My tutor tried to persuade me to focus onTacitus’s Histories, and the more respectable verses of Horace, and Virgil. He thought I should be studying the ideal of the Roman hero, and his devotion to the Empire, the repetition of myths and legends, but I wanted to know about the underbelly of Roman society, to try to get a feeling for how the Romans really lived. And so I read Juvenal’s Satires, and Ovid’s Art of Love. More than anything I wanted to understand Julia, because she was an adulteress, too.
I sit at the kitchen table, sift through my notes and close my eyes. I am in the library again in London University, finishing off a sentence in haste, about to pack my books away. I have exactly five minutes to walk from the library, across the courtyard and to my tutor’s rooms. I am nervous. I have more to prove than my fellow students, for I am the only girl amongst them. My tutor doesn’t completely approve of my presence as a woman at the University of London.
Every morning when I woke up as a student of London University I doubted myself. What right had I to be there, safe inside the walls of the university when my father was suffering, and needed me? Yet it was my father’s belief in me that continued to motivate me every day. As children, Min was always the dreamer, but strangely our roles had been reversed and now my sister was taking care of Father. It was over six months since I had been in Italy with Mother, and I had not heard from her since Christmas. What good was a degree anyway, when as a woman in our world I was expected to marry and be a wife and a mother? Yet I was passionate about my studies. I happily spent all day in the monolithic library. I craved the safety I found in the building’s silent corners, where I had a purpose, and where no one could disturb me. My favourite spot was at the end of the long mahogany table, covered in green baize, opposite one of the large sash windows, affording me a view of the grey rooftops of the college buildings, and three cherry trees, which in the spring were delightfully pink, and gay, lifting me out of my brown world of study and the rows of cases filled with books.
I was not lonely. I saw my sister sometimes, and my father not so often. Mother was in Milan. I had no friends, for it would have been inappropriate to socialize with the other male students on my course. But I didn’t mind. I populated my life with characters from the past. In my tiny bedroom, when I could block out the noises of the family I lodged with, I thought only of Rome and of Emperor Augustus’s daughter Julia and her many husbands and lovers. More than anything I wanted to know how it felt to be her, and to be adored by men to such an extent?
A patch of blue sky pushes through the clouds. I stand up and walk to the window of my Irish kitchen, holding the sheaves of papers to my chest as if they are a child most dear to me. I remember visiting the island of Ponza in 1933 when I was in Italy. It was the beginning of my obsession. How the beat of the waves on the brittle Mediterranean shore summoned a picture in front of me. I saw quite clearly the exiled Julia, standing on the beach, craning to see land, her hands shielding her eyes, and her figure blurring as if there was a mist rising off the sea. It was only for an instant I saw this, but it was like a call to me, as if Julia herself had whispered into my ear, Tell me the secret loves of Julia Caesar so softly it made me shiver.
How could I have told my tutor that I believed I was on a mission to vindicate Julia? He was a cold practical man, hiding behind a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, with thin lips and a sharp, ironic wit. He believed my research on Julia to be frivolous, and irrelevant.
‘Rome was a patriarchal society,’ he kept telling me. ‘The lives of these women were marginal, and did not affect the main political events of the day.’
But I didn’t agree with him, and I hoped to prove this to him one day.
Two weeks in Italy. It changed my family’s destiny forever. I pick up the blue-and-white jug from the draining board and pour some milk into a teacup, taking a sip. I don’t like the taste, but I feel weak and need some sustenance. The milk is a pale creamy ochre colour, although it doesn’t taste sour. I dip my finger into the milk, and all of a sudden its colour and texture bring to mind the art of Giovanni Calvesi. The last time I was in his rooms he showed me his paintings. They were odd. Small and austere pictures of vessels – bottles, jars, vases, boxes, bowls, all of them brown, cream, yellow, white, the odd one blue or orange. The objects were always lined up on a dark-brown table, against a creamy ochre wall the colour of curdled milk. He called them all Natura Morta. Giovanni Calvesi showed me where he had set up his studio, and there was the same brown table, littered with lots of different objects, mostly stone jars, or ceramic bottles and vases.
‘Why do you paint these things?’ I asked him.
‘Because I like what is ordinary. To find beauty in what is plain, this is my challenge.’
‘Then why did you ask to paint her?’ I asked him sharply.
‘Ah,’ he smiled slowly, pushing his long fingers through his thick dark hair. ‘That was only an excuse to talk to your sister.’
‘But she is a married woman,’ I said hotly.
‘Yes, I believe that is so. And I, too, I have a wife and child.’
I looked about me. ‘Where are they?’
I could see no evidence of a wife in the artist’s plain rooms, no womanly touch. The floors were bare, with no rugs, and although the room was not dirty, it was higgledy-piggledy, with books and crockery all mixed up on tables and chairs.
‘They are in my home town, Bologna.’ He smiled and bent down, picking up a small piece of charcoal. ‘I was a boy when I married, and she was a girl. Together we grew up.’ He laughed. ‘Such innocence. But it cannot last forever. We walk through many circles of love, I call it my piazza del amore. Your sister and I. We have entered a new one.’
I could not stop myself, although I had promised Mother I would not tell him. ‘She is my mother, not my sister.’
Giovanni widened his eyes, stopped drawing. He roared with laughter.
I uncrossed my legs and stood up.
‘Please.’ He waved his hands towards the stool. ‘Please . . .’
Reluctantly I sat down again.
‘You are very young,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘I can see this in the texture of your skin, and the whiteness of your eyes. And your mother, hah! She is a goddess!’
‘But why did you change your mind and decide to draw me instead!’ My eyes blazed. I was angry with myself for agreeing to be this philanderer’s subject matter.
‘Sì, this is true. But she understands why.’ He swept his hands behind him, indicating his stacked paintings. ‘When she saw what I paint, she knew why I prefer to draw you.’
‘I am not a bottle, or a vase, or a jug, Signore Calvesi.’
‘No, Signorina June, but your form,’ he swept his hand, fingers spread, like the wings of a bird, over my chest, so close to my blouse that the skin beneath pimpled. ‘It is all the same, a vessel waiting to be filled.’
He paused, looking directly into my face, smiling kindly, and I felt myself blush, the slow creeping bloom of pink spreading up my neck, across my cheeks, while at the same time a knot untwisted inside my belly. I felt trapped under his knowing gaze, and wanted more than anything to get up and refuse to let him continue drawing me. What had he said before? He was interested in painting the ordinary? This was a wicked trick of my mother’s, revenge for all the lecturing I had given her the night before. She wanted me to know she believed me dull, and incapable of the grand love she could so easily inspire. For why else had she left me alone in the rooms of this Italian wolf for over one hour, knowing quite surely that he would never touch me?
Giovanni Calvesi picked up the charcoal again, saying no more. I closed my eyes, and then slowly began to unbutton my blouse, thinking all the time of my sister Minerva and what she had done to try to save my parents’ marriage.
I drop my notes. The papers scatter and fan out across the flagstone floor. The sky is dark again, and I can hear the rain beating against the door, the wind howling down the chimney. I shiver and crouch down, picking up the
papers. I pause and wipe a tear from my eye. Still the humiliation of that moment returns to me. Giovanni Calvesi had stopped drawing, and taken my hands in his. I opened my eyes, expecting him to ravish me, but instead he quickly did up my buttons and kissed my forehead.
‘No, no, sweet signorina,’ he said shaking his head before returning to his drawing.
I clench my fists. What quality do my sister and my mother have that eludes me? Yes, Robert married me, but he has never made me feel idolized. No man has ever looked at me as if I were a goddess, as Giovanni called my mother. How do they do it?
I gather my work about me, looking at the words written in a steady slanting hand. I feel better just to look at it. I see a picture of myself running up the staircase in the college, to the second floor, and knocking breathless at my tutor’s door. As always my throat is tight, my mouth sticky and dry, my heart is pounding, and I am shaking slightly, gripping tightly onto my books. Yet for all my fear, I have never felt so alive. When I remember this feeling of conviction, I know I need to start what I never finished. I need to write my thesis, even if I am a farmer’s wife living in the middle of nowhere in Cavan.
NICHOLAS
Driving into the yard, Nicholas notices a bicycle leaning by the gate to the orchard. It definitely wasn’t there this morning when they left. He lifts Hopper out of the car and the dog hobbles towards the bike, sniffing around it.
‘Who does that belong to? Hey, boy?’
He opens the gate and walks through the trees. He can see there are more apples to pick. At the back of the orchard there is a diminutive figure with curly white hair, reaching up and filling a plastic bag with plums. Nicholas coughs, unsure what he should say to the old woman.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Oonagh Tuite says, turning. ‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to run off with all your plums. I was going to ask if you minded, but you weren’t here, so I decided to pick some and offer to make you some jam in return.’
Nicholas joins the old woman and starts to pick some of the plums.
‘Well, that sounds like a good deal to me.’
‘Grand so,’ she says, stepping back and putting her hands on her hips. ‘Well, you get picking then and I shall take a little break.’ She breathes in and out deeply, a smile of satisfaction on her face. ‘I can barely remember what happened last week, and yet I remember being here during the war as if it were yesterday.’
‘What was she like? Mrs Fanning?’
‘She was a lady. Not a snob, or above herself, but just a lady. She read lots of books – that used to intimidate me at first, but she knew so much about history and art.’
‘So what happened to her?’
‘Nothing dramatic. She was here until she died.’ Oonagh scratches her head. ‘She was quite young when she died. Sometime in the Sixties, it would have been. The place was sold after she went. That was when the land and the farm were split up.’
She leans against the tree and stares wistfully into the woods.
‘You know, I don’t think she ever got used to living here. She used to talk about England and the seaside where she grew up, all the time. I think she always hoped she would go back home.’
‘But if she was here on her own all those years, why didn’t she go back?’
‘Well, you see, she was waiting. Waiting for him to come back, and I don’t think she ever gave up hope.’
Oonagh snaps out of her reverie and claps Nicholas on the back.
‘That’s why I always say to my granddaughter not to wait for anyone to change. You’ve to get on with things, because life can pass you by so fast. One day you’re a young thing, and next you’re a grandmother.’
Nicholas turns to look at Oonagh and her sparkling eyes.
‘But I’m still a young one inside,’ she says, banging her chest. ‘I get surprised when I look in the mirror and see this old wrinkly face looking back at me.’
‘Well, you don’t look your age,’ Nicholas says politely.
‘That’s very kind of you, young man,’ Oonagh says briskly. ‘Well, I think you’ve enough plums there for a gallon of jam. I had better be pushing off. I’ve tea to get for Paddy. The poor old fella’s hips are gone. That’s why I keep cycling. I said to him: if you don’t use it you lose it.’ She laughs heartily and picks up one of the bags full of plums.
Nicholas watches Oonagh cycling back up the lane, two big bags full of plums in her front carrier. There is still a good stretch in the evenings. He knows he should go back inside and do more work on the house, but it smells so good outside and it is so rare for the sun to be out, and the evening mild, that he goes back into the orchard, Hopper at his heels. He enters the wood and it feels like a balm to be walking on his own, in such private tranquillity.
He looks at his watch. Charlie will be home by now. Will she sense he was in the house? He has to stop thinking about her. But he finds thinking about the future without Charlie frightening. He wishes she had never told him about her adultery. He remembers the moment she confessed, the look on her face as if someone had died, and the snap inside his heart as she said the words:‘Nick, I’ve slept with someone else.’
His reaction had been a gut one, fierce and angry, unforgiving. He believed in fidelity, but was he so naive as to believe you could stay with the same person forever? Was that just a myth? He wonders about June Fanning and her story of the Adulteress. Was she talking about herself? Oonagh had said she was a lady, a faithful wife waiting for her husband to come home from the war. How on earth could she possibly betray him?
JUNE
I am in the orchard picking the last of the windfalls. The overgrown, sprawling mess of the trees make it a hard job. The orchard’s abandonment cloaks me, making the place seem even more eerie and miserable, especially on a misty morning like today. I ponder why it is that Robert’s family have been unable to bury their grief for so long, year after year, and allow the wreck of the orchard to remind them of their loss. How could they bear it? It is not a place I like to linger, yet ghosts or no ghosts, our orchard is a valuable asset in these hard times.
When every corner of our small larder is packed with apple jelly, apple chutney, pies, tarts, cordial and sauces, and when even I begin to tire of the tart bittersweet tang of apples with nearly every meal, I discover, through Oonagh, that I am able to use my apple harvest to barter for other things. The season for apples is short, and thus they are precious commodities and I have been able to get some more tea, and cigarettes – the two things I miss so much – and a little oil for the lamp so that I can read at night.
This morning we have had the first frost tipping the blades of grass, and ringing the ditches between the fields. As I work I can smell winter coming, and this anticipation knots inside my stomach. How will I cope here all on my own? Again I wonder: should I return to England? At least I would be closer to Robert. Yet he has forbidden me to come. Two weeks ago we spoke on the telephone.
It was an awful conversation, so short and disjointed. I was self-conscious, for a start, standing in the post office, aware of Miss Daly behind the counter, of Oonagh who had walked down with me and was waiting outside the box, and of other neighbours coming in and out. And although I was separated from them by a wooden partition, I was afraid they would hear.
He didn’t sound like Robert at all. His voice was more formal – ‘English’, I suppose, like when I first met him. I missed the soft thrum of his home accent, which I have become accustomed to now. I could hear other voices in the background, and I knew he had no privacy, yet I felt annoyed that he could not say more to me, and tell me he loved me. I almost wished something terrible might happen to me, something to do with the baby, so that I could jolt a reaction out of him.
‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked me.
‘Yes . . . and you, what are your quarters like?’
‘Oh, they’re grand. How are things with the foot-and-mouth?’
‘It’s fine,’ I replied, irritated he wanted to talk about such things whe
n we had so little time. ‘Nobody is affected here.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. And then there was a pause. I could hear all the crackles, and pips on the line, and my breath short and fast against the handpiece, and I realized, astonished, this was the first time we had ever talked to each other on the telephone. The first time, and we had nothing to say to each other.
‘Are you flying yet?’ I asked, panicked that Robert would say goodbye too soon and end the conversation.
‘No.’ His voice sounded flat and wooden, and I immediately regretted mentioning it. ‘It will be soon, June.’
‘When are you getting leave?’ I asked, my voice trembling.
‘I don’t know, June. Not for a while.’
‘Can I not come over to you, Robert, and find somewhere to stay, so that we can be near to each other?’ I asked hopefully.
‘God, no, June! It’s far too dangerous for you. There are raids nearly every night here.’
‘Oh,’ I gulped, and whispered, ‘but I miss you, Robert.’
‘What? Speak up, will you, there’s so much damn noise going on here—’
‘I . . .’ But I couldn’t bring myself to say it again. ‘Are you lonely, darling?’
‘I’m all right . . . bored mainly.’ His voice warmed a little and he sounded less tense. ‘There are plenty of dances, though. The chaps know how to have a party. You would laugh to see me, June, stamping on some poor nurse’s feet. But it’s better than staying in the barracks. Christ, they’re freezing!’
I was astonished. Not since we were married, over five years ago, had Robert taken me to a dance. After we were engaged he admitted to me how much he hated them, and I had never asked him to take me to one since. I love to dance. Who were these nurses who induced my husband to dance with them?
The Adulteress Page 17