Secrecy - By Rupert Thomson Page 0,43

spontaneous air about her that you never would have suspected she was meeting someone.

At last, I could resist no longer. I went up and touched her on the shoulder. She turned slowly.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said.

‘You weren’t late. You’ve been here all the time.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘I could feel it.’

‘I couldn’t believe I was the one you were waiting for. I felt really lucky.’

‘If you pay me too many compliments at the beginning,’ she said, ‘you might find yourself with nothing left to say.’

‘The beginning of what?’

Her face appeared to rock a little, like a boat disturbed by a wave that had come from nowhere.

‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘I disagree.’

‘Do you?’

I stared out over the rooftops. The pale-gold October light streamed down on to my face. My skin seemed to be absorbing it, soaking it up. Light could feel liquid.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’ My face still felt illuminated, not just by the sky, but by a kind of candour, the fact that I was speaking the truth. ‘I’ll never run out of ways of telling you how beautiful you are.’

She linked her arm through mine, and we walked east, along the Corso. I remembered what Marvuglia had said as we sat in his kitchen. You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right. What did he know?

‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I drew you.’

She asked if she could see. I took out my notebook and opened it. She stared at the image for a few long moments. ‘I look like that?’

‘To me you do.’

‘It’s lovely.’

In Piazza Santa Croce a crowd was gathering for a game of calcio. Music started up close by. There was a man hunched over a lute, his hand a blur. Another man blew on a set of pipes. A third hammered at a tall, barrel-shaped drum, his face transfixed, almost demonic. Faustina stood in front of me, and I watched over her shoulder, my face close to her hair. The three men were arranged in an arc around a dark-skinned woman who wore a leather waistcoat and an ankle-length bronze skirt. Her eyelids were painted with black dots, which made her eyes look caged. She sang in a guttural, agonized voice, her head angled sideways and downwards, her hands clapping in a rhythm I had never heard before. Leaning back against me, Faustina put her mouth next to my ear. They were Spanish, she said. They came through the city every year.

I followed her across the square and into Via dei Malcontenti. As we passed alongside the church, a few hundred people surged in our direction, all looking beyond us, and I had to keep hold of Faustina and edge sideways, leading with my shoulder, or we would both have been swept back into the square.

We turned left, then right, the streets narrowing. All that remained of the music was the pulsing of the drum. She led me through a door of warped wooden staves and into a wild garden. There was a cluster of palm trees and a tiled terrace. I followed her down some steps and through an arbour, its metal frame in the clutch of superannuated fig trees and twisting vines. We walked in a green gloom, rotten fruit exploding softly beneath our shoes.

‘Who else knows about this place?’ I said.

‘I’m not sure. Children, maybe.’

She had found a twist of ribbon once, she said. Another time, her foot had caught in a wooden hoop.

Beyond a tangle of undergrowth, at the far end of the garden, was a second, smaller terrace, overshadowed by pine trees and the remains of a pergola. Two pillars, a stone bench. A few broken pots. The faded pink tiles were decorated with pale-green concentric circles, like the ripples when a pebble is dropped into a pond.

‘When I was young, I was alone a lot,’ I told her. ‘I used to break into abandoned houses.’

I described how I would stride out on to the first-floor balconies and make speeches to the crowds that massed below. A sea of faces. Deafening applause.

Faustina was brushing the leaves and dirt off the stone bench. ‘So you always knew you were going to be famous?’

‘No, no. It was just a game. Anyway, I’m not famous.’

‘You will be,’ she said.

I glanced at her, sitting there. I could see her as a little girl – dark, wary, eel-quick. ‘Were you lonely as a child?’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I had a friend called Mimmo. He thought I was a witch.’ She grinned. But then the