The Apartment in Rome

by Penny Feeny

  ‘Really?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  He didn’t think she’d be persuaded, but she climbed up onto the rock and stood poised to dive. Silhouetted against the light, she could have been a bronze statuette on a plinth, a dancer: her arms raised above her head, her breasts small but shapely with their upward tilt, the muscles tautening in her calves as she rose on tiptoe. She was teasing him.

  ‘Bet you daren’t jump,’ he yelled and then regretted it.

  ‘You lose,’ she shouted back, springing off the rock headfirst into the lake. Ripples spread at the spot where her feet had disappeared. He thrashed towards them, his teeth chattering. Diving into unknown waters was a crazy thing to do. They might be too shallow, there might be submerged rocks or the treacherous tug of reeds, the swallow of silt. Why couldn’t he see her?

  She surfaced twenty yards away, her sleek head breaking through the placid sheen of the water, her legs pummelling fiercely beneath. ‘It’s fucking perishing,’ she said. ‘Mind you, I knew it would be.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have dived. You could have bust your head open or broken your neck.’

  ‘You know I’m a risk-taker.’

  ‘Is that another name for an idiot?’

  She kicked out at him and they tussled for a while. She jumped onto his head, he grabbed her ankles; flailing and spluttering, they cast crystal rainbows, kissed with hot tongues. Then they floated on their backs, sculling with their hands; Gina’s red toenails poked into view like poppy petals.

  ‘It’s not so bad like this,’ he said. ‘Gives the sun a chance to warm your skin.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve done photo shoots in far worse conditions. I mean, arctic. I’m not all self-indulgence.’ She rolled onto her front. ‘Mind you, I’m not a sado-masochist either.’

  She began to swim to the shore, but Mitchell was determined to outlast her. Various parts of him were protesting, squeaking with pain, and he tried backstroke, followed by butterfly, in an effort to boost his circulation. Then he saw her clamber onto the bank and rub herself down with the towel in a way that might have been deliberately languid and erotic. It seemed absurd to punish himself by continuing this endurance test. As he headed towards the rock and the small beach he felt the stirrings of his extremities returning to life.

  She sat hugging her knees as he dried himself. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, contemplating the sky’s reflection, a deep tranquil blue patterned with silver, ‘that there can be nothing in the world more idyllic than a lake with no one about?’

  He shook the towel he’d been using, unfurled it and lay down. ‘An idyllic lake,’ he said, ‘with us beside it.’

  Gina came over then to straddle him, her long thighs either side of his hips, her long hair, tawny as a lion’s mane in those days, streaking damply past her shoulders. She pinned his arms to the ground, allowing him just enough movement to be able to raise his head. He fastened his mouth around her nipple as she lowered her body onto the shaft of his penis, miraculously restored to its full beating energy.

  He remembered that day by the lake – he couldn’t help it – when, twenty years later, Gina opened the door of her apartment and allowed him to enter it. Allowed, rather than invited. She didn’t say ‘Come in’. She weighed him up without speaking; her hand fell from the doorknob, she turned and disappeared.

  He supposed he should follow her. He shut the door behind him and went into the sitting room. On yesterday’s brief visit, when she’d feared a break-in, it had all looked relatively orderly. Today the place was in a state of upheaval: drawers pulled out and upturned, chests and cupboards spilling contents, cushions scattered from sofa to floor.

  ‘What the – ?’ he began, but he couldn’t see her. ‘Gina? Are you all right?’

  She had stalked through the chaos and disappeared. He tracked her down in her bedroom. She was lying on the bed with the shutters closed; the light was dim. She was wearing a flimsy vest and matching baggy bottoms. Either she’d been in her pyjamas all day or she was having a very early night. Her complexion was unusually pale, almost grey compared to the day before, though that might have been the effect of the gloom.

  ‘No, of course I’m not all right,’ she said. ‘I have a stinking bastard of a migraine.’

  ‘And the flat? Have you really been burgled this time?’

  ‘I was really burgled last time. Only I didn’t cotton on.’

  ‘Have you reported it?’

  ‘Don’t make me go over it all again. Please.’

  ‘Sure. Okay. Fine. Can I do anything?’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘Why?’ He raised the plastic bag he was carrying and its contents clinked. ‘I’ve brought you a nice bottle of wine and a jar of mixed antipasti. Hoped I could persuade you to come out to dinner afterwards. I did try to phone.’

  ‘I’m not taking any calls.’

  ‘No. You’re probably not in the mood for dinner either.’ He sighed. His offerings of wine and pickles seemed forlorn and inappropriate. ‘The girls have gone shopping, didn’t want me to cramp their style. You might as well let me be useful. That mess next door – it wasn’t made by your burglars? No need for fingerprinting?’

  ‘It was made by me,’ muttered Gina with her eyes shut.

  ‘Right. So why don’t I tidy up a bit for you? Restore some order?’

  ‘Why? Does it bother you?’

  ‘You can’t leave it like that. Someone could have an accident.’

  ‘Is this your health and safety training? Everything has to be shipshape.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a shit unless you find my Twombly.’

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, but on the way to his self-appointed task he stopped to tell her, ‘I went to see your show. I liked it.’

  Her eyes flew open. ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah. Very strong, I thought.’

  ‘No sales though.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard. I’d’ve bought one myself, only…’

  ‘Only what? No. Don’t go on.’ She rolled her head on the pillow. ‘I wouldn’t want you to buy something out of sheer sentiment. And don’t kid yourself: that’s what it would have been.’

  ‘There’s no convincing you, is there?’ And no point in trying to combat her present mood. He shouldn’t have come. He should have left yesterday’s encounter as a one-off. What was he trying to prove? That a little jaunt into the past could be salutary? That he was on the same kind of voyage of discovery as his wife? Would Corinne see it that way? Unlikely. But he couldn’t walk out on a sick unhappy woman whose home looked as though a hurricane had blown through. He’d put it to rights, see if she needed anything from the chemist and then catch up with Sasha.

  In fact, the mayhem looked worse than it was. He did the easy things first: replacing the sofa cushions, righting the chairs, stacking the magazines on the coffee table, straightening the rugs. Then he sorted the clothes that appeared to have been flung around in a frenzy and folded them into two piles, male and female. He guessed they came from the blanket boxes beside the French windows. Once he’d returned them and shut the box lids, the room looked much more civilised. Now there were merely scraps of paper, letters and documents to collect up; he piled them on top of the sideboard for Gina to sort out later. He noticed a cup and a plate had been smashed and rooted in cupboards for a dustpan and brush. When he’d disposed of the broken china and wiped up a spillage of something sticky, he glanced around in satisfaction. Perhaps not everything was in its right place yet, but at least it was manageable again.

  There was no reason for him to linger. It was impossible to say why he decided to shuffle the papers on the sideboard, whether he’d been subconsciously seeking it, or whether the birth certificate of Thomas Stanhope would have caught his eye in any event. This must be what Ruby’d been referring to. He was shocked that she and Sasha had been going through Gina’s papers; he was shocked a great deal m
ore when he saw the date of the boy’s birth.

  Holding the certificate in both hands, he went out onto the terrace. Large terracotta pots were lined up along one edge, filled with evergreen bay, rosemary and lemon trees. A passion flower twining through a trellis protected a corner seat from sun and wind alike, but Mitchell couldn’t sit down. Above him a Boeing 737 glided across the sky, as stately as a cruise liner. What wouldn’t he give to be at the controls, to be concentrating on something other than the document before him.

  He had left Gina for Corinne in April 1993. The baby had been born in October the same year. This boy could be his. A son. He would have liked a son. His beloved Sasha had been a tomboy of the first order and he’d encouraged her fearlessness. But inevitably she’d become a young woman, with feminine preoccupations (like clothes shopping). She’d never shown any interest in engines; flying; cricket.

  The paper trembled in his hands. There was another explanation: Gina could have been two-timing him. She’d had no shortage of opportunity and it might explain why she’d been so ready to let him go, told him nothing. But then why was the space for the father’s details blank? Had that relationship finished too? Perhaps, if she’d planned to have the boy adopted, she didn’t want the other guy to know in case he staked a claim. He could imagine that. The circumstances of Gina’s own origins would have made her shy from abortion, but she’d often said she didn’t know why Phoebe had kept her when she rarely showed her any love.

  Somewhere out there roamed the boy who’d been born as Thomas Stanhope. Gina’s son (and maybe his own) would be eighteen and entitled to search for his birth parents. He’d heard tales of such reunions: of confusion, denial, then grudging acceptance; sometimes (more rarely) delight. He couldn’t believe she had kept such information from him. All that nostalgia for happier times, fornicating by foreign lakes, was replaced with bitterness.

  He didn’t care how bad her headache was. He couldn’t let this lie. He was no longer aware of the dry rustle of the bay leaves, the strong fragrance of rosemary, the imprecations floating up from the street. Gripping the certificate between finger and thumb he returned indoors and marched into Gina’s room without knocking.

  She was either asleep or pretending to be so, her lips slightly parted. Her brow was pale but smoother than before, as if she’d finally found relaxation. Half an hour earlier he might have tiptoed out again, but in the space of thirty minutes his world had fractured into a kaleidoscope of possibilities, nearly all of them traumatic. He couldn’t wait for an answer. He leaned forward to touch her and she stirred.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he said, more gruffly than he intended.

  She moaned, wriggled, scoured her eyes with the heels of her palms until they opened, bloodshot. ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘I’ve been clearing up for you.’

  ‘You couldn’t get me another couple of Nurofen, could you? To be on the safe side? In the cabinet in the bathroom, left-hand shelf.’

  He laid the document on the bedside table, but she paid it no attention. He fetched her the painkillers and a glass of water and sat on the edge of the bed while she took them.

  He planned to be tactful. Dealing with Gina was unpredictable; she might deny everything. He would never know which were the lies and which the truth. But impatience overcame him.

  ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ he said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Him,’ He jabbed at the name. ‘Thomas.’

  ‘What do you know about Thomas?’

  ‘Only his date of birth. Why don’t you tell me the rest?’

  ‘Oh God, Mitch…’ She struggled into a more upright position. Her vest was made of some gauzy fabric ripped at the seam; he could see straight through it. ‘You’ve caught me at a low ebb; my bloody head…’

  His eyes moved to her face, on the lookout for any hint of deceit. ‘Well?’

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘I didn’t intentionally keep you in the dark. But there didn’t seem to be any point in explaining…’

  It was as he’d expected: she’d been seeing someone else. He said, a little awkwardly, ‘So I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions? That was a mistake, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously!’ He’d set her off. Would she start throwing things again or had she grown out of the habit? He doubted it, given the state of the room he’d just cleared up. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m surmising…’ Sweat ran around the collar of his shirt, trickled down his back. ‘The boy wasn’t mine, that’s all.’

  ‘Why?’ she glowered.

  ‘How about because I’m not named on the birth certificate? Isn’t that a good enough reason?’

  ‘I’d like to know how you got hold of it.’

  ‘Gina, it was floating around the room with all sorts of other debris. I picked it up and saw the date. Look, this is all a long time ago and I’m not going to start recriminating. God, if you had another bloke back then I’m hardly going to make a big deal of it now, am I? I have no claim over you. On the other hand…’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago. Still hurts though.’

  He cleared his throat, toyed with the links of his wristwatch. ‘When we split,’ he said, ‘we weren’t exactly on the best of terms, and I thought you’d be glad to be rid of me. A clean break. No ties. In the past half hour I’ve learned it wasn’t so simple. You must have been pregnant, but you didn’t tell me. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘You believe what you want,’ said Gina. ‘What suits you. Clean break? No ties? How mighty convenient.’

  ‘I’m not a mind reader! How was I to know any different?’

  ‘You’re right.’ He was startled by her change of tone, doleful and contrite. ‘It wasn’t fair of me. I should have told you.’

  ‘You mean that he really was my son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was like being dealt a ferocious punch. His ears rang with silence. ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’

  ‘To start with, because I hadn’t made up my mind what to do.’

  ‘If only you’d consulted me, we could have talked it over…’

  She ignored him. ‘And then I had this terrible threatened miscarriage.’ She flinched at the recollection. ‘I was in Ostia. Felix and I had gone to the beach for the afternoon. The pain, well, it was so… alarming. I’d never felt anything like it. He had to take me to a private clinic.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It might have been better if I’d lost him then, but the nuns, you know, they were determined to save him even though I must have scandalised them. As a person, I mean. They flapped around like swans and put me on a drip. And I did try, really. I stopped drinking; I ate bland food like rice and mozzarella and bananas. I had a crap pregnancy – I was laid up for weeks. Felix looked after me. I was in that apartment, you remember, near the University and he used to come over at lunchtime and after classes and give me the gossip and make me laugh. He was fantastic actually. I wouldn’t have predicted it. In the end we both surprised each other.’

  ‘And then?’ he prompted, already jealous of Felix, a dead man he’d never met, which was patently ridiculous.

  ‘Have you ever heard the saying: The best thing a father can do for his children is love their mother?’

  Mitchell shook his head.

  ‘I think there’s a lot of truth in it,’ said Gina. ‘Don’t you?’

  This was uncomfortably guilt-inducing. Nonetheless, he nodded.

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Mitch, but you didn’t love me, you didn’t want to be saddled with me and I sure as hell didn’t want to be anybody’s millstone.’

  He wondered whether she herself had ever truly loved anyone, whether she was capable of it. Independence was one thing, but Gina was positively intransigent. Bloody impossible. He tried to keep his temper, stay rational. ‘All the same, you shouldn’t have deprived the boy of a father. Everyone has a right to know where they come from. Chances are, however successful the
adoption process, he’s going to want to know the truth one day.’

  ‘Who told you he was adopted?’

  ‘Well…’ He swallowed, massaged the back of his neck, which was sticking to his collar. Her face, devoid of make-up, was bland, inscrutable. He thought, not for the first time, how much easier it was to read a computer screen. All the information you needed in front of you on the primary flight display: airspeed, altitude, barometric pressure. Figures that followed the rules of logic, told you what you needed to know, enabled you to make the necessary adjustments. Intuitive deduction not required. ‘Nobody. I didn’t think you’d brought him up here by yourself because…’ Mitchell knew what a house looked like when it had a teenager living in it.

  ‘Well, you’re wrong. I didn’t give him away. He was taken.’

  He was puzzled. ‘By the nuns?’

  ‘Thomas was born prematurely,’ she said. ‘His lungs weren’t developed and he had a hole in the heart. Three actually. So tiny, his heart. I used to picture it like a fragolina de bosco, a wild strawberry. Dark crimson and slightly misshapen, but oh so sweet.’

  Mitchell’s limbs stiffened as if caught in a sudden icy blast.

  Gina clamped her hands briefly over her mouth, then knotted them in her lap. She spoke in a low monotone, a story she must have told before.

  ‘He was in an incubator at first, while they decided what they could do. He would have needed an operation, a whole new heart and lungs. Someone else would have had to die, another baby somewhere… But then they let me take him home, wrapped in a blanket like a little doll. I didn’t play much with dolls as a girl, though I used to make plasticine effigies of people I didn’t like – my stepfather mostly – and stick pins into them. I was a horrid child.

  ‘We were allowed home because there was nothing they could do for him – and those private clinics don’t come cheap. We had three days together and I didn’t leave him for a moment. Me and Tom, we were inseparable. The bed was our whole world. Most of the time he slept and I watched over him. He was hardly feeding and my milk was leaking as if my breasts were crying too.