Bestseller

—Graham Greene

Camilla returned to Firenze with her finished manuscript and the promise from Frederick Ashton that he would look her up. She had a tour to meet, and good docent that she was, she arrived early and crossed the Piazza della Repubblica at a slower-than-usual pace. She never enjoyed the moments before she met a new group. Some groups were very pleasant, eager to learn what she knew and as delighted by the city as she was. But others never seemed to coalesce or were made up of difficult or apparently stupid individuals who were either too shy or too uninterested to respond to her. She hoped she didn’t have one of those on her hands. It would be so dispiriting just now when Camilla was pleased with herself, with her book, and with her new friend.

And then, almost at the door to the Hotel Excelsior, she saw Gianfranco. He was walking along the far side of the square with an older woman—perhaps his mother or his aunt. He was walking in her direction, facing her, but then he turned. Camilla was almost certain that he had seen her and, though it was he who should be ashamed, she felt her own face redden.

Gianfranco’s family were well-off but certainly not among the oldest of Florentine families. They owned several hotels. Not the enormous ones, or the very best, like the Excelsior, but they were large enough and good enough to keep the family comfortable. His father was a judge, and Gianfranco himself was an avvocato. He would probably, in the fullness of time, be a judge as well. In the meanwhile, he spent as little time in the office as he could get away with and quite a bit of time in the bars and cafés of Firenze.

He had the dark good looks of an Italian film star—his features a little less regular than an American hero’s but still incredibly attractive. Camilla had been surprised when he approached her at one of the few Florentine parties she had been invited to. Gianfranco had seduced her with his charm, his attentiveness, and his good looks, but while she had taken all of that as a sign of romantic and perhaps marital interest, he had meant it as the almost formal announcement of his interest in her—as a mistress. And only as a mistress. I have been stupid, Camilla thought. It was only after she had been dazzled by him, after she had slept with him, that she had realized her mistake. She thought they were in love, but he had laughed when she had asked about meeting his family. “Whatever for?” he had said, and she had realized that the rules of the game were very different among his class. Here you romanced a mistress while you married into the best family you could possibly manage. Rather like England, but Englishmen often omitted the bother of a mistress altogether.

Realizing her mistake, Camilla had tried to break up with him, but he was always so sweet, so sexual, and so clearly astonished by her pain. He cried with her and called her “tesauro.” His treasure. And she—who had never been anybody’s treasure—was touched, and found it impossible to go back to the emptiness of her life before she slept in his arms.

But she never got to sleep in his arms for long. Gianfranco would meet her at an apartment he kept only for his assignations. He never stayed overnight, 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 their approval as she did winning the Olympic decathlon.

All of this she explained to Frederick, whose long face lengthened and whose deep red-brown eyes darkened in sympathy. “What happened then?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I wasn’t offered a place at Cambridge.”

“So, what did you do?”

“Well, I deeply disappointed Sister Agnus. And I proved my mother’s thesis right when she said that Cambridge wasn’t the place for the likes of us.” Camilla took another sip of wine and then tried a bite of her meal. But she’d lost her appetite. She put her fork down. Even now, years later, the experience was raw.

Frederick reached his hand across the table and patted hers just for a moment, very gently. “I mean,” he said, “what did you do about school?”

“Well, I did well in my A levels. Well enough for Sister Agnus to put me in for a full scholarship at Marymount. It’s a Catholic girls’ college in New York City, and she knew one of the deans. I did my undergraduate work there and then my graduate work at Columbia.”

“So you lived in New York,” Frederick said.

“Yes, for a long time.”

“And those are fine schools.”

“Yes. Marymount might have been stronger—there were a lot of spoiled rich girls there—but the faculty was kind to me. And Columbia was top-drawer.”

“Still, it wasn’t Cambridge.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She looked over at him, into those red-brown eyes. Somehow they seemed to understand a great deal about pain. Had he experienced so much? It didn’t seem possible. After all, he was a wealthy, young American man with a devoted mother and a good education. Once again, Camilla wondered if he was gay: If that was the burden he carried, it gave him an insight into the burdens of others.

“It wasn’t Cambridge,” she repeated. “Cambridge was my last chance to find a place where I fit in among my own kind. I might have found a niche among other bright scholarship students. You know, all the other smart ones who didn’t fit in at home. And then I would have gone down to London and been a part of that world. But it didn’t work out. So, instead, I was a poor Brit in New York, a scholarship student among debutantes. Then, in graduate school, I was a woman among men, and an expatriate to boot. I had no connections, no way to get any. I was passed over for all the good jobs.”

“Then what?”

Camilla shrugged. “Here I’m just a foreigner. I can’t go back to Birmingham, and I’m not sure where to go next.”

Frederick waited, as if he understood her feelings. “So you wrote a book,” he coaxed. She nodded. “And now what?” he asked.

Camilla thought of Gianfranco. She sighed. “I don’t know,” she told him truthfully and raised her glass of wine to her lips.

“Well, I think it’s obvious. I think you have to send your book to my sister.”

“I’m not sure about that,” she said.

“Yes,” he told her. “My sister in New York. Remember? She’s an editor with Davis & Dash. And it sounds as if she would like your book. Of course, there are no guarantees. But what have you got to lose?”

What indeed, Camilla thought. Would he send the book as a quid pro quo, a payment for future services rendered? He certainly didn’t seem that type. Camilla looked at him, this very plain American who had entered her life, made no demands, and seemed to offer so much. What did he expect of her? What could she deliver? “I couldn’t,” she said, “I really couldn’t.”

“Sure you could,” he told her. “You’d be silly not to.”