Last Train from Liguria

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  Her hand goes over his few possessions: shirts, collars, underwear, socks, cigarettes. She removes nothing, except for one silver sea horse from a pair of cufflinks and a long page with writing on it that she comes across almost by accident, folded into an inside pocket. It's the letter she wrote to him on her last night in Bordighera on Signora Tassi's handmade Amalfi paper. She unfolds it and sees he's written a reply on the back of the page. She has never seen so much of his writing at once. Every inch of the page has been used, starting at the top and bringing it right down to the bottom and his initial. She goes back to the top and wonders why his letter should begin mid-sentence, until turning over the page she finds his first words there, his 'My dearest Bella' starting his letter, where she had ended hers.

  DUBLIN, 1940

  June

  SHE IS IN WOOLWORTHS in Dublin when she hears that Italy has joined Hitler in the war against the allies. It's the day before Katherine's second birthday and she has brought her into the shop hoping the child will light on something that can be bought behind her back and given to her next day as a surprise. But she is two years old and everything surprises her.

  They have just come from feeding the ducks in Stephen's Green, Katherine trying to get into the pond to force-feed the bread to the unfortunate creatures. In the end Bella had to lure her out of the green and down Grafton Street with the promise of sweeties.

  Katherine, now overtired, is having a last spurt of energy. She runs up and down the aisles of Woolworths, pointing at rubber dolls, train sets, ashtrays, kettles, egg cups and holy statues. Everything is bestowed with equal love and admiration. It's a quiet time in the shop, shortly after the lunch hour, and the June heat is keeping customers away. One pregnant woman at the sweet counter, one old man peering at wallets, two young girls giggling over hair ribbons.

  The sales assistants are getting a kick out of Katherine. She is a funny, outgoing child, tearing up and down the shop, singing her little head off, throwing her arms open to anyone willing to catch her, coming back sometimes to slap her hand on Bella's skirt before running off again.

  'You have your hands full there.' The older assistant smiles and Bella smiles back and says, 'That's for sure.'

  'Go on,' the younger assistant is saying to Katherine. 'Give us an oul song there and I'll give you a choccie.'

  Katherine is screaming out a primitive rendition of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' when the manager comes back from his late lunch and announces the news.

  'Well, that's Italy in,' he says, striding through the shop, newspaper under his arm. 'That's Italy in the war. That's the Eyetalians for you now.'

  'With Hitler, sir?' the young assistant asks.

  'Who else, Bridget? Who else now would you think would be up to Mussolini's mark? The wonder is he contained himself this long.'

  Her legs go from under her when she hears the manager's news, and all the things she has put out of her mind come screaming back into it. The Signora in Germany. Alec in a Jewish orphanage. Edward. The pregnant woman clutches her bag of sweets and walks over to ask if she's all right. The old man looks up from his wallets. The older assistant tells the younger one to bring out a chair. Katherine comes tearing down the shop, lays her curly head on Bella's lap, nuzzles it there for a second. 'Mammy,' she says, then scuttles off again.

  The manager calls out for someone to bring a glass of water.

  Edward's Letter

  Villa Lami, Bordighera

  26 September 1938

  Edward,

  Thank you for your kind offer to go with us as far as Menton or even Monte Carlo. However, I have decided to go it alone. I will take my chances with the children.

  Whatever direction you decide to take, I wish you all the luck you deserve.

  B.

  My dearest Bella,

  I am writing this letter in the hope that you will never have to read it. Because if it's in your hand now, it means something will have gone badly wrong. As you know by now, I decided to go with you after all. In any case, my things are on the bed ready to be packed and I'm here at my desk, writing this letter, instead of in a bar, hugging a bottle. It's the middle of the night and soon I will leave Villa L. There are arrangements I've made, which now must be cancelled. I am laughing to myself – at myself rather, that after all these years I should come to this. But I can't leave you alone, not with Alec the way he is, and a baby on top of everything else. I have to try. And I promise I will try. These past few hours I've been thinking about what you said, that I never trusted you enough to let you get to know me, and that when it came to it I always closed the door in your face. Well, if you want to know, if it makes you believe I do care for you.

  In that case – my parents. They started with a bargain – her fine English artistic ways in exchange for his money. In the end both found themselves tricked. My mother was a minor opera singer who, along with notions of grandeur, had an insatiable need for endless disputes with colleagues and short-lived friends. A prima donna who would never be more than a terza. My father, for all his coarseness, was weak in these matters, and for years backed her up against his better judgement. I hated him for that, but realize now he had no choice. He had to convince himself that her outrages were somehow justified, or face the fact of her mental instability. Perhaps I've inherited that! Later his weakness soured into resentment, against me mostly, the child most like her, the one sent to an English boarding school in the hope that I might become even more like her! He made no bones about it. I was a waster, and probably not even his. Louise (my sister) his pride and joy. And yet I can't blame my parents for me. And it's a sad state of affairs when we can't even blame our own parents.

  Back to us. You are reading this letter and something has happened, most likely to me. Either I have been lifted, or I have decided that it has become too dangerous to carry on and have left you somewhere. In the middle of the night or when you least expect it, I have slithered off, leaving this letter behind where you may find it. You see, that's the thing, when it comes right down to it, I will save my own skin. Above all else, I will do that. And for this reason I know I don't love you and I feel that's what you want now, that's what you expect, after last night. What nearly happened. My saying this will cut your pride to the quick, but it's too late now for the usual rules of engagement, and besides we know each other too well for such games. I don't believe it's in my nature to love. Or to sacrifice myself to love anyway. It's simply not there. If it's any consolation I have come close with you, or as close to it as someone like me can do. And you have been my friend, Bella. You have always been that. In many ways, this is stronger than any romantic love could ever hope to be. If you feel any regret for me, any sense of loss, I can tell you how to cure it – find out about me – believe me, it will soon get you over it. I left Dublin in 1924 on 5 August. Go to the newspaper archive in the library, you will find all you need to know.

  Wherever I am, whether taken, or by my own free will, rest assured I am thinking of you. My dear, brave Bella, my friend. I am thinking of you and Alec and the baby, wishing you safe and well and wishing I were a different sort of man.

  Think badly of me. I deserve it.

  E.

  PART EIGHT

  Anna

  1995

  August

  NONNA DIED WITHOUT FUSS at four in the morning; not an unusual hour, it seems, for old people to 'snuff it', as she might have put it herself. The phone rang into my dream in the dead of night just as I was standing in the back of a rush-hour bus. 'Excuse me,' I kept saying to the standing-room-only passengers, 'can you let me through please? Can you let me through? That's the phone ringing now, to tell me my grandmother has died.' I had been shoving and pushing to get through the crowd, the sweat running off me, and it had all seemed so normal. Then I woke up, the duvet over my face.

  Of course, it had to be Bunty. 'At least she's not suffering anymore,' she said.

  'Well, thank you for letting me know,' I calmly replied. 'Thank you for that now
.'

  'It was very peaceful, Anna, she went in her sleep.'

  And I felt like saying, 'She's hasn't opened her eyes in months, how the fuck else was she going to go – roller blading?'

  'Oh yes, that's good to know, thank you again.'

  'You'll be in touch about—?'

  'Yes, yes. I'll give you a call tomorrow. I mean later on, today.'

  'I'm presuming you won't want her buried in the hospital cemetery?'

  'No.'

  'That you'll be making your own arrangements?'

  'Yes.'

  'I'll put her in the mortuary so.'

  'Yes, if you wouldn't mind. Goodbye.'

  I put down the phone and decided to get under the shower. I'd been back living in Pembroke Road since the beginning of the summer and still hadn't fully reacquainted myself with the moods of the house, like the fact that the immersion needed to be on at least twenty minutes for the miracle of hot water to occur. And so at around five o'clock on a chilly morning in late July, on learning that I had just lost the last member of my family, the only person in fact with whom I had any sort of a relationship, I found myself gasping and gibbering under an ice-cold shower. I don't know why, but it had seemed the only thing to do at the time, and getting warm afterwards at least gave me something to do.

  A while later I was skinning the back of my legs on the heat of a full-blast radiator, drinking tea and chain-smoking, my mouth chasing the trembling butt between my fingertips like a baby going after a nipple. It was bright by then and I stayed listening to the household shifting above me. The clatter of a toilet roll holder, the flush of a toilet, feet crossing floors, a rattle of clothes hangers, a television breakfast show. Another flushing chain. Each tenant in their own secretive little corner, imagining themselves to be private. I made myself another cup of tea, this time adding a tot of whiskey, wrapped myself in a duvet and crawled into the corner of the sofa.

  Upstairs, the door of flat number three opened and I followed the footsteps down the stairs, through the hall and out of the house. Then the car; a beep to open it, a thud to close it, and a rev or two to take it away. A few seconds later, the next tenant – flat number six; a heavier step, taking slightly longer to come downstairs, but more or less the same routine. And for a moment I felt that maybe I should be telling someone. Maybe the next time I heard a step on the stair I should waddle out in my duvet and stop someone in the hall and say, 'Excuse me, just thought you might like to know – the woman who owns this house? Well, she's just died.'

  But then I thought, To hell with it, they wouldn't know who I was talking about anyway. And besides, I was the woman who owned this house now.

  *

  We buried her from Haddington Road church. I say we – there were other people present but there was no one with me, as such. Not enough to turn me into a we, anyhow. Still, I was glad that such things still existed as old ladies and First Fridays, otherwise it might have been even bleaker. In that near-empty cave of a church.

  When I arrived Bunty was already standing in the porch. I nearly died when I saw her there. She was with two others from the hospital: a little ginger-bob junior nurse I knew vaguely and a slender brown man with soft chocolate eyes whom I'd never seen before in my life. A male nurse – a term Nonna used to hate because she said it always had her expecting Dick Emery or one of those chaps off the English telly to come prancing along.

  As I walked into the church I noticed another woman, about my age, sitting on the left, halfway up the aisle. It took me a few seconds to twig it was Melanie Connors, a girl who was in my class at school. I'd heard from another ex-classmate, recently met in the doctor's waiting room, that Melanie had fallen on rough times and had taken to going to the funerals of anyone she half knew or had heard of. On the make apparently: a funeral always being a good spot for free drinks and a bit of company or even to tap a few quid from the bereaved, which, according to reportbacks, wasn't beyond her either.

  As the priest began to run through the funeral rites, his voice fluttering in and out of pockets of empty space, I kept thinking about Melanie and what she was up to back there, and how out of the hour or so that day in the doctor's waiting room, gossiping about old schoolmates – the engineer who had gone out to Africa, the solicitor who had recently been on the news, the mousy one who had run off and left her husband and kids – it had been Melanie, taking her chances at the funerals of strangers, who had stolen the show. Even so, I pretended not to know her on the way up the aisle, and by the time the coffin was hoisted back down on the undertakers' shoulders, she'd gone. Melanie, clearly no fool, wasn't about to waste her time on a funeral of such paltry promise.

  The three nurses ended up coming to the cemetery with me. I got the feeling they hadn't intended to go any further than the mass but had changed their minds on realizing that the few old biddies posted here and there along the church benches, like counters on an abacus, had nothing to do with me, and that otherwise I would be burying my grandmother on my own. And so Bunty insisted on paying off the taxi I had waiting outside and we all went together in her Fiat Punto car.

  The traffic was slow on the Harold's Cross road and we found ourselves stuck in behind another funeral so well attended, the hearse was no longer in view. I watched with envy as each car slipped out of the line and over the road into the cemetery. Faces through glass, stony or weeping; drifts of cigarette smoke whiffling out the gap of a car window or up through a sunroof; a last-minute butt flick out onto the road. Then it was our turn: Nonna's hearse, followed by its pathetic one-car cortège.

  As the gate of Mount Jerome came into sight I saw an elderly lady standing near the flower stall, nonchalantly leaning on a Zimmer frame as if it were a garden fence. For every second or third car that came her way she lifted her hand in a halt and said something in through the passenger window. She allowed Nonna's hearse to pass undisturbed, blessing herself as it did, then stopped us.

  'Do you mind if I ask the name of the deceased?' she said.

  'Barrett,' I replied.

  'Barrett? Oh, thank God for that. I thought I was after missing her.'

  Nurse Bunty put her into the car and the male nurse gave up his seat and offered to follow the car on foot.

  The old lady turned out to be Dolores and I was appalled to have forgotten all about Nonna's only friend. I apologized over and over, until Dolores more or less told me to shut up. She had read the announcement in the paper, she said, and was dismayed to see the mass was in Hadding ton Road because she would never have made it that far and was fecked if she'd pay one of those robbing taxi men to take her there, but then luckily enough she had continued to read on down the death notice and was thrilled then to find, after all, that the burial would be here, in Mount Jerome, because she only lived down the road, a manageable distance for someone who travelled by Zimmer frame. 'All the same,' she finished by saying, 'isn't the weather terrible disappointing for this time of the year?'

  Nonna had been dead to me for some months. Dead, if still breathing. And realistically I should have been prepared. I'd often heard mourners say the likes of, 'I can't believe I'll never speak to so-and-so again,' or 'I can't bear the idea of never hearing so-and-so's voice again.' But I had grown used to the lack of communication. I had grown used to the absence of her. So why was I crying from the pit of my stomach, making a show of myself in front of Dolores and the three nurses? Why was I hurling tears after the coffin as it fumbled like a rusty elevator going all the way down?

  Everyone so kind to me: hankies, shoulder pats, a little hug, an arm to link. And all the while I kept thinking – I wish they'd all just fuck off home and leave me alone.

  Afterwards we went in for a drink. Dolores came as far as the pub, but disappeared while I was in the toilet. 'Where is she?' I whined when I came back out and found her gone. 'Did she not leave a number, did she not even leave an address?'

  'Ah, she was tired, God love her, ' Nurse Bunty said.

  I sulked over a whiskey or two
, then forgot about Dolores as the conversation came round to Nonna.

  I told them all the registrar had said about Nonna never having given birth. Then I told them all about the stuff I had found in the box in the nursing home storeroom.

  'Oh my God!' Bunty said. 'It's obvious, she was Jewish. She had to be. Rose Barrett – would that be a Jewish name? I mean, come on – two sets of identity papers? Just before the Second World War? And do you know what that means – we've probably just buried her in the wrong graveyard!'

  'Or she could have been a spy maybe!' ginger-bob suggested.

  'Oh, such intrigue!' the male nurse, a Bengali named Dilip, deliciously beamed.

  *

  For a week or so after the funeral I played with Nonna's effects, placing everything of possible interest on the table and making notes on my little finds. Trying to get the clues to follow each other – it kept me going, I suppose. It put in an evening.

  I would gather my cigarettes, lighter, ashtray, glass of wine or whiskey, depending on what form I was in, a pen and paper. And off I'd go. The box contained of two sets of identity papers. One set, obviously Italian, in the name of Magrini: husband, wife, a boy called Alfredo or Alberto – the writing was slightly frayed, so I couldn't really tell – and a baby named Edda. The other set was English in the name of Barrett, which was Nonna's name. Mrs Rose Barrett, husband James Barrett, also naming a boy, John, and a baby, Katherine – my mother's name.

  The address was in Burnmouth. I had never heard Nonna mention such a place, nor anyone named John.

  On both sets of papers, including a carte de tourisme for France, there was a place for photographs. But every photograph had been removed.