The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (12 page)

One day, she told herself as she baked her cakes every Friday, the doorbell will ring. And when I go to the door and open it,
I’ll see a handsome young man standing there, with the sun shining on him and his face illuminated like an angel. And as soon as I see him, though all these years have passed, I’ll say ‘Good morning,
signor
Dario, come in’; and know that all my waiting has not been in vain. For it won’t just be that he has grown into a handsome young man of what, twenty-eight it must be by now; nor even that he has come to tell me that he is going to open up The Villa and come and stay with, perhaps, a wife and a small child. No, what will really make him glow and what will really make me think that my years of
cake-making
were justified will be the knowledge, that will be evident in every pore of him, in the way he holds himself, in the very shade of his skin, that though he is now twenty-eight, he still has not lost his faith, he still writes poetry and he still, as he did at thirteen, distrusts and holds at a distance his mother; or her memory, if she is no longer alive. Oh, you were right to distrust her—poor, kind, unhappy Amelia—Maria told the figure of Dario in her imagination. And I know, I’m absolutely convinced, that though you are now grown-up and have in a sense come to terms with her, you still distrust her. For you spotted her corruption instinctively, didn’t you? And once one has spotted corruption, one cannot, however much one has come to terms with it, put one’s knowledge aside, can one?

No, Maria told herself firmly, whenever she found herself asking this question: one cannot. Not if one wants to live.

Oh, Dario, Dario, she would almost mutter out loud: please, one day, do come.

My angel.

*

When, on that Easter Sunday morning fifteen years after Amelia Cavalieri had first spoken to her, Maria heard the doorbell ring as she was starting to prepare lunch, she didn’t even tremble. In fact, she told herself, as she wiped her hands and patted her hair
into place, she had never felt calmer in her life. Moreover, while of course it could have been any one of a hundred people ringing her doorbell, she knew that it wasn’t. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind. It was him. What she had always dreamed of had come to pass. What reason had she to be agitated? she asked herself as she looked in at Giuseppe, sitting in an armchair in the bedroom watching the Pope’s Easter address from St Peter’s and murmured to him, unnecessarily, ‘I’ll go.’ One isn’t agitated when the sun shines, or when the rain falls. One cannot be agitated about what is only and entirely natural.

There had to be angels on this earth, she told herself.
Otherwise
, the earth would not survive.

Opening the door and letting the Easter Sunday sun fall on her, Maria saw a massively built, handsome young man standing in front of her, with a grave yet smiling face, and a brightly dressed and beautiful young woman by his side.

‘
Signor
Dario,’ she said, at exactly the same moment as the young man said ‘
Signora
Maria’. ‘Do come in and have a coffee. How nice to see you again after all these years.’

So Dario and Giulia his wife came to the small dark house across the dusty street from The Villa; and so, after Maria had apologised for the gloom, and explained very quietly and gently the reasons for it—and for the fact that Giuseppe would not be coming out to welcome them, but was closed in the bedroom watching television—she was able to offer them the cakes that were set out in a silver dish on the table just inside the front door. To offer them cakes. To hear Dario tell her that alas his mother had died some seven years ago (‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Maria muttered. ‘No, don’t be,’ Dario said with just the faintest of frowns, ‘I mean I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but she was never a happy woman and somehow I can’t help feeling that maybe, well … you know.’) To learn that they were going to open The Villa again and from now on were planning to spend as much of the year in Sardinia as possible. And to be told, in answer to her question as to what the two of them did, that
while Giulia was in her last year of studies before qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, Dario himself, having been uncertain about a career for sometime and having even considered joining one of his father’s companies, had finally decided to do what he had always wanted to do and become a partner in a small publishing company owned by a friend of his.

‘That makes a little money out of school textbooks,’ he said, ‘but whose real business, as far as I’m concerned, is the publishing of poetry. I mean, I don’t know if you ever knew,
signora
, but I always wrote poetry myself when I was young. I still do,’ he said, lowering his head in embarrassment. ‘And I thought well, we’re only here once, aren’t we, so I should do what I want. And since Giulia’s going to be doing what you could call a proper job … We were thinking,’ he concluded, ‘I mean, it’s just an idea, but … There’s a possibility that we could get some sort of grant, you know, some sort of backing, from the
regione
here. And if we did, we were thinking of moving here permanently. Because there are quite a number of young Sardinian poets, and I do feel—well, I mean, I know no one reads poetry nowadays, but it is important to publish it, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got to keep the flowers growing, haven’t you, even if no one … Anyway,’ he said, looking up again, ‘we both love swimming, and riding, and walking, and I think that perhaps here … It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? And you know, that summer all those years ago, the last time we were here, it’s always stuck in my mind as the most beautiful summer of my life.’

In fact, Maria was to tell herself later, everything had turned out so very much as she had always dreamed it would, and she had been made so very happy by Dario’s visit, that by the time the young couple had left she had been feeling almost frightened. It was as if the Devil had had a hand in what had happened. In real life, she had thought, nothing works out that neatly; no one’s prayers are answered that thoroughly. I mean, there has to be a catch in it, somewhere.

And so there was. For when she went into the bedroom to tell Giuseppe the news, she found that her husband, still sitting in front of the television, had died—of a heart attack, it
transpired
. So that while she could never quite bring herself to be sorry that Dario had come, she could never, equally, stop wishing that he hadn’t.

All right, she told herself two months after Giuseppe’s funeral, leaning on the windowsill of the front room and looking out over the shining glorious sea; maybe the Devil didn’t have a hand in what happened. But it does rather make one reflect on the nature of angels, doesn’t it? And it does rather make one wonder whether I should have been baking my biscuits all those years.

Maybe Giuseppe was right to come into the kitchen every Friday, and tell me that he didn’t understand.

Sitting by the window, with a shawl pulled around her, Alice looked at her watch and wondered when she could turn the heating on. In another five minutes, she supposed. At a quarter to eight. That way even if Humphrey, or Jim and his Italian friend, arrived at precisely eight o’clock, they wouldn’t find the place freezing, as it was now; and if they arrived at eight-fifteen, as was more likely, they would find it almost warm. Certainly warm enough for them not to suspect that until very recently there had been no heat at all in the fashionably located flat to which they had been invited for dinner; and certainly warm enough for them, whatever else they did, not to feel sorry for their hostess.

To stop people feeling sorry for her and not to feel sorry for herself sometimes seemed to Alice the only real principle of her life. It was a constant battle, one that she fought from morning till evening every day of the year. And she knew that if she ever relaxed, as occasionally she had done in the past, she would be so speared, so stabbed, so run through, cudgelled and shot that her whole body would feel like a wound; and for a month, or three months after, she would find the struggle of such
overwhelming
difficulty that she would be tempted to give up
altogether
; just to lie down and howl to the world, or to herself, ‘Poor me’. It was a battle she had to fight, however, she reminded herself again and again—she reminded herself now, as she left her post at the living-room window and walked back to the kitchen—because without it there was no living; or no living in
the sense that she understood that word. Besides, she told herself, as the cold seemed to find the last inch of her it hadn’t already invaded, and made her feel dazed, and pinched, and sick, she had no reason to feel sorry for herself, or to expect other people to. Didn’t she live in what was—in the summer, or when the heating was on—a very comfortable and beautifully furnished two bedroomed flat in one of the most pleasant squares in London? She did. Didn’t she have a wide, a huge circle of friends and acquaintances, nearly all of whom liked her even if they did, despite all her efforts, inevitably talk about her—sometimes talk to her—as ‘poor Alice’? Yes, she did. And didn’t she have a son whom she loved, however far away he was, and the satisfaction of knowing that, short though she might fall of her goal, she did at least try to live with integrity? Yes, yes, yes. So if she was decently, even luxuriously housed, in a world where an immense number of people were hardly housed at all, if her friends not only liked her but were, for the most part, intelligent, talented, amusing and in some cases practically famous, and if she had been given, by nature, by accident, or by design, the greatest gift of all, that of being able to live with a degree of integrity—for who wouldn’t so live, she liked to ask herself, if given the chance—how could she seriously complain?

Of course not everything in her life was wonderful. And for all the various pluses, there were a number of minuses. There was the fact that much as she liked England, it wasn’t her native country, and that often, particularly on cold winter nights, she was very conscious of being away from home; cut off, as she perceived it, from the main. Then there was the fact that though she did have this well furnished flat with its fashionable address, she didn’t have enough money to heat it or, on occasions, to eat very much in it; and was prevented from selling it by the knowledge that it was the one thing she possessed of any value that she could pass on to Derek when the time came. As well as by the suspicion that if she did sell it now, and invested the money in some way that would give her a small income and,
eventually, Derek the capital, she would live way beyond that income, spend the capital herself, and Derek would have to pay the price of her trying to live ‘
dans
le
vrai
’. That, wasn’t, in her book, right.

And the last in this list of the principal flaws of her life was the fact that though she did have such a wide circle of friends, and those friends not only made her feel she could rely on their kindness but gave her work—work helping to edit the literary magazines they ran, work for the relief organisations they were involved with, work typing out their manuscripts, answering their mail when they were away, and feeding cats, placating lovers, and fending off lawyers or government agencies—that work did not always pay her enough to live on. Or to live on in any degree of comfort.

Nevertheless, all in all she reckoned she came out ahead; and even if it was at times a nearer thing than she might have liked—well, she had made her choice and in the final analysis she never, really, regretted it. Particularly as she was aware that most of the disadvantages she suffered were self-imposed; and had she really wanted to she could have gone back to the States, sold the flat, or found some better paying work. No, Bohemia was her country, Bohemians her fellow citizens, and if she sometimes had to be cold, or go hungry, to live in it with them, then so be it. It was a better place than any other she knew, for all its faults; and they were more pleasant companions, for all their foibles, falsehoods and foolishness.

Her determination not to see herself, or be seen, in a pathetic light had at times made Alice act in a way that her friends would have considered perverse, had they known about it; and she herself thought of as being her own contribution to the cause of foolishness. For example, her refusal to sell the flat, though principally a result of her desire to have something to leave to Derek, was also prompted by the reflection that having such a smart address and such a thickly carpeted, finely furnished home, none of her friends would ever guess to what extent she
did live in what all would have called relative poverty and some would have called absolute poverty. Then there was her propensity for buying, when she had some money, cashmere sweaters, silk blouses and expensive shoes; all of which made her feel guilty when she wore them and none of which she particularly cared for. Here again, though: better to feel guilty and spend money uselessly than to see that look in people’s eyes; or to catch sight of herself in a mirror and think, involuntarily: you silly, forlorn creature, washed up on this shore that is not your own. Also, the knowledge that she did own such items of clothing and the fact that she did occasionally wear them meant that she could, for six days out of seven, go round in
second-hand
clothes and plastic-soled boots bought in closing-down sales; and do this without people thinking that her hand-me-down look was anything other than a conscious desire not to be ostentatious, or wasteful. She had actually been told once by a friend she met in the street, ‘Oh, Alice, you look like a
bag-lady
.’ A remark that would never have been made if that friend hadn’t seen her at other times in her finery, and therefore thought that she was entitled to say such a thing without being considered in bad taste. And perhaps the most perverse and foolish of all was her refusal to tell the truth of her situation even to Derek; and to keep up the pretence of affluence most thoroughly
whenever
her big, black-haired, rugger-playing son, who was studying engineering at Durham University, and who was always off walking up mountains and scaling cliffs when he wasn’t in Durham, did come to see her. It was foolish because Derek, who loved her and was protective of her, would have been a great comfort to her and, without ever feeling sorry for her—it wasn’t in Derek’s nature to feel sorry for people—would have helped her withstand her attacks of self-pity. Also, because she knew that he not only would, but could, without much sacrifice on his part, have given her a portion of the generous allowance his father gave him. A monthly payment Derek had always understood—his mother had made him understand—similar to
one that she received; and according to her always had, ever since her husband had bought the flat in Knightsbridge, furnished it, put it in her name, and then said, ‘Goodbye, I’m off, if you want some alimony you’d better tell your lawyer to get in touch with mine.’ If she had told Derek, however, not only might he have said something to one or some of her friends and thus demolished her whole luxuriously appointed façade, but he would, she knew, have pointed out that he was soon going to be earning good money, assured her that he would never want to live in Knightsbridge, and insisted not only that she sell both the flat and the furniture, but that with the proceeds in her pocket she leave Bohemia and join him on the solid ground of England. Of an England to which he was entirely native, despite his American parents. A move that, however much she loved him, liked England, and every now and then longed for solid ground beneath her feet, she would never have been able to make.

He might even, it sometimes occurred to her, have insisted, too, that though fifteen years had passed since his father had walked out on them both, she should still sue her ex-husband for alimony. And had she ever allowed herself to be bullied into doing that, she would have lost, she told herself, whatever remained of her self-respect. It was bad enough having accepted the flat.

Yet for all the perversity and foolishness of what she had said and done at times, Alice had never, until recently, been ashamed of having said and done them. Moreover, she wouldn’t really have been ashamed if the truth had come out. If it had been revealed that she was not just a comfortably off American woman living in London who amused herself by flirting with Bohemians, but was a genuine waif, who had been put into a false position, both figuratively and literally, by her ownership of her flat, and who, if she wasn’t at home in Bohemia, wasn’t at home anywhere. She would have laughed; she would have blushed; and she would have said ‘So what?’ She was, she had
always liked to think, in control of her fantasies. Then, though, about six months ago, something had happened.

Coming back one day from Harrods Food Hall, dressed in her bag-lady outfit and clutching a packet of lentils, she had bumped into Humphrey; and for just a second, after he had stared at her, laughed ‘Oh, good heavens, Alice I didn’t recognise you,’ and taken in the packet of pulses, he had revealed to her that he had, suddenly, understood everything. So, Alice told herself, as Humphrey lowered his eyes, not wanting to hurt her by appearing shocked, that’s it. The game’s up. She was on the point of stretching out a hand, touching Humphrey on the arm and saying ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ But even as she was about to say it, Humphrey smiled ‘How are you?’, and without in the slightest meaning to, or knowing where the words came from, she said, ‘Oh, I’m very well, Humphrey. I’m just coming back from Harrods for the third time today. I keep on forgetting to buy things—’holding up her packet—‘and I’ve got a friend coming to dinner tonight, and I promised I’d make him some lentils.’

Then, for another second, as Humphrey looked both relieved that the truth he had suddenly learned was not to be discussed and intrigued as to the identity of this ‘friend’, Alice felt a sense of panic; as if all at once, driving along a dry, straight road, she had skidded into a ditch. ‘A friend?’ ‘Him.’ For God’s sake, what was she talking about? She didn’t have anyone coming to dinner and if she had she would never have spoken of ‘a friend’. Coyness had never been one of her failings. She would have given a name, or said ‘someone I met’ at such and such a place; he’s this, or that, I wonder if you know him. You’re going mad, she told herself, as it occurred to her that in all her years of keeping up a front she had never actually told a lie. She had simply let people gather what they would and if what they concluded wasn’t how matters really stood, that was their lookout and nothing to do with her. Now, all at once to start inventing things—and to start without intending to—oh, that
was to invite disaster. That was truly to unleash the wolves of pity. Already she could hear them in the distance, howling in the cold and the night. That is really pathetic, they were howling, when you start telling lies. That’s the beginning of madness. You always liked to think you were in control of your fantasies. But now …

We’re going to get you, the wolves howled, as Alice stood there in the Brompton Road, talking to Humphrey. We don’t care how long it takes. We’ve caught your scent and now—now you’ll never escape. A friend! Him, indeed! Oh, you poor, poor thing.

And from then on, try though she might to get a hold on herself, Alice realised that her fantasies were controlling her.

The trouble was compounded by the fact that Humphrey, having caught his brief glimpse of the truth, even though he had lowered his eyes almost immediately, couldn’t help but sneak the occasional glance to make sure that he had seen what he had, and that he hadn’t been imagining things. It was a sneaked glance that took the form of a telephone call three times a week as opposed to his former once a week; and of his constantly bringing up the subject of the friend, and Him, as if to reassure himself that even if all the rest of Alice’s life were a fantasy, this at least was true, so one still didn’t feel sorry for her. All right, she might be poor, she might be cold, she might, often, be hungry; but she did, for all that, have a friend.

He meant well, Alice was certain; it was his way of telling her he cared for her. Also, he felt guilty about being her oldest friend in London and her most constant employer, and never having realised until now just what her situation was. However, because she hadn’t introduced him to the truth, so to speak, when it had suddenly popped up, and because she had shown herself determined to keep her mask up, he felt it incumbent upon him to let her know he would respect her secret. That he would continue to take her mask as her real face. And that to prove how thoroughly he understood she didn’t want to be
pitied, while being extra solicitous, he would show his solicitude only by endlessly referring to and making jokes about that one aspect of her life that didn’t seem to him to be sensitive.

The first time he phoned her after their meeting in the street he said ‘How did your dinner with Him go?’

‘Oh, very well,’ Alice laughed. ‘He’s really very nice.’