Birthright by Charles Lambert

Author:Charles Lambert [Lambert, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The next day was Thursday, the day Fiona taught her weekly class on campus at five o’clock. At ten past five, Maddy rang the bell beneath Fiona’s flat. She waited a few seconds, then rang again. When nobody answered, she looked up at the windows, the glass black in the brightness of the late-afternoon sun. She hadn’t expected to find Ludovico at home, but she was still disappointed. She walked across to the bar – she might as well have a coffee before she got the bus back to San Lorenzo.

Pausing outside the bar, she glanced back at the building in which Fiona and Ludovico lived and at the imposing archway two storeys tall; Roman buildings are strata of life, she thought, layered as lasagne, the piano nobile, the floors above more modest and then, at the very top, a floor of garrets for the servants, with sloping roofs and windows just large enough to let air circulate. Fiona had said that her mother was the granddaughter of a maid, or her daughter, she couldn’t remember now. And here she was, living on the piano nobile with two spoilt brats and her on-off boyfriend. Maddy couldn’t stop wondering who was lying, Fiona or Ludovico. And the money Fiona would soon inherit, like a constant buzz in the background, the unfairness of it. This is my city, she thought, not yours.

She was about to go into the bar when she saw a movement at one of the windows. There was a second twitch of curtain as she stared up and whoever was looking down at her in the square below must have realised she had noticed, and stepped back, and adjusted the curtain so that the window once again reflected the sky, bright blue and banked with cloud, and nothing else.

*

Fiona spent most of Thursday in the flat, curled up on her bed, wrapped in a blanket, convincing herself that she was too ill to go to work. She called the faculty to say she wasn’t well enough to do her class. She ate bowls of cereal until the milk ran out and read Jane Eyre for the twentieth time. When the doorbell rang, she jumped but didn’t answer. There was no one she wanted to see, and nobody else was in the flat. She crawled out of bed and peered down into the square to see who it might have been, but recognised no one. She threw herself back on the bed, picked up her book after checking her watch. She should have been at the lesson ten minutes ago, she saw, and she had a comforting sense of her own naughtiness. Patrick would be proud of her.

She was fast asleep when someone tapped on the door.

‘It’s me,’ said Ludovico.

‘Hang on,’ she said. But he was already in her bedroom. He sat down on the bed.

‘I’ve got her address,’ he said and gave Fiona a scrap of paper. She slipped it inside her book.

‘And Maddy?’ she said. ‘Did you speak to her?’

‘She asked me to call her back in twenty minutes,’ he said.

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