Surviving
Page 18
“Hi, it’s me, Erik. Happy Christmas. Have I got the time right? Is it Christmas yet in Roma?”
“Yes, indeed, and Happy Christmas to you. Where are you?”
“On the Coast. On a beach actually, at a party. Where are you?”
“Just coming down the steps from the Aracoeli. It’s sweet of you to call.”
“Have you been thinking about me?”
“From time to time, quite often really.”
“Miss me?”
All around her were people embracing, kissing on both cheeks, hugging, wishing each other good fortune, and below cars roared past, hooting, towards the river or the Aventino.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
“Oh good, I hoped you’d say that. I might come to Roma in the Spring, what do you say?”
“What do you think? I’ll look forward to it.”
“Must ring off. Love to all.”
“Love.”
Love to you.
She turned and found Tom Durward by her side.
“That was Erik, he seems all right.”
Silently, he accompanied her towards the ghetto and her apartment. They paused in Piazza Mattei by the fountain of the tortoises, and Belinda let her hand slide over the stone thigh of one of the boys holding up a tortoise to drink. They turned into the Via Portico d’Ottavia.
Durward said, “That bar on the corner there … I told you I once stayed with a friend in this street. One morning Jules and I sat outside that bar, we’d come from Spoleto on the night train. We’d gone there for the festival, a bad trip, and on the train back there was an old woman with a hen on a string … straight out of Under the Volcano she was. We were both drunks already and addicted to Malcolm Lowry. So we sat outside that bar for hours – is this boring you? No? – talking Lowry, and coming back always to that phrase that runs through the novel, about the church for the bereaved: she is the virgin for those who have nobody with …”
“The Virgin for those who have nobody with … I like that. It’s so odd they’ve never found the body …”
“Call it providence. Perhaps we’ve survived …”
“The virgin for those who have nobody with …,” she leaned up and kissed Durward on the cheek. “We’ve a lot to be thankful for. Merry Christmas, Tom.”
“Merry Christmas …”
He watched her into the house and stood there for a couple of minutes before he moved away in the direction of Largo Argentina. They were both those who had nobody with, but that’s how it was. He lit a cigar. It had come to him several times on Capri to make something of what they had been through, even a novel. He knew its first line: “You’re mad, Belinda said, you really are, out of your head …”
But it couldn’t be written, and not just because the story couldn’t be told, not now, not while any of them were alive. He didn’t know enough. He couldn’t imagine enough. He couldn’t even imagine that telephone conversation between Belinda and Erik. And what would they have said when they were alone together? It was beyond him, just as it had been beyond him to imagine what went on in Gary’s head. All he knew were externals …
Except … he knew himself, didn’t he? The story as it had been seen and experienced by him?
He drew deep on his toscano.
Greif zur Feder, Kumpel …
Perhaps … perhaps not.
“Nobody go there. Only those who have nobody with …”
FINIS
Copyright
© Allan Massie 2009
First published in June 2009
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,
Glasgow,
Scotland
ISBN 978–1–908251–12–1
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
Typeset by Park Productions
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk