The Closed Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

changing your mind.”
    â€œHow dare you! How dare you try to put the blame for your laziness and your
sheer fucking incompetence on to me?”
    â€œI cannot do this. My business will go under and I have a family to support.
Be reasonable.”
    â€œWho cares? Who gives a shit?”
    â€œStupid woman! Stupid! You said five centimetres! It’s written here.”
    â€œWe changed it, you cretin. We talked about it, and I said three centimetres,
and you said you would remember.”
    â€œYou never put it into writing.”
    â€œThat’s because I was silly enough to think that you’d remember, you big fat
fucking moron. I thought that three centimetres would be easy to remember
because it’s the same size as your dick.”
    She waited for me to speak. I said: “I’m not going to translate that.”
    â€œI pay you,” she pointed out, “to translate every word that I say. Now translate it. Every single word.”
    I dropped my voice, and translated Liz’s last comment. And that was when I
saw it happen: an astonishing transformation coming over Gianni—this big,
kind, gentle man—whose eyes suddenly gleamed with hatred, and who without
thinking about it snatched up some tool from the box near to him—it was a chisel,
an enormous chisel—and lunged towards his employer, screaming at her, inarticulate words of fury, so that he had to be restrained by his workmates, but not
before he had managed to catch her a blow across the mouth. So that Liz, lips
bleeding, had to storm off indoors to the kitchen, which had just recently been
plumbed in, and a few minutes later we heard her drive away without another
word to any of us.
    After that the men packed up their gear methodically and in silence. Stefano
and Gianni had a long conversation in a quiet corner of the garden, beneath the
shade of a cypress tree. I had asked Stefano if I could go but he said that he would
like me to stay a little longer, if that was possible. I waited for about twenty minutes and then, when he had finished talking to the builder, Stefano came over to
me as I sat in what was designed to be the
loggia,
and he said, “I don’t know
about you, but I need a drink after that—will you join me?”
    We went to a restaurant along the main road not far from the farmhouse, up
on the hillside overlooking Lucca, and we sat on the terrace and drank wine and
Grappa for a couple of hours, and then ate some pasta, and talked until the sun
started to go down, and I noticed how handsome he was and how kind his eyes
were and what a great, childlike, shoulder-shaking laugh he had, and he told me
what a relief it would be if Liz sacked him, because she was the worst client he
had ever worked for, and the stress of it was almost giving him a breakdown,
and this was the last thing he needed because apart from anything else his marriage was in trouble. And there was a sudden silence after he said that, as if
neither of us could understand how it had slipped out. And then he told me that
he’d been married to his wife for seven years, and they had a little daughter
called Annamaria who was four, but he didn’t know how much longer they
were going to be together because his wife had been unfaithful to him and
although her a fair was over now it had hurt him terribly, worse than anything that had happened to him in his life, and he didn’t know if he could ever
forgive her or feel about her the same way again. And I nodded and made sympathetic noises and spoke comforting words and even then, right at the beginning,
I was too blind, too self-deceiving to admit that really my heart was singing
when he told me all this, that it was just what I most wanted to hear. And the
evening ended with him kissing me in the restaurant car park—kissing me on
the cheek, but not just in a friendly way, stroking my hair a little bit as he did so,
and I asked him if he wanted my mobile number and he