Patricia and Malise

by Susanna Johnston

  Malise, for a second or two, remembered Dawn, his kilt and his dead mother. But not for long.

  Eagerness, sex, disregard for all but their senses, led them through a great part of the night. The neighbouring guitarist made no impression whatsoever on either of the pulsating pair.

  Patricia slipped back to her bedroom and Malise, by the light of a strong torch, bathed in the cold stream.

  He did not return, for the remainder of the night, to the hammock but drifted away in gratification on a pillow provided by Patricia.

  The need to entertain Antonio during the day was frustrating but made tolerable by the celestial anticipation of nights ahead.

  30

  It was Wednesday and another message from the PostoPublico announced that Andrea was to arrive by car on Friday evening. Patricia had no car of her own and relied on her feet when unable to ride her bicycle on rough and hilly ground. Lucky the village shop was within walking distance.

  Malise, finding it impossible to be with Patricia on her own during the day whilst she attended to her son, took Ruggles for a spin or two. This was much to the disappointment of Antonio and Malise had to spend patient times explaining about work taking him away for hours at a time.

  On one of the days, he did drive to Volterra – partly in order to send a postcard to his father and to show that Etruscan studies still absorbed him and made it hard for him to return to the farm yet awhile.

  He greatly liked Volterra but, with the newly discovered rapture of contact with Patricia’s body, there was little likelihood of his moving to live there.

  Lucca, in term time, was to be an unassailable haven. Andrea in Pisa, Antonio at school all day and blissful antics at the top of the seventy-nine steps.

  With feverish fingers, twitching toes and throbbing member, no longer did he view himself as a desiccated loner. His stiffness evaporated. He decided not to try to make any more stately jokes.

  In Volterra, he ate frugally at a trattoria on a narrow pavement beside a shop that sold alabaster objects formed to look like different fruits. They were convincingly set out as though at a greengrocer’s store. He bought an alabaster peach for Patricia. Tempted by a pear as well but allowed caution to dominate.

  He drove back to his camp in the evening after sending the postcard. Three more Andrea-free nights. Celestial squirming on the thin mattress. Body in a spasm. He was nearly forty and, apart from preliminary forages, such rapture had never crossed his path. His mother’s teaching, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ on his childhood bedroom wall, Alyson’s righteousness, Christian’s adoration of him – dissolved as if they had been nothing at all. The agitation in him almost amounted to a divine form of terror.

  On the way back he pulled Ruggles to a halt and shopped for supper. Non-stop spending.

  Partricia and Antonio were scheduled to join them to ‘sup’ beside his tent. After Antonio’s bed time, Patricia would return to him for more throbbing, more thunderous power from within him. Fireflies, frogs croaking, tent shaking. A family of wild boar tramping past. An enchanted place.

  The days passed.

  Friday was upon them and the arrival of Andrea prepared for. The atmosphere altered. Patricia became anxious and a little distant. Antonio was excited.

  Malise was proud to find himself badly ruffled by spasms of exaltation and agony that succeeded each other by the hour. No longer self-sufficient and dignified as he had once believed himself to be.

  Andrea arrived. Neat, smiling, friendly – but with firm gravity of face – and chain-smoking. He and his wife appeared easy together. Easy and affectionate. It was understood that Malise join them for meals at the stone table by the crumbling house.

  He heard them (and saw them if he strained) making preparations. Ashtrays for Andrea. Bottles of respectable wine. Grapes. Fennel salad. Coloured napkins.

  The two men met for the second time in their lives. It was the first time since Malise had become the lover of the other’s wife.

  ‘What a marvellous place you have here.’

  ‘I am happy that you find it like that. It was a gesture towards my English wife. She loves the countryside. We live very tidy in an apartment just outside the Lucca walls and this is her freedom.’

  31

  Supper, smoke and candles, went well. Andrea asked Antonio many questions about their activities during his absence. Antonio regaled his father with stories of Ruggles, bathing, head-standing, the hammock – ‘sups’ beside the tent.

  The lean and immaculately dressed Andrea was amused and interested. Malise did not follow the language well but made himself useful – taking plates in and out and trying to kiss Patricia when he found her scraping a bowl in the kitchen. She was awkward and flushed. It was all terrible.

  When the time came for Antonio to go to bed, Patricia took him upstairs and read to him by gas light as the two men lingered over wine and remains of supper.

  Andrea spoke English fluently but without competence.

  ‘Tell me more of you’ he asked with great good manners and no suspicion.

  ‘We liked very much to meet you when we came to your beautiful apartment. I ask you again. What brings you to our city of Lucca?’

  Malise answered, giving some attention to bricks but shirking detail. Andrea was a professor and it might have been hard for Malise not to appear spurious or give himself away.

  Andrea probably knew more about Etruscan history than he did and Malise put their language barrier to good use as the other smoked many cigarettes and spoke sadly of the war years and, again, of his families escape from the cruelty of Mussolini. Malise showed tender sympathy as he re-registered how far Patricia had strayed from her, unmistakably, noble English origins. Andrea thanked Malise for his kindness to Patricia and Antonio during his absences but promised that, for the remainder of the holidays, he was to spend more time with them.

  ‘It is hard for my English wife to be alone with only a child for company.’

  Before Patricia had finished reading to Antonio in his bedroom, Malise went to his patch and decided that, in the morning, he would pack Ruggles with his possessions, including tent and hammock, and head back for Lucca.

  Present restraints imposed on him by the situation were intolerable. There were many weeks left before term started when the family were ready to return to their city life. Andrea driving each day to Pisa and his studies.

  At breakfast he followed Patricia into the kitchen and, with misery scratched all over his face, explained that he had need to disappear. Too near and far too far. He also slipped a note into her hand as she brewed coffee. Her men folk were outside at the stone table. The note gave her his address in case she had not registered the exact number of his apartment. She handed him a scrap of paper too. On it were written the details of somewhere that he would find her. In the village. A friend who was to be trusted. An Englishwoman married to an Italian electrician.

  With many a complicated pang, he drove to Lucca and to the PostoPublico where he was handed another letter from Christian. It was not pitiful or at all affectionate but urged him to return if only for a short while.

  ‘Daddy is very weak and Alyson not coping well. There is business to be seen to and, I gather, you are to be in charge. I always felt things should be equally divided between us but – there we go!’

  32

  Having written a few lines of love and further explanation to Patricia, Malise turned a large key after closing his apartment door. He then locked Ruggles and left it in the courtyard before planning to leave by train for Pisa airport. After a second’s thought, he decided to hide the car key in the apartment. Up he went again, unlocked the door, entered and slid the ignition key under an ancient brick.

  He knew that the answer lay in his returning to the farm and staying there until term began in Lucca. He must contain himself until then. There were many weary weeks to be killed. Denial.

  Down the steps again. From Pisa he flew to London. Then he took a train from Liverpool
Street to the old familiar station where he was met by an enigmatic Christian in ‘my old banger.’

  Things were bad at the farm. The father was fragile, walked with two sticks and barely spoke. He showed pleasure with a toothy smile when he saw Malise but said nothing.

  Alyson, also walking with two sticks, told, before he had been more than minutes in the house, interminable tales of woe.

  Malise was still expected to share a room with Christian. Neither man queried that. His Teddy bear had also travelled back from Lucca – so a worn and weary-eyed Teddy lay on each bed as they had done in the old days when the boys’ mother read them tracts.

  Household duties had become Christian’s responsibility, shopping, cooking, firewood. A woman came in from the village to clean but was, according to Christian ‘wather hawum-scawum’ and stole things.

  In the bedroom, Christian asked, with some hostility about the ‘Etwuscans’, but drew little reward.

  One evening, however, as they lay in their single beds, Malise was overcome by an urge to confide. Christian was the only ear available to him as he writhed and craved Patricia’s body.

  ‘Christian’ he asked as he lay in the dark facing his brother’s bed. ‘Have you ever been in love?’

  Christian, astounded by this bolt from the blue, took time to answer.

  After a short while, however, he said ‘No, Malise. I don’t think so. I’ve lost my heart to one or two of the scouts and choir boys – lovely lads, but nothing much more.’

  Malise was trembling and not himself.‘I have Christian. I know what it is.’

  The words left him as shots from a rifle. One after another. He told his brother of the bicycle tumble; the tracking down, nights in the tent. Startling details. Arrival of the husband. Sore heart. Aching limbs. Terror of loss. Never before had he bared himself to a living soul. With Patricia he had been too busy huffing and puffing for much speech. Detailed though his revelations were, Malise failed to mention Andrea’s Jewish origins. They didn’t quite fit with the Italian picture he wanted to paint.

  Christian, although near to uncomprehending, gloated over the power he now held. Unsympathetic confidante. Heart intact, he purred as he slept.

  Appearing not to remember his outpourings to his brother, Malise spent some time, most days, with his father who did barely more than nod – and with Alyson who poured out lists of lamentations and repeatedly told him that it was unpleasant to live to an old age.

  One morning she handed over a damp pile of letters addressed to him.

  ‘They have been here for some while dear but it didn’t seem safe to forward them to that funny Box number. Fortunate I didn’t since you are now here.’

  Some were merely formal – from tailors and shoemakers, a card from the debutante he had danced with at The Hyde Park Hotel to tell him that she was getting married.

  One came from Mr Scarlatti of schoolboy days.

  ‘I write with little expectation of a reply. I am sad to have lost touch with you and your fellow pupils but pin my hopes on the chance that you can still be contacted at this address. You are, by now, I imagine, a happily married man with a large and thriving family. I have been unfortunate in that, soon after retiring, I fell victim to an arthritic complaint and now live in a care home. The people are kind but time hangs heavy on my hands and it would give me untold pleasure to hear how you fared after the atrocious war. Correspondence with your old school has led me to believe that you survived it and distinguished yourself. As you know, I had high hopes for you and have every reason to believe that they have been fulfilled. Yours in hope of a reply. J.Scarlatti.’

  ‘PS I do not seek pity but it is impossible for me to exaggerate the wretched state to which I have been reduced and the heartache that I cannot subdue. We have, perhaps, all lost something in the pain of war but, with the collapse of my health, no one has lost what I have lost – all early hopes and many of them, my boy, were for you. JS.’

  Malise felt sorry for Mr Scarlatti in his care home but knew that no good would become of renewing their friendship – if that was what it had been. He would send him a card, later on, from Italy. Picture of an Etruscan urn.

  The weather was fine and, after sessions with his father, he usually walked around the garden as he pictured Patricia, possibly on her bike. Wished he was her bike. Lucky bike.

  He was shocked by the ramshackle condition of the garden. Overgrown and dismal. Seats broken and unpainted. Branches fallen helter-skelter. He decided to tackle it in a manly fashion. Christian was gloating and much taken up with scouts, choir and village pursuits. ‘A bit of do-gooding’ he would say, smugly, as he slipped from the house.

  As well as trying to sort out business matters and to establish his ownership of the no-longer-desirable property, he spent hours, mostly lusting, in the garden.

  How rewarding it would have been were Patricia there to witness the tackling of his tasks.

  After a few false starts, he wrote to her. He wanted her to know how well he did but wanted, too, to show light heartedness. Feared that complaints might not show as manly. Several drafts. Different paper, nibs, headings, inks, endearments.

  It ended up as follows.

  ‘My angel.

  I miss you non-stop but have spent an inordinate amount of time coping with the almost hopelessly overgrown shrubbery at the end of the garden here. Last winter’s mild weather and abundant rain gave the shrubs a chance to unite into a single wall of vegetation, cleverly threaded with bramble to repel attack (holly too). Plainly a plot had been hatched by them! But I fought back, crawling in beneath them with a bushman’s saw, and the cost of much blood, and laid the enemy low. Then, of course, they all had to be cut up, wheel-barrowed away and burnt. And then I had to dig up the roots, though often frustrated by tap-roots. On top of that I have been re-glazing half of the green house, also clearing out a century’s deposit of wood, iron, glass, old pig feeders, useless tools etc from the large carpenter’s loft and taking unusable items to the dump. I won’t go on with the litany! There was a good deal of satisfaction in getting all this done, but, really, I overworked and now have to draw in my belt by two notches to keep my trousers up.’

  He wanted her to remember his trousers and to picture him in masculine mode.

  He also mentioned that he was planning to write his autobiography as he had a tale or two to tell. Interesting man behind the handsome face. He sent his regards to Andrea and Antonio, added a great many words of adoration, sealed the letter up and walked in military strides to the village post office where he basked in the slight stir he caused by asking for a foreign stamp. Weeks still to go. He eyed the telephone kiosk. If he could but hear her voice. But he had no number. Or, rather, she had no telephone in her woodland retreat.

  33

  As well as composing his letter to Patricia (which took several days), passing time in the garden, as described in the composition, talking to his father, his stepmother, and occasionally and formally with his brother (but never referring to his foolish nocturnal outpouring), Malise held conferences with a local solicitor. It was the moment to put matters in place. There were several weeks to go before Antonio’s school term began and, if matters were not settled by then, it would be a case of dividing his time between Lucca and the Hertfordshire farm house until they were.

  Together with the solicitor, mutterings from Christian, silence from the father and lamentations from Alyson, it was decided that the old pair move to a care home in the next village but one. It was inopportunely known as ‘The Grid.’ The name had been much criticised in the neighbourhood when first the institution opened, but the place had been converted from old farm buildings and the main house stood on the site of a long-disused cattle grid. Notwithstanding opposition it continued to be called ‘The Grid’ and the staff were known to be kind.

  Alyson was resigned. She already knew three dwellers there, all widows, and she hoped to be included in their bridge circle although her game was rusty.

  Th
e farmhouse was to be let with arrangement for Christian to keep three rooms at the back. One of these was to be their shared bedroom so that Malise would always have somewhere to sleep on his visits to the old place.

  ‘As you know Christian.’ He spoke with less certainty than in the past – now that Christian was party to his secret. ‘I may be away a great deal. This place does belong to me but I am happy to let you stay on for the time being. If, when I return from time to time, I shall put up a bed in the downstairs room. It’s high time we had rooms of our own.’ With Patricia in mind, he was a grown man.

  All this needed much sorting and constant argument – largely over which pieces of furniture Alyson wished to take with her to The Grid.

  An anxious Malise knew that many days were likely to be needed for a letter to travel to the Pisan hills where Patricia was to be handed it by her conspiratorial neighbour.

  He wrote several similar ones – doubly reminding her of his manliness, his sense of duty and the notch in his trousers.

  It was at least a fortnight before a reply came. Remembering, with extraordinary vividness, her writing from the brief note she had handed him and knowing that no other letter was likely to come for him with an Italian stamp attached, his hands trembled as he opened it. To his infinite but momentary joy, it contained more than just a line or two. His infinite joy departed but the trembling continued as he read on.

  ‘Dear Malise. I have now had three letters from you, all posted in England, and thank you for all of them BUT, I fear, they must now stop.’

  Lead entered his body.

  ‘The days you spent here were wonderful but I was, and I’m sorry to say this, in cloud cuckoo land. I was a little starved of ‘Englishness’ and you were more than brilliant with Antonio. Thank you for that and for our unreal time together.