Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Assunta took her rosary and her book of saints out of her bag and transferred them to her apron pocket.

  ‘Let’s see what’s what,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, can I smell the coffee burning?’ the signora said and clattered into the kitchen, leaving Assunta to carry out her tour of inspection alone.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,’ Assunta said when she saw the living room.

  She fingered the rosary in her pocket and leant heavily against the door frame. She was reminded of the devastation her littlest grandsons caused when she allowed them to make dens at home. Assunta remembered hearing that there had been something not right in the signora’s sister’s head and wondered whether it was hereditary, whether the signora was now displaying the signs.

  The pianola had been pulled out into the centre of the room, gathering and bunching the rug between its castors on its journey so that the rug welled up behind in a frozen, unwieldy wave. Behind it the pull-out bed that Assunta had only ever seen closed was a mass of springs in its crooked iron frame. On top and around the pianola, even wedged into the carpet’s stiff folds, was debris from all corners of the room. Two semi-dismantled sewing machines; a dozen or so picture frames with woodworm, containing hideous old paintings in various stages of dilapidation; a variety of tin and wood trunks and chests filled with pieces of wire, electrical leads and bits of other electrical items; the brass ends of a single bed; a giant pouffe of rich green velvet that had lost most of its stuffing. Splinters of wood were heaped to one side, like kindling. It looked like a funeral pyre.

  She stepped forward and leant over the pianola, which she had never seen out of its corner. The yellowing paper cartridge inside the apparatus emitted a chemical aroma of decay, like blackened bananas. She stepped quickly back to the doorway. Her impulse was to gather her belongings and leave. She wanted nothing to do with this, even if the signora was paying her double for coming in on a Saturday.

  But something nagged at her and she was moved to pull out her book of saints and open it. She read slowly but she persevered. She read about St Nereus and St Achilleus, whose feast day it was, throwing away their shields, their armour and their blood-stained javelins. She didn’t know how that helped, but it slowed her thoughts.

  She looked again at the chaos. The signora must have attempted to wheel the pianola out from its awkward position behind the sofa in order to make room for the pull-down bed to be extended. In shifting the sofa, she had uncovered the stack of mouldering paintings and fat old books with smelly covers that had lain there undisturbed for who knows how long, presumably long forgotten by the signora, but which Assunta swept around on a weekly basis.

  That much Assunta deduced and could understand. But then, something else had happened, a wild and wanton kicking and savaging; the side table had been reduced to splinters as if an axe had been taken to it; cushions had been ripped open and their feathers strewn, as if a fox had got into a henhouse. She surveyed it all and then, quite suddenly, she understood.

  Assunta, who would not normally sit down while working, took the chair opposite the signora when she returned to the kitchen. This room at least was still intact.

  The signora poured them both a small coffee and pushed a cup across the table to Assunta.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  Assunta stirred three spoons of sugar into her coffee. What she thought was that all of this should have been done weeks ago, that what was needed was a specialised removal firm to come and take away some of these ancient, cumbersome and broken pieces of furniture, that two women of a certain age could not possibly sort this out in a morning. She thought that the signora, who was younger than Assunta, was not young enough by a good fifty years to excuse this foolishness.

  But because she had seen and had understood that the signora had come up in a violent and unpleasant way against her own declining physical powers, she didn’t say these things. She knew that, until that moment of horrible realisation in the living room, the signora had somehow hung on to a notion that it was all a question of will and determination, of which she had bucketloads, and that when she had been proved wrong, the illusion had shattered.

  So Assunta said, carefully, ‘Where is the girl going to sleep?’

  ‘I was going to put her on the fold-down bed in the salon, but then when I folded it down, it fell apart.’

  ‘I saw,’ Assunta said.

  The signora, hunched over her coffee cup, looked up at her from under the rain-hood. It was one of those plastic transparent hoods with ties under the chin, that came folded up in a tiny purse, perfect should it start to rain, but entirely wrong in a domestic setting. It was tied loosely so as not to disarrange the upward, gravity-defying sweep of the signora’s hair. What Assunta saw on the sharp little face protruding beneath was trust.

  She took out the book of saints and placed it on the table, glancing at the signora again. The look was still there, ­unwavering. She ran her finger down the list and read out the words bequeathed them by Julian of Norwich.

  ‘He said not “Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased”; but He said, “Thou shalt not be overcome,’” she pronounced. She got to her feet. ‘I’ve got three hours. Let’s see what can be done.’

  They washed up their coffee cups, put them on the draining rack and went together into the living room.

  Assunta surveyed the devastation for the second time with the signora standing quiveringly at her side. She had wondered why the signora hadn’t telephoned one of her friends to come and help because it wasn’t cleaning as such that needed doing here, but as they stood there she realised why. She, Assunta, was privy to something. It could have meant she didn’t matter, but she knew otherwise.

  ‘I thought I could make it all lovely and spacious,’ the signora said.

  ‘Enough of that,’ said Assunta. ‘What we have to do is make the best of it. I’ll see if my big grandson can come and cart the rubbish away, create some space, clear the junk room if you like, but that won’t be for a while yet because he’s on a course.’

  The girl was due to arrive on Tuesday.

  ‘I could give her my bedroom, and I could sleep on the sofa,’ the signora said.

  ‘But, signora,’ Assunta said, ‘no.’

  She gave the signora a look to make sure she had understood the suggestion was ridiculous.

  By dint of the signora crawling around and tugging at the carpet, and Assunta lifting corners and shifting, they freed the pianola, wheeled it along to the junk room and wedged it in. The rusted, fold-down mechanism on the bed had snapped through, and the remaining screws holding the bed part together had either buckled or popped free. The signora was dispatched to the hardware store two streets away for replacement screws, a screwdriver and sturdy refuse bags. Assunta straightened the carpet, swept up the feathers and then, when the signora returned, she got on with filling the bags, while the signora set to on the fold-down bed.

  Assunta thought it best not to enquire what could be thrown away and what kept, but to make her own decisions. She stuffed the leads back into the boxes and stacked them one on top of another behind the door. Other unwieldy objects–the broken sewing machines and larger paintings–she placed at the door of the junk room. There was no room just inside the door because of the pianola, and no way of passing farther inside where there might be the odd space. Instead, she arranged them in an orderly row. They would have to wait. The little piles she had spotted when she first entered the apartment–musty coats and scarves, newspapers and sewing patterns, mush, broken lamp parts–she bagged and put out on the landing.

  In the living room, the signora was squatting on the floor with her knees up beside her ears, screwing in the last screw. Assunta thought the posture unladylike but impressive for a woman in her sixties. As far as she could recall her own body had never folded into that position.

  ‘There,’ the signora said, creakily standing up.

&nbs
p; They both looked at the cobbled-together, precarious contraption. It would never fold away again but, as a bed, might serve.

  ‘Let’s hope she’s not a fatty,’ Assunta said, realising she had no idea who this girl was or why she was coming. That, she supposed, was because of the weeks of their hardly speaking after the ironing incident.

  ‘She isn’t,’ said the signora.

  The signora made five trips, carrying the rubbish down to the big bin on the street corner, up and down those two flights, while Assunta made up the bed. It didn’t look so bad with sheets and a pillow. Then the signora was back, looking done in.

  ‘You’d better put your feet up this afternoon,’ Assunta said.

  ‘Can we just, before you go, can we just, between us, take these things down to the rubbish?’ the signora said.

  She meant the sewing machines and the big pictures.

  ‘I can’t,’ Assunta said.

  The signora put her hands together. She was going to plead, and Assunta forestalled her.

  ‘I’m not up to it,’ she said. ‘I know my limits.’

  It wasn’t meant to be a reproach. Not really.

  ‘You need to get rid of some of this stuff,’ Assunta said.

  And the signora, instead of defending it or talking about heirlooms or odd ideas of beauty that she had transiently seen in these objects, said meekly, ‘I know.’

  Her rain-hood had come awry. Her hand swept up to tug it off her head, her hair popping back up into its bristly shape, and Assunta nodded, agreeing with something unsaid.

  At one of the other apartments where Assunta cleaned, the man of the house had his own dressing room. On a walnut chest of drawers there were laid out enamel-handled paraphernalia: an instrument of unknown function like a pair of miniature fire tongs, three brushes of varying sizes (the smallest would have been for grooming his moustache if he weren’t clean-shaven), a comb, a cut-throat razor and a shaving brush. Only the comb ever seemed to have been used. Assunta had a fondness for the shaving brush, however, because it was a miniature replica of Signora Ravello’s hair, and every time she lifted it to dust beneath, she was reminded of the signora.

  At the sight of the shaving-brush hair now, she felt her heart soften.

  ‘Shall I get Marco to come and see what can be done?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, please,’ the signora said.

  ‘Your apartment is good enough for you and so it’s good enough for a little foreign girl. She’s not a princess,’ Assunta said.

  She buttoned up her coat, picked up her basket and let herself out.

  Chiara went to the window and waited there until Assunta emerged. She watched her load her basket full of cleaning products onto her scooter and put-put away down the street. Then she returned to the pile of rubbish in the hall.

  She bent to the first picture, braced herself, lifted it with both hands, raised it above her head and threw it with all her might over the pianola into the far reaches of the junk room where it made a thunderous noise as it landed in among the stacked furniture. She fetched the stepladder, heaved the other items one by one onto the top of the pianola and pushed them off. They clattered and banged until they found their places. The second sewing machine wedged itself at an angle between the pianola and an old screen propped behind. When she jammed the door shut, she could hear noises from within, objects adjusting to their new space, slowly subsiding and settling, and then a horrible sliding, crackling noise as if an avalanche were coming. She stood with her back against the door. When it had all quietened down, she reattached the wall hanging.

  She wondered whether perhaps, after all, everything could be kept in its separate compartment. Like on one of those trains where there is no connecting corridor between carriages.

  The thought of this train made her shiver.

  TEN

  Trains from the north come and go, one of them no doubt carrying away the elderly couple, whom they do not see again. Chiara buys apples and hard bread rolls at inflated prices from a vendor with a pushcart. They drink the water from the faucet on the platform. The guard announces an unspecified hold-up farther down the track and that no trains are getting through at present from the south. They retreat to the waiting room.

  Cecilia sits on the bench, wrapped in a blanket. She is always exhausted the day after a fit. She ignores the boy, who opts for a position on the floor behind, where he huddles with his knees drawn up to his chin. Sometimes his head falls forward and he nods in sleep but then, inevitably, he jerks back up and stares around as if he can’t believe what he sees, where he is. As if this is the dream, or the nightmare, and he would like to wake up. The irises of his eyes are so dark they are almost black, so that pupil and iris seem to merge. Liquid eyes, Chiara thinks. If he catches her looking at him, he adopts his lizard face. It might be funny if it weren’t so sad. She might laugh, if she weren’t in a state of such acute tension that the inside of her head pulsates like the beam in a lighthouse, and her thighbones ache with a suppressed desire to run. And if it weren’t so sad.

  In the moments when the other two are both asleep, Chiara paces the platform, underneath the colonnade, pausing each time she passes the waiting-room door to peer in and check they are both still there. Another troop train comes rumbling through without stopping. The noise it makes is deafening but moves slowly. It must be an entire German division, a series of flat cars loaded with immense tanks, anti-aircraft guns and other armaments she cannot name, and, at either end of each car, steel-helmeted soldiers with rifles pointing. The guard waves his flag and blows his whistle.

  ‘We don’t have a hope in hell, do we?’ he remarks as he walks past.

  A train going in the right direction finally arrives in the late afternoon. It is a local one with only three carriages that will stop at every village on the line and is already full. They clamber aboard and find a pull-down seat in the corridor for Cecilia.

  ‘Sit on my case,’ she tells the boy, and she stands in the space between the two. Both of them, Cecilia and Daniele, despite all their napping, are pale and drooping.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ Cecilia says.

  ‘You had a fit last night, darling. Do you remember?’

  ‘No,’ she says in a mournful voice.

  Chiara stands at the window, looking blankly out across the tracks. Her mind jumps forward to the next leg of the journey and the one after, because there’s a weary way to go yet, lifts to be negotiated and walking to be managed, in the dark at this rate. She’s wondering how she will keep the boy and Cecilia going, where she will find the resources and the stamina.

  And she is willing the train to depart. Get us out of this place, she is thinking over and over again until at last the hiss of steam heralds departure. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s be on our way, she chants in her mind.

  Then, she will sit herself down on Cecilia’s case and she will try to have a little nap, for half an hour or so, recoup some energy. And the door in her mind slides open, she sees her sleeping father and the corners of her mouth twitch up. It is going to be all right.

  She still has this sort of smile on her face, she can feel it stuck there, as another train, a great long one, a locomotive pulling dozens of wagons, draws up against the platform opposite. Some of the wagons are high-sided and open, but most are sealed cars with metal grilles. A cattle train, she registers without thinking about it. Afterwards, she tells herself that the boy didn’t see, can’t have known what he was seeing even if he did. That she hardly knew herself. That anyway she blocked his view. When she remembers it, she thinks that she was half smiling because she was happy that they were finally leaving Orte and happy to be visited by her softly sleeping father, bathed in the strong sunshine of her memory.

  She is not curious about the train opposite. Because it just happens to be in her line of sight, she becomes aware of a movement at the grille on the car directly facing her, a pale thing, flapping. She squints at it and sees that it is an arm, a slender human arm squeezing out from
between the metal bars. Behind the grille is the face of a young woman. Her mouth is open as if she is calling or singing a sustained note, but any sound she might be making is drowned out by the cacophonous clanking, hissing and rumbling of the trains.

  Chiara glances to the side. There are other people standing on this stretch of corridor but only one is, like her, facing outwards–a middle-aged woman with a muffler and a grey coat. She turns and looks at Chiara, wide-eyed, open-mouthed and horrified, and it is this other woman’s expression that confirms Chiara is not hallucinating.

  They both look out of the window once more. The engine noise of the other locomotive abates and, in the second-long interval before their own train noisily cranks into gear, an eerie wailing can be heard. If you weren’t staring straight at the gaping mouth of a young woman, you might take it for the screech of an unoiled brake or an off-key whistle or the sighing of the rails as the metal contracts. But if you are looking, if you have half seen the other faces pressing against the grilles, bearded men, women old and young, you can identify it as the sound of many human voices, male and female. And although you catch only a half-choked syllable before your own train hoots and lets off a loud spurt of steam, drowning out all other sounds, you can recognise a word.

  Two words.

  Help.

  Water.

  The boy is beside her. She does not know how long he has been standing there. She puts her hand on his head, on the cloth of the funny hat, and presses him back into his seat.

  ‘Bad soldiers,’ she hisses. ‘Keep down.’

  She maintains the pressure on the child’s head. She keeps looking as their train chugs away. They form the corners of a triangle, she and the grey-coated woman along the corridor and the woman in the cattle truck across the track, until the angle becomes too acute, the hypotenuse impossibly overstretched, and the line breaks.

  Now there are only ordinary houses and trees spinning past.