Michael Dibdin: A Rich Full Death

I slept badly, tormented by doubts, questions, hopes and fears, and was awakened at six o’clock by the characteristic Florentine din of a bullock-cart passing by underneath my window. It is now almost nine, and with the sunlight streaming into the room last night seems little more real than a bad dream-it suddenly occurs to me that the answers to all the mysteries I have so laboriously described may well be known by now. I shall therefore lay down my pen and go and seek them out, in hopes of concluding this letter in a more satisfactory fashion than with a mere series of question marks.

Tuesday

Has it ever happened to you, while going through old papers, to hit upon some youthful journal or memorandum, full of shallow certainties and easy courage? If so, you will be familiar with the mixture of contempt and pity which I now feel on scanning the above lines-the difference being that these were penned not six-and-thirty hours ago!

Judge from this the intensity of the changes that have taken place in so short a time: truly I may say that most of the things I thought yesterday have been unceremoniously seized and stood on their heads, leaving my own in a state of utter bewilderment. Believe it or not, Prescott, I find myself in the extraordinary situation of aiding and abetting Mr Robert Browning in an attempt to pervert the course of justice!

But this is not the way to set about it. ‘First things first’ must be my motto, if I am to make any sense of all.

By Monday morning, then, as I mentioned, the storm had quite blown over, leaving a clear sky and crisp sunshot air-one of those splendid days, harbingers of spring, that make one feel like crying out aloud ‘The South! The South!’ Needless to say, I restrained any such impulse, but nevertheless my heart was high as I strode through the streets of Florence. Poor Isabel’s death seemed a distant memory, a horror of the night, and my grief had become almost an abstraction. Nature’s compensation for the loss of our loved ones is a renewed sense of our own vitality. ‘Alas, that she is gone!’ I sighed, and back came answer, ‘Rejoice, that you remain!’ At such a moment, on such a day, simply being alive is reason enough to exult; and I exulted.

The streets of Florence are a spectacle of which one never tires, but that morning every scene produced an effect overwhelmingly rich and deep and full of life. The profusion of anecdote and incident which assails the eye here may be partly explained by the way in which the aristocrat here lives cheek by jowl with the pauper, the merchant with the artisan. There is no ‘good’ quarter, with the result that you see more in the time it takes to stroll the length of one average street than you will in a week elsewhere; and all bizarrely juxtaposed with the greatest nonchalance: grave burghers in fur-lined capes discussing the real unpublished news of the city in discreet murmurs; a locksmith at work on a creaky old door; a brace of counterfeit Madonnas set out in the street, awaiting the framer’s art; a ringing laugh, a cutting jibe, a sullen retort; chickens being throttled, plucked and suspended on strings; a peasant woman carefully sprinkling water to freshen her horde of green vegetables; meat being hoisted in a basket on a rope towards an inaccessible window from which a face peers anxiously down; a distinguished-looking gentleman complaining loudly that the watch he has been sold keeps stopping dead at five to five every day; a priest scurrying along on some urgent mission of life or death; a soldier with a prisoner in guard; a girl with big grave eyes who leaves her work for a moment to watch you pass.

And when at length you reach the river, and the huddling mediaeval walls fall back to reveal San Donato hill with the monastery, and the great reach of glinting water bridged by the quaint old Ponte Vecchio (which is apparently to be pulled down any day now) and the snow-capped mountains in the distance-well, to my unphilosophical eye it all seems a quite sufficient justification in itself for the existence of the world.

Once beyond the river, however, this mood of unreflecting joy waned, deserting me altogether as I approached the Guidi palace. I had set off thither without much thought of the difficulties of my enterprise, but as I drew nearer to my goal these became only too evident. What did I think I was about, setting off thus blithely to pay a morning call on Mr Robert Browning? Even assuming that this gentleman was prepared to receive me at such an hour, it would almost certainly be impossible for us to discuss what had happened the previous night, since his wife was bound to be present. Moreover, I realised, it was more than likely that I featured in whatever story Browning had dreamed up to account for his late return home-the servant to whom I had handed in the note had recognised me, and this would have had to be explained. To blunder in and attempt to improvise my part in this domestic comedy was to risk my entire standing here. At one stroke I might become a social leper, persona non grata wherever I turned, the man to whom no one would ever again be at home!

On the other hand, the fact remained that I absolutely had to know the outcome of Browning’s interrogation and the police enquiries into Isabel’s death; and since an approach through a third party might equally give rise to embarrassing questions my informant could only be Mr Browning himself.

The only solution which occurred to me was to wait until Mr Browning left home, and then approach him in the street. I accordingly made my way to a small cafe on the other side of the Rome road, ordered a large dish of coffee and settled down to read the morning paper-keeping a careful watch on everyone who emerged from the Palazzo Guidi.

I had not been there very long when I became aware that I was not the only person thus employed: in the doorway of a church opposite stood a man lounging in a painfully self-conscious fashion, whom I recognised with a shock as one of the policemen who had been at the villa the night before!

For a moment I assumed that the fellow was spying on me , but I soon realised that his attention too was fixed on the building opposite. This naturally redoubled my curiosity, but I was obliged to contain myself in patience for the best part of an hour before I spied the stocky figure of Robert Browning emerge from the cave-like entrance to his lair into the strong sunlight and deeper shadows of Via Maggio.

I had devoted some thought to what the police agent might do at this juncture, and what my best course would be if-as indeed proved to be the case-he were to follow Browning. To have two of us dogging the poet’s footsteps was manifestly absurd, yet now Browning had emerged I did not wish to risk losing him. I therefore crossed the road and dashed down a side-street opposite, past mangy cats and beggar brats-for though the Brownings face the Grand-Dukes’s palace, the alleyways behind are plebeian in the extreme-to the next street, where I turned right and continued my headlong course, lungs bursting-thank heaven they are fully mended now, and can support this kind of exercise! — as far as the Trinity bridge. Thanks to my exertions, however, I arrived at the bridge before Mr Browning, and was leaning over a parapet contemplating the turbid waters of the Arno when he passed by-at which moment I turned and greeted him with as convincing a show of natural surprise as I was capable of.

‘You are followed,’ I told him, indicating with a nod the spy who had just hove in sight at the end of the bridge, struggling to keep up with the foreigner’s brisk pace.

A look of deep dismay crossed Browning’s features.

‘Have you time for a coffee?’ I enquired without pause. ‘I would like to hear how last night’s little drama ended.’