By the time I descended to the piazza, I saw my mother at the foot of a large statue of a man on a horse, talking to the tall Italian man. My heart sank. How had she found him again?
‘Signore Giovanni Calvesi has invited us to take an ice cream with him,’ my mother announced, half-turning from her admirer to speak to me. She was as sparkling as the day, dressed in a long jade coat over a blue patterned dress, with a small jade hat cocked teasingly on the side of her head. She brought her gloved hands up to her face, to keep the sun out of her eyes. They were the same colour and fabric as her coat. Her black hair glistened, coiffured in perfect waves, and her lips were painted plum. I pulled the loose strands of my own hair away from my face, and wondered if I had put my hat back on straight. I felt like a buffoon beside Mother’s sleek sophistication.
Giovanni Calvesi turned towards me and smiled warmly. I noticed he had kind eyes, liquid brown with long lashes like a horse, and smooth pale fingers as he delicately picked up my hand and pressed it to his lips.
‘Piacere di conosceria. I am so pleased to meet you. It would be an honour if you and your sister would like to join me.’ Without waiting for an answer, he continued to speak. ‘Please . . . come.’ He indicated for us both to take either arm so that we could safely cross the piazza and avoid the trams.
‘How wonderful it is to be in a city of culture,’ my mother said gaily.
Giovanni Calvesi turned to look at her, and her eyes twinkled, her smile wavering and mysterious. He nodded, completely entranced.
‘Signore Calvesi is a painter, June. He has requested I sit for a portrait.’
‘Your sister has a most unusual visage,’ said Giovanni the painter. ‘The colouring of her skin and its texture. It is such an English rose, and one I would wish to paint.’ He paused, a little breathless. ‘It is hard in Milano to find a subject who has such fair skin.’
We walked through a monumental arch and beneath a glass dome, people milling about us. Now we were in the shade. Trams passed by us, and we walked swiftly back out into another piazza. Giovanni Calvesi pointed to a building on his left.
‘La Scala. One evening I will take you to an opera, I think. Oh, it is quite absolute you must come with me!’
My mother laughed lightly, the notes tinkling like coins dropped on the cobbles.
We turned and walked up a narrow street, cars and trams creating a confusion of noise beside us. I wished Signore Calvesi would not walk so fast. I could feel my cheeks blooming and my forehead dampen. Suddenly he stopped opposite a wide building with dark awnings, and small wooden tables and chairs clustered outside.
‘This is the caffè of my friend, Giuseppe Castellano, and it is where you will find the best gelato in Milano.’
Giovanni Calvesi spread his arms wide and then, again taking each of our elbows, he guided us across the busy street.
‘Can you believe Signore Calvesi doesn’t like the Duomo,’ my mother said to me as she sat down on one of the spindly chairs that our host had pulled back for her.
‘It is vulgar, like a wedding cake,’ he said, pushing her into it and waving his hands in front of his face. ‘To see a beautiful church, you should go to Santa Maria delle Grazie. It is a place that inspires . . .’ he paused and waved his hands about again, ‘. . . the divine, with simple classic proportions, and the frescoes. All you can do in the Duomo is look up. It is designed to make you feel small, too small for me.’
He laughed flamboyantly, and Mother joined in. I felt dread rise up inside me. This man was different from all the others. I could see it in my mother’s face. She was going to betray Father. And what could I do about it? I was useless, and a traitor too.
Yet I had never seen my mother like this before. I had seen her flirt with Captain Sanderson, and all those other poor husbands, and the men we had met on our journey so far. My mother attracted such attention effortlessly. She was always the light around which they gathered, yet sometimes I suspected Mother felt bored, weary of the whole business. Here, in a Milanese caffè, delicately spooning vanilla ice cream into her rosebud mouth, my mother was like a child again. The little girl who craved her own glamorous mother’s notice and never got it. So who will give it to her? Who will feed her heart, lost in the dark since she was so small? Giovanni Calvesi. He was her light, and my mother was lit by him. She was instantly younger, gayer. Like the first tiny snowdrop pushing its way up through the hard frost, there was something quite beautiful about it. It was the only time I saw my mother’s heart in her face, and it was soft.
NICHOLAS
Nicholas takes Hopper for a walk in the Ramor woods in Virginia. The old dog is still limping, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He does look happy, even though he is wounded. Hopper accepts that’s the way he is and carries on. They cross a little stone bridge over a rushing brook and climb down to it, through the reeds. Hopper isn’t keen to go in the water, but drinks from the puddles on the muddy bank.
Charlie would like it here. Nicholas knows it. For years she had been saying she was tired of Dublin and, if they were going to start a family, she thought it best to move to the country – more room, a better lifestyle. But no children came. He didn’t like to plan, and so each day just led into the next, and they were still in Sandycove three years after that first discussion.
Even buying the Fanning house had been by chance. He had got in his car one day, brimming with heat and anger, knowing that he couldn’t stay under the same roof as his wife any longer, and started to drive. Hours had passed in a blur, and he had had no idea where he was. He had ended up in Oldcastle, of all places, and by then it was dark so he went into the hotel, booked a room and got drunk at the bar. The next morning, after attempting to cure his hangover with a fried breakfast, he had walked past the estate agents and saw a picture of the house in the window. Something made him stop. Before he knew it, he was walking through the door and arranging a viewing. Within the week he had made an offer. Charlie had been astonished. She had begged him to think things through, not to make a rash decision. But at the time he couldn’t bear to look at her.
Hopper and he come back out of the woods and onto the golf course. He walks back up the hill to the hotel car park and puts Hopper into the car, making sure the windows are all open. The sun has gone in now, and it is chillier, but even so he doesn’t want to risk the dog getting dehydrated. The hotel appears deserted. He goes into the empty bar and picks up a menu. He sits on a big red sofa by a fireplace that isn’t lit. A girl in a black skirt suit walks in and asks him if he would like anything. He orders fish chowder.
He is on his own in the large, empty lounge of this hotel, looking out of the big sash windows at the garden, and it feels so wrong. Charlie should be here with him. The two of them having lunch after walking the dog, maybe a baby in a sling across his chest, and he would be passing him or her to Charlie now so that she could feed the baby. Nicholas clenches his fists. She thought that he hadn’t felt anything when she had the first miscarriage, but he had. She hadn’t told him what was going on. She had gone to the hospital on her own and rung him to say that she had lost it.
‘Why didn’t you call me earlier? I could have been with you,’ he had said in panic to her, down the phone.
‘I’m sorry. I just knew if you were with me, I would have fallen apart. I was better on my own.’ She sounded so aloof and distant.
It was only when she got home that she cried. He held her in his arms and wished he could change their destiny.
‘We can try again,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘It’ll be all right.’
Three more times Charlie had got pregnant, and three times she had miscarriages. They were good at conceiving, but the babies didn’t want to stay. Charlie lost weight, couldn’t sleep, and painted more and more furiously. During the daytime he was always trying to comfort her, cooking her food, bringing her cups of coffee to the studio, paying all the bills and cleaning up. But he had lost the babies, too. He knew it wasn’t the same, because he hadn
’t actually been through the physical trauma of being pregnant and then the pain and bloodiness of losing the baby; but he still felt bereft, powerless and a failure. Gradually Charlie became so touchy he thought it best not to mention it any more. Sometimes at night he would wake up and she wasn’t in the bed with him, and he would tiptoe across the hall and see her sitting in her studio, rocking backwards and forwards, crying like a child, and it frightened him. She never seemed to see him, so he would creep back to the bedroom feeling like a coward, but convincing himself that if he spoke to her it would only make things worse. She was possessive about her grief and she didn’t want to share it with him. What Nicholas couldn’t get out of his head was that maybe she had slept with that other man hoping to get pregnant. Maybe she thought his seed was no good? Another man’s baby might succeed to full term, whereas his hadn’t. It was ridiculous to think this way, but he couldn’t help it.
The girl in the suit brings him his bowl of chowder and some home-made brown bread. He looks around the room as he eats. There is a large painting of horses at a fair, with a dog in the foreground staring at him. It is a wiry grey-and-white hound and it reminds him of Hopper. There is a strange light shaped like a duck on the mantelpiece, and a plaster tableau on the wall of Cupid offering Venus a cup of love. Nicholas believes that if he were offered a cup of love right now, he would drink from it. No matter who gave it to him. He is so lonely.
‘Hello, Nick.’
Nicholas starts. He hadn’t noticed anyone coming into the lounge. And, of all people, it’s Geraldine, with her little girl.
‘Hello, Geraldine. How are you?’
‘I’m grand. This is my daughter, Grainne. Grainne, this is my piano teacher.’
The little girl smiles shyly and then looks at the rug. She must be about eight. She is dressed in riding clothes. She looks like an old-fashioned little girl, her brown hair tied in plaits.
‘Grainne’s just been riding. We were coming in here for lunch.’
‘Would you like to join me?’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’ He puts his spoon down. ‘As you can see, I’m on my own.’
‘Oh, your friend went home.’
‘Yes.’
Geraldine and Grainne sit opposite him on another red sofa. Geraldine orders soup and sandwiches for them. She is wearing a lacy white smock dress. Her legs are bare and she has on a pair of pink flip-flops. It is an odd-looking outfit, something a little girl might wear, which looks incongruous on her ample frame. They talk about the weather for a few minutes. Maybe the temperature will stay high and they’ll get a bit of summer now before school is back. Grainne says nothing, nibbling her sandwich when it arrives.
‘Do you like school?’ Nicholas asks her.
The child looks mortified and nods.
‘She has a lovely teacher next year,’ Geraldine says. ‘She’s an old schoolfriend of mine. She’s really good, does interesting things with the children. More than the usual you get on the curriculum.’
Nicholas nods.
‘Sorry,’ Geraldine apologizes. ‘That’s not very interesting for you. Not if you don’t have children.’
‘Yes. Well, we wanted to.’
Geraldine stops eating, stunned by this admission. ‘Oh, I am sorry. I . . . er . . . I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘That’s all right. So how’s the practice going?’
She smiles, still pink with embarrassment. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be very pleased with me tomorrow. I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to do much at all. Ray’s sister and family are coming to stay at the weekend and I have to get the house ready, laundry and baking.’ She sighs, looks at Nicholas. ‘It’s been non-stop.’
‘You know, I think you’re a natural.’
‘At the piano?’
‘Yes. You’ve really progressed in such a short time. We’ll have you playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata by the end of the year.’
Geraldine looks genuinely thrilled. ‘Do you hear that, Grainne? Now wouldn’t you like to learn as well? We could play duets.’
‘Okay,’ the little girl says, dipping her crusts into her soup.
Geraldine beams at Nicholas. ‘I can’t tell you how much your lessons mean to me. I don’t know what I’d do without them.’
He can tell she means it, and it worries him. What kind of life must she have, if the highlight of her week is his piano lessons?
JUNE
The weather turns and the rain comes again. I have been walking down by the lake every afternoon, bathed in autumnal shades, feeding my growing belly with humble November sunshine. Every day I rest on a small cup of shore, and sit on a boulder the shape of a turtle’s back, listening to the moorhens coo, and looking at the silhouette of one lone heron. The simple, yet hypnotic quality of nature helps me not to think about what might be happening on the other side of the Irish Sea and to my husband in the skies above Europe.
Now the heavens have opened, and I have to concede that Oonagh is right. It is no weather for me to go walking, as the path down to the lake is slippery and treacherous. It would be foolish to take a chance in my condition, as well as risking a cold, which I am told is always tenfold worse when you are pregnant.
And so I find myself sitting in the bedroom on the cold bed when I should be busy working about the house. I stare out at the rain, those pedantic lines of grey streaking the sky, blocking out the light, imprisoning me, and think I should write my husband a letter. But I have no news to tell him, and I am afraid to write my feelings down for they would surely dismantle me. As the rain pounds into the thatch, and I curl up in my cave, I realize I ought to find something to occupy my mind. Either that or lose my sanity.
I could easily spend all day working on the farm of course, and my chores fill many hours. Sometimes I like the clear simplicity of making butter, feeding the hens, gathering eggs, or just washing the yard. I try to clear my mind of all despondency and I look with satisfaction at my hands, the skin reddened and hardening. These are a farmer’s wife’s hands.
When I lie down during the day I am so very tired, yet I cannot sleep. Oonagh says it is early pregnancy that makes me so exhausted, and soon I will have energy again. She says this happened to all of her sisters, and sister-in-laws, when they had their children. When I feel sick in the mornings, Oonagh gives me a small dish of grated apple to make me feel better.
I close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come, and instead I daydream of times before the war, before I came to Ireland and the blackout curtain was dropped between my sister’s world and mine. It was only a few years ago, and possibly I look back on it all with rose-coloured spectacles, but the world we inhabited then was more colourful, and joyful. I am sure of it. My musings take me back to Italy, and the day Giovanni Calvesi bought Mother and I ice creams in Milan. I watch Mother slowly eating her ice cream, savouring each delicious scoop, her eyes fixed on Giovanni Calvesi’s, her spirit detaching from mine and all that she belonged to back home. My ice cream turned to brown sludge in the bottom of my glass bowl and all the time I was thinking: what has kept our family from cherishing each other?
It terrifies me to think I will be a mother soon. I am not ready. But I suppose I would never have been ready. Perhaps it is better this way, to have motherhood forced upon me. And so I try to wear myself out. I work my body as hard as I can, yet still every night I am restless. My mind is racing, and flying off in myriad directions; unfettered, uncontrolled. All the physical work in the world is not going to give me peace. I need to do something with my brain, keep it ticking over, and thinking of other things apart from the past, apart from Robert and the war.
This realization brings me up to the loft, and one small box I had placed in the far corner when we first moved here. I have not opened this box since the day I got married, more than five years ago. I bring it down to the kitchen and place it on the table, standing back and just staring at it. It is a large brown cardboard box, with my name written
on the label – June Sinclair, University College, Gower Street, London. I step forward, untie the string and slowly lift off the lid. Inside is a stack of papers, notes for my final dissertation, which I never finished. The box is a summary of my failure, and a reminder of what my universe had been before I met Robert.
I was the one to follow in Daddy’s classical footsteps, yet his love of Greek and Roman architecture was transformed into literature for me. I loved the anarchy of the Roman authors, their scathing, biting tongues, their elegiac poetry and the epic – a story, part legend, part history, which can bind you for a lifetime. My grasp of Latin grammar was always shaky, but what attracted me was its emphatic structure, phrases that you could picture carved in stone, with a clear beginning, middle and end to them, no lingering, no maybe, just absolute.
Et Mihi Cedet Amor.
That phrase would spin inside my head as I worked in the library on a fresh, blustery spring day in London, cherry blossom knocking on the windowpanes, the air sparkling around my head, becoming a jewel-laden halo, inspiring my endeavours.
Et Mihi Cedet Amor.
And Love Shall Yield to Me.
What did it mean?
I applied it to one woman’s life, a Roman princess called Julia, who was the daughter of Emperor Augustus. I thought that phrase of Ovid’s was like a gauntlet to women of her time. I believed she should have been a warrior in a different lifetime. Julia was a man in a woman’s body, and love was her only chance for combat.
When I met Robert I believed I understood what Ovid meant. Now I was yielding to love, so surely what Ovid had written meant the opposite? His challenge to mankind was: never fall in love. But what human being could ever possibly want not to be in love?
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