Broken Chord by Margaret Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

by Jacopo della Quercia. At her feet lies a dog, symbol of faithfulness. Dragonetti remembered that the restoration of this sculpture some years back had caused a furore with serious accusations from various experts, of work badly carried out. Not being an expert himself, he thought it looked good, the marble gleaming as it surely must have done when it was first put there.
    After that he went back out into the heat, half blinded by the sunlight but did notice on the wall beside the entrance door a sculpted labyrinth believed to predate the more famous one in Chartres Cathedral. The inscription in Latin recited: ‘This is the labyrinth built by Dedalus of Crete; all who entered therein were lost, save Theseus, thanks to Ariadne’s thread.’
    At the first bar he found he grabbed a toasted focaccia oozing with melting mozzarella and grilled aubergine. He ate it standing up and then quickly downed an espresso. While walking back to his office he smoked a cigarette, wishing he could have smoked it while drinking his coffee. Smoking was now strictly forbidden in all public buildings and that included his office. He spent the afternoon twiddling his thumbs while he listened to Radio Toscana Classica which transmitted classical music all day and half the night.
    At the end of another uneventful day Dragonetti drove home through the heat on the motorway, past the amazing modern church of San Giovanni Battista, the church of the motorway. The green copper roof swooped and curved and the church always reminded him of a sort of Noah’s Ark floating on the waves of the traffic. He exited at Florence North into a hectic city filled to the brim with tourists and those who live off them. The African street vendors, who lined the pavements, their goods spilling over intothe road where he lived, chatted among themselves in their own tongue, pausing only to harangue passing tourists as they pointed at their wares, the fake Gucci handbags or Armani jeans. “Only ten euro, only fifteen euro, real leather!”
    Dragonetti was an expert at driving along the narrow streets without killing anyone though at times he felt almost homicidal. Florence had changed, like most other towns and he thought it was difficult to live in any large town these days. The traffic was horrendous, especially in the rush hour, and Florence as a tourist attraction was packed for most of the year. He was a true Florentine, his home a decaying Palazzo that had been in his family for generations and, despite all the drawbacks of living in a busy town centre, he knew he would never want to live anywhere else. He was more attached to his home than he liked to admit. He always joked about it in an offhand way, calling it ‘the mausoleum’ and referring to it as ‘the crumbling stately pile’, to hide his fierce attachment. He liked to think of his ancestors living there, and his own childhood, in a different, less hectic Florence, had been spent in this building. At that time the family had been larger. Apart from his parents, his grandparents were still alive then, as well as two aunts, one a widow, one a spinster, all living there. There had been live-in servants too and everyday life had had a certain formality, with rituals that repeated and an old world feeling that would have been unthinkable now except for the extremely rich, which he wasn’t.
    He had been an only child and had played alone in the palazzo, learning to know it intimately. Now, of course, he only lived in a part of it and the rest had been closed up. Occasionally, he would unlock the dividing door and walk alone through the musty rooms where furniture was swathed in sheets, themselves dusty now, where family portraits loomed and he could recognise himself in a sixteenth century ancestor, who had the same black hair, the same heavy-lidded green eyes, and the full sensual lips that he had hated so much as a child. As he walked he would remember himself as a skinny lad who had invented companions to