At first there was no response. Then: ‘Who is it that sleeps with a door open?’
‘Otmar. A German victim of the outrage. Also in my house is an English general, similarly a victim.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s strange for all of us.’
That observation was ignored. There was another pause, so long I thought we’d been cut off. But in time the gritty voice went on:
‘The doctor seems anxious that the child should make more progress before I come to take her home.’
‘Aimée is welcome to remain as long as is necessary.’
‘I’m sorry. I did not catch that.’
I repeated what I’d said. Then formally, the tone still not giving an inch, socially or otherwise:
‘Our authorities here have informed yours that I will naturally pay all that is owing. Not only the hospital fees, but also what is owing to yourself.’
This sounded like a speech, as though many people were being addressed. I did not explain that that was Quinty’s department. I did not say anything at all. A woman’s voice murmured in the background, and Mr Riversmith – having first questioned some remark made – asked if I, myself, was quite recovered from the ordeal. The background prompt was repeated; the man obediently commiserated. It had been a dreadful shock for him, he confessed. He’d read about these things, but had never believed that he himself could be brought so close to one. You could hear the effort in every word he spoke, as if he resented having to share a sentiment, as if anything as personal as a telephone conversation – even between strangers – was anathema to him.
‘That is true, Mr Riversmith.’
The solemnity and the seriousness made me jittery. He was a man without a word of small talk. I knew he hadn’t smiled during all this conversation. I could tell that smiling didn’t interest him. Again I reflected that he wasn’t at all like an American.
‘If I may, I’ll call again, Mrs Delahunty. And perhaps we might arrange a date that’s convenient to both of us.’
He left a number in case of any emergency, not asking if I had a pencil handy. He had no children of his own: Dr Innocenti hadn’t told me that, but I guessed it easily.
‘Goodbye, Mr Riversmith.’
I imagined him replacing the receiver in its cradle and turning to the woman who had shadowed the encounter for him. In the lives of such men there is always such a woman, covering their small inadequacies.
‘Not an easy person,’ I remarked later to the General and Otmar – which I considered was a fair observation to make. I repeated as much of the conversation as I could recall, and described Thomas Riversmith’s brusqueness. Neither of them said much by way of response, but I sensed immediately their concern that a man whom it was clearly hard to take to should be charged with the care of a tragically orphaned child. Already all three of us knew that that felt wrong.
The General walked with the assistance of a cane and always would now. But he walked more easily than he had at first. My neck and my left cheek had healed, and what they’d said was right: make-up effortlessly obscured the tiny fissures. By now Otmar could light his own cigarettes, gripping the matchbox between his knees. He had difficulty with meat, and one of us always cut it up for him. He’d have to learn to type again, but cleverly he managed to play patience. ‘Solo?’ Aimée would say when a game had been resolved, and after they’d played a few hands she would arrange the draughts on the draughts-board. There was another game, some German game I didn’t understand, with torn-up pieces of paper.
The old man told her stories, not about his schooldays but concerning the adventures he’d had as a soldier. They sat together in the inner hall, he in a ladder-backed chair, she on one of my peacock-embroidered stools. He murmured through the quiet of an afternoon while the household rested, a faint scent of floor polish on the air. They chose the inner hall because it’s always cool.
As for me, on all those days I stared at the only words I had typed on my green paper since the outrage. I counted them – thirty-six, thirty-eight with the title. Everything that should have followed I was deprived of, and I knew by now that this was the loss I must put beside the greater loss of a girlfriend, and of a daughter, and of a father, a mother and a brother.
The private room set aside for my writing is a brown-shadowed cubicle with heavy curtains that keep both heat and light out, the ornate ivy of its wallpaper simulating a further coolness. Besides the glass-faced cabinet that contains my titles, there is my desk, surfaced in green leather, and a matching chair. Here I sat during those days of June, the cover lifted from my black Olympia, my typing paper mostly blank. I could not glimpse my heroine’s face, nor even find her name. Esmeralda? Deborah? I could not find the barest hint of a relationship or the suggestion, however foggy, of a story. There was still only the swish of a white dress, a single moment before that flimsy ghost was gone again.
‘Apparently, a scholarly gentleman, this Mr Riversmith,’ Quinty remarked one evening after dinner, interrupting my weary efforts by placing a glass of gin and tonic on the desk beside me. ‘I don’t think I ever met a professor before.’
I hadn’t either. I sipped the drink, hoping he’d go away. But Quinty never does what you want him to do.
‘The doctor tells me Mr Riversmith’s never so much as laid an eye on young Aimée. Did he say the same to you? A rift between the late sister and himself?’
I shook my head. Briskly, I thanked him for bringing me the drink. I hadn’t asked him to. One of Quinty’s many assumptions is that in such matters he invariably knows best.
‘What I’m thinking is, how will the wife welcome a kid she’s never so much as laid an eye on either?’
Again I indicated that I did not know. It naturally would not be easy for Mrs Riversmith, I suggested. I didn’t imagine she was expecting it to be.
‘Interesting type of gentleman,’ Quinty remarked. ‘Interesting to meet a guy like that.’
He stood there, still tiresome, fiddling with objects on my desk. They’d never find the culprits now, he said; you could forget all that. As soon as Riversmith came for the child the old man and the German would go. That stood to reason; they couldn’t stay for ever; the whole thing would be over then. ‘You’ll pay the German’s bill, eh?’
‘I said I would.’
He laughed the way he does. ‘You’ll get your reward in heaven,’ he repeated for the umpteenth time in our relationship. A kind of catch-phrase this is with him: he doesn’t believe it. What he knows – though it’s never spoken between us – is that the house will be his and Rosa Crevelli’s when I die. My own reward has nothing to do with anything.
‘Roast in hell, the rest of us,’ he said before he went away.
Mr Riversmith telephoned again; we had a similar conversation. I reported on his niece’s continuing progress, what she had done that day, what she had said. When there was nothing left to say the conversation ended. There was a pause, a cough, the woman’s voice in the background, a dismissive word of farewell.
A few days later he telephoned a third time. He’d had further conversations with Dr Innocenti, he said; he suggested a date – a week hence – for his arrival in my house. There was the usual prickly atmosphere, the same empty pause before he brought himself to say goodbye. I poured myself a drink and walked out to the terrace with it. The awkward conversation echoed; I watched the fireflies twinkling in the gloom. How indeed would that woman react to the advent of a child who was totally strange to her? What was the woman like? With someone less cold, the subject of what it was going to be like for both of them might even have been brought up on the telephone. Thomas Riversmith sounded a lot older than his sister. Capricorn, I’d guessed after our first conversation. You often get an uptight Capricorn.
On the terrace I lit a cigarette. Then, quite without warning, monstrously shattering the peaceful evening, the screaming of the child began, the most awful sound I’ve ever heard.
6
Dr Innocenti came at onc
e. He was calm, and calmly soothed our anxiety. He placed Aimée under temporary sedation, warning us that its effects would not last long. He maintained from the first that there was no need to take her into hospital again, that nothing would be gained. His strength and his tranquillity allowed me to accompany him to the bedside; afterwards he sat with me in the salotto, sipping a glass of mineral water. He wished to be within earshot when Aimée emerged from her sleep, since each time she did so she would find herself deeper in what seemed like a nightmare.
‘You comprehend, signora? Reversal of waking from bad dreams. For this child such dreams begin then.’
Together we returned to the bedside when the screaming started again, but Dr Innocenti did not administer the drug immediately. Aimée sobbed when the screams had exhausted her, and while she threw her head about on the pillow a dreadful shivering seeming to wrench her small body asunder. I begged him to put a stop to it.
‘We understand, Aimée,’ he murmured instead, in unhurried tones. ‘Here are your friends.’
The child ignored the sympathy. Her eyes stared wide, like those of a creature demented. More sedation was given at last.
‘She will sleep till morning now,’ the doctor promised, ‘and then be drowsy for a little time. I will be here before another crisis.’
From the hall he telephoned Thomas Riversmith to inform him of the development. ‘May I urge you to delay your journey, signore?’ I heard him say. ‘Three weeks maybe? Four? Not easy now to calculate.’
It was impossible not to have confidence in Dr Innocenti. All his predictions came naturally about, as if he and nature shared some knowledge. There was compassion in the cut of his features, and even in the way he moved, yet it never hindered him. Pity can be an enemy, I know that well.
His presence in my house that night was a marvel. It affected Otmar and the General: without speaking a word, as though anxious only to be co-operative, they went to their rooms and closed their doors. I alone bade the doctor good-night and watched the little red tail-light of his car creeping away into the darkness, still glowing long after the sound of the engine had died.
‘Very presentable, the doctor,’ Quinty remarked in the hall, even in these wretched circumstances attempting to be jokey or whatever it was he would have called it.
‘Yes, very.’
‘A different kettle of fish from a certain medical party who had better stay nameless, eh?’
He referred to the doctor who’d been a regular in the Café Rose, a man whose weight was said to be twenty-four stone, whose stomach hung hugely out above the band of his trousers, whose chest was like a woman’s. Great sandalled feet shuffled and thumped; like florid blubber, thick lips were loosely open; eyes, piglike, peered. ‘We could make a go of it,’ was the suggestion he once made to me, and I have no doubt that Quinty knew about this. I have no doubt that the offer was later guffawed over at the card-table.
‘I’ll say good-night so,’ Quinty went on. ‘I think it’ll be best for all of us when Uncle comes.’
‘Good-night, Quinty.’
*
I could not sleep. I could not even close my eyes. I tried not to recall the sound of those screams, that stark, high-pitched shrieking that had chilled me to my very bones. Instead I made myself think about the obese doctor whom Quinty had so conveniently dredged up. You’d never have guessed he was a medical man, more like someone who drilled holes in the street. Yet when an elderly farmer sustained a heart attack in an upstairs room at the café he appeared to know what to do, and there was talk of cures among the natives.
In my continued determination not to dwell on the more immediate past I again saw vividly, as I had on my early-morning walk, the hand of Otmar’s girlfriend reaching for the herbs in the supermarket; I saw the General and his well-loved wife. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Beeds on to you,’ Mrs Trice shouted the day she came back early from the laundry. ‘Lay another finger on her and you’ll find yourself in handcuffs.’ The man I’d once taken to be my father blustered and then pleaded, a kind of gibberish coming out of him.
All through that night my mind filled with memories and dreams, a jumble that went on and on, imaginings and reality. ‘Please,’ Madeleine begged, and Otmar moved his belongings into her flat. When she was out at work he drank a great deal of coffee, and smoked, and typed the articles he submitted to newspapers. Madeleine cooked him moussaka and chicken stew, and once they went to Belgium because he’d heard of an incident which he was convinced would make a newspaper story: how a young man had ingeniously taken the place of a Belgian couple’s son after a period of army service.
‘So’s you can’t see up her skirts,’ a boy who had something wrong with him said, but no one believed that that was why Miss Alzapiedi wore long dresses. Miss Alzapiedi didn’t even know about people looking up skirts. ‘If you close your eyes you can feel the love of Jesus,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘Promise me now. Wherever you are, in all your lives, find time to feel the love of Jesus.’ Nobody liked the boy who had something wrong with him. When he grinned inanely you had to avert your gaze. The girls pulled his hair whenever he made his rude noise, if Miss Alzapiedi wasn’t looking.
‘Ah, how d’you do?’ the General greeted his would-be son-in-law beneath the tree I’d heard about. The drinks were on a white table among the deck-chairs, Martini already mixed, with ice and lemon, in a tall glass jug. ‘So very pleased,’ his wife said, and he watched the face of his daughter’s fiancé, the features crinkling in a polite acknowledgement, the lips half open. The intimacy of kissing, he thought, damp and sensual. His stomach heaved; he turned away. ‘So very pleased,’ he heard again.
The aviator who wrote messages in the sky wanted to marry me before the obese doctor did. He had retired from the skywriting business when I knew him, but often he spoke of it in the Café Rose, repeating the message he had a thousand times looped and dotted high above Africa: Drink Bailey’s Beer. A condition of the inner ear had dictated his retirement, but one day he risked his life and flew again. ‘Look, missy!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried excitedly, pulling me out of the café on to the dirt expanse where the trucks parked. ‘Look! Look!’ And there, in the sky, like shaving foam, was my name and an intended compliment. A tiny aircraft, soundless from where we stood, formed the last few letters and then smeared a zigzag flourish. ‘Oh, that is beautiful!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried as we watched. ‘Oh, my, it’s beautiful!’ Fortunately Poor Boy Abraham could not read.
‘He forgot to lock the windows,’ Aimée repeated firmly at the railway station. The Italian woman was angry and almost stamped her foot; the man was smaller than she was, with oiled black hair brushed straight back. ‘More likely he left something turned on,’ Aimée’s brother suggested. ‘Maybe the stove.’ Aimée disagreed, but then the train came in and they had to find their way to Carrozza 219. When the train moved again Aimée gazed out at the fields of sunflowers, at the green vine shoots in orderly rows and the hot little railway stations. She stared at the pale sky, all the blue bleached out of it. Some of the fields were being sprayed with water that gushed from a jet going round and round. In the far distance there were hills with clumps of trees on them. ‘Cypresses,’ her father said as the bell of the restaurant attendant tinkled and the businessmen and the fashion woman rose. The woman would have turned off the stove herself, Aimée whispered, and her brother turned grumpily away from her. ‘Stop that silly arguing,’ their mother reprimanded.
‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Madeleine said when Otmar asked if his friends might come to the flat when she was out. His friends were intense young men, students or unemployed, one of them a girl whom Madeleine was jealous of. When Otmar and Madeleine were in Italy two of them came up while they were sitting in the sun outside a café. They gave Otmar the name of a cheap restaurant, but afterwards he lost the piece of paper he’d written it down on. ‘Look, there’re your friends,’ Madeleine said a few days later, pointing to where they sat at a café table with two other men, but Otmar didn’t wa
nt to join them, although they could have given him the name of the restaurant again.
‘Rum and Coke,’ Ernie Chubbs ordered in the Al Fresco Club, and the Eastern girl brought it quickly, flashy with him as she always was with the customers. They didn’t put any rum in mine although Ernie paid for it. They never did in the Al Fresco, saying a girl could end up anywhere if she didn’t stay sober. ‘Now then, my pretty maid,’ Ernie Chubbs said in our corner. I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know what it looked like because it was shadowy where we sat and I’d only caught a glimpse of it on the street. ‘Often come here, darling?’ he chattily questioned me.
Best White Tits in Africa! the writing said in the sky, but in my dream it was different. Angela Fresu, aged three, it said, as it does in marble at Bologna.
When I awoke next there was a dusky light in the room. I reached out for a cigarette and lit it, and closed my eyes. ‘I shall love you,’ Jason says in For Ever More, ‘till the scent has gone from the flowers and the salt from the seas.’ But Jason and Maggie are different from the people I’d kept company with in the night. You can play around with Jason and Maggie, you can change what you wish to change, you can make them do what they’re told.
I must digress here. To compose a romance it is necessary to have a set of circumstances and within those circumstances a cast of people. As the main protagonists of a cast, you have, for instance, Jason and Maggie and Maggie’s self-centred sister, and Jason’s well-to-do Uncle Cedric. The circumstances are that Jason and Maggie want to start a riding stables, but they have very little money. Maggie’s sister wants Jason for herself, and Jason’s Uncle Cedric will allow the pair a handsome income if Jason agrees to go into the family business, manufacturing girder-rivets. You must also supply places of interest – in this instance the old mill that would make an ideal stables, the little hills over which horses can be exercised, and far away – darkly unprepossessing – the family foundry. You need dramatic incident: the discovery of the machinations of Maggie’s sister, the angry family quarrel when Jason refuses to toe his Uncle Cedric’s line. None of it’s any good if the people aren’t real to you as you compose.