The Heroes' Welcome (12 page)

‘Where is it?’

‘Now? It’s asleep. You’ve put it to sleep.’ She gave a kind of smile at the idea, at the fact she’d said it.

‘That’s not good enough,’ he said. ‘Wake it up.’

‘What?’ She was slightly alarmed suddenly. She had offered a tiny opening to her inner world, a first step in something she expected to be tender and delicate, and he was racing in like a cowboy on horseback.

‘Wake it up!’ he cried. ‘Where does it talk to you from? Is it inside you? Inside your head?’

‘It sits on my shoulder,’ she said.

‘Stand up,’ he said. He took her hand to pull her. ‘Stand there. OK.’ There was a wooden post set into the beach; a fisherman’s mooring post, its base drifted with fine sand. He positioned her by it, the sea behind her, and looked her hard in the face. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. He hadn’t ever, but she knew he wanted to. There was something serious in him which prevented it.

‘Let me get this right,’ he said. ‘You get that voice, like a teacher or some bully from school—’

‘I never went to school,’ she said.

‘Waste,’ he said. ‘Clever woman like you,’ and she was pleased, because nobody had ever thought her clever, and he noticed that she was pleased and smiled at her, and then continued, ‘OK, the voice – the goblin – is it like your parents when they’re angry, or you think they’re angry, and it goes over and over all the things that are wrong about your moral character and your behaviour and everything?’

‘That’s just what it’s like,’ she said.

‘That’s what it is,’ he said. ‘It’s not what you really are. Or what you really think. It’s some habit you got into when you were little, and you get used to it and it just goes on and on. My sister had an owl in her belly. Did just the same thing. Made her feel nauseous too. So. Is it awake yet?’

She looked at him.

Clever?
said the goblin.
Clever? You’d fall for that cheap and clearly inaccurate compliment? He’s out for what he can get. Probably just thinks you’re rich. He’d hardly be after you for your looks, would he? Unless he’s desperate …

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s right here.’

‘On your shoulder? Which one?’

‘Right,’ she said, and her mouth tightened, and she thought she might cry, and what was she even doing here?
He doesn’t like you. How could he like you?

‘Put your hands on the post, in front of you,’ he said. ‘Just rest them on the top.’

He smiled at her. ‘Don’t move,’ he said.

The next thing was a ferocious loud report, and a hard clean note past her right ear, swift and sudden and gone again with a brush of air and an idea of heat, harder and hotter than she had ever experienced.

She cried out, lurching a little to the left, her foot turning on the soft sand, but she didn’t fall. Her eyes were wide as she glanced behind, out to the wide clear sea, and then looked back at him.

He was standing in front of her, a pistol held in both hands, pointing downwards.

‘Got it,’ he said, and he grinned. ‘Point blank, pretty much.’

Back on the rug, she sat shaking. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Lunatic? Hero? What?

But you presented it to him as real, and he dealt with it as real.

He nearly shot you! His bullet went past inches from your head! If you had moved, you’d be dead – but he told you not to move. And you didn’t move – he …

She’d refused his arm to get back to the rug, to sit. He was squatting now, a little to the side, watching her and holding out his hip flask.

‘Whisky,’ he said. ‘Sorry to scare you. Had to be like that.’

She stared up at him, dark against the bright sky behind him. A flurry of seabirds had been set off by the sound of the shot – gradually they were returning to the rocks and the strand, resettling. She did not feel at all settled. But the voice in her head was not the goblin.

‘You OK?’ he said. He gestured again with the flask. She shook her head.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am OK.’ She sounded a bit puzzled by the fact. But she was OK. He’d shot the goblin.

*

Later she asked him what had happened to his sister’s owl.

‘I got rid of it for her,’ he said. ‘I squeezed it up out of her tummy, moving it higher and higher till it popped out of her mouth, and then I strangled it and put it in the stove.’

‘Could you see it?’ Julia asked.

‘Nope! I had to hold on real tight so it didn’t get away and go bothering some other little girl. I just grabbed it right out of her mouth and stuffed it in the stove and slammed down the lid.’

She smiled.

Over the next days and weeks she found herself smiling in her sleep, and waking up smiling.

Rome and London, June–July 1919

Before leaving London, Riley and Nadine had made one other visit: to their old art teacher, Riley’s mentor, Sir Alfred, in his white and beautiful house in Orme Square, behind the magnolias. When they had told him they were married, he had said, ‘Good,’ and ‘Where are you living? Want to come and live here?’ His warmth had been joyous. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘You must go on your great trip.’ This had been a dream plan from the years before the war – that they should visit Amsterdam, Paris, Florence, Borgo San Sepolcro, Mantua, Rome, Istanbul, Cairo, to see Rembrandts, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Delphi, the chapel of Chora, the mosque of Ibn Tulun. Sir Alfred had sent Nadine up to his studio to choose a present of one of his travelling painting cases, and Riley had gone up with her. They had looked out of the tall windows at the spring sunshine; the memory of five years before, when he had first touched her, in this room, had hovered like a ghost, making Riley’s hand ache. The old man’s main wedding present was a truncated section of the Grand Tour – an extension to their honeymoon – a trip to Italy.

Now, night after night across Europe, following Sir Alfred’s itinerary, Nadine and Riley slept under high ceilings in single beds on opposite sides of tile-floored bedrooms, separated by little marble-topped bedside cupboards, glass-shaded lamps, guidebooks, dressing gowns, and deep, terrible misunderstanding. This profound wrongness streaked Nadine’s heart. Everything around them was so right, so promising, so surging with possibility and fruitfulness … except for what was wrong, and she knew – she
knew
– did not have to be wrong. It wasn’t his face. She was getting used to his face. It had become just – the truth. She thought.
Or am I still in shock about it? Is he?
But we can live with it. Look at us, living with it! We’ve only another fifty years or so …
Y
es, so far, we’re just wandering around, settling nowhere – this is not a real life …

Nor was it his speech. She understood him, with only a small amount of extra effort. Other people, unused to him, found it a little harder. When he heard of the Italian mode of speech known as the
bocca aperta
, the open mouth, he noticed how much easier it was to understand, and took to practising it himself – when he wanted to communicate, which she knew was not always. Communication was work for him, physically, emotionally, socially. He did not want attention.

No, the same thing was wrong. The sex thing.

By pure force of will she pushed it away. Distraction! And in this she had a sudden though entirely predictable burst of assistance: Nadine, like so many before and after her, fell deeply, madly, in a most devout, transparent and mysterious way, in love with Italy. She blinded herself with the glory of the Italian summer. Every time she looked out onto Umbrian hills or Tuscan streets, on to Venice! – every time she breathed pine or fennel or frankincense, or looked into some shaded church in the heat of the day, the fear which had desiccated her in 1918 wilted and shrank. Everything was beautiful, and the beauty began to overpower all her sorrows and regrets.
She smelt basil, for the first time in her life, and was intoxicated. The fat and glossy tomatoes made her sigh. This Italian sun was making a nymph of her, mossy-footed, cool-thighed, water-pouring. She loved the world –
it’s true! I do! I had forgotten! –
and she began to wonder what she was going to do about it. She wanted to tell it. To thank it.
Is that what art is for? To tell the world you love it?

This educational voyage, arranged by a most knowledgeable guide, was peeling mud and sorrow off her soul. She remembered suddenly, one morning, wounded soldiers arriving from the battlefields after days of travel caked in mud, in a dried-out carapace that had to be chipped off them … a clay shell like a gypsy’s roasted hedgehog, and God knows what wounds and damage you’d find inside. Every day the cities and the paintings exposed to her long, deep unities of humanity, strong living channels that emerged from the depths of the past like crystal streams bursting from a cavern. She found herself connected not only to the painters, but to their subjects too.
All these humans, all these lives, all that time. Look …

In Milan she saw a
Supper at Emmaus
by Caravaggio. Jesus sat at the table, looking ill, she felt, with a light sweat on his face, and concern occupied every angle of the three people around him. Just a man, suffering. Such love and fear surrounding him –
well, of course I identify with that
. Looking at him, some phrases came back to her from the book of Edward Thomas which Peter had given her: ‘a strong citizen of infinity and eternity … I knew that I could not do without the Infinite, nor the Infinite without me’. Thomas, she remembered, had died at Arras, at Easter, 1917. She wondered if he had been a religious man.
And oh – Peter—

*

One day at Mantua, she saw another painting, not especially good, in the shadows of a church they had only gone into to get out of the heat. It was typical, showing the Virgin and Child on their throne, with some saints, her in blue, him in a coral necklace. But at the bottom, excluded from the rest of the painting by a marble step and the Virgin’s tapestry carpet, scowled at by the Lion of St Jerome (who was offering the Virgin a model of a church), almost trodden on by a baby St John the Baptist, were the heads of four shamefaced people. Two were women, scarved, modest in dark clothing, sad. The others were men: one grey-bearded, aged and wrinkled, the other, younger, guilty-eyed, stubborn, despairing. The women looked down and sideways. The men stared out. Each wore a circle of yellow cord stitched to his coat. At the top of the painting two angels held up a plaque on which was written:
Debellata hebraeorum temeritate.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked Riley.

‘Something of the temerity of the Jews,’ he said. ‘I think.’ It took them a moment or two to get ‘temerity’ across. Some consonants are less clear than others.

The figures seemed to be standing in a pit. Were they a family – parents, a son and a daughter? What had they done? Why were they so banished?

She asked an old lady, who pointed her to a young cleric, who took them to meet a dusty priest who was eating cake in a room behind the church, and he told them in decent English with an amount of gesticulation the story of the Defeat of the Jews’ Temerity. In 1493 Daniele di Norsa, a Jew of Mantua, bought a house with a fresco of the Virgin Mary painted on the façade. Having asked the Bishop’s permission, he had it painted over. Two years later, under threat of being hung, he had to pay 110 ducats at three days’ notice for a new painting by Mantegna, to the glory of the Virgin. A year after that, Daniele was evicted, the house demolished, and the land ‘donated’ for a church to be built. Mantegna’s painting was put in it, with great pomp and a procession. A year later Daniele was vindicated of any wrongdoing; but two years after
that
this painting was made, recording his humiliation, and put in the church. This church, on the land where his house had been.

Nadine flexed and wriggled her fingers quietly as the priest told the story. Afterwards, walking between the afternoon sun and the black shadows by the stone walls, she said: ‘How many times can someone be punished for the same thing?’

‘As many times as the culture he lives in allows,’ said Riley.

It reminded her of scared boys running away from German bullets into the line of the firing squad for deserters. The priest told them that Norsa had been lucky: the punishment for damaging a sacred image was to have your hand chopped off.

*

They went to see the painting Norsa had paid for: a magnificent thing, showing Francesco Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, in all his glory and virtue, kneeling in his black armour and his pink and gold brocade. There was no customary image of the donor here, no family symbol or tiny figures of them and their wife on their knees before God. Nadine wondered if Gonzaga was just obliterating Norsa, as a less-than-nothing Jew. Or was he protecting him from further attention and obloquy?

‘Christians,’ she murmured. ‘Love thy neighbour. And Christ was a Jew, wasn’t he?’

‘Mmm,’ said Riley.

‘Technically, I think I am too,’ she said. ‘Let’s not let our children be religious, shall we?’ And then realised what she had touched on, and rushed into a tiny shop, where there were new cherries, over which she exclaimed in pleasure.

Children?
thought Riley.
What does she mean?

She spoke without thinking. That’s why she ran off.

*

For their first hot, starry, delirious nights in Rome, Nadine and Riley stayed at a little place near Santa Maria sopra Minerva, so full of priests that it made them laugh.
Even if he wanted to, we couldn’t, here
,
she thought,
surrounded by so much chastity …

‘I’d rather like to try a different sort of hotel,’ she said, and Riley, who had taken to the ascetic little room with its crucifix and iron beds, was sorry that he had perhaps inflicted lack of comfort on her. They had laughed together at their 1909 Baedeker, where it had said that travels with ladies would cost more, and that ladies should wear blue veils, and on no account go anywhere on their own, and so forth – but he was a man unaccustomed to comfort, and uncertain about the true nature and requirements of women – even a fearless-seeming woman such as Nadine. She liked watching him realise that of course she must have more comforts than this. She liked the pleasure it gave him to attend to her, and began to invent little desires for him to enjoy indulging.