Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the boy’s little suitcase up there on the truck next to where he had been standing. His clothes, his possessions, maybe a toy or a bedtime book. Something that was his. She can’t have any of it. Not a single thing. Not a photograph. Not a vest.

  The trucks pull away.

  Chiara stands in a daze with the heavy child in her arms, his face pressed into her coat.

  ‘Off you go,’ the officer says, giving her a look that she doesn’t understand. He raises his voice, addressing the whole crowd. ‘Go away now,’ he barks and claps his hands, in a theatrical gesture. The show is over.

  Chiara moves away as quickly as she can, the inert child clutched to her bosom, his feet swinging into her knees with each step. She wonders whether she has suffocated him. She takes the road to the river, lurches along Lungotevere under the plane trees and, when she gets past Garibaldi bridge, she puts him down. He has left a trail of snot down the front of her coat.

  ‘I want my mamma,’ he says.

  She looks at him. Small, defiant. Orphaned. Her knees buckle, and she puts her hand to the parapet. For the first time this morning, the sun comes out, giving the leaves above their heads an orangey-gold glow. Down below, a fallen branch bobs past on the engorged river. She steadies herself.

  ‘I’m taking you home with me,’ Chiara starts to say but stops and grabs at his clothing instead, because he is making a run for it. She hoicks him in close, crouches behind him, pins his flailing arms, shushes him. A label is sticking out from his coat collar. Daniele Levi she reads upside down. That will have to go. She wraps her arms around him tightly, there on the pavement, holding him still, binding him. She takes the end of the tag in her teeth and pulls at it, rips it free.

  All the way home, Chiara drags the boy, kicking and shouting ‘Mamma’ until his voice is hoarse. If it were a battle of wills, he might have got away. His determination to run is at least as great as her determination to keep him. But it is a question of physical strength, and he does not have a chance.

  By the time they get to Via dei Cappellari, he is silent.

  Two packed suitcases are in the hall. Cecilia is sitting at her sewing table in the salon. She does not immediately look up. She is hemming a piece of fabric the colour of damson plums. The folds of the cloth ripple over the edge of the table, almost down to the floor, catching the glow from the watery sunlight at the window. She snips the thread with a pair of scissors, straightens up.

  ‘Finished,’ she says, and looks at them, over the top of her round-rimmed reading glasses. She stares at the exhausted, tear-stained child.

  ‘Is this my something special?’ she says to Chiara. Then, before Chiara can answer, ‘Didn’t they have any girls?’

  TWO

  CARDIFF, MARCH 1973

  There was the before: before Maria found the letter, or understood what it meant. That was etched in clarity, a sunshine time not appreciated then but revered in retrospect when it was forever gone. Everything with its shine and polish and sharply defined gleaming edges that reflected the light back at you. Then there was the after, when a fog had descended and the air was heavy with it, so Maria felt as if, just by breathing, she might be slowly drowning.

  In the middle, at half past six in the evening, came the pit. To think about it was to have the sensation of falling backwards. Not to think about it–not to have it replay endlessly, not just in her head but in her being, as if she were caught in the beam of a strobe light that meted out white pain–was beyond her.

  To the before time belonged her little sister, Nel, sitting on Maria’s knee to have her hair plaited, their brother Patrick skating on yellow dusters up and down the hall, polishing the parquet to earn his pocket money. There was Tabitha, next-door’s cat whom she was feeding while the neighbours were on holiday, chasing a butterfly under the lilac bush. There was a walk across the promenade to the newsagent on the other side of the lake to buy the Telegraph for her dad, and ice creams for herself and the kids. Flirting with the boy in the ice-cream van. There was Brian. He was a creature of the before time. Poor Brian. The whole family watching Doctor Who, Maria cross-legged on the floor, leaning against her dad’s shins. The comfort of those legs in their brown-corduroy gardening trousers. Gone.

  Maria had been waiting for Brian to phone. She was thinking that kissing him, or rather, being kissed by him–he was the first boy she had ever properly kissed–had been a teeth-clashing, spittle-infused experience. She was wondering whether snogging was necessarily like that or if it was to do with Brian’s prominent teeth. There was a swollen rim inside her lower lip where his teeth had pressed into her. She ran her tongue along it repeatedly.

  With exams looming, life and revision were all blurred together so that even there, sprawled on the beanbag under the stairs next to the telephone on a Saturday afternoon, she had a book propped open.

  Lift me with thee to some starry sphere, she read.

  She was doing Keats and the Romantic Poets for English Lit. She tried to imagine Brian lifting her with him to some starry sphere. A thought slipped in before she had time to shut it out: any version of a starry sphere that Brian could access might not be one she wanted to enter.

  Patrick skated past.

  ‘Oh, Brian,’ he said, clutching his hands to his heart as he sashayed by. He was eight years old and thought himself a great wit.

  ‘Shut up and go away,’ Maria said. He shot the length of the hall to the front door, shimmied off his duster, turned and thundered up the stairs.

  She had met Brian at a high school gig that she had gone to on the night of her sixteenth birthday with her friend Ed, and now Ed wasn’t speaking to her. The band were sixth-form boys who played Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple covers. The lead guitarist had a trick of sliding to the front of the stage on his knees, and the singer shook his head about as if he had a blond mane like Robert Plant. The boys at that school weren’t allowed to grow their hair.

  Maria, wearing her new lilac loons and a striped, skinny-rib jumper, saw this boy out of the corner of her eye and kept looking at him until he glanced across. The band was playing ‘Black Dog’. The boy, who had a feathery haircut like Rod Stewart’s, down to his shoulders, couldn’t keep away. She was like the woman in the song, dripping honey. She drew him to her, holding herself very still, her head slightly bowed, first looking at him from under her lashes and then down at the floor. He walked over and leant in close to be heard over the noise of the music. A hot tickle in her ear. He had to go backstage, he said, because he was recording the band. She didn’t catch why.

  ‘Don’t go away,’ he breathed.

  He disappeared through a door on the left-hand side of the stage, and Maria had stayed close by, full of promise and mystery, swaying to the music, but all the time with an eye on the door where the boy had gone. By the time he came out, her lift was waiting and she had to go. She had pressed her number, boldly, into his hand.

  It had been three days before he had phoned.

  ‘Brian,’ she said to her mum when he eventually did. ‘Why did he have to be called Brian? It’s as bad as Trevor.’

  ‘Good Irish name,’ her mum said. ‘Don’t forget Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland.’

  Maria’s dad was Irish.

  Lolling in the crunchy folds of the beanbag with Keats open on her lap, Maria thought about how she had liked Brian best in those three days, when she was in a kind of agony of expectation and waiting, thrilled with a yearning. When, closeted in her bedroom, she would play her mum’s old jazz (she hadn’t got any records of her own yet) on the portable stereophonic record player she’d had as a birthday present, and would practise kissing, using the back of her hand. This was before she had known that he thought novels were a waste of paper and that people who laughed at Monty Python were fakes, or that he was a first-year student at university, reading Chemistry, of all things.

  In those three days, the squat green telephone on the shelf under the stairs had assumed
a presence all its own. She had picked up the receiver often to check the ringtone was there, quickly put it back in case he had elected that very second to call, had found it engaged and given up for ever. She had offered up her equanimity and well-being to a ginger stranger in a school hall. As one might do, then, in the before time.

  ‘Dress rehearsal,’ Nel shouted down the stairs.

  The kids were preparing the Fabulous Kelly Easter Rabbit Show to be performed on the landing on Easter Sunday after the treasure hunt. Maria was the compère.

  The phone rang. ‘Can you call me back?’ Brian said. ‘I’m in a phone box.’

  ‘Someone get me a pen and a piece of paper,’ Maria bellowed.

  ‘Do you want to go to the pictures tonight?’ Brian said. He wanted to see Conquest of the Planet of the Apes again.

  Nel came hurtling down the stairs. ‘Pat’s doing a poo,’ she said.

  Nel was six. She liked to talk about bottoms, farts, poo, and had learnt to make a squelching noise with her hands. She snorted with laughter.

  ‘Pen and paper, quick,’ Maria said.

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Mum’s desk.’

  Maria repeated the number in her head and listened to Brian tell her film times. Nel was taking an age.

  ‘Quick, quick,’ Maria shouted.

  The line went dead. From the back room came a great clattering. Maria unfolded herself from the depths of the beanbag and went to investigate, muttering the number.

  Nel was standing beside an upturned drawer, manila envelopes and pieces of paper protruding from beneath it. ‘It wouldn’t open,’ she said. ‘The drawer was stuck.’

  ‘That’s the one they keep locked,’ Maria said. ‘It’s for important documents.’

  ‘You said quick quick.’

  ‘It must have been a bit broken already,’ Maria said. ‘Or Mum didn’t lock it properly. Or,’ she squeezed Nel’s little bicep, ‘you’ve got superhuman strength.’

  Nel squealed and wriggled.

  ‘Never mind. Let me phone Brian back and then I’ll tidy it up.’

  They went back to the hall and Maria dialled what she thought was the number. ‘It doesn’t work,’ she said.

  Nel was hovering helpfully near by. ‘You said a seven at the end,’ she said.

  Maria, unconvinced, tried altering the last digit and this time it rang but no one answered.

  ‘That’s not right either,’ she said.

  She thought of Brian in the telephone box waiting for her call, hunching up his velvet jacket round his ears, turning his back to the irate queue building up outside. She imagined a battleaxe with a hairnet rapping on the glass. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes again, she thought. How desperately unglamorous.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘I tried. He’ll phone again.’

  Nel ran off upstairs.

  Maria slid her hand under the drawer and flipped it over, pushing the contents back into place. It was stacked with labelled manila envelopes. Legal Docs said the uppermost one. She flicked through. Deeds, Certificates, Guarantees, Insurance. She picked up the drawer, slotted it back into the desk and pushed it shut. As she turned away a piece of thin airmail paper lying on the carpet caught her eye. She picked it up and turned it over. It was a typed letter, dated just a week before, with a handwritten postscript.

  Via dei Cappellari 147,

  Int. 5, Roma, Italia

  Signora Edna Kelly

  41 Buttermere Avenue,

  Cardiff

  17 March 1973

  Dear Mrs Kelly,

  I write in reply to your letter addressed to the occupant of the above address. I am unable to pass on your correspondence to Daniele Levi as you request because I do not know his whereabouts. He left a long time ago and never gave a forwarding address.

  Yours sincerely,

  Signora Chiara Ravello

  Who was this writing to her mother from Rome? She knew her mother had a sort of penfriend in Italy, from when she’d been an au pair there. Was it something to do with that? But her mum’s correspondent was female, and this letter referred to a ‘he’. She struggled to recall what her mum might have told her. Helen, the friend in Italy was called. She had married an Italian and stayed, but her mum had come home and married Maria’s dad. Her childhood sweetheart.

  Maria studied the postscript. The handwriting was angular and upright, written in black ink, with a fountain pen, not a biro, old-fashioned and somehow foreign. The letters were formed separately, a jerky, staccato style, as if the writer had never learnt joined-up script. Only the Rs in the middle of ‘sorry’ connected. They reached out to each other and then to the Y, with a curl first and then a bar across, like little bridges, holding the word together.

  Sorry.

  PS. It pains me to say. It is not known if Daniele is alive or dead. So sorry.

  She laid the letter back on top of the legal docs envelope and shut the drawer.

  Pat and Nel were either side of Dad on the sofa so they could slide over the back and hide if they got scared, Maria on the floor at his feet, Mum on the armchair. The Saturday teatime Doctor Who ritual. A paper napkin and a side plate on each of their laps, a picnic spread out on the tablecloth in the middle of the carpet: open ham-and-mustard sandwiches and mashed-egg-and-cress ones made with crusty white bread from the bakery on Albany Road, jars of pickle, crisps doled out from a giant packet, an apple or an orange each, and a pot of tea.

  Maria loved Saturday afternoon tea and had loved Doctor Who since it first started ten years earlier; she had been six, but Pat and Nel hadn’t even been born then. Their first-ever ­television set was black and white. Now it was in colour. The Spiridons, spindly creatures enslaved by the Daleks, became fully visible when dead. Only then could their furry, floor-length purple cloaks be seen–cloaks the same colour, Maria observed, as her own crushed-velvet maxi coat.

  ‘Would you rather have the power of invisibility or be able to travel through time?’ she asked in the kitchen afterwards. She was washing the dishes while her mum cleared up and put things away.

  ‘Time travel,’ her mum replied straightaway.

  ‘Where would you go?’ Maria asked, swilling her hands about to froth the water.

  ‘When would you go, that’s more the question,’ her mum replied. ‘What era would you visit?’ She stood next to Maria a moment, the bunched-up tablecloth in her hands, a faraway look on her face.

  ‘I’d go to Rome in 1821,’ Maria said, ‘to Keats’s house. I’d take modern treatments for tuberculosis, and then he would get better and write more poetry.’

  ‘You’d need a nurse on board,’ her mum said. ‘Moi,’ she added, patting her own chest and identifying herself as the nurse intended, in case Maria was in any doubt.

  Maria watched her mum through the window as she shook the crumbs out in the garden. She was wearing the stripy pink-nylon overall she always wore to do the housework, buttoned up over her clothes. She returned, clipped a clothes-peg onto the crisp packet to keep the remaining crisps fresh, and went into the pantry.

  ‘Would you go to Rome, Mum?’ Maria said. ‘Would you go and see Daniele Levi?’

  The name had just popped into her head, but once she had said it, she wanted to say it again. She had to raise her voice because the clattering noise of jars and tins had intensified.

  ‘Who is Daniele Levi, Mum?’ Maria said.

  The answer was silence. A sudden and localised silence in which Maria could hear the television from the front room and her brother giggling as he did when being tickled.

  ‘Mum?’ Maria said, half turning, her hands still in the warm soapy water.

  The patchwork curtain that hung in front of the pantry instead of a door was still. The silence was of someone holding their breath. What came into Maria’s head was that her mother was enacting a scene from Doctor Who, pretending to have been transported into another time dimension, and she nearly laughed. She drew her hands out of the bowl and wiped them down the front of her
dungarees.

  ‘Mum?’ she said again.

  Her mum burst out from behind the curtain. ‘Where’s your dad?’ she said. ‘I forgot to tell him … I just need to … We need… ’

  Her face had assumed an expression that was like a smile but wasn’t, and she offered this grimace to the part of the kitchen where Maria stood and then walked quickly out, closing the door behind her.

  Maria took a step away from the sink and stopped in the middle of the kitchen, watching her parents in the hall through the frosted glass of the kitchen door. The glass distorted their outlines and smudged their movements as if they were under water. Her mum was speaking, grabbing at her dad’s shirt, resting her head on his chest. He put his arms around her. He patted her back, twisting his head to look in Maria’s direction.

  Maria’s grandad came into her mind. She remembered how, soon after he died, he kept appearing in her dreams. Not in a dynamic way, not as a protagonist, but as a silent bystander, attenuated and barely there. She’d wake up, glad to have seen him again but with the sad knowledge that, even in her dreams, she couldn’t resurrect him. That to wish him alive again was to wish him the kind of posthumous life that Keats endured in those last months in Italy. There wasn’t a time-travel machine and there was no going back.

  She opened the kitchen door. She felt sick.

  ‘Come into the back room, Maria,’ her dad said in a quiet voice. ‘We need to talk to you.’

  ‘Go on, love,’ he said to her mum, ushering her ahead of him. ‘I’ll get the kids to leave us alone for ten minutes.’

  What had been unsaid for sixteen years and a month suddenly couldn’t wait a minute longer. Her mother was bursting with it. She didn’t even wait for Maria’s dad to come back but simply blurted it out.

  She told Maria that Daniele Levi was her father, her biological father. As she said the word ‘father’, Maria’s dad came into the room.