The Faces of Angels (21 page)

Outside, the rain alternates between sudden bursts and misty drizzle. We pick our way towards Piazza della Signoria, heading for Rivoire where we have decided we need a treat. In the market, where the traders sell fake pashminas and knockoff watches, knots of people gather under the deep roof of the loggia. A few tourists rub the wild boar's nose and throw coins into his fountain, but, despite the numbers, there's a hush. It's something to do with the buildings themselves, with the way they crowd up to the thick cottony sky, and with the rain that drops like grey beads. And with time, as if centuries and centuries have silted up in these streets, muffling voices and causing footsteps to fade away.

A juggler throws soggy red and blue balls into the air, and someone begins to play a saxophone. The low mournful notes trail after us as we come into the piazza, where the cartoonists lean their sketches of big-mouthed women and giant-headed men under a canopy beside Palazzo Vecchio. In the Loggia dei Lanzi the white men stand on their pedestals.

I don't know if the white men are unique to Italy, but I have never seen them anywhere else. They're out-of-work actors, or drama students, I guess, who cover themselves in chalky makeup and long white gowns so they look like snow-frosted Petrarchs or whitewashed models of Dante. And, although they are mute, like mimes, the white men don't do much of anything.

There's something perverse and Italian in their refusal to pretend to push walls apart or walk against the wind. Instead, they stand in public squares, under loggias or outside buildings, hands outstretched, feet poised, their eyes locked on some distant point. If they're good, the crowds gather around them, half entranced by the suggestion that they really are watching a human being turn to stone, and wait, like Leontes in
The Winter's Tale
, to see the statue move.

Three of them are here today. Billy and I climb the steps and join the quiet press of bodies. The figure closest to me is turned away, the starched white sheets he wears falling in columns from his thin, sloping shoulders to his feet. His neck emerges from the stiff collar, elongated and powder white beneath the fold of his turban. Billy is not as entranced by the white men as I am and she plucks my sleeve.

‘Do you think,' she whispers, ‘that I should make a reservation for tomorrow, since there's a bunch of us?' We are going up to Fiesole for lunch, and I nod, and dig in my bag for my phone. Then the white man begins to move.

He turns his left palm up, in a gesture of supplication, the fingers of his wide hands spread open. His arm straightens, and the crowd shifts, swaying with him as he pivots, so slowly he looks barely human. I see the broad ridge of his cheekbone and the flat strong nose, and my stomach contracts.

‘I have the number,' Billy whispers. ‘It's local from here, right?' People glance at us, annoyed, as I shove the phone into her hand and the white man turns to face me.

The extraordinary amber-coloured eyes lock on mine, just as they did at Santo Spirito, and this time I feel as if I'm falling, as if I am shedding time, sliding out of days and months until I am lying on deep spring grass, bound and gagged, as Ty pauses, hovers in the air, and falls.

‘Come on!' I grab Billy's arm, shoving someone in the process and not even apologizing as I elbow our way towards the steps, desperate to get out of here, down into the piazza where people will be scurrying to cafés and jostling at the postcard kiosk. Or into Via Calzaiuoli where crowds will be window shopping, even if it means getting wet. Anywhere where I'm not going to come face to face with ghosts.

I drag Billy across the loggia, the phone still pressed to her ear. ‘Wait,' she says finally, pushing my hand away, ‘it's ringing. It's really raining again,' she adds, apparently unperturbed by my behaviour as she waits for an answer. And she's right, it is. A curtain of drops falls off the loggia roof, hemming us in.

I take a deep breath and don't look behind me, while Billy makes our reservation for tomorrow in Fiesole. Then she hands me back the phone and starts to fuss around with her umbrella. Rivulets dribble down the steps in tiny waterfalls and I wish I'd worn rubber boots. But I don't even have a pair. I should buy some, I think. I saw some green striped ones in Rinascente. I could go back there now.

‘Come on,' Billy says. ‘Let's make a run for Rivoire. This rain sucks.'

She hops down a few steps, pushing her umbrella open as she goes. It's kelly green with little white flowers all over it. I haven't seen it before. The wooden handle looks expensive, and I feel a little pang of covetous lust, which is a relief. Ogling umbrellas is reassuringly normal. I make a deliberate effort not to glance behind me, and say instead, ‘That's nice.'

Billy bats her eyelashes and steps down into the rain, dainty on tippy-toes in her lace-up boots. Drops spangle around her as she twirls. ‘It is a gift from a gentleman friend,' she says. Now she's Melanie from
Gone with the Wind
, and come to think of it Kirk actually does look a little like Ashley Wilkes. I follow her, glad to get away, and feeling foolish for it, as she skips into the piazza. If I went back and looked at the white man's eyes, I tell myself, they'd be perfectly normal. Blue or brown. It was just my imagination. The fact I didn't eat lunch. The light playing tricks.

Rivoire is full, so we find a free table under an awning at one of the other cafés. The horses and carriages have gone but a few damp tourists still run out and pose in front of the Neptune statue, spray rising behind them and glittering in the rain. The waiter comes and Billy orders a bottle of Prosecco. ‘We deserve a treat,' she announces. ‘Just because.'

‘
L'chaim
,' she says after her glass is filled. ‘I'm Jewish too. Didn't I tell you?'

‘Uh-huh,' I say.

‘I am!'

‘And I have a one in five chance of being Chinese. Statistically speaking.'

So far Billy has informed me, at various times, that she was raised as an Episcopalian, a Unitarian and a Druid, and that her mother's other sister, Eloise, was born with six toes, which definitely makes her a witch.

Now she laughs and knocks back half of her wine in one gulp. Then she turns to me, her face suddenly serious. ‘Your husband,' she says. ‘Is it OK if I ask about him, or would you rather I didn't?'

‘Sure.' I shrug. ‘I mean, I don't mind.' It seems unfair that Ty can't even be mentioned, like killing him twice.

‘Well, what did he do?' Billy asks. ‘Unless you don't want to say.'

The way she puts it makes it sound as if he was a spy, or some peripheral member of an organized crime family. The Warrenzittis, perhaps. The idea is so absurd it makes me laugh out loud.

‘He was a teacher.' I sip my Prosecco and feel the bubbles exploding on the back of my tongue. I only had half a croissant this morning, and if I'm not careful this is going to go straight to my head. ‘That's why we were here,' I add. ‘He was teaching in a cultural exchange programme for religious schools.'

She raises her eyebrows, as if this is fascinating, or at least unexpected. ‘So he was a Catholic too?' A little smile sneaks across Billy's face. ‘Don't you guys mate for life, or something, like swans?'

‘No. No swans, no geese, and no again, he wasn't a Catholic. He was a Quaker.' I start to tell her that it didn't much matter anyways because our marriage was over pretty much by the time we got here—in fact by the time we got married—but this seems unfair too, so I swallow the words with another drink, which means my glass is already almost empty.

‘Quakers. They're the ones who say thee and thou, like that guy who kept microfilm in the pumpkin.'

‘Yup. And they don't say anything at funerals.' I reach for the bottle to pour myself more.

‘Did that bother you?' Billy asks.

‘That they don't talk at funerals?'

‘No. I mean, with the way you were brought up and all, didn't you want a nice Catholic? An altar boy or something?'

‘No, Bill.' I'm now definitely beginning to feel light-headed. ‘I didn't go shopping for altar boys.'

I start to add that I didn't go shopping at all, as far as husbands were concerned, but before I can Billy begins to giggle. She reaches for the tiny dish of nuts on our table and throws one into her mouth, catching it like a trained seal. ‘I learned how to do that specially to annoy my mother,' she says. ‘She thought I'd choke.'

‘She might have had a point.'

‘Yeah, I guess.' Billy shrugs. ‘She was kind of sensitive about it because one of her friends choked on a brazil nut. In a Chinese restaurant. OK,' she adds, ‘so, no altar boys. But what about those priests? I mean, they're the guys with the wine, right? I bet you had a crush on your priest. You had to have. All you Catholic girls did.'

I shake my head. ‘Hate to disappoint you, but I don't think our virtue was ever in too much danger at St Andrews, even if we'd wanted it to be.'

‘Well, they are human, Mary,' Billy says. ‘I mean, they have sex. We all know that now, after Boston.' She widens her eyes, being wicked. ‘I bet they do it all the time,' she says. ‘In the confessional. It's kind of like a phone box.'

‘Right.' I think of doddering old Father Perseus who probably slept through the catalogues of made-up sins we competed so hard over when I was a kid. Or of Rinaldo, with his white hands and his baby face. Somehow, I don't think it's the physical side of things that turns him on, but you never know.

‘It's the simplicity of it,' Billy adds. ‘The classic quality. Just give me a man in a little black dress. Better any day than a hunky labourer. Speaking of which,' she says suddenly, ‘that kid in the grocery store has the hots for you.'

‘Oh please.'

‘Uh-huh.' Billy rolls her eyes. ‘He's pretty cute too. I told him so. Maybe I'll snatch him up myself, since you're so preoccupied with Signor Rose Petal.' This is her new name for Pierangelo, adopted since his roses, which I still won't throw out, have disintegrated all over the kitchen table. ‘Or actually,' she says, reaching for her glass again, ‘maybe not.'

‘No?' I feel a brief pang of regret for Marcello. A fling with Billy would probably be the highlight of his life.

‘No.' She shakes her head. ‘Vegetable boy's definitely a virgin, and I don't do virgins. They are waaay too much trouble.'

‘Well, then better stick to lusty clerics.'

‘Been there, done that.'

‘You are so full of crap!'

‘Well, true,' Billy says. ‘True. Actually, an undeniable fact of life.'

We are both getting loaded now. The waiter brings us more nuts, takes our empty bottle away, and without asking brings us another one. Around us, tables are filling up with people leaving work and I am suddenly convinced that at least half the faces are familiar. Behind us a group of Germans press themselves together, and a flash goes off. Men in suits stop to buy the evening paper at the kiosk and women in bright clothes flit across the cobbles and come in out of the rain, dropping down onto the frail café chairs like butterflies. Drops patter on the canopy making it sound like we're camping out, and despite the weather a line forms at the
gelateria
on the far side of the square. As we watch, the lights go on at the Palazzo Vecchio, catching the tips of Neptune's trident and the dark solid lines of David's torso, and the slight, sad tilt of his head.

‘Shall we get those people to take our picture?' Billy whips out one of her disposable cameras and waggles it at me. She loves the things, says they're cheaper than digital, and have the element of surprise when you get stuff developed.

‘No.' I hate having my picture taken.

‘Grump.' She drops it on the table. ‘What time is it, anyways?' Billy asks this all the time; along with the picture taking, it drives everybody crazy.

‘About six.' I glance at my own watch. ‘Ten past, to be exact. Why don't you buy a watch? I'm sure there are plenty in the market.'

She shrugs. ‘I had one once. I lost it. Besides,' she points out, ‘there are the bells. That's what they're for anyways.'

‘Yeah. Until you leave Florence. They're not exactly handy to pack.'

‘Maybe I'll stay for ever,' she announces. ‘Well, why not?' she asks when I raise my eyebrows. ‘From what I hear some people do. Besides,' she says, ‘you just never know. Maybe I'll meet Mr Perfect too. You're not the only one. Maybe I already have, and I just haven't recognized him. Mr Perfects can be like that,' Billy adds. ‘They often travel in disguise and jump out at you when you least expect it.'

We sit in silence for a minute, sipping our Prosecco. Then Billy turns to me, a sly conspiratorial smile creeping across her face, and, despite myself, I feel a twinge of both anticipation and anxiety. I was essentially a goody-goody as a kid, more from lack of inspiration than desire, and just for a second I can imagine Billy as my sister, my bad alter ego, leading me into all the dangerous places I secretly want to go. I can see her wrestling me to the ground, sitting on my stomach and tickling me until I agree with whatever she proposes or, at least, say ‘Uncle'.

‘Let's blow the bank and stay for dinner.'

Meals at places like this are crazy expensive, but right now I don't care. It occurs to me that if Billy suggested we run up to the top of the Palazzo Vecchio and jump off to see if we could fly, I'd probably go along with that too.

‘Don't you have plans?' I ask. I know perfectly well that Kirk called the apartment this morning and asked her out.

‘Oh, I guess,' she giggles. ‘But Kirk'll chew me out for drinking too much, and besides he wants to go somewhere incredibly minimalist. He was talking about a sushi bar. I mean, what's the point of that, being here and pretending we're in Tokyo?'