by JH Fletcher
‘Since when does my mother need an invitation to attend one of my performances?’
Again she turned away, cutting off what was rapidly becoming an interview, but there was no escape. Within seconds someone else was on her, and someone after him. Eventually it was Solti who rescued her, white-faced, reeling with fatigue.
‘Madame Visconti thanks you all for coming. She loves you with all her heart. But she has another appointment. And the police say there is a huge crowd waiting for her outside the opera house.’ They got rid of them eventually.
‘Thank you. Thank you …’
It seemed she’d said it a thousand times before the last of them had been eased out of the door. Behind them was wreckage: glasses half full or broken, plates clean and dirty, the remains of the buffet that the opera management had provided.
Lucia looked about her.
‘Oh dear!’
Georg, considerate as ever, shook his head.
‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon clear it up.’
Lucia smiled brightly.
‘Of course.’
But they wouldn’t, because what Lucia was looking at was not the wreckage of a party but of thirty-two years of her life. Georg, bald and tanned, left to go to his own dressing room, while Benedetta, generous heart in a generous body, the middle-aged dresser who had been with her fifteen years, was trying to organise the forests of flowers. Each was a token of love but Lucia couldn’t keep them, however much she might wish it. Love might be joy but was seldom very practical.
‘Arrange with the opera house to have them sent to the hospitals.’ First, though, Benedetta had to help her out of her costume. Lucia looked at her in the mirror as she did so.
‘It’s ridiculous, I know, but I’m so exhausted I really don’t think I could have taken it off by myself.’
There was no time for a bath; that would have to wait until she was back in the apartment. Benedetta removed her wig, creamed her face and sponged her down. Lucia put on lipstick and eyeshadow, very modest after the earlier theatrical make-up. She tidied her hair. Between them they got her into her Balenciaga-inspired gown, ordered especially for the occasion: silver, with a standaway collar to emphasise her long neck, and three-quarter sleeves, accentuating her height. She gave her reflection a critical look. She was still pale. She was beginning to look her age, she decided, but with her chestnut hair still lustrous, her enormous sapphire eyes and pronounced cheekbones, she hoped she might still be thought interesting by some. She smiled ruefully at Benedetta.
‘Better not keep my public waiting.’
She left the dressing room — the last time? — and went to meet the conductor. With Otto’s shadow behind them, they walked out of the stage door — the last time? — into pandemonium.
Somehow they got away at last, with Lucia besieged by love that was its own exhausting burden. There was a car waiting. They piled in and drove to the quay where a launch was waiting to ferry them to Hector Godolphin’s yacht, which she knew from previous visits. The yacht was lit up like a Christmas tree in mid-harbour. Hector was both tycoon and barbarian. He would not have known a stave of music had one poked him in the eye but, like Brendan Hicks, knew the value of publicity and had put on a party for Lucia aboard the yacht that the media — his media — had described as Australia’s answer to Monte Carlo. Lucia told herself she would have preferred to go straight to the apartment, have a long bath, hit the sheets and sleep, but in truth it was not how she felt at all. She was obsessed by images of emptiness, of one life ended with only uncertainty to take its place. For the moment she was not sure about anything.
Hector Godolphin was introducing her to one of his co-directors.
‘Harry Dann …’
‘Good evening.’
Someone else, a face she thought she recognised.
‘Ruth Ballard …’
Of course. The writer. Another celebrity, then. But writers, presumably, could practise their craft in solitude. How I wish, she thought, but knew she would have hated it.
In the distance she caught a glimpse of an even more illustrious author. Patrick White, she thought. What a sour-faced bitch. Always sneering at functions like this yet somehow always managing to be there.
There was dinner: caviar flown from Russia, salmon from Scotland, price no object where Hector Godolphin’s ego was concerned.
‘I won’t be able to manage a mouthful …’ Did so, all the same, washing it down with champagne that no doubt had also been imported.
Do we have to import everything? she wondered. Do we have nothing of our own? She saw Ruth Ballard on the other side of the table and thought yes, there at least was one genuinely Australian product. And I? she asked herself. Part Australian, part Italian, wholly international like all musicians. What am I?
And had no answer.
After dinner they wanted her to sing but she would not.
‘I am not a cabaret performer.’
Hector tried to pressure her. She turned on him.
‘Those who went to the opera have heard enough for one night.’
‘And the others?’
‘Missed their chance, didn’t they? They can go without.’
Georg Solti, who had appointed himself her escort for the evening, took her home eventually. It was past two but still she wanted him to come in. He would not.
‘I’m not a young man any longer, Lucia. I need my sleep.’
She closed the door on him. She was alone. Her head rang with music and memories.
What had that cow Juliet Jones said tonight?
The woman betrayed. Is that how you see yourself?
Lucia popped a bottle of champagne and poured herself a glass; she didn’t drink much, as a rule, but tonight seemed the night for it. She walked onto the balcony, kicked off her shoes and lay back in a lounger, feeling the soothing coolness of the breeze, watching the lights on the far side of the harbour.
La Traviata: the woman led astray.
She wasn’t a fool. Others besides Juliet Jones would believe she’d chosen the opera to get back at Denzil Ryan. Of course he had betrayed her but Juliet and the rest were way out if they imagined she would dignify him by confessing such a thing in public. No, she had told Juliet the truth. She, the greatest dramatic actress in opera, had chosen it for her mother because her story, too, had been one of the highest drama. The libretto of Traviata contained more bathos even than most operas, yet there were similarities between it and her mother’s own experience. To that extent it provided some explanation for the way she had sought to control her daughter’s life and the endless friction that had existed between them because of it.
La Traviata: the woman led astray. Oh yes. No doubt of its original meaning: the harlot — at home in society but a harlot nonetheless — whose lifestyle brought upon her the tragedy that consumed her, no doubt to the moral gratification of the audiences of the day. Serve her right: that was what many would have said, although some of the men would have contributed to her downfall, had they had the opportunity.
It was a title resonant with ambiguities. Lucia liked to believe that Piave, the librettist, had intended it to have another meaning altogether. If he had …
The cobbled streets are bright with excitement, the clatter of hooves and iron-shod wheels. Through the windows of the stone-faced mansions that line both sides of the street shines the tender brilliance of candlelight from a hundred chandeliers. Several of these houses are holding receptions of one sort or another. Elegantly dressed women, many young and beautiful, are accompanied by men resplendent in cloaks lined with scarlet silk, their shirt fronts bejewelled with decorations. In chattering groups, in pairs, they dismount from their carriages and enter the open doorways past liveried footmen who wear the powdered wigs of an earlier century. The jangling street absorbs the mingled sounds of music and laughter.
The woman, Violetta Valéry, enters the grandest of all the mansions in this street of grand mansions. She is a courtesan, twenty-three years old
and the toast of those — all men, mostly rich, some young — who frequent the world of Violetta Valéry and others of her trade. She is on the arm of Alfredo, a young man whom she met two weeks before at another party. She is tubercular and in love.
For anyone in Violetta’s business, love is a dangerous delusion. At their previous meeting Alfredo told her he was tormented by his longings for her, but her world is full of young men who talk like that and at the time she laughed at him. Far better to remain free, she told him, to make the most of life’s pleasures while she is still young enough to enjoy them. Yet he pressed her and when he begged her to accompany him to this ball that will be attended by some of the biggest names in the city, she agreed. She is still teasing him as they enter the vast reception hall, warm and full of the scent of banked flowers, but is aware that her own feelings have been captured by this man whose protestations of love she now finds herself wanting so much to believe.
During the ball her feelings for him deepen and when Alfredo urges her to go away with him, she agrees. They find a house in the country and settle down to an idyllic life together. But, despite their happiness, there is a problem. Alfredo has no money and Violetta has been dipping into her savings in order to keep them. Now, three months later, she has exhausted her funds and is forced to explain the position. Tormented by guilt at her sacrifice, Alfredo leaves for the city, where he hopes to raise money. In his absence Violetta is visited by his father. Alfredo’s relationship with a woman of Violetta’s reputation has put his sister’s marriage into question. The father appeals to her to give Alfredo up. At first Violetta is scornful but eventually he persuades her. She agrees to leave his son. When Alfredo finds out, he is distraught but it is too late. Violetta has gone. His father attempts to console him but Alfredo will not listen. He leaves the old man standing there and gallops pell-mell to the city, determined to find Violetta and win her back. Eventually he does but, once again, it is too late. Violetta’s illness, re-inflamed by poverty and emotional stress, overwhelms her and she dies.
Well.
Lucia drained the last of her glass. She got up, went into the bathroom and began to draw herself a bath.
Melodrama, indeed. Yet, if her alternative and perhaps anarchic thought were correct, Violetta — the woman led astray — had erred not because of her choice of career but for permitting herself to fall in love with Alfredo, a man from a background vastly different from her own, and to pin her future life and happiness on her being able to make a success of it.
Just as her own mother, Helena Sforza, had when, at the end of the First World War, she married an Australian airman in search of freedom and travelled sixteen thousand kilometres with him to the eucalypt-choked wastes of the Victorian mallee and to the reality of the life that had awaited her in that distant and arid place.
That was how her own destiny began, Lucia thought. In the Italy of her mother’s youth, during the closing years of World War I.
Part One
THE MOTHER
1917–1936
CHAPTER ONE
1
Helena Sforza, tall, ardent, hair like a black flame, left her aunt’s house a little after daybreak and rode her mount across the stream and down the steep flank of the hill into the pine woods. The air was sharp with the scent of the trees, the slope steepened ahead of her and the noise of the torrent was loud in her ears. Her companion said, ‘It’s still not too late to change your mind.’ Helena did not answer. Guido disapproved of her going, especially in such a fashion. She had not asked for her cousin’s company but he rode with her anyway.
There was a long-barrelled pistol in his saddle holster and the silver-chased scattergun that had been his father’s was slung across his shoulders; for Helena’s sake, Guido would have been willing to take on the whole of the Austro-Hungarian army that rumour said was loose in the mountains ahead of them. He would keep her company as far as the track that was the only road. It led northwards through the forest to Tolmino, or Tolminska, as their Slovene neighbours called it: this was frontier country and turbulent, like most frontiers. If they were lucky, they would reach the track in time to meet Michelangelo and his cart, as he made his twice-weekly journey into town with vegetables for the market: it would take more than a war to stop Michelangelo from doing what he had done now for fifty years. He would take Helena on to her parents’ farmhouse, while Guido would go back with the horses.
The November air was cold up here in the mountains. A chilly rain began to fall as the two cousins followed the stream down the steeply plunging slope. Helena drew her coat collar closer about her neck. She was wearing a pair of her cousin’s breeches and rode astride, partly because it made sense but mainly because she had known it would scandalise her aunt.
It would have been hard to say who was the more pleased to see her go: the fifty-something woman who looked for stillness and obedience in her niece, or the eighteen-year-old who was prepared to offer neither.
Helena had been a visitor, by arrangement, for three weeks now. There was talk of a battle coming in the mountains outside Tolmino and her parents had wanted her out of the house, for safety. So she had come here, to her aunt’s farm, which was even more remote than their own, but the two women — each wilful and dominant by nature — had fought each other from the first. Last night’s argument about nothing, about everything, had put the cap on things.
‘You are a guest in this house. Respect: that is what I require. And for you to come with me to Mass on Sundays.’
Because her niece, black eyes flashing, would not, or at least had not.
‘Guido needed help with the calf.’
‘That is man’s work.’ And then the edict: ‘You will come next week.’
Helena did not answer, which was answer enough. She walked out of the house and went to the stables, where Guido was working.
‘Will you lend me a horse?’
‘It’s not safe to go back by yourself.’
Nevertheless she would go, and both of them knew it.
‘I will come with you.’
He had been kind and she knew how fond of her he was. That was why she was willing to grant the concession, if it would make him happy.
‘As far as the track, if you like.’
He wanted to take her all the way but to this she would not agree: she was not a parcel to be delivered. She would make her own way.
‘To the track.’
They reached the track at a point where it passed through a deep cutting made by the centuries-old passage of cartwheels. The ground rose steeply on either side, closing them in so that they could hear nothing but the hooves of the horses, then the track regained the high ground. The vastness of the Tolmino valley lay before them. In the distance the mountains were a wall of grey and white against the sky and for the first time they heard the distant rumble of the guns.
They reined in the horses.
The rain had eased but the sky was murkier than ever. In the gloom, they could see the yellow flashes of artillery fire.
‘It’s not safe.’
‘You’ve already told me that.’
‘I’d be happier if you changed your mind.’
She did not answer; both of them knew she would not.
‘Then I shall wait here with you until the cart arrives.’
Guido delivered his ultimatum fiercely, daring her to challenge him. She would have liked him to believe it made no difference to her whether he stayed or not but in truth she was glad of his company, not because of his opinion that an unescorted woman could soon find herself in trouble, but because it was more dignified to wait in the saddle for Michelangelo’s cart than to stand like a waif beside the track in the rain that had once again begun to fall. They were too far away to see troop movements but she could visualise very clearly what was happening down in the valley: the trudging columns of men with their ponchos and rifles, bodies shapeless with the ammunition pouches that each man carried on his belt. Several times during the last two year
s she had seen the soldiers, first of one army, then the other, marching behind the snub-nosed howitzers along the poplar-bordered lanes that ran down the valley to the town below her parents’ farm. Neither side had bothered them, nor would: or so her pepper-hot father always said.
‘Any of those bastards sets foot on my land, he’ll be leaving a lot quicker than he came.’
As though he really believed he could drive off an army at the end of his gun. He sounded convincing enough, but had still packed his daughter off to his sister-in-law for safe-keeping.
And now, battle or no battle, she was going back. She was unrepentant. Why should they bother us? she asked herself. Let them mind their business and we’ll mind ours. Like father, like daughter, she thought, laughing out loud both at herself and with relief that she was free at last from Guido’s harridan mother.
Guido looked at her, smiling uncertainly, and she felt affection for this man, four years older yet in some ways much younger than herself, who was armed like a bandit yet so docile underneath. She gestured towards the mountains, sharing memory like a reward.
‘You remember how we went up there together?’
It was ten years ago; it was yesterday. The day after her eighth birthday the two of them had made the long climb up from the valley to the ridge of Razor Mountain, with its views of the distant Adriatic swooning in haze. It was spring and the alpine meadows were covered with crocuses, snowdrops, narcissi, peonies, cyclamen and orchids of various kinds. As the track grew steep, rock showed through the turf, and on either side the ground fell into chasms where streams raged downhill, their waters grey with ice-melt. Just before they reached the ridge, they saw an eagle sailing on outspread wings. They stood and looked at the world far below, the black-white world of rock and ice, the green rectangles of fields in the valley. She had been tired, the track seemingly endless; but at the top she was exultant. It was the first time she had measured herself against something outside herself and won. The sense of winning filled her with delight.