‘I’m sorry.’
‘Do you adore her?’
He doesn’t answer.
‘Have I been no good to you all these years, Roy?’
‘Of course you have.’
They have made love, the girl and he. He tells Henrietta so, confessing awkwardly, mentioning the floor of his room in the department. He would have taken off the girl’s granny glasses and put them on the fawn vinyl by the leg of his desk. He would have run his fingers through the lustreless hair.
‘How could you do this, Roy?’
‘It’s a thing that happened. Nobody did anything.’ Red-faced, shame-faced, he attempts to shrug, but the effort becomes lost in his sprawling flabbiness. He is as unattractive as the girl, she finds herself reflecting: a stranded jellyfish.
‘It’s ridiculous, Roy,’ she shouts, at last losing control. ‘It’s madness all this.’ They have had quarrels before, ordinary quarrels about ordinary matters. Mild insults were later taken back, apologized for, the heat of the moment blamed.
‘Why should it be ridiculous,’ he questions now, ‘that someone should love me? Why should it be?’
‘She’s a child, you’re a man of fifty. How could there possibly be a normal relationship between you? What have you in common?’
‘We fell in love, Henrietta. Love has nothing to do with having things in common or normal relationships. Hesselmann in fact points out –’
‘For God’s sake, Roy, this is not a time for Hesselmann.’
‘He does suggest that love abnormalizes –’
‘So you’re going to become a middle-aged hippy, are you, Roy? You’re going to put on robes and dance and meditate in a field with the Orange People? The Orange People were phony, you said. You said that, Roy.’
‘You know as well as I do that Sharon has nothing to do with the Orange People any more.’
‘You’ll love her grandmother. Not to mention Mr Tamm.’
‘Sharon needs to be protected from her family. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t want ever to go back to that house. You’re being snide, you know.’
‘I’m actually suffering from shock.’
‘There are things we must work out.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roy, have your menopausal fling with the girl. Take her off to a hotel in Margate or Benidorm.’
She pours herself more sherry, her hands shaking, a harsh fieriness darkening her face, reflecting the fury in her voice. She imagines the pair of them in the places she mentions, people looking at them, he getting to know the girl’s intimate habits. He would become familiar with the contents of her handbag, the way she puts on and takes off her clothes, the way she wakes up. Nineteen years ago, on their honeymoon in La Grève, Roy spoke of this aspect of a close relationship. Henrietta’s own particular way of doing things, and her possessions – her lipstick, her powder compact, her dark glasses, the leather suitcase with her pre-marriage initials on it, the buttoning of her skirts and dresses – were daily becoming as familiar to him as they had been for so long to her. Her childhood existed for him because of what, in passing, she told him of it.
‘D’you remember La Grève?’ she asks, her voice calm again. ‘The woman who called you Professor, those walks in the snow?’
Impatiently he looks away. La Grève is irrelevant, all of it far too long ago. Again he mentions Hesselmann. Not understanding, she says:
‘At least I shall not forget La Grève.’
‘I’ve tried to get over her. I’ve tried not seeing her. None of it works.’
‘She said you would not have told me. What did you intend, Roy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She said it wasn’t fair, did she?’
‘Yes, she did.’ He pauses. ‘She’s very fond of you, you know.’
In the oven the breast of turkey would be shrivelling, the pineapple pudding of which he was so boyishly fond would be a burnt mess. She says, and feels ashamed of admitting it: ‘I’ve always had affection for her too, in spite of what I say.’
‘I need to talk to her now. I need to tell her we’ve cleared the air.’
He stands up and drinks what remains of his drink. Tears ooze from beneath his spectacles as he looks down at Henrietta, staring at her. He says nothing else except, yet again, that he is sorry. He shuffles and blows his nose as he speaks. Then he turns and goes away, and a few minutes later she hears the bang of the hall door, as she heard it after Sharon Tamm had left the house also.
Henrietta shops in a greengrocer’s that in the Italian small-town manner has no name, just Fiori e Frutta: above the door. The shy woman who serves there, who has come to know her, adds up the cost of fagiolini, pears and spinach on a piece of paper.
‘Mille quattro cento.’ Henrietta counts out the money and gathers up her purchases.
‘Buon giorno, grazie,’ the woman murmurs, and Henrietta wishes her good-day and passes out into the street.
The fat barber sleeps in his customers’ chair, his white overall as spotless as a surgeon’s before an operation. In the window his wife knits, glancing up now and again at the women who come and go in the Maigri Moda. It is Tuesday and the Jollycaffè is closed. The men who usually sit outside it are nowhere to be seen.
Henrietta buys a slice of beef, enough for one. In the mini-market she buys eggs and a packet of zuppa di verdura, and biscotti strudel ‘cocktail di frutta’, which have become her favourites. She climbs up through the town, to the appartamento in the Piazza Santa Lucia. She is dressed less formally than she thought suitable for middle age in England. She wears a denim skirt, blue canvas shoes, a blue shirt which she bought before the weekend from Signora Leici. Her Italian improves a little every day, due mainly to the lessons she has with the girl in the Informazioni. They are both determined that by the winter she will know enough to teach English to the youngest children in the orphanage. Sister Maria has said she would welcome that.
It is May. On the verges of the meadows and the wheat fields that stretch below the town pale roses are in bloom. Laburnum blossoms in the vineyards, wires for the vines stretching between the narrow trunks of the trees. It is the season of broom and clover, of poppies, and geraniums forgotten in the grass. Sleepy vipers emerge from crevices, no longer kept down by the animals that once grazed these hillsides. Because of them Henrietta has bought rubber boots for walking in the woods or up Monte Totona.
She is happy because she is alone. She is happy in the small appartamento lent to her by friends of her sister, who use it infrequently. She loves the town’s steep, cool streets, its quietness, the grey stone of its buildings, quarried from the hill it is built upon. She is happy because the nightmare is distant now, a picture she can illuminate in her mind and calmly survey. She sees her husband sprawling on the chair in the garden, the girl in her granny glasses, and her own weeping face in the bathroom looking-glass. Time shrinks the order of events: she packs her clothes into three suitcases; she is in her sister’s house in Hemel Hempstead. That was the worst of all, the passing of the days in Hemel Hempstead, the sympathy of her sister, her generous, patient brother-in-law, their children imagining she was ill. When she thinks of herself now she feels a child herself, not the Henrietta of the suburban sitting-room and the tray of drinks, with chiffontidily in her hair. Her father makes a swing for her because she has begged so, ropes tied to the bough of an apple tree. Her mother once was cross because she climbed that tree. She cries and her sister comforts her, a sunny afternoon when she got tar on her dress. She skates on an icy pond, a birthday treat before her birthday tea when she was nine. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said in Hemel Hempstead, and then there was the stroke of good fortune, people she did not even know who had an appartamento in a Tuscan hill town.
In the cantina of the Contucci family the wine matures in oaken barrels of immense diameter, the iron hoops that bind them stylishly painted red. She has been shown the cantina and the palace of the Contucci. She has looked across the slopes of terracotta roof-tiles t
o Monticchiello and Pienza. She has drunk the water of the nearby spa and has sat in the sun outside the café by the bank, whiling away a morning with an Italian dictionary. Frusta means whip, and it’s also the word for the bread she has with Fontina for lunch.
Her husband pays money into her bank account and she accepts it because she must. There are some investments her father left her: between the two sources there is enough to live on. But one day, when her Italian is good enough, she will reject the money her husband pays her. It is degrading to look for support from someone she no longer respects. And one day, too, she will revert to her maiden name, for why should she carry with her the name of a man who shrugged her off?
In the cool of the appartamento she lunches alone. With her frusta and Fontina she eats peppery radishes and drinks acqua minerale. Wine in the daytime makes her sleepy, and she is determined this afternoon to learn another thirty words and to do two exercises for the girl in the Informazioni. Le Chiavi del Regno by A.J. Cronin is open beside her, but for a moment she does not read it. A week ago, on the telephone to England, she described the four new villas of Signor Falconi to prospective tenants, Signora Falconi having asked her if she would. The Falconis had shown her the villas they had built near their fattoria in the hills, and she assured someone in Gloucester that any one of them would perfectly suit her requirements, which were sun and tranquillity and room enough for six.
Guilt once consumed her, Henrietta considers. She continued to be a secretary in the department for six years after her marriage but had given it up because she’d found it awkward, having to work not just for her husband but for his rivals and his enemies. He’d been pleased when she’d done so, and although she’d always intended to find a secretarial post outside the university she never had. She’d felt guilty about that, because she was contributing so little, a childless housewife.
‘I want to stay here.’ She says it aloud, pouring herself more acqua minerale, not eating for a moment. ‘Voglio stare qui.’ She has known the worst of last winter’s weather; she has watched spring coming; heat will not defeat her. How has she not guessed, through all those years of what seemed like a contented marriage, that solitude suits her better? It only seemed contented, she knows that now: she had talked herself into an artificial contentment, she had allowed herself to become a woman dulled by the monotony of a foolish man, his sprawling bigness and his sense of failure. It is bliss of a kind not to hear his laughter turned on for a television joke, not to look daily at his flamboyant ties and unpolished shoes. Quella mattina il diario si aprí alla data Ottobre 1917: how astonished he would be if he could see her now, childishly delighting in The Keys of the Kingdom in Italian.
It was her fault, she’d always believed, that they could not have children – yet something informs her now that it was probably more her husband’s, that she’d been wrong to feel inadequate. As a vacuum-cleaner sucks in whatever it touches, he had drawn her into a world that was not her own; she had existed on territory where it was natural to be blind – where it was natural, too, to feel she must dutifully console a husband because he was not a success professionally. ‘Born with a sense of duty,’ her father once said, when she was ten or so. ‘A good thing, Henrietta.’ She is not so sure: guilt and duty seem now to belong together, different names for a single quality.
Later that day she walks to the Church of San Biagio, among the meadows below the walls of the town. Boys are playing football in the shade, girls lie on the grass. She goes over her vocabulary in her mind, passing by the church. She walks on white, dusty roads, between rows of slender pines. Solivare is the word she has invented – to do with wandering alone. Piantare means to plant; piantamento is planting, piantagione plantation. Determinedly she taxes her atrophied memory: sulla via di casa and in modo da; un manovale and la briciola.
In the August of that year, when the heat is at its height, Signora Falconi approaches Henrietta in the macelleria. She speaks in Italian, for Henrietta’s Italian is better now than Signora Falconi’s rudimentary English. There is something, Signora Falconi reveals – a request that has not to do with reassuring a would-be tenant on the telephone. There is some other proposition that Signor Falconi and his wife would like to put to her.
‘Verrò,’ Henrietta agrees. ‘Verrò martedí coll’ autobus.’
The Falconis offer her coffee and a little grappa. Their four villas, clustered around their fattoria, are full of English tenants now. Every fortnight these tenants change, so dirty laundry must be gathered for the lavanderia, fresh sheets put on the beds, the villa cleaned. And the newcomers, when they arrive, must be shown where everything is, told about the windows and the shutters, warned about the mosquitoes and requested not to use too much water. They must have many other details explained to them, which the Falconis, up to now, have not quite succeeded in doing. There is a loggia in one of the villas that would be Henrietta’s, a single room with a balcony and a bathroom, an outside staircase. And the Falconis would pay just a little for the cleaning and the changing of the sheets, the many details explained. The Falconis are apologetic, fearing that Henrietta may consider the work too humble. They are anxious she should know that women to clean and change sheets are not easy to come by since they find employment in the hotels of the nearby spa, and that there is more than enough for Signora Falconi herself to do at the fattoria.
It is not the work Henrietta has imagined when anticipating her future, but her future in her appartamento is uncertain, for she cannot live for ever on strangers’ charity and one day the strangers will return.
‘Va bene,’ she says to the Falconis. ‘Lo faccio.’
She moves from the Piazza San Lucia. La governante Signora Falconi calls her, and the tenants of the villas become her temporary friends. Some take her out to II Marzucco, the hotel of the town. Others drive her to the sulphur baths or to the abbey at Monte Oliveto, where doves flutter through the cloisters, as white as the dusty roads she loves to walk on. On either side of the pink brick archway are the masterpieces of Luca della Robbia and sometimes the doves alight on them. This abbey on the hill of Oliveto is the most beautiful place she has ever visited: she owes a debt to the girl with the granny glasses.
In the evening she sits on her balcony, drinking a glass of vino nobile, hearing the English voices, and the voices of the Italians in and around the fattoria. But by October the English voices have dwindled and the only customers of the fattoria are the Italians who come traditionally for lunch on Sundays. Henrietta cleans the villas then. She scours the saucepans and puts away the cutlery and the bed linen. The Falconis seem concerned that she should be on her own so much and invite her to their meals occasionally, but she explains that her discovery of solitude has made her happy. Sometimes she watches them making soap and candles, learning how that is done.
The girl, walking up and down the sitting-room that once was Henrietta’s, is more matter-of-fact and assured than Henrietta remembers her, though her complexion has not improved. Her clothes – a black je sey and a black leather skirt – are of a better quality. There is a dusting of dandruff on the jersey, her long hair has been cut.
‘It’s the way things worked out,’ she says, which is something she has said repeatedly before, during the time they have had to spend together.
Henrietta does not reply, as she has not on the previous occasions. Upstairs, in blue-and-brown-striped pyjamas, purchased by herself three years ago, the man of whom each has had a share rests. He is out of danger, recovering in an orderly way.
‘As Roy himself said,’ the girl repeats also, ‘we live in a world of mistakes.’
Yet they belong together, he and the girl, with their academic brightness and Hesselmann to talk about. The dog is no longer in the house. Ka-Ki has eaten a plastic bag, attracted by slivers of meat adhering to it, and has died. Henrietta blames herself. No matter how upset she’d felt it had been cruel to walk out and leave that dog.
‘I gave Roy up to you,’ she says, ‘since that was
what you and he wanted.’
‘Roy is ill.’
‘He is ill, but at the same time he is well again. This house is yours and his now. You have changed things. You have let the place get dirty, the windows don’t seem ever to have been opened. I gave the house up to you also. I’m not asking you to give it back.’
‘Like I say, Henrietta, it was unfortunate about the dog. I’m sorry about that.’
‘I chose to leave the dog behind, with everything else.’
‘Look, Henrietta –’
‘Roy will be able to work again, just as before: we’ve been quite assured about that. He is to lose some weight, he is to take care of his diet. He is to exercise himself properly, something he never bothered with. It was you, not me, they gave those instructions to.’
‘They didn’t seem to get the picture, Henrietta. Like I say, we broke up, I wasn’t even living here. I’ve explained that to you, Henrietta. I haven’t been here for the past five months, I’m down in London now.’
‘Don’t you feel you should get Roy on his feet again, since you had last use of him, as it were?’
‘That way you’re talking is unpleasant, Henrietta. You’re getting at me, you’re getting at poor Roy. Like you’re jealous or something. There was love between us, there really was. Deep love. You know, Henrietta? You understand?’
‘Roy explained it to me about the love, that evening.’
‘But then it went. It just extinguished itself, like maybe there was something in the age-difference bit. I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll never know, Henrietta.’
‘Perhaps not indeed.’
‘We were happy for a long time, Roy and me. As happy as any two people could be.’
‘I’m sure you were.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Look, Henrietta, I’m with someone else now. It’s different what I’ve got now. It’s going to work out.’
A damp coldness, like the fog that hangs about the garden, touches Henrietta’s flesh, insinuating itself beneath her clothes, icy on her stomach and her back. The girl had been at the hospital, called there because Roy had asked for her. She did not say then that she was with someone else.
The Collected Stories Page 132
