Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [79]
He paused at the bottom of the Rialto and reeled in his thoughts. The prospect of walking home along the less crowded riva appealed to him, but he decided to go down to Biancat and get Paola some flowers: it had been an age since he had. He found the florist closed. Having got the idea of flowers in his head, he was irritated – more than that – not to be able to take them to Paola. He stood in front of the window and looked at the irises he wanted, a white plastic cylinder of them visible behind the humidity-clouded window, beautiful and all the more desirable because he could not have them. ‘How like a man,’ he muttered to himself and turned away and down his own calle. He was on time; that would have to take the place of flowers.
Brunetti was not a man of faith, at least not in a way that posited a supreme being that concerned itself with the doings of men: as a policeman, Brunetti knew enough about the doings of men to make him hope the deity would be warned away from them in search of some more rewarding species. But at odd times during his life he found himself racked with a sense of limitless gratitude: it could come upon him at any time, and it always leaped upon him with maximum surprise. This evening it hit him as he turned into the last flight of steps leading to the apartment. He was healthy, he didn’t think he was crazy or violent, he had a wife he loved to the point of folly, two children in whom he had invested every hope of happiness on this earth. And, to date, misery and pain and privation and sickness had stayed outside the ring of fire he liked to think encircled them. What he thought of as primitive superstition kept him wary of daring to make any conscious expression of gratitude: to do so was to invite disaster. And to think like this, he knew, was to be a primitive fool.
He let himself in, hung his jacket to the left of the door, and went towards the kitchen. Indeed, turbanti di soglie, or else both Paola and his nose were liars. She was in the kitchen, standing at the table, palms splayed on either side of an open newspaper, head bent as she read.
He came up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. She ignored him. He opened the cabinet to her right and pulled down a glass, then another one. He opened the fridge and removed another bottle of the Moët from the vegetable drawer, thinking how lucky he was to be married to a woman who would be offered such a tasteful bribe. He stripped off the foil, put his thumbs under the cork, and shot it across the room. Not even the explosive sound stirred her to action or comment.
He poured carefully into both glasses, allowed the bubbles to subside, added, waited, added, then put a stopper in the bottle and put it back in the door of the fridge. He slid one glass towards her until it touched the edge of the page, then picked up his glass and tapped it against hers. ‘Cin cin,’ he said in his gruff, hearty voice.
She ignored him and turned a page. He put a hand out to steady her glass, nudged to one side by the turning page of the newspaper. ‘It does a man’s heart good to come into the bosom of his family and be welcomed with the affection he is accustomed to,’ he said and sipped at his wine. ‘Ah, that effusive warmth, that sense of familial intimacy and well-being to be had only in a man’s home, surrounded and revered by the people he most cherishes.’
She reached aside, picked up her glass, and took a sip. What she tasted caused her to look aside at him. ‘Is this more of the Moët?’ she asked.
‘The woman wins a prize,’ he said, toasted her, and took another sip.
‘I thought we were going to save it for something special?’ she asked, sounding surprised but not at all displeased.
‘And what is more special than that I return to my lady wife and she greets me with the loving kindness – beneath which glow the embers of raging passion – that has characterized our union for these two decades and more?