Last Train from Liguria (2010) (5 page)

*

Her father said he would skip the station. At his age he found farewells a little too much to bear. ‘I will say one thing, however - if I may?’

‘Yes?’

‘Always remember, you are not a servant. Do you hear me now, Bella?

‘Yes.’

‘You are a surgeon’s daughter. Remember that. And write, of course. Let me know how you’re getting along. Lend a little excitement to my dull life.’

‘Of course.’

‘And you must promise to eat properly. Don’t scowl, it has to be said, you know what you’re like when… Well, if you say you’re eating, you’re eating. We’ll leave it at that. How is the old back by the way?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good, good. Stand up now and we’ll take a look.’

His fingers pressed along her spine, pausing sometimes to inquire, ‘How’s that? And that?’ Then his questions trailed into a series of grunts. Finally he patted her on the shoulder.

‘Keep up the exercises, maintain the curve, that’s the trick. When you stand up swing into it, like so.’ He put his hands on his hips and began to push himself forward, as he always did when he gave this little demonstration. ‘Got it?’

She nodded and looked away.

‘Off you go now. I’ll miss you. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. Good luck, Bella. Safe journey.’

She thought there might be something else, an embrace, a word - something to give her courage. Anything at all. But already he was on the way back down the stairs.

Bella waited till he was in the hall again. ‘Father?’

‘Yes, my dear?’

She came down a few steps towards him and he turned from the front door, his coat over his arm. Then with a sad half-smile laid the coat down and held his arms out to her.

‘Might I have some money please?’ she said.

‘Money?’

‘Mmm. If you wouldn’t mind.’

He put down his arms. ‘Well, of course. I mean, but I thought I’d already given you—?’

‘I’d like a little more. Just to be on the safe side. If that’s all right with you.’

‘I think I have maybe forty pounds or so in the safe. I could give you a cheque, I suppose?’

‘Forty will be plenty, thank you. It’s as I said, in case. If you could leave it on your desk before you go? Well, goodbye, Father, take care of yourself and don’t work too hard.’ She nodded, then turned and went back up the stairs.

*

Bella waited in her bedroom for the taxi to arrive. Through the rear window the garden was crawling with cats, and Mrs Carter, sweeping brush in hand, was staring bewilderedly down at them, as if trying to figure out what the attraction might be.

Bella moved to the front window. Down on the street early summer was showing: more people than usual, walking at a more leisurely pace, in paler clothes made of lighter cloth. Muslin on windows instead of heavy drapes; a dark red mat airing like a dog’s tongue from one window down the way. Across the way, a housemaid scrubbing a step stopped and turned her face up to the sun. Bella let down the sash and leaned out to the smell of new paint and the gnashing of a gardener’s shears.

And the one thing with which she would always associate this street, this borough, this time of the year - the Chinese wisteria: falling in clusters of pale-blue and mauve. Down the fronts and across the gables, through the railings and over the doorways, of all these Chelsea houses.

FROM SHIPBOARD SHE NOTICES Signor Pino. His is the only calm figure down there on the dockside, the only one who doesn’t appear to be either running to, or from, an emergency. Apart from the emigrants waiting to board the ship for America. They stand on the sidelines in dark, silent coppices; bags like dogs at their feet, clothes that are heavy and formal - what she imagines to be their funeral-best.

Pino wears jodhpurs and tall boots, like somebody waiting for his horse to be brought round. An urchin stands beside him, schoolroom slate held over a small, cropped head. As soon as the queue gives its first tentative shudder, the urchin makes a charge for the gangway, displaying his little blackboard to those already on the descent and accompanying them on their first terra firma steps, pushing the blackboard at them, pointing at its message, until he seems satisfied that it has been read and understood by all. Then, through similar urchins holding similar signs, he struggles back to the gangway and the next batch of passengers, to start the whole process again.

It takes her a moment to recognize the name chalked on his slate, Signora Stvart, the u drawn like a v in the Greek fashion. There had been no need to worry about being Bella after all. Here she will be, like any other adult woman would be, simply Signora.

Under the slate, the child appears frantic, as if he is afraid he will never find her, and therefore, she supposes, will never be paid. She tries to attract his attention. But her gesture is timid, and his eye moves too quickly to catch it.

Bella turns onto the gangway and the heat is so sudden she feels almost molested; the thrust of it, the way it forces itself on her face and neck. She pulls back a few times, before finally accepting that from now on the heat will have a permanent hold of her.

And so down into a Palermo dockside morning she inches, keeping her eye on the queue ahead, as it lands and then splits to join other queues. Some are alphabetically arranged to facilitate baggage collection or custom clearance, others appear to have an official, if somewhat indefinite, purpose. At various points an officer pops up, black uniform and seagull gloves, turning a truncheon gracefully in his hand to conduct passengers out of the mob and into a line, until the terminal, as far as the eye can see anyway, is a tabulation of shuffling queues.

She steps off the gangway and, breaking away, waits for Pino. Bella sees that he has already spotted her, and is manoeuvring himself through the crowd, hip first and agile as a waiter. He is holding an old-fashioned veiled hat, and a pair of goggles sit on his head. When he reaches her, he gives a little bow, the goggles dip and she finds herself smiling into a pair of large, insectile eyes. His face lifts back to her and she tries to say something, something unnecessary, like to tell him that she is Signora Stuart and that he must be Signor Pino. But the noise on the dockside is dense, impossible to navigate and she can’t even hear her own voice. She notes Pino nonetheless is following her lips with his eyes. She stops speaking. The impact of movement and sound is immediate and shocking: wheels, whistles, limbs, screaming machinery, brawling voices. In the distance a precarious sway of cargo, which, through her tired and distorted eye, seems to be aiming for the side of Pino’s head. She resists the urge to push him to safety and turns her face away.

Hundreds of children; she has never seen so many. Squalls of them, barefooted and scrapping for attention. Bella concentrates on holding steady, as one after another they come at her. Each has something to sell - lavender punnet, rosary beads, bag of cherries or sugary bits, all shoved under her nose. Others seem to deal solely in promises: a cartwheel - if she’ll only step aside. A song - if she’ll only listen. A novena for the next nine Fridays to Sant’Agata of the mutilated breasts.

She thinks about offering her hand to Pino, but now his own hands, suddenly occupied, are no longer available: a click of his fingers and the children are dispersed as easily as flies. He passes her the hat; plucks the luggage docket from her fingers; claps his hand in the air three times for a porter; dismisses the urchin with a tossed coin; shoves the docket at the porter now stepping forward; tugs her alligator bag away from her - despite her best efforts to hold on to it - and finally beckons her onto the meandering but insistent path that he has already started to carve through the crowd.

They move towards the exit, past custom officials and immigration clerks, policemen and men in Hollywood suits. Pino greets some by way of a nod or a handshake, perhaps an embrace, pausing to do so without ever quite stopping. She can feel the eyes of her fellow passengers lift from their respective queues to watch her, unburdened and unquestioned, stroll by.

They come out through an arcade and the screeching of stallholders, the temporary comfort of shade. Pino rudders her along by the elbow until they are under a roaring sun and he is guiding her into a long leather seat. She is in the back of a car, a black open-topped car, the roof folded back like the hood of a pram, and she peering out like a baby. Behind her Pino is berating someone, and she is surprised by his voice, the weight of it first, then its anger, and not least of all, because she recognizes it as being his in the first place. She turns and yes, it is Pino, hysterical hands pushing a point at the porter earlier left in charge of her luggage. She feels afraid for the poor little man then, his body squashed and squared by luggage that does not belong to her. Slowly she looks away.

Now she’s facing a nearby stall, a mound of ice spangled on a table. A young boy, brown and bony, crushes a cut lemon in his fist and twists his head to supervise the drops of juice falling over the ice. He keeps his other hand busy swatting flies away from, or plucking them off, the ice. There is a dog tied to the leg of the cart, a scabby-looking wretch, with ribs bursting to get out of its skin and a dry yellowish tongue. Now and then the boy touches the dog with his bare foot. Or he might break from his work for a moment to lower his hand so the dog can help itself to a lick.

She feels peculiar. Everything around her has become enlarged: the dog’s enlarged tongue, the boy’s elongated feet, even the flies on the ice seem to have grown recognizable faces, fly-eyes staring straight at her. She catches Pino watching her watch the boy and before she can prevent the misunderstanding, he is leaning over the door of the car, holding a shard of ice wrapped in a cone of brown paper. He pushes it at her, then gestures at the hat. She thinks he may be saying something about the violence of the sun. He tells her the hood of the car is broken and so she must wear the hat. He repeats this, word by slow word to Bella first, then for the benefit of the onlookers now gathering around, in a more rapid, almost apologetic version. Why can’t the English signora understand? She must wear the hat! ‘
Deve mettersi il capello!
’

Already, the cone of ice is beginning to yield in his hand. He looks at it, then flings it to the ground.

A woman steps up, tells Bella to do what she’s told, to be
brava
, put the hat on her head for the love of God before she is fried alive. Bella tries, but can’t seem to get her hand to obey… She can see Pino is worried that perhaps she is going to faint. Somebody has said it:
svenire
, to faint. ‘
La signora sta per svenire
.’ She wants to tell him there is nothing to worry about, that her body is solid, never so solid, here on this seat, as if it is nailed to it. It’s her mind that’s too light, trying to drift off like a balloon on a string that she has to keep pulling back. She wonders how to say in Italian, ‘My mind is a balloon, floating off on its string.’

Pino climbs into the car, eyes abruptly blue. Almost at once he begins taking liberties.

’
Ex-cuse
me…’ she begins to protest.

Her gloves give him no trouble, disloyally abandoning her hands in an instant. Naked hands. Now he is holding one of them and slapping her wrist. The voices of the little group close in.

’
Mi scusi
,’ Pino says and inserts his index finger under the collar of her blouse.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘No. You’re not to. Don’t. I said, no!’ The top button leaps out of its clasp. ‘I’ll tell on you. I will tell. I’ll scream.’

’
Signora? Signora?
’

The word signora comes and goes elastically from his lips and the blue has spilled out of his eyes and down his face. Her own eyes close. She feels him taking hold of her chin, shaking it from side to side. Her head fills up with smears of darkness and strands of electrified light. A man wants to know if she’s eaten. Another one thinks they should call the doctor - after all, these English women with their thin bones and watery blood, anything might happen! A discussion begins - a
medico
is mentioned, a
Dottor Amalfi
suggested.

‘That’s right,’ she says, ‘that’s absolutely correct.’

’
Signora?
’

‘I am not a servant. I am a surgeon’s daughter.’

Pino sighs, grazing her face with tobacco, cologne and something more pungent, perhaps garlic. He tightens his grip on her chin. ‘
Uno, due, tre
,’ she hears him say, before a shock of ammonia goes hurling up her nose and cracks open her brain. Her eyelids snap, she hears herself gasp, thinks for a moment she might have been drowning and is being pulled up out of the water.

The hat rises from her lap and settles on her head. Shapes through a mist. The veil is rolled back and she can see the audience now; brown, battered, caps and shawls. And Pino, his face much too close to hers, his hand still on her shoulder. A sugary cake appears, a cup of coffee, a glass of water. A woman with a tray, a long white apron blotted with stains. Bella is urged to eat. You must eat, the woman is saying. ‘
Deve mangiare
.’ Everyone seems to agree that all her problems will be over if only she eats. Even the children join in, chanting and clapping: ‘
Mangi, mangi, mangi
.’

Bella obeys. The cake is sweet, gushing cream and jam. The coffee is thick, black and bitter. The water, vile. Pino flaps a handkerchief, wipes it across her mouth and chin. She can feel his fingertips through the cloth; her lips yield and follow their touch. He brings the handkerchief down towards her dress where it hovers for a few seconds before he passes it to the woman with the tray who completes the job with a much rougher touch. Somebody offers her a new shard of ice. She takes it.

’
Sta bene, Signora?
‘ Pino asks.

She nods and then he is gone.

The next time she sees Pino, he is back by the mule station, hand leaning on the little porter’s shoulder, both men smiling, talking, smoking, eating cake while they’re at it, hooked tongues catching cream, hands reaching for tiny coffee cups on a tray held by the woman with the dirty apron. She blinks and they’ve disappeared.

Bella pulls a cushion into her back and settles into it. She leans her shoulder on the folds of the hood, sucks on the stick of citrus-sharp ice. Behind her she can hear the luggage rack being loaded and strapped, and for a second remembers to fret about her alligator bag, the pouch of money, the bits of jewellery belonging to her mother that she hasn’t yet sold. Then her eyes close down.

She sees a terrace of blue-eyed mules. A woman in an apron with one mutilated breast. A dog with a scabby back. The dog cocks his leg, splashing yellow piddle all over a hill of ice. The woman walks towards her.

*

She misses the sullen shift of the sea, its curious muscularity, pushing everything on, giving the impression of always being in charge. The big black car too, ever decisive, following its own nose from Palermo to here, barking and snorting at anything that had tried to get in its way, asking nothing of her, expecting nothing, only that she continue to drift in and out of sleep.

Now that she is responsible for her own mobility, Bella finds she’s reluctant to move. Not that there is much to encourage her, here in this vast dim room, scarcely furnished.

A bed in the distance stands raised like a tomb, wings of muslin and a mattress obese with what would have to be goose feathers - even from here, she can see it won’t offer much in the way of support for her back. Down this end, one dainty chair and a low lacquered table, the seat on the chair like a velvet lozenge which she wouldn’t dare sit on. An enormous mirror on the back wall, her reflection skulking inside like a mentally disturbed neighbour at the window. Then the floor - a marble piazza. One large primrose-coloured rug in the centre. And that’s it, really - no chest of drawers, no dressing table, not so much as a hook for a jacket, nowhere to lay out her personal belongings, nor indeed to hide them away.

*

‘I shouldn’t go unpacking if I was you, not till the Signora’s ‘ad a word,’ the housekeeper had said on the way up the stairs, startling Bella with a shrill London accent that melted to honey the moment she had started to speak Italian, leaning over the banister to do so at a trundle of servants carting the luggage up from the hall. An English housekeeper - Bella had felt less alone then, thinking there would be at least one person to chat to. The housekeeper’s demeanour and evasive eye, however, soon made it clear she was not the type to get chatty.

‘Dinner’s at seven. The Signora will see you before’and. Maria will come fetch you. I’ll send the girl up with washing water.’

Through a pair of tall doors the housekeeper then retracted her string of servants, leaving the last, an elderly man wearing pale pink gloves, to clatter and clang his way out of the room. Bella hadn’t been able to decide if she felt locked into her room, or out of the household.