Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  The ring had been the first thing Edna had noticed about Daniele. His hand on her arm, and the ring glinting on his little finger. She was at a jazz club with her friend Helen, and Helen had elbowed a passage for them through the crowd with Edna hanging on to the back of her cardigan. They broke through to a little space, right next to the rail at the front.

  Helen leant in to whisper in Edna’s ear.

  ‘Cool West Coast jazz.’

  They were two British girls out on the town. They were wearing their glad-rags, their frocks, nylon stockings and kitten heels. Their lips were daubed pearly pink. Edna’s long blonde hair had been put up in a topknot, held in place with a tortoiseshell clip.

  Chet Baker strolled onto the stage. Helen nudged her.

  The music began. Edna could feel Helen swaying beside her and others too, around and about, moving to the beat, but she didn’t know what to do with herself. She had never heard anything like it. It was as if the music were not an outside thing created and performed up there, but was inside her. She stood stock-still, rigid, as if to let the music move her would be her undoing.

  She had been in Rome for two months. She had arrived in February, in the coldest winter it had ever known: the city white and frozen and almost at a standstill. The family she worked for lived to the south, in the suburb of EUR, which seemed the most un-Italian of names, difficult to pronounce and sounding like an expression of disgust. The letters stood for the Roman Universal Exhibition, an event that would have showcased fascism to the world, but it never took place because the war had come along to stop it. EUR in 1956 was like a giant building site with occasional, monumental white edifices of over-smooth arches and hard square edges, solemn and self-important.

  The family were reluctant to allow her out in the evening unless in a group or with suitable, vetted escorts. Her charges were a fat baby who had to be wrapped up in woollens, mittens and hats before being tucked under blankets and wheeled out to the park; and a little boy, Paolo, who clung to her side, frightened of everything. She was sometimes surprised that anyone would entrust children to her, but she did her best.

  It was not, after all, the children’s fault that none of this was what she had imagined when she responded to the advertisement in the Lady. She was going to be Audrey Hepburn on her day out in Roman Holiday, free and lovely and fêted. She had not expected Rome to be chilly and restrictive and judgmental. Until she had met Helen, it had been bleak. Helen’s family was more liberal, or lax, and she had a supply of escorts. They were out with two of them now, Renzo and Cristofero, the bespectacled, spotty, earnest sons of Helen’s neighbours. The girls had given them the slip and snuck up to the front on their own.

  The lights dimmed, and the spotlight was only on Chet, who held the microphone and sang into it tenderly. From his other hand hung his trumpet. It was the way he held that trumpet, the way it swung, the insouciance, that precious thing hooked lightly over his curled fingers. It was the tone of his voice, reaching through her. It spoke straight to her heart. It was the words.

  She closed her eyes. Barry came into her mind. She and Barry weren’t engaged, not formally, but they had a sort of understanding. He was being sent to Egypt for his national service. When he finished, in two years’ time, or a bit longer because he hadn’t even gone yet, they would get married. Barry hadn’t been at all sure about her going off to Italy. Neither had her parents. But she had convinced them to let her. She had made it happen.

  ‘You don’t know what love is,’ Chet Baker sang, and she opened her eyes, forgot herself, forgot Barry.

  The tenor sax started up. It was as if she were being drenched in the music. She was standing underneath it, and it was cascading over her. It was everything. She started to move.

  A hand clasped her forearm. A male hand, broad and strong; a gold ring glinted on the little finger. She looked down at the hand, surprised, then leant around Helen’s back to see a young man. He wore a black jacket with a dark shirt underneath, the top button undone. No tie. His hair was slicked back.

  He pulled her towards him and they danced, although it was nothing like the dancing she was used to, the foxtrot and the waltz that she and Barry had been perfecting at the Saturday-night hop. It was more like sidling. They sidled around each other, ever closer, treading water in the music. She waited for his wave to engulf her.

  He picked her up on her afternoon off on a borrowed motorbike. She hung on to him, clinging to his ribcage, his torso tightly encased in a white T-shirt, her hands inside his leather jacket, her face buried against the collar. They soared up into the Castelli hills, roaring around the bends. He was intoxicatingly beautiful.

  James Dean was his hero.

  ‘Too fast to live, too young to die,’ he said in his funny accent. He had no family, he said. An orphan boy. She couldn’t get enough of him.

  They thundered along the Sea Highway and ate spaghetti with clams at a café on the beach at Ostia. They walked in the pine forest and lay down among the cones and needles. They knew only a few words of each other’s languages. Mostly, they bypassed words.

  She watched him parading in expensive winkle-pickers with silver buckles in a shoeshop on Via Veneto. The dangerous look in his eye made her breathless. When the assistant went to the storeroom, he took her hand and tugged her.

  ‘Corri,’ he said. Run.

  He came or he didn’t. It was all on his terms. Once they shot down the little street he lived in, right in the centre of Rome, on the motorbike. But he didn’t take her to his home.

  Helen didn’t approve. She said he was no good, a waster. Helen was jealous, Edna thought, although she also knew that Helen was right. But she didn’t care.

  ‘Cover for me,’ Edna pleaded, ‘please.’

  And Helen, reluctantly, did.

  He arrived in a small white car, a brand-new Fiat Sei Cento. His, he said. He drove her to an abandoned crumbling farmhouse in the mountains, and they walked among the olive trees. They dropped stones into an ancient well and waited to hear the distant plosh. He was quiet, playing with his ring, twisting it around his little finger.

  ‘That ring looks precious,’ she said, for something to say.

  ‘Precious’ was one of those words that could be said in an Italian way with a roll of the R and an O on the end, and it was the same, more or less. Prezioso.

  ‘Precious,’ he repeated. ‘It is.’

  He slid it off and tossed it across the well to her. She reached out, caught it in the palm of her hand on the downward arc and closed her fist around it. If she’d missed, it would have gone down the well. He laughed at the look of shock on her face.

  ‘For you,’ he had said.

  The golden dangle of Chet Baker’s trumpet and the gold spin of the ring in the spring air were together in her memory, different facets of the same precious thing, catching the light on the way down.

  Maria’s next exam was a morning one. English language. Somehow, she and her mum were leaving the house at the exact same time–Barry had already left with the kids–and so they were obliged to walk down the road as far as the bus stop together, the way they always used to do when her mum was on the nine o’clock shift.

  ‘Good luck, darling,’ her mum said at the bus stop. She knew better than to try to kiss Maria now. ‘Not that you need it,’ she added and walked briskly away.

  This was her daily exercise, the march to work and back. Sometimes the bus came before her mum had turned the corner, in which case Maria would wave from the upper deck as she went past. Other times, like today, her mum reached the corner first and would turn and wave one last time before heading up Wedal Road to the hospital. She did that now. Maria waved back with a minimal gesture, the merest flutter of the hand. Then her mum disappeared round the corner.

  Maria was already halfway across the promenade by the time the bus came. She bought a packet of ten Number Six from the kiosk on the other side of the lake. Ten and a half pence well spent. She was going to take up smoking.

>   ‘You’ll get fat,’ her non-biological father had said when she refused to go with him on their customary runs around the lake.

  He kept turning up at her bedroom door in his tracksuit, failing to get the message. Smoking was an alternative way of keeping thin. The first cigarette was disgusting but she knew it took practice. At home, she took off her uniform, put on her nightie and got back into bed. Missing English language meant that she was going to have to miss them all. English was her best subject. She could have walked it, even without doing any revision. She pulled her knees up and hugged her secrets to her chest.

  That would show them.

  SIX

  The library windows had been thrown open to let in some fresh air. The sun pouring in was already hot, awakening the innate smells of the objects it alighted on–the old studded leather chairs, the panelled walls, the bound tomes on shelves or in glass-fronted cases–and drawing them out, evoking their origins: the animal skin, timber, glue and thread, the paper pulp. A bee buzzed somewhere up high, pinging itself frenziedly against the panes. Down in the courtyard garden, the wisteria was in full bloom. The heavy vines, supported on trellises, created private, flower-enclosed compartments in between the brick pathways, and in one of these scented arbours sat a priest. Only his legs, crossed at the shins, were visible.

  In the library gallery, Chiara, sitting in the pod of warm light next to the open window, was trying to decide which priest it might be. It wasn’t Father Pascale because he would be wearing sandals at this time of year, and it wasn’t Father Pio who was corpulent and so couldn’t have such slender ankles. She was wondering whether it might be her friend Father Antonio, by whose grace she was allowed to come and use this private library attached to the pontifical university.

  The page proofs of the book about shipping in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages lay open in front of her, an oblong of white light that was too bright to read even if she squinted.

  She decamped to the street side of the building where the mullioned windows were set too high to see out. It was darker and stuffier here, more conducive to study perhaps. She laid out the pages again. She put her elbows on the table, her head in her hands and her thumbs in her ears, although there wasn’t any noise to shut out, other than the bee. The other, very occasional, users of this library were young theologians, but today she was alone with the ancient volumes. It was a peaceful place to work and it carved a separation between her home life and her working life. The walk between her apartment and the ancient palazzo where the pontifical library was situated marked the transition between the two. And then there was Antonio to have a coffee with if she wanted a break. They used to work together in State Archives in the olden days, before he took holy orders. His was a late vocation.

  She was reading through the chapter on the maritime republic of Genoa.

  ‘Spices, incense and opium were hugely in demand,’ she read for the fourth time.

  Each translation posed its own challenges, some untranslatable core element. With this one, written by a British academic, it wasn’t the subject matter, which would be, if anything, more familiar to an Italian reader. It was the register. The conversational style didn’t befit an academic treatise in Italian and would undermine the seriousness of the research. She had opted for a halfway kind of language. Something in between the convoluted, multiple-claused sentence structure that an Italian academic might have used and the punchy, staccato style employed by the author. She had pulled it off. She had rendered the flavour, and the author, who knew some Italian, was pleased too.

  A little wavering square of luminous colour, cast by the light beaming through the diamond shapes of green glass that patterned the windows, played on the page. She put her hand there and observed her green skin. She needed to press on. The publisher was waiting. She got up and moved everything back over to the courtyard side. Down in the gardens, the priest had changed position, and she saw now it was indeed Antonio, a bible and a notebook on his lap.

  She went down to join him.

  ‘Not coffee time already?’ he said with a delighted smile.

  He always looked as if she had made his day by turning up, even though she came regularly, and they went out for their morning cappuccino together at least once a week.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I can’t concentrate today.’

  She looked at him, weighing the idea of telling him about the phone call. But that would mean bringing up Daniele’s name, talking about Daniele, which was not something that she and Antonio did any more. She had stopped asking Antonio for news years ago.

  ‘Haven’t you heard anything? Hasn’t he been in touch?’ she used to say as if Antonio might just have forgotten to mention a letter or a telephone call or a visit.

  ‘I will tell you,’ Antonio would reply, ‘if there is anything to tell.’

  No, the subject of Daniele was closed.

  All of a sudden, that silence between them seemed to her like a sheet, a shroud-like wrapping, and she was bound inside it, her mouth gagged. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the wisteria, and sat down on a rock opposite Antonio, under a roof of flowers. If they had been in the confessional, with the grille between them, it would have been easier. Antonio would be God’s mediator rather than Antonio, the man. Not that she believed all that stuff, but he did, and that might be enough for both of them.

  Antonio patted his pockets and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She accepted one though she had already used up three of today’s precious five during the long night.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘You go on with your work. Ignore me. I’m in a funny mood.’

  ‘I’m writing a sermon,’ he said and bent to the task.

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ she would say. ‘It has been… ’

  How long had it been? Years? Decades?

  ‘A very long time since my last confession.’

  She and Cecilia kneeling next to each other in the cavernous gloom of Sant’Eustachio, waiting their turn. The pitter-patter of nuns’ feet somewhere to the side of the altar. The cold, holy-water smell. She was conscious of wrong­doing now, and a need to expiate it, but shaky about the exact nature of her new sin. Was it the way she had dismissed the girl out of hand? As if Daniele himself had walked back into her life, and she had looked the other way. Help me, he had said, but she had no longer known how.

  ‘Whatever is troubling you, it will pass,’ Antonio said.

  Platitudes. It hadn’t passed in all these years, and just when she thought she’d entered a new phase, along came this dreadful girl to stir it all up.

  Antonio leant across the space between them, reached for her hand, gathered it up from her lap and held it in his.

  ‘I am your friend and I am here if you need me,’ he said.

  Looking up at him, seeing the way the sun glinted on his round glasses, she had a sudden image of him ten years before, when he had faced down Daniele’s creditors. Her loyal friend Antonio, who had wanted to be more than a friend but had settled for that, who had stepped in when things had got desperate and she had needed help, and who had made it all go away. That calm certainty he exuded. Not only did he know what the right thing to do was, but he did it.

  A flash of such resentment shot through her that she had to lower her eyes.

  You sent my boy away. Why did you send my boy away? she wanted to scream at him. Sent him into exile, she sometimes thought, when she imagined Daniele wandering the world, a pack on his back, without a home.

  ‘I’ve dealt with it,’ Antonio used to assure her when she was at her lowest ebb, in the first few months after Daniele’s departure. ‘Don’t worry yourself, we’ll talk about it when you’re stronger.’

  And then, when she was stronger, it turned out that there was nothing to talk about. Daniele’s banishment was total. How had she let that happen?

  ‘I didn’t banish him. He refused my help,’ Antonio had told her when s
he had made him repeat all the things Daniele had said before he left.

  ‘She is better off without me,’ was one of them.

  Then he had disappeared and, in all those years, there was only one time that she had had news of him. Not really news, but an inkling that he was still alive.

  It was about eighteen months after his departure. She and Simone had gone up to Nonna’s farm. Another earthquake had finished the place off, and the house itself was ruined and uninhabitable, but she was investigating whether she could sell off the land. There were still debts and she needed to raise more cash. It had always been there in the back of her mind as a final resort, but it turned out there wasn’t much land attached to the property; all the pasture had been leased from the neighbouring farm. It was just a broken-down house; Nonna’s vegetable patch had long become overgrown and the well was hidden under brambles.

  People had said that a wild man had been living there for a while. He might have been sleeping in a cave up in the hills higher up but he had been seen in and around the farmhouse. He was long gone by the time they had arrived, though. Still, it had comforted her to think he had found a refuge for a while at Nonna’s farm. And to realise that it was probably where he went the other, earlier times that he had disappeared.

  They had sat a while in the neglected olive grove, she and Simone, and she nearly told Simone about the night that Daniele had climbed into the hollow of Nonna’s most ancient tree under a full moon to make a wish. But Simone wanted to believe that Chiara didn’t think of him all the time and so Chiara hadn’t spoken. And anyway, she had learnt later what he had wished for that night and it didn’t make for such a pretty story.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Antonio now and looked up at him again.

  There he was, her kind and constant friend, gazing at her with concern. He had only been acting in her interest after all. His version of what her interest was.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said now. ‘I’m fine.’