by Penny Feeny
‘He didn’t open his eyes often, but when he did they were this intense violet blue like a night sky. I didn’t know that all babies are born with blue eyes, did you? I was so damn ignorant, I didn’t know a thing. Babies were totally foreign to me. I couldn’t get over how something so perfectly formed on the outside, down to the teeniest whisker of an eyelash or a toenail, could be such a mess on the inside. Stupid of me really. I’ve worked all my life with superficial images. I should know how deceptive they are.’
‘Gina, you should have…’
‘What, contacted you? No, you were last person I would have told. I didn’t want to share him. I hardly ever put him down. He died in his sleep, in the crook of my arm.’
His reactions were slow, but the poignancy of her situation finally pierced him. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what went wrong.’
‘It was just something that happened. You think everybody can be saved, everybody can have what they want in our brave new world, but it doesn’t work like that. A granny of sixty-five can have a healthy baby. I was twenty-seven and I couldn’t.’
Twenty-seven, he thought, how young; he didn’t like to ask if she’d tried again.
‘It was for the best,’ she said after a pause. ‘Some people aren’t cut out for motherhood and I’d never had much of a role model.’
‘So what did you do, afterwards…?’
‘Do? I went back to work. I needed the money. I’d lost quite a bit of weight so no one complained. Friends rallied round; Felix, and my flatmate Vicki.’
‘Vicki? Christ, I think she was the woman who rang me… it must have been, I don’t know, about the time that…’
‘I was in a blue funk for a bit. She was always going on at me for not contacting you.’
‘She left messages but they were very cryptic, so I’m afraid I ignored them.’ He was ashamed to admit this, but she had spoken to Corinne and in those days Corinne was his new beginning.
‘Interfering harpy,’ said Gina. ‘Kind, I’ll grant you, but never happy except when she’s meddling. Some people are like that. Usually because they don’t have enough to do.’
‘She was probably very worried about you.’
Gina grimaced. ‘She still is. She called me this afternoon and I made the mistake of telling her I’d run into you. She insisted I came clean.’
‘You wouldn’t have done though, would you, if I hadn’t found the birth certificate?’ He didn’t ask why she had kept it: the only evidence of a life so briefly lived.
‘No, I guess not. It’s actually very painful, you know, raking this up. If you bury things deep enough and don’t disturb them it’s easier to carry on. Isn’t that the catchphrase of the moment: going forward. Well, that’s what I try to do.’
He seized her hand in an attempt at consolation. She didn’t resist but she said, ‘Don’t look so grim, Mitch. You have the lovely Sasha.’
‘True.’ Where were the girls, he wondered. Glad to have shaken him off no doubt, toasting themselves with colourful cocktails, carrier bags slung over their arms. ‘She thinks Rome is paradise.’
‘Any particular reason why you’re not making a family holiday of it? You are still married to Sasha’s mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve been with her ever since…?’
‘Since you and I split up, yes.’ He kept a snapshot of a laughing Corinne in his wallet but he decided against producing it. ‘I suppose I met her at a point where I was feeling a need to put down roots. Because of all the travelling. But obviously, if I had known about… the pregnancy… I would have acted differently. I would have – ’
‘Done what exactly? You’d already fallen for her, hadn’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t have let you down. I’m not that much of a bastard.’
‘Here’s the thing, I don’t want to be anybody’s second best. Not then. Not now. Not ever.’
‘We had some terrific times together, Gina, but ultimately… I mean, all relationships require a bit of compromise…’ He really wasn’t handling this very well. He added wryly, ‘Corinne’s very different from you.’ A backhanded compliment if ever there was one.
‘So anyway, what’s happened to her? Where is she?’
‘She’s hiking.’
‘Hiking! Striding out on her own? I’m picturing some kind of Brunhilde.’
He shouldn’t be surprised that she sounded snide; she was unlikely to feel well-disposed towards the woman who’d crashed into her life at just the wrong moment. ‘She’s with a friend. In Scotland. I would have gone too but we both felt Sash could do with a chaperone and my Italian’s better.’
‘Ever the linguist.’
‘You should hear my Farsi.’
Her hand was still lying between his. He wanted to ask whether she was lonely, but there comes a time when any language, native or foreign, turns into meaningless babble. After a while, he managed, ‘Would you like me to stay for a bit?’
‘Yes please,’ she said.
28
He couldn’t sleep. He’d checked on the girls and told them he’d be in touch again in the morning. Under Gina’s directions he had pulled out the sofa bed in the spare room and found a duvet. They’d eaten toast and drunk a bottle of wine. Then Gina had taken a Valium and offered one to Mitchell, which he declined. He knew sleep wouldn’t come easily when she lay the other side of the wall, when his brain was processing new information, but he had trained himself to manage long periods of wakefulness, to cope without loss of function.
On his back, elbows behind his head, he stared up at the ceiling with its wood-panelled squares, the bevelled edges diminishing inside each section in much the same way his thoughts chased their tails, revolving around this unexpected story: a pregnancy, a baby, a death. What should he have done? If he’d kept in touch with her, what difference would it have made to the outcome? Did he hate her for not telling him? No, probably not. Forgive her? Well, that was another question. And what was he to do with such knowledge that was now out of date; redundant. Where could he go from here?
He was up early, long before Gina. He took a cold shower, wanting to clear his head, scourge his body; every part of him was numb. His mood skittered irrationally from disbelief to resentment, guilt to remorse. He had to do something. No way could he let her off the hook, let himself out of her flat and leave as if the information had never come to light. He would take charge, steer this extraordinary out-of-control situation to its logical conclusion. He would pay his respects to his son.
He took a coffee into her room and put it down on the bedside table. She was lying with her arm flung out and her cheek flushed, but the aroma aroused her. She stretched and yawned and as soon as she’d opened her eyes, he said, ‘I want you to take me there.’
‘Where?’
Fresh coffee couldn’t mask the sour smell of last night’s wine. Gina shifted herself against the pillows in the half dark. In the past twelve hours she had scarcely changed her position, still wore the same grungy pyjamas.
‘Wherever he is.’
‘I already told you.’
This was true. She had explained through sobs that, unlike Felix, no memorial had been erected to Thomas Stanhope. No grieving group of friends clubbed together for the best quality marble on the best site in the city. No poetry lovers trooped past in search of great names. His ashes had been taken into the countryside on a drab November day and scattered on the surface of Lake Albano.
‘I know. I want to go there.’
‘Today?’
‘Yes.’ He opened the shutters and she cringed as the light flooded in. ‘You should get up. Have a shower. Get dressed.’
He thought she might protest, but she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood shakily. He resisted the urge to reach out and steady her. She picked up the small espresso cup and downed the contents. Mitchell took his own coffee outside onto the terrace.
The world should have looked different, but it didn’t. The panti
led roofs layered around him in their autumn colours had scarcely changed in centuries. Workmen came along with their bags of plaster and lengths of copper piping and rendered and repainted and re-plumbed, but their alterations were superficial. The threads of the old street patterns remained the same. A bunch of cells had divided and grown, matured into life and withered again within the flash of an eye. A child had breathed on his own for less than a week. Eventually, in the scheme of things, seventy years might have no more consequence than seven days.
He gripped the railings, sensed a movement behind him. Gina was barefoot, in tight jeans, damp hair pulled back from her newly scrubbed face.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. ‘Better?’
‘Like I’m recovering from the worst ever hangover.’
‘Have you thought about what I said?’
‘About wanting to go to Albano?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll show you. You don’t need to worry. I can handle it. I’m not going to make a scene. Only…’
‘Only what?’
‘Please don’t make me go on the train. It’s so slow and noisy and it won’t get us anywhere near the bit you need to see. You’ll have to hire a car.’
Mitchell hadn’t thought about how they would actually travel there, merely the moment of catharsis he hoped would arrive. Below, at street level, a Vespa curved elegantly around the corner. He straightened up. ‘I’d rather hire a bike.’
She frowned. ‘What sort of bike?’
‘One with a decent engine. I’m not going to putter up and down the hills on 50cc.’
‘A motorbike!’ exclaimed Gina. ‘Like a bloody teenager. Oh my God, this is mid-life crisis behaviour, isn’t it?’
Possibly she was trying to goad him, but he refused to be riled. ‘I think this qualifies as a mid-life crisis, Gina, for both of us. Don’t you want to feel the wind on your skin again?’
*
It cost far more to hire a bike than a car – especially since he went for a Ducati Monster – but wasn’t wild extravagance part of the whole deal anyhow? The sensation of owning the road, negotiating the traffic and inhaling its fumes as they left the city; of cresting a hill at full throttle or swooping into a bend as the air rushed past; the simple elemental power of the engine, the growl and the heat it threw out – all these were pure pleasure. Gina leaned against his back with her arms around his waist. It was possible she was scared but he wasn’t going to let her inhibit him. Transporting people from A to B was the one thing (maybe the only thing) he could do well.
The lake was a perfect mirror of the sky. In other circumstances, he would have liked to race around it a couple of times, feeling the pull of gravity and the leap of Ducati performance, knowing this was something he could control.
‘Left here,’ said Gina, indicating. ‘Then down that track.’
He followed her instructions and after a few hundred metres the track widened into a asphalted area where inverted rowing boats were humped on top of each other. When he killed the engine he wasn’t prepared for the sudden silence – but it was soon filled with birdsong and the far-off whistle of a train trundling along its single track. Gina clambered off the pillion seat.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
She removed her helmet and shook out her hair, bent to massage her calves. ‘Feel as though I’ve been at sea and just got back onto dry land.’
‘You weren’t frightened? I mean, I hope you trusted me.’
‘Funny you should say that. I knew someone who killed his friend on the very stretch of road we’ve come down.’
He said defensively, ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Not getting at you, Mitch. I’m in one piece, aren’t I? You reminded me, that’s all.’ She shivered and hugged herself as if she were cold. ‘One little mistake, one lapse in concentration. That’s all it takes. Self-reproach must be such an awful burden. I don’t know how a person can learn to live with it. They must always be going over that moment, you know, when they’d taken their foot off the brake or pumped the accelerator too hard. Or whatever. How would I know? I’ve never sat behind a steering wheel. But I do know that sometimes there’s a point when things could go either way and you have to keep your nerve or live with the consequences…
‘Anyway, it wasn’t like that with Tom. You must believe me. I had no influence one way or the other. It was a totally random condition he was born with. We couldn’t have made any difference.’
‘Right,’ he said, trying to smile. No man wants to think he’s behaved like a shit, even if he has. ‘I would have supported you through it all if you’d given me the chance.’
She shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place, but accidents happen, don’t they? I’m not blaming you. It’s easier to think of it really as an Act of God. Bloody God. I’ve never had much time for Catholicism – all that confession and repentance seems such a cop-out. Felix got pretty close to converting, but he couldn’t deal with the whole transubstantiation issue. He and Leone used to argue for hours.’
She was off on a tangent again and Mitchell was worried about her state of mind and whether he’d been wise to suggest the excursion. But then she recomposed herself and marched towards the dense woodland that quilted the sides of the once volcanic crater. He followed.
They passed a mangy dog rooting in the shallows, a family of newly fledged ducklings, a trio of fishermen setting up camp for the day with their canvas stools and their cool-box, fitting their rods together, unspooling their lines. The path wound through thickets of trees and, nearer the shore, palisades of rustling reeds. Mitchell trod pungent wild garlic underfoot, nearly tripped on brambles and whips of twining honeysuckle. He became confused by the direction they were taking. ‘Are you sure you know the way?’
‘Oh yes, David and Sergio have a place not far from here.’
‘Who are they?’
‘David’s my dealer. And Sergio’s family have lived in the area for generations. They have a boathouse and a jetty a little further on. So you see, I do come here from time to time and Sergio’s very helpful. He’ll give me a lift if I want one, whenever…’
Because he was trying to catch what she was saying he lost concentration, caught his toe in a tree root and went sprawling. Pain stabbed his ribs, struck his knee; he could taste dirt on his tongue. Gina turned. When she saw him spread-eagled, she laughed. It was a laugh with an edge of hysteria, a release of tension. ‘Oh my goodness, you look so –’
‘What?’
She was trying, not very successfully, to control herself. ‘So… helpless.’
‘I tripped, that’s all. No big deal.’ He rose stiffly and dusted his jeans.
‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘We’re nearly there, anyhow.’
She came towards him, as if she were going to guide him like a blind man or an invalid for the last few yards. Instead she rubbed a smudge of dust from his cheekbone. He’d forgotten, this close, how tall she was, their eyes almost level. She only had to tilt her chin and their lips would meet too. Her hands were resting on his shoulders; his reached around her back to pull her to him. Their mouths joined in so natural and familiar a fit the years spent apart contracted in an instant.
A kiss. A real kiss. A deep, ardent, devouring kiss. A kiss of promises and apologies, of commiseration and forgiveness. A kiss that could be the end or the beginning, that could lead nowhere at all. Only a kiss.
Gina broke away first, tugged him through a gap in the trees. ‘Here,’ she said.
They were standing on a patch of coarse sand. The water at its edge was utterly transparent, but as it stretched into the distance it took on an intense blue. Although they were now side by side, their moment of intimacy dissolved, her hand slipped into his as Sasha’s used to when she was a little girl.
‘Here,’ she said again. Then, ‘Can you feel the breeze?’
He could – a light breath of
wind with a nip of spring.
‘It’s not as easy to scatter ashes as you might think. You don’t want them blowing back in your face and it was a blustery autumn day. Felix was with me. He was very consoling but he wasn’t like you. He didn’t like to get his feet wet. I’d already taken off my boots and waded in. Tom was in a pretty white casket and I threw it as far as I could. It bobbed about for a little while – I had expected it would float for longer, it was such a light frail thing.’ Her voice was low. He squeezed her knuckles, rubbed his thumb into her palm. She continued, ‘Then it sank, very gracefully, but very quickly and there was nothing left to see. You can’t really visit ashes like you can a grave. Or tend them. I should have thought of that, but I wasn’t thinking straight at all. And I was so young then. There was still the prospect of tomorrow. Anyway…’ She gave a brilliant brittle smile. ‘You’re here now. Do your thing. I’ll wait for you.’
She withdrew, to sit some yards away on a tree stump. He moved closer to the water, till it lapped at the leather of his trainers. The ebb and flow, although slight, had a pacifying effect. He couldn’t envisage the features of a child he’d never met – no, not a child, a premature infant, a small pink scrap – but of all the sensations of loss that had been troubling him, shouldn’t this be the most acute? He needed more time to adapt to the extraordinary cruel truth of it, but the image of this spot was captured in his head. Later he would reconcile it with everything else he’d been told; meanwhile he would store it, as precisely defined as one of Gina’s photographs, for safekeeping.
He walked back up the beach towards her. She was sitting with her legs tucked at an angle like a mermaid. He half-expected to see a flat rock projecting like a diving platform and a thought struck him. ‘This isn’t the place where we went swimming, is it?’
When she laughed he thought it might have been in mockery – that he should have revived the memory of the pair of them grappling naked on the shore like the couple in From Here to Eternity or any of its imitators – but no.