A Place for Us (3 page)

Karen

K
AREN
W
INTER SAT
at the counter while the girl in front of her held her fingers, scraping at her cuticles. Outside, rain fell steadily out of a metallic sky, turning the golden Bath stone a dirty sand. People hurried past the nail salon, the fogged-up windows blurring their figures into smears of dull color. Karen stared blankly up at the music channel on the screen above her head, eyes following the video, not registering any of it.

The invitation had arrived that morning, as she was on her way out. What did it mean? What the hell was Martha on about? Had she guessed? Was it a threat? Karen wasn’t normally one for introspection: she acted first, thought later. When her stepdaughter, Lucy, stayed with them, she alternately drove Karen up the wall and made her laugh with her amateur dramatics, staying in bed till all hours, sighing over her phone, frantically texting, scribbling her every last thought into a book she called a journal, which Karen thought was pretty pretentious. Then she’d flop into the kitchen at midday and say she hadn’t slept well because things were “on her mind.” Karen, who was only ten years older than Lucy, always wanted to retort:
Can’t you unload the dishwasher at the same time as having things on your mind?
Karen was a devotee of motivational self-help books and knew that the main principle of effective living as outlined in
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
was the Character Ethic. Lucy needed the Character Ethic. She, Karen, had it and—well, anyway.

She sighed. Coralie looked up. “Okay, miss?”

“Sure.” Karen shrugged. The nail salon was warm, tiny, crowded; it hummed with the easy chatter of women in salons. She could hear snatches of conversation: Marks & Spencer was having a sale on clothes,
some child wouldn’t eat pasta, someone was going to Minorca on a package deal. “Didn’t sleep much last night,” she added, for no particular reason.

“Oh dear. That’s bad. Why?” Coralie slapped Karen’s hands, slicking them with cream, and rubbed each one in turn.

Karen’s fingers itched to scratch her own face, a habit of hers since she was little whenever she felt awkward. She inhaled slowly, watching Coralie deftly plumping the glossy blob of undercoat onto her nail. “Oh, family business.”

“Oh. Family.” Coralie coughed. “Huh.”

Karen smiled. “My mother-in-law’s having a party. Could do without it. You know?”

“Sure. I know.” Coralie rolled her eyes. “Where do they live?”

“They’re just south of here. It’s called . . . Winterfold.” She looked at Coralie, expecting her to recognize it, and then smiled. Why the hell should she? The way people said “Winterfold” in hushed tones, same as “the Queen” or “the National Trust.” But the Winters were famous, they had a sort of sheen to them. Their parties were legendary, they knew everyone for miles around, and it was all because of Martha. She had a cupboard full of woolen blankets for picnics in summer, for God’s sake. She made sloe gin, she pickled green tomatoes, she sewed bunting for birthdays. She remembered anniversaries, and brought round lasagnas to new parents. Didn’t stop to coo, just handed it over and left. She didn’t want to be your best friend; she just made you feel welcome and gave you a drink, and she listened.

Karen’s only attempt to create something similar, her and Bill’s New Year’s Eve drinks party the previous year, had been a disaster. Susan Talbot, who ran the village shop–cum–post office, and therefore apparently had to be kept sweet otherwise she’d close it down and then Winter Stoke would be plunged back into the Middle Ages, had leaned too close over Karen’s Swedish candle display, which she’d recreated from a magazine article, and Susan’s hair had caught alight. It had ruined the atmosphere. Thirty people was too many in a house the size of theirs, and the smell of burned hair wouldn’t leave, even after they opened all the doors and windows.

It was somehow symptomatic of her and Bill, she thought. They didn’t “entertain” well. At least his daughter brought a bit of life into the house,
even if she was messy and loud and bouncy, like Tigger. Lucy made Bill smile. People seemed to drop by when she was staying. She was the exact combination of her grandparents: warmth radiated off her like David; she could knock together a meal from baked potatoes and a packet of ham and turn it into a delicious little winter supper, and the wine would flow, noise and laughter flowering in the house like a desert after rain. . . . Karen had bought Susan vouchers for a proper salon experience at Toni & Guy by way of apology for the New Year’s incident, and Susan had been deeply offended. Karen knew that if Lucy had been responsible for the Swedish candle disaster, she’d have had everyone laughing in seconds and more drinks flowing, and sent Susan Talbot home warm with attention and grateful for her free haircut.

Afterward, in bed, Karen had said angrily to Bill, “I’m sure your parents never have a sodding cock-up like that at one of their parties. It’s just us.”

Bill had laughed. “You weren’t there for the Summer Party Disaster.”

“What?”

“Oh, it was years ago. Our dog, Hadley . . .” He’d begun to smile, then said, “Actually, it was awful. But everyone stayed till three, in the rain. There was a conga, I seem to remember. Funny, isn’t it?”

No, it wasn’t funny. Karen, dying to know what had happened, had simply turned over and pretended to go to sleep. They’d had a party and it’d gone horribly wrong, but of course that was all part of the fun, wasn’t it? Those Winters!

Maybe that was when the sinkhole started to form under their marriage, and no one saw it, of course. Karen hated herself for being mean about her in-laws, but she couldn’t help it. Winterfold was only a house, for God’s sake, not a cathedral. They were only a family.

“It’s my mother-in-law’s eightieth. They have a beautiful house,” she told Coralie. “Near here. Yes . . . they’re having a family party.”

Coralie looked blank. “Fine. Why don’t you want to go?”

Karen’s cheeks twitched. “Because . . . we’re so different. I don’t fit in there.” She didn’t know Coralie’s surname or where she lived, but it was easier to say it to her than to him. She’d been married to Bill for four years now, she knew every mole and freckle on his slim body, she knew how he liked his eggs done and what he meant when he said “Hmm” any one of fifteen ways, and yet she didn’t know how to tell him that.
I don’t fit in
.

“Fit in?”

Coralie’s supple fingers pressed the tiny bones in Karen’s hand. She jumped. “Like . . . I don’t belong there. Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“You feel stupid with them. I know.” Coralie took the clear nail varnish off the rack, shook it. Karen stared at it.

“Something like that.” She imagined the look on Martha’s face if she could hear her. Did she know that was how Karen felt? Did Bill? Or his crazy sister, Florence the crackpot? Florence barely acknowledged Karen; it was as if she didn’t exist. Karen laughed softly to herself. She remembered the first time she’d met Bill and he’d told her he had a sister who studied art history.

“Just . . . looks at paintings all day? For real? That’s her
job
?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Bill had said, as if she’d said something funny, and she’d flushed. This quiet man who was—what?—ten years older than she, and yet so handsome in a strange way, so intriguing, polite. He’d been so easy to tease, back then. She’d wanted to talk to him just to hear his soft voice, see the light in his eyes when he looked at her. But she’d made a fool of herself, even that first time.

Funny to think of it now, really, the first time she’d met him. She remembered thinking:
This guy’s a bit older than me but he could be the father of my kids.
She’d felt instantly, completely, as if she’d found someone safe, calm, funny, kind. But she’d got his age wrong: he was seventeen years older, almost old enough to be her dad. He had a twenty-year marriage behind him, and a teenage daughter. She’d got a lot of things wrong, hadn’t she? And now she was paying, she supposed. Paying to not fit in.

Karen heard her phone buzz with a text message; she glanced down into her bag, hands trapped, then, with her heart racing, looked up again, trying to seem calm.

Suddenly she said, “Can I change my mind about my color? I don’t want clear anymore.”

“Fine. What color you want?”

Coralie gestured at the wall behind her, where the bottles of polish were stacked in multicolored rows, like sweets. Karen nodded. “Fifth Avenue, please. Third along from the end.”

Coralie reached around and plucked the third bottle off the shelf, then checked the base. “Yes,” she said, impressed. “Is Fifth Avenue. How you know that?”

“I just know.” Karen shrugged.

“Bright, sexy red.” Coralie pulled one of Karen’s slim, tanned hands toward her, unscrewed the white lid. “You going out tonight?”

“No,” said Karen. “We’re staying in.”

“Aha!” Coralie smiled. “You want to look good, huh? A night in with hubby.”

“Something like that.” Karen tried to smile.

Florence

“
D
EAR ME
,”
F
LORENCE
Winter said, hurrying along the road, shoving the invitation back into her capacious yet overstuffed straw bag. “What does it mean?”

She felt upset. Out of the blue here it was, this extraordinary message slapping onto the cold stone tiles of her apartment floor while she was having her coffee. Years ago her brother, Bill, would joke that that was why she’d gone to study in Italy, to drink as much coffee as she liked. He didn’t make that joke anymore—she’d lived there for twenty years. Besides, these days you had to search high and low for a decent
tabacchi
; everything in Florence was either Irish-themed pubs—the Italians were mad about them, perplexingly—or soulless
pizzerie
serving an ever-changing carousel of Japanese, American, French, and German tourists.

Nowadays Florence felt less disloyal about admitting that the worst tourists were often the English. They were either bellicose, obese, annoyed at being in this culturally heavy but entertainment-lite hole, or by contrast desperate to prove they were Italian, waving their arms around and saying
grazie mille
and
il conto, per favore
, as if that made them Italian, as if every waiter couldn’t speak English like a native because that was the only way of getting ahead these days. It depressed her, either shame at her homeland or sadness at the world she inhabited. Florence the city, once the noble flower of the Renaissance, was becoming a ghost town, a history-theme-park shell filled with moving shoals of visitors, shepherded along by pink umbrellas and microphones. And still she loved it, with all her heart.

When she was a little girl, many years ago, she’d asked her father why they’d named her Florence.

“Because we went there on our honeymoon. We were so happy,” David had told her solemnly. “I made your mother promise if we ever had a baby girl we’d call her Florence, to remind us every day how much in love we were.”

“Why didn’t you call Daisy that then? She came first.”

Her father had laughed. “She wasn’t a Florence. You were.” And he’d kissed her on the head.

When Florence was a little girl, her birthday treat was to go up to London for the day with her father: he was her favorite person in the world. They always followed the same program. First to the National Gallery to look at the Italian Renaissance paintings, paying particular attention to her father’s favorite,
The Annunciation
by Fra Filippo Lippi. Florence loved the story of the chaste monk who’d run off with the golden-haired nun, and she loved David’s quiet, rapt expression as he gazed at the handsome angel with his thick curls, the graceful arc of Mary’s bowed head as she received news of her destiny. “The most beautiful piece of art in the world,” her father would say every time, visibly moved.

Then they would walk five minutes up to Jermyn Street and have lunch at the same old-fashioned English restaurant, Brights, where the waiters were all terribly ancient and formal, and the tablecloths snowy white linen. Florence always felt so grown-up, drinking a ginger beer out of a huge crystal goblet and eating a steak the size of her head, having proper conversations with her father. Not talking about Wilbur, for once; everyone always wanted to ask him about that silly dog. When she was out with Pa they always wanted to know if she was Daisy. Florence hated that, though not as much as Daisy would have, if she’d known.

She could ask him anything at those lunches, so they didn’t talk about boring things like Daisy’s moods or the girls at school or games. They’d talk about things he’d seen on his travels, because he’d been everywhere when he was younger.

“Before you married Ma and she had all of us.”

“Ma came too. We were both artists, we wanted to see the world. Then we had all of you. And then we moved to Winterfold. We didn’t want to go away much after that.”

Florence didn’t really understand why they’d moved to Winterfold, when they could have lived in London. She wanted to live in London,
but whenever she asked her father about growing up there, she got the same response: “I never liked London very much.”

He never talked directly about his childhood. Never said, “Your granny had blue eyes,” or, “We lived on this or this road.” Only oblique references to events that had happened to him. Florence worshiped her father and wanted to know everything possible about him, so she’d draw him out as much as she could. Hear about Mr. Wilson, the art teacher at school who’d let David stay late, given him construction paper and pastels to take home. The boy the next road over who was born without a nose—Pa swore it was true. The time one summer’s morning he caught the train to Bath, then walked for hours until he saw Winterfold, how he’d promised to come back there one day. He loved walking, back then. He’d walk into town and go to concerts at the National Gallery during the war. All the paintings had been taken away, to a cave in Wales, but people played the piano there instead. Once, the air raid sirens sounded and he had to stay there for hours, hidden in the basement with all the others: local office workers, young lovers meeting at lunchtime, posh old men. Everyone was very scared; they sang songs, and one of the posh old men gave David a piece of fudge.

Years later, Florence was back at the National Gallery, giving an oft-delivered lecture to some students in front of Uccello’s
Battle of San Romano
. Her mind wandered and she found herself working out that her father would have been really quite small during the Blitz, no more than nine or ten. The idea of him drifting freely around town at that age, in the middle of a war too, seemed appalling to her. When she’d mentioned it to him later on, he’d smiled. “I was grown-up for my age. You had a sheltered childhood, Flo.”

“I’m glad,” she’d said, never happier than when she was safely cocooned away with a book or several books, undisturbed by dogs or family or Daisy’s special treatment.

And he’d said, “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

Florence sometimes wondered now if her childhood had been too sheltered. She was nearly fifty, and felt she should have a better grip on life; yet more and more it seemed to her that life was veering away from her, like a runaway train. The little girl who was too tall for her older sister’s cast-offs, who only wanted to read and look at pictures, was now a professor employed at the British College of Art History in Florence,
author of two books, contributor to several more, a visiting professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and an occasional voice on the radio: she’d been on Melvyn Bragg’s
In Our Time
last year, only they’d cut most of what she’d said. (When Florence was nervous, she tended to ramble, and it was often impossible to prune the tangled mess of her original point.)

When she was alone in her apartment, writing or thinking on her own, everything was always clear. It was talking aloud, interacting with people that tripped her up: it was reality she found difficult.

When Florence had last been back in the UK in July, she had been invited to dinner at the house of her Courtauld colleague, Jim Buxton. Jim was an old boyfriend of hers from Oxford, still a good, dear friend. He was married to Amna, a professor of Islamic studies at University College London, who spent much of the year in far-flung places like Tashkent, spoke at least six different languages, and was, frankly, terrifying to Florence. They lived in Islington, not far from the center of town, but due to several mishaps including broken spectacles and a flapping boot sole, Florence arrived late and flustered. When Jim introduced her to the other guests, one of them—a well-known editor at Penguin called Susanna—half stood up, shook her hand, and said, “Oh, the
famous
Professor Winter! We heard you on the radio, talking about Masaccio. I agreed with you broadly, but for your interpretation of the
Expulsion of Adam and Eve
. It’s simplistic to merely say that—oh!”

For Florence, still holding her cloth book bag, which passed for a handbag, had simply cut a deep bow (so that her change slid out of her pockets) and backed out of the room, the boot sole folding under and nearly tripping her up. She went to the downstairs bathroom and sat on the lavatory for five minutes. She knew she’d have to apologize when she emerged, could see enough to know that she should explain about the broken spectacles meaning she’d got on the wrong bus, and the unglued boot sole severely impeding her journey; but she couldn’t ever work out a way to apologize gracefully for something so that the moment was forgotten.

When she emerged, they’d all gone into the dining room, so she’d taken her seat and the other guests pretty much ignored her, but Florence didn’t mind. She almost preferred it that this Susanna person
thought
she
was totally crackers, that they all did. It meant she didn’t have to bother with entangling herself in social situations.

The next day she’d gone to see Jim in his office.

“I’m sorry about last night, Jim, about stowing away in your lav. I was in a bit of a flap when I arrived. So was my boot. Ho-ho.”

And Jim had said with a smile, “Don’t worry. Susanna’s awful. It rather made the evening, I thought.”

•   •   •

Yes, more and more this idea haunted her, the question she couldn’t escape. What was that missing piece, the one she knew existed but couldn’t ever see? What if she’d wasted the last twenty years staring at the same paintings, working on the same ideas, and coming to no worthwhile conclusions? Just shuffling opinions around and about from one journal to another book to yet another set of students, in the same way a banker got paid for moving money about? She loved Florence, but had she stayed here for one reason, and one reason only, for a man who barely cared if she was there or not?

No, she told herself in her more buoyant moments. He did care. He
did
.

Florence hurried over the Ponte Santa Trìnita, barely glancing at the tourists thronging the Ponte Vecchio, crammed with tiny shops like a pantomime set. She was able to block out the modern world, almost too effectively; if Lorenzo the Magnificent had appeared on horseback cantering over the bridge and asked in his best Renaissance Italian if she’d like to accompany him to his palazzo for some wild boar, Florence would not have been surprised.

She was so absorbed in imagining what Lorenzo de Medici would wear on a normal day out and about in the city—and he
did
go out and about, that was why he’d been such a great leader, truly
Il Magnifico—
that, as she turned the corner leading to the college, Florence wasn’t looking where she was going. She felt herself trip on something and then stumble, hurtling to the ground with the curiously drunken sensation of lost gravity.

“
Attento!
Signora, please take care!” said an angry voice, one that set her heart thumping as she lay on the cobbles, arms and legs waving in
the air like an upturned beetle’s. “
É molto—
Oh, it’s you. For God’s sake, watch where you’re going, can’t you?”

Florence scrambled to her feet by herself, as Peter Connolly disentangled the leather straps of her bag from his leg with such force she nearly yelped. “Oh dear,” she said, looking down at the ground. “Where are my glasses?”

“I’ve no idea.” He was rubbing his foot, glaring coldly at her. “That bloody hurt, Florence. You—” He stopped, looking around.

The arriving students watched them curiously: Byronic, slightly eccentric, but still impressive Professor Connolly, the one who’d written the unlikely best-seller about the Renaissance that made the Medici into a bawdy soap opera, and got a BBC TV series at the same time—he was famous, their mums watched him! And that weird Professor Winter, mad hair awry, searching for her glasses. The plastic frames were cracked and frequently the sharp wire arms of the glasses slid out if she leaned forward, but she never even noticed. Someone had seen her singing Queen to herself the previous week as she walked past the Uffizi. Singing really loudly.

Florence’s head was spinning. She looked at Peter, flustered, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. He was so different these days, ever since that damned book had come out and he’d started to listen to the siren call of Fame. All smart and stylish, in a televisually approved rumpled academic sort of way. So very far from the curly-haired, slightly hopeless man she’d once known and loved—loved so much that she—

“Here.” Professor Connolly pulled her bag back up so it was slung over her shoulder and not hanging off her wrist.

“Ha-ha! Oh, unhand me, Professor Connolly!” Florence said loudly, putting her hand to her breast, and dropping several items on the ground in the process. She had thought this would sound hilarious, but as so often when some witticism came out of her mouth, it hung there in the air, sounding completely awful. She looked mad, as always, a crazy old hag whom no one had ever loved or could possibly ever in the future love, especially not Professor Connolly, to whom of all people she had once so hoped to cleave herself.

The professor bent down and picked something up off the curb.

“You dropped this.” He glanced down nosily. “Nice invitation. Is this your family? Curious way of asking people to a party. What does that bit at the end mean?”

Florence gently took it out of his hand, biting her lip.

“Thank you. It’s from my parents. I have no idea what it means. I’ll have to go home for it, I suppose.”

“Leaving Florence again, Florence?” He gave a small smile. “I must say, we are becoming practiced in the art of missing you.” He rocked on his feet, and tipped his imaginary hat to her.

“Why, did you—did you need me for something, Pe—Professor?”

He gave her a look of complete astonishment. “Goodness, no. Why would you think that?”

Another slight, another little barb, but she was equal to it. She knew his little secret, and she was glad to carry it safe until such time as he felt the need to make use of her again. Florence bowed her head, as though she were a lady bidding farewell to a knight.