Trespassers (21 page)

So back to my birthday.

Having dined alone, I walked out into the summery, noisy June evening and there he was, a lean, dark-eyed young man, wearing a seersucker jacket which marked him out as an American, sitting in an outside café in a group which included Anna Maria, the girl I had annoyed the day before and was now – though I didn’t realise this – annoying even more. She and I greeted each other, which enabled the men to invite me to join them and within minutes, when the other man said he was the librarian at the Villa I Tatti, which Bernard Berenson had bequeathed to Harvard, one or other of us mentioned Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier,
and soon we were all bickering about books – as
Lauro and I still do. He is a historian and was then writing his doctoral thesis for Harvard, but he had also been to the Kenyon School of English, where he had worked under Kenneth Burke and William Empson, and had an approach to reading a text which impressed me. I had not majored in English, and at home there had been an anti-academic bias, a romantic approval of the writer as ‘inspired idiot’, even a notion that the brain hobbles the imagination. Some of this may be traced to the cult of ‘the people’ and some to my father’s reaction against the dry discipline of his own time at Harvard. There is truth in it, too – at least there is for me, but it is a small, limited one. I enjoy research but find that it can shrivel my ability to invent. This belongs to a part of the mind that takes over when the critical part closes down. Then, in a sort of dream, it gets to work on the raw material – facts – that have been left for it like offerings to a capricious daemon. Later, the dreamer’s work is checked by the monitor. You need both, and it was Lauro who taught me to use the second.

We met for lunch the next day, shared more meals and some days later – Lauro did not go in for climbing lamp posts – went to the station and tried to buy tickets for the next train.

‘To where?’ asked the ticket-seller.

‘Anywhere. We want to leave on the next train.’

This turned out to be bound for Arezzo, so that was where we went. In those years Piero della Francesca’s
Pregnant Madonna
was housed in a small free-standing chapel in the open countryside, so we visited and became particularly fond of this painting which, like all this painter’s work, has a thrillingly luminous tranquillity. We were to revisit it often.

Back in Florence, we moved into a flat on the Lungarno Vespucci and five months later were married in the local parish church. I
was no longer a Catholic, and Lauro had never been one, though, by luck, he had been baptised in a Catholic church. I say ‘luck’ because now, in one of those appeals which blend cynicism with piety, Seán begged me to get married in the Catholic church.

‘What difference can it make to you?’ he pleaded. ‘It will mean a lot to your mother and me.’ I knew the argument. Ireland was run on its dodgy track. It reconciled the irreconcilable, shirked change and must have darkened many minds, but in the land of ‘great hatred, little room’ was a necessary tribute to tribalism. I tried it on Lauro. ‘What’, I challenged, ‘can it matter to you?’

He conceded the point but, with American candour, warned, ‘I won’t lie to that priest. I’ll let him know that I don’t believe in God.’ This baffled Monsignor Marani. Why, he plainly wondered, would an unbeliever
want
to marry in his church? Might I, he worried, be an heiress and Lauro a fortune-hunter? While he dragged out the paperwork, our landlady told us that his wariness was due to his having been duped in the past by a couple who, since the Italian state did not yet allow divorce, had chosen to marry in the Catholic church as it has always been prepared to annul a marriage if either spouse can prove to have contracted it with ‘a mental reservation’. Proof that, in this case, the bride had done this was established when she was found to have written in shorthand next to her signature, ‘This is all balls.’

‘
Palle!
Excuse the expression!’ Our landlady’s lips twitched in amusement. ‘It’s what she wrote.’

‘In shorthand?’

She quenched a smile. ‘The monsignor couldn’t read it.’

His worries about us may have festered when no relatives attended our wedding. Lauro’s were in the US, and I had fallen out with mine. This happened when enquiries about Lauro, which Seán had made through Harvard friends, stirred up gossip and revived a small scandal.

A year earlier Lauro had had a fling with an undergraduate
called Nina who, when checking out of her Radcliffe dormitory to spend two nights with him, mistakenly specified that she would be away for one. When she overran her exeat, the authorities fussed, made indiscreet phone calls and then expelled her, as they had the power to do. They had none over him, who was a PhD student living off-campus. However, the difference in the way the two were treated looked unfair, and the Dean of Students, McGeorge Bundy (later US National Security Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), had Lauro on the carpet, and told him that, if it had been up to him, he would have clawed back the Sheldon Travelling Fellowship which Lauro had won and which was to take him to Florence.

What may have given this tittle-tattle legs was the fact that Nina’s father was Leo Castelli, a New York art dealer who would be described in a subsequent biography as having ‘revolutionized the status of the artist in America and changed the rules of the art market’. He and her mother, who would later become a still more successful gallerist, pleaded with the Radcliffe authorities, reminding them that, though Nina was a prize-winning student, being kicked out of Radcliffe could prevent her from getting into another élite college. And indeed, this happened, and she had to settle in the end for New York University. New England Puritanism was making a late, last stand.

All this, condensed in the misleading phrase ‘he got a girl into trouble’, was hyped by Harvard professors with a verve which village gossips could not have bettered.

Seán, who even before meeting Lauro had been seeking grounds to discourage our marriage, now had them. Why, he challenged me, were we rushing it? The answer was that I was doing so because of him, who, I suspected (rightly as it would later turn out), had asked his Harvard contact to find an obstacle that would justify his and Eileen’s opposing it.

A maxim she liked to air gives a key to this. It runs, ‘Your son
is your son till he marries, but your daughter is your daughter for life.’ I have since heard Englishwomen complain of the burden put on them by such expectations, but in Ireland, from which daughters had been emigrating since the Famine, these were often foiled. I once visited an Irish retirement home where a tearful widow beckoned me over and told me that I reminded her of her daughter in Australia. Other residents took up the lament. Their daughters, too, were far away, and one of Seán’s letters, written that year to a Harvard friend, comically cursing ‘the entire American nation for stealing my daughter’, echoed an ancient dirge. He could, he added, make his peace with the marriage if Lauro found work in New England, but feared we would both go mad if we ended up in the Middle West.

His concern, this implied, was not only for me but also for Lauro, with whom he now began to exchange letters.

‘I find’, he wrote in his second one (the first had been tougher), ‘that despite my concern for Julie which remains well based considering the harsh sort of impressions (just or unjust) that you can evoke in and about Harvard, I can also find room for much sympathy for you.’

This letter, which I still have, is typed, but the word ‘much’ has been inserted by hand. A puzzled afterthought? Did he mean it? If so, he may have been wondering on which side of the fence he now stood. With defiant youth as he had in the past? Or not? The excerpt quoted concedes that he may have been casting too cold an eye.

Lauro and I, meanwhile, were heading for Edward Albee territory, just four years before
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
was first put on.

Like that play’s setting, Reed College in Oregon was animated by brainy drunks, some of them as articulate as his leading characters. It was a pastoral playground for the clever young, staffed for the most part by ageing intellectuals who had somehow got stuck in a place which, though stimulating for students, was less so for them. Consequently they drank. And when accepting their hospitality, so did we. Dinner was often served a good hour or two after the one for which guests had been invited so as to allow time to have several stiff Martinis. Reed was reputed to be Red at a time – we reached it in 1958 – when a hangover from McCarthyism still poisoned the air, and the local town, Portland, ostracised Reed people. It was said that the children of successive central committees of the USCP had been educated there, but I can’t vouch for this, for when I, riding Lauro’s coat-tails, got a job there teaching French, the students struck me as unlikely to be politically active. They were polite, self-absorbed pre-hippies from places like Boston and New York, devoted to free love, bare feet and a tolerance which could have put Radcliffe to shame. Reed’s one drawback was that, as Seán and Eileen must have seen with dismay on the map, it was a long way from Europe. We stayed for four years – just as the students did.

I guessed from their style and ease that most of them were more emancipated than I had been at their age. But then, at that age I had just emerged from a convent school, where we had
had to wear grim, grey gymslips with matching stockings and bloomers, whereas Reed girls didn’t even have to wear shoes. This distinguished them – perhaps deliberately? – from the local teenagers who flaunted lipstick and large plastic hair curlers at Portland bus stops. Perhaps Anna Maria, the girl I had annoyed in Florence, had feared I might think she looked like these girls. US snobbery, I learned, was, if anything, touchier than ours.

Thinking of Florence reminded me that of the five guests at our modest wedding reception there, three had been damaged by their elders. Of these, the one least likely to recover fast was probably Yvonne. A Cambridge (UK) graduate now working as a governess in a Florentine marchese’s family, she had been seduced by the marchese. Convinced at first that the sheer banality of her plight would protect her, she had found that even a playful replay of
Jane Eyre
could generate hurt. When we met the marchese, we saw she was right, for his talk of seeking a Mexican divorce from his wife was clearly an outing from reality. He enjoyed raising Yvonne’s hopes and liked showing off his English, but would not, we guessed, rock his domestic boat for her sake. Though a lot older than she, his sexual antics must have been vigorous, for once, leaping over her in bed, he almost broke her neck.

Both of our male guests were called Roberto and the one we called Roberto V was at odds with himself. He is the man I mentioned earlier who at the end of the war was beaten up by Reds because his father had died fighting in Mussolini’s army. Oddly, this led to his becoming an ardent Red himself, who sang lefty songs and strummed his guitar with what struck people who knew his story as displaced rage.

The other Roberto too had troubles stemming from the past. He was a general’s son which, he assured us, was a hard thing for
an Italian to be. He claimed to have been repeatedly tormented by envious bullies, but never told us why. Had the now-dead general been a Fascist or a post-war democrat? We didn’t ask and Roberto didn’t say.

His sisters came to tea with us once, but refused to drink any. He explained later that they never used a lavatory outside their own home, so were fearful of ingesting liquids. I began to see why the bullies had felt irked.

Another man we met in Florence was a Harvard friend of Lauro’s who would later become a psychoanalyst and may already have been practising. He told me that what I should know about Lauro was that, though prone to losing his temper, he was always sorry at once.

I remembered this when we began having culture clashes over beggars. These started when we were still in the flat on Lungarno Vespucci, near the Grand Hotel, a smart area where beggars would count on getting generous alms. This meant that I, who had promised to help stretch our funds to keep us in Florence for another year, felt two-way guilt when giving stingily to the needy who knocked on our door. Lauro, who spent his days doing research in the State Archives, at first knew nothing about them.

Back in Ireland beggars had had an acknowledged foothold in society. They brought entertainment to bored households and for years Eileen had regulars to whom she would sometimes give a meal, some cast-off clothes and a few coins. I particularly remember a man from Ballinasloe, where she had taught school for a while, who used to amuse her with tales of figures from its past. The glitziest of these was Belle Bilton, who was remembered in that bleak, boggy region long after her death. A popular English music-hall singer, she had so bewitched aristocratic young bloods
that members of a group of these were said to have tossed a coin for her.

‘What I heard,’ Eileen liked to recall, ‘was that the Earl of Clancarty won her at cards, then took her to Galway.’

‘No, ma’am!’ The man from Ballinasloe sometimes corrected. ‘It was on the toss of a coin. He was Viscount Dunlo then and only became earl when his da died.’

‘They say the da opposed the marriage?’

‘He did indeed, which is why it took place in secret and why he tried to get it declared void due to the boy being a minor. When this failed he stopped his allowance and sent him to Australia. That left Bilton without a penny and obliged to take up with an old admirer.’

‘Falling into the wicked earl’s trap?’ Eileen could be all for young love.

‘True for you, ma’am!’ The beggar tended at this point to pause and chew a mouthful of Irish stew then, sustained by this, take up his story. ‘When news of the admirer reached Australia, Dunlo started proceedings against her for adultery and set off for London, but no sooner did he get there than the pair were reconciled. She could twist him round her finger.’

‘The old earl must have been beside himself!’

Thoughtfully, the beggar would now wipe bread around his plate. ‘The queer thing was that he dropped dead the next year. That roused talk. But once Bilton was Countess of Clancarty it died down.’

‘Was it true she had no talent?’

‘Divil a bit!’ Cheered by the thought, the Ballinasloe man laughed. His name – it comes back to me – was Fleming. He must have been descended from a soldier brought to Ireland by the Williamite wars.

Bilton’s story used to thrill me but, knowing I couldn’t pass the thrill on to Lauro, I didn’t try.

Then one day he came home early with a headache. I was out, so he fell asleep, but was woken by someone ringing our door bell so persistently that, on seeing that the man outside was a beggar, he flew into a rage which was still on the boil when I got back. The beggar, according to him, had said, ‘I won’t deal with you. I want to talk to the signora.’ Lauro asked how much I used to give, and, when I wouldn’t say, we had our first major row, which was followed, over the years, by others.

I don’t remember any at Reed, but later in Los Angeles, when I found what seemed to be a dying man on our lawn, the only thing that stopped me hauling him up our steps and into the house was his weight. Hoping for help, I rang Lauro in his UCLA office, only to be told that sane people did not bring strangers into the house. Next I appealed to our neighbours who agreed with him. Then I rang a helpline, only to learn that the only help on offer was from the police who would lock the man up. I was protesting at this heartlessness, when a glance out at the lawn revealed that the dying man was gone. No doubt seeing me telephone had led his thoughts to the police, too.

My credibility shrank on the spot and vanished for good when we moved to London, where a man who claimed to be collecting for cancer research proved to be a fraud. I had reached the front door ahead of Lauro and by the time he joined me had handed over two twenty-pound notes in memory of a friend who had died of cancer. The self-styled charity worker had a collecting box and badge showing his ID, but Lauro rang the research charity anyway, which confirmed his doubts. The man, it turned out,
had
worked for them – hence the ID – then been fired for larceny and now, with the ease of the Artful Dodger, had slipped from sight.

I saw no logic to this. Lauro
should
have been wrong, so I refused to believe that his rightness proved anything other than
the world’s meanness. He couldn’t explain how he had come to distrust the man – or rather he could, but only by saying that I attracted con men and imposters who could
smell
my gullibility. This, need I say, prolonged our row when I observed that I had, not so long ago, attracted
him.

In other ways, Lauro was more prone to melt than I. Not only did he weep in cinemas, but the very touch of 500-year-old documents in the Florentine State Archives set him agog with pleasure. Learning to decipher their Latin and Italian abbreviations did, too, and this was partly why his thesis was taking so much time, despite his often working on it until 3 a.m. His Harvard professor – the man whose reported gossip had upset my parents – had been little help, having known nothing about the archives until Lauro himself, who learned of them from a student of Theodor Mommsen’s at Princeton, submitted his project. There was, though, a stimulating peer group of young researchers who revelled in their work and, when in Florence, often got together for after-dinner drinks to share their excitement. A favoured venue for these sessions was the flat of an English scholar who had married the daughter of a
fattore
employed by one of the great Tuscan estates. Sometimes she took us down to her father’s wine cellar, whose rows of shelved bottles were like another archive. Some of these were venerable, in wine terms, so could turn out to be either delicious or disappointingly past their prime. For the researchers the city, too, was like an archive, since what most of its street names commemorated was itself: a proud, tight, in-turned, provincial world, which in spite of its architecture and past eminence reminded me of Dublin. Both places were self-absorbed, obsessed by memory, treasured small scandals, retold puns and gave the impression, when I first knew them, of
disproving the dictum that one cannot step into the same river twice.

Yet changes did take place. On our first return visit to Florence we spent a week in Elba where, lying in a vineyard on a warm evening, we saw Sputnik orbit high above us, winking its prophetic way, like the star of Bethlehem, across a cloudless lapis-blue sky.

Not only was it exciting to watch and wonder at, it would, at surprising speed, affect our lives when US authorities, shaken by the Soviet success, started to realise that academics, hitherto regarded as near-useless citizens, not to say arty-farty frills on the body of a serious, commercial society, could on the contrary affect the space race and the Cold War. Scientists’ salaries were promptly raised, and some trickle-down reached the humanities too. As a result we, who had two salaries during our Reed years, were able to pay off debts contracted during our year together in Florence and even to save. Things became easier still when in our second year at Reed we moved to a house on campus. It was airy and roomy, surrounded by trees and, once I had painted its inside walls and hung home-made, pin-striped roller blinds on its windows, struck me as charming. Others were less impressed. Kick Erlanger, a rich New York friend of Seán’s and Eileen’s, flew out to see us and, judging by a subsequent letter from Seán praising our ‘fortitude’, was taken aback by what she saw. But then Kick’s standards were high, as she owned two mansions, one in East 64th Street, New York, and the other in New Jersey.

Months later, when our son, who had been born prematurely weighing less than three pounds, was big enough to come out of his incubator, Eileen also visited. By then the place must have looked better, for she showed no signs of shock. But then in the Twenties she and Seán had probably been no better off
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And meanwhile, gifts had come from Kick: electric cooking appliances, a Balenciaga coat for me, a nappy-laundry service for three months, a baby-carrier and several dresses from Bergdorf Goodman.

This mix of grandeur and thrift seemed amusingly bohemian. Geoffrey Taylor, when poetry editor of
The Bell,
had, I now remembered, lived in a house full of furniture made from tea chests and butter boxes. I, who must have been about nine when I was first taken to visit it, had been thrilled to see adults playing house and now had my chance to follow their example. Furniture from charity shops was easier to recycle than butter boxes and when re-upholstered looked, I considered, rather well. We had brought a dozen antique champagne glasses and two baroque porcelain candelabra from Florence, and Eileen arrived with a gift of Staffordshire pottery from her friend Norah McGuinness, which both soothed our nostalgia for Europe and added style.

Meanwhile letters brought news of friends. Among them came a copy of the first number of a magazine called
Nonplus
from Patricia Murphy, who had founded and funded it and enclosed a covering note reporting – tartly – that Patrick Kavanagh had taken up with Katherine Moloney ‘because he wanted a nurse’. What Patricia herself had wanted was a poet. Accordingly, when she came to the end of her affair with Philip Larkin, she had married Richard Murphy, with whom she had been living when I last visited them in a revamped Lake Park which he had turned into a setting fit for poets by adding such features as a Yeatsian flight of seven granite steps.

The lake itself, though, struck me as gloomy. Wicklow water is often filtered through turf, and though bright as honey on your skin when you are swimming in it, can look, from afar, as dark and restive as a flock of starlings. Perhaps because of this, the two had now divorced and Patricia was living in Dublin near the Grand Canal.