The Italian Romance (25 page)

The windshield glared light, and though she knew he was sitting there in the front seat next to his father, Lilian couldn't see him, not really. If he was looking out at her, now that the car had turned into their side path, braked, engine purred down to a stop, he would see her on the front porch, hand up to protect her eyes, her father's arm around her shoulder. And he'd see her mother slowly go down the two red stone steps, out on to the sharp-cut grass, alive with the sunlight, walk towards the black Ford, and he'd lean his head to peer out through the driver's window, past the bulk of his own father, as Viv leaned down to peer in at him.

‘Oh, darling,' Lilian heard her mother say. ‘Welcome, welcome home.'

His door opened. She heard the stiffness of the hinges give. And he began to appear, the top of his head, his shoulder, and he stood, his bare forearm on the hot roof. He was looking beyond Viv, the grassy lawn, to the porch where she still did not move. Her father's hand rubbed at her arm. Her arms were crossed, one hand tucked at her waist, the other firmly cupping an elbow. Her father said quietly, mistaking everything, ‘Come on, love.'

She moved. Down the steps. He came slowly to the front of
the car. Her mother walked around to meet him, and he bent as she hugged him. Lilian could hear their murmur, and she saw the driver's door open very slowly, too, and Vince Malone's big boots, one at a time, his dark brown hand on the window frame.

Bernie left her mother, whose hand fell away from his arm, and he walked towards her. He was so thin; the bones of his face pushed against his skin. His eyes were dark, sunken dark pools. And his skin was yellowed, sick. He did not look alive, not as the others there in the front garden were alive.

Her face, which had been set, jaw stiff, began to melt with her terrible surprise.

She felt herself alone, waiting for him. Her father had gone. She stood where she was, and Bernie came closer.

His hands took hold of her arms; his fingers pushed into her skin. Lilian's head jolted back with the force of it. She could almost see his breath escaping from between his dry, sunburnt lips. His nostrils flared and collapsed, flared again, and she noticed all of these things. They were uncomfortable, both of them. She didn't touch him.

His eyes glanced sideways and she felt the shadow of her father. Her mother came up behind his left shoulder. Vince walked across the grass, his hand outstretched to Mick. And then, as the men's hands clapped and met and they said, G'day, mate, G'day, mate, and as Viv grabbed at Bernie's elbow and he looked around at his mother-in-law as if he'd just been awakened, and Viv said, ‘Come on, darling, come inside. I've got a lovely spread for you. Come on, Lil, bring him in,' Bernie's hands released her. He caught her eye only for the briefest of moments so that she didn't know what it was that was new in him, only that it was something irrevocable. And maybe he did or maybe he did not sense the irrevocability in her own eyes.

They all moved again, as if everything was the same, spoke words into the summer afternoon silence, trod on the porch tiles, banged the screen door behind them.

The plate of scones and the dish of thick cream and Viv's own strawberry jam were laid out on a white muslin cloth in the kitchen. Bernie was seated on a hard-backed chair, Vince beside him. Their legs seemed too big. Vince had his son's slouch hat resting on one thigh. The thumb and two fingers of his left hand creased the rim of the crown. Every few minutes he picked it up and turned it around, and creased the other side.

Viv made Bernie stand up again, drag his chair further in to the table. He sat down on the edge of it. She stood over him, spread jam and heaped cream on to a half scone. He bit into it. The white cream caught in the dried cracks at the joins of his lips.

‘Pour the tea, Lil, will you?' Viv said, and she smiled at Bernie as if he were the perfect stranger and Lil the girl for whom wordless apologies were called for.

The tea was dark honey brown. The two older men reached their cups in under the pot in her hands and lifted them away. They spoke too loudly. Viv laughed, mopped at her eyes with her hot arm. Bernie munched on the other half of his scone. His sunken eyes glanced once or twice at the men; the crow's feet deepened as he showed his interest. The hinges of his jaw worked up and down.

Lil said, ‘I'll just ... uh...' and he nodded and returned to his scone. Her mother looked quickly around at her, and away again to the men.

She walked down the hall to her own room. It was a morning room; there was no flood of light falling through the window. She closed the door. She heard Vince laugh, and her father talk in a kind of roar over him.

She sat heavily on the mattress and felt the springs bounce. They squeaked. She picked up her white pillow and held it on her lap.

Lilian didn't know how long she sat in there. She knew it was too long. The knock at the door was so tentative, she wasn't sure if she'd heard it. She said, ‘Yes?' The knock came again, one knuckle
perhaps. She tried to raise her voice, though it seemed too curled within her. She said, ‘Yes, come in.' He stood in the doorway, unsure of himself, or of her. ‘Are you coming?' he said. He was angry, she was sure of that, but quietly.

She put the pillow on the bed. ‘Well, I ... I thought you'd want to see your mother alone. You know. Frankie and everything.'

‘Does that mean no?' he said.

She stood up. The backs of her knees felt the cool metal of the bed. ‘Don't you think it would be better?' she said.

He stared at the white frame of the door. She waited. He nodded but as if to some conversation that did not include her. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Are you ever coming home?'

She took two steps towards him. ‘Oh, yes, I mean of course. I just decided to ... just wait till you'd seen your family, you know.'

‘And who are you, exactly?' He stared at her now.

She was frightened of his eyes. Or not that. She was frightened that she couldn't see his eyes. They had disappeared into a cave, his brow bone, the eye socket, the sharp jut of his cheekbone. She opened her mouth to speak, but as she looked at him, her throat hurt and would not allow it. She pulled her gaze from him to the floor.

‘I'll go,' he said. ‘See you whenever.'

She said, ‘Bernie?'

He had been holding himself straight, his hand up against the edge of the door. He'd turned, about to walk away from her, then he stopped. His shoulder hid him.

She said, ‘Have you been sick?'

He laughed. ‘Yeah, I've been sick,' he said. ‘Sick of the whole damn thing.'

‘No, I mean your skin. You look sick.'

He relented, just a little. ‘It's the tablets we had to take so we didn't get malaria. Makes you yellow.'

He examined his boots for a moment. ‘Is that all?' he said.

He heard her take a little, shuddering breath. He looked over at her. She rubbed her arm and she was watching her hand as it moved against her skin. She was trying to swallow.

He was so tired. ‘God,' he whispered.

When finally she raised her eyes, he was gone.

Sonia walked behind the others. Her legs were wet. Ankle-high grass, a slap of a low-lying branch, damp leaves, and in the end it was will that hardened up inside her and made her put one foot in front of the other. And this was something new. Sonia was a woman who, till recently, had looked down at the floor, up at the ceiling, folded her arms over her chest, swallowed her pain in small doses. That was how it was in a world where, really, what had there been to complain about? Except a husband whose eyes glazed over when they fell on her? She surprised herself. She had been surprising herself quite a lot lately. This will had been there all the time, asleep, coiled.

Rain had been falling all morning. They'd been late setting out because of it. The old man wanted to give them his black umbrella and Jack had almost taken it for her, but she'd stopped him, politely refused it. The old man, who'd stood in his kitchen with it held out to her, lowered his arm. The wooden handle was as polished as a river stone, and the furls were overlapped in large,
hypnotic generosity. He brought it up close to his heart. His hurt at the rebuttal struggled on his face with relief. Sonia had guessed that the umbrella was his wife's pride. He'd probably never used it, never moved it from its peg on their bedroom door since the day she'd died.

But the rain had stopped. It was a fairytale wood. Light fell now. A sheer sheet of it spilled through a dripping treetop, widening behind the trunk till it covered the ground. Jack and Gianni had stepped through it. They'd brought the light to life; bright dust motes swirled in their wake, circled and floated. The two she loved the most.

She stopped her plodding, unsteady steps. The leaves all around her rained water, beat, beat, beat. A drip iced down her forehead. She stared at the two as they disappeared up the track and rounded the bend. The subtlest shift had happened, the crucial shift. This Englishman was sure in the way that only lost and found again sureness can be, the hurt passions of a passionate boy, the slow and bitter discarding of young men's dreams, everything made new again in her. He overwhelmed her. And he, in an instant almost, though in truth the weeks had been whispering it to her, had become her heart. It was all gone now, the old world she'd once inhabited. Francesco, writing from his cold northern prison to someone else perhaps but not to her, the years of her useless need for him, gone, slipped off. Even her home, the yellow stone catching light, the quiet garden she'd looked over from her window day in, day out, all gone. And perhaps everyone she'd ever known spirited away. She also had been spirited, to some other universe, she and Jack and Gianni.

She moved again. Her socks were sopping, her leather shoes slipping under her. But she herself was shifting like light, everything in her on the move, alive and gossamer-like, and nothing solid to hold, to pull her known self back. What had happened, had happened. And Sonia sloughed off herself.

The slush of the soles of her shoes on the muddy path walked
with her. She was almost alone in that patch of wood. She wasn't afraid. As she came up to the bend, she listened for their low voices. There was a silence.

She turned, the hugeness of an oak blocking her view along the pathway. She looked down to step carefully over a swollen snake of root.

Her eyes looked up. Something had beaten in her heart. She was already on top of them, so close, so sudden she could not quite understand. How many? Five, seven, Schmeissers, handguns, and her two beloveds, Jack with his arm on Gianni's shoulder, waiting for her. The boots of the Germans were caked with mud. They smelled of sweat and leather.

I'm not letting her out tonight. She can sulk and lie on her bed all she likes. If her punk friend wants to come up here and see her, he's welcome. Welcome might not be quite the word. He'll be tolerated, anyway. They can sit out on the terrace with the bats and I'll relegate myself to the living room and stick my walkman's into my ears. That's enough romance for them.

I'm getting tetchy waiting for Francesca to ring. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe she said Monday. She'd hardly scoot back up the country without even a phone call. On the other hand, she might. Oh, well, I've been waiting fifty years. I suppose I can wait another day or two.

And now that bloody Irishman throwing a spanner in the works. It simply wouldn't be possible. The invisible man, ten feet away all these years. No, I don't believe in a coincidence that big. No. I've got enough people popping up miraculously in my life.

When the punk shows up, I'll have a quiet word, as the Irishman suggested. Someone in that world will know who he was and where he came from. Anyway, whoever you were, Rodolfo, rest in peace. So near and yet so far, hey?

Speak of the devil. There's the intercom. I'll just put down the newspaper and check. It might be Francesca.

Needn't bother. There's the whirlwind I seem to have reaped, thundering through the lobby.

‘Hello, hello,' she's yelling. She can barely get her breath. ‘Cool! Yeah, come in.'

I see. It's the devil. Ah, well.

The best thing to do is to barely notice. I open the newspaper and sink back into the cushions. She is hovering outside by the stairwell. There he is, crashing the concertina'd grill closed. Sounds like he's running up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Ciao,' he calls.

She says, ‘Ciao,' her only word of Italian but perfectly at ease with what she has and what she hasn't.

I detect a little moment of silence. How old did the Irishman say this guy is? Doesn't he have a girlfriend at college or somewhere? I suppose it's Jane's foreignness, the blonde hair, the pale fragility and all that. Now they're having a whispered conversation. She's probably relating my witchery to him, my old dodderiness that seems to think she's only a child or something.

They're staggering inside. I glance to my side, casually, over the glasses perched on my nose. They are joined at the hip; all the better to devour me with, I suppose.

He's not that tall. Pleasant enough, from the looks of him. He's a bit sheepish in front of me. I think I terrified him the other night when I found them together in the square. He combs his fingers up through his hair. He looks about ten years old with his forehead bare to the world like that. The brown curls spring back, knowing their place. He says, ‘Buona sera, Signora.'

‘Hello there. You've come to visit Jane,' I say. If that's a command, let's hope he hears it.

He clutches tighter at her waist. ‘Signora, tonight I am free from the work with homeless.'

He's about to present his argument. So I, being too old and doddery to understand what's going on, interrupt him with, ‘That's lovely, Jane, isn't it? So you can have a night in. Jane can show you the terrace. Make yourself at home.'

‘Thank you,' he says. He looks at her. Her forehead wrinkles. She stares at him, a signal to try again.

I say, ‘Actually, Jane won't be going out tonight, so it's nice of you to come around. You could probably do with a quiet night yourself.'

‘Yes, Signora,' he says. He's defeated. He looks at her; she looks at him. She doesn't look at me, I note. Finally she jerks her head towards the terrace door and they stagger off, arms diagonal across each other's backs.

I want to laugh. I make do with a cough.

As they open the glass door, the noise of the traffic pours in. They close it behind them and it's quiet again. I shake the folded newspaper to straighten up the corner which keeps nodding back, as if it's too tired to be read. I peer at the article. The latest move in the Middle Eastern dance. I've read the first line six or seven times. The hieroglyphics still don't form into any recognisable phrase for me. And I wait. I wait for the phone to ring. What is she doing now? Sitting on her bed in the hotel, staring at her telephone?