And so we listened. The big important moments for me were these: overhearing my mum being quizzed about the food allergies I had which she had listed as part of the expense of keeping me; the fact that I had worked in milk bars, etc., since I was fourteen seeming to be an excuse for my father to not contribute to my upbringing; my clothing allowances and other expenses being questioned; and there was something about my need for a university degree. I wanted to be a journalist. My father had become a journalist without one, lots of others had, why did I need one? And then that moment, from Dad’s lawyer, ‘I put it to you, your honour, that Miss Jameson is one very spoiled young lady.’
After my mother left the dock it was my turn. I stepped up onto that podium and sat down on that seat, and my father’s lawyer began on me, about me being a bad daughter because I did not try to have contact with him. ‘He didn’t have contact with us!’ I said. And I broke down uncontrollably. I see now that all the years of feeling poor, of hiding when the police and the debt collectors came because he hadn’t paid bills or fines, all the grief from years of knowing his chronic lack of willingness to pay maintenance, the sheer fact of his abandonment, my still then very active denial that I had been in any way affected by my parents’ divorce, all this swamped me. Dad’s lawyer kept going and I couldn’t speak for gasping, heaving, wailing.
I recall our lawyer asking for a stay for me to get myself together, and the judge letting me go, saying there was no need for me to come back. She’d made up her mind.
And of course, in the anteroom, I was a hero. My ‘performance’ was brilliant. Yes, wasn’t it, I agreed. What an actress, me, just like my mother. The judge needed no more evidence. The old man had proven himself to be a cheap scoundrel. He had to pay. Which of course, he never did, but I suspect that was not what we were there for.
And one more pertinent memory: as we were leaving the court, the old man popped over to our camp and suggested we all go for a beer—as if we’d just played a game of footy and he was someone who used to play for our team but now played for the opposition.
We didn’t go.
Lord Byron wrote congenially to his estranged wife, Lady Byron, till his death. That strange dissociation with unpleasantness, there’s a lot of what we these days call narcissist disorder in that. My dad had an extraordinary talent for it that his children would come up against time and time again. Life was a series of games from which he wouldn’t back down till he won. He’d expect everyone to shake hands and be good sports about it. Go for a beer. Even the court case: he probably thought he’d won because he knew he was never going to pay up anyway, and had gone through the motions knowing my mother wouldn’t have the energy, or the heart, to take him back to court again.
He did some terrible things to my brothers and sisters, of the mentally and emotionally tormenting kind—he was not a violent man, but he was a mind-fucker. He just loved to be. We could all trot out a yarn about how he did that, about our own personal episodes.
Allegra Byron and I shared more than just 12 January as our birthday. We shared terrible fathers, and we shared parents who used us as currency in their war against each other. At least I was being given the opportunity to bring my sadness up for examination. Allegra didn’t live long enough to even be aware of hers in any meaningful sense, other than becoming fractious because of it, then dying, I thought, of abandonment and loneliness. Though I didn’t know I had made much more progress than Allegra. As a woman in her forties, only just becoming aware of how much she had pushed the pain of all this down, it was clear that a great part of me had been walking dead for far too many years. The part of me that wanted to believe trustworthy, respectful love was not only possible but my right and due, this is what had been dormant.
What would it take to have me believe in that again? Would it take that kind of love actually turning up? Or could it not turn up until I believed? By asking the question, I could feel the stirrings of a sense of worthiness attempting to come out from under its blanket of early experience. And it didn’t feel bad at all.
16
Piazza del Popolo
Oh, Love! What is it in this world of ours
Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah why
With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers,
And made thy best interpreter a sigh?
Don Juan, Canto III
‘Lord Byron gets up at two.’ That was p.m., according to Percy Shelley, who wrote of visiting his friend in Ravenna:
‘From six to eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning … Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it … (P.S.) I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.’
*
Lord Byron was enjoying life in Ravenna, particularly riding in those glorious pine forests, and the mix of rusticity and sophistication the town had then.
But trouble was brewing.
The early cantos of Don Juan had been savaged in London as ‘filthy and impious’ work from ‘an unrepenting, unsoftened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner’. Lord Byron was unable to brush it off but he stood firm: this was his best writing yet, he believed. While his publisher John Murray pleaded with him to clean up the cantos, Lord Byron would not budge. Teresa was not a fan of the work, either.
Things in the poet’s life were building to their crescendo. Though Alessandro Guiccioli had to have known about the affair—he had a network of spies and snitches throughout the palazzo, as Lord Byron and Teresa had also—it was when he broke into Teresa’s writing desk and found the correspondence between the lovers that tensions reached untenable heights. Teresa’s father, Count Gamba, stepped in, using his own papal connections to secure a decree releasing Teresa from her marriage.
Ravenna then was a papal state and paranoia about civil unrest was setting in. The loose-cannon poet was beginning to be seen as a threat. A subversive underground, the Carbonari, was gaining strength throughout Italy, intent on rising up against Austrian rule. At first unbeknown to Lord Byron, Teresa’s family, the Gambas, were heavily involved in the Carbonari. When he did find out, it was not long before he too became embroiled.
And it would not be long before the Gambas would be banished from Ravenna because of their links, forcing Lord Byron to leave the city too. ‘It is an awful work, this love, and prevents all a man’s projected of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up here),’ he wrote to Thomas Moore. ‘But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and the weakness of one’s own heart, are paramount to these projects, and I can hardly indulge them.’
No man is an island, not even one as enduringly singular in his pursuit of self-interest as Lord Byron. Our relationships impact upon us fundamentally. Our choice of associates can seem to take us in directions we never intended. But we know. At the outset we know. Intuition tells us. The uh-oh, or the ah-ha. For a split second, we are conscious of it. It tells us all we need to know. We choose whether to ignore that knowledge or heed it. Lord Byron knew, perhaps even on a soul level before he met Teresa, that in making a decision to link his destiny to hers, life was going to move in a profoundly different direction. On that deep level he must have wanted that. He committed fully to going with it.
Our choice of relationships and the paths they take us down can have astonishing consequences, revealing aspects of ourselves of which we had no previous idea. Those choices are quite possibly the best choices. They may not deliver the expected outcomes. But like Lord Byron’s choice of Teresa, they can deliver the outcome the soul desires. A true awakening.
; I had found my Ravenna gelateria, at last. It was biologico, that is, organic, so it was, you know, healthy. It was called Dolce Bio and was on busy Via Trieste, quite some distance out of the centre, so the extra cycling out there and back meant I really wasn’t taking on any calories at all. They hand-made their ice cream daily, so the selection was small but the taste immense. For seating, they had planks set up running between pot plants and crates. They faced into the store, appearing like pews, with the reverential all lined up there, slurping, speechlessly giving praise to the man at the refrigerated high altar of goodness. Each time I left there I died a little, knowing it would be the last time I would have that exact creation. Mamma mia. No unnatural nothing and oodles of deliciousness. I forgave the man behind the counter his uncertain standoffishness, which wasn’t his fault. He didn’t get too many non-Italian-speaking, over-excited, quite possibly drooling, bike-riding Australians at his counter, of that I was sure.
My alarm went off at 6.30 a.m. so I could catch the eight o’clock train to Bologna for a day visit. That beautiful university city is a busy one, especially compared to the pace of life in the centre of Ravenna, where cars were limited, many of my days were spent lying on the beach reading, and gelato was back to being my main concern—other than Lord Byron.
I was walking down Bologna’s colonnaded streets between the buzzing and grand university buildings when I realised I was done with sightseeing for now. I was a bit tired of being the unfamiliar element. I wondered about Lord Byron, who had spent his time there, and his wanderlust, his constant need for new experience, new inspiration. I did think he was running. Who knew from what? Probably not from the things everyone believed he was, least of all from the things he might have thought he was.
This I would soon come to know about myself.
I had a ticket to another Ravenna Festival event. I was contemplating not going. It began at 9.30 p.m. and my day in Bologna had taken it out of me. At the Bologna university’s pinacoteca I’d seen a few great Tintoretto works and then I’d been privy to a room full of exemplary Raphaels. I’d stood as close as I could without the alarm going off, trying to see his brush strokes. I honestly couldn’t. The faces, the unfiltered humanity: how did he commit to eternity like that? He made Tintoretto look like an artisan. So I’d had me some art for the day.
But my festival ticket, to the soloists of the Vienna Philharmonic, was a gift from the festival director. So not going would have been rude. I was on my way out the door for some pre-concert dinner when my phone sounded. It was a message from Paul. ‘Just got back to town from the office. Are you free for a bite?’
‘Dolce Bio is my place for gelato too!’ said Paul as we ate a tasty dinner at one of Ravenna’s crazy good trattorie. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t seen you there.’ If he knew the amount of time I’d been spending at the place, his incredulity would have been ten-fold. ‘My friend who took me there is a Sicilian. He says it’s the best he’s had.’
‘Outside Sicily, surely,’ I chimed in.
‘Well, no, he said best, full-stop.’
‘Wow. Do I know gelato, or what?’ I was very impressed with myself.
Paul laughed.
We talked more of the places we’d both been, the experiences we’d had there, two lives lived on the move. But mostly we talked about Italy. When you share a common love of bella Italia, conversation is endless, like her charms.
‘Gosh, look at the time. I have to go to the theatre,’ I said.
‘I must say I’m jealous of you going to a concert,’ he replied. ‘Do you think they’ll have any tickets left?’
We walked up to Ravenna’s ornate Teatro Alighieri where the box office did indeed still have some tickets. Paul bought one and then we went to the concert, sat together and enjoyed it, but enjoyed more our riffing at interval on the theme of what would make a young man pick up the harp and become so brilliant at it as the fellow from the Vienna Phil who was the star of the show. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘I could be brilliant at the harp but I’ve never encountered one. How on earth does one get interested in the harp?’
‘I know. Football or the harp. Exactly when does a young man make that choice? Guitar or football, I understand. Both have a certain swagger to them and you have to choose one or the other to be any good, I suppose. Guitar or the harp I understand, if you happen to be anywhere there’s a harp. Though it’s not an altogether manly instrument. Maybe he began at school playing the guitar and progressed to that big thing with lots of strings in the corner of the music room. Maybe it’s a progressive process to get to the harp.’
‘Like all things in life, really. I wasn’t born liking black coffee. It evolved through choices and exposure,’ I said. ‘I guess like being single at our age. Did either of us choose it? Nope, right?’
Paul was silent.
‘We evolved into that,’ I continued.
‘Hey, would you like a prosecco?’ he offered.
‘No thanks, just a water,’ I said. ‘But I’ll happily watch you drink one.’
After the concert we strolled to nearby Piazza del Popolo, Ravenna’s main town square, which has been called one of the finest in Italy, a much-loved space with layers of the city’s history in its exquisite architecture, and where late into the evening, especially if it’s warm, the Ravennese love to congregate, stroll, cycle, talk, sit. We walked to a place there where they served gelato out of a hole in the wall. It was no Dolce Bio, but it was convenient. And still good. Hey, it was Italian ice cream in Italy.
And then, with a kiss on the cheek for me from him, we parted, him going in one direction, me the other. He was lovely, I thought as I walked home. Did I have expectations? I told myself no. It was all so easy and comfortable. It was, I thought, a result of the way I was now presenting to the world—a sign that I’d shifted.
The next afternoon, Luciana came to the table outside my apartment with things for tea. No language, she said, so let’s have tea. We managed some good conversation though. Charades, my disjointed Italian and Luciana’s determination to tell me her stories were a potent mix. She made this crazy concoction in her cup of massive chunks of lemon and weak tea and dissolved biscuits. ‘Zuppa di te,’ she said, and we both cracked up. Tea soup. She told me she was off to a wedding in Tuscany on the weekend. That the little shih tzu was not eating, which was news to me because he may have been a bit blind but he had the olfactory abilities of a bloodhound and every night I cooked chicken, steak or lamb, he was sharing half my dinner. Perhaps this was why he was not eating the dry food Luciana fed him. And she told me that since I’d been in Ravenna, compared to how I had looked when I arrived, I was looking healthier and happier. She told me in Italian and I understood.
Later that night I went to see Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray, which was in town as part of the festival. It was a powerful take on hedonism, a reminder of how you could be enjoying yourself but if you were only into the beauty of your own existence with no eye on the bigger picture, it could easily slip into dark chaos. Intending to keep God close was no insurance policy because you could kid yourself you were doing that. Honest self-examination was the only failsafe, I thought.
After the show I went back to the hole-in-the-wall gelato place, put my two euro in the tray and ordered from the same woman who had served Paul and me.
‘Where your husband?’ the lady said as she scooped. I laughed. ‘You his wife from England? He say his wife no come. And here you are.’
I found the strength to nod and laugh again. And then I sat down on one of the benches in Piazza del Popolo to eat my gelato. But for the first time ever, I had no appetite for it.
Deep down somewhere I had known this. Though I could have misunderstood the woman, and though Paul wore no ring and only spoke in singular terms of his experiences, which family people tended not to do, instead using the more inclusive ‘we’, his decision to live in a serviced apartment in Ravenna and his wistfulness at all the things I had done in the city had made me fleetingly suspect he
might have flown home on weekends. ‘It’s so sad. I go to work, come home and don’t really get to experience all these things,’ he had said. The suspicion had arisen. I’d batted it off, choosing to ignore it.
Some little boys were playing soccer in the piazza and I sat watching them, out late at night, running like their lives depended on it, their wayward kicks no cause for ridicule from their friends. They would improve. They all knew that. The ball would go near grown men who would kick it back to the little ones, knowing it too. A communion from man to boy.
One little guy, he wasn’t allowed to play. I noticed him as he stood, in his high-hiked short pants, watching the big boys, his hands on his hips, his little bowl-cut head watching every curve of the ball. He didn’t give in though. He ran with them, followed them, got a touch when he could, when someone was kicking for the imaginary goal post and it was the more the merrier along the imaginary defence line.
Then all of the older kids bar the one who owned the ball had to go home. And the little kid got to kick back and forth then with the ball’s owner. A girl all dressed in pink with a ruffled skirt and cardigan, and only very recently walking so she still needed to hold her father’s hands to do so, wanted a kick. The boys let her. She squealed every time she laid her foot on the ball. She kicked better than she walked. It was sweet watching the little boy with the high pants and the bowl cut. He wanted to keep playing with the bigger boy. He included the little girl but he was itching to keep kicking as big as he could go. You could see how torn he was. His heart was on his sleeve.
And then the kid who owned the ball left the square and went home. And the little bowl-cut boy put his hands in his pockets and wandered off, despondent.
That little boy, he was trying and trying and trying. Trying to be what he wanted to be in this world, wanting desperately to be part of life and have his turn. His little lost face on the sidelines and his eagerness when he was included, when he was thrown a bone, that’s what it was about him that ultimately made me see the truth about myself.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 17
