‘We did. It was our place. I can’t believe you remembered. You weren’t even three.’
‘We came out onto the roof, through a metal door, and we walked to the edge of the roof, and it was, whoosh, I’ve been here before. Such a strange feeling.’
It wasn’t the view itself, modern high-rise buildings, a park, a geometric lake. She didn’t recognise that at all. Rather, it was the flap of the sheets, the way they flicked in and out of the edge of her vision, and the snapping sound they made as they unfurled and billowed in the breeze. More, it was the smell of them, of linen speed-drying in the hot afternoon sun, and the aroma of the coffee and an under-layer of something else, a faintly industrial odour, that seemed to be the smell of the building itself, its workings.
‘It’s come back to me before, that place, but I thought it was a dream. I remembered a red flying thing.’
‘It was a tablecloth,’ her mum said. ‘You were charging around the roof, diving in and out of the washing on the lines.’
‘Was I?’ She felt a pang of tenderness for her early self. She wrapped the arm that wasn’t holding the phone across her chest and tucked it into her armpit.
‘Fancy you remembering!’
Her mum, she could tell, was delighted to hear from her.
‘And why did we, Mum, why did you bring me here?’
Her mum made a little noise, almost a moan. ‘To have one last look’–she paused, exhaled noisily–‘to see if I couldn’t find him, Daniele, before… ’
‘Before what?’
‘Before I, um,’ her mum cleared her throat. ‘Before I settled down.’
Maria was silent, taking in what this meant.
‘Say something,’ her mum said.
‘So Dad, I mean Barry, doesn’t know,’ Maria said.
Her mum’s voice was so soft Maria had to strain to hear her. ‘No. I never told him,’ she said.
The signora’s apartment building came into Maria’s mind, the salt-and-stone smell just within the doorway, the rectangular image of wavering light on the stairwell wall.
‘Oh,’ she said.
A tremor ran up through her from her feet to her head, and she swayed, her spine arching forwards as if something had shunted into her from behind, things all of a sudden starting to connect.
‘We went to Signora Ravello’s street, didn’t we?’ she said. Her own voice too was a whisper.
Her mother’s breathing was juddery. Maria could hear little slapping noises. She imagined her mother was patting her own chest to calm herself down. Something clicked into place.
‘Oh, Mum,’ Maria said. ‘Oh, Mum.’
Her mother was speaking but she was crying at the same time, and it came out all a jumble.
She knew, she was sure, it was the right house, but there was no Levi listed on any of the name plates. She rang all the bells and asked for him, and someone, some sharp-voiced woman, said through the intercom, ‘There is no such person here.’
And then someone else, one of the other residents, came down as they were standing there in the street. And there was nothing else to be done.
The man behind the counter, visible through a small window in the phone-booth door, held up his hand. She had had four minutes.
‘Mum, I’m going to have to go in one minute’s time. I’m so sorry. Ring me at the flat, yeah?’
Her mum’s breathing quietened. She got hold of herself. ‘How was Helen?’ she said.
‘OK, I suppose. She didn’t have anything useful to say about Daniele Levi. I haven’t got anything to go on. I haven’t even got a photo. Didn’t people take photos in the 1950s?’
‘They cost a lot, cameras. Most people didn’t have one.’
‘Most people still don’t!’
‘Barry did say you could borrow his.’
She thought of Barry, jogging on his own around the lake. Second best.
‘Is she the same age as you, that Helen?’
‘Yes, pretty much.’
‘You look much younger.’
Her mum made a noise that was nearly a laugh. ‘I’ll phone you at the signora’s flat,’ she said. ‘At the weekend, when it’s cheaper.’
‘Are you going to be all right, Mum?’ she said.
But her five minutes were up, and the phone had gone dead.
She got off the bus a stop early so she could have a think before she went back to the apartment.
They had been here before, she and her mother, and they had come to the signora’s apartment building and someone, a peremptory someone, had turned them away.
She lit a cigarette and smoked it furiously as she walked along. A wave of sadness rose up in her. She wanted her mum. She didn’t want her mum. Her poor mum. She was utterly alone. She wanted to throw herself to the pavement and howl. Words from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ sprang up:
when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
She looked wildly at all the unknown Italians walking past, the alien corn.
Seeing that she was outside a church, she stubbed out her cigarette and went in, blessing herself with the holy water as she entered. She was collecting holy pictures for the signora’s cleaner, Assunta, and so could never walk past a church’s open door. This, a vast one with geometric tiled floors, rust- and amber-coloured marble pillars, was dedicated to someone called St Crisogono. She picked up a picture of the saint, riding a white horse, bearing a lance and a red shield, and sat down in a row at the back.
Crisogono. That was a good one. Perhaps even Assunta wouldn’t know about him.
Gasparo, she had said the other day, unloading the pile of pictures from her handbag.
Gasparo of Buffalo, do you mean? Assunta had replied, and Maria had admitted that was indeed the one.
Quirico, Maria had said, flipping over the next card.
Which one? Assunta had rejoined.
Quirico and Julietta? Maria had ventured tentatively.
Oh, little Quirico, Assunta had said, as if she were fondly remembering the lad, who was just a baby when he was martyred.
Assunta was an expert on the gruesome deaths of martyrs. Little Quirico had been flung down some stone steps. His mother had her sides torn off with hooks.
Maria became aware of the other occupants of the church. On her own row sat a woman with white hair scrunched up in a bun from which electrified tendrils radiated. She was bent double, as if with stomach cramps, her head down below her knees. Occasionally she rocked. Spread among the front two pews were five beige-clad nuns with white headdresses, kneeling. On the right-hand side of the central aisle, in a middle row, knelt a woman with ginger and brown curls–hair that matched and mirrored the colours and swirls of the marble. She emitted a sudden noise. She might have been clearing her throat or it might have been an involuntary expression of anguish. She did it again, a sort of bark. The heads of the five nuns swung sideways to look and then swung back again.
Fortified by the strange delights of the church and its inmates, Maria wandered back out and along the road. It was a comfort to think you could just duck into a church and express your feelings by making ghastly noises or contorting your body, and nobody would interfere.
She crossed the Ponte Sisto. The river had turned out not to be blond at all, more a murky greenish-grey. Still, the gleam of it at this time of day, and the way the buildings on the other side put on the glamour as the sun was going down, glowing orange and red and yellow and amber, dazzled her out of her reverie and into a different one, just as it always did. It was like magic. She forgot about the alien corn because it was happening again, the way it kept happening every day, something she could never have imagined in a million years. The beauty got inside her and she felt herself more lovely, gilded by it. It was fanciful but she felt that in Rome sometimes, off and on like a defective light bulb, she shone.
The signora was not home when Maria got back to the apartment. She called out to make sure but then remembered that the signora was
at the doctor’s again, had been summoned back for some treatment. She walked the length of the hallway to the signora’s room. Speedily, unthinkingly, she picked up the photograph of the signora’s grandparents that stood on the bedside table, ran her fingers along the side, tapped it and out slid another, as she had known it would.
She looked at the young man in the picture, his leather jacket and his slicked-back hair. She thought, Cool dude. Was this Daniele Levi? She went and stared in the mirror, holding the picture up next to her face to observe them side by side. Did she look like him? She didn’t know what to think. The only thing that was certain was that the signora was deliberately hiding things from her.
She put the picture back where it belonged and went into the salon where she stood, blankly, amid the clutter of furniture and draperies and books.
A vision came to her of tall trees in full leaf, carved angels with folded or outstretched wings, ornate and plain crosses, white and grey tombstones, box hedges and fragrant shrubs. She remembered a particular carving she had seen in the cemetery where Keats was buried.
She draped herself over the sofa back, angled one bare foot out behind her, allowed the sofa to take her weight, her arms and head to fall forward. She hung there, inhabiting the stance, feeling the blood going to her head, the tiled floor beneath the ball and heel of the one firmly planted foot, her own skin where the fingers of one hand rested on the other arm. She allowed herself to drop into the pose, replicating the posture of the Angel of Grief.
TWENTY
They throw petals at the feet of the American soldiers when they march into Rome in June 1944. Oleander flowers in all shades of pink, from pearly pale to deep cerise. The Germans haven’t gone, they aren’t defeated yet, but they have withdrawn from the city.
The people of Rome, thronging the streets, have never seen anything like these Americans. Whole battalions of black men, laughing and calling out to the girls, handing out sweets and chewing gum to the kids. Some of them are like giants. They are standing at the bottom of the Campidoglio stairs, she and Daniele, right at the front of the crowd, and an American soldier takes her in his arms and waltzes her around on the spot. He lets go only to scoop Daniele up, throw him into the sky and catch him with a guffaw, until Daniele’s eyes are bright and his face scarlet.
The soldier dives back into the army of liberators sweeping on to Piazza Venezia, and the watching people surge into the space the soldiers have vacated. As Chiara grips Daniele’s hand, telling him to hold tight and not get separated, she spots the face of a woman she knows among the people pouring down the steps. Beatrice, the woman from Nonna’s farm in whose care she left Cecilia.
Chiara calls out. Beatrice hears her name, looks sideways at Chiara and stops dead, so that the people behind her have to quickly sidestep. There is too much tumult to make themselves heard. Beatrice points in the direction of a side street and Chiara nods her assent.
As they thread through the crowd, Chiara relives the night they left the farm. How Judas was in her mind and she didn’t kiss her sleeping sister goodbye. How they knocked up Gabriele and he harnessed the donkey for Daniele to ride and accompanied them down as far as the road. How she wanted Gabriele to say, ‘Don’t worry. It will be fine,’ but he didn’t.
They make their way across the road, down a side street and into the vestibule of a little church, where it is quieter. Outside people are whooping, children blow horns, male voices sing ‘Avanti, Popolo’ in a bold, manly way, but Beatrice talks quietly and is kinder than Chiara remembered.
She tells her that she and Ettore are back in Rome now. That on a night not long after Chiara left the farm, Cecilia arose from her bed when all were sleeping, walked out in her nightgown and bare feet into the dark fields, climbed the hill into the olive grove and beyond, and never came back.
Cecilia must have had a fit out there in the dark by herself, with no one to fish her tongue out of her throat or arrange her limbs.
Gabriele has been missing, eventually presumed dead, ever since the night Chiara and Daniele left.
Chiara has an urge to fling herself to her knees on the stone church floor but knows there is no solace to be found here and no forgiveness.
A horrible conjunction comes to her unbidden: Cecilia lying in the ditch and Daniele caught in a moonbeam there on the hill, baying like a little wolf.
She made a choice. It is not his fault.
That is what Simone says to her.
‘It’s not your fault. She could have had a major fit at any time, whether you were there or not. You told me she had been going downhill for a while.’
‘I abandoned her,’ Chiara says.
She wishes she were a believer and then she would go to confession in a church where she had never before been and she would say, ‘I killed my sister.’ But, anyway, even if she believed, there would be no point because she doesn’t want absolution.
Often, afterwards, Chiara will think of Gabriele, alone on the night path, being seen before he saw. But the image of her sister, face down in a puddle on the hillside, her arms flung wide, her long hair trailing in the mud, she carries with her for ever.
TWENTY-ONE
Her own doctor held her feet, and the visiting American audiologist–‘Mr Hennessey, call me Charles’–held her upper body. Between them the two men lifted Chiara into the air as if she were gossamer.
Charles, an inner ear specialist, was en route to a Japanese university and only in Rome for the briefest of sojourns to deliver a paper. It was he who directed operations in a kindly drawl.
‘Hold her there, wait, keep her still, now, like this, gentle and slow, slow, slow as she goes,’ he said, as if she were a ship that they were guiding into harbour.
They tilted her this way and that, tipping her almost upside down so her eyes swivelled up into her skull. Her head was held and cupped; she was dangled in a position that she hadn’t been in since childhood. She handed over her body and experienced an extraordinary sensation of weightlessness, a desperate intensification of the spin, and then it was over, and they laid her back on the treatment bed, moved her head gently into a central position and left her to rest.
When she got up she discovered that the world had been restored more or less to its rightful place, and the sick dizziness that had accompanied her for weeks had gone. More than that, she realised as she set off home, swinging her now-redundant cane, a general fuzziness had lifted. The shop windows she passed gleamed as if they had just been polished. The sky was a radiant and unrelenting blue. The fountain in the piazza tinkled, and the water glistened as it fell.
Everything was sharp and bright and clear. The bells of St Cecilia rang out, loud and insistent. And suddenly she was hurrying. An urgency had come upon her. A desire to talk to Maria, because it couldn’t wait. Whatever reason there was to delay was as nothing compared to the compelling reasons for speaking out. Not telling Maria the truth was putting a big, entirely unnecessary obstacle between her and the beloved girl, and she couldn’t tolerate it a minute longer.
The apartment was empty. Maria was not there.
The phone rang, and Chiara jumped but it was only dear Simone to say she was back.
‘You sound distracted,’ Simone said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I can’t talk,’ Chiara said, ‘I’m expecting a call.’
Simone said she had plenty to do anyway, unpacking, having a deep bubble bath and then Umberto was going to give her a massage, but how about meeting at Babington’s for afternoon tea tomorrow?
‘I can’t tomorrow, I’m busy. I have to go,’ Chiara said.
She didn’t know why she had said that about expecting a call, but something was coming, she could feel it in the air, an expectancy, a storm brewing. She paced up and down the passageway. She went out twice onto the communal landing. From the front window she looked down onto the street. Perhaps Maria had had an arrangement with the girls from school and had told her she would be out. She searched her memory. She paced some mor
e. She poured herself a glass of wine. She must stay sober in case there was an emergency. She tipped the wine down the sink.
After an hour, she phoned Simone.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘To be so brusque earlier.’
‘That’s all right,’ Simone said. ‘I know your ways. I didn’t take offence.’
‘It’s just I’m worried about the girl. She’s gone missing.’
‘What girl?’ Simone said.
‘Maria, Daniele’s daughter,’ Chiara wailed.
She waited for the ceiling to fall around her ears or the floor to erupt, but nothing happened. She became aware that Simone was speaking. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Pour yourself a glass of wine. Get a cushion and the stool and make yourself comfortable. I will phone you back in five minutes and you can tell me everything.’
Chiara did as she was told. The phone rang.
‘That wasn’t five minutes,’ she said.
‘Zia,’ Beppe said. Aunt.
He told her Maria was going to stay on their sofa because she had accidentally got a bit drunk and emotional, but he would make sure she was up in time for school in the morning.
‘I thought she was out with the girls from school,’ Chiara said.
‘Well, she must have lost them, because she was on her own when she turned up here,’ Beppe said. ‘Don’t worry about her, Zia, we’ll look after her.’
Simone phoned back. ‘I’m just going to listen quietly,’ she said.
Chiara told her the whole story.
‘How absolutely lovely,’ Simone said when Chiara had finished. ‘What a very, very lovely thing. Daniele had a daughter. And she has found you. Oh, I am bowled over.’
She started to sniffle, and Chiara did too. Chiara began to think that perhaps things might be all right after all.
‘Does she look like him?’ Simone said.
‘As soon as you see her, you will know. Her hair is much lighter than his, and she has blue eyes but otherwise she is like a female version of him, aged sixteen.’
‘What I don’t understand is why Antonio dictates the timing,’ Simone said. ‘I mean, what’s it got to do with him? She’s your granddaughter. Not his.’
Early One Morning Page 30
