Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [5]
India’s high heels clattered on the marble tiles of the floor of the Casa d’Ario and she paused for a moment to admire the curves of the staircase with its grand sweep of polished walnut rail and filigreed iron balusters. The old house where she had the first-floor apartment might be crumbling, but its beauty never failed to amaze her. If she had lots of money she’d pour it into this place, restore it to its former splendor, polish its cool rose-and-cream marble, gild its ironwork, lavish its decaying stone with careful new mortar—and banish Signora Figoli’s ancient perambulator from the front hall. Signora Figoli must be at least fifty, but she still kept the baby carriage there—just in case, she had told India with a smile. “You never know, with my husband,” she had added with a knowing wink, and India had smiled back in amazement. Signor Figoli was a mild-mannered, unremarkable little man, always quiet and polite. Oh, well, she thought with a grin as she dodged the permanent perambulator and caught the sounds of the six young Figolis apparently at war with each other again, maybe it’s those long Italian lunches that cause a population explosion—all those warm afternoon siestas with the shades drawn and a little wine still left in the bottle.
The vast wooden door clicked shut behind her and India peered across the road at her tiny Fiat to see if there were another of those ominous yellow tickets on it. She breathed a sigh of relief; no, today she was lucky. Flinging the Gucci satchel on to the minuscule backseat, she folded herself into her car and edged her way into the turbulent traffic of Rome. With luck she’d be able to drop off the paintings first and still be on time for the reception. She didn’t want to be late for that. Today was so important for Fabrizio. His Paroli Studios were launching their own line of furnishings, everything from sumptuous colorful fabrics to sleek lacquered tables, fluffy sensual sofas for lazing to severe linear chairs whose pure lines had earned themselves a place in a museum.
Paroli was famous for the best in modern Italian interior design, deriving its initial influences from Erno Sotsass and his famous Memphis design group, but Fabrizio cleverly diffused avant-garde concepts into an immediately acceptable and appealing form. India always felt that the Paroli Studios should be locked in a time capsule and buried for earthlings to open in the year 2500 as the pure example of the refinement of modern taste in our era.
Fabrizio’s supreme knack was in “humanizing” the strong spatial lines of his designs and the open areas that made his rooms flow, by adding a touch of the old. He’d hang a clouded sixteenth-century Venetian mirror over a stark burgundy lacquer console table so that the mirror’s curlicued gilded wood frame was reflected in the dense gloss of the table’s laminated wood and the mirror in turn would pick up the rich color of the table. He’d place a single exquisite satinwood box inlaid with delicate tracings of rosewood and holly alongside an astonishing streak of scarlet lamp that soared across a table like a spear. His taste was faultless, his judgment as to each piece’s value in a setting was exact, and the occasional quirk of the old contrasting with the very newest was pure genius.
Apart from that he was thirty-seven years old and incredibly handsome in a classical Florentine way, with the thick, blond, curly hair and straight-nosed profile of Michelangelo’s David. He was also married to a very attractive woman from Milan, heiress to an industrial fortune, with