Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 10

  It had been finally arranged that the marriage should take place in London, she reads in the trattoria. There were certainly many reasons which would have made a marriage from Courcy Castle more convenient. The De Courcy family were all assembled at their country family residence, and could therefore have been present at the ceremony without cost or trouble. She isn’t hungry; she has ordered risotto, hoping it will be small, and mineral water without gas.

  ‘C’è del pane o della farina nel piatto? Non devo mangiare della farina,’ a woman is saying, and the gaunt-faced waiter carefully listens, not understanding at first and then excitedly nodding. ‘Non c’è farina,’ he replies, pointing at items on the menu. The woman is from the pensione. She’s with a lanky young man who might be her son, and Harriet can’t identify the language they speak to one another.

  ‘Is fine?’ the same waiter asks Harriet as he passes, noticing that she has begun to eat her risotto. She nods and smiles and reads again. The rain outside is heavy now.

  The Annunciation in the church of Santa Fabiola is by an unknown artist, perhaps of the school of Filippo Lippi, no one is certain. The angel kneels, grey wings protruding, his lily half hidden by a pillar. The floor is marble, white and green and ochre. The Virgin looks alarmed, right hand arresting her visitor’s advance. Beyond – background to the encounter – there are gracious arches, a balustrade and then the sky and hills. There is a soundlessness about the picture, the silence of a mystery: no words are spoken in this captured moment, what’s said between the two has been said already.

  Harriet’s eye records the details: the green folds of the angel’s dress, the red beneath it, the mark in the sky that is a dove, the Virgin’s book, the stately pillars and the empty vase, the Virgin’s slipper, the bare feet of the angel. The distant landscape is soft, as if no heat has ever touched it. It isn’t alarm in the Virgin’s eyes, it’s wonderment. In another moment there’ll be serenity. A few tourists glide about the church, whispering now and again. A man in a black overall is mopping the floor of the central aisle and has roped it off at either end. An elderly woman prays before a statue of the Virgin, each bead of her rosary fingered, lips silently murmuring. Incense is cloying on the air.

  Harriet walks slowly past flaring candles and the tomb of a local family, past the relics of the altar, and the story of Santa Fabiola flaking in a side chapel. She has not been in this church before, neither during her present visit nor in the past. Her parents didn’t bother much with churches; she might have come here on her own yesterday or on any day of her stay but she didn’t bother either. Her parents liked the sun in the garden of the pensione, the walk down to the cafés and drives into the hills or to other little towns, to the swimming-pool at Ponte Nicolo.

  The woman who has been praying hobbles to light another candle, then prays again, and hobbles off. Returning to the Annunciation, Harriet sits down in the pew that’s nearest it. There is blue as well as grey in the wings of the angel, little flecks of blue you don’t notice when you look at first. The Virgin’s slipper is a shade of brown, the empty vase is bulb-shaped with a slender stem, the Virgin’s book had gold on it but only traces remain.

  The rain has stopped when Harriet leaves the church, the air is fresher. Too slick and glib, to use her love affairs to restore her faith in love: that thought is there mysteriously. She has cheated in her love affairs: that comes from nowhere too.

  Harriet stands a moment longer, alone on the steps of the church, bewildered by this personal revelation, aware instinctively of its truth. The dust of the piazza paving has been washed into the crevices that separate the stones. At the café where she had her cappuccino the waiter is wiping dry the plastic of the chairs.

  The sun is still reluctant in the watery sky. On her walk back to the Pensione Cesarina it seems to Harriet that in this respite from the brash smother of heat a different life has crept out of the foliage and stone. A coolness emanates from the road she walks on. Unseen, among the wild geraniums, one bird sings.

  Tomorrow, when the sun is again in charge at its time of year, a few midday minutes will wipe away what lingers of this softness. New dust will settle, marble will be warm to touch. Weeks it may be, months perhaps, before rain coaxes out these fragrances that are tender now.

  The sun is always pitiless when it returns, harsh in its punishment. In the dried-out garden of the Pensione Cesarina they made her wear a hat she didn’t like but they could take the sun themselves, both of them skulking behind dark glasses and high-factor cream. Skyros’s sun is its attraction. ‘What I need is sun,’ he said, and Harriet wonders if he went there after all, if he’s there today, not left behind in London, if he even found someone to go with. She sees him in Skyros, windsurfing in Atsitsa Bay, which he has talked about. She sees him with a companion who is uncomplicated and happy in Atsitsa Bay, who tries out a therapy just to see what it’s like.

  The deck-chairs are sodden at the Pensione Cesarina, rose petals glisten. A glass left on a terrace table has gathered an inch of water. The umbrellas in the outer hall have all been used. Windows, closed for a while, are opened; on the vineyard slopes the sprinklers are turned on again.

  Not wanting to be inside, Harriet walks in the garden and among the vines, her shoes drenched. From the town comes the chiming of bells: six o’clock at Santa Fabiola, six o’clock a minute later somewhere else. While she stands alone among the dripping vines she cannot make a connection that she knows is there. There is a blankness in her thoughts, a density that feels like muddle also, until she realizes: the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape, glimpsed through arches, has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time.

  In the dining-room the table where the man with the garish shirts sat has been joined to a family table to allow for a party of seven. There is a different woman where the smart Frenchwoman sat, and no one at the table of the old man. The woman who was explaining in the trattoria that she must not eat food containing flour is given consommé instead of ravioli. New faces are dotted everywhere.

  ‘Buona sera,’ the rust-haired waitress greets Harriet, and the waitress with glasses brings her salad.

  ‘Grazie,’ Harriet murmurs.

  ‘Prego, signora.’

  She pours her wine, breaks off a crust of bread. It’s noisy in the dining-room now, dishes clattering, the babble of voices. It felt like noise in the foyer of the Rembrandt Cinema when he told her: the uproar of shock, although in fact it was quite silent there. Bright, harsh colours flashed through her consciousness, as if some rush of blood exploded in a kaleidoscope of distress. For a moment in the foyer of the cinema she closed her eyes, as she had when they told her they weren’t to be a family any more.

  She might have sent them postcards, but she hasn’t. She might have reported that breakfast at the pensione is more than coffee and rolls since the Germans and the Dutch and the Swiss have begun to come: cheese and cold meats, fruit and cereals, fresh sponge cake, a buffet on the terrace. Each morning she has sat there reading The Small House at Allington , wondering if they would like to know of the breakfast-time improvement. She wondered today if it would interest them to learn that the abandoned petrol pumps are still there on the road to the town, or that she sat in the deserted park beneath the chestnut trees. She thought of sending him a postcard too, but in the end she didn’t. His predecessor it was who encouraged her to bring long novels on holiday, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Mill on the Floss.

  It’s beef tonight, with spinach. And afterwards Harriet has dolce, remembering this sodden yellow raisin cake from the past. She won’t taste that again; as mysteriously as she knows she has cheated without meaning to in her love affairs, she knows she won’t come back, alone or with someone else. Coming back has been done, a private journey that chance suggested. Tomorrow she’ll be gone.

  In the room with the bookcases and the Giotto reproductions she watches while people drink t
heir grappa or their Stock, or ask the white-jacketed boy for more coffee, or pick up conversations with one another. The Belgian girls have got to know the young Englishman who goes down after wrecks and Nev who’s in the business world. All four pass through the room on their way to the terrace, the girls with white cardigans draped on their shoulders because it isn’t as warm as it was last night. ‘That man drew us!’ a voice cries, and the couple who were sketched last night gaze down at their hardly recognizable selves in the pensione’s comment book.

  He backed away, as others have, when she asked too much of love, when she tried to change the circumstances that are the past by imposing a brighter present, and constancy in the future above all else. She has been the victim of herself: with vivid clarity she knows that now and wonders why she does and why she didn’t before. Nothing tells her when she ponders the solitude of her stay in the Pensione Cesarina, and she senses that nothing ever will.

  She sees again the brown-and-green striped tie of the old man who talked about being on your own, and the freckles that are blotches on his forehead. She sees herself walking in the morning heat past the graveyard and the rusted petrol pumps. She sees herself seeking the shade of the chestnut trees in the park, and crossing the piazza to the trattoria when the first raindrops fell. She hears the swish of the cleaner’s mop in the church of Santa Fabiola, she hears the tourists’ whisper. The fingers of the praying woman flutter on her beads, the candles flare. The story of Santa Fabiola is lost in the shadows that were once the people of her life, the family tomb reeks odourlessly of death. Rain has sweetened the breathless air, the angel comes mysteriously also.

  Widows

  Waking on a warm, bright morning in early October, Catherine found herself a widow. In some moment during the night Matthew had gone peacefully: had there been pain or distress she would have known it. Yet what lay beside her in the bed was less than a photograph now, the fallen jaw harshly distorting a face she’d loved.

  Tears ran on Catherine’s cheeks and dripped on to her nightdress. She knelt by the bedside, then drew the sheet over the still features. Quiet, gently spoken, given to thought before offering an opinion, her husband had been regarded by Catherine as cleverer and wiser than she was herself, and more charitable in his view of other people. In his business life - the sale of agricultural machinery – he had been known as a man of his word. For miles around – far beyond the town and its immediate neighbourhood - the farm people who had been his customers repaid his honesty and straight dealing with respect. At Christmas there had been gifts of fowls and fish, jars of cream, sacks of potatoes. The funeral would be well attended. ‘There’ll be a comfort in the memories, Catherine,’ Matthew had said more than once, attempting to anticipate the melancholy of their separation: they had known that it was soon to be.

  He would have held the memories to him if he’d been the one remaining. ‘Whichever is left,’ he reminded Catherine as they grew old, ‘it’s only for the time being.’ And in that time-being one of them would manage in what had previously been the other’s domain: he ironing his sheets and trousers, working the washing-machine, cooking as he had watched her cook, using the Electrolux; she arranging for someone to undertake the small repairs he had attended to in the house if she or her sister couldn’t manage them, paying the household bills and keeping an eye on the bank balance. Matthew had never minded talking about their separation, and had taught her not to mind either.

  On her knees by the bedside Catherine prayed, then her tears came again. She reached out for his hand and grasped the cold, stiff fingers beneath the bedclothes. ‘Oh, love,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, love.’

  The three sons of the marriage came for the funeral, remaining briefly, with their families, in the town where they had spent their childhood. Father Cahill intoned the last words in the cemetery, and soon after that Catherine and her sister Alicia were alone in the house again. Alicia had lived there since her own husband’s death, nine years ago; she was the older of the two sisters – fifty-seven, almost fifty-eight.

  The house that for Catherine was still haunted by her husband’s recent presence was comfortable, with a narrow hall and a kitchen at the back, and bedrooms on two floors. Outside, it was colour-washed blue, with white window-frames and hall-door, the last house of the town, the first on the Dublin road. Opposite was the convent school, behind silver-painted railings, three sides enclosed by the drab concrete of its classrooms and the nuns’ house, its play-yard often bustling into noisy excitement. Once upon a time Catherine and Alicia had played there themselves, hardly noticing the house across the road, blue then also.

  ‘You’re all right?’ Alicia said on the evening of the funeral, when together they cleared up the glasses sherry had been drunk from, and cups and saucers. On the sideboard in the dining-room the stoppers of the decanters had not yet been replaced, crumbs not yet brushed from the dining-table cloth. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ Catherine said. In her girlhood she had been pretty – slender and dark, and shyly smiling, dimples in both cheeks. Alicia, taller, dark also, had been considered the beauty of the town. Now, Catherine was greying, and plump about the face, the joints of her fingers a little swollen. Alicia was straight-backed, her beauty still recalled in features that were classically proportioned, her hair greyer than her sister’s.

  ‘Good of them all to come,’ Catherine said.

  ‘People liked Matthew.’

  ‘Yes.’

  For a moment Catherine felt the rising of her tears, the first time since the morning of the death, but stoically she held them in. Their marriage had not gone. Their marriage was still there in children and in grandchildren, in the voices that had spoken well of it, in the bed they had shared, and in remembering. The time-being would not be endless: he had said that too. ‘You’re managing, Catherine?’ people asked, the same words often used, and she tried to convey that strength still came from all there had been.

  The day after the funeral Fagan from the solicitors’ office explained to Catherine the contents of the few papers he brought to the house. It took ten minutes.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, and for a moment the finality with which he spoke reminded Catherine of the coffin slipping down, filling the hole that had been dug for it. The papers lay neatly on the well-polished surface of the dining-room table, cleared now of the debris of the day before, and of the cloth that had protected it. Fagan drank a cup of instant coffee and said she had only to pick up the phone if ever there was anything.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ Alicia said later that same morning when Catherine mentioned Matthew’s personal belongings. Clothes and shoes would be accepted gratefully by one of the charities with which Alicia was connected. The signet ring, the watch, the tie-pin, the matching fountain-pen and propelling pencil were earmarked for the family, to be shared among Catherine’s sons. Shaving things were thrown away.

  Recalling the same sorting out of possessions at the time of her own loss, Alicia was in no way distressed. She had experienced little emotion when her husband’s death occurred: for the last nineteen years of her marriage she had not loved him.

  ‘You’ve been a strength,’ Catherine said, for her sister had been that and more, looking after her as she used to, years ago, when they were children.

  ‘Oh no, no,’ came Alicia’s deprecation.

  Thomas Pius John Leary was by trade a painter and decorator. He had, for this work, no special qualifications beyond experience; he brought to it no special skill. As a result, he was often accused of poor workmanship, which in turn led to disputes about payment. But he charged less than his competitors and so ensured a reasonably steady demand for his services. When for one reason or another the demand wasn’t there he took on any kind of odd job he was offered.

  Leary was middle-aged now, married, the father of six children. He was a small, wiry man with tight features and bloodshot eyes, his spare-ness occasionally reminding people of a hedgerow animal they could not readily name. Sparse grey hair was b
rushed straight back from the narrow dome of his forehead. Two forefingers, thumbs, middle fingers, upper lip and teeth, were stained brown from cigarettes he manufactured with the aid of a small machine. Leary did not wear overalls when at work and was rarely encountered in clothes that did not bear splashes of paint.

  It was in this condition, the damp end of a cigarette emerging from a cupped palm, that he presented himself to Catherine and Alicia one afternoon in November, six weeks after the death. He stood on the doorstep, declaring his regrets and his sympathy in a low voice, not meeting Catherine’s eye. In the time that had passed, other people had come to the door and said much the same thing, not many, only those who found it difficult to write a letter and considered the use of the telephone to be inappropriate in such circumstances. They’d made a brief statement and then had hurried off. Leary appeared inclined to linger.

  ‘That’s very good of you, Mr Leary,’ Catherine said.

  A few months ago he had repainted the front of the house, the same pale blue. He had renewed the white gloss of the window-frames. ‘Poor Leary’s desperate for work,’ Matthew had said. ‘Will we give the rogue a go?’ Alicia had been against it, Leary not being a man she’d cared for when he’d done other jobs for them. Catherine, although she didn’t much care for Leary either, felt sorry for anyone who was up against it.

  ‘Could I step in for a minute?’

  Across the street the convent children were running about in the play-yard before their afternoon classes began. Still watching them, Catherine was aware of checking a frown that had begun to gather. He was looking for more work, she supposed, but there was no question of that. Alicia’s misgivings had been justified: there’d been skimping on the amount and quality of the paint used, and inadequate preparation. ‘We’ll know not to do that again,’ Matthew had said. Besides, there wasn’t anything else at present.