‘And Gordon?’
‘Fine. Swell. I’d told him the first, you see. He said, “You and Pop haven’t had anything good to say to each other for years.” And that’s about the truth of it.’
Ah, but I remember, Maria thought, noticing the excitable beaded tears. Seeing again the 1923 wedding, Jenny hanging on Archie’s arm, looking up adoringly. You are marrying to escape, she had thought.
‘Guy,’ she said, ‘Guy Dennison. Eleanor’s adopted – did Dulcie tell you? He’s marrying a girl from Naples. Any moment now. They’ll be in London in the autumn.’
‘Nice for you, Maria – another Italian.’
‘Well, hardly.’ (I do not care to think of this Laura.) ‘No love lost between Neapolitans and Sicilians. My childhood memories of New York. Dreadful.’
She said quickly: ‘Tell me more, Jenny. What you’re going to do, where you’re going to be –’
‘I just want to live my own life, to breathe freely.’
‘Where, though? With whom?’
‘You were always so practical, Maria … I’m going to stay on, as long as I want, in Montpelier Square. With Mother.’ She said it in an offhand tone, but as if she wanted it noticed.
‘With Mother,’ she repeated. ‘What do you say to that?’
‘I heard all right … Only I don’t understand. I mean, Aunt Maimie –’
‘But I’m Aunt Dulcie’s child!’ It was the voice suddenly in the nursery at Linthorpe Road. ‘She’s my mother.’
Secrets, Maria thought, yet more secrets. More than I ever wanted to know. Dulcie, Maimie, Uncle Eric. Dad had not really deceived his wife – rather it had been romantic, a great love. Subterfuge, heartbreak, misunderstandings. Ah, what we carry round in our hearts. Is it any wonder they break?
‘Remember? I wish Aunt Dulcie was my mother!… And wanting to live in London with her? Well, here I am at forty-two, doing just that … And ain’t it a grand and glorious feeling?’
‘Who told you? Did she?’
‘She wrote me. A year ago last April, just after Jim was killed. A ten-page letter. I cried. Oh dear God, how I cried … Jim gone – and everything … Then I called her transatlantic. I don’t know how long we talked. The operator kept saying –’
‘You told Archie?’
‘It’s not his business. Gordon I told – it’s his grandma, after all. But all of it, it shook me up. From then out things weren’t ever the same. I just planned and planned to quit – all of it, him, the life, everything.’
They sat looking at each other over the table. Maria saying, ‘It’s going to be very strong tea by now,’ pouring some out.
Jenny, trying to make her voice normal. ‘Where’s the worldfamous crooner?’
‘Out. He’s very hopeful of some recording, some dates this summer. It must start up for him again. The illness, the breakdown, was ghastly. Really set him back.’
‘Oh, and Helen?’
‘At school. I’m dying for you to meet Helen. She’s helped a lot in his recovery, by the way. He’s teaching her to croon.’ ‘Any good?’
‘Squeaky, a bit earnest. But she may have something.’
Gradually the awkwardness passed. Maria asked: ‘And Syb, when are we going to see Sybil back?’
Jenny animated, excited: ‘We aren’t. That’s my other great piece of news. Sybil’s lost her heart. She’s going to be married in the fall. I think she’s writing you –’
‘Anyone we – you know?’
She picked up a biscuit, let it drop on the table where it broke. ‘Garry Mitcheson. She’ll have mentioned him, I’m sure. Six foot six at least – anyway, very tall, and handsome but nice with it. Clever, too. He got a seat as a Liberal in the election last year. He’s quite crazy about her, and young Peter. Can’t do enough for them … There’s a happy ever after for you,’ she said, brushing away the crumbs.
But it was her own excitement filled the room. Maria asked her what she was going to do?
‘I expect I’ll do that famous secretarial course I was always wanting to do … You did it of course.’
Ah, what I did, Maria thought. And why. What a burden of secrets. It was possible to have kept back so many of them (and always, the worst secret of all. Peter’s death). Only geography and perhaps Sybil’s companionship had hidden the secret of Guy’s birth. One day, I suppose I shall tell her. Or Guy will. Or Dulcie will. Who asks permission of whom, to tell which secrets?
‘I’m so happy for you,’ she said.
12
The pealing, the hammering of bells woke him. All of hell, all of heaven, all of Palermo let loose. A great angry cascade of sound invaded his sleep.
He pulled the pillow about his ears. It made no difference. Laura, in pink silk, lay flat on her back, the sheets turned back a little. She gave little moans in her sleep. He reached out and stroked her breast, cupped it. She opened her eyes.
‘I can’t go to Mass, it’s really not possible.’
‘Of course not. Stay here. Rest as much as you can. Dr Crivello said – what did he say?’
‘He says I’ve to take care.’
When he came back from Mass she was sitting up, propped against the lace-edged pillow, round her shoulders a wisp of silk. The nurse, Agata, had brought the child in. She was the old style of nurse, her dress long, her cuffs starched. Baby Silvi struggled in her arms. ‘Put her on the bed,’ Guy said. She fell at once, spreadeagled in the softness. She made crawling movements, then turned towards Guy.
‘She loves her papa,’ the nurse said.
‘Her mama feels too ill to care,’ Laura said. When the child had left, he sat closer to her on the bed, buried his head in her neck. Moist, cool. Scented. ‘My hair’s a mess,’ she said. ‘It reflects how I feel.’
‘You didn’t feel like this for Silvi.’
‘Maybe it’s because … perhaps it’s a boy. Old wives’ tales, really bad sickness. No use, though, to ask my mother.’
He agreed. No use to ask Signora Varelli, who had given birth to Laura and cried finis – to everything. ‘I can scarcely ask my mother,’ he said.
She gave a half-smile – she understood. But she didn’t like Maria, and Maria had not liked her. That was to be the price paid for his happiness and for his reconciliation, his friendship with Maria.
They breakfasted together on the balcony of the apartment, pots of geraniums at their feet. The morning sun had come up, blazing hot. Laura not dressed yet, in her silk wrap with the swansdown collar. He had bought it in Paris. Everything he had bought on their honeymoon evoked the wonders of Paris, September 1946. Of his happiness.
She yawned all the time as she sat there. She had fresh lemonade in front of her, that she had thought she wanted. But after a sip it was untouched.
She said, ‘It’s a miracle you don’t have any work. A wonder we aren’t entertaining some English who don’t know what to do with today.’
‘Is British Council work as bad as all that?’
She said, ‘I don’t know how I’m to get through the day, feeling like this. And then an excursion … What is she called again, this woman we must go and see – this friend from Mother’s girlhood?’
‘Tarantino-Falletta. Contessa. You’d looked forward to it – meeting people more interesting than my colleagues. Exciting people, you said.’
‘When I feel like this? I’m no good before five in the evening.’
‘You could sit in the shade somewhere. I can explain your condition –’
‘She’s English, or half-English, isn’t she? She won’t have patience with suffering like this. I ought to grin and bear it. My governess, I can hear her still … Besides, it’s a private matter for another month or two. Why should I tell?’
‘Can’t think why you married me – when English is such a dirty word.’
‘You’re not English. You may call yourself so when it suits you, but … Why don’t we talk English at home?’
‘I prefer Italian …’
For a fleeting second
, she looked like her mother. ‘I think I’ll save myself for tomorrow,’ she said. But he didn’t at once recall.
‘The Di Benedettos – Virginia, Ruggero. We eat there …’ She fingered her glass. ‘You go and see this Contessa,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if we’d arranged to take Silvi … You go, and I’ll rest. Who knows what I mightn’t be ready for this evening?’ She touched him between his brows, rubbing with her finger: ‘No frowning.’ She opened her mouth to be kissed.
*
Driving out of Palermo to the Tarantino-Falletta villa it was impossible not to see the evidence of war, the relics of war. Bomb sites, craters. He should have been used to it from his days in Naples but perhaps because the war in Europe was three years ended, it seemed to him worse. And yet poverty, homelessness, and that intricate web (intrallazzo, or tangle as they called it) of the black market, a whole economy based on the black market – he knew it from Naples.
Nothing could surprise him after Naples. (Although perhaps England and London especially had surprised him in 1945. So they thought that was a black market? The half-pound of butter up from the country, the daring addition of babies’ issue orange juice to hardly won gin.) And now to live in Sicily. In Palermo. Laura would have liked to live in Paris. When he had joined the British Council, it had been Paris she had hoped for, while dreading perhaps Portugal or Spain. She had never thought of being, relatively, so near home.
If not Paris, then London (it was an affectation, this rudeness about the English). In 1946 she had drunk in everything about the fashionable parts of London. What seemed to him a shabby post-war Park Lane, an austerity Knightsbridge, had had only glamour for her. Making friends with the newly returned Jenny, she’d done the sights. They made an unlikely pair. Jenny with her eagerness and renewed enthusiasm, Laura with her cool manner masking the excitement of a child in a toyshop. Jenny had teased her, saying, ‘Me Colonial, You Wop.’
Paris, although not the place he remembered either from his Grand Tour or his last visit in 1939, had enchanted her – mainly perhaps because it was a honeymoon visit. September 1946. But before that, for the wedding, he had introduced her to a bread-rationed England. Even though the ration was generous and quite sufficient, it had horrified her. Bread was symbolic. ‘You can eat all you want of everything, and certainly of bread, when you get to England,’ he’d told her back in Naples. It had not been quite so. But in Paris, money had bought the oysters, the steaks, the cream cakes, the chocolates she yearned for. She had seemed like a child. Laura in Wonderland. Laura in the Enchanted City, in the autumn sun.
There was a great rush of English to the continent that summer. (‘The sheep who go to Switzerland and the goats who go to France.’) Currency was very limited, but he had been able through friends to make arrangements sufficient for their needs. They had done all the accepted things, walking hand in hand along the Seine, leafing through books on the Left Bank, staying in a little hotel in the Rue St Jacob that he remembered from 1939 and which was miraculously, it seemed, under the same management. They sat through a Cocteau play, Les Parents Terribles – Josette Day expressing passion in black velvet and very high heels – for which Laura’s French was not quite good enough.
And they had made love. He had dreamed of this, from the night of the raid when, dust-covered, they had clung together. Their first night had been in London. Next day they were to take the newly restored Golden Arrow train to Paris. He had joked about a golden arrow, his. She even liked the joke. But the arrow, shot from its bow, had not met its mark. The joking had been easy, the performance not. Simply, he could not penetrate her. His vigorous unsuccessful thrusting frightened him. She took it calmly. ‘I’ve heard of such things,’ she said. ‘It will be all right.’ The second occasion, in Paris this time, it was. With a virgin, he thought, that could be the penalty, the risk perhaps.
But afterwards when they were quiet and content – she smelled as always of frangipani and her own body, cool, delicate – he had thought absurdly and with guilt, of Sheila. Sh sh Sheila (who was over him surely? She had married that summer after a whirlwind courtship, a returned Guards officer – ex-pupil of her schoolmaster father).
Through and successful. A success. It was not difficult to teach Laura … ‘Show me, show me, and I’ll do it.’ Within days she was begging for more. As ready as he was. Back in St-Germaindes-Prés after lobster and Montrachet – Laura in the pink satin nightgown sewn for her by Maria.
Successful, and by the next month, pregnant. Silvi, born nine months after marriage. Black-haired, black-eyed, bewitching. Laura had not wanted to feed her, but otherwise everything had been perfect. She had been taken to Naples at Christmas to be admired.
And now, another. A son. Superstitiously, he felt certain. She had not been so sick last time – now from the beginning, she’d felt wretched.
He had been driving half an hour and was well outside Palermo now. He halted the Lancia and looking at his written instructions, saw that he was almost at the villa. The drive up to it was long. Outside, the large wrought-iron gates were opened for him by a porter who might have passed for at least a Barone himself.
‘My wife sends her excuses …’
The double doors between two of the great rooms had been opened. Luncheon. White-gloved waiters hovered behind his chair. He had not known what to expect of the Contessa. She was small, shrunken almost, with a much-lined face. Dark-haired and possibly wearing a wig. Her dress was pleated silk, her hands gnarled. He judged her to be in her late seventies.
The room they sat in had wall hangings of tapestry from the sixteenth century. The Count was a tiny faded man with wispy white hair and moustache. He had had a stroke four years ago. Now he seemed confused, distrait, ate with difficulty and contributed nothing to the conversation.
The eldest son and heir lived in Rome, where he was in business, Guy learned. He would bring money into the estate if and when he inherited.
Amongst the guests at the table, the only ones anywhere near Guy’s age were a young lawyer, Vincenzo Mendola, and his wife. He was earnest, eager, solidly built – speaking a lot about work he hoped to get. Guy suspected him of having an empty engagement book. His wife watched him all the time, whether he was talking or not. When Guy, sitting next to her, spoke, she appeared distracted. ‘Excuse me, I didn’t catch?’ She was plump and exuded aggression.
Also present were a late-middle-aged couple, General Abbate and wife. He spoke only occasionally, his contributions to the conversation being more in the nature of pronouncements. The whole table stopped talking to listen. These pronouncements, or announcements, had a finality which stopped further comment. He pronounced on the forthcoming elections, the state of the economy, and the vagaries of the telephone system.
The last guest was a Dominican in his early forties. Father Clemente. Heavy-jawed, balding, with a charming smile, he came from Sant’Anselmo, a priory a few miles outside Palermo, founded by the Tarantino-Falletta family in the seventeenth century and owned by them ever since.
They ate small grilled songbirds. Early wild strawberries, eaten with cream, were arranged in small baskets, the handles wreathed in yellow rosebuds.
The conversation circled round Guy – it did not touch on him directly. He was asked a little about his work. At one time the priest asked him about his time in the army. ‘It’s my regret that ’15–’18 saw me only a schoolboy. I saw nothing of fighting in a just war. This last one, quite different of course – but if I could have helped stamp out Fascism … Aid the allies. The cloth, the habit, prevented me … You say you were in Naples?’
Guy was congratulated on his excellent Italian. Hearsay had gone before, that he was adopted of Tuscan parents. He was used to this. (Time enough to decide later whether his children, his son, should know the truth. Whether to make Maria a grandmother before the world.)
General Abbate spoke:
‘Your experience in Naples, those difficult days, they parallel our difficult times. I am not a lover of things
Neapolitan, or indeed of Neapolitans, but some of those same crises – hunger, cold, bombs, homelessness, an ancient city, with problems already, thrown into fresh, unsurmountable confusion – I fear I have seen all this before …’
In the silence which always followed one of his pronouncements, Signor Mendola said, ‘And Rome, of course. Rome too –’ He looked down at the table, his wife’s eyes following him. ‘The Contessa will feel that. Rome is particularly hers, peculiarly hers.’
‘Ah yes, Rome,’ Father Clemente said. ‘Rome and the Contessa.’ Then lightly: ‘Tell us the story of the whipped cream, Contessa.’
‘Oh but that,’ she replied, obviously pleased. ‘A nothing. High spirits only. A party that became a little wild. And the old Baron (what was his name, Swedish, Danish I think) and a party so merry that the Count – this very man you see at the table here –’ she looked over at him as he toyed with his strawberries ‘– it was you, caro, was it not? The Count in the flush of his youth, wanting to show off to his young wife … emptying a whole tureen jug of whipped cream over the Baron’s bald head. The Baron was so delighted by the attention, he asked for coffee to follow. “Why cream without coffee?” he asked with this great crown of yellow foam sitting on his bald head. And soon the coffee joined the cream and poured down on to his moustaches – he was well whiskered besides the bald head. It was quite a horrible sight but we all laughed, at his pride and pleasure as much as anything. “I am quite the star turn tonight,” he said.’
‘Ah then, those were the days of plenty,’ the priest said. ‘Cream to waste, real coffee to waste … Ah me. And the paper chases, Contessa –’
The Golden Lion Page 37
