Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  It was the window that drew Julia. She rested her hand on the wooden shutter and looked out. Beneath her she could see the blue sea with its fringe of white and gold, and all the shades and undulations of the land to the remote grey-blue horizon.

  She turned back to Sister Maria. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You are welcome here.’ At first Julia couldn’t understand the rest of the nun’s response. Finally, from their combined efforts in English and Italian, she gathered that the community and their guests, those that were well enough to come or to be brought to the table, ate all together at six o’clock in the refectory. They would be happy if their visitor would join them.

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia said again.

  Sister Maria went briskly away.

  Julia crossed back to the door. Opposite it, in the corridor wall, there was another window. It looked down into the courtyard. She saw that there was a greenish metal basin in the centre, ornamented with dolphins’ heads. It must have been a fountain, once. The basin was surrounded with terracotta pots in which straggling geraniums grew. A man loped in a diagonal through the sun. His body shook and his head twitched, and he was shouting and laughing. Julia couldn’t decipher any words. Against the courtyard wall opposite her there were more chairs. The occupants were of all ages, some seemingly alert, others motionless bundles. On the east and west sides there were arches instead of walls, making open loggias. There were white beds drawn up in the deeper shade. Nuns were moving to and fro, or sitting beside the chairs. Two of them had their heads bent over a white cloth spread across their knees. They were mending, or embroidering. Watching from her window, Julia wondered why she had wanted to run away from her first glimpse of the palazzo’s inhabitants. Now that she saw them again she recognised that they belonged in the sun’s warmth as much as she did herself. Their faces, sighted or blind, turned up to drink it in.

  When she listened, she heard a comfortable buzz of sound. There were voices, overlaying each other, some talking and some singing, uncoordinated but happy. From somewhere else came a high, braying laugh. And looking straight beneath her Julia saw the girl of Lily’s age, in her wheelchair. She was banging a child’s drum with a stick, a rhythmic tattoo, her head nodding with the beat of it.

  Julia watched for a long time before going back into her white room. The drum’s rhythm never flagged or varied itself.

  She sat down on the bed with her hands loose in her lap. It was odd that it should be here in this place, that the self-pitying loneliness should release her. But it did. She felt the weight of it, lifting, letting her see clearly again. She saw herself, thrown into sharp focus against the people in the courtyard. The picture was unappealing, but she studied it, carefully.

  And then she realised that the restlessness had gone too. She had come to Montebellate, and she knew that she could stay here. If they would let her stay.

  Close at hand, so close that it seemed directly above her head, the palazzo bell began to toll. Listening to it, counting the long, slow strokes, Julia realised that it wasn’t cracked at all. It was the warmth-thickened air that took up the notes, muffling them and stretching them and delivering them up, distorted, over the tiled roofs. It was a pleasing discovery. It made her feel that, after all, after her mistakes, all would still be well.

  She sat on her bed and the bell echoes faded over her head.

  Just before six o’clock, two young boys appeared with her suitcases. They seemed to know and feel comfortable in the palazzo, although they shuffled and giggled with embarrassment outside her door. Julia thanked them, and gave them small-denomination lire notes, at which they looked amazed.

  Julia changed her dress and laid out her toilet things on the washstand. Then she went down to dinner.

  The refectory was bare, arched and wooden-beamed. The community sat at long tables, on benches at one side, in their wheelchairs on the other. Sister Maria led Julia to an empty place. She was greeted with smiles, or welcoming glances devoid of curiosity. A handbell rang, and those who could stand stood up for a Latin grace, simply delivered by a young nun. The nuns took their places amongst their charges, and the food was served. It was coarse, but good. There was a soup of vegetables, tasting strongly of olive oil, penne and tomato sauce, then figs and rosy grapes and lumps of pecorino.

  Julia never forgot her first meal at the palazzo.

  She had been placed between a tiny old woman with fingers like a bird’s claws, and a young man who mumbled incessantly and made fish-like movements with his knobby red hands. Covertly. Julia peered at the nuns. They spooned up their charges’ food for them, held their jerking limbs steady while they ate, talked and listened and smiled.

  Julia’s old lady seemed too frail to lift her spoon. Julia crumbled her bread for her and was rewarded with a darting glance from bright eyes in a pucker of seamed brown skin The spoon was not, after all, too heavy. The bread was soaked in soup, to soften it. The boy on her left was harder to help. His arms began to shoot out in uncontrollable lunges. At last, before all her own food had descended into her lap, Julia discovered how to keep them pinioned between them with one hand while she fed him with the other. She didn’t know whether his mumblings were for her or not. She talked back to him, in English, about her journey from Rome to Naples to Montebellate. Her lack of Italian was, at last, no handicap. Looking around her she reflected that each one of them at these long tables, except for the calm-faced nuns, was inarticulate in their own particular way.

  And yet the hum of their talk rose from the tables and companionably filled the space under the rough beams.

  Julia discovered that she was very hungry. She ate everything, rapidly, in the intervals that were left between helping her neighbours. She noticed that, by the end of the meal, Sister Maria had stopped watching out for her from her place at the other end of the table.

  That pleased her, too.

  Julia stayed for a month with the Sisters of the Blessed Family at Montebellate. Over the days and weeks she came to know and admire them all, the different Marias and Martas and Teresas of the Innocents and the Martyrs and the Holy Blood. Few of them had more than a word or two of English; Sister Maria of the Angels and the Mother Superior herself were the rare exceptions. But they were all used to obstacles in the path of communication and to circumventing them. Their friendliness and interest and warmth did not, in any case, need words in order to express itself. Julia felt it surrounding her, as well as the more deserving guests who were brought up to the palazzo in ambulances and buses and dusty Fiats. Sometimes they stayed only for a few days, sometimes for much longer. They came, mostly, from the poor villages that spread down from Naples into Calabria, from families that had no other resources to turn to for help. For all their suffering, Julia saw clearly how much the visitors benefited from their stay. The palazzo community was a deeply happy one. The recognition of the nuns’ goodness was chastening for Julia, but it was also profoundly soothing.

  She did what she could to help in their work, frustrated at first by how little it was. She had no nursing skills, and not many more domestic ones.

  At last, she found her niche with the small group of little children who occupied the upper floor of one of the wings. Most of them were incurably handicapped; more happily, there were two or three who were convalescing, and one boisterous little boy who was well, but whose parents were unable to care for him. Julia discovered that her emergent, infantile Italian was just right for the children. They could understand each other perfectly. She knelt on the linoleum floors of the ward or on the stone flags of the courtyard and drew pictures, or helped with jigsaw puzzles, or sang songs with them. More patiently, more willingly, than she had ever done with Lily.

  They grew fond of her, even the ones who could barely recognise anything. The stronger ones hung on her hands, shouting, and put their arms around her neck. The healthy Raimundo became her lieutenant in their games.

  When she was not with the children, Julia was too tired to do much else. She
walked in the palazzo’s ruined gardens, down the steep terraces that fell away beneath her window to the south side of Montebellate’s hill. She tried to make sense of the once formal grandeur, and wondered about the unfamiliar plants that sprang and straggled along the overgrown walks. One of the nuns knew a little about the garden’s history. She told her that at the beginning of the century, the palace and its land had been bought by a wealthy family, a manufacturing family from the north. The lady had had the gardens laid out, in the grand Italian manner. But, Sister Agnes had shrugged, the times had changed. Perhaps the family had lost their money. In any case they had gone away, and the palace had lain empty for years. Then, in the War, it had been a garrison for the military. Sister Agnes crossed herself. Since the War, another absentee owner, and then the convent had taken possession of it.

  ‘Better,’ Julia said, nodding and smiling.

  But the sight of the neglected gardens disturbed her.

  Sometimes, in the evenings after the early meal in the refectory, she walked out through the iron gates and into the darkness gathering in the steep streets. On one of the first of these walks a voice called to her from a balcony over her head. She looked up, and saw Signor Galli. He invited her up to his rooms, and she sat down between high shelves of books and drank strong coffee out of a blue and gold cup. Her new friend, she discovered, was an architect who had worked in Paris and London as well as Rome and Milan. He was a widower, with grown-up children now scattered across Italy.

  It was comfortable to sit and talk in the warm light of red-shaded lamps. After that first visit, Julia found her way back on other evenings. Nicolo Galli was an easy and stimulating conversationalist.

  ‘Ah, Montebellate. I came back to my birthplace to die,’ he said cheerfully, on one occasion.

  ‘You don’t look on the point of death.’

  ‘No, indeed. But here I shall stay until the day comes. How pleasant it is not to have to think of travelling further.’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said softly. She felt a little of his stability herself. She had been happy here, this time. And if she had not come to Montebellate she would have spent the weeks wandering through Europe, waiting for enough time to elapse before she could decently allow herself to head for home again. ‘I wish I could stay here. But I must go home soon.’

  It was the second half of November. The mornings and the evenings were cold, with a thin mist wrapped around the stone walls of the palazzo, although the afternoon sunshine could still generate the last stirrings of warmth.

  She had been thinking of Mattie. Here, in the quiet village on its hilltop, the memory of Mattie and Alexander at Ladyhill was losing its sharpness. Julia wished that she could show the palazzo and the gardens to Mattie. One morning she had bought a postcard at the little tobacconist’s shop, scrawled a few neutral words and signed it, Your old friend. When she had posted it, she’d felt the links tighten again.

  Nicolo looked at her. ‘Who do you go home to?’

  ‘My daughter. And my business.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course.’

  Rain came, whipping down from the north and then drifting inexorably in from the sea. Julia knew that it was tine to go. In London, the shop windows would already be piled up with tinsel and parcels and fake snow. She told Sister Maria and the other nuns that she was leaving. They would be sorry to lose her, they said, but Julia knew that they wouldn’t really miss her. They were too closely bound by the needs and necessities of the community, too secure in their faith, to miss an outsider. It was she who would miss them.

  Julia went to see the Mother Superior, to thank her for the convent’s hospitality. She gave her, as tactfully as she could, as much money as she could afford. The nun accepted it gracefully. Julia knew that the State provided only a small amount of money for the work done at the palazzo. The Infirmary of the Sisters of the Blessed Family depended on the Church, and charity.

  The hardest part was saying goodbye to the children. Raimundo wrapped his arms around her waist and sobbed. The others flocked behind him. Julia disentangled herself, gently, too close to tears herself.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ she promised. ‘I’ll come back one day, and see you all. You will be a big boy, Raimundo. You won’t cry then.’

  She left them, blindly running down the stone steps. Her suitcases, full of the now unsuitably light clothes, were packed and waiting in the lodge between the two turrets. A taxi had come to take her back to Agropoli.

  The sisters crowded round her. They kissed her and commended her to God’s keeping. Nicolo Galli had come too, to say a last goodbye. He took Julia’s hands and kissed both of her cheeks. She turned and climbed into the battered Fiat.

  When she looked back, as the car drove away, her last sight was of Nicolo. With the arrival of winter, he had exchanged his straw hat for a black fedora. He took it off, and waved it over his head, saluting her.

  Twenty-two

  Mattie walked down to the harbour. It was cold, and the wind stung her face. The sea was grey, greasily flecked with white, and she could taste salt spray on her tongue. She walked slowly with her hands in her pockets trying not to think of the play, of her opening lines, trying not to think of anything. The cold was distracting: that helped.

  Most of the sailing dinghies that flecked the summer harbour had been lifted for the winter, but a few still rode at their moorings. She watched them dipping and rearing with the small, vicious waves, then looked away again because even contemplating the motion made her feel sicker than she did already.

  Mattie walked on a little further, then perched on a bollard to watch the gulls. She liked the deserted feel of out-of-season English towns. The shuttered kiosks and wet-slicked quaysides reminded her of her days on tour with Francis Willoughby’s repertory company. She flapped her arms against her sides to keep warm, remembering Great Yarmouth and John Douglas who had taken her to bed in a commercial travellers’ hotel. John Douglas had eventually retired, taking his bitterness with the theatre back to his wife in Burford, and for all Mattie knew he was there still. She thought of him with distant, incurious affection. All of it seemed a very long time ago.

  It was too cold to sit down. She stood up and moved on, to the edge of the quay. The tide was out, and she liked the look of the shiny mud netted with salt channels, and the stiff tufts of marsh grass. It was better to be outside, anyway, than in her hotel or waiting in her dressing room at the theatre. Mattie shivered.

  She was still afflicted with nerves. Every time, before every performance, fear gripped her stomach and her blood froze. She was certain that she would remember nothing, be unable to utter a syllable. It was worse, if anything, this time. It was more than two years since Mattie had appeared before a theatre audience. Film work was different. It still induced fear, but it was a diffuse, more controllable variety.

  Mattie concentrated on her well-practised routine for containing the fright. She breathed deeply, in and out, feeling the rise and fall of her diaphragm. She told herself that the play was good, and that she could only do what she had been doing in rehearsal, with all her heart. Then she made herself dismiss all thoughts of the performance. She emptied her mind, letting her face muscles slacken, the corners of her mouth drooping.

  She saw that a man was watching her, from a few yards away, along the quay. She looked away quickly, and noticed the first few spots of rain pocking the stones.

  ‘Got the place all to ourselves,’ the man said.

  Mattie noted, automatically, that his north-country vowels were overlaid with a faint mid-Atlantic drawl. It was a pleasant, friendly voice.

  ‘The summer sailors have all gone home,’ she responded, moving past him. That was enough; they had acknowledged each other’s existence in the empty landscape, now they could walk on.

  To her irritation, he turned in the same direction and began to walk with her. Damn it, she thought, he must have recognised me. In a moment there would be a request for an autograph, for his wife, or daughter, of course, never fo
r himself; a handshake; questions. She didn’t want that, intruding into her isolation out here on the harbour wall.

  ‘I don’t mind the place being empty,’ the man said happily. ‘I like looking at the birds and the mud. See the patterns they make, walking in it? Like little stars.’

  Mattie looked. The birds’ prints were like a child’s drawing of stars, scribbled over each other on the grey-brown mudbank. ‘I’ve never noticed that,’ she said.

  ‘I saw it when I was a boy. I didn’t have much else to look at.’ He laughed, pleased with the memory. ‘I grew up in Whitby. North Yorkshire. Do you know it?’

  Mattie had played there, with John Douglas and Sheila Firth and the others. It had been another town, smelling of fish and chips and bottled Guinness. ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘It’s a grand place.’

  She looked sideways at him. He was squarely built, not very tall, zipped up in an anonymous greenish anorak. With the addition of a map and rucksack he might have been a hiker, with binoculars perhaps a birdwatcher. Except that a birdwatcher would have talked about gulls, not birds in the mud. The man was balding, probably in his late fifties. He wore glasses, and the lenses were spotted with raindrops. He took them off and wiped them with a clean white handkerchief.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Mattie asked, rather reluctantly.

  ‘Vacationing.’ The transatlantic word sounded odd.

  It was raining harder. The wind batted it into their faces.

  ‘Getting ugly,’ the man announced. ‘Shall we go and have some tea? I saw a teashop, a little way back. It might even be open.’