The Faces of Angels Read online

  ‘Non fa niente.’ She takes my hand and smiles, saying it’s nothing, forgiving me my clumsiness, because, after all, it’s Sunday and she has just come out of church. I smile back, apologize again, then turn to look for the dog and the tall thin man.

  They should be right above me on the steps, but a couple are standing there now, arguing about where to go for lunch. I have to have been wrong, I think. It’s the sleeping pill. No one but Ty ever had eyes like that. I imagined it. I know I did. But, suddenly, I desperately need to check. To prove I’m not going completely nuts.

  I climb up to the terrace, stepping over people and past them, and look again. But I can’t see a faded blue shirt, or a patch of black and white anywhere. They’re not on the terrace, or in the piazza below. They’ve vanished, been swallowed into the crowd, and the only person I do recognize is Billy, waving to me from under the white umbrellas at the bar.

  ‘See,’ Kirk says, as I finally join them, ‘I told you it would be spring today. Oh, ye of little faith, I told you so!’ He spreads his arms and his overcoat flaps at his sides like wings.

  ‘Where are the Japanese girls?’ Billy is looking around at the outside tables as if she expects to see them sitting there with their pot of tea. ‘Didn’t you ask them?’ She turns on Kirk. ‘I brought them sandwiches,’ she says, and the indignation in her voice suggests that this fact alone, the mere presence of prosciutto and Gorgonzola with their names on it, should be enough to make Ayako and Mikiko and Tamayo materialize out of thin air.

  Kirk shakes his head. ‘They are otherwise engaged. La Bardino, or, as it should be, La Bardina, has whisked them away.’

  ‘Away?’ Billy asks as though she envisions a dungeon, or at the very least an impossibly tall tower.

  ‘To fair Verona.’ Kirk presses his hands together and bows like something out of The Mikado. ‘They are going to bisit Womeo and Juriet!’

  ‘Bad!’ Billy slaps his shoulder, but she’s laughing too.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kirk says, ‘and after that they are hieing themselves hence to Mantua, which, if you ask me, is actually prettier.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He shrugs. ‘I was there a few years ago. It was fab. Great ducal palace.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘That I was a duke? I was, in my former life. You should see my last duchess.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘Sounds to me like you’re waving, not Browning.’

  ‘Oh, boo,’ Billy groans. ‘That is definitely one less sandwich for you.’

  She loops her arm through Kirk’s and takes his hand, their fingers intertwining, and for the first time I notice she has a new ring, one of the ones she pointed out on the bridge. The little heart stones, pink and green, sparkle in the sunlight. I glance at Henry, who raises his eyebrows. Clearly he’s as surprised by this development as I am.

  Kirk lifts the basket off the bar table with his free hand and groans at the weight. ‘So,’ he asks, ‘have we got the tickets?’

  ‘There’s a tabaccaio right beside the bus stop,’ I point out, suddenly relieved that at least we don’t have to walk up to Bellosguardo dragging Billy’s huge picnic basket.

  ‘Bus stop, bah,’ Henry says. ‘On a day like this we have to be at one with nature.’ My heart sinks again. It’s a steep hill. Then Henry says, ‘Voilà!’

  He bows like a magician and holds up four tickets. ‘Change of plans,’ he announces. ‘We’re going to the Boboli Gardens!’

  Chapter Seven

  I COULD THINK of a hundred things. I could say I’m sick, or that I have allergies, or that I’ve just remembered my grandmother’s going to die today. For that matter, I could just leave, but what would that prove? I have to go back to the Boboli Gardens sometime, so I might as well get it over with while I’m already in a bad mood. After all, just yesterday I was all excited about ‘moving on.’ As we come out of the alley opposite the main entrance, I try to remember who the clever clogs was who warned about getting what you wish for.

  The Pitti Palace glows dirty yellow in the sun, the huge façade looking as though it’s been blasted by a sand storm. The apron in front is crowded with people sitting on the pebbled cement, reading newspapers, talking on cell phones, lounging, as if they’re on the beach instead of slap in the middle of the city with traffic streaming by.

  ‘Weird,’ Billy says.

  As she leads us through the sea of bodies, we catch snatches of conversation in so many languages it sounds like Sunday at the Tower of Babel. There are a lot of foreign students and back-packers sitting out here, probably because some guidebook told them it was an authentic thing to do, but there are Italian kids too, and when we reach the entrance, I find myself scanning the crowd, not sure whether I want to catch sight of the blue-jeaned El Greco and the black and white dog again, or not, or what, exactly, it would mean if I did. That my epiphany last night summoned him up, and now Ty’s ghost is following me around Florence? The idea is less than appealing, no matter what I owe him.

  ‘And one for you, Miss Little Lamb.’ Kirk slaps a ticket into my palm, and for half a second I see him with a hood over his face, with gloves on his pale, long-fingered hands, and eyes that stare out at me through slits. If I look as though I’m about to shriek, he doesn’t appear to notice.

  Henry hefts the basket. He’s taken his jacket off and spread it over the top in a not very convincing disguise, and we walk right by the sign that says No Picnicking, and pass under the archway into the courtyard.

  The entrance to the gardens is on the far side of the Pitti, up a tunnel that passes under the hill behind the palace. As we make our way towards it, hundreds of rows of windows look down on us. Several tour groups are gathering by the flights of stairs that go up to the museums, but the courtyard still feels empty, as if so much history has spilled out of here that it can never be filled up again. I give my ticket to the man who sits at the tunnel entrance and tuck my hands under my arms, as if it’s winter and I should be wearing mittens.

  ‘Where should we go?’ Kirk stops at the top of the steps as we come out into the sunshine. The hill rises in front of us, the amphitheatre, where the first opera performance in the world took place, scooped out of its centre. I’d forgotten I even knew things like that, about the opera. For an uncomfortable moment, Ty’s voice comes back to me, reading aloud from a guidebook, and I wonder what else I’m about to remember. Gravel paths lead left and right.

  ‘This way.’ I step past Kirk. ‘Up here.’ My voice sounds weird, even to me. ‘Up here are the best views.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Billy stops and looks at me.

  ‘Because,’ I mutter, ‘I used to come here with my husband.’ Then I turn my back on them, still chaffing my arms, and begin to climb the steps that lead away from the crowds and off towards the abandoned vineyards and the derelict coffee house where the terraces crumble in the long grass and you can see all the way to Fiesole.

  I am deliberately heading in the opposite direction from the long gravel walk with its white dust, as far as I can get from the green tunnel of trees, and skeleton of the Medici maze, but, even so, I’m surprised to find out how much I don’t like being here. I feel queasy, and I have the bizarre sensation that I might turn around and see Ty or, worse, Father Rinaldo standing behind me.

  We finally reach the best spot, below the coffee house, spread out the rug Billy’s brought, and lie down in the sun. Very few people come over to this side of the garden, so it’s quiet. You can hear birds. Someone starts pouring wine, and I close my eyes. But instead of blotches of sunlight and shadows and leaves, I see the statues on the long walk above the round pond that Ty made such a big deal of that last afternoon. They’re dwarves and grotesques, blindfolded boys who beat each other with sticks. It was so hot that the stones seemed to move, undulate in the heat, as if they were coming alive. The children run down the hill. Their mouths open in silent scream, they melt in the crowd where Rinaldo walks like a black crow amidst the brig
ht summer shirts and dresses.

  ‘Earth to Mary.’

  The picture vanishes abruptly and I open my eyes to see Henry, smiling and handing me an apricot. Velvety and round, it looks like a perfect golden egg in the palm of his hand.

  ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that this place used to be full of weird stuff like mazes?’

  This is not addressed particularly to me, or at least I don’t think it is, so I ignore it and bite into the sweet fruit, the juice dribbling down my chin. Kirk looks at him through a sleepy eye. He has actually taken his coat off and rolled up his sleeves, exposing the fine red hairs on his white freckled arms. ‘Mazes?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ Henry says. ‘You know, like the Minotaur.’

  Henry is wearing sandals, with socks. He reaches into the basket for another bottle of wine, and I watch him struggling with Signora Bardino’s very fancy corkscrew, which is complicated and shaped like a fish. He stuffs the top of the bottle into its mouth and twirls its tail ineffectively. ‘Mazes were very popular,’ he says. ‘Incredibly ornate. You could be lost for days.’ He adjusts his glasses, gripping the corkscrew by the tail as if it might escape. ‘Presumably,’ he adds, ‘every time you went into your own back yard you had to carry a ball of string. Or would it be breadcrumbs? I forget.’

  ‘The breadcrumbs were Hansel and Gretel.’ Kirk leans over and takes the bottle and corkscrew fish out of Henry’s hands.

  ‘The Medici, being the Medici, had three.’ Henry does not seem to be at all worried by the loss of the bottle. ‘Mazes,’ he adds. ‘In these gardens.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Billy asks. Now that we’ve polished off one bottle of wine she’s decreed we should eat, and she’s handing out sandwiches, peeking into the white paper packages to be sure of what’s what, and announcing, ‘Prosciutto! Asiago e ruccola! Pomodoro e mortadella!’ like a barker at a fun fair.

  Henry shrugs. ‘I read a book thing.’

  ‘A book thing?’

  ‘Yeah. You know, with pages that have words on them. Anyways, I guess you can still find the outlines of the mazes, if you know where to look. The paths, and the centre.’

  ‘The room.’ Henry looks up at me when I speak. ‘The room,’ I say again, louder. ‘The centre of a maze is called “the room.”’

  Already, it feels like we’ve been drinking too much, and my voice is slipping away from me like a dog on an extendable leash. Kirk opens one of the white paper packages. The butter in the sandwich is melting, running in little rivulets down the brown flaky edges of the crusts.

  ‘Usually they used yew, or box hedge,’ my voice says. ‘But one of the mazes here was planted in trees.’

  Henry picks up one of Signora Bardino’s wine glasses and flicks a bug out of the bottom of it. ‘Trees?’ he asks.

  ‘Uh-huh. When they grew up,’ I hear myself say, ‘the trunks got so close together they became a wall. So once you got in, there was no way out.’

  ‘Spooky-wooky.’ Kirk is holding the bottle. When he pours the wine it leaves little fizzing bubbles on the edge of my glass. A bird starts to sing. It’s a high trilling sound from the trees behind us, and Billy rolls over as if the sound is a cue and starts fanning her arms like she’s making a snow angel.

  ‘Do you think that’s a nightingale?’ she asks. ‘Wouldn’t that just be too cool if that was a nightingale?’

  Henry takes the bottle back. ‘“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.”’

  ‘Keats,’ Kirk says. ‘Tuberculosis. Dead. Spanish Steps.’

  Henry shrugs and starts to laugh. ‘When I was little,’ he says, ‘my uncle told me, he honestly told me, that there were no songbirds in Italy because the Italians were so crazy they shot them all.’ He picks up a sandwich and takes a bite. ‘I can remember it perfectly. He seriously said, my uncle said, people in Rome stood on their balconies and shot birds with pistols. I think he’d been in the war. Anzio or something.’

  ‘Shit.’ Billy starts to laugh. She sits up and holds her glass out. ‘That’s a great story.’ She lies back on the grass, balancing the wine on her chest. ‘Let’s all tell stories,’ she says. ‘Let’s just stay here and lay around for days, eating and telling stories.’

  ‘It’s been done, darlin’.’ Kirk reaches out and pulls her hair. ‘It’s called The Decameron.’

  ‘Oh, fuck you,’ Billy bats his hand away. ‘You are such a prick. I’m not going to talk to you.’

  ‘Ever again?’ Kirk asks.

  ‘Ever again!’ Billy’s voice is suddenly edgy with sun and alcohol and not enough food. ‘I want Mary to tell a story,’ she demands.

  ‘I don’t know any.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Billy sits up again. She looks like an angry angel now, one that has pieces of grass in its hair.

  ‘I don’t,’ I insist. But I can feel words rising in my throat, feel them slipping into my mouth and pushing at my lips, determined to get out, like smoke curling under a door.

  ‘There are no more birds,’ I say suddenly. ‘Or, at least, there shouldn’t be. Because Henry’s right, they did kill them. They used to kill them all. But not with guns. They did it with nets. They stretched nets called rangaie between the trees. That’s what this whole garden was designed for. To begin with, anyways. Killing birds. They built the fountains to attract them, then they drove them into the nets and killed them.’

  I pause for breath, and I can feel Kirk staring at me, a sandwich halfway to his mouth. ‘They liked killing things,’ I say. ‘Especially in gardens. As a matter of fact, there’s a story about it in The Decameron.’ My voice is gathering speed now, running away like a ball rolling downhill.

  ‘A young man falls in love with a woman, but she doesn’t love him, so he kills himself. Then she dies. And since suicide is a mortal sin, and she was so hard-hearted because she didn’t love him, both of them are punished. For eternity. His punishment is to chase her through this beautiful wood, and her punishment is to run away from him. But, every time, he sets his hounds on her and catches her, and kills her and cuts her heart out. Then, as soon as he does, after just a few seconds, she jumps up again, runs off again and he has to chase her again. And they go around and around like that in the beautiful wood, him killing her because she didn’t love him, and her being killed because she was so cruel, over and over and over. For ever. Amen.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  I don’t look at Billy, but I can sense her eyes on me. I can feel her parted lips and see the bright white line of her teeth just the same way I can see the birds flying into the nets, and the running woman, and the hounds. The man wielding his knife. The shower of feathers landing on the trampled grass. I reach for my wine and it spills, running down the inside of my wrist.

  Henry touches my arm. His hand feels hot through the sleeve of my shirt. ‘Mary?’ he asks. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Oh, just leave her alone!’ Billy stands up suddenly, pieces of grass clinging to her hair and dress. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she says, ‘just leave her alone.’ Then she turns and stalks up the slope towards the ruins of the coffee house.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s a few minutes later when I say this to Henry.

  Kirk has followed Billy up the hill, his coat a dark pile, like a skin some animal has shed, lying on the edge of the rug. From where we are sitting we can see them standing by the red plastic tape that’s stretched across the entrance of the little rococo coffee house. Billy runs her hand down the ornate crumbling stone, her fingers plucking at clumps of carved grapes and the worn edges of leaves. Then she ducks under the tape and disappears. Kirk follows her.

  ‘For what?’ Henry asks.

  I look at him stretched out in the sun, his head resting on his balled-up sweater. He smiles, and I think again that he looks like a curly-haired bear. It’s easy to imagine Henry swiping honey from a pot, or plucking ripe fruit from the branch of a tree.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The strange fuggy feeling that has enveloped me
all afternoon is slipping away, as if a fog inside my head is clearing, and I wonder how crazy, exactly, I sounded. ‘It’s an ugly story,’ I add. ‘I guess it upset Billy. Anyways, I’m sorry if I ruined the picnic.’

  ‘Picnic shmicnic,’ Henry shrugs. ‘And don’t worry about Billy. She’s fine. You want my bet?’ he asks. ‘In my professional capacity, that is? I’d say Miss Billy’s just not too thrilled when anyone else is the centre of attention.’ He grins at me. ‘Especially,’ he adds, ‘if they’re talking about dead birds.’

  In the end, it’s Henry and I who pack up the picnic.

  Billy and Kirk eventually reappear, holding hands like teenagers, and announce they’re going to the Porcelain Museum, an expedition it’s clear we’re not really invited to join, which is no big deal, since neither of us want to go anyway. Henry says he’s not interested in soup tureens and china monkeys playing violins, and I’ve seen them already. So we volunteer to throw the remains of the sandwiches into the bushes, and wrap up Signora Bardino’s sticky glasses, and carry the big basket back to the apartment, where I finally get a call from Pierangelo. He’ll be back from Rome tomorrow night and he wants to take me out to dinner.

  All day, I have been trying not to fantasize about him pretending to be in the Vatican City with the cardinal while in fact hiding in his apartment with some strange woman, probably Monika, who, in my mind, is now a combination of Angelina Jolie and Sophia Loren, so this cheers me up considerably. Or at least enough to agree when Henry suggests we ‘abandon the lovebirds’ and go off for an early meal by ourselves.

  We dither for a while over where to go, but our minds are finally made up for us because so few places are open on Sunday evening. We eventually find a tiny trattoria over in San Frediano and have to stand in line, our backs smushed into the coat rack as we hover over the jammed-in tables where couples drink wine out of pitchers and devour the Florentine version of the Blue Plate Special, which usually turns out to be tripe.

  ‘God,’ Henry says when we finally sit down, ‘I am starving. You know what,’ he adds as the waiter flings two menus in our direction, ‘I really hate picnics.’ He raises his eyebrows when I start to laugh.