We stopped outside the apartment building where I saw, to my astonishment, that Vogue was taking a photograph. The cameraman had posed, against the crumbling sepia walls of the tobacco shop, against a backdrop of picturesque urban poverty, a collection of extravagantly coiffed model girls wearing silver tentacles on their heads and silver sandals on their feet. They were dressed, from shoulder to hem, in sun-ray pleated gossamer and were being gawped at, impassively, by an old woman in black crepe seated behind them on a wooden cafe chair on the cobbled street.
The apartment, like all the best apartments, was on the top floor, rising airily with its new green shutters above the rotting vegetables and discarded fish-heads of the street. I approached it by means of a prodigious flight of barren stone steps and walked in through the open door, treading ceramic tiles underfoot. The Signora, my hostess, was one-time English. Her name was Leone Bernard. She was in the bath drinking whisky. One of her man friends was sitting in his clothes upon the bidet.
‘Cara,’ he said to her, ‘you must trim your public hair. I will not rape a woman who looks like Archbishop Makarios.’ I stopped momentarily in my poor suburban tracks, thinking Wow! The sophistication of it! Over the past years I had got used to Jacob being graphic, but Jacob was never smart. He had no aspirations towards becoming a man-about-town.
‘It’s John’s little Caterina,’ said my hostess, her voice a boozy croak plucked somewhere from Noel Coward. ‘Avanti, my dear and welcome. Get her a glass, Oliver. My God, but aren’t you young?’ she said. ‘And gorgeous,’ she added, assessing flesh by pound and ounce. She wore her hair knotted prettily on top of her head and strands curled damply in the nape of her neck. Her head, as she talked, turned frequently from front to side as she presented a contrived but nonetheless alluring right half-profile. I took the glass, thinking nervously for a moment of the white slave trade. I’m not much of a boozer even now. When people ask me what I will drink I have a strong urge to say Cherryade, please. Stone’s Ginger Wine is my only serious tipple.
‘If you have crossed Italy in that skirt,’ she said with emphasis, ‘then I think you are game for anything. You’ll have to take us out, Oliver.’ With commendable good humour did Oliver put aside his thoughts of rape for another day and take us to lunch. Leone was nothing if not commanding. She reminded me often of those little girls in the junior school who told you not to wear your shiny pink dress to the party because they were going to wear theirs. And you didn’t wear it, even though you had got your own dress first and it wasn’t fair. And then you went on being flattered when they chose you first for their side in games.
I have a blurred, heady memory of that lunch and of picking my way to the restaurant, whisky-drunk, through narrow streets in unaccustomed heat; of bees around flower stalls, of suckers on fried octopus legs and the sound of Leone’s voice on the windless air.
Leone had learned her voice at Cambridge in the nineteen-fifties. She was the daughter of an unmarried kitchen maid and had got a university place very much against the odds. But she had left it a year later in disgrace: a botched home abortion had caused her to pass out, theatrically, in a pool of uterine blood on the floor of the dining hall. She had terrific, mannered style, and wore the most marvellous clothes, which she flung shamelessly at the ironing woman, who laboured half the day in Leone’s kitchen, wearing her stockings rolled over bulging veins, bowlegged and smelling of old sweat. A part of me was highly susceptible to Leone’s style. I am in general susceptible to style. Style is what attracted me to John Millet. I have that within which admires the well-plucked eyebrow and the well-hung lithograph almost as much as the well-turned sonnet. I am a reader of glossies – archetypal fodder for the Habitat catalogue. Like Leone I have always understood these things as the cues to social mobility. That is why Jane Goldman was, with her indifference to them, like a breath of new air for me. But if, like Jane, you have been to school with girls who marry merchant bankers it is no doubt easier to jack in the trappings of privilege in the face of a decent alternative. Jane saw things very straight. She had no need of Jacob’s Marxist reading group to understand base and superstructure. Given the choice, Jane would far sooner have consumed the well-hung pheasant than been the owner of the well-hung lithograph with which to impress the neighbours. Come to think, she had made a point of not having neighbours. Her self-esteem was not bound up with what she owned. She could ‘live off the land’, as Jacob said in jest. ‘Upper-class buggers,’ as he put it, ‘are not slow to learn the lessons of guerrilla warfare.’
Dear Jacob, how easily one could miss the benefits of his lunatic sanity! If Jacob had met Leone Bernard he might, I reckon, have conceded grudgingly that she had better legs than Marlene Dietrich. She appeared to me a wonderfully spirited parasite. She visited beauticians and she bought shoes. Her major pleasures were spending her husband’s money and bedding his friends. And she would talk so disloyally about the poor chaps afterwards that I soon could not look at the Bernards’ friends without knowing which was obsessed with anal sex and which had what she called ‘potency problems’.
Two mornings a week, Leone went out to buy food. She called this ‘doing the marketing’. Something to do, I believe, with the high proportion of Americans which made up the Bernards’ expatriate smart set. There was never much marketing to be done, since a great deal of eating out went on, but Leone and I – until my job began to take up my mornings – would each of us take a ludicrously small but picturesque basket into the Campo de Fiori where Leone would buy flowers and figs and present charming half-profiles to the Bohemian young men who hung about on the statuary. I would wander in and out through the little rows of specialist food shops, glorying in the ornate and gilded packaging, and the wrappings adorned with facsimiles of medals won at food fairs in the eighteen-nineties, or displaying neo-classical profiles of Victor Emmanuel the Second. There is none of that Sainsbury’s lowercase restraint, that deliberate suppression of graphic joie de vivre. Leone would push her way to the front in a bakery bursting with its pretty star-shaped loaves and buy an etto of biscuits. We would pass butchers’ stalls displaying rows of spongy, pink, inflated lung, pegged to clothes lines over the counter. I remember that once the brevity of my skirt caused two paunchy market vendors to gesture heartily to each other with unmistakably phallic aubergines, after which, for a while, I wore Leone’s clothes. Later I made my own. The old woman in black crepe was my home landmark. She was always there, planted on the kerb on her cafe chair. She sold black-market cigarettes, Peter Bernard said.
Peter was Leone’s husband. She had acquired him, or rather, had stolen him, from a previous wife in Southampton, where he still had two children. Leone had gone to Southampton to consult a psychiatrist. She had been sent there by a person she referred to, off-handedly, as ‘my haberdasher’. She had married the haberdasher after leaving Cambridge, because he was rich and Leone liked to live as high as possible. She was damned if she was going to append herself to anyone who would need to work nights to pay her debts. She had met Peter in a coffee bar. After six months of bogus visits to the psychiatrist, the haberdasher had one day thought to telephone the consulting room. In the ensuing show-down Peter left his wife, who subsequently threatened to kill both herself and the children, and the haberdasher began attending a Japanese martial arts class, with a view to killing Peter. All of them ended up on the couch of the same Southampton psychiatrist – except Leone, that is, who had discovered she had a taste for high drama and was therefore feeling fine.
Peter had once worked with John Millet and the connection took them to Rome. In spite of the money he had inherited from his dead mother and his admirable parade-ground stance, Peter had the look of a man weighed down by alimony and exile. He wore his Christopher Robin hair over a face incongruously lined and had a horror of being recognised for the straight man he was. For Leone needed him to be avant-garde. She was wedded to her life on the piazzas, feeling the chic of rubbing shoulders in the summer with Sartre in a bar; of catch
ing brief glimpses of Sophia Loren stepping into a motor car. So Peter, who, without her, might well have been the kind of man who spent weekends happily repairing the brake-linings on his Morgan or putting together plastic model bi-planes with his kids in Southampton, had cultivated instead a series of advanced poses the most embarrassing of which were nudity and communal bathing.
I ought to explain that the Bernards’ bathroom was in any case conducive to impromptu happenings. Things came to a head in that part of the apartment as they had in the Goldmans’ kitchen. The bathroom had no door. It gave access to both kitchen and balcony and was got up not merely for bathing. There was a record player and a pile of New Yorkers; trailing plants and abandoned whisky tumblers; a glass orb filled with Mediterranean sea-shells and an elegant, high-glazed, pedestal fruit dish, piled high with a pyramid of French soap lemons. Peter would come in from a squash game, therefore, and hang about lighting cigarettes or soaping one’s boobs, parading his male equipment, all the while, at eye-level. He was, I think, attempting to get even with Leone who, having first wrecked his marriage, gave much of her creative energy to destroying him in public. But it suited her a treat, in fact, to have him preening nude before me. She pushed me at him until I felt like a stage housemaid. Black suspenders and fishnet could have done no more for me, nor a saucy flick of the feather duster. It gives me goose-pimples even now to think of the Bernards. They were like people locked together in hell.
During the weeks I spent there, Leone Bernard, beautifully dressed, carefully made-up, smelling always of Antelop, bore down upon me with a greedy, controlling urge which unnerved me a little. She spoke to me in English, peppering her talk impressively with Italian phrases which she pronounced with theatrical perfection, lingering exaggeratedly upon the double consonant and stressing the penultimate syllable to absurdity. She evidently relished to a degree the idea of me as a young person disappointed in love and began to remove for me thereby even the comfort of the emotion’s validity, leaving me feeling like the heroine of a melodramatic operetta. Most nights I cried myself to sleep behind the open, shuttered window of my tiny bedroom against a soothing blur of sound from the restaurant below, with its tanks of clams planted out each night upon the cobbles. ‘Specialita’‘, said the notice, ‘Zuppa di Pesce’. Somebody had crossed it out to read, ‘Zuppa di Gatto’. I have always liked cat soup.
I bore with it, I believe, not only because at first I had nowhere else to go but because I was resolute in the determination to make my way in a place where there were at last no mothers or aunts to undermine my anonymity and because I was still too much in love with Roger to care what happened to me. I was also quite dizzy with the look and the feel of a place whose textures never staled. Though most of my life consisted of catching buses to work and discovering how grindingly wearing it was to earn one’s living along with the rest of humanity, I nevertheless wrote repeatedly to Jane Goldman telling her effusively that it was all happening. Jane wrote back hasty scribbled postcards giving me, with a certain ironic flair, the view from her kitchen sink. After a while our correspondence petered and died.
Thirty
As painful as I found Leone Bernard, so equivalently, I found my colleagues a pleasure. A fortuitous collection of young British teachers, all of them living from day to day, without sickness benefits or holiday pay, some tied by Italian boyfriends and girlfriends, some by the evident advantages of the Roman lifestyle over what they had known in Bradford and Tottenham. They were both my escape route from the Bernards and in the long run the most loyal of friends. Their range of knock-knock jokes exceeded even Rosie Goldman’s. I moved in with one of them, who had had the good luck to find a tiny flat near the Spanish Steps, over a bar, where we quenched our thirst on tumblers of frozen black coffee on hot days and bought slabs of pizza for breakfast. The art of dressing myself, without guilt, in fantastic clothes came back to me; of hanging jewels in my ears and of blowing a week’s earnings upon sea green crepe without being answerable to Roger Goldman for the excess. On the rebound from Roger’s puritanism, I had a lot of men. I do not much like voyeurism among other people’s heavy breathing, so I will only tell you that with not one of them did I descend to the floor of a bike shed and that nearly all of them were married. Unmarried men in southern Europe have mothers. Strong, frank matriarchs, who nose one out as a subversive within minutes, who make perfectly clear the reality that their sons will not make injudicious, long-term attachments with bookish, unconventional, Protestant women: women who have no reputable dowry and insufficient deference for the art of homemade fettuccine. So who am I? I asked myself. Am I that despicably suburban young woman, interested only in knitting and personal adorment, whom Roger Goldman saw fit to cast off? Or am I that dangerous emancipate, steeped in Plato and febrile subversion? In short, I avoided the wives as they walked out with the children in the parks.
Only once did I think, absurdly, that I saw Roger Goldman. I pursued the illusion feverishly through the streets, clutching to myself my sturdy brown paper bag full of grapes and wine and buffalo milk cheese, until I shook with exhaustion and went home shattered and tearful knowing that I would, at a nod from that snooty bastard, yield up the whole seductive edifice. All that booze and cheese and crumbling sepia. All that unwonted credit one got for being blonde. All those times when, flitting by in my brassy tart’s earrings and my high-heeled shoes I had caught, without desert, the reverent accolade, ‘Madonna’.
Thirty-One
My mother came to see me twice. She came by air and stayed with me in the cubby-hole on the way to the shower cubicle which passed for my bedroom. She insistently begged me to come home. She could see no reason for my feelings for the place. And no more could I, in my youthful ignorance, see why she was less than euphoric at the prospect of dossing in my cubby-hole for two weeks on end, in a flat above a bar, in a town where the natives never go to bed. She saw no reason why the food came as it did. She saw no reason at all, she said once over a plateful of squid, why the locals couldn’t eat ‘ordinary’ food like people in England. You couldn’t drink the coffee and you couldn’t toast the bread. It was stale by lunchtime and it had no insides. Only crusts.
Then she wrote to me suddenly from Hendon to say that she was getting married. Her letter was both extraordinary and revealing to me. She was planning to marry an assistant bank manager from Dorset, she said, and she hoped that I wouldn’t mind. I wondered by what right I ought to mind. She felt free to do so, she said, since I had grown up and left home and appeared not to need her any more. She had only once before considered marrying again but, as I might remember, I had taken against the gentleman and she had felt that she ought to put me first. I was stunned to discover that I had wielded this kind of power over her. I recalled that when I was twelve there had been a man who had called at the house a good bit, whom I had vocally disliked for the profound reasons that he had blown his nose over-politely at table, almost burying his head under the cloth, that he had worn bow ties, and that he had made a point of carving meat with a formidable show of expertise. That my mother had decided against remarrying on the basis of these youthful aversions filled me with horror. With what contained resentment had she thereafter washed my clothes and brought me my cocoa and custard creams in bed? And what kind of reciprocal sacrifices were, in consequence, required of me? Pish, I thought, as I went my way, stamping firmly on guilt.
I went to her wedding and played out, for an hour or two, my mother’s fantasy: her desire to see me as a reflection of the best of herself. I enacted a charade in a tasteless navy two-piece with yellow saddle-stitching and a yellow shirt which tied at the neck, feeling like a perfume lady in John Barnes. I bore the castrated smut which emanated from the best man’s speech. I gave her my love and hopped it, an extravagant and wheeling stranger, belonging nowhere. I was, in addition, about to lose my rights to the cubby-hole over the bar. My flat-mate’s boyfriend had designs upon it.
Thirty-Two
There is the whiff of l
ow cliche about airport romance, but let me confess to it. I fell in love with a man at the airport after my cheap return flight.
The aeroplane was crowded with Italian boys returning from a summer camp in England. They fell into the arms of their parents at the arrivals lounge – all but two of them, who appended themselves to me. Two well-brought-up little boys, clutching duty-free perfume for mother and looking in vain for a welcoming parent. I waited with them on the steps outside in the sunlight. The disinherited among the blessed. All around us lovely, smothering mothers were asking their offspring concernedly how often they had changed their socks.
Enter Michele, half an hour late, swearing wonderfully, built like a cart-horse. Somebody had stolen his wallet and his keys, he said. He couldn’t drive home. The police would, as usual, do nothing, he said. He had not a kind word for the children, whom he ignored, other than to abuse them impatiently for wasting the signorina’s time. I volunteered the money for the bus into the city. We took the bus to the Cinecittà, where we took the underground to the Termini, where we took a taxi to his one-time wife’s apartment to unload the children. Then we took a taxi to his apartment to collect his spare keys. He lived not a million miles from Leone Bernard, and the black-market cigarette lady was visible from his window. He had, upon the marble floor, a sparse collection of stark, punitive wire chairs, chairs that Marinetti might have dreamed up in a futurist vision. Then we took the bus to the Termini, where we took the underground to the Cinecittà, where we took the bus to the airport, where we found that whoever stole Michele’s car keys had now stolen the whole car. Michele, who, like most Italians, expected nothing from the police except ignorance and brutality, cast injudicious doubt upon the fidelity of the policeman’s wife. It raised the level of aggro to a pitch where the fuzz went off in rage. Then we took the bus to the Cinecittà, where we took the underground to the Termini, where we took a taxi to his apartment and made love in his unmade bed.
Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 11