Last Train from Liguria (2010)

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  Bella turns away from the French doors, and hurries back down the room to where the English housekeeper had instructed her to wait in the first place. Staying with her back to the terrace, facing the door she had earlier come through, she sits on the edge of the least comfortable-looking chair.

  As it happens the Signora comes in behind her, by the terrace; brisk steps perfectly in time with the beat of Bella’s heart. She is up off the chair in an instant.

  ‘Please,’ the Signora’s voice says. ‘Do stay as you are. Keep yourself comfortable.’ She comes round to face Bella. ‘I am Signora Lami - how do you do? Please forgive the delay, I’m afraid things have been, shall we say, rather hectic these past few days. I trust your journey has not been too arduous?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Bella mutters, taking a step towards the Signora, taking a step back again when she sees no hand is offered.

  ‘Splendid.’

  It is difficult to know which is more surprising, the Signora’s formal, indeed almost comically regal, use of the English language, or her appearance. For a start, she’s so young. Quite a bit younger than Bella, who up to now has been carrying an older Signora Lami in her head. She is also very good-looking. Although oddly dressed. Her hair - fair, possibly blonde - is pulled up and caught at the back in a covering that’s not quite a wimple but much more than a cap. She is wearing a long navy skirt and a white starched pinny. In one hand she holds a large glass bulb, which after a few seconds Bella recognizes as being part of a breathing apparatus - the type she has seen from time to time in her father’s study. It is then that it dawns on her - the Signora is dressed like a nurse. Of course.

  ‘I’ve been admiring the photographs,’ Bella says, because she feels by now she really ought to have said something.

  ‘Ah yes.’ The Signora’s eye runs along the wall. ‘My husband’s passion.’ She then goes over to a writing desk and moving behind it with the glass bulb raised in one hand, she uses her other hand to edge open a drawer. It drops and she stops it against her thigh.

  ‘I must say your little boy takes a lovely photograph,’ Bella says, hoping to hear his name in return for the compliment.

  ‘Yes. He is a very handsome boy,’ the Signora says, and begins rummaging through the drawer. ‘Unfortunately he’s not here. I sent him to our summer residence three days ago. In Bordighera - you know - on the Riviera - you would have passed it en route? It is cool enough today, thank goodness, but up to now the weather has - how shall we say? - been quite, quite ridiculous. Not very comfortable for him - you understand.’ The Signora tilts her hip and hoists the drawer back up with her thigh, then closes it. ‘You will like it there, Miss Stuart,’ she says. ‘I am quite certain. We are a small but friendly household. And Bordighera is very refined - many English are permanent residents, and others come as holidaymakers during the summer. There is even a season, almost like in London, from November to May, you know. My son is there now with his music master.’

  ‘He’s fond of music?’ Bella asks.

  ‘Rather.’

  The Signora frowns and moves to the next drawer. ‘Also his two cousins are staying there for a few weeks. Most entertaining, I’m sure.’

  ‘That’s nice for your son - someone to play with, I mean,’ Bella says, hoping again.

  ‘Hardly, Miss Stuart, they are older than me, the connection is through my husband’s side. His first wife, you know. Yes. Americans. They have been doing Europe, as they would say, for the past few months. You know how Americans are. They like looking at things on a list. They wanted to come to Sicily, of course, but that was out of the question with my husband unwell.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thank you, how kind. And so they remain in Bordighera. One of them, I can’t recall which, broke something - her collarbone perhaps, so they have had to suspend their travels for a while. Playing tennis, I believe - we have a splendid lawn tennis club in Bordighera. The very first one in all of Italy. Do you play, Miss Stuart?’

  ‘I’m not very good, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What a pity. My son plays every day.’

  ‘Oh, does he really?’ Bella is beginning to wonder if the Signora actually knows her own son’s name.

  The Signora continues. ‘Anyway, what I have arranged is as follows. You will rest until tomorrow and then you are to take the night ferry to Naples tomorrow evening.’

  ‘To Naples?’

  ‘In fact. I’m afraid it appears there is no ferry to Genoa until next week. So you will have to take the train from Naples. While there, if you don’t mind, I would like to ask you to deliver a letter for me. It’s rather urgent. I’m afraid I simply don’t have anyone reliable to spare at the moment.’ The Signora pauses and frowns at Bella. ‘It will only be a question of taking a taxicab from the port and then back to the train station, Miss Stuart. You know, hardly more than half an hour.’ She says this sternly as if Bella has refused the errand.

  ‘Oh, of course, Signora Lami,’ Bella says. ‘Anything I can do.’

  ‘Good.’ The Signora almost smiles. ‘That’s settled then. Do you think you will require a lady’s maid?’

  ‘Well. I mean, I hadn’t really—’

  ‘It won’t be a problem, the kitchen is swarming with girls, take a pick if you wish, although you will have to train her from the very first scratch. Some of them are frightful primitives, you know. Anyway, choose and then speak to Mrs Harding. She will be here in a moment to take you to dinner.’

  The Signora reaches into the drawer and slides out a large envelope. Bella cringes slightly at what can only be another complicated set of directions.

  ‘Everything you need is here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss Stuart, I must get back. You may have a stroll in the garden before retiring, but please keep to the garden at your side of the house. The one you will have seen from your terrace?’

  ‘Ah, so there is more than one garden? I thought there—’

  ‘Yes, my own garden is just outside here. I have designed it myself. In the English style, you know. But as our rooms are also on this side of the house I don’t want my husband disturbed. Another time perhaps.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If you need to know anything, you may ask Mrs Harding. Of course there is also Sister Ursula - her English is quite acceptable. One finds her about the place. Well, goodbye, Miss Stuart. A pleasure, all mine. No doubt we will see each other soon, in Bordighera.’ This time she offers her hand and Bella takes it.

  ‘I hope your husband feels better soon,’ she says.

  The Signora looks straight into her eyes. ‘Thank you, Miss Stuart. But my husband is dying.’

  *

  When the housekeeper comes to take her to the dining room, Bella is still slightly dazed. Signor Lami about to die. The boy with no name sent away three days ago. He would have been leaving Palermo just as she was leaving Nice, their paths crossing on the way. Why had no telegram been sent to intercept her? It’s not as if they didn’t know where she’d be staying en route. A strange oversight from a woman as organized as Signora Lami, who, if her reams of directions were anything to judge by, had a higher than usual regard for the finer detail. A woman who dresses up as a nurse so she can look after her dying husband - for God’s sake! - would surely know how to send a telegram. It was as if the inconvenience to Bella simply hadn’t mattered. And now after coming all this way, to have to retrace her journey, almost as far as France. Except this time with the errand in Naples thrown in, just to complicate things even further.

  The English housekeeper speaks, as if she’s been reading Bella’s mind. ‘You know, we did send a telegram,’ she begins. ‘Actually we sent two. Both returned.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes, really. One to the train station in Nice. The other the station in Genoa. But it seems there was no Miss Stuart to be found in the first-class carriages of either train.’

  ‘Oh?’ Bella tries to sound and look surprised.

  ‘P’rap
s you didn’t hear them call your name?’

  ‘Yes. That was probably it.’

  ”Appen they mispronounced it. Often do.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  They come into a hallway and Mrs Harding lifts a brown package from a chair. She says, ‘Would you mind giving this to Alessandro please? He left it behind and can’t be doing without.’

  Bella accepts the parcel. At least she knows the boy’s name now. Alessandro.

  ‘Well, there’s the dining room. Enjoy your dinner now.’

  ‘Thank you. Oh, Mrs Harding?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Stuart?’

  ‘Signora Lami mentioned, well, actually she said that if I needed a lady’s maid, one of the kitchen girls, and I thought—’

  ‘And do you need a lady’s maid?’

  ‘Well, I suppose…’

  ‘Put it this way, Miss Stuart, would you normally be used to a lady’s maid?’

  ‘No. But if the Signora… I mean, I thought perhaps Lena—’

  ‘Lena?’

  ‘Yes, she brought water to my room—’

  ‘I’m aware of that, yes. But I’m afraid Lena is out of the question.’

  ‘But the Signora said—’

  ‘Maria would never allow it.’

  ‘Is it up to Maria? Because quite frankly I feel she’s hardly—’

  ‘Maria is her mother.’

  ‘Oh. I hadn’t realized. Sorry - and her father?’

  The English housekeeper ignores this question. There is silence for a moment. ‘Did you have anyone else in mind?’ she asks then.

  ‘No. No, Mrs Harding, that’s fine. I’m sure I’ll be able to manage.’

  ‘Very well, if you’re sure. Safe journey, Miss Stuart. Please give Alessandro my best and tell him I shall drop him a line.’ Then the English housekeeper is gone.

  *

  When Bella finally escapes to the garden, the heat has pulled back to a more considerate warmth. Everything else about the evening has intensified: smell, colour and above all else, the light, although it takes a moment to notice that she’s been walking through liquid gold.

  Her mind is stuffed with the trauma of dinner - how any one person could be expected to eat so much food in so many courses. And the servants, constant and overbearing as if they’d been instructed to report on her every mouthful. It had reminded her of the summer with the Johnsons in Margate, when her father had written that letter. Big fat Betty Johnson reading it aloud before dinner: ‘Bella’s appetite is poor, and deteriorates with excitement. She needs to be - I won’t say watched, but certainly encouraged.’

  At least in Margate the food had been recognizable. But here? A nibble or two of tough bread. A scrap from a slice of meat she had pulled around a plate for a while. The meat like raw rashers of bacon they’d forgotten to put on the pan. A fidget with a spool of spaghetti next, little snaillike creatures barnacled to the strands - the whiff of urine and ocean. That had been the last straw. She had thrown down her napkin, stood up and raised a determined palm. ‘Basta. No thank you. Grazie. Enough.’ In the end all that had really passed her lips was perhaps a little too much wine.

  Bella feels the weight of the wine now as she stands in the garden, staring down into a patch of grey pebbles. She shakes herself up. There’s a walkway on the far side of the parterre sloping towards an archway pompomed with roses. She begins to move towards it.

  Strange to be walking through what had, until now, been a distant view. Like stepping into an illustration in a book or sitting in the front row of the theatre; pencil lines and spits. Before, there had been a gorgeous compatibility about the garden, everything blending and flowing together. Now, up close and in this shortening light, each thing seems slightly disconnected. The water from the fountain like individual shreds of glass; the boy on his dolphin stands only for himself. The dolphin is a separate entity and doesn’t even know of the boy’s existence. Each lemon, leaf and blade of grass pushes itself forward as if it’s the only thing that matters. Even the voices of the crickets seem different - harsher and slightly neurotic - and the slither of yet another lizard up another wall no longer startles or charms. Even so, Bella knows she has never been more physically aware of a place, and would give anything not to have to leave it tomorrow.

  She turns to look back over the villa, locating her room at the gable end of the house, the only window not to have green shutters clamped to the wall. And there, the balcony she had stood earlier, looking down at this very spot, and the corner terrace where she saw the nun praying in the lemon grove. She turns away from the house and continues, passing beside a long low wall lined with terracotta urns and marble vases through air that is pampered with lemons and roses.

  The archway turns out to be a pergola, longer than expected and much lower, so that she has to stoop through a tunnel of musty odour to pass to the other side. Coming out she lifts her head for light and air, and is surprised to find neither. The air remains ripe, the light dull. Her eyes adjust. Bella almost screams. After a few seconds, a short nervy laugh comes out instead. She is in a statuary. For one foolish moment it had crossed her mind that these figures might be real men, standing around in a large circle looking at each other. She feels like an intruder in a doorway who has stumbled on and silenced a conversation not meant for the ears of strangers. Some of the figures look so real. Naked or near naked men. The prime of manhood in fact. Robust legs and high tight rumps. One of them with a shoulder blade slightly turned as if he is preparing himself to throw a discus. There are cushions of muscle moulded into his long back, a strength and grace to every turn of his body. Vitality. It is hard to believe that should she lay her hand on his back, all she would feel would be cold and stone.

  She reaches her hand towards him, then pulls back. She does this several times, before beginning to trace his shape with her palm, starting at his shoulder, drawing down the length of his spine, over his rump, down the curves of his legs. Bella steps into the circle. And now she is standing like a child in the centre of a game she can’t quite grasp. Immediately she wants to get out again, but can see no way through. There is only the stout round thigh, the ready hand, the determined foot. She notices now, there have been a few attempts at modesty: a fig leaf or a swatch of loin cloth. One figure covers himself with his hand, a gesture that seems more obscene than modest. She reminds herself that these are statues and that she has seen such statues before in art galleries or books. They are not real men, with their hairless bodies and pretty bunches of harmless fruit. They will not harm.

  As the light continues to deteriorate, she looks up at their faces. She sees eyes that are blank and blind, mutilated profiles, noses corroded to stumps on faces riddled with cancer. Amputees. She is certain that if she remains here, the statues will begin closing in. Her legs are dizzy, her head hot and weak. When a space appears between two figures, Bella closes her eyes and rushes through it.

  Out now, on a corridor shaped by high-hedged walls, she passes Roman centurions, Grecian maidens, a private party of nymphs. There’s a monumental stairway ahead, leading under a stone archway. The archway is decorated with a grotesquerie of faces. It is not the way she came in, but is the only way she sees out.

  Almost dark. In what appears to be a forgotten orchard, branches claw out at each other, rolls of overgrowth are dense on the ground. A stench, vaguely yeasty, like a gust of air through the street grating of a public house. Beneath her feet windfalls yield and squelch, sometimes with a squeak. Bella tries not to imagine she’s trampling on mice. She makes for the wall, stays with it until an overdrop from the house lights shows an iron gate. She passes through and is back on civilized ground.

  The outline of the house is sturdy with shadow. Only the rooms above the loggia are open and lit. From here a chevron of light drops over the balustrade down on the parterre. She’s in the wrong garden - she sees this at once; the lawn, the benches, the cast-iron frog, menacing now under a cuff of light.

  Bella slips over to the trees at the s
ide, sneaking along a pathway that winds through them and which she prays may keep her hidden until she finds her way back to the other side of the house. Something catches her eye then, a movement on the terrace. It takes a moment to accept that the woman up there could possibly be Signora Lami. Hair loose and long, a sheet wrapped around her, bare arms and shoulders suggesting that she is otherwise naked. But it is the Signora. Bella sees that now, as she moves into the corner of the terrace to where an old man sits in a bath chair. Bella tells herself not to look, but her eyes keep returning to the terrace. She is afraid or unable to move away.

  The Signora draws the chair out of the corner towards the French doors then stops at the threshold, where the light of the room settles about them. Signora Lami then goes into the room to return almost at once with a cushion and something which she hands to the man. The cushion drops from her hand and she kneels down beside the bath chair. The old man then begins brushing her hair. Bella wants to see his face. But he keeps it bent over his task, and the balustrade allows her to see only the hand drawing the brush over the hair, and the hair responding in sprays of filigreed light. Even from here she can see the hands are ancient, as if they’ve been dried and salted. Yet there is nothing feeble in their movement, one hand firmly working the brush, the other smoothing and calming the hair back into place.

  After a time the old man leans towards the Signora and says something. She lifts herself towards him, raising her arms, and the sheet slips down a little. Now her arms are around his neck and his old hands are splayed on her naked back. They embrace for a while and speak to each other; the words fall softly and although they are not decipherable to Bella she feels the tone is one of comfort and love.

  The Signora stands and pulls the sheet up, wrapping it around her body, tucking it into place. She moves behind the bath chair, twists it on its wheels a little, so that they are now both facing the garden. The chair takes a slight backward dip before they reverse into the room, allowing a momentary view of Signor Lami, his thick silver hair, his thin, fine-boned face. A face that is ready to die.