nor did she. They met there at five and left around seven, he to have dinner with his mother and father, to take his place as the only son, the beloved only child, while she went home to her single room and her cold plate. Camilla had begun writing because of the long nights she spent awake, longing for Gianfranco. Yet when she was with him, every kiss, every stroke of his hand on her hair, was enough to cause her pain, pain that came from the knowledge that he might love her but never marry her.
“But why should you care about this?” he asked her reasonably. “It is you I love now. My father had a mistress for twenty-two years. Tesauro, why should you not be happy?”
She was too proud and too shy to explain that she did not want to be one of his loves: that for her he was an only love, and she wanted him to feel that way as well. But he didn’t.
And so her book got written in the nights she spent alone, first as a distraction and then as an end in itself. Slowly, Camilla had been drawn into the web of words she was creating, rather like a spider getting trapped in its own grid. The power that writing gave her, the power to create a character, an event, a whole world, seduced her more deeply than Gianfranco had. She found herself obsessed, challenged, and despairing:—fascinated by both the problems and the triumphs that came as she doggedly moved forward.
And now her book was finished, and so was her affair with Gianfranco. She had told him so before she had left for San Gimignano. He had laughed at her, as he had when she’d told him that before. But for her, this time it was different. Now she had something to keep her from being alone in that room. She would not go back to Gianfranco.
Still, seeing him there was enough to both humiliate her and set off a longing for him that she knew was dangerous. Camilla straightened her shoulders and walked into the Hotel Excelsior. She would guide these people through the wonders of Firenze, and if, like Dante before her, she was also a guide leading them through her own personal hell, she would not show it.
The group was not a good one, and it made Camilla all the more ready to accept Frederick’s invitation to dinner when it came. He took her to a pleasant restaurant not far from the Palazzo Vecchio, something Gianfranco would never do for fear of being seen. She enjoyed the way Frederick took her arm and seemed pleased to be seen with her. But then, he was very plain. There was none of the sleekness, the feral but flashingly attractive looks of Gianfranco. Frederick’s physical awkwardness with her was complimentary, though anything but sexy. Camilla smiled when he fumbled at the table and pulled out her chair too far. She was the one who had the power in this relationship. If there was any relationship. The French, those masters of orchestrated love, had once defined each member of a couple as “the one who kissed or who was kissed.” With Gianfranco, Camilla had been the one who did the kissing. Now, if there was any kissing to be done, it would be Frederick’s job. She looked across the table at him calmly. This was not a man to raise your temperature. But he seemed a nice man. And no one else had shown any interest in her. His eyes, which seemed very vague and almost unfocused, were the color of sherry. Camilla liked his eyes.
They ordered dinner, and he asked her about the tour group. She inquired about his mother, who was, apparently, leaving Italy the following morning. “But don’t you want to have dinner with her on her last night?” Camilla asked.
“No. I’ll see her in New York soon enough.”
“I thought she lived in Larchmont.”
“She lives in two places, actually. Larchmont and East Eighty-sixth Street and the park,” he told her. That must mean Central Park and that they were wealthy. Camilla knew the rents in New York. “It’s actually my apartment,” Frederick explained. “But Mother is staying there to oversee some work that’s being done to it.”
Camilla nodded. They were unusually close, this man and his mother.
“How did you wind up in school in New York?” Frederick asked.
“Divine intervention.” Camilla laughed. But now, years later, even joking about it was still painful. She had never spoken about the misadventure. Yet, tonight, under the influence of a fine bottle of Montepulciano, she felt as if she might. Frederick was easy to talk to. He seemed to have no expectations of her. She need not entertain or work to charm, as she did with Gianfranco, but if she did, she felt as if Frederick would like it, rather than being put off (as some men were when a plain brown wren became a more outgoing bird).
“I was meant to go to Cambridge,” Camilla began to explain, and the words, spoken aloud for the first time in her life, actually hurt her throat. She picked up her wineglass and took another sip. “I was a scholarship girl at the convent school. The nuns took an interest in me, and when I seemed about to do very well on my A levels we filed an application with their written reports. The mother superior helped me get an interview at Cambridge.” She paused, remembering back to the preparations for that day.
She hadn’t known what to wear, and that was one way Sister Agnus had failed her. After all, how could a nun be expected to keep up with university fashions? So Camilla had worn her bright blue crimpolene Sunday suit and gone up to Cambridge with her mother. But despite her convent studies in Latin and Greek, despite her mastery of European history and her strong background in English literature, Camilla had been woefully unprepared for Cambridge.
The colleges on the banks of the Cam were more beautiful than she had ever imagined, and more bewildering. She smiled at Frederick, but the smile cost her. “It’s existed for more than five hundred years, and it’s based on an assumption that those who were about to be initiated were those in the know, while those who are uninitiated should remain so. Do you understand?”
Frederick nodded. “Despite propaganda to the contrary, we do have a class structure in America,” he said.
“Well,” Camilla continued, “colleges each had their specialities, and their names, which are often pronounced totally differently from the way they’re spelled. There’s Magdalene, pronounced ‘Maudlin’ (and spelled without the final e at Oxford). There’s Peterborough, which was a college, but the only one that was never called a college.” She paused. “I humiliated myself by asking for it incorrectly. Anyroad, interview times and places were posted, but I had no idea where, and there seemed no central desk, no registrar’s office to inquire of, so I completely missed my first appointment when I discovered the listings on a board in a sequestered quadrangle.” Camilla winced, recalling how her mother, horrified, began to yell at her—which certainly hadn’t helped Camilla’s composure. She had only found the history don, a mild, pleasant man, as he was leaving. He took pity on her in her dishevelment and humiliation and graciously suggested they reschedule the appointment for later in the day. But his only available hour conflicted with her other interview. “I was just naive,” she explained to Frederick. “I should have told him how much I wanted to see him, how I hoped to read history, but all I managed was, ‘Well, you see, I am seeing the classics don then.’ He looked at the crimpolene, and I babbled, ‘I haven’t decided whether to do history or classics. I suppose I’D do classics in the end.’”
“So what happened then?” Frederick asked, as if it mattered.
“He told me, ‘Then it’s all come out right,’ and wandered off, a bit bemused, his black gown flapping in the spring breeze.”
Camilla smiled at Frederick, but it cost her. She’d only realized the ghastliness of her mistake after her interview with the two supercilious classics dons, who eyed her with an unconcealed coldness that was as good as a poster announcing they knew she was NOKD—Not Our Kind, Dear. Under their merciless interrogation Camilla had wilted quickly, knowing too late that as a female, a Catholic, and a tongue-tied, badly dressed upstart from the working class she had as much chance of winning
