‘I could sell it very well. I’ve begun to think of that.’
She nodded. Cesare was expertly gathering up the plates four businessmen had eaten from. The men were stout and flushed, all of them married: you could tell a married look at once. At another table a chap who was married also was taking out a girl less than half his age, and next to them a couple looked as though they were planning a dirty weekend. A party of six, men and women, were at the big central table, just beside where the salads and the bowls of fruit were all laid out and where the dessert trolley was. She’d seen that party here a couple of weeks ago; they’d been talking about En Tout Cas tennis courts.
‘Once you’ve made something as you want it,’ Fitz was saying, ‘you tend to lose interest, I suppose.’
The head-waiter called out to the other, younger Italian, she didn’t know what his name was, lumpy-looking boy. But Cesare, because he was less busy, answered. ‘Pronto! Pronto!’
‘You’re never selling up, Fitz?’
‘Well, I’m wondering about it.’
He had told her about the woman he’d married, a responsible type of woman she sounded, but she’d been ill or something and hadn’t been able to have children. Twenty-three years was really a very long time for any two people to keep going. But then the woman had died.
‘You get itchy feet,’ he said. ‘Even when you’re passing sixty.’
‘My, you don’t look it.’ Automatically she responded, watching the waiter while he served the party at the central table with T-bone steaks, a San Michele speciality. He said something else, but it didn’t impinge on her. Then she heard:
‘I often think it would be nice to live in London.’
He was eyeing her, to catch her reaction to this. ‘You’ve had a battered life,’ he’d said to her, the second time they’d had lunch. He’d looked at her much as he was looking at her now, and had said it twice. That was being an actress, she’d explained: always living on your nerves, hoping for this part or that, the disappointment of don’t-call-us. ‘Well, I suppose it batters you in the end,’ she’d agreed. ‘The old Profession.’
He, on the other hand, had appeared to have had quite a cosy time in the intervening years. Certainly, the responsible-sounding woman hadn’t battered him, far from it. They’d been as snug as anything in the house by the sea, a heavy type of woman, Nancy imagined she’d been, with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was. It was after she’d dropped off her twig that he’d begun to feel sorry for himself and of course you couldn’t blame him, poor Fitz. It had upset him at first that people had led unattached women up to him at cocktail parties, widows and the like, who’d lost their figures or had let their hair go frizzy, or were old. He’d told her all that one lunchtime and on another occasion he’d confessed that after a year or so had passed he’d gone to a bureau place, an introduction agency, where much younger women were fixed up for him. But that hadn’t worked either. He had met the first of them for tea in the Ceylon Centre, where she’d told him that her deceased husband had been an important figure in a chemicals firm and that her older daughter was married in Australia, that her son was in the Hong Kong Police and another daughter married to a dentist in Worcester. She had not ceased to talk the entire time she was with him, apparently, telling him that she suffered from the heat, especially her feet. He’d taken another woman to a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and he’d met a third in a bar she had suggested, where she’d begun to slur her speech after half an hour. Poor Fitz! He’d always been a simple soldier. She could have told him a bureau place would be no good, stood to reason you’d only get the down-and-outs.
‘Sorry?’ she said.
‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of giving it another go?’
‘Darling Fitz! Dear darling Fitz!’
She smiled at him. How typical it was that he didn’t know it was impossible to pick up pieces that had been lying about for forty years! The past was full of Simpson and Laurie Henderson and Eddie Lush, and the two children she’d borne, the girl the child of a fertilizer salesman, which was something Eddie Lush had never guessed. You couldn’t keep going on journeys down Memory Lane, and the more you did the more you realized that it was just an ugly black tunnel. Time goes by, as the old song had it, a kiss and a sigh and that was that. She smiled again. ‘The fundamental things of life,’ she sang softly, smiling again at her ex-husband.
‘I just thought –’ he began.
‘You always said pretty things, Fitz.’
‘I always meant them.’
It had been so romantic when he’d said she needed looking after. He’d called her winsome another time. He was far more romantic than any of the others had ever been, but unfortunately when being romantic went on for a while it could become a teeny bit dreary, no other word for it. Not of course that you’d ever call poor Fitz dreary, far from it.
‘Where d’you come from, Cesare?’ she asked the waiter, thinking it a good idea to cause a diversion – and besides, it was nice to make the waiter linger. He was better looking than the airman from the base. He had a better nose, a nicer chin. She’d never seen such eyes, nor hair she longed so much to touch. Delicate with the coffee flask, his hands were as brown as an Italian fir-cone. She’d been to Italy once, to Sestri Levante with a man called Jacob Fynne who’d said he was going to put on Lilac Time. She’d collected fir-cones because she’d been bored, because all Jacob Fynne had wanted was her body. The waiter said he came from somewhere she’d never heard of.
‘D’you know Sestri Levante?’ she asked in order to keep him at their table.
He said he didn’t, so she told him about it. Supposing she ran into him on the street, like she’d run into Fitz six months ago? He’d be alone: restaurant waiters in a city that was foreign to them could not know many people. Would it be so strange to walk together for a little while and then maybe to go in somewhere for a drink? ‘Are your lodgings adequate, Cesare?’ She would ask the question, and he would reply that his lodgings were not good. He’d say so because it stood to reason that the kind of lodgings an Italian waiter would be put into would of course be abominable. ‘I’ll look out for somewhere for you’: would it be so wrong to say that?
‘Would you consider it, Nancy? I mean, is it beyond the pale?’
For a moment it seemed that the hand which had seized one of hers was the waiter’s, but then she noticed that Cesare was hurrying away with his flask of coffee. The hand that was paying her attention was marked with age, a bigger, squarer hand than Cesare’s.
‘Oh Fitz, you are a dear!’
‘Well…’
‘D’you think we might be naughty and go for a brandy today?’
‘Of course.’
He signalled the waiter back. She lit another cigarette. When the brandy came and more coffee was being poured she said:
‘And how do you like England? London?’
‘Very nice, signora.’
‘When you’ve tired of London you’ve tired of life, Cesare. That’s a famous saying we have.’
‘Sì?, signora.’
‘D’you know Berkeley Square, Cesare? There’s a famous song we have about a nightingale in Berkeley Square. Whereabouts d’you live, Cesare?’
‘Tooting Bee, signora.’
‘Good heavens! Tooting’s miles away.’
‘Not too far, signora.’
‘I’d rather have Naples any day. See Naples and die, eh?’
She sang a little from the song she’d referred to, and then she laughed and slapped Cesare lightly on the wrist, causing him to laugh also. He said the song was very nice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz was saying. ‘It was a silly thing to say.’
‘You’ve never been silly in your life, Fitz.’ She laughed again. ‘Except when you married me.’
Gallantly, he shook his head.
‘Thanks ever so,’ she called after the waiter, who had moved with his coffee flask to the table with the business people. She thought of his being in Pu
tney, in the room she’d found for him, much more convenient than Tooting. She thought of his coming to see her in the flat, of their sitting together with the windows open so that they could look out over the river. It was an unusual relationship, they both knew that, but he confessed that he had always liked the company of older women. He said so very quietly, not looking at her, speaking in a solemn tone. Nothing would change between them, he promised while they drank Campari sodas and she explained about the Boat Race.
‘I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry, Nancy.’
She hummed a snatch of something, smiling at him to show it didn’t matter in the least. He’d made another proposal, just like he had when she’d been a sunflower at the Old Gaiety. It was a compliment, but she didn’t say so because she was still thinking about sitting with the windows open in Putney.
‘I must get back. I’ll take an earlier train today,’ he said.
‘Just a teeny ‘nother coffee, Fitz? And perhaps…’ She lifted her empty brandy glass, her head a little on one side, the way he’d so often said he liked. And when the waiter came again she said:
‘And have you always been a waiter, Cesare?’
He said he had, leaving a plate with the bill on it on the table. She tried to think of something else to say to him, but could think of nothing.
When they left the restaurant they walked with a bitter wind in their faces and he didn’t take her arm, the way he’d done last week and the week before. On a crowded street the hurrying people jostled them, not apologizing. Once they were separated and for a moment she couldn’t see her ex-husband and thought that he had slipped away from her, punishing her because she had been embarrassing with the waiter. But that was not his way. I’m here,’ his voice said.
His cold lips touched her cheeks, first one, then the other. His large, square fingers gripped her arm for just a moment. ‘Well, goodbye, Nancy,’ he said, as always he did on Thursday afternoons, but this time he did not mention next week and he was gone before she could remind him.
That evening she sat in her usual corner of the Bayeux Lounge, sipping vodka and tonic and thinking about the day. She’d been terrible; if she knew poor Fitz’s number she’d ring him now from the booth in the passage and say she was sorry. ‘Wine goes to your head, Nancy,’ Laurie Henderson used to say and it was true. A few glasses of red wine in the Trattoria San Michele and she was pawing at a waiter who was young enough to be her son. And Fitz politely sat there, officer and gentleman still written all over him, saying he’d sell his house up and come to London. The waiter’d probably thought she was after his body.
Not that it mattered what he thought, because he and the Trattoria San Michele already belonged in Memory Lane. She’d never been there until that lunchtime six months ago when old Fitz had said, ‘Let’s turn in here.’ No word would come from him, she sensed that also: never again on a Thursday would she hurry along to the Trattoria San Michele and say she was sorry she was late.
I’ll he around, no matter how you treat me now… She’d seen him first when they’d sung that number, the grand finale; she’d suddenly noticed him, three rows from the front. She’d seen him looking at her and had wondered while she danced if he was Mr R.R. Well, of course, he had been in a way. He’d stood up for her to his awful relations, he’d kissed away her tears, saying he would die for her. And then the first thing she’d done when he’d married her after all that fuss, when he’d gone back after his leave, was to imagine that that stupid boy with a tubercular chest was the be-all and end-all. And when the boy had proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he was no such thing there was the new one they’d taken on for his tap-dancing.
She smiled in the Bayeux Lounge, remembering the laughter and the applause when the back legs of Jack and the Beanstalk’s Dobbin surprised everyone by breaking into that elegant tap-dance, and how Jack and his mother had stood there with their mouths comically open. She’d told Fitz about it a few lunches ago because, of course, she hadn’t been able to tell him at the time on account of the thing she’d had with the back legs. He had nodded solemnly, poor Fitz, not really amused, you could see, but pleased because she was happy to remember. A right little troublemaker that tap-dancer had turned out to be, and a right little scrounge, begging every penny he could lay his hands on, with no intention of paying a farthing back.
If she’d run out of hope, she thought, she could have said yes, let’s try again. She could have admitted, because it was only fair to, that she’d never be like the responsible woman who’d gone and died on him. She could have pointed out that she’d never acquire the class of his mother and his sister because she wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thought all that out a few weeks ago, knowing what he was getting around to. She’d thought it was awful for him to be going to a bureau place and have women telling him about how the heat affected them. She’d imagined saying yes and then humming something special, probably ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, and leaning her face towards him across the table, waiting for his kiss again. But of course you couldn’t live in fantasies, you couldn’t just pretend.
‘Ready for your second, Nancy?’ the barmaid called across the empty lounge, and she said yes, she thought she was.
You gave up hope if you just agreed because it sounded cosy. When he’d swept her off her feet all those years ago everything had sounded lovely: being with him in some nice place when the war was over, never again being short, the flowers he brought her. ‘No need to come to London, Fitz,’ she might have said today. ‘Let’s just go and live in your house by the sea.’ And he’d have been delighted and relieved, because he’d only mentioned selling up in order to show her that he would if she wanted him to. But all hope would be gone if she’d agreed.
She sighed, sorry for him, imagining him in the house he talked about. He’d have arrived there by now, and she imagined him turning the lights on and everything coming to life. You could tell from the way he talked that there were memories there for him, that the woman he’d married was still all over the place: it wasn’t because he’d finished making a stone wall in the garden that he wanted to move on. He’d probably pour himself a drink and sit down to watch the television; he’d open a tin later on. She imagined him putting a match to the fire and pulling over the curtains. Probably in a drawer somewhere he had a photo of her as a sunflower. He’d maybe sit with it in his hand, with his drink and the television. ‘Dear, it’s a fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘It couldn’t ever have worked second time round, no more’n it did before.’
‘Warm your bones, Nancy,’ the barmaid said, placing her second vodka and tonic on a cardboard mat on the table where she sat. ‘Freeze you tonight, it would.’
‘Yes, it’s very cold.’
She hadn’t returned to the flat after the visit to the Trattoria San Michele; somehow she hadn’t felt like it. She’d walked about during the couple of hours that had to pass before the Bayeux Lounge opened. She’d looked in the shop windows, and looked at the young people with their peculiarly coloured hair. Two boys in eastern robes, with no hair, had tried to sell her a record. She hadn’t been keen to go back to the flat because she wanted to save up the hope that something might have come on the second post, an offer of a part. If she saved it up it would still hover in her mind while she sat in the Bayeux Lounge – just a chance in a million but that was how chances always were. It was more likely, when her luck changed, that the telephone would ring, but even so you could never rule out a letter. You never should. You should never rule out anything.
She wished now she’d tried to tell him that, even though he might not ever have understood. She wished she’d explained that it was all to do with not giving up hope. She’d felt the same when Eddie had got the children, even though one of them wasn’t his, and when they’d gone on so about neglect. All she’d been doing was hoping then too, not wanting to be defeated, not wanting to give in to what they demanded where the children were concerned. Eddie had married someone else, some woman who probably thoug
ht she was an awful kind of person because she’d let her children go. But one day the children would write, she knew that inside her somewhere; one day there’d be that letter waiting for her, too.
She sipped more vodka and tonic. She knew as well that one day Mr R.R. would suddenly be there, to make up for every single thing. He’d make up for all the disappointment, for Simpson and Eddie and Laurie Henderson, for treating badly the one man who’d been good to you. He’d make up for scrounging tap-dancers and waiters you wanted to be with because there was sadness in their faces, and the dear old Trattoria San Michele gone for ever into Memory Lane. You couldn’t give up on Mr R.R., might as well walk out and throw yourself down into the river; like giving up on yourself it would be.
‘I think of you only,’ she murmured in her soft whisper, feeling much better now because of the vodka and tonic, ‘only wishing, wishing you were by my side.’ When she’d come in at half past five she’d noticed a chap booking in at the reception, some kind of foreign commercial traveller since the tennis people naturally didn’t come in winter; fiftyish, handsomeish, not badly dressed. She was glad they hadn’t turned on the television yet. From the corner where she sat she could see the stairs, where sooner or later the chap would appear. He’d buy a drink and then he’d look around and there she’d be.
The Property of Colette Nervi
Drumgawnie the crossroads was known as, and for miles around the land was called Drumgawnie also. There was a single shop at the crossroads, next to a pink house with its roof gone. There was an abandoned mill, with tall grain stores no longer used for any purpose. Drumgawnie Rath, a ring of standing stones that predated history, was half a mile across the fields where Odd Garvey grazed his cattle.
It was in 1959, an arbitrary date as far as the people who lived in and around Drumgawnie were concerned, that visitors began to take an interest in the stones, drawing their cars up by the mill and the grain stores. English or French people they usually were, spring or summertime tourists who always called in at the shop to inquire the way. Mrs Mullally, who owned the shop, had thought of erecting a small sign but in the end had abandoned the notion on the grounds that one day, perhaps, a visitor might glance about her premises and purchase something. None ever had.
The Collected Stories Page 128