Innocence. Julian Barnes

she never felt she was doing all she could. She had a good heart. But she had no idea how to make the best of herself, or indeed how to dress at all. It was thought, because she held her head so neatly and so high, that she would come into her own when dressed up for the evening, but then, the Ridolfi had no jewellery, and Chiara didn’t care whether they had or not.

      A year ago, when she was sixteen, without previous explanation and without at all being able to afford it, Aunt Mad had taken her to have a dress made for her at Parenti. A Parenti was still, in the 1950s, what it had been in the 1920s, a dress recognizable at once and anywhere dresses were worn, and recognizing, in turn, no style but its own. But by this time Vittorio Parenti did scarcely any cutting at all, and his confezione might be described as mere sacks, long or short. The secret (as with Fortuny) lay in the material. Parenti silk (he made only in Italian silk) was woven and finished in his own backstreet factory off Via delle Caldaie. The tissue emerged in the finest possible pleats, one half of each pleat going with the grain, the other half against, so that each crease was part of the texture itself and could never become less sharp, indeed it was not a crease, but a change in the silk’s direction. The output of the ramshackle factory could only be compared to legend’s least probable materials, the cloak woven of the west wind, or the wedding dress that would go through a ring. It was, of course, strictly and exclusively for the use of the house, and when the lengths arrived in the sewing-room there were instructions that all the off-cuts should be destroyed. These instructions, however, were not accompanied by high pay for the employees, who were obliged to sell what they could and there must still be numberless bits and pieces of Parenti silk in Florence, doing duty as a lining or a patch on heaven knows what, but still giving themselves away by their pale glowing colours and the trace of the inimitable pleats.

      Chiara dreaded ‘good’ clothes, and consoled herself with the thought that at least a Parenti dress (which could never be hung up, but must be kept folded and twisted on a shelf) wouldn’t be, in the ordinary sense, ‘good’. There were a very few ‘good’ clothes left among her aunt’s possessions. They had concealed stiffenings, weighted hems, curious straps and supports, taped waists, which meant that even on the hanger they presented a rigid and forbidding human shape. Aunt Mad, to take her to the appointment, wore an ancient black outfit of this kind, a Viennese suit by Knüpfe. Chiara was in her English school uniform. For the moment her anxiety was swallowed up by the fear that she might, by some outside chance, meet someone else from the convent and suffer the disgrace of being seen in uniform during the holidays.

      Parenti received his clients, as he had always done, in a building next to his factory. He had known difficult times, for which he was now given credit. Since the night in 1923 when the Fascist youth had shot out the street-lights in the Oltrarno he had never consented to make anything for the women of the Party officials. (On the other hand, it might well be that the new political order had not appreciated his clothes.)

      The house had no name plate or bell, and nothing written up either on the outer or the inner glass door or on the wall inside. One ought to know one’s way, or not venture up these dark stairs. But the establishment had no secrets. The second floor landing led straight through the two sewing rooms and the pressing room. Every face at the ironing tables looked up at them for a moment as they passed, and then bent down again. I hope there’s another way out of here, Chiara thought.

      They were kept waiting in a little place which was certainly not a fitting room, since there were no looking-glasses. Armfuls of silk, all in different shades of tender grey, were thrown down on a row of chairs. Without moving them, there was nowhere to sit down, and even Aunt Mad couldn’t bring herself to disturb them.

      ‘He isn’t expecting us, aunt, he’s forgotten, let’s go home.’

      ‘Contessa! Contessina!’

      Parenti had come into the room behind their backs. He looked much older and much smaller than in his photographs and very tired, still able, but surely only just, to sustain the fatigue of being Parenti. And yet it wasn’t a studied performance, since the old maestro had never had any pretence to make.

      ‘Commendatore, I want to introduce you to my niece, Chiara Ridolfi,’ said Aunt Mad. By choosing not to complain about the five minutes wait, she had gained a little advantage. By refusing even to glance at her Knüpfe suit, he had recovered it. Now he swept the piles of grey silk to the ground, where they whispered into a diminished heap.

      He said: ‘I took the liberty of coming in unexpectedly just now so that I could see the Contessina of the present generation exactly as she really is, I mean when, as a young woman, she is unaware of anyone else.’

      ‘I don’t question the way you conduct your business, Parenti,’ said Aunt Mad sharply.

      He turned full upon her his melancholy gaze, as of one survivor to another. ‘Contessa, I last made for you in 1921. For the evening, in pale biscuit-coloured pongée silk, with a belt in matching silk satin, applied with motifs of the Florentine lily. The belt interrupted the line, and one hoped that it would never be worn.’

      ‘Good, and what do you suggest for my niece?’

      For the first time Parenti turned to Chiara.

      ‘Please do me the favour to stand up.’

      So Chiara stood up, with her arms straight down by her sides, and half-listening to the whine and mutter from the sewing rooms down the corridor. Without being asked to, but feeling that perhaps it was the right thing to do in a fashion house, she began to walk up and down a little, but very gently Parenti asked her to stop. ‘Just keep quite still, Contessina, then I will tell you what to do next.’ A whole minute, not less than that, passed by to the relentless chattering of the Necchis.

      Then Parenti, who had been looking at her with deep professional attention, raised his hands a little, let them fall, turned away from her at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, and said quietly, ‘I cannot make for her. She could not wear a Parenti.’

7

      In the following year, after she had left school for good, Chiara asked her father for ten thousand lira and went to a small dressmaker, recommended (as a relation by marriage) by the barber in the courtyard. Even here she met with some opposition.

      ‘Yes, but no one else is wearing them like this, it will have no style, think how it will look from the back.’

      ‘I shan’t have to see it from the back,’ said Chiara. If there’s something hopelessly wrong with me, she thought, it might as well be wrong the way I want it. Really all I need is not to have to worry. For the first time in all eternity I shan’t be at school in May. I shall go to the Maggio Musicale, I shall go to every concert, I shall listen to every note.

      The two dresses, one black and one white, were brought round to 5, Piazza Limbo by the dressmaker in person. ‘I have told the Contessina that I have done my utmost, but she must wear something round her neck.’

      ‘Oh, no one will look at me.’

      ‘Think a little,’ said Maddalena. ‘You must have noticed that during a concert people have nowhere to look and stare first of all at the ceiling, then at their hands, then at the four corners of the hall, not, for some reason, at the performers, then finally at each other’s clothes. Certainly the black dress would look better with my diamonds.’ Giancarlo, who had come into the room, pointed out that she no longer had any.

      ‘I give you my word of honour,’ said Chiara, ‘I’ll go to the Central Market tomorrow and get some beads, some black glass beads, I like them.’

      ‘They would not be suitable,’ cried the dressmaker. ‘They would not be real.’

      ‘Well, but glass beads are real.’

      ‘So are diamonds,’ said Giancarlo, ‘not more or less real, but equally so.’

      There was a small diamond necklace which had belonged to Cesare’s mother, and which had been deposited, when she died, in a bank in the Via Strozzi. Either Chiara’s