The Marshal at the Villa Torrini (12 page)

There were just the two candles lit at the head and foot of the coffin. The Marshal had barely been able to distinguish the altar where a bunch of wax white lilies perfumed the chilly air. Their scent was covered now by that of the incense as Father Jameson circled the coffin. He moved slowly with an almost imperceptible limp.

'For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness and by reason of Thy
law I have waited for Thee, O Lord.'

There were a great many candles lit this morning, so that the altar at least was illuminated. The small door into the sacristy, though, was still hidden in gloom.

Father Jameson, last night, had gone through first, the Marshal following.

'You must mind the step. I hope you won't feel too cold with just the one bar. I try not to use too much electricity here, my parishioners not being rich. You do understand . . . At one time I said the English mass and heard confessions in the cathedral, but this is very good. We're quiet here and we have our Sunday mass now. Sit down, Marshal— forgive me, I don't remember your name though you told me.'

'Guarnaccia.'

'Guarnaccia. Yes, yes. Marshal Guarnaccia—not a Florentine name?'

'No, I'm from Sicily.'

'Ah. I was never there but I think it must be very beautiful, especially the sea. The "wine-dark sea"—I'm thinking not of Homer but of the story by Sciascia, your fellow Sicilian, a fine writer. Warm your hands a little, they're blue with cold.'

The Marshal did so gratefully. They were frozen despite his heavy leather gloves.

'Thank you. It's a fierce wind.'

'It is indeed and it chills the bones and my bones are old and a bit rheumatic. I think the good Lord will forgive us if we drink a drop of Marsala, do you think so?'

He took the bottle and two small glasses from a tall, antique cupboard. The Marshal's chair was also antique, as big as a throne and elaborately carved. But the other chair was a kitchen chair, made of Formica or something similar, and the table, though shrouded in worn tapestry, undoubtedly went with it, judging from the just visible straight metal legs. The one bar electric fire looked old and cheap, and the priest's black trousers shone with age. Yet there was something about Father Jameson that made all this irrelevant. The Marshal liked him. He felt comfortable with him, and even before the priest had told him what he had to tell him, he felt for the first time that here was somebody who would take away some of the burden of this business.

'My soul hath relied on his word: my soul hath hoped in the
Lord.'

Apart from anything else, he had been of practical help, telephoning to Mary Mancini himself to arrange for her to meet the Marshal this morning after the funeral. The Marshal was pretty sure that he could guess which one she was even from behind. She would be the one standing next to the thin fair girl who must be Celia Carter's daughter. With what he knew now, he would certainly have to talk to the girl at length, but he would be happier doing that after a word with Mary, who might, he hoped, know what it all meant.

The church was so cold there must be no heating on at all. If those lilies had been carved in ice they wouldn't have melted. The Marshal's ears and nose were frozen.

'From the morning watch even until night let Israel hope in the
Lord.
'Because with the Lord there is mercy . . . '

In general, he was inclined to agree with Signora Torrini about priests. But then, his experience had been mostly of the country village priests down home, the sort who warned you that your soul would turn black and suppurate if you didn't take Holy Communion . . . Why had she brought that up, anyway? He ought to remember to ask her. In any case there was something about Father Jameson that had made him feel better last night, made him sit peacefully sipping his tiny glass of Marsala, in no hurry to come to the argument in question, despite the chill that the one bar fire did so little to dispel. They had talked for a while of their respective homes and it was the Marshal who first mentioned the subject of exile.

'Well now, Marshal, no priest from anywhere in the world would consider himself in exile in Italy, the home and heart of the Church. And there's some truth in that perhaps as regards any Catholic'

'You mean someone like Celia Carter? But I understood she wasn't a practising Catholic'

'No. But perhaps that's not quite what I meant. I'm thinking more of questions of culture, of education. The good Mary Mancini, now, she's comfortable here, married to an Italian, more so than she might be married to an Englishman of the Protestant faith. Of course, since Vatican II there have been great changes and mixed marriages are not frowned upon so much as they were. Nevertheless, they create problems and, in my experience, they've never been problems that were, so to speak, clearly denned religious ones. They're subtle and persistent problems of very different sensibilities which, even in these days of Ecumenicism, show no signs of resolving themselves.'

'And Celia Carter suffered, you think, from problems like that?'

'I'm certain of it.'

'Is that why she came to see you?'

'Oh, she didn't come to see me, Marshal, no.'

'I understood from Captain Maestrangelo . . .'

'That I'd talked to her. Yes, indeed I did. But she didn't come looking for me, though she was certainly looking for help. I didn't go into detail with your Captain. No doubt he's a busy man and besides, he felt you were the person who should be told. No, she didn't come here at all. You might say I found her or that she found me. I don't know. It was in the cathedral after Saturday mass at which I'd served, as I sometimes do during busy festive periods.'

'Was this around Christmas time?'

'You already know something about it, then?'

'Not really. Only that something went very wrong and that it happened around Christmas.'

'I see. Yes. You're right. It was Christmas Eve. I served at the normal Saturday mass so that those who usually did so could rest before serving at midnight mass. I was going home. It would be about six o'clock, I would think, and there were few lights on in the cathedral and very few people remaining. Just a small group lighting candles at the crib and another with guide books looking at the fresco of John Hawkwood.

'I didn't notice her at once, and when I did it was only as a dark shape out of the corner of my eye, and I imagined she was one of those elderly women who often kneel alone in empty churches to pray. Then, for some reason, I looked at her more carefully. There was something wrong, something about the figure that was too rigid. I had almost passed by her but I stopped. She wasn't praying, not then. She was kneeling, but she looked more as though she'd collapsed. Her arms were hanging limply by her sides and some shopping, Christmas shopping, had tumbled to the floor. Her eyes were closed, she was breathing very slowly and deeply. I touched her shoulder, afraid she was ill.

' "Are you all right? Do you need help?"

'She turned her face towards me and I realized that the deep distressed breathing was in fact a form of weeping. Her cheeks were wet with tears and her eyes were very swollen. She spoke to me in Italian.

' "I can't go home . . . "

'"Indeed you can't, in such a state. Sit down now, a moment."

'I had to help her and, to be honest, despite her evident grief, I was worried that her health was compromised, that she might suffer a serious physical collapse.

'"Do you feel faint?"

'She shook her head. "I can't go home." She made an effort at collecting her Christmas parcels but her fumbling only caused them to tumble about more and the very sight of them seemed to distress her. She pushed them away from herself and began sobbing. We all, even as small children, cry in a different way when somebody can hear us, did you ever notice that, Marshal? I collected the parcels together and took her arm.

' "Come with me now a moment and sit quietly until you're feeling better. It's so cold in this great place."

'She came with me quite docilely, and yet I felt she had little enough strength to walk and I had to support her. I could feel the physical weight of her grief. I sat her down in one of the sacristan's rooms and switched on the light.

'"Is there anything I can offer you?"

'She shook her head. I was still worried that she might collapse. It was clearly a great effort for her to breathe.

' "Do you want to tell me about it? Is it something you want to confess?"

'She looked at me blankly. "Confess?"

'"You are a Catholic?"

' "I suppose so, yes. But I don't go to church . . . "

'"You came today. Were you at Holy Mass?"

'"No . . . "

'I sat down before her. She looked as though she might fall forward. She was still crying, but the tears rolled steadily down her cheeks in silence now, and she seemed unaware of them.

'"Try to breathe more deeply. That's it. You're very distressed. Look at me, child. I'm a priest and I'm also a very old man. Whatever it is I've probably heard it before, and it might give you some relief to tell someone, a stranger especially, if you prefer to think of me so, rather than as a priest."

'"Yes."

' "Have you told no one at all what's troubling you?"

'She shook her head. "I'm ashamed, I can't . . . "

' "But there's nothing you want to confess?"

'She shook her head. "I don't know what I've done . . . But there must be something I did or should have done. I feel responsible but there's nothing to confess."

'"What made you come into the cathedral, do you know?"

'"Oh yes. I was frightened."

'"You need help."

' "I was frightened. I was trying so hard and I thought . . . I was managing, shopping. I bought things. I bought— then I just collapsed inside. I can't cope, I can't! And I don't want to die, Father, you must believe that,-but perhaps that's how it happens, against your will!"

'"Suicide?"

'"Yes.."

'"That's what you're afraid of?"

'She nodded. "But I don't want it. Believe me."

' "I do believe you, child. Will you pray with me for a moment?"

' "I can't, not in words."

' "Well, well. Your being here is a prayer in itself, isn't it? Did you pray as a child?"

' "With my father, when I was very small."

' "And what prayer did you say together? Do you remember one after all these years?"

'"Only one.
Out of the depths . . . have I cried to Thee . .
."

' "The
De profundis?"
It seemed a strange choice for a young child. "It's very beautiful. A penitential psalm. Will we say it together now?"

' "I can't remember very much . . . "

'"Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord:
'Lord, hear my voice.
'Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
'If Thou, O Lord, shall observe iniquities, Lord, who shall endure
it?
'For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness and by reason of Thy
law I have waited for Thee, O Lord.
'My soul hath relied on his word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
'From the morning watch even until night let Israel hope in the
Lord.
'For with the Lord there is mercy and with him plentiful
redemption.
'And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities."

'As I finished the prayer I saw that she had begun to breathe properly and her colour was slightly better.

'"I hadn't forgotten it. I thought I had, but I remembered each phrase as you said it. Thank you. He was such a good man, my father. Do you think it really means anything, the phrase they always use—while the balance of his mind was disturbed?"

'She told me then, and I understood what she was afraid of. She was afraid of grief, of unbearable grief of the sort that had ended in her father's suicide. She told me all about her mother's illness—she'd have been no more than eight or nine years old herself then—a terrible form of cancer which disfigured her face so that near the end she refused to let the child see her.

' "She didn't want to frighten me. She didn't want to be remembered like that."

'She knew, as children do know things, that her father had somehow helped her mother to die.

' "Did I listen to those whispered conversations between him and his sister? I can't honestly remember. I never saw the morphine suppositories that the nurse left each day and yet I was aware of their presence and the feeling of dread that they provoked, a cold sick panic in my stomach."

'Her father had outlived his wife by less than a year.

' "He did it with sleeping pills. They say that's a woman's suicide but he put a plastic bag over his head to make sure."

'She was too young to help him, too young to talk to him, but sensitive enough to feel inadequate and to take the blame.

'"It wasn't just because he missed her, I'm sure of that. He must have been lonely, but the horror of her illness coupled with his guilt about the morphine . . . Oh, I don't blame him in any way, not now."

' "But you blame yourself?"

' "I couldn't help him. I wasn't strong enough. I wasn't important enough."

' "You were only a child."

'"It doesn't matter! Age has nothing to do with it. I didn't help him. Do you know, everything I do, every book I publish, every good review, every success, it's all to make it up to him, to console him, to give him something to live for—only he's dead. What sense does it make? I've never told anyone this before, and maybe I didn't even know it until just now when I said it. I think that's why I don't like living in England where I might think about it."

'"But something provoked you into thinking about it. Your own grief which makes you fear suicide, which you think might overwhelm you?"

'"Yes, that . . .
Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O
Lord: Lord, hear my voice
—but he didn't! My father was a good man."

' "But you're very angry with him, is that not so?"

' "Angry?"

'"He deserted you. It doesn't seem to me that you've forgiven him. Now you're angry with me, are you not? But suicide is a very big sin for such a small child to forgive. Perhaps you should have left it to God."