The Drowning River Read Online Free Page B

sighed.
    Ma’s focus had returned to Iris then. ‘And you’ve got talent,’ she’d said, with a determination that unnerved Iris. Ma didn’t have a determined bone in her body, or so Iris had always thought.
    ‘Ma,’ Iris had muttered, looking down at her feet. ‘Don’t.’ Because Ma would say that, wouldn’t she? Her only child had to have talent, at something. It was no joking matter. She sighed.
    ‘Darling,’ Ma had said, and Iris heard the worry in her voice. ‘You’ve got to decide on something. You can’t stay here all your life, working in the bar.’ Why not? Iris had thought stubbornly, still looking at the floor. You did. She heard Ma clear her throat. ‘There’s always London.’
    Shocked, Iris had looked up then. By London, she knew, Ma meant Iris’s father; she meant that she’d move heaven and earth to get Iris into Camberwell or Chelsea or Goldsmith’s or any other London art school, and she would live with her father and his new family, in Dulwich. With the baby and the four-year-old and the ten-year-old twins and the second wife she’d never met, and her father. Her father whom she barely knew, who had taken absolutely zero interest in his first, grown child. Not now, not ever.
    ‘Ma,’ she’d said, alarmed, and it was Ma’s turn to look away. This was serious. Grow up, Iris told herself urgently. What does it matter if wedon’t get on? Florence might be stuffy and gloomy, but Italy was Italy, right? Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and coffee and sunshine. Even in November. And three months’ proper grown-up life-drawing. It’d be all right.
    What it was, was lonely. Resignedly Iris sat up in bed in the dark, sniffing in the cold air. High-ceilinged, north-facing, the room was full of the outlines of things in the gloom; every morning, it seemed, she still woke up wondering where on earth she was. There was a colossal wardrobe on one wall with something like an eagle carved on top of it, and big dusty curtains hung in heavy swags over the shuttered window. She pulled back the duvet. It was warmer outside than in this place, even in November. She crossed the smooth, icy tiles in bare feet, stubbed her toe on some great huge bit of furniture, an oak chest or uncomfortable armchair. ‘Ow. Bugger, bugger, bugger.’ She sat down on the scratchy stuffed seat, rubbing her toe.
    Around her the apartment was still quiet; only the ticking of the ancient heating cranking up – or it could be cranking down, for all Iris knew. It never actually seemed to get warm. Iris stood up, opened the shutters and looked out.
    Now that she’d got to know the city a little better, Iris sometimes thought she would have lived anywhere but Piazza d’Azeglio. A vast, gloomy nineteenth-century square just to the north of the centre, it was too grown-up, too big, too ugly, too much of a hike from the drawing school on the other side of the river. The massive buildings flanking the dull square of grass and trees were either owned by banks or, like this one, by ancient families who couldn’t afford to keep them up and let little apartments stuffed with hideous old family furniture to foreigners like Ronnie and Iris. They saw her coming, Iris reflected on Ronnie’s mum; had she even seen the place before she handed over the deposit?
    The view out of the back was odd; it wasn’t the Florence she’d imagined. The smallish garden, with bits of statues in it and lots of black ivy, and the synagogue, although she hadn’t known that when they moved in. It looked like something from South Kensington, a green copper dome and mottled beige stonework, Victorian. Iris softened;on a morning like this, with muffled sunlight trying to get through the mist, the view was nice. The roofs, some far-off hills just about visible to the south. Iris pushed open the window on impulse, leaned out on the cold stone of the window ledge. It was warmer outside. There was a smell of smoke and the air was mild.
    In the summer, Iris