*
The hotel that she had reserved for him in Siena was exactly what he would have expected from her. He checked in the following day shortly after noon and then waited for her in the lobby, with its white marble floor and its smiling concierge, with its elegant cane furniture and many green plants. She wouldn’t be late: she was never late. At twelve-thirty on the dot the glass door of the hotel opened.
Marta was wearing a simple beige dress and her hair was pinned up, showing off her neck and shoulders. She didn’t seem older, just more tired-looking than Roderic remembered, as well she might have done, he told himself, given her life in recent years. Her stern, somewhat defensive expression changed when she saw him and he realised that she was struggling to conceal her shock. He knew he’d gone downhill a lot in the past eight years, but surely not that much. If she thought he looked raddled now it was just as well that she hadn’t seen him in the last year before he stopped drinking. ‘Roderic!’ The pity she felt for him and his sadness at it broke down some of their defences and made the initial moments of their meeting easier than either of them had dared to hope. She told him she had booked a table for lunch at a nearby restaurant. After the fiasco of the preceding summer, it had been decided that as much of this visit as possible would be conducted on neutral territory. Hence the hotel, hence the restaurant, on the terrace of which they took their places a short while later.
‘Was this place here in my time?’
Marta shook her head. ‘It’s only been open a year or so, but it’s become extremely popular.’
‘I can see why,’ Roderic said, taking in the crystal and linen, the view of the soft valley before them. A thick vine had been trained up a trellis and made a canopy above them. The sun dappled down through the leaves and Marta pointed out across the valley the three bridges that gave the restaurant its name. Ever since he arrived Italy had been conspiring to seduce him again, to make him ask how and why he had ever chosen to exile himself, to drive himself out from this Eden. They ordered melon and rabbit and steak, unfolded their napkins and helped themselves to bread from the basket on the table. The waiter brought them bottled sparkling water.
‘Dennis sends you his best’
‘Give him mine when you see him.’ They both knew that without him, their reconciliation would never have been possible. It was he who had brokered an uneasy peace between them in the aftermath of their separation and urged them to keep open the lines of communication in the years that followed.
‘And Gianni? Where did you say he was this week, Berlin?’
‘Hanover.’
He wasn’t convinced that this business trip wasn’t a fiction but Marta’s new companion owned a factory that made luggage, so it was quite possible that he really was off at a trade fair.
‘It’s good to be with someone again,’ she said. ‘The girls like him, which is important.’ She asked him then if he was seeing anyone.
‘There have been a few people actually, yes,’ he said, holding her gaze, ‘but nobody special. You know how it is,’ and he smiled.
At that moment the waiter returned to the table bringing their first courses and they fell silent until he had gone away again. Now that they had moved on to sensitive subjects, Roderic considered, it was best to keep going, to deal with the difficult things and get it over with. ‘I also want,’ he said rather stiffly, ‘to apologise for what happened last year.’
‘As well you might,’ Marta said. ‘I’d have skinned you alive if I’d been able to get my hands on you that day. I was livid with you. Livid.’
He knew this already: she had told him so at the time.
‘We were all at the airport, you know. The girls were hurt, and bitterly disappointed, especially Allegra. What happened, anyway?’
Roderic sighed. ‘You know how it is,’ he said again, but this time he didn’t smile.
A similar visit had been planned the year before, some six months after he stopped drinking. It had been Roderic’s idea, but as the time approached he had viewed the prospect with increasing dread. ‘I did get as far as Dublin airport that morning,’ he told Marta. ‘I got as far as the check-in desk, and waited in a queue for fifteen minutes. Then my turn came and the man behind the counter held out his hand for my ticket and passport. “I’m sorry about this,” I said to him, not that he was going to lose any sleep over it, “but I’m not going,” I just couldn’t do it. I turned and walked away.’
‘And you went straight home?’
‘Yes.’ This wasn’t true. He’d gone and sat under the screens where the departures were listed and sat there for over an hour looking at the information on the flight to Rome. Where to check in, the boarding gate number. The information moved on up the screen as time went on and the flights ahead of it departed. Then it was being boarded, last call, and it left. He waited until the information had disappeared completely off the screen and only then did he go home. He remembered that he had started to cry in the taxi. When he got to the house he lifted the phone off the hook, took a couple of sleeping tablets and went back to bed.
Thinking of all this now he put down his knife and fork, and sat like that for several moments. For years he had longed to see his daughters and then when the moment came, he hadn’t been able to face it. How would they judge him? Would they be disappointed in him? How would he cope if they disliked him? If they were angry? What if they considered him a stranger, in spite of all the letters and phone calls with which he had wooed them in recent times? ‘I was afraid,’ he said very slowly, ‘that if I did get on that plane I would be so anxious about what was going to happen when I arrived I would start drinking again. And as the time drew nearer that feeling got worse, so that when push came to shove, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I got on the plane that morning in the state I was in, I would start to drink. By the time I got to Rome I would have been right back to square one. And if the only way to avoid that was by not taking the flight then that was how it had to be. I had no choice, Marta. Christ knows I didn’t want to hurt you and the girls yet again but I couldn’t see an alternative. I had no choice.’ He sat for a few moments longer in silence.
‘The last trip,’ she said, ‘was badly thought out. That we should meet you at the airport, that you should stay with us: it would never have worked. It’s better like this. Are you nervous about meeting the girls?’
‘Maybe just a bit. How do you think it will go?’
‘Very differently with each of them,’ Marta said decisively. ‘Serena will be difficult. Extremely difficult. But don’t take it personally, she’s like that with everyone at the moment. Serena by name, we say in the family, but not Serena by nature.’
‘Is she going through a rebellious phase, then?’
‘Is she what! I don’t know where she gets it from; I was never like that. Were you?’
Roderic shook his head. ‘It must be a rogue gene she inherited from her Uncle Dennis. What’s Serena getting up to?’
‘Everything,’ Marta says. ‘She quarrels with me, she quarrels with Allegra, she’s even had rows with my mother.’ At this Roderic felt a quick surge of sympathy for Serena, which he did his best to conceal. ‘She’s got a horrible boyfriend, a real smart-alec. Paolo. She spends all her spare time hanging out with him. He has a motorbike.’
‘You mean a Vespa?’
‘No, no, a real motorbike. I think it’s a Harley. They go off up into the hills,’ and she tossed her chin, gesturing towards the valley before them which immediately took on a darker, more sinister air to Roderic. ‘At least she’s doing well at school. She’s lazy, but she’s smart. You won’t enjoy seeing Serena, I can tell you that now,’ Marta went on. ‘She’ll give you a hard time. She’ll think she has you on a gilt pin because of all the trouble in the past, but if you want my advice you ought to stand up to her and not take any cheek.’ The waiter came over to remove their plates, returned moments later bringing the meat.
Marta helped herself to more bread and turned the conversation
to Allegra. ‘You have nothing to worry about there,’ she said. ‘Allegra loves you. She adores you. You may not realise this but you’ve never done anything wrong in your life.’
That any member of his family could think this in the face of such firm evidence to the contrary didn’t seem possible to Roderic, and he said as much to Marta.
‘Oh, but if you drank it must have been my fault,’ she said. ‘I drove you to it, dreadful woman that I am. I must have made your life intolerable to force such a paragon as yourself to the bottle. That’s the version of events you’ll get from Allegra.’
‘I’ll try and disabuse her of that notion.’
‘Will you?’ she replied, and there was more than a touch of bitterness in her voice. ‘Will you? If you succeed in doing so, I’ll be much obliged.
‘As for Oriana,’ she went on, ‘it’s like this.’ She spoke hesitantly and he knew that she was about to broach something difficult. ‘I know we spoke at length before you came over about keeping everything on neutral ground, and your not coming to the house and so on.’
He nodded. That he would not visit their former family home which Marta and the girls now shared with Gianni had been very much his idea.
‘You’ll find that she comes across as far younger than she actually is. She’s a sweet child, gentle, but anxious. She can’t remember you at all and she’s extremely nervous about meeting you. Given that, I thought it might be easier for her if you were to see her in surroundings that are familiar, where she feels comfortable and safe.’
‘Absolutely’
‘We could go, then, straight after lunch, back to the house. She’s there on her own.’
‘Why not?’ Roderic said, forcing a smile. Marta poured more water for herself and topped up his glass too. He was glad of this as he was not sure that he could do it now without his hands trembling.
At the end of the meal Roderic insisted on paying the bill, and reluctantly accepted Marta’s promise to take him out to dinner at some stage over the coming days. Then they set off for their former home. ‘The Germans left that place, do you remember them?’ she said, nodding at a villa up on the hill. ‘Their marriage didn’t work out either. I think an American couple own it now, I don’t know them.’ They continued in causal talk about changes that had taken place in the area since Roderic’s departure and people he had known then but they both fell silent as they drew near to the house. The trees and plants had thickened around it in the years of his absence. Marta pulled into the driveway and they got out of the car. His old home looked more imposing than he remembered it. Everything about Italy was slightly out of kilter with the image he had carried in his mind, as though he were looking at it all through some kind of filter. Marta fumbled for her keys in her handbag, then opened the door and admitted him to the hall.
He would have known it, he thought, had he been blindfolded, would have recognised immediately that cool air with its faint fragrance of furniture polish, the exact timbre of the sound the door made as she closed it behind them. They stood in the dim hall, not speaking, inches from each other, and for a split second it was as if it had all never happened: the drinking and the quarrels, the years apart. This woman was still his wife, this house was still his home. That it should be otherwise and that she was now living here with another man was unbelievable to him. They stood there on the black and white tiled floor staring at each other and he could feel between them that powerful sensuality that he always associated with Marta, that he had experienced first so many years before in the darkened chapel. He was still physically in thrall to her as he always had been, and he wanted her now, here and now. Softly he spoke her name, ‘O Marta,’ and she stared up at him, made no movement to resist as he lifted his hand to touch her face.
Just at that moment, a timid voice came from the top of the stairs. ‘Mamma?’ Marta jerked away violently from Roderic’s touch as if she had been electrocuted, and they stared at each other, shocked at what had almost happened. She was bristling with anger now. ‘Mamma?’ the voice said again. ‘Oriana? Si, si, sto qui.’ Struggling to compose herself she waved Roderic towards the door of the drawing room and then ascended the staircase, speaking to her daughter in Italian as she went.
The incident in the hall had completely thrown Roderic and he was further disconcerted when he went into the drawing room. It had changed almost out of all recognition. There were chairs and a sofa that had not been there in his time and the pieces of furniture he did remember – a dresser and a small table – had been moved to different positions in the room. It was dark there too because the shutters were closed, so he switched on a lamp that looked like an egg of opaque white glass and sat down on the sofa. Footsteps on the stairs, whispers. Now they were just outside the closed door of the drawing room. He could hear Marta and Oriana conferring in lowered voices, the child’s voice urgent, anxious, Marta’s soothing and cajoling. ‘Of course I’ll stay with you, at least to begin with,’ he heard her whisper. ‘Don’t worry, darling, it’ll be fine, you’ll see.’ But there was no one to console Roderic, who could feel his own heart beating with unnatural intensity. He was more nervous even than he had been when waiting in the hotel for her to arrive. It seemed to him in that moment that with the exception of a few paintings there was nothing in his life, but nothing, that he hadn’t botched. Please God, let me not botch this, he thought, please let the next hour be an exception.
The door opened and Marta appeared, ushering into the room an exquisite child who was small for her eleven years. Roderic stood up and the little girl’s face registered shock. ‘But he’s so big! So big!’ she said, turning to her mother and not addressing Roderic at all. He immediately sat down again so as not to appear intimidatingly tall, and then felt foolish because he had to stand up once more to greet her properly, taking the tiny hand she held out to him and kissing her very lightly and gingerly on the cheek, so as not to startle her further. What he really wanted to do was to throw his arms around her and wail, to give himself up to the visceral love he felt for her. He wanted to carry her off in his arms, he wanted to take her back to Ireland with him to live for the rest of her life. He wanted to stop complete strangers in the streets and say to them, ‘This is my daughter. My daughter.’ She was like a child as she might have been painted by Bronzino, with her fine-boned face and her thick brown hair. He could see her in brocades and heavy green stuffs, could see her with golden chains and jewels, a small book in her hands, a classic Renaissance beauty, and yet the miracle was there was something in her that was him, in her brow, in her jaw: she was his daughter.
He patted the cushions on the sofa, inviting her to sit beside him, but she had already slunk into a chair opposite, safely separated from him by a low table scattered with art magazines. ‘We had ever such a nice lunch,’ Marta said to her. ‘We went to I Tre Ponti, you know, where we went for Allegra’s birthday? They had that chocolate ice cream you liked so much.’ She rattled on brightly about how well Oriana was doing at school. Speaking of dance classes and piano lessons, asking questions and giving prompts, she tried to draw both father and daughter into the conversation but with limited success. Roderic wished he didn’t have to talk at all. He would have liked just to look at Oriana in silence for fifteen, twenty minutes, to drink her in, to savour the full, almost Shakespearean import of the situation and think of all that had been lost, all restored. It was evidently a sentiment Oriana shared. She sat staring rapt across the table at Roderic as though he were some fabulous creature from the outer limits of imagination. She gave her mother abrupt ‘yes’, ‘no’ answers to her questions as she struggled to match this total stranger with the concept of Father.
‘I don’t remember you,’ Oriana said all at once, still staring at him. ‘I thought I might, but I don’t.’
‘Oh well, it can’t be helped,’ Roderic said, attempting to be jocular, but his disappointment was too deep to be completely hidden, and a certain awkwardness fell over them.
‘We had a very nice hol
iday in Positano a few weeks ago, didn’t we?’ Marta said. She was clutching at straws by now, like a slightly desperate hostess trying to crank up the atmosphere at a party, but strangely enough this remark at last struck a chord with the child.
‘We did; it was lovely,’ Oriana said. ‘We all had a brilliant time. Can I show him the photographs?’ The little girl was already on her feet and from a drawer in the sideboard she took a brightly coloured paper wallet.
‘Very well,’ Marta said, ‘you do that while I go and get us all something to drink.’
Roderic patted the cushions beside him again and this time Oriana accepted the invitation, settled in close by his side. ‘This is Serena and me on the beach. This is Nonno and Nonna and Allegra on the balcony. This is Mamma and Allegra …’ Four photographs in and he could understand why Marta had left the room. This is Mamma and Gianni in the pool,’ was Oriana’s caption for a photo of Marta and a man kissing in the turquoise waters of a swimming pool fringed by white oleanders. He looked at the photograph with intense curiosity and Oriana noticed this. ‘You can’t see Gianni very clearly there,’ she said apologetically, ‘but there’s one later of us all at dinner where you can see him better. This is Allegra and Serena playing volleyball on the beach…’
Authenticity Page 28