by Norman Lewis
Possibly by Ernestina’s design I was present when the inevitable confrontation took place.
‘Did you know the emerald was a chip?’ Ernestina asked, deadly calm in her manner.
Ernesto said, ‘You were a young girl. Only an expert can tell the difference. It was an expensive ring.’
‘You deceived me,’ Ernestina said. She took the ring from her finger, walked to the window and threw it into the street. Now she had discovered a personal grudge with which to reinforce vicarious injury.
The formal visit by the Corvajas to my parents in Enfield took place shortly before the opening of the breach. Ernestina and I had been to Enfield on many occasions, but by the time the Corvajas had brought themselves to the pitch of journeying to the outer suburbs a coldness had developed between Ernestina and my mother, the fault lying largely with my mother. Ernestina got on well enough with my father, who was warm in manner, more adaptable, and could even be gallant, but my mother exhibited all the traditional defects of an Anglo-Saxon — or in this case, Welsh — mother-in-law, and it was clear to all of us that Ernestina would never be received by her as a daughter, however much Ernesto and Maria Corvaja treated me as a son.
The Corvajas rarely left their house except to visit the opera or once in a while for some celebratory meal, eaten in an upstairs private room in Gennaro’s restaurant in Frith Street. The journey to Enfield involved them in much forethought and planning. Sicilians are the most urban of people, with an affection for bricks and mortar and the consoling familiarities of the home. Largely this is a response to an environment which has compelled people to draw close together for protection, in a country with no isolated houses, no villages and no town so small that it could not muster a defence force in an emergency to fight off an attack by an armed band. As late as the period immediately following the last war there were some twenty of these at large, spreading terror through the countryside.
In the Corvaja household one minded one’s own business and asked no questions. So engrained is this traditional Sicilian reserve that I was sometimes inclined to the theory that normal human curiosity, as we understand it, did not exist among them. Sometimes however, grudgingly, reluctantly, sensitive facts could no longer be suppressed, and what began to look like more and more extraordinary security measures controlling the family’s movement had to be explained. Ernesto, Maria explained, had to be on his guard from a visitor from America who might visit London with the intention of killing him. Hence the ineffective pistol carried in her handbag. Hence the imposing snub-nosed (and loaded) revolver in the top drawer of Ernesto’s desk. She added one further piece of information: that Ernesto had narrowly escaped death in an ambush a few days before they had taken the first ship out of New York, his hat on this occasion having been blown off his head. On these matters Ernesto himself preferred to add no comment.
The visit to Enfield must have seemed to the Corvajas as novel and strange as a traveller’s first experience of the Amazon rain forest. They knew nothing of England outside a square mile of London’s West End, and the ten-mile drive in the old Bugatti through some of Europe’s seediest suburbs came as an eye-opener to them. Maria, a kindly and compassionate woman, although imbued with a ‘let them eat cake’ attitude where the poor were concerned, could not understand how people could consent to live in Tottenham and Edmonton, and why there were no taxis about. Forty Hill, Enfield, bewildered the Corvajas for other reasons. Apart from the rusty planes growing in Gordon Square, Ernesto had seen few trees since the old days of the Parco della Favorita in Palermo. Now, suddenly, he found himself deep in flowering cherry orchards, reacting to them with a curiosity not wholly free from suspicion. Sicilians had good reason to distrust wooded places, so much so that precautionary deforestation had left a single sizeable reserve of woods in the whole country, the Ficuzza, which still gave shelter, I was informed, to numerous outlaws.
Our small house must have astonished them too, in its terrible vulnerability. We trudged together up the garden path, and it occurred to me that this might have been the first time in twenty or thirty years that the Corvajas had walked on anything but lush carpets and city pavements. The unfamiliar presence and scent of foreigners set all the local dogs barking, and Ernesto nodded his approval of their outcry. It was good to have reliable watchdogs about the place.
The meeting, from the very beginning, showed signs of being a great success, and the Corvajas, who had probably prepared themselves to crunch on the claws of more toads, were clearly delighted to find that my father and mother were normal human beings, eccentric perhaps in their choice of living accommodation, but no more than that, certainly harmless and reasonably intelligent in a cold-blooded English way. Ernestina, who was exceedingly vivacious when pleased, made a successful effort to be kind to my mother, and my father nodded instant agreement when I asked him to switch off the musical box tinkling ‘Guide Me Oh Thou Great Redeemer’ in the background.
After the brilliant emptiness of life at Gordon Street, our modest house, the garden and the surrounding orchards seemed to the Corvajas encrusted with small wonders, which they investigated with the delight of children collecting offerings left by the sea on a sandy beach. The exotic birds in my father’s garden aviary entranced them, and Ernesto wondered if he could not build something similar into one of his bathrooms. My father amazed them with the present of a pot plant which had been in some way cajoled into becoming host to mistletoe. Best of all for them were the weird-looking Polish Fancy chickens that lurched about the place half-blinded by their feathered crests, and Ernesto took the name of the last remaining supplier, determined to buy some to relieve the squalor of his back garden. Although both my father and Ernesto could only normally be understood by members of their own family, it was quite extraordinary the degree of communication they established, although my father admitted later that it had proved a disappointment to find that his dog Latin did not help.
Maria, grossly over-painted, frilled and flounced, danced from plant to plant in the garden, insisting that everything she found growing there was edible if cooked with the right herbs. For once the sun shone, the trees held their umbrellas of blossom over us, hundreds of blackbirds were in full song. A spotty local girl on the arm of her lover arrived to deliver a pot of cream, and Maria said it reminded her of a scene from Cavalleria Rusticana. What could be a greater tribute to Forty Hill, Enfield, on a May morning than that it should be seen so closely to imitate the opera? Life, displayed here in so many small facets of delight, must have presented a moment of joy of the kind the Corvajas had not known for years.
The Corvajas had brought with them the ritual gift of panetone, the bread of love from pagan times, exchanged by all Italians on feast days, and in particular at Christmas. When removed from its festive wrappings of blue and gold paper, what remains is in fact stale bread dressed up to look like cake, but my parents munched it with a civilized pretence of relish. Ernesto had also brought a bottle of Gancia along to wash the stuff down with, and this was opened up. My father had his fair share of Welsh hypocrisy where alcohol was concerned, and normally let himself be seen only drinking Wincarnis, which he claimed — despite his contempt for medicines — that he took for health reasons. He had to be persuaded that Gancia was its Italian equivalent before he consented to take a glass — although this was soon followed by a second.
It was inevitable that my mother, refusing to be guided by me, should have gone to her friends for advice as to what her foreign guests would like to eat. The general agreement was that where Italians were concerned one could not go wrong with spaghetti, and this view received further support from the strong body of vegetarians in the movement, who declared this to be a vegetarian dish. When informed at the last moment that this was what was proposed, my heart sank, for spaghetti like panetone is ritual food, bearing as prepared in the average English home little resemblance in appearance, substance or flavour to the Italian original. The Corvajas, moreover, were tremendous gourmets. Maria was
an exponent of the refined north Italian cuisine in which a strong French influence is to be detected, while Ernesto’s preference was for typical Sicilian dishes. These suggested the survival of a Moorish tradition, and whenever an excuse could be found the meat they contained was spiced with such ingredients as ginger, cumin, coriander, cardamoms and saffron to which might be added various kinds of chillies, and above all an abundance of garlic. The Corvajas rarely bothered with spaghetti, but when they did it was cooked with rare expertise, and finicky attention to detail.
My mother led me away to inspect the dish in course of preparation. I found it to be a coarse version of macaroni, the only form of pasta to be had locally, a rank of thick-walled, rubbery tubes simmering in cream in a dish under a layer of tomato sauce squeezed from a tube. My mother worked from a cookery book which suggested a cooking time of thirty minutes, but she was allowing forty minutes to be on the safe side. By this time I foresaw that the macaroni would be reduced to a pulp.
In due course we were seated at table and the guests were invited to serve themselves from the ochreous mess sizzling in the dish. Gastronomic disaster was confronted by the Corvajas in the same adventurous spirit with which the other incidents of their day in the country had been faced. The Gancia was now at an end, but my father produced a bottle of Wincarnis, of which, for his health’s sake when the rest had been served, he permitted himself a half-glass.
Despite everything, and largely due to the Corvaja enthusiasm and resilience, things were going remarkably well. Ernestina had put on the best possible front with my mother, and insisted on helping out with small domestic tasks, and now they frequently exchanged sickly smiles. Watching my father closely however, I detected certain familiar and worrying symptoms. They were picked up by my mother too, who began to wave her hands about vigorously as if to dissipate a cloud of smoke. Ernesto and his wife paid not the slightest attention to this behaviour which they probably assumed to be part of a traditional welcoming ceremony in a British household.
I knew only too well now what was about to happen. After a decade of mediumship my father had never developed predictability or controllability. At his best his performance probably surpassed that of the average professional medium, but these whatever their limitations, accomplished what was asked of them in a subdued and orderly fashion, and with as much regard for the niceties of time and place as, say, an insurance broker. My father had never achieved anything approaching this bland professionalism, and there was something haphazard and all too spontaneous about what he had to offer. A group which had gathered for a séance might sit for hours on end in a fog of incense, to chant Sankey and Moody and set the musical box endlessly tinkling, and absolutely nothing would happen. Father dealt in the unexpected. It was a painful fact that at no other time could he call up the souls of the dead with greater ease than at the table set for Sunday lunch, with possibly a couple of relatives present, when without the slightest encouragement or preamble and before the guests had had time to dip their spoons into their soup, he would unleash his apocalyptic torrent.
These experiences, to which I never became hardened, caused me paralysing embarrassment. The first time at the age of twelve or thirteen, when trapped in such an ordeal, I scrambled under the table and remained there until it was all over, and later I got out of the room as fast as ever I could, on picking up the first warning sign. But now, knowing what was coming, there was no escape. My mother’s gesticulations of exorcism would clearly fail, and the stern commands with which she ordered the hovering spirit not to intrude upon our lunch party would also, as I could see, have no effect. My father closed his eyes, and began a soft, preliminary braying, the knife and fork fell from his hands, and he began to writhe and sweat.
All these goings-on appeared to escape the Corvajas’ notice, as they continued to tackle their macaroni with imperturbability. Ernestina, who had been warned by me that such things could happen, looked down and dickered with the mess on her plate. My father, ceasing to writhe, had now begun to babble softly, and this was a danger sign. My mother, realizing that the thing was out of control, had given up and was murmuring a prayer, eyes closed. I gripped the edges of my chair, ready for the worst, while the unshakeable Corvajas continued their mastication.
There was a moment of electric silence, then a child’s voice spoke. ‘Mamma, mamma, mamma.’ It was impossible to continue with the farce of pretending to eat. We exchanged bewildered, stricken looks. My embarrassment bordered on panic. I longed to get up and dash from the room.
‘Mamma,’ the voice said again. ‘Mamma.’ It was thin, and unearthly and troubled, and I felt Maria at my side go tense.
‘Yes, darling. Darling, I’m here. This is mamma.’
Now I was confronted with the second shocking aspect of this situation. Maria Corvaja, a self-proclaimed atheist, had been taken by surprise by belief.
‘Mamma, oh mamma.’
‘I’m here, darling. I’m listening,’ Maria cried out. ‘Where are you? Talk to me.’
‘Oh Mamma, mamma, mamma.’
The thin, whining little voice had become progressively weaker, and now it trailed off into silence. It was all over. My father opened his eyes, blinking, still far away from us, and my mother was ready with a sponge and cold water with which she sponged his forehead. Then we all got up and went into the garden, where Maria affirmed her conviction that the voice was that of her second child, who had died some ten years before. For me the voice could have been that of any young child, but it remained a puzzle and always would, how it could have been produced by the vocal cords of a man of sixty. I had no way of knowing whether my father had ever heard of the existence of this second daughter.
The visit had two lasting effects on the Corvajas’ lives. Maria became a clandestine spiritualist, although to me her furtive incursions into that uncharted and illusory territory in which my parents had so long wandered in search of their lost one, suggested little more than the exchange of resignation for heartache.
An unimportant development was that Ernesto now became even more of an animal-lover than he had been, adding to the dog, the cats, and the tame hawk so often encountered in Italian families, a brood of chickens in which he delighted, and which for him typified the delights of the rustic scene. Since Polish Fancies and other freakish breeds of the kind recommended by my father could not be procured at short notice, my mother-in-law went to the pet shop in Tottenham Court Road, bought a dozen week-old Rhode Island Reds, plus a sizeable coop, and installed this in their bedroom — a large semi-basement chamber in which an almost complete absence of daylight was compensated for, in Corvaja style, by a huge excess of electrical voltage.
The chicks’ stay in the coop was short. During the daylight they had the run of the room, fouling the Bokhara carpet to their hearts’ content, and at night they slept in the matrimonial bed. Both Corvajas took an interest in their diet. They were fed the best Italian food, chopped mortadella, Parma ham, and rice flavoured with garlic and saffron, plus occasional cannibalistic treats of chicken flesh cooked in various complex styles. The result from this remarkable start in life was that they all developed extreme cases of rickets, staggering through the basement rooms, balanced on their wing tips, upon grossly bent and distorted legs, although otherwise in good shape and possessed of exceptional sexual energy. Like all other mild eccentricities abounding in the Corvaja household, the poultry-keeping mania was accepted by Ernestina and her brother with extreme phlegm.
All in all the trip to Enfield could be counted a success. The Corvajas and my parents had taken a liking to each other, and Ernestina now did her best to conquer her dislike for my mother, and to make allowances for her absurdly over-possessive attitude towards her only son. There followed regular visits by my parents to Gordon Street, where they were entertained — in the preferred English way, as the Corvajas believed — invariably with the accompaniment of hot crumpets and strong tea.
Chapter Eight
WITHIN A FEW WEEKS of
the Enfield visit a summons came to Wales, and this filled me with huge misgivings. I had paid two duty visits in Carmarthen since the disastrous eighteen months spent there in childhood, noting — although Li lived at home once more — a change for the worse in my grandfather and my aunts. Now it was my turn to be involved in family affairs of the kind I would have wished to avoid.
About two years previously my grandfather, who had continued to sell tea until the age of eighty-six, passed away in his sleep. When the will was read my father learned that he had been disinherited — something for which he was well prepared, and which in no way surprised him. There were more grievous consequences for his brother, my Uncle John, who had worked for the old man all his life. The business had passed on to him, but the transfer had been tied up in such a way that most of the profits had to be paid to the aunts. John, understandably, took to the bottle, died within the year, and his widow Aunt Margaret was obliged to sell her Carmarthen house and move into one of the picturesque, if slightly sinister cottages on the beach front at Llanstephan. A low price for a quick sale was accepted for the business in King Street, and most of the money raised went to the aunts.
Following an unsatisfactory, even mystifying correspondence with solicitors and my Aunt Polly, a diplomatic visit to Wales on my father’s part was called for, to see what, if anything, could be done to rescue Margaret from the penury into which she had been plunged. At this point my father informed me that he was tired of life, and that nothing would induce him to leave Enfield again. The diplomatic visit then fell to my lot. My problem now was that Ernestina was determined to accompany me.
‘You don’t realize what you’re letting yourself in for,’ I said.
‘It’s no good trying to talk me out of it. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.’
‘What you have to remember is you’re not dealing with ordinary, civilized people. They’ll probably tell you to go away.’