Two Lives (31 page)

Rosa Crevelli brought us lasagne, and lamb with rosemary, and the Vino Nobile of Montepulciano, and peaches. A stranger would have been surprised to see us, with our bandages and plaster, the walking wounded at table. I was the only one who had not lost a loved one, having none to lose. As I dwelt upon that, the title that had come to me floated through my consciousness, golden letters on a stark black ground. I saw again a girl in white passing through a garden, and again the image froze.

3

Miss Alzapiedi, our Sunday-school teacher, was excessively tall and lanky, with hair that was a nuisance to her, and other disadvantages too. It was she who gave me the picture of Jesus on a donkey to hang above my bed; it was she who taught me how to pray, pointing out that some people are drawn to prayer, some are not. ‘Pray for love,’ Miss Alzapiedi adjured. ‘Pray for protection.’

So before I ran away from 21 Prince Albert Street I prayed for protection because I knew I’d need it. I prayed for protection when I worked in the public-house dining-room and the shoe shop and on the S.S.
Hamburg
, and when Ernie Chubbs took me to Idaho, and later when he abandoned me in Ombubu. Even though I was trying to be a sophisticate it didn’t embarrass me to get down on my knees the way Miss Alzapiedi had taught us, even if there was a visitor in the room. To be honest, I don’t get down on my knees any more. I pray standing up now, or sitting, and I don’t whisper either; I do it in my mind.

At the end of my first year in this house I finished
Precious September
. I wrote it just for fun, to pass the time. When it was complete I put it in a drawer and began another story, which this time I called
Flight to Enchantment
. Then glancing one day through the belongings of a tourist who was staying here, I came across a romance that seemed no better than my own. I noted the publisher’s address and later wrapped
Precious September
up and posted it to England. So many months passed without a response that I imagined the parcel had gone astray or that the publisher was no longer in business. Then, when I had given up all hope of ever seeing my manuscript again, it was returned.
We have no use for material of this nature
, a printed note brusquely declared. I knew of no other publisher, so I continued with
Flight to Enchantment
and after a month or so dispatched it in the same direction. This elicited a note to the effect that the work would only be returned to me if I forwarded a money order to cover the postage. When that wound had healed I completed another story quite quickly and although it, too, was similarly rejected I did not lose heart. There was, after all, consolation to be found in the tapestries I so very privately stitched. They came out of nothing, literally out of emptiness. Even then I marvelled over that.

We are interested in your novelette
. I found it hard to believe that I was reading this simple typewritten statement, that I was not asleep and dreaming. The letter, which was brief, was signed
J
.
A
.
Makers
, and I at once responded, impatient to receive what this Makers called ‘our reader’s suggestions for introducing a little more thrust into the plot’. These arrived within a fortnight, a long page of ideas, all of which I most willingly incorporated. Eventually I received from J. A. Makers an effusively complimentary letter. By now many others among his employees had read the work; all, without exception, were overwhelmed. We
foretell a profitable relationship
, Mr Makers concluded, foretelling correctly. But when I received, after I’d submitted the next title, a list of ‘our reader’s suggestions’ I tore it up and have never been bothered in that way since. That story was
Behold My Heart!
Its predecessors, so disdainfully rejected once, were published in rapid succession.

Something of all this, in order to keep a conversation going,
I passed on to the General. I knew that conversation was what he needed; otherwise I would have been happy to leave him in peace. I wanted to create a little introduction, as it were, so that I might ask him to tell me about his own life.

‘If you would like to,’ I gently added.

He did not at once reply. His gnarled grey head had fallen low between his shoulders. The
Daily Telegraph
which Quinty had bought for him was open on his knees. My eye caught gruesome headlines. A baby had been taken from its pram outside a shop and buried in nearby woods. A dentist had taken advantage of his women patients. A bishop was in some other trouble.

‘It sometimes helps to talk a bit.’

‘Eh?’

‘Only if you’d like to.’

Again there was a silence. I imagined him in his heyday, leading his men in battle. I calculated that the Second World War would have been his time. I saw him in the desert, a young fox who was now an old one.

‘You’re on your own, General?’

‘Since my wife died.’

His eyes passed over the unpleasant headlines in the newspaper. There was something about a handful of jam thrown at the prime minister.

‘Things were to change when we returned,’ he said.

I smiled encouragingly. I did not say a word.

‘I was to live with my daughter and her husband in Hampshire.’

He was away then, and I could feel it doing him good. Only one child had been born to him, the daughter he spoke of, that faded prettiness on the train. ‘Don’t go spoiling her,’ his wife had pleaded, and he told me of a day when his daughter, at six or seven, had fallen out of a tree. He’d lifted her himself into the dining-room and covered her with a rug on the sofa.
She’d been no weight at all. ‘This is Digby,’ she introduced years later while they stood, all four of them drinking gin and French, beneath that very same tree.

‘I couldn’t like him,’ he confessed, his voice gruff beneath the shame induced by death. I remembered the trio’s politeness on the train, the feeling of constraint, of something hidden. I waited patiently while he rummaged among his thoughts and when he spoke again the gruffness was still there. If the outrage hadn’t occurred he would have continued to keep his own counsel concerning the man his daughter had married: you could tell that easily.

He spoke fondly of his wife. When she died there’d been a feeling of relief because the pain was over for her. Her departure from him was part of his existence now, a fact like an appendix scar. When I looked away, and banished from my mind the spare old body that carried in it somewhere an elusive chip of shrapnel, I saw, in sunshine on a shorn lawn, a medal pinned on a young man’s tunic and a girl’s arms around a soldier’s neck. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes!’ she eagerly agreed when marriage was proposed, her tears of happiness staining the leather of a shoulder strap. You could search for ever for a nicer man, she privately reflected: I guessed that easily also.

‘No, I never liked him and my wife was cross with me for that. She was a better mother than I ever was a father.’

Again the silence. Had he perished in the outrage he would have rated an obituary of reasonable length in the English newspapers. His wife, no doubt, had passed on without a trace of such attention; his daughter and his son-in-law too.

‘I doubted if I could live with him. But I kept that to myself.’

‘A trial run, your holiday? Was that it?’

‘Perhaps so.’

I smiled and did not press him. Jealousy, he supposed it was. More than ever on this holiday he had noticed it – in
pensiones
and churches and art galleries, permeating every conversation. No children had been born to his daughter, he revealed; his wife had regretted that, he hadn’t himself.

‘Have you finished with the
Telegraph
, sir?’ Quinty hovered, not wishing to pick up the newspaper from the old man’s knees. Rosa Crevelli set out the contents of a tea-tray.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with it.’

‘Then I’ll take it to the kitchen, sir, if I may. There’s nothing I like better than an hour with the
Telegraph
in the cool of the evening. When the dinner’s all been and done with, the
Telegraph
goes down a treat.’

A glass of lemon tea, on a saucer, was placed on a table within the General’s reach. Rosa Crevelli picked up her tray. Quinty still hovered. Nothing could stop him now.

‘I mention it, sir, so that if you require the paper you would know where it is.’

The General acknowledged this. Quinty softly coughed. He inquired:

‘Do you follow the cricket at all, sir?’

The General shook his head. But noticing that Quinty waited expectantly for a verbal response, he courteously added that cricket had never greatly interested him.

‘Myself, I follow all sport, sir. There is no sport I do not take an interest in. Ice-hockey. Baseball. Lacrosse, both men’s and women’s. I have watched the racing of canoes.’

The General sipped his tea. There were little biscuits,
ricci-arelli
, on a plate. Quinty offered them. He mentioned the game of
boules
, and again the racing of canoes. I made a sign at him, endeavouring to communicate that his playfulness, though harmless, was out of place in an atmosphere of mourning. He took no notice of my gesture.

‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’m an armchair observer myself. I never played a ball-game. Cards was as far as I got.’

Quinty’s smile is a twisted little thing, and he was smiling
now. Was he aware that the reference to cards would trigger a memory – the Englishmen, and he himself, playing poker at the corner table of the Café Rose? Impossible to tell.

‘I’m afraid he’s a law unto himself,’ I explained as lightly as I could when he had left the room. A tourist had once asked me if Quinty had a screw loose, and for all I knew the General was wondering the same thing, too polite to put it into words. By way of further explanation I might have touched upon Quinty’s unfortunate life, how he had passed himself off as the manager of a meat-extract factory in order to impress an au pair girl. I might have told how he’d been left on the roadside a few kilometres outside the town of Modena, how later he’d turned up in Ombubu. I might even have confessed that I’d once felt so sorry for Quinty I’d taken him into my arms and stroked his head.

‘It’s just his way,’ I said instead, and in a moment Quinty returned and asked me if he should pour me a g and t, keeping his voice low, as if some naughtiness were afoot. He didn’t wait for my response but poured the drink as he stood there. Half a child and half a rogue, as I have said before.

Deep within what seemed like plumage, a mass of creatures darted. Their heads were the heads of human beings, their hands and feet misshapen. There was frenzy in their movement, as though they struggled against the landscape they belonged to, that forest of pale quills and silky foliage.

For a week I watched with trepidation while the child created this world that was her own. Signora Bardini had bought her crayons when we noticed she’d begun to draw, and then, with colour, everything came startlingly alive. Mouths retched. Eyes stared distractedly. Cats, as thin as razors, scavenged among human entrails; the flesh was plucked from dogs and horses. Birds lay in their own blood; rabbits were devoured by maggots.

Sometimes the child looked up from her task, and even slightly smiled, as though the unease belonged to her pictures, not to her. Her silence continued.

In her lifetime Otmar’s mother had made lace. He told me about that, his remaining fingers forever caressing whatever surface there was. His mother had found it a restful occupation, her concentration lost in the intricacies of a pattern. He spoke a lot about his mother. He described a dimly lit house in a German suburb, where the furniture loomed heavily and there was waxen fruit on a sideboard dish. Listening to his awkward voice, I heard as well the clock ticking in the curtained dining-room, the clock itself flanked by two bronze horsemen. Schweinsbrust was served, and good wine of the Rhine. ‘
Guten Appetit!
’ Otmar’s father exclaimed. How I, at Otmar’s age, would have loved the house and the family he spoke of, apfelstrudel by a winter fireside!

‘Madeleine,’ Otmar said, speaking now of the girl who had died in the outrage. I told him she had reminded me of a famous actress, Lilli Palmer, perhaps before his time. I recollected, as I spoke, the scratchy copy of
Beware of Pity
that had arrived in Ombubu in the 1960s, the film seeming dated and old-fashioned by then.

‘Madeleine, too, was Jewish,’ Otmar said, and I realized I’d been wrong to assume the film actress was not known to him.

They’d been on their way from Orvieto to Milan. Otmar was to continue by train to Germany, Madeleine to fly from Linata Airport to Israel, where her parents were. For weeks they’d talked about that, about whether or not she should seek her father’s permission to marry. If he gave it he might also give them money to help them on their way, even though Otmar was not Jewish himself, which would be a disappointment. ‘When the day comes you wish to marry you must seek his permission,’ her mother had warned Madeleine
years ago. ‘Otherwise he will be harsh.’ Her father had left Germany for Jerusalem five years ago, offering his wealth and his business acumen to the land he regarded as his spiritual home. Madeleine had never been there, but when she wrote to say she wished to visit her family her father sent a banker’s draft, its generosity reflecting his pleasure. ‘So we afford the expensive train,’ Otmar explained. ‘Otherwise it would be to hitchhike.’

I did not say anything. I did not say that surely it would have been more sensible to travel to Rome to catch a plane, since Rome is closer to Orvieto than Milan is. I was reminded of the General revealing to me that he and his daughter and son-in-law had originally intended to travel the day before, and of the businessmen and the fashion woman going to the dining-car. Otmar went on talking, about the girl and the days before the outrage, the waiting for the banker’s draft and its arrival. In August they would have married.

‘The kraut hasn’t any money,’ Quinty said in his joky way. ‘He’s having us on.’