—Natalia Ginsburg
Camilla Clapfish pushed the lock of brown hair behind her ear with her habitual little twist, wrote the last line, and then slowly looked up from the manuscript she had just completed. Outside, beyond the open window, the dull gray cobbled streets of San Gimignano were offset by the vibrant blue of the Italian sky. Camilla sighed and put down her pen. She had given herself a week here, undisturbed, to finish the book, a book she had been working on for almost a year, and she’d achieved her goal a day early. She smiled to herself. It felt like “the hols”—what upper-class British schoolchildren used to call vacation. She looked across the rooftops to the crazy stone towers of the ancient hill town. She’d go out and celebrate. She could spend the little she had left of her money on a good bottle of wine and a slap-up meal. She wouldn’t eat at the hotel tonight; she’d find a really good restaurant. But first she would walk in the tiny park, climb the steps of one of the towers, and look out over the Tuscan plain.
Oddly, Camilla felt as much sadness as triumph over finishing the book. Writing had come late to her—well, if at twenty-nine anything could be considered late. She’d found how she loved to record what her eyes took in, to create with words instead of paints. She was a failed artist, an unsuccessful art historian, and a quiet person—not a talker. But words on paper had become her companions this last year, and the characters she had drawn had become her friends. She’d written about a group of middle-aged ladies on a bus tour. She felt she’d come to know and like them all, even the troublesome Mrs. Florence Mallabar. She would miss them.
Camilla added the last page to the neat stack of manuscript, rose from the table, and went to the wardrobe, where her plain brown linen jacket hung. She was tall, and her light brown hair and her dark brown eyes set the tone for her wrennish dress. Camilla was not one for bright carmine or aquamarine. She wore no lipstick. Too much early exposure to nuns, she supposed. You wound up dressing like either a tart or a novice. She was certainly of the novitiate school. And although her English skin and regular features were enough to draw some attention from Italian men, she didn’t—as her mother had frequently reminded her—”make very much of herself.”
Now she carefully locked the door to the sparely furnished hotel room and walked down the stone stairs to the lobby. The clerk at the desk greeted her in Italian and asked if she was having a good day.
“Si. Buono. Grazie.” Yes, it was a very good day. The day I finished my first novel, Camilla thought, but she merely nodded. Her Italian was passable enough to discuss the practicalities of life but not good enough to describe this quiet joy. The clerk, an older man with a grizzled mustache, smiled. To him she was only another tourist. San Gimignano was a famous tourist town, a perfectly intact fourteenth-century wonder. There were those who called it “The Medieval Manhattan of Tuscany” because of the beautiful and bizarre stone towers that graced it. Once there had been sixty or seventy of them, but now only fourteen remained, making a strange and beautiful silhouette against the green Tuscan landscape. She would go out and enjoy looking about.
She walked out the stone portal of the hotel onto Via S’Porto, the secondary street that led to the main piazza. She paused, took a deep breath, and rubbed her eyelids with the very tips of her fingers. She was tired but elated, and more than a little surprised. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did, she thought. I’ve finished it. I’ve finished my first book. She smiled and—for the first time in months—felt a pang of loneliness. Camilla was quite used to being alone. But now, without the comfort of her book to work on and keep her company, she wished there was someone she could tell her news to.
I suppose I never thought I’d complete it, she realized. After all, she had never been taught what was now called “creative writing.” Camilla had attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Birmingham, a dark, failed industrial city in the English Midlands, and her salvation had been that she was taken under the wing of Sister Agnus Dei, stern Sister Agnus, her sixth-form teacher, who had recognized her intelligence and championed her cause. It was Sister Agnus who had insisted that Camilla sit for A levels—the all-important testing that got British schoolchildren accepted to university.
No one in Camilla’s family had been to university. Well, in point of fact, all of them had left school at the earliest legal opportunity. Camilla’s father had been a lorry driver until an accident resulted in a bad back that ended his days behind the wheel. Her mother, not to put too fine a point on it, had been what once was referred to as a “char.”
Perhaps that was unfair. Camilla, walking over the cobblestones, reconsidered her words and edited her thoughts. Well, if Mum was not as little as a cleaning lady, she certainly was not as much as a housekeeper. She had been the “daily” whom the Beveridge family had called in as needed, and she had spent a good part of her life cleaning up the messes of those she still referred to as “her betters.” In fact, it seemed to Camilla that her mother had always been more interested and more willing to clean and cook and listen to the children of the Beveridge family than to her own. The Clapfish flat was messy, ill-managed, overcrowded, and damp. Mrs. Clapfish rarely bothered with housework at home—”Don’t get paid to do it, now, do I?” she’d ask. Thinking of their home even now, under the warm Italian autumn sun, made Camilla shiver. Her three younger brothers had been in a constant clamor, their noses always wet, as were their socks and vests. When they weren’t shouting at one another they were being shouted at by their mother, who was just as often being shouted at by their father. Camilla sighed, her loneliness deepening. No point in writing to them, telling them she had finished a novel, Camilla thought. Her mother would only ask, “Whatever for?”
As she continued walking toward the center of San Gimignano, she decided that she certainly wouldn’t tell Lady Ann Beveridge about her novel. But maybe she would write to Sister Agnus Dei tomorrow and give her the news. Sister Agnus, despite her name, wasn’t the least bit lamblike. She’d be fiercely glad. In the meantime, Camilla would enjoy this day, the Italian sun, and the beauty of the stonework, being responsible for no one but herself.
She did not have to guide anyone through either of the two main churches, or point out the Roman ruins, or wait while calculatedly naïf souvenirs were purchased. Camilla had spent the last year and a half in Firenze, first studying and then supporting herself there as a tour guide. All of her higher education in art history in New York—which her parents had neither understood nor approved of—had, in the end, come down to this: She was a tour guide. Because, only after Camilla had struggled through college and graduated, only after she’d finished her dissertation, did she realize that—without connections in either the art world or academia and without any particular personal charm—she would never get one of the few and highly coveted museum or teaching jobs. So, adrift, she had left New York and wound up in Florence, giving guided tours and, in her loneliness, writing fiction in her spare time.
She liked giving tours, but only to Americans. They were used to standing in groups and were eager to improve themselves. It seemed almost a religion with them. British tourists never would stand together—they were always wandering off or directing their gaze somewhere else, while the French were absolutely impossible—rude and arrogant, the lot of them. Camilla had never finished a tour without one of them walking but on her while she spoke. Yes, Americans were nicest, most grateful. And although she became frozen with a paralyzing shyness if they asked her to coffee or lunch after a tour, Camilla spoke with authority during her stint as docent. She could guide people more easily than be with them.
Camilla lived frugally, watching every penny, but she’d already had a lifetime of experience with that. She also had to put up with the occasional condescension of wealthy visitors who wanted their art predigested and their history reduced to four-hundred-year-old scandal. But she persevered. She was actually rather well-suited to the job. She had a surprisingly strong voice, physical stamina, and a good memory for details. If at first speaking to groups was difficult, she found, in time and with good notes, that it was easier than talking to people one-to-one. Although hers was
