Last Train from Liguria

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  *

  Bella knew exactly what she should do now. If there were any chance of getting the better of her father, she would have to learn from her late mother. What would Mother have advised?

  She rested her forehead on the door her father had just closed behind him, then gave herself firm instruction: leave well enough alone for the moment. Withdraw, stay silent. Let him be the one to come back to the subject. Let him be the one to do all the talking until he has talked himself out of the idea. There is strength in silence, Mother would have said so. No surer way of unnerving a man.

  Now. She would start by gently opening this door, stepping lightly into the hall, a slow easy turn for the stairs, pass by his study with neither remark nor glance, then continue on up to her room. Where she would remain until he decided to come around, first to his senses, then to her way of thinking. Yes.

  But the more she thought of it! The way he had made the decision without her, the way he shrugged off any attempt to discuss the matter further; the way he kept making those awful jokes and jolly gestures throughout. Then the cold, cruel delivery of that last remark about her always being alone. Turning his back on her like that, then leaving the room, clipping the door shut behind him.

  She snatched at the doorknob, twitched it open, then ploughed up the stairs shaking with rage. When she got to his study the door was ajar; she slapped it away from her. 'How could you?' she demanded. 'Father, how could you?'

  He was moving about the room in his slow, efficient manner; pulling at shelves, plucking at drawers until he had constructed a pile on his desk: medical documents, sample bottles, pocket watch, stethoscope, a small narrow torch which he brought up to his face, switched on and eyeballed for a moment before switching it off again.

  When the pile was complete, he immediately began to thin it out again, picking each item up and feeding it down into the soft leather gut of his big brown bag.

  These were his props for the outside world. This was the bag that would carry them there. Bella knew the routine and knew that nothing would interfere with it. There was a time, long ago, when she would have been part of it. A house in Dublin then; a different desk. She was a child holding the bag open for him, lisping the title and purpose of each article. She was going to be a doctor. They had both seemed so certain of it – why had it never happened?

  She waited while he pulled his overcoat from the coat stand, shrugged his shoulders into it, slapped the creases out of his gloves, angled his umbrella out from the stand, and he still hadn't looked at her face. When he did speak to her, it was through the mirror while he fussed at his collar and stud. 'Listen to me, Bella, we moved to London for a better life, a new start – for your sake as I recall. We have been here more than seventeen years and well, your life is not exactly…''

  'Not exactly what?'

  'Well. Not what we hoped it would be. You're almost thirty-two, you know, and with your poor mother gone, and the trouble with your back resolved, and your other little problems well under control.'

  'Father, please!'

  'All right – there's no point in dragging all that up now, I suppose. What I'm trying to say is, there really is no reason for you to remain here day in, day out. You're in good health now and still relatively young.'

  'I just don't understand it, Father.'

  'Oh come on now, Bella, you don't want to be stuck with an old goat like me for ever.'

  'But, Father, you're not an old goat.'

  'Indeed I am an old goat. Please, my dear, it's for your own good.'

  'I thought we were happy,' she said and began crying.

  'Now let's not have any of this,' he said, turning around at last to face her.

  She could see the back of his head in the mirror, the edge of his collar, the rind of thick skin over it, the line of his shoulders, the fall of his coat. It was as if somebody else was in the room with them. Somebody who had wandered in by mistake, from a crowded railway platform or some other populated and anonymous place. A stranger, bewildered and embarrassed to have found himself caught in the middle of this little scene. He was like a man who was pretending not to be there.

  'I should be with you, Father. With you, here. I don't want to live in Sicily, in a strange—''

  'That's enough, Bella.'

  'Please don't make me go. Please. Please. Please.'

  'Bella, stop it now, I said. Now.'

  It wasn't until he raised his voice that she realized what she'd been doing, pulling at his lapels like that, sobbing and screaming, dribbling all over him. His hands came down and settled on top of hers, then in one strong steady movement, like that of an oarsman, he had lifted, pushed and dropped them away.

  'Take control of yourself, Bella!'

  She accepted his chair and the handkerchief too, offered at arm's length – not one of his own either, she noted, but from the box he reserved for hysterical female patients. Next she was clutching a glass, sucking at something he had concocted and mixed with water.

  'Bella,' he said after a while. 'Are you settled now?'

  'Yes, Father.'

  'Are you certain?'

  'Yes.'

  'How do you feel?'

  'Foolish.'

  'Indeed.'

  'I'm sorry, I'm just a little upset, that's all.'

  'We'll forget about it now. But Bella, I have something important to say to you, and I want you to listen to me carefully.' He leaned a little way towards her.

  'Yes, Father?'

  'You are not my wife, Bella. You are my daughter.'

  *

  In the end Bella had decided to believe her father; that it was for her own good, a sacrifice was being made on her account. A sacrifice she must respect. He was a father trying to prepare his only child for the future, it was as simple as that. One day she would find herself completely alone, no one to look to, nor care for. The few relatives they had left behind in Ireland would want nothing to do with her – nor would she make any attempt to contact them. Her father knew this just as he had known not to insult her with any pretence of a possible marriage.

  She would be like poor Miss Vaughan who used to live across the road. A middle-aged orphan. In the meantime, what was wrong with striking out on her own for a year or two – if that was how she was going to end up? Alone in this house. But at least it would be her house, whatever little money remained, hers to spend as she wished. Not that she'd have to rely on her father's leftovers. She could make her own way. Take in lodgers perhaps, or become fluent enough in Italian to translate professionally. Or maybe even teach Italian – why not? Her father's study could be converted into a sort of classroom; blackboard set behind his desk, students placed at little tables round the edges of his silk Kashmiri rug. If that didn't suit she could always teach in a proper language school, where she could meet people, make friends, visit and be visited. She could live alone in this house one day as an independent woman, without fear of the rooms beyond the room she was occupying. Or fear of the street outside, because to go out into it would mean having to return to a house that had become her enemy. She would be more than just a name muttered by neighbours too polite to bring themselves to knock on her door. More than an occasional shadow at the lace of an upstairs window, or a pair of hands taking in a small box of delivered groceries every week. She would not lie dead for days on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Nor be covered in a rough police blanket and carried down the garden path with Gilby's grocery boy mewling up at a constable, 'I knew it when she didn't answer the door the second I rung! She always answers straight off, she does. On other side, waitin' – see? – that's where she always is.'

  She would not, not become poor Miss Vaughan.

  *

  The house grew alive around her and she couldn't seem to leave it alone, drifting from room to room, passing through the ghosts of her future: friends she had yet to meet; conversations she was yet to be part of; laughter. Everything became relevant. The mirabelle pattern on the dining-room wallpaper; the textur
e of a sofa, a cushion, a drape. Even ornaments that up to now she had either despised or simply not noticed, were mentally preserved. She would modernize this whole stuffy house, pull it apart, take it beyond recognition – streamline it. For days Bella felt a sense of elation and longed to get her new life in Sicily over and done with, so she could return to revise and relive her old one, as this other, independent person.

  The sense of elation soon passed. One evening when she had just lit the study fire, and the aroma of the meal Mrs Carter had left in the oven was beginning to make itself known, a message arrived from the hospital. Her father would be detained overnight – again. Bella went down to the kitchen then, where she eased Mrs Carter's dinner out of the oven. She removed the lid – a casserole bulging with onions and smoked cod – and took it outside. She carried the dish down the garden path. Lumps of fish and half-raw potato spilled out, and her wrists flinched at the occasional spit of hot parsley sauce. When she reached the back wall, she tipped what remained of the casserole into a tin they kept there for next door's cat.

  Returning to her father's study, she stood before the apothecary cupboard that took up most of one wall. It contained many and multi-sized drawers as well as several nooks and compartments, and had come from the widow of one of his patients, a pharmacist from Aldgate. It had always reminded Bella of a tenement building, a secret life held in each section, a different life each time.

  She began, at first absent-mindedly, to open and shut the drawers. They made a clipping sound when they opened and a dry slight suck on the return. She did that for a time, opening and shutting: clip and suck, her enthusiasm increasing along with her speed until both had slipped just a little beyond her control. Then she was standing on a chair stretching towards the drawers at the very top; clip, suck, clip, suck. Faster and faster, on and on. Clip, suck, clip. It was only after a very close topple that she finally made herself stop.

  She was cold when she climbed back down. The fire had died and the room had grown dark except for a little street light through the window. Here she could see her father's consulting couch, the fold of a Foxford rug at its headrest. The couch, firm with horsehair and taut leather, would feel good on her back. She lowered herself onto it, pulled the Foxford rug up to her neck and lay down. Bella looked up at the window. She could remember her mother standing there, the evening after Miss Vaughan's body had been found, quietly weeping as she looked out on the street trying to find some sort of a reason.

  'It's the English, you see,' she had begun. 'They make you feel like you're being forward when you're only trying to be friendly. They make you ashamed.'

  'It's these streets,' she had decided then a few minutes later. 'Everyone trying to stay private when we're all on top of each other, looking in at each other, pretending we can't see.'

  'It's these houses,' she had concluded. 'These awful Chelsea houses.'

  Bella lay listening to the sounds of the surrounding rooms – the peevish chime of a clock, the sob and sigh of a water pipe, the whinge of an upstairs door Mrs Carter had forgotten to lock. She could hear no laughter, nor conversation from the future. There were only the sounds of a melancholic house. If she was to be honest with herself, it was a house that should suit her quite well.

  *

  Days went by and she couldn't shake off the feeling that if she went to Sicily she would never see her father again. Bella reminded herself that he was not an old man, although his exact age was unknown to her. There had always been a slight awkwardness around the subject, probably because he had been some years younger than his late wife. Perhaps as many as ten. Judging by the date of the Hippocratic Oath framed on the wall of his study along with a photograph taken on the day, Bella guessed he must have been about twenty-four when he graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. This would make him now about sixty or sixty-one. It wasn't very old, but hardly the first flush either. In any case he would grow older. One day he would die. Perhaps be ill first, even linger. She found herself daydreaming about what it would be like to be his nurse, rushing to his bedside from Sicily on the summons of a telegram. In her daydreams his condition never worsened nor did he grow any older. He stayed much the same; sick enough to be infirm, well enough not to suffer too much. They would have years of that, her nursing, him being nursed. Her reading, him listening. Or fixing the blanket around his knees and bringing him invalid's soup; propping him up by the window on days that were warm, bucking him up on wet days when he might feel a little down. If a doctor came into the picture it would be to Bella he would address himself, drawing her into a hushed conversation on the far side of the door.

  The daydreams passed, spat away by the rain on the window, or burnt up by the fire in the grate, and the feeling came back to her. She would not see him again. He would be dead before her return. She would find out, days after the event, in a strange landscape surrounded by people she didn't know. His habits and moods would all become lost to her, just as those of her mother had done. He would become a series of vague and disconnected impressions, impossible to remember, and therefore impossible to grieve. Instead of the house and its contents, she began to catalogue her father. She found herself, like a child, constantly trying to detain him with banal comments and pointless questions he clearly had no wish to answer. His work at the hospital had caused him to miss so many recent dinners that she took to rising early, sometimes as early as dawn, so she could breakfast with him. Just to be able to sit in his company, to watch his face, to hear his voice. To remember. She even made a special effort to eat a good breakfast, just to please him. But her efforts went unnoticed and her presence at the table seemed to irritate him. After a few painful attempts, she left him in peace to study his notes or read the first post. She told herself he was never at his best first thing in the morning anyhow; a man with so much on his mind.

  She decided to make another attempt to visit her mother's grave, and even went as far as to order a wreath of flowers, drawing the florist into a lengthy consultation on the colour and shape of each bloom and throwing in a few reminiscences about her late mother, none of which were entirely accurate. But when the wreath arrived Bella couldn't bear the sight of it and threw it away. To escape the hawk-eye of Mrs Carter and make it blend into the rubbish bin, she had to first mutilate the flowers, then hack at the oasis that held them together until it crumbled to bits. How could she have even considered walking through Brompton cemetery with that absurdity in her arms, past endless terraces of gravestones and plots tended by love and grief, pretending to know or even vaguely recall where her mother was buried? Like looking for a house without an address. And even if she did manage to find the grave, how could she have imagined laying this insult down in the centre of what would have to be by now a shameful display of neglect, disrespect and trapped weeds?

  Bella settled on a photograph instead, a portrait she couldn't quite look in the face. Her eyes instead recalled the plum-coloured coat, the curl of cream chiffon over one shoulder. She took the same scarf from her mother's chest of drawers, stood for a while with the drawer slanted in her hands, looking down into the intimacies of a life that had once belonged to her mother. Folds of silk, a book of Tennyson's verse. Stockings, a corset. The start of a Christmas shopping list, and a pair of yellow gloves warped to the shape of hands, now decayed.

  She was shaking as she wrapped the photograph in the chiffon scarf and placed it in her mother's alligator travel bag. It was the first thing she packed for Sicily. The first physical acknowledgement that she would actually be leaving.

  *

  The luggage for Sicily labelled and waiting in the hall; clothes from former winters, in hope of future ones, moth-balled and boxed, ready for the attic. A few remaining days. Bella decided to pay a final visit to her father's old godmother, who lived in a nursing home in Piccadilly. Gummy by now and slightly deranged, the poor woman believed herself to be in a hilltown in Abruzzo, her days spent watching in the window for people long since dead, or waving out a
t strangers she suddenly recognized as her own. Not only had she lost her geographical bearings, but also her command of the English language, which, word by word, seemed to have fallen out of her head.

  Bella knew, or thought she knew, that the old woman had once been to Sicily.

  'Madrina?' she asked. 'Com' è in Sicilia?'

  'Com' è? Perché chiedi?'

  'Perché io vado in Sicilia.'

  'Tu vai in Sicilia?'

  'Sì.'

  'Tu?'

  'Sì. Com' è?'

  'È come Africa.'

  Then the old lady started to laugh, a distant, spiteful sort of laugh that Bella found disquieting.

  On the way home from Piccadilly a whim came over her. She would meet her father from the hospital. All that day she had been thinking of him, and how nice it would be to walk by his side for a while, be with him in public, away from the confines of the house, as an equal. A part of her also wanted to let him know that she had fully accepted her new life and was even looking forward to it. Her new life without him.

  This was the hour when he usually took a stroll in the hospital grounds to clear his head, smoke a cigar and relax for a while before either returning to his patients, or, if his work for the day was done, returning home. She would accompany him either way, he would be pleased to see her, she was certain of it. Perhaps he would even invite her to supper. Nowhere too fancy – after all, she wasn't dressed – but somewhere friendly where they could chat. There was bound to be a place nearby favoured by doctors. He could take her there, introduce her to his colleagues, proudly, as he used to do, when she was a child and they went on little outings. He could say, 'This is my daughter, off to Sicily in a few days, if you don't mind!' Yes, he would get a kick out of that.

  But the moment Bella climbed down from the bus and stood looking up through the trees at the long hospital windows, she was waylaid by shyness. Supposing she broke down when she saw him, started to cry again? Could she really trust herself not to make a scene? She decided it might be better to watch him first, allow a little time to monitor her reaction or, if needs be, compose herself at least.