Mr. Timothy: A Novel (13 page)

Colin is kneeling now, tracing the letters on the stone, and as he traces, the syllables seem to bleed from the marker and rise up through my mouth before I'm even sure of them.

--Serafino Rotunno.

I had meant only to whisper it, but I see her head whip around and her body plant itself in a defiant straddle, as though preparing for a new outrage.

--Did I pronounce it correctly?

No yielding. Not a smile, not a frown.

--Is he related to you? And now she begins to circle us--moving faster and faster as she spins farther away. Despairing, I call out to her:

--Do you speak English at all?

A slight tilting of the head, the barest shrug of a shoulder.

--My name is Timothy.

And still she keeps marching in her steadily expanding circle. Marching us out of her head, very likely.

--And this, as I mentioned before, is Colin.

Nudged once more in the ribs, the boy doffs his cap, lowers his head. But even this piece of decorum fails to move her. Her circle grows still wider...extravagant apiarian loops...she'll have reached Lincoln's Inn Fields by the time she's done.

Half frantic, I dig through my trouser pockets for the article I took from Iris's wardrobe this morning, and for a few grisly seconds, I think it must have tumbled out somewhere back in the wastes and been tramped down into the deepest geological depths, and I have just about given it up for lost when my hand at last closes round it...and raises it carefully into the halfnight of morning.

A ribbon, that is all. Scarlet and satin. Burning off the grey light like a tiny volcano.

--I thought you might like this.

She has stopped now.

--Your old one...was a bit torn, I'm afraid.

One hand plunges into the mess of matted black ringlets. The other rests apprehensively on her belly.

--You may pick it up whenever you like. I'll leave it here, shall I?

My first instinct is to drape it over the headstone, but the crazed angle defeats me: unanchored, the ribbon slides earthward, catches on a chrysanthemum. I point towards it, vaguely, but she's not looking at the ribbon, not looking at anything.

I whisper to Colin:

--Time to go.

He whispers back:

--Where's my bloody remuneration?

--You'll have it when you lead me back. That's all the assurance he needs. He claps his cap back on his head and gallops for the gate...trips once over a sunken marker but rights himself quickly and keeps moving, and it seems I am moving as well, for I am only a few yards behind him when her voice comes.

A huskier voice than I would have thought, but soft, too, as though the abrasion of the vocal cords had served only to plane it down. It blows through us like a wind through rocks, rising on the third syllable and singing into silence.

--Philomela.

And when I turn round, the ribbon is already in her hair, tied in a neat bow without benefit of a glass.

--My name is Philomela.

She clears her throat, swallows twice, and walks towards us. From the recesses of her apron she extracts a discarded cigar box and then opens it, carefully, to reveal a week's worth of secreted treasure: row after row of copper nails, salvaged from wharves and riverbeds and God knows where else. Bowing her head over her luminous currency, she says:

--For ribbon. I pay you.

It's the last thing I would have expected. This proud collegial air! It brings quite the blush to my cheek.

--Oh, well, thank you, but you see,
these
would fetch you...oh, my, dozens of ribbons, so it wouldn't...and besides, there's no need, really, it's my pleasure.

And it's Iris's ribbon.

For the next few moments, she contents herself simply with searching my face. Whether she finds what she is looking for, I cannot say. All I know is there is one final beat of hesitation before she says:

--Serafino Rotunno is my father. He is dead. He make frames.

Chapter 9

VERY DAINTY SHE IS AT FIRST, freeing the roast potato from its cocoon of whiteybrown paper, peeling back a segment of skin, pausing a moment to let the aroma tingle in her nostrils. And then hunger, as it must, takes over. She plunges her mouth into that warm bank of tuber and doesn't emerge for a good two minutes. I think I can feel each of her senses prickling back into life. She never notices the fork I have proffered, and even I am hard pressed to notice, for I am too busy planning her next meals. Smoked herring and pickled eels at Billingsgate...roasted chestnuts from the Lambeth market...one of Mary Catherine's famous Christmas cakes, with the currants and candied orange peel and the breath of brandy in each bite....
But there will be time enough for that later. For now, I am content to watch her eat this potato, piece by piece, and chase it down with gargles of ginger beer.

Around us: Covent Garden Market, all joints and jaws. The squawks of the costers, the brays of the donkeys, squeaking shoes and squealing children and tipped-over waggons and the haggling murmurs of gentlefolk--none of it subdued in any way by the day's ceaseless drizzle, which freezes as it strikes the cobblestones. The only stationary point is a silent man ten yards off, encased in an advertising placard for the Christmas pantomime at Theatre Royal. He is grimly dedicated to his profession. Two boys Colin's age have already given the man a kick in the hindboard, and yet he stands, frowning and rigid, ever so slowly resolving into ice.

How can his vigil, though, compare with young Colin's? Having already pocketed his pound, and a few shillings' surcharge, he abides with us still. No explanation has been tendered, and a credulous soul might suppose it was loyalty to me that keeps him here, but the evidence points in other directions. Look, if you please, at the impatient arcs he sketches round the girl's indifferent person. Watch him repeatedly tear the cap off his head and put it right back on. Listen to his apologetic mumbling, directed, one might think, at anyone other than the intended object:

--See here. Hope you know. Scarf 'n' all. Strictly business. No harm meant.

And the only face Philomela turns on him is a blank one--the look a baby might give a large dog poking its head into the bassinet. For poor Colin, this is just an invitation to more locomotion. He whirls on his toes, scuffs his heels in the dirt, and swings his hat in fidgety circles, as if marching in a sulky and invisible regiment. It's enough, finally, to make me tap him on the shoulder and say:

--Colin, I think our young friend might still be hungry. Do you think you could fetch us some pease porridge?

His lips draw back from his teeth.

--I ain't your bloody servant.

--I know it well.

--I don't fetch for nobody. In case you forgot, old brown son, I'm an
artiste
.

--Of course you are. And just wait until Mrs. Sharpe's girls get a glimpse of your art tomorrow night.

This reminder of his prospects must stir him down to his tiny loins, for in response, he squares his shoulders, thrusts out his chest, and hurls himself into the market throng. Claws his way past an orange merchant, nearly upends a turnip vendor, pauses only long enough to ascertain that we are still where he left us before charging on.

As oblivious of his departure as she was of his presence, Philomela tears off a strip of potato skin and lowers it suspensefully into her mouth. Then another strip, and another. How good it must taste. No potato, I think, ever aroused such gratitude in its consumer or went to its end more gratefully.
I am grateful myself. Her raptness allows me to study her in profile, the way a sidewalk artist might. The long, slightly arched, womanly nose and the hard, almost mannish chin: two parents happily conjoined, with almost nothing left of girl save for the round, brown, exuberantly lashed eyes and that sleek young skin, darker than its English counterpart but with a clarity and creaminess all its own. No wonder Colin can't see straight.

Which makes it all the more incumbent on me to see straight, or at least true. And so I find myself craving not romance but fact, some shard of hard knowledge to drive into this still life.

--Philomela. I don't know a word of your language, I'm afraid, so we are left with mine. If I were to ask you questions, do you think you might be able to answer? Do you...can you even understand what I am saying now?

The chewing stops; the eyes retreat; the face hardens. And here I was thinking we had already surmounted our barrier, but no, this is the real barrier, and it has less to do with comprehension than apprehension. Once she answers the first question, who knows how many more may be in the offing?

The seconds pass, the sleet turns to cold feathery rain, the shoving and squawking carry on unmodulated around us, and yet I feel the two of us becoming more and more isolated, as if the noise were calling down a mantle of silence over us.

And then she nods. Curtly but unequivocally, she nods.

I understand.

--Very well, then. Can you tell me how old you are?

--I am...I am ten years.

--And how long have you been here? In London?

She considers a moment, then holds up one of her hands. The fingers spring out like quills.

--Five? Do you mean five
weeks
? Five...

--Months.

That
th
sound slides away, leaving a tapering sibilance. Unsatisfied, she repeats it:
Months
.

--And your father...Signor Rotunno...how did he die?

She looks at me as though waiting for something more. I start again.

--How did--

--Sick. On boat sick. More sick here.

The advantage of speaking tragedy in a foreign language. One concentrates only on the pronunciation. Everything else flies to the back of the brain.

--When did he pass on, Philomela? --When...?

--Did he die when you arrived? Did he--

--No-vem-ber.

--Just in the last month?

She nods.

--My father died, too, I say.--Six months past.

She frowns a little, absorbing this intelligence. I can't be sure whether it's some spark of sympathy catching inside her or a lingering distrust. She purses her lips and, in a risibly solemn tone, asks:

--His trade?

--Oh, what was his trade? He was a clerk, actually, all his life. He worked in an office. A changing house.

Clerk in a changing house
. As though that were all one could say of a man. And indeed, the very sparseness of the description compels me to add more.

--He was very kind. A good man. Was your father a good man?

Another nod, this one slightly aggrieved.

--And he made frames, is that right?

--For the painting. Lovely.

--Did he leave any behind?

She shakes her head.

--And when he died, you were alone? No mother?

Again she shakes her head, more slowly this time.

--I don't...she dead when I...all dead....

--When you were born?

A nod.

--And there was no one else to take you in? No other family?

--Family Calabria, not...

Her voice trails away. Her eyes drift back to that last patch of potato skin, now resting in her palm. To eat or not to eat?
She eats. Claps it into her mouth and lets the earthy undertaste evaporate down her throat, waft into the far reaches of her sinuses. A serene sadness settles over her--a silent obituary notice for that lost tuber.

--Philomela, when I saw you--when I
first
saw you, the other night--you were running. What were you running from?

--River....

--No, no, two nights before that.

--I see you river.

Something so odd, so mulish about her tone. Doesn't want even to acknowledge the possibility of our having met previously.

--It was two nights before, Philomela. You were hiding. Under a tarpaulin.

No response.

--You were running.

Once again I pump my arms in a furious pantomime, but it's not amusement I inspire this time but choler. A head of steam rises inside her. I can see all the signs: the twitching chin, the tightening shoulders, the fingers of her right hand closing and unclosing. With a detached fascination, I wait for the scalding bath of her rage.

--I see you river.

And there we will leave it
. That is what she is truly saying.
One more brazen wall, Mr. Timothy
.

Carefully, I fold the potato's old wrapping into a small, compact square. I smooth the section of bench that separates us.

--Philomela, tell me what happened after your father died.

She gives her shoulder an irritable jerk.

--Was there a funeral?

--A little.

--Did you...who paid for the burial?

--People.

--Which people?

--The next door.

--Your neighbours? --Yes.

--And they weren't able to take you in?

A slight softening here. The memory seems to be at work inside her.

--For day. Two day. But poor.

--And what happened after that?

My eyes have now left her face entirely. Untethered, they range freely through the crowd, taking in clowns and conjurers, blacking sellers and umbrella menders, before coming to rest once more on that godforsaken boardman, rusted in place, glistening like bronze.

I hear her say:

--Man come.

The voice different, yes. Quieter.

--What kind of man?

Silence.

--Did he have a trade?

I steal my eyes back towards her in time to see the vigorous, almost distasteful shaking of her head.

No. Nothing so honourable as a trade.

My mind meanders back to our meeting by the river, to the shudder, the instinctive recoil my appearance produced in her. Not a reaction to our earlier encounter as I then believed, but a visceral response, an involuntary chain of association.

--Did he look like me, Philomela?

She rubs her hands together slowly.

--Dress like you.

--How so?

--He have hat, big hat. Boots like you.

Her eyes dart towards my feet, and a streak of amusement creases her brow.