I thought about this after he’d gone. I wondered what kind of a woman this could be, who, for whatever reason, could be so harsh.
‘They got it all wrong again,’ Quinty said on a later occasion. ‘That woman’s the aunt of someone else. The same story with those grandparents.’
I wouldn’t have known any of this if Quinty hadn’t been interested in questioning the carabinieri on the matter. From what I could gather, the policemen did not themselves appear to know what was happening in the search – so far away – for possible relatives or family friends. The hospital authorities were worried because the child would not, or could not, speak.
Apart from the victims of Carrozza 219 no one on the train had been injured, and no one of political importance had been on the train in any case. The old man’s son-in-law had had something to do with a merchant bank apparently; the American father had been a paediatrician. Yet a bomb had been planted, deliberately to take life, ingeniously and callously placed where those who by chance had been allocated certain seats would be killed or maimed.
What would one see, I wondered, in the perpetrators’ eyes? What monstrous nature did such human beings seek to disguise? There’d been crime, often more than petty, on the S.S. Hamburg. Living human embryos had been scraped out of my body and dropped into waste-disposal buckets. Seedy confessions had surfaced in the Café Rose. An ugly guilt had skittered about in the shifty eyes of Ernie Chubbs. Yet no crime could rank with what had happened on the train I’d caught at 11.45 on the morning of 5 May 1987. In search of consolation, I wrote down the few lines I had composed in Carrozza 219, the beginning of the work which had come to me through its title. In the garden the geraniums were in flower. Through scented twilight the girl in the white dress walked with a step as light as a morning cobweb. That evening she hadn’t a care in the world. But I found it difficult to continue and did my best, instead, simply to recover.
The old man and I suffered from shock. I’d had splinters of glass taken from the left side of my face; he from his legs and body. The German boy, called Otmar, had lost an arm. The old man was a general.
‘An irony,’ he murmured in the corridor where he learned to walk again. ‘It was I who’d reached the end of things.’
He made the statement without emotion. I remembered his daughter as a pretty woman in a gentle, English kind of way, quiet and rather slight, a little faded. Aries probably.
‘We are fortunate to be alive, General.’
He turned away his head, half shaking it as he did so. I told him about the child called Aimée, about the search for relatives in America. I hoped to involve him in the pathos of the child’s predicament and perhaps to make him realize that someone else had lost even more than he had. He did his best to respond, later even to smile. With military stoicism he appeared to be resigned to what had occurred, his vocation no doubt demanding that. A sense of melancholy did not come from him, only one of weariness. I left him soldiering on, precisely obeying the nurses’ strictures, marching with the aid of a metal stick, back and forth between his bed and a curtained balcony at the corridor’s end.
‘I’m sorry, Otmar,’ I commiserated, and in a soft whisper, speaking quite good English, the German boy accepted the sympathy: that it was offered because of the loss of his sweetheart or a limb was barely relevant. In the train he had been wearing a red and yellow lumberjack shirt and rather large glasses, which were shattered in the blast. He wore other spectacles now, wire-rimmed, and jeans and a plain grey shirt. His features were sallow, the eyes behind the magnifying lenses still terrified. Unlike the General, he did not attempt to smile. There was a cornered look about Otmar, as if the horror he had woken up to was too much for him.
‘We must hope, Otmar. What there is left to us is hope.’
Every time I returned to my own room, and to the ward when I was a little better, I endeavoured to proceed with my new work, but still I found it difficult to continue. This had never happened before: with reason, I had been confident on the train as soon as the girl appeared in my mind’s vision. Yet now it seemed as though a film had halted within seconds of its commencement. The fluttering of the girl’s dress was frozen, her carefree mood arrested in a random instant. Was there some companion of whom my broken cinematograph held the secret, some figure waiting to step from the garden’s shadows? Would the carefree mood become ecstatic? Would a gardenia nestle in the long fair hair? I did not know. I knew neither what joy nor sorrow there was; my girl was nameless, without detail in her life, vague as to parentage, born beneath a choice of all the stars. The title Ceaseless Tears appeared so naturally to belong to the suffering on the train that greater bewilderment, and blankness, was engendered. I was aware of a sensation that caused me to shiver in dismay, as though all that had been given to me had been snatched away. Then one day Quinty said:
‘They could stay a while in the house, you know.’
A week ago the General had murmured that he would find the return to England difficult, and wished he did not have to face it immediately. ‘The struggle back and forth,’ he said. ‘The bed, the corridor, the holy statue in the wall, the balcony. The faces of the patients, the smell of ether. You feel that’s where you belong.’
Quinty was clearly out to profit from misfortune, but even so I saw nothing to object to in his suggestion. ‘You would find it peaceful,’ I told the old man. ‘My house is high enough to be cool. Sometimes a breeze blows over the water of Lake Trasimeno.’
He nodded, and then he thanked me. When he sought me out two days later I explained that we were used to catering for strangers, that for many years we had taken in passing tourists when the hotels of the neighbourhood were full.
‘I would insist on paying,’ he gently laid down. ‘I told the man I would insist on paying whatever rates you normally charge.’
‘It is he who sees to all that.’
I’d known army officers of lower rank before; never a general. He had the look of one, sparely made, his hair the colour of iron, great firmness about the mouth, a grey moustache. He was a man of presence, but of course he was not young: touching seventy, I guessed.
‘A week or two,’ he agreed with unemphatic graciousness. ‘That would be nice. But are you certain, Mrs Delahunty? I don’t want to be a nuisance at a time like this.’
‘Indeed I’m certain.’
Otmar refused at first. Poor boy, with every day that passed he seemed more wretchedly unhappy and I sensed that, even more than the General, he did not know how to return to the world he was familiar with.
‘You are most good.’ His voice echoed the distortion in his eyes. Often, in speaking to him, I found myself obliged to turn my head away. ‘But it should not be. I have not money to pay this.’
Quinty cannot have known that, and I resolved, if necessary, to pay for Otmar’s stay myself. I said the money didn’t matter. Some time in the future, when everything had calmed for him, he could pay a little. ‘If you would care to, Otmar, the house is there.’
The doctor who looked after the American child was a Dr Innocenti, a small, brown-complexioned man with gold in his teeth. He was the English-speaking one among the doctors and the nurses, and had often acted as interpreter for the specialists who were more directly concerned with the General and Otmar and myself. When he heard that hospitality had been offered in my house he came to see me and to thank me.
‘It will do some good,’ he said. ‘I would prescribe it.’
He wore a pale brown suit and a silk tie, striped red and green. When I said the child also would be welcome in my house he doubtfully shook his head. The carabinieri would have to be consulted, he explained, since the child – being at present without a guardian – was in their charge. ‘In Italy we must always be patient,’ he said. ‘But truly I would wish the little girl removed from the hospital ambience.’
‘Is she recovering, doctor?’
In reply the little shoulders were raised within the well-cut suit. The hands gesticulated, the nu
t-brown head sloped this way and then that.
‘Slowly?’ I prompted.
Too slowly, a contortion of the neat features indicated: it was not easy. At present the prognosis was not good.
‘The child is more than welcome if you believe it would be a help.’
‘So Signor Quinty explain to me. There is nowhere else, you comprehend.’ He spoke gently. His jet-black eyes were as soft as a kitten’s. Piscean, I guessed. ‘I will speak with the officers of the carabinieri. Red tape may be cut, after all. To be surrounded by people whose language she understands will be advantageous for Aimée.’
Later I learnt he’d been successful in persuading the carabinieri to agree to his wishes. They would visit us two or three times a week to satisfy themselves that the child remained safely in our care, and report their satisfaction to the American authorities. Dr Innocenti himself would also visit us regularly; if there were signs of deterioration in the child she would be at once returned to the hospital. But he believed that the clinical surroundings were keeping the tragedy fresh in her mind and preventing her from coming to terms with it.
‘You are generous, signora. I have explained to Signor Quinty the expenses will be paid when the person they seek in America is found. My friends of the carabinieri have reason to believe that this is not a poor family.’
We were all discharged on the same afternoon and the first night in my house we sat around the tiled table on the terrace, the General on my right, Otmar on my other side. The child was already sleeping in her bed.
Rosa Crevelli brought us lasagne, and lamb with rosemary, and the Vino Nobile of Montepulciano, and peaches. A stranger would have been surprised to see us, with our bandages and plaster, the walking wounded at table. I was the only one who had not lost a loved one, having none to lose. As I dwelt upon that, the title that had come to me floated through my consciousness, golden letters on a stark black ground. I saw again a girl in white passing through a garden, and again the image froze.
3
Miss Alzapiedi, our Sunday-school teacher, was excessively tall and lanky, with hair that was a nuisance to her, and other disadvantages too. It was she who gave me the picture of Jesus on a donkey to hang above my bed; it was she who taught me how to pray, pointing out that some people are drawn to prayer, some are not. ‘Pray for love,’ Miss Alzapiedi adjured. ‘Pray for protection.’
So before I ran away from 21 Prince Albert Street I prayed for protection because I knew I’d need it. I prayed for protection when I worked in the public-house dining-room and the shoe shop and on the S.S. Hamburg, and when Ernie Chubbs took me to Idaho, and later when he abandoned me in Ombubu. Even though I was trying to be a sophisticate it didn’t embarrass me to get down on my knees the way Miss Alzapiedi had taught us, even if there was a visitor in the room. To be honest, I don’t get down on my knees any more. I pray standing up now, or sitting, and I don’t whisper either; I do it in my mind.
At the end of my first year in this house I finished Precious September. I wrote it just for fun, to pass the time. When it was complete I put it in a drawer and began another story, which this time I called Flight to Enchantment. Then glancing one day through the belongings of a tourist who was staying here, I came across a romance that seemed no better than my own. I noted the publisher’s address and later wrapped Precious September up and posted it to England. So many months passed without a response that I imagined the parcel had gone astray or that the publisher was no longer in business. Then, when I had given up all hope of ever seeing my manuscript again, it was returned. We have no use for material of this nature, a printed note brusquely declared. I knew of no other publisher, so I continued with Flight to Enchantment and after a month or so dispatched it in the same direction. This elicited a note to the effect that the work would only be returned to me if I forwarded a money order to cover the postage. When that wound had healed I completed another story quite quickly and although it, too, was similarly rejected I did not lose heart. There was, after all, consolation to be found in the tapestries I so very privately stitched. They came out of nothing, literally out of emptiness. Even then I marvelled over that.
We are interested in your novelette. I found it hard to believe that I was reading this simple typewritten statement, that I was not asleep and dreaming. The letter, which was brief, was signed J. A. Makers, and I at once responded, impatient to receive what this Makers called ‘our reader’s suggestions for introducing a little more thrust into the plot’. These arrived within a fortnight, a long page of ideas, all of which I most willingly incorporated. Eventually I received from J. A. Makers an effusively complimentary letter. By now many others among his employees had read the work; all, without exception, were overwhelmed. We foretell a profitable relationship, Mr Makers concluded, foretelling correctly. But when I received, after I’d submitted the next title, a list of ‘our reader’s suggestions’ I tore it up and have never been bothered in that way since. That story was Behold My Heart! Its predecessors, so disdainfully rejected once, were published in rapid succession.
Something of all this, in order to keep a conversation going, I passed on to the General. I knew that conversation was what he needed; otherwise I would have been happy to leave him in peace. I wanted to create a little introduction, as it were, so that I might ask him to tell me about his own life.
‘If you would like to,’ I gently added.
He did not at once reply. His gnarled grey head had fallen low between his shoulders. The Daily Telegraph which Quinty had bought for him was open on his knees. My eye caught gruesome headlines. A baby had been taken from its pram outside a shop and buried in nearby woods. A dentist had taken advantage of his women patients. A bishop was in some other trouble.
‘It sometimes helps to talk a bit.’
‘Eh?’
‘Only if you’d like to.’
Again there was a silence. I imagined him in his heyday, leading his men in battle. I calculated that the Second World War would have been his time. I saw him in the desert, a young fox who was now an old one.
‘You’re on your own, General?’
‘Since my wife died.’
His eyes passed over the unpleasant headlines in the newspaper. There was something about a handful of jam thrown at the prime minister.
‘Things were to change when we returned,’ he said.
I smiled encouragingly. I did not say a word.
‘I was to live with my daughter and her husband in Hampshire.’
He was away then, and I could feel it doing him good. Only one child had been born to him, the daughter he spoke of, that faded prettiness on the train. ‘Don’t go spoiling her,’ his wife had pleaded, and he told me of a day when his daughter, at six or seven, had fallen out of a tree. He’d lifted her himself into the dining-room and covered her with a rug on the sofa. She’d been no weight at all. ‘This is Digby,’ she introduced years later while they stood, all four of them drinking gin and French, beneath that very same tree.
‘I couldn’t like him,’ he confessed, his voice gruff beneath the shame induced by death. I remembered the trio’s politeness on the train, the feeling of constraint, of something hidden. I waited patiently while he rummaged among his thoughts and when he spoke again the gruffness was still there. If the outrage hadn’t occurred he would have continued to keep his own counsel concerning the man his daughter had married: you could tell that easily.
He spoke fondly of his wife. When she died there’d been a feeling of relief because the pain was over for her. Her departure from him was part of his existence now, a fact like an appendix scar. When I looked away, and banished from my mind the spare old body that carried in it somewhere an elusive chip of shrapnel, I saw, in sunshine on a shorn lawn, a medal pinned on a young man’s tunic and a girl’s arms around a soldier’s neck. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes!’ she eagerly agreed when marriage was proposed, her tears of happiness staining the leather of a shoulder strap. You could search for ever for a nicer man, she privat
ely reflected: I guessed that easily also.
‘No, I never liked him and my wife was cross with me for that. She was a better mother than I ever was a father.’
Again the silence. Had he perished in the outrage he would have rated an obituary of reasonable length in the English newspapers. His wife, no doubt, had passed on without a trace of such attention; his daughter and his son-in-law too.
‘I doubted if I could live with him. But I kept that to myself.’
‘A trial run, your holiday? Was that it?’
‘Perhaps so.’
I smiled and did not press him. Jealousy, he supposed it was. More than ever on this holiday he had noticed it – in pensiones and churches and art galleries, permeating every conversation. No children had been born to his daughter, he revealed; his wife had regretted that, he hadn’t himself.
‘Have you finished with the Telegraph, sir?’ Quinty hovered, not wishing to pick up the newspaper from the old man’s knees. Rosa Crevelli set out the contents of a tea-tray.
‘Yes, I’ve finished with it.’
‘Then I’ll take it to the kitchen, sir, if I may. There’s nothing I like better than an hour with the Telegraph in the cool of the evening. When the dinner’s all been and done with, the Telegraph goes down a treat.’
A glass of lemon tea, on a saucer, was placed on a table within the General’s reach. Rosa Crevelli picked up her tray. Quinty still hovered. Nothing could stop him now.
‘I mention it, sir, so that if you require the paper you would know where it is.’
The General acknowledged this. Quinty softly coughed. He inquired:
‘Do you follow the cricket at all, sir?’
The General shook his head. But noticing that Quinty waited expectantly for a verbal response, he courteously added that cricket had never greatly interested him.
‘Myself, I follow all sport, sir. There is no sport I do not take an interest in. Ice-hockey. Baseball. Lacrosse, both men’s and women’s. I have watched the racing of canoes.’