Two Lives

  The General sipped his tea. There were little biscuits, ricci-arelli, on a plate. Quinty offered them. He mentioned the game of boules, and again the racing of canoes. I made a sign at him, endeavouring to communicate that his playfulness, though harmless, was out of place in an atmosphere of mourning. He took no notice of my gesture.

  ‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’m an armchair observer myself. I never played a ball-game. Cards was as far as I got.’

  Quinty’s smile is a twisted little thing, and he was smiling now. Was he aware that the reference to cards would trigger a memory – the Englishmen, and he himself, playing poker at the corner table of the Café Rose? Impossible to tell.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s a law unto himself,’ I explained as lightly as I could when he had left the room. A tourist had once asked me if Quinty had a screw loose, and for all I knew the General was wondering the same thing, too polite to put it into words. By way of further explanation I might have touched upon Quinty’s unfortunate life, how he had passed himself off as the manager of a meat-extract factory in order to impress an au pair girl. I might have told how he’d been left on the roadside a few kilometres outside the town of Modena, how later he’d turned up in Ombubu. I might even have confessed that I’d once felt so sorry for Quinty I’d taken him into my arms and stroked his head.

  ‘It’s just his way,’ I said instead, and in a moment Quinty returned and asked me if he should pour me a g and t, keeping his voice low, as if some naughtiness were afoot. He didn’t wait for my response but poured the drink as he stood there. Half a child and half a rogue, as I have said before.

  Deep within what seemed like plumage, a mass of creatures darted. Their heads were the heads of human beings, their hands and feet misshapen. There was frenzy in their movement, as though they struggled against the landscape they belonged to, that forest of pale quills and silky foliage.

  For a week I watched with trepidation while the child created this world that was her own. Signora Bardini had bought her crayons when we noticed she’d begun to draw, and then, with colour, everything came startlingly alive. Mouths retched. Eyes stared distractedly. Cats, as thin as razors, scavenged among human entrails; the flesh was plucked from dogs and horses. Birds lay in their own blood; rabbits were devoured by maggots.

  Sometimes the child looked up from her task, and even slightly smiled, as though the unease belonged to her pictures, not to her. Her silence continued.

  In her lifetime Otmar’s mother had made lace. He told me about that, his remaining fingers forever caressing whatever surface there was. His mother had found it a restful occupation, her concentration lost in the intricacies of a pattern. He spoke a lot about his mother. He described a dimly lit house in a German suburb, where the furniture loomed heavily and there was waxen fruit on a sideboard dish. Listening to his awkward voice, I heard as well the clock ticking in the curtained dining-room, the clock itself flanked by two bronze horsemen. Schweinsbrust was served, and good wine of the Rhine. ‘Guten Appetit!’ Otmar’s father exclaimed. How I, at Otmar’s age, would have loved the house and the family he spoke of, apfelstrudel by a winter fireside!

  ‘Madeleine,’ Otmar said, speaking now of the girl who had died in the outrage. I told him she had reminded me of a famous actress, Lilli Palmer, perhaps before his time. I recollected, as I spoke, the scratchy copy of Beware of Pity that had arrived in Ombubu in the 1960s, the film seeming dated and old-fashioned by then.

  ‘Madeleine, too, was Jewish,’ Otmar said, and I realized I’d been wrong to assume the film actress was not known to him.

  They’d been on their way from Orvieto to Milan. Otmar was to continue by train to Germany, Madeleine to fly from Linata Airport to Israel, where her parents were. For weeks they’d talked about that, about whether or not she should seek her father’s permission to marry. If he gave it he might also give them money to help them on their way, even though Otmar was not Jewish himself, which would be a disappointment. ‘When the day comes you wish to marry you must seek his permission,’ her mother had warned Madeleine years ago. ‘Otherwise he will be harsh.’ Her father had left Germany for Jerusalem five years ago, offering his wealth and his business acumen to the land he regarded as his spiritual home. Madeleine had never been there, but when she wrote to say she wished to visit her family her father sent a banker’s draft, its generosity reflecting his pleasure. ‘So we afford the expensive train,’ Otmar explained. ‘Otherwise it would be to hitchhike.’

  I did not say anything. I did not say that surely it would have been more sensible to travel to Rome to catch a plane, since Rome is closer to Orvieto than Milan is. I was reminded of the General revealing to me that he and his daughter and son-in-law had originally intended to travel the day before, and of the businessmen and the fashion woman going to the dining-car. Otmar went on talking, about the girl and the days before the outrage, the waiting for the banker’s draft and its arrival. In August they would have married.

  ‘The kraut hasn’t any money,’ Quinty said in his joky way. ‘He’s having us on.’

  ‘He told me he hadn’t any money. I’ll pay what’s owing.’

  ‘You’re not running a charity, don’t forget.’

  ‘I’m sorry for these people.’

  I might have reminded Quinty that once I’d been sorry for him too. I might have reminded him that I had been sorry for Rosa Crevelli when first she came to my house, ill-nourished and thin as fuse-wire, her fingernails all broken. I’d been sorry for the cat that came wandering in.

  ‘You’ll get your reward in heaven,’ Quinty said.

  That summer I opened my eyes at a quarter past five every morning and wished there were birds to listen to, but the summer was too far advanced. Dawn is bleak without the chittering of birds; and perhaps because of it I began, at that particular time, to wonder again about the perpetrators. No political group had claimed responsibility, and the police were considering a theory that we had possibly been the victims of a lunatic. Naturally I endeavoured to imagine this wretched individual, protected now by a mother who had always believed that one day he would commit an unthinkable crime, or even by a wife who could not turn her back on him. What kind of lunatic, or devil? I wondered. What form of mental sickness, or malignancy, orders the death of strangers on a train? In the early morning I took my pick of murderers – the crazed, the cruel, the embittered, the tormented, the despised, the vengeful. Was it already a joke somewhere that six were dead and four maimed, that a child had been left an orphan, her own self taken from her too? The cuts on my face and body would heal and scarcely leave a scar: I’d been assured of that, and did not doubt it. But in other ways neither I nor any of the others had recovered and I wondered if we ever would. The ceaseless tears of my title mocked me now; still understanding nothing, I felt defeated.

  We were in a nowhere land in my house: there was a sense of waiting without knowing in the least what we were waiting for. Grief, pain, distress, long silences, the still shadows of death, our private nightmares: all that was what we shared without words, without sharing’s consolation. Ghosts you might have called us had you visited my house in Umbria that summer.

  The police came regularly. Two carabinieri remained outside by the police car while the detectives asked their questions and showed us photographs of suspects. Signora Bardini carried out iced tea to the uniformed men. Every day Dr Innocenti spent some time with the child, his presence so quiet in the house that often we didn’t notice he was there. Time, he always said – we must have faith in time.

  In my private room I opened the glass-faced cabinet where my titles are arranged, and displayed for Aimée the pleasantly colourful jackets in the hope that they’d influence the hours she spent with her crayons. Obediently she examined the illustrations and even nodded over them. She opened one or two of the books themselves, and appeared briefly to read what was written. But still she did not speak, and when she returned to her room it was to complete a picture full of horrors even more arrestin
g than the previous ones. ‘The appetite is good,’ Dr Innocenti soothingly pointed out, and appeared to take some heart from that.

  One night there was at least a development. A telephone call came from the American official who had several times visited the hospital in connection with the child’s orphaning. He informed Quinty that a brother of Aimée’s mother had been located in America. This time there was no mistake. Dr Innocenti had already spoken to the man.

  ‘Isn’t that good news?’ I remarked to the General the following morning while we were breakfasting on the terrace.

  ‘News? I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They’ve found Aimée’s uncle.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Riversmith the name is.’

  ‘There was a Riversmith at school.’

  ‘This one’s an American.’

  The General was fond of the child; I had watched him becoming so. But he had difficulty in concentrating on the discovery of an uncle, and with hindsight I can see he didn’t even want to think about this man. The conversation drifted about, edging away from the subject I had raised. He spoke of the Cotswold village near the boarding-school he’d mentioned, the warm brown stones, the little flower gardens. He and his friends could walk to the outskirts of the village, where a woman – a Mrs Patch – would give them tea in her small dining-room, charging sixpence for a table which seated four. Mrs Patch made lettuce sandwiches, and honey sandwiches, and sardine sandwiches; and there were hot currant scones on which the butter melted, and banana cake with chocolate filling, and as much tea as you wanted. It was a tradition, the walk to the village, the small dining-room of the cottage, the sixpenny piece placed on the tablecloth, and Mrs Patch saying she had sons of her own, now grown up. If you paid more – a shilling for a table for four – and if you gave her warning well in advance, Mrs Patch would cook fish.

  These memories of time past were delivered in a tone that did not vary much. Jobson played the organ in the chapel. He played the voluntary while everyone stood in long pews, parallel to the aisle, waiting for the masters to process to their places behind the choir. Handel or Bach would thunder to a climax and then there’d be a fidgeting silence before the headmaster led the way. Sometimes, afterwards, Jobson revealed the errors he had made, but no one had noticed because Jobson was skilful at disguising his errors even as he made them. Jobson and the General had been friends from the moment they met, their first night in the Junior Dormitory.

  Odd, I reflected as I listened, how an old man’s memory operates in distress! Odd, the flotsam that has been caught and surfaces to assist him: the mustiness of Mrs Patch’s dining-room, a prefect’s voice, a mug dipped into a communal pail of milk. Housemasters – six older men – sprawled in splendour in the Chapel, a chin held in a hand, an arm thrown back, black gowns draping their crossed legs. While he spoke, the old man’s gaze remained fixed on the distant hills. Remembered bells had different sounds: the Chapel bell, the School bell, the night-time bell. A conjuror came once and performed with rabbits and with birds. Boys smoked behind a gymnasium. Rules were broken, but no one stole. Owning up was taken for granted, and if you were caught you did not lie. At that school, modestly set in undemanding landscape, he said he’d learned what honour was. Again there was his effort at a smile, more successful now than in the hospital.

  ‘Crewe and McMichael are being a nuisance,’ he confided a little later, and for a moment I imagined the two he spoke of were boys, like Jobson, at the school. In all four of us bewilderment easily became confusion.

  In fact, he referred to solicitors. Crewe and McMichael were his: Johnston Johnson his son-in-law’s. Both firms had written to him. Having offered their commiserations, they turned now to wills and property, to affairs being tidied up, legalities of one kind or another. Soothingly, I said:

  ‘They see it as their duty, I suppose.’

  He nodded, half resigned to that, half questioning such duty. He spoke of the empty house in Hampshire and of his daughter’s effects: he was the inheritor of both. He did not say so but I knew he dreaded going from room to room, opening drawers and cabinets. Pieces of jewellery had been named, to be given to the children of friends. A letter from one of the solicitors stated in a pernickety way that there might well be doubt as to which article was which. There were the son-in-law’s belongings also, his collection of Chinese postage stamps, his photographs. There were the clothes of both of them, and books and records. Articles of a personal nature, the same solicitor had written. We shall in the fullness of time need to take instruction regarding all these matters.

  ‘A friend of your daughter would sort the stuff out, you know.’

  He said he didn’t want to shirk what was expected of him. And yet I knew – for it was there in his face – that his soldier’s courage faltered, probably for the first time in his life. He could not bear to see those clothes again, nor the house in Hampshire where he might now be living with his daughter and the man he hadn’t cared for. How petty that small aversion seemed to him in retrospect! How petty not to have come to terms with a foible! His gaze slipped from the far-off hills; tired eyes, expressionless, were directed toward mine. Had his heart been full of that dislike as he fiddled with his watch in Carrozza 219? Had it nagged at him even while death occurred?

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he whispered, without emotion.

  Tears were repressed, lost somewhere in that sudden exclamation. His grasp on consolation weakened, the Memory Lane of boyhood was useless dust. I reached for his hand, took it in both of mine, and held it. In that moment I would have given him whatever he asked of me.

  ‘No one can help disliking a person.’ I whispered also. ‘Don’t dwell on it.’

  ‘All these years she must have guessed. All these years I hurt her.’

  ‘Your daughter looked far too sensible to be hurt when it wasn’t meant.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand his laugh.’

  I imagined his wife standing up for their son-in-law, saying he wasn’t bad, saying what was important was their daughter’s happiness. How could it possibly matter that a laugh was irritating? ‘Now, you behave yourself: her reprimand was firm, though never coming crossly from her. She managed people well.

  ‘No, it wasn’t meant,’ he said. He slipped his hand away, but I knew he had experienced the comfort I intended. His voice had calmed. He was less huddled; even sitting down, his military bearing had returned.

  ‘I wish they’d just dispose of everything,’ he said with greater spirit.

  ‘Well, perhaps they will.’

  I smiled at him again. He needed an excuse, a cover for what he saw as cowardice. ‘When in distress, pretend, my dear,’ Lady Daysmith pronounces in Precious September, and I pretended now, suggesting that his reluctance to return to England was perhaps because England was so very different from the country it had been in his Cotswold days. Tourists I’d talked to complained of violence in the streets, and derelict cities, and greed. Jack-booted policemen scowled from motorcycles. In television advertisements there was a fashion for coarsely-spoken people, often appearing to be mentally afflicted. The back windows of motor-cars were decorated with snappy obscenities.

  ‘I never noticed.’ His interest was only momentarily held. He rarely watched the television, he confessed.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been assured. Not once but many times. Corner-boys rule the roost in England’s green and pleasant land. The Royals sell cheese for profit.’

  Pursuing the diversion, I threw in that Ernie Chubbs had managed to get the royal warrant on the sanitary-ware he sold, that there’d been a bit of a fuss when it was discovered he was using it without authority. The General nodded, but I knew I’d lost him: in their grey offices the solicitors were already droning at him through pursed solicitors’ lips. He stood forlorn among old books and box-files and sealed documents in out-trays. A lifetime’s bravery oozed finally away to nothing.

  ‘General, you’re welcome to remain here for as long as you feel like it. You’re not alone i
n this, you know.’

  ‘That’s a great kindness, Mrs Delahunty.’ The beaten head was raised; again, blank eyes stared deeply into mine. ‘Thank you so much,’ the General said.

  A conversation with Otmar was similar in a way. In the salotto I had just lit a cigarette when he entered and in his self-effacing way slipped into an armchair by the tall, wide-open french windows. I smiled at him. ‘An uncle of Aimée’s has been found,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that good news at last?’

  ‘Oh, ja.’

  He nodded several times.

  ‘Ja,’ he said again.

  I didn’t press; I didn’t try to draw enthusiasm from him. But the fact was that someone would love Aimée now; and in time Aimée herself would love. I didn’t say to Otmar that there has to be love in a person’s life, that no one can do without either receiving it or giving it. I didn’t say that love, as much as a daughter and a girlfriend, had been taken away. I didn’t say that love expired for me on a Wall of Death. ‘They killed themselves in the end,’ Mrs Trice callously replied when I asked. ‘Stands to reason with a dangerous game like that.’ A thousand times I have mourned the passing of the people who abandoned me, the motor-cycle skittering over the edge, smashing through the inadequate protection of a wooden rail. To this day, the woman’s arm is still triumphantly raised in a salute. A red handkerchief still flies from her mouth, and the machine races on to nowhere.

  ‘Where did you learn your English, Otmar?’ I asked the question when I had poured the boy his coffee. I watched him awkwardly breaking a brioche.

  ‘I learn in school. I was never in England or America.’

  A finger ran back and forth on the edge of the saucer beneath his coffee cup. Once Madeleine had been in England, he said, working in some relation’s business in Bournemouth. ‘Silk scarves. At first she is in the factory, then later in the selling.’