She had no curiosity about him, and her uncle did not mention him. Nor did any of Angelica’s friends on the occasions when they invited Deborah to lunch or drinks, since she had not just turned up as they’d suggested at the funeral. In reply to some casual query by a stranger, she once replied that her father was probably dead. The happiness of her relationship with Angelica was what she thought about and moodily dwelt upon, regretting that she had taken it for granted.
The heat was at its most intense at three o’clock, but afterwards did not lose its fervour. The concrete blocks of Oliver’s patio, the metal ribs of the car chairs, the scorching upholstery, the stone of the house itself, all cancelled the lessening of the sun’s attack by exuding the heat that had been stored. By half past five a kind of coolness was beginning. By seven it had properly arrived. By half past eight there was pleasure in its relief.
Perhaps he had been wrong, Oliver thought later, not to approach the girl: thoughtfulness sometimes was misplaced. If she had waited for the day to cool she would have found herself too late for the last bus to Betona, and a taxi would have been outrageously expensive. Angelica would have taken a taxi, of course, though in other ways, as he well knew, she could be penny-pinching.
But Deborah didn’t come that evening, nor the next day, nor the day after that. So Oliver made the journey into Perugia again, long before it was time for his next visit to the Credito Italiano. The only explanation was that the girl had not been Deborah at all. But he still felt she was, and was bewildered. He even wondered if his daughter was lying low because she’d been sent to spy on him.
‘Si, signore?’ The clerk in the reception of the hotel smiled at him, and in slow Italian Oliver made his query. He wrote down Deborah’s name on a piece of paper so that there could be no confusion. He remembered the date of the day he’d last sat at the café. From the photograph he had of her he described his daughter.
‘Momento, signore. Scusi.’ The clerk entered a small office to one side of the reception desk and returned some minutes later with a registration form. On it were Deborah’s name and signature, and the address of the flat in London. She had stayed one night only in the hotel.
‘Student,’ a girl who had accompanied the clerk from the office said. ‘She search a room in Perugia.’
‘A room?’
‘She ask.’ The girl shrugged. ‘I no have room.’
‘Thank you.’ Oliver smiled at both of them in turn. The clerk called after him in Italian. The girl had given Deborah the name of an agency, not twenty metres away, where rooms were rented to students. ‘Thank you,’ Oliver said again, but did not take the details of the agency. At the café he ordered a cappuccino.
Deborah had enrolled on a course – language or culture, or perhaps a combination. Perugia was famous for its courses; students came from all over the place. Sometimes they spent a year, or even longer, depending on the course they’d chosen. He knew that because now and again he dropped into conversation with one, and in return for a grappa or a cappuccino supplied some local information. Once he’d had lunch with a well-to-do young Iranian who’d clearly been grateful for his company.
‘Ecco, signore!’ The waitress who went off duty at eleven placed his coffee in front of him.
‘Grazie.’
‘Prego, signore.’
He lit a cigarette. Once he’d had a lighter and a silver cigarette case, given to him by a Mrs Dogsmith, whom he’d met in the Giardini Carducci. For a moment he saw again the slim, faintly embossed case, and the initials curling around one another at the bottom left-hand corner of the lighter. He’d sold both of them years ago.
A woman came out of the hotel and paused idly, glancing at the café tables. She was taller than Mrs Dogsmith and a great deal thinner. A widow or divorcee, Oliver guessed, but then a man came out of the hotel and took her arm.
‘Your mother gave you so much,’ Angelica’s irrational chatter lurched at him suddenly. ‘But still you had to steal from her.’
He felt himself broken into, set upon and violated, as he remembered feeling at the time. The unpleasant memory had come because of Deborah, because Deborah’s presence put him in mind of Angelica, naturally enough. More agreeably, he recalled that it was he who’d chosen that name for their daughter. ‘Deborah,’ he’d suggested, and Angelica had not resisted it.
Not wishing to think about Angelica, he watched the waddling movement of a pigeon on the pavement, and then listened to a conversation in Italian between a darkly suited man and his companion, a Woman in a striped tan dress. They were talking about swimwear; the man appeared to be the proprietor of a fashion shop. Young people in a group went by, and Oliver glanced swiftly from face to face, but his daughter was not among them. He ordered another cappuccino because in ten minutes or so the early-morning waitress would be going off duty.
It was a silliness of Angelica’s to say he’d stolen from his mother. He more than anyone had regretted the sad delusions that had beset his mother. It was he who had watched her becoming vague, he who had suffered when she left all she possessed to a Barnardo’s home. Angelica belonged to a later time; she’d hardly known his mother.
Slowly Oliver lit and smoked another cigarette, filling in time while he waited for the new waitress to arrive. As soon as he saw her he crumpled up the little slip that had accompanied his first cup of coffee, and placed on the table the money for the second. But this morning, when he’d gone only a few yards along the street, the waitress came hurrying after him, jabbering in Italian. He smiled and shook his head. She held out the money he’d left.
‘Oh! Mi dispiace!’ he apologized, paying her the extra.
*
‘Deborah.’
She heard her name and turned. A middle-aged man was smiling at her. She smiled back, thinking he was one of the tutors whom she couldn’t place.
‘Don’t you recognize me, Deborah?’
They were in the square. He had risen from the edge of a wooden stage that had been erected for some public meeting. The two girls Deborah was with were curious.
‘My dear,’ the man said, but seventeen years had passed since Deborah had caught her one glimpse of her father that Sunday afternoon. Neither features nor voice were familiar. ‘It’s really you!’ the man said.
Bewildered, Deborah shook her head.
‘I’m Oliver,’ Oliver said. ‘Your father.’
They sat outside, at the nearest café. She didn’t take off her sunglasses. She’d spoken to the girls she’d been with and they’d walked on. She had a class at two, she’d said.
‘Time at least for a coffee,’ Oliver said.
She had a look of him, even though she was more like Angelica. It had been a disappointment, the deduction that she hadn’t come here to seek him out. A disappointment that it was no more than a coincidence, her presence in Perugia.
‘You knew of course?’ he said. ‘You did have my address?’
She shook her head. She’d had no idea. She hadn’t even been aware that he was not in England.
‘But, Deborah, surely Angelica –’
‘No, she never did.’
Their coffee came. The waiter was young and unshaven, not neatly in a uniform like the girls at the café by the hotel. He glanced at Deborah with interest. Oliver thought he heard him making a sound with his lips, but he could not be sure.
‘I often think of you and your mother in that flat.’
Deborah realized he didn’t know Angelica had died, and found it difficult to break the news. She did so clumsily, or so she thought.
‘My God!’ he said.
Deborah dipped a finger into the foam of her coffee. She didn’t like the encounter; she wished it hadn’t taken place. She didn’t like sitting here with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. ‘Apparently he’s my father,’ she’d said to her companions, momentarily enjoying the sophistication; but later, of course, all that would have to be explained.
‘Poor Angelica!’ he said.
&
nbsp; Deborah wondered why nobody had warned her. Why hadn’t her grey-suited uncle or one of Angelica’s friends advised against this particular Italian city? Why hadn’t her mother mentioned it?
Presumably they hadn’t warned her because they didn’t know. Her mother hadn’t ever wanted to mention him; it wasn’t Angelica’s way to warn people against people.
‘She used to send me a photograph of you every summer,’ he said. ‘I wondered why none came these last two years. I never guessed.’
She nodded meaninglessly.
‘Why are you learning Italian, Deborah?’
‘I took my degree in the history of art. It’s necessary to improve my Italian now.’
‘You’re taking it up? The history of art?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘It’s lovely you’re here.’
‘Yes.’
She had chosen Perugia rather than Florence or Rome because the course was better. But if she’d known she wouldn’t have.
‘Not really a coincidence,’ he was saying, very softly. ‘These things never are.’
Just for a moment Deborah felt irritated. What had been the use of Angelica’s being generous, unwilling to malign, bending over backwards to be decent, when this could happen as a result? What was the good of calling a marriage a mistake, and leaving it at that? But the moment passed; irritation with the dead was shameful.
‘Is it far from here, where you live?’ she asked, hoping that it was.
Oliver tore a cheque-stub from his cheque-book and wrote his address on it, then tore out another and drew a map. He wrote down the number of the Betona bus.
‘It’s lovely you’re here,’ he said again, giving his daughter the cheque-stubs. An excitement had begun in him. If he hadn’t been outside the hotel that morning he’d never even have known she was in Perugia. She might have come and gone and he’d have been none the wiser. Angelica had died, the two of them were left; he wouldn’t have known that, either.
‘If you don’t mind,’ he heard his daughter saying and felt she was repeating something he hadn’t heard the first time, ‘I don’t think I’ll visit you.’
‘You’ve been told unpleasant things, Deborah.’
‘No, not at all.’
‘We can be frank, you know.’
Angelica had been like that, he knew it to his cost. In his own case, she had laid down harsh conditions, believing that to be his due. The half-converted house and the monthly transfer of money carried the proviso that he should not come to the flat ever again, that he should not live in England. That wasn’t pleasant, but since it was what she wanted he’d agreed. At least the money hadn’t ceased when the woman died. Oliver smiled, feeling that to be a triumph.
‘Angelica was always jealous. It was jealousy that spoilt things.’
‘I never noticed that in her.’
He smiled again, knowing better. Heaven alone knew what this girl had been told about him, but today, now that she was here and Angelica was not, it didn’t matter.
‘A pity you feel you can’t come out to Betona. The bus fare’s quite a bit, else I’d come in oftener while you’re here.’
‘Actually, to tell the truth, I’d rather we didn’t have to meet.’ Deborah’s tone was matter of fact and sharp. A note of impatience had entered it, reminding Oliver not of his wife, but strangely of his mother.
‘I only come in once a month or so.’ He slid a cigarette from his packet of MS. ‘Angelica tried to keep us apart,’ he said, ‘all these years. She made the most elaborate arrangements.’
Deborah rooted in her handbag and found her own cigarettes and matches. Oliver said he’d have offered her one of his if he’d known she smoked. She said it didn’t matter.
‘I don’t want any of this hassle,’ she said.
‘Hassle, Deborah? A cup of coffee now and again –’
‘Look, honestly, not even that.’
Oliver smiled. It was always better not to argue. He’d never argued with Angelica. It was she who’d done the arguing, working herself up, making it sound as though she were angrily talking to herself. Deborah could easily sleep in the downstairs room; there were early-morning buses to Perugia. They could share the expenses of the household: the arrangement there’d been with the bankrupt man had been perfectly satisfactory.
‘Sorry,’ Deborah said, and to Oliver her voice sounded careless. She blew out smoke, looking over her shoulder, no doubt to see if her friends were still hanging around. He felt a little angry. He might have been just anyone, sitting there. He wanted to remind her that he had given her life.
‘It’s simple at Betona,’ he said instead. ‘I’m not well off. But I don’t think you’d find it dreadful.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t. All the same –’
‘Angelica was well off, you know. She never wanted me to be.’
Deborah missed her two o’clock lesson because it was harder than she’d anticipated to get away. She was told about all sorts of things, none of which she’d known about before. The Sunday afternoon she remembered was mentioned. ‘I wasn’t very well then,’ Oliver said. It was after that occasion that a legal agreement had been drawn up: in return for financial assistance Oliver undertook not to come to the flat again, not ever to attempt to see his child. He was given the house near Betona, no more than a shack really. ‘None of it was easy,’ he said. He looked away, as if to hide emotion from her. The photographs he annually received were a legality also, the only one he had insisted on himself. Suddenly he stood up and said he had a bus to catch.
‘It’s understandable,’ he said. ‘Your not wanting to come to Betona. Of course you have your own life.’
He nodded and went away. Deborah watched him disappearing into the crowd that was again collecting, after the afternoon siesta.
Who on earth would have believed that he’d outlive Angelica? Extra-ordinary how things happen; though, perhaps, in a sense, there was a fairness in it. Angelica had said he always had to win. In her unpleasant moods she’d said he had to cheat people, that he could not help himself. As a gambler was in thrall to luck, or a dipsomaniac to drink, his flaw was having to show a gain in everything he did.
On the bus journey back to Betona Oliver did not feel angry when he recalled that side of Angelica, and supposed it was because she was dead. Naturally it was a relief to have the weight of anger lifted after all these years, no point in denying it. The trouble had been it wasn’t easy to understand what she was getting at. When she’d found the three or four pieces among his things, she’d forgotten that they were his as much as his mother’s, and didn’t even try to understand that you couldn’t have told his mother that, she being like she was. Instead Angelica chose to repeat that he hadn’t been able to resist ‘getting the better of his mother. Angelica’s favourite theme was that: what she called his pettiness and his meanness left him cruel. He had often thought she didn’t care what she said; it never mattered how she hurt.
On the bus Angelica’s face lolled about in Oliver’s memory, with his mother’s and – to Oliver’s surprise – his daughter’s. Angelica pleaded about something, tears dripped from the old woman’s cheeks, Deborah simply shook her head. ‘Like cancer in a person’, Angelica said. Yet it was Angelica who had died, he thought again.
Deborah would come. She would come because she was his flesh and blood. One day he’d look down and see her on the path, bringing something with her because he wasn’t well off. Solicitors had drawn up the stipulations that had kept them apart all these years; in ugly legal jargon all of it was written coldly down. When Deborah considered that, she would begin to understand. He’d sensed, before they parted, a shadow of unease: guilt on Angelica’s behalf, which wasn’t surprising in the circumstances.
The thought cheered Oliver considerably. In his house, as he changed his clothes, he reflected that it didn’t really matter, the waitress running after him for the money. In all, over the months that had passed since this waitress had begun to work at the café, he
’d probably had twenty, even thirty, second cups of coffee. He knew it didn’t matter because after a little time it hadn’t mattered that the bankrupt man had made a scene, since by then the roof was repaired and the plumbing completed. It hadn’t mattered when Mrs Dogsmith turned nasty, since already she’d given him the lighter and the cigarette case. That was the kind of thing Angelica simply couldn’t understand, any more than she’d understood the confusions of his mother, any more than, probably, she’d understood their daughter. You couldn’t keep flesh and blood apart; you actually weren’t meant to.
In the kitchen Oliver put the kettle on for tea. When it boiled he poured the water on to a tea-bag he’d already used before setting out for Perugia. He carried the glass out to the patio and lit a cigarette. The car seats were too hot to sit on, so he stood, waiting for them to cool. There’d been no reason why she shouldn’t have paid for their coffee since she, after all, had been the cause of their having it. Eighteen thousand lire a cappuccino cost at that particular café, he’d noticed it on the bill.
August Saturday
‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said.
His tone suggested a statement, not a question, but Grania did remember him. She had recognized him immediately, his face smiling above the glass he held. He was a man she had believed she would never see again. For sixteen years – since the summer of 1972 – she had tried not to think about him, and for the most part had succeeded.
The Collected Stories Page 164
