The Closed Circle (4 page)

Now, it's a slightly alarming feeling, to sign a contract with someone and then
to realize, about two days later, that you're dealing with the boss from hell. To
describe Liz as having a bad temper and a foul mouth doesn't even begin to convey
what she was like. She was a stuck-up cow from north London whose basic attitude
towards the people working for her—and, as far as I could see, to the whole of the
human race—was one of absolute contempt. Whether she had ever worked herself
I was never able to find out: certainly she showed no particular talent for anything,
apart from scaring people and bossing them around. Luckily, my job was straightforward, and I was good at it, or at least competent; so although I never received a
gracious word from her, or was made to feel that I was anything other than her
minion, at least I never had her screaming at me. But Stefano had to put up with
the most terrible abuse (which I of course had to translate), as did the builders
themselves. Eventually, it was more than they could take.

It happened on a Wednesday, I remember, a Wednesday in late August.
There was a site meeting fixed for 5 p.m. Stefano, Liz and I all drove out to
the house separately. The builders' foreman, Gianni, was already there. He'd
been working all day, with four other men, and they were hot and bothered.
The job had overrun now by several weeks, and they were probably all wishing
that they were on holiday, like everybody else in Italy. The heat was indescribable. Nobody should have to work in that kind of heat. But in the last couple of
weeks they had done (I thought) an extraordinary job. A huge swimming pool
had been dug out, and almost completely tiled. The tiling alone had taken three
days. They had used porcelain tiles in subtly
different  shades of blue, each one
five centimetres square. The
effect was magnificent. But there seemed to be a
problem.

“What are these?” Liz snapped at Gianni, pointing at the tiles.

I translated for him, and he answered: “These are the tiles you asked for.”

She said: “They're too big.”

He said: “No, you asked for five centimetres.”

Stefano stepped forward, leafing through the thick wedge of papers that made
up his spec.

“That's right,” he said. “We placed the order about five weeks ago.”

To Gianni, Liz said: “But I changed my mind since then. We talked about it.”

He said: “Yes, we
talked,
but you hadn't come to a decision. You never came to
a new decision, so we just proceeded.”

Liz said: “I did come to a decision. I asked for smaller tiles than those. Three
centimetres across.”

Slowly, as they argued, it must have dawned on Gianni what she was asking
him to do. She wanted his men to strip all the tiles out, order thousands of new,
smaller ones, and start all over again. What's more, she wanted him to do this at
his own expense, because she was adamant that she had given verbal instructions
to use smaller tiles in the first place.

“No!” he was saying. “No! It's impossible! You'll bankrupt me.”

I translated this for Liz, and she answered: “I don't care. It's your fault. You
didn't listen to me.”

“But you didn't make it
clear
—” Gianni said.

“Don't argue with me, you fucking idiot. I know what I said.”

I translated this, without the “fucking.”

Gianni was still furious. “I'm not an idiot.
You
are the stupid one here. You
keep changing your mind.”

“How dare you! How dare you try to put the blame for your laziness and your
sheer fucking incompetence on to me?”

“I cannot do this. My business will go under and I have a family to support.
Be reasonable.”

“Who cares? Who gives a shit?”

“Stupid woman! Stupid! You said five centimetres! It's written here.”

“We changed it, you cretin. We talked about it, and I said three centimetres,
and you said you would remember.”

“You never put it into writing.”

“That's because I was silly enough to think that you'd remember, you big fat
fucking moron. I thought that three centimetres would be easy to remember
because it's the same size as your dick.”

She waited for me to speak. I said: “I'm not going to translate that.”

“I pay you,” she pointed out, “to translate every word that I say. Now translate it. Every single word.”

I dropped my voice, and translated Liz's last comment. And that was when I
saw it happen: an astonishing transformation coming over Gianni—this big,
kind, gentle man—whose eyes suddenly gleamed with hatred, and who without
thinking about it snatched up some tool from the box near to him—it was a chisel,
an enormous chisel—and lunged towards his employer, screaming at her, inarticulate words of fury, so that he had to be restrained by his workmates, but not
before he had managed to catch her a blow across the mouth. So that Liz, lips
bleeding, had to storm off indoors to the kitchen, which had just recently been
plumbed in, and a few minutes later we heard her drive away without another
word to any of us.

After that the men packed up their gear methodically and in silence. Stefano
and Gianni had a long conversation in a quiet corner of the garden, beneath the
shade of a cypress tree. I had asked Stefano if I could go but he said that he would
like me to stay a little longer, if that was possible. I waited for about twenty minutes and then, when he had finished talking to the builder, Stefano came over to
me as I sat in what was designed to be the
loggia,
and he said, “I don't know
about you, but I need a drink after that—will you join me?”

We went to a restaurant along the main road not far from the farmhouse, up
on the hillside overlooking Lucca, and we sat on the terrace and drank wine and
Grappa for a couple of hours, and then ate some pasta, and talked until the sun
started to go down, and I noticed how handsome he was and how kind his eyes
were and what a great, childlike, shoulder-shaking laugh he had, and he told me
what a relief it would be if Liz sacked him, because she was the worst client he
had ever worked for, and the stress of it was almost giving him a breakdown,
and this was the last thing he needed because apart from anything else his marriage was in trouble. And there was a sudden silence after he said that, as if
neither of us could understand how it had slipped out. And then he told me that
he'd been married to his wife for seven years, and they had a little daughter
called Annamaria who was four, but he didn't know how much longer they
were going to be together because his wife had been unfaithful to him and
although her a fair was over now it had hurt him terribly, worse than anything that had happened to him in his life, and he didn't know if he could ever
forgive her or feel about her the same way again. And I nodded and made sympathetic noises and spoke comforting words and even then, right at the beginning,
I was too blind, too self-deceiving to admit that really my heart was singing
when he told me all this, that it was just what I most wanted to hear. And the
evening ended with him kissing me in the restaurant car park—kissing me on
the cheek, but not just in a friendly way, stroking my hair a little bit as he did so,
and I asked him if he wanted my mobile number and he reminded me that of
course he'd already got it, it was on my business card, and he said he'd call me
again soon.

He called me the next morning, and we went out for dinner again that night.

Living the high life
Hyatt Regency Hotel
Birmingham
13th December, 1999
Late at night

I fell on my feet with this hotel. I'm not quite sure how it happened, because
I've never been very good at the fluttering-eyelashes, damsel-in-distress look. But
when I turned up here yesterday afternoon, looking pretty downtrodden I suspect,
with just a few clothes and things crammed into a holdall (I've left the rest of my
stuff at Dad's, for now) the man behind the desk was one of the junior managers
and he did me a
big
favour. He told me that all of the executive suites were free at
the moment and I could have one of those if I wanted. And I can tell you, dear
sister, it's been wonderful. After four miserable days in the Amish-style establishment that Dad maintains these days, I've at last been able to
relax
and enjoy
myself. I've spent half the time in the bath and half of it raiding the minibar. It
will all have to be paid for, of course, but this is going to be my last little fling
before I settle down to the serious business of sorting my life out. Meanwhile the
lights of Birmingham are twinkling away beneath my feet and all at once the
world seems full of possibilities.

Now: I'm just going to tell you about this evening, and then I shall leave you
in peace.

So, just a few hours ago, I decide that I might as well do the decent thing and
go to hear Benjamin's band after all. The pub where they're playing, The Glass
and Bottle, is only about five minutes' walk along the canal from here. Phil and
Patrick will be there, and so will Emily: it's high time that I caught up with her.
And there's no danger of running into Doug Anderton, because he'll be in London
saying “Goodbye To All That” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (a marginally more
prestigious venue than The Glass and Bottle, I can't help thinking to myself, but
there you go). So I have no excuse, really, for not putting in an appearance.

On my way there, all the same, I find myself wondering why it is that I feel so
reluctant to be part of the audience tonight. It has nothing to do with musical
taste, or my suspicion that I'm in for an evening of slightly morbid nostalgia. I'm
trying to be entirely honest with myself, and I know it must be—partly at least—
because I had a tiny crush on Benjamin when we were at school, and even now, so
many years later, running into him again on Friday at the bookshop felt weird.
Not just because of the woman he'd been with, and how obvious they made it that I
was interrupting rather more than a meeting between two friends. No, there was
something else: I can hardly believe this, because I have hardly given Benjamin a
thought (truthfully) in the last decade or more, but it was still there—a stubborn
little residue of what I used to feel for him. How annoying—how
depressing
—is
that? It's the very thing I don't need to know at the moment. I feel that it's now
absolutely necessary, to my health, to my mental wellbeing, to my
survival,
that I
flush Stefano out of my system as soon as possible: but what if you can never do
that? What if those feelings
never go away
? Am I unique in that respect—
uniquely hopeless—or does everyone have the same problem, deep down?

I push open the door to the pub and exchange the black frostiness of the canalside for a blast of light and warm air and loud, competing voices.

Patrick sees me at once, comes over, gives me a big kiss. Phil is talking to
Emily. We fall into each other's arms. Hi, Emily, great to see you, how long has
it been, et cetera, et cetera. She hasn't changed. No grey hairs (or at least, she's
got a good hairdresser), still with a nice figure, doesn't even look as plump as she
used to. (Cruelly, I tell myself that it's easier for women to stay that way when
they haven't had children.) I ask for a Bloody Mary and Phil sees to it. (They've
already clocked that Patrick is underage—not difficult, to be honest—and are
refusing to serve him.) There's a decent-sized crowd in there. “Have they all come
for the music?” I ask. Philip nods. He's in a good mood, proud that so many people
have turned out for Benjamin. As I said, Philip was always the best-natured of us
all. It's not hard to define the crowd's demographic: they nearly all seem to be men
on the cusp of early middle age. I see incipient paunches everywhere. But most of
the band members have got families by now, as well, so wives are also in evidence,
and a few confused-looking teenagers. Altogether there are about sixty or seventy
of us, maybe, gravitating in small groups towards the stage, which is in a far
corner of the pub, and where the band is setting up. Benjamin is sitting at his
keyboard, frowning in concentration, pushing buttons. There are beads of sweat on
his brow already: the ceiling is low, and it must be hot up there, under the lights. I
look around for his friend, Malvina, and spot her at a table by herself, in another
corner. We make eye contact but that's about all: I don't know what the protocol is.
She's not socializing with any of the others and my guess is that she hasn't met any
of them before tonight. Am I supposed to make introductions? Too risky—I don't
want to complicate an already ambiguous situation. I wonder if Emily knows this
woman exists, if Benjamin's ever mentioned her. I bet he hasn't. Emily is gazing
up at him on stage, now, and her eyes are rapt, hero-worshipping. All he's doing is
plugging a keyboard into an amplifier and setting up a piano stool. It's not like he's
building a model of Westminster Abbey out of matches or making an ice sculpture
or anything like that. But she still adores him, after sixteen years of marriage. I
never expected Benjamin and Emily to last that long, I have to say. I suppose in a
way it makes sense: Benjamin would always find it hard to split up with anyone,
because he hates difficulty, he hates confrontation. Anything for a quiet life, is his
unspoken motto, and I imagine that life with Emily must be very quiet indeed.
But really, they are not well suited. Benjamin always struck me as rather a self-centred person. I don't mean that he's greedy or (consciously) unkind, I mean that
he has a strong sense of self—a good sense of self—and he doesn't really need anybody's company other than his own. He's not very
giving
of himself, that's for sure.
Whereas Emily gives a lot of herself. She is happy to spread herself around, generously, among her friends, and I expect that within a relationship, or a marriage,
she will give herself entirely, hold nothing back: no secrets or no-go areas. But
surely there must have come a point where that's started to frustrate her—giving
so much of herself to him, and getting so little back? There must have been such
disappointments for her, in that time. Not just the children, the lack of children. I
mean the small disappointments. The many little ways, the hundreds of ways, in
which he has probably let her down. Over the years.