“In June, 1940, we were evacuated,” she started, for the tenth or eleventh time. “I was back by October. Italians had taken over the hotel. They used the mirror behind the bar for target practice. Oddly enough it was not smashed. It is covered with spiderwebs, and the bullet hole is the spider. I had great trouble over Aunt Vera, who disappeared and was found finally in one of the attic rooms.
“The Italians made a pet of her. Took her picture. She enjoyed that. Everyone who became thin had a desire to be photographed, as if knowing they would use this intimidating evidence against those loved ones who had missed being starved. Guilt for life. After an initial period of hardship, during which she often had her picture taken at her request, the Italians brought food and looked after her, more than anyone. She was their mama. We were annexed territory and in time we had the same food as the Italians. The thin pictures of your mother are here on my desk.
“She buried her British passport and would never say where. Perhaps under the Judas tree with Mr. Cordier’s cat, Polly. She remained just as mad and just as spoiled, and that became dangerous when life stopped being ordinary. She complained about me to the Italians. At that time a complaint was a matter of prison and of death if it was made to the wrong person. Luckily for me, there was also the right person to take the message.
“A couple of years after that, the Germans and certain French took over and the Italians were shut up in another hotel without food or water, and some people risked their well-being to take water to them (for not everyone preferred the new situation, you can believe me). When she was dying I asked her if she had a message for one Italian officer who had made such a pet of her and she said, ‘No, why?’ She died without a word for anybody. She was buried as ‘Rossini,’ because the Italians had changed people’s names. She had said she was French, a Frenchwoman named Ross, and so some peculiar civil status was created for us – the two Mrs. Rossinis.
“The records were topsy-turvy; it would have meant going to the Germans and explaining my dead aunt was British, and of course I thought I would not. The death certificate and permission to bury are for a Vera Rossini. I have them here on my desk for you with her pictures.
“You are probably wondering where I have found all this writing paper. The Germans left it behind. When we were being shelled I took what few books were left in the reading room down to what used to be the wine cellar and read by candlelight. You are probably wondering where the candles came from. A long story. I even have paint for the radiators, large buckets that have never been opened.
“I live in one room, my mother’s old sitting room. The business room can be used but the files have gone. When the Italians were here your mother was their mother, but I was not their Moslem wife, although I still had respect for men. One yelled ‘Luce, luce,’ because your mother was showing a light. She said, ‘Bugger you, you little toad.’ He said, ‘Granny, I said “luce,” not “Duce.” ’
“Not long ago we crept out of our shelled homes, looking like cave dwellers. When you see the hotel again, it will be functioning. I shall have painted the radiators. Long shoots of bramble come in through the cardroom windows. There are drifts of leaves in the old music room and I saw scorpions and heard their rustling like the rustle of death. Everything that could have been looted has gone. Sheets, bedding, mattresses. The neighbors did quite a lot of that. At the risk of their lives. When the Italians were here we had rice and oil. Your mother, who was crazy, used to put out grains to feed the mice.
“When the Germans came we had to live under Vichy law, which meant each region lived on what it could produce. As ours produces nothing, we got quite thin again. Aunt Vera died plump. Do you know what it means when I say she used to complain about me?
“Send me some books. As long as they are in English. I am quite sick of the three other languages in which I’ve heard so many threats, such boasting, such a lot of lying.
“For a time I thought people would like to know how the Italians left and the Germans came in. It was like this: They came in with the first car moving slowly, flying the French flag. The highest-ranking French official in the region. Not a German. No, just a chap getting his job back. The Belgian Red Cross people were completely uninterested and warned me that no one would ever want to hear.
“I suppose that you already have the fiction of all this. The fiction must be different, oh very different, from Italians sobbing with homesickness in the night. The Germans were not real, they were specially got up for the events of the time. Sat in the white dining room, eating with whatever plates and spoons were not broken or looted, ate soups that were mostly water, were forbidden to complain. Only in retreat did they develop faces and I noticed then that some were terrified and many were old. A radio broadcast from some untouched area advised the local population not to attack them as they retreated, it would make wild animals of them. But they were attacked by some young boys shooting out of a window and eight hostages were taken, including the son of the man who cut the maharaja’s daughters’ black hair, and they were shot and left along the wall of a café on the more or less Italian side of the border. And the man who owned the café was killed too, but later, by civilians – he had given names to the Gestapo once, or perhaps it was something else. He got on the wrong side of the right side at the wrong time, and he was thrown down the deep gorge between the two frontiers.
“Up in one of the hill villages Germans stayed till no one was alive. I was at that time in the former wine cellar, reading books by candlelight.
“The Belgian Red Cross team found the skeleton of a German deserter in a cave and took back the helmet and skull to Knokke-le-Zoute as souvenirs.
“My war has ended. Our family held together almost from the Napoleonic adventures. It is shattered now. Sentiment does not keep families whole – only mutual pride and mutual money.”
This true story sounded so implausible that she decided never to send it. She wrote a sensible letter asking for sugar and rice and for new books; nothing must be older than 1940.
Jack answered at once: there were no new authors (he had been asking people). Sugar was unobtainable, and there were queues for rice. Shoes had been rationed. There were no women’s stockings but lisle, and the famous American legs looked terrible. You could not find butter or meat or tinned pineapple. In restaurants, instead of butter you were given miniature golf balls of cream cheese. He supposed that all this must sound like small beer to Netta.
A notice arrived that a CARE package awaited her at the post office. It meant that Jack had added his name and his money to a mailing list. She refused to sign for it; then she changed her mind and discovered it was not from Jack but from the American she had once taken to such a pretty room. Jack did send rice and sugar and delicious coffee but he forgot about books. His letters followed; sometimes three arrived in a morning. She left them sealed for days. When she sat down to answer, all she could remember were implausible things.
Iris came back. She was the first. She had grown puffy in England – the result of drinking whatever alcohol she could get her hands on and grimly eating her sweets allowance: there would be that much less gin and chocolate for the Germans if ever they landed. She put her now wide bottom on a comfortable armchair – one of the few chairs the, first wave of Italians had not burned with cigarettes or idly hacked at with daggers – and said Jack had been living with a woman in America and to spare the gossip had let her be known as his wife. Another Mrs. Ross? When Netta discovered it was dimpled Chippendale, she laughed aloud.
“I’ve seen them,” said Iris. “I mean I saw them together. King Charles and a spaniel. Jack wiped his feet on her.”
Netta’s feelings were of lightness, relief. She would not have to tell Jack about the partisans hanging by the neck in the arches of the Place Masséna at Nice. When Iris had finished talking, Netta said, “What about his music?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know something so important?”
“Jack
had a good chance at things, but he made a mess of everything,” said Iris. “My father is still living. Life really is too incredible for some of us.”
A dark girl of about twenty turned up soon after. Her costume, a gray dress buttoned to the neck, gave her the appearance of being in uniform. She unzipped a military-looking bag and cried, in an unplaceable accent, “Hallo, hallo, Mrs. Ross? A few small gifts for you,” and unpacked a bottle of Haig, four tins of corned beef, a jar of honey, and six pairs of American nylon stockings, which Netta had never seen before, and were as good to have under a mattress as gold. Netta looked up at the tall girl.
“Remember? I was the middle sister. With,” she said gravely, “the typical middle-sister problems.” She scarcely recalled Jack, her beloved. The memory of Netta had grown up with her. “I remember you laughing,” she said, without loving that memory. She was a severe, tragic girl. “You were the first adult I ever heard laughing. At night in bed I could hear it from your balcony. You sat smoking with, I suppose, your handsome husband. I used to laugh just to hear you.”
She had married an Iranian journalist. He had discovered that political prisoners in the United States were working under lamentable conditions in tin mines. President Truman had sent them there. People from all over the world planned to unite to get them out. The girl said she had been to Germany and to Austria, she had visited camps, they were all alike, and that was already the past, and the future was the prisoners in the tin mines.
Netta said, “In what part of the country are these mines?”
The middle sister looked at her sadly and said, “Is there more than one part?”
For the first time in years, Netta could see Jack clearly. They were silently sharing a joke; he had caught it too. She and the girl lunched in a corner of the battered dining-room. The tables were scarred with initials. There were no tablecloths. One of the great-uncle’s paintings still hung on a wall. It showed the Quai Laurenti, a country road alongside the sea. Netta, who had no use for the past, was discovering a past she could regret. Out of a dark, gentle silence – silence imposed by the impossibility of telling anything real – she counted the cracks in the walls. When silence failed she heard power saws ripping into olive trees and a lemon grove. With a sense of deliverance she understood that soon there would be nothing left to spoil. Her great-uncle’s picture, which ought to have changed out of sympathetic magic, remained faithful. She regretted everything now, even the three anxious little girls in blue linen. Every calamitous season between then and now seemed to descend directly from Georgina Blackley’s having said “white” just to keep three children in their place. Clad in buttoned-up gray, the middle sister now picked at corned beef and said she had hated her father, her mother, her sisters, and most of all the Dutch governess.
“Where is she now?” said Netta.
“Dead, I hope.” This was from someone who had visited camps. Netta sat listening, her cheek on her hand. Death made death casual: she had always known. Neither the vanquished in their flight nor the victors returning to pick over rubble seemed half so vindictive as a tragic girl who had disliked her governess.
Dr. Blackley came back looking positively cheerful. In those days men still liked soldiering. It made them feel young, if they needed to feel it, and it got them away from home. War made the break few men could make on their own. The doctor looked years younger, too, and very fit. His wife was not with him. She had survived everything, and the hardships she had undergone had completely restored her to health – which had made it easy for her husband to leave her. Actually, he had never gone back, except to wind up the matter.
“There are things about Georgina I respect and admire,” he said, as husbands will say from a distance. His war had been in Malta. He had come here, as soon as he could, to the shelled, gnawed, tarnished coast (as if he had not seen enough at Malta) to ask Netta to divorce Jack and to marry him, or live with him – anything she wanted, on any terms.
But she wanted nothing – at least, not from him.
“Well, one can’t defeat a memory,” he said. “I always thought it was mostly su-hex between the two of you.”
“So it was,” said Netta. “So far as I remember.”
“Everyone noticed. You would vanish at odd hours. Dishuppear.”
“Yes, we did.”
“You can’t live on memories,” he objected. “Though I respect you for being faithful, of course.”
“What you are talking about is something of which one has no specific memory,” said Netta. “Only of seasons. Places. Rooms. It is as abstract to remember as to read about. That is why it is boring in talk except as a joke, and boring in books except for poetry.”
“You never read poetry.”
“I do now.”
“I guessed that,” he said.
“That lack of memory is why people are unfaithful, as it is so curiously called. When I see closed shutters I know there are lovers behind them. That is how the memory works. The rest is just convention and small talk.”
“Why lovers? Why not someone sleeping off the wine he had for lunch?”
“No. Lovers.”
“A middle-aged man cutting his toenails in the bathtub,” he said with unexpected feeling. “Wearing bifocal lenses so that he can see his own feet.”
“No, lovers. Always.”
He said, “Have you missed him?”
“Missed who?”
“Who the bloody hell are we talking about?”
“The Italian commander billeted here. He was not a guest. He was here by force. I was not breaking a rule. Without him I’d have perished in every way. He may be home with his wife now. Or in that fortress near Turin where he sent other men. Or dead.” She looked at the doctor and said, “Well, what would you like me to do? Sit here and cry?”
“I can’t imagine you with a brute.”
“I never said that.”
“Do you miss him still?”
“The absence of Jack was like a cancer which I am sure has taken root, and of which I am bound to die,” said Netta.
“You’ll bu-hury us all,” he said, as doctors tell the condemned.
“I haven’t said I won’t.” She rose suddenly and straightened her skirt, as she used to do when hotel guests became pally. “Conversation over,” it meant.
“Don’t be too hard on Jack,” he said.
“I am hard on myself,” she replied.
After he had gone he sent her a parcel of books, printed on grayish paper, in warped wartime covers. All of the titles were, to Netta, unknown. There was Fireman Flower and The Horse’s Mouth and Four Quartets and The Stuff to Give the Troops and Better Than a Kick in the Pants and Put Out More Flags. A note added that the next package would contain Henry Green and Dylan Thomas. She guessed he would not want to be thanked, but she did so anyway. At the end of her letter was “Please remember, if you mind too much, that I said no to you once before.” Leaning on the bar, exactly as Jack used to, with a glass of the middle sister’s drink at hand, she opened Better Than a Kick in the Pants and read, “… two Fascists came in, one of them tall and thin and tough looking; the other smaller, with only one arm and an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Both of them were quite young and wore black shirts.”
Oh, thought Netta, I am the only one who knows all this. No one will ever realize how much I know of the truth, the truth, the truth, and she put her head on her hands, her elbows on the scarred bar, and let the first tears of her after-war run down her wrists.
The last to return was the one who should have been first. Jack wrote that he was coming down from the north as far as Nice by bus. It was a common way of travelling and much cheaper than by train. Netta guessed that he was mildly hard up and that he had saved nothing from his war job. The bus came in at six, at the foot of the Place Masséna. There was a deep-blue late-afternoon sky and pale sunlight. She could hear birds from the public gardens nearby. The Place was as she had always seen it, like an elegant drawing room with a blue c
eiling. It was nearly empty. Jack looked out on this sunlighted, handsome space and said, “Well, I’ll just leave my stuff at the bus office, for the moment” – perhaps noticing that Netta had not invited him anywhere. He placed his ticket on the counter, and she saw that he had not come from far away: he must have been moving south by stages. He carried an aura of London pub life; he had been in London for weeks.
A frowning man hurrying to wind things up so he could have his first drink of the evening said, “The office, is closing and we don’t keep baggage here.”
“People used to be nice,” Jack said.
“Bus people?”
“Just people.”
She was hit by the sharp change in his accent. As for the way of speaking, which is something else again, he was like the heir to great estates back home after a Grand Tour. Perhaps the estates had run down in his absence. She slipped the frowning man a thousand francs, a new pastel-tinted bill, on which the face of a calm girl glowed like an opal. She said, “We shan’t be long.”
She set off over the Place, walking diagonally – Jack beside her, of course. He did not ask where they were headed, though he did make her smile by saying, “Did you bring a car?,” expecting one of the hotel cars to be parked nearby, perhaps with a driver to open the door; perhaps with cold chicken and wine in a hamper, too. He said, “I’d forgotten about having to tip for every little thing.” He did not question his destination, which was no farther than a café at the far end of the square. What she felt at that instant was intense revulsion. She thought, I don’t want him, and pushed away some invisible flying thing – a bat or a blown paper. He looked at her with surprise. He must have been wondering if hardship had taught Netta to talk in her mind.
From the Fifteenth District Page 8
