I did.
I’ve still got it.
You never lost it.
I think I did. Just a bit.
Not for long, though.
No. Not for long.
Midnight and they’d just turned off the light. The sound of a match being struck and Dotty’s face flared yellow in the darkness. She sat up and reached for an ashtray. She said, I wanted to ask you, Lynny. Earlier when I was waiting for you, I went to the Loggia to sketch the statues. In particular, the Giambologna.
Which one? said Evelyn. Hercules or the Rape?
The Rape—
One of the greats—
Isn’t it? I felt aroused.
You’re supposed to.
I did wonder. But it troubled me.
Evelyn said, Giambologna knew exactly what he was doing, Dotty. He understood the erotic dance as much as he understood the response. The struggle between idealised man versus the mortal. It’s as if he’s watching us looking at it. It’s quite a bravura performance, really. But context is everything – and the long heavy hand of religion was everywhere. This statue, more than anything, represents the artistic freedom of the Renaissance. The freedom to think and feel outside of the Church. It was only with the recuperation of the great classical tradition – subjects of classical antiquity – that artists could free themselves from the constraints of Christianity and so present narratives of Good and Evil. Bloody and exalting, thrilling and – yes – arousing.
Dotty handed the cigarette across the darkness to Evelyn. The tip glowed orange. Evelyn said, I think it’s also worth noting at this point that without Giambologna, Bernini wouldn’t have been Bernini.
Wouldn’t he?
No. And then where would we have been?
Where indeed? said Dotty. Is there nothing you don’t know, Lynny?
Oh, plenty, said Evelyn, stubbing out the cigarette. I don’t know much about motor racing.
Not such a loss, though, said Dotty. Night night, sweets.
The next morning, the two women were up early. Dotty jettisoned the easel that day for a more mobile life with footstool and large drawing pad. They pocketed the last two boiled eggs on their way out, and took coffee in Via dei Neri at a bustling café full of stylish young men and women. Evelyn couldn’t decide whether or not to go over to the Piazza del Carmine to see the Masaccio frescoes, but chose not to in the end. Had she listened to that quiet nudge inside her, that impulse to go south, she would have crossed into Piazza Santo Spirito at the same time as Ulysses, who was on his way to his workshop. They would have stopped and looked at one another in disbelief and she would have said, It’s you, isn’t it? and he would’ve said, Yes, it’s me. She would have gone towards him and embraced him. They would have been momentarily speechless at the way fate had summoned them once again. They would have walked arm in arm towards Michele’s café and would have sat down and ordered coffee, and Ulysses in faltering Italian would have explained to Michele who Evelyn was, how they’d previously met, how he’d never been happier to see anyone in his life. She would have commented on his language ability. And she would finally have said, So tell me, Ulysses – How is the good captain?
This was the version of events, had Evelyn gone south.
But what she did that morning was to go and buy a newspaper, la Repubblica, from a nearby stand. She took the bus up to Fiesole. The almond trees were in blossom when she made the ascent to the convent of San Francesco. The roses were pink and fragrant in hedgerows, the view across the Mugnone valley exhilarating. She sat and read her newspaper overlooking an olive grove, but there was always the gnawing feeling that she should have been somewhere else, seeing someone else.
By the time she returned to the colonnade, Dotty was sketching the portraits of two handsome older men – long-time partners, obviously. It was a stunning likeness, four shades of pencil on tinted paper. They didn’t demand a signature, and yet when they took the rolled picture from her, one bent low and whispered, We know who you are – thank you.
Evelyn took Dotty to lunch over by the Pitti Palace, at a small trattoria close to Casa Guidi, former home to the poets Browning, where they shared a bistecca. An afternoon walk in the Boboli Gardens proved a more sensible alternative to another carafe of red wine.
They walked slowly up through the amphitheatre, the once-upon-a-time quarry that had supplied the stone for Signor Pitti’s extraordinary palace. Up past Neptune’s Fountain and the terraces to the top. And there, Florence revealed her splendour. Golden light, the precursor to dusk, crowned them, and they appeared exalted, happy. Evelyn sat and leant against a wall and closed her eyes and Dotty captured her there, in that moment, in a portrait of equal tenderness and soul as the one hanging in the restaurant where the plan to visit Italy had first been devised.