Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [81]
With Pavlovian rapidity, Brunetti turned to the refrigerator. ‘The elegance of your thinking is matched only by that of your language,’ he said.
She smiled and held her empty glass towards him. ‘It’s the fate of the person who lives with two teenagers.’
There remained sufficient champagne for each of the children to find a glass in front of them as they sat down to dinner.
‘What are we celebrating?’ Raffi asked as he picked up his glass.
‘You don’t have to have something to celebrate to drink champagne,’ Chiara said, trying to sound like the sort of person who has left a trail of empty jeroboams behind her. She lifted her glass and clicked it against Raffi’s, then took a sip.
Raffi, looking at his glass but making no attempt to drink from it, said, ‘I don’t get it about champagne.’
Paola placed a plate of turbanti in front of him and one in front of Chiara, then went to fill two for Brunetti and herself. She set them down and took her place. ‘What don’t you understand?’ she asked, though not before she had taken a sip, as if to re-test the evidence.
‘Why people go crazy about it or think it’s so good,’ Raffi said, sliding his glass to the side of his plate and picking up his fork.
‘Snobbery,’ Chiara said through a mouthful of fish.
‘Chiara,’ Paola said in a warning voice, and Chiara nodded and put her hand to her mouth in acknowledgement of the reprimand. She poured some mineral water and took a sip, set her fork down and repeated, ‘Snobbery.’ Brunetti, studying her face, saw that some of the plumpness of adolescence had given way to the angles of maturity, making her resemblance to her mother even stronger.
‘Which means what?’ Raffi said, turning his attention to his dinner.
‘To impress people,’ Chiara said. ‘With how sophisticated they are and how good their taste is.’ Before Raffi could say anything, she added, ‘People do it all the time, with everything. Cars, what they wear, what they say they like.’
‘Why say you like something when you don’t?’ Raffi asked with what sounded to Brunetti like honest confusion, forcing him to wonder if, unbeknownst to either him or Paola, their son had been spending his free time on some other planet for the last few years.
Chiara set her fork down, rested her chin on one hand, and stared across the table at her brother. He ignored her. Finally she said, ‘It’s why you want a pair of Tod’s and not a plain old pair of shoes.’
Raffi ignored her and continued to eat.
‘Or why my friends’ parents all think they have to go to the Maldives or the Seychelles for vacation,’ she persisted.
Raffi poured himself a glass of water, ignoring the champagne. He drank the water and set the glass on the table, then pushed his chair back and turned to face his sister. He held up one foot and extended it in her direction. ‘Bought at the Lignano market this summer for nineteen euros,’ he said proudly, waving his foot in a circle, the better to display his shoe. ‘No Tod’s, no label.’ He lowered his foot and turned his chair, pulling himself back into place at the table. He picked up his fork and resumed eating.
Crestfallen, Chiara looked at her mother and then at her father. Had she been a boy, she and Raffi would probably have got into a scuffle of some sort, and Brunetti suspected he would have broken it up to protect the smaller child. Why was it, then, that when the combatant used only words, she had to be left alone to protect herself?
Brunetti had been in what he assumed was the normal number of fights when he was growing up: nothing had ever passed beyond a few punches and a good deal of shoving. He could not remember ever having been hurt, nor indeed hurting anyone, and none of the fights had left any clear memory. But he still remembered an afternoon when Geraldo Barasciutti, who sat next to him in mathematics class, had laughed when Brunetti made a grammatical error, mixing Veneziano with Italian.
‘What’s the matter with you? Does your father unload