by Alen Mattich
“I read and took long walks on the Heath. It’s a lovely place, easy to get used to,” he said.
He’d indulged himself. He’d had more time to be alone with his thoughts over the past month than at any time since childhood. He didn’t explore so much as let the Heath swallow him; he disappeared along the forest paths, through the meadows, past the ponds fringed with willows, where hardy swimmers almost inevitably twice his age braved the early morning chill. His ruminations kept company with the dog-walkers, birdwatchers, joggers. He’d walk to Kenwood, the grand country house at the top of the Heath, and take in the bucolic vistas. Keats’s house was nearby, and he reacquainted himself with the Romantic’s poetry.
He’d filled his mind with music — Wagner and Bruckner, Bach and Brahms, and always Beethoven. And with trashy novels. They worked best. He’d never had much patience with television. There was never anything worth watching in Yugoslavia.
Soon, ex-Yugoslavia. Would he ever go back?
“Isn’t it just.” Harry looked him over with soft eyes.
“What?” he asked, drawn out of his thoughts.
“The Heath.”
“Yes, yes, it is.”
A waiter discreetly interrupted them, and they ordered.
“I’m sorry about the past week. I had to shove all my appointments into when I got back. Stacked-up obligations are how you have to pay for having nice times.”
“Is this an obligation?”
She stared at him hard. “No. This is pleasure.”
“So, how many of you were there?”
“Oh, there were always at least a dozen, and for about four days there were nearly thirty if you count the babies. I mean, it’s a big house, but that was a squash.”
“Were they all old friends?”
“Nearly all. One or two newish boyfriends or girlfriends, but they were mostly out of place and got ignored. And the kids, of course, but they don’t count.”
“Where exactly is it?”
“It’s off the west coast of France. It’s where the smart French go on holiday. All the nouveau money goes to Saint-Tropez, but the old money goes west. It’s much less spoilt and much more chic.”
“I’ll have to try it sometime.”
“You’d fit right in.”
They drained their glasses of kir and their first courses arrived. Della Torre figured he’d have been able to eat for the best part of a week in Zagreb on the money his scallops cost. It didn’t matter. Strumbić was paying.
“When I got to the office, there were about a hundred messages from your Mr. Strumbić-Vodka. Apparently he was very irritated but not entirely comprehensible.”
“I know, you’d said.”
“Sorry. I forgot I saw a bit of you this week. It’s been such a blur.”
“His English isn’t very good.”
“It isn’t, is it. His Italian’s passable, though,” Harry said.
“Just as well you speak it.”
“I tried calling the number in Mestre to get a message through to him, but there was no answer.”
“I guess he’s onto us.”
“I suppose so. We’ll have forty thousand pounds next week, though. He won’t know about that until he gets his bank statement and my letter. I won’t send it until it’s time for the last instalment. So how long do we keep going?”
“Not much longer.”
“Next week? I’ll get the furniture moved into my father’s barn, but I don’t want that to happen until we’re about to leave.”
He smiled, but it worried him that Strumbić was getting anxious. Della Torre had thought they’d have at least six months clear of him — that the investigation by Messar would more or less pin Strumbić down. Strumbić knew the UDBA would be keeping close tabs on him until they finally gave up searching for della Torre. But maybe with war starting he would have a chance of disappearing into the chaos.
Della Torre had wanted to find Irena. To see her, to tell her he was fine. But he’d stopped himself. The UDBA would track him down through her. And as long as he stayed away, she’d also be safe.
“So were there any interesting men?”
“Oh yes. Very interesting. Very, very interesting,” she said with a mischievous smile. “One was an astronomer, so he told us all about the stars. We’d lie on picnic blankets over the pine needles at night and he’d point out the constellations in this sexy whisper . . . But it was lucky that stargazing is an outdoor pursuit. You didn’t want to get too close because of his breath. He could strip paint with it. Another one was an Olympic fencer. Tall and supple. But he’s a good friend’s husband and likes to keep his sword well sheathed, I’m told. And there were a couple of guys from the New York music industry. Very good-looking. Witty. Able to talk about anything intelligently. One has a Ph.D. in classical history and the other trained as an engineer.” She paused for effect. “But gay, unfortunately. There was a writer and a whole bale of lawyers. I think that’s what you call a group of lawyers. A bale. They certainly were baleful. You might have found them interesting.”
“I’m sure I would.”
“But, sadly, nothing to entertain a girl’s fancy. Any luck with the women in Hampstead?”
“Are there any? I hadn’t noticed.”
“For shame. You won’t find a better collection of trophy wives east of New York. All of them pining for a bit of adventure. But no, you’ve got your nose in a book and your head in the clouds. Did you read anything edifying?”
“Jilly Cooper. Dick Francis. Anthony Powell. That’s off the top of my head. But there was a lot of unmemorable stuff too.”
She laughed. “So you went right through the high end of my collection.”
“I made up for it with the music. I learned to like Shostakovich and Britten. The Bach and the Brahms and the Beethoven I mostly knew, but the twentieth-century stuff I’d always been sniffy about. I suppose that’s because I’d never really listened to it before.”
“Bravo.”
“Thanks to your collection.”
“Did you try the sheet music?” She ran her fingers along an imaginary keyboard. “Do you play?”
“I don’t know. I never tried.”
She laughed as if she’d never heard the joke before.
After dinner, they flagged down a cab.
Della Torre was amused to watch another as yet undiscovered part of London go past. The city seemed endless and limitless. And then he was back in the brutally familiar.
The building was unmistakable, the Brompton Oratory’s floodlit Baroque lines, its white stone a shroud of della Torre’s memory, catching him unaware. The rush of images from his student days there came to him, uncalled and unwanted. Croatian Mass in the crypt chapel on Sunday mornings.
Svjet.
Della Torre shuddered. The memory gripped him. For a moment the pain became physical, girdling him with a pulse and then another one.
“Are you all right?” Harry asked.
“Sure. I probably ate too much,” he replied, his eyes on London’s passing lights. It took a force of will to forget.
The taxi stopped at the bottom corner of the Heath so that they could walk back, the late evening still shedding a soft glow. Della Torre threw the whole of his attention onto Harry. She watched in amusement the men, in singles and couples, who furtively made their way into the parkland’s deep woods.
“Think of all the good times that are going on not much past the foot of our building,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“The Heath is notorious. Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.”
“I did rather wonder once or twice, coming back late at night. People seemed unusually . . . friendly.”
“More than friendly, darling. Downright dirty. I’m sure they’d have
loved to show you just how much,” Harry said. “On really still, warm nights, if you put your head out the window, you can sometimes hear them. It’s like a nature documentary.”
Harry opened another bottle of wine when they got back to the apartment. Della Torre stretched himself along one sofa. Harry took the one opposite, facing him, her legs tucked underneath her. The light was muted, but clear enough for della Torre to see the high colour in her cheeks. Her lips glowed red, though she’d used only a bit of gloss.
He lit a cigarette, and for once she didn’t complain. The windows were open and a faint breeze wafted the gossamer curtains.
“Cheers,” she said, raising her glass. “Thanks for dinner.”
“It was the least Strumbić could do.”
“He’s a very kind man,” she said.
“No, he isn’t. But he can be very entertaining.”
“Like tonight?”
“Yes, like tonight,” della Torre said. “By the way, I never properly thanked you for the weekend on the coast. I enjoyed it.”
“You mean you liked being hit on the head and made to go for a swim in a cold, cold river.” Her eyes glittered.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s what made the weekend.”
They were watching each other across the room.
“So, plenty of men on your magical island, but none that suited. What’s the line — water, water everywhere . . .” della Torre said.
“But not a one to lick.”
“I’m not quite sure that’s how it goes.”
“It seems right to me.”
“Should I be doing something right now?”
She shrugged. “Funny. I’d been pretty happy not to think about sex until you moved in,” she said.
“Had it been long?”
“You mean since the banker? About a year and a half.”
“And you’d given up thinking about sex since then?”
“Well, it had started coming back a little. Maybe in the past six months. It starts really randomly. Somebody gives you a look, and rather than just ignoring it or being irritated by it you feel a little ping in your diaphragm. Or a book. Sex scenes you might have skimmed over a few months before, you find yourself reading. Little things. And then one night you wake up to find your nightgown has worked its way up over your hips and you’re on top of the duvet and suddenly you’re aware that you’re naked from the waist down. Or you sit down in the shower to shave your legs and you feel the coldness of the tiles and the heat of the water.”
“I can picture it now.”
“Can you?” The way she was sitting on the sofa had made the already short dress pull up past her thighs so that he saw a little crescent of tanned flesh at the top of her stocking. His breath caught. She could see where he was looking but didn’t move to adjust her clothes. She just reclined there, watching him.
“It’s funny,” she said. “Any other time of my life, with any other man, I’d have expected him by now to be tugging my clothes off as if he were trying to skin a fish. And I’d be helping.”
“You make it sound so dignified. Is that what you’d like?”
“No. Oh, no. I like this. Looking at you and talking. I think I like this more. Sex without sex,” she said.
He gave a heartfelt laugh. “You are unquestionably and achingly beautiful. Would you like me to talk about that?”
“No. That sounds so dull.”
“It sounds like you were building up during the past six months.”
“I’ve been reminding myself. A little after you arrived. More on holiday, remembering you. My memory didn’t do you justice. And then, since I’ve been back, I keep hoping that when I get home, you’ll still be awake.”
“I was, the other night.”
“You were? I can’t even begin to tell you how I cursed the crashing headache I had.”
“I know something that helps headaches.”
“So do I. But I don’t know you well enough to hand you a prescription and ask you to fill it right away.”
“So if you don’t want me to tell you how beautiful you are, what would you like to talk about?” he asked, watching that little crescent grow as she shifted her leg.
“Tell me a story. Tell me the sexiest thing that’s ever happened to you that doesn’t involve sex.”
“You mean food or some other sort of pleasure?” he asked, confused.
“No. I mean something that didn’t involve your having sex with someone else, but that, when you think about it, makes you go weak at the knees.”
Della Torre watched her, bemused. He filled up both of their wineglasses, lit another cigarette, and then lay back down on the sofa. The crescent had become a near half-moon, and he could see the lines of her black suspenders.
“When I was fourteen, I think — yes, it was fourteen — I went on a school trip to the seaside. We went for two weeks every summer. It was a big school, so it would only be two year-groups at a time. But for some reason it was three that year. We went to these huge facilities built for socialist workers, giant concrete blocks of dormitories in amongst the pines, just back from the beach. Usually you stayed in single-sex dormitories with about twenty boys to a cinder-block room. But this time, because there were so many of us, the pupils in the top year got rooms for just four people and some just for two. For some reason I was put in a room with a guy two years above me. He was a real heartthrob. All the girls loved him. He was very good-looking and the teachers really liked him, which was probably why he got a room for just two. I don’t know why they put me in with him.
“It’s funny. Because I’d lived in America, the teachers either hated me and would be as unpleasant as possible — maybe because I represented a threat to their socialist ideals — or they bent over backwards to be nice to me. I think those ones thought we’d be invaded by the U.S. in the next war and wanted a bit of insurance against the fact that they were all members of the Communist Party.
“Anyway, for whatever reason, I got to share the room with this boy. It was a tiny room. We had bunk beds, but you could only just squeeze between the wall and the bed. He took the top, as you’d expect. He was very nice, very kind, except that every night he told me not to draw the blinds and made sure the window was unlatched and a bit open. It irritated me because there were these yellow arc lights outside and they were on the whole night, and leaving the window open meant the mosquitoes got in. But who was I to say anything?” He stubbed out the cigarette.
“I learned why he had this arrangement the third night into the holiday. I’d been asleep, but I heard the window open and somebody come in. It woke me up, and I froze. I thought it was burglars come in to slit our throats, and for some reason I thought if I played dead they’d leave me alone. It wasn’t burglars. It was one of the girls in the boy’s year, one of those high school girls who looks like a ripe peach, who all the boys fantasize about but are too terrified ever to talk to. I saw her as she climbed up the ladder. ‘Be quiet,’ he said. I remember her saying, ‘Don’t worry, Gringo’s asleep.’”
“Gringo?”
Della Torre could have slapped himself. “It’s my nickname. Everyone calls me that. All Yugoslavs and ex-Yugoslavs are cowboys-and-Indians fanatics. They started calling me that because I’d lived in America. I don’t like the name, but it stuck.”
“I like it. It’s better than calling you della Torre.”
“Okay, I was defeated on this one years ago. At least my father and my ex-wife don’t call me Gringo.”
“You were telling me a story, Gringo.”
“She said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s asleep. I saw him.’” He paused, pulling together the memory.
“And what happened next?”
“What you might expect. Except that the whole while, she was narrating in one of those stage whispers that yo
u can hear across an auditorium. She was saying exactly what she was doing to him, exactly what he was doing to her, exactly where and how he was touching her or she him or she herself. It was like one of those voice-overs that movies do for blind people.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I was frozen stiff.”
“Stiff?”
“Well, yes. But I didn’t dare move a muscle. I don’t think I breathed for twenty minutes.”
“Is that how long it went on?”
“I think so. Maybe not. But it certainly felt that long.”
“And then?”
“When they’d finished, she climbed back down the ladder. It was right by my head. She got most of the way down and she stopped. She asked the boy for a last kiss and he obliged. They kissed for what seemed like eternity. And as they did she pulled up this long T-shirt she was wearing. I could smell her; it was the headiest, most musky scent I’d ever smelled in my life. And I could see her in the light of those yellow lamps. And as they kissed she kept rocking her hips forward and backward, forward and backward.”
Harry swallowed hard and looked at della Torre, lips slightly apart, eyes wide. “Do you think they knew you weren’t asleep?”
“The next day I was on the beach, just sitting and getting some sun, when she came over and sat next to me. For some reason I was alone just then. She looked straight at me from a couple of feet away, not saying anything but not even pretending to look at anything else. Finally I had to say hi, but I think I must have blushed like a boiled scampi. She said, ‘So, Gringo, did you like our conversation last night?’ I thought it must be some trap and I stammered, ‘But we didn’t talk. I mean, I don’t remember talking to you last night.’ And she said, with a straight face, ‘You didn’t talk, but I did. Did you like our conversation? The one where you were quiet as a mouse while I was telling you things. Do you remember that one?’ I swear I felt like crying. I didn’t know how to answer, so I didn’t. Eventually she just got up and went away.”
