Last Train from Liguria

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  'Oh please,' I begin, 'it doesn't matter now. Really it doesn't. I'm sorry I sent it at all.'

  'My dear girl, you were quite entitled. And I'd just like you to know before we go any further that this sort of thing will never happen again. Never.'

  He begins to tell me about a new electronic security system, soon to be installed, involving secret codes and a button panel. As he speaks his fingers move as if already on the panel, his expression slightly bewildered as if he's trying to understand how such a thing could be possible.

  'Yes. If you forget your number then it seems – hard cheese. You have to go home.' Anyway, it means at least only a staff member can open the door. He tuts, then half laughs, closing that particular subject. Then, folding the letter, he slips it back into my grandmother's file.

  I glance at the file. Not all that thick, considering. A whole life boiled down to a few flimsy pages; a few shameful incidents recorded. I wouldn't mind getting my hands on it, but haven't the nerve to ask.

  'Anna?'

  'Yes, Mr Brook?'

  'We should probably talk about the tests now, and yes, my dear, you are quite right, it was without your consent. Now let me just explain why. The nature of her injuries being, well… You see we were concerned that a sexual assault may have taken place. Awful to think that such a thing could happen, but in fact not long ago, and not too far from here either, an elderly lady was sexually assaulted. Perhaps even by a patient in this hospital. The perpetrator was never found, I'm afraid. Anyway I'm glad to tell you no sexual assault took place. But, quite simply, we couldn't locate you, and therefore I made her my ward – this is the usual practice when no relative is available to a patient. Because you see it's imperative to act quickly in cases of sexual—'

  'Please, Mr Brook,' I say. 'Please, could you not keep saying that, I mean – even if it didn't actually happen could you not keep saying it?'

  'Which dear? Oh yes, of course, Anna. I am sorry. Look, why don't I get us some tea?'

  I wait for him to ring a bell, or go to the door in the wall and call out to a secretary, but instead he moves to a corner of the room and lifts a small electric kettle from a tray. He removes a dead plant from the sink before filling the kettle.

  'You were brought up by your grandmother, I believe?'

  'Since I was eight anyhow. After my mother died in a car accident.'

  'Ah, wasn't that unfortunate for you,' he tuts, as if it were down to some sort of carelessness. 'Was your mother an only child?'

  'Yes.'

  He goes to the wall and plugs in the kettle. Then turns around, smiles and nods as if he's only just seen me. 'And your father?'

  'He worked away from home most of the time so Nonna, my grandmother, took care of me. He died last year – cancer.'

  'I'm sorry to hear it. And what do you do yourself, Anna? Are you working?'

  'I'm an art teacher in a secondary school.'

  'Ah, that's very good. Tell me, do you have anybody else in your life at the moment, a husband? A boyfriend?'

  'My partner and I just split up, that's why I was in London.'

  'He works in London?'

  'He's an artist. He can work wherever he likes but yes, now he likes London. I was over there because I was trying to… Well, I don't know really what I was trying to do.' And I begin to sniffle again.

  'These artistic types, eh?' he says and rolls his eyes wearily before turning back to the tray. 'Still, a lovely girl like you won't be long about getting a replacement.'

  I listen to the rattle of cups.

  'And your grandfather? Is he dead a long time?'

  'I never knew him. He died in the war, in Italy. It's where they met.'

  'Ah, he was Italian? That explains it.'

  'What?'

  'She was speaking Italian, in fact the guards at first thought she was a foreigner. She used to speak it now and then when she came here first, and of course nonna is the Italian for grandma – am I right?'

  'Yes. But no, he wasn't Italian, my grandfather. He was English. English. I've always called her Nonna, I don't know why, really.'

  'I see.' When he turns back around there's a carton of milk in his hand. 'Were they married long, Anna?' He lifts the carton to his nose and sniffs.

  'No. Only a short time, I believe.'

  'Ah I see. Was your mother adopted, do you know, Anna?'

  I can feel my heart tighten like a fist. 'Is that what you found out, that my mother was adopted?'

  'You weren't told anything yourself on that line, Anna?'

  'No.'

  Steam from the kettle blooms behind his head and I wait to see what's next. He turns away from me again and makes, then pours, tea. 'No thoughts at all on the subject, Anna?'

  'No. To be honest Nonna is – was always very private. But I feel if my mother had been told, I would have been. Certainly my father would have said something.'

  'And he never did?'

  'No.'

  'Well, I suppose in the old days people often kept that sort of thing quiet – do you take sugar, Anna?'

  'No.'

  'Oh good. He smiles, turning back around. 'Because do you know what? I don't think we have any.'

  I don't want smiles or apologies about sugar, I want him to come straight out and say whatever it is he's trying to say.

  'So, Mr Brook, are you telling me that when you examined my grandmother you discovered she'd never given birth – is that it?'

  'Well, yes but…' For a moment I feel as confused as he looks. He passes me a cup of tea and waits for me to accept and taste it. Then he takes a short breath. 'What I'm telling you is, not only did your grandmother never give birth, but she was never sexually active. I mean, never. As far as I'm aware.'

  'But she was married?'

  'Indeed.'

  'I don't understand.'

  He shrugs, then, priest-like, lifts, lowers and then joins his hands. 'The marriage was never consummated.'

  Next he is standing up and I can see it's time for me to go. 'Anyway, Anna, I just thought you ought to know. Now I am sorry for all the upset, but at least she's safe, your poor old Nonna. At least there's no more distress.'

  'Yes.'

  He picks up his coat from the back of the chair and begins walking me towards the door. 'Again, I apologize.'

  And again I say it doesn't matter. Even if I'm still not quite sure what the hell either of us is talking about.

  I stand outside the office watching Mr Brook go to the reception area where a taxi driver, tucking a newspaper under his arm, steps up to him. There is a familiarity between the two men, and I get the impression that the driver has been waiting since dropping Mr Brook off. I can imagine Mr Brook saying to him, 'Wait here – would you? It shouldn't take long.' I look at the door of the office; heavy varnished oak, the title THE REGISTRAR painted in black across the top panel. Not even a proper Christian name, as if it's a movable post, allowing registrars to come and go, to be dragged off the golf course, or out of retirement without even needing to shave, when and as they're required. And I can't help feeling that somehow I've been duped.

  I return to the ward to collect my suitcase. Standing at my grandmother's bed, I have an overwhelming urge to touch her, more from curiosity than affection. Her hand seems the obvious choice. But her right hand, along with her entire right side, is guarded by drips, and there's no way past the wigwam of wires. Her left wrist is plastered from forearm to just over the knuckles of her fist, squeezing her hand so that the delicate bulbs of her fingertips are bunched together like something dainty in a vase. The plaster of Paris is a lovely job, a confectioner's job, smooth and white and careful. It gives me an adolescent impulse to take a marker pen to it. For a second I see the black gleaming letters trail from its nib; three words and a question mark. I try to decide how I'd arrange them, these adolescent words that have come into my head – in a bracelet around her wrist, or one word beneath the other in a column. Either way, my question would be the same: WHO ARE YOU?
<
br />   *

  When I get home the nine o'clock news is just coming on the telly. I stand at the door while the light from the screen jitters into the darkness, and the voice of a newsreader speaks to me. I can't believe it's been on the whole time I've been away in London. Then again, since the day Hugh left I don't think it's ever been off. I'd even made a little nest on the sofa in front of it, because it was less painful to sleep out here than in the bed we had shared. It had been the last thing I saw at night, and was waiting for me each day the moment I opened my eyes. Even while I slept it was there in the background slyly inserting its images into my head. How else would they have got there – the bland-faced professor and his quantum physics; the black-shawled Mexican dodging bullets up the side of a mountain? And now in my absence it's been twittering away into the empty rooms of my flat. Suddenly I hate the bloody thing, I want to kick it over, I want to bash my boot heel right down through its glass and into its guts. I pick up the remote and switch on the silence. Then I go up to the studio. Hugh's studio, originally supposed to be mine. The best room in the flat of course, a converted attic accessed by a pull-down stepladder. I haven't been up here since before he left, a long time before that even, come to think of it.

  I'd forgotten how much I liked it up here, how it had clinched my decision to take this flat. It's the skylights really; the way they throw light out in the morning across the long bare floor. Or even now, at this hour, the way they contain the night sky. The smell of wood and paint and turps; I'd forgotten all that.

  I think about getting the long pole and opening one of the windows. I imagine how it will groan and yawn and yield. Outside there will be a glimpse of a black Georgian roofline. The sky will be diluted to mauve by the city lights, and the traffic, muffled by distance, will sound like the ocean. But then I remember I've left the pole at the bottom of the stepladder, and it feels too far to go all the way back down.

  The room is dusty, but not untidy – he hasn't left enough of himself behind for that. What he hasn't taken, he has boxed and pushed under the eaves. 'I'll be back for the rest,' were the last words he said to me. 'You needn't bother your fucking arse, you stupid prick,' had been my dignified reply.

  So that was that then, after all the years together, that was the end of it. I knew he wouldn't be back. What he had taken that day was all he had wanted. The boxes had somehow been meant to soften the blow. Some day I might go through them; for the moment, however, I imagine them to be a conman's ruse – a folly, stuffed with newspapers and bricks.

  I move across the floorboards, stretching the width of this large house, smeared with years of paint and effort. There is something odd about the whole scene: the empty space, the dribbles of electric light from the bulbs hanging out of the rafters. The few carefully located props. And it occurs to me then, yes that's it, it reminds me of one of his paintings. I am walking through one of his paintings. All the more forlorn then, the dirty mug on an old kitchen chair in one corner; the twisted empty Marlboro packet on the floor; the can of Coke beside it, with one last cigarette butt squeezed out on its lid. And a tweed jacket humped over one of the boxes, the sight of which leaves me winded with grief.

  I come back down, sit on the last step where I wallow awhile, bawling my eyes out. Then I stop, and begin to think about Nonna.

  PART THREE

  Bella

  BORDIGHERA, 1933

  July

  UNDER THE AWNING OF Bordighera train station, Bella waits in the shade. Behind her a porter builds a small wall of luggage and she can hear the snail train potter off towards France. When she looks again the porter has disappeared without his tip, leaving an address tag pinned on the luggage: 'per Villa Lami, via Romano, Bordighera.' All she needs now is a driver.

  Outside the station, a row of heavy-headed ponies attached to carriages and traps; further along, noses to the shade, a quartet of vacant taxi cars. There's a chubby blue bus parked at an angle in the middle of the square. No sign of a driver in any case. No sign of life at all. Apart from the ponies and the devotion of flies all around them.

  She stays for a while looking over the piazza, for a moment loses all sense of place. The buildings, ornate and often shabby, their fragile balconettes like strips of black lingerie. To the right, a group of squat palm trees. Over the way, more palms; longer, leaner, shaggier; big unruly heads gawking into the second-floor windows of a darkened pensione. A newspaper kiosk, boarded up. An ice-cream cart, abandoned. Four large flat-faced cacti growing from a trough just behind it. Like a queue of deformed children, she can't help but think. The café down the way is closed, chairs folded and decked against the wall.

  Bella lifts her alligator bag from the rest of the luggage, crosses the piazza to a wall smeared with layers of scraped-off advertisements. Over a door a crucifix appears in an alcove, the face on the Christ gaudy with painted make-up. It hardly seems like a town on the Italian Riviera, a few miles from Monte Carlo or Nice. More like Mexico, she imagines. Or Cuba even. Some half-remembered place once seen in the dark of a picture house. Heat, dust, absence. The meandering snore of a swollen fly.

  An avenue facing the station seems to offer the only way off the piazza. She pushes her eye up its considerable length, the slight dingy downturn that takes it to, and then over, a crossroads where it begins to widen and lift into the sunlight. It stretches on for a time, and only seems to stop at all because a large white hotel, backed up by a burly hillside, appears to be blocking its way. The air seems as if it might be cooler up there, the buildings and palazzi solid and clean like slabs of ice cream. There would be cafés with shaded terraces. People who spoke English probably. English people, even. Tall glasses of something cold and sweet. But she is too afraid of leaving the luggage unattended, of getting lost and being found somewhere foolish, of missing someone who might this very moment be on the way to fetch her.

  A double-faced clock stands on the corner of the crossroads. Bella checks her wristwatch and finds a different time by over an hour. She remembers the clock above the train station and, taking a backward glance, reads yet another time again. Somehow, she needs to know. She decides to go as far as the crossroads clock to consult its other face and there, caught between time and four corners, they find her.

  The American cousins. Coming down the last few yards of the avenue. Equal height but different builds. One a little on the plump side. The other perhaps a bit scrawny. Two mousey-brown heads of hair, crimped to the ear. Four bare legs. The plumpish one sends down a wide overhead wave. The thinner one, who at first appears to be carrying something, a baby or perhaps a small white dog, turns out to have her arm in a sling. Both dressed for tennis, even though the one with the trussed-up arm couldn't possibly have been playing.

  The plump one says her name is Grace and insists on carrying the bag. 'They'll send the rest on up,' she says, clearly used to such matters taking care of themselves. Then, putting her arm through Bella's, she draws her over the crossroads, onto the avenue.

  The other one is called Amelia. 'So how do you like Bordighera?' she asks. 'Seems a little sedate, wouldn't you say? Well, don't go fooling yourself, it's that time of day, the Italians snoring off lunch, the English on the beach, braising themselves to death. Just you wait another hour or so – see how sedate you think it is then.'

  Bella, between the sisters, on an avenue that is proving steeper than expected, inclines her head from one to the other, smiles when it seems the right thing to do, finds herself frequently unsure of their accent, the speed of their delivery and their forthright manner (if they could really be saying what she thinks they are saying). They laugh quite a bit, particularly Grace. Sometimes Bella finds herself laughing along, without knowing quite why.

  'Have you seen the Musso wallpaper?' Grace begins.

  'I'm sorry – the which?'

  'You know? Mussolini?' Amelia explains. 'Il Doo-che! You better get used to him, let me tell you. Radio, newspapers, movie reels, you name it, every which way your ears or eyes go
– there's baldy old Ben-ee-toe. And as for the market place! His picture is pasted over every inch of wall, I swear it. Hardly a seam – wallpaper, practically. It's like a Mussolini parlour down there. I wouldn't mind if he was anything to look at, but he's rather awful – don't you agree, Miss Stuart? Don't you find him unattractive? By the way must we call you Miss Stuart?'

  'Well, Aunt Lami would probably—' Grace begins.

  'Oh God. Aunt Lami, let's not even think about her.'

  Amelia carries on in a tired, distracted voice, turning her hips stiffly as she walks along, breaking here and there into a short sideways glide, like a coquettish child, Bella thinks, or maybe one of those new sporty-type film actresses. In fact the whole experience is beginning to remind her of the pictures, which is the closest, up to now, that she's ever been to Americans.

  'She's not our real aunt of course,' Grace explains. 'The first wife, Aunt Josephine, was. Mother's sister – you know.'

  'Quite a looker too,' Amelia says. 'You won't be surprised to hear. They met when old man Lami was staying in New York in one of Dad's hotels – Dad's an hotelier, you know. They fell in love, as the saying goes, and he took her back with him to Sicily.'

  'Mother never forgave him,' Grace says, 'and then poor old Josie died.'

  'Only gone five minutes,' her sister continues, 'when he took up with numero due. Well, the less said there… Except for this – I don't think she ought decide what we may or may not call each other. Wouldn't you agree? After all, we are not children. If my guess is right, we are all, in fact, a little older than our dear Aunt Lami. Worse luck. I certainly won't be asking you to refer to me as Miss Nelson! You've met Aunt Lami of course, in Sicily? And we'll be expecting a full and frank on that, let me tell you. Odd little item, isn't she? Of course, he's going to die soon. Wonder what'll happen to her then? For all we know he's gone already – was he still alive when you left? Would one notice at his age, I wonder? We would have had a wire if— at least one would hope they'd have the courtesy to wire if. Oh, please don't think I'm callous, I certainly hope you don't think that. It's just, well, we don't really know him. In fact, we don't know him at all.' Amelia finally stops and joins in with her sister in laughing like a horse.