The Drowning River (6 page)

Hiroko was looking at her. ‘She hasn’t been here since Monday. Has she gone back home?’ she said in her soft, apologetic tones, and for a moment Iris wondered what she was talking about.

‘Back home?’ And then she realized she meant Ronnie. ‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly, because if Ronnie’d gone back, she’d be going back too. ‘She hasn’t gone back. To England, you mean?’ She shook her head at
the very idea, no, no, no. ‘No. She’s. . . around. Somewhere.’ And she laughed.

Hiroko looked at her in puzzlement. ‘You don’t know where she is?’ Maybe it sounded worse to a Japanese person; perhaps like Italians they left home in their late twenties, weren’t used to teenagers being allowed to roam the world on their own. And as she spoke Iris became aware of the school’s director at her shoulder with a small metal tray of coffee things. He set it down. There was a silence.

‘Oh,’ said Iris, ‘it’s some guy. Well, you know Ronnie.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, I suppose you don’t. . .’ She gave Hiroko an agonized look, incorporating a meaningful glance at the course director, who had sat down at the end of the table and was frowning. Hiroko still looked baffled, but she shrugged.

‘OK,’ she said, eyeing Iris curiously. ‘But you’re not lonely? Living on your own?’

‘I’m not living on my own,’ said Iris quickly, feeling the director’s eyes on her as he waited for an explanation.

Antonella came out of the kitchen and began to collect the small coffee cups. Iris sprang to her feet to help.

‘Back to work,’ said Massi.

They were to do charcoal studies of a small Etruscan statue Antonella had set up against the glass doors, but they had hardly sat at their easels when a bell rang. It was only the doorbell but today to Iris it sounded ridiculously loud, a raucous, grating sound like the alarms that called farmers in from the fields in France. In the peaceful space it reverberated, stopping them all in their tracks: Hiroko, Traude, Sophia, who’d turned up breathless just as they packed up their easels from the morning’s sitting, looking around for someone before sitting down, Antonella in her work apron behind the delicate, beautiful statue. Massi came out of the office that sat on a
soppalco,
a kind of loft platform in the space above them, and looked down.

Antonella shrugged in response; she made as if to take off her apron and go to answer it but Massi made an impatient gesture and came down the stairs.

‘Come along,’ said Antonella, turning back briskly to her small audience as Massi passed behind them on the way to answer the door, a tiny frown puckering her forehead. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.
A lavoro’.

But none of them even picked up the charcoal; they were listening. There were men’s voices, lowered but serious, at the end of the wide corridor that led to the street door. Massi’s voice was raised. Then there were footsteps and the voices came closer, and seeing the expression on Antonella’s face as she looked down the corridor, they all turned, and Iris stared along with all the rest. Two carabinieri in dark blue uniforms with guns startlingly real, matt black and substantial on their hips, were following the course director back into the studio and up the stairs to the office. One of them was carrying a large plastic envelope by the corners; it was opaque, and seemed to contain something bulky.

All three men’s faces were averted from their curious audience as in unison the heads below followed their progress; there was a tiny gasp, from Sophia, when the nearest policeman’s holster came into her line of sight. She began to say something in a whisper but stopped when Antonella raised a hand.

Iris saw Antonella make an effort. ‘Really,’ she said to the small, open-mouthed group with an attempt at her usual authority, though Iris could see she was shaken. ‘Please.’

There was a stirring and settling but the door on the
soppalco
remained firmly closed and eventually, reluctantly, they took up their charcoal. By the time the policemen re-emerged from the office close to an hour had gone by and Iris had almost finished her study of the statue, though it wasn’t any good, she could see that. The sound of the door, though, jerked all their heads back up from the easels immediately, as if none of them had had their minds on higher things, not even Hiroko.

Slowly the director came out on to the gallery. Iris saw Antonella shoot him a frowning glance from below, then, bunching her apron in one fist she said nothing to any of them this time, only mounted the stairs and disappeared into the office.

It was only when Antonella came back out and Iris saw her face looking down at them from the gallery that
she felt it, a jolt of panic.
Ma,
was her first thought, because home had always been the first thing she worried about. What would she do without Ma? She darted a look at the others; Sophia was open-mouthed but Traude’s face was only politely interested, and Hiroko’s patiently expectant. Calm down, she told herself.

Antonella was alone on the gallery; behind her in the office Iris could see the three men, standing, two in their dark blue uniforms, the course director half a head taller. Antonella’s eyes swept the room, and she cleared her throat. She blinked; her gaze settled on the drawing on the wall, the girl lying on her back with her book. And just as Iris was wondering what the connection could be between the arrival of policemen in the school and her drawing of Ronnie, Antonella turned and looked directly at her.

Iris got to her feet in a daze; she felt them all watching.

‘Iris,’ said Antonella. ‘If you would come into the office.’

For A Long Time after Lucia Gentileschi had gone, Sandro sat at his desk and thought about memory and what it must be like to lose it. Unwillingly, he conceded to himself that he knew the pattern of the disease all too well, whether they called it Alzheimer’s or something else – and apparently, Lucia Gentileschi had told him, in her dead husband’s case, it was something else. It had always been around – on the bus there was inevitably an old lady who would say every two minutes,
Are you getting off here? Is this the station?
But these days everyone knew someone who had it. Luisa’s mother had certainly had it, although there had been so many other things gone wrong with the poor creature that she hadn’t had it long.

‘It’s because people are getting older,’ Lucia Gentileschi had told him with sorrowful precision. ‘We are an ageing population.’

The most recent memories crumbled first; you forgot setting a pan on to boil, or what you had gone to the refrigerator for, the names of recent acquaintances. Then you would confuse your children with your siblings, then with your own parents, then you would fail to recognize them at all. Sandro realized he had not asked Lucia about children. What stage had Claudio been at? The earliest, his widow had said, barely noticeable, unless you knew him inside out as she
did, unless you knew the quality of his mind and his meticulous attention to detail.

‘He stopped reading,’ she said, then halted again and folded those pale hands back up in her lap. And although Sandro had never been interested in reading more than the newspaper in that moment he could see the two of them reading together, scholarly, silent, companionable. And then one of them stopped reading and – did what, instead? Stared, vacantly? Panicked, silently?

‘I started to find little sticky notes he put around the place,’ she said with a tiny gasp. ‘Two or three times, saying
Teeth.
Things like that. Reminding himself to clean his teeth.’ And he saw her press her lips together.

They did say that the earliest stages could be the worst, when there was still considerable lucidity and the implications of the memory loss could be understood by the sufferer. He had seen that terrified look in Luisa’s mother’s eyes for a brief few weeks, before other parts of her brain had shut down and shielded her, mercifully, from her loss.

He called Pietro, with a heavy heart; he hadn’t anticipated how much he would hate this. The calling in of favours. He was out on a call; carefully Sandro left the message, that he wanted to talk to him about the death of Claudio Gentileschi, gave details of the date, age, address, everything he knew would speed things up. The desk officer – whose name he had avoided asking – took down all the information, his voice remote and uninterested as if Gentileschi had died a hundred years ago. Sandro hung up, his mind ticking through the whole hopeless business; what does a man do who sees the end of his life rushing towards him?

By the time he stood, stiff in the failing light, and reached for his coat, although he had liked her perhaps more than anyone he had met in years, Sandro was dreading his next encounter with Lucia Gentileschi.

Nothing had happened to Ma, though the moment Iris understood that fact she had to fight the urge to phone her mother, tell her she loved her, despite being a stroppy, censorious and ungrateful only child who’d never said it before.

She couldn’t; she mustn’t. ‘Don’t worry about phoning,’ Ma had said, squeezing Iris’s hands in hers, roughened with turps. ‘Too expensive. Too distracting.’

The look Antonella had given her as she’d come past on the gallery had only confused Iris further. Then Antonella had stepped out of her way and gone down the metal staircase to the dwindling group of her students.

Once inside the office, Iris had seen it on the desk, laid out on the plastic ziplock bag the policeman had brought it up in, and Ma was out of the picture.

‘Iris,’ said Paolo Massi abruptly, ‘I’m sorry, please sit down.’ She looked from one face to another, and hesitated, her eyes fixed on the table. Massi pulled out a chair for her, then another for himself, and then, reluctantly, she sat. Awkwardly the policemen took off their shiny peaked caps and followed suit, as if only belatedly realizing that Iris might need putting at her ease.

‘Where did you get that?’ she asked, her throat dry as a bone. ‘That’s Ronnie’s.’

It certainly looked like Ronnie’s bag. Iris had been with her when she bought it from one of the Nigerian street traders three weeks ago, and for a second, remembering the conversation they’d had about the fines they’d started making tourists pay for buying fake stuff on the street, the circumspection with which they’d checked out the Via Por Santa Maria for policemen before handing over the twenty euros, she thought they might have come after her to pay.

Only a second, though, before she asked herself, well, if they wanted to fine someone, why wouldn’t they fine Ronnie herself? Because where the bag went, Ronnie went, arm clamped over it to ward off Vespa thieves. She loved that bag.

Iris pulled her chair a foot closer to the table, staring. The bag was big, dark brown with buckles and cleats and a big brass padlock with the designer’s name on it; she remembered peering at the seams with Ronnie, deciding that it wasn’t real leather. Ronnie’d had her bag nicked, was that it? She put out a hand to touch it but the closest policeman, a short, solid man with shiny black hair, cleared his throat; it was a
warning sound, and she stopped. Iris could smell his aftershave, and she felt a kind of tension in her cheeks, as if she was about to be sick.

‘Is this Veronica’s bag?’ asked Paolo Massi.

‘I think so,’ she said, warily. The bag was empty; how could they have known whose it was or where to bring it? But as if she’d asked the question out loud the other policeman produced a smaller, transparent plastic bag from a nylon suitcase at his feet, and she knew. Ronnie’s grubby make-up bag; and her purse – still stuffed with old receipts, thought Iris, puzzled, wouldn’t a pickpocket just chuck all that stuff? – her keys on the designer keyfob some ex-boyfriend had given her. No phone.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Iris. ‘When – ? Ronnie hasn’t. . .’ She stopped then, feeling Massi’s eyes on her. She couldn’t tell them, could she, that Ronnie hadn’t been in the city for days. That she’d had no intention of doing any work this week, and that for four days Iris had lied for her.

But how had Ronnie managed to get out to the country – and at that moment Iris wished she could remember the name of the town or the people she was staying with or anything but her mind was a complete blank – how had Ronnie got there, bought her train ticket, without her bag? It didn’t make sense. ‘Where did you find it?’

And then as she stared at the plastic bag Iris became aware of a dusty scent, somewhere below the policeman’s aftershave, a smell at once familiar and incongruous. Out of place here inside, in the brightly lit office. The smell of what? Of the dry earth under trees, of hummus and pine needles and leaf mould. Against her better judgement Iris leaned to look closer and she saw the bag was scuffed and grubby, sifted with fine grey dirt inside. As though it had been rescued from a rabbit hole, like a terrier she’d seen hauled out of the ground with powdery grey eyelashes. As though it had been buried.

Iris felt something rise inside her, huge and nameless. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘If she’d lost her bag, she’d have come back, she’d have – What’s happened to her? What’s happened to Ronnie?’ She struggled to hold it back. ‘Where is she?’

Both policemen, perhaps at the panic in her voice, began talking at once, in Italian, and although her Italian had been improving, Iris
couldn’t understand. She looked from one of them to the other, and then Paolo Massi stood up, holding up a hand to the policemen. Taking control. He turned to Iris, and gratefully she found herself able to take a breath.

‘Iris,’ he said, and she could tell he was trying to keep his tone easy, ‘I’m sure Veronica is fine. They just need to know when, when did you last see her? See, ah, Ronnie?’

And at the words Iris felt a strange humming in her ears, her line of vision narrowed until she could only see the bag, the brass padlock and the designer’s name, off centre, the hallmark of a fake, they’d agreed. Narrowed until all she could see was the grey dirt inside Ronnie’s bag.

‘I – ah – I – sorry – ’ she stumbled, but Paolo had turned away to say something to the carabinieri; she focussed on the sound of his voice, and slowly the world reasserted itself. Stupid, she thought, what was that all about? She understood that he was asking if they’d like him to translate for the moment, and they talked together about how long it might take to arrange an official translator and then they agreed. If they spoke slowly, she wanted to say, she’d be able to follow, she wasn’t useless. But then she gave in. She needed to be sure of what was happening, didn’t she? This was important. There was some nodding and shrugging, then Massi turned back to Iris.