The Italian Romance, page 22
‘Sit down, Signora,’ Elsa said. ‘We have a little grappa left.’
‘No, no,’ the woman said.
‘Come.’ Elsa put her hand on Sonia’s back and led her to a chair. And when Sonia sat heavily down, Elsa thought of the boy. She put her small hand over Sonia’s bony shoulder. ‘No wonder you were frightened,’ she said.
Her husband came towards them, a tiny glass in his hand. He shook his head at his wife, drew his brows together. Elsa kept quiet. He held out the glass and the woman took it. Her hand was shaking so much she almost couldn’t find her mouth.
I don’t know who this girl is. This woman. How many weeks has she been in my life, this time round, I mean? Is she married, divorced? Widowed? She mentioned a daughter’s wedding. How many grandchildren do I have, I wonder?
I suppose I could have just asked her. Dora will want to know, and I feel such an idiot that I haven’t managed to find out a damn thing. Oh, except that she has unserious relationships, like all the sane women do, you poor old thing. I’ll just have to avoid Dora.
My face is very tender. If I tap at it under the eye, on the cheekbone, I can really feel it. I got a few looks when I walked up the aisle to my seat. Oh, well, it’s not my responsibility, what goes on in other people’s heads.
We’re on the outskirts of Rome now. The heat-filled orientalism of cedar trees. Love them. I suppose when I get off I’d better catch the tram up to the supermarket. Might as well before I go home.
Oh, Lord, who is this? Is she stopping to talk to me? Big, anxious eyes, she places her hand on the seat where I’m resting my poor old leg. ‘Signora,’ she says, ‘please, may I have a word?’
I ease my leg down. Not the simplest operation. The damn girl slides into the seat and leans towards me, hands joined on her knees. She’s got a card or something between her fingers. I seem to be on the other end of a length of string, for I lean towards her, too. What on earth does she want?
‘Signora,’ she whispers. ‘Please take this. You don’t have to put up with it.’ She looks down at the card. She seems to be struggling with something, poor child. I urge her with my eyes to be brave, to continue. ‘Even at your age,’ she says at last.
I nod. I am mystified. Our heads are almost touching. She suddenly thrusts the little card towards me. Her hand does a kind of waltz of approach with mine, but I am a bit too slow for the beat. It’s my age, I suppose. As a result of my tardiness, she throws the card into my lap. She jumps up, and I am more than a little startled. Then she leans down again and murmurs in my ear, so close that the tiny hairs shiver with her breath, ‘God bless you, my dear.’ And off she shoots, up the aisle. I rub my ear. I find that most uncomfortable, a stranger’s breath.
I take a quick look at the card, and as I do the train pulls into a station, the doors slide open, the brakes and wheels screech against each other. Haven’t got my glasses on. I hold the tiny white thing out as far as my arm can reach, narrow one eye. And a shadow rears over me. I nearly jump as I lift my gaze to the window, and there she is again, waving. I wave the card. What’s it say, refuse or something? No. Refuge. Oh good God, a home for battered women. I have to bite my lip. She is still there. She joins her hands in silent supplication. I am going to laugh very loudly if she doesn’t stop that.
The train moves along, she walks with it. And I have an immensely strong desire to stand up, open the window, poke my nose out and cry to her, ‘Have you got a refuge for newly discovered mummies?’
Guido, the portiere at my apartment block, nearly had a stroke when he saw me. I caught a cab back from the shops. The young fellow who drove it seemed a little overcome, too; he insisted on carrying the bags inside for me. Guido was in a sombre mood behind his glass cage. Something had gone badly wrong, a collapse of his football team’s back row, a complaint from one tenant about another, too much salami for lunch, the fall in the value of the dollar, who knows? Or perhaps his relentless failure to catch the invisible man has been gnawing at him again. Has he found spores in the storage room while I’ve been away? Guido crawled out of his den as the driver delivered me in, made to drag himself across the vestibule to us, and then saw my face. Hell broke loose.
We shuffled to the elevator, Guido, my overnight bag and three ‘green’ shopping bags. And he insisted on carrying everything up the final round of stairs including my shoulder bag which he slung across himself. He told me to go to the hospital, and also to sue. I said I would. He came very close to unpacking and putting away the groceries, but thought better of it in the end. He looked a great deal happier as he left my apartment. I suppose I took his mind off it, whatever it was.
I pushed the playback button on my answering machine when he’d gone. Dora had rung, presuming I’d be back in Rome a couple of days ago. Then it was London calling, how is the new novel going, my pet? And two messages from Jim. Numero uno, am I back yet and am I all right, Francesca wants to know? I raced across the room; well, hobbled, but as fast as I could, and replayed that one. And numero due, here I am again, Lilian, it’s Jim again, and I have an enormous effrontery for you; you know I told you about my daughter, Jane? She’s arriving tomorrow morning. But I’ve had an emergency call to Dublin, the guy who’s going to run our new outfit there isn’t, he stormed out, I don’t want to drag Jane on to Ireland after a long flight, also won’t have two seconds for her, also she needs a woman’s hand on her.
I pressed the stop button. I don’t believe this, I said to myself.
So I left it. I unpacked. I changed. I poured myself a lovely rough glass of red and I’m reclining on my couch, my head sunk into my down pillow which I carried in from the bed. The wine tastes of bread sopping up meat and olive juices, lavender and sea-salt in the air. I close my eyes.
And a minute or two of that is enough. Can’t live there, not at this physical juncture of one’s eternal life. So I get up, press play-back.
Jim is in mid-flight. ‘...in a hell of a state about this and I know what a bloody madman I’m being. But would it be all right, Lil, if she spent two days with you? God, I apologise for this.’ He lowers his voice. He doesn’t want anyone to hear this but me. ‘I can’t ask Francesca, Lil. It’s too awkward. Minding my kid for me, this early on.’ There’s an intake of breath. ‘I can’t trust anyone else. She’s terribly precious, Lil. Anyway, tell me to go to hell, but could you do it as soon as possible.’ The machine clicks, gurgles, clicks and turns itself off.
I am reclining again. I lift my head to take another sip. And I say to the machine, ‘Go to hell.’
I can’t finish the damn glass, of course. Try to. I find myself with the telephone on my lap, dialling my number at the farmhouse. As the line burrs, I worry about the novel. I’ve got agents ringing me from London, children arriving from Australia every second day. Don’t they know I need a bit of peace and quiet?
New South Wales, 1944
Lilian walked out of the house. The sun was going down. From the verandah, facing east, the sky was greying. A ghost moon waited above the distant ridges.
It was Easter, Easter Sunday night. The sun had danced at dawn. And some hours later, the telegram had arrived. The postmistress had sent Toby Andrews out on his bicycle. No job for a boy. Toby had learned his trade quick. Nowadays, he tucked his peaked hat under his arm and almost stood to attention as he made his deliveries. He was a good boy, as numbers of people had remarked after their tragic events.
She sat down on the tiles, her knees up, her feet together on the first step. The whole house shuddered from Mae’s grief. Lilian had felt her own chest caving in from the physical pressure of it. There were ten or twelve people in there, helpless. Mae had been put on a kitchen chair. They offered tea, a sandwich, a word of awkward sympathy. Mae was somewhere beyond the bearing of it.
Lilian had never seen that before.
She looked over at the hay shed, where bales used to be piled high. There were two bales now, that’s all. The Ford was parked in the shade of the roof; it wasn’t taken out very much any more. Frankie used to ride around on the running board, his arm around the strut between front and back windows. He used to lean right out to catch the wind. And he would be a Chicago gangster occasionally, a machine gun coughing in the crook of his free arm. Bernie gave him a few rides around the yard when their father wasn’t at home. They pretended they were bank robbers. Mae used to roar out at them to stop, be careful, you’ll fall off, you silly duffer.
A brief awareness flashed up in her, like sunlight on the dark glisten of a leaping porpoise, and disappeared under. She turned her mind instantly away from it. She did not want to feel the boy’s absolute going.
She stood and walked down the steps. Her shoes made muffled thuds on the summer-wearied earth. She put her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She was heading for the men’s barracks.
He was sitting at a table, which he’d pushed against the wall opposite his bed, using the stub of a pencil to write. Lilian stood six feet from the open doorway, unnoticed. He seemed to write with his hand folded over, as a left-hander does; it made his body turn slightly towards the left and in this way, she could see the back of his head, the brown neck, the feathery arrow of hair. He ripped a page over – it was a child’s exercise book – and began at the top again.
And then he stopped. He stared at the wall in front of him, and slowly faced her. He stood up as she walked into the quiet room.
She said, in a voice she had not realised was covered in tears, ‘My husband’s brother got killed.’
‘I know,’ he said. The back of his fingers brushed at her arm as he passed her to close the door. She walked after him, a child. He put his hands on her elbows. A smell came off him, a smell she didn’t know. It filled her and ran through her veins.
The pressure from his hands was cautious, but it need not have been. She moved fraction by fraction into him. He bent over her and kissed the side of her head. And something happened to her body, that later she felt too embarrassed to tell even him. It was to do with her nipples. For all the years that followed, she realised that everything in her had known it was him she wanted, everything but her. Everything leaped to him.
And when he put his lips on her mouth and she drew back with fear, he held her, with gentleness but held her nevertheless, until her mouth realised too what she’d thirsted for, and she drank wine and honey from him. Her own hand, she discovered some moments later, was holding his head. Her fingers were in his hair.
When they released each other, she stepped back.
‘My God, no,’ she said.
‘Lilian.’
‘I can’t. Antonio, this is not possible. It can’t be happening.’
‘But it is. It’s been happening for some time, hasn’t it?’
‘But it isn’t possible. There must be some kind of mistake.’
‘There must be a mistake? What do you mean?’ He was almost laughing.
She stepped back further and her leg bumped the edge of his desk. ‘I have been thinking about it,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Me too.’
‘Yes, but things that are impossible to happen can’t be happening.’
‘Is that why you don’t come out here anymore?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You’re here now.’
‘I had to.’ She gestured with her hand towards the house.
‘You didn’t have to come down here, Lilian. You did that.’
‘I won’t do it again,’ she cried. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be a child,’ he said.
She knew she was. But he’d also misjudged her. ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to behave properly.’
‘You’ll be a child for as long as you stay here. For as long as you stay married to that boy.’
‘You’re just saying that to make me...’ Her eyes fell on the neat, single bed.
He looked down, too. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Forgive me if I hurt you. But it is true, Lilian. You must come to me. You must.’
‘No. Don’t talk like that to me.’
She saw his face drop. He lowered his eyes. She wanted to touch him again, to restore the light in him. He turned from her, and sat on the end of the bed. He looked at the floor. He said, ‘Is this something very important, or is it ridiculous?’
She whispered, ‘Both, maybe.’
He joined his hands between his knees. ‘You’d better go now,’ he said. ‘Please, Lilian.’
‘You want me to go?’ she said, her voice barely audible.
He raised his head and looked at her. ‘Do you want to stay?’
‘Can’t we just talk?’
He said nothing for a moment. ‘We’ll talk some other time,’ he said. She saw his fingers pressing hard into the backs of his joined hands.
‘All right,’ she said. She went to the door. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
He nodded, looked away. As she turned the handle Antonio stood up and walked to the table, picked up a rolled cigarette that he’d stubbed a while ago. His back turned, he struck a match and bent his head to the flame. Lilian walked out. He stared after her, but she didn’t know that.
Lilian’s legs were heavy as she crossed the yard. A deep fissure began to open in her that day. She felt only the faintest, hair’s breadth of it, but it had begun.
She approached the sprawling house, the wide, cool verandah, the silent wail of the pain inside. She trod up the steps, looked down the length of the verandah. Last year, she and Frank had sat on the old couch. Frank had carried out the green-baize card table and they’d played euchre all evening till they couldn’t see the cards anymore.
Romanzo
Sonia’s legs were tired. Gianni cycled ahead, stopping occasionally to wait for her, his feet on either side of his bike. His face was reddened by the winter wind. She’d say to him as she pedalled slowly, her skirt up at her knees, ‘Don’t disappear, Gianni. I won’t be able to see you.’ He was impatient with her, but knew better than to argue. He wobbled away from her. Sonia pushed at the pedals.
He had veered off the road and into their avenue before she’d rounded the bend. She walked the bike the last two hundred yards, her cane shopping basket strapped on the back, just behind the saddle. The sky rolled with cannon-grey tirades of cloud. A storm was brewing, an electric white light skirted the lower borders of clouds in the west. It was really quite beautiful. And even when the wind suddenly lashed up, beating the boughs of trees, and leaves tumbled over themselves on the lawn, and she knew she would have to run or she’d be caught by the rain that she could see in filmy sheets just behind the house and the trees, she was excited by it, alive in it. The whole place darkened in a few moments. She wheeled up the broad path and down it came, in big, isolated drops at first. She wanted to feel the cold damp on her face.
Jack was running from the side of the house. ‘Come on,’ he shouted, seizing the handlebars. It was then that a fork of lightning tore the sky and thunder roared one second after, too close. She felt it in her bones. She began to run beside him.
He propped the bicycle against the back wall. As she opened the kitchen door he was struggling with the leather strap and she stood on the threshold until he’d released the basket. He dangled it beside him, pulled his shoulders up and ran to her, his shoes splashing up tiny pools of water. She closed the door behind him. The kitchen fire was low, logs that had been burning for a long while were red, alive with a tiny flame. Berta was rubbing the boy’s hands one by one, briskly, with her own. Hers were fat, sandpapery, and he kept pulling away from them. ‘Stop,’ she said to him, and then to anyone who’d listen, ‘The child’s freezing.’
Sonia rubbed her fingers at her wet hair and Berta looked down at her feet. ‘Take those shoes off,’ she said. ‘We don’t want you getting sick on top of everything else.’
‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ Sonia said.
‘Don’t spend all day up there,’ Berta said.
Sonia had already reached the hallway, but she stopped, turned back and looked at the old woman. Berta glanced at her and then lifted the boy’s cold hand to blow her own warm breath on it. As Sonia walked towards the staircase, she felt a prickle down her spine. She heard the kitchen door close. It surprised her that Jack was following her; she waited for him at the foot of the stairs.
He said, ‘Gianni was saying something about Germans.’
Rivers of rain trickled from his hair down on to his forehead. ‘They didn’t stop,’ she said.
‘Many?’
‘Oh, yes. I don’t know. Trucks and trucks. They were going south.’
‘And where were you? Were you on the road?’
‘No. We’d parked our bikes. We were in the village. We went into a shop, and stayed there till they’d gone.’
‘Good,’ he said. He was standing so close to her that his arm, resting on the banister as hers was, touched her. She gazed at his arm, at the woollen sweater she’d given him from her husband’s wardrobe, and she moved her hand. Her fingers plucked at the wool. She said, ‘I was scared, Jack. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.’
‘Oh, Sonia,’ he said, stricken. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How can you say sorry to me, Jack? Of all people in the world?’
She watched his face. His worry for her lined his forehead and deepened the wrinkles around his eyes. She was constantly surprised by him.
‘You should not have this,’ he said. He took her hand, gently, as if it were a bird. He raised it, and kissed the palm. ‘This ugly world. War. It’s not right for you. It’s all wrong.’
She felt the brush of his unshaven cheek and chin. ‘Is it right for you?’
‘I don’t matter. I went into it, eyes open. I thought it would be better than ... where I was before.’
