Two Lives (35 page)

In my continued determination not to dwell on the more immediate past I again saw vividly, as I had on my early-morning walk, the hand of Otmar’s girlfriend reaching for the herbs in the supermarket; I saw the General and his well-loved wife. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Beeds on to you,’ Mrs Trice shouted the day she came back early from the laundry. ‘Lay another finger on her and you’ll find yourself in handcuffs.’ The man I’d once taken to be my father blustered and then pleaded, a kind of gibberish coming out of him.

All through that night my mind filled with memories and dreams, a jumble that went on and on, imaginings and reality. ‘Please,’ Madeleine begged, and Otmar moved his belongings into her flat. When she was out at work he drank a great deal of coffee, and smoked, and typed the articles he submitted to newspapers. Madeleine cooked him moussaka and chicken stew, and once they went to Belgium because he’d heard of an incident which he was convinced would make a newspaper story: how a young man had ingeniously taken the place of a Belgian couple’s son after a period of army service.

‘So’s you can’t see up her skirts,’ a boy who had something wrong with him said, but no one believed that that was why Miss Alzapiedi wore long dresses. Miss Alzapiedi didn’t even know about people looking up skirts. ‘If you close your eyes you can
feel
the love of Jesus,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘Promise me now. Wherever you are, in all your lives, find time to feel
the love of Jesus.’ Nobody liked the boy who had something wrong with him. When he grinned inanely you had to avert your gaze. The girls pulled his hair whenever he made his rude noise, if Miss Alzapiedi wasn’t looking.

‘Ah, how d’you do?’ the General greeted his would-be son-in-law beneath the tree I’d heard about. The drinks were on a white table among the deck-chairs, Martini already mixed, with ice and lemon, in a tall glass jug. ‘So very pleased,’ his wife said, and he watched the face of his daughter’s fiancé, the features crinkling in a polite acknowledgement, the lips half open. The intimacy of kissing, he thought, damp and sensual. His stomach heaved; he turned away. ‘So
very
pleased,’ he heard again.

The aviator who wrote messages in the sky wanted to marry me before the obese doctor did. He had retired from the skywriting business when I knew him, but often he spoke of it in the Café Rose, repeating the message he had a thousand times looped and dotted high above Africa:
Drink Bailey’s Beer
. A condition of the inner ear had dictated his retirement, but one day he risked his life and flew again. ‘Look, missy!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried excitedly, pulling me out of the café on to the dirt expanse where the trucks parked. ‘Look! Look!’ And there, in the sky, like shaving foam, was my name and an intended compliment. A tiny aircraft, soundless from where we stood, formed the last few letters and then smeared a zigzag flourish. ‘Oh, that is
beautiful!
’ Poor Boy Abraham cried as we watched. ‘Oh,
my
, it’s beautiful!’ Fortunately Poor Boy Abraham could not read.

‘He forgot to lock the windows,’ Aimée repeated firmly at the railway station. The Italian woman was angry and almost stamped her foot; the man was smaller than she was, with oiled black hair brushed straight back. ‘More likely he left something turned on,’ Aimée’s brother suggested. ‘Maybe the stove.’ Aimée disagreed, but then the train came in and they had to find their way to Carrozza 219. When the train moved
again Aimée gazed out at the fields of sunflowers, at the green vine shoots in orderly rows and the hot little railway stations. She stared at the pale sky, all the blue bleached out of it. Some of the fields were being sprayed with water that gushed from a jet going round and round. In the far distance there were hills with clumps of trees on them. ‘Cypresses,’ her father said as the bell of the restaurant attendant tinkled and the businessmen and the fashion woman rose. The woman would have turned off the stove herself, Aimée whispered, and her brother turned grumpily away from her. ‘Stop that silly arguing,’ their mother reprimanded.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Madeleine said when Otmar asked if his friends might come to the flat when she was out. His friends were intense young men, students or unemployed, one of them a girl whom Madeleine was jealous of. When Otmar and Madeleine were in Italy two of them came up while they were sitting in the sun outside a café. They gave Otmar the name of a cheap restaurant, but afterwards he lost the piece of paper he’d written it down on. ‘Look, there’re your friends,’ Madeleine said a few days later, pointing to where they sat at a café table with two other men, but Otmar didn’t want to join them, although they could have given him the name of the restaurant again.

‘Rum and Coke,’ Ernie Chubbs ordered in the Al Fresco Club, and the Eastern girl brought it quickly, flashy with him as she always was with the customers. They didn’t put any rum in mine although Ernie paid for it. They never did in the Al Fresco, saying a girl could end up anywhere if she didn’t stay sober. ‘Now then, my pretty maid,’ Ernie Chubbs said in our corner. I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know what it looked like because it was shadowy where we sat and I’d only caught a glimpse of it on the street. ‘Often come here, darling?’ he chattily questioned me.

Best White Tits in Africa!
the writing said in the sky, but in
my dream it was different.
Angela Fresu, aged three
, it said, as it does in marble at Bologna.

When I awoke next there was a dusky light in the room. I reached out for a cigarette and lit it, and closed my eyes. ‘I shall love you,’ Jason says in
For Ever More
, ‘till the scent has gone from the flowers and the salt from the seas.’ But Jason and Maggie are different from the people I’d kept company with in the night. You can play around with Jason and Maggie, you can change what you wish to change, you can make them do what they’re told.

I must digress here. To compose a romance it is necessary to have a set of circumstances and within those circumstances a cast of people. As the main protagonists of a cast, you have, for instance, Jason and Maggie and Maggie’s self-centred sister, and Jason’s well-to-do Uncle Cedric. The circumstances are that Jason and Maggie want to start a riding stables, but they have very little money. Maggie’s sister wants Jason for herself, and Jason’s Uncle Cedric will allow the pair a handsome income if Jason agrees to go into the family business, manufacturing girder-rivets. You must also supply places of interest – in this instance the old mill that would make an ideal stables, the little hills over which horses can be exercised, and far away – darkly unprepossessing – the family foundry. You need dramatic incident: the discovery of the machinations of Maggie’s sister, the angry family quarrel when Jason refuses to toe his Uncle Cedric’s line. None of it’s any good if the people aren’t real to you as you compose.

In the early morning after that unsettled night it seemed to me that the only story I was being offered was the story of the summer that was slipping by. The circumstances were those that followed a tragedy, the people were those who had crowded my night, the places you can guess.
Ceaseless Tears
was a working title only, and that morning I abandoned it. All
I had dreamed was the chaos from which order was to be drawn, one way or another. Everything in storytelling, romantic or otherwise, is hit and miss, and the fact that reality was involved didn’t appear to make much difference.

I prayed, and then I finished my cigarette and soon afterwards rose. I walked about my house in the cool of the morning, relishing its tranquillity and the almost eerie feeling that possessed me: inspiration, or whatever you care to call it, had never before struck me in so strange a manner. I poured myself some tonic water and added just a trace of the other to pep it up. It seemed like obtuseness that I hadn’t realized the girl in the white dress was Aimée.

7

Aimée was calm when she awoke, but during the days that followed there were further setbacks, though thankfully none was as alarming as the first one. Her uncle’s departure from America was again delayed to allow her further time to make a recovery. But even so Dr Innocenti was optimistic.

We ourselves – the General, Otmar and I – were naturally apprehensive and each day that ended without incident seemed like a victory of a kind. And for me there was another small source of pleasure, a bolt from the blue as agreeable as any I have experienced. As I recall it now I am reminded, by way of introduction, that overheard conversations do not always throw up welcome truths. ‘Pass on, my dear, for you’ll hear no good,’ Lady Daysmith advises in
Precious September
, but of course it is not always so. Pausing by the door of the
salotto
one evening, I overheard Otmar and the General tentatively conversing.

‘Yes, she has mentioned that,’ the old man was saying, and this was when I paused, for I sensed it was I who was referred to, and who can resist a moment’s listening in such circumstances?

‘I would take the chance,’ Otmar said, ‘to pay my debt to her.’

His wife had been quite expert, the old man said next, especially where the cultivation of fritillaries was concerned. Otmar didn’t understand the term; an explanation followed,
the plant described. The name came from the Latin:
fritillus
meant a dice-box. ‘She was always interested in a horticultural derivation. She read Dr Linnaeus.’

Otmar professing ignorance again, there came an explanation. I heard that this Linnaeus, a Swedish person apparently – Linné as he’d been born – had sorted out a whole array of flowers and plants, giving them names or finding Latin roots for existing names, orderliness and Latin being his forte.

‘She wants a garden,’ Otmar said, not interrupting but by the sound of it repeating what he had said already, in an effort to bring the conversation down to earth.

‘Then we must make her one.’

How could they make me a garden? One was too old, the other had but a single arm left! Yet how sweet it was to hear them! As I stood there I felt a throb of warmth within my body, as though a man had said when I was still a girl: ‘I love you…’

‘He’s not the sort of person,’ the old man was observing when next I paid attention. ‘He’s not the sort to be a help or even be much interested.’

I guessed they spoke of Quinty, and certainly what was deduced was true.

‘A machine is there?’ Otmar asked then. ‘An implement to break the earth?’

‘There’s a thing in England called a Merry Tiller. A motorized plough.’

I imagine Otmar nodded. The General said:

‘Heaven knows what grows best in such dry conditions. Precious little, probably. We’d have to read all that up.’

‘I do not know seeds.’

Fuchsias grew in the garden of his parents, Otmar went on. He was not good about the names of plants, but he remembered fuchsias in pots – double headed, scarlet and cream. The geranium family should do well, the General said, and
brooms. To my delight he mentioned azaleas. Shade would be important, and would somehow have to be supplied. The azaleas would have to be grown in urns, and moved inside in winter.

‘With one arm,’ Otmar reminded him, ‘I could not dig.’ ‘It is remarkable what can be done, you know. Once you settle to it.’

I moved away because I heard them get to their feet. A few minutes later I saw them at the back of my house, gesturing to one another beside the ruined out-buildings. Their voices drifted to where I watched from; the old man pointed. Here there’d be a flight of steps, leading to a lower level, here four flowerbeds formally in a semi-circle, here a marble figure perhaps. A few days later, when they revealed their secret to me, they showed me the plans they had drawn on several sheets of paper in the meantime. The General promised a herb bed, with thyme and basil and tarragon and rosemary. There would be solitary yew trees or local pines, whichever were advised. They’d try for box hedges and cotoneaster and oleander. There’d be a smoke tree and a handkerchief tree, and roses and peach trees, whatever they could induce to thrive.

‘When I’m grown up I’d like to tell stories too.’

Aimée had
Flight to Enchantment
in her hand. She had asked me and I had related its contents, while effortlessly she listened.

‘I like being here in the hills,’ she said.

8

On 14 July Thomas Riversmith arrived. Telephoning a few evenings before, he insisted that he did not wish to be met; that he wished to cause the minimum of inconvenience. So he took a taxi from Pisa, which is an extremely long journey, and then there was difficulty finding my house. From an upstairs window I watched him paying his driver in one-hundred-thousand-lire notes. He had black Mandarina Duck bags. I went downstairs, to welcome him in the inner hall.

He was a tall, thickset man, rather heavy about the face, not at all like the young woman on the train. His eyes, between beetle-black brows, were opaque – green or blue, it wasn’t apparent which; his crinkly hair was greyish. Mr Riversmith was indeed as serious and as solemn as he had seemed on the telephone: the surprise was that, in his way, he was a handsome man. He wore a dark suit, which had become creased on his air flight and creased again due to his sitting in a hired car for so long. His wife would have bought him the Mandarina luggage; it didn’t match the rest of him in any way whatsoever.

‘I’m Mrs Delahunty.’

He nodded, not saying who he was because no doubt he assumed that no one else was expected just then. He stood there, not seeming interested in anything, waiting for me to say something else. It was a little after six in the evening; the cocktail hour, as the Americans call it. A certain weariness
about his features intimated that Mr Riversmith could do with a drink.

‘Drink?’ he repeated when I suggested this. He shook his head. He had better wash, he said. He had a way of looking at you intently when he spoke, while giving the impression that he didn’t see you. Beneath the scrutiny I felt foolish, the way you do with some people.

‘Quinty’ll take you up, Mr Riversmith.’