The Italian Affair

by Helen Crossfield

  So, either Dan had decided to slip out of the building without her noticing, or, someone had taken him with their hands clasped over his mouth as he would have been kicking and screaming otherwise.

  There was also a third possibility which was even more sinister – that he’d been taken by someone within her own palazzo block.

  “But who would want to take Dan? He hadn’t done anything wrong. All he had seen was a gunshot through a window. He had not fired the shot,” she thought as sweat ran down her body. And yet she somehow could not help thinking that they were both now marked people.

  As she got closer to her apartment the finality of not finding Dan hit her in the pit of her stomach. Issy had only felt this alone and frightened once in her life before. On the 5th November 1970 at approximately 9.15am at the time her father had died in front of her.

  As Issy opened her front door walked past the Concierge’s empty chair she scowled. “Where the hell was Dan and where was the Concierge?” She wanted to ask him about Dan. He was the only other person in the world who might have any information and be able to help her and he had conveniently gone AWOL.

  “If Dan didn’t leave of his own accord,” Issy thought. “The Concierge must have had something to do with it – or at least witnessed what had happened. He was the only other person around.”

  Feeling immensely vulnerable and disturbed, Issy went upstairs in the gold plated lift. It suddenly seemed too opulent and far too shiny for her liking. She tried to steady her shaking fingers as she put the key into the front door lock, and gingerly reached her hand inside to the left of the hallway to make sure all the lights were on before she entered.

  Just for good measure, Issy also picked up a large Neapolitan umbrella from the hat stand, which she had been assured she would need in November when the rain would unleash itself on the city. Slightly emboldened by the fact she now had a means of self-defence, Issy left nothing to chance.

  Just as when she’d been small and dreamt of goblins and ghosts, Issy now methodically checked each room in her apartment to make sure no-one was lurking behind doors or in large cupboards and then looked under the bed.

  There was nothing there apart from the precious box of letters and memories from the past. Using the end of the large umbrella, Issy slid the large familiar box out from under her bed.

  “Somewhere inside was the answer,” Issy thought as she remained sprawled out on the floor. In her darkest moments when she had felt in most need of inspiration and courage the box had always given her what she needed. It was a magic box, the place where the ghost of her father could always be reached.

  But before letting out the genie, she first she needed a thick black shot of caffeine. Issy walked into the kitchen using the umbrella to steady her. “What was she supposed to do now?” she thought. “There were two options. Go to total pieces. Or Keep Calm and Carry On.”

  Fuelled by the genes and the memory of her father Issy decided that however tough it got tonight or the day after that she could not give up. Whatever forces existed out there and were trying to destroy her or others they would be stopped even if she ended up dying in the process. Death held no fear in comparison to the need to find Dan and justice for what had been done – although now she had found Bruno she had a reason to want to go on and yet this made her feel guilty for what had happened to Dan.

  As these thoughts raced through her mind Issy watched the little aluminum coffee machine hiss and spit on the stove. “If she hadn’t insisted on seeing Bruno,” Issy thought ruefully “none of this would have happened. It was all her bloody fault. What could she have been thinking of? Despite the softness of his touch and the intensity of his kisses, Bruno was an underpant salesman whom she didn’t know anything about. Was she guilty of sacrificing Dan for a romantic notion that Bruno might be her Heathcliff?”

  Angry at herself for putting them both in this situation, Issy opened the lid of the macchinetta, impatient for it to finish the process of percolation. Finally, after a few more minutes, hot black spurts of dark coffee spluttered out from the top of a small metal flute at the centre of the machine. “Come on!” shouted Issy “I need you to finish bloody doing whatever you do in there.”

  The coffee was an essential part of Issy’s survival plan. She needed some of the black liquid stuff to keep her adrenalin going until the first rays of white sunlight burst into her apartment.

  She had already decided that if Dan was not up and about in his apartment by 7am, she would go to the school and demand answers from Gennaro. “He would have to get involved,” she thought “whether he wanted to or not. The Omerta no longer applied. Her best friend was missing and she needed to find him, whatever that took.”

  Issy took a small white coffee cup out of the cupboard and decanted the espresso into it. Spooning in a big sugar, she stirred it in knocking back the intense shot of coffee in one. It tasted bitter, despite the added sweetness and Issy remained motionless, waiting for the full effect to hit her brain and after a few seconds it hit the bulls-eye.

  After the double espresso, she now felt much better prepared to make plans and sit things out until sunrise. Without any further delay, she made her way back into the bedroom.

  Before opening the box, she closed her eyes and made a wish just like she always did. It had become a kind of ritual from childhood and, as she got older, she had continued to do it out of some self-taught belief that if she didn’t the spell would somehow be broken.

  Over the past fifteen years, the box had been opened when she wanted to remember her father and wanted help with something or someone.

  In the most recent years at Oxford, it had become her comfort when there was no-one she could turn to. Removing the tissue paper that sat on the top to protect the contents, Issy fished deep into the bottom of the pile of letters, and finally uncovered what she was looking for.

  A picture that she had drawn of her father on the day he’d died. He was sitting cross-legged in the sky next to the moon amidst a rich galaxy of stars and meteorites.

  It was where her Grandma Bea and mother had told her he‘d gone – up into the night sky, and so Issy had drawn a picture of her beloved father that same evening to help her make sense of everything.

  Issy remembered the exact position on the kitchen table where she had sat and drawn the picture. It was the same place her father had sat at only hours earlier to have his last breakfast.

  As she looked now at the picture drawn in those first traumatic hours after his death she studied the wobbly body and face. Memories of drawing it flooded her mind with absolute clarity.

  As she looked at the picture now some fifteen years later, she closed her eyes and remembered exactly how she’d felt on the worst evening of her life so far.

  Confused, lost, disorientated, frightened and inconsolably sad were some of the adjectives that best described the emotions that had coursed through her body that dark winter night when her father had dropped down dead like a stone in front of her that very morning.

  It had felt very strange then, as it did now, how the lives of others around her had gone on as the life she had known had disappeared like melting snow.

  She remembered how the neighbours Mr and Mrs Armitage and daughter Janet had come round with some baked potatoes and a toffee apple for Issy on the evening he died.

  “We’ve just come round to see if you need anything and hope you don‘t mind the fireworks tonight” Mrs Armitage had said in the most delicate and sombre voice, whilst standing on the doorstep with her husband nodding silently and their daughter nervously playing with her pigtails.

  Despite the gaping hole in their lives and raw grief, her mother and Grandma Bea had welcomed the Armitages into their home. It had seemed a kindly act at the time and seemed more so in retrospect.

  Issy remembered how English they’d been. Despite how desperate they’d all felt, they’d had enough energy left to arrange themselves on the various bits of furniture in the sitting room.

 
Her mother and Grandma Bea with Issy in the middle on the scruffy green sofa and Mr Armitage in Richard’s favourite armchair which he would never EVER sit in again with Mrs Armitage sitting opposite with Janet perched on her lap.

  After a few words of condolence along the lines of “We are so sorry about your loss, what a shock it must have been, how very sudden,” they’d gone, leaving the house even emptier than just before they’d arrived.

  “WHAT had been the point of that,” Issy had thought at the time. “They didn’t need reminding of their loss, or their shock or the suddenness,” despite the intention the reaffirmation of death had just made them feel a hundred times worse than before.

  And then, somewhat bizarrely they had listened with a dull ache in their hearts as the Armitages had set off Catherine Wheels, Squealers and bangers and started up their bonfire just as they always did on Guy Fawkes night their schedules unchanged despite the fact that the life of Issy and her family had spun thousands of miles off course.

  Issy and Snoopy the black and white family cat had clung to each other for most of the evening. Snoopy had sought comfort from the big bangs and Issy from anything that was prepared to give love and fill the huge big hole that had only recently appeared in her heart.

  Sitting in the darkened apartment in Naples at 4am that morning, Issy stared at the picture that she’d drawn of her father and held it closely to the hole in her chest that had never ever gone away since that fateful day so many years ago.

  After a few moments of praying for strength and for a solution to her problem she held the picture in front of her once again. She re-read the spidery writing on the back faded by fifteen years of it being read and re-read and from sitting in a box.

  “Dear Daddy,” it said. “I am so unhappy. Please stop being a star and come home. I love you and we need you more than the night sky does. It’s bright enough up there and it is dark and cold here down here without you. I’m not sure if the postman posts letters that far away, but I promise I will ask him tomorrow so we can at least keep in touch if you are not able to come back down as mummy says. Sleep tight daddy, we love you. Issy and Snoopy xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”

  Those words rang as true now as they had when she had written them. How cruel life had been. Issy’s shoulders started to heave as hot round tears streamed down her face for the lost years without her father.

  In between, snuffles and gulps, Issy looked at all the other letters that she had written to her father on the 5th day of November – one for every year after he had died. In some she had told him how she was doing at school and in others how she was she was feeling (lonely, wretched and alone mostly) and others were actually quite humorous.

  As she read each one, she was struck by how little in the intervening years her family had changed. They’d been stuck in a time-warp unable to move forward without the engine that had sustained all of them.

  There were memories in these precious letters of the things that reminded her of her father. the green Morris Minor, which had been his, their holidays to Whitby and the numerous day trips to Haworth and the Parsonage so Issy could buy Bronte books and picnic on the moors after which, she would recline on an old woolen rug and imagine she was Cathy and that Heathcliff was waiting for her somewhere in the peaty heathland.

  After she’d finished reading all the letters she had written to her father she closed her eyes. “There was only one other letter in the box unopened,” she thought “and that was the letter from Jeremy she had promised herself she would never open.”

  He’d given it to her the day he had unceremoniously finished their relationship and Issy had decided then that didn’t want to hear his last words.

  Their parting had been traumatic enough, and Issy had no desire to read words about the end of their affair.

  But as she waited for dawn to break, and for news of Dan, a force greater than her guided her hand towards the unopened letter and the official looking seal that had kept it closed for the last few months.

  As her hand hovered her decision to read it was based on the chance that her days on earth could well now be numbered and she wanted to know what he’d written. She didn’t want to die without hearing his voice one last time. Her father had never been able to utter even one syllable before he passed away. He had just literally been snatched from her life. And now in these uncertain moments of her own life, when she did not know what would happen to her it seemed like the right time to find out.

  Ripping open the letter, Issy pulled out a sheet of thick cream writing paper which was slightly too big for the envelope. The first thing she noticed was that there was no clue on the letter or envelope itself that it had come from Jeremy. It was also typed not written.

  How furtive, that he should hide behind anonymity. With hot anger burning in her head and an over-powering pain straining in her chest Issy started to read Jeremy’s words.

  My Dearest Issy,

  Where to start? The beginning is the obvious place, as without it there is no context to the end but it is you and you alone who will ultimately determine how you will look back on what passed between us.

  When our eyes first met in the Quad three years ago, you may have noticed me falter? I hesitated. Not because I did not feel the connection and significance of our meeting, but because I was trying to reconcile the overwhelming desire I had for you with the ending I had already written for myself.

  With age I have come to understand one thing very clearly. After the umbilical cord is broken, we continue to search for that same unconditional connection to another human being, where two hearts beat as one.

  However romantic it may seem, that unconditional love is what we all need most to sustain us and make it worth carrying on with the burden of life. I know now that whatever ideologies we have they cannot replace that basic need which lives in all of us but which often we repress for many reasons – for me the reason has always been a sense of overriding guilt.

  You may be surprised to know, that I believe I found a pure and true love with you but the tragedy for me was that I had to let you go.

  I found a domestic situation many years ago which works and which I will never walk away from. I made that promise before I met you, and it is a promise I will never break. My past and future do not allow me to do that. After we parted I desperately wanted to hold you and to be near to you. One afternoon in late summer, when you had left I lay by the river in the same place we once did with a copy of Brideshead Revisited. I know how much you loved that book. It was the only way I could be close to you again.

  I was strangely drawn in by some of the parallels between me and Charles Ryder and there are two quotes in there that I want you to remember me by. The first is “To understand all is to forgive all,” and one day it is my greatest hope that you will find out about me and forgive me. The second really explains how I have felt all my life. It perhaps explains better than I ever could in my own words why I left you. “If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name Charles Ryder. For the rest, my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be. On second thought, one emotion remains my own. Alone among the borrowed and the second hand, as pure as that faith from which I am still in flight: Guilt.” When my background finally reveals itself to you which I know it will, read these words again and all will be clear.

  Not many people meet their soul mates and I did so with you. My tragedy as I have already said was that I could not have you. To have solved one of life’s major puzzles is to find the elixir of life.

  You are beautiful, quirky and hugely intelligent, but because I love you and always did I now need to let you be totally and utterly free so you can spread your wings and make your own choices. The least I owe you is the chance to drink that elixir from someone who can be with you for always. That is what you deserve.

  We were two people hugely attract
ed to one another and who needed to be loved in that intense moment our eyes crossed. We have a shared love of Ancient Greece, and perhaps that too makes us more susceptible to the madness of the Gods.

  For that in a way was what happened in our secret garden on that very first day, it was like there was no other option. Tick Tock. Tick Tock. The clock stopped from that first moment we entered the door in the college wall and found our own secret paradise.

  I hope you find true love with another, or Agape as the Greeks defined it. Don’t waste your time on other types of love for too long, for they will distract you and cause you pain. You are worth more than that. You can’t make the wrong person love you. It is a mistake many of us make and is the root of much unhappiness in the world. We turn that disappointment inwards, rather looking for the knowledge that allows us greater fulfillment and freedom.

  When you find true love again, as I am sure you will, treat it like gold. Look after it. Be grateful every day of your life that you have found it.

  Emotional unhappiness that comes from being in the wrong relationship or being unable to form a relationship is one of the major problems the world-over. Not everyone will find their soulmate and so the key is to find personal happiness within. Look to the East to find the universal masters of this.

  The art of happiness is to love and know yourself. To achieve this you have to recognise your feelings, really know who you are and what drives you and importantly understand what your purpose is in life.

  The key to finding happiness now is in your hands – we are responsible for how we write our own story not others – and I hope you find what you deserve Issy.

  I have been selfish to have taken three years from your life. The gift I can give you is to let you now be free and to share with you what I know.

  When anything happens in your life which makes you sit up and take notice, whether it is a good experience or a bad experience, there is a lesson to be learnt from it as there is most undoubtedly from our time together.