Patricia and Malise

by Susanna Johnston

  When off her bicycle and lying on her bed, she did begin to think back. Not for long at a time. Memories jarred her with electric shocks. Often she pulled down a shutter in her mind and made shopping lists.

  A day came when she decided to stifle insupportable shame and to summon the courage to concentrate. Andrea was working in Pisa and Antonio at school for the best part of the day. She was free of duty at the art academy and decided to drive out to her house in the woods. She had shunned it since the start of term and it needed certain attentions before the winter came. Once there, it felt as if autumn had arrived. Figs lay like tiny cowpats sploshed onto the jagged terrace that surrounded the building. Wasps swarmed all over them and she was scared of being stung. They were everywhere. Buzzing around. Possibly a wasps nest in the eaves. She pulled a chair from the kitchen and placed it up against the outdoor stone table from which she looked over, across the stream, to the terrace where Malise Mc Hip had pitched his tent and where she, leaving Antonio alone in the dark wreck of a house, had pattered to indulge in reckless passion with a semi-stranger. The sudden impulse, perhaps, of a madwoman. At the same time as shaking at her memories, it did comfort her enormously to remember that she had not been entirely insane; had taken fool-proof anti-pregnancy precautions. For many years she and Andrea had hoped to have another child but, none having come along, she was fairly confident of her own infertility. Nonetheless she took no risks in that area. Huge comfort.

  Then her thoughts returned to her bicycle tumble. His stately assurance. Never had she seen anyone as handsome. And English. The supper at the top of his seventy-nine steps. Had she been attracted to him then? She thought not. Not particularly. But she had enjoyed the rapport that he and her husband engaged in – although there was something stilted about the English visitor.

  Later meetings. Antonio’s sightseeing ventures and her boy’s delicious delight in ‘Sir’s company.

  Andrea was often working in Pisa and also often silent when at home. They did, sometimes, visit friends and relations in England but it was never a success. She did not care to dwell on that for it disappointed her. Andrea spoke reasonable English but was reluctant to do so when with her family in Essex. Her family home in Essex was not at all far from the Mc Hip farm in Hertfordshire. Might that have constituted a factor? A topographical twin-ship?

  Andrea had encouraged her by saying what an interesting man she had introduced him to. He had, after all, been the one to suggest English lessons.

  Maybe, during that first lunch at the trattoria, Malise had handed her the notion that he admired her. Apart from that, why had she behaved irrationally?

  There had, to her knowledge, been no subdued hankering within her. She loved her husband, her boy and her funny little plot in the hills. Her once-weekly job at the art academy. She had a few friends from England who had settled in Lucca – taught in schools or had married Italian prisoners of war and returned with them when fighting stopped.

  It was impossible for her to work out where the gaps had been in her life – or if there had been any gaps.

  The Malise thing had been a blast from the blue.

  She regretted it deeply. Back her mind went again as she looked to the loathsome spot on the terrace. Fireflies, candles, comestibles, strumming guitar. Maybe the wine. The admiration; flattery of a sort. Hints about being a Mc Hip had puzzled her and had made her wonder if there had been a fashionable general or politician of that name. She took no interest in the aristocracy – had never got the hang of it.

  The christening of his car ‘Ruggles’ had jarred slightly. An attempt at wholesome humour.

  Possibly, too, he had been too successful at winning the admiration of Antonio. The understanding bachelor. The ‘I might not be a father but ….’

  She knew he had a slightly simple brother but had been told nothing of the scouts or the choir.

  A violent attack of indigestion overpowered her. Pains near her heart. Nausea. She hoped it was indigestion and not a heart attack. She had no pills with her. Day trip. Water from the spring, cupped in her hands, gave her a break and the respite released some power with which to relive the scenes that had engulfed her only a few weeks before. Reconstructing repelled her. The sensation was entirely nasty – heart half burning and shame overpowering her. Panic of the past. Worse than the panic of the present – by far. There was sweat in her hair and round her ears as she went through inward argument. That first kiss. That had stirred something curious in her. It reminded her of something that she had missed – or thought she had missed. The past, the recent past, was a part of her and she was responsible for it. She had treated the ludicrous Englishman badly. Given encouragement.

  Both her legs, from the ankles upwards, began to burn. Hot pins and needles. And her back ached. It was frightful.

  Those hours (she had no idea how many) when wrapped in sex with the almost unknown visitor, haunted her in many mysterious ways. Then her back started to itch. Another symptom. She had nothing with her – no luggage, no food, no alcohol. The little house was always left empty.

  She cried as Antonio’s voice sounded in her head ‘Where is Sir? Capitano? I want him to take me on walks again. I want him to make a camp and to drive Ruggles. Why does he not want to be our friend anymore? Perche mamma?’

  The itching rose to the tops of her legs and her back ached. Lower back. Then her right shoulder. Her memories were killing her; suffocating her with mental shivers. Her body underwent the mortification of having been given away on a mattress pierced with twigs.

  She threw the alabaster peach, that he had given her, into the stream and liked hearing it plop and seeing the water ripple. She loved the word ‘plop’.

  Andrea had not been able to join them for several days. Antonio had been in a state of ecstasy. His cup was full. Mother with him, father expected and a thrilling newcomer with a tent and a Lagonda called ‘Ruggles’. Hammock too.

  During the infamy of those dizzy sexual exploits Malise had ceased to mystify her. Whilst making love – he had been entirely there. That was what it had boiled down to. Total presence. Top to toe. Ecstasy. Out of doors. Crazed. Walking back to her house on elastic steps.

  He left suddenly not, he had said, wishing to be there when her husband became part of the cast. His note. Her relief. She had been pleased when he left. So pleased that she had failed to suffer until later.

  Some of his characteristics, in retrospect, had begun to jar on her – such as, one evening, when he said ‘I spied some enticing herbs on the bank. Basil, rosemarina, salvia.’ His words, Italianised, had made her squirm a bit. It struck her as vulgar to discuss herbs in that way. If only she had registered the absurdity of it more firmly – and retracted.

  The short notes they had handed to each other in the kitchen on the day of their last meeting had been friendly and both written with the intention of continuing their affair once Antonio’s holidays were over. Up the seventy-nine steps. How proud he had been of those steps.

  That day, the day of Malise’s departure, Andrea had found his wife much altered. She was abstracted and uninterested in his activities at the university. Antonio wanted to talk of nothing but the ‘Capitano.’ Why had he abandoned them after making many promises? Rides in Ruggles.

  She did not write to him at the address in Lucca and did not know if he was there still.

  The second day after Malise’s departure was different. She flew to Andrea’s side and into his arms and bed. He comforted and forgave her – not that he had more than a slight inkling that there was anything to forgive her for.

  Now, later, at the scene of the crimes, she walked on tingling legs to the spot where grass was still flattened by the thin mattress and the stretch of tarpaulin. Malise had cleared up meticulously and with pride. It was as if a giant snake had left a slimy trail on the dry grass.

  Her local friend came up the hill on foot carrying three letters. They spoke for a while but Patricia was clearly abstracted and her friend found her ungratefu
l. After all – she had been the go-between, the confidante, and expected more than an icy reception (which is what she got) after walking up the steep hill.

  It was, paradoxically, the letters that cheered Patricia up and comforted her. She read them each twice as she ate only the figs not to have been invaded by wasps.

  He was in the land of the living – in Hertfordshire. She realised that as she opened each letter in turn.

  The first one horrified her. His description of himself crawling through the undergrowth with a bushman’s saw and the cost of much blood whilst laying the enemy low, appalled her. His ‘having a tale or two to tell’ petrified her. As for his reference to keeping his trousers up. That disgusted her.

  The second and the third letters were all in the same vein but each one reminded her of the notch in his belt.

  She walked to the village shop where she bought paper and an envelope. A letter could be posted on her way home.

  At the stone table she wrote the cruel letter that triggered off the reply (received some weeks later) of ‘Whoa there!’

  She had always abhorred screech marks and his letters screeched with them. Poor Malise. The letters he had troubled himself with had been a part of his undoing.

  Again and again, the closeness that had sprung up out of nothing and ended quickly, plunged her into misery. She had not wanted to enter his world but he had, inexorably, entered hers.

  After writing the letter, she walked into the house. It was dark and damp but very pretty – trees almost breaking in through the windows, she opened the one in her bedroom and heard birds twitter as wasps buzzed. She was thankful that she had never shared that room with Mc Hip. Maybe out of doors didn’t count. The house was not contaminated. That was a blessing. Winter wind and rain might dispose of outside evidence. She spotted the pink ribbon that had tied her hair back on the day of Malise’s arrival at La Cassetta. It lay on a table beside her bed. The double bed she shared with Andrea. She walked down the chipped, stone stairs to the kitchen where she found a pair of scissors and cut the ribbon into tiny shreds. Malise became no more, in her identity, than a blunt instrument. A garden tool. The memory of his tool provoked an unsteady reaction and she sat down again. One more walk past the oozing, open-mouthed, wasp-infected figs and onto a raised patch of grass where the two trees, between which the hammock had been hitched, leant towards each other – faintly scarred where knots had been tied around their trunks.

  She tore up his letters and shoved them into a plastic bag alongside her shredded ribbon.

  The magic of the place began to return in shafts of light. The grizzly episode had, after all, lasted but a few days. Even by magnifying those days by five, or even fifty, recovery was not going to last forever.

  She had driven back to Lucca, clutching her discreditable secret, where she fetched Antonio from school.

  Her terror of meeting Malise, were he to return from England, lasted for several months and then disappeared altogether. It was as if he had never been. She did not know, though, that he, too, was becoming as if he had never been.

  Later in the year, as winter arrived, she sat with Andrea at the stone table. Both wore overcoats. Then she said to him ‘Andrea. We are to become parents again.’ Andrea was more than amazed and overjoyed. Ecstatic. Proud and dazed. He told her how happy he had been during their few last days together during the summer holiday.

  ‘What, I wonder,’ he asked as he drank coffee and smoked ‘became of that strange Englishman? Malise Mc Hip. The one we met in Lucca and who spent a few nights here in his tent.’

  Patricia quaked as he went on ‘We are, I think, lucky to be rid of him. He was interesting and educated but I didn’t care for the way he worked in order to impress Antonio. It was a little suspicious – as if he wanted to give us lessons in parenting.’

  She answered, ‘He was an oddity. I liked him to start with, then, well to tell you the truth, I went right off him.’

  She looked at her happy husband with dedication. He was an excellent person. How could she have been unfaithful to him? As she wondered about that, she realised that she had never, ever been unfaithful. She had strayed, to be sure, but had never stopped loving Andrea. The realisation cheered her up. ‘He was odd; fishy. Handsome to an eerie degree. Snobbish. Self-righteous. Conceited.’ Patricia began to revel in her own and her husband’s opinion of the strange man who had not hesitated to seduce her.

  Various things had to be dealt with before the damp became damper. Logs to be stacked in the shed. Logs that had been left behind by the gypsies who Malise, from his hammock, had thought of tackling on Patricia’s behalf as they walked away with large bundles.

  37

  Several months later Christian sent Ruggles’s ignition key to Patricia. Registered. Malise sat silent and uninterested as his brother wrote the letter to accompany it. Christian had read Patricia’s letter of dismissal and, with Malise’s earlier confessions on his mind, felt, in his limited way, that he understood a little of what had taken place.

  ‘Here comes the key to my brother’s Lagonda. I am sure that he would like to remind you that he always called it ‘Ruggles’. I have never known why he chose that name. The car is still parked (here he gave the particulars) and ready for your collection. I have power of attorney and am happy on his behalf to give you the car as a present to your unborn child in memory of my brother. I have reason to believe that I may well be the child’s uncle.’

  Christian sat quietly after writing the letter and fantasised that, one day, he might turn up in Lucca to claim the child. The last of his particular branch of Mc Hips. He, after all, with Malise’s wits gone, was the head of the family and had rights.

  Patricia, within weeks of giving birth to her second child, found the hard packet – key and letter within, on her door mat. Feeling clammy and hysterical she called a mechanic and asked him to join her beside Ruggles. Fortunately Antonio had never known that the car remained in Lucca and had asked no questions as to its whereabouts. The mechanic, with difficulty, managed to get Ruggles’s engine running. At that point Patricia asked him if the car might be of any use to him. He was welcome to own it. The young man, mystified, accepted the offer and drove away in it. He sold it almost at once. It went to a buyer in Florence so was, no more, to be seen on the streets in or around the city of Lucca.

  38

  After some negotiations, one of the rooms at the farm house was reclaimed from the tenant. He was a nice but pernickety man and insisted on a reduced rent. Christian needed the extra room for he could no longer look after his brother single-handedly and a live-in helper was needed.

  Malise had become irrational – buying more and more bananas; removing paintings from the walls, carrying them clumsily to the barn where he stacked them beside the spot, now sacred, on which, in his youth, he had rolled in the straw with Dawn.

  Sometimes he disappeared altogether and had to be tracked down by the local policeman.

  A live-in helper was finally found. Her name was Kathleen and, to begin with, Malise fell for her. She was sixty two years old and had been through rough patches in her life.

  It had not been easy for Christian to persuade anyone to take the job. Two bachelors, one of them mad and both creepy, living in isolation, did not attract many candidates.

  On the first day he was wary but on the second, Malise ran his hands over her face and mumbled the name ‘Patricia’ through half-closed lips.

  ‘No dear. Kathleen. Not Patricia.’

  That made him cross.

  ‘I call you Patricia. Trish. Pat. Tricia. Pat. Trish.’

  ‘Very well. Call me names. I am called Kathleen all the same.’

  She liked the running of his hands over her face but when they descended to her body she felt compelled to object.

  ‘No dear. Nothing naughty.’

  For the first few weeks he went quietly and enjoyed her attention. He followed her around wherever she went and continued to call her Patricia. Trish. Pat. Tricia or wh
atever related shortening came into his head.

  Christian steered clear of them both and returned to his duties. Choir and Boy Scouts.

  After some months, though, when it was clear that Kathleen was going to continue to reject any sexual advances, Malise began to get violent. One of his father’s old walking sticks stood in a holder by the back door. He brandished it and brought it down on her shoulder leaving her with a nasty bruise.

  When Christian returned from a choir meeting he was met by a bedraggled Kathleen who insisted on showing him black marks on her shoulder.

  At first she had wanted to call the police but caution told her to control her instinct. She was not well paid but it was at least, a job and she did not lose touch with the fact that Christian was, after all, a bachelor. Malise was very handsome – if violent and abusive. But she could no longer manage him on her own. He started throwing things at her, kitchen utensils, china and tins of food, as he shouted ‘Patricia’ at concert pitch. Then he was up half the night unhooking pictures from the walls – ready to remove to the barn when day broke.

  The kitchen had to be declared out of bounds after an unnerving incident. Consequently it became the place where Malise most wanted to be.

  The unnerving incident took place as Kathleen watched an early evening programme on a newly installed black and white television set. Malise had wandered into the kitchen where a fearsome animation overtook him and he pulled a large pudding basin from a sagging shelf. Then he investigated the store cupboard. Methodically but with shaky hands, he collected together an assortment of food stuffs and emptied samples into the bowl. First a can of brightly coloured soup, then corn flakes, chocolate powder – stiff and stinking with mouse droppings, condensed milk, golden syrup, marmite, and crumbled digestive biscuits. All he could lay his trembling hands on. After a while the bowl was full and the mixture slopped over its sides. Malise stirred awkwardly with a wooden spoon and spoke (to himself) ‘Patricia. Patricia is coming to supper. Up seventy-nine steps.’ He said that in his head over and over again. Then, drawing himself tall, he took the bowl and its swilling contents and hurled it at the window – cracking the glass and leaving trails of glutinous slime over table, sink and window sill.