Lettice & Victoria

by Susanna Johnston

  An attitude crisis attacked her. Edgar was nice enough – but was it because he was the only man to have crossed her path in months? Puzzled, lit up and aghast amongst treasures, she touched the legs of the maestro’s piano and blinked in delight. There beside her was his aspirin bottle, his spectacles, his white and waxy death mask lying snug on the pillow where his true, living head had lain during final hours. A dedicated smoker he had died from a cancerous growth in his throat. Victoria decided to stop smoking now that things were looking up. Edgar stood beside her and made comments. He was enjoying himself, running a hand over a mother-of-pearl screen; a present to the maestro from the Japanese government to mark the opening performance of Madama Butterfly, as the guide called it. Behind the piano, bones of members of the Puccini family were walled up. All squeezed in somehow. The group filed past the family monument that held them tight and dead behind it; then into the gun room. Boots for every type of weather, macs, cartridge bags and guns took up most of the space. The visitors could hardly inch in and Edgar’s body was close against Victoria’s. Victims of sport in glass cases stared out to the lake – expressions curiously forgiving. A great crested grebe, two pheasants, a cormorant, tufted ducks. Edgar recoiled. His father was an ornithologist of acclaim. There was also an owl, beside it a bag or two of feathers and the odd loose wing. But a good set of antlers and a mothy deer’s head cheered him up. Jammed tight, in corners of the room, were clusters of enormous guns and rifles; every shape and size.

  Back in the main room where the tour had started, the guide took charge. He led them to a portrait of the great composer. It was surrounded by framed photographs and original manuscripts. He halted under the gilded frame, his concentration deep, and with a chuckle pointed to the face inches above him and almost identical to his own, ‘Bel uomo.’ Identical, too, to the face of the souvenir seller. He explained with a shrug that his mother had been a serving maid in the house, his father the gardener. The disapproving face of Puccini’s sister, Soeur Angelica, a nun in nun’s habit, hung alongside. Victoria glanced at Edgar and wondered how much the nun had known of her famous brother’s philandering.

  The guide, in full swing, held forth again in faulty English, ‘The maestro had four great loves and they came in this order. Smoking. Women. Shooting, Music. Music was the least in importance to him’

  Hints of the guide’s inherited lechery as Edgar stood by made her feel shaky and unsure. Shyness mingled with distaste and a modicum of desire confused and frightened her. Confused and frightened her even more, later, in the car park where many more Puccini lookalikes scampered in every direction. Edgar almost leering by her side.

  In fear of Laurence’s certain grumpiness, they drove back to the villa. Edgar told her that he had one more free day. If only Laurence would allow him to stay for another night, there might be the chance of one more sightseeing trip. He appealed to Victoria. ‘I’m afraid I’ve made you late for tea but aren’t you rather over-restricted?’

  ‘I know. It’s hopeless. I handle it badly. I’m awfully wet.’

  ‘Perhaps I should visit you more often. May I?’

  That evening Laurence, in his doubtful blindness, was unaware of conspiracy.

  ‘I hate to introduce a sad subject,’ he picked over his omelette, ‘but what time do you have to leave in the morning?’

  Her face was hot and her voice reached concert pitch as Victoria made her first stand.

  ‘Laurence. Can Edgar stay for another night?’

  ‘Very well but I can’t have you distracted again. Tomorrow he will have to look after himself.’

  Edgar had to go for a drive on his own during that day but in the evening he kissed Victoria at bedtime. Before breakfast the next morning he was on his way.

  Both Victoria’s mind and body were riddled with unedifying torment – agitation almost overpowered by mortification. She did not forget the kiss. That had almost been exciting. Professional if mechanical. Not that she found Edgar sensitive or full of heart. Far from it but might he do? In her thoughts for the future, nothing else was ever likely to offer. He liked her. He had kissed her. He had a job. He had a flat in London. She counted assets as she fell asleep.

  There wasn’t much doubt when, a week later, a letter stamped in Dubrovnic was handed to her by Elena.

  ‘Nothing here to touch the magic of Puccini’s lake. But then part of the magic was the company…’

  He asked if he might return for a night or two on his way back. There was a chance of swinging it with his production department; printer ink in her neighbourhood might be of interest to them. Could she swing it with Laurence?

  She lost her nerve.

  Conspiring with Elena they booked him a room at a guest house further up the hill, and each night after Mahler, interminable on the terrace, she stole away and walked to the end of the drive where Edgar, having made his report on printing ink, waited in his hired car before driving her back to his pensione. She was shy and unnerved but allowed herself to be swept along.

  During the first night there was a peculiar storm. To start with, only lightning and wind; no rain or thunder. The lightning was pale and occupied the entire space of the bedroom window, occasionally flickering. It was not lightning as Victoria knew it. It had never been like that at any stage during her time at the villa. It was as if electricity had been turned on, powered by a faltering generator, to illuminate the sky. It was September and figs were ripe and splitting open. On a terrace outside the window of the pensione the wind whipped the sea and bashed at trees so that figs sploshed to the ground. A herd of cattle dropping tiny cow pats. Then came an assault on the eardrums. Dense and deafening thunder. A million buckets emptied from the sky. Amplified crackles; louder and louder. Edgar went to the window and Victoria wished her underclothes had not been threadbare. She kicked them under a chair. Window and doorframes were ill fitting and the room was bright.

  They lay very close and he told her of his family; his gifted ornithologist father, his elegantly refined mother and the atmosphere of tasteful peace at the tower where they lived on the borders of England and Wales. By the skin of its teeth the tower was in England. It was all that remained of a mediaeval fortress half converted in Victorian times. The main floor of the tower was used as a darkroom. Above it and reached by a winding stairway in the thickness of the walls, were two floors used as overflow bedrooms in the summer – uninhabited in winter months. The rest of living was taken care of in the Victorian wing. Under the tower there was a dark vault housing home-produced wine, elderflower and dandelion syrups. Lettice and Roland had bought it when the children were young and had renamed it ‘The Old Keep’.

  They planted lavender bushes and laid out brick paths leading to the riverbank. His mother, Edgar told her with some reverence, spent a lot of her time writing letters – inviting intellectual people to stay. Victoria had nothing to exchange with him – her mother, inebriated and wan, her only kin. She was in his bed, deprived of self-control, in a hair-raising storm in a shabby pensione on a piece of isolated coast and hearing tales of his home life. He spoke in a flat voice and, at fixed intervals, cleared his throat but Victoria revelled in closeness after the emptiness of her days and nothing else offered. She was hungry to belong to someone and didn’t mind who. They indulged in violent passion. Edgar was twenty-six and balding slightly on top and near the back of his head. In London, he told her, he owned a basement flat in Battersea. She hungered to see it; kitchen, books and bedroom. Also the tower and the irreproachable parents. She thought of Lettice’s absurdly affected letter and feared there might be a flaw in their unity of vision. Still. Mothers didn’t matter. Thirsty for the opportunity and drunk with the chance to rescue herself from spinsterhood, she agreed to marry Edgar as soon as she could extricate herself from Laurence’s grip. ‘One day,’ she told him, ‘but I have no idea when that will be.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ he promised with a crooked smile and sadness printed on his face.

  The next day, as she
soaked in a marble bath, feet propped in front of her on a wooden rack, she counted her toes. Did she own all ten of them, she wondered. Were they soon to become the property of Edgar? Maybe one of them, the little one on its way to market, would be kidnapped by his mother.

  How was she to break it to Laurence? How was she to find a successor? How was Edgar to break it to Lettice – to disturb the tranquillity of her dreamy days, poetry and flowers?

  She came very near to funking it.

  Begging her by letter, as he daily did, to return, Edgar barely touched on the matter of his family’s reaction.

  He suggested a secluded wedding; just the two of them and some sort of witness. Victoria was relieved. Her mother, scarcely capable of smiling let alone handling a celebration or being able to afford one, was off the hook.

  Just then the poor tipsy thing became seriously ill overnight. A neighbour sent Victoria a telegram and she had, willy-nilly, Laurence or no Laurence, to return to London, Edgar or no Edgar. He met her at the station and loads fell off her back. A male companion acted as a painkiller.

  Edgar behaved with masterly correctitude, seeing to details of death when the sad lush, destined never to become his mother-in-law, expired.

  Notwithstanding his help during difficult days, Victoria already looked forward to returning to Italy and freeing herself again from Edgar. It hit her that no sooner had she escaped from her last type of captivity than she started to hanker to return to it.

  She entered into the depression of mourning as she looked around her mother’s flat. It was up three floors in a house on an outlying London street. Many stairs for a little drunk lady, whose name had been Lilias, to tread. It was very small – one bedroom, a dismal bathroom and a kitchen that consisted of no more than a sliced-off corner of the room. It was all, though, very neat and tidy. No empty bottles in spite of the alcohol that Lilias had poured daily into her small body. Several pairs of spectacles were neatly snapped into their cases. Very few sheets and towels were methodically stacked and shelves were clean. The emptiness made Victoria frighteningly sad.

  The pair decided to spend some nights there as they arranged to have a few pieces of battered furniture removed to Edgar’s flat in Battersea where they were to live after they were married. No souvenirs. No photographs of her as a child. Clothes, tinned soups and a near-perished hot-water bottle to be binned. Dangerous to use a hot-water bottle when drunk.

  Edgar was respectful to Victoria and they both strained to re-enact the passion they had shared together in the thunderstorm by the sea. He was courteous and assured but did not refer to any earlier courtships. Perhaps he had patronised many a brothel. Something lacked and his limbs were abnormally cold, particularly in the early mornings. One evening he handed her an engagement ring. It had been supplied by Lettice – sent with a note to Edgar saying, ‘For my firstborn to place on the finger of his lady love. I was given it by a disappointed suitor. I suppose I should have returned it but I’d already broken his heart and didn’t want to rub salt in the wound.’ Victoria didn’t care for it. As far as she could make out, it represented the entwined symbols of art and music – a quill pen entangled with a lute or something.

  Victoria had involved herself, once or twice and hurriedly before, with men but never to the extent of spending a night with one – or of making a promise to marry. She watched him as he undressed – near to her in the small room. He unhooked a stretch of cloth that went across the top of his trousers before undoing fly buttons, one by one. Zips were just coming into vogue but Edgar was old-fashioned. Why fly? Fly leaf? Something that’s covered. Maybe they attracted flies. She disliked the flagrant attention paid to the penis’s position. Women exposed no urges in their dress.

  They moved, with the help of an odd-job man with a van, to Edgar’s basement flat in Battersea. It turned out to be to her liking – having the bonus of a small garden at the back. The rooms were reasonably large and well furnished. Needlework pictures, a few Kelim rugs, pictures with maple-wood frames, some embroidered cushions, an upright piano with candlesticks attached. Probably all provided by his mother. There were, too, bird pictures painted by his father – skilled but spindly and lifeless. Edgar, with awkwardness, showed her round. There was a little room at the back of the flat where a cot would fit with ease. There might be a nursery school nearby. Limbs cold or not, she had made up her mind to marry Edgar. His limbs might get hotter. Her reason slipped in every direction.

  One evening the telephone rang and Edgar signalled her to answer it. ‘I hail and greet thee, my belle fille to be. Would that we could meet during your days in England. So very sorry about your dear mama. The Way of All Flesh – one of my very favourite books. I’m folded here in my canopy of moss and ivy and, mainly because of the hatefulness of our financial position, just cannot get to the metropolis for the time being.’ She clearly found it a struggle to be picturesque as she returned to the topic of the engagement ring and the suitor’s heart that she had broken. Victoria half listened as Lettice told of her hopes of a meeting. ‘Edgar tells me that you will go back to the great man of letters for a spell. What a privilege to have dwelt in a literary environment. Books! We have far too many of course.’

  Victoria hushed her, saying that she much looked forward to visiting The Old Keep – saying it as she yearned to be back amongst the olives, Laurence’s dead wife’s ashes, Elba wine, Elena, Dante and pine trees.

  She had spent her life blocking things out. She had the knack. Somewhere she sensed shame but hid it from herself for she was curiously exhilarated by the prospect of new people (even Lettice), new places, a baby, a home, a kind man to trouble himself with her. She hoped not to trouble him.

  From London, Victoria wrote to Laurence to explain what had happened and to say that there were things to be seen to and, desperately sorry as she was, she had to delay her return to the villa. Then, when she did return, it was only to be for a short time. She was to marry Edgar Holliday as soon as he, Laurence, was able to spare her. Meanwhile, she was searching high and low, but not too low, for a substitute and would return to her post for as many weeks as it took them to find a replacement.

  For some reason, maybe because the situation almost suited her, Victoria had only faintly queried the motive for Edgar’s speedy proposal of marriage. He barely knew her. It crossed her mind that he might have some vital cylinder in his make-up missing; had been underfed and stunted by his absurd mother. Something wonky in his outlook. Possibly he proposed to every girl he met. Possibly he had been rejected fifty times – or more. A misfit with stifled emotions. What didn’t occur to her was to wriggle out of it.

  Laurence, assisted by an English-speaking neighbour, replied to her letter, sending it, as planned, care of Edgar’s flat.

  ‘My dear Victoria. This has come as a terrible shock. Firstly, of course, I refer to the death of your dear mother. Then I come to a more serious matter. That of your intention to marry. I hope you are entering into this of your own accord; that you are exercising your own free will. You were, after all, very happy here. Are you under any unreasonable pressure? You know the rules, don’t you? Twenty-four of everything. No young lady in my day would have considered anything less. Starting with twenty-four handkerchiefs. I look forward to seeing you here again as soon as possible and I, for one, believe in very long engagements.’

  Before the inner myth that she had woven into herself exploded, she went back to Italy with the ring on her finger and hoped that once she had a base with Edgar she would take proper painting lessons. Go to art classes; have a baby. Edgar was kind and said he loved her. Seeing her off at the station, Edgar outlined plans. He was to take out an open-dated, special licence and be there and ready to marry her as soon as she returned. He planned to explain to his mother that the wedding was to be private on account of recent death. Then there might be a party at Christmas time.

  She fingered the ring.

  Tears trickling through slits, Elena carried in the breakfast tray and cli
pped back mosquito nets around the bed although it was late in the season for such insects. So. The signorina was going to be married. To that handsome fellow she had spent nights with at the time of the thunderstorm. She and Dante had already waited for four years. Dante had suffered once more in the storm. It had been too rough for fish but more sea horses had been washed up. Shoals of them.