by Gordon Kerr
He emptied his bag, laying the jacket he had been sent carefully on the bed. He showered quickly and changed into a fresh shirt and pair of black jeans before heading downstairs once again in the direction of the bar.
The girl was behind the bar, pulling at one of the pumps and emptying the results into a slops pail that stood in the sink. The walls around her were decorated with still more pictures of lighthouses and mysterious brass items – pieces of the workings of lighthouses sat on shelves.
‘Hello!’ she said cheerily as he entered, ‘I hope everything’s alright with the room?’
‘Oh, yes thanks, absolutely fine,’ he replied. ‘A bit heavy on the lighthouse theme, but I can live with it.’
‘I know what you mean.’ She laughed as she spoke. ‘You should hear the locals about it! It’s not as if there’s even a lighthouse for miles around! Now, if you’d like to choose a filling for your sandwich, I’ll get you a drink. What would you like?’
He looked down at a hand-written menu she had handed him. ‘Cheese and ham would be fine and a pint of …’ He surveyed the unfamiliar names on the pumps and selected one at random. ‘A pint of that, please,’ he said, indicating his choice with a nod of his head.
She poured it, her face a mask of concentration and her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. He got the impression that this was not a part of hotel work with which she was totally familiar.
‘And will you join me?’ he asked, pulling out his wallet.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t really, but … well go on then!’ she laughed. ‘I’ll have a gin and tonic, if that’s alright.’ She put the pint of beer down in front of him. ‘I think I deserve it. I’ve been on duty since the crack of dawn and the guy who was supposed to be doing the bar tonight phoned in with flu, so I’m here until the death.’
‘The joys of the catering industry, eh?’ He said taking a long draught from his glass.
‘Yes indeed. I’ve just about had enough of it.’ she replied. ‘Now, cheese and ham you said, didn’t you?’ She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen to prepare his sandwich.
He climbed onto a stool at the bar and began to eat his sandwich there when it arrived. She polished glasses and sipped intermittently at her gin.
‘Business?’ she asked.
‘Pardon?’ he mumbled through a hot mouthful of ham and melted cheese.
‘Is it business that brings you here?’
‘Oh, erm, yes. Well, business and coincidence, really.’
‘Coincidence? What do you mean?’ she asked, becoming curious. He had prepared his story as he had showered and it came out, he thought, like the truth.
‘Well, it’s a bit complicated. You see, my sister stayed here a few months ago, with a friend of hers and it seems this friend left a jacket behind. Your Mrs Stewart sent the jacket to my sister’s address and … well … the truth is, my sister died a month ago and I don’t know who the jacket belongs to. If she was close to someone, I’d really like to meet him.’ It sounded quite plausible, he thought.
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she said, and he realised with relief that she actually had no reason not to believe what he was saying. ‘I mean to hear about your sister’s death, and all. That must have been a blow. I presume she wasn’t that old.’ She stopped polishing the glass in her hand and put it on the bar-top.
‘Yes, it was, and she wasn’t,’ he sighed, ‘It was very sudden,’ he added, warming to his subject. ‘And then to find that she had been here seemingly with a friend, a male friend at that, that none of us knew about … well, it was a bit of a surprise, as you can imagine.’ He had been staring at his knotted fingers and looked up at that moment partly for effect and partly to gauge whether she was, in fact, buying his story. She was, however, nodding sympathetically, with a concerned look in her eyes. ‘We were close – she told me everything – so I thought at first that some kind of mistake had been made,’ he went on. ‘Anyway, long story short, I happened to be passing on my way to Glasgow and decided to come here to see if I could find out anything about this shadowy friend. At the very least I could let him know what has happened to her if he doesn’t already know.’
He felt guilt at this fabrication, but it seemed to be having the desired effect. Her interest was well and truly aroused.
‘Oh, but perhaps I could be of help. When did she stay here?’
‘It would have been in September.’
‘And her name?’
‘Keats … Rosa Keats, and her companion would have been a big guy, if his jacket is anything to go by. I have a photograph of her, if that would be any help.’
He fished out of his wallet the photo of Rosa that he had always carried with him. It had been taken in a restaurant before they had married. She had been caught laughing at something, holding her head in that peculiar way of hers, angled to one side like a puzzled bird, her dark hair, as ever, cascading down over her shoulders. He thought he could smell it, even now, as he handed over the photo.
‘Och, yes, I remember this lady. What a shame. She was lovely.’ She smiled sadly at him, holding the photo. ‘What I should say really is that I remember the chap she was with. He wasn’t all that young – in his fifties, I would think – but, God, he was really good-looking. In a kind of well-off way, you know? You know the way that rich people’s skin glows in a funny way?’
He evidently did not.
She laughed again. ‘You know, it’s like the money oozes out of their pores; they look tanned all the time without having gone anywhere.’ She smiled at the bewildered look on his face. ‘Och, you know what I mean.’
‘Okay, I think I do.’ He smiled faintly. ‘But tell me, did they have two rooms or did they share? I was wondering, erm, just how close they were. I may have this all wrong and he might just have been a business associate.’
He asked as nonchalantly as he could, but this was a question he would rather not ask, a question for which he would rather there was no answer. Nonetheless it was the question that he had travelled all this way to find the answer to. Whole lives can sometimes pivot around key moments. These are usually decisions that one makes – to decide on the spur of the moment to go to a party where you meet your soulmate; or to open a newspaper at a certain page and see a job that inalterably changes your life; or to step into a road that looks clear but, unknown to you, hides a juggernaut which is balling round a blind corner in your direction. Sometimes, however, hearing a single sentence that appears to the speaker quite innocent can move your life to another place entirely, in the same way that chaos theory asserts the familiar cliché that the innocent flap of a butterfly’s wings in China can set off a chain of events that ends in an earthquake on the other side of the world.
‘Oh, they shared, if I remember rightly. Yes, they had a double room.’ She casually picked up another wet glass.
Michael felt the ground shift beneath his feet. His heart was riven by pain that was beyond the physical. If a soul could hurt then his was hurting greatly. The last few years unravelled like a film falling off a spool. The images in the frames seemed to slip out, fall to the floor and shatter. He grasped the edge of the bar to steady himself.
‘Between you and me they seemed to be very much in love,’ she went on. ‘I waited on them in the restaurant – it was the waitress that phoned in sick that time – and they held hands and stared into each other’s eyes all the way through the meal. She was so busy looking at him that she hardly ate anything. I remember that because Chef was bloody furious. He was all for going out and asking if there was something wrong with the food … hey, are you alright?’ she asked, looking curiously at him and noticing that something had changed in him, perhaps the colour draining from his face. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m being stupid, forgetting how difficult this must be for you; let me get you another drink.’
He asked for a Bowmore malt whisky with a little water, reviving slightly as the smoky liquor slipped down his throat.
Just then some locals entered the bar and she
went off to serve them, exchanging noisy stories about the excesses of the weekend and leaving Michael alone with thoughts he would rather not have. Indeed, they were thoughts that several more malts failed to quell.
Eventually, the locals drifted off, noisily making their farewells, leaving Michael and the girl alone again in the bar. He was by now seated at a table and she came over to join him, sitting down with a sigh.
‘He was Italian,’ she said after a moment had passed.
‘What? You mean …’ He ran his hand through his hair in exasperation. ‘Italian?’
‘Yes, your sister’s friend, he was Italian. I heard them speaking Italian together and when he ordered his food, he had an accent. He was Italian. I thought you should know.’
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.’ His words were quiet.
‘But I’m afraid I don’t know his name,’ she went on.
‘No?’ he asked, disappointed, beginning to come to his senses and becoming curious.
‘No. I’m afraid your sister signed the register as Mrs and Mr Keats and she paid with her Mastercard. I checked.’ She got up and disappeared behind the bar for a moment, returning with a bottle of Champagne and a couple of glasses. Jacquie … Mrs Stewart … said I could help myself to a bottle for staying on late tonight and locking up. ‘Like to join me?’
‘Why not?’ he replied, smiling.
‘It’s Helen, by the way. Helen Matthieson,’ she said holding out a hand to him.
‘And I’m Michael, he said shaking the hand.
‘I know. I already checked it out on your registration card. Michael John Keats, to be precise. Very poetic. Would you be kind enough to do the honours?’ She handed him the bottle and he removed the foil and the wire from around the cork. He was no expert at opening Champagne bottles, but he managed it without losing too much of the contents. He filled the two glasses she had brought and they raised them in a toast.
‘To lighthousemen everywhere,’ he said.
‘To lighthousemen,’ she replied, laughing and adding, ‘Long may their lights shine!’
‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to be drinking this, given that I’ve already had a pint and a few generous malts. You know what they say about mixing the grape and the grain.’
‘Och, Champagne’s absolutely the best idea there ever was,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, carpe diem, Michael. Carpe diem.’
There were a few moments of silence between them.
‘How long were you married, then?’ she said quietly, breaking the silence as she raised her glass to her lips, looking directly at him.
He had been lost in the sound of the wind raging outside, driving squally rain against the windows.
‘Sorry?’
‘Ah, Michael. That look in your eyes when I told you that they shared a room, Rosa and her companion. That wasn’t the look of a brother trying to find a friend of his dead sister’s. That was the look of a lover wronged. For a moment you looked utterly destroyed.’
He looked at her, the feeling of devastation momentarily returning.
‘Well? I’m not wrong, am I?’
A pause. He smiled.
‘How old are you, Helen?’
‘Oh, twenty-five going on sixty, my mother says.’ A smile spread across her face. She had cut through the facade of his secret like a knife through rice-paper.
‘She’s not wrong, your mother,’ he sighed. ‘Yes. You’re right. Rosa was my wife. When she was here, I thought she was actually in Newcastle on a photographic assignment. She was a photographer … and …’ The alcohol, tiredness and the emotion of the last month took hold of him. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It must be awful. I understand.’ She reached across and squeezed his hand. ‘You obviously had no idea …’
‘None at all. I think that’s what’s making it so hard.’
And he told her the whole story, the shifting sands of their marriage, the photography, the trip to Italy, the blue car. She listened intently, the rain hammering on the windows of the bar.
He finished and felt like he had emptied himself. He felt, somehow, better for having shared his story with a virtual stranger.
‘So, what now for Michael Keats?’
‘Who the hell knows, Helen. I need to get back to work, I suppose. But I need to know, too, about this guy who’s barged into my life, who was seeing my wife. I’d like to find out more. How long it was going on. I’d also like to find the driver of the car that killed Rosa. The Italian police don’t seem to be getting very far. Those two things would close the circle for me and I think I could kind of get on with my life.’
‘That would mean going back to Italy for a while?’
‘Possibly … I guess, yes.’
Helen yawned across the table from him.
‘But look, you’re knackered. When did you start work this morning?
‘Oh …’ she stifled another yawn. ‘… about six, I think.’
‘So, time you went to bed, then!’
They both stood up.
‘Breakfast is from seven o’clock. I’m on duty again.’
‘You need to find another profession! But, thanks for the Champagne and for listening. I didn’t mean to burden you with all my problems.’
‘Sometimes, you know, all you need is to talk to someone.’ She touched his arm. ‘Goodnight, Michael. See you in the morning.’
As he climbed the stairs, he realised he had drunk a little more than he should have. He managed to get the key into the lock at the second attempt and entered the room. The jacket lay on the bed where he had left it on his arrival. He picked it up and held it at arm’s length, swaying slightly from the cumulative effects of the beer, whisky and Champagne.
‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’ he hissed, hot tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. He held it against his body as if he were in a shop trying on a jacket with a view to buying it and once again put it on, as if somehow that would make him feel better. The sleeves still dangled three inches below his fingertips and he wiped the tears from his cheeks with one of them. This was one big bastard, he thought. He put his hands into the pockets and eyed himself in the mirror. He looked like a little boy trying on his father’s clothes. All at once, however, the passion left his body, his shoulders fell forward and he sighed and began to remove the jacket. He was about to throw it back onto the bed when he felt something inside the lining at the hem, something rectangular and hard, like a small piece of card. He felt in the pockets and sure enough there was a hole in one. That’ll teach you to put such fine lining on a jacket, he thought to himself as he folded it back so that he could reach two fingers down into the bottom corner where the card was lodged.
His fingers found it and lost it a couple of times before he was able to pull it out. ‘Got you!’ he breathed, looking at a business card. He mouthed the words written on it as he read them. ‘Massimo Di Livio, Via Broletto No. 110, Milano.’ There were simply those words and a phone number.
He stared into space wondering who this Di Livio character was. It need not necessarily be the same man who was having a fling with Rosa. It could be a business associate, anyone. But it was a start, a clue. He put the card carefully in his wallet, folded the jacket and climbed out of his clothes, kicking them off carelessly onto the floor, before crawling into bed. Before too long, the room stopped spinning and he drifted off into a shallow sleep.
Outside, rain had begun to rattle on the window once again and the waves beat against the coastline like a warning.
4
November 1943
Southern slopes
The Valtellina
North Italy
Fifty-six years had made a substantial difference to the valley that Michael Keats surveyed from Renzo’s balcony in 1999.
In 1943 the villages were smaller and the distances between them greater; each did not possess its own urban sprawl. Instead, the houses huddled together as if for warmth, and the roads that ran between them did not shine blackly in the glar
e of the late afternoon sun as they did in 1999. Rather, back then they were mainly tracks, rivers of mud in winter and dust bowls in the searing heat of summer.
In fact, the valley possessed an altogether different colour back then; a greyer, darker tone hung over it and was present in its houses, as well as in its undergrowth and in its people. The style of construction made a large contribution to this difference in atmosphere. The walls of the buildings were of dark stone and the roofs were of local slate, not the red, Mediterranean slates of factory-produced regularity that became fashionable in the nineties. In 1943 they were dark and ragged-edged in design, hewn by hand in the quarry. And even then, these buildings looked ancient, spilling out their insides and, in some cases, pursuing a centuries-long collapse into rubble, as if being swallowed up by the earth from whence they came.
In the distance the lake glowed as ever, on its shores two different stories being played out. On the Italian side, desperate people clutched suitcases. The Jews from Milan and Rome waited in a kind of purgatory, ready to escape through the mountain passes that in previous centuries had served as corridors for armies from Central Europe moving in one direction and armies from eastern Italy marching in another. For the Alps had, through those centuries, separated this part of Italy from the major shifts of European political and economic life.
On the other side, life went on in a more or less normal fashion, albeit a normality coloured by the shifting sands of the war. The air was rent by suspicion: suspicion of everything and everyone. Motives were always suspect and in these latter days of the war, this was wise, as fortunes were made quickly and, sometimes, lost even more quickly, as the future of the world was carved and laid out on tables in expensive restaurants.
Much had changed. The Allies had landed on mainland Italy during the first weeks of September, 1943 and by early October, they were in control of the whole of the south of the country. It was just the beginning of a grinding slog up through the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini’s rule of Italy had ended in July 1943 when the Italian Grand Council of Fascism had passed a vote of no confidence in his leadership. He had been replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio and arrested. The Kingdom of Italy – in reality, the southern part of the country – had signed an armistice with the Allies in September.