Falling in Love Read Free

theatre. Slipping on her shoes, she took her coat from the closet and wrapped a woollen scarf – red as her dress had been – around her neck: Flavia often referred to her scarves as her hijab: she could never leave the house without wearing one.
    At the door, she paused and looked back into the room: was this the reality that came to replace the dream of success? she wondered. A small, impersonal room, used for a time by one person, the next month by another; a single wardrobe; a mirror surrounded – just as in the movies – by light bulbs; no carpet on the floor; a small bathroom with shower and sink. And that was it: if you had this, you were a star, she supposed. She had it, so she must be a star. But she didn’t feel like one, only like a woman in her forties – she forced herself to say – who had just worked like a dog for more than two hours and now had to go and smile at nameless people who wanted a part of her, wanted to be her friend, her confidant; for all she knew, her lover.
    And all she wanted to do was go to a restaurant and eat and drink something and then go home, call both of her children to see how they were and to say goodnight to them, and when the rush of performance began to dissipate and normal life started slipping back, go to bed and see if she could sleep. During productions where she knew or liked her colleagues, she looked forward to the conviviality of dinner after the show, of jokes and stories about agents and managers and theatre directors, of being in the company of those with whom she had just experienced the miracle of making music. But here, in Venice, a city where she had spent a great deal of time and where she should know a lot of people, she had no desire to mingle with her colleagues: a baritone who spoke only of his success, a conductor who disliked her and found the feeling hard to disguise, and a tenor who seemed to have fallen in love with her – and she looked herself in the eye when she maintained this silently – with certainly no encouragement from her. Not only was he little more than a decade older than her son; he was far too innocent to interest her as a person.
    As she stood there, it occurred to her that she had effectively blocked out the flowers. And the vases. Should the man who had sent them be at the exit, she should at least be seen leaving the theatre with one of the bouquets. ‘To hell with him,’ she said to the woman in the mirror, who nodded back at her in sage agreement.
    It had happened first in London, two months before, after the last performance of Nozze , when the single yellow roses had rained down on her at the first curtain call, and during each successive one. Then at a solo recital in St Petersburg, they had fallen amidst quite a number of more traditional bouquets. She had been charmed by the way some of the Russians, most of them women, had walked to the front of the theatre after the performance and handed the bouquets up to her on stage. Flavia liked seeing the eyes of the person who gave her flowers or said something nice to her: it was more human, somehow.
    Then it happened here, the opening night, scores of them falling like yellow rain, but she had found none in the dressing room after that performance. Yet they had appeared again tonight. No name, no information, no note to explain such an excessive gesture.
    She was stalling: she didn’t want to have to decide about the flowers, and she didn’t want to have to go and sign programmes and exchange small talk with strangers or, sometimes worse, with those fans who came to many performances and believed that frequency earned familiarity.
    She slipped the cotton bag over her shoulder and ran her hand through her hair again; it was dry. Outside, she saw the dresser at the end of the corridor. ‘Marina,’ she called.
    ‘ Sì , Signora,’ the woman answered, approaching her.
    ‘If you’d like, take the roses home with you: you and the other dressers. Anyone who wants