Surviving Read online

  It was Giuseppe, her third husband, who had installed the fax. He had gone on to e-mail before he left her. So the fax remained in the apartment. She used it to communicate with her broker.

  She went down to the bar for her coffee. Seeing her step out of the already hot sun into cool shade, Aldo, without need of instruction, prepared an espresso and a cappuccino. His mother, heavy in black at the cassa, called out morning greetings and, instead of ringing up on the till, made a little mark in a book. Belinda paid them 50,000 lira in advance and they let her know when the money was exhausted. Kate disapproved of the manner in which Belinda organised her finances, in the bar, at the grocer’s along the street, and at the fruit and vegetable stall in Campo de’ Fiori.

  “It’s immoral,” she said. “You invite them to cheat you.”

  “Oh I’m sure they don’t.”

  Maybe they think I’m mad, she thought, but I don’t think that either. If you trust people they don’t cheat you, not ordinary people. Her broker might cheat her, but not Aldo or Signora Patruzzi, or Rico the grocer, or the old ladies Isabella and Lucia in the market. But Kate’s trust – her apparent trust – in this boy disturbed her.

  She drank her coffee and, as she often did, walked by way of the side streets and then across the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, to the church of St Louis of France, to spend twenty minutes before the three Caravaggios there which depict the calling of St Matthew, St Matthew receiving help from an angel in the writing of his gospel, and then his martyrdom. Alone of the Apostles, St Matthew gave up wealth to follow Christ; as a tax collector he had been on to a good racket. He did so reluctantly, if Caravaggio had got it right. And he must have, she thought. You can see that the pretty boy in the fine clothes and the hat with the big feather thinks Christ’s call crazy.

  The martyrdom panel always puzzled her. That was why she kept returning. Why is the magnificently muscled killer with the sword naked but for a loincloth? And why are there three or four all but naked boys and men in the painting? The one in the foreground has his buttocks bare. He is shrinking behind an equally young companion who is, one suspects, just as naked. Is the saint being murdered in a brothel? Has he come there to denounce immorality? Or has he come as a patron, and is the so-called martyrdom no more than a quarrel about the reckoning? Despite the swirls of draperies and the straining of muscles, the scene is strangely frozen. But perhaps, Belinda thought, not for the first time, that is what the moment of murder is like. Caravaggio would know, even though he wasn’t yet a murderer when he painted St Matthew. But he would have seen murders, she’d no doubt of that, in the streets around where they both lived.

  She lit a candle, though she had never accustomed herself happily to the replacement of real flickering candles by an electric device, and though she never told herself who she was lighting the candle for. It was just something you did, like stuffing a 5,000 note into an alms box for the poor of the parish.

  She crossed Piazza Navona which no longer seemed part of everyday Roman life as it had been when she first knew the city, and came into little Piazza Pasquino. She went into the tobacconist to buy cigarettes and was disappointed to find only the old man, the licensee there, and not his grandson, Mario. But the old man was courteous and the exchange of some insignificant sentences felt good. She left the shop feeling cheerful.

  A tall man with broad shoulders, a bit hunched, and grey hair rather too long, was standing in front of the little statue of Pasquino, reading the notice affixed to it. He half-turned and she recognised him as Tom, from last night’s meeting.

  He was wearing a crumpled cotton suit, biscuit-coloured and with a few stains. There was the stump of a toscano in the right corner of his mouth, and he carried a soft straw hat. Seeing her, he made a flapping gesture with the hat as if to suggest that he would have removed it from his head if it had happened to be there, took the cigar from his mouth, and said, “You were at the meeting, weren’t you? Maybe you remember me saying something?”

  “Of course. Tom, isn’t it? I’m Belinda. I almost never speak at meetings.”

  “I nearly always do. It’s a bad habit. People rarely like what I say. They prefer happiness and optimism. That’s my experience anyway.”

  “It’s natural,” she said. “We go to the meetings to be encouraged.”

  “I know. I should keep my mouth shut. But somehow I don’t seem able to.” Belinda wasn’t sure whether he was laughing at her or at himself.

  “You’re here for some months, I think you said.”

  “Aim to be. I used to live here. When I was prosperous. In the Seventies.”

  “We must have just missed each other.”

  “Sad, eh?”

  He smiled again, this time without removing the cigar. It had gone out, the way toscani do, and he put a match to it.

  “This piazza,” he said. “There used to be a vinaio over there, with a few tables in the back room. I used to drink in it, with an English Augustinian. I think it was where that restaurant is, but I can’t be sure. Good times. Or I thought so then.”

  “A lot of these old vinai are restaurants now. Better for people like us, maybe.”

  “Maybe, but sad. Seen this notice? I always come to Pasquino soon as I’m back.”

  “That one’s been there for a bit,” she said. “Or perhaps it comes and goes.”

  In loosely rhyming couplets, the author of the pasquinata called for a new inquiry into the murder, now more than twenty years ago, of the poet and film director, Pasolini. He denounced a cover-up at ministerial level and accused the secret services of complicity in the killing.

  “Could be something in it,” Tom Durward said.

  “Oh I don’t know. There’s nothing that Romans love better than murder and conspiracy.”

  “Don’t we all. What about lunch?”

  “It’s a bit early. It’s not twelve o’clock. Are you jet-lagged or something?”

  “Just hungry. I’m never much good at breakfast.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you can bear with me while I do some shopping in the market.”

  “Happy to …”

  They ate at a restaurant in the shadow of Pompey’s theatre.

  “Hope this place is all right,” Tom said. “I used to eat here often. Now I’ve reached the stage or rather age at which there’s no pleasure like nostalgia. Sometimes I think, no pleasure but nostalgia.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, “and I do know what you mean.”

  They ordered: spaghetti alle vongole for Tom, a salad of mozzarella and tomato for Belinda, with veal for both to follow. They drank mineral water. Tom crumbled bread. “Do you like AA?”

  “Not a lot,” she said, “but I need it.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but enthusiasts depress me. You know, the ones who insist that we’re special people. As if we were Calvin’s Elect, for Christ sake.”

  “Calvin? Are you a Scot?”

  “Way back. If I call myself anything, which I don’t, then I call myself a Scot. But I prefer Bogey’s reply to that sort of question in Casablanca. ‘I’m a drunkard’.”

  “To which the answer,” she said, “is: that makes you a citizen of the world.”

  “Which is no better. Has Bridget been coming to AA long?”

  “Five years, I think. You know her then?”

  “Of old. She once clawed my face open. She was a real street-fighter in her drinking days. But you probably know that. I guess Tomaso has saved her life.”

  “It’s still an unhappy one,” Belinda said.

  “And how do you see yours?”

  It was the kind of question she couldn’t abide. And this Tom hadn’t earned the right, which indeed nobody had, to ask it. She lit a cigarette, Gitanes with no filter.

  “I don’t ask myself that sort of question. So I can’t answer when it’s put to me.”

  “Intruding, am I? Sol asked me to tell my story at next week’s meeting. Should I?”

  “Probably. Up to you of course. Someo
ne might benefit.”

  “But not you?”

  He took some bread and mopped up the olive oil and veal juices on his plate. “What did you do this morning?” he said.

  “Not a lot, went to look at the Caravaggios in the French church. I quite often do that.”

  “Used to be keen on painting,” he said. “That’s gone. Years since I was in a gallery, or a church. Pasolini talked about making a film about Caravaggio. I looked at a lot of them about then.”

  “You knew him then?”

  “Not well. I was in the business in those days. Scriptwriter. Script-doctor too. But not well. I wasn’t queer and I wasn’t left-wing. I thought he was a phoney. Maybe he thought me one too. I’ve more sympathy with him now than I had then. Today’s world’s rather horrible, isn’t it? You know there really might be something in these allegations on old Pasquino.”

  “Rome’s full of conspiracy theorists,” Belinda said. “It’s more likely surely that it happened the way it was represented, that he picked up this poor boy, or boys, and they didn’t like what he suggested. Or they just went too far roughing him up. Or it was robbery with violence, I don’t know.”

  “Oh sure, it’s more likely. I just said there might be something in the allegations. There were all sorts of odd things going on here then. Shall we have coffee, or do you want fruit or cheese?

  “No,” she said, “coffee’s just right.”

  Back in the apartment the table on which the fax machine stood was covered with a tumbled ream of paper. Kenneth had certainly responded. She wasn’t sure now that she wanted to know. The feeling would pass, but … She took a glass of mineral water from the bottle in the fridge and went through to her bedroom. She undressed but for her knickers and lay down. She slept badly at night but well in the afternoon. The cats came to join her.

  Tom Durward had said he would sit in a bar with a book.

  “I’ve a couple of dozen Maigrets in my book-bag. There’s no comfort-reading like Maigret. Who was that twitchy guy at the meeting? Looked like a Church of England vicar.”

  “Stephen? He is a Church of England vicar, or was. He doesn’t have a charge now. I’m not sure what he does have.”

  Tom Durward nodded. He took a toscano from his inside breast-pocket, and a cigar-cutter from his side-pocket, and clipped the cigar in half. He lit it and drew the smoke in. “I just wondered if I knew him,” he said. “Nervy, isn’t he?”

  IV

  Kate Sturzo was brisk in the morning, her time of day. She woke at 6.30, got up at once, had a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, showered, ate cereal and dried figs, and was at her desk by 7.15. In summer she wore shorts and a T-shirt for morning work, in winter a tracksuit. It was still warm enough to be summer.

  In three hours she wrote 1,500 words of a paper she was due to give at a conference in Geneva in October. The title was “The Dislocation of Conscience”. She started with a sub-title, “A Study in Criminal Mentality”. That was what had been suggested to her. But she didn’t like it. The phrase “criminal mentality” … She read over what she had written. It didn’t satisfy her, rang false. Would listening to Gary Kelly disturb the line she was taking?

  Criminality, she thought, is self-programming, just as alcoholism is. Nobody is programmed a criminal by outside agencies. But could criminal behaviour be the making of a better person, like alcoholism?

  Her own alcoholism had taken her by surprise. There was no family history and nothing in her life till she was well over thirty to suggest she would have trouble with booze. It had, as it were, ambushed her.

  She had been brought up with wine as a part of everyday life, but not an important part. Her parents, second-generation Italian-Scots, had a grocer’s shop with ice-cream parlour attached in Aberdeen. There was a flask of wine on the table at mealtimes, but it was rarely emptied. Giulio and Maria were serious people; they had done well, the shop flourished. When the supermarkets threatened the business, they moved upmarket, converting it to a high-class delicatessen. People came from all over the county to buy their coffee, cheese, prosciutto, salami and Italian wine.

  They had restricted themselves to three children. Kate supposed they had practised birth control, disobeying the Church despite Maria’s devout faith. Kate was the eldest, Caterina till she went to University in Glasgow. Peppe had gone into the business, making it still more expensive, more exclusive, more successful. Marco worked for an oil company; he too had now dropped the Italian form of his name. When they were young, Maria had taken them all, several summers in succession, to Italy, to maintain a family connection with a multiplicity of cousins. Now that she had lived years in Rome, Kate never saw them.

  She had never married. She had settled there first on account of an affair with Angelo, a Professor of Law at the University. That was over some time ago. Angelo was now in politics, a member of parliament belonging to the Party of the Democratic Left, the reformed Communists.

  Kate switched off her computer, and went through to her bedroom. She put on a cream-coloured dress with a broad red belt. She combed her hair. Her face was strong, the skin darker than it used to be, and there were lines running down from the corners of her mouth.

  It was 11.15. She had an hour and a half before she was due to meet Mike. If he turned up. He had a habit of making a lunch date, as after the meeting the previous night, and then cutting it. Kate was Mike’s sponsor in AA. She didn’t much like him, told herself she might be a better sponsor for that reason. Affection interfered with judgement.

  She checked her e-mail. She never did this before starting work for fear of distraction. There was confirmation of Gary Kelly’s flight. He was arriving at noon the next day. There had been difficulty over his passport which the police were reluctant to return. She had had to speak to someone quite high up in the Home Office, and also to the barrister who had defended him, Reynard Yallett, an old acquaintance, now celebrated as a right-wing Rottweiler, much in demand for Newsnight and radio programmes.

  Kate left the apartment, double-locking the door, and took the lift down. The porter was sweeping the hallway. She remembered to ask after his granddaughter who had been off school with chickenpox.

  The leaves of the chestnut trees were still green, but dusty. Dust and spiders’ webs lay on the oleanders. At the end of the street a group of boys were revving their motor bikes. They eyed her, obedient to their code, and one called out “Bella, bella” as she passed; routine.

  She bought newspapers at the kiosk: Il Messaggero, La Repubblica, Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Daily Telegraph and Herald Tribune. She would read them intently, gut them, for information, not diversion.

  Belinda couldn’t understand why Kate chose to live in Parioli, a solidly, repressively, bourgeois district of dull nineteenth-century apartment blocks. It was its anonymity, its lack of character, the fact that nobody called it “interesting”, that appealed to Kate; also the tree-lined avenues.

  Waiting for Mike she worked her way through the newspapers. She took a pair of nail-scissors from her bag and cut out an article from the German paper about the fire-bombing of a hostel for Kurdish workers in Leipzig. Le Monde gave her a piece about the lax investigation into the murder of two Arab girls in the rue St-Denis.

  She looked at her watch. Mike was late. Then he was there, sweating and looking rough.

  “I bet you thought I wasn’t coming. I thought I wasn’t coming.”

  “It was your business whether you came or not.”

  “Do you mind if I have a drink?”

  “I do, rather.”

  “Just the one necessary therapeutic drink,” he said, and asked the waiter for a Fernet Branca and a beer.

  “Peroni,” he said, “there’s nothing in Italian beer, Kate …”

  “That’s an old line,” she said. “You’ve used it too often. And haven’t you been applying a spot of therapy already?”

  “Hell,” he said, “nothing serious.”

  When the waiter brought Mike his
drinks, which he did with an expression on his face which indicated disapproval, as if he had had trouble with Mike before, Mike looked at the Fernet Branca for a couple of minutes, as if to say he could take it or leave it. But he took it, using both hands to lift the glass and hold it steady, and then gulped a third of the beer. He held himself very still, letting the liquor work, then stretched out his right hand and watched it. It shook only a little.

  “Small town tremor,” he said. “I was with Stephen. We were at that night bar off Via del Tritone. I’m not sure it was a good idea.”

  “I’m quite sure it wasn’t,” she said. “I’m not going to sit here and watch you drink, Mike. I don’t have to do that.”

  “That’s all right. If I was planning to go on, I wouldn’t have kept our date. But I need help, Kate.”

  “Naturally,” she said. “The question is: do you want it?”

  “God,” he said, “you’re so good for me, Kate. If I can stick with you for a few hours, then I won’t need a drink. I haven’t been home and I can’t face Meg till I’m off this jag.”

  “Have you phoned her?”

  “Christ no.”

  “You should. But it’s your life. Hers too of course.”

  “I think, Meg and me, we’ve come to the end, pretty near the end.”

  “Don’t look to me for sympathy.”

  But she got him to come with her to a restaurant, and eat something. Ravioli, which is always easy, and some bread. When he had eaten most of it, he tried out a smile.

  “You know what set me off?” he said. “I’ve got to tell you.”

  “You don’t, you know. I’m not interested. It’s irrelevant. I’m sure you told Stephen. More than once.”

  “But I do need to tell you. Really. I came home yesterday – if it was yesterday – for lunch and found Meg reading my manuscript, my novel. And you know what she said? She said, ‘This is crap, Mike, total crap.’ My wife. I don’t need Meg to tell me my work’s crap. The reviewers can do that if there are any reviewers. ‘You used to have a talent,’ she said, and let the pages of the typescript fall all over the floor. Sure, I used to have a talent, and who killed it, what killed it? Providing for her. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, not out loud. I just turned and headed for the bar.”