Two Lives (40 page)

‘There are mysteries in this world,’ I said as lightly as I could. ‘There are mysteries that are beyond the realm of detectives.’

He didn’t deny that, but he didn’t agree either. If he’d had a pipe he would have relit it now. He would have pressed the tobacco into the cherrywood bowl and drawn on it to make it glow again. I was sorry he was troubled, even though it made it easier to converse with him. Around us the fireflies were beginning.

‘I’ve been trying to get to know you, Mr Riversmith.’

Perhaps it was a trick of the twilight but for a moment I thought I saw his face crinkling, and the bright flash of his healthy teeth. I tapped out a cigarette from a packet of MS and held the packet toward him. He hadn’t smoked so far and he didn’t now. I asked him if he minded the smell of a cigarette.

‘Go right ahead.’

‘You brought up mysteries, Mr Riversmith.’ I went on to tell him about the feeling I continued to experience – of a story developing around us, of small, daily details apparently imbued with a significance that was as yet mysterious. I spoke of pieces of a jigsaw jumbled together on a table, hoping to make him see that higgledy-piggledy mass of jagged shapes.

‘I don’t entirely grasp this,’ he said.

‘Survival’s a complicated business.’

From the back of the house the voice of the Italian with the motorized ploughs came to us, a halting line or two of broken English, and then the General’s reply. As soon as possible, the old man urged. It would do no harm to turn the earth over several times, now and in the autumn and the spring. The Italian said there would have to be a water line, a trench dug for a pipe from the well. There would be enough stone in the ruined stables, no need to have more cut. Dates were mentioned, argued about, and then agreed.

‘It’s been a long day.’

As he spoke, Mr Riversmith stood up. I begged him, just for a moment longer, to remain. I poured a little wine into his glass, and a little into mine. Because of his American background, I told him how I’d found myself in Idaho. I mentioned my childhood fascination with the Old West, first encountered in the Gaiety Cinema. I even mentioned Claire Trevor and Marlene Dietrich.

‘Idaho is hardly the Wild West.’

‘I was misled. I was no more than a foolish child.’

I told him how Ernie Chubbs had been going to Idaho in search of orders for sanitary-ware and had taken me with him on expenses; I told him how he’d taken me with him to Africa and then had disappeared. In the Café Rose they said they expected I’d met Mrs Chubbs, and it was clear what they were hinting at. ‘A healthy woman,’ they used to say. ‘Chubbs’s wife was always healthy.’ All I knew myself was that every time Ernie Chubbs referred to his wife he had to cough.

I described Ernie Chubbs because it was relevant, his glasses, and tidy black hair kept down with scented oil. I explained that he didn’t travel with the sanitary-ware itself, just brochures full of photographs. In order to illustrate a point, I was obliged to refer again to the Café Rose, explaining that he took an order there but when the thing arrived eight or so months later it had a crack in it. ‘The place was unfortunate in that respect. “I Speak Your Weight”, a weighing-machine said in the general toilet, but when you put your coin in nothing happened. Chubbs sold them that too. He used to be in weighing-machines.’

‘I see.’

There was another line Chubbs had, what he called the ‘joke flush’. When you pulled the chain, a voice called out, ‘Ha! ha!’ You kept pulling it and it kept saying, ‘Ha! ha!’ What was meant to happen was you’d give up in desperation;
then you’d open the door to go out and the thing would flush on its own. But what actually happened was that when people installed the joke flush the voice said, ‘Ha! ha!’ and they couldn’t make it stop, and the flush didn’t work no matter what they did. Another thing was, when the light was turned on in the toilet, music was meant to play but it hardly ever did.

‘In the end the defective goods people caught up with Ernie Chubbs.’

‘I really think I must get along to bed now.’

Women were Ernie Chubbs’s weakness: he was Aries on the cusp with Taurus, a very mixed-up region for a man of his sensual disposition. Before my time he took someone else round with him on expenses, but when she wanted to marry him he couldn’t afford to because of the alimony. It was then that Mrs Chubbs conveniently turned up her toes, and after that the other lady wouldn’t touch him with a pole. Maybe she got scared, I wouldn’t know. I was eighteen years old when I first met Ernie Chubbs, green as a pea. ‘All very different from your ants,’ I said.

The engine of a motor-car started. ‘
Buonanotte!
’ the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.

Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my titles in the glass-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.

‘You’re an author, Mrs Delahunty?’

I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Café Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew ‘The Lady of
Shalott’ by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I said:

‘You might like to call me Emily.’

There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he’d said he didn’t grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was reassurance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn’t. Clever men probably always need drawing out.

‘You’re Capricorn,’ I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. ‘The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.’

He turned the first few pages of
Bloom of Love
. There was a flicker of astonishment in the eyes that had been so expressionlessly opaque a moment before. He picked up
Waltz Me to Paradise
, then returned both volumes to where he’d taken them from.

‘Most interesting,’ he said.

‘Your ants are interesting too, Tom.’

Perhaps it was ridiculous to think that a professor of entomology in his middle years would ask if he might take
Little Bonny Maye
or
Two on a Sunbeam
to bed with him, but even so it was a disappointment when he didn’t. We stood without saying anything for a moment, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. I kept seeing his ants, running all over the place, a few carrying others on their backs, all of them intent upon some business or other.

‘I would listen if you told me, Tom. About your ants.’

He shook his head. His research was of academic interest only, and was complex. An explanation of it did not belong in everyday conversation.

‘What was it you didn’t grasp, Tom?’

‘What?’

I smiled encouragingly, wanting to say that if he smiled more himself everything would be easier for both of us, that it was a pity to possess such strong teeth and not ever to display them. I asked him to pick out
Precious September
. By Janine Ann Johns, I said, and watched him while he did so.

‘Open it, Tom.’

I asked him to look for Lady Daysmith, and to read me a single sentence concerning her. There was an initial hesitation, a shifting of the jaw, the familiar tightening of the lips. I sensed a reminder to himself of the care, and love, that had so cosseted his sister’s child in this house.

‘Lady Daysmith knelt,’ he read eventually. ‘She closed her eyes and her whisper was heard in the empty room, beseeching mercy.’

He replaced the volume on its shelf and closed the glass-paned door on it.

‘Sit down, Tom. Have a glass of grappa with me.’

He rejected this, but I begged him and in the end he did as I wished because I said it was important. I poured us each a glass of grappa. I said:

‘Lady Daysmith had her origins in a Sunday-school teacher.’ I described the humility of Miss Alzapiedi, her gangling height, the hair that should have been her crowning glory. ‘Flat as a table up front. I turned her into an attractive woman, Tom.’

‘I see.’

‘All her life she never wore stockings. Her skirts came down to her shoes.’

He began to rise, his drink untouched.

‘Drink your grappa, Tom. I’ve poured it for you.’

He sipped a little. I told him that that was how it was done: you turned Miss Alzapiedi into elegant Lady Daysmith. I told him how Miss Alzapiedi had come to my assistance when I mixed up God with Joseph. I didn’t claim that making her Lady Daysmith was a reward. It was just something that had occurred.

‘But it’s nice, Tom. And it’s nice that an old man who’s had the stuffing knocked out of him can still find his last reserves in order to create an English garden in the heat of Umbria.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

Illusion came into it, of course it did. Illusion and mystery and pretence: dismiss that trinity of wonders and what’s left, after all? A stick of an old creature in misery as he walks up and down a hospital corridor with a holy statue in it. The suffering in the heart of a Sunday-school teacher who wears her dresses long. Dismiss it and you’re face to face with a violent salesman of sanitary-ware, free-wheeling about with young girls on expenses. Dismiss the conventions of my house in Umbria and Quinty, for one, would be back where he started.

‘If I gave Quinty his marching orders, Tom, he’d take his gypsy with him and they’d end up on a wasteland. They’d make a shack out of flattened oil-drums. They’d thieve from people on the streets.’

‘Mrs Delahunty –’

‘I’ve seen the tourists here looking askance at Quinty, and who on earth can blame them? You must have thought you’d come to a madhouse when he began his talk about holy women. Yet eccentric conversation’s better than being a near criminal. Or so I’d have thought.’

Politely he said he found Quinty not uninteresting on the subject of hagiology. I smiled at him: once again he was doing his best. I remembered him walking beside Rosa Crevelli after we’d had lunch, making an effort to converse with her. He’d had a glass or two of wine, and I wondered if he’d thought to himself that she had an easy look to her. No reason why a reticent man shouldn’t have a fancy, shouldn’t go for that sallow skin and gypsy eyes, a different ball-game from Francine. But this wasn’t the time to wonder for long about any of that.

Perhaps in the morning, I suggested, we might look for a bark-ant together so that he could show me his side of things, since I’d been going on so about my own. For a start, I’d no idea if a bark-ant looked different from the kind of ant that lives beneath a stone. I asked him about that, pouring just a thimbleful more grappa into my glass. I said it was fascinating what he’d said about bark-ants behaving like human beings. I asked him how they came by their name. He didn’t answer, and when I looked up I discovered he was no longer in the room.

11

The old man showed me what he intended, passing on to me the gist of the deliberations that had taken place the evening before, how the Italian had pointed out that in order to create the different levels a mechanical digger rather than a ploughing machine was necessary. This, too, he could supply and operate himself. The General showed me where the terracing and the flights of steps would be. Part of the garden would be walled: the Italian had machinery for demolishing the half-ruined stables and moving the stone to where it could be attractively put to use.

The General repeated that the garden was a gift. But he did not feel he could make such drastic alterations without my agreement. He showed me where a fountain would be, and where the shade trees would be planted.

‘It’ll be beautiful, General.’

‘A garden should have little gardens tucked away inside it. It should have alcoves and secret places, and paths that make you want to take them even though they don’t lead anywhere. What grows well, you cherish. What doesn’t, you throw out.’

The digger would bite into the slope beside the sunflower field. As well as terraces, there would be sunken areas. The Italian who’d come was a man of imagination; he’d entered into the spirit of the challenge. A separate well for the garden might be necessary, rather than the pipeline he’d first suggested. The old cypress tree beside the stables would remain.

‘This’ll be costly, General. Are you sure –’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

Then, for the last time in my presence, the old man mentioned his daughter. We stood among the rank growth of that wasted area, to which the dilapidated old buildings and rusty wheels and axles lent a dismal air. The General stared down at the ground of which he expected so much. In his daughter’s lifetime he had resented the fact that what wealth he left behind would be shared with her husband. ‘I would happily give all the days remaining to me if it might be now,’ he murmured, and said no more.

So it was left. I had accepted gifts from men before, but never one like this, and never without strings that tied some grisly package. I was moved afresh by what was happening, by faith being kept in so many directions at once, by frailty turned into strength. The timbers of these useless buildings and the discoloured iron that had sunk into the ground would be scooped away, the fallen walls given an unexpected lease of life; an old man’s dream would spread on the hill beside the sunflower slope. He knew, as I did, that he would not live to see his garden’s heyday. But he knew it didn’t matter.

That day was hotter, even, than the days that had preceded it. At half-past ten Aimée and her uncle went for a walk, advised to do so before the day became oppressive. There is a selection of straw hats in the outer hall, kept for the tourists, since people who come here always want to walk about the hillsides no matter what the temperature. I insisted that Aimée should wear one, and her uncle also; I warned them to keep to the roads and tracks for fear of snakes. For a few moments I watched their slow progress through the clumps of broom and laburnum, Aimée in a light-blue dress, her wide-brimmed panama too big for her, he in shirtsleeves and fawn cotton trousers, and a hat with a brown band. When they passed from sight I hurried into the house and made my way to his bedroom.