As the procession passed before her, Rita inhaled its intoxicating smell and felt blessed and released.
SHE TOOK UP ballroom dancing. She went to Giuseppe Forte’s Academy on Pitt Street. The studios (as Mr Forte described his tatty rooms above a draper’s shop) were a large, neglected premises. Paint peeled off the walls, the stairs hosted a faint smell of mouse droppings, the lavatories stank of rot. But when Mr Forte whipped the faded blue velvet curtains across the studio windows (with his own name appliqued on to them in a crescent except for the two Ps which had fallen off), the squalor of the surroundings retreated into the dark corners and Rita found herself in a bright, new, perilous world. Mr Forte had escaped after the war in Europe, they said. Escaped what, Rita wondered, looking at his fat, pampered body, his receding hairline, his oily skin. He had an unfortunate squint which made most of the girls in the beginners’ class think he was winking at them. They regarded him as faintly ridiculous. His courtly use of language, his thin, reedy voice, his very profession.
‘I am a dancing master,’ he would declare with untoward pride.
He dressed with meticulous care. A creased white shirt, a dickie bow, a brocade waistcoat. Rita was not used to a man who took such care with his appearance. His unprepossessing looks did not warrant such vain and cautious attention. He would set the stylus down on the gramophone records he used for practice with a plump hand and would move about the dance floor, his arm frozen in mid-air about an imaginary partner. It was not difficult to believe watching him that he was holding a slender beauty with a rose between her teeth.
‘Watch my feet,’ he would command as if guessing her thoughts, ‘and one and two and three and four …’
The record crackled at his back. Duly, she watched. She marvelled at how delicate he was on his feet. He turned and wheeled, like a falling feather caressing the air, lost in some distant dream behind his closed eyes. Then the record would end and he would come to in the silence, a plain, fat, balding man called Juicy behind his back because his pupils couldn’t master his foreign name.
In her first year, Rita got partnered with Mona Dodd, a tall, graceless woman with buck teeth. There weren’t enough men to go around.
‘Story of my life,’ Mona Dodd muttered as she and Rita laboured across the floor.
Mona played the man but refused to lead.
‘No, no, no,’ Mr Forte would complain petulantly, breaking them up as if they were boxers locked in hostile embrace. ‘Like so …’ And he would sweep Rita away, the room a blue haze, his hand lightly settled in the small of her back as he steered her deftly round the room. Up close he smelt of cooking but it was not unpleasant. She loved the sensation of grace and control. And the discipline. She had never worked so hard at anything in her life. It was the closest Rita Spain would ever come to a vocation.
‘You’re a natural, my dear,’ he breathed once in her ear.
She treasured the compliment. Here, at last, was someone who saw her, not what had happened to her. He knew nothing of her history – the shotgun wedding, the baby, the kidnapping. He didn’t read the newspapers except when they were thrust at him in the barber’s shop. The name Spain meant nothing to him, except as a place on the map. Rita felt utterly safe with him. Partly because of his age. He must be forty, she reckoned, his name sounding like a clue. (He was, in fact, thirty-eight.) But also because he was soft and round, his placid brown eyes, the daintiness of his gestures, the sureness of his small feet. And she was consumed with mastering the steps – the wide arc of waltzes, the choppy pertness of the foxtrot, the violent glide of tango.
‘You should try the competitions,’ he said to her one night as she was gathering up her belongings.
‘But Mr Forte, I have no partner …’
Mona Dodd had given up after the first term.
‘I could be your partner,’ he offered.
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t be good enough …’
‘On the contrary, carina, it is I who would not be good enough …’
Giuseppe Forte had walked into trouble. His two talented feet had danced him into it. He was captivated by a twenty-one-year-old girl, the wife of another man. He knew the dangers and yet he had capitulated. He had not run a dancing academy for ten years without learning where to draw the line. There were women who believed that because he was a foreigner his classes were a front for some furtive kind of lechery. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a painfully shy man, a man who had never made sense of his adopted country. There had been the problem of language, of course, but he had mastered that. What he had never learned was the easy sociability that was expected of him, the loud heartiness of male company, and the brooding imminence of violence in a divided city. The wet winters depressed him, the rocky isolation of island living. He missed the embrace of a land mass, the comfort of mountains at his back. He had grown up in the town from which Michelangelo had ordered his stone. Carved out of the mountainside, the quarries glistened white in the bleached sunlight, rising like snowcapped peaks above the town square. He remembered fondly the ochre and russet houses, their shutters vainly closed in an attempt to fend off the fine dust that settled everywhere. And the boy that was him sitting on a bag of onions in the Piazza Alberica and hearing through an open window his first two-step on a wind-up gramophone that belonged to the Countess. He never knew why she was called the Countess; the only trace of nobility was her benign madness. A small, bird-like creature, she stood, vacant-eyed and abandoned-looking on her balcony and threw crumbs for the birds and her music flooded out into the chill morning air.
His father had been a stonecarver. Chisel and hammer in hand he carved angels for tombstones and inscribed the names of the faithfully departed in stone. And it was to that trade that Giuseppe was apprenticed and sent abroad to an uncle who had emigrated and had a thriving business in memorials here … Giuseppe gazed out at the wet streets, the low grey skies, and longed for a high azure freedom. His feet had saved him. Saved him from a life of chipping away, inch by inch, with blunt, leaden instruments. He despised how primitive it was and how epigrammatic of the human condition, tussling with large lumps of stone and turning them into sightless caryatids or the columns of cathedrals. His uncle died. He sold the business and said goodbye to graveyards. He gazed at his own empire, the garish, ill-lit studio, and did not regret his decision. Only that he had had to travel so far to do it.
He had danced with hundreds of women, a liberty he would never have been afforded otherwise. He had never abused his position of privilege. He couldn’t afford to. But he knew that the intricate steps he taught Rita Spain were a form of elaborate courtship like the flourishing of intimate secrets.
If Rita did think of Hazel Mary during this time it was only as a vague premonition, a blur at the periphery of her vision, an angel, liberated and floating high like in the pictures of the Annunciation in the illustrated bible. Tiny, winged cherubs, they gazed down benignly from the comers of the frames, happy and playful. Sometimes they were no more than mop-topped heads with wings attached. She liked to think of Hazel Mary like this without the encumbrance of a scaly, labouring body, all claws and aggravation. An angel baby, a child of flight, gifted in wisdom and foresight. The cream and pink confections Rita wore, the tulle and netting, the satin-covered pumps belonged to this airy world; she thought of these days as golden. Rita Golden’s days.
She imagined them aboard the Queen Bea, a cruise ship, on course for the New World. Giuseppe and she leading the dancing in the first-class lounge on A deck in the evenings. She heard the applause as the passengers stood back in awe at the glittering arc they made. She swam in the elegant tattoo of their steps, the sooty purr of clarinets, the tinkle of glasses in the balmy nights, the ocean pulling and sucking at the prow … that was where the fantasy ended. Rita had developed a fear of water. She would no longer go near the river. On her way home through the dark streets she could hear its hungry lapping at her heels as if it was a creature following her. Its oily depths frigh
tened her; she was afraid of what secrets it might throw up – the body of a baby, for example.
It was the evening that they won the Everglades Pairs Championship. Rita and Giuseppe had gone back to the studios. It was a ritual of theirs to bring their trophies back and put them immediately on display; they could boast a family of them which sat on the mantel in the office at the studios. It was a cluttered room where papers lapped up against the walls or sank faint-hearted on the floor. It always had a distraught air as if it had been recently rifled by a burglar. Giuseppe was moving the cup this way and that anxious to have it plum in the centre. Rita was wearing a turquoise and midnight blue ensemble; Giuseppe had a matching cummerbund. She liked to remember these details and how they seemed to contribute to the overall effect. Ballroom dancing had convinced her how easy it was to convert the world. Her bolero that night, for example, had been made from the lining of a coat that had belonged to Mel’s mother. The sea of sequins covered the awkward joins and disguised the fact that part of the fabric had faded. But in the twilight no one saw that; they saw only the quicksilver of movement, a fleeting impression of glitter.
Giuseppe stepped backwards and in the gloom, trod on Rita’s foot.
‘Oh, my dear,’ he said as she stooped and winced. ‘I am most terribly sorry.’
He could not bear to see her in pain. He bent down to loosen her shoe – something he had done hundreds of times – but to Rita’s dismay, he began to kiss her stockinged foot. A surge of delighted shock went through her. Feeling the touch of a man’s lips on those tiny bones of her feet – most used, most neglected – she felt a horrifying wave of desire. She reached down to stop him but found herself instead stroking his hair and finding the pale, bald spot on his crown, soft as a baby’s. And she surrendered to his mute and agonised veneration, a man prostrate before her. Afterwards she blushed to think of it, she and Mr Forte grappling together on the floor, the awful foolishness of it. With Mel, she could at least blame her yearning and her own incredulity. No one turns away when a life’s dream is offered. But she had never felt more than a vague fondness for Mr Forte – she could not even bring herself now to use his first name. Viewed in the cold light of day, the whole episode seemed outlandish. Why had she done such a thing? She was fascinated and horrified by her own lust. And she was angry with Mr Forte, who had obviously been harbouring these feelings for her for a long time. Each time he had touched her he had been thinking only of this. She thought of him as someone carrying a contagious disease. He had nursed these longings for months. She was angry with herself for not having spotted the signs. She, of all people, should have sensed the wistful power of his pining. His expression of bashful anticipation that greeted her arrival, a sense of grateful surprise that seemed to dog their encounters, the air of tender recrimination that followed any of her unexplained absences. How foolish she had been. And how swift the retribution. This, she realised, was her curse. Her absolute fecundity. Nine months later, Stella Spain was born.
Mel never suspected that Stella was not his. He came home one evening to find Rita waiting up for him. He had got used to finding a darkened house, his father-in-law snoring loudly in the next room and their bedroom abandoned to piles of spangly dresses and pigeon-toed pumps, cards of satin edging, the slender fall of silk. And his wife resolutely asleep. He had grown used to the cold turn of her shoulder. He was a restless sleeper; sometimes he would wake in the night to find he had thrown an arm around her waist or his ankle entwined in hers and he would nuzzle closer to her using sleep as an excuse. But by morning she would have thrown him off and be once more in retreat, her arm clutching the edge of the bed as if she was clinging on for dear life.
‘Rita,’ he said heartily as he switched the light on in the kitchen; she had been sitting in the dark. He blushed, fearing that somehow she had found out about Greta. ‘What are you doing here in the dark?’
‘I think it’s time, Mel.’
‘Time for what?’
‘Time to try again.’
She watched him carefully as he took off his jacket and draped it on the back of a chair and remembered how once his presence alone, like this, would have been unthinkable. Was it the baby that had drained away her once unshakeable belief in him, or would it have happened anyway? She tried to summon up that old feeling, her blind faith, but couldn’t.
‘You mean …?’
She nodded gravely. For the first time, she felt wiser than Mel, wiser and more treacherous.
Lily Spain, proud grandmother, sat cradling the new baby in her arms, in the kitchen in Mecklenburgh Street. Walter Golden puffed on a celebratory cigar. Mel was boiling water for the feed. Rita surveyed the scene with satisfaction; she had finally managed the impossible – a happy family. Lily stroked the baby’s face.
‘Funny,’ she said, ‘but the Spains were never swarthy. I don’t know where you got her from, Rita.’
Rita blushed dangerously. Granny Spain was the only blot on her manufactured landscape of happiness.
Giuseppe Forte returned to the country of his birth, to the village in the valley. The ticking summers, the long droughts. He bought a truck and worked for the quarries hauling blocks of stone over the dry roads. His hands grew chapped, his skin weathered. He married a local woman; they had a son who died in infancy. This was what was known about him; the meagre details like an epitaph carved in stone. And when he died in his forty-ninth year – a heart attack in the noonday sun, sitting in the cab of his truck – there was no one in his midst who knew the story of his exile, the northern country, the chill ruins of his foolishness, the impossible love which had afflicted him, the second story of his life.
RITA AND MEL’S final fresh start took them away from Mecklenburgh Street. They were a proper family now, Rita reasoned, and should have a home of their own. She used the growing unrest on the north side of the city to justify the move to her father. There were marches on the streets, not the seasonal waving of flags and banners to commemorate ancient sieges but less ordered parades with placards bearing clenched messages and urgent invocations. It was no longer safe to walk on the north side; proximity to the river automatically meant danger. Trouble, Mel said, was brewing. Rita worried that he had to cross the bridge daily to work, but it was a good job and he had been promoted to deputy manager filling in for Captain Prunty when he was away.
Their flat was small and cramped but because they were so high up – the fourteenth floor – it was full of lofty light. To Rita it was like living in a tree house. She felt unassailable as she stood at the window of the kitchenette and looked down far below at the tiny figures that were people moving about. It was hard-won respectability. She surveyed the domestic flotsam of her life with Mel and Stella, the touching totems of their intimacy, the baby’s soft toys, the steaming laundry drying on the backs of chairs in front of the gas fire and she revelled in her sense of relief. The modernity of the place, the shiny false veneer, the wipe-down formica, convinced her that she had made a lucky escape. There were no reminders here of the false start and the lost child. The block was like a vast factory of people where individual lives were reduced to the knocks and scrapes she could hear through the thin walls, the clamouring of the lift, the stony echoes of the communal corridors. Inside it was like a doll’s house. She had hung pretty net curtains in the living room. She had cut up one of her old dancing dresses to make cushion covers; they glinted opal and blue. She had made herself over again; the sense of magical conversion made her feel invincible. She did not miss her father’s house with its high, dim ceilings strung with cobwebs, the landings perpetually sunk in a watery twilight. It had never been a proper home; it was a shop with a house attached which, like an ugly growth, had distorted all the rooms. Guiltily, she did not miss her father either. They visited him on Sundays but even after a few minutes she could feel the dead calm of his disapproval settling on her which she was glad to shake off. She felt she had made good; he felt she had thrown away her life. Mecklenburgh Street seemed dingy
to her now. Derelict in spots, a brown no-man’s land. The traders had been moved to another pitch, many of the shops were shut and abandoned. Her father didn’t seem to worry about his dwindling custom and the steady decline all around him but Rita was glad to get into the car with Stella on her lap and Mel by her side and drive away from the dark river, and the battered landmarks of her old life. It was not the sick, dizzy kind of happiness she had expected, but it was happiness of a kind and she was glad of it. She only had to compare it to the dazed misery of those intervening years, which seemed as distantly elusive as a bad dream, to be happy. Only the sensations of the nightmare stayed with her. The glare of publicity like the dazzling eye of God watching her, Hazel Mary in the tank, the flames consuming her, and, yes, sometimes Giuseppe Forte. She realised that she had him to thank for all of this but she thought no more fondly of him because of that. She had to reduce him to a ridiculous foreigner with airs and graces who had taken advantage of her. She knew it wasn’t true but she realised it was necessary. Any smarting tenderness she might feel, and she did when she remembered him kneeling at her feet, or on the dance floor palming her away then reeling her in, she quickly rebuked knowing how dangerous it could be. If she indulged in such feelings, the next thing she might do would be to blurt it out to Mel and ruin what had been so meticulously constructed. She took it as a sign of getting older that she could handle such subterfuge; it gave her a curious sense of power to have such control over the official version of their lives. She had no troubled history now; she had replaced it with a blameless and invisible present.
Mel Spain was shot at the La Scala during a late-night showing of The Big Country. At what point in the plot he was struck down nobody could figure out. It would all have been familiar to him anyway. On a long run he could anticipate the dialogue ahead of time. Rita knew the plots of all the films at the La Scala, not from seeing them, but from hearing Mel recite the lines over breakfast. And then, he would say, rising to enact, John Wayne comes into the bar and boom!
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