The Italian Romance, page 4
‘But, my God, Lilian.’ Johnny is standing at his place. ‘This is so rude. Your beautiful dinner spoiled.’
‘It’s not that beautiful, Johnny,’ I say. I raise my hand to stop them. ‘Why don’t you enjoy your meal, the three of you. I apologise for this.’
Vincenzo, damn him, walks around the table to me. ‘Why do you apologise? My God, you did nothing to invite this...’ he hesitates, and turns to the others as he says, ‘performance.’
‘Exacto,’ Johnny says.
‘Sit down, Johnny,’ I say as I escape Vincenzo’s attempt to hug me. ‘Please. I can’t explain just now.’ I look at Dora. She is still seated, though her chair is now well back from the table. I say, specifically to her, ‘Tomorrow.’
She doesn’t take her troubled gaze off me. But she says, ‘Vin, sit down, caro. Let’s enjoy our dinner. Johnny.’
Johnny does as he is told. He is the picture of misery. He picks up his fork, nevertheless, and rolls strings of taglietelle around it. Vincenzo, under his wife’s unspoken supplication, goes back to her. As he sits, he says, ‘All the same, I offer my sympathies to you, Lilian, for the ruination of your evening.’
I too sit. I am not hungry, of course. I pour more wine into my half-full glass. ‘I don’t deserve sympathy, Vin, yours or anyone else’s. Most certainly not Francesca’s.’
Dora’s hand is tactful as it takes my wrist. All the same, I feel like a prisoner in her grip and, even worse, I feel like a performer. I smile a false smile of thanks and release myself. I have a pressing need to hold my wineglass between both palms.
New South Wales, 1939
The sun began to rise. Even before, the kookaburras were already laughing. They woke first. The trees were still spectres. Light splayed out along the horizon, the tip of the sun’s head crowned and into the world came the huge, unavoidable presence. It was perfect, blood red, heavy. Other birds sensed it. One after another the calls came, a whip lashed, bells chimed in tiny throats. One bird shrieked high and clear and across the vastness of the bush, miles perhaps, another, waiting, shrieked back. The darkness bled away in the night-cooled clay; and beneath the storms of mist breathing among the trunks of trees, discarded strings of bark hung lank to the grass and nests of damp ferns hid.
The sun rose swiftly from the earth. It shrank as it ascended and became more brilliant, distant. The bush turned to its business.
The young husband left the house without disturbing his wife. She was waking as he quietly closed the screen door.
The clock on the sideboard tick-tocked. There were hours when she loved its sound. She reached for his pillow, hugged it against her. She lay awake, listening.
It was after two when she picked up the tin dish and opened the screen door with her hip. She stepped down from the verandah. The light brown earth had a red tinge to it. It was dry. Dust. When she tipped the water a few feet from the front door, it found no purchase, turned immediately to mud. Belatedly, she spotted the row of leggy geraniums growing by the verandah. ‘Oh,’ she said, and she walked across the dirt to the thirsty plants, upended the dish and shook it. A few drops caught themselves on leaves, weighed them down and dripped ineffectually to the cracked soil. ‘Bugger,’ she said.
It was as she trailed towards the cottage, the tin dish clutched against her breast, that her father-in-law’s black car, kicking up a dust trail, drove to the main house. Young Frankie rode on the running board, leaning his body out like a taut bow. She could make out his father’s hand as it banged on the outside of his door and she could hear him shouting at Frankie to straighten up and stop fooling around. Frank barely responded. As the car slid around to the front door, he jumped from the board and ran a few feet to slow himself down. He saw her on the cottage verandah, darkened by the shade of the corrugated iron roof. He waved his freckled hand and she waved back. She liked Frankie. He took off around the side of the house.
The two men climbed out from the front. The other was her own father. He opened the back door and her mother erupted from the dim insides. She wore a hip-length jacket over her dress and the white hat she’d worn to the wedding. She caught sight of her daughter. The girl waved at her and mouthed a garbled message about being up there in a minute after returning the washing-up dish to the kitchen and putting on her shoes. Her mother put a hand up to her ear. The girl shook her head.
Mae Malone had appeared. She came down the red stone steps, her hands raised as if she were amazed to see the Fergusons pouring out of her husband’s car, as if she hadn’t been baking since the day before.
The young wife opened the screen door. It creaked and as she let it fall back behind her, it shuddered. She walked dust across the wooden floor. Clear imprints of the pads of her feet followed her to the shaving mirror nailed on the wall. She picked up the damp tea towel and wiped her hot, reddened cheeks and forehead. She dabbed at the sides of her nose, at two clusters of tiny bubbles of sweat.
She was suddenly tired. She didn’t want to go up to the big house, to carry around plates of scones and lamingtons, and afterwards collect up the dirty cups and saucers and, with another tea towel in her fist, stand beside her mother-in-law who’d pass her the steaming hot, too slippery, too precious tea things from her water-boiled hands. And she’d wonder how Mae could bear that her hands were lobster-red.
She bunched the towel in her fist. The windowsill took her attention. She wrapped a corner of the cloth around her finger and poked at a tiny quarry of ingrained black dirt where a dead fly had ended its days. She swept the fly ungraciously to the floor and continued to scrape conscientiously with her nail. Outside the window, she could see the wooden tower of the water tank. And there was Rusty, the cur who compartmentalised his life between, on the one hand, running like a mad thing at the wheels of the car, joining in the gallop when the men rode out, darting about the legs of the horses, and on the other flopping in the shade, motionless, possibly dead, for hot hour upon hour till his visible ear woke up, twitched once more and he, astonishingly, tore off to some new event of the world’s making. He lay now at his leisure under the wooden struts. The early afternoon shadows were inexorably on the move. He would feel his dust-laden, tan rump heating up in the awful sun before long.
She heard the footsteps. She recognised them, the two-toned beat, the sturdy heel and wider sole, a blood rhythm. She picked up her husband’s comb from his shaving-gear shelf, took an appalled look at the scum which had gathered along the base of its teeth, and nevertheless made a few approaches to the front of her hair with it.
The footsteps stopped. Her mother was bent to peer through the wire screen; the bending seemed to assist in the seeing, though it was otherwise pointless. ‘Anybody home?’ she yodelled. And, without a pause, the hinges squealed. There she was, in the open doorway, dark against the almost unbearable light washing over the yard and the tree-less paddocks to the encroaching bush and the dazed horizon.
‘What are you doing?’ her mother said.
The girl scissored her fingers through her hair, busy establishing waves. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Why aren’t you up at the house helping Mae?’ Vivienne Ferguson walked into the room. Her face, too, was flushed, cheeks reddened in the heat. ‘Get me a glass of water, darling. It’s so hot. Phew.’ Viv enjoyed illustrating her point. She put her handbag on the table, pulled a white handkerchief from her sleeve and wagged it in front of her face, and said again, ‘Phew. Oh, darling, look at all the flies. Why don’t you shut the door properly?’
The girl continued to fuss at her hair. She was aware of her mother immobilised in the middle of the floor, white straw hat on her head, her other hand, palm up, poised in the most delicate way across her abdomen. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her.
Viv said, ‘Where’s a glass?’
‘Oh, sorry. I’ll get it,’ she said and opened the dresser. She was secretly thrilled to see the neat line-up of cups, glasses, plates and bowls, only too recently achieved. Thrilled not for and in themselves, but because her mother would barely notice, so natural an event it was to open a cupboard door on to such a scene. She poured crystal clear water from a blue jug she kept in the ice-box.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Viv said. She drank thirstily, and self-consciously as she always did. She flapped the opening of her jacket, a gesture vain in its efforts to cool down her over-heated little body.
‘Why don’t you take your coat off?’ Lilian said.
Viv tipped the glass and drained the water. ‘I will, love,’ she said. ‘After. I want to look nice for Mae and Vince. Oh, darling, where are your shoes? Don’t walk around like that. What will they think of you?’
‘I couldn’t care less what they think of me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Viv said. She put the glass on the table. She walked towards the bedroom.
The girl’s heart sank. ‘Oh, Mum, don’t,’ she said, but Viv had already opened the door.
‘Oh, my God,’ Viv said.
‘Oh, Mum,’ the girl said again.
‘Would you look at this? When did you last wash those sheets? Oh, look! Your clothes are all over the floor. Bernie won’t put up with this forever, sweetheart. Do you even know where your shoes are?’
‘Yes, I do,’ the girl said, upset. Viv had a certain way with her. The girl stomped past her into the bedroom, ripped the sheets from where they’d been mangled at the foot of the bed and dropped them to the floor. She trod on them as she went around to the other side and looked down expectantly at the bare boards. Her shoes were not there. She glanced quickly at the doorway – her mother had disappeared – then got down on her hands and knees to feel around under the bed.
‘Where’s there a hankie?’ she said, distracted, as she walked back in to the kitchen. The shoes bit at her heels. She began to pull underwear from the washing basket she’d left on the couch, and found a lace-edged handkerchief. She folded it over, and over again.
‘Give that to me and let me iron it,’ her mother said.
The girl held it against her abdomen and smoothed it with her hand. ‘There. Ironed,’ she said.
Bernie straddled the wing of the sofa. He rested his arm lightly behind his young wife’s shoulders. She could smell the sweat of his morning’s work and sense the heat off him. She leaned back, unobtrusively. His moist skin sucked against hers. She felt the bulge of muscle where his shirt-sleeve was rolled up above his elbow.
The green-baize card table had been brought out from the pantry, unfolded, covered with a linen cloth. Mae had embroidered the cloth herself when she was expecting her second son, Frankie. Two dinner plates, that had been loaded with sandwiches, were nearly empty. No one was impolite enough to polish off the last lonely looking egg-and-lettuce-filled triangle. And on the lamington plate were scattered only cake crumbs and thumbprints of chocolate and coconut gratings which resembled, off-puttingly, an exhausted tribe of white ants.
The girl’s father sat upright on one of the kitchen chairs, which Mae had quietly carried into the lounge room before the guests arrived. He balanced his bread-and-butter plate on his knees and held a delicate and very best cup and saucer in his intimidated hands.
Beside him, her father-in-law reached down for the cup and saucer he’d placed on the floor, crossed his legs and said, ‘Yes, well, o’course the Poles couldn’t a been expected to hold out any longer than they did. They never had a chance, really. I don’t know, Mick, I don’t trust this man at all. It remains to be seen what he intends to do next.’
‘Still, it doesn’t look too bad over there at present,’ Mick Ferguson assured him. ‘They’ve gone quiet. Won’t blow up like the last one.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ Mae Malone said. ‘We wouldn’t want to go that way again.’ Mae picked at her sandwich, two fingers beak-like at the bread. She had painstakingly sliced all the crusts off earlier and thrown them out the back door to the dogs. She seemed lost in contemplation of the moist white triangle of bread and the slice of red tomato trailing from it onto her flowered plate.
Mick said, ‘Storm in a teacup, love. It’ll all die down again.’
‘Of course it will,’ Vivienne said. ‘They’ve got more sense.’
‘You’d think the Germans would a bloody learned their lesson.’ The girl’s shoulders jumped. She looked over at her father-in-law, watched how his big, sun-leathered hand circled the tiny cup. He slurped at the strong tea. He said, ‘How many times do they have to have their backsides kicked?’
‘Oh, Vince,’ Mae said. She looked sheepishly at Viv.
‘Sorry, ladies,’ he said. ‘But you’d agree with me on that, Mick. When my lot were over there, in France, you never saw anything like it.’ He moved slightly on his chair and glanced at the women. As Mae caught his eye, he held up a hand and said, ‘Now, I’m not going to talk about it, love. Anyway, we’ve had enough of it, I can tell you.’
‘Too right,’ Mick Ferguson said. He stared at the milky dregs in his own cup and put it back on the saucer. ‘Still,’ he said ‘if it comes to it, I suppose there’s only one thing to do about it.’
The girl felt the muscle in her husband’s arm tense and grow hard. And then she heard him say, ‘They reckon France will hold this time, if the Germans attack. That might put a bit of sense into Adolph’s head.’
She wanted to sip at her cooling tea, but the air had thickened around her; she couldn’t raise her hand. She didn’t really know why.
Her mother’s voice broke a moment’s unexplained silence. ‘Just let him have the bits he says belong to them,’ Viv said. The girl felt a worm of embarrassment. Her mother tried to please sometimes, in a way that made her daughter too sorry for them all. Viv said, ‘That way, we can have peace.’
‘That’s right, darling. A bit of common sense, that’s all that’s needed,’ Mae said. She leaned forward and pushed the plate with the lone sandwich forward. ‘Anyone going to have that? Come on. It’ll only go out to the dogs.’
‘Don’t be shy,’ Vince said.
Bernie sat forward, too. His thigh bumped her elbow. ‘Well, the Aussies took care of them the last time. Our boys will sort them out again, if need be.’
The light cotton curtains billowed in a breeze that took them by surprise. Her mother suddenly made a grab for the egg sandwich and stuffed most of it in her mouth as if she were hardly aware of herself. Her father picked up his cup again and drained it of its cold, milky dregs. Mae hit her knee with her hands, just once, gently.
Vince nested his cup and saucer in one hand and stood. ‘Let’s get them into the kitchen for her, Mick, and I’ll show you a beauty I picked up at the sales last week. Two-year-old,’ he said.
Mae began to hoist herself to her feet. The girl, watching her, stood. She felt the damp imprint of her husband’s arm on her back.
‘No, love, we’ll do it,’ Vince said. ‘You lot stay here and talk. It’s early yet. You sit down, too, Lilian.’
‘Lilian! What are you doing?’
‘I’m working,’ I say. I hope it hits the mark but I know very well it won’t. Margaret wasn’t born that way. I breathe heavily into the telephone.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I knew you’d be interested in this. There’s a new woman doing archaeological tours. She’s excellent, evidently. Don’t know her. English, I think. Or maybe she’s a Yank. Anyway. Every Thursday morning for six weeks. What do you think?’
‘Well, as I say, I’m working at the moment, Margaret.’
‘But this won’t take long. And you might get a good idea for a book out of it, that’s what I was thinking. They reckon she points out where the bordellos were for the clergy, hundreds of years ago.’ She laughs. ‘My God! And we could go for lunch, afterwards. Oh, listen, by the way...’ she says and there is a hiatus.
I wait for a modest pause and say, ‘Yes, Margaret?’
‘I heard about that dreadful woman at your dinner the other night. I mean, we were busy as it happens. But what did you do? I couldn’t believe my ears.’
I can see the wall socket holding the phone connection. If I were to lean over in my chair and yank it out, surely she’d be none the wiser. I could leave it out all day. All week, in fact. Except I couldn’t, because Francesca might ring.
‘Johnny told you, did he?’ I say.
‘No, it was ... Oh God, I can’t remember. Oh, I know who it was, it was Frank’s secretary. Even the ambassador’s wife thinks she’s a slut. Frank’s secretary, I mean. I’m not worried about it because I know good, old Frank. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, that’s one thing you can say about him.’
‘Who told her?’ I say, calmly.
‘God, who did she say it was again?’ She drifts off for a thoughtful moment. ‘Oh, Johnny! You’re right. She’s after him, I believe. Poor old Johnny. You ought to warn him, Lilian. She’s incredible. She’s like one of those cartoon things, garbage bin things, you know, with teeth.’ She makes a few rather vivid gnashing sounds.
I can’t bear her any longer, not her endless prattle, and certainly not her terrifying, bulging-eyed panic. Not today. And I am enraged.
‘Well, look, Margaret, thanks for thinking of me. But I really can’t get Thursdays clear for a while. I’m under pressure with this one.’
‘A deadline,’ she says, perhaps seriously.
‘Absolutely. So, thanks again. I’ll make contact when I come out from under,’ I say. I am ready to put down the receiver.
But she is too quick for me. ‘But what did you do? She sounds really, really dreadful. She just walked out, did she?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t like that. She arrived late, by accident. Got lost. And then had to go early. Just a little awkward for her, that’s all.’ I am so smooth these days.
‘I thought there was some kind of a row or something,’ Margaret says hopefully.
I laugh. I haven’t laughed a good belly laugh, even a pretend one, since I met Francesca. Again. ‘Good Lord, isn’t Johnny hilarious?’ I say. ‘No, no, no. Nothing like that.’ I am playing with my pen. I pick it up and, in the margin of my open writing pad, draw a noughts and crosses grid. ‘Well, do let me know how the walking tours go, Margaret, and thanks for thinking of me.’
