The View from Mount Dog (21 page)

Suddenly Jhonny stood unsteadily up and reached down the plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol from the shelf. In a strange and clear voice he said: ‘I can climb any palm. I can drink any drink.’ He sat down again.

‘Don’t be silly, Jhon,’ said Siyo, weaving his head blurrily. ‘Can’t drink rubbing alcohol. Wrong sort of alcohol. Got menth … menthol in it. It’ll make you sick.’

‘Nah, not Jhonny it wouldn’t,’ said someone.

‘No,’ said Jhonny, ‘not me.’ Without hesitation he unscrewed the cap and drank the contents. Then he put the bottle down, looked at it for a moment, closed his eyes and jerked both knees violently into his chest. He made a weird sound, ‘Idzizz … sizz … sizz,’ before falling backwards and hitting his head on the door-jamb.

‘Whad I tell you?’ Siyo asked him rhetorically. ‘Serves you right. By God you’ll have a headache tomorrow.’

But Jhonny was not sick; he was stone dead.

*

That night Siyo, utterly sober, wept and wept and would not be stopped.

‘We’re all to blame,’ said his wife. ‘He was too drunk to know what he was doing.’

‘That
isn’t
the
point,
woman
,’
said Siyo in a miserable, quiet scream. ‘The point is he
must
have known,
I
must have known. For God’s sake, we’d been out fishing often enough for me to know he kept his poison in that bottle. You don’t just forget you’ve put cyanide and
tubli
root into a rubbing-alcohol bottle, do you?’

‘You might quite easily when you’re as drunk as he was. One
bottle of rubbing alcohol looks much like any other; they’re common enough. I expect what he thought was, “Aha, rubbing alcohol. I’ll drink that – that’ll amaze them,” because he was still high, he was still on top of it all after his climb, wasn’t he? Go on, Siyo, wasn’t he?’

But Siyo wouldn’t be consoled, and it was many days before his attacks of crying stopped and many months before he could pass an entire day without that hollow ache of loss, and he never again in his life went fishing illegally with poison.

As for poor Boyet, he acted the part of head of the family with perfect decorum for as long as was needed over the period of the obsequies. Then one morning he sat on the river-bank opposite the wallow with his godfather, awkwardly, at times aggressively, telling Siyo things about himself which were profoundly shocking. For Jhonny had been right: there was something wrong, Boyet was not like the other sons with whom he had always been so unfavourably compared; there never would be hospitality girls in crimson jeeps. Siyo, whose own grief had now made him better able to sense it in others, was shocked far less by what the boy confessed to than by his isolate misery. That inveterate difference which he had always felt would drive him out of his village and which had made him repudiate it together with his family, his origins, his very intellect: he hated it all and in so doing hated what he had become.

Shortly afterwards he left, seemingly for good. They expected to see him at least for the death anniversary, his own birthday, but Boyet never came. Siyo often longed to send him a letter telling him funny village news, that his family were well, that he was loved, that he understood. But, alas, he was unable to write and he could not bring himself to lay bare to some gossipy amanuensis confidences stumblingly expressed.

So that was that. And ever afterwards his eyes would fill with tears when passing that spot on the river-bank, as at the least mention of his friend Jhonny and the terrible accident.

Leaving her mother to rest back at the hotel she wandered out into the blinding sunlight once again. Eventually, because she did not want more coffee or more ice-cream, she went into a church and sat down. One could do that in Italy with the excuse that one wished to look at something: there was generally a minor painting, a flaking fresco, an altarpiece. In this particular church there was nothing, however; just gloom and stale incense and soft cooing overhead.

How vivacious her mother must have been then! Still was, for that matter, nearly eighty and amused by so much. So many memories, so many people. She had come here all those years ago in her mid-twenties with Dorothy, the famous Dorothy. A composite image here came to Janet’s inward eye of faces from the pictures in her mother’s photograph-album, a document she had thought was as utterly familiar as anything else she had grown up with. Yet now the album with its images was retreating strangely and acquiring a deeper unknowableness. There had been a moment that morning in the Piazza delle Tre Marie when she had recognised absolutely the fountain in the middle with its circular cobbled surround. She had shut her eyes and the photograph became vivid near the bottom of a right-hand page of her mother – snapped presumably by Dorothy – perched on that thick iron railing, her fingers on the crown of the stanchion maintaining her balance, smiling right out of the picture with a spout of water coming from the top of her head.

‘The fountain!’ Janet had exclaimed.

‘Oh, pretty. I like the little lion.’

‘But you
must
remember it. You were here before with Dorothy.’

‘Was I? Well, I dare say we were, but it was a long time ago. Also, it’s not the most distinguished piazza, is it?’

‘But, Mumbo, it’s all in your album at home. Look at this railing, up at the end here. Now put your hand on it. Go on….
There.
Exactly fifty-three years ago you sat on that precise bit of iron and smiled.’

‘I doubt if I should do so again; it looks uncommonly sharp to me. I always wondered why when they have a rail that is square they should set it on edge like a diamond so only a bird could enjoy perching on it.’

How was it, Janet wondered, that she herself should be more touched and made more aghast by the passage of time than her mother? Were the old so used to seeing places and thinking of themselves there in younger days they were no longer affected? How did one acquire resistance to making the obvious equation: that girl in the photograph equals this old woman here, now probably half a head shorter? They were not the same person; of course they were the same person. But the upshot of it all was that a certain kind of validity which she had always ascribed to her mother’s photograph-album was now thrown into doubt. If the places, why not the faces, too? Girls with bobbed hair and the look of having been good sports; heavy black bicycles, thick wood raquets, boxy cars with running-boards. And smiling through those missed years when Janet did not exist the face of her future mother’s especial friend Dorothy. ‘D in Verona’, ‘D in Lowry’s Morris’, ‘D coaching St C’s hockey XI’, and later on ‘D convalescing’. None, though, of D’s funeral.

‘Oh, she was such
fun,’
her mother would say from as far back as Janet could remember. ‘We had such lovely times. We used to laugh so much we would choke. She was one of those special people; I think everybody loved Dorothy.’

When she was quite little these words used to fill Janet with a deep pity for her mother as if Dorothy’s death had left her for ever friendless; and she would cry on her mother’s behalf and at her own inability to comfort and protect her. Later the formula ‘everybody loved Dorothy’ would induce a less sympathetic feeling amounting almost to a grudge. It was unjust. How could she help comparing herself to this unknown friend? How could
she not ransack her mind for a single schoolmate of her own who might conceivably say such things about her in twenty, forty, sixty years? She would sit with her chin on her knees, long grey woollen stockings concertina’d round her ankles like any boy’s, wondering why her white shins were so pronounced and bruised and shiny. How
did
one acquire friends, anyway? The people with friends like Dorothy seemed always to have had them, like blonde hair or athletic ability, never to have acquired them suddenly. Also there was about those kinds of friendship a suggestion of a golden age which had existed before her own creation: sunnier times which lay somewhere between the demise of the dinosaur and the institution of compulsory games at school. Then it had come to her how absolutely peculiar it was for one’s own mother to have existed at all before one was born, more still that she could carry forward memories into modern times of extreme happiness with someone who – as far as one’s own chronology was concerned – had only ever lived on this earth as a chemically imaged shadow on squares of glossy, dog-eared paper.

There was a thud behind her as the church door closed, then slow footsteps along a far aisle. Janet being Janet had not sat somewhere up the nave but off to one side in the shadow of a pillar; any visitor would at once believe themselves alone. Soon came a murmur from a distant confessional. Other lives in progress, she thought, whereas hers…. A billow of familiar irritation and anxiety swelled upwards from her viscera, crushing her lungs a little. The dreary stagnation, the awful sense of irredeemable time slipping always. Forty-five in September and nothing to show for it but the unmistakable signs of ageing. No husband, no lover, the same librarian’s job in the same Oxford college for twenty years. True, there had been affairs – especially Teresa, always and forever Teresa – and, true, there had been holidays abroad, the odd experiences and minor adventures which were inescapable for anybody not actually screwed into an iron lung. She had been caught in an avalanche and had been trapped on a rotting medieval roof of oolite shingles for half an hour by a fire in her college and she had once had a series of ever-more-menacing and crudely drawn notes pushed under her Egyptian hotel door followed by the blade of a knife
through
the door. But now they had happened (and she had long since felt self-disgust at dining out on them) they were finished, over, past and done with. It was as
if they had happened to somebody else entirely, leaving no apparent residue in her own life. So now it was perfectly possible for that intestinal billow to lurch up and make her unable to stop the thought: ‘I haven’t lived. And soon I’ll be dead.’ But what would it take to stop it? What inconceivably transfiguring affair, experience, belatedly discovered talent or whatever?

At moments when she was better defended against the billows – most of the time, actually – she could be realistic, even cynical about herself. She did it, as any other sane and observant person did, by looking at those about her and absolutely failing to detect much difference in their own lives, still less anything very enviable. Even the ones with families agonised and were secretly miserable, although they all worked hard to maintain that outward grimace of pleasure, that inward censorship so they could later say with such self-pleased worldliness, ‘Oh, we had our ups and downs, didn’t we, William?’ or ‘Of course kids are a real pest much of the time but just occasionally’ – pause for effect – ‘one of them says or does something that makes it all worth it a million times over.’ And, well, yes, it
filled
the
time.
But other than that they had not lived in Bokhara, either, nor had an affair with an entire string quartet, nor been in an aeroplane which was hijacked. They paid mortgages and school bills and phone bills and once in a while one of them would publish the book she or he had been working on for nigh on fifteen years:
Coleridge’s
Thought
and
the
German
Philosophical
Tradition
or
Kinship
Systems
among
the
’Utuwâ.

What, then, was it which produced the sudden bursts of upset and restlessness?
What
is
it,
Catullus?
Why
do
you
not
make
haste
to
die?
Janet stared up at the ceiling, which, her eyes having adjusted to the dimness, she could now see had been nastily restored with a vault of bright blue plaster. Her gaze wandered downwards to the wall across from where she sat. There was a marble plaque surmounted by a plaster wreath containing a portrait of the head and shoulders of a young man wearing some sort of military jacket. Peering closer she could see the picture was actually a photograph which had somehow been glazed on to the surface of an oval porcelain tablet. The process had resulted in an excellent cameo likeness, very sharp, but in sepia tones like a daguerrotype. The text beneath read:

She got up and crossed over to look more closely at the picture. It was a wonderfully handsome and sensitive face, luxuriant hair (surely it had been a glossy black?) brushed straight back, in all very much resembling the pianist Dinu Lipatti. Now, there, she thought, was a way to go. What to everybody else had been merely a sharp squall sending them scurrying across the slippery cobbles into warm cafés and shops had been, a thousand feet above, a fatal frenzy of nature for the lost boy in his Fiat or Caproni. It was right: it didn’t much matter how you lived as long as you died well, and young Franco, buffeted and blind in his rain-streaked goggles, had died with splendid drama. She wondered if he had come right through the ceiling, whether the nave she sat in had been littered with masonry and pieces of alloy and fabric, filled with the stench of burned castor oil and aviation spirit, the perhaps headless body in its flying jacket bundled into a corner near the battered engine which ticked as it cooled. Or had it stuck in the roof so that only the bent propeller and cowling protruded through a ragged hole above the altar, hot streams of glycol and blood and hydraulic fluid pattering among pyx and plate?

The crash in its various forms and possibilities had now become completely vivid to her. If she walked round the church and really looked closely, might she not find other evidence for that event of January 1932? A chipped flagstone, perhaps. Or maybe if the dirt between the flagstones could be analysed there would still be traces of burned oil or haemoglobin. And then it struck her: 1932 was the very year her mother and Dorothy had been here in this city. True, they had come a bit later, in summer. But now the photograph Janet could so clearly visualise in her mother’s album took on new interest. Mumbo had sat on that fountain railing five months after young Franco had done his death-dive a few hundred yards away. Merely a coincidence, of course, without the least significance. Still, the mind turned it over.

She stood there with her mouth open seeing and not looking at the plaque while pigeons cooed and the muttering in the confessional went on and on as if some penitent were pouring out their whole life-story. She had the conviction that she herself would never form part of anybody else’s history. That was what old photographs did so mercilessly: they reminded you of other people’s continuities. ‘We had such lovely times…. We used to laugh so much.’ But you had to have somebody to show them to. It wasn’t enough just to go around snapping pictures. Janet knew plenty of people who took photographs, but in general she could swear that, once they had come back from the developer’s and had been pored over with amusement, they were practically never looked at again. Had it not been clear only that morning that her mother had no idea she’d ever been to that piazza before, still less been photographed there? When had she last looked at her own album? Come to that, when had she last taken a photograph? All her hoarded pictures seemed immensely old, many of them still pushed into the wallets of long-defunct chemists now marked with the rust of pins and staples. What, then, had it all been for?

‘Darling Janet, what you need is a camera.’ Mumbo had said it time and time again. ‘They’re such
fun.’
And time and time again her daughter had refused as if she knew that what and where she had been were more likely to return to mock her than to console. It was as if she had always known that nobody would ever show pictures of her to their children: Janet the good sport (why, she wondered, did cars no longer have running-boards for good sports to put one foot up on?); Janet who was
such a dear … you couldn’t help laughing when Janet was around…. Oh, but you could, actually; you could very easily help it because she was sharp and angular-minded and serious all at once and could deflate you with the same bleakness with which she could deflate herself. Permanently deflated, that’s what she was, and when she came into contact with the world it seemed inexorably to follow suit. And it was not what people liked at all, she knew, but neither could she help it. She just saw things discomfortingly.

‘Signora
scusi.
’
She turned to the quiet voice behind her. An elderly priest with thick grey hair brushed straight back and wearing a black cassock greenish with age stood there watching her. Funds, thought Janet. He’s soliciting for the poor of the parish, the upkeep of the organ, for himself. ‘Forgive me, signora,’ he continued in his soft Tuscan accent, ‘but I could not help noticing your attention. You have been looking at this memorial for ten minutes or more. I hope you will not think me impertinent if I ask you what there is about it which so holds your interest?’