by Burke, John
“My grandmother did not approve. She was very angry. I knew my mother and my grandmother did not love — there was no happiness between them — but it was only when I grew up that I understood why. My grandmother had no reason to love the English, I think? But now we find she was wrong. Her husband did not leave her. Her husband was … removed. That is the word — removed?”
Arthur did not reply. He slowly turned over the material on the desk before him. There was a picture of the same young woman, this time holding a baby, taken against a white wall in bright sunlight. There were two frayed envelopes addressed to Mrs Walter Blythe in Lurgate, one of them still containing a folded bill — the sort of scraps that remain among people’s belongings for years without ever coming to the surface and being thrown away.
“The other letters,” Peter Blythe prompted. He leaned forward and prodded a small batch of letters from the heap. “Please, you read them?”
Arthur unfolded one. “It’s a personal letter,” he said uncertainly.
“They are all personal. I do not think my grandfather will mind now.”
There were two or three brief notes from Walter Blythe to Serafina. He had evidently not been a good letter writer. One had been sent from Florence, presumably to Sicily. Two were rather matter-of-factly amorous scribbles from an address in Scotland. They were the kind of thing a husband away on business would feel he ought to write to his wife at home.
Nell felt as diffident as Arthur when it came to skimming through these letters. They belonged to a dead world; no-one could be hurt or even mildly upset now by this scrutiny; yet still she felt that they had no right to snoop.
“If you have examples of my grandfather’s handwriting in your records,” said Peter Blythe, “you can check.” He was confident, she knew, that everything would match up. He was insistent that they should check, and his insistence was terribly convincing. “And there are other things in my luggage,” he said.
“Luggage?”
“I left it at the station. I came straight here with these few things, so that you would understand it was right for us to talk.”
Nell had to concede that he was being meticulous and polite. This Peter, or Pietro, if he were telling the truth, would be justified in being far more antagonistic towards the Johnsons if he felt so inclined. A Johnson had done him out of his inheritance and allowed his grandmother to live under a cloud for the rest of her life.
Nell said: “What really happened to your grandmother, then? I mean, afterwards — after she’d disappeared. Everyone thought — at least, we’ve learnt recently that most people thought — she’d gone to join her husband.”
“But now we know she couldn’t have done,” said Arthur.
Peter nodded sardonic agreement.
“She went home, then?” said Nell. “To Italy?”
“To Sicily,” he said. “Where else could she go?”
The doorknob rattled and turned. Brigid stood in the doorway.
“You said I was to come in…?”
Arthur introduced her with a firmness that told Nell his mind was already made up. He accepted the story and the young man’s identity.
“Brigid, this is Peter Blythe. He’s Walter Blythe’s grandson.”
When they sat down again, Peter Blythe edged his chair round so that he could see Brigid. His heavy eyes were sleepily appreciative. While Arthur swiftly sketched in for Brigid’s benefit what they had learnt so far, the young man unashamedly studied Brigid’s face, her legs, and the line of her forearm along the padded arm of her chair.
When Arthur had filled in the background, Peter took up the story. He addressed it to Nell and Arthur, but Nell knew from a slight change of timbre in his voice that he was conscious of Brigid all the time. He was set on impressing her with his clarity, his sadness, and his family loyalty. He pulled out all the stops. For the first time Nell was uncritically and unwaveringly glad that Brigid was engaged to Martin Hemming and was so soon going to marry him.
Serafina had lived ‘outside Palermo’. That was how Peter phrased it, as though there was no point in going into detail about towns or villages which would mean nothing to people in an English coast resort. It was here that the footloose Walter Blythe had met her, from here that he had impetuously brought her to Lurgate as his wife, and to here that she returned under the cloud of his supposed crime.
Not that she spoke of his crime and his desertion. In a tight, proud Sicilian community the shame of it would have been too much for her. It would have been regarded as a judgment on her for having married an Englishman and left her island.
It was understood that she was a widow. Her husband had died and she had come home. There was nobody to deny it. In those days gossip and scandal did not spread over the world in a matter of hours. Not even in a matter of days or weeks. The ripples did not get far from home. Foreign newspapers weren’t flown in on fast planes. The heart of Sicily was as far from Lurgate as it was from the moon.
Serafina Blythe was a respectable widow. That was her story. There was no reason why it should be disbelieved.
“Family honour is a great thing in our land,” said Peter Blythe. “Before the first world war it was an almost religious concept. Men and women killed for honour. So it has been with us through the centuries. Family pride was everything. Vendetta was a noble cause. Loss of face, a slight to the family or any member of it, and…” he wiped his forefinger significantly across his throat.
“You mean that if any of the family had known the truth, they’d have tried to avenge her?”
“How could they? To find Walter Blythe and kill him, yes … but how? Where? We know now that he was dead anyway, but my grandmother did not know that. So nothing could have been done. They would simply have despised her because her man had left her.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better for her to have stayed in Lurgate?” asked Brigid. She did not blink under the intense, bold gaze he turned upon her. “If her pride meant so much to her, shouldn’t she have faced them out? By disappearing herself, she made it look as though she knew all about the embezzlement and was off to join her husband.”
“She did wait ten days or so,” her father reminded her. “Perhaps she couldn’t understand, and she was waiting to hear from him. And there was no word. Better her home, where the story would be unknown and she could pretend to be a widow, than here, where everybody knew.”
Peter nodded as though thanking Arthur for making this easy for him.
Then he resumed his story.
Serafina Blythe had proudly spurned offers of help from Victor Johnson. After what Walter Blythe had done, she hated him and hated all the English. She went back to Sicily and her pride went with her.
She had been home only a week when she realised that she was going to have a child.
Nell tried to think herself into the mind of that flashing, beautiful Italian woman — girl, rather, for she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or so — but the distance was too great. In that day and age, in that primitive community, would one have been able to carry it off with a flourish? She must have had a difficult role thrust on her — having to keep up a pretence of joy that, although her husband was dead, a child was on its way to keep his memory alive. Could she have loved the child, or was it only pride that made it possible for her to keep up the pretence? Did the child, Luigi, remind her too bitterly of the treacherous Walter Blythe, or was she able to love him for himself and be thankful that at least some good had come out of that misery?
Luigi certainly brought further misery to her. He married an English girl, a holidaymaker on the island, a year before the second world war broke out. Serafina and the girl didn’t get on.
Peter was born in 1943, and Serafina insisted on referring to him always as Pietro. His father was killed when he was seven.
“Killed?” asked Arthur. “But the war must have been over — I mean, it was over. Long before.”
“He was among those who welcomed the Allies to Sicily,” said
Peter. “In 1943 — the year I was born. In Sicily we always had ideas of our own, you understand? We never loved Mussolini. Tyrants from the mainland were never welcome among us. The Mafia made things easy for the Allies, and when peace came the important men of the Mafia were in very good positions. That is how it always is in Sicily.” he tried to smile ruefully, to imply with a shrug that he was a civilised young man of the twentieth century who had no time for such things; but there was a spark of arrogant approval which he could not disguise. “But afterwards, many Mafiosi who had been living in America decided to come back. Their old friends were prospering — why should they not all be friends together? There were many feuds. Many old enmities were revived. My father mixed with the wrong people. One day he went on business to Enna and he was stabbed. Nobody asked why, because nobody would have answered. He was on the wrong side — the side that lost.”
“There wasn’t anything you could do about it?” It came from Brigid with the force of a challenge.
It was the first time Nell had seen the young man disconcerted. He flushed slowly and sat very still for a moment. Then he forced a rueful smile again. He spread his hands.
“I was seven. You think when I grew up I should practise the vendetta? To seek out and kill my father’s killers — and then be killed by one of their family?”
“No, of course not. But…”
“When I was old enough to do that, I had other things to do. In Palermo and then in Rome.”
He hurried on as though to give her no further chance of questioning him on this embarrassing point.
His mother had married again. Her husband this time was an Italian-American who had returned to Sicily but decided that the States were better after all. Serafina would not meet him. In the world she knew, a widow would never have contemplated marrying again.
“My grandmother,” said Peter with a little bow of the head, “held me with her. My mother went to the States with her new man, and I think she was glad to go. I stayed.”
In spite of his grandmother’s hatred of them, Peter was drawn to the English. He had learnt English from his mother and there was English blood in him from his grandfather and from his mother. “I think in English,” he said, glancing from Nell to Arthur and then lingeringly to Brigid, perhaps awaiting a nod of recognition or some implicit applause.
But he could not afford to come to England. They were too poor. “And if my grandmother had had the money, I think she would not have given me any of it — not to come to this country.” He went eventually to Palermo but his grandmother insisted that he came home regularly. Because of the sacrifices she had made for him, he could not refuse. Not until she died could he go to Palermo for good — and then he was restless and soon on his way to Rome. Again he was a tourist guide.
“I am in Rome a year,” he concluded, “when I read in II Giorno a little piece about my grandfather. He is not in South America. He has been in England all the time! So I come.” Slowly he appraised the room. “Always I tell myself I will come to England someday. But I did not expect it to be in such circumstances.”
They were silent for what seemed an eternity to Nell. There must be a hundred questions still to be asked, but Arthur was exhausted. She wanted to send the young man away. She wanted him out of the house: his eyes were pricing everything, he gave the impression of fingering their possessions and debating whether or not to lay claim to them.
Abruptly Nell said: “Your story’s amazingly circumstantial. Did your grandmother tell you the lot?”
“We were very close.”
“But if she was so anxious to keep it a secret…”
“We were very close,” he repeated. “I was all she had. There was no-one else she could talk to.”
Arthur frowned a warning to Nell. He accepted the story and saw no point in niggling away at the why and wherefore of its assembly. She realised that he was right, but perversely she would have liked to trip Peter up somehow, somewhere.
Arthur put his elbows on the desk. Tiredly he said: “What do you want from me, then?”
“Oh, I have not thought … I have not had time to consider…”
“You must have some idea.” Tired he might be, but Arthur could still say what he meant to say, brushing aside quibbles and reservations. “A share in the firm — or a cash payment? Which have you come for?”
Peter Blythe did not smile too eagerly, or sigh, or give any sign that he knew he had pulled it off. There was no hint of jubilation when he said:
“I thought we would discuss it. Let us get to know one another, yes? I am not here to demand anything, you understand. But I remember my grandmother and what she suffered. Suffered … not because of her husband, we now discover, but because of the man who murdered her husband. The murderer…”
He left it suggestively in the air.
Nell said: “Have you anywhere to stay in Lurgate?”
“I came straight to you from the station.” He got up slowly. Everything about him now was sleek and leisurely. “I must go and find a hotel before it is too late. I do not have much money with me…”
“We’ll fix it,” said Arthur.
“It is kind of you.”
“If there’s any difficulty, we might fit you in here, but…”
“No!” said Peter Blythe quickly. “No, of course you will not wish to do that. You will want to check my story. You will need time. And if I were in your house, at your table, you would not feel free to talk.” He picked up his brief-case and put the papers and photographs back into it. He was standing close to Brigid and looking sideways at her — touching her without touching, thought Nell, just as he had done with the room and everything in it. “You will have a great deal to talk about,” he said. “And then I think we arrange another meeting.”
With Easter almost upon them, hotel bookings were difficult. Two days, yes. Beyond that, not so easy. And who could say how long Peter Blythe would be staying?
Brigid was glad of the opportunity to ring Martin at Fernrock Hotel and ask him to help them. Perhaps his mother could help a friend of theirs who had just arrived from abroad.
“No need to go into detail,” said Arthur. “Just ask if she can rally round.”
Nell drove the young man to the station to pick up his luggage.
Arthur had offered to do it but she had overruled him. She was used to taking on the odd jobs. Arthur was so engrossed in business that he tended to leave small duties and routine matters to her. He relied on her. This reliance had frightened her when they were first married. She was a diffident girl, scared of responsibility. Yet because he thought of her as a clear-headed, efficient person she found that she had become one. For years she had felt inadequate with other people but grew brisk and practical because that was how Arthur saw her and how, in time, the others saw her.
By being alone with Peter Blythe while she drove him to the station and the hotel she hoped to discover something about him which had escaped Arthur. She could not have defined exactly what she was expecting: a viciousness that would enable her to hate him, a mistake that would prove he was a fraud, a glimpse of the real person rather than Walter Blythe’s self-styled grandson?
But in the car his manner was the same as it had been all evening. He became neither boastful nor more intimate. He was deferential but took it for granted that they were in complete accord and that she recognised the validity of his case.
“I think,” he said as they circled the perimeter of the park and headed across town towards the station, “no publicity. Not yet. You agree?”
She could not have agreed more. It was strange, though, that the suggestion should have come from him. She would have expected him to long for the chance to tell the world of his grandmother’s wrongs, of all that she had suffered, and of his own moral inheritance.
“I do not wish to embarrass you,” he went on, watching the road ahead with the same possessive curiosity he had shown all evening. “We make our own decisions before the reporters tell stories, yes?�
�
“I think it would be better,” she had to say.
“This hotel you are taking me to…?”
“Utterly reliable,” said Nell. “The proprietor is a friend of ours. Brigid — our daughter — is marrying her son a couple of weeks from now.”
“Ah.” It was a strange, long sigh. She wanted to glance at his profile but did not want him to guess that he had disturbed her. She accelerated, and they raced down the slope towards the railway cutting. “She is a very beautiful girl, your daughter.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Nell lamely.
“I hope the man is worthy of her.”
“Yes,” said Nell, very firm now: “he is.”
The main road dipped more steeply, and then she had swung into the station approach and they climbed a few yards to the facade of brown brick and green noticeboards. Peter Blythe got out and went to the door that served the enquiry office, goods yard and left luggage office. It was closed. He went into the station through the waiting room. Knowing the vagaries of Lurgate station, Nell thought she ought to get out and help him to track down one of the elusive old men who would be on duty at this time of night. Instead, she stayed where she was. The red light of a signal glowed stolidly above the edge of a roof. A coloured poster faded into monochrome under the station entrance telling her that Harwich was the gate to the Continent. She leaned a few inches out of her window and tried to believe that she could hear the sea. The sound of it against the cliffs and on the beds of pebbles beneath the pier had grown so familiar that it required an effort of will to hear it, from a distance or close at hand.
Peter Blythe came out of the station with two large cases. They were shabby but substantial. It looked as though he had travelled here with every intention of staying.
When the cases had been stowed in the boot and they were driving away, Peter said:
“Your daughter — Brigid, her name?”
Brigid would be sitting with her father at this moment. Nell could so easily visualise them. Brigid would have poured a brandy for Arthur and they would be talking, or sitting meditatively if that was what Arthur wanted. The two of them had always been remarkably in harmony. As a family, thought Nell, we haven’t done badly; not at all badly.
