A Foreign Affair (23 page)

If you enjoyed
A Foreign Affair
by Stella Russell, you might be interested in
The Italian Affair
by Helen Crossfield.

Extract from
The Italian Affair
by Helen Crossfield

Antipasto

I am starting this book in Italy. It’s the only place to begin. It’s where everything really started to unravel. In the end it all came down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time or, eventually as it turned out, being in the right place at exactly the right time.

This book is about me. Almost all of it is true, but it’s easier to write it in the name of someone else in case the pain of what happened stops me from writing everything I need to say.

My story is about deep loss and coming through it the other side. It’s also about finding true love with a lot of help from the Ancient Greeks, Charles Ryder (think Jeremy Irons Brideshead Revisited), Heathcliff (my all-time romantic hero) and my best friend Dan. I know, bear with me. My mind doesn’t always work like yours but what I discovered might help you.

The story is called The Italian Affair for a hugely important reason. That one sentence has enabled me to understand what life is REALLY about. It tied up the loose ends and provided me with the final pieces of the jigsaw.

Hopefully, by the time I die the memories I leave behind – because that is the only thing that will remain of me – will be a testament to those three words. It is my epitaph.

Stay with me as I write. It will take a while to warm up, as the memories this story evokes sit deep within me and often I don’t even recognize the person that was. Even as I start to type I am not sure how much of the past I will need to reveal to explain the present. Just thinking about it all now overwhelms me. It was touch and go at one stage as to whether I could carry on. It would have been so easy to have curled up and died.

Yours Issy Mead

PART I – Primo Piatto

Naples – 3pm local time August 28th 1986

“What a bottom,” hissed one of the olive-skinned men, as Issy Mead was finally approved as perfectly legitimate and fit for entry.

Staring at her peachy arse as she walked on by in a light beige cotton dress, the Neapolitans controlling the borders continued to talk about her bum until it was a dot on their horizons.

That’s how much they liked it. “How odd,” Issy thought “that she should suddenly be attracting such unwelcome attention. No man had ever studied her in that way before apart from one.”

She pulled at the dress whilst struggling to shake off dark lusting looks that bored into her body.

Oxfam didn’t always sell cotton and, whatever the fabric, it clung to Issy like a second skin as thousands of her perspiration ducts unused to temperatures of what felt like one hundred degrees started to work over-time.

“What a bloody cheek,” Issy said to herself as she simultaneously walked forwards, smiling at her own irony.

But there was no time for offence, or even prolonged humour, because as soon as she got into the baggage reclaim area a throbbing scene of travel chaos sprawled itself out in front of her.

Despite the name, luggage seemed thin on the ground. There was no information, and only one carousel, being given a good kick up the backside by a small chain-smoking Italian man with a very large moustache.

“Miserable pig,” he shouted at the conveyor belt without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, thrashing about and waving his arms in the air in an attempt to get things moving.

Miraculously after only a few minutes, this mad approach worked, and the carousel spluttered slowly to life before haphazardly spewing out suitcases, one after the other.

“This clearly isn’t an airport where you want to be carrying anything important,” Issy thought nervously as bags that weren’t hers started to make slow circuits in front of her.

And then she remembered. “The letters, please God. Don’t let me lose the box of letters,” Issy screeched at herself in silence as she despondently stared at the conveyor belt. Seconds of anxious waiting turned into minutes that felt like hours.

Issy’s agitation at potentially losing the only bits of her past she had left in the world intensified until a familiar-looking black suitcase eventually appeared.

Jostling to remain upright, it was only recognisable by the big yellow “Ban the Nuke” stickers which looked much less politically charged than they had at home.

But it was not just the relief of seeing her bag, or the words on the stickers, that screamed for her attention. It was the colour so vivid in its yellowness that triggered her back to childhood.

It happened sometimes this way. A moment in the present which propelled her back fifteen years, when things beyond Issy’s control had unfolded and she had not been able to stop any of it from happening right in front of her.

“Oh shit,” Issy thought as the carousel randomly picked up speed. The sudden familiar sour taste of panic arrived back in her mouth from somewhere below her waistline. Her only task was to grab the bag and the letters from the throng

She reached her hands out from the crowd to take her battered suitcase but it was too late. She’d missed her slot.

Weaving in and out of the crowds, Issy started to jog as she kept her eyes focused on the Ban the Nuke stickers which had, bizarrely, only a few moments before, reminded her of the pair of Extra Large Marigold washing-up gloves that her father had died in.

“Fuck,” she said out loud she had to get the bag before it disappeared from view. Or worse someone took it.

Issy checked the panic attack threatening to overwhelm her as her legs automatically picked up speed and ran alongside the carousel.

As she clenched her nails into her fists, the familiar sensation of self-inflicted pain crushed into her palm. It was an old habit and retribution today for not treating the letters with more respect.

“Don’t even for one second allow those stickers to disappear from view,” Issy demanded of herself as she finally found another gap in the crowds of eager British holidaymakers and threw herself at her suitcase.

Huge relief surged over her as she embraced it. Smoothing down her dress and her hair she steadied herself before walking shakily through customs and into the arrivals hall.

Unbearably hot, an excitable crowd of Neapolitans pushed forwards to welcome loved ones home. Above the scrum of embracing couples and screaming families, Issy spotted a huge big white sign with the name ISSY MEAD written across it in bold capital letters.

“Christ, that’s subtle” Issy muttered as she walked towards it. “She’d come here to escape and be incognito for a while” she thought ruefully. As she got closer, Issy could see that the sign was being held up high by a short Neapolitan man who peered out from underneath it, sporting a big moustache over an even bigger grin which seemed to get wider and wider as she drew nearer.

As Issy finally stood in front of the person she thought must be her driver, she tried to respond to his apparent delight but no words came out of her mouth.

Trying harder to focus, she stared intently at the writing on the board. She recognised the name, but no longer knew or understood the person who answered to it. Or why, in God’s name, she had chosen to come to Southern Italy on a hot Saturday afternoon in August when her shattered heart belonged somewhere else.

“Ciao, it eez a pleasure,” the small Italian man said with a heavy Italian accent, his moustache twitching with every syllable. “I am Gennaro.”

“Hello, nice to meet you” Issy replied smiling, despite her parched mouth. “I am Issy Mead.”

Naples
- 4pm local time - 28th August 1986

The dried meat and mozzarella van that delivered Issy from Naples airport to her apartment was erratically, but skillfully, driven by Gennaro, the director of the language school she was going to be teaching at.

The journey had been different to anything she’d ever experienced in the twenty-one years that had gone before. Fiats of all shapes and sizes drove at them, around them and in front of them.

And Gennaro had somehow – just – managed to avoid a series of most definite collisions by shouting expletives. “What cads of crap,” he shouted followed by “Mother of God” whilst driving at break neck speed and rough handling his gearbox.

A curious feature of the journey, was not just the fact they were travelling in a clapped out deli van. It was what they were travelling with.

In the back, there was a pantry full of dried pig quarters and salamis swinging around gaily on meat hooks.

And it wasn’t just cured meats that accompanied them. On the floor in the back there were trays of marinated olives, big ripe tomatoes, and huge bunches of basil providing an intoxicating backdrop of aromas as they hurtled along.

“Why you come to Naples?” asked Gennaro in a sexy sly sort of way – smiling across at Issy in the passenger seat as she squirmed at the directness of his question.

Issy looked sharply at her driver from the corner of her eye. As a direct descendant of the ancient Romans she understood emotional intelligence was in his DNA, it would be impossible for her to tell him a half truth about her emotional state.

“Because I’m running away,” she replied slowly avoiding eye contact.

“Si, si,” said Gennaro in a way that signalled he was not surprised. “But you are beautiful, why you need to run? You lose the love, and er….. ,” (huge shrug of the shoulders) “you find the love, non? Sometimes you find the better love.” (Big throaty laugh – probable cause – nicotine abuse).

Issy looked at Gennaro this time with a defiant look. “Why did he need to know her story and what had beauty got to do with it?” she thought. “She was a bloody feminist not one of his pieces of cured meat.”

As Issy swallowed her indignation at Gennaro’s assumptions about her love life she started to prepare a suitable reply but before she could utter another word, the deli van swerved at a bend in the road dislocating her internal feminist diatribe and simultaneously causing her to inhale sharply at the sight of what had just become visible in the distance.

There, standing majestically in front of them appeared the city’s brooding twin-peaked volcano – Mount Vesuvius – magnificent against an azure blue sky.

Despite the brightness of the day, it cast a half shadow across the sprawling pale yellow coloured conurbations that nestled trustingly in its’ lower reaches.

“My city is beautiful, non?” said Gennaro proudly waving his hands in the general direction of Vesuvius before using one of them to help him draw heavily on his cigarette. He gesticulated towards the volcano and asked simply. “You like no?”

Issy nodded forgetting she was supposed to be angry with him. “Yes. Of course, it is magnificent. But Naples already feels like a land of many paradoxes,” said Issy forgetting she was not in a lecture at Balliol College Oxford but on a motorway in Naples with a crazy driver who spoke pigeon English who she’d only just met.

“What you say?” Gennaro said over the noise of the traffic.

“Sorry,” Issy said, trying to simplify what she meant. “I mean the airport and the roads are chaotic and crazy but Vesuvius is well … it is simply breath taking.”

“Si,” Gennaro laughed as he revved his engine and swerved to avoid a car in front of them. “It eez the crazy city, but the beautiful city non?”

As Issy started to laugh at his turn of phrase, she turned her head to the left, partly in an attempt to avoid letting him know he amused her but mostly because she was drawn by the twinkling reflections of a deep blue sea with vast stretches of turquoise that ebbed and flowed against a rugged shoreline.

As a gentle breeze caught her face, Issy leant out of the mobile deli window to get a better view. As Gennaro drove, Issy breathed in lungful after lungful of warm salty sea air.

Transfixed by the sight in front of her, tears pricked at her eyes as she took in the regal splendor of the Bay of Naples that appeared tantalizingly for a few seconds before disappearing from view.

“Gennaro, you are right. Your city is beautiful. This is spectacular,” Issy shouted back into the van, trying to suppress the tears and emotions being stirred up by the beauty and suddenly feeling very alone.

She didn’t want Gennaro to see her cry. It’s not what feminists did and certainly not over a man who had abruptly left her. To try and maintain her dignity, Issy kept her face fixed firmly out of the window and bit her lower lip hard.

As she struggled to remain calm as they drove along, a cluster of tiny islands appeared in the middle of the resplendent blue sea like three priceless jewels in a tiara of exquisite diamonds.

As the true splendor of the coastline revealed itself tears started to fall silently. “How could she be witnessing this,” Issy thought “and not have him by her side?”

Despite now believing it to have been a relationship built on sand, that would have eventually washed away, Issy still could not accept she would never be with the man she’d loved so intently and so desperately for the past three years.

Theirs had been a love as strong and as powerful as Vesuvius and as deep and vast as the sea before her today.

As Issy watched golden threads of sunlight dance on the surface of the sea, she recalled the time early on in their relationship when the amazement of finding each other had possessed them both.

Memories of their love replayed themselves over and over in her head as the pain of what she had lost burned in her chest. Being next to water reminded her of that lazy summer afternoon in Oxford when Jeremy had punted them down the river in the first throes of heady passion. They had taken the boat out at dusk when the tourists had gone, the only sound their rhythmic breathing and the whispers of history that lived on within the old stone college walls.

Afterwards, as they had laid together under an oak-tree with an old picnic basket filled with the food of lovers, Jeremy had whispered in her ear in that clear, clipped English upper-class way which was his trademark.“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue, one can’t love and do nothing.”

After a perfect few hours that had gone on long into the evening, they had claimed Graham Greene’s words greedily as their own giving them both a reason to continue, despite him being a married man.

Jeremy hadn’t told Issy this vital piece of information for several months after they’d met. But even when he’d told her that he belonged to someone else, she was powerless to pull back and stop loving him. She’d fallen in too deep too soon.

He had assured her over and over again it was a loveless marriage. “I love my wife,” he would say “but I am not in love with her. Does that make sense?”

“NO,” Issy had thought at the time “it bloody well did not.”

But oddly, despite her normal approach to life, which was to question everything and fight injustice on behalf of women, most of the time she ignored what he’d told her. She only ever once challenged Jeremy on what he meant by those paradoxical words.

But all it had done was to drive a wedge between them both. In those moments of questioning Jeremy assumed a different persona. The stuffy one that inhabited the privileged and protected world of academia and a world he had no intention of changing. Not for Issy. Not for anyone even the wife he loved but never seemed to touch.

“There is no question of me leaving my wife Issy” Jeremy had said eventually towards the end of their relationship in a slightly irritated way when she’d asked him how he could remain in a loveless marriage. “Being married does not stop me loving you and wanting you,” he continued. “But I cannot destroy my wife’s life. It may be difficult for you to understand, but my religion, my background my own personal moral code prevents me from doing that. I hope you can find it in your heart to understand.”

As Issy looked out at the Tyrrhenian Sea, she remembered Jeremy’s face as he’d said those words. It had darkened in sadness and looked haunted by the destiny he had already mapped out for himself. As she watched the ebb and flow of the sea, Issy remembered each syllable Jeremy had spoken with such finality – each one a shard of broken glass that had pierced her heart.

She’d wanted to ask him what kind of moral code and religion gave him such latitude to take a wife and a lover but she’d caught the look in his eyes. She knew that, whatever the reason, it lay deep inside and that she didn’t have the key to unlock his heart or free his soul.

Looking back now nearly two months after their affair had ended, Issy shook her head to stop her from remembering the desperate weeks that had followed the dark night of the soul when he had simply walked out and left her. As a slight breeze rustled her long blond curly hair on this hot steaming Neapolitan August day, it felt like her heart was being physically wrenched out of her body once more and laid out on a cold slab to die.

And yet somehow, by some miracle, warm blood still flowed through her veins and her life went on, albeit now in an increasingly bizarre way.

As the cars around them continued to honk, Issy allowed herself a wry smile. When she’d decided to escape Oxford, she’d envisaged her period of self-exile and personal reflection would be spent in a sparsely furnished apartment in an historic quarter of an Umbrian or Tuscan village not a heaving burning cauldron of humanity in various states of anarchy.

“Issy” (pronounced IZZZZY) Gennaro shouted excited by the buzz of the street theatre around them. “This eez my city and it eez the most beautiful city in the world non? But the people can sometimes be shits,” he laughed.

“Sorry” said Issy as her thoughts were transported back from Oxford to the world of pigeon English and general mania. “What did you say?”

“I say…” said Gennaro. “This eez my city and it ezz the most beautiful city in the world but the people eez shits sometimes.”

“Why are they are so bad?” Issy asked.

Gennaro’s eyes widened amazed that Issy didn’t know the answer.

“Because they are robbers non?” he replied taking both his hands off the steering wheel for a moment, and gesticulating with his fingers to communicate that they liked to steal things from under people’s noses. “There eez a story which says when God stand on top of Vesuvius he looked down and cry at how bad they are. We ‘ave a wine Christ’s tears called in this way because – the water fall on the ground making a fertile soil and a good wine.”

“God is it really that bad?” asked Issy kind of getting the gist of what Gennaro was saying. “I had no idea Naples had this kind of problem. I normally know everything about a place before I land but I left England somewhat abruptly and it was the only place I could find a teaching job.”

“Ah. But why you leave England in a hurry?” he winked before hurtling into a tunnel which scarily didn‘t cause him to slow down and if anything sped him up.

“Because I....,” shrieked Issy as everything went black. “......you’re going very fast. Can you slow down please? I don’t feel safe.”

Gennaro laughed out loud. “It is better to do the fast driving,” he said as he swerved out of the way of each car that looked like it was about to have a serious impact before shouting various profanities at the other drivers, irrespective of whether it was their fault or not. His favourites were “go to hell” and “pieces of crap.”

Despite the fear, Issy had to admit Gennaro was really good at avoiding high speed pile-ups and she consoled herself with the thought that, after losing her father and without Jeremy, life might be better anyway if it just ended now.

As they torpedoed out of the other end of the tunnel Issy’s anxiety levels started to subside as they finally started to slow down. Not because Gennaro had hit the brakes, but because of a huge traffic jam to get into the city centre.

After remaining stationary for a few minutes, Gennaro jumped up and down in his seat and hit the horn with his fist whilst spewing out a litany of rude words as if being crude and blasphemous in a continuum would speed things up.

As Issy caught her breath and looked skywards she marvelled at the crumbling palazzo blocks that stood regally against the slightly fading sunlight.

The colours of the buildings were amazing. Eggshell yellow and Wedgewood blue. As Gennaro continued forwards, even grander looking buildings painted blood red with green wooden shutters tightly clamped against the afternoon sun disclosed themselves as the deli van wove through ancient streets filled with locals, food, debris and noise.

But, despite the wonderful sense of antiquity and slightly aristocratic feel to some of the architecture, Issy became fascinated by the total lack of regard for civic order and refuse collection.

“Does the rubbish not get collected round here at all?” Issy asked in amazement as they remained stationary by a huge pile of rotting garbage.

“Yes but….,” Gennaro said putting the deli van jerkily into second gear, “it eez complicated to explain Issy.”