‘They’re all stupid, that’s why,’ Alice said. It didn’t occur to her how dramatically, with the utterance, she was separating herself from the cosiness of that dominant consenting world to which she had always, more or less, belonged. ‘Of course I’ll keep them for you,’ she said. ‘But they’re so good, Jem. Shouldn’t you keep them at home? Shouldn’t your father keep them for you? They’re “manuscripts”, aren’t they? He could keep them for you in the summerhouse.’
Jem took longer than usual to make reply. ‘Frankly,’ she said, eventually, ‘my father is a teeny bit of a fire hazard. He’s rather absent-minded, you see.’
‘What do you mean, “a fire hazard”?’ Alice asked.
‘Well,’ Jem said. ‘Not only does he smoke like a chimney, but he’s quite likely to use the odd manuscript for kindling.’
‘Oh never!’ Alice said. ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t do that!’
‘Only on the chilliest of winter mornings,’ Jem said, amending the accusation with a sanguine laugh. ‘And then only when the anthracite’s run out. He’s got a little Russian stove in there. It gets greedy for food twice a day.’
Alice gulped. ‘You must give them to me today,’ she said. ‘You must give me the whole box. I’ll take them this afternoon. I’ll phone my mother to fetch me in the car. Jem, I’ll take care of those stories for you for as long as ever you need.’
‘Thank you, Alice,’ Jem said. ‘I know you will. You will always be my dearest friend.’ She turned quickly and flicked through the topmost of the exercise books before emotion became an embarrassment. Then she handed the batch to Alice.
The books constituted the first two thirds of her ‘novel’. It was called My Last Duchess. Alice opened the first of the books and skimmed the first page.
Gabriella Alessandra Gallo, she read, looked out from her bedroom window on to the Cuillin Hills. They loomed, black, enclosing, beyond the blacker waters of the loch. She was almost nine years old. Gabriella was young, but not so young that she could not remember those other hills which had risen from that other water which had filled the Golfo da Gaeta.
‘I will never forget you, Papa dearest,’ she said. ‘I know that I will find you again.’
It was at this point Alice registered that Flora had come back to school. She was approaching across the playing field in the company of Claire Crouchley. Claire had taken on an air of guardianship and was walking slightly ahead.
‘Hello, you two!’ Claire called out. ‘I knew that we’d find you here. I know you always come here. I’ve been wondering what you do.’
‘Hello F-flora,’ Alice said. ‘Th-this is Jem.’ She put the books down beside her on the grass.
Alice, who had harboured an uneasy notion of co-existing with Jem and Flora, recognized within those next few seconds that this was not a possibility. Flora was holding back, saying nothing, but something right then about the choreography of the group made it apparent that Flora was pointedly lining up with Claire.
‘Hello, Flora,’ Jem said. Flora ignored her. She was watching Claire who had bent suddenly to swoop on the topmost of the exercise books.
‘What are all these?’ she said. ‘ “Convent of the Ascension”?’
‘It’s my old school,’ Jem said. ‘It’s nothing.’ She made a move to retrieve the book but Claire stepped back, holding it tauntingly behind her.
‘Oh come on, Claire,’ Alice said. ‘They’re only books. Give them back. They’re Jem’s.’ Claire opened one of them and began, stumblingly, to read out loud.
‘Umm-bert-oh, her husband, the Duke, the Demon Padd-ronn - padd-ronn? – was dead. Blimey!’
‘ “Pah-drone-eh”,’ Jem said. ‘It means the big smell at the top.’
‘Pah yourself,’ Claire said wittily. ‘We haven’t all swallowed a dictionary. Anyway, what is it?’
‘It’s a story,’ Jem said. ‘Alice is reading it.’
‘All that’s one story?’ Claire said.
‘It’s a longish story,’ Jem said. ‘Alice is reading it, that’s all.’
‘But those are exercise books,’ Claire said suspiciously. ‘You don’t get stories like that in exercise books. And anyway it’s all in your writing.’
‘Give me a break,’ Jem said. ‘It’s in my writing because I wrote it.’ She took advantage of Claire’s puzzlement to take back the book. Then she gathered up the others and handed them quickly to Alice. Claire’s mouth was fixed half open. It was beyond her experience, Alice guessed, to grasp that people actually wrote ‘proper’ stories. Novels appeared as if by virgin birth on the shelves of W. H. Smith alongside the comic papers and Christmas annuals.
‘Say, Jem,’ Claire said. ‘If you’re letting Alice read it then you’ve got to let me and Flora read it too.’ She paused, waiting for a response. Jem gave her none. ‘If I told Miss Aldridge you were here you’d be in trouble,’ she said. ‘And I’ve seen both of you bunking assembly.’ This was true. If Claire told Miss Aldridge, they would be in trouble.
‘All right,’ Jem said. ‘I don’t mind if you read it. So long as Alice can read it first. She’s only just started it. She can give you a bit of it tomorrow.’
Alice took Jem’s box of stories home that night. She read My Last Duchess to the end of the first third. Though its period was twentieth century, the story was an ambitious and somewhat camped-up combination of bitter-sweet Highland romance and higher Renaissance intrigue. Its heroine, the beautiful Gabriella, was the offspring of a daring cross-cultural union between an impoverished Highland chieftain’s daughter and a young, well-born Italian medical man. The story, which opened on the Isle of Skye, at once flashed back to re-create Gabriella’s early life in a harsh rural idyll, set east of Naples, where her father had nobly elected to tend the discarded, ailing poor.
The story then described how the good dottore made his dutiful rounds by mule, performing emergency eye surgery, or tracheotomies, on the floors of peasant hovels. His patients, too poor to pay him in money, brought him gifts of new-laid eggs and jars of olive oil. Doctor Gallo had met his wife on the Isle of Skye during a tour of the Western Isles which he had made as a medical student. He had undertaken it, being a devotee of travel literature, after having read Samuel Johnson’s account of his travels in those islands.
Jem’s text portrayed vividly not only the landscape of southern Italy, but the doctor’s growing up; how, as a boy, he had sat together for hours in the summerhouse with his English tutor, reading Captain Marryat and Sir Walter Scott and the stories of the Mabinogion.
* * *
Next day, Alice dutifully brought in the first four exercise books and handed them over to Claire. Claire read them with scant attention, in the breaks and in the library period, sitting in a huddle with Flora who was conspicuously uninterested in the project. But over the next three days, Jem’s novel became the readiest vehicle for underlining her severance from Alice. While Alice and Flora themselves hung back, the battle was waged between Jem and Claire, with My Last Duchess as the weapon.
‘But why do they live in Naples when they’re Scottish?’ Claire said. ‘I mean, why don’t they live in Scotland?’
‘Because Gabriella’s father’s Italian,’ Jem said, ‘that’s why. You’ll have noticed that he’s called Doctor Gionata Gallo and not Doctor Hamish McCleod.’
‘Bit thick, isn’t it?’ Claire said. ‘A Highland chief’s daughter marrying a greasy eye-tye?’
‘He’s not a “greasy eye-tye”, you ignorant bigot,’ Jem said. ‘He’s from an old Neapolitan family. It’s her mother’s family that has no money. Do you know anything about the Western Isles? Or about the history of Scotland?’ Claire gawped, gracelessly. Jem seemed to feel quite bruised. ‘Just because Doctor Gallo chooses to treat the poor,’ she said, ‘and not hang about like his colleagues, growing fat on treating the rich, that doesn’t make him a prole.’ Claire retreated into the text with Flora, but she was soon back again, this time faking great splutters of mirth. She had got to the place where a p
easant woman had given the doctor a demijohn of home-pressed olive oil.
‘Oil?’ Claire said. ‘Can you imagine anyone paying the doctor in oil!’
‘The first pressing of the olive,’ Jem said grandly, ‘is not a gift to be scorned.’
Claire spluttered some more. ‘And I love this,’ she said. ‘ “Virgin” oil. Bit daft, isn’t it?’
‘Why don’t you stop reading it?’ Jem said. ‘And give me a break?’
‘Oh no,’ Claire said. ‘Do let’s carry on, Flora.’
* * *
That night Alice read on. The story turned on the disappearance of Gabriella’s father who, having enemies among the local men of property, had been suddenly framed on a drugs charge. A stash had been planted in his garden, under his olive trees. The doctor was arrested and thrown into a van. His wife and daughter never saw him again. The connubial idyll was abruptly shattered and the poor widow, broken by years of fruitless enquiries, eventually returned to the Highlands with her child, where her health and her mind gave way.
Alice wept over the vivid and moving depiction of Gabriella’s broken mother, with her delicate, faded Celtic looks and her increasingly tenuous grip on reality. But Gabriella herself grew strong in beauty and wisdom. At seventeen she entered the medical school at Aberdeen where she fell in love with Angus, a fellow student. Life, however, was not simple for Gabriella, who was tormented by memories of her father’s disappearance and – liberated, finally, by her invalid mother’s death – ready to continue the search for him.
In order to fund these inquiries, Gabriella took on a modelling job. Jem had accomplished all this delightfully. The convivial bustle of student life and the fine, brave, handsome Highlander who jumped off the pages in his climbing boots were all there to savour and relish. So were the subsequent descriptions of Gabriella’s glamorous modelling life, as her job swept her off on sudden flights to Morocco and Bermuda and Milan. And then the pitiful climax, as it became impossible for Gabriella to continue with her studies. She made her terrible choice in favour of earning money to fund her quest and dedicating her life to finding her father. The decision resulted in a heartbreaking severance with the Highland medical student. Angus, like Miss Aldridge, could not get on with foreigners. Nor with Gabriella’s new world of high fashion and fast flights. He was a man’s man; a straight man; a man for the heather and the saddle and the salmon pool. Angus retired, bruised, to his Highland solitude and his textbooks, vowing never to marry.
* * *
Alice brought in the exercise books with a heavy heart next morning. She handed them over to Claire. Even Claire was mercifully silent that day and returned the batch to Jem without a word.
Gabriella, meanwhile, Alice discovered that evening, was as lonely in heart and as frustrated in her quest as she was successful in her career. Putting Angus determinedly behind her, she eventually made a loveless marriage with the dazzling Umberto, an aristocratic Neapolitan who carted her off to produce a son and heir for his palazzo – his other two wives having both died childless in mysterious circumstances. Jem had succeeded in creating around Umberto an extraordinary aura of decadent and encrusted grandeur, of powerful sexual magnetism and menacing, Italianate intrigue. Umberto was, of course, the very prince of the drug ring. The Demon Padrone himself, anxious to nobble Gabriella in her attempts to discover her father and at the same time to ensure his posterity by the espousal of a young and fecund wife.
Jem had contrived the denouement so artfully, with such an eye for pulling out the stops, that Alice slept with her bedside lamp on all through that night for fear of waking to find that the Demon Padrone was standing over her bed. Just before she fell asleep, Alice read that Gabriella had made a chilling discovery. Childless and berated for it by her impatient and ruthless husband, Gabriella walked secretly one evening in the ancient, forbidden burial ground where the family’s hunting dogs had been entombed. While doing so, she found that the earth had thrown up the skeleton of a human hand among a smattering of canine bones – a hand upon which her father’s ring was still encircling the bone. Hiding the precious relic in the cleavage of her evening gown, Gabriella swiftly left the graveyard and hastened, next, to bury the object in a stone plant pot on her balcony, under a brilliant cyclamen.
* * *
‘She plants it?’ Claire said. ‘She plants the hand?’
‘It’s not unprecedented actually,’ Jem said, ‘to obscure parts of the dead in plant pots. It happens in “Isabella; or The Pot of Basil”.’
‘Who’s Basil?’ Claire said. ‘Is that her father’s name, by any chance?’
‘Basil is a plant,’ Jem said. ‘The man whose remains were in the pot was called Claudio.’
‘So was that her father’s name then?’ Claire said. ‘Clordio?’
‘ “Cloudio”,’ Jem said. ‘As in cumulus nimbus. Gabriella’s father was called Gionata, you may remember.’
‘Oh, excuse me,’ Claire said sarcastically. ‘Anyway, why’s she so sneaky about being at the doggies’ graves?’
‘Women aren’t allowed into the burial ground,’ Jem said. ‘It has to do with the cult of Diana.’
‘Crumbs,’ Claire said. ‘Who’s Diana when she’s at home?’
‘The goddess,’ Jem said. ‘ “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.” She’s rather inclined to be jealous.’
‘But I thought Italians were Catholics,’ Claire said. ‘I didn’t know Catholics had a goddess.’
‘Of course they have a goddess,’ Flora said. It was almost the first whole sentence Alice had heard her utter in days. Jem looked up and blinked at her.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘I think you heard me,’ Flora said. She paused for a moment, poised, impressive, like a hanging judge about to pass sentence. ‘Just one query,’ she said. ‘I assume she never gets back to her medical school? Your “heroine”? In other words, she’s a dropout. Why bother writing a book about a drop-out?’ Jem stared at her. So did Alice and Claire. They were all of them aware that in the question lay a declaration of cold war.
The war was won by Flora. Jem dropped out. That is, while Alice never believed that Jem had ‘dropped out’, all the others believed it. True, Jem had dropped unexpectedly, cruelly, out of Alice’s life, leaving no address. She had departed at sixteen, just as suddenly as she had come. Since she was not in general popular among the girls, most of the class had little difficulty in dismissing her departure as petulance when she had failed to get the Upper School scholarship.
‘She was always a bad sport,’ Claire said. Jem had, in truth, got the highest mark in the scholarship examination, but Miss Trotter, since the result had been ‘so close’, as she said, had felt entitled to use her discretion in making the award to Flora. She had called in both girls to her office and had explained the matter very frankly. All of her staff had agreed, she said, that of the two Flora was the more ‘steady’. Flora was the more direct. Flora was the more likely to bring honour to the school in all her future achievements. Jem surprised Alice by leaving that same afternoon. She appeared from the dormitories after lunch, no longer in school uniform and was once again dragging the canvas toolbag.
‘But wait!’ Alice said. ‘Jem, wait for me!’ To accompany Jem off the premises and all the way to the railway station meant absenting herself from Geography, but Jem had taught her how to manage these things with something like aplomb.
‘Please don’t go,’ she said, but Jem only smiled. A small wistful smile such as Alice had not seen in her friend before. ‘Look – I know it’s unfair about the scholarship,’ Alice said, talking fast, ‘but at least your family aren’t such misers as Flora’s. I mean, they’d go on paying your fees, you see. Not like the Fergussons. I reckon that’s why Miss Trotter did it, don’t you? Please, Jem. Don’t go.’
Jem looked for a moment as though she meant to speak but in the end she said nothing. Then the girls went through the barrier and on to the platform.
‘I’ll write to you
,’ Jem said as the train pulled in.
‘But what about your stories?’ Alice said, remembering suddenly, and clutching at straws. ‘You can’t go yet, Jem. I’ve got all your stories!’
‘Hang on to them,’ Jem said and she touched Alice’s arm before boarding the train. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘Soon?’ Alice said. ‘Will you be back soon?’ Then the guard blew his whistle. ‘But I don’t even know your address!’ Alice cried, over the first rumblings of the wheels.
‘I’ll write to you,’ Jem said again. ‘Alice, you will always be my dearest friend.’
‘What?’ Alice called, because she couldn’t catch the words and Jem was getting further away.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ Jem called out, but the sound of her voice was drowned in a roar of gathering speed.
Chapter 12
Mrs Pilling hated to see Alice moping in her room over a box of old exercise books. She opened the curtains and let the sunlight in.
‘At your age you should be out enjoying yourself,’ she said. ‘Come on, lovey. You’ll get over it. You’ll make new friends.’ In her heart Mrs Pilling felt enormous relief at the passing of Jem McCrail, but it made her angry that Alice had been treated so badly. ‘If the wretched girl can’t write to you,’ she said, ‘or even pick up the telephone, then she doesn’t deserve your friendship.’
After Directory Enquiries had proved itself quite unequal to the business of uncovering either Saul Gluckman or Patch McCrail, Alice pinned all her hopes on ‘Quality Gnomes of Knightsbridge’, but here too, it seemed, the system fell short of full efficiency. As to Jem’s father, Gordon McCrail and his French wife Minette, while Alice knew all about their wallpaper and their personal habits, she did not know about their domicile. Alice, though she had always longed for it, had somehow never got round to meeting Jem’s parents throughout the two years of their friendship. There were always so many persons to be attended to in the household when the school holidays came along. Authors breezed into the McCrail ménage, clutching manuscripts completed in tax havens abroad. Or Catholic aunts in great numbers appeared from Normandy, clutching baskets of pungent cheeses wrapped in straw. Jem had had the most wonderful stories about all of them.
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