by Penny Feeny
She was intrigued to see his colour deepen. ‘I do not know this hut.’
‘You don’t? But Enrico said – ’
Shuffling the files on his desk, he corrected himself. ‘Please excuse my English. I mean that I did not know this hut.’
She frowned and started to speak but he cut her off. He tapped some figures into a pocket calculator. ‘While you are in our home we wish for you to have first-class treatment. I will adjust your bill so the stay is not expensive for you. We can give special offer at this moment: three nights for price of two. Is good, yes?’
‘Oh . . .’ She was startled. ‘Very good. Thank you.’
‘Prego.’ He turned his back, dismissing her.
She went upstairs to her room. It had been cleaned and tidied in her absence. At the head of the bed, the pillows were crisp and puffed as meringues. And at the foot, the stained and crumpled clothes she’d hauled around Europe for the past two weeks were folded into sweet-smelling piles.
22
The view from the cathedral tower was renowned for its scope: the sweep of the Welsh hills across the wide grey channel of the Mersey, the clash of spiky Victorian gothic and florid neo-classicism, the narrow red-brick terraces like lengths of taut rope – and lately an outcrop of ambitious new monuments with steel frames and mirrored glass, a gaggle of cranes dangling crows’ nests and wrecking balls. Just as a city’s grandeur is best appreciated from a height, mused Helena, the past is better understood from a distance.
She was gazing at the great sandstone bulwark of the cathedral through the window of Simon’s top-foor flat in Gambier Terrace. ‘I hadn’t imagined you in a place like this,’ she’d said on her first visit. ‘I thought you’d be in one of the swanky modern apartments they’re building, all spotlights and chrome.’
‘Ah, but I took this on before those developments got off the ground and I’m too lazy to move. Besides, I’m walking distance from work.’
Helena raised the sash, inhaling estuary sludge, a whiff of salt and the tired flowers of unpruned privet.
Simon was packing. He was moving between rooms, taking down books from his bookshelf, assembling razor, adaptor, phone charger, assessing clothes for cleanliness and soliciting her opinion. ‘I suppose I’ll have to take some ties.’ He draped half a dozen over his arm. ‘Which do you think?’
She’d been trying to peer into the nooks of the sunken graveyard, but from this height and with the shrubs in full leaf only shadows could be seen. In contrast, the dancing tails of woven silk were astonishingly vivid. ‘I’m not sure that I have an opinion on ties.’
‘Helena without an opinion? I don’t think so.’
She perched on the sill. ‘Well, no one’s going to accuse you of understatement, are they? But, since you’re going to America, I guess that’s fine. You should flaunt yourself.’ She swooped on one that had a jagged design like forked lightning and knotted it around his head. ‘Now you look like a schoolboy playing Cowboys and Indians!’
He trapped her hand between his. ‘I’d have more fun if you’d come with me.’
‘Fun? On a conference about effective deterrents within the penal system? Are you sure that’s allowed?’
‘You could stand in as exhibit A.’
Helena turned her back on him, and gazed with increased concentration at the cathedral. Simon wrenched off his headgear and threw it on to the sofa. He stood behind her, rested his hand with caution on her hip. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘It’s okay, I’m not offended.’
‘It was a really tactless thing to say. What happened to you should never have happened.’
‘That’s beside the point.’
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a confession to make.’ With gentle pressure he swivelled her to face him again. ‘I have a guilty past myself.’
She stared at him blankly. ‘You?’ Then she roared with laughter. ‘I knew it! You know, the first thing I thought, when you accosted me in Lee’s, was that you must be a pickpocket.’
‘Fucking hell. Why?’
‘Because of the creepy way you pretended I’d dropped something and then commandeered my suitcase.’
‘Creepy?’ He looked hurt. ‘I was being a good citizen.’
‘So what were your youthful misdemeanours then? Cheating in exams? Dope-peddling? Joyriding? All of the above?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Pretty much. But mainly I was shoplifter supreme. Woolies, HMV, WHSmith, you name it. Independents are easier than high-street chains because they can’t afford sophisticated security, but even as an angry adolescent you can feel a bit shit about taking advantage of a small business.’
‘What about the joyriding?’
‘Oh, we only nicked rich men’s cars. No cachet in a Ford takeaway.’
‘And you never got caught?’
‘Nope.’
‘Christ,’ said Helena. ‘Doesn’t look like the wages of sin worked out quite fair, does it?’
‘We shouldn’t have got away with it. Had some hairy moments. But young boys can leap over walls and outrun most adults so we were lucky, basically. And then when I’d grown out of the whole phase, it got me thinking I suppose, got me into what I do today.’
‘Being careless. That was my mistake.’
‘We stole,’ said Simon, ‘for the thrill of it. The buzz. The loot was a by-product really. But you, you like to go head-to-head, don’t you?’
‘I don’t like being told what to do if that’s what you mean.’
‘I think it’s more a deliberate distaste for authority that motivates you.’
‘Fuck off, Simon. Stop treating me like an object lesson for a seminar.’
‘Yes, but seriously, back then, if you’d –’
‘If I’d what?’ There are so many ifs in a lifetime; she happened to have a concentrated bunch that summer. She ticked them off. ‘If I’d never fallen for Fabrizio? If I hadn’t left my passport with Liddy? If I’d watched where Mimmo went to hide? If I’d smoked all Jake’s dope and not left a few crumbs for a rainy day? If I hadn’t aggravated Enzo?’
Simon’s chin jerked up. ‘Enzo? Who’s he?’
‘Just a carabiniere who liked to cut a dash rescuing damsels in distress. He wanted a date and I was a bit of a cow. He probably couldn’t believe his luck when he got me in handcuffs. Look, can we forget it, please? I am not your piece of research. I am totally unsuitable.’
‘Totally,’ he agreed, slotting his fingers beneath the waistband of her trousers. ‘Great piece of arse though.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said again. ‘And finish your packing.’
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he promised, pausing only to change the CD on the system. R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’ quavered into the room. Helena sank into a leather armchair, which sighed beneath her weight. She kicked off her sandals and settled her feet on to a leather footstool. To her left were the windows overlooking Hope Street. Around the other three walls, hung at carefully measured intervals, were reproductions of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. Simon told her he’d been collecting them for years, hunting down bargains in backstreet print shops.
You could spend hours observing the details of the depravity Hogarth portrayed, examining each rung of the descent into destitution in an age of rough and random justice. She chewed at her bottom lip reflectively. You didn’t have to accept a downward spiral. You could dig yourself out of a hole if you put your mind to it. She’d proved that, hadn’t she? It was why, despite the ordeal she’d been through, she’d stayed on in Italy after her release.
She didn’t intend to be seen as a victim – so there was no point running home to the pitying whispers of local gossip, accompanied by Allie the albatross. It was different in Rome. She wasn’t mixing with the Catholic bourgeoisie; she was on the expatriate fringe. Her flatmates – Chilean Milagra, Syrian Samira, Australian Greg, Irish Kevin, and the host of stranieri who passed through the squat, metal-clad entrance to their shared apartment –
were happy to take a turn with the baby. Communal living, they all agreed, was good for young children. Their attitude meant that she hardly noticed when Fabrizio’s visits became less frequent; she didn’t need him in her life. She hadn’t forgiven him for his reaction to Allegra.
‘Why is her arm twisted like that?’ he’d said.
‘Because her shoulder caught on my pelvis and they didn’t do a Caesarean in time.’ (You realize you could have sued the hospital? people told her afterwards, but Helena felt she’d had quite enough of the Italian legal system.) ‘They said the nerves aren’t damaged beyond repair. If she exercises, she can build up her strength and do everything other people do and more.’
‘She looks . . .’
‘What?’
‘Ouf . . . I don’t know. Like a bird of some kind?’
She had the barrel ribs, the scrawny limbs, the large, wobbling head of any other newborn on the ward. ‘You’re making her sound like an alien! Your precious Mimmo must have looked like this too.’ In truth, Mimmo was the albatross, the unspoken weight that had scuppered what was not, as it turned out, a satisfactory love affair.
Fabrizio did try to take a scientific approach to Allie’s treatment, to see it as a counterbalance of stresses and load-bearing joints, but a baby was not a building with clean harmonious lines, to be taken apart and put together again, reinforced with steel ties and concrete. Progress was slow and frequently disheartening. Soon after Allie’s second birthday Helena gave up on him. She moved to Wales at the invitation of a woman ceramicist she’d met, who’d bought a sprawling farmhouse and was establishing a studio complex. This rural idyll of potters’ wheels, creative partnerships and country-reared children didn’t last either.
Simon stood in the doorway. ‘All done.’ He crossed the room, knelt beside the footstool and began to fondle her bare foot. ‘I wish you’d reconsider,’ he said.
‘Reconsider what?’
‘Coming along.’ When she groaned, he continued, ‘I have the hotel room booked already, you know that. You’ve admitted you’ve got no urgent commitments. You could spare a few days. I know you’re a carpe diem sort of girl.’ He stroked her sole. ‘I will lay the sights of Chicago at your feet.’
‘There’s the problem of the flight.’
‘Yes, I’ve thought of that, but I reckon you could get one on standby quite cheaply. Give it a whirl – you’ve nothing to lose.’
‘It’s not the money, Simon, you idiot.’
‘Then what? Oh, bollocks . . .’ One hand cupped her heel; the other, running up the back of her leg, tightened around her calf. ‘Explain something to me,’ he said. ‘You told me you have a kiln in the shed at the bottom of your garden. You work in highly dangerous conditions in a tinder box that could go up any minute. Why the hell doesn’t that freak you out?’
‘The conditions are only dangerous if you’re stupid,’ she said, ‘which I’m not. But anyway, it isn’t the small enclosed space that’s the problem, it’s the moving small enclosed space.’
‘A car?’
‘A car’s different,’ she snapped. ‘You can see out, get fresh air if you need it.’
‘It is the result of being locked up, then?’
‘Actually, the worst bit was when they took me across to the mainland.’ She could speak about it now in a detached way, as if it had happened to somebody else – even though she was still handicapped by the effects. ‘It was a horrid day, overcast and windy. I was in a hold in the boat, below the water level, and the sea was quite choppy. I was dreadfully sick, I mean really disgusting – it went everywhere – but I’d no other clothes to change into. When we disembarked they shoved me into the back of a van. I didn’t even know where they were taking me. We were rattling around all these hairpin bends and the stench of vomit was unbelievable. I thought I was going to suffocate.’
‘How long were you in there?’
‘An hour or two, I suppose. The journey seemed to go on for ages, there were traffic jams and all kinds of hold-ups. It was bad enough at the time, but I didn’t find out how bad until later . . .’
Simon sat on the arm of her chair and took her hand. ‘How much later?’
‘Oh, months afterwards, when I was back in Rome. I was visiting a friend who lived in a modern tower block on the outskirts – the sort they threw up for people who couldn’t afford anything better. I had Allie with me. She was four weeks old, strapped in a sling. I wasn’t going to traipse up eight flights – anyway, I wasn’t aware at that point I had a problem, so I got in the lift and pressed the button.’
‘Surely you’d used a lift since the arrest?’
‘I suppose I must have done. But this one had an odd smell – maybe there was a ventilation problem – and it felt to me like it was tilting. Then the metal walls started to move inwards, crumpling the way polythene does when you vacuum-pack something. That was what was happening to Allie and me: all the air was being sucked from around us. First I couldn’t breathe and then I blacked out. Apparently we went on up, collapsed together in a heap, until we were rescued by some guy on the top storey. An angel stepping off his cloud and into the lift.’ Afterwards, she couldn’t get it out of her mind that she might have killed her baby, literally crushed her to death because of the way she’d fallen. The damaged baby she hadn’t wanted in the first place? That was her turning point.
‘And you’ve never tried since?’
‘To take a lift? Yes, I’ve tried. But I hyperventilate as soon as the doors start to close so I avoid them. It’s called risk assessment. Anyway, stairs are good for you.’
‘I could be good for you,’ said Simon with conviction. ‘I shall make it my mission.’
‘What?’
‘To get you on a plane.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you can go places! You’re not the only person to have been afflicted: there are ways and means.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘What about tranquillizers?’
‘Useless.’
‘Cognitive behaviour therapy?’
‘That didn’t work either.’
‘Not at all?’
‘I wasn’t the right subject. Whatever.’
‘You will find,’ he said, tracing the lines on her palm, ‘that I don’t give up so easily.’
‘Well, it’s nice that you’re so keen to help me,’ said Helena, pushing him away. ‘But don’t let’s rush things.’
‘Who’s rushing?’ Then he tapped his watch and said with a grin, ‘Only I was hoping we could manage a quick fuck before the taxi comes. Something for me to remember you by.’
Later, lying on his bed – catching from a different window the gleam of slate rooftops and a fanciful display of chimney pots – she watched him strut around the room, getting dressed again. She liked his unabashed nakedness, the slick way he zipped up his chinos, slotted his arms into his shirt. There was, in all his movements, the easy confidence of a man not much troubled. Researching the darkest recesses of deviant minds, the depressing triviality of the petty criminal, the wearisome predictability of the repeat offender, might not have given him a rosy notion of human behaviour, but it hadn’t dragged him down. Cocky bastard probably thought he had it all under control. She’d observed this with academics: lecturing, posturing, confabulating, they soon considered themselves minor deities.
She stretched her legs and arched her spine. Her clothes were pooled yards away. He came to sit beside her, tweaked a nipple. ‘I’m going to miss you.’
‘I know what conferences are like. You won’t be deprived. You’ll be bed-hopping for four days.’
‘I wouldn’t if you were with me.’
‘Why do we keep going round in circles?’
‘You can do it, Helena. You have to find the will.’
‘It’s the end of the world as we know it,’ she sang in imitation of Michael Stipe. ‘Change the record, Simon.’
‘You don’t realize how much you’re restricting yourself.’<
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‘Why, because there are now all these ridiculously cheap flights to godforsaken places I don’t want to visit anyhow?’
‘The United States?’
‘I’ve managed so far. No one invited me to an unmissable international conference until today.’
‘Suppose your precious one-and-only daughter decided to live there?’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because she met someone? Or to follow her musical ambitions?’
Helena sat up and began to pull on her underwear, rejecting his teasing attempts to help her.
‘Well? You’d never see her, would you?’
‘I don’t believe in crossing bridges until you get to them.’ She finished fastening her trousers and reached for her bra.
‘Or oceans, it appears.’
At this, at what she interpreted as his snide manner, she stuffed the bra into her pocket and yanked her top over her head, ignoring the fact that it was the wrong way around. Was he deaf? Had he not paid attention to anything she’d told him? Storming into the sitting room, she seized sandals and bag, sniping at him over her shoulder. ‘I shall get a fucking boat. In spite of what happened in the bay of Naples I’m okay on deck. I like the water.’
‘Hey!’ he protested, in pursuit. ‘I’m not trying to pick a fight.’
‘Well, don’t let me stop you.’
‘Helena, I’ve got to leave in ten minutes. The taxi’s on its way. Please let’s not quarrel . . . I could get blown up mid-Atlantic.’
She snorted. ‘That’s planes for you.’
He wrapped his arms around her. ‘Will you wait for me?’
‘I might have gone home to Oxford by the time you get back.’
‘I’ll have to come and find you then, won’t I? Any last wishes? Final demands?’
He was holding her in his bear hug. She was trying to break free. Hogarth’s Rake was declining into pox and penury. The cathedral tower was filling the window. ‘Bring me a hat,’ she said. ‘Not a baseball cap. A Stetson. Haven’t got one of those. But now I have to go. Have a good trip.’ She kissed him lightly on the lips and sprinted down the stairs to avoid a protracted goodbye.
