Free Beastly Things by Donna Leon Page A

were to betray her, shame her, and bring a new lover into their home? Less than Clytemnestra did, he suspected, and without physical violence. But he had no doubt that she would do her best to destroy him with words and with the power of her family, and he was sure she would leave him with nothing.
    He heard her set down some shopping bags by the door. While hanging up her jacket, she would see his. He called her name, and she called back that she’d be there in a minute. Then he heard the rustle of the plastic bags and her footsteps retreating towards the kitchen.
    She wouldn’t do it for jealousy, he knew, but from injured pride and a sense of honour betrayed. Her father, with a phone call, would see that he was quietly transferred to some stagnant, Mafia-infested village in Sicily; she’d have every sign of him out of the apartment in a day. Even his books. And she’d never speak his name again; perhaps with the children, though they’d know enough not to name him or ask about him. Why did knowing this make him so happy?
    She was back, carrying two glasses of prosecco. He had been so preoccupied with their separation and her revenge that he had not heard the pop of the cork, though it was a sound that had the beauty of music for Brunetti.
    Paola handed him a glass and tapped his knee until he pulled his feet up and made room for her. He sipped. ‘This is the champagne,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ she said, sipping in her turn. ‘I felt I deserved a reward.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Suffering fools.’
    ‘Gladly?’
    She gave a snort of contempt. ‘Listening to their nonsense and pretending to pay attention to it or pretending to think their idiotic ideas are worthy of discussion.’
    ‘The thing about good books?’
    She pushed her hair back with one hand, scratched idly at the base of her skull. In profile, she was the same woman he had met and loved decades ago. The blonde hair was touched with white, but it was hard to see unless one were very close. Nose, chin, line of the mouth: they were all the same. Seen from the front, he knew, there were creases around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but she could still cause heads to turn on the street or at a dinner party.
    She took a deep swallow and flopped against the back of the sofa, careful not to spill any wine. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep teaching,’ she said, and Brunetti did not remark that it was because she loved it. ‘I could stop. We own the house, and you make enough to support us both.’ And if things got rough, he did not say, they could always pawn the Canaletto in the kitchen. Let her talk, let her get rid of it.
    ‘What would you do, lie on the sofa all day in your pyjamas and read?’ he asked.
    She patted his knee with her free hand. ‘You pretty much prevent my taking up residence on the sofa, don’t you?’
    ‘But what
would
you do?’ he asked, suddenly serious.
    She took another sip, then said, ‘That’s the problem, of course. If
you
quit, you could always be a security guard and walk around all night sticking little pieces of paper into the doorways of houses and stores to show you’d been there. But no one’s going to ask me to come and talk to them about the English novel, are they?’
    ‘Probably not,’ he agreed.
    ‘Might as well live,’ she confused him by saying, but he was so eager to talk about the cows that he did not ask her to explain what she had said.
    ‘How much do you know about cows?’ he asked.
    ‘Oh, my God. Not another one,’ she said and sank down on the sofa, her hand pressed to her eyes.

11
    ‘WHAT DO YOU mean, “Another one”?’ he asked, though what he really wanted to know was whom she included among them.
    ‘As I have told you at least twelve thousand times in the last decades: don’t be smart with me, Guido Brunetti,’ she said with exaggerated severity. ‘You know exactly who they are: Chiara, Signorina Elettra, and Vianello. And from what you’ve said, I suspect