Rupert Thomson: Secrecy

‘Always the hero,’ I murmured.

He thrust his face so close to mine that I could smell the grappa on his breath. Since his rejection by the Camilleri girl, as he called her, he had started spending time on the waterfront in Graziella, arm-wrestling fishermen and pinching the fat on the hips of the innkeeper’s daughter.

‘Look at you,’ he said, grabbing a handful of my dark-brown curls and twisting. ‘You wormed your way into this family. You fucking worm —’

‘Language, Jacopo.’

Our mother had appeared in the doorway.

Jacopo draped a heavy, careless arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re quite right, mother. Worm was a bit strong.’

A few days later, I called at the Camilleri residence, a tall grey-white house at the southern tip of Ortigia, not far from the fortress. As chance would have it, it was Ornella herself who answered the door.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Much better, thanks.’

‘You have a bruise.’ She put her fingers to the equivalent place on her own forehead, a gesture so intimate that she might have touched me after all.

In the parlour she stood by the shutters, which were half-closed against the heat. If she gave the impression of aloofness, it had to do with the angle at which she carried her head, I decided, and with the tilt of her top lip. In other words, it was something she had no say over, and might not even have been aware of. I wanted to thank her, I said, for saving me.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said. ‘It was all Laura’s doing. My governess. I’m hopeless in emergencies, not practical at all.’ She turned from the window, her eyes grey as the sea on an October morning. ‘Something strange. You were lying on the footpath, dazed and bleeding, but when you noticed me, you smiled …’

Yes, it had been strange. That rush of gratitude, the feeling of well-being. The sudden, irresistible desire for oblivion. As if all my living had been done now that I had seen her face.

‘Maybe I was happy to be rescued,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that kind of smile.’

A brief silence followed, during which we both appeared to be thinking. Not long afterwards, I said I had to leave.

As I reached the end of the hall, another thought occurred to me, and I swung round. Ornella must have been stepping forwards, ready to shut the door behind me, because she was suddenly so close that I could see the gold spokes in her cool grey eyes. If she ran into my brother, I said, it might be best not to tell him I had visited her house. In fact, it might be best not to mention me at all.

She looked startled.

‘You don’t know him,’ I went on. ‘If he finds out we’ve spoken —’

‘I know him a little. He frightens me.’

‘He frightens me too — and I have to live with him.’

‘I won’t mention you,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

‘You’ve never seen me. You’ve never even heard of me.’ I had become giddy, perhaps because I had inadvertently found a way of making her my ally. ‘You don’t know I exist.’

Out on the street again, I walked without noticing where I was going. Before long, I found myself above the Porto Grande. The sea was smooth that day, and paler than the sky — more like light than water. I rested my forearms on the warm stone of the wall. Since Jacopo had all the perceived advantages — a classically proportioned face, a warrior’s physique — he had no grounds for jealousy or hatred, yet I had spent most of my life trying to avoid the blows he aimed at me. As I looked south towards Egg Rock and the low green headland of Plemmirio, I realized that if he learned of my encounter with Ornella he would have all the grounds he needed. We had been alone together. I had seen the gold in her grey eyes. That would be enough, more than enough.

*

I came back from Mass one day to find that a consignment of wax had been delivered to my room. I cut the cord that held the wrapping in place, and there it was, a brownish-yellow block, about the size of a child’s torso. Running my hand over the surface, which was pockmarked and granular, like certain cheeses, I leaned down and breathed it in. Such a delicious, complex smell.

I lit a small fire in the grate, then shaved a wedge off the block and began to heat it in a copper-bottomed pan.

‘Are you cooking?’

I had been so absorbed that I hadn’t heard Fiore enter. She was over by the door, chewing on her lower lip.

‘In a way.’ I tilted the pan, and we both watched the wax spill across the copper, faster than water. ‘Some sculptors make things out of wood or marble, but this is what I use.’

‘It smells like church.’

I took the pan off the fire and stood it on a metal trivet. ‘You know why?’

She shook her head.

‘This is what candles are made of,’ I said. ‘The more expensive candles, anyway. But you can make other things as well. Arms and legs. Heads. You can make whole people. Wax is the closest thing we have to skin and bone. Sometimes you can hardly tell the difference.’

‘When you talk about wax,’ Fiore said, ‘your voice changes completely.’

‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

She grinned.

Her mother had been with us the last time we were together, and I hadn’t had a chance to ask her the question that had been on my mind for several days. I had been unable to forget the girl I had seen in the apothecary window, and how she had stepped back into the shop’s interior with just the suggestion of a smile. I didn’t think that I’d imagined it. I had tried drawing her from memory — without success. I had also spent an entire afternoon doing my best to retrace Fiore’s route. Since she had been in charge, though, I hadn’t paid much attention to the sequence of the streets, let alone their names — I hadn’t known it was going to be so important — and while I had the feeling, more than once, that I was close — the iron studs on a front door, the fall of bleak light into a courtyard — I had failed to find the place.

‘On our tour of the city,’ I said, ‘we stopped outside an apothecary …’

Fiore’s eyes seemed to lose their focus.

‘It was in a narrow street,’ I said. ‘Quite dark.’

‘Most of the streets are like that.’

‘But I stopped, remember? I looked through the window.’

‘You looked through lots of windows.’

I tried to be patient. ‘This one was made of glass. Small glass panes.’

Fiore shrugged.

‘The shop was closed up for the night,’ I said, ‘so all I did was stand outside, and when I walked on there were dandelions floating in the air — thousands of dandelions —’

‘ Dandelions ?’ She wound a tangled strand of hair around her forefinger.

I was making her feel awkward, stupid — the way other people made her feel — but I had to keep probing.

‘You got left behind,’ I said. ‘You had to run to catch up. Don’t you remember?’

‘Sort of.’

It was no good. And if Fiore couldn’t help me, no one could. I would have to forget about the girl. I let out a sigh, then looked towards the window. Having to forget: I was used to that.

As Fiore turned to leave, the loose sole of her shoe caught on the uneven floorboards, and she almost fell.

‘I’m so clumsy,’ she wailed.

‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘It’s those terrible shoes. How long have you had them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know what? Tomorrow, I’m going to buy you a new pair.’

I saw excitement in her face, and disbelief, but most of all I saw a kind of longing, and I realized, in that moment, just how little she got by on, how little she was given.

I had taken the Grand Duke up on his offer of the disused stables as a place to work, but there were walls to knock down and windows to install, and while the outbuildings were being converted I put in an appearance at court. Since everyone had their own carefully calibrated and highly symbolic position in the room, I had no way of approaching him, not unless he summoned me himself, and he was preoccupied that day, showing off a relic he had recently acquired, so I hung about on the fringes of the crowd, finding the whole experience stilted and strangely enervating. Then Bassetti came over.