A Party in San Niccolo

by Christobel Kent

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

'In the far distance, the great terracotta dome of the cathedral appeared, like a mirage shimmering in the heat haze . . .'

Gina Donovan arrives in Florence on a beautiful spring morning to stay with an old friend. She is hoping for nothing more than a break from her demanding young family, but as she soon finds out, this most ancient and beautiful of cities has its dark side.

Within hours of her arrival, Gina meets the elegant Frances Richardson, who invites her to her birthday party. As Gina learns, Frances' party is the highlight of the expatriate calendar. This year it is to be held in the gardens beneath the city's medieval wall.

However, as Gina's week in Florence unfolds and the party draws near, a terrible discovery is made. And no one in this close-knit community is free of suspicion . . .

Release date: June 7, 2018

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 464

Sample

As the S223, fast, narrow and dangerous, curves south out of Siena and down towards the sea, it leaves the rounded, painterly contours of Chianti behind, for something altogether darker and more mountainous. The neon-lit bar of a truck stop carved out of the red earth marks the transition, then the road dips. Velvety black hills, densely forested with holm-oak, juniper and myrtle, rise up to enclose it and almost all signs of human habitation disappear; there are none of the stone villas surrounded by cypresses that colonize the landscape between Siena and Florence; no terraces of olives nor carefully tended vineyards. Here begins the part of southern Tuscany known as the Maremma: barely inhabited, uncultivated, shunned for its malarial swamps since the departure of the Romans and threaded through with pungent, sulphurous springs.

The road climbs, then, as a huge valley opens up ahead, becomes a bridge, two miles long and hundreds of feet above the valley floor. The river winds through stripped cork trees, willow and hazel thickets, and only occasionally the roof of a dilapidated farm building can be glimpsed through the vegetation. As the bridge is reunited with the valley’s steep far side, it widens to include one of the lay-bys to be found every couple of miles between Siena and Grosseto. This May morning, at about seven o’clock, there is still dew on the scrubby grass and stunted wild flowers bordering the lay-by, and on the miscellaneous debris scattered on the gravel: crumpled cans, condoms, cigarette butts, a piece of newspaper smeared with dirt. The lay-by is enclosed by a thick, tangled hedge; behind the hedge the mountainside falls back steeply down to the river. Set near the hedge, midway along the lay-by, facing out towards the road, is what appears to be a carefully composed tableau: a small, collapsible stool and, resting against it, a large, opened golf umbrella, alternating pink and purple. In front of the stool, on the ground, is one teetering, cork-soled, plastic-strapped platform sandal, and behind the stool, at the mouth of a low tunnel through the undergrowth, is the other, on its side as though its owner had just stumbled out of it.

 

In a dark Florentine backstreet just before dawn the insistent metallic judder of an alarm starts up. A not-unfamiliar addition to the city’s street noise, it seems at first to go unheeded, although at this hour it rings strident in the silent, apparently empty streets. But then a man appears at the top of a dark, carpeted stairway above the endlessly ringing bell and descends towards the source of the sound.

The stairway ends in a long narrow room, windowed at either end, one window barred by an expanding metal shutter, the other, which is smaller and apparently had no such protection, has been smashed, a jagged hole about four feet in diameter gaping in it at waist height. The man moves towards it through the room, which in the dim grey light harbours all manner of strange shapes. Quickening his pace he passes a carved throne, a marble nymph, her hands in her hair; the spread wings of a stuffed bird of prey, its feathers furred with dust, loom over him out of the darkness. In front of the broken window stands a little yellow silk divan, and there he stops, the sound of the alarm bell vibrating in the room around him, and looks down.

The girl is spreadeagled on her back in a shower of broken glass, her arms flung back over her head; one hand, dangling from the divan and still just perceptibly in motion, almost touches the floor. A crumpled silk camisole is pulled up to expose the girl’s flat belly, its navel torn and bleeding where a stud has been torn out by some violent struggle, and the first signs of massive bruising are beginning to appear on the vulnerable flesh. Her long slender arm is pale, but her neck is livid with the signs of profound trauma, her face bluish in the uncertain light and her open eyes pools of black. He kneels at her head and places his ear to her mouth, then jerks it back as though burnt when his skin comes into contact with her own, which is very cold, and as her pale face comes out of the shadow cast by his head, he sees that the whites of her eyes are suffused with blood from tiny haemorrhages. He moves back from her towards a switch on the wall beside an old-fashioned desk. Abruptly the alarm stops, no more than five minutes after it had begun, and in the sudden, resounding silence that follows, the ghost of a laugh, a distant skittering of footsteps on the flagstones echo from somewhere down the labyrinth of darkened streets. He reaches for the phone.

 

Frances Richardson opened her eyes and thought, as she had thought on waking for the thirteen years since her husband’s death, Still here. She turned her head to the side, looking at the photograph in a tarnished silver frame that rested on a small oak table by the bed, and felt the small, secret pang of irritation she always felt on considering Roland; alive, he had presented her with many and varied reasons to be angry with him, and now he annoyed her only by the obstinate, unchanging definiteness of his absence. Frances looked up at the faded garlands and roses of the fresco on the vaulted ceiling of her tiny bedroom and through its door into her dark drawing room, where sunlight filtered through the slits in the three tall sets of arched shutters, laid her head back on her pillow, closed her eyes and smiled.

Outside, in the narrow street, motorini buzzed past, their high-pitched whines amplified by the height of the stone palazzi lining the Via delle Caldaie. Frances could hear Liliana setting up crates outside her shop, chiding her husband, Gianni, as he unloaded his tiny three-wheeled van. Slowly, carefully – How did I get so old suddenly, she thought – Frances stood up and went to the window, opening the peeling shutters wide. Hearing the creak and clang, Liliana looked up and smiled. Buon compleanno, Signora Frances, she called. Happy birthday. Frances made a rueful face, and shrugged. Still here, after all. She turned to look inwards, into the dark room, the sun warming her back, and contemplated with satisfaction the prospect of a day spent engaged in the final organization of her party.

Frances’s birthday party was an event of some significance in the Florentine social calendar. Although she was not rich, she owned her apartment, which was large by the city’s standards, and she lived fairly quietly for most of the year. She ate out only modestly and infrequently, and, when she needed to escape the intense, suffocating heat of July and August, would take the train down to stay with friends in Cortona, high above the Val di Chiana, where occasionally a breeze would blow some freshness through the narrow streets, and where there were friendly swimming pools to be borrowed on the outskirts of the old town.

She rarely stayed for more than a day or two, unwilling to surrender her independence and disciplined in her determination not to outstay her welcome, but in this way the income she received from Roland’s pension, combined with the rent from the English house, kept her quite happily and permitted her, every year, to throw her party. It was keenly anticipated and much discussed by Frances’s guests, an assortment of new and old friends, exiles, expatriates and hangers-on, always with the addition of a small number of people she did not know at all but who happened to have drifted into town at the right time and in the right person’s wake.

Three doors along, one floor down and on the opposite, and less desirable, side of the Via delle Caldaie, a man stood at his own open window, his square, blunt-nailed hands resting on the windowsill and a thoughtful frown on his broad face as he listened to the exchange between Liliana and Frances, Lady Richardson. Frank Sutton leant a little way out of his window, far enough to see Frances’s back and her neat, silvery-white head gleaming in the sun while still remaining concealed by shadow himself. In his hands he held an invitation, printed in black on heavy cream card, to Frances’s party, which, according to the heavy script, was to be held the following Friday at the Casa Ferrali.

In previous years Frances’s parties had been held in her apartment on the Via delle Caldaie, an opportunity for the Florentines and the expatriate community alike to inhale the atmosphere of English bohemia at its most civilized: old velvet, the faded lustre of Georgian silver and glass, the mingling scents of Moroccan patchouli, musk-roses and gardenia, Frances’s bookshelves declaring her foreignness in shabby old editions of Yeats and Blake, Aphra Behn and George Eliot. But this year, it seemed, things were going to be different; this year Frances would be celebrating at the heart of the Italian city, in the gardens and on the piano nobile of a great house that had for 400 years been in the hands of the same Florentine family and was now inhabited by Frances’s old friend Nino Ferrali and his wife, Lucienne.

Frank Sutton had been a regular guest at Frances’s birthday parties since his first year in Florence, ten years ago; her radar had managed to pick him up only three months after his arrival. He had been only a stringer then, interviewing poets and architects more in hope than expectation of ever being published, it seemed, and covering the occasional beatification in Rome. Had he been ambitious he would have gone to live down there, and there were plenty of Frances’s friends who wondered why she bothered to go on inviting him, a failure, or at least an oddity, still marooned in this backwater after ten years.

He turned back inside and stood as if in contemplation of the crowded interior of his own flat. On the bed a small, battered, old-fashioned suitcase sat open, either in the process of being packed or unpacked, probably, on balance the latter as most of its contents seemed crushed and grubby. Towers of books and papers climbed precariously up the walls, crates of wine and water occupied the space beneath his desk, yesterday’s clothes and a dressing-gown lay in the doorway, books lay open on the floor and a round metal tray from the bar below with a sticky espresso cup, crumbs and a twist of paper napkin sat at the foot of his bed. The only calm and ordered space was occupied by his work table, next to the far window, a laptop computer open and already humming on its surface. Frank looked thoughtfully at the computer for a moment or two, then picked his way through the debris towards a darkened hallway.

A few moments later Sutton appeared in the street below, emerging from the massive, studded front door to his building. He threaded his way through the market stalls to the newspaper stand in the Piazza Santo Spirito to collect a fat bundle of Italian papers, returned to the Via delle Caldaie, and turned into the Caffè Medici. Although, technically, Frank Sutton’s flat had a kitchen (consisting, as Frances had witnessed, of an ancient fridge which administered an electric kick like a cattle prod if the occasional visitor made the mistake of touching it and the tap at the same time, and a single ring of the kind usually supplied in camper vans), he had never been known to use it; and he was generally to be observed in the Medici around mealtimes, chewing thoughtfully on a brioche or a dried-up tramezzino, apparently as unconcerned about his diet as he was about his appearance.

The sandals lying beside the busy road belong to Evelina; they are only three weeks old, and are two sizes too big for her, but she doesn’t need them any more. Evelina is caught between two rocks several hundred feet below her sandals, bent in half at the waist like a doll. Her head is down; she has been dead for several hours now and her body is stiffening into this awkward position. It is not immediately apparent what killed Evelina, although there is plenty of evidence of injury. It could have been the fall; her face looks caved in above the left eye where it rests against the rock, partly hidden by the stiff sheaf of her hair, gleaming with hairspray and coarse from straightening. Her head is tilted oddly sideways as though her neck might be broken; the one visible eye is barely closed, and a sliver of white gleams dully below the heavy dark lid, and, while in her left ear the gleam of a big gold hoop is visible, the right is unadorned, its pierced hole ripped and crusted with blood. Her gleaming dark legs, long in proportion to her child’s body and fully exposed by her tiny shorts, are scratched and grazed all along their length, and there is a deep laceration over her instep. Her toenails are painted with glitter polish, and the soles of her feet are cut and bloody.

Evelina is wearing her favourite purple halter top; the girls often fight over the bin bags of clothes, seconds from the market, that Betty brings for them to wear, and Evelina was pleased to get this one – Glory wanted it, but Betty, who always had the last word, let Evelina have it in the end, because she was the youngest. It is hard to say when her body will be found; there is no one to register her as missing, unless you count Betty, or the man Betty sent to collect the girls, neither of whom, all things considered, is much of a prospect, and she isn’t near any of the paths through the Maremma’s dark scrub – known as macchia, which means ‘stain’ – used by those who intermittently tend the land. Evelina is fourteen, which is young to die, even for a girl from Nigeria, where, had she remained in her village, she could have expected to live for another thirty-seven years.

 

Three doors down from Frank Sutton’s flat, the Caffè Medici was a good local; it was Frances’s, too. It was not ostentatious, but was a step up from basic, having a couple of tables and some booths, such as the one Frank was occupying, for extra discretion, and regulars who took tables were charged only bar prices rather than the hefty surcharge generally levied on tourists for the privilege. From the beginning of May, three or four tables and some potted jasmine would be squeezed between the pavement and the traffic and you could sit outside, if you didn’t mind the noise and the fumes and the delivery vans edging past. The Via delle Caldaie was little more than an alley, mostly used by locals cutting through from the Via Romana to Santo Spirito, at the outer edge of the tourist centre of Florence. The Medici was handy for the Annalena Gate – the back entrance to the Boboli Gardens – and was just visible to anyone emerging from the lovely, austere façade of Santo Spirito, Brunelleschi’s last, unfinished church, so the place managed to catch a bit of tourist trade.

Although the Medici was just a little backstreet café, its bar was marble, the mirrors were polished and you could buy five different single malts, as well as the usual Italian digestivi: Unicum, Cynara and Vecchia Romagna. Massi, senior barman and the owner’s son, could quote from Dante and Boccaccio, collected fresh brioches from the pasticceria every morning and always wore a clean, ironed shirt, in summer changing into a fresh one after lunch, his sleeves carefully rolled to just below the elbow. He knew how to mix Negronis, Manhattans and a dry Martini, and you could even get a glass of champagne, though Frances didn’t know how much you’d have to pay for it.

Frances was well aware that in England no such place was available to her; pubs were not for elderly ladies with cut-glass vowels, however open-minded or outgoing those ladies might be. The easy intimacy of her place at the marble bar of the Medici, exchanging a few friendly words with Massi or with her neighbours, having a cappuccino on her way to market or an aperitif as the sun left the piazza, suited her so perfectly that every day she gave thanks for its unassuming presence in her life, so far from the oppressive, maudlin misogyny, the flashing lights and aggressive adolescent clientele of the village pub, or the toe-curling gentility and lace-curtained fug of a provincial tearoom. This was why Frances loved living abroad; she fitted into no class here, she was treated with courtesy because of her age and not her social position and she was permitted to chat gravely at the bar with whoever might be standing next to her, without fear of being thought condescending.

This morning the bar was almost empty; by the time Frances walked in it was long past the eight-thirty rush-hour, when most of the southern suburbs seemed to be in there, Piaggios and Vespas triple-parked outside while their owners swallowed cappuccino and pastries in five minutes flat on their way to work. Frances leant happily on the polished marble and smiled at Massi as he acknowledged her arrival with a friendly nod. She looked around the small, brightly lit room and could see the back of Frank Sutton’s head as he sat at a table in the corner, bent in concentration over a newspaper. He was often in here; what had always seemed to her a rather pleasantly undemanding part of the foreign correspondent’s job was a morning spent examining the Italian newspapers in search of titbits of interest to the British public. Not for the first time she wondered about Frank, so determinedly solitary, it seemed, and she decided not to disturb him. Massi set Frances’s little cup of coffee down on the bar in front of her and she reached down the shining length of the marble counter for the sugar dispenser.

At the far end of the bar, drinking orangeade, was a tall black girl she vaguely recognized – Betty? – usually in here in the evenings, when the clientele could get a lot rougher; Frances herself rarely came in after seven or eight, only occasionally in search of bottled water, or wine to take to dinner. Betty’s nose was pierced, with a tiny gold ring through one nostril, and her face was scarred. She wore orange pedal-pushers, tight over her round, muscular bottom, thrust up and out by the pitch of her fraying raffia-soled platforms. She turned to look at Frances scornfully, and Frances looked back unafraid, smiling in admiration at the fierceness in her gaze. She sipped her coffee. The girl turned back to Massi.

‘So you don’t know where Evelina’s got to?’ he was asking her.

Betty shook her head angrily. ‘Just disappeared. Left my shoes behind, though. The driver, he shouted for her but she didn’t come, so he went. She’ll turn up, one way or another.’ Massi nodded without much conviction, and Betty looked back at him without expression. She shrugged, and turned to look out at the street.

The girl’s Italian was good, though overlaid with a thick African accent, and Frances, listening, thought she had probably been in the city for some time. The Nigerian immigrants to Florence in particular and Italy in general were mostly illegal; many of them, it was obvious even to Frances, trafficked in prostitution, or, in the case of the men, were lured across the Mediterranean to sell the knock-off handbags they hauled about the main tourist sites in grubby tablecloths, always ready to gather them up and trudge away when the carabinieri approached. The prostitutes and street hawkers lived in obscure, ill-lit and badly policed parts of town, squeezed into dangerously converted, overcrowded and windowless flats, controlled by some mysterious and sinister power and largely distrusted and ostracized by the locals. Some lived here, in the shabbier parts of the Oltrarno, perhaps for easy access to the tourist roads to the south, perhaps because it had its own particular atmosphere, Frances thought, of lazy tolerance, although that might have been her benign imagination.

‘Seen Stefano, then?’ Massi said to Betty, as she turned away from him. Out of the corner of her eye Frances saw Frank’s head straighten as he looked up from his paper. The girl turned back, suddenly alert.

‘Why?’

Massi shrugged. ‘He was looking for you last night. Owe him money, do you?’

‘Owe him money? No way; I don’t buy what he’s selling. He owes me, more like, I gave him stuff to sell a month ago. I’ll smash his face in when I see him.’ She sniffed, and drained her glass of sticky orange dregs.

Massi shook his head, and exchanged a glance with Frances. Both of them knew the man – everyone knew Stefano. The girl’s attempt at bravado sounded hollow and neither of them were convinced, Frances felt.

The first time Frances had seen Stefano, years ago now, he was sitting on his bench in the Piazza Santo Spirito, probably, although she couldn’t have said how soon after her arrival in Florence he had found a place on her map of the city’s inhabitants. She had been struck then by how handsome he was. Tall, for an Italian, something over six foot, she thought (instinctively measuring him, as she tended to measure men, against Roland in his prime). Stefano had thick white hair almost to his shoulders, smooth dark skin and the profile and bearing of a Roman emperor, or perhaps a Cherokee. There was something noble about him, hawklike, and his eyes were deep-set and a surprising clear light blue.

Stefano wasn’t flashy – his clothes were good, but old – and he never seemed aggressive; on the contrary, he had a mild, gentle manner that somehow gave him more presence as he sat like any other itinerant on his bench, nodding and smiling and speaking softly to the assortment of derelicts and drop-outs and the addicts, twitching with nervous anticipation, who would gather around him. So when Frances eventually learnt, somehow – through Frank? – that Stefano was not a kind of gutter saint but was a dealer and a career criminal it disturbed her, that her instincts could have betrayed her. It was an early and instructive example to her of her romantic foreigner’s tendency – a tendency she refused quite to surrender – to assume that the natural physical ease and good taste she so often observed among the Italian people were signs of moral worth, rather than lovely habits learnt over centuries, accidents of birth.

Frances wondered, now, what Stefano was doing with the Nigerian girls. There seemed to be few kinds of criminal activity in the city he wasn’t somehow engaged in, and she had always had a feeling that he had some involvement with prostitution. She had seen him with an Eastern European girl, whom she’d initially thought might have been a girlfriend but who turned out to be something else; a dark-eyed girl with her head bowed, Stefano’s hand clamped too tightly on her wrist. But not an African girl; the Nigerians seemed to keep themselves to themselves. Most likely Betty owed him some money, presumably for drugs, and he was getting it back in the usual way.

With one last look at Betty, who was leaning forward with her backside thrust out, elbows on the bar, her chin cupped in her hands and frowning in concentration, Frances pushed a pile of coins over to Massi to pay for her coffee, picked up her shopping and turned to the door.

 

Frances had come to live in the Oltrarno, the part of Florence that lies south of the river, after Roland’s death. A largely working-class district, tucked in between the Arno and the city’s thick mediaeval walls, it was quite unlike the cool luxury and seething tourist boulevards north of the river, where everything seemed to converge on the great dome of the cathedral and the tide of visitors surged and eddied around the huge green-and-white edifice.

Crossing the river to the south, over the mediaeval clutter of the Ponte Vecchio or the graceful span of the Ponte Santo Trinita, the atmosphere of the city relaxed. Warm, noisy and dirty, the narrow streets were full of workshops: upholsterers, ironmongers, people making leather boxes, or faking ‘antique’ gold frames for the foreigners. Contadini – peasant farmers whose patiently tended smallholdings and crumbling farmhouses still co-existed with apartment blocks in the Florentine suburbs – brought irises and heaps of bitter salad leaves from their gardens to the market in the Piazza Santo Spirito, and loud arguments spilt out of kitchen windows in the evenings. And, although Frances had never before lived in a working-class district anywhere, to her the Oltrarno felt like home. She was treated with friendly generosity and accorded respect; and even though she was embedded safely in the city, if she looked down to the south she could see hills, and straggling, neglected terraces of arthritic old olive trees, all that remained of the ancient estates of Arcetri and Galluzzo. Slanting across the horizon and visible from almost every corner of the Oltrarno was the great cypress avenue that formed the broad spine of the Boboli, backlit on summer evenings by the crackle and flare of thunderstorms.

After those two months in the cottage waiting for Roland to die, trapped in the damp and the rain, Roland getting out of bed later every day until finally he would only move from the bed to his chair by the smoky little fire at teatime then not at all, Frances had taken him back to London. She would not bury him in the local church – Norman, rather pretty and the reason they had ended up in the village, Roland’s father being buried there – but in a crowded churchyard in Soho, where bodies were probably stacked on bodies. She liked to think of him there, where he had been happy, his laughing handsome face at Muriel’s, at the French House, drinking ouzo at Jimmy’s. It would have infuriated her to think of him out in the sticks, in the village now clustered around with ‘executive homes’, the little shop selling stale salami and Happy Shopper washing powder, with its ‘Do not ask for credit, as a refusal may offend’ propped on the shelf behind the till.

Alone and bereft, huddled in the gloom beneath the cottage’s low ceiling, as rain dripped from the eaves in the wettest spring since records began, Frances had felt herself on the verge of despair, something she had never before felt in her life. She didn’t want visitors any more, stopped wanting to get out of bed in the morning or, in fact, to wake up at all. She spent three weeks looking from Roland’s chair to her sodden garden, and finally she understood that she would have to leave.

She had put the house up for rent and decided to go, just for a week or two, to Florence. She had first visited the city as a sixteen-year-old in the summer of 1938, sent by her parents to learn about Leonardo, the Sienese masters, Galileo and the Renaissance. She had been a paying guest at the Casa Ferrali in the part of the Oltrarno known as San Niccolò, which was named after the pretty church that stood at its centre. The Casa Ferrali was one of the patrician houses that stood at the tail-end of the Via de’ Bardi, a broad street of decaying palaces built by the great families of Florence who followed the Medici when they acquired the Pitti Palace and moved south of the river.

More than forty-five years on, after the funeral, Frances telephoned Nino Ferrali, the family’s only son and her companion and chaperone for that long-ago summer. Frances’s friendship with Nino had survived largely unaltered since their first meeting, in part because Nino and Roland had, against all predictions, immediately found each other amusing and sympathetic, but also because Nino had married Lucienne, Frances’s best friend. Frances had known Lucienne since 1949, two years after her marriage to Roland, when they had been posted to Paris. She had been studying fine art, and subsidising herself by making intricate, miniature sculptures out of wire and copper scrap and selling them in Montmartre. Frances loved Lucienne, and here in Florence she particularly relished Lucienne’s eccentricity, which far outclassed anything a mere Englishwoman could manage. Roland had introduced Nino to Lucienne, rather reluctantly, never imagining that the rather serious and impoverished son of the Florentine nobility would worship her on sight and spend the rest of his life following her admiringly, as she strode ahead, gesturing, pointing the world out to him. Now Lucienne and Nino, the odd couple, lived in peaceable companionship in the old house by the Arno in the winter, in Cortona in the summer, and they still made some money by permitting weddings in the grand first-floor apartments and the gardens, orchestrated by Lucienne. It had taken Frances less than a week with them, a week of listening to their constant gentle bickering as she rested in the sun on the wide balcony of the piano nobile, tendrils of wisteria curling at her feet, to decide that she didn’t have to go back.

Frances loved her flat; it had been a piece of luck finding it, or so she had been assured by Nino, as good-sized apartments in Florence were a rarity now that the Italian birth rate was in dramatic decline and the average family could fit into a space half the size of Frances’s. It had five long, arched windows in all looking on to the Via delle Caldaie; one was at the end of the long, narrow kitchen, three in the huge salone, and the fifth in the little bedroom, almost like a monk’s cell had it not been for the extravagantly painted ceiling, leading off the salone. Frances’s kitchen was primitive, with a couple of electric rings, a cracked sink and a small fridge, but the sun flooded it every morning, and to sit, bathed in light and warmth at her table in the window, observing the activity of the street below and occasionally also the apartment opposite, was one of the first of many daily reminders of how happy she was to be here, and not back in England. The bathroom had been installed in the thirties and remained untouched since, covered with chipped, pale-green tiling, a rusty bath and only a tiny curtained window looking on a narrow internal lightwell, but Frances couldn’t have cared less. To begin with she had thought she would have liked a balcony of her own to bask on, but after a year or two of more sun than she knew what to do with she came, like the Florentines, to prize the dim cool of her drawing room, and the sensation that came with it that she was no longer a tourist, but was becoming a native.

At the small wooden table – room for only two chairs – in her kitchen, pushed right up against the window which, today, was open, Frances piled the fruit she’d bought at the market into a green bowl. She sat down to drink the second – the first, for social reasons, always taken in the Medici – of the two large cups of milky coffee she drank every day for breakfast, even though her doctor had advised her that the human digestive system is unable to digest cow’s milk once the human in question is more than three years old. She did not believe him, but she did, firmly, believe in living one’s life by certain rituals, and her daily two cups of coffee constituted the first of these.

Today, her seventy-fifth birthday, Frances would have lunch with Lucienne and Nino. As she leant from her window, Frances could see them, slowly making their way up from the Via Maggio where, she knew, they would have been window-shopping among the gilded Renaissance mirrors and salon chairs. Tiny, tanned and wrinkled, like a little jewelled monkey, Lucienne was wearing an emerald-green tiered silk skirt with a silver mesh belt, a silk singlet, ballet slippers and her wire-rimmed glasses; in her mouth, without even a hint of affectation, was clenched a small clay pipe, like Popeye’s. Courtly and amiable, Nino walked a pace or two behind her, dressed in an ancient but perfectly preserved linen suit and carrying Lucienne’s bags. Frances smiled as she watched them approach, and thought how lucky she was to have old friends near her, friends to whom her entire history – her girlhood, her marriage, her widowhood – was transparent, to whom she did not need to explain herself, to whom she was the same as she had been nearly fifty years before. And they to her.

At four-thirty in South London a clammy grey dawn was breaking. Gina lay at the edge of the extra-large double bed, her eyes suddenly wide open. She didn’t know what had woken her; perhaps Stella, lying diagonally across the bed between them, like the central bar of a capital N, had kicked, or muttered, or perhaps it was the same thing that so often woke her in the middle of the night. Gina was afraid of something; anxiety, they’d call it, but she didn’t feel anxious, exactly, as she started awake – she felt like something was after her, adrenaline pumping through her as though she’d been running. She craned her neck to look past Stella at Stephen, his head tilted back, mouth slightly open, and resting on his chest another, smaller head. Not Dan, too. All her fault, though: when they crept in she’d comfort them, soothed by their knack of instant relaxation once in her arms, unwound by the scent of their tangled hair in her nostrils. It would be later, forced into a corner, her head at an awkward angle and her arm gone dead from the weight of the head resting on it, that she would wake up with her heart pounding. Gina looked around at the room’s familiarity emerging from the dark, the pale, smooth outlines of a chair, her dressing table, the folds of the undrawn curtains sharpening as the dawn light grew stronger.

There were, of course, the usual things to be afraid of: that her children would find their way into the attic and fall from the cobwebbed window, the only one in the house without a lock; that the bruises on their legs would turn out to be leukaemia; that she would lose sight of Dan or Stella at the swimming pool while they slipped beneath the thrashing legs, trapped on the bottom; that one day she would give in and let Jim go to the rec on his own and a greasy-haired paedophile would talk him into the back of a stinking van. That she would die before the children grew up. And at the back of her mind she stored the unfading memory of everything she had ever done wrong, for which these things might be a punishment. She had always known, you could not escape being told, that motherhood held its terrors; what she had not suspected was that they would be so extreme and so uncontrollable.

Outside the long window she could see the outline of the horse-chestnut emerge as the night faded, a great cumulonimbus of a tree with its roots curling through the foundations of a dozen houses in the terrace, its waxy candles of blossom gleaming white. The birdsong had just begun, almost deafening, and with it came some dim echo of childhood awakening, just at the moment when spring tips over into early summer. At least it was getting light. And today, she remembered belatedly, there was some good in waking up at four-thirty, with the alarm set for five and a plane to catch. She rolled carefully away from Stella and eased herself off the bed.

Downstairs, at the kitchen table in her dressing-gown, Gina laid out cereal bowls, tracked down school bags and swimming things, then went to the back door to sip her tea. The sun was just coming up, and she felt some warmth from it, and caught the scent of the honeysuckle coming over next door’s wall, and the musky sweetness of her own, sprawling roses. Even at five she could hear the roar of London’s traffic starting up, and she thought of the children’s school, deserted now. The other mothers in the school playground never seemed to falter. Talking loudly about soft-play centres, violin lessons, their wedding anniversaries, boasting, as discreetly as they were able, of their children’s talents, and coolly appraising other people’s. She would stand, patiently – what else could she do? – as Dan kicked her on the ankles and screamed when she told him again that, no, he couldn’t go to Jake’s house, he hadn’t been invited; she could feel their eyes on her and looked straight ahead, unwilling to receive their sympathetic smiles. Something wrong with that child, they were . . .