Patricia and Malise

by Susanna Johnston

  Italy, he fully decided, in spite of the chain smoking, was the place for him. He had seen dead and dying there as Germans struggled to hold on, but he had not been unhappy. No social skills had been needed. It refreshed him to remember how little his lack of them had mattered. Not that he had then understood that he lacked them – or had even known about them.

  His failure to produce favourable reactions puzzled and almost hurt him.

  16

  There were hiccoughs during discussions with his Italian friend at the museum. The aunt, believed likely to spend the rest of her days in a home for the sickly, had recovered her strength and a tenant was no longer needed for her apartment in Volterra.

  It dealt a blow to Malise who was rearing to go but did not wish to pay pensione fees as he looked for a more permanent perch. Giovanni begged for patience when Malise showed dismay.

  ‘I know the best place for you. Not Volterra but my cousin has a nice apartment for renting just now. In Lucca. A beautiful city. Little food in wartime but now in prosperity. It is not a long way – only two hours from Volterra so, if you take it, you can search from there.’

  Giovanni lit a cigarette and talked in a low voice.

  ‘Lucca, for me, is a fantastic place. There are many large and beautiful gardens within the walls. That is why the city survived well during war.’

  His cigarette burnt low as he continued talking. ‘For me, too, Lucca is special. My uncle was chief of police there. The Nazis ordered him to round up all Jews. I was only a boy. My uncle rounded them up – one day early – helping them on to trains and allowing them to escape. I don’t know where they went. The next day the Nazis shot my uncle dead and my aunt took many pills to join him. In my family we are proud of this aunt and uncle.’

  Giovanni looked sad and Malise remembered how near he had been to atrocity at the time. Not that the memory of his proximity to horror triggered off much in the way of sympathy or involvement.

  The rent was low. The apartment was up seventy-nine steep steps – above a small piazza in the centre of the city; a city surrounded by walls – Part Medieval, part Roman.

  ‘My cousin is living in Birmingham and the place is empty. You find it enchanting. That I am sure.’

  Giovanni was hopeful and so, after a bit of thought, was Malise.

  He decided to go ahead and, after some planning, set off in Ruggles.

  With a proud, resolute certitude, he made a stately and rewarding entry into the city, under one of the gates that arched through the walls. There were few cars and Ruggles caused a satisfactory stir as he drove cautiously into the town. Many times he stopped and asked, in faltering Italian, for help with directions. Always he caused interest. He was able to park Ruggles in the piazza outside the entrance to the building near to the top of which his future apartment perched. Cats writhed round doorways. He looked up and noticed that his rooms were the highest. A basket hung from one of the top windows on a rope. Elevator for shopping. Picturesque, he decided. Bells, pigeons, walls, a Roman amphitheatre, cobbles, bakeries, flowers, an orthopaedic shop, a pet shop where a parrot spoke in Italian. Olive oil, honey, bicycles (few riders paying attention to the use of handle bars.)

  The city, although short of food, had not been harmed during the war. Malise blanked the war out. He had the knack.

  He learnt that Lucca had belonged to Napoleon and that he had given it to his sister. Had he had a sister, he would not have given it to her. Nor to a brother.

  There was a forecourt below the apartment building where nobody stopped him leaving his car. It constantly amused him that he had named it ‘Ruggles.’ Again he thought back to his long past dance with Dawn in Mrs Ruggles’s drawing room where the carpet had been rolled back. He, in his kilt, had all but been rolled back too and he revelled in that moment of the past. Even wondered how Dawn’s marriage was going.

  He saw himself as picturesque as he filled the basket with lentils, pastas and focaccia loaves before racing up the seventy nine steps, three at a time.

  From the window, with immense satisfaction, he wound the rope upwards.

  17

  The apartment was charming, uncluttered, and looking out over red tiled roofs with mountains beyond. The building, all of old brick, was a simple duecento tenement one. Malise liked situating a year in its actual numbers. ‘Duecento’ seemed to him more immediate to the time than thirteenth century. He sat and read his guide book, from time to time looking out of the window.

  The first night he was kept awake by the Torre delle Ore, a medieval bell that rang every quarter of an hour, confounding him by the oddness of the rings – for when, by his grandfather’s Half Hunter watch, he saw midnight, the bells only rang six times. The strangeness of this was explained to him in the morning when, at a pasticceria he tried to make himself known as a regular by speaking Italian in arbitrary genders. He asked why bells that were meant to tell the time were so odd. The explanation, also quite odd, was that in the Middle Ages, bells rang only up to six, so, six in the morning, six at noon, six at six in the evening and six at midnight. He was learning fast.

  It came to him. Bricks. A study of brickwork in Lucca was to become his interest. Esoteric. Unfashionable. Rarefied.

  He set out each morning with a pencil and pad, to take notes and make drawings of bricks that formed arches and the lintels above doors and windows. His close studies led him to suppose that the earlier bricks – say of the thirteenth century – were decorated with simple rosettes and zigzags, but whose decorations became more and more complicated in the later bricks of the fifteenth century. The historian in him thought the earlier in time the better for the sincerity of simplicity whereas the later ones showed the decadence of complexity. After all the early ones were carved by hand and for the later ones a mould was used.

  Thanks to a connection through some cousins, he did have a letter of introduction to la Contessa Isolata and, after having left it on her, received an invitation to her palazzo. She waited behind the servant, who opened the door, and held out her hand to him but dropped it as he reached for it and said ‘piacere’ which he had thought the proper expression on greeting (having been busy with a short-cut phrase book) but which, clearly, was not. She showed him into her soggiorno and asked him why he had come to live in Lucca. He replied, with a worldliness that was surely authentic enough to know what the proper expression was on greeting, that he was fascinated by brick. That was an important reason for his choosing to live in a duecento slum tenement.

  ‘Brick?’ she asked. He said ‘It may be a presumption of mine to know more about your bricks than a Lucchese whose family have lived here for centuries but, you see, bricks are of great historical interest.’

  ‘Are they?’

  He offered to take her on a tour of Lucca to study the various brick work, from Roman through to Renaissance and even to the Belle Époque, but she declined as he made to leave. At the door, she held out her hand to shake his and said ‘My dear Mr Mc Hip. I must warn you that it is difficult to get into Lucchese society although you do have the aristocratic credentials, but, if you do have such aspirations, never say ‘piacere’ when introduced.

  Malise stood, as if at attention, but did not ask why. The Contessa went on ‘but how could you know, used, as you are, to your own manners? Here we do not say ‘piacere.’

  ‘What, then, should I say?’

  ‘Do as your compatriots do’ the Contessa Isolata answered ‘say nothing.’

  He accepted that he was not in tune with social spheres ‘piacere’ or not. It was bewildering and he did not see the Contessa again.

  Apart from regretting his innocent solecism, the days passed gratifyingly and fast. He hired a bicycle and rode, stiff backed, through broad avenues around the ramparts.

  He walked in the city, taking notes of its sensational sights. The vast wooden figure of Christ in the cathedral – borne by crewless ships from the Holy Land, it was said, and carried by driverless carts to Lucca. He believed not a word o
f the myth. He and Bertrand Russell thought otherwise and his mother had become no more than a pale and pious shadow.

  He lived among theLucchese; those who kept fruit and vegetable stalls in the market, dug up old cobbles in the high street, the Via Fillungo (the long thread), to replace old sewage pipes or, on a higher level, sold religious articles in a shop near the Duomo.

  His mistrust of religion in no way diminished his pleasure or prevented him from gazing at the shrivelled remains of Santa Zita, patron saint of serving maids, in the wondrous Romanesque church of San Frediano. She was barely more than bones but held plastic flowers and was decorated in colourful lace.

  He liked to stride around a piazza built on the foundations of an old Roman amphitheatre where a Roman bath stood, filled with rotting tomatoes and where body-shaped washing hung from upper windows. Then to walk homewards over paved or cobbled streets, passing handsome, carved, wooden shop fronts.

  Most of all he revelled in sitting in a corner of the grand piazza watching girls, many very pretty, as they chatted loudly to each other from the seats of their bicycles; most of them smoking cigarettes and few using handlebars.

  It was not a large town and, after some months, many of the local people became familiar to him.

  One in particular. She did not smoke.

  On a certain day, that particular girl fell from her bicycle near to where Malise sat at a table of an outdoor bar.

  He leapt from his chair. Good looks to the fore. ‘Scusi signorina. Voglia Scusarmi.’ He had again been busy with a phrase book and spoke in clipped Italian as he offered to pick her and her shopping up.

  The girl, dark and slight, said ‘I’m OK but thanks all the same.’

  ‘You are English then?’

  ‘I am. So are you.’ She had recognised his accent.

  ‘Yes.’

  They laughed and he offered to buy her a cup of coffee. That or a Campari and soda. She parked her bicycle and sat with him, out of doors, in the magnificent piazza where pigeons strutted as they pecked at grain thrown to them by meticulously dressed, white socked, children.

  She settled for a Campari and soda and they talked about their reasons for being there. He told her, with minor embellishments, murmuring about Etruscans and bricks. She was, she told him as she gazed at his handsome face, married to an Italian academic who worked at the university in Pisa. Pisa had been horrifyingly bombed in the war and Lucca was a more tranquil place in which to live. Much re-building going on in Pisa.

  Malise found her entrancing. Brown eyes, faultless legs, curly mouth. She was quick and disconcertingly alert.

  She, Patricia, found him to be unusual, educated and English. She was a trifle starved of Englishness. The handsomeness of his face was almost an introduction.

  They got on well. She thanked him, picked up her parcels, retrieved her bicycle and rode away on it.

  He then realised that, in his own eyes, he was not, after all, a mummified pedant. He even got a kick out of paying for the Campari and soda.

  His heart had turned over. He went back, up his seventy-nine stairs and writhed about on the thin bed reliving the dance with Dawn (replacing her body with that of Patricia) when he had been sixteen. He always returned to that regardless of what might have taken place in intervening years.

  18

  His normally robust emotional system was disturbed. Mind, mixed and mingled, he disturbed himself and his bedding. He didn’t dream because he didn’t sleep but believed his hands to be investigating every beautiful curve of the girl who had fallen from her bicycle.

  No thought for the academic husband. Up until that day he had considered himself to have become desiccated and odd.

  Now he lived in the land of predators.

  Waking was exciting but, uncharacteristically fearful of rejection were he and Patricia to meet, he made up his mind to drive to Volterra.

  He had not attempted this outing during his time in Lucca – due to the lapsing of his interest in Etruscan history.

  He drove through flat land before climbing into hills, cypress trees, tumbling buildings. Sheep, Stars of Bethlehem, white and sparkling on the roadside, as he rounded steep bends. Precipices sliding away from steep cliff. His brain and visual senses still seemed to be calmly at work even if other parts of him twitched. Great gates. The city was magnificent. Owls sheltered under umbrellas blinking at the hilly foundations that crumbled – having taken with them over the centuries, entire villages.

  The museum, jammed with sarcophagi and elongated kitchen utensils from a forgotten civilisation, slightly bored him – although they were the cause of his being there in the first place.

  He decided to write a guide book. Always room for a new one – brick work included – and it would give an accountable reason for his being there at all. He sat in the piazza and flipped through packets of torn and blotchy Italian bank notes. One hundred thousand by the one hundred thousand. He considered thwarting his desires and adding, with luck, to Patricia’s curiosity by spending a night or two in that glorious hill-top town. There was a chance that she might bicycle through Lucca whilst keeping an eye out for him.

  She might, even, one day, climb with him up the seventy-nine steps.

  If, say, he stayed away for a few nights, (he counted the notes again) there was a possibility of her curiosity rising. Two nights in Volterra. The least expensive room to be found. But only an hour and a half in his car and he could be back in Lucca. Back at the bar. Back, maybe, in the presence of Patricia. He bought a newspaper. Anything to pass the time for Etruscan remains weren’t holding his attention. Bicycles passed. Ladies’ legs. He also went to the unusual length of buying a postcard to send to his father and Alyson. He excluded Christian. Teach him a lesson for his faithlessness.

  He wrote ‘Greetings from the world of Etruscan treasures!!’ He was much addicted to screech marks. ‘I’m keeping body and soul together as my limited budget requires, but am much absorbed in the intriguing past.’

  He walked into the cathedral and was taken aback by the gaudily painted Deposizione – the startling figure of Christ as he was removed from the cross by giant tweezers. His was to be a quaint and quirky guide book.

  But he drove back to Lucca. The pull was overpowering. There was a traffic hold up on the way – in the distressed and drab town of Pontedera – which delayed him for an hour or more – so he didn’t get back to the city until late.

  Streets were empty and bicycles no longer on them. He loved his own humanity as he trudged up the steps and ached for the next day to come.

  He was becoming a spender and ate breakfast outside at the bar as he looked to the church with its ancient brick façade (between glances at the passing cyclists). She might be an early bird. Might shop before the heat descended.

  Travesties of her cycled by – large ladies with red lips and navy blue hair. Squeaky voices. Cigarettes.

  19

  He quaked at the thought of deserting his post. Many times, as he tried to sit still, he semi-jumped. It was almost her – but never her enough. Pretty girls, plain girls – boys too – rode past. He wrote another postcard to his father and Alyson and pictured their delight at hearing from him twice in a short space of time. Might make Christian, on being excluded, sit up a bit.

  He broke away from his vigil at lunch time and walked up the main street, past shops with old fashioned wooden showcases. Up one narrow street leading off it, he concentrated on the sight of an ancient tower with a cluster of trees reaching the skies from its top.

  The chances were that Patricia ate her lunch indoors – rather than cycling about. He dipped into a wine store. Beneath it was a cave that housed about a thousand bottles, covered in dust and cobwebs. Not only had bottles escaped the war but, also, many of the drinkers who went before it.

  These sporadic perusals of waiting and wandering lasted for four days. On the fifth he sat, at his usual place outside the bar and Patricia rode past, looked in his direction, smiled, parked her bicycle an
d joined him.

  Her presence did nothing to help with his inner commotion. He was as bewitched as he had been when she wasn’t there. She seemed not to have registered his despair, obsession, anxiety or to be in the least bit perturbed that they hadn’t met since her tumble the week before.

  ‘I’ve been in Pisa. My husband, Andrea, has been giving lectures there and we stayed at the university.’

  Malise ordered two cappuccinos. It was mid morning. Patricia said ‘Yes. I’d love a cup of coffee. How kind. I mustn’t stay long.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’ She looked sharply at him. What business was it of his? He pulled himself together.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t think why I said that. It has been very enjoyable meeting you like this. I am, in fact, rather lonely here. Perhaps you and, er, your husband might join me for a bite one evening. I’m rather a frustrated cook to tell you the truth and I’d enjoy buying comestibles and preparing something to eat. If you don’t mind seventy-nine steps, that is.’

  His troubles were still with him as he devoured her beauty but he controlled his manner and captured the instant.

  Patricia had already told her husband of her meeting with the handsome Englishman. She said that she must consult with him, a busy man, before accepting Malise’s kind offer but, if a date could be found, might they bring their nine year old son, Antonio, along with them?’