by Olivia Fane
He was at Thomas’ house at 5.15; at the station a half an hour later after a sleepy cup of tea and a taxi ride; at Stansted airport by 6.30. They barely said a word to each other, just half-smiled from time to time. The plane left at 8.15: Josiah took the window seat. They touched down in Florence two-and-a-half hours later. They were free.
Freedom is a heady business, and the heat disoriented them even further. Dear Thomas, the responsible one, tried not to not succumb to it: he was all maps and taxis and logistics. They were waiting in the taxi queue; Thomas was sweating, remembering that he still hasn’t warned the Scroppos about Josiah. In his head: a hundred ways of explaining the boy away, the pupil who wants to see Siena, the nephew whose parents are abroad, or perhaps the nephew who wants to see Siena. Tell the truth, goddammit! Have you done anything wrong? Will you do anything you regret?
Thomas turned to Josiah. He was intending to say, ‘You keep the place in the queue while I phone the Scroppos to tell them we’ve landed.’ But his eyes were closed, and there was a half-smile upon his lips, as innocent as a babe’s. The boy so pure and pale and calm that Thomas was held there for an instant – there was too much beauty here to interrupt it – too much beauty! Then a certain sickness forced him to action, and he shook him quite violently by the arm, and said, ‘I’m going to that phone booth over there.’
He got through to Signor Scroppo, and told him he was in the taxi queue and should be with them by lunchtime. There was more he had to tell him, of course, but Signor Scroppo was so pleased to hear from him that he never stopped talking, they’d been painting the walls of the chapel, the weather has been excellent… then the phone went dead, and Thomas had no more change.
The taxi queue moved quickly; the roads were fast. The smiling boy was soon asleep. But his neck was lolling onto one side, and Thomas was anxious that when he woke up his neck would be stiff – oh, he reasoned this and that, and the long and the short of it was that Thomas offered the sleeping head his shoulder, and the sleeping head accepted it, and he slyly stroked the head’s hair, or ‘slyly’ was how it felt to poor Thomas, and when the head suddenly lurched away from him, he guiltily pulled his hand away.
The Scroppos’ farmhouse was at the end of a long drive, with an orchard of pears to the left and the right of it, and even as they drove up women and children were gathering them in baskets. The house itself was made of warm Tuscan stone, with fig trees growing up it and small slits for windows, as though no-one in the Scroppo family had seen fit to modernise it in four hundred years. Thomas paid the taxi driver and waited nervously by the front door. No-one answered the dong of the old iron bell. Josiah stood with his face skywards, lit up by the sun.
‘Come on, let’s go in, they’re expecting us.’
The room was awesome in its simplicity. It made Thomas forget, even, to call out and declare his presence. A large table stood on an old brick floor, and from the ceiling were hanging plaits of garlic and onions. But the room was dark and dour and serious. Josiah instinctively sought out Thomas’ hand, which Thomas pushed away when Signora Scroppo bounded in like an overweight Labrador with a tail that won’t stop wagging.
‘Mr Thomas, my English friend! Welcome again!’ She planted warm kisses on both of Thomas’ cheeks, and Thomas managed to return them, feeling like an Englishman.
‘This is my nephew, Josiah,’ said Thomas, and almost immediately the signora’s tail stopped wagging and there were certainly no spare kisses for him.
‘Now you make me worried, Mr Thomas. You see, they are carrying a bed over the hills even now, three, four, kilometres, allora, you know how far away is the chapel. But the bed is small. We thought you were coming alone.’
‘I was!’ exclaimed Thomas. ‘But at the last moment I persuaded Josiah to come with me. His parents both work, you know, and it’s not much fun being home alone in the holidays.’
Ah, those lies, they came quite tripping off his tongue! Where was the honourable gentleman now?
‘But we need another bed!’ insisted the signora, looking at Thomas accusingly.
‘I just had a bit of rush matting when I was here last. Simplicity suits me, Signora, don’t mind me.’
‘But you are happier now,’ observed the signora, as though luxury was a thing that happier people required.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your marriage was finished, no? You were a sad man.’
Thomas laughed, or tried to, at least. ‘Yes, I suppose I was,’ he said.
If Thomas was supposedly happier, the signora was sadder than he remembered. Six years ago there had been a houseful of children in their early teens; there would have been a great cauldron of soup on the stove and a smell of home-made bread. But the children had grown and found work elsewhere, and the signora was older and fatter and yes, sadder. The first time Thomas had been to this house the signora had been singing over her sink, washing lettuces; a glass of wine and a bowl of olives had been his within moments. But now there was an awkwardness between them, as if they were made of different stuff.
When Signor Scroppo walked in a few minutes later, Josiah thought him quite ridiculous. He had a large moustachioed pink face, and black, greased-back hair; in fact, a good deal blacker than the last time Thomas had seen him, and his braces were decorated with cartoon characters, which is what he seemed to have become. How many times had they spent the evening together, was it twice? In his mind’s eye there were a thousand such evenings, there was food and wine in abundance, they were the refuge from the world; they were, above all, the people who had happily lent him their chapel for a couple of months after coming across it on a solitary walk. But today, who were they, these people?
If the Signora had ignored Josiah, Signor Scroppo more than compensated for her. In fact, for the hour and a half they were together, Signor Scroppo’s eyes rarely left him. While they ate home-made pate and bread, a tomato and onion salad and a plate of sliced pears, his wife introduced the boy as ‘Mr Thomas’s friend’, and when the sensitive Thomas reiterated, ‘My nephew, Josiah’, Signor Scroppo laughed and said, ‘Let us call the boy Guiseppe, shall we? He is a fine-looking boy, Thomas.’ And Signor Scroppo had shot him a look as if to say, ‘Well done!’
Josiah said not a word throughout the meal; Thomas’ interjections were limited to ‘Not for me!’ ‘Please don’t bother on my behalf!’ and several ‘No thank you’s – for where is an appetite to come from when your host and hostess are bickering, in Italian, about whether one bed will be sufficient for the pair of them? By the end, Thomas and Josiah were more than happy to accept their gift of a bag of pears and a bottle of wine and be sent on their way.
The weight of their bags and the heat of the sun dried up whatever conversation they might have had. Thomas would have said, because he kept thinking it, that the landscape was as perfect as the backdrop for a Madonna and child: tall dark poplars on the hill ridge, winding streams falling downward amidst outcrops of rock, pale blue in the early evening light; and the grass so green, so untrodden, so fed by the water running through it. But Thomas kept his thoughts to himself, conscious that the sudden sound of his voice would seem harsh and unnecessary when he so wanted Josiah to hear every murmur that the valley could offer him.
‘We’ve arrived,’ said Thomas.
‘It’s good,’ said Josiah.
‘Simple, but lovely in its way.’
‘It’s how I imagined it.’
‘It would have had a bell once.’
‘Perhaps the Scroppos took it.’
Thomas laughed. ‘You know you might be right. Make yourself at home, Josiah. There’s no lock on the door. Or never used to be.’
The chapel consisted of a single, rectangular room. Its walls were newly whitewashed with lime, and the paint smelt faintly sulphurous; its floor was made of large slabs of stone, surprisingly worn, suggesting that at one time the chapel was well-used. At the head of it, underneath its only window, was a small painting of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue, her eyes
questioning, and her head bent slightly to one side as if she were listening to their answers.
The bed was unremittingly single.
‘That’s where you’re sleeping,’ said Thomas.
‘And you?’ There was no matting. There weren’t even any extra blankets.
‘Don’t worry about me, Josiah.’
And Josiah didn’t, because he knew there’d be no need.
‘Let’s unpack,’ said Thomas.
Josiah laughed. ‘Where do we put our clothes, Tom?’
‘I suppose we’ll just keep them in our bags. Here look, I’ve brought our first supper. Light, but nutritious.’ Thomas unzipped his rucksack and laid out on the bed a few provisions from Sainsbury’s: biscuits, tea-bags, ready-sliced cheese, marmite and a pack of Knorr’s vegetable soup.
Josiah was neither surprised nor grateful. ‘Isn’t it about time we opened that bottle of wine?’ he said.
‘Unfortunately we don’t have a corkscrew,’ said Thomas, oddly relieved.
‘And fortunately, it has a screw top.’
‘Well then, I have tin mugs. We must celebrate!’ But Thomas’s voice was half-hearted, and tired, too. He couldn’t deny a fifteen-year-old boy a glass of wine. Thomas delved once more into his rucksack and found the tin mugs, and a small gas stove, too, and said, ‘I hope you’re impressed. There’s a whole kitchen in here you know.’ And while he proceeded to take out tin plates, bowls, cutlery and even a saucepan, Josiah opened the bottle of wine and poured it into the mugs, taking a swig from one of them more or less immediately.
‘To the holiday!’ toasted Josiah.
‘To the holiday!’ attempted Thomas, anxiously.
By now it was six in the evening, and the heat of the day had finally receded. They sat with their backs against the still warm chapel walls, watching the reddening sun and aware, at last, of a cooler breeze. A herd of goats with bells round their necks grazed nearby; the rushing of a hill stream broke the silence.
‘Fortunatus est ille deos qui novit agrestis,’ said Thomas. Josiah wasn’t interested, so Thomas translated. ‘Happy is he who knows the gods of the country.’
‘I’m too tired for Latin,’ confessed Josiah unapologetically. He was holding his empty cup between his knees.
‘Did you notice the green earthenware jug?’ asked Thomas.
‘No,’ said Josiah, ‘Should I have?’
‘It was here last time I came here. I used it to get water. I imagine we’ll be using it again.’
‘Well get it, then. And bring out the wine, too,’ said Josiah.
Thomas did as he was told, and he filled Josiah’s cup half way. Josiah shot him an angry glance. ‘More,’ he said.
‘Do I sound like an uncle if I recommend diluting that wine?’
‘Yes, you do,’ said Josiah seriously. ‘Listen, I’ve had wine before. I like it, it’s good.’
‘Well, all right. But then we put the rest away till tomorrow, right?’
‘Uncle, I don’t like your tone.’ Josiah was merciless, and he downed the wine in one.
‘I don’t like yours,’ said Thomas, taking the empty cup from him.
For a minute or two they both sat shocked and silent, backs against the chapel wall, eyes locked on some distant vista.
Then Thomas said, ‘It’s getting dark. I’m going to get water.’ He picked up the jug and set off purposefully down the hill. Josiah ran after him.
‘You were going off without me,’ he said.
‘I was,’ said Thomas, without looking back.
‘I want to swim.’
‘You can’t. The water’s not deep enough.’
‘Surely you found a pool when you were here.’
‘It’s a mile away.’
‘So what’s stopping us? I need to be purified. It’s still the first of August, Tom. It’s still the beginning. That’s what rites are for, the shedding of an old skin, living again in a new.’
That was as good an apology as Thomas had ever heard, so he fell into the trap.
Thomas filled the jug at the stream and left it on the bank. Without saying a word, they both walked on upstream into the sunset. Neither even exclaimed at the strange noises in the valley, the scratchings and moans of night animals beginning to stir. Josiah was plotting his performance: or rather, devising his very own purification ceremony. He was going to invite Thomas to join him; but of course Thomas would say no, because he was far too virtuous. And anyway, if they were to swim together, any purification ritual would be made a mockery of. So Josiah was smiling to himself, calm and happy, ready for his nakedness. So ready that he was taking off his clothes before Thomas could say something like ‘We’ve arrived!’ or ‘Watch out, the water’s cold!’
Thomas pretended, even to himself, that he didn’t notice. What is a body, after all? A body can be analysed away in a trice: this one was regular, slender and smooth; this one was healthy and young. That’s all!
Josiah stood there naked on the shore, with his arms above his head as though he were about to dive in; but no, the pleasure would be over too soon. So he looked back over his shoulder and called out, ‘So aren’t you going to purify me? Isn’t there a god you’d like to dedicate me to?’
‘Whom would you like to be dedicated to?’
‘To my Uncle Zeus, what do you think?’
‘And you are?’
‘I’m Ganymede, of course, I’m your cup bearer. And I shall be a better cup bearer than you turned out to be.’
Thomas laughed nervously.
‘The gods are all here tonight, can’t you feel them, Thomas? Can’t you feel them watching us? What should I say to them?’
‘You could say, Euoi! Euoi! That was how they would summon Dionysus. Euoi! Euoi!’ And those words began to sweep Thomas along.
So Josiah thrust his arms over his head and looked up into the darkening sky and shouted out, ‘Euoi! Euoi!’ Then he put his arms back by his sides and said, seriously, ‘Now, I want to make a sacrifice.’
‘A sacrifice?’
‘Yes, my noble Lord. Because to sacrifice means to give, doesn’t it? No, it’s more than that. I want to make amends, I want to balance things again, I want everything to be right. So I’m going to make a sacrifice.’
‘But what of? There are no rams lurking in the thicket, dear Josiah.’
‘I’m sacrificing my own body, Uncle Zeus, it’s all I have.’
And with those words the water welcomed Josiah into it, all the way up to his chest, rising up to meet his arms splayed over its surface. Then all at once Josiah’s body seemed to give way, and he sank down into its cleanness and let it wash him, running over his body and his hair and forcing his eyes shut.
Thomas began calling him from the bank: twenty seconds seemed an eternity as he watched the boy’s shadow in the water, looking for movement or evidence of struggle, or some sign which would tell him how to act. Perhaps the cold and the wine had made him pass out. He seemed so serene, so still, it crossed Thomas’ mind that he was already dead.
Josiah was no fool, he knew what he was doing. They talk about relief being ‘palpable’ – which means, literally, ‘that which can be explored by touch’: and the relief which Thomas felt when he saw Josiah’s head emerging from the water lasted well into the night. For the shivering body walking back to the chapel needed an arm about him, there were no two ways about it, and once inside the chapel an arm wasn’t enough, by any stretch. They slept, wrapped up in each other, in a bed made for one.
Chapter Twelve
THE NEXT MORNING the fact that the two had slept in one another’s arms was never referred to by either of them; both knew better than to turn into language something as innocent and loving, as giving and as needy, as the embrace they fell into that night. And to those of you that wonder, were they naked? Did they touch each other in that way – because that’s all any of you are interested in; the answer is no on both counts. Nonetheless, touch reigned absolute, touch was what it was all about, skin on skin matt
ered like two stray souls becoming one.
Thomas was the first to get up; he felt no shame. He pulled the blankets back over Josiah and watched the sunlight flickering over his eyelids, incorporating itself into a dream. A dream of angels, he thought, tenderly.
Once outside, Thomas set to business. The air was cool, invigorating: it was still only seven o’clock; six, English time. He went down to the stream to fetch the jug of water, set up his little camping stove and aluminium kettle on a rock nearby, and found the teabags. They hadn’t eaten the night before, and Thomas found himself ravenously hungry, wolfing down slices of cheese and two or three pears to boot. After all, there was no point in waiting for Josiah to wake up – didn’t teenagers sleep all morning? There was no hurry! For what pleasure there was to be had in maps, in drinking tea in a sweet-smelling valley in Tuscany with a spread-out large-scale map in front of you, and every square inch brimming with promise?
Josiah was to sleep till eleven that morning; if he hadn’t, the country gods might have won, and a rural idyll worthy of Virgilian shepherd-boys might have been the theme of their month together. But after a couple of hours with his map, Thomas sought his Blue Guide to Florence and Siena, and a different kind of excitement overwhelmed him. For yes, in the beginning there was Nature, but what Man does with that beginning is surely even more awe-inspiring, and it was his duty, yes, as his teacher, to lead his pupil into the realms of Culture.
So by the time Josiah was awake, Thomas’ mind was made up. That first day they would walk to the nearest village, pick up a bus timetable and shop for food; they might even spend the afternoon swimming in the pool together – for how happy Thomas was, in every aspect of their friendship! – and then, early the next morning, Josiah’s cultural education would begin.
That day, Thomas dutifully roused Josiah’s interest; on their walk to and from the village, while Josiah kicked rocks and skimmed flat stones across the surface of the widening stream, Thomas told him how Siena had prospered in medieval times, and had more or less ignored the Renaissance altogether.