The Bestseller Read online

  The fire was nearly burned out. Terry looked around the apartment. With all the papers burned there was very little else: a few nondescript skirts, a gray tweed dress, some reams of printer paper, her battered laptop, her good leather purse, a canvas book bag. Things that didn’t matter. She took the three back-up computer disks and placed them, last of all, into the dying embers. They stank as they melted and bubbled. The bitter smell in the air mingled with the fear at the back of her throat.

  She thought about writing a note to Opal. But what was there to say? I was wrong? You were wrong? She’d written thousands of paragraphs, millions of words. It was enough for one lifetime. Yet she didn’t want her mother to feel her blame. So, when at the last, the very last, Terry picked up the carefully labeled file of rejection letters, she paused before consigning them to the guttering flames. She needed no other explanation, no other note. Almost gaily, she found some transparent tape and walked around the room, decorating the walls with the only visible reward of her eight years of endless, single-minded toil. The letters papered the room nicely. They proved she’d left no stone unturned. With all that done, she went to the window outside the kitchenette and cut down the clothesline that, long ago, she had strung across to the fire escape of the next building. Terry dragged the kitchen chair to the center of the room and sat with the coil of rope upon her lap. Before she did anything else, she thought she’d simply sit back, staring at all the nos, all the negative votes, hanging on the wall and—in her own mordant way—enjoy the view.

  2

  I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.

  —Natalia Ginsburg

  Camilla Clapfish pushed the lock of brown hair behind her ear with her habitual little twist, wrote the last line, and then slowly looked up from the manuscript she had just completed. Outside, beyond the open window, the dull gray cobbled streets of San Gimignano were offset by the vibrant blue of the Italian sky. Camilla sighed and put down her pen. She had given herself a week here, undisturbed, to finish the book, a book she had been working on for almost a year, and she’d achieved her goal a day early. She smiled to herself. It felt like “the hols”—what upper-class British schoolchildren used to call vacation. She looked across the rooftops to the crazy stone towers of the ancient hill town. She’d go out and celebrate. She could spend the little she had left of her money on a good bottle of wine and a slap-up meal. She wouldn’t eat at the hotel tonight; she’d find a really good restaurant. But first she would walk in the tiny park, climb the steps of one of the towers, and look out over the Tuscan plain.

  Oddly, Camilla felt as much sadness as triumph over finishing the book. Writing had come late to her—well, if at twenty-nine anything could be considered late. She’d found how she loved to record what her eyes took in, to create with words instead of paints. She was a failed artist, an unsuccessful art historian, and a quiet person—not a talker. But words on paper had become her companions this last year, and the characters she had drawn had become her friends. She’d written about a group of middle-aged ladies on a bus tour. She felt she’d come to know and like them all, even the troublesome Mrs. Florence Mallabar. She would miss them.

  Camilla added the last page to the neat stack of manuscript, rose from the table, and went to the wardrobe, where her plain brown linen jacket hung. She was tall, and her light brown hair and her dark brown eyes set the tone for her wrennish dress. Camilla was not one for bright carmine or aquamarine. She wore no lipstick. Too much early exposure to nuns, she supposed. You wound up dressing like either a tart or a novice. She was certainly of the novitiate school. And although her English skin and regular features were enough to draw some attention from Italian men, she didn’t—as her mother had frequently reminded her—“make very much of herself.”

  Now she carefully locked the door to the sparely furnished hotel room and walked down the stone stairs to the lobby. The clerk at the desk greeted her in Italian and asked if she was having a good day.

  “Sì. Buono. Grazie.” Yes, it was a very good day. The day I finished my first novel, Camilla thought, but she merely nodded. Her Italian was passable enough to discuss the practicalities of life but not good enough to describe this quiet joy. The clerk, an older man with a grizzled mustache, smiled. To him she was only another tourist. San Gimignano was a famous tourist town, a perfectly intact fourteenth-century wonder. There were those who called it “The Medieval Manhattan of Tuscany” because of the beautiful and bizarre stone towers that graced it. Once there had been sixty or seventy of them, but now only fourteen remained, making a strange and beautiful silhouette against the green Tuscan landscape. She would go out and enjoy looking about.

  She walked out the stone portal of the hotel onto Via S’Porto, the secondary street that led to the main piazza. She paused, took a deep breath, and rubbed her eyelids with the very tips of her fingers. She was tired but elated, and more than a little surprised. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did, she thought. I’ve finished it. I’ve finished my first book. She smiled and—for the first time in months—felt a pang of loneliness. Camilla was quite used to being alone. But now, without the comfort of her book to work on and keep her company, she wished there was someone she could tell her news to.

  I suppose I never thought I’d complete it, she realized. After all, she had never been taught what was now called “creative writing.” Camilla had attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Birmingham, a dark, failed industrial city in the English Midlands, and her salvation had been that she was taken under the wing of Sister Agnus Dei, stern Sister Agnus, her sixth-form teacher, who had recognized her intelligence and championed her cause. It was Sister Agnus who had insisted that Camilla sit for A levels—the all-important testing that got British schoolchildren accepted to university.

  No one in Camilla’s family had been to university. Well, in point of fact, all of them had left school at the earliest legal opportunity. Camilla’s father had been a lorry driver until an accident resulted in a bad back that ended his days behind the wheel. Her mother, not to put too fine a point on it, had been what once was referred to as a “char.”

  Perhaps that was unfair. Camilla, walking over the cobblestones, reconsidered her words and edited her thoughts. Well, if Mum was not as little as a cleaning lady, she certainly was not as much as a housekeeper. She had been the “daily” whom the Beveridge family had called in as needed, and she had spent a good part of her life cleaning up the messes of those she still referred to as “her betters.” In fact, it seemed to Camilla that her mother had always been more interested and more willing to clean and cook and listen to the children of the Beveridge family than to her own. The Clapfish flat was messy, ill-managed, overcrowded, and damp. Mrs. Clapfish rarely bothered with housework at home—“Don’t get paid to do it, now, do I?” she’d ask. Thinking of their home even now, under the warm Italian autumn sun, made Camilla shiver. Her three younger brothers had been in a constant clamor, their noses always wet, as were their socks and vests. When they weren’t shouting at one another they were being shouted at by their mother, who was just as often being shouted at by their father. Camilla sighed, her loneliness deepening. No point in writing to them, telling them she had finished a novel, Camilla thought. Her mother would only ask, “Whatever for?”

  As she continued walking toward the center of San Gimignano, she decided that she certainly wouldn’t tell Lady Ann Beveridge about her novel. But maybe she would write to Sister Agnus Dei tomorrow and give her the news. Sister Agnus, despite her name, wasn’t the least bit lamblike. She’d be fiercely glad. In the meantime, Camilla would enjoy this day, the Italian sun, and the beauty of the stonework, being responsible for no one but herself.

  She did not have to guide anyone through either of the two main churches, or point out the Roman ruins, or wait while calculatedly naif souvenirs were purchased. Camilla had spent the last year and a half in Firenze, first studying and then supporting herself there as a tour guide. All of he
r higher education in art history in New York—which her parents had neither understood nor approved of—had, in the end, come down to this: She was a tour guide. Because, only after Camilla had struggled through college and graduated, only after she’d finished her dissertation, did she realize that—without connections in either the art world or academia and without any particular personal charm—she would never get one of the few and highly coveted museum or teaching jobs. So, adrift, she had left New York and wound up in Florence, giving guided tours and, in her loneliness, writing fiction in her spare time.

  She liked giving tours, but only to Americans. They were used to standing in groups and were eager to improve themselves. It seemed almost a religion with them. British tourists never would stand together—they were always wandering off or directing their gaze somewhere else, while the French were absolutely impossible—rude and arrogant, the lot of them. Camilla had never finished a tour without one of them walking out on her while she spoke. Yes, Americans were nicest, most grateful. And although she became frozen with a paralyzing shyness if they asked her to coffee or lunch after a tour, Camilla spoke with authority during her stint as docent. She could guide people more easily than be with them.

  Camilla lived frugally, watching every penny, but she’d already had a lifetime of experience with that. She also had to put up with the occasional condescension of wealthy visitors who wanted their art predigested and their history reduced to four-hundred-year-old scandal. But she persevered. She was actually rather well-suited to the job. She had a surprisingly strong voice, physical stamina, and a good memory for details. If at first speaking to groups was difficult, she found, in time and with good notes, that it was easier than talking to people one-to-one. Although hers was by no means a glamorous or lucrative life, she had at least managed to live among the splendors of Italy and have her evenings free. Free for Gianfranco and, on nights he couldn’t see her, for her novel.

  Along with the writing, the fresh flowers she always kept in her room kept her loneliness at bay. A solitary life did not mean a lonely one, and it comforted her to recognize flowers in the Firenze markets, just the same as the ones she bought at the Camden Passage tube stand and at the Korean greengrocers in New York—the delphiniums, tuberoses, and gladioli, all as familiar as old friends.

  Now she walked into the flower-bedecked square that opened before her. The sun was just beginning its slanting descent. One side of the square was already in shadows, while the other was illuminated by a golden light. The old stone buildings, gilt by the sun, glowed as if lit from within. The air was so clear that each lintel, each doorstep, each window mullion showed a line as clean as a pen stroke. Geraniums, nasturtiums, and ivy exploded from window boxes, breaking the austerity of the stone with their riot of color. For once she wouldn’t have to stand against a building, her calves aching, the expense of a café out of reach. No. Tonight she’d splurge and enjoy the view in comfort. Boldly, Camilla walked toward a café table beside the well in the center of the square, ready to take a seat. She would have an apéritif here and, in doing so, pay for the rental of a comfortable chair. It would allow her to watch while the sun set and the square emptied, as it did each evening at this time.

  Camilla had made her life—such as it was—on such small pleasures. Snatched hours with Gianfranco, walks among the splendid architecture, hours spent in museums. It had always been so. While her classmates back at the Sacred Heart looked forward to country-house weekends, Christmas gifts from Harrods, and, later, cordon bleu classes in Paris or a stint at what passed as the season in London, Camilla had comforted herself with small, sometimes even tiny, pleasures but ones that deeply satisfied: a good library book and a bag of boiled sweets; hot toast spread with Marmite eaten alone in her room; a long afternoon visit to the Birmingham Museum, or a special program on the telly that she could watch undisturbed while the boys were out footballing. Even a hot bath with a rare dollop of scented bath oil was a treat to be looked forward to.

  Then later, when she was older, there was the wider world of art—the hours she could spend at the Tate staring at—no, devouring—the Turners—her favorite artist save for Canaletto. The Van Huysum at the National Gallery. Taking the Wallace Collection one lush room at a time. Whole days whiled away at the V & A. Then there was New York, mooning around the Frick, sitting in a quiet spot at the Cloisters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gave particularly good value—for the investment of looking there was so very much to see. And now there was today, when she would enjoy her comfortable seat and the beauty and activity all around her in the square.

  But as she approached the table, the chair at the other side was appropriated by a pale, ginger-haired man who helped an older woman into the seat. Camilla’s hand was already on the corner of her own chair, and as the stout woman slid her bottom onto the metal seat, Camilla’s hand brushed the man’s. She pulled back as if burned. He must have seen that it was her seat, her withdrawal, because he immediately began to apologize.

  “I’m so sorry. Are you sitting here? I didn’t mean to…” He paused, and in the silence Camilla tried to bite back her disappointment and come up with a plan B. All of the other tables were taken, so she would have to sit inside the café, away from the quiet beauty of the piazza. She shook her head and was about to leave, but he continued. “Mother, we’ve taken this young lady’s table.”

  The older woman looked up. “What?” she asked. “I don’t think so. I think this table was free.” The older woman glanced at Camilla. “Sit down, Frederick,” she told him. She was flushed, with a round, heavy face in late middle age. But despite her weight she had a good haircut and discreet but excellent makeup. “Were you sitting here?” she demanded.

  Camilla shook her head wordlessly. “No, Mother, but she was about to,” the man explained. Then he smiled at Camilla. They were Americans. The ginger-haired man had a nice, crooked smile, and his irregular nose and tiny freckles gave his face a pleasant aspect. “We’ll take another place,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t we just share the table?” the older woman asked, irritated. Clearly, she was not planning to move. Camilla stood motionless for a moment and looked again at the young man.

  “Yes. Would you let us sit at your table?” he said, and his absolute good nature was easy to give in to. Yet, after months of taking tourists through the major sites of the quattrocento, Camilla didn’t relish another tourist conversation. She paused. She had so longed for this seat and this view and the beautiful light, fading even as she stood there. She took her seat.

  A waiter—handsome, negligent, and self-absorbed—casually asked for their order. “A Martini,” Camilla said. The older woman’s eyebrows seemed to rise as her eyes narrowed.

  “Shall we share a bottle of Montepulciano?” the man asked his mother.

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  The waiter nodded briskly and left them to their silence. Camilla was relieved by it and stared across the slightly hilly cobblestone path to the archway that led to the road out of San Gimignano. Camilla knew it was likely that at any moment her thoughts would be broken into by the nervous, idle chatter of these two tourists: Where are you from? Oh, we’ve been there. How long are you staying? Where do you go next? She had better savour this silence for as long as it lasted.

  But she was wrong. The older woman opened her purse and seemed to be ransacking it, while her son simply sat, one long freckled hand on the table, looking across the courtyard and occasionally up at the birds that were settling into the hundreds of niches in the walls. Surprisingly, the silence was not awkward, and after a few moments Camilla found herself relaxing, slowly but inexorably becoming a part of the scene. This was what she liked. The sensation—unusual for her—that she was a part of the pageant, rather than a mere observer. For just as surely as she was sitting there beside the freckled man and his mother, there were tourists across the way snapping pictures. Pictures that they would bring home to Cincinnati and Lyons and Munich, pictures in
which she would appear, a stranger in the square beside two other strangers, her hands lying idly on the empty white table.

  Camilla’s heart suddenly lifted in her chest. She didn’t have only the beauty of the scene in front of her, she was also a part of the scene, now and forever in those snapshots and her own memory the woman dressed in brown at the table beside the well. She couldn’t repress a small sigh.

  “It is lovely, isn’t it?” the man asked. She had to nod. “I tell myself that I won’t forget it and I tell myself that I know how beautiful it is. But each time I come back I am taken by surprise all over again.” She nodded again. She felt that way about so many of the beauties of Italy—about the Botticelli room in the Uffizi, the Medici Chapel, the Giotto frescoes in Assisi. About all of Venice, and of course, about Canaletto.

  The older woman looked up for the first time. “I think I’ve lost my sunglasses,” she said.

  “Oh, Mother. You do this twice a day. They’re probably back at the hotel.”

  “Well, they won’t do me any good there.”

  “Shall I get them for you?” her son asked, rising from his seat.

  “Don’t be silly,” she told him. “I’ll go.” She got up and without another word left the table. How unpleasant. Camilla watched her bustle across the square and wished the woman’s hotel was in Umbria. But she disappeared into a doorway right on the square. One of the better hotels in the town, Camilla noticed. And the one with an excellent restaurant.