Notorious (25 page)

She smells of honey and jasmine.

‘Don’t give me any sympathy,’ I say. ‘I might cry.’

She pats my back. She says, ‘I never had time for sympathy.’ She holds me by the shoulders. Her eyes are all black pupil. She says, ‘Don’t worry about those government pigs. Stay here and rest.’

I nod, but as she moves away, I see Anna in the window’s reflection: Anna in the hospital with her pale face, the shadows under her eyes, the strands from her blanket twisting in the antiseptic air.

Pietr pours a pale red wine into my glass. The bottle dips towards me and the wolf’s head crest gleams gold on the label.

Rosza says, ‘From Santa Margherita. Our vineyard.’

Pietr says, ‘Technically, we harvest on the other side of Trepani.’ He sits opposite me, unfolds his napkin. ‘Margherita is a wreck. But you can find it on the map. So, to impress the overseas buyers . . . ’ The rain increases, as loud as hail. Rosza spits a pine nut into the bowl on her left.

‘My mother follows Sicilian customs at table,’ says Pietr. ‘Plain speaking. And plain eating.’
Eatingk
.

‘You sound like your father when you say that,’ says Rosza.

‘I would hardly know, would I?’ says Pietr.

Rosza makes a noise between a grunt and cough and watches me, unblinking, over her clasped hands. The water running down the glass softens the dead black of her eyes. In the rippled light, they seem dark grey.

She nods at me. ‘You have good manners.’

I say, ‘They were thrashed into us.’

‘Thrashings,’ says Rosza. ‘You had no love for your father.’

‘I was brought up to be dutiful,’ I say. ‘Sometimes when all that is expected of you is duty – ’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘There is no room for love.’ She picks up her fork. ‘And children feel – ’

‘Everything,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she says. There is a spark of recognition in her eyes. ‘Pietr, we should have a party. A Christmas Eve gathering to introduce your friend. Just whoever has not run away from the weather.’

‘My mother likes you,’ says Pietr. ‘She only entertains for people she likes.’ He raises his glass. ‘We’ll have to invite your lover.’

I have an image of Devlin lying on the bed. His breathing fills the room as I bend over him and unbutton his shirt and look down at what is on his body.

‘It was a joke,’ says Pietr. ‘But what a long silence. You had to think through all the names.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rosza frown. ‘You’ll make her blush.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ says Pietr. ‘Mr Devlin called.’ The small deadly dislike coils through the formal address. ‘He has to prepare a report for his boss who will be arriving soon. He said he would call back.’

After lunch, Rosza takes me into the living room for coffee. We sit on the long sofa while she knits and talks. I am tired – I think of Anna growing paler – and I slouch on the huge soft cushions and watch the light flash off the points of Rosza’s steel knitting needles. She says, ‘Pietr tells me you were a friend of Anna’s.’

‘We were at school together. And then on the nightclub scene.

She dated my brother before he went away. Before she – got sick.’

‘So many of these girls,’ says Rosza, ‘are butterflies on lounges. All they want is excitement.’

I think of Anna’s small sad face.

‘At first the clubs were fun,’ I say. ‘We knew everyone, we had plenty of money. But after a few years there was a nasty pushing quality to the dance floor. Girls getting drunk too easily, getting sick. Girls waking up in the back of crashed cars the next morning, clothing disarranged, far from home. It was predatory.’

‘Wolves,’ says Rosza. ‘Wolves are everywhere.’

‘The men got older,’ I say, ‘and the girls got younger.’ I remember the teenage girl in the bathroom. A cotton smock dress, plastic princess clips in her hair. Talking about her mother and six sisters and brothers in the country. Smelling of lavender talcum powder. I saw her on the dance floor only briefly after that. The bodyguard of one of the old men came and got her and she went to the back room with him and I never saw her again.

‘Anna should have known better,’ says Rosza.

‘No-one knows,’ I say, ‘that they’ll have horse steroids slipped in their drink, and get raped, and become sterile.’

‘Well,’ says Rosza. She takes out one of her small dark cigarettes and lights it, blows a perfect smoke ring and watches it break up into small dark sails.

She puts her head on one side. ‘You survived,’ she says.

‘I was always bloody-minded. And I had my poetry.’

‘Poetry . . . ’ She blows another smoke ring. ‘I never understood the value. My husband was obsessed with books. Living according to the good book. Carrying his book of scraps. Out of touch with the real world.’

I run my hand over the silky pillow on my lap. It is threaded satin with tassels and brightly coloured embroidered birds: peacocks, parrots. An exotic flavour, African. I rub my finger against the shiny material. It comes away with the same black specks I had seen in the cellar.

‘Volcano ash,’ says Rosza. ‘No matter what you do, it creeps in. Like the mould on the glass. The salt under the doors. Fine black powder everywhere. Soot. It is like being back in the village.’

‘I didn’t know there were any active volcanoes left in Sicily.’

‘Don’t let the water fool you,’ says Rosza. ‘This is a dry island, an island of fire. No-one can tell when Etna will erupt. The maids think the soot flies around and around and settles on houses which are cursed.’ She snorts, smokes her cigarette. ‘These old
ofanculu
superstitions. Wearing fear like a medal pinned to the chest. Pinned so the rusted point goes in. Thank God I got away from it.’ She stubs out her cigarette. ‘My mother used to say that I was born with a map of calamity in my hand. As though it was my fault. For years I would turn my hand over, to see where the map was.’ She sits back, her black eyes glassy. ‘One day, she grabbed my wrist and bent it backwards and said,
In there, you stupid girl,
and drove her long wooden washing peg into my palm.’

She lights another cigarette, her eyes hooded. ‘My father told me I would twist my own head off to get what I wanted,’ she says. ‘As though that was a bad thing. As though he hadn’t done exactly the same.’ She plants her feet on the Moroccan rug, pushes against the sofa. I feel the heavy frame slide. She is stronger than she looks. ‘Pietr tells me you didn’t stay when your father was arrested.’

‘He wanted me out of the country.’

She is still for a moment then she nods. ‘Sensible enough.’ Her eyelids droop. ‘I always rest after lunch.’

I glance at the slicked wet terrace. The rain is falling in flat sheets from the beaten grey sky. ‘I might go for a walk.’

‘Oh, no, my dear,’ says Rosza. ‘It’s too wet for that. Mudslides are common. You will rest in your room.’ She stands up. ‘Build up your strength for your Mr Devlin.’

She is watching me. There is nothing I can do but nod.

In my room, I open the balcony doors. Pools of black standing water are cupped irregularly down the slope. The trees bow under the weight of water, the clouds make knotted fists of shadows across the plain to Santa Margherita. I think of the crest on the bottle of wine in the cellar. I think of wolves.

Under the dark reaching arms of the trees on the edge of the forest, a silhouette watches me. Devlin. I raise my hand. He stands. The trees shift in the wind, the shadows move and he is gone.

After dinner that night, we sit in the living room looking at photo albums from Koloshnovar. The photos are of her husband’s Polish family, Rosza says. She turns over pages of women in corseted dresses, men with stiff white bibs and precisely creased trousers, some with slim elegant dogs, their noses raised, sniffing the wind. Here and there is a dried flower so colourless, it is hard to even tell what is pressed between the pages. One page has an embroidered handkerchief pinned to the stiff cardboard.

‘I always wonder what happens either side of the photo,’ says Pietr, stooping over the back of the sofa, swirling brandy in a large glass. The light illuminates the liquid’s inner fire. ‘There.’ He taps the page. ‘That’s the perfect moment. But the perfect moment is always backed by messiness and sweat.’

‘Like the plain brown paper behind the silver mirror,’ I say.

‘Exactly.’

I smell the delicate aftershave he used. He has changed for maybe the third time today. There are cufflinks at his wrist. I look to see whether they have the wolf’s crest. But they are plain mother-of-pearl.

‘Poor Georg.’ He points at a photo of a thin worried-looking man hovering at the edge of a tennis party. ‘In his suit and tie, trying so hard to fit in. Always so anxious at weddings, luncheons.’

‘A failure,’ says Rosza. ‘Expecting pity.’

‘Vulnerable,’ says Pietr. ‘He would hold onto my pocket and say, What shape is yellow?’

‘Synaesthesia,’ I say. ‘The ability to blend two senses. It’s a mark of creative people. Some ability to leap between left brain, right brain. All the great poets have it.’ I feel the brandy slide down my throat. ‘Rimbaud was famous for it.’

‘Georg was a failure,’ says Rosza. ‘I never expected anyone in this world to give me anything before I proved myself. No-one deserves respect unless they contribute.’

Behind me, Pietr says, under his breath, ‘Unless they win at any cost.’

‘But you have the right to expect respect as a human,’ I say.

‘No.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Why?’

The rain beats down. The terrace spotlights fall away into the black air. Through the dark, a drawn-out sound crosses the plain. Not so much a sound as a ghost falling through two dimensions.

‘Wolves,’ says Pietr. ‘At Margherita.’

Rosza turns over the pages of the album.

‘Who took these early ones?’ asks Pietr.

‘Your grandfather,’ says Rosza. ‘My husband’s father,’ she says to me. She taps a photo of a fierce-looking man with very black hair and a handlebar moustache who stands in a garden filled with black roses. By his side is a dark-skinned youth, bare-chested with loose flowing trousers and a curved dagger in the sash around his waist.

‘It’s another world, isn’t it?’ says Pietr.

‘That’s the servant he brought back from Morocco,’ says Rosza.

‘Slave, I would more believe,’ says Pietr.

Rosza stares down at the photo. ‘Your grandfather didn’t like me at first. Natural, I suppose. The foreigner. The peasant girl.’

‘You said it was guilt,’ says Pietr.

‘He was crazed by the death of his son,’ says Rosza. ‘He blamed himself for Czeslaw leaving.’ She puts her thumb over the face in the photo. ‘He felt something in his own past had driven away his son.’

Pietr reaches down. After a small hesitation, Rosza lifts up her hand. Pietr turns the next few pages and says, ‘Here we are.’ Tall, perfectly matched and spaced poplars run beside a long straight road to the white chateau in the distance. The house itself is only glimpsed through the trees but I know what it looks like: the huge bay windows along the broad stone terrace, the narrow balconies jutting out from the second storey, the tall pointed turrets. But when I saw it, the windows were broken and gaping, the roof was missing its tiles, the poplars were snow-blighted.

‘Poland,’ I say. ‘Koloshnovar.’

‘Yes,’ says Pietr as though I had asked a question. ‘I remember my grandfather’s voice echoing down the long halls. You couldn’t get away from him. And the incredibly heavy red curtains. Red velvet wallpaper. All the colour of blood. Oh, and horses’ heads looking over the half doors in the stables.’

‘That was a story of your father’s,’ says Rosza. ‘I told you.’

‘Yes,’ says Pietr. ‘Because he couldn’t.’

He turns another page. ‘There should be a view of the stables. Here.’

This was a photograph taken in a cobbled courtyard of a glossy black horse – a thoroughbred – being brushed down by a boy in shirt and braces. Nearby, a gate opened onto a field, bushes in the distance, a light hovering sky, the darker hump of low windowless buildings.

‘Those fields are famous,’ says Rosza.

‘Infamous,’ says Pietr. He says to me, ‘The Polish cavalry rode out to meet the German tanks there in World War II. All the men in silver and tassels. Swords. Of course it was total carnage. My grandfather gave them horses but refused to go himself. He said it was madness. He wouldn’t let my father go either.’

‘He saw it though,’ says Rosza. ‘He watched it all from a ditch. It made a terrible impression on him.’

‘You never told me this,’ says Pietr.

‘Oh yes,’ says Rosza. ‘I am sure that is why he wanted to become a monk.’

‘Until he met you,’ says Pietr.

Rosza nods.

‘You had so much in common,’ says Pietr.

‘We did,’ says Rosza, meeting his glance squarely. ‘I was more mature than most girls my age. You don’t know what it is like to go through a war. The things you see.’

‘I think all my father wanted,’ says Pietr, ‘was to be pure.’

‘That is impossible in this world,’ says Rosza. ‘The best you can hope to be is changed.’

The beat on the roof slows, the rain easing. Pietr touches the photo. ‘There should be a memorial there.’

In the voice of one who has argued the point before, Rosza says, ‘We had to put the landing strip in. The business was in trouble.

We needed to make use of every acre.’

‘Leasing out is not making use,’ says Pietr.

‘We survived, didn’t we? You enjoy the comforts of it now, don’t you?’

He looks out the window. The sound of the sea is clear from this side of the house.

I turn the page. There are more shots of the house and the flat fields which stretched to the horizon under a sky of threaded blue fringed with clouds. Next came the moustached man flanked by two unsmiling black-haired young men; the one on the left had a duelling scar on each cheek.

‘The sons from his first marriage,’ says Pietr.

Rosza mutters under her breath, ‘Bastards.’

Pietr frowns. He says to me, ‘Literally, bastards. My grandfather disinherited them for me. They were very bitter. One shot himself, the other drank himself to death.’ He turns over the page. In the next photos, his grandfather had grey in his moustache; he stood beside a small woman with very light eyes and hair a shade deeper than Pietr’s platinum. Next to her was a little girl, with almost the same colour hair.