Last Train from Liguria (2010) (4 page)

The sense of elation soon passed. One evening when she had just lit the study fire, and the aroma of the meal Mrs Carter had left in the oven was beginning to make itself known, a message arrived from the hospital. Her father would be detained overnight - again. Bella went down to the kitchen then, where she eased Mrs Carter’s dinner out of the oven. She removed the lid - a casserole bulging with onions and smoked cod - and took it outside. She carried the dish down the garden path. Lumps of fish and half-raw potato spilled out, and her wrists flinched at the occasional spit of hot parsley sauce. When she reached the back wall, she tipped what remained of the casserole into a tin they kept there for next door’s cat.

Returning to her father’s study, she stood before the apothecary cupboard that took up most of one wall. It contained many and multi-sized drawers as well as several nooks and compartments, and had come from the widow of one of his patients, a pharmacist from Aldgate. It had always reminded Bella of a tenement building, a secret life held in each section, a different life each time.

She began, at first absent-mindedly, to open and shut the drawers. They made a clipping sound when they opened and a dry slight suck on the return. She did that for a time, opening and shutting: clip and suck, her enthusiasm increasing along with her speed until both had slipped just a little beyond her control. Then she was standing on a chair stretching towards the drawers at the very top; clip, suck, clip, suck. Faster and faster, on and on. Clip, suck, clip. It was only after a very close topple that she finally made herself stop.

She was cold when she climbed back down. The fire had died and the room had grown dark except for a little street light through the window. Here she could see her father’s consulting couch, the fold of a Foxford rug at its headrest. The couch, firm with horsehair and taut leather, would feel good on her back. She lowered herself onto it, pulled the Foxford rug up to her neck and lay down. Bella looked up at the window. She could remember her mother standing there, the evening after Miss Vaughan’s body had been found, quietly weeping as she looked out on the street trying to find some sort of a reason.

‘It’s the English, you see,’ she had begun. ‘They make you feel like you’re being forward when you’re only trying to be friendly. They make you
ashamed
.’

‘It’s these streets,’ she had decided then a few minutes later. ‘Everyone trying to stay private when we’re all on top of each other, looking in at each other, pretending we can’t see.’

‘It’s these houses,’ she had concluded. ‘These awful Chelsea houses.’

Bella lay listening to the sounds of the surrounding rooms - the peevish chime of a clock, the sob and sigh of a water pipe, the whinge of an upstairs door Mrs Carter had forgotten to lock. She could hear no laughter, nor conversation from the future. There were only the sounds of a melancholic house. If she was to be honest with herself, it was a house that should suit her quite well.

*

Days went by and she couldn’t shake off the feeling that if she went to Sicily she would never see her father again. Bella reminded herself that he was not an old man, although his exact age was unknown to her. There had always been a slight awkwardness around the subject, probably because he had been some years younger than his late wife. Perhaps as many as ten. Judging by the date of the Hippocratic Oath framed on the wall of his study along with a photograph taken on the day, Bella guessed he must have been about twenty-four when he graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. This would make him now about sixty or sixty-one. It wasn’t very old, but hardly the first flush either. In any case he would grow older. One day he would die. Perhaps be ill first, even linger. She found herself daydreaming about what it would be like to be his nurse, rushing to his bedside from Sicily on the summons of a telegram. In her daydreams his condition never worsened nor did he grow any older. He stayed much the same; sick enough to be infirm, well enough not to suffer too much. They would have years of that, her nursing, him being nursed. Her reading, him listening. Or fixing the blanket around his knees and bringing him invalid’s soup; propping him up by the window on days that were warm, bucking him up on wet days when he might feel a little down. If a doctor came into the picture it would be to Bella he would address himself, drawing her into a hushed conversation on the far side of the door.

The daydreams passed, spat away by the rain on the window, or burnt up by the fire in the grate, and the feeling came back to her. She would not see him again. He would be dead before her return. She would find out, days after the event, in a strange landscape surrounded by people she didn’t know. His habits and moods would all become lost to her, just as those of her mother had done. He would become a series of vague and disconnected impressions, impossible to remember, and therefore impossible to grieve. Instead of the house and its contents, she began to catalogue her father. She found herself, like a child, constantly trying to detain him with banal comments and pointless questions he clearly had no wish to answer. His work at the hospital had caused him to miss so many recent dinners that she took to rising early, sometimes as early as dawn, so she could breakfast with him. Just to be able to sit in his company, to watch his face, to hear his voice. To remember. She even made a special effort to eat a good breakfast, just to please him. But her efforts went unnoticed and her presence at the table seemed to irritate him. After a few painful attempts, she left him in peace to study his notes or read the first post. She told herself he was never at his best first thing in the morning anyhow; a man with so much on his mind.

She decided to make another attempt to visit her mother’s grave, and even went as far as to order a wreath of flowers, drawing the florist into a lengthy consultation on the colour and shape of each bloom and throwing in a few reminiscences about her late mother, none of which were entirely accurate. But when the wreath arrived Bella couldn’t bear the sight of it and threw it away. To escape the hawk-eye of Mrs Carter and make it blend into the rubbish bin, she had to first mutilate the flowers, then hack at the oasis that held them together until it crumbled to bits. How could she have even considered walking through Brompton cemetery with that absurdity in her arms, past endless terraces of gravestones and plots tended by love and grief, pretending to know or even vaguely recall where her mother was buried? Like looking for a house without an address. And even if she did manage to find the grave, how could she have imagined laying this insult down in the centre of what would have to be by now a shameful display of neglect, disrespect and trapped weeds?

Bella settled on a photograph instead, a portrait she couldn’t quite look in the face. Her eyes instead recalled the plum-coloured coat, the curl of cream chiffon over one shoulder. She took the same scarf from her mother’s chest of drawers, stood for a while with the drawer slanted in her hands, looking down into the intimacies of a life that had once belonged to her mother. Folds of silk, a book of Tennyson’s verse. Stockings, a corset. The start of a Christmas shopping list, and a pair of yellow gloves warped to the shape of hands, now decayed.

She was shaking as she wrapped the photograph in the chiffon scarf and placed it in her mother’s alligator travel bag. It was the first thing she packed for Sicily. The first physical acknowledgement that she would actually be leaving.

*

The luggage for Sicily labelled and waiting in the hall; clothes from former winters, in hope of future ones, moth-balled and boxed, ready for the attic. A few remaining days. Bella decided to pay a final visit to her father’s old godmother, who lived in a nursing home in Piccadilly. Gummy by now and slightly deranged, the poor woman believed herself to be in a hilltown in Abruzzo, her days spent watching in the window for people long since dead, or waving out at strangers she suddenly recognized as her own. Not only had she lost her geographical bearings, but also her command of the English language, which, word by word, seemed to have fallen out of her head.

Bella knew, or thought she knew, that the old woman had once been to Sicily.

’
Madrina?
‘ she asked. ‘
Com’ e in Sicilia?
’

’
Com’ e? Perche chiedi?
’

’
Perche io vado in Sicilia
.’

’
Tu vai in Sicilia?
’

’
Si
.’

’
Tu?
’

’
Si. Com’ e?
’

’
E come Africa
.’

Then the old lady started to laugh, a distant, spiteful sort of laugh that Bella found disquieting.

On the way home from Piccadilly a whim came over her. She would meet her father from the hospital. All that day she had been thinking of him, and how nice it would be to walk by his side for a while, be with him in public, away from the confines of the house, as an equal. A part of her also wanted to let him know that she had fully accepted her new life and was even looking forward to it. Her new life without him.

This was the hour when he usually took a stroll in the hospital grounds to clear his head, smoke a cigar and relax for a while before either returning to his patients, or, if his work for the day was done, returning home. She would accompany him either way, he would be pleased to see her, she was certain of it. Perhaps he would even invite her to supper. Nowhere too fancy - after all, she wasn’t dressed - but somewhere friendly where they could chat. There was bound to be a place nearby favoured by doctors. He could take her there, introduce her to his colleagues, proudly, as he used to do, when she was a child and they went on little outings. He could say, ‘This is my daughter, off to Sicily in a few days,
if
you don’t mind!’ Yes, he would get a kick out of that.

But the moment Bella climbed down from the bus and stood looking up through the trees at the long hospital windows, she was waylaid by shyness. Supposing she broke down when she saw him, started to cry again? Could she really trust herself not to make a scene? She decided it might be better to watch him first, allow a little time to monitor her reaction or, if needs be, compose herself at least.

She recognized the shape of him on the far side of the big glass door at almost the same moment as she noticed Mrs Jenkins sitting on a bench across the road. In fact she almost moved towards Mrs Jenkins, the widow of a doctor, who lived nearby and who had helped nurse her dying mother. Bella had sometimes felt her mother hadn’t always been appreciative to this kind and pretty woman. Perhaps on occasion had even been a little rude.

She watched her father’s shoulder push against the glass door and his head nod at a porter, who rushed to hold the door open. He was carrying his bag, which meant he must be finished for the evening, yet he wore no overcoat, no hat, carried no umbrella, despite the changeable weather and his fussy ways. He paused at the top of the steps for a moment, looked up at the sky, then descended before turning left, to take the pathway along the Fulham Road. He seemed smaller outside the house, his surgeon’s suit old-fashioned rather than dignified, his legs somewhat shorter, the tails of his jacket a little too long. He was headed away from the hospital in the direction of home, but Bella knew where he was going even before he broke away from the path, veered across the road and doubled back under the trees.

He drew the tails of his jacket apart so he could sit beside Mrs Jenkins. They didn’t touch. In fact no acknowledgement passed between them. They looked neither guilty nor innocent. And he certainly didn’t look like an old goat. He looked handsome, in his prime, more than that, he looked like a lover.

A lifetime of whispers steamed up inside her head, strained whispers behind walls that had travelled with them from their old house in Dublin. Of course. There had always been a Mrs Jenkins. She had been there as her mother lay dying. In Dublin there had been another one. There always would be a Mrs Jenkins. That’s what it had been about all along. An adult daughter was no good to this type of a man. She had simply been in the way.

That night saw the start of the money-tuck. Pulling the Signora’s envelopes out of the portfolio as soon as she got home, opening each one and making a tidy pool of money on the bed, Bella began her calculations. Starting with the tickets. Why was it necessary to go first class - wouldn’t second do just as well? What if she were to go into Thomas Cook’s in the morning and ask for an exchange and a refund where possible? She could throw them some yarn about reduced circumstances and a sickly relative. A little less comfort, perhaps even a lot less for all she knew, but the reward would be in the refund - why not?

Next she examined miscellaneous expenses, subtracting what she felt might actually be needed from the amount the Signora had allowed. Adjustments could be made either way, as needs must and the journey proceeded, but already she could see a very encouraging start to her scheme. She began to feel better.

She was getting into her stride now, and with her mind alight with thrifty notions, went again to her mother’s room. This time Bella moved without sentiment, going through every drawer, fancywork box or embroidered bag her mother had accumulated over her lifetime.

At first she took only those trinkets and jewellery bits that her father would be unlikely to miss, but then on second thoughts Bella decided to bag the pieces that would fetch the best price. What was he going to do after all? Follow her out to Sicily? Inform Scotland Yard?

Lying in bed, sleepy already, Bella closed her eyes and tried to look into the future. She could see as far as Sicily, silent and scorched as Africa. Beyond that another landscape, and beyond that a pulsing sciagraphy of shadow. The further she looked, the darker it became. Yet she couldn’t say the darkness was ever complete. It allowed her to see that there was no horizon, that the landscapes would continue, one behind the other: they would never end.