Meanwhile a woman emerged from another; she was unkempt and wearing a dressing-gown, she had a bucket in her hand. Ginia only just managed to get up to her in time to ask her where the painter lived. But the woman did not deign either to glance at her or reply and hurried off down the corridor. Ginia, flushed and trembling, held her breath until everything was quiet again and then hurried downstairs.
Every so often someone would enter or leave by the front door and look at her in passing. Ginia began to walk up and down, feeling desperate, especially as a butcher-boy was leaning against a doorpost at the other side of the street, leering at her most unpleasantly. She thought of enquiring where the studio was of the female concierge but now she might as well wait for Amelia. It was almost midday.
To make matters worse, she had not fixed any rendezvous with Amelia and so she would have to stay on her own that afternoon. ‘Nothing seems to go right for me’, she thought. Just then Rodrigues appeared in the doorway and beckoned to her. ‘Amelia is up there’, he said casually, ‘and wants you to come up’.
Ginia accompanied him upstairs in silence. It turned out to be the last door; it had been silent within. Amelia was sitting on the sofa, smoking as if she were at the café. ‘Why didn’t you come up?’ she asked suddenly in a quiet voice. Ginia told her not to be silly, but she and Rodrigues seemed so categorical that they expected her to find her way up that she found it impossible to argue and she could not even say that she had listened at the door – that would have made matters worse. But she had only to recall how quiet the two of them had been to realize that the sofa could tell a tale. ‘They take me for an idiot’, she reflected, and tried to decide whether Amelia’s hair was ruffled and read the expression in Rodrigues’ eyes.
Amelia’s hat – the one with the veil – had been flung down on the table. Rodrigues, standing with his back to the window, was staring at her ironically. ‘Perhaps a veil would suit Ginia’, remarked Amelia point-blank.
Ginia frowned and, from where she stood, began to survey the pictures above Amelia’s head. But all those little paintings had lost interest for her. Lifting her nose, she could detect Amelia’s perfume in the cold mustiness. She could not recollect the smell of the room from the last occasion.
Then she walked through the room, looking at the pictures on the walls. She inspected a landscape, then a plate of fruit; she stopped; she could not bring herself to look away; nobody spoke. There were some female portraits; she did not recognize the faces. She came to the back of the room and found herself before the high curtain made of some heavy material such as draped the walls. It occurred to her that Guido had collected the glasses from behind there and she said, ‘May I?’ in an undertone, but neither of them heard because Rodrigues was saying something. Then Ginia parted the curtain to look, but all that met her eyes was an unmade bed and the sink-recess. Behind there too she could smell Amelia’s perfume and she thought it must be pleasant to sleep alone tucked away in that corner.
SEVEN
‘Rodrigues is dying for you to sit for him’, remarked Ginia, on their way home.
‘So what?’
‘Didn’t you notice how he was hopping round you, looking at your legs?’
‘Let him!’ said Amelia.
‘Have you ever posed for Guido?’
‘Never’, said Amelia.
On their way across the piazza, they saw Rosa go by, arm in arm with someone who was not Pino. She was clinging to him as if she were lame, and Ginia said, ‘Look, they’re afraid of losing each other!’ ‘You can do anything on Sundays’, said Amelia. ‘But surely not in the piazza. It makes you a laughing-stock’.
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