You mentioned between mouthfuls that we’d bought two tickets for Dorchester. The coach would be leaving at nine-fifteen the next morning.
‘Let me take you to the station,’ your father immediately offered. ‘It will mean an early start, and we don’t want you missing that coach.’
Your father then washed up while I dried. We began by agreeing about the linguistic corruption in saying ‘pacifically’ instead of ‘specifically’.
‘But you can hear it on the BBC,’ he complained.
He seemed a little younger than your mother. He had grey hair, centre-parted, drawn back from a high, dignified forehead. There was some firmness to his slightly pursed mouth. His pale, deep-set blue eyes bulged a little, with an abstracted gaze. He had begun his career as a teacher of English in public schools. Later, he transferred to sixth-form literature and pedagogic method. Now he was a senior lecturer at the local teacher training college.
He possessed a fine eye for linguistic detail. An excellent reader of proof, he would annotate the books he studied with editorial queries and correct solecisms. He wrote to the publishers of dictionaries pointing out words they had unaccountably overlooked, improperly excluded, or wrongly defined. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, he retained a sense of the world’s manifold corruption; it had come to express itself in points of usage and abusage. By this means he could hold himself aloof, maintain a sense of self-control and order, and try to keep the world he criticized at bay. Perhaps he could repay it thus for his mother’s early insanity, the Arctic Convoy war he never mentioned, a pupil’s suicide, the attrition of his marriage, or some barely perceptible and irremediable hurt done him long before.
Despite my family name, grammar and spelling have never been my forte. Still, those few years of practice had made me familiar with your father’s preferred lines of conversation, and I joined in with the case of a teacher who considered the split infinitive a matter for eternal perdition, the examiner at university who deducted marks if students used contractions in their essays, and the trailing clauses that had got me into such hot water with tutors. Then he took up the crusade by deploring those who say ‘disinterested’ when they mean ‘uninterested’. Here was a crucial distinction to preserve.
‘Yet it’s being eroded,’ your father warned, and asked could I distinguish metonymy from synecdoche.
‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I had to admit.
So he explained that ‘England’ for a cricket team was a case of the former, while ‘a bit of skirt’ for a girl exemplified the latter. Then I volunteered the misuse of ‘hopefully’ to maintain the camaraderie of interests your father seemed almost to relish. He added that it was properly an adverb of manner and not an alternative form of ‘I hope’. Was there any difference between ‘judgement’ with ‘e’ and ‘judgment’ without? Your father averred that the legal profession reserved the former for the pronouncements of judges, the latter for anyone’s act of considered distinction making.
With only the cutlery and pans to do we shifted ground slightly and exemplified to his satisfaction a litotes and an understatement, the one being a negative of the contrary and the other any expression which states a case with restraint and for greater effect.
‘El Greco was not a bad painter,’ I proposed.
‘God works in a mysterious way,’ said Mr. Young, and added:
‘How about an oxymoron?’
‘Poor Rich’, Alice seemed to whisper in a tone not quite of mockery.
‘Can you have one made of two adjectives?’
‘They’re usually formed with an adjective and a noun,’ your father explained, ‘like Milton’s notorious “darkness visible”.’
My mistake, I reflected, as it dawned on me that ‘Rich’ in her witticism was primarily a proper name and only then the shadow of an adjective. Did we have our favourite zeugmas?
‘She left in a hat and a hurry,’ the washer-up offered.
‘Making love and art,’ replied the dryer.
Coffee was served beside the living room coal-effect gas fire. Your mother passed round a postcard that Kate had sent from somewhere in central France. A cousin had recently married, a baby expected late next spring. Then silence but for the sound of sips descended on the four of us.
‘I’m feeling quite tired,’ you said after a moment. ‘I think I’ll have a bath if the water’s hot. It is? Oh good, and then it’s off to bed for me.’
It would have certainly appeared discourteous to say much the same, to finesse an escape with you and leave the room together. Which is why I remained seated in that upright chair, wishing you ‘Goodnight’ and ‘Sleep well’ in a mistimed chorus with your parents. Your dad then rose to clear away the cups and saucers.
‘As you may know,’ your mother began almost as soon as he had left the room, ‘Mary has told me about you and Alice Mac … pherson? Is that her name? And I am glad we can have this little opportunity to exchange a few words, because I would like to be clear in my own mind at least what you expect is to happen between my daughter and yourself.’
The wall-clock’s tick steadily interrupted a continuous low hissing from the soporific gas fire. Then there was a squeak from Mrs. Young’s rocking chair.
‘Alice McLeod is a friend of ours from when we were students. We both read the same subjects and had a holiday in Holland together looking at paintings …’
Taken unawares by the directness of your mother’s approach, it hadn’t so much as crossed my mind that this might be an area of her concern. Evidently, it was not how she perceived the situation.
‘That isn’t quite what I understand from my daughter,’ she went on, as if inviting second thoughts. ‘She wrote to me before you left for Italy, as I am sure you are aware.’
The hissing of the gas fire, and ticking of the clock, the squeaking of your mother’s rocking chair continued. No reply came from me for so long that she finally felt obliged to begin again.
‘My daughter gave me to understand that you had left her for this other girl, and that as far as you were concerned your “relationship” with Mary is now at an end. Is this the case?’
Once more no words came into my mind, and none came from my mouth.
‘You see I need to know how I am to behave towards you both,’ she was explaining. ‘I would not like to have to act upon an assumed understanding between you that does not in fact exist. You do see that, don’t you?’
I did. And I saw that breakfast table in the hotel at ’s-Hertogenbosch. I heard myself promising to get in touch, intending to phone as soon as we were back from Italy; light falling across the white table cloth, over the butter, chocolate vermicelli, bread and jams, I heard her voice whispering the words: ‘a brief affair’. And how could I never speak to her again just because of events that were none of her doing? She didn’t even know what had happened. Write to her, I had to write to her. Suddenly there came a great longing to be with her again, to talk it through somehow, be understood and able to explain.
I was sitting quite motionless before your mother, her stilled facial expression now awaiting an answer. I was hearing the faint hisses, clicks and squeaks, trying to fend off her questions politely, unable to decide matters not yet understood, and trying to stop myself telling her straight out that it was none of her business; then standing up and escaping from the room. I was hoping for some inspiration, but no words came that would paper the cracks. It was as if my life had been sliced in two then roughly pasted back together. Only those who knew could unite the two parts across that jagged divide. There was only one person who could do that. What had happened had happened to you.
‘No, it was only a holiday. Mary and I are still together, and you can assume we will be, I think, after term begins at the Institute in London.’
Her face lightened with an inward smile.
‘Thank you, I really am so glad you have told me this. And my h
usband will be too, I’m sure. You know I have been very brave asking you, don’t you? It certainly is a relief to hear.’ Then, after a further moment’s silence: ‘Perhaps now you might let me run you a hot bath too?’
CHAPTER 13
Of those few days spent together in Dorchester, I can hardly remember a thing. Though we must have wandered out of town to look at Max Gate, must have peered into the reconstruction of Thomas Hardy’s study in the County Museum, nothing of either trip remains. Like an ordinary break in a picturesque part of England, those days and nights out of harm’s way have blurred into all the other such excursions and visits we were to make down through our years together. No, not quite nothing: perhaps unintentionally, it turned out your mother had booked us into a room for two with a little double bed. Waking in the small hours, it seems I’m lying there unable to get back to sleep, you not stirring, the sounds of wind and rain in the trees outside. If so, that will have been the first of many such nights. For years I suffered from the sound of rain falling in the dark. Starting awake, I would find there was nothing else for it but to lie in sleepless anguish, as if for no other reason at all, but suddenly remembering.
Your father drove us up the A3 to London at the end of that week and back to the flat in the Belle View House Settlement. The idea was that I would be allowed to stay there and sleep in the spare room until somewhere else could be found. Even this provoked a difficulty, because you had already agreed the spare room would be available for Roger—Captain Psycho’s agent—while he was on his forty-eight hour shifts. So when you were off duty, you would let me sleep beside you in the double bed. That was how things continued through a chilly October, during which I disappeared for a couple of nights to Bristol. You knew about that, of course, and didn’t outwardly object. After this, slowly but surely, there seemed less and less point in traipsing off each evening to Roger’s spare room, and the idea that I was looking for somewhere, or planning to move out, gradually got forgotten.
All through the autumn, the days dwindling down from September, while the lectures of Michael Kitson and Anita Bruckner started at the Courtauld, I was keeping my proximity, you, Mary, living and working at the Home, your children no less alarmingly wayward. During those months in Warwick Crescent, where it turned out Robert Browning lived after his wife’s death and his return with their son from Italy, I got to know Danny, the senior social worker and his series of girlfriends. Your co-worker Roger would tell us about his string of part-time clients. And we were soon only too familiar with the antics of Sylvester, Justin, Tessa, Althea—and Edwin forever combing back his Elvis quiff. Mr. Draper no doubt sent his letter to Roy Jenkins, probably during our staying in Dorchester, and, although we never heard from him about that again, behind the scenes the processes were coming to a head.
On a New Year visit to Port Isaac Bay, we rented one of the whitewashed cottages at Trelights. You had found the advert for a holiday let in The Lady. From the upstairs back windows I could see St Endellion church on its hill. When the wind was in the right direction we could hear its bell ringers practising. It was a freezing winter, and the dark evenings were spent playing game after game of bezique in front of a chimneybreast clad in stone with a brass fireguard. After a few days of exploring the environs, you seemed to soften and relent.
‘You know, I never really intended to finish with you,’ I made myself say into one of your thought-filled silences, your hand held high with the card you were threatening to play.
‘You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?’
Now you had slapped it onto the little table between us, and were holding the cards firmly against your pink cardigan.
‘Well, I do, because it was me who kept saying we should stay together, wasn’t it?’
Then you looked up from your well-concealed hand.
‘Ah yes,’ you said, ‘I can see things haven’t quite turned out the way you planned them.’
‘You know I don’t think I ever had a plan exactly—just making it up as I went along. I was sort of experimenting.’
At that, you played another card.
‘Doubtless,’ you said. ‘So what do you imagine we should do?’
‘Good question,’ I agreed, and played one of mine.
We would take up the same topic the next day over lunch at the Heartland Head Hotel, its draughty dining room deserted, the walls lined with enormous framed jigsaws, difficult ones of facial features, dunes, or stretches of sea and sky.
Walking back along the winding road up towards St Endellion, we paused and leaned on an old field-gate. The dark winter trees were whipped back by fierce sea wind, wild grasses driven flat; it was exactly then that we found a way ahead. You were making up your mind to leave Belle Vue House at the end of the year’s contract. You were planning to train as a hospital manager.
‘We could try and find somewhere to live together … and a change of place might make a difference.’
‘Are you telling me you want to mend your ways?’ you asked with a faint smile at the appropriate, slightly antique-sounding phrase.
Yet by then my ways had been mended for me. So we strode on down to Port Quinn’s hidden shore, found a smugglers’ cove where the waves came pounding, a pebble beach with shards and wrack, soapstone and razor shells. There were a few shallow caves in the cliff face. Wandering in and out of them, picking our way among the tide pools, two young people yoked by violence together, it was here that the one future we could live found its course in us again.
Your summons to appear at the Court of Milan was waiting for you when we got back to Little Venice.
CHAPTER 14
It hadn’t been easy to sleep on the overnight train from Paris. Bleary-eyed and stiff, with luggage for a few nights only, we stepped down to the platform and set off towards the ticket barrier. Then you stopped and looked up into an enormous, curved roof of smutted glass and steel. Ahead gleamed the vast advert for the Corriere della sera. On the fat iron pillars of Milan’s railway station, I could make out its date of construction given according to the Fascist calendar: Anno IX. So what would that be? Counting from 1922 … but I hadn’t had time to work it out before we pushed through the grey metal swing barrier, and crossed between the busy kiosks and timetable boards. Descending by way of a steep escalator, we were engulfed in the portentous marble of the central station’s vast booking hall … built in 1931.
Roger, your co-worker, knew the name of a hotel, one which he happened to remember was within walking distance of the courts where your case was to be tried. It was on the Corso Lodi. Nevertheless, despite everything, the Belle Vue House director was reluctant to let you have the time off to go. We had spent a week of your annual leave together in Cornwall and there was no more due for months. Finally, after you flourished the documents from the Italian Embassy under his nose, the director relented and allowed you a few days’ grace.
Nobody was forcing you to attend the trial. So why did you want to return?
‘It’s the proper thing to do,’ you told me.
‘But it’ll be a torture,’ I said. ‘How can you do that to yourself?’
‘I just have to.’
Coming from that vast edifice into a winter morning light, we bought a street map from one of the newsstands in the enormous square. There was a line of taxi drivers touting for custom under the shadows of various skyscrapers with huge neon adverts on their façades. Corso Lodi was somewhere down on our left-hand side, and quite a distance away along the Viale Umbria. Fearing the appeals of the taxi drivers and not understanding the tram or bus systems, I supposed there was nothing else for it.
‘Wouldn’t it be safer just to walk?’
‘Safer than taking a tram in the wrong direction, like we did in Rome,’ you said.
‘We might find a restaurant and get some lunch on our way.’
So we set off briskly down the Viale Andrea Doria in chilly lat
e January air. Walking close to the frontages, you were all but grazing the walls with your shoulder. The street was not crowded, but at intervals groups of men in business suits and leather overcoats or formally dressed women in thick brown furs would come striding towards us. Here were city people with marks of determination, masks slackened in a picture of settled dissatisfaction, or resignation, masks aggressively animated in unintelligible talk, or laughing out loud, their large teeth on show. A few yards further on, up above the people’s heads, an enormous pair of spectacles, an optician’s signboard, was suspended over a shop doorway. Underneath, a man stood still by the wall. Closer, it was clear that his eyes were wide open, but the pale blue irises didn’t move at all, and a watery lightness transfigured the whites. Around his neck he wore a neatly painted label on a chain. It said CIECO in red lettering on a gold enamel ground.
At Piazzale Loreto we had to turn right. Each time anyone came anywhere near us on the street you would convulsively tense. You couldn’t but sense a threat in these people’s very appearance, which was perhaps only the everyday suspiciousness of urban populations; and yet Piazzale Loreto seemed grimly reminiscent of the violent mood in films about the Spanish Civil War. A car pulled up some distance ahead and as its window was wound down, passersby stepped away and hurried on regardless. But, no, not all of them—for now one old lady had ventured towards it and was pointing out landmarks or directions.
On the far side of the Viale Abruzzi, plate-glass windows of what looked like a restaurant opened around one spacious corner. It had Tavola Calda in an elegant cursive script across the curtained panes.
‘Let’s try that one. It means “hot food”, I think, not “cold buffet”.’
‘If you like.’
September in the Rain Page 15