Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was as they were sitting, watching her play, that the Contessa said to Katherine. ‘Thank you for bringing her. Thank you,’ her large bony nose quivered.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t do so sooner,’ Katherine murmured, ashamed.

  The Contessa looked at her, a dark look from shrewd eyes. ‘You know, Katrina. I never had any illusions about my son’s qualifications as a husband.’

  Katherine stared at her. So she had known, had suspected.

  The Contessa hurried on, ‘The Buonaterra men…well…,’ she made a large, generous gesture with her hands. ‘But Carlo was a good son to me. And he loved Natalie. I only wish he could see her now. I still mourn him.’ Tears sprang to her eyes again. ‘I hope,’ she pinioned Katherine with her gaze, ‘I hope you will let Natalie stay with me a little.’

  Before Katherine could respond, she called to Natalie in English. ‘Natalie, come. I would like to show you something. Perhaps your mother would like to see too.’

  They followed her inside, up the grand staircase, to a door on the first floor. The Contessa held herself straight, her stick a mere rhythmical punctuation. She led them into the library. Katherine remembered the room well, the heavy tomes which looked as if they had not been opened for hundreds of years, the high shuttered windows giving onto a breathtaking vista, its horizon the sea.

  On the centre table carefully placed lay four leather bound folios. The Contessa urged them into chairs. She opened the first book. Photographs, sepia tinted, from the turn of the century. She turned the pages slowly and as she turned, she told Natalie about the Buonaterras. Slow, lulling words, conjuring intrigue, power. Natalie sat, her eyes intent, her ears tuned. Katherine gazed at her. She began to see the magic taking over. The magic of history. That old, that other Europe. Began to see her daughter taken over.

  She had a blinding urge to take Natalie’s hand and flee. Run. Run, like she had all those years ago.

  And then Natalie laughed. ‘He looks funny,’ her nose crinkled as she pointed to a tiny uniformed man, stiff on horseback.

  Katherine looked at her daughter in amazement. She sat back in her chair. Wonder dawned in her. She hadn’t allowed for Natalie. Hadn’t trusted her. She was her own person now. Another person. A separate person. Not Katherine.

  Not me. Katherine marvelled.

  Another thick folio. Carlo. Carlo as a small boy with an elegant Contessa. Now Natalie’s attention was completely fixed. Katherine held her breath, watched image upon image of Carlo. Carlo at the seaside with tumbling dark curls. Carlo on his first pony. Carlo at twelve in his school uniform looking, she was not the only one to notice, a very great deal like Natalie.

  And then, Katherine hadn’t prepared herself sufficiently, there were the wedding photographs. Katherine, young, radiant, smiling blissfully in her fairy tale dress. Carlo, darkly sensual, his arm on her shoulder. The two of them dancing, a sardonic lilt on his lips.

  ‘A beautiful couple,’ Natalie murmured for Katherine’s ears.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Contessa took her up. ‘The most beautiful couple.’ She smiled at Katherine.

  Katherine averted her eyes, then returned to gaze. Gaze on Mathilde, Leo, Portia, Jacob. And more, more. Gaze on a plump baby Natalie in her father’s arms. Carlo rapturous, flinging her in the air. Her first birthday. An idyllic family.

  The story pictures didn’t tell, Katherine thought.

  And yet they did tell a story, a story she had forgotten. A story traduced by its ending.

  Natalie only saw one of those stories. ‘Why don’t we have these pictures?’ she asked Katherine querulously.

  She met her on it. ‘I’m sure we can have them now, hon. We’ll get duplicates made.’

  ‘You promise?’

  Katherine nodded.

  Natalie beamed.

  They stayed the night.

  The next day after breakfast, and before they were due to leave, Katherine took Natalie for a stroll through the grounds to the little Chapel.

  ‘Will you take a picture of me here?’ Natalie pressed her camera into Katherine’s hands.

  Katherine clicked, smiled at her. ‘Happy we came?’

  Natalie nodded. She looked up at Katherine, ‘The Contessa has asked me to stay for a few days, a week. She says we’ll go to the seashore.’ The question was poised on her face.

  Katherine took a deep breath. ‘Do you want to stay, hon?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Natalie considered, held her mother’s eyes.

  ‘If you want to, then it’s fine by me.’ Katherine tried a smile, found it didn’t sit too badly.

  ‘Perhaps for a few days then. I can get to know her a bit. She’s a strange old thing.’

  Katherine laughed, ‘It will make her very happy.’

  ‘And you? Would you stay?’ Natalie asked.

  Katherine shook her head. ‘I’d rather not. There are things I want to do in Rome. See some galleries. I’ll come and collect you. Whenever you say the word.’

  Natalie looked at her shrewdly, ‘And see Signor Alexei Gismondi, I bet,’ she rolled the words off her lips with Italian aplomb.

  Katherine flushed, ‘Perhaps that too.’

  ‘I think that’s a great idea,’ Natalie giggled.

  ‘As long as I have your blessing,’ Katherine murmured wryly.

  She rang Alexei’s number as soon as she got back to Rome. The same voice answered. No, Signor Gismondi was not in. Katherine’s heart sank. He was expected back this evening, the voice continued. Around nine.

  Katherine rang off. She had hours to kill. She showered, changed, put on a dress of boldly patterned black and white linen with a halter top, a short jacket. The jagged extremes of her mood. She was growing increasingly impatient. She had to see him. Had to know. What, she wasn’t quite certain. Know about him. About Sylvie’s ring.

  She visited a few galleries. Was too late for the Palazzo Barberini where she had hoped to gaze on Raphael’s Fornarina, renew her acquaintance with Filippo Lippi. Instead she trod the stairs to the Capitol, looked out on the Forum, felt herself a tourist and yet not. The familiar grown unfamiliar. She walked some more, lost herself in a maze of streets, re-emerged in the Piazza Navona, sat gratefully in a cafe overlooking Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers. A church bell tolled eight. She could go back to the hotel now, ring Alexei again.

  Katherine walked, glanced up at a street sign. Familiar. Whom had she known on this street?

  Then she remembered. Alexei, it was Alexei’s address. She had stumbled upon it. She quickened her pace, feeling uncomfortable, feeling like a spy. And then, as if her imagination had conjured him up, she saw him. There. Not a hundred feet from her. Getting out of a red sports car. Pale trousers, blue shirt, dark tousled hair, the hand, characteristically, pushing it back. The eyes, she could almost see the startling blue of his eyes.

  She moved into the shelter of a half-columned doorway. Hid. She didn’t want to be seen. Not like this. Not unannounced, as if she were stalking him.

  There was a woman at the wheel of the car. Sleek shoulder length hair. Red mouth. He blew her a kiss, waved.

  Katherine waited, waited until the car had pulled away, until he had safely been swallowed up by a door. Then quickly, breathing a little fast, she retraced her steps, found a bar, ordered a drink. Ten minutes later, suddenly afraid he might go out again, she telephoned.

  Alexei restlessly paced the length and width of the living room. She was here. Katherine Jardine was here in Rome. She would be here in this room with him in a few minutes. He had thought of little else but her since his return to Italy and now she was here. What would he say to her?

  He had all but decided in these last days that his entire pursuit of Sylvie Kowalska was an aberration. An attempt to reconstruct a phantom past for himself so that the vacuum of the present might be filled. An escape, a tantalizing fugue into the romance of origins, to distract him from the void of a present he did not want to face.

  He had pounced on the seductiveness
of an image, the coincidence of the colour of eyes, a Polish name, a letter from the buried past. Pounced on it as a distraction. A new door had been opened and in the very way that his favourite filmmaking dictum suggested, reality had entered through that door to violate his arrangements. Katherine had walked in. Real, alive, a figure of the present and perhaps the future. Not a shadowy phantom. Not another lost mother. He had told Jacob Jardine, partially in jest, that he suffered from a surfeit of absent mothers. There was no need for that suffering, that staring into the navel of history.

  Over these last days, Alexei’s desire, his desire for Katherine, had battled against those shadowy phantoms and blotted them out. She meant more to him than all that. He was ashamed of the way he had bolted from New York, fled to the safety of a refuge where he could think. Mull over the significance of the proof he had found, the proof that Sylvie Kowalska had known his father. And what of it, his reason had said, now that it had a new end, a future in view. His father had never been to France, couldn’t have been in those latter days of the war. Jacob had told him that his wife had only been in Poland for a few months. So that was that. And as for Sylvie Kowalska’s letter to him, he would never learn any more about her without disrupting too many lives. Let the past keep its secrets. More important things drew him now.

  Katherine. That very morning he had woken thinking that he would return to New York very soon.

  And now she was here.

  He heard Gina opening the door to her, heard footsteps. And then she was there. Only the width of the room away from him. More beautiful than he had remembered her. Her colour high as if she had been running. A slight air of worry about her features, like a forest creature sniffing the room for signals of danger.

  He took her hands, held them. ‘Katherine, how wonderful.’ His eyes glowed. ‘A delicious surprise.’

  ‘I needed to come,’ she murmured, taking sustenance from his gaze. Yes, she thought, she had needed to. The current from him was almost too strong. She withdrew her hands. Looked around her. So this was where he lived. A large airy space, uncluttered. A minimum of objects, soft, rounded arches, blue grey sofas, walls in a paler tinge, a fresco half-unearthed from the plaster, white pyramidal lamps. An ascetic room, a space for contemplation.

  She perched on the corner of a sofa. Took the proffered drink. He sat down opposite her, close, so close. She surveyed his face, looked away. Words came with difficulty.

  ‘I had to know,’ she said. ‘I have to know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Her face was shadowed, frightened. The vulnerability.

  ‘About you,’ she lifted her gaze to him, hesitant, searching.

  He kissed her. Words would only separate them. Confuse. They didn’t need words. There had already been too many.

  Her lips were soft, tentative. He lifted her to him, pressed her close, felt the curve and sway of her body, the resistance and then the little leap, the kindling, her hands in his hair. He forced her eyes to him. Secret. A little wild. He wanted those secrets, wanted to fan that wildness. Wanted her. He had not felt so certain about anything for a long time.

  ‘Come, we shall know about each other.’ It was at once question and promise.

  Katherine allowed him to lead her. Through an arch. A stretch of hall, another room, another hue of bluey grey. A vast white bed, naked, untouched, beneath a vaulted alcove. A bowl of flowers, red and creamy white, swaying frilled tulips. Her mind insisted on the detail as if in a dream. His fingers on her face, tracing the line of brow and cheek and neck. His eyes on her, the irises dark, fringed against the startling blue. Searching, exploring. A memory nipped at her and then vanished as arms enfolded her, lips roused. Sensation. A sea of sensation. Dream and his skin colliding. Warm. The imagined and the real in a wave of desire.

  They tumbled on the bed. Cool sheets. Hands, limbs, eyes, lips, touching, holding, stroking. Dangerously searching. Nakedness beneath the skin. The world, memory, erased and heightened. Into him. Into her. The same and other. Known and unknown. The new.

  Katherine felt but didn’t think. Felt herself and not herself. Movements precipitating and echoing her pleasure. Tuned to her, Katherine, not any woman. Confirmed as herself, known and unknown. Wanting. Unashamed.

  Alexei felt time stretching, opening out, unconstricted. Substantial. Not fugitive. In her. Warm waves lapping. Her eyes open on him. To him. Dilated. Urging, discovering. He kissed her moans, thrust deeper, deeper into time. A centre opening out, enfolding, sheltering, pleasuring. A cry, a drowning, a together.

  Afterwards, he looked at her, his smile glowing, his hand caressing the line of hip and thigh.

  ‘And now we know each other a little better.’

  ‘Only a little,’ Katherine mused, playful and earnest.

  ‘You want to know more?’ he teased.

  She nodded.

  ‘Oh, these modern women,’ he groaned in mock dismay.

  She looked a little hurt.

  ‘Silly,’ he rose, took a white robe from an invisible cupboard.

  A tall man with bronzed limbs and startling eyes. Alexei, leaving her, moving from the room. The desolation his sudden distance caused surprised her. She buried her face in her arms, wanting to weep.

  ‘Katherine?’ he was back.

  She lifted her face, tears glistening. Saw a tray, champagne. She smiled at her own silliness.

  ‘Katherine.’ He was beside her at once, kissing her eyes, the tears, her lips. ‘Don’t cry. I am glad. So glad you are here. With me.’

  She looked at him seriously, ‘But you left. Left me in New York?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘Yes,’ he stroked the tumble of her hair.

  He didn’t want to explain. He held her again, that elegant body, somehow still dressed in its nudity. Her caress, hesitant, despite their earlier passion, as if he might not be there. Be there for her. Her sadness roused him. I’m here now, he said with his body, loving her, loving the tentativeness and then the hunger, kindling it, filling it.

  Katherine wondered at his gentleness, a kind of physical courtesy, wondered at how it moved and fired her at once. Hadn’t known that before. Hadn’t known it was possible. For her. She wanted to cry, to cry out, I love you, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.

  When it was over, she was suddenly afraid, afraid of her desire never to leave this room again. This whiteness and their clasped bodies. Afraid, too, of that other need, surfacing again, unforgotten, the need to know.

  She took the glass he handed her, sipped, looked at him.‘I still need to know,’ she murmured. ‘Need to know about your note. What is it that you wanted me to understand? Where did you get my mother’s ring? Why did you send it to me?’

  Alexei felt lost. The truth. What was the truth? ‘I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you Katherine,’ his voice had a huskiness.

  She stroked his face, smiled, smiled. ‘And me, with you’ she mouthed. They held each other’s gaze. And then she lowered hers. ‘And the ring?’ she laughed suddenly. ‘Did you find it in an antique shop? No. That’s improbable. Sylvie would never have pawned it. And in any case, you wouldn’t have known it was hers. Who gave it to you?’

  She had pre-empted his alibi. He had had one ready. Yes, an antique shop, a coincidence of initials, a little find. But he couldn’t lie to her. Not now. Not in front of that face, so open, so vulnerable.

  ‘She gave it to me,’ Alexei said at last.

  ‘She gave it to you,’ Katherine echoed softly. For some reason, jealousy bolted through her. ‘You knew her?’

  Alexei shook his head. Then changing his mind, nodded. he would have to tell her. They would laugh over it, laugh at his own delusions. But he was afraid.

  ‘I met Sylvie Kowalska once. She came to interview me.’

  ‘Interview you? For what? She never wrote. I didn’t know she ever wrote.’ Katherine felt confused. She covered herself with the white sheet.

  Alexei shrugged, rose, paced, then restlessly positioned himself in an arm
chair. He watched Katherine’s face.

  ‘I don’t know what for. Sometime later, a letter came from her. In 1968. With the ring.’ He took a deep breath and continued levelly: ‘In the letter she implied she was my mother.’

  ‘What?’ Katherine sat bolt upright. A shudder rose in her spine.

  Alexei’s fear crystallised. She would hate him. Hate him because he might be tainted by the mother she hated. ‘It’s nonsense of course. Completely incomprehensible. My own mother died at my birth. But last year, when I saw Sylvie Kowalska’s portrait, the one in your house, I was intrigued. Why would the woman write to me? I was at a loose end. I came to New York, to find out more if I could. I found you instead.’ He took her hand. ‘She led me to you,’ he said urgently.

  It wasn’t enough. She needed to know more. ‘Sylvie died at the end of 1961,’ she looked away from him. Sylvie’s web, still clutching at her after all these years. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this in New York?’ she turned on him, accusing him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I was confused. I thought it might be true. Something in it might be true,’ he laughed harshly. ‘Stupid. I thought you might be my sister. My half sister. Absurd. Ridiculous. But sometimes fantasies take hold of one. I was at a loose end.’ He talked on, trying to drown the look on her face with words. ‘That’s why I didn’t stay. Though I wanted to stay. Wanted you. Katherine,’ his voice rose. She was getting up, pulling on her clothes. Brusquely. Harsh, painful gestures.

  ‘Katherine,’ he murmured again.

  She faced him, clothed now. Armoured. ‘You could be my brother,’ she hissed, her face contorted. ‘Sylvie was always fucking around. Always. It would be like her, just like her. To spoil. To wound. Even after her death. To wreck. Everything. Anything I felt.’ She was crying, great heaving sobs. She raced from the room.