with the rest of the apartment; Livia presumed her mother, or possibly her long-dead grandmother, had chosen it. She laid her suitcase on the bed and began to hang up her clothes in the wardrobe.
Those first few days in the apartment were a whirlwind of cleaning and sorting. Livia and Luisa stripped the beds and made them up with the fresh linen brought from the villa. Slowly a pile of dirty washing accumulated on the kitchen floor.
‘Before the war, I had an arrangement with a laundry round the corner,’ Luisa sighed. ‘Your father would drop his shirts in to them on his way to work – and once a fortnight they’d wash his sheets. But the thought of staggering down all those stairs carrying all of this seems impossible.’ She gazed down at the untidy mountain of washing. ‘I think it would be easier if we washed it ourselves.’
‘But where will we dry it all?’ Livia asked sensibly. ‘Should we hang a line across the front of the house, between the windows?’ On their way through the outskirts of the city, she had noticed how people strung up their washing lines between apartments.
‘Absolutely not!’ her mother retorted. ‘What a disgraceful suggestion – we are not peasants, Livia. No, we shall dry the laundry on the roof terrace.’
‘Do we have a roof terrace?’ Livia asked.
Her mother took a set of keys from a kitchen cabinet, and unlocked a narrow door at one end of the hall. Livia had assumed this was merely a cleaning cupboard, but as Luisa opened the door, Livia was surprised to find a set of steep stone steps leading upwards.
‘Go and have a look,’ her mother said, handing her a piece of rope she’d found in a drawer. ‘And put up this washing line while you’re there… and please be careful, the railings are not safe.’
At the top of stairs was a landing with three doors leading off it. Livia tried the handle of the first door, and it opened to reveal a dark attic space, illuminated only by a tiny window, and filled with wooden tea chests, an old desk and a couple of broken chairs. Peering into the chests, Livia saw they contained nothing but old legal files of her father’s clients. Opening the second door revealed a minuscule space filled once again with tea chests. The final door was part-glazed, and although its windows were smeared with years of grime, Livia had a tantalising glimpse of the roof terrace beyond. On it she could see a rusting pergola, and a battered metal table and chairs.
She opened the rickety door, and walked out onto the terrace, instantly feeling the sun beating down on the back of her neck. The terrace itself was about three metres square, edged by a low wall into which was concreted a flimsy metal rail running around the perimeter at waist height. Her mother had been right: the rail wobbled when she pushed it. But in spite of the shabby surroundings, Livia could imagine the family eating up there, the old plant pots filled once again with scarlet geraniums and flowering climbers.
At one end of the terrace, there was a fixed ladder which led to a flat roof above. Intrigued, Livia climbed the ladder. Disappointingly, the roof contained nothing more than the water tank for the building, but the view was spectacular. Shielding her eyes against the fierce Florentine sun, she admired the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of the city. To the south, the bronze-green cupola of the Duomo, and further west the angular blond splendour of the church of Santa Croce. To the north, the city was framed by the soft green hills on top of which stood the village of Fiesole, behind which, much further away, she could imagine the family villa. In the foreground, and surrounding the terrace, were the rich-red terracotta roofs of the neighbouring buildings.
She clambered back down the ladder and began to look for a way to attach the washing line. An old hook projecting from a wall seemed sturdy enough, and she tied the other end to the rusting pergola.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Livia, coming back into the kitchen. ‘The view is so beautiful – we should eat our meals up there. And if we cleared out Papa’s papers, I could move into that little attic room, so Papa could have his study back.’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’ said her mother. ‘Where would we put all his papers? He won’t hear of getting rid of anything, and his