it, you can never change the fact afterwards. After Florence, I would always be in row F of the stalls, hands clasped, looking up as the lights pointed in a different direction, allowing myself to be persuaded.
I went to Italy because of love – no, guilt. I was twenty-seven. I had been working ‘in the arts’ for five years. It was the sort of job that had sounded immensely desirable once. ‘Arts administration,’ I had confidently said to careers advisers, friends of my parents at drinks at Christmas. It had sounded good, labour rooted in passion and exchanged, at the end of the month, for money you couldn’t be ashamed of earning. My contemporaries failed, and had to settle for jobs as solicitors. Five years later, they earned three times what I did and were beginning to drop me. They could not be blamed. ‘Arts administration’ meant a narrow office in a Victorian museum in the north, kept going with public money and the promise of lottery largesse. I found, after all, that you could be ashamed of the money at the end of the month. It was so little. My grey walls teetered with box files; outside, you walked between the museum’s doubtful Raffaelino and the still more doubtful school parties. I grew to detest the single Matthew Smith, lurid as the municipal flowerbeds, to hate, too, the multiple aldermen in committees, drab and important in appearance as the museum’s solitary Stanley Spencer. Last Supper in Maidenhead. You may know it from reproductions.
It was a city of three hundred thousand people but, still, it hardly seems surprising that I noticed Silvia. In that city, she was like a panther at a Tupperware party. The society was less extensive than you might imagine. A small Italian woman, with expensive accoutrements and an expensive, contemptuous way of standing with her hips jutting forward, made herself conspicuous. I had formed the habit of going to concerts in the university hall every other Friday. The tickets were cheap, and the platform just about big enough for an orchestra. The timpanist had to sit beneath the conductor’s podium, however, and guess at the beat. More usually, as tonight, it was a string quartet. In the interval, the audience sat in their seats or clustered in the chilly atrium drinking coffee. It was not a well-dressed audience. You noticed Silvia.
‘Have you seen,’ my colleague Margaret said. ‘A footballer’s wife?’
(It was a recognized social category, in that impoverished northern town with two famous football clubs. It was used for any woman under thirty with a tan and a handbag.)
‘I hope she enjoyed the Webern,’ Margaret said bitchily. I went to concerts with Margaret. It was no more than that.
‘I hope so too,’ I said.
After the interval, I took more notice of Silvia. She was sitting three or four rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle. She listened intently to the first two movements of the next piece. Then, with a sigh, just as the string quartet was raising its bows, she got up and left, clacking down the central aisle. The string quartet lowered its bows, waited for her to leave. They began to play again.
‘A bit much for the Footballer’s Wife,’ Margaret said archly, when it was all over. ‘The bitonal passage can be a little demanding for many music lovers.’ I wasn’t sure, and not just because I didn’t know what Margaret meant. To me those decisive stilettos clacking towards the exit looked much more like someone who only wanted to hear the scherzo of the Ravel string quartet; had come for that, had left when it was done.
In fact, Silvia seemed to attend the university concerts fairly regularly. I started to notice her now, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed her before. She rarely stayed for a whole concert. She would turn up at the interval, leave after a particular piece, or even walk out, as with the Ravel, in the middle of one. It was terribly rude. It was the behaviour of someone, I decided, who had come to like music through a collection of CDs. She had the habit of skipping about, selecting favourite movements, and rejecting music with all its tyranny and gleeful infliction of boredom in favour of ‘highlights’. Margaret had a great deal to say on the subject. I weakly agreed, though tried not to refer to Silvia as ‘the FW’. I did not agree with Margaret as often as she seemed to assume, and sometimes rebelliously thought, as I clapped exhaustedly at the end of some juvenile assault on a great masterpiece, that it might indeed be quite nice to press a fast-forward button as the Diabelli Variations grew a little too pleased with themselves. There was no such fast-forward button at the museum, either. It took up as much time as you were prepared to grant it.
‘I’ve found out about the FW,’ Margaret said one day, popping her head round the door of my office. ‘She’s not an FW, a footballer’s wife, I mean. She’s a lettrice.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A lettrice in the Italian department of the university,’ Margaret said immaculately. ‘The equivalent of a lectrice in French, Lektorin, I believe, in German. She’s come to teach them Italian.’
‘It’s not a big department,’ I said. In the museum, we liked to think we had a relationship with the university that extended to sending Christmas cards to given departments, as long as no Bunsen burners were involved, at which point snobbery came into consideration. We did not know them, but we went to their concerts and we very well might have known them personally. Margaret, for instance, constantly referred to the professor of English literature, a man she had never spoken to and who was not called Percy as ‘Percy’.
‘No, it’s not,’ Margaret said. ‘She’s the first time they’ve been able to afford a lettrice – they’re cock-a-hoop about it.’
‘Where does the budget come from, though?’ I said knowingly.
‘They’ll have got sponsorship from an Italian company,’ Margaret said. ‘Fiat, no, I tell a lie, it’s Buitoni.’
‘They make ravioli,’ I said.
‘They’re sponsoring all sorts, these days,’ Margaret said. ‘The Hallé had a bel canto evening in Manchester and there was a reception at the town hall here after – the whole orchestra went. Oysters, I heard, the cor anglais player was laid prostrate for a week.’
‘Only to be expected,’ I said.
‘But they’ve funded a lettrice for the Italian department here as well,’ Margaret said. ‘I found out she’s called Silvia. Do you think they’d be interested in giving us money, Buitoni, I mean?’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, that’s your pigeon, isn’t it? Something Italian. Futurismo. Let’s have a meeting. She’s living with the professor of theology. She comes from Cremona. Ah, la bella Italia,’ she finished, clacking her hands in the shape of imaginary castanets, for some geographically inaccurate but festive reason.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, giggling.
‘You know who I mean, the Australian professor of theology, not that there’s more than one,’ Margaret said. ‘Renting a room off him. Must dash.’
She dashed.
As often happens in life, once you have acquired a certain body of information about a thing, a place, a person, it is impossible not to enter into a more active relationship with them. Once Margaret had told me all of this about Silvia, it was inevitable that I would meet her very soon. It is something to do with the quality of the gaze. Once you know that a woman lives in the spare room of the Australian professor of theology, that she comes from Cremona, a town that, though famous for violin makers, only called up in my more slapdash mind the idea of a vast pudding, creamy and lemony at once, a city, more realistically, of pale yellow churches surrounded by a perfectly circular crimped wall, the warm colour of baked pastry
