Last Train from Liguria (2010) (43 page)

‘Mother! How lovely to talk to you. How’s the holiday going? Hope it’s not too warm for you. Oh, your poor throat still sore then? Never mind, don’t speak. So how are the boys? Are they back from Monday’s fishing trip yet? You’ll never guess who we met on the train? That piano chap, can’t think of his name, anyway he’s gone fishing too. Isn’t that nice? So they’re still out then?’

‘Nobody is here, no,’ Elida cautiously croaks.

‘Oh, Mother - what a pity about your not being well, you should stay in the good weather as long as you can - promise me now? Don’t go anywhere until you’re well again. And what about that aunt of mine - I suppose she’s out shopping as usual. Has she even telephoned to say what time she’ll be back for lunch? No? Now let’s see what news this end… Oh yes, that nice friend of Ursula’s said he might be in touch. Such an interesting man. Do you know the one I mean? He works with her. Tall, handsome, dark; all that. We have friends in common you know - did he call at all looking for me?’

‘Yes. This morning.’

‘Lovely! Did he mention if he’d news of any of the old gang?’

‘He has no news but hopes soon.’

‘Oh, ask him to drop me a line sometime, would you? I’d love to hear from him. No, I’m not staying at home - the builders are in. I’m with a friend.’

Fred looks up from the racing page of his newspaper, catches her eye and taps his watch.

‘Well, Mother, I must go. I’m off now to the post office in Portman Square - I said the P-O-R-T-M-A-N - to fetch letters for that nice lady I’m helping out. Ursula introduced us, yes, she’s English all right. From Bournemouth, I believe. Has a little baby girl - ask Ursula, she’ll tell you all about it. Hasn’t made up her mind to come or to go, so for the moment her letters go to the
Portman
Square. By the way, that little parcel I left? Don’t give it to Ursula after all but put it away safe for me somewhere, would you? Until I decide what to do. I’m afraid those children of hers will get their hands on it and you know what they’re like!’

Fred has folded his newspaper under his arm and is rapping his knuckles on the desk now.

‘Yes, darling, I’ve got to go now. Yes, I have to really. You take care and tell that family of mine I miss them and to write. I’ll try again soon. I’m thinking of you always. I’ll see you very, very soon.’

She puts down the phone on Elida’s sobs.

Fred waits a few seconds and says, ‘Look, I’m really going to have to ask you to go. I’m sorry but… I really am.’

‘Yes. Yes. Just give me a minute - would you? I’m afraid I’m not feeling all that well.’

Bella wipes her eyes and goes to her bag. She takes out a ten-shilling note. ‘I wonder. I wonder if you’d mind, I mean, if I could ask you to take the pram back down the steps for me?’

Fred takes the note and does as she asks.

*

When she gets back to the guest house she tells Mrs Mains she has a headache.

‘Exhaustion, my love. Everything’s catching up on you, I shouldn’t wonder.’

She wears herself out, all that afternoon and well into the night, her ribs ache and the walls of her throat swell up from the strain of crying. Even after it seems there’s not a drop of water left in her body, it jolts on regardless, for another hour or so, like a car that’s run out of petrol.

The following evening Mrs Mains invites her into the private parlour for a listen to the wireless. They drink cocoa. Mrs Mains knits and prattles away. Bella nods, occasionally mutters something agreeable while desperately trying to hear what the radio broadcast is saying. Mrs Mains talks like someone who, despite long periods of practice, is still not used to living alone and can’t help but take full advantage of a new pair of ears. Bella tries not to scream.

It’s probably one of the most important items Bella has ever heard come out of a radio, Chamberlain returning from Munich saying there won’t be a war after all. Yet the news has to weave through and duck under Mrs Mains’ anecdotes and opinions in general.

Sometimes the voices appear to mingle. So that it seems as if Mr Chamberlain has a daughter out in Australia named Alice, and it’s Mrs Mains who has just come back from Munich.

‘Peace for our time,’ she hears the man on the broadcast say.

‘Peace for our time,’ Mrs Mains repeats with a sigh. ‘Well, let’s see how long that lasts!’

‘You think not?’

‘I tell you what I think, I think that Chamberlain is a right doormat, is what. They ought to have sent that Anthony Eden, he’s man enough for the job.’

‘At least there won’t be a war.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Call me gloomy but. We’ve got a right few Jewish refugees come in lately - you must have noticed, dear, London’s crawling with them. More coming in every day. The landlady of the Avon guest house down the road was telling me only yesterday that her house is jammers with them. Some of the stories! Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, all sorts, she’s got a few Eyetalians coming in the next few weeks, Frenchies too. Well, it can’t go on. It can’t really. Someone will have to put a stop to that Hitler.’

‘You’re not hopeful then?’

‘The government’s been expecting it all along. No reason to stop expecting it now.’ She puts down her knitting and leans towards Bella. ‘Put it this way, Mrs Barrett, did you never wonder how so many gas masks should be ready so quickly? I mean thousands and thousands?’

‘Well, I suppose.’

‘It’s the interval, darling, that’s all. We can’t see it, but everything is still going on behind the curtains. They’ll come up again, soon as we’re ready. Anyway, what was I saying?’

What she was saying was that Alice had married beneath her.

‘Oh yes. Unlike her mum, who went up - I did. I make no bones about it. Hence this lovely house, long may it stand. And I’ve made a fair living out of it, in its time. Though I don’t stretch myself too much these days, a few lifers, as I call them, the occasional pass-through that Peter might throw my way. But our Alice? She’s got nothing to fall back on. Someone who works on a ranch is what she’s got. A cowboy or whatever they call the Australian equivalent.’

*

The crisis in Munich blows up, then blows over. Every day she wakes and thinks today she will go to Chelsea. She gets the baby ready, has her small breakfast and leaves the house before Mrs Mains has a chance to pounce. She walks the legs off herself, the wheels off the pram. She moves through a London where, for a few days anyhow, everything seems to be happening in reverse.

Evacuees come out of train stations and climb back onto coach buses. In parks, scars begin to settle over refilled trenches. Sandbags, damp and fat as slugs from the rain, are removed, leaving rooftops and walls looking raw and deserted.

She goes into one of the new American milk bars when it’s time to feed the baby. Or a Lyons Corner House cafe whenever a nappy needs changing. For a day or two after Munich she hears strangers everywhere having the same loud, long conversations. She hears the small uncertain silences in between sentences.

She learns how to cry in public. Looking into shop windows on Oxford Street, or standing outside picture houses studying photographic stills, or sheltering under the trees in the Strand watching the traffic and picking black taxis out of the shoal.

Late afternoon she returns to Kensington Gardens, where she wanders around or sits on a bench staring at the dusk tighten around her. Until the all-out whistle smashes her thoughts and it’s time to go back to Mrs Mains. The next morning she will think about Chelsea again. There is always something else to be done. Something more urgent. Usually something to buy, and Bella is often glad she took Mrs Cardiff’s advice to change her money to sterling. She goes to Smith’s to buy a book about babies; how to feed, change and wean them. Then she has to buy all the things the book tells her a well-minded baby needs. Another day is spent buying a charcoal-grey suit and black overcoat that Mrs Mains says makes her look like a widow. ‘You don’t want to go putting the mockers on your old man now do you, my love?’

The day after she buys her new black coat she goes into a second-hand shop to give away her continental clothes and finds herself in a queue of refugees who are selling the coats off their backs. She tries to tell the assistant that she doesn’t want any money, that she’s not selling, but giving the clothes away. The stupid woman insists on bargaining anyway, speaking slowly and loudly into her face. In the end Bella just leaves, giving the bag of clothes to a little black-eyed girl who is sitting on the kerb outside the shop, waiting for her mother.

She is frequently in queues these days, and usually surrounded by refugees. In the poste restante line or at the international telephone ex change. She probably looks like one herself by now: a furtive look over a shoulder; a face with a fading suntan; a reluctance to answer when spoken to; a jump, barely contained, if someone comes too close on the street.

The first few times she checks for a letter she is cautious, asking only that the name Barrett be checked. Then, as it becomes more widely accepted that the war is off, and the man behind the counter grows more disinterested, she chances her other names: Magrini and Stuart. But it doesn’t matter which name she gives him, he always come back empty-handed.

Two weeks since she’s arrived and there’s no trouble putting a call through to Bordighera. The crisis is over, the threat of war has passed. Her heart starts to thump even before she’s told which number booth she should go into. The light springs on, she pulls the door behind her, tucks the baby into her arms and picks up the receiver.

Bella listens to the phone ringing into Villa Lami. She imagines it crashing into the silence of the hall. Spreading out to the rooms that lead off it: kitchen, pantry, dining room, cloakroom. She follows its course up the first flight of stairs, the Signora’s sitting room and bedroom. Weaker on the second flight up; barely audible by the time it gets to the library, her room, Alec’s. She hears it roll towards the windows and French doors in an attempt to slip through and tumble down over the terraces, into the garden. But she knows by now the windows are shuttered, the sound of the telephone is trapped inside the house, away from the garden, the street, the gate.

‘I’m sorry, madam, there’s no reply from that number, try again later.’

‘Yes, thank you, I will.’

A few days later she does it again; sits and waits and listens and follows. It’s like sending her own heartbeat through the empty house.

Mrs Mains has stopped asking questions or passing remarks, even for something as obvious as the lack of a phone call or letter from a husband in Paris. She lets it be known that Bella will always be welcome, without pinning her down to a date or a large, upfront payment. She offers to provide meals even though she doesn’t normally run an ‘all-in’ house, but Bella says she prefers to eat out. She can’t do enough when it comes to the baby; insisting the sink downstairs be used to wash out the nappies, dragging out an old ham pot to boil them in first and allowing her kitchen to be turned into a bunting of steaming nappies. She even suggests babysitting anytime Bella fancies a bit of time on her own. ‘The pictures maybe or someone perhaps you might care to visit?’

‘No, thank you, Mrs Mains, I’d rather stay with the baby.’

‘Just as you please, my love.’

She shows kindness after kindness, in return only asks for an hour or two’s company in the evenings, and every day Bella dislikes her a little bit more.

At the end of October Mrs Mains moves her to a room at the top of the house. She tells Bella it will be much better up there; what has to be endured in extra stairs will be compensated by privacy. There’s even a gas ring in case she wants to make herself a cup of tea or heat little Katherine’s bottle. Like her own little flat, that’s what it will be. The reason she wants to move Bella is that she has decided to open her house to refugees. Mrs Mains has already had a word with her remaining long-term guests and is very glad to say they have no objections. She wants to have it all up and running by Christmas. There’ll be furniture to move, partitions to put up, a temporary kitchen to allow these people to eat.

‘Not everyone can afford to nosh out every day, you know,’ she says and Bella wonders if she’s taking a dig at her.

‘My husband was a Jew - you didn’t know that, Mrs B, did you? Oh yes. He didn’t bother with all the palaver, skullcaps and synagogues and so forth, but he was a Jew just the same. Just think of it, if our Alice had married a European instead of her Australian cowboy, she could be living out there in Europe somewhere; Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, even France. Anything could happen really. Her being a halfo- halfo.’

The room at the top is a large converted attic. Four and a half flights up, its windows give over rooftops and distant black trees. It holds a double brass bed and two singles, as well as a cot. Mrs Mains says the singles will be shifted downstairs for her refugees as soon as their rooms are ready but the cot of course will do for Katherine, who will have grown out of her Moses basket before they know it. There’s a bathroom next door with a geyser in good working order and a walk-in storage cupboard beside it, where, one day when Bella is out, Mrs Mains has the ‘girls’ move all her luggage, including the two suitcases which have remained strapped up and packed since her arrival.

When she comes back to the house Judy is in the hallway holding her lower back like a pregnant septuagenarian and resentfully glaring.