The Gulf Between

by Maxine Alterio

  ‘I’m impressed. You’re making your mark as a fashion leader.’

  ‘What about you, Julia? Any acting parts on the horizon?’

  ‘I’m no longer looking for anything in that line. Don’t fall over, but I recently applied for a library position with on-the-job training. I start in a week. The pay’s not great. Mostly I’m looking forward to the learning that comes with it.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I want to be a positive role model for Francesca.’

  ‘And Matteo.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You must miss him and Ben.’

  ‘The ache never leaves me.’

  She and I arranged to meet once a month. Sometimes Marsha joined us if she could find a babysitter and had the money to spare to catch a train into the city. More often than not I felt like an imposter, making excuses for Ben and Matteo’s ongoing absence. I hadn’t fitted the mould of a traditional housewife in Naples, and I didn’t feel at ease as Oliver’s live-in companion in London. If it hadn’t been for my work and Dr Reysel, I would have been tempted to turn into a hermit. Every now and then I thought of retreating to Queenstown and settling there, but I had Francesca to consider and Dulwich was geographically closer to Matteo.

  53

  I needed Dr Reysel’s support again in late autumn when the newspaper that had covered Ilaria’s death delivered another devastating blow. A body had been retrieved from a swimming hole below the outcrop Ben had dived off to impress me. The place he’d haunted as a child. Where he had gone on those solo swims as Alessia sunk lower and our lives diverged.

  His name hit me like a thunderbolt. The teacup I held fell to the slate floor of the conservatory, shattering into pieces. I folded the page over, reopened it, scrutinised every line, searching for fictions, misprints, untruths, but it was there in black and white: Ben had drowned in a bay as familiar to him as his own face.

  My skin felt tight, everything beneath it expansive. I had no saliva. My mouth tasted of ash. I was hyperventilating. My hands shook as I searched for the date. A fortnight earlier; too late for me to make sure there hadn’t been a mistake. Ben was a strong swimmer. He knew the tides. I couldn’t imagine him drowning in this stretch of water. Unless — I struggled to voice the thought — he wanted to die.

  I slumped to the floor, a multitude of thoughts competing for attention. If he had reached a state of utter hopelessness, one he thought he would never recover from, it’s possible he’d want to end the pain. From psychoanalysis I knew that a gloomy outlook and withdrawal from people suggested the presence of a serious depressive condition. If I had known in Naples half of what I had learned from Dr Reysel, I might have been able to help Ben.

  The news of his death crushed me. Awash with tears, I anguished over who would have told Matteo: Ernesto, Carlo or Rosa. I prayed it was Rosa. The thought of Ernesto comforting Matteo made me nauseous. I couldn’t imagine telling Francesca. This was not what I had wanted for my children.

  As sadness turned to anger, I phoned the club where Oliver met work contacts and gave him a scrambled account.

  He read the full article back at the house. ‘Poor Ben.’

  ‘I’m to blame,’ I said. ‘I insisted we go to that death trap. We have to get Mattie out as soon as possible.’

  After a sleepless night we set off to Francesca’s school. An administrator took us to the headmistress, who sent for Frannie. We were left alone with her in the office. Midway through my relaying the facts she came at me with the speed of a charging rhino, ramming me with her head, rendering me airless for a few seconds. She went on to snort and stamp and trample. I didn’t stop her. She was inflicting pain on me because her emotions were too huge to handle.

  When she fell exhausted into my arms, I spoke of the love her papa had for her, how proud she had made him. ‘We will get through this, Frannie, come out the other side stronger and wiser.’ To begin with she refused to come to Dulwich. I placed my hand on her arm. She shook it off, saying, ‘I want to be by myself.’

  I, too, craved solitude but it wasn’t feasible. ‘Whether we like it or not,’ I said, ‘we need each other.’

  While I packed her belongings, the headmistress fetched the paperwork we had to fill in to grant Francesca leave on compassionate grounds. Thinking he was helping, Oliver tried to bribe her to get into the car with the promise of another pet. ‘I’m too old and too sad to fall for that trick,’ she said. ‘You never got me the parrot.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Oliver said. ‘It flew clean out of my head.’

  I gave him a scathing look. This was not the time for jokes.

  Back at the house Francesca and I roamed about like zombies. If the daily hadn’t put meals on the table, we wouldn’t have eaten. Oliver hogged the phone.

  ‘Get off it,’ I said after he’d made four calls in a row. ‘Matteo might ring.’

  ‘He hasn’t bothered before,’ he shot back.

  Francesca was more forgiving. ‘Mattie bottles things up. He won’t talk to us until he’s figured out what to do.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Some good could come from this.’

  Oliver said, ‘It’s possible. But don’t count on it.’

  We held a memorial service for Ben. Clinty and Marsha tracked down the old crowd. The formal part began with me reading the famous Yeats lines ‘Things fall apart/ the centre cannot hold’, because Ben had said when I read the poem to him during our courtship, ‘That’s often how life turns out.’ Oliver gave the eulogy, and a new friend of his ended this part of the ceremony with a spirited rendition of ‘You Made Me Love You’ on his saxophone.

  The change in tempo eased us into the informalities. Francesca and I mixed with the mourners, accepted their condolences, evaded awkward questions and let the curious think Ben had stayed in Italy so Matteo could finish his education.

  Over hors d’oeuvres and cocktails Marsha talked of Ben’s capacity for fun, Clinty waxed on about his fashion sense, and Jasper applauded his eye for quality merchandise. Gradually we resurrected Ben’s London essence.

  Since his death I have worn orange on our wedding anniversary — a scarf, a string of amber beads or a bangle. Working with Dr Reysel has taught me to value what we’d had at our best and to forgive the flaws that formed long before we met. I also took on board that before we can attempt to understand another human being we must fully know ourselves. I cringe when I recall my previous quickness to judge, my propensity to value my experiences and opinions above those of others.

  Shaken by Ben’s death, Oliver hired the investigator he had used before to put Matteo under close surveillance and send us detailed reports. One had him drinking on the beach with a crowd of schoolboys, which sent me into a panic.

  ‘Is he turning into an alcoholic?’ I said, recalling it had been a weakness of my mother’s and one I had almost fallen prey to.

  Oliver quashed the notion. ‘He’s behaving like a normal teenager whose life has been disrupted at an impressionable age.’

  Intermittently I accused Oliver of withholding information to protect me. On these occasions he reminded me that a happy childhood can act as a counterbalance to the hardships that assail us in adulthood. For the most part I agreed. When I faltered, I went to see Dr Reysel. With his support, I worked on integrating my fractured self, and in the process learned to like myself again.

  With Francesca away at school, Oliver and I flew to Rome intent on bringing Matteo home. We had sent the private investigator on ahead to talk to Alphonse, thinking he might persuade the fisherman to bring my son to St Lucia. From there our chap would convince Matteo to accompany him to Rome, and to me.

  Either the wily fisherman didn’t trust the investigator or he’d been muzzled. All our chap got from Alphonse was the sign of the cross when he spoke of Ben and Ilaria, and frenetic hand-waving when he asked about Matteo. No mention of my letters either, which could mean that, like Rosa, he was illiterate.

  I suggested to Oliver that we go an
d see Alphonse ourselves. ‘He’ll talk to me,’ I said, pulling on the lapels of Oliver’s suit jacket. ‘If anyone can get Mattie to contact me, he will.’ Alphonse owed Ben for liberating his family from starvation. Now it was the fisherman’s turn to repay the favour.

  ‘The boy hasn’t taken up previous propositions, Julia. Sit it out. He’ll get in touch when he’s ready.’

  Sitting it out had served Oliver well during the Profumo debacle. I had to trust that he knew what he was doing where Matteo was concerned, too.

  Aged eighteen and captain of the upper-school team, Matteo and fellow players won an inter-regional football trophy. An article in Il Mattino’s sports pages told of girls screaming his name from the grandstands when he scored the winning goal. A photograph taken at the after-match function showed busty, leggy types hanging off his arm. I hoped that at least one among them had more going for her than looks. We heard through the investigator that Ernesto had given him an olive-green Alvis roadster to mark the achievement.

  Around his nineteenth birthday, when he was no longer at school, we received reports of reckless behaviour. I was upset. Oliver suggested that I go out more, however the theatre, jazz clubs and swanky parties had lost their appeal.

  For over a decade I found satisfaction working as a librarian and teaching a bit of Italian on the side, but inner peace and contentment eluded me. Francesca went to university to study marine biology. She thrived in this environment. At the completion of her study, and with the support of her Master’s supervisor, she secured a position as a research scientist. Coincidentally, once she was settled a rugged landscape reappeared in my dreams and, with Oliver’s and Francesca’s blessing, I returned to Queenstown where almost everyone came from somewhere else.

  54

  New Zealand, 1994

  No one knew me as Ben’s widow here, a mother who had abandoned her son, a washed-up actress. I secured part-time work at the town library, a job I worked at diligently until taking voluntary redundancy last year aged sixty-two. Nowadays I take on volunteer work as a translator, and help out two mornings a week behind the counter of a charity shop.

  A week after settling into my home on the hill overlooking Lake Wakatipu, I hired a woman to clean, a task I detested — too many reminders of the backbreaking housework at the villa. On her second day, she mentioned her other job, wardrobe mistress for the town’s amateur repertory company. She gave me the director’s number. I phoned and offered my services. ‘Behind the scenes or on stage, I’ll do anything.’ He auditioned me for a role in an upcoming show. I was thrilled when he offered me the part. We rehearsed and performed in a draughty hall — hardly the Old Vic, but satisfying all the same.

  I am a better version of myself in this place.

  Whenever Oliver visits, I introduce him to acquaintances as the person who knows me best. He says the same about me during my biannual trips to London, funded through the trust. We are there for each other, the glue holding the past and present together.

  Periodically I speculate on what might have been if I hadn’t insisted on going as a family to Naples, if it weren’t for Ernesto’s proclivities, if Ben had brought our son home when I wrote and begged him to, if Matteo had listened to Oliver when he went to fetch him, had replied to my letters, had left of his own accord.

  ‘If’ seems such a little word to bear this great weight.

  As far as I know, Francesca returned just the once to visit her papa’s gravesite. According to her boyfriend at the time, she left violets. When they returned to Dulwich, where I was still living at the time, while she unpacked upstairs he told me that she’d shivered uncontrollably in the 35-degree heat. He said they were in the city for less than a day. She hadn’t wanted to drive through the Vomero, although she mentioned having lived there for nineteen months. At Positano, she took Polaroids of the beach, the town and a house on a clifftop: ‘I think she wanted to recreate something that had disappeared.’ They drove back to Rome that night, flew out in the morning. She dumped him a month after he talked to me. I guess she thought he’d been too free with his tongue.

  On receiving official notification of Ben’s death, the solicitor changed the deeds of our Chelsea house into my name, as requested in a will Ben had lodged a week before our departure in ’61. I hired a moving company to pack up our furniture and put it in storage. While I’d had good intentions when I lived in Dulwich, and on flying visits to London from Queenstown, I have not decided which pieces to keep. I thought it might be something Matteo and Francesca would do in the future, with me in the wings.

  I instructed the solicitor to place our home, unlived in after Marsha and Simon moved to a country idyll, with a letting agency and to include a special clause in all tenancy agreements so that if Matteo came looking for Frannie or me, the tenants were to hand him my solicitor’s business card. He would let me know if my son contacted him. I would take it from there.

  My decision not to sell the house stemmed from a vague hope that Matteo and Francesca might live there again someday. I also dreaded the emotional toll of letting the place go completely. It was bad enough sorting through my parents’ belongings. They’d been packed into the attic with our personal possessions when we went to Italy, and disposing of them took me months, mainly because clothing, jewellery, books and photo albums awakened childhood memories. I viewed many as gifts and cherished them for their emotional value. A second difficulty revolved around which possessions to keep. In the end I hung onto the photographs and jewellery. What the dealers didn’t want I donated to a charity shop.

  In an email Francesca sent me a month ago she described descending in a cage to film a shark-feeding frenzy, and how she felt as though her skin was dissolving when her body reached the same temperature as the water. Considering the lengths I had taken to keep her from one type of predator it struck me as odd that in adulthood she had chosen a career that placed her close to the jaws of another.

  She wanted none of Wiggin and Muz’s possessions. ‘I travel light,’ she said.

  We talked on the phone this morning. She’s booked her air ticket for next week. She can’t wait to see her brother. The neurosurgeon has almost weaned Matteo off the sedation. He’s hinting at a conscious response from him today or tomorrow. I haven’t slept for twenty-four hours. Every time I go to the bathroom I picture him sitting up in the hospital bed, scribbling a message on a strip of paper, rolling it into a ball and hiding it for me to find as he did as a youngster, intending to entertain me. But he also wrote those other notes. I didn’t pay sufficient attention to them, not until it was almost too late. There was too much going on for me to indulge in what I thought were childish games.

  55

  I am sitting alongside Matteo in the semi-dark. As the neurosurgeon predicted, he is beginning the steady climb to consciousness. Fractured light from the traffic outside and the buildings opposite spills through the window onto his body as though projected from a B-grade movie. Facets of his younger self merge with those of a mature man. There is constant blinking, contracting of eyebrows, puzzlement expressed as frowns.

  Any minute, I think, as a barrage of emotions hit me. I backpedal into cerebral territory where it feels less risky. My mind settles on the connections between sight and experience, the complex structure of our eyes: fluid, tissue, muscles, blood vessels, cells, rods, cones and light working in harmony, relaying signals to our brains, translating them into images, preserving them as memories.

  I try to convince myself that I did everything within my means to bring Matteo home. Had Ben not been caught up in the issues he had with his mother and brother, had he listened to my concerns instead of brushing them aside or ignoring me, had he not complied with Ernesto’s orders at my expense, making me feel unimportant, I might not have behaved as I did. While I don’t hold him responsible for my actions, his behaviour was a contributing factor.

  Sometimes I imagine what differences there would be between Ben’s account and mine. Would we, I wonder, recognise eac
h other in our interpretations? I have done my best to prepare for the disparities I know will arise between Matteo’s and my memories. I am already familiar with Francesca’s. That’s the nature of family narratives. I once read somewhere that what we remember is fiction anyway.

  Matteo keeps blinking, a good sign.

  A compassionate nurse is on duty. She is relieved that the awakening we’ve been working towards is almost upon us. The neurosurgeon has talked me through the signs and stages to expect. He thinks he has prepared me for every eventuality — but he doesn’t know the half of it. Nor do the nurses who take care of Matteo. I have been speaking to him in Italian and only breaking into English occasionally.

  It’s 9 p.m. The unit is quiet. No deaths or disasters so far. All the same, there’s a chill in the corridor. I shut the door but I cannot get warm. If I’m lucky there’ll be a spare blanket in the closet.

  What I find is a dark-green rucksack pushed against the rear wall. I pull it out. Sit it on the floor. Stare at it for ages.

  Then I loosen the straps, remove items of Matteo’s clothing and lift them one by one up to my face, searching for his pre-hospital smell. In a woollen jumper I detect a hint of marjoram. Further down in the rucksack I find his passport with the photo Roberto had taken of us after eating crêpes as his birthday treat, a roadmap of the South Island, toiletries, a leather-bound diary with a black elastic band to keep it secure, and a pen. Although I’m tempted to open it and read what he’s written, I think of the outrage I would feel if anyone were to read the journals I kept during psychoanalysis. I return Matteo’s belongings to his pack, make myself comfortable in the straight-backed chair, and rest my eyes.