Innocence. Julian Barnes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ said: ‘I took the liberty of coming in unexpectedly just now so that I could see the Contessina of the present generation exactly as she really is, I mean when, as a young woman, she is unaware of anyone else.’

      ‘I don’t question the way you conduct your business, Parenti,’ said Aunt Mad sharply.

      He turned full upon her his melancholy gaze, as of one survivor to another. ‘Contessa, I last made for you in 1921. For the evening, in pale biscuit-coloured pongée silk, with a belt in matching silk satin, applied with motifs of the Florentine lily. The belt interrupted the line, and one hoped that it would never be worn.’

      ‘Good, and what do you suggest for my niece?’

      For the first time Parenti turned to Chiara.

      ‘Please do me the favour to stand up.’

      So Chiara stood up, with her arms straight down by her sides, and half-listening to the whine and mutter from the sewing rooms down the corridor. Without being asked to, but feeling that perhaps it was the right thing to do in a fashion house, she began to walk up and down a little, but very gently Parenti asked her to stop. ‘Just keep quite still, Contessina, then I will tell you what to do next.’ A whole minute, not less than that, passed by to the relentless chattering of the Necchis.

      Then Parenti, who had been looking at her with deep professional attention, raised his hands a little, let them fall, turned away from her at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, and said quietly, ‘I cannot make for her. She could not wear a Parenti.’

7

      In the following year, after she had left school for good, Chiara asked her father for ten thousand lira and went to a small dressmaker, recommended (as a relation by marriage) by the barber in the courtyard. Even here she met with some opposition.

      ‘Yes, but no one else is wearing them like this, it will have no style, think how it will look from the back.’

      ‘I shan’t have to see it from the back,’ said Chiara. If there’s something hopelessly wrong with me, she thought, it might as well be wrong the way I want it. Really all I need is not to have to worry. For the first time in all eternity I shan’t be at school in May. I shall go to the Maggio Musicale, I shall go to every concert, I shall listen to every note.

      The two dresses, one black and one white, were brought round to 5, Piazza Limbo by the dressmaker in person. ‘I have told the Contessina that I have done my utmost, but she must wear something round her neck.’

      ‘Oh, no one will look at me.’

      ‘Think a little,’ said Maddalena. ‘You must have noticed that during a concert people have nowhere to look and stare first of all at the ceiling, then at their hands, then at the four corners of the hall, not, for some reason, at the performers, then finally at each other’s clothes. Certainly the black dress would look better with my diamonds.’ Giancarlo, who had come into the room, pointed out that she no longer had any.

      ‘I give you my word of honour,’ said Chiara, ‘I’ll go to the Central Market tomorrow and get some beads, some black glass beads, I like them.’

      ‘They would not be suitable,’ cried the dressmaker. ‘They would not be real.’

      ‘Well, but glass beads are real.’

      ‘So are diamonds,’ said Giancarlo, ‘not more or less real, but equally so.’

      There was a small diamond necklace which had belonged to Cesare’s mother, and which had been deposited, when she died, in a bank in the Via Strozzi. Either Chiara’s father or her aunt must have given Cesare a hint on the subject, because he wrote (he was not much of a letter-writer) to her to tell her that he remembered the necklace, but had forgotten where it was; she could have it, if she wanted it. ‘He means, I suppose, that he will arrange about the insurance if you want to take it out for some concert or other,’ said the Count. ‘Meanwhile, your aunt keeps talking about these two dresses of yours.’

      ‘Does she think they’re ugly?’ Chiara cried.

      ‘She wonders whether they will make you happy.’

      The necklace arrived from the bank in a canvas package, sewn up with linen thread. It had not been opened since 1943, when poor Aunt Lisa had died from dysentery. When Chiara had undone the thread she found a sealed envelope addressed to Cesare, in Aunt Lisa’s handwriting, which she put back at once.

      The little diamonds, square-cut, glittered valiantly, each with its outer and hidden inner drops of pure light. Annunziata, who had seen them before, was disappointed. She remembered them as larger, and making a better effect.

8

      On their first appearance Chiara’s dresses were thought peculiar, but not peculiar for the Ridolfi daughter. You had to consider that childhood of hers, shut up with her aunt during the war in the three-times-requisitioned, Villa Ricordanza. Now that the girl was back from the school in England everyone wished her well, so hopeful and shining, so full of projects, so ready to regard the world as a friend. But meanwhile, how could Maddalena let her go out to the May concerts in those garments which she had apparently designed for herself and which, like her convent uniforms, must have been run up on the machine at home by Annunziata? The little necklace looked well, however. Where had that come from?

      On that April evening, at the Teatro della Pergola, a pianist and a violinist were confronting not so much the audience as each other. The young energetic violinist, dark, sweaty and smelly, only just confined into an evening suit and white neckcloth, was a true Central European gypsy, defying restraint and security, as his music did. The rather older man at the piano was pale and balding, with discreet spectacles and, emerging from his cuffs, long-wristed hands whose gleaming fingertips each seemed to have an independent life. Chance and the demands of a career had bound them together, but only just, for the duration of Brahms’ third violin sonata, a work which, so the programme said, ‘reunited Brahms and Joachim after a rift of several years’. Before the slow movement the violinist retuned with a coarse, exuberant tzigane flourish, the pianist unobtrusively winced, then, as the music resumed, leaned forward to his keyboard in deep quiet intimacy, as to an old acquaintance, while the violinist forced obedience under what seemed the threat of instant destruction from his tiny, melodiously protesting instrument. His sweat flew visibly. The pianist raised, only once, his pallid eyelids to heaven. And to think that politicians, at that time, dreamed that Europe could become a unity! Here was a representative of one of the finest-tuned of the human species, condemned in the name of music to this unlikely partnership. When all was over, the violinist, as was his right, left the platform first and returned exultant to take his bow, while the pianist following him, was almost obscured from sight by the resplendent woman who had been turning over his pages for him.

      The Count never went to concerts, for fear of being trapped into listening to something that did not please him. Chiara was there with friends. It was old, or ageing Mimi, an acquaintance of Aunt Mad’s, who introduced her during the interval to Dr Rossi.

      ‘My dear child, I want you to meet Dr Rinaldi, no, Dr Salvatore Rossini, no, Rossi, who is doing me so much good.’

      Chiara gave the doctor her hand.

      ‘You enjoyed the Brahms?’ he asked.

      She СКАЧАТЬ