized with annoyance that she’d observed his discomfort, though he struggled to suppress it as soon as he could. This unspoken communication was an intimacy too soon. How long had Simona been planning this little reunion, and what the hell was Kate Holland doing here anyway?