by Sarah Hall
What she likes about his work he’s gleaned from the paintings she has chosen to hang in the cottage, and her few light observations about clarity and prophecy, landscapes stripped of former inhabitants, the next Mesolithic age. She likes his human figures frilled and sutured, like ammonites. She hung the paintings the day they moved into the ramshackle Border cottage, while the roof gaped open at one end, and the crows dropped cobs of mud in like a dirty hex upon the new occupants.
There are none of the severe mountain ridges in the house, though. Those are the ones that have fetched big money in America and Canada, that have complicated tax years for them, while enabling the underpinning of the house at its north-west corner. Those are the paintings that have provided funds to travel, to visit collections in the national galleries of the world and spend six months in Italy, finally. That was a good trip–they pulled the kids out of school, much to the disapproval of Headmaster Pokerarse-and spent the time visiting museums like Victorian gentry. Rome: shabby and vandalised, but extraordinary, busted seat of the colossal empire. Green-lipped Venice. Florence, where they couldn’t turn around without tripping over a masterpiece. Perseus with the head of the Medusa. The church in Umbria, hung with a thousand tiles depicting a thousand local tragedies. He made those little pilgrimages he had wanted to make for years. Picked up some great souvenirs (and one particularly meaningful ‘find’, undeclared at customs, naturally). They made a fuss of him at the British Academy; he was on the radar by then, beginning to command respect, beginning to sell expensively.
Now wealthy climbers collect his mountains faithfully-the Rolex-Gore-tex brigade, Lydia calls them. They’ll travel upcountry when over on business, not only to scale famous peaks in the Lakeland, but to locate his little hub of industry and tell him under his front-door lintel that if it weren’t for the detail on the side of such and such a composition, grandly positioned in their study, office or corporate lobby, they never would have found a new route up the crags to the summit. ‘Super, I can charge you double for cartography then,’ he’ll say.
Never mind that fish pie; he could murder a toke. That would take the edge off all this madness. That would give him some reprieve from the existential mind-fuck. Except the pouch is in the bloody car. Why is it never to hand when he needs it? Why does he always have to go and fetch it from the glove box, the kitchen table, the bottom of the laundry hamper? Senility, probably. Welcome to your dotty dotage, laddo. If he could just have a smoke he could clear the cobwebs from his brain and he’d be able to sort this mess out. Come up with a plan to save the perishing foot, and get home, or to the hospital. Instead he’s sitting here under the rain clouds, dreaming of a tobacco miracle. He’s exhausting himself with nihilism, and expending his energy on imaginary rodents.
What time is it now? Must be late. After midnight. After heart attacks and cancers. After love and lost lovers, after he’s been born. Neville Caldicutt will be getting up in a few hours, throwing leaves into the tin teapot, squeaking his bedsprings. ‘Mind you keep reading books, Petie. Mind you work hard. There’s a whole world out there.’ There is a world. But he is tired. He is spent. And the dark is as dark as it is behind his eyes, when he closes them, just for a second.
The Divine Vision of Annette Tambroni
In four years Annette has learned many things. She has learned that customers are more likely to buy flowers on a day of clear skies and moderate wind, rather than of fog or thunderstorms. She has learned to navigate the invisible pathways of the town, and to trust her noisy, vigorous brothers. She has learned to listen with her head cocked, like an owl, and to predict her body’s cycles. She has learned that the items of the world have various definitions, and if one is hidden, others will manifest with greater strength. A fire is its warmth on her skin and its spitting, clapping dance. The birds are their different songs in the morning in the courtyard. She has learned that people in the market give the correct change whenever they can, that Elemme is kind and lonely, even though she is married. All people smell differently, like the cardamoms, and nutmegs, and Spanish chillies in the spice jars at the market. Tommaso smells of burnt milk and hyacinths. Maurizio like candle wax, chicken skin, and sometimes cologne from the pharmacy where he has flirted with the girl behind the counter. Her mother’s voice always has an undercurrent of dark blue, like the night sky of the Nativity.
She has learned how to find the juiciest fruits in the market’s woven punnets. She has memorised the sufferings of the saints–the agonies and banishments and poverty. And, if someone is looking at her, her head will automatically turn towards the gaze like the magnetic needle of a compass. She has learned to live carefully inside the rooms of Castrabecco, in the alleys of the summer theatre and between the hot panes of the greenhouses; to walk carefully along the streets to the church of San Lorenzo and up the steps to the cimitero di campagna. She knows not to dress and undress at certain areas of her bedroom with the shutters open, or to invite trouble from boys and demons. She knows there are rules. But she knows also that life is more complicated, that the dimensions of her mind are endless.
On Sundays she continues to tell her papa the small domestic news of Castrabecco and recounts the affairs of the town. This week, Mauri has learned to do one hundred and fifty keep-ups with the football; she counted them for him, listening to his left foot twisting on the ground as he hopped round and the leather slapped against his thigh. At one hundred and eight he went skittering across the courtyard and skilfully recovered the wildly spinning ball. Afterwards, he told her what the shepherds used to do to their goats in the building in which they live, before it was a house, and that night she had a terrible dream in which the men of her family were lined up, in front of the castration blades. Tommaso has been training for the bike races, wearing a rubber swimming-cap, donated to him by his teacher, and with Vaseline on his legs and chest. He is as slippery as a fish and cannot be caught by their mother when it is time to eat. Uncle Marcello has found him a little odometer for the bicycle spokes so that he can know the distances pedalled. For two days the training has been suspended due to a head-cold. Uncle Marcello has prepared a mallow infusion for his sore throat. Another contagion brought from the South on the treno del sole, her mother declared when Tommaso began to sniff and cough.
The tourists have arrived again, asking where the best restaurants are, and the pharmacists, the museums and shrines and the sites of the miracles, the stigmata and the bleeding hearts. They wear inappropriate attire to enter San Lorenzo and Father Mencaroni spends much of an afternoon removing baseball hats and asking ladies to cover their legs and heads. The visitors spoon gelato from little cups and look for sweet bunches of fragola to adorn their rented tables. ‘How preferable life is here,’ they say. In the market on Wednesday a cheer suddenly went up and Elemme told Annette that the railway workers were going to strike for better pay. Uncle Marcello is still battling with the invasion of greenfly. He suspects these to be of foreign origin, having come in with the shipments of orchid bulbs sent by Vincenzo from South America. They are making Chantilly patterns out of all the leaves. In defeat, he has ordered chloroform to clean the bottoms of the trays. She feels the minuscule legs creeping on her neck and ears when she goes to the greenhouses, or, if it is not the flies, it is Mauri. Such are their lives.
The cimitero di campagna is deserted. Overhead swallows flit and flurry, going to and from their nests under the tiled roofs of the ruins. The sky is busy with feathers. It is a hot day. Annette takes off her scarf and puts it into her pocket. Also in the pocket is a wooden rosary, given to her by the nuns at her confirmation ceremony when she was twelve. It is cheap. Its beads pinch the skin of her neck, and she does not like to wear it. The sun begins to melt like warm caramel through her hair. She wonders again exactly what colour her hair is, whether it has lightened or darkened over the years. Her mother will not confirm whether it is corn-yellow, or flax, or the auburn of summer wheat. It is a vanity to ask such things, her mother says, and what does it
matter if she can’t see it? But there are so many subtle colours in Annette’s head. They span like rainbows across her mind.
Annette can hear the fizzle and tock of fireworks, and the minute laughter of the boys down at the lake. Mauri will be with them. Perhaps he will be diving down through the cool water in search of lost jewellery. Or he will be lying, naked as Adam, on a green rock. After her report, she says a prayer for her father and crosses the cemetery to visit Signor Giorgio.
She still does not know if Signor Giorgio has a family to care for his niche. In the classroom he never mentioned a daughter or a granddaughter, living close by, or in the north. The sole evidence is that Tommaso has seen a weeping woman leaving the tomb. Annette has only ever heard someone taking a photograph close by-the pop of a shutter, the clicking of winding gear. Perhaps an admirer of his paintings. She wonders if the other children remember the artist as she does. She does not often see her old friends to ask. When they rush past her in the market on their way to school or on the way to mass they call to her, ‘Hello Netta, goodbye Netta.’ That is all. Perhaps they have forgotten the lessons, on how to copy a figure, how to paint the foam of the breaking sea. She sometimes pictures the Dutch still-lifes. She imagines elaborate bouquets, containing cherries and nesting parrots and English willow, all of this held in a large transparent urn, like a world made of glass. She can recall her tutor’s gentle instructions. ‘Do not be afraid to paint the reverse side of the sunflower,’ he once said. ‘It is just as worthy of your attention. You will already know the strength of its neck, how it keeps turning to face the sun wherever the sun is in the sky.’
His shadowy tomb is like the third season, even though it is summer. Dry leaves have blown inside, and crisp and curl on the floor, and the place smells smoky, like the smoke of Signor Giorgio’s clothes. The rustling of the beech trees by the cimitero gate is hushed. She has already told Signor Giorgio that in previous times beech leaves were used to stuff mattresses, and that the voices of lovers who once whispered under the trees can sometimes be heard whispering inside the bolsters. The sepulchre is a good place to come. It feels restful. His bones must have settled, she thinks. Into the bottle, which he gave her and she has given back, she places a single chrysanthemum, the first of the season. They will continue to flourish through to All Souls’ Day. ‘You are already dead,’ she says. ‘I do not wish it.’
As she leaves the tomb she can hear that she is not alone after all. Someone is whistling nearby. The tune has no melody, and the scale slides randomly up and down. It is a strange sound for the cimitero. She is used to the recital of elegies, to crying or prayers. She has heard singing from the old women who come to sweep the pathways, but only hymns. The whistling is too bold. Perhaps there will soon be an interment, she thinks. Perhaps the peck-deads are working in the corner, preparing a new chamber. It is hard to know from which corner the whistling is coming. She turns and tries to place it. After a moment it stops. Perhaps the peck-deads have seen her. But there is nothing, no footsteps, no respectful salutation to indicate neighbourly proximity. She wonders, was it only the warbling and trilling of a bird in the tall beeches beyond the little city of the dead? Perhaps.
She puts on her headscarf and ties it under her chin. She should not have taken it off; it is an informality of which her mother would not approve. She calls good day and takes a step towards the gate. The whistling begins again, closer this time, directly behind her. Or no, directly in front of her. She stands still. How strange. The notes are so agile and light; they skim round the marble sculptures and commemorative pictures like something winged and flying. If Tommaso were not sick, if he were here, he could be playing a trick. But he has never really been able to approach her stealthily, even with bare feet. She can always hear the scrape of his heels, his rustling T-shirt, his excited breath. She is sure he is in bed, reading a comic, or writing a story about bicycle races.
Again, the whistling stops. The warm air drifts. She can smell an extinguished candlewick, or the tannin of the leather factory in the next valley, a brief bitter scent. A cloud sails overhead on a high, rapid current. The sun disappears and returns to its full heat. Someone is here. She can feel it. Someone is here in the cimitero but will not speak or be polite. There is another shadow. She feels pressure, a pressure no greater than the shadow cast by one of the angels on the marble plinths. But this is a shadow coming from beneath, or within. Though the sun blazes hot on her head, she feels the shadow creeping up her legs. It cools her insides. She catches her breath and tries to divine a presence. But there’s no ache in the air of someone following a lover. There is no mood of ill will, as when a pickpocket works the market. There is no gesture of friendship, like that of the accordion player from Toulouse, who sang ‘Remember Me’ to her after she had given him a coin.
The shadow has no mood or purpose. No one is advancing to rest a hand on her shoulder. No one is preparing to greet her or say, yes, the day is fine. No one is slipping shyly away through the rusty gates, leaving the hinges creaking softly behind them. The shadow has not moved–it is simply attending to her, chilling her warm skin, spreading into her core.
Her heart begins to shrink. Perhaps. Perhaps it is Him. But he has never come so far. He has never followed her further than the market, which is close to San Lorenzo, close to his slippery lair in the oil paint. If her little brother were here, he could hold her hand and tell her what he sees. He could even calculate the distance of the cimitero from the church, saying it is approximately a kilometre, or it is five furlongs, having copied the charts on the walls of the Montessori, and she might take comfort in this. How far can the Bestia walk when he stirs within the old varnish and releases himself from the tarnished cage? To the greenhouse garden where her father was killed? To the edge of the summer theatre where he watches Annette on her stool? Here?
If she were to reach down now would there be a trail of saliva on the dusty path, drooled from the gaping hole of his mouth? If she reached out a hand would she find the face with its contortion of muscle and its rasping thorns? Would there be the bloody stump of castration between his goat-hair legs? She listens to the almost silent, heat-slow day. She listens to the swallows overhead and a hawk crying over a warren on the hillside, to the droning of a long-legged insect between patches of ragwort and to the far-off detonation of fireworks. She puts a hand to her throat, but the rosemary spirit-stopper Uncle Marcello made for her is at home, lying safe in the drawer of her dresser. She would like it now, around her neck, or in her pocket, instead of the wooden rosary.
She holds her breath and steps forward. And then she steps again. ‘Is it you?’ she whispers. ‘Where are you? What do you want with me?’
There is no reply.
The Mirror Crisis
Last time you were up north, you went to see Nicki in the hospital. The truth is, you’d been avoiding it. You didn’t think you could face it, not with everything else that had happened, another dark chore amid so many. With Nicki you have always felt the urge to confess, to verbalise your troubles. She lies benignly in the starched bed, as if ready with atonement, and it’s easy to talk to her, easy to unload. Over the years you’ve confided lots of things. The rejected marriage proposal. Your feelings of fraudulency. How you might have been instrumental in the dissolution of a couple of Danny’s relationships. There’s no come-back. You are never judged. You aren’t even issued with penitentiaries.
But this recent corruption of life. Your brother’s accident. The fatalism. The infidelity. Where would you begin?
Anyway, you felt duty bound to visit her. You felt guilty. You’d just been to the cemetery with your mum and dad. It was a beautiful late spring day, warm by mid-morning. A few stray pieces of blossom were drifting from the trees alongside the crematorium. In the grounds of the cemetery, everything was shooting and budding, and the new lushness was like a country garden. There was a disturbing firmness to the headstones. The dead were staked down. Danny had been gone for seventeen weeks.
You stood for a while, looking at the sprigs of grass trying to seed on the bald mound. There were cards and gifts, newly deposited. An unopened beer can. A takeaway fork speared into the earth. A ridiculous plastic toy with green troll hair. Debris left after a festival. There were messages too, like the notes that used to get pinned to the door of his flat at weekends-whimsical and un-profound. Great shakes, Danny Boy, you wazzock. Hope you’re good and wasted now. Mackie. Still owe you a pint of Best, Daz.
After a few minutes you turned and walked out of the cemetery, through the park to the back of the hospital.
