by Louisa Young
She has another world, he thought, which is not mine. What do I think about that?
Though what I think about it is not, probably, the point.
*
Partly to put Riley at ease about all this, and because Riley was the only person who knew and Peter needed him strong by his side, Peter invited him along to hear Mabel sing. Riley did not want to come. Clubs, going out – no. It was all an oppression to him. He didn’t like the noise, the being looked at, the having to decide how to conceal himself, the being spoken to and not being able to speak back easily, the not being understood, the staying up late, the having to drink more than you wanted to in order to make it all bearable.
But he went, because it was Peter, and it was important. Peter arranged for them a small table, at the back, sheltered; he pre-ordered the wine, he sat between Riley and the crowds. It was crowded. Smoky, clattery, laughter and scent, chiffon and cocktails. It was like another world to Riley. He smiled quietly, sat himself down, took out his brass straw, and twirled it. It stopped him smoking too much. Smoking was making him cough, and coughing was difficult.
Mabel came out on stage in a gold dress, dripping with sequins and glass beads, fringed with bugling. Her hair was slicked back and gleaming, her smile wide and red. She waved to them across the room: fluttering fingers with scarlet long nails. She cracked a few jokes, sang a few funny numbers, and then said, ‘Droppin’ a gear now, boys and girls. This one is for a friend o’ mine out the back there, don’t look at him now, he’s shy. I ain’t seen him in a while, and I hope he don’t mind this song and this dedication. Our mutual friend quoted me this. It’s for them.’
She came up close to her microphone and began, a slow blues, a smoky voice, a slinky melody:
Courage … Courage … Oh courage …
for the big … Problems … in life …
Courage – (and the notes rose, crescendo)
Oh Lord courage, give it to me.
Courage, (a righteous shout)
for the big,
problems,
in life …
Oh Lord courage, give it to me.
Riley sat transfixed as she continued, quiet again, smooth and intimate, a beseeching prayer, right up with the microphone:
Oh Lord and Patience,
oh Patience, for the small …
Patience, sweet Lord patience, for the small …
By the time she got to Be of good cheer, God is awake, tears rolled down his face. If he had heard this ten years earlier he would have felt their ghosts all around him, clamouring; now he heard them turn in their graves as if in their sleep, a little shift, a sigh. Ferdinand, Dowland, Dowland’s brother, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones, Bloom, Bruce, Lovall, Hall, Green, Wester, Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford. Merritt. Captain Harper. Captain Jessop. Baker. And above all Jack Ainsworth, whose prayer this was, whose scrap of paper was still, worn and creased, these words on it almost illegible, in Riley’s wallet.
*
She came to join them at their table afterwards, her silky coat slipping from her shoulders, her make-up a little worn. Riley was about to be polite, formally refer to their previous encounter all those years ago, roll his eyes at the passage of time, but she just slipped into the booth beside him and said: ‘Was that all right? To use your friend’s words for the song? If you don’t like it I won’t sing it again.’ Her hand was resting gently on Peter’s shoulder; relaxed, quietly protective, affectionate. Giving strength.
‘The only problem is how to get Sybil Ainsworth down to London so that you can reduce her to tears too,’ Riley said, and Mabel smiled, and said: ‘I’ll go to wherever she is, and I’ll sing it for her wherever she wants.’ And she meant it, and Riley saw that the offer was as honest as her wordless concern for Peter, the big heart she offered up when she sang.
‘Did you know about this, Peter?’ Riley asked, leaning forward – but Peter hadn’t known. Didn’t even remember quoting the prayer to her. ‘When was it, darling?’ he said – such a settled-couple thing to say, Riley thought. Peter was drinking soda water, and smoking. They looked beautiful together. They seem right, Riley thought.
Mabel caught his eye as he said to Peter, ‘D’you want another of those?’ – the eye catch that says, I am noticing. Each of them noticed the other’s affection for Peter and concern for his well-being, and each was glad to see it. Peter, of course, did not notice this noticing.
*
In the end, that first time they went to hear Mabel sing, Riley had said – at least Peter thought this was what he’d said, but it had been dark and quite noisy – ‘Actually, you should do yourself a favour, Peter, and just marry her.’ Of course he might not have said that at all.
By the time Peter got off the train at Sidcup he had decided to talk to Rose about it. Rose, cool-headed fount of understanding, would help.
By the time he reached home, he had decided not to after all. If he told Rose, he would need to tell Tom and Kitty, and would they not hate him for it?
Part Three
1933–4
Chapter Nine
Rome and Bracciano, 1933–4
The following two summers, 1933 and 1934, Tom went to Italy without his immediate family. Being there liberated him, and he was entranced by the magnificence of the liberation. He and Nenna played tennis, and went about on bicycles. I am a young student, he thought. I am studying in Rome. It gave him great pleasure to think it and know it was true. He was rather full of himself, wrapped and seduced in the glamour. Then, as he became used to it and relaxed, it became true.
Later, he asked himself: but when did that happen? What was the progress? How did the little things add up to become big? When should I have noticed? Why didn’t I notice – was it just because I was otherwise engaged? Not so much with the irregular verbs as with – and he had to acknowledge for a moment his youthful obsessions, and admit his folly, his natural folly – Nenna, and the beauty, and the strangeness, which remained strange?
1933 – what happened in 1933? My summer between school and Cambridge.
He’d had his interview that spring: Natural Sciences. It seemed to have gone all right, or perhaps it went terribly, he couldn’t tell. So he went to the pub, the Blue Boar, feeling rather adult and swaggery, and tiny underneath, at the sight of these grown undergraduates: the biggest boy in school acknowledging that he would be the smallest boy at university.
There were some other interviewees in the pub and they chatted, and – how did it happen? – the subject of Oswald Mosley came up, and a languid toff said to him, with a repellently suave little smile, something along the lines of ‘I don’t know why you’re fretting, whoever you are. People like us will always be all right …’
People like us! Tom could have explained to him that though they were both blond, human, male, and applying for Cambridge, the similarity ended there. He could have explained that he didn’t define what kind of a person he was by his accent, his blue eyes or his pale skin or the name he used for God, but by his thoughts and his actions, his beliefs and his heart and his guts and his morals. He might have taken the twit home and shown him Nadine (Jewish blood); Riley (common, disfigured); John Purefoy (a railwayman! Good Lord!). He might have pointed out, mildly, that actually he wasn’t that interested in being ‘all right’ himself, if everyone else was suffering – that didn’t really seem to him to be what ‘all right’ meant. The clue, perhaps, being in the word ‘all’. He should have said, perhaps, that if you’re going to divide humanity up into types, and generalise about them, then perhaps rather than dividing them into races and religions you might divide them into open-hearted honest kind people who believe in justice and have a sense of humour, and self-serving bastards who build their power and their personality on greed and fear and violence and an incomprehensible notion of their superiority.
But what he wanted to do was hit him. He really wanted to – right there in the pub just down the road from the college he wanted to take him in, his instinct
s were telling him it was worth it, to shut this smarmball up – this idea, that because one was all right one didn’t have to be concerned about anyone else—
But he had absorbed Riley’s lesson, from that day he’d blacked Slater’s eye. Violence is very rarely a useful response. He did agree with that.
The smarmball was raising his eyebrows at him.
Tom blinked and thought about Riley. The moment passed.
Look what I nearly threw away, he thought, and he said, mildly: ‘That rather depends on how you define “people like us”.’
A very Cambridge answer, he thought, as he walked up to the station, resolving always to do his best to keep his temper and define his terms.
And how were Nenna and I then?
She used to laugh at me a lot, and I didn’t mind.
He laughed at her too. They had a foundation of trust which neither of them ever thought about. They really were like brother and sister, except that the affection between them had to be made the most of, because his visits were limited. This made them uncritical of each other, which made them like each other more. The natural superiority he had by dint of being older – he would never have knocked around with a fourteen-year-old girl at home – was compensated for by her being in her home city, talking her native tongue. They were equalised.
That was the year that one day hundreds of pamphlets came tumbling down over the city, from a plane. They stared up into the bright sky, the tiny shining plane seemed close enough to climb up to, and the pamphlets fell, flicking and turning on the wind like doves as older people cried Anvedi oh che roba! and the younger ran around to find them: writing falling from the sky! Tom took one home for Aldo, who said some people were never satisfied. Some people were very ungrateful and didn’t know when they were lucky.
Nenna and Tom spent most of the time at the lake, that year. They were immersed in the nature – the black volcanic beach, fields prickly dry or lush with irrigation, ruins, looking up from books to admire the hills and the rocks, shining blue and green rollers and bee-eaters which had flown north from Africa, crimson cyclamen on the dusty roadside, fat black and yellow spiders, little amber-coloured scorpions, ruffled millipedes. They drew a lot, and had picnics.
It was while lounging among the rubble of the ruins of the little Roman villa in the neighbouring vineyard, after a picnic lunch of hard bread and salami, that Tom found himself noticing the golden hairs on Nenna’s shins glinting in the sunlight. In the same moment, because she was sitting with her knees up in her tennis skirt, her back against a bit of low tumbled wall, he saw the golden hairs on her thighs, and just as quickly he realised that he shouldn’t be looking at her thighs – so he raised his eyes, thinking to observe how lush and big the fig tree craning from a crack in the wall had grown, or to stare up in wonder at the great umbrella pine in whose fragrant shade they lay. But it seemed that his eyes did not want to look at the fig tree, or the umbrella pine. They wanted to look at the golden hairs on her thighs.
He glanced back at her. Avoid the thighs. His eyes caught, helpless, on her T-shirt, and the curve within it, which had not been there last year.
So he closed his eyes instead. Inside the pink glow of his eyelids, he cast them down. They re-opened on white dust, dry grass, and the long pale brown tweezer-shapes of last year’s fallen pine needles. He picked one up, and poked the back of his hand with it.
He knew about sex. Horses did it, and stags, in season, and he’d seen a dog doing something quite peculiar once with what must have been its own penis, which had made some older boys laugh in quite a disturbing way. He knew that the wet dreams and embarrassingly gloopy sheets which had got him into trouble at school were something to do with it. But he didn’t know why he had this sudden exceptionally strong urge, now, to hug his cousin, and push his face into her neck.
‘Look,’ he said, poking at his hand, pricking the skin with the sharp pine needle. ‘If you did this long enough and hard enough it would look like a rash, and you could get off school.’
Nenna gave him a most bemused look. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said, and for that he had no answer.
‘Let’s go for a swim!’ he said, to cover the moment, and then realised that swimming, far from solving this issue, would exacerbate it. He put out his hand to help pull her up – a gentlemanly gesture he had been making automatically for years: she landed inches from his face, smiling and sun-warm. His body, for a moment, thrilled.
In the turn of a moment, his life had become a chaos. Fraught.
‘Come on!’ he cried, over-perky—
—and from then on his days were spent in a web of perils: a shoulder too close when they sat reading together; a breath on his ear if she leant in; the swing of her walk, half boyish, half – something else. Her utter relaxation with him. The way when he glanced at her and she glanced back she would say, ‘What?’ and he could say nothing. She’s a child. She’s fourteen! But she wasn’t exactly a child. But she was fourteen.
*
He was at the fishmongers with Aldo one morning in Anguillara – eeltown! – where the fishmonger indeed sold giant lake eels from lakewater tanks carved out of the rock beneath the shop on the quay. If he leant and peered, he could see them, four-or five-feet long and as thick as a child’s forearm, coiling and gleaming in the dark water. Aldo would buy by the metre, and later split them and grill them with bay leaves on hot orange embers. His caveman side, which sat amusingly with his vanity.
‘Aldo, what shall I be when I grow up?’ Tom asked.
Aldo snorted. ‘You are grown up. How old are you, seventeen? Do things now!’
‘Do what now?’ Tom asked, horrified – are my thoughts about Nenna visible? It wouldn’t be surprising. He was, he’d begun to think, obsessed, and he didn’t like it. It’s not right, he thought. It’s not decent.
But no. Aldo said: ‘Come shooting. Learn something like a man.’ And Tom smiled, because Riley didn’t like guns and Tom had never used one. And because a manly business like this would keep him safe from this growing obsession.
*
Up in the dark wooded hills, alongside Aldo and a small crew of local blokes, Tom, with old coat and borrowed gun, learnt the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, between birdshot and buckshot, a quail and a blackbird, an ancient Carcano novant’uno and a not-that-old Winchester, the comparative merits of Franchi and Beretta, 20-gauge or 28-, or even, maybe, 12-, sovrapposti and paralleli and the tale of the Sicilian who once appeared in the neighbourhood trying to sell a sawn-off shotgun that he called a Lupara. He learnt terms in dialect that he would never know in English. He learned when to talk about these things, and when to be silent in anticipation; the joy of the wind coming up just before dawn, and with it the sound of wings. He turned out to have an eye and an ear: the sight, the creak, the dog pointing, the glimpse, the decision and the shot! And the triumph or failure, the laugh, the next one, the moving on … He caught eyes with the other men over each triumph, collecting a prize, feathered and still warm. He learnt the swift movements required for gutting and plucking; making a fire, sharpening a knife, stripping green twigs for a spit, roasting your catch then and there in the woods. A bit of bread, cut sideways with a hunting knife against a wool-clad chest, a sprinkle of salt. Swigging home-made red wine or grappa from the other man’s flask. Sitting back against a tree trunk, listening to them sing. Aldo bought him a hunting knife at the market in Bracciano, identical to everyone else’s, sharp in its own brown leather sheath, to hang from his belt.
Occasionally the talk turned to things beyond the wind, the birds, the guns and the lunch: light mockery of Aldo for being a decent man despite being a Roman and a forestiero; heavier mockery of Tom for thinking a forestiero was someone from the forest, rather than someone from Fuori – outside. ‘So I am a forestiero?’ he asked, to howls of laughter and the response – ‘People from Trevignano or Tolfa are forestieri! You are a little green man from space!’
Aldo explained on their wa
y home, heads aching slightly from the woodland siesta after wine, about this thing, ‘This campanilismo – the spirit of the campanile, the belltower – this universal belief, this self-fulfilling prophesy, that the people from just over there’ – he waved his arm, generally – ‘are idiotic foreigners who hate you. It’s left over, of course, from all the tiny states and small towns. You’ve seen the Palio in Siena? You must go. Pure campanilismo, from one building to the next. You know what they say in Milan? Dal Po’ in giù l’Italia non c’é più – South of the Po, Italy no more. In Lucca? Meglio avere un morto in casa che un pisano alla porta. Better a corpse in the house than a Pisan at the door. Pisa is no distance from Lucca! Half an hour in a motor car. Which is the point – those closest to you are the ones who can make the most trouble!’ Here he gave Tom a little glance, rueful, humorous. ‘It takes no time to reach you when they want to steal your cow, insult your wife, burn your barn. Down at the marshes, the original inhabitants from the mountains call the new northerners who’ve moved down Vikings. And the Vikings call the southerners Wogs. Which is why Italy loves the Duce. He reminds us we are Italian in the modern world, not terrified contadini in the sixteenth century.’
‘I read the other day,’ Tom said, ‘that he said Fascism was not something for export.’
‘Yes,’ Aldo said. ‘It is designed for us, for our history and our needs.’
‘So England doesn’t need it?’
Aldo side-eyed him. ‘What do you think?’
