They bathed and slept on their return to the pensione. For an hour Evelyn watched the linen curtains billow and fall and matched her breathing to the pulse of fabric. The sound of trams outside, the birds, a burst of laughter from below, and her thoughts were of people no longer living, and it wasn’t an act of nostalgia but one of love of reminiscence, of the people who had made her her. The privilege and the freedom they had brought her. Beauty and gratitude entwined forever in a closely woven fabric of sympathetic names: Constance, Dotty, Thaddeus Collins, H. W., Gabriela, Livia, and of course her mother. Her mother was the knot that stopped the fraying. That’s what she learnt later, and learnt it the hard way, too late to say thank you truly. A woman whose Italian lineage was a stunning counterpoint to the pale, judgemental society she at first encountered. Until the night she met H. W. Skinner, as unconventional a man as she’d ever meet, who had given his heart to countless women – gossip she really should have taken seriously, because she ended up with a husband whose artistic soul she could never own, and neither was she ever the muse. She was trapped by a form of courtly love, church-imposed, whilst her body cried out for wings. He held out a daily offering of feathers and wax, but she couldn’t do it, couldn’t leap. For she could only see all that she wasn’t.
Her currency, in the end, was money. She gave to others the freedom she could never take for herself. She bought her daughter that first rail ticket, a gateway into her thrilling twenty-second year.
Evelyn remembered the journey from the rail station to the Pensione Simi, down dark streets teeming with life and smells and across trecento squares where she saw statues come to life and where the bells called the medieval dead to rise. A conspiracy of beauty everywhere. The city threw aside its cloak and introduced itself to her, and she met it with eyes wide and heart thumping and open-mouthed. She stumbled clumsily from the cab into the vestibule of the hotel. She couldn’t speak. It wasn’t being struck dumb by beauty per se, but the acknowledgement that if such beauty existed, then so did the opposite. And in that brief moment, she’d felt the opposite.
Evelyn climbed out of bed and Dotty stirred. She said, Morning darling, and Evelyn said, It’s still evening, Dotty.
Evelyn opened the cupboard and put on a long black dress, loose fitting with three-quarter sleeves, and reached down for her Greek-style sandals. She pinned her hair and painted her mouth a vivid orange. She stood at the window, watching the city move about in dusky elegance. The sky appeared as an ocean, the clouds as waves, and an all-pervading stillness had settled, the lowering sun an image of the rising dawn.
Less elegantly, behind her, Dotty was in her underwear with her legs up against the wall. Look at these things, said Dotty, slapping her thighs. Who could say no?
Evelyn said, We are approaching the time ‘when the fly yields to the mosquito. Come la mosca cede a la zanzara,’ and she closed the shutters, casting the room into shadow and cool.
That’s rather eloquent, said Dotty.
It is. Dante’s Inferno.
Dotty threw a glance at the clock and said, We are actually approaching the hour when water yields to the cocktail. Come l’acqua cede a la cocktaila, and she rolled away from the wall and unexpectedly met gravity. She fell off the bed with a thump.
Harry’s Bar was tucked behind the Palazzo Corsini. It bore no relation to the more famous Harry’s Bar in Venice and had been opened the year before by a man called Enrico, known as Harry or Henry to his English-speaking friends. He had tended the bar at the Hotel Excelsior during wartime and was the man who had seen Evelyn at her lowest ebb. And standing in the doorway, looking into the dark interior, Evelyn felt nervous at an encounter with her past.
She needn’t have. Enrico noticed her immediately, said how she hadn’t changed at all, offered his hand and kissed hers ceremoniously. How I wondered what had happened to my favourite Miss Skinner, he said and led her and Dotty over to a corner table where they had both privacy and a view of the room. He brought them what he’d always brought Evelyn – biciclettas! – You are a dark horse, Lynny!
Cin cin! Clink of glass.
Evelyn told Dotty that back in ’44 she’d had to wait a month before she’d been able to enter the city with the Allied Military Government, and when she had, she’d wept. The buildings that had once overhung the river were gone. The ancient quarter, the medieval towers, all gone. She could see straight across the river to Orsanmichele and the Duomo, an uninterrupted corridor never deemed possible. What had been the heart of Dante’s Florence had been reduced overnight to mountainous piles of smoking rubble. An act of destruction purely to halt the Allied advance, which of course it failed to do. There was no military justification for any of it, said Evelyn. She remembered the people stumbling about incredulous and dazed by the violence inflicted upon their gentle city.