As I listened, I knew that I had never before heard my mother say anything as silly. Every evening after the day of our excursion to Triora Monsieur Paillez had stepped out of his taxi in front of the hotel and had joined us on the terrace. On none of these occasions had he carried a parcel, let alone handed one to my mother. In Triora I could not recollect her pausing even once by a shop window that contained men’s clothes.
‘Yes, all right,’ I said.
That was the moment my childhood ended. It is the most devious irony that Dr Edlund’s bluff assurances – certainly not believed by him – anticipated the circumstance that allows me now to look back to those summers in San Pietro al Mare, and to that summer in particular. It is, of course, the same circumstance that allows me to remember the rest of each year in Linvik. I did not know in my childhood that my mother and father had ceased to love one another. I did not know that it was my delicate constitution that kept them tied to one another; a child who had not long to live should not, in fairness, have to tolerate a family’s disruption as well as everything else.
At the Villa Parco, when we returned the following summer, Monsieur Paillez was already there, visiting his mad Italian wife. The very first night he shared our table, and after that we did everything together. Signora Binelli and her daughter were not at the hotel that year. (Nor were they again at the Villa Parco when we were. My mother and Monsieur Paillez were relieved about that, I think, although they often mentioned Signora Binelli and her daughter and seemed amused by the memory of them.)
‘We had snow in Lille as early as October,’ Monsieur Paillez said, and so the conversation was on this night, and on other nights – conducted in such a manner because my presence demanded it. Later my mother did not say that we should avoid mentioning Monsieur Paillez when we returned to Linvik. She knew it was not necessary to go through another palaver of silliness.
When I was sixteen and seventeen we still returned to San Pietro. What had begun for my mother as a duty, taking her weakling child down through Europe to the sun, became the very breath of her life. Long after it was necessary to do so we continued to make the journey, our roles reversed, I now being the one inspired by compassion. The mad wife of Monsieur Paillez, once visited in compassion, died; but Monsieur Paillez did not cease to return to the Villa Parco. In the dining-room I sometimes observed the waiters repeating what there was to repeat to younger waiters, newly arrived at the hotel. As I grew older, my mother and I no longer had adjoining rooms.
In Linvik my father had other women. After my childhood ended I noticed that sometimes in the evenings he was drunk. It won’t be long, he and my mother must have so often thought, but they were steadfast in their honourable resolve.
Slow years of wondering washed the magic from my childhood recollections and left them ordinary, like pallid photographs that gracelessly record the facts. Yet what a memory it was for a while, his hand reaching across the tablecloth, the candlelight on her hair. What a memory the smoke trees were, and Signora Binelli, and Claudia, and the sea as blue as the sky! My father was a great horseman, my mother the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. ‘Ti diverti?’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice was hardly raised as he swam by: how pleased I was that he had chosen to address me!
In my borrowed time I take from an ebony box my smudged attempts to draw the smoke trees of San Pietro and reflect that my talent did not amount to much. Silly, it seems now, to have tried so hard to capture the elusive character of that extraordinary foliage.
Virgins
Like a wasp, Laura says to herself, as she invariably does in the cathedral of Siena, with its violent argument of stripes. An uneasy place, her husband had been remarking only the other night, informing some other tourists in the Palazzo Ravizza.
In several languages, guides draw attention to the pulpit and Pastorino’s Last Supper. Wilting Americans rest on chairs, Germans work their cameras. An old Italian woman lights a candle, children chatter and are silenced. With dark glasses dangling from her fingers, Laura makes her way through the cathedral crowds, having quickly verified that Francesco Piccolomini became Pius III. She knew she’d been right; her husband had said it was Pius II Her husband is often wrong, about all sorts of things.
‘Laura? Is it Laura?’
She stares at the round face, flushed from the August heat. Hair, once coppery red, Laura guesses, is peppered now with grey; a dress is less elegantly striped than the architecture, in lettuce-green and blue. Laura smiles, but shakes her head. She passes her glance down the tired dress, to legs on which mosquitoes have feasted, to sandals whose shade of blue once matched the blue of the cotton above. She smiles again, knowing she knows this woman of fifty or so.
‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ the woman says, and immediately Laura remembers because the voice is as it has always been. Polite to say she hasn’t changed a bit; politely she lies herself.
‘Nor you, now that I look, Margaretta.’
But her tone is nervous, and her confidence melts as they stand among the tourists and the angry stripes. How odd to meet here, she says, knowing it is not odd at all, since everyone’s a tourist nowadays. She wishes they had not met like this; why could not Margaretta just have seen her and let her pass by?
‘It’s lovely to see you,’Margaretta says.
They continue to look at one another, and simultaneously, in their different moods, their distant friendship possesses them. Two marriages and their children are irrelevant.
The Heaslips’ house was in a straggling grassy square, dusty in summer. A brass plate announced the profession of Dr Heaslip; the oak-grained hall door was heavy and impressive, with brass that matched in weight and tone the nameplate. Near by, the Bank of Ireland was ivy-covered, less gaunt because of it than the Heaslips’ grey stone façade. Other houses, each detached from its neighbour, were of grey stone also, or colourwashed in pink or cream or white. In the approximate centre of an extensive area of shorn grass, green railings protected an empty pedestal, which Queen Victoria in her day had dominated. A cinema – the De Luxe Picture House, as antique as its title – occupied a corner created by the edge of the square and the town’s main street. Hogan’s Hotel filled the corner opposite.
One day in June, during the Second World War, a day when the brass plate shimmered in warm sunshine, a day Laura for all her life did not forget, Mrs Heaslip said in the drawing-room of the house:
‘Laura, this is Margaretta.’
Laura held out her hand, as she had been taught, but Margaretta giggled, finding it amusing that two small girls should be so formal.
‘Margaretta! Really, what will Laura think? Now, do at once apologize.’
‘We’re all like that in Ireland,’ Margaretta pronounced instead. ‘Bog-trotters, y’know.’
‘Indeed we’re not,’ protested Mrs Heaslip, a thin, tall woman in a flowery dress. With some panache she wore as well a straw hat with a faded purple ribbon on it. The skin of her face, and of her arms and legs, was deeply brown, as if she spent the greater part of her time outside. ‘Indeed, indeed, we’re not,’ she repeated, most emphatically. ‘And do not say “y’know”, Margaretta.’
They were nine, the girls, in 1941. Laura had been sent from England because of the war, called in Ireland ‘the emergency’: there was more nourishment to be had in Ireland, and a feeling of safety in an Irish provincial town. Years before Laura had been born, her mother, living in Ireland then, had been at a boarding-school in Bray with Mrs Heaslip. ‘I think you’ll like it in Ireland,’ her mother had promised. ‘If I didn’t have this wretched job I’d come with you like a shot.’ They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a village called Anstey Rye. In December 1939, when the war had scarcely begun, Laura’s father had been killed, the Spitfire he’d been piloting shot down over the sea. Her mother worked in the Anstey Rye clothes shop, where she was responsible for the accounts, for correspondence with wholesalers and for considerable formalities connected with clothing coupons. It was all very different f
rom Ireland.
‘That’s what’s called a monkey puzzle, y’know,’ Margaretta said in the garden, and Laura quietly replied that she knew a monkey puzzle when she saw one.
Unlike Mrs Heaslip, Margaretta wasn’t thin. Nor was she brown. She was pretty in a sleepy, careless kind of way: her eyes were sleepily blue, her cheeks carelessly dimpled, her red jumble of hair the most beautiful Laura had ever seen. Margaretta would be astonishing when she grew up –what, Laura imagined, looking at her on that first afternoon, Helen of Troy must have been like. She felt jealous of the promise that seemed to be in every movement of Margaretta’s body, in every footstep that she took as she led the way through the garden and the house.
‘I am to show you everything,’ Margaretta said. ‘Would you be enormously bored to see the town?’
‘No, no, of course not. Thank you, Margaretta.’
‘It isn’t much, I’ll tell you that.’
The girls walked slowly through the wide main street, Margaretta drawing attention to the shops. All of them were cluttered, Laura noticed, except one, connected with a bakery, which seemed to sell, not bread, but only flour and sugar. They passed Martell’s Café, Jas. Ryan’s drapery and Medical Hall, Clancy’s grocery, which Margaretta said was a public house as well as a grocer’s, the Home and Colonial, a hardware shop and a shoe shop, other public houses. They paused by a window full of exercise-books and bottles of Stephens’ ink, which Margaretta said was her favourite shop of all. The window was strewn with packets of nibs and pencils, packets of rubber bands, rulers, pencil-sharpeners, and Waterman fountain pens in different marbled colours. There was an advertisement for Mellifont Books, and some of the books themselves, with garish paper covers: Angela and the Pixies in the Children’s Series, Murder from Beyond in Crime and Detection. The shop, Margaretta said, was called Coffey’s although the name over the door was T. MacCarthy. She liked it because it smelt so pleasantly of paper. Clancy’s smelt of whiskey and sawdust, the butcher’s of offal.
‘How’re you, Margaretta?’ Mr Hearne greeted her from his doorway, a heavy man in a blood-stained apron.
‘Laura’s come from England,’ Margaretta said by way of reply.
‘How’re you, Laura?’ Mr Hearne said.
In the weeks and months that followed, Laura came to know Mr Hearne well, for she and Margaretta did all the shopping for the household. ‘Meat and women,’ the butcher had a way of saying, ‘won’t take squeezing.’ He used to ask riddles, of which he did not know the answers. His wife, Mrs Heaslip said, was frequently pregnant.
The sweetshops of the town became familiar to Laura also, Murphy’s, O’Connor’s, Eldon’s, Morrissey’s, Mrs Finney’s. Different brands of icecream were sold: H.B., Lucan, Melville, and Eldon’s own make, cheaper and yellower than the others. Murphy’s sold fruit as well as confectionery, and was the smartest of the sweetshops. Margaretta said it smelt the nicest, a mixture of vanilla and grapes. They all sold scarlet money-balls, in which, if you were lucky, you got your money back, a brand-new ha’penny wrapped in a piece of paper. They all sold boxes of Urney chocolates, and liquorice pipes and strips, and Lemon’s Nut-Milk Toffees and Rainbow Toffees. In their windows, boxes of Willwood’s Dolly Mixtures were laid out, and slabs of Mickey Mouse Toffee, and jelly babies. Best value of all was the yellow lemonade powder, which Margaretta and Laura never waited to make lemonade with but ate on the street.
That first summer in Ireland was full of such novelty, but most fascinating of all was the Heaslip family itself. Dr Heaslip related solemn jokes in an unhurried voice, and his equally unhurried smile came to your rescue when you were flustered and didn’t know whether it was a joke or not. Mrs Heaslip read in the garden – books that had their covers protected with brown paper, borrowed from the library the nuns ran. Margaretta’s two younger brothers, six and five, were looked after by Francie, a crosseyed girl of nineteen who came every day to the house. Eileen and Katie between them did the cooking and cleaning, Katie for ever up and down the basement stairs, answering the hall door to Dr Heaslip’s patients. Eileen was quite old – Margaretta said sixty, but Mrs Heaslip, overhearing that, altered the estimation to forty-five – and made brown bread that Laura thought delicious. Katie was keeping company with Wiry Bohan from the hardware’s. Margaretta said she’d seen them kissing.
Dr Heaslip’s motor-car, unlike the others in the town, which for the most part were laid up because of the emergency, was driven every day out of the garage at the back by a man called Mattie Devlin. He parked it in front of the house so that Dr Heaslip could hasten to it and journey out into the country to attend a childbirth or to do his best when there’d been an accident on a farm. ‘Ah, well, we’ll do our best’ was a much-employed expression of his, issued in a tone of voice that did not hold out much hope of success though in fact, as Laura learnt, he often saved a life. ‘She’s out there ready, Doctor,’ Mattie Devlin every morning shouted up through the house at breakfast-time. He then began his day’s work in the garden, where, to Mrs Heaslip’s displeasure, he refused to grow peas, broad beans or spinach, claiming that the soil was unsuitable for them. He grew instead a great number of turnips, both swedes and white, potatoes, and a form of kale which nobody in the family liked. He was a man in a striped brown suit who wore both belt and braces and tucked the ends of his trousers into his socks when he worked in the garden. He never took off either his jacket or his hat.
Sometimes when Dr Heaslip was summoned on a call that involved a journey in his car he would invite the girls to accompany him, but he was insistent that they should make themselves as inconspicuous as possible on the back seat in case their presence should be regarded as a misuse of his petrol allowance. When they arrived at whatever house it was that required his skill he relaxed this severity and permitted them to emerge. ‘Go and look at the chickens and cows,’ he’d urge. ‘Show Laura what a chicken is, Margaretta.’ If the day was fine and the farmhouse not too far from the town, they’d ask if they might walk home. Later he would pass them on the road and would blow his horn, slowing down to give them a lift if they wanted one. But they usually walked on and no one particularly minded when they were late for whatever meal it was. Their plates of meat and vegetables would be taken from the oven and they’d eat at the kitchen table, gravy dried away to nothing, mashed potatoes brown. Or tea, at teatime, would have gone black almost, keeping hot on the range.
Headstrong and impetuous, Dr Heaslip described his daughter as. ‘Not like yourself, Laura. You’re the wise virgin of the two.’ He repeated this comparison often, asking Mrs Heaslip and sometimes Katie or Eileen, even Mattie Devlin, if they agreed. Margaretta ignored it, Laura politely smiled. Nothing much upset the Heaslip household and nothing hurried it. Mrs Heaslip’s only complaints were the manner in which her daughter spoke and Mattie Devlin’s ways with vegetables.
‘The Rains Came,’ Margaretta said. ‘All about India, y’know.’
They went to it, as they did to all the films at the De Luxe Picture House, which hadn’t yet acquired Western Electric Sound, so that the voices were sometimes difficult to hear. Dr Heaslip and Mrs Heaslip attended the De Luxe almost as regularly as Margaretta and Laura, who went three times a week, every time there was a change of programme. At breakfast the next day the girls reported on what they’d seen; Dr and Mrs Heaslip then made up their minds. Mr Deeds Goes to Town had for years been Mrs Heaslip’s favourite and The House of Rothschild her husband’s. Margaretta thought The House of Rothschild the most enormously boring picture she’d ever seen in her life, worse even than The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For her, and for Laura, the highlights of that first summer were Fast and Loose, Dodge City, His Butler’s Sister and Naughty Marietta; and best of all, they easily agreed, was The Rains Came. On Saturdays there was a serial called Flaming Frontiers, and there were travelogues and the news, and shorts with Charlie Chase or Leon Errol. ‘Don’t you love the smell of the De Luxe?’ Margaretta used to say after they’d dwelt at length on a performance by
Franchot Tone or Deanna Durbin, exhausting the subject and yet unwilling to leave it. ‘Hot celluloid, I think it is, and cigarette-butts.’
The war ended in May 1945 and Laura brought back to England these memories of the family and the town, of the school she had attended with Margaretta, of the people and the shops. Margaretta wrote from time to time, a huge sprawling hand, words grotesquely misspelt: Mrs Hearne had called her latest baby Liam Pius, after the Pope; Cry Havoc was on at the De Luxe, The Way to the Stars was coming.
Laura wrote neatly, with nothing to say because Margaretta couldn’t be expected to be interested in all the talk about building things up again and descriptions of utility clothes. Margaretta had become her best friend and she Margaretta’s. They had decided it the night before she’d returned. They’d shared Margaretta’s bed, talking in whispers from ten o’clock until the Donald Duck clock said it was twenty past two. ‘We’d better go to sleep, y’know,’ Margaretta had said, but Laura had wanted to continue talking, to make the time go slowly. After Margaretta put the light out she lay in the darkness thinking she’d never had a friend like Margaretta before, someone who found the same things as boring as you did, someone you didn’t have to be careful with. A wash of moonlight for a moment lightened the gloom, catching the untidy mass of Margaretta’s hair on the pillow. She was breathing heavily, already asleep, smiling a little as if from some amusing dream. Then a cloud slipped over the moon again and the room abruptly darkened.
It was that night that Laura afterwards remembered most. ‘You can’t find friends in a town the like of this,’ Margaretta had said. ‘Well, I mean you can, y’know. Only it’s different.’ And she mentioned the girls she knew in the town, whom Laura knew also. None of them would have been, fascinated, as they were, by the way Mrs Eldon of the sweetshop made her lips seem larger with the outline of her lipstick. None of them would have wondered how it was that Mr Hearne always had the same amount of stubble on his face. ‘One day’s growth,’ Dr Heaslip had said when they’d asked him. How could a man, every day, have one day’s stubble? ‘They want to be nuns and things,’ Margaretta said. These girls went to the De Luxe also, but they didn’t take much interest in the performances, nor in the trademarks of the films, the roaring lion, the searchlights, the statue with the torch, the snow-capped mountain, the radio aerial with electricity escaping from it. The girls of the town didn’t go in for finding things funny. Sometimes Laura and Margaretta found a remark a shopkeeper had made so funny that they had to lean against some other shopkeeper’s window, laughing so much it gave them a stitch. Sometimes the very sight of people made them laugh. Entranced, Margaretta listened when Laura had told her how her Uncle Gilbert had taken her on to his bony knee on her sixth birthday and softly spanked her for no reason whatsoever. Afterwards he’d given her a sweet and said it was their secret. ‘Keep well away from that fellow,’ Margaretta had sharply advised, and both of them had giggled, not quite knowing what they were giggling at. It was something Laura had never told anyone else.