Last Train from Liguria (2010) (11 page)

‘And your grandfather? Is he dead a long time?’

‘I never knew him. He died in the war, in Italy. It’s where they met.’

‘Ah, he was Italian? That explains it.’

‘What?’

‘She was speaking Italian, in fact the guards at first thought she was a foreigner. She used to speak it now and then when she came here first, and of course
nonna
is the Italian for grandma - am I right?’

‘Yes. But no, he wasn’t Italian, my grandfather. He was English. English. I’ve always called her Nonna, I don’t know why, really.’

‘I see.’ When he turns back around there’s a carton of milk in his hand. ‘Were they married long, Anna?’ He lifts the carton to his nose and sniffs.

‘No. Only a short time, I believe.’

‘Ah I see. Was your mother adopted, do you know, Anna?’

I can feel my heart tighten like a fist. ‘Is that what you found out, that my mother was adopted?’

‘You weren’t told anything yourself on that line, Anna?’

‘No.’

Steam from the kettle blooms behind his head and I wait to see what’s next. He turns away from me again and makes, then pours, tea. ‘No thoughts at all on the subject, Anna?’

‘No. To be honest Nonna is - was always very private. But I feel if my mother had been told, I would have been. Certainly my father would have said something.’

‘And he never did?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I suppose in the old days people often kept that sort of thing quiet - do you take sugar, Anna?’

‘No.’

‘Oh good. He smiles, turning back around. ‘Because do you know what? I don’t think we have any.’

I don’t want smiles or apologies about sugar, I want him to come straight out and say whatever it is he’s trying to say.

‘So, Mr Brook, are you telling me that when you examined my grandmother you discovered she’d never given birth - is that it?’

‘Well, yes but…’ For a moment I feel as confused as he looks. He passes me a cup of tea and waits for me to accept and taste it. Then he takes a short breath. ‘What I’m telling you is, not only did your grandmother never give birth, but she was never sexually active. I mean, never. As far as I’m aware.’

‘But she was married?’

‘Indeed.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He shrugs, then, priest-like, lifts, lowers and then joins his hands. ‘The marriage was never consummated.’

Next he is standing up and I can see it’s time for me to go. ‘Anyway, Anna, I just thought you ought to know. Now I am sorry for all the upset, but at least she’s safe, your poor old Nonna. At least there’s no more distress.’

‘Yes.’

He picks up his coat from the back of the chair and begins walking me towards the door. ‘Again, I apologize.’

And again I say it doesn’t matter. Even if I’m still not quite sure what the hell either of us is talking about.

I stand outside the office watching Mr Brook go to the reception area where a taxi driver, tucking a newspaper under his arm, steps up to him. There is a familiarity between the two men, and I get the impression that the driver has been waiting since dropping Mr Brook off. I can imagine Mr Brook saying to him, ‘Wait here - would you? It shouldn’t take long.’ I look at the door of the office; heavy varnished oak, the title THE REGISTRAR painted in black across the top panel. Not even a proper Christian name, as if it’s a movable post, allowing registrars to come and go, to be dragged off the golf course, or out of retirement without even needing to shave, when and as they’re required. And I can’t help feeling that somehow I’ve been duped.

I return to the ward to collect my suitcase. Standing at my grandmother’s bed, I have an overwhelming urge to touch her, more from curiosity than affection. Her hand seems the obvious choice. But her right hand, along with her entire right side, is guarded by drips, and there’s no way past the wigwam of wires. Her left wrist is plastered from forearm to just over the knuckles of her fist, squeezing her hand so that the delicate bulbs of her fingertips are bunched together like something dainty in a vase. The plaster of Paris is a lovely job, a confectioner’s job, smooth and white and careful. It gives me an adolescent impulse to take a marker pen to it. For a second I see the black gleaming letters trail from its nib; three words and a question mark. I try to decide how I’d arrange them, these adolescent words that have come into my head - in a bracelet around her wrist, or one word beneath the other in a column. Either way, my question would be the same: WHO ARE YOU?

*

When I get home the nine o’clock news is just coming on the telly. I stand at the door while the light from the screen jitters into the darkness, and the voice of a newsreader speaks to me. I can’t believe it’s been on the whole time I’ve been away in London. Then again, since the day Hugh left I don’t think it’s ever been off. I’d even made a little nest on the sofa in front of it, because it was less painful to sleep out here than in the bed we had shared. It had been the last thing I saw at night, and was waiting for me each day the moment I opened my eyes. Even while I slept it was there in the background slyly inserting its images into my head. How else would they have got there - the bland-faced professor and his quantum physics; the black-shawled Mexican dodging bullets up the side of a mountain? And now in my absence it’s been twittering away into the empty rooms of my flat. Suddenly I hate the bloody thing, I want to kick it over, I want to bash my boot heel right down through its glass and into its guts. I pick up the remote and switch on the silence. Then I go up to the studio. Hugh’s studio, originally supposed to be mine. The best room in the flat of course, a converted attic accessed by a pull-down stepladder. I haven’t been up here since before he left, a long time before that even, come to think of it.

I’d forgotten how much I liked it up here, how it had clinched my decision to take this flat. It’s the skylights really; the way they throw light out in the morning across the long bare floor. Or even now, at this hour, the way they contain the night sky. The smell of wood and paint and turps; I’d forgotten all that.

I think about getting the long pole and opening one of the windows. I imagine how it will groan and yawn and yield. Outside there will be a glimpse of a black Georgian roofline. The sky will be diluted to mauve by the city lights, and the traffic, muffled by distance, will sound like the ocean. But then I remember I’ve left the pole at the bottom of the stepladder, and it feels too far to go all the way back down.

The room is dusty, but not untidy - he hasn’t left enough of himself behind for that. What he hasn’t taken, he has boxed and pushed under the eaves. ‘I’ll be back for the rest,’ were the last words he said to me. ‘You needn’t bother your fucking arse, you stupid prick,’ had been my dignified reply.

So that was that then, after all the years together, that was the end of it. I knew he wouldn’t be back. What he had taken that day was all he had wanted. The boxes had somehow been meant to soften the blow. Some day I might go through them; for the moment, however, I imagine them to be a conman’s ruse - a folly, stuffed with newspapers and bricks.

I move across the floorboards, stretching the width of this large house, smeared with years of paint and effort. There is something odd about the whole scene: the empty space, the dribbles of electric light from the bulbs hanging out of the rafters. The few carefully located props. And it occurs to me then, yes that’s it, it reminds me of one of his paintings. I am walking through one of his paintings. All the more forlorn then, the dirty mug on an old kitchen chair in one corner; the twisted empty Marlboro packet on the floor; the can of Coke beside it, with one last cigarette butt squeezed out on its lid. And a tweed jacket humped over one of the boxes, the sight of which leaves me winded with grief.

I come back down, sit on the last step where I wallow awhile, bawling my eyes out. Then I stop, and begin to think about Nonna.

July

UNDER THE AWNING OF Bordighera train station, Bella waits in the shade. Behind her a porter builds a small wall of luggage and she can hear the snail train potter off towards France. When she looks again the porter has disappeared without his tip, leaving an address tag pinned on the luggage: ‘
per Villa Lami
,
via Romano
,
Bordighera
.’ All she needs now is a driver.

Outside the station, a row of heavy-headed ponies attached to carriages and traps; further along, noses to the shade, a quartet of vacant taxi cars. There’s a chubby blue bus parked at an angle in the middle of the square. No sign of a driver in any case. No sign of life at all. Apart from the ponies and the devotion of flies all around them.

She stays for a while looking over the piazza, for a moment loses all sense of place. The buildings, ornate and often shabby, their fragile balconettes like strips of black lingerie. To the right, a group of squat palm trees. Over the way, more palms; longer, leaner, shaggier; big unruly heads gawking into the second-floor windows of a darkened
pensione
. A newspaper kiosk, boarded up. An ice-cream cart, abandoned. Four large flat-faced cacti growing from a trough just behind it. Like a queue of deformed children, she can’t help but think. The cafe down the way is closed, chairs folded and decked against the wall.

Bella lifts her alligator bag from the rest of the luggage, crosses the piazza to a wall smeared with layers of scraped-off advertisements. Over a door a crucifix appears in an alcove, the face on the Christ gaudy with painted make-up. It hardly seems like a town on the Italian Riviera, a few miles from Monte Carlo or Nice. More like Mexico, she imagines. Or Cuba even. Some half-remembered place once seen in the dark of a picture house. Heat, dust, absence. The meandering snore of a swollen fly.

An avenue facing the station seems to offer the only way off the piazza. She pushes her eye up its considerable length, the slight dingy downturn that takes it to, and then over, a crossroads where it begins to widen and lift into the sunlight. It stretches on for a time, and only seems to stop at all because a large white hotel, backed up by a burly hillside, appears to be blocking its way. The air seems as if it might be cooler up there, the buildings and palazzi solid and clean like slabs of ice cream. There would be cafes with shaded terraces. People who spoke English probably. English people, even. Tall glasses of something cold and sweet. But she is too afraid of leaving the luggage unattended, of getting lost and being found somewhere foolish, of missing someone who might this very moment be on the way to fetch her.

A double-faced clock stands on the corner of the crossroads. Bella checks her wristwatch and finds a different time by over an hour. She remembers the clock above the train station and, taking a backward glance, reads yet another time again. Somehow, she needs to know. She decides to go as far as the crossroads clock to consult its other face and there, caught between time and four corners, they find her.

The American cousins. Coming down the last few yards of the avenue. Equal height but different builds. One a little on the plump side. The other perhaps a bit scrawny. Two mousey-brown heads of hair, crimped to the ear. Four bare legs. The plumpish one sends down a wide overhead wave. The thinner one, who at first appears to be carrying something, a baby or perhaps a small white dog, turns out to have her arm in a sling. Both dressed for tennis, even though the one with the trussed-up arm couldn’t possibly have been playing.

The plump one says her name is Grace and insists on carrying the bag. ‘They’ll send the rest on up,’ she says, clearly used to such matters taking care of themselves. Then, putting her arm through Bella’s, she draws her over the crossroads, onto the avenue.

The other one is called Amelia. ‘So how do you like Bordighera?’ she asks. ‘Seems a little sedate, wouldn’t you say? Well, don’t go fooling yourself, it’s that time of day, the Italians snoring off lunch, the English on the beach, braising themselves to death. Just you wait another hour or so - see how sedate you think it is
then
.’

Bella, between the sisters, on an avenue that is proving steeper than expected, inclines her head from one to the other, smiles when it seems the right thing to do, finds herself frequently unsure of their accent, the speed of their delivery and their forthright manner (if they could really be saying what she thinks they are saying). They laugh quite a bit, particularly Grace. Sometimes Bella finds herself laughing along, without knowing quite why.

‘Have you seen the Musso wallpaper?’ Grace begins.

‘I’m sorry - the which?’

‘You know? Mussolini?’ Amelia explains. ‘Il Doo-che! You better get used to
him
, let me tell you. Radio, newspapers, movie reels, you name it, every which way your ears or eyes go - there’s baldy old Ben-ee-toe. And as for the market place! His picture is pasted over every inch of wall, I swear it. Hardly a seam - wallpaper, practically. It’s like a Mussolini parlour down there. I wouldn’t mind if he was anything to look at, but he’s rather awful - don’t you agree, Miss Stuart? Don’t you find him unattractive? By the way must we call you Miss Stuart?’

‘Well, Aunt Lami would probably—’ Grace begins.

‘Oh God. Aunt Lami, let’s not even think about
her
.’

Amelia carries on in a tired, distracted voice, turning her hips stiffly as she walks along, breaking here and there into a short sideways glide, like a coquettish child, Bella thinks, or maybe one of those new sporty-type film actresses. In fact the whole experience is beginning to remind her of the pictures, which is the closest, up to now, that she’s ever been to Americans.

‘She’s not our real aunt of course,’ Grace explains. ‘The first wife, Aunt Josephine, was. Mother’s sister - you know.’

‘Quite a looker too,’ Amelia says. ‘You won’t be surprised to hear. They met when old man Lami was staying in New York in one of Dad’s hotels - Dad’s an hotelier, you know. They fell in love, as the saying goes, and he took her back with him to Sicily.’

‘Mother never forgave him,’ Grace says, ‘and then poor old Josie died.’

‘Only gone five minutes,’ her sister continues, ‘when he took up with
numero due
. Well, the less said there… Except for this - I don’t think she ought decide what we may or may not call each other. Wouldn’t you agree? After all, we are not children. If my guess is right, we are all, in fact, a little older than our dear Aunt Lami. Worse luck. I certainly won’t be asking you to refer to me as
Miss Nelson
! You’ve met Aunt Lami of course, in Sicily? And we’ll be expecting a full and frank on
that
, let me tell you. Odd little item, isn’t she? Of course, he’s going to die soon. Wonder what’ll happen to her then? For all we know he’s gone already - was he still alive when you left? Would one notice at his age, I wonder? We would have had a wire if— at least one would hope they’d have the courtesy to wire if. Oh, please don’t think I’m callous, I certainly hope you don’t think that. It’s just, well, we don’t really know him. In fact, we don’t know him at all.’ Amelia finally stops and joins in with her sister in laughing like a horse.

Bella nods and smiles and tries not to look too bewildered. Around them the afternoon begins to stir. Shutters fall open on upper terraces. Out of dark interiors onto glaring pavements, shopkeepers cart baskets and crates. A waiter comes out of a restaurant rolling a tabletop like a wheel before him. Behind, in the doorway, an old lady sits, folding napkins and frantically smoking. Deanna Durbin coos out of a wireless. Bella notes the avenue is called corso d’Italia.

‘You must forgive my sister.’ Grace struggles to speak. ‘She gets a little—’

‘Overexcited? Overwrought? Over-easy?’ Amelia suggests.

Grace exclaims, ‘Oh now, that is en-
ough
.’

‘You may as well know - it’s why I’m in Europe,’ Amelia continues. ‘To calm my exhausted nerves.’ She throws the back of her free hand up to her forehead and pretends to almost faint. ‘Anyhow now that we’ve got my collarbone to worry about, my nerves are quite forgotten. Forty days, I’m told, before I can travel. These Italian doctors certainly know how to make something of nothing. Not even as far as Monte Carlo. I can’t tell you what a bore it all is.’

‘Pay no attention,’ Grace insists. ‘She just loves it here. You ought to know Amelia is this month’s Bordighera Beach Miss. Oh yes, this is her actual title. In the afternoon the beach clubs hold pyjama party competitions - quite the hoot! My sister’s picture? All over the wall of the Kursaal club. I mean, talk about il Duce! She is wearing this hat—’

‘Oh, must you remind me!’

‘Well, you were the one who entered, dear.’

‘Now, that’s only because I was drunk.’

‘For which you only have yourself to blame.’

‘Thank you, Grace, I am aware.’

On the corso. Lamps and trees in perfect alignment, the pavement tiled like an outdoor floor. There are English names over some of the shops: Good English Cakes. Real English Tea. And two French shops; one selling hats, the other artists’ requisites. Outside the barber’s, a poster shows this week’s cinema attraction -
Detectivi Crek e Crok, Laurel e Holiver.

‘Now, had Aunt Lami’s English doctor been here, my sentence may well have been lighter,’ Amelia resumes, ‘but he left a few weeks ago for Egypt. The English colony have to have their own doctor, you know - don’t trust the Eye-ties - in fact they have to have their own just about everything: church, clubs, shops. Frankly, I don’t know why they don’t just stay at home and turn up the central heating! Anyhow, the new English doc hasn’t yet arrived. Unmarried too, or so it seems, with all his own teeth and hair by the way, so we can expect quite a stampede there! So now you have it, forty days, just like Jesus in the desert. Mother wants me home. Dad says it’s best to stay, though he does have his concerns given the present political situation, I mean
anything
might happen at almost any moment - don’t you agree?’

‘Oh please,’ Grace says. ‘Please just let’s not go into all that again - I swear, once she gets started on politics.’

‘Oh Grace, really, everybody knows Europe is, well, in foul mood - is that a discreet way to put it? And anything
is
liable to happen. Except nobody wants to talk about it. So long as we all continue to pretend - we can continue to bask. And bask cheaply, at that. Oh, all right I’ll stop. Not that Anabelle minds, I’m sure. It is Anabelle, right? Yes, I made it my business to find that out. Actually, I peeked at your papers when they arrived the other day. Or rather I peeked at the envelope with the official
Prefettura
‘s stamp on.

‘My papers?’ Bella asks.

They pause outside the
tabaccheria
where a man softly sweating is cranking at the hinges of a canopy. He bows, mutters, ‘
Buona sera
,’ and takes a long low look over the girls’ bare legs. Both his greeting and his greedy eye go ignored or else unnoticed.

‘Oh, you have to have papers for just about everything these days in Italy,’ Amelia explains. ‘Aunt Lami would have arranged it. You can’t go to the ladies room without your precious
documenti
. Otherwise, whooooff, they kick you right out on your you-know-what.’ Here Amelia lifts her leg into a high kick that almost makes her fall over and Bella is sure she hears the tobacconist gasp.

She feels the squeeze and pull of Grace’s linking arm, the nudge of her elbow. Her mouth, wide with laughter, releases a smell of something warm and eggy, which Bella tries not to taste. Unlinking her arm and falling back slightly, she pretends to fix her shoe. When she catches up with the girls, arms folded firmly to her chest, they are still howling loudly. She is beginning to wonder if they’ve had a few drinks.

They near the top of the
corso
. Real fruit trees on the street! Bella wishes she was alone. She looks up to see clutches of small soft oranges. Over a wall, a swag of beady green olives. On the corner two men dressed in black fascist uniform gossip like housewives, and fuss at intervals over a little girl with Shirley Temple hair. She can see now the large white hotel recede and a street begin to open out on the perpendicular: via Romano. An open-top tram edges across it, a woman on its upper deck, holding a black umbrella against the sun.

Tall, narrow gates between pillars. The pillars topped with an urn of chipped stone grapes. A short pebble path to a few curved steps to a front door. The house, the colour of ivory with shutters of glossy green, set at an angle, making it look slightly askew, as if it has come off its thread. A comfortable garden, trees, bushes, and the same cerise blossoms that appeared to have been flung at random all over Bordighera. High stone boundary walls. One shouldering a lane which runs back down towards the sea and the town centre. A layer of trees just inside the walls: olives, figs, chestnuts, the - already by now - inevitable palms. A solid three-storey seaside villa. Nowhere near as grand as the house in Sicily. Far grander than anything she’s ever been used to. Bella crosses the gate into Villa Lami.

On the way in Grace leans through the open front door and bowls the alligator bag across the polished floor of the hallway. Then she comes back down the front steps to order tea, which she does by shouting through a low window around the side of the house at somebody named Elida. A few minutes later a tray is passed through.

There is a well-positioned table in its own patch of shade near to the front of the house, marked out by vases of cacti and mandarin. But the cousins head off in the opposite direction, Amelia leading, Grace carrying the tray, away from the house, down a bumpy slope, towards the bottom of the garden. Wild roses and broom. A sudden curved wall of bamboo. A recurring glimpse of a building through the trees as they approach the back boundary wall - a garage with living quarters above; outdoor iron steps at the side. A few feet away from it Bella asks, ‘Who lives there?’