Since Dan’s death she was always in trouble, one way or another, with her children. Among her many reasons for missing her husband was a shocked and growing awareness that even one’s children attack the vulnerable. Maybe, she reflected, especially one’s children. Maybe it’s some obscure aspect of evolutionary survival.
It had never occurred to her to be afraid of being a solitary woman. She and Dan had enjoyed a shared independence, neither demanding total attention from the other; relishing each other’s company, with the inevitable ups and downs, when they were together. She knew when he died how badly she would miss him. What she had not calculated was that his presence had provided a certain safety. Although she didn’t like admitting it nowadays, she often felt bullied. Bullied and, this was harder to acknowledge, faintly despised.
‘I’d ask you to mine,’ Prue said, ‘but my mother’s coming and –’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ Frances interrupted. ‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Why not say you’ve been invited somewhere else?’
‘Where? They know all my friends. They’d ring me there, or Anna would anyway, and find I wasn’t.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Prue said, becoming bored of the subject. ‘Tell them you have a secret lover or something.’
Although Frances had taken this last suggestion as one of Prue’s flippancies, the idea strangely took hold. Why shouldn’t she have a secret lover? She was only fifty-five and looked, she’d been told, ten years younger. Men, she had been assured, still found her attractive. That she had not found any man she had met since Dan’s death sufficiently attractive to settle with was neither here nor there. A fictional lover could be constructed. It might also, she began to think, encourage a change of attitude in her children.
She spent some time envisaging this phantom paramour. For a while she toyed with the image of a younger man, but she was a woman of good sense and reason told her a younger man would breed in her insecurity. No, the new lover would be in his sixties. Grey haired, but once dark (as she had once said to Prue, men had to be dark), well dressed, but not over concerned with fashion. Quite possibly he was French, or Italian, or even, throwing fancy further to the winds, Australian. The one time she had contemplated infidelity to Dan it was with an Australian. It had left her with the view – probably a prejudice, she thought – that Australian men were more direct than the English. And braver. Any new consort, she decided, must be brave.
She spent an enjoyable time considering the question of her lover’s profession. An architect? That would work well with her own profession of industrial designer. A politician was out because that would entail a public life too easy to disprove. But he would need to hold strong political views. Left-wing ones, certainly. She settled finally on an art historian, with a university background. That gave them shared tastes and would allow scope for travel.
His marital status was easier. He couldn’t be a bachelor, as that would give rise to questions from Anna about his sexuality. It might be best if he was a widower to match her widowhood. Or at least long-since divorced.
By the time her daughter rang again Frances’s lover was promisingly fleshed out. He was half Scottish (on his father’s side), half Italian, a former professor in Milan (not as traceable as, say, Glasgow or Edinburgh), and she had met him at an exhibition at the Courtauld. She had foolishly left her umbrella at the café table where he was also taking coffee and he, noticing the omission, had courteously come after her with it. It was that unusual jade-green umbrella she’d bought in Paris. They had found they were headed for the same bus stop, and the same bus, the number 9, and one thing had led to another.
‘But, Mum, you’ve never mentioned him.’
‘Well, darling, I wasn’t sure, you know, that it was serious and I don’t necessarily tell you everything about my life.’
There was a pause at the other end of the phone and, safely obscured by distance, Frances smiled.
‘But who is he? Is he safe?’
So like her daughter, who, for all her mother’s competence as a driver, still refused to allow her to transport her children. ‘Oh, very safe.’ This was going to be good fun. ‘He’s an art historian. He’d been at the Courtauld to advise on a drawing.’
‘And is he married?’ Anna’s voice conveyed a tincture of reproval.
‘Of course not, darling. I’m not a man snatcher.’ A slight hint of offence in her own tone seemed appropriate. ‘He’s divorced.’
‘You should be careful with divorced men. He might just be using you.’
‘The decree was seventeen years ago. I imagine he’s got over it.’
‘Does he have children?’
Stupid of her. She’d not worked out his position on children. Swiftly, hoping there was no perceptible pause to betray any indecision, she offered up ‘A son and a daughter, but they’re both long grown up.’
‘Like you, then?’
‘I suppose,’ Frances said, wondering if it was a strain of jealousy in Anna’s voice that she was detecting. ‘I’ve not met them,’ she added, not wishing to hurt her daughter by displaying too much interest in her lover’s offspring.
‘Well,’ Anna said. ‘I suppose he could come here too. What’s he called, by the way?’
‘That’s sweet of you, darling, but we thought we might go away.’ She hadn’t quite settled on a name for her new companion and was hoping for more time. Names are important.
Luckily, Anna decided that she had to go, only adding that she hoped Jacob wouldn’t be worried at this news.
Jacob, however, was relieved, she guessed, to have the prospect of his mother off his hands. He asked fewer questions than his elder sibling, only inquiring where she planned to go.
And ‘Venice’ was her surprising answer, surprising only because she had hitherto had thoughts of somewhere like the Lake District.
‘Will you be okay with that?’
She knew why he was asking. It was the last holiday she’d taken with Dan. It was there that the first mortal symptoms had declared themselves and they had flown home early to a doctor to receive the dread news.
But the destination with her new lover had been spoken unconsciously, so she assumed it must be right.
‘Perfectly. It’s time to go back.’
‘Well, good luck with it, Mum. We’ll see you before you go?’
Neither of her children had pressed Frances about her lover’s name, which was as well, she reflected, as she waited at the quayside at Marco Polo Airport for the boat to take her to San Stae. She herself had still not settled on a name. But it would come to her, she felt sure, as she passed these intimate days with him. She would get to know him better as they walked together, visited churches, and galleries, shopped, ate and made love. She had to mentally shake herself a little when she realized she was looking forward to the last.
She had decided an apartment would suit her better than a hotel. She could cook there and lounge about in more freedom. And she and whatever his name was needed a degree of space. An apartment was less likely to have an en suite bathroom with thin walls, which might lead to embarrassment in the early days of intimacy.
And it was a good choice, she reflected, as the young bearded Italian showed her round. The apartment was spacious, with two bathrooms – a blessing for any relationship, however familiar – and two bedrooms hung with heavy Venetian fabrics, and over-welcoming, capacious beds. The young man advised about the heating system, the bewildering complexities of the rubbish disposal, warned her about a sticking shutter and then regretted, in perfect English, that he ‘must dash’.
The Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio is one of Venice’s most domestic areas, where children out of school still play hopscotch and blithely shoot footballs against the goal of the billowing walls of the charming thirteenth-century church. On bright winter days old men, splendid in copious and colourful scarfs, lounge in the sun reading their newspapers while mothers sit by them and chat, rocking their equally well-muffled babies. And the gods were
being kind to her, for it was just such a brilliant golden day as she strolled through the campo taking the measure of her environment.
There was a supermarket, a baker’s exuding delicious smells of vanilla – and why, for heaven’s sake, was that never possible in England? – and, by a bridge in a nearby calle, a wine shop which, for two euros, decanted wine from barrels into plastic bottles (one euro extra for the bottle). What more could she ask?
She would buy litres of wine from the Veneto and eat exactly what she felt like: artichokes, large tomatoes, little frizzy greens, salty provolone cheese, walnut bread, chestnuts, dense black grapes and leafy clustered clementines. There would be no question of turkey.
Deciding to inspect the church, she was startled to be commanded to pay. ‘Per pregare?’ she inquired and was grudgingly admitted without having to cough up the tourist tariff. Well, but she did want to pray. She wanted to give thanks for the excellent outcome of her lucky inspiration. If there was a God, he deserved her thanks.
A Byzantine cross painted with a mournful twisted Christ hung suspended in the dim air before the altar and dutiful to her implied promise she sat head bowed awhile before getting up to examine the altarpiece behind. A badly lit notice informed her it was the Virgin with Saints by Lorenzo Lotto (c. MDXLVI).
‘The only Lotto altar left in Venice,’ a voice behind her said.
A man. A man with greying hair, possibly in his sixties.
‘Yes?’
‘Sadly, because he is, I think, one of the best artists Venice produced. You know this church?’
‘Not really. I’ve just arrived. But I like it.’
‘It may be the oldest in Venice. Its foundations are ninth century.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve read nothing about it yet.’
‘It’s certainly to my mind one of the most agreeable. Come and see the column that Ruskin admired.’
He took her to inspect a dark green marble column topped with the curling ram’s horn ionic capital.
‘I like Ruskin,’ she said. She seemed to have lost her usually rich vocabulary.
‘Yes. He knew his own mind.’
‘That’s good.’ She must sound like an idiot.
‘Essential to know one’s mind, I believe.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I have spent years getting to know my own. You are staying near here?’
‘In an apartment just around the corner.’
‘Me too. I’m visiting my daughter, who had the good sense to marry a Venetian and the even better sense to live in this sestiere. My son, on the other hand, has married an American who lives in Kansas but you can’t win ’em all. May I give you coffee? The place in the campo is pricey but you do get the sun.’
‘He’s called Alec,’ Frances told her daughter the following week when she rang to inquire about the holiday. ‘His daughter lives in Venice so he knows it well. And of course he’s an art historian so –’
‘That’s great. As long as you’re sure, Mum.’
‘Well, I wasn’t,’ Frances said gravely. ‘These things take time to develop. But –’
‘Spending a holiday together,’ Anna agreed. ‘It does sort of –’
‘Absolutely,’ Frances interrupted, wishing to deflect any trespass on her wholly delightful escapade and shelving the moment when the companion she had spent those delightful days with might have to disappear. ‘It gives a kind of substance to one’s vague fantasizing.’
Vacation
VACATION: A period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation; the act or an instance of vacating.
‘What the hell does she want from you?’ Beth asked for the third time. Hamish was negotiating the car on to the M1. The start of their holiday had been delayed by the lateness of the hour at which they had finally got to bed. Never mind sleep.
‘Darling,’ Hamish’s mother had written. ‘Stefan died suddenly last Thursday. We cremated him today. May I throw myself on your mercy and come? Blessings, Una.’
‘Why now?’ Beth had asked. ‘For Christ’s sake, why must she come now? And why “Blessings”? She’s not remotely religious.’
‘Because she’s my mother. Because I’m her only son and there’s no one else. Because I can’t just say, “Sorry, Ma, we’re on holiday” when there’s room for her to come too.’
‘Hardly “room”. Two bedrooms and I’ll bet they’re tiny. And you never call her “Ma”.’
‘That’s not what you said when we rented it!’ Women, Hamish thought, always redefined experience to fit their argument.
‘Why not say, “Sorry, we’re on holiday”? She sent you away when it suited her. She didn’t give a damn about Stefan – only his obscene bank balance. She didn’t even ask you to the funeral. It was a marriage of convenience for her. You’ve always said so.’
Hamish’s father had died of leukaemia when his only child was eighteen months. Barely a year later, his widow remarried a Swiss banker thirty years her senior. When Hamish was not quite five he was sent back to England as a boarder at Stefan’s old prep school. Thereafter, the banker stumped up any finance needed to keep his wife’s only child well dressed, well educated and at a distance.
‘Because I can’t.’
The Sancerre he had brought home because it was Beth’s favourite was finished and she had resorted to a bottle of cheap Spanish red. She had started to drink more, Hamish noted.
‘I don’t think I’ll come.’ Beth spoke with the careful diction of the not-yet-quite drunk. ‘You go. Take “Ma” with you with my blessings. I’ll stay here.’
‘Bethy!’
‘I loathe it when you call me that when we’re having a row.’
While Beth was in the bath, Hamish rang his mother in Zurich. Beth heard him say, ‘I’ll pick you up at Glasgow Airport,’ and then something she couldn’t catch.
‘What did you tell her?’ She was out of the bath and towelling herself dry. She was a handsome woman, Hamish thought, yet he felt no desire for her. He wished he did. In his heart of hearts (Wherever that is! Beth would say) he didn’t like his assistant Nicky, the girl he seemed to be having an affair with. But Nicky had what Beth had never had: the ability to make him feel he was lucky to be with her. Beth was stoical and faithful. Fidelity, for reasons hard to account for, is rarely sexually attractive.
‘I told her that she could stay the first few days with us and then I would find her a hotel.’
‘There is no hotel on the island.’
‘We can ship her over to the mainland. Come on, Bethy, what’s done cannot be undone.’
‘That’s Macbeth,’ Beth said. ‘Not exactly a comforting reference. And don’t call me that.’ She pulled on her pyjamas and climbed into bed. Turning her back to him, she said, ‘It’s not true, anyway, about Macbeth. It’s never too late. That’s the point. It’s called irony.’
Near Doncaster, she brought up the subject of his mother again.
‘How can she do this? Ignore you for thirty-odd years and just pick you up when it suits her. It’s a fucking cheek.’
‘I dislike the fashion of saying “fuck” at every turn,’ Beth had recently opined at a dinner party. ‘I prefer to use the word accurately.’
Hamish rejected the notion of reminding her of this. Watching, in his rear mirror, a juggernaut lumbering alongside them in the next lane, he was assailed by a desire to pull over into its path and be smashed to smithereens. ‘I wouldn’t say she ignored me, exactly.’
‘What would you say, then?’
‘Beth, I’m driving. I don’t want to have an accident talking about my mother.’
‘There you are,’ Beth said. ‘That says it all.’
South-west of Oban, they crossed an elderly grey stone bridge, which, since the eighteenth century, has connected the mainland to Seil, one of the Slate Islands off the west coast of Argyll. They were met at the island’s northerly point by Andy, who was to ferry them across to the tiny island off Seil’s northern tip.
Andy’s nav
y wool hat was jammed over a flat freckled face, which bore, Hamish detected, an expression of impertinent resentment. His hair was the orange of a ginger tom. Under Andy’s direction, Hamish backed the car into a dangerously narrow space, hitting a bollard and badly pitting the back bumper.
Andy began to sling their luggage into the motorboat, which was littered with damp cigarette packets, silver paper and Mars-bar wrappers. A pair of old binoculars lay on one of the seats. He handed down his passengers carelessly, started up the motor and they sheered violently off, knocking Hamish sideways.
‘Oh, Hamish, look, seals.’
‘Where?’
‘Over there, by those rocks.’
‘Be seals, all right,’ said Andy, nodding as if he owned them. ‘Here.’ He handed Beth the binoculars. His pale, red-rimmed eyes creased cannily as if he had already reckoned up her husband’s failings and was offering himself as an ally.
The smooth round heads of the seals looked avuncular. Beth pictured herself swimming beside their sleek bodies with the cold Atlantic water annihilating her limbs. The sea was for ever. Nothing of men and women, of humankind, ever was.
‘Here we are, then,’ Andy said, hacking up a gobbet of phlegm and spitting it into the water as the engine cut out and he steered the boat towards a jetty. It looked like a child’s drawing, Beth thought, a few bars of wood thrown together by an unpractised hand.
‘Watch how you go,’ Andy said, as Hamish bashed his shin on the anchor while making his way towards the prow.
He dismissed the offer of Andy’s lobster-red hand and lunged on to the jetty’s slimy surface. ‘Shit!’
‘Said ’twas slippery.’ Unvarnished delight glinted for a moment over the entrenched resentment. Hamish decided that he detested Andy and would not tip him for the ride.
But Beth was already fishing out a fiver from her purse. ‘Lift’s part of the cottage rental,’ Andy said, trousering the note. ‘Take the bags up, will I?’ He began manhandling the two suitcases and the assorted bags on to a rusting supermarket trolley.
‘For Christ’s sake, watch it!’ Hamish shouted as his case toppled over, and simultaneously Beth called out, ‘Don’t worry!’ Andy rescued the case, spat, rubbed in the seagull droppings with his sleeve and began to push the trolley determinedly up a track that ran through waves of mauve and pink and purple.
The Boy Who Could See Death Page 13
