by Dick Francis
‘Where will you stay?’ he said.
‘Hotel, I suppose,’ I said vaguely.
‘If you like, you could come with me. There’s a family in Milan I berth with when I’m stranded, and there’s room for two.’
I had a strong inclination, as usual, to be by myself, but principally because I couldn’t even ask for a hotel room in Italian let alone find entertainment except looking at architecture for the rest of the day, I accepted his offer, and thanked him.
‘You’ll like them,’ he said.
We went two hundred yards in silence.
‘Is it true,’ he said, ‘that you’re a viscount?’
‘No,’ I said casually. ‘A Boeing 707.’
He chuckled. ‘A bleeding viscount, that little Welshman said you were, to be precise.’
‘Would it make any difference to you if I were?’
‘None whatever.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘So you are?’
‘On and off.’
We went through the glass doors into the hall of the airport. It was spacious, airy, glass-walled, stone floored. Along one side stretched a long gift counter with souvenir presents crowded in a row of display cases and stacked on shelves at the back. There were silk ties on a stand, and dolls in local dress scattered on the counter, and trays of paper-backed books and local view postcards. In charge of this display stood a tall dark-haired girl in a smooth black dress. She saw us coming and her coolly solemn face lit into a delicious smile.
‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Hullo, Patrick, come sta?’
He answered her in Italian, and as an afterthought waved his hand at me and said ‘Gabriella,…Henry.’ He asked her a question, and she looked at me carefully and nodded.
‘Si,’ she said. ‘Henry anche.’
‘That’s fixed, then,’ said Patrick cheerfully.
‘You mean,’ I said incredulously, ‘that we are going to stay with – er – Gabriella?’
He stiffened slightly. ‘Do you object?’
I looked at Gabriella, and she at me.
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that it is too good to be true.’
It wasn’t for another ten minutes, during which time she talked to Patrick while looking at me, that I realised that I spoke no Italian and the only English word that she knew was ‘Hullo’.
Chapter Six
You couldn’t say it was reasonable, it was just electric. I found out between one heartbeat and the next what all the poets throughout the ages had been going on about. I understood at last why Roman Anthony threw away his honour for Egyptian Cleopatra, why Trojan Paris caused a ten years war abducting Greek Helen, why Leander drowned on one of his risky nightly swims across the Dardanelles to see Hero. The distance from home, the mystery, the unknownness, were a part of it: one couldn’t feel like that for the girl next door. But that didn’t explain why it hadn’t happened before: why it should be this girl, this one alone who fizzed in my blood.
I stood on the cool stone airport floor and felt as if I’d been struck by lightning: the world had tilted, the air was crackling, the grey February day blazed with light, and all because of a perfectly ordinary girl who sold souvenirs to tourists.
The same thing, fantastically, had happened to her as well. Perhaps it had to be mutual, to happen at all. I don’t know. But I watched the brightness grow in her eyes, the excitement and gaiety in her manner, and I knew that against all probability it was for me. Girls were seldom moved to any emotion by my brown haired tidy unobtrusive self, and since I rarely set out to make an impression on them, I even more rarely did so. Even the ones who wanted to marry my title were apt to yawn in my face. Which made Gabriella’s instant reaction doubly devastating.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Patrick in amusement, when she didn’t answer a twice repeated question, ‘will you two stop gawping at each other?’
‘Gabriella,’ I said.
‘Si?’
‘Gabriella …’
Patrick laughed. ‘You’re not going to get far like that.’
‘Parla francese?’ she said anxiously.
Patrick translated. ‘Do you speak French.’
‘Yes.’ I laughed with relief. ‘Yes, more or less.’
‘E bene,’ she sighed smiling. ‘E molto molto bene.’
Perhaps because we were unburdened by having to observe any French proprieties and because we both knew already that we would need it later on, we began right away using the intimate form tu instead of vous, for ‘you’. Patrick raised his eyebrows and laughed again and said in three languages that we were nuts.
I was nuts, there was no getting away from it. Patrick endured the whole afternoon sitting at a table in the snack bar drinking coffee and telling me about Gabriella and her family. We could see her from where we sat, moving quietly about behind her long counter, selling trinkets to departing travellers. She was made of curves, which after all the flat hips, flat stomachs, and more or less flat chests of the skinny debs at home, was as warming as a night-watchman’s fire on a snowy night. Her oval pale olive-skinned face reminded me of mediaeval Italian paintings, a type of bone structure which must have persisted through centuries, and her expression, except when she smiled, was so wholly calm as to be almost unfriendly.
It struck me after a while, when I had watched her make two or three self-conscious customers nervous by her detached manner, that selling wasn’t really suited to her character, and I said so, idly, to Patrick.
‘I agree,’ he said dryly. ‘But there are few places better for a smuggler to work than an airport.’
‘A … smuggler? I don’t believe it.’ I was aghast.
Patrick enjoyed his effect. ‘Smuggler,’ he nodded. ‘Definitely.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ he added smiling.
I looked down at my coffee, very disturbed. ‘Neither of you is the type.’
‘You’re wrong, Henry. I’m only one of many who brings … er … goods … in to Gabriella.’
‘What,’ I said slowly, fearing the answer, ‘are the goods?’
He put his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a flat bottle about five inches high, and handed it to me. A printed chemist’s label on the front said ‘Two hundred aspirin tablets B.P.’, and the brown glass bottle was filled to the brim with them. I unscrewed the top, pulled out the twist of cotton wool, and shook a few out on to my hand.
‘Don’t take one,’ said Patrick, still smiling. ‘It wouldn’t do you any good at all.’
‘They’re not aspirins.’ I tipped them back into the bottle and screwed on the cap.
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘Birth control pills,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Italy is a Roman Catholic country,’ he observed. ‘You can’t buy these pills here. But that doesn’t stop women wanting to avoid being in a constant state of baby production, does it? And the pills are marvellous for them, they can take them without the devoutest husbands knowing anything about it.’
‘Good God,’ I said.
‘My brother’s wife collects them at home from her friends and so on, and when she has a bottle full I bring it to Gabriella and she passes them on at this end. I know for a fact that at least four other pilots do the same, not to mention a whole fleet of air hostesses, and she admitted to me once that a day seldom goes by without some supplies flying in.’
‘Do you … well … sell … them to Gabriella?’
He was quite shocked, which pleased me. ‘Of course not. She doesn’t sell them, either. They are a gift, a service if you like, from the women of one country to the women of another. My sister-in-law and her friends are really keen on it, they don’t see why any woman in the world should have to risk having a child if she doesn’t want one.’
‘I’ve never thought about it,’ I said, fingering the bottle.
‘You’ve never had a sister who’s borne six children in six years and collapsed
into a shattering nervous break-down when she started the seventh.’
‘Gabriella’s sister?’
He nodded. ‘That’s why she got some pills, in the first place. And the demand just grew and grew.’
I gave him back the bottle and he put it in his pocket. ‘Well?’ he said, with a hint of challenge.
‘She must be quite a girl,’ I said, ‘to do something like this.’
His curving mouth curved wider. ‘If she smuggled the Crown Jewels you’d forgive her. Confess it.’
‘Whatever she did,’ I said slowly.
The amusement died right out of his face and he looked at me soberly. ‘I’ve heard of this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never seen it happen before. And you didn’t even need to speak to each other. In fact, it’s just damn lucky you can speak to each other …’
Three times during the afternoon I made sure of that. She would get into trouble, she said, if she just talked to me when she should be working, so I bought presents, separately, for my father, mother and sister, taking a long time over each choice. Each time she spoke and looked at me in a kaleidoscopic mixture of excitement, caution and surprise, as if she too found falling helplessly in love with a complete stranger an overwhelming and almost frightening business.
‘I like that one.’
‘It costs six thousand lire.’
‘That is too dear.’
‘This one is cheaper.’
‘Show me some others.’
We began like that, like school-day text books, in careful stilted French, but by the end of the afternoon, when she locked the display cases and left with Patrick and me through the employees’ entrance, we could talk with some ease. I perhaps knew most French of the three of us, then Gabriella, then Patrick; but his Italian was excellent, so between us everything could in one language or another be understood.
We left the airport in a taxi, and as soon as we were on the move Patrick gave her the aspirin bottle. She thanked him with a flashing smile and asked him if they were all the same sort. He nodded, and explained they’d come from some R.A.F. wives whose husbands were away on a three months overseas course.
From her large shoulder-sling bag of black leather she produced some of the bright striped wrapping paper from her airport gift shop and a large packet of sweets. The sweets and the aspirin bottle were expertly whisked into a ball shaped parcel with four corners sticking up on top like leaves on a pineapple, and a scrap of sticky tape secured them.
The taxi stopped outside a dilapidated narrow terrace house in a poor looking street. Gabriella climbed out of the taxi, but Patrick waved me back into my seat.
‘She doesn’t live here,’ he said. ‘She’s just delivering the sweets.’
She was already talking to a tired looking young woman whose black dress accentuated the pallor of her skin, and whose varicose veins were the worst I had seen, like great dark blue knobbed worms networking just under the surface of her legs. Round her clung two small children with two or three more behind in the doorway, but she had a flat stomach in her skimpy dress and no baby in her arms. The look she gave Gabriella and her pretty present were all the reward that anyone would need. The children knew that there were sweets in the parcel. They were jumping up trying to reach it as their mother held it above their heads, and as we left she went indoors with them, and she was laughing.
‘Now,’ said Patrick, turning away from the window, ‘we had better show Henry Milan.’
It was getting dark and was still cold, but not for us. I wouldn’t have noticed if it had been raining ice. They began by marching me slowly around the Piazza del Duomo to see the great gothic cathedral and the Palazzo Reale, and along the high glass arcade into the Piazza della Scala to gaze at the opera house, which Gabriella solemnly told me was the second largest theatre in Europe, and could hold three thousand six hundred people.
‘Where is the largest?’ said Patrick.
‘In Naples,’ she said smiling. ‘It is ours too.’
‘I suppose Milan has the biggest cathedral, then,’ he teased her.
‘No,’ she laughed, showing an unsuspected dimple, ‘Rome.’
‘An extravagant nation, the Italians.’
‘We were ruling the world while you were still painting yourselves blue.’
‘Hey, hey,’ said Patrick.
‘Leonardo da Vinci lived in Milan,’ she said.
‘Italy is undoubtedly the most beautiful country in the world and Milan is its pearl.’
‘Patrick, you are a great idiot,’ she said affectionately. But she was proud indeed of her native city, and before dinner that evening I learned that nearly a million and a half people lived there and that there were dozens of museums, and music and art schools, and that it was the best manufacturing town in the country, and the richest, and its factories made textiles and paper and railway engines and cars. And, in fact, aeroplanes.
We ate in a quiet warmly lit little restaurant which looked disconcertingly like Italian restaurants in London but smelled quite different, spicy and fragrant. I hardly noticed what I ate: Gabriella chose some sort of veal for us all, and it tasted fine, like everything else that evening. We drank two bottles of red local wine which fizzed slightly on the tongue, and unending little gold cups of black coffee. I knew even then that it was because we were all speaking a language not our own that I felt liberated from my usual self. It was so much easier to be uninhibited away from everything which had planted the inhibitions: another sky, another culture, a time out of time. But that only made the way simpler, it didn’t make the object less real. It meant I didn’t have chains on my tongue; but what I had said wasn’t said loosely, it was still rooted in some unchanging inner core. On that one evening in Milan I learned what it was like to be gay deep into the spirit, and if for nothing else I would thank Gabriella for that all my life.
We talked for hours: not profoundly, I dare say, but companionably: at first about the things we had done and seen that day, then of ourselves, our childhood. Then of Fellini’s films, and a little about travel, and then, in ever widening ripples, of religion, and our own hopes, and the state the world was in. There wasn’t an ounce of natural reforming zeal among the three of us, as perhaps there ought to have been when so much needed reforming; but faith didn’t move mountains any more, it got bogged down by committees, Patrick said, and the saints of the past would be smeared as psychological misfits today.
‘Could you imagine the modern French army allowing itself to be inspired and led into battle by a girl who saw visions?’ he said. ‘You could not.’
It was true. You could not.
‘Psychology,’ Patrick said, with wine and candle light in his yellow eyes, ‘is the death of courage.’
‘I don’t understand,’ protested Gabriella.
‘Not for girls,’ he said. ‘For men. It is now not considered sensible to take physical risks unless you can’t avoid them. Ye gods, there’s no quicker way to ruin a nation than to teach its young men it’s foolish to take risks. Or worse than foolish, they would have you believe.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Ask Henry. He’ll cheerfully go out and risk his neck on a racehorse any day of the week. Ask him why.’
‘Why?’ she said, half-serious, half-laughing, the glints of light in her dark eyes outpointing the stars.
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s fun.’
Patrick shook his red head. ‘You look out, pal, you mustn’t go around admitting that sort of thing these days. You’ve got to say you do it only for the money, or you’ll be labelled as a masochistic guilt complex before you can say … er … masochistic guilt complex.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I said, laughing.
‘Yeah, damn it, and it’s not funny. It’s deadly serious. The knockers have had so much success that now it’s fashionable to say you’re a coward. You may not be one, mind, but you’ve got to say so, just to prove you’re normal. Historically, it’s fantastic. What other nation eve
r went around saying on television and in the press and at parties and things that cowardice is normal and courage is disgusting? Nearly all nations used to have elaborate tests for young men to prove they were brave. Now in England they are taught to settle down and want security. But bravery is built in somewhere in human nature and you can’t stamp it out any more than the sex urge. So if you outlaw ordinary bravery it bursts out somewhere else, and I reckon that’s what the increase in crime is due to. If you make enjoying danger seem perverted, I don’t see how you can complain if it becomes so.’
This was too much for his French; he said it to me in hot English, and repeated it, when Gabriella protested, in cooler Italian.
‘But,’ she said wonderingly, ‘I do not like a man to say he is a coward. Who wants that? A man is for hunting and for defending, for keeping his wife safe.’
‘Back to the caves?’ I said.
‘Our instincts are still the same,’ agreed Patrick. ‘Basically good.’
‘And a man is for loving,’ Gabriella said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed with enthusiasm.
‘If you like to risk your neck, I like that. If you risk it for me, I like it better.’
‘You mustn’t say so,’ said Patrick smiling. ‘There’s probably some vile explanation for that too.’
We all laughed, and some fresh coffee came, and the talk drifted away to what girls in Italy wanted of life as opposed to what they could have. Gabriella said the gap was narrowing fast, and that she was content, particularly as she was an orphan and had no parental pressure to deal with. We discussed for some time the pros and cons of having parents after adolescence, and all maintained that what we had was best: Gabriella her liberty, Patrick a widowed mother who spoiled him undemandingly, and I, free board and lodging. Patrick looked at me sharply when I said that, and opened his mouth to blow the gaff.
‘Don’t tell her,’ I said in English. ‘Please don’t.’
‘She would like you even more.’