The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  He came dancing across to her then, and lifted dovelike hands on either side of her face as if to cup it. Then he stopped and let the hands and his head tip together first one way then the other as he smiled with the whitest of teeth and the most affectionate lips. He then appeared to recollect himself, and Molly unexpectedly thought of the groom who muttered, ‘Jobs is scarce.’

  ‘Miss Ironside,’ said Signor Settimo, ‘Signorina Ironside—I should very much like to photograph your mother.’

  ‘He said he wanted to photograph you,’ said Molly. They were riding lugubriously up and down Shipley leaving cards on people on a dank and sunless afternoon.

  ‘Insolence,’ said Florrie, and then, ‘Well, I dare say he does. I’m not surprised. The prices he charges he’ll need a good bit of advertisement.’

  ‘He’s put me in the window.’

  ‘What? He hasn’t dared! Without permission? For everyone to see? We have been good enough to give him trade and he hasn’t asked permission? How dare he! We’re going there at once.’ And she gave the groom a prod in the back and they turned about.

  In the window of Spratpool Street, there sat straight-eyed Molly with her frozen shoulders awaiting the lightning, and beside her, Lily, daughter of Alderman Bellinger, the late Mr. Ironside’s most vulgar and thrusting competitor in the building trade, who had posthumously absorbed him though at an exorbitant price. Lily’s portrait was bigger than Molly’s.

  ‘This must be stopped. Wait here.’ And Florrie was into the shop in three strides. And very quickly out of it again.

  Signor Settimo was now on holiday. ‘At The Grand at Scarborough,’ said Netta with awe. There was only her there, and the messenger. The messenger was sitting looking rather ill on the ornamental chair, picking his teeth. He was without his pill-box and didn’t get up.

  ‘I shall complain in writing. Take my daughter from the window.’

  ‘I’d never dare.’

  ‘Then you—’ She pointed. She grabbed the messenger by the neck.

  ‘I’ve not got to touch things,’ he said. ‘I’ve got unnatural damp hands.’

  ‘Then I shall.’

  And Molly (and Shipley) saw the black arm of Mrs. Ironside appear like King Arthur’s in reverse and pluck her from the window.

  Mrs. Ironside was considerably upset and didn’t speak all the way home or during tea. She sat in heavy thunder all the evening and the next day when Molly, frightened, at last said, ‘There’s no need to mind, you know, Ma. He can’t hurt you. I mean, you’re an old woman and he’s only a boy.’

  Then Mrs. Ironside leaned across the breakfast table and slapped Molly across the face.

  ‘She did,’ said May, who’d been at the sideboard replenishing one of the big steel domes with bacon. ‘She did. She slapped her face! And there’s Molly runs out and up the stairs crying. That’s the front door. Run and get it. I’m hot and cold all over.’

  The bell had been rung by Signor Settimo hastening early from the studio in his new motor to apologise for the bish about Molly and Lily Bellinger. The breakfast room door was still open and Mrs. Ironside was shaking at the table, shocked and prior to weeping, but the weeping she set aside. She found her heart was beating fast. She ordered the maid to show the photographer into the morning room. Breathing slowly now, she sat on for a little, wondering at the wonderful sense of lightness in her, the triumph within. She went out to him.

  Settimo stood in the window of the morning room beside the metal storks. He stood upon a rich Turkey rug admiring the polish on all the mahogany, the shine on the Dutch tiled grate, the bloom on the escritoire. His fingers stroked a Chinese pot on a plinth of inlaid walnut. Above his head hung the very latest thing—a metal drum with a pink silk frill that contained bulbs of electricity. It was like looking up skirts.

  ‘Cremona,’ he was saying, ‘Oh, Cremona!’

  ‘Mrs. Ironside,’ he said, ‘how I should like to make a commemorative album of this house! How nearly it is like my home.’

  ‘Cremona?’ Florrie was feeling lighter and lighter; a victor, yet joyously damned. ‘Cremona?’

  He told her about Northern Italy, the watery flatness of the plains, the reedy River Po (which he pronounced as in pot or tot or clot, in the best possible taste), the dark canyons of the old streets of its cities and how, in Cremona, his own city, the narrow toppling alleys flung black flags of shade. He told how you burst out from under them into the bright sunlight of the piazzas, light that softly bathed the street-long baroque palaces, the gold and pale-pink churches, the tightly bound but generously bulging, beckoning cathedral. He described the boom of the bells, the jingle of the little carriages all ribbons and plumes, the café tables shining with thick linen cloths under the pillars round the cathedral square. There you could sit talking, talking long into the summer night, and nobody to hurry you away.

  ‘Cremona is the essence of dignity and culture and civilisation. Keep Firenze. Keep Roma.’

  ‘I wonder that you could bear to leave it, Mr. Settimo.’

  ‘I wonder, too, but in Cremona there are many photographers. All is weddings—weddings and weddings. Weddings and babies. I was so seldom called upon to photograph a face of experience, of knowledge of the world.’

  Florence Ironside was booked in for a sitting at 2:30 P.M. the following Tuesday.

  But it was not a success.

  Signor Settimo was desolate. It was not a success. Florence (prophetic name) was not herself—hush! He meant it. ‘This is not yourself, not your real self sitting there. You pretend to be so bold, so, if you will forgive me, so tight drawn-up. But I cannot see you. I cannot feel your essence. All I see and feel are your—certainly magnificent—strength and your ferocity. Hush, yes, your ferocity. Your enmity. Oh, relax please, Signora Ironside, you electrify the air.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Florence, lifting her chin, confronting the dragonfly optic and the black hump of Settimo laid along behind. She felt excited. He thought he’d catch her, did he, with all that about sunshine and piazzas? Little Signor Settimo and she, the widow of Willy Ironside of Shipley. She curled her rather pretty, scornful little lips. There came the squeeze and the flash and the crash of thunderbolts and he took the photograph that a long time later went the rounds.

  It is always the wrong photograph that goes the rounds.

  He came over and stood looking down into her face and said, ‘Signora—why are you belligerent?’

  ‘Your English is very good,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. I am from Cremona. Do you think I am a Sardinian? Or educated in Shipley?’

  He made her sit in the hard spotlight and slid back under the cloth. The silence returned. The bulb was held high, but was not pressed.

  Mrs. Ironside’s face changed, the small eyes widened, the chin sank down. The lips seemed to soften. He came over and directed the cheekbone towards the Bridge of Sighs. He touched the shoulder of the armoured dress. He lifted one of the hands across the breast, screening poor old Willy.

  ‘I’ll take this off,’ said Florence, unpinning the brooch, wondering if she had been told to do so or if it was her own idea.

  Under the pall he cried, ‘Oh—that is so much better. But still—no, I still do not see you. You are unpractised. You cannot give. There is something withheld, something secret about you. Am I looking at a woman or a cold machine? A frightened—forgive me—old maid?’

  He squeezed the bulb listlessly and the lightning seemed scarcely to flicker.

  ‘There will be no charge,’ he said. ‘You have not trusted me. You cannot give. You shall return next week.’ He walked with her only as far as the door of the darkroom and dismissed her inattentively.

  ‘He said he wouldn’t charge me,’ she said to Molly, who had asked no questions and now said nothing. ‘And I should think not. He was entirely at fault. He was out of s
orts. Very temperamental.’ She thought of the horrible slapping of Molly’s face. ‘Well, who isn’t, from time to time. Especially after bereavement. I’m afraid I am sometimes temperamental myself. I do thoughtless things sometimes. I’m sorry, Molly.’

  Molly, amazed, said, ‘I don’t think I am temperamental.’

  ‘Oh, but you see all Italians are, and you have your father’s colouring, Scottish colouring. I wonder if I have a little drop of Italian blood.’

  ‘They say he’s overspending,’ said Molly. ‘May says there are bills as long as your arm everywhere. And that car isn’t paid for, May says. He’s in trouble.’

  ‘Oh, but I think he’s been used to wealth. He tells me that in Cremona there are streets of nothing but palaces. He only travels for his Art.’

  ‘Are you going back to him then? I know I wouldn’t. Ma—I was a bit afraid of him.’

  ‘Oh, of course I’m going back. I’m not a churlish woman, I hope.’

  For the next sitting she left off the mourning brooch, laying it down on her dressing table, and turned back into her bedroom at the last minute to change her hat for a great Leghorn straw swooning with flat roses—cream roses—and a veil that tied under the chin, this time with a white velvet ribbon.

  ‘Ah—’ said Settimo. ‘There! Exactly. Yes. Just like that. Lift the chin a fraction—do not pretend to be demure. It hasn’t come to that. Smile at me. Mrs. Ironside, I have never seen you openly smile. But that is beautiful. Oh, how beautiful—your lovely smile. You have the lips of a young madonna, Mrs. Ironside. Delicious under the veil.’

  His pointed fingers were on her shoulder as she left. ‘But, I want more.’ He was like a sympathetic doctor. They were alone. Netta and the messenger were nowhere to be seen. She suddenly remembered for some reason that little Henry Bickerstaffe had measles and that Wednesday anyway was Shipley’s early-closing day.

  He moved his fingers across the back of her neck to the knot of ribbon that held the veil. ‘I should like to undo this veil. I should like to see—perhaps unpin—your hair. Had I the money—any money, I am over-spent. I am in deep, deep water owing to circumstances in Cremona—had I any money, I would dress you as a Princess of Piedmont. I would drop your awful English jewels in the river and I would adorn you with moonstones.’

  He sent for her again the following Wednesday and she went to him on foot and (‘I’m not imagining this, I saw it from the end of Blenheim Terrace and Mrs. Cricklewood saw it, too’) she went hatless. Perhaps gloveless. He held back the bead curtain, first drawing down the blind that said ‘Half Day Wednesday’ over the glass front door. She passed before him into the darkroom.

  ‘All right then. Tek me to Scarborough. I’ll say nothing if you’ll tek me to Scarborough. Mind you, half Shipley knows. They’re all asking me.’

  ‘Netta, I can’t take anyone anywhere. This is the reason about the abeyance of the wages. I am in trouble. I am an artist—you know that—not a businessman. I need a business partner of character, if possible with great capital. That is all there is to say. I take you into my confidence. I never have trouble in finding business partners. Never. I have every hope of money—even for Scarborough—quite soon.’

  ‘You mean my Auntie Florrie?’

  ‘Auntie?’

  ‘It’s not a real auntie. “Auntie”’s what you call your mother’s best friends in England. You may not have it in Cremona. Auntie Florrie was at school with my mam. Auntie Florrie had to walk in to Shipley school five miles. Her Molly and me, we went to different schools, Molly’s being private, but she was always my Auntie Florrie. She married rich and you see what’s become of her, sitting up at that great place and Molly like a cold drink of water and neither of them with a thing to do. Tek me to The Grand. You’re on the wrong tack up there, Ferdinando.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Half Shipley does then. It’s the wonder of the world. And those that knows laughs their heads off and thinks you’re a daftie.’

  ‘A—what?’

  ‘I don’t know it in Italian. Will you tek me to Scarborough?’

  ‘I can not.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell yer. I know where you went to the so-called funeral. It was your engagement party—I opened the photos. And I’ll tell you you’re up the wrong tree with Auntie Florrie. She hasn’t a penny after Molly’s thirty-five. It’s all going to be Molly’s. I saw it in the will when I was being a solicitor.’

  Signor Settimo looked steadily at Netta with his clever eyes angry and little like those of the Piedmontese bridegroom. He then left her and stepped into his car.

  He roared out of Spratpool Street and hurtled out of the town, way past Ilkley and on to the purple moors. Hours went by and in the end the car seemed to drift and sway, to turn back and to take itself home via the dachas on the green slopes surrounding Shipley.

  Molly, the girl so mad about cars, Molly, so innocent, so eager for life. Oh, the mistake he had made. He cursed himself. He had an insane desire to proceed at once to The Mount, to sweep up the deep trenched gravel of its drive, to ask to see Molly. But, impossible now.

  Yet as he drew near, at the end of The Mount’s driveway he let the car dawdle and stop and after a time he heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and he got out of the car and took off his tight little driving helmet and waited.

  But it was only the groom in a muffler and an old coat, trailing the dog along behind him; and the groom gave him a look of pity as he passed.

  Then the groom called back over his shoulder as he went off down the hill, ‘Whichever you’re after you’re out of luck, Maestro. They’re gone, the pair of them. They’re gone touring off foreign and both of them miserable, thanks to you. You’ve ruined them with your magic lanterns.’

  III: THE HOT SWEETS OF CREMONA

  Molly Fielding’s daughter Alice and the woman Molly Fielding had liked and had left a ring to were sitting together drinking under the stone canopy and inside the forest of pillars of the great piazza of Cremona. It was a month or so after old Molly’s funeral.

  They had been a little nervous of going on holiday together. It had been rashly, emotionally arranged, the ghost of the old woman the only bond, for as girls they had not got on, Alice too vehement and self-conscious for the other one.

  And their lives and marriages had been very different. The friend was a reticent widow whom Alice had always found rather dull, and Alice was a recent divorcée whom the friend had always thought shallow and too talkative. They were relieved now to find that their conventional upbringing was helping them through the blind spots and the dark pools, that they knew the antique rules for Englishwomen of a certain age on holiday abroad. ‘Mustn’t forget the postcards. God, so expensive!’ ‘How about doing our sums? You did these drinks. I paid for the tummy medicine’—and so on. They had looked up assiduously the opening and closing times of the galleries, underlining everything marked with two or three stars.

  Alcohol had helped as it does after funerals. They were drinking vermouth now out of little gold-rimmed glasses shaped like convolvus flowers and thinking contentedly that it would soon be lunchtime when there would be wine. After a long siesta they would then set off and wander in the cathedral again, maybe take a little carriage and jingle round the streets of the city. And then—my dear, a divine dinner in the dark hotel with the dazzling white cloths thick as blankets, and those great jars of crystallised fruits gleaming on the central table. ‘Like Mantegnas,’ said the educated friend, and Alice said, ‘And we’ll try the fegato.’

  They sighed and leaned back gazing at the piazza; sixtyish, well-heeled, well-dressed and pleased not to be young.

  ‘I’m pleased not to be young.’ The friend examined old Molly’s ring on her finger.

  ‘Italy tore me to bits, you know, when I was young,’ said Alice.

  ‘All that passion. God—how did we survive? How did we
get anything else done? Why does time go by so much faster now that we’ve nothing to do—nothing to obsess us? D’you realise, nobody will ever kiss either of us any more.’

  The other one looked across the sunny square crisscrossed by Romeos and Juliets on glittering scooters. The girls tossed their hair and clasped their hands round the boys’ waists, rested their beautiful faces sideways against the boys’ leather backs. Frighteningly positive, they didn’t look as if they dawdled over kissing. The friend knew, and so did Alice, that she had meant to say fuck not kiss, but it had not been possible. They were too old to be able to say aloud the once unthinkable word without seeming outrageous or pathetic, just as they could not wear a skirt halfway up the thigh.

  It was not characteristic, rather drunk-sounding, for Alice to say next, ‘You can tell when women have stopped being kissed, it’s when the lips go indistinct round the edges and the lipstick goes jammy. That was one of Ma’s little adages: “Over fifty and lipstick goes jammy.”’

  ‘I fell in love with a German in Florence my first time in Italy,’ said the friend, ‘when I was eighteen. Just after the war. He looked wonderful, like Galahad. I was confused. We’d all just seen the Belsen films. He was so gentle.’

  ‘I came to Italy as an au pair about then,’ said Alice, ‘to a grand Roman family. Their last au pair had died in a bath at the other end of the palazzo and they hadn’t found her for three days. They thought it was funny! So poor! They were so poor there was only pasta. I did learn how to eat it though, not to wind it round the fork like the servants do, or so I was told. Some foreign royalty came once and the daughter really did take down curtains to make a dress. Eighteenth-century curtains. All dust in the folds. It was a wonderful dress, too. The Conte made the usual passes. No, he wasn’t the one. It was the gardener. Under the olives. On the Campagna. Marvellous. Ma came out to get me back when I wouldn’t come home. Thank God, I suppose. Well—I suppose. She dragged me off to Parma to buy a ham on the way back! “So cheap, dear.” A great purple shank of it. And me weeping.’