East fortune, p.15
East Fortune, page 15
Tessa heard her arguing in the corridor outside. She had never heard a nun shout before.
A few days later Edoardo returned to say that his father had spoken to the landlady and paid off Tessa’s rent. The family had a flat in Trastevere in which she could recover as their guest. Normally it was rented out to students but she could have it all to herself for three months and they would pay for everything. It was only right. Then it would be spring, and she would be better and she could be happy again.
Tessa recognised the deal. Three months’ free accommodation for a lifetime of scarring.
‘And my course?’ Tessa had asked.
‘They will send you books, if you like. And when you are better my sister will take you to the galleries.’
‘Why not you?’ she wanted to ask.
When she asked Edoardo to help with the dressing on her arm he told her that it was something his sister Maria would do. It wasn’t something he felt able to manage himself.
‘So you find it distasteful.’
At first he didn’t understand what she meant.
Schifoso.
‘No, no,’ he said in English. ‘It’s not that.’
‘You know it is.’
‘I am not a nurse. I would be frightened of making a mistake. Of infection.’
He was flustered, he spoke too quickly, but she was too tired to push it further.
‘It’s all right,’ she said.
‘Do you still love me?’ he asked.
That’s not the question, Tessa thought. It should be the other way round.
‘If you love me you will forgive me,’ he said.
His sister Maria came to the flat with simple food from her parents: yoghurt, bread and mortadella, the last of the autumn apples. One evening she made a soup, tortellini in brodo, but Tessa could not bear anything hot. She only wanted food that was cold and easy to swallow. The nights were frosty now but the fridge in the apartment was filled with ice cream and mineral water. For weeks it was all Tessa ate.
‘Soon you will be well,’ Maria said.
Edoardo brought her a selection of exotic birds to keep her company. They came in wicker baskets and elaborate wrought-iron cages that dated back to the eighteenth century. Each day he brought a different bird and lined the cages with copies of La Stampa.
‘The man said I ordered so many he thought I was going to ask for a case of flamingos.’ He thought this was funny: una cassa di fenicotteri.
She learned the names for all of them: ring-necked parakeets, umbrella cockatoos, cheery-headed conures.
The man from the pet shop came to see how she was managing. He told her about the subtle variations in colour, how they changed as the birds aged. He taught her what to feed them and how to weigh and wash them, controlling dust and dander. She had to monitor the doors and windows to prevent accidental escape when they were out of their cages.
At first Tessa found them beautiful; black-cheeked, peach-faced Nyasa lovebirds. Her flat filled with peeps, chirps and squeaks and, because she couldn’t bear to close the cages, the birds kept flying around the room. They gave her comfort: the illusion of freedom.
On Christmas Day she stood at the back of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, watching Edoardo’s family make confession, receive communion, and light candles that she was still too afraid to go near. Perhaps she should have recuperated at home but she had chosen to separate herself from her family. She thought of them all singing carols in the darkness of St Mary’s Cathedral in Palmerston Place, followed by the turkey lunch in a Georgian town house that reaffirmed the worldly success of her father. He would be complaining about the bluntness of the carving knife already.
Tessa looked at the devotion of the old women crossing themselves in front of a life-sized icon, La Madonna della Clemenza, at the servers processing with their silver candlesticks and at children clutching their unwrapped presents: dolls and drums, twists of sweets, a new leather football.
I am not part of this, she thought. I am not part of anything at all. What would it mean to let go and have faith? Would I no longer be afraid?
It would have been so much easier to believe.
In the new year the winter set in. The flat had a gas heater which Tessa was too frightened to light and so she was permanently cold. If she put on extra layers of clothing they felt too heavy on the burns.
Maria made visits, as did old friends from her course, but Tessa did not feel that she was getting any better. The pain continued and she slept badly. Every morning she made an effort, dressed herself, and sat in cafés on her own in order to keep warm. She brought out her books on Italian literature and art history but found that she could not concentrate on anything other than Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. Then in the afternoons she was so tired that she had to go back to bed for a siesta.
It meant that she was unable to sleep at night.
She thought back to the summer, hoping that she might be able to imagine herself warm. She dreamed of the old Roman restaurants with their heavy pieces of wild boar grilled over open flames. How well they had eaten and how much Chianti they had drunk! She could still see the door swinging open with people selling roses, watches, lottery tickets and cigarette lighters. She remembered the laughter, late nights, and a heat that would never recede.
But the cold continued and the birds stopped eating and talking. They slept on both feet during the day. They no longer preened their feathers, or opened their eyes fully, but sneezed and became colder and quieter as the winter progressed. They lost weight and had difficulty breathing. Some sat on the floor of their cages, too weak to sit on a perch.
‘You are not looking after them properly,’ Edoardo said. He worried more about the birds than he did about her.
Tessa stopped listening. He was going to have to do his National Service and he would be away before long.
The birds began to die, shuddering away from the window, freezing to death in the corners of the room. There was nothing Tessa could do to stop it apart from light the fire that she was too scared to go near.
She needed to go somewhere warm, where it was as light as possible, where there was no need for fire or naked flames. She wanted to go to a place where birds were free and didn’t drop down dead on to a cold terrazzo floor.
In the early spring people in the square outside were carrying bunches of mimosa for the Festa della Donna. The yellow of the flowers reminded her of the healing around the burns on her arms, of iodine and wounds about to be dressed. Maria took her to a park on the outside of the city in the Colli Albani. They followed paths flanked by old ilexes and maples, lindens and oaks. In the pools of light between the trees Tessa thought that she could see fallow deer. For the first time the temperature felt even, neither the cold of winter nor the fierce heat of summer.
They passed sequoias and magnolias, and then an aviary and a small zoo. By the pond were a dozen flamingos bowing and bending their necks, running back and forth as a group, and then suddenly taking flight to wheel around the edges of the lake.
Tessa stopped to look at the deep-pink plumage, their carminered bills with black tips, their orange eyes.
‘They are the only animals that don’t fight others for food,’ Maria said. ‘They flock together. Their only enemy is man. You know the Romans ate their tongues as a delicacy?’
Tessa watched the flamingos rise and fly over the lake, their necks and feet stretching far from their dark-pink bodies, their wings black along the trailing edges.
It was as beautiful a night as any before the accident. Tessa had been in Trastevere for three months. She would leave before the embarrassment of asking if she could stay longer.
She would not say goodbye to Edoardo. In all probability she would never see him again. The next morning she would go to the train station and start the journey home without telling anyone other than Maria.
Once she had returned Tessa gave up any thought of reading art history and studied law instead. She shared a flat in Edinburgh with two other girls. There were no naked flames: no fires, no matches, no cigarette lighters and no candles; not even on birthday cakes.
At times she was afraid that she would never mend. Perhaps, she told her friends, we never fully recover from the defining moments in our lives. We only learn to accommodate them: the death of a parent or a lover, the break-up of a marriage.
But she found love quickly and more easily than she had ever thought possible; with Angus, who was passionate about rugby and loved her from the start. He had thick eyebrows, and slightly crooked teeth that seemed too small for his mouth, and he was so tall that when she spoke to him he had to lean down towards her.
‘Show me,’ he said.
He cupped his hand under her arm. It was one of the largest hands she had ever seen but he supported her so gently that Tessa thought she was going to cry.
‘I’m sure we can live with this.’
‘We?’ she asked.
‘If you’d like.’
‘You’re not put off?’
‘Why would I be put off?’
He took her to meet his parents and they greeted her as the daughter they had never had.
‘You have such beautiful hair,’ Elizabeth announced.
Tessa felt at home in East Fortune. The Hendersons were relieved that their son had found someone to love; and the fact that their future daughter-in-law was training to be a lawyer meant that she hardly had to say anything to win Ian’s approval.
‘So there is a God,’ he announced after her first visit.
Angus told Tessa that if she wanted someone to love her unconditionally then she did not have to worry. As soon as he had met her he had known. There was never going to be anyone else as far as he was concerned. If she said no to him then he would be single for the rest of his life.
‘You say that now…’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Angus. ‘I know. I will only ever love you.’
She was almost put off by his certainty. But he had been true throughout their marriage. Even at the beginning Tessa recognised that she had found what her mother would have called ‘a right man’. He wasn’t going to be making love to her in the bathrooms of the Villa Borghese or in the car park of the Quirinale but he wasn’t going to set fire to her either.
She went to watch Angus play rugby at Myreside. He had once had a game for Scotland ‘B’, and Tessa was surprised how quick and authoritative he was, turning out for Watsonians in a maroon-and-white-hooped shirt and muddy white shorts, directing the three-quarter line, taking the kicks and shouting instructions during the scrums and line-outs. The other players kept calling him Hendo, and Tessa imagined it was a nickname he must have been given at school. If so, he had escaped lightly since other players were called Psycho, Fatboy and Captain Scum.
Angus had talked her through the first game in advance, telling her patiently about offside and what was expected of a stand-off, and one freezing Saturday she had even seen him score a try, cutting inside from just outside the twenty-five, shimmying past the opposition full-back and placing the ball right underneath the posts. He had been so pleased with himself that he had fluffed the conversion: instant hubris.
In the pub afterwards he told her that it was one of the best tries he had ever scored.
‘And if you had to choose between scoring that try and meeting me, which would it be?’ she asked.
‘Meeting you, of course.’
‘And you expect me to believe that?’
‘Love me,’ he said.
In the beginning it was friendship more than passion, but Tessa had faith in it lasting and, over the years, their relationship had grown into something she had never imagined. They had been wrong to assume that everyone else had what they had or enjoyed stronger, more passionate relationships. She only had to look at her friends, or at her brothers-in-law, to recognise that they had done more than survive. They had found a place of safety, a refuge beyond passion, and she was determined to let nothing threaten it.
Now, twenty-seven years later, Tessa raised her head to see her husband coming towards her. The look was instinctive, a moment of minor telepathy, as she sensed his arrival. He had bought a new panama hat that shaded his face but she could see that he was smiling.
People were leaving the Orange Garden now; their early-evening walks were at an end. Church bells rang out across the city, summoning the faithful to the last Mass of the day. Tessa thought of his words all those years before.
Love me.
Angus sat down on the bench beside her.
‘What have you been thinking?’ he asked.
‘So many things…’
He looked at her watercolour and then out at the view of St Peter’s.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been more for you. You know, that I haven’t done better.’
‘I don’t think that at all…’
‘It’s been a pretty ordinary life.’
‘That’s what most people want,’ said Tessa.
‘Do they?’
‘And now we’re going to do something different.’
‘If you’re happy…’
‘I was frightened of coming here …’ Tessa began.
‘I know that.’
‘But it was so long ago and now I’m here it all seems to belong to someone else’s life rather than mine. I can let go of it all now…’
‘And you’re happy to leave home?’ he asked.
‘I never quite know what people mean by home. Of course I know really; it’s a building, a place, a marriage, a family; but sometimes it’s both more and less than that. You’re my home.’
She looked at Angus and knew that they would grow old together. She thought of her marriage: such an odd word, ‘husband’. Such a far-off country, the past.
Eleven
The next time Douglas saw Julia they had no privacy. It was at the opening of an exhibition in London and it was the earliest time Douglas could see her without having to make a complicated arrangement or find another excuse. He organised a few spurious meetings and flew down from Glasgow.
The exhibition was so crowded that it took a long time to find her. Julia looked up, saw him, and separated herself from the people she was speaking to.
Douglas leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek, as if they were acquaintances.
Julia held on to his arm.
‘We can’t be seen talking to each other. The slightest thing could give us away.’
‘I’ve hardly touched you.’
‘Don’t even joke about it. My husband is here. He’ll guess.’
‘You never told me he was coming.’
‘How could I? Is your wife with you?’
‘No. We live in Glasgow.’
‘Well, we live in London.’
Douglas did not want to see her with her husband. He could not stand the thought of pretending that he didn’t know her.
‘I have something for you,’ she said, reaching into her bag. ‘It’s a letter. It explains everything; or as much as I can. Read it when you are alone. Then destroy it.’
It was a tightly folded piece of orange paper with Bundestagswahl … und was das Grundgesetz dazu sagt written on it, a flyer for an open-air dance event in a small German town. The dance steps were drawn in diagrammatic form.
‘It looks very odd.’
‘I had to wait for a flight back,’Julia said. ‘Don’t let anyone see it. It says too much already.’
Douglas could see other guests coming towards them: Steven, the owner of an art gallery, a dandyish painter in a lemon-yellow suit, a woman whose name he could not remember.
‘I didn’t know you two knew each other,’ Steven said.
‘We don’t,’ Julia replied.
‘I’d have thought you’d get on rather well…’
‘Another time, perhaps,’ said Douglas, obeying Julia’s instructions. ‘I have to be going.’
‘Of course.’ Julia smiled. ‘Another time.’
Douglas found the nearest pub. He ordered a pint of Guinness and looked for a place where he could read her note. He found a light by the slot machine.
He had not seen Julia’s handwriting before. It was rounded and scarcely joined; almost printed. He wondered how long it had taken her to write it (had there been a previous draft?) and what a graphologist might make of it:
Dear Douglas,
Don’t ask me what’s on the other side of this paper. I think it’s dance steps meets nuclear physics. I am killing time before the flight, soaking up the um-pa-pa atmosphere. The brass band has left the stage and now I am confronted with an aerobics performance. Yesterday I went to a small medieval village near by. We took a boat upriver, past the vineyards and a charming industrial area complete with its very own nuclear power plant. But I know you don’t want to hear all this. You want to talk about us. What a difficult thing to do. Every day I think about us. I know it is impossible and can only lead to disaster. We must stop. I think the longer it goes on the harder it will be. I can feel myself slipping and before I know it I will not be able to break away. This is why I keep my distance. I have made a life with John. Now the aerobics team has left the stage and been replaced by a chorus singing ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ in German. What a weird country. Nothing matters to me more than my children. You know there really isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. So when can I see you again? Hopefully I can deliver this letter to you in person Thursday night.
Love,
Lonely, obsessed, confused, intoxicated, sensual, paranoid
Julia
Douglas read the letter again. It was a form of thinking aloud. He thought of writing a reply. But he realised he still didn’t want to say anything. If anything he wanted to silence Julia, be with her physically, their mouths together and bound so fast that no speech was necessary. He wanted to call her, be with her, never leave her again. He didn’t want a letter. A letter wasn’t enough.
He said little on his return from London.
Emma was in rehearsals for a musical play and was tense because only half the songs had been written.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘this happens every time. And there’s a whole song about consumer goods that’s supposed to represent the decadence of Western culture but it’s impossible to learn. You know, every soap, every breakfast cereal, every bread and every biscuit. They want to do it as a kind of rap but none of us can get our heads round it – are you listening?’
