A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  We were staying in a hotel in the Via Cavour. Later on, Jamie told me it was the one in which Francis had stayed when first they met after twenty years apart. In Francis's room were two pictures, ugly abstracts in raucous colours, and pretentious too. He got two narrow strips of white adhesive paper, wrote on one in Italian Section Through a Blackhead and on the other Contents of a Drain in the Borgo Pinti, and carefully stuck each on to a picture. Jamie asked me to try and get into Room 36 and take a look if I could. I did and the stickers were still there, Contenuti d'un Canale dal Borgo Pinti and the other which I don't remember the Italian for. No chambermaid or bellboy had ever spotted them, and if guests had seen and marvelled, they had never mentioned their discovery to the management. How typical of Francis this was! Jamie took a gleeful delight in it, in this aspect of Francis, laughing in his shrill hiccupping way at the very thought of Francis's teases and practical jokes. They had become friends of a kind, those two, the last thing one would have expected.

  It was more than twenty years since I had seen Jamie, nearer twenty-five. Of course I knew he lived in Italy, had felt a special affinity with Italy since spending his school holidays with the Contessa who had a house somewhere near Verona. After school came to an end he stayed for a while in London with another Pearmain relative and then Tony sent him to the University of Bologna. Always, you see, he had to be kept out of sight, for he was an embarrassment and a reminder. In all this time I don't think Tony saw him but communicated with him through solicitors, like people in Victorian novels, turning him into a remittance man, but one who in this case had committed no offence. But this may not be so, or not quite so, or different in detail. Jamie's life has been, and still is, a mystery, his very existence a mystery.

  Patricia it was who told me he was a journalist, a war correspondent who had been in Vietnam. Helen believed otherwise. In her version, Jamie worked at the Biblioteca Nazionale and had been one of those concerned in the salvaging of precious books when the Arno overflowed into the great library in November 1966. Francis might have told us the truth but none of us, not even Helen regularly, kept in touch with Francis except Gerald, his father. And Gerald, Helen said, must have been ‘going strange’ even then, for he averred Francis had told him Jamie was a cook.

  All these beliefs contained something of the truth, as such beliefs usually do. I went to Florence without any idea of looking Jamie up, for this was the third or fourth time I had been there and without doing more than reflect that for a few days we would be in the same city, he and I. But at Pisa where, having just missed the Florence train, we had time to kill, we bought a newspaper, La Nazione, and on an inside page I found Jamie's name: James Ricardo. His by-line (as journalists call it, as years and years ago Chad Hamner first taught me to call it) was under a heading which, translated, means ‘delicious crust’ and over an article on how to make pâté sablée. Jamie was a journalist, he was a cook, and later on I heard from his own lips that it was true he had helped in the book rescue.

  When we got to Florence I looked him up in the phone book. There were a lot of Ricardos but only one James. I was nervous about phoning him. People can put the phone down but all they can do with a letter is not answer it. I wrote him a note. This was before he went to live in the gardens of the Orcellari – the Otello restaurant is on the corner at the top – and the address was a street off the Viale Gramsci, up near where the Porta a' Pinti once stood. Jamie wrote back by return. He had heard of me, Francis had mentioned the existence of a cousin and said we knew each other when he was a child, but of that he had no recollection. Perhaps we should meet. Would I meet him in the English Cemetery when it opened at three on the following afternoon?

  ‘Why can't he ask you to his house or come here like a civilized person?’ said my husband.

  I said that since his life and his origins were so shrouded in the mysterious, perhaps he enjoyed keeping up the mystery. He must like the arcane.

  ‘I'm not sure I like the idea of my wife having assignations in cemeteries with strange cookery columnists,’ he said. ‘At any rate, you'd better look out for yourself crossing the piazza, the way the traffic sweeps round.’

  But he wouldn't come with me, fearing Jamie might have turned out like Francis. He went off to buy a pair of shoes.

  The Cimitero Protestante di Porta a' Pinti, known as the ‘English Cemetery’, though there are Americans and Poles and plenty of Swiss buried there too, stands like a hilly green island in the middle of the Piazza Donatello. And the traffic, as my husband said, rushes round and past it as a millrace might sweep past just such an island. It was a beautiful day, clear and sunny, blue-skied, hot by our standards though not by those of the Florentines who by the end of September, having endured months of true heat, were already wearing their winter leather and wool. The iron gates were closed but the custodian, seeing me, came out and unlocked them and showed me the way through the archway in the gatehouse into the graveyard on the other side.

  It was not silent in the cemetery – how could it be with that traffic not a hundred yards away? – but it had an air of silence, an air of endeavouring to be silent, brought about by the ranks of pale, bright grey stones and the thin cypress trees. At first I didn't see Jamie. The cemetery appeared to be empty. I walked slowly up the path towards the Emperor Frederick William's marble column, past Elizabeth Barrett's tomb, looking rather cautiously from side to side, feeling exposed now, feeling watched. But Jamie wasn't watching me or even watching for me. I found him when I turned back, seated on the grave of Walter Savage Landor and reading, perhaps not too surprisingly, Brillat-Savarin's celebrated work on gastronomy, La Physiologie du Goût.

  I hadn't known Landor was in there. Chad had quoted him on Eden's wedding day, standing by the lake in the garden at Walbrooks: ‘There are no voices that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.’ The echo of Eden's name was faint by then. I had forgotten what Chad's voice sounded like, though his face I remembered and Hadrian's ears. Jamie looked up at me and then he got up.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you look like a Longley. I would have recognized you as a Longley – from photographs, of course.’

  I held out my hand to him. We shook hands.

  ‘I mostly come here in the afternoons,’ he said. ‘It's peaceful without being quiet if you know what I mean. People don't come much. People are frightened of cemeteries.’ And for the first time I heard that curious neighing laugh of his. ‘I suppose you would have preferred to be invited to my apartment?’

  The American term sounded strange in Jamie's voice which is English public school with overtones of Italian, especially about the r's. They are a bit too liquid, his r's, pronounced too high up in the mouth. I said I didn't mind, it was nice to be able to sit outside. We couldn't do much of that in England.

  ‘I haven't been back there for fourteen years,’ he said. ‘I don't suppose I shall ever go now. The thought of England fills me with horror.’

  It is disconcerting, the way he laughs after he has said something not at all laughable, in just the same way as he laughs when he has expressed pleasure or amusement. The laughter died and he stared at me. Suddenly he made a flicking movement with his right hand towards his left shoulder, caught me looking and drew his hand away, laughing again. He is a thick-set, going-to-seed, not very tall man who looks older than he is. He also looks Italian with his round, full-featured, sallow face, his red lips and his dark curly hair. And this is very much what one would expect, all things considered. Though fair-haired as a child he always had olive skin. His eyes, which in those days the grown-ups looked at curiously, surreptitiously, watching for the colour to stay or to change, are a dark velvety glowing brown, animal eyes but feral, not meek. That time in the English Cemetery he reminded me a little of Chad, which is absurd. There was no real physical resemblance and Jamie was too young to have creases on his ear lobes. Perhaps what they had in common was a
look of desire unsatisfied, of lives spoiled and incomplete.

  I sat down facing him and he asked me hesitatingly, as if curiosity was overcoming his better judgement, to tell him about our family – his family too, of course, as much as mine. So I talked, going carefully, for I had rehearsed this on my long walk along Cavour. It wouldn't do, I felt, to mention Goodney Hall or the name of his mother or the men who had made themselves his enemies through no fault of his but because of his very existence and because of jealousy and resentment and hurt pride. My mother was still alive then, so I spoke about my parents, and about Helen and her children and her granddaughter.

  ‘I called myself Richardson because of Aunt Helen,’ he said. ‘Pearmain didn't care. He wouldn't have cared what I called myself.’ He neighed with laughter and I shuddered at the way he called Tony ‘Pearmain’ with such disgusted vehemence. His right hand came up again, flicking from his shoulder invisible contamination. ‘Zia Francesca used to tell me how much he loved children. It was her way of making me feel all right about staying with her instead of being with him. He was too busy for me but he really loved children. Did you know he was a big shot in the Save the Children fund? He loved all the children in the world but me. Tough on him, wasn't it?’ Jamie paused, staring into the sunlight, the thin parallel black shadows the cypresses made, like the bars of a cage. ‘Aunt Helen used to tell me what wonderful people her grandparents were. I hadn't known many wonderful people, you see, so when Pearmain said – very stiff and shy about it, Pearmain was – that now I was going to prep school I mustn't be called by my surname any more and how about James Smith? I said not Smith but Richardson and it was all one to him. So I called myself Richardson and later on I had it changed to Ricardo. Have you ever heard an Eye-tie pronounce Richardson?’

  He is practically Italian himself yet he calls Italians Eye-ties in a grinning cockney way each time he mentions them. His charmlessness suddenly clarified itself before me. It seemed to underline the absurdity of our meeting in a cemetery. The noble stones, the cypresses, the blue sky, the terracotta roofed gatehouse, all these should have formed the backdrop for someone tall, handsome and Byronic, a gracious man of character. And that was the way, I thought, Jamie had promised to grow up when last I had seen him and he was five. But the terrible things that had happened were already waiting for him, crowding at the gate, had been gathering there even before he was born.

  ‘I don't remember anything that happened before I was six,’ he said. ‘The first thing I can remember is the summer when I was six and always being with two women I didn't like.’

  ‘Mrs King and your nanny,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose so. Pearmain used to come and look at me sometimes, the way you'd go and look at a dog you'd had put in quarantine.’

  I wanted to speak Vera's name then but I was afraid. The picture of the little boy – such an articulate, lively, good little boy he had been – alone at Goodney Hall with his two paid guardians upset me disproportionately. After all, it was long ago, it was lost in the past. Afraid and distressed, I wanted to say something about missing his mother, about my own feelings of sympathy for that, but I couldn't, and not only because of the effects of emotion. As much as that, doubt prevented my speaking, a doubt of how to phrase this expression of pity and what terms to use. He came to my rescue.

  ‘Would you like to go somewhere for a coffee?’

  I shook my head. One of the few things I dislike about Italy is the coffee. Cappuccino is out for me because I don't drink milk. Espresso would be fine if you could have half a pint of it and not a teaspoonful.

  Jamie said, ‘Next time you come I'll cook for you.’

  I realized I was honoured. In this country of haute cuisine he, an Englishman, had made a name for himself as a cook and adviser of cooks. In that moment Vera came into my mind and I remembered her excellence in that sole aspect of culinary skill Englishwomen are best at – baking. I saw her with the puff pastry buttered and turned on the veined grey marble slab, the wood-handled marble rolling-pin in her hands, and I seemed to taste again her lemon-curd tarts, her Victoria sponges and all the rest of the panoply laid out for tea.

  Jamie shocked me. ‘My mother was a good cook,’ he said.

  The feeling I had was like what we have when we are in the presence of someone known to be mentally disturbed but whose manner and way of speaking is so rational that we forget the psychosis, the schizophrenia, until we are sharply and suddenly reminded of it by a remark he makes on the other side of sanity, out there in the region only the mad inhabit. Not that Jamie was anything but sane, remarkably normal really. It was more that what he said opened a door into the incredible and one's reaction was first to be horribly startled, then to feel the pity one has for those who take comfort from delusion.

  His eyes that are like the eyes of a bear came back to meet mine. He jumped up, gave his shoulder a brisk brushing with his hand.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I'll show you the graves. I'll show you Isa Blagden and Mrs Holman Hunt.’

  After that he walked back with me quite a long way down the Borgo Pinti. It was then that he told me about Francis and the paintings and asked me to check if the titles Francis had given them were still there. We were shaking hands again, about to part, when he said to me, and for the first time he seemed embarrassed:

  ‘If anyone ever wants to write about all that – you know what I mean – if they do and they approach you, I mean they're just as likely to approach you as anyone, if they do, I wouldn't mind. I don't know about Francis but I wouldn't mind. As a matter of fact I'd welcome it to put the record straight, I'd like to see the truth.’

  ‘But you say you don't remember,’ I said.

  His laughter echoed in that narrow street and people turned round to look. He said goodbye to me and walked away.

  I couldn't agree with Jamie that any potential biographer of Vera would be as likely to approach me as anyone. For one thing I wouldn't have expected such a biographer to find me, for I have twice changed my name since Vera died. And for another I was a mere niece while she has a son and a husband and a sister living. Helen has reached an age when life itself has become fragile, when each day must be an only half-expected gift, when she knows there can be no future to talk about. Her memory for contemporary things is gone but her memory of the distant past is bright and as for her mental grasp of things, I know no one sounder of any age. Yet when she told me to expect a letter and a request I hardly took her seriously. This writer, this man called Daniel Stewart, might well have a Vera-book in mind as a project, might have asked Helen for information, but me, I was sure, he would ignore. And Helen, moreover, swore my name had not been given him by her. By Jamie then?

  Stewart is a common enough name. I must have met many Stewarts and Stuarts in those intervening years, yet when I see it at the end of this letter, I am reminded of Mary Stuart whose life we acted out, Anne and I, and that Goodney Hall was designed by Steuart, a fact that Eden and Tony always made much of. The letter accompanies a book: Peter Starr, the Misunderstood Murderer by Daniel Stewart, published by Heinemann at nine pounds ninety-five.

  It is a London address on the headed paper, not too far from us on the other side of the Cromwell Road.

  ‘Dear Mrs Severn,’ he begins. ‘By now you may have heard from others of the project I have in mind, a biographical reappraisal of the Vera Hillyard case. Your name and address were given me by your cousin Dr Frank Loder Hills who does not, however, personally wish to contribute a memoir…’

  Francis, of course. Purely to cause trouble, I suppose, and then, as my husband suggests, to sue me and Stewart if we defame him. Stewart goes on to say he feels Vera has been in some ways misjudged. Apparently, he has made a speciality of reassessing murder cases, looking at them afresh and from the viewpoint of what he calls the perpetrator.

  ‘Mr James Ricardo, of the Via Orti Orcellari, Florence, has undertaken to write something for me about his early memories. Mr Anthony Pearmain is at present in the
Far East but…’

  In the Far, in the Far… This geographical commonplace in newspapers and on radio and television I have never been able to see or hear without remembering my father on the morning of Vera's execution reading aloud in the toneless senseless voice of a mynah bird. ‘In the Far…’ he said and stopped and folded up the paper and sat there silent.

  ‘Mrs Helen Chatteriss has already contributed a memoir and Mr Chad Hamner has promised to jot down for me some of his own impressions. His own intention to write a biography of Vera Hillyard he has now abandoned due to ill health.

  ‘If you would be kind enough to read my book on Peter Starr, and if you feel satisfied with my abilities at this kind of reportage, I would like to send you a copy of my draft first and second chapter, my first being an account of the murder itself. I realize that since you were not present at Goodney Hall at the time you will be unable to judge the accuracy of this. Of those who were present, only Mrs June Stoddard is still alive and her memory of events, as she herself admits, is confused.

  ‘My second chapter, however, purports to give some family history, beginning at the time of your own great-grandfather, William Longley. Your confirmation of this account would be invaluable to me as would any corrections you may like to make. You will see that I have drawn heavily on correspondence in the possession of Mrs Chatteriss and the Hubbard family as well as, to some extent, on information given in the Vera Hillyard section in Mary Gough-Williams's book Women and Capital Punishment.’