The Heart Is a Burial Ground

by Tamara Colchester

  ‘You know,’ she turned at the door and eyed her mother, ‘I did live through two wars.’

  Caresse looked up, eyebrows raised in question.

  Diana nodded. ‘Hitler, and you.’

  A look of pain briefly crossed her mother’s face. But the remark did not penetrate; it was only the comparison that hurt.

  Everyone was already gathered around the large stone table set in the middle of the walled garden. The spreading branches of lemon trees threw shade across the people as they chattered, their faces flickering in the dappled light. The garden was surrounded by crumbling walls, veined with capers and lichens; and although these walls contained the group around the table, the empty blue sky above gave rise to the sense that they were seated on a plateau at the top of the world. The air was clear and there was no sound except the occasional call of the birds flying way below, soaring straight-winged over the tops of the trees that covered the hills.

  Diana took them in. They seemed nice enough (despite the ridiculous little white flag pins they all wore) but were hardly worth breaking concentration on what she knew would be a very good meal. She didn’t always care for her mother’s menu choices – a gastronomic confusion of caviar, puttanesca and marshmallows – but the cooking here was excellent. She sat back and smiled vacantly at the bespectacled young man talking earnestly at her left elbow. There was that poet Ellis thingummy who looked as though he’d been asleep in an ashtray; a few young people wearing T-shirts, a Canadian in a lilac kaftan who’d written a strange book of poetry about the migratory pattern of flamingos; that English art historian who was meant to be something of an expert on restoration (her hair in a severely ill-advised middle parting), the film crew from the BBC – she nodded in greeting at the raised glass of a bearded man in a paisley cravat, yikes, she must have met him in London somewhere – and an admittedly interesting-looking woman from Haiti, an artist with a shaved head who spoke quietly in a scattered French patois. As she raised her own glass in salute to her, and the gesture was returned, Diana recalled an ugly voice speaking across another dining table long ago in the purple-painted dining room at Rue de Lille.

  ‘Negroes,’ the wine-stained stranger spat, causing the other guests to turn towards him. ‘Running all over the country like cockroaches.’ His lips searched for his glass. ‘In my opinion, the only thing a gentleman should do to a Negro is knock him down.’

  The guests had looked over to her mother at the head of the polished table, dark hair cut in a sharp line above her eyes. She had crossed her arms and looked straight down to the other end of the table where her new husband sat. Diana had watched them as they smiled at each other, wondering why they didn’t speak; she hated it when they didn’t speak (she gripped the sides of her chair, tears pricking her eyes), it was rude not to share their jokes.

  Eventually her stepfather leaned back in his chair and caught the man in his hard blue stare. ‘And what do you suppose,’ his hoarse voice silenced the room, ‘we should do with the Negress?’ He glanced at her mother, whose mouth had stretched into a slow smile and Diana had wished, wished to death, that she knew what it was they should do with the Negress.

  He tapped his pipe against the sole of his shoe, one two three. ‘Knock her up, I suppose?’ And her mother had laughed, laughed even when everyone had gone home, even when Diana had been sent back downstairs and she could only hear the sound of them moving across the ceiling of her nursery.

  A word at her left brought her back to the table. Nodding in agreement at the man without hearing a word he said, she continued to look around at the group, her eyes stopping on a boy whose hair shone white in the sun. At that moment he looked over, and despite the pretty girl nestled in the crook of his arm, Diana met his gaze with a kick of satisfaction. Later, she thought, as the table was distracted by the arrival of a girl wearing a short dress made of silver discs that shimmered like a tambourine. She was almost as irritating as a tambourine, Diana decided as she listened to her regaling the company with a story of how she’d got stuck in Rome with an old count.

  ‘He’d left all his money to his dog. Said if he was going to leave it to a bitch, it might as well be one he liked!’

  Diana observed her for a moment and sat forward.

  ‘You know my mother bought me a dog when I was a child.’ Her voice was low and clear, her painted mouth giving out each word like a gift. The table turned towards her and she nodded as someone filled her glass. ‘She was a little pearl-grey whippet that was to be a companion to my mother’s magnificent dog, Narcisse Noir. One day my mother took Narcisse to meet Picasso at his studio – she wanted him to illustrate one of their books – and the great beauty of the dog stirred the Spaniard,’ she caressed the word until it came to life, ‘to demand that Mother bring him one of his sons. Well, Narcisse never did breed – too fancy to fuck, you might say – but one of his brothers did and this animal was brought to me as a gift. Its name, my mother decided, was to be Clytoris. (I was told it was the name of a Greek goddess.) So from that day on, much to my delight,’ she smiled, ‘I had a little Clytoris to play with.’

  The ashtray poet laughed long and hard, and everyone followed. He looked at Diana across the table and wiped his perspiring face with his linen napkin. He’d been waiting to meet this daughter for a while and no, she definitely didn’t disappoint. She looked as expensive as her mother and wore her age well, particularly that mocking smile that lifted the corners of her mouth. He’d like to wipe it off her face with this very fine rag. There was an ass worth visiting beneath that swishy skirt. The waist was thickening a bit, it always did at that age, but the proportions were still a honeyed ratio. What was he thinking though? He shook his head as she glanced over him and turned towards the man on her left. She looked cold as hell. The torture of rich pussy – may he be delivered from this tumorous obsession. A fish nibbling at the fingers of a sick old lady. What was wrong with him? A tumour tuna. A tumour sandwich. He laughed, delighted and disgusted. A disgusted boy. A custard pie. He would go down to Rieti and fuck a girl from the port, he decided. This place wasn’t good for him.

  ‘To your mother.’ He stood with a sudden movement and raised his glass. Diana flicked her eyes over him and then nodded and everyone followed.

  ‘Her mother, what?’ Caresse came through the stone archway into the garden with Roberto beside her as tender and careful as a groom. Though her hair was now brilliant white in the sun, her hips still swayed with the knowledge of the sex between them. Everybody stood as she took her place at the head of the table and she laughed, thick and throaty, patting them all back into place.

  Oh, she loved to see her table full! Look at all this colour, the shimmer of that little dress, the bitter scent of the capers that clung to the walls of the castle and the smell of pine high on the wind. It’s like a bouquet, she thought. A magnificent bouquet gathered in the arms of this castle.

  ‘Diana was just telling us about her Clytoris,’ someone said.

  Caresse smiled. ‘Such a sweet little dog.’

  Diana laced her hands tightly together and watched the girls from the kitchen carry out two huge pans, the rich scent of the rigatoni alla pajata, the milky guts of a calf in tomato sauce, drawing everyone towards their glazed pottery plates.

  ‘Thank you, Roberto.’ Caresse indicated where he should fill her glass to. ‘Now I want to hear everything.’ She sat forward, ready to hear the first person speak. ‘What have you all been doing?’

  Diana leaned back in her chair and put her face to the sun. Aware that the young blond man that she’d noticed was glancing occasionally towards where she sat, she allowed the words to wash over her. She’d done her bit.

  Later that night she made her way slowly down through the dark corridors and out onto a terrace. Someone was attempting a tremolo, and she sat down on a stone bench beneath the bent shape of a tree, amused by the ineptitude. The guitar stopped with the whack of a palm against wood.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ the youn
g man asked.

  Diana nodded, pointing at the wicker bag that lay curled at her feet, then watched as he set the guitar down and approached her. He was thin and very tanned with lightly freckled skin stretched taut over the bridge of his nose, hair in tangled sun rays round his head. She noted his eyes on her legs as he crouched down and held the case up to her. She took one between her fingers and withdrew it slowly.

  ‘So what brought you here?’ She gently bit the tip between her teeth.

  He sat back on his haunches and moved his hands in the shape of a woman, or was it a guitar? Diana put her head to one side.

  ‘Sculptor,’ he said.

  She turned her face slightly so that he could see her profile. ‘I’m surprised you’re English. You look American somehow.’

  He smiled. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment to my good health. Very much improved by a month in this rather beautiful place.’

  ‘How did you come to be here?’

  ‘Your mother came to see me at my studio in Rome. She just appeared one afternoon out of the blue and asked to see my drawings. We drank some wine and had a long discussion about Brâncuși. Apparently, he once roasted a pullet for her in his studio and then carved it with a sculpting knife. The way she told it made me laugh and that was it, we’ve been firm friends ever since. I very much liked that she didn’t ask me where I was from or where I was going.’ (Dig; Diana smarted, but the boy didn’t seem to have said it with any intent, so with a roll of her shoulders she let it go.) ‘And I appreciate her philosophy. Citizens of the World. A City of Peace. That feels about right.’

  ‘Yes, she’s always been full of ideas.’

  ‘I hear you live in Spain?’ He looked up at her from where he sat, tanned arms round his knees.

  ‘Ibiza mostly. I like to sail.’

  ‘So do I. I sailed the Bay of Biscay with my father when I was a child. He got beaten up by a port master for insulting a plate of angulas. I’ve had a special love for them ever since.’

  Diana laughed. ‘Spain’s a fascinating country. They have a relationship with violence that is very life-affirming.’

  ‘And why not Italy?’

  ‘Spain suits me. The sun’s hotter, shadow colder. Plus they make better wine.’

  ‘And I suppose your mother got Italy first.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette.

  Diana looked into his eyes as he said this, but again saw no malice. Just a light moving like a torch in the dark. She felt the thrill of pursuit begin to beat.

  ‘Do you like bullfights?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen one. You?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘And here you are in the Città della Pace.’ He laughed.

  ‘Is peace really one of your ideals?’ Her tone was less mocking than usual.

  ‘Yes, I think I aim for that.’

  ‘Well, you’re still young.’

  ‘Your mother’s not.’

  ‘My mother’s always been younger than me. It’s a fact physics has no answer for.’

  The boy, whose name was David, laughed. ‘She’s certainly a one-off. They don’t seem to make women like that any more.’

  ‘How are you so sure?’ Diana sat forward.

  Lowering his cigarette, he squinted at her through the smoke.

  ‘Which room are you in?’ she asked.

  He pointed towards one of the dark ground-floor windows. ‘We sleep in there.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My wife and Pierre. We picked him up on the way here.’

  ‘Wife? You’re too young to be stuck in that mud.’

  He shrugged. ‘Twenty-eight can feel awfully old.’

  ‘Well then.’ Diana stood and pulled her cardigan over her shoulders. ‘You’d better come with me.’

  Boston, 1920

  ‘There’s that Crosby boy, just back from Verdun. Apparently he refuses to wear a hat.’ Diana stood on tiptoes to see where her grandmother discreetly indicated and saw it was the man that had stared at them all through church. The women allowed their eyes to stray briefly in his direction before returning to the centre of their little group.

  Diana’s grandmother turned to the pretty young woman whose smile seemed to be taking a bite out of life’s cheek. ‘You never did tell me how you got on chaperoning his beach party.’

  ‘Oh, did I not? I must have forgotten.’

  Diana recognised the lie in her mother’s voice, as high and irretrievable as the ribbon of a let-go balloon, and staring up at her, she bit her lip.

  ‘I thought he was terribly interesting really, not to mention brave. He came back with the Croix de Guerre, you know.’

  ‘Awfully odd, some of his antics,’ a blonde woman said lazily. ‘He crashed his father’s Bugatti into the Porcellian Club.’

  ‘I find that intensity rather attractive,’ another one put in.

  ‘There was that scandal at Harvard . . .’

  Leaning out of the circle, Diana watched the man walking around the side of the church towards the graveyard at the rear, where she could just see him pacing back and forth between two tombstones. He seemed like the bird that had flown through her nursery window, darting madly about causing screams and breakages.

  ‘I heard he was seen with Bessie Pulborough on the shore early in the morning before her wedding. Her husband has threatened to . . .’ The other women murmured their interest and five flowered hats gathered in a closed bunch.

  ‘Maybe he just doesn’t care about hats.’ Her mother’s voice was a cry that silenced the women. They narrowed their eyes towards her and Diana gripped her hand a little tighter.

  ‘I think we’ll go,’ her grandmother said, holding an arm out towards where their driver waited.

  ‘You and Diana can go,’ her mother said, pulling her hand free. ‘I need some air.’

  And Diana’s hand was taken up in the dry leather grip of her grandmother’s while five flower-laden hats watched in silence as the young woman pulled hers from her head and walked slowly around the side of the church towards the graveyard, long skirt trailing on the ground, before ducking away out of sight.

  Roccasinibalda, 1970

  One foot in front of the other, Diana’s ribbon-crossed ankles flickered over the old stone ramparts as the sun lowered itself beyond the line of hills in the distance. Below her, a sheer drop, the tops of the trees – Diana faltered for a moment, tipped a fraction and split: watched her body fall, only half interested by the possibility of her dying. She completed the circuit of the roof, the last heavy rays causing her to half-close her eyes, the angled roofs of the town below tucked in shadow now, like a shy child holding close to its mother’s skirt. Carefully ignoring the men at work on the sea of tiles that rose and fell around her, she turned away and looked out across the valley gilded by the evening light. Oh, it made her mad, she would not look at it. A million dollars. A million dollars!

  ‘An investment, a legacy,’ her mother called it, the cloudless sky reflected in her glasses. Diana had shaken her head. ‘We don’t choose our own legacy, Mother, it’s decided by the people doing the remembering.’ She’d looked a little perturbed by that and made a note in her diary.

  It shamed Diana somehow, this late altruism. It was all so meagre, with the meetings, and flag pins, and the eager teenagers doing dance routines. Why did she bother with all this now? Frittering what little remained on this absurd flea circus. It had been so huge, and this was so . . . pathetic somehow; just look at it. She stared with folded arms at the tiles spreading between the battlements, the wind blowing her skirt against her legs. This roof was nothing more than a lid on a steaming pan. A load of hot air. She smiled condescendingly, pleased with her metaphor. Perhaps that was it: denial. Nothing more than the simple fear of death. Well, we all have to face up to that, she thought, with the brusque clarity of one who wasn’t. But why did her mother bother with all these ideas? Why couldn’t she just be brave, like he had? He hadn’t cared about roofs and political reconciliation. He’d just don
e it. He’d smashed on out of here instead of this endless birthing of all that was new. New ideas, new life, new friends. She gripped the wall, the weight of loss inside her as heavy as stone. Coming back was always a mistake. As she stood there, she slowly became aware of the press of someone’s gaze and, turning her head, saw that a few of the workmen, large men, sweating and covered in dark hair, were indeed staring. Without altering her expression she arched her back slightly – a better line – and shook her hair back as she gazed, open-eyed, into the last of the sunlight. Biting her bottom lip, she bent further over the edge of the battlements to look down at the streets winding below.

  ‘C’ è un fico maturo,’ one of the men murmured, causing the others to laugh.

  ‘Attento, che ci troverai dentro una vespa,’ another said.

  ‘Morirei per una così.’

  She watched a boy kicking something along the road that ran beneath the south wall and then, hearing a shout, moved slowly, her hand trailing the stone, feeling the men’s breath rising and falling in her own chest, to where the winding walkway of the entrance unfolded beneath her. Through the archway she saw the wide circle of her mother’s jade parasol making its swaying descent, the fringed silk cutting side to side as she was carried in her sedan chair – a man in front, a man behind – down the steep winding entrance of the castle towards where the large doors stood open. Strange thing to do with a fortress, Caresse, she’d said to her mother. This place was built to keep people out. And her mother had smiled that infuriating smile. ‘I like a bit of subversion.’ She leaned further over to watch her mother going forward with arms extended to greet the driver of yet another car, suitcases tied to its roof. Who were all these people? Always people . . . guests, guests, guess who’s in your bed tonight. But then look at this place. She shook her head and turned back, the sole of her shoe rasping the grit. Living in a castle was asking for an invasion.