‘Did you ever read that story of mine, Quinty? Little Bonny Maye? I was surprised to hear myself asking Quinty that. It wasn’t our usual kind of conversation. He said:
‘It’s great you have your stories.’
‘I thought about them in the Café Rose.’
‘You told me that.’
‘I don’t remember telling you.’
‘You had a drink or two in, the time you told me.’
The three words of the title were blue on the amber of the book-jacket, the two girls illustrated below. I must have said so because Quinty nodded. Soon afterwards he went away. He might even have guessed I had begun to hear the girls’ voices.
‘Dear, there is an “h” in “house”, you know.’ Dorothy could bring out Bonny’s blushes, hardly making an effort. When they went on holiday together, while Bonny fetched and carried for the older girl, Dorothy drew up a list of words that Bonny should take special care with. ‘Our fork belongs on our plate, not in the air. I had a nanny who said that.’
When I dozed, the pain in my face sometimes dulled to a tightness and for the first time, probably, I tried to smile. The two girls were on holiday in Menton, and when Blane came into their lives he naturally took Dorothy out, leaving poor Bonny to mooch about on her own, since it wouldn’t have been right for her to tag along. ‘Of course I don’t mind. Of course not.’ She tried to keep her spirits up by eating ice-cream or going to look at the yachts.
I was aware of making no effort whatsoever. I controlled nothing. Faces and words and voices flowed over me. ‘Such an unhappy thing!’ Blane exclaimed. ‘Such rotten luck!’ Dorothy had developed appendicitis. An ambulance had come. ‘You need a cognac,’ Blane insisted. ‘Or a Cointreau. No, Bonny, I absolutely insist. Poor girl, how wretched for you too!’ Dorothy’s holiday was a write-off. Every morning Blane called for Bonny in his Peugeot and drove her to the bedside of her friend, who usually had made a list of things she wanted. Afterwards Blane and Bonny lunched together in the Petit Es-cargot.
Three months ago Blane had inherited Mara Hall, a great house in its own park in Shropshire. But as soon as he had done so he left England, being fearful of the house even though he loved it.
‘My mother died when I was one and a half. There was always just my father and myself.’
‘No brothers or sisters, Blane?’
‘No brothers or sisters.’
Bonny thought how lonely that must have been: a boy growing up in a great house with only his father and the servants for company. His father was severe, expecting a lot of his heir.
‘I’m a coward, I dare say. I’d give the world to take everything in my stride. I’m running away. I know that, Bonny.’
‘Was your father – ’
‘My father did things perfectly. He was a strong man. He married the woman he loved and never looked at another. The servants and his tenants adored him.’
There was a head gardener at Mara Hall, and several under-gardeners. There was a butler and a cook and old retainers in the way of maids, all of whom had been there as long as Blane could remember. Once there’d been footmen, but that was ages ago.
Mara Hall was more vivid than the shadows of nurses whose speech I did not understand, and the odour of an-aesthetic: the lawns and the tea roses, the mellow brick of the house itself and of the kitchen-garden walls, the old ornamental ironwork. I felt as Bonny felt – overawed with wonder. Bonny had not been abandoned in a bleak seaside town by a couple who rode a Wall of Death; but something like it was in Bonny’s past, even if it did not come out in the story. I felt that strongly now; I never had before.
‘It sounds so lovely, Blane. Your home.’
‘Yes, it’s lovely.’
They walked in the evenings on the promenade. He would marry Dorothy, Bonny thought, and take her to Mara Hall. Dorothy was capable as well as beautiful. Dorothy would gently lead him back to his responsibilities. He would become as strong as his father; he would do things as perfectly.
‘Dear Bonny,’ he said, in a tone that made her hold her breath. She could not speak. The sea was a sheet of glass, reflecting the tranquil azure of the sky. ‘Dear Bonny,’ he said again.
The doctors who attended me conferred. One spoke in English, smiling, telling me I had made progress, saying they were pleased.
‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ I replied.
‘You have been courageous, signora,’ the same doctor said. ‘And patient, signora.’
They passed on, both nodding a satisfied farewell at me. Blane took the modest creature’s arm; she trembled at the touch because no man had ever taken Bonny Maye’s arm before. No man had ever called her dear. She’d never known a heart’s companion.
‘Much better,’ Dorothy said, but it was their last day in Menton. She’d left her dark glasses on her bedside table and Bonny went to fetch them. Blane drove her to Bordighera and Bonny miserably ate an ice-cream on the front. She wrote the postcards she should have written before, to the other girls in Toupe’s Better Value Store. She’d be back before they received them.
Once only the story was interrupted by the ravenous features of Ernie Chubbs, his eyes seeking mine from the shadows of the Al Fresco Club, his fingers undoing my zips in the motel room. There was an old mangle in the motel room, and a tin bath in which kindling was kept. I knew all that was wrong. ‘It wouldn’t do to tell,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Good girls don’t tell, Emily.’ That was wrong also. It wasn’t Ernie who’d ever said good girls don’t tell, and Ernie Chubbs hadn’t been ravenous in that particular way.
The chill fag-end of a nightmare, darkly colourless, something like a rat in a drawing-room, went as quickly as it had arrived, crushed out of existence by a warmer potency. ‘Well, really!’ Dorothy was a little cross when they returned from Bordighera. She lay down to rest and complained that the bedroom was too hot and then, when the window was opened, that the draught was uncomfortable. She wanted Vichy water but they brought her Evian. Impatiently she stubbed out a cigarette she had not yet placed between her lips.
‘Bonny,’ he said, leaning on the open door of the little Peugeot. ‘Oh, Bonny, if I could only make you happy!’
He is the kindest person I have ever known, she thought. He knows I love him; he knows I have been unable to help myself. This is kindness now, to speak of my happiness when it is his and Dorothy’s that is at stake. They have had a little tiff this afternoon, but soon they will make it up. Tonight he will ask Dorothy to marry him, and after tomorrow I shall never in my life see either of them again. Dorothy’ll be too busy and too full of happiness ever to return to the table-tennis club. There’ll be the wedding preparations and then the honeymoon and then the return to Mara Hall.
‘Look, Bonny,’ he said, and in the sunlight sapphires sparkled. He had snapped open a little box; the slender band of gold that held the jewels lay on a tiny cushion. ‘I bought it for her,’ he said, ‘three days after we met.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ The words choked out of her. Tears misted her vision. She tried to smile but could not.
‘I have to tell you that, Bonny. I have to tell you I bought it for Dorothy.’
She nodded bleakly.
‘I might have offered it to Dorothy this afternoon. I could not, Bonny.’
Again she nodded, not understanding, trying to pretend she did.
‘I can only love you, Bonny. I know that, if I know nothing else in this world.’
‘Me? Me?’
‘Yes. Oh yes, my dear.’
His face was smiling down at her bewilderment. His lips were parted. She heard herself saying she was nothing much, while knowing she should not say that. She heard him laugh.
‘Oh, but of course you are, my dear. You are everything in this world to me. Darling, you are the sun and the stars, you are the scent of summer jasmine. Can you understand that?’
She flushed and looked away, thinking of Dorothy and feeling treacherous, and more confused than ever. She wanted to laugh and cry all at on
ce.
‘Darling Bonny, you have the lips of an angel.’
His own touched the lips he spoke of. The gentle pressure was like fire between them.
‘Oh Blane, Blane,’ she murmured.
‘Say nothing, darling,’ he whispered back, and in some secret moment the sapphire ring found her engagement finger.
I would like to have married and had children. But Ernie Chubbs, swearing to me that he took precautions, never did so. In my association with him I had no fewer than four abortions, the last of them in Idaho. I would not have children now, they told me then. ‘Sorry, girlie,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Fancy a chilli con carne sent up?’
Crimson spread on denim. A hand that was crimson also bounced back from the ceiling, dangled for an instant in the air, fingers splayed. A screeching of terror was different from the screams of pain. Even while it was happening you could hear the difference.
‘Twenty pound,’ Mrs Trice said. ‘That’s what he give. He likes a child, Mr Trice does. He got the dog for nothing.’ Rough type of people she said, to profit from a baby. ‘You bloody give it back,’ I said to him, ‘but they was gone by then. Fifty they ask, twenty he give.’ Rum and Coca-Cola, Ernie asked for in the Al Fresco, a fiver a time. ‘Easy money,’ Mrs Trice said, lifting a slice of Dundee to her lips. ‘Travelling people’s always after easy money.’
‘Lightning,’ I said myself. ‘The train was struck by lightning.’
The strength of the drugs was daily reduced; tranquillity receded little by little. At 21 Prince Albert Street I stirred milk in a saucepan, and Mrs Trice was furious because the milk burnt and milk cannot burn, apparently, while it is stirred. It was in the back-yard shed at 21 Prince Albert Street that the mangle was, and the kindling in the bath. It was in the back-yard shed that the man I took to be my father wept and said we mustn’t tell, that good girls didn’t. It was his face that was ravenous, not Ernie Chubbs’s. Ernie loved me was what I thought.
Mr Trice possessed a smooth-haired fox terrier, a black and white dog of inordinate stupidity. With the chopping of kindling, washing up, and frying the breakfast, a task when I was nine was to exercise this animal, which refused to leave the confined space of the Trices’ back-yard of its own accord. It would amble reluctantly behind me down Prince Albert Street and on the damp sand of the seashore. Seagulls would sniff it when I sat with my back against a breakwater and it stood obediently on the sand. They sometimes even poked at it with their beaks, but the dog displayed signs neither of alarm nor pleasure, seeming almost to be unaware of the seagulls’ attention. When other dogs ran snarling up to it Mr Trice’s pet stolidly sat there, unimpressed also by this display of hostility. If actually attacked, it would cringe unemotionally, tightly pressed to the ground, eyes closed, hackles undisturbed. ‘A gentle creature,’ Mr Trice would say if he had chosen to accompany me, which now and again, to my dismay, he did. We would walk by the edge of the sea and Mr Trice would attempt to entice his pet towards the grey waves. But it always stubbornly resisted the temptation of the stones that were thrown and the whistles of encouragement that emanated from Mr Trice. ‘It’s a sign of intelligence,’ he would remark in defeat. ‘There’s many a dog doesn’t spot cold water before he’s in it.’ Mr Trice and I sat down by the breakwater and he always glanced over his shoulder before he put his arm around me to cuddle me. ‘Tell your Daddy you love him,’ he would urge, and I did as I was bidden, thinking it would be unobliging not to. Mr Trice would glance about him again. He would hold my hand and kiss the side of my forehead while the dog stood beside us, not seeming to know it would be restful to sit down also. The cuddles and the kisses were all Mr Trice ever went in for on the seashore. In the back-yard shed he took me on to his knee, and in the darkness of the Gaiety Cinema he kept a hand on my leg for all the time we were there, all the way through Destry Rides Again and Stagecoach War. It wasn’t until later, when I was eleven, that Mr Trice took me into the bedroom when Mrs Trice was out at the laundry where she worked. He gave me a penny and I promised. People got the wrong end of the stick, he said.
Lying in that Italian hospital, I had no wish to dwell upon the uglier parts of my life yet could not prevent myself from doing so. In my fifty-sixth year, I had my beautiful house, and as I lay there that was where I endeavoured to see myself. But again my thoughts betrayed me. Wholly against my will, I was snagged in another kind of ugliness, keeping company with the tourists who over the years had gathered at my table. The mother and the nervous son, the homosexuals with Aids, the ménage à trois and all the others: so many tell-tale signs there were, in gesture or intonation. Long ago the mother had instilled fear in her son in order to keep him by her. The younger of the homosexuals had been unfaithful but was forgiven; both soon would die. The women who shared a lover had each settled for second best. In my dining-room or on the terrace Rosa Crevelli filled the tourists’ wineglasses and offered them fruit or dolce. Wearily I rose from my table, drained by such human tragedy.
How joyfully then, how warmly, I kept company with pert Polly Darling or Annette St Claire! From pretty lips, or lips a little moist, poured whispers and murmurs and cries of simple delight. Dark hair framed another oval face, eyes were as blue as early-summer cornflowers. Often it was half-past three or four before I replaced the cover of my black Olympia. New light streaked the sky when I smoked, on the terrace, the last of the night’s cigarettes. A lovely tiredness cried out for sleep.
They dabbed at my forehead. They bound the blood-pressure thing around my arm. They stuck in a thermometer. Their tweezers pulled out stitches.
‘No harm in secrets,’ Mr Trice said. ‘No harm, eh?’
‘No.’
After the third time he’d given me a penny I put the chair against my bedroom door, but it didn’t do any good. So on the day before my sixteenth birthday I packed a brown cardboard suitcase, and left five shillings in its place because the suitcase was Mrs Trice’s and we’d been taught not to take things at Sunday school.
‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the woman in the public house said. ‘Have you served at table before?’
I never had, so they put me in the kitchen first, washing up the dishes. ‘Gawky,’ the woman said. ‘God, you’re a gawky girl.’ My hair was frizzy, I couldn’t keep my weight down, my clothes were bought in second-hand places mostly. Yet not much time went by before other men besides Mr Trice desired me and gave me presents.
*
‘A timed device,’ Quinty said.
‘I thought it was lightning.’
‘It was a timed device.’
‘Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?’
‘It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.’
‘Is that why the police came?’
‘That would be it.’
Early on in my hospital sojourn the carabinieri had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts. Their dark blue uniforms trimmed with red and white, revolvers in black holsters, the grizzled head of one of them: all this remained with me after they had left my bedside, slipping in and out of my crowded fantasies. If conversation took place I do not recall it.
Later, in ordinary suits, detectives came with an interpreter. There were several visits, but soon it became clear from the detectives’ demeanour they did not consider it likely that I, in particular, had been the target of the outrage, though they listened intently to their interpreter’s rendering of my replies. A hundred times, it seems like now, they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual, either as I stepped on to the train or after I occupied my seat. Repeatedly I shook my head. I could recall no one skulking, no sudden turning away of a head, no hiding of a face. Each time, the detectives were patient and polite.
‘Buongiorno, signora. Grazie.’
‘Good day, lady,’ the interpreter each time translated. ‘Thank you.’
Carrozza 219 our carriage had been. I remembered the number on the ticket. Seat 11. In my mind’s v
ision the faces of the people who’d been near me lingered: the American family, the lovers, the couple and their elderly relative. The fashion lady and the businessmen in lightweight suits had gone to lunch.
‘They are here,’ Quinty said, and glanced at me, and added: ‘Some of them.’
Of the three English people, only the old man was alive. Of the German couple, only the boy. In the hospital they called the little American girl Aimée: the family passport had been found. She was the sole survivor of that family, and there was difficulty in locating someone in America to take responsibility. It even seemed, so Quinty said at first, that such a person did not exist. The information that filtered through the carabinieri and the hospital staff appeared to indicate that there were grandparents somewhere, later that there was an aunt. Then we learnt that the child’s grandfather suffered a heart condition and could not be told of the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild; the grandmother could not be told because she would not be able to hide her grief from him. Lying there, I approved of that: it was right that these people should be left in peace; it was only humane that elderly people should be permitted to drift out of life without this final nightmare to torment them.
‘They’re having difficulty in tracking down the aunt they’re after,’ Quinty reported. ‘It seems she’s travelling herself.’
She was in Germany or England, it was said, but the next day Quinty contradicted that. It was someone else who was travelling, a friend of the family who’d been assumed to be this relation. The aunt had been located.
‘Unfortunately she can’t look after a child.’
‘Why not, Quinty?’
‘It isn’t said why not. Maybe she’s delicate. Maybe she has work that keeps her on the go all over the place.’