In later years Christina sometimes wondered whether she had been born with a part of her brain missing, or whether it had merely been the influence of Granny P’s resolute materialism that had caused her, so early on in life, to have become the Sunday School iconoclast. Right then, in the context, it had had the effect of making her ears go fuzzy. She had endowed each of her three cirles with brown eyes and yellow hair and she’d thought of them as the Holy Family. Joseph, Mary and the baby.
‘We’re having a little difficulty,’ Mrs del Nevo had said afterwards, addressing Joe and Alice in the forecourt.
There was no ‘difficulty’ at all as far as Granny P was concerned. It was all just a lot of mumbo-jumbo. She didn’t understand, she said, how ‘Mummy’ could believe in so much nonsense. It evidently made her especially irritable to think of a man believing in it, though it was all right for ‘old biddies’, she said, who had nothing better to do. It was apparent that Granny P had always had plenty to do. For years she had run a thriving small business in her home town and she was especially indefatigable when it came to shopping and gardening.
Granny P lost few opportunities to vent her sarcasm upon her daughter and son-in-law. Once, Christina remembered, she had placed before them a photograph from her local newspaper showing a mother with her little triplets in matching, super-automated wheelchairs, alongside a prodigiously moustached civic dignitary who was holding up a gigantic cheque as big as a Monopoly box.
‘And I suppose your Church,’ Granny P said, ‘can explain why God sees fit to land this poor wretched woman with three spastic children? Not one, mark you, but three?’
‘Search me, Valerie,’ Joe sniped back in kind. ‘I guess it’s all down to the Vatican’s in vitro research capability.’
Granny P had ignored the remark and had gone on to tell a story about a beggar-man she had once seen, in Goa, in the precinct of the cathedral, who had been proof enough for anyone, she said, that there could not be any God. He had had no legs and no arms, it seemed, except for one ghastly little stump that he had made efforts to stretch out in supplication. Granny P had wanted to give him all her loose change, she said, but she had felt ‘far too creepy’ to go putting her money on the stump.
Alice, of all people, ought to know better, she said, because she was not ‘some poor bog Irishwoman’, but a graduate in Oxford Greats. Instead, she had simply espoused all the mumbo-jumbo along with her marriage to Mr Svengali. She had simply taken the whole package on board in a job lot, so to speak.
Not only did Granny P suspect her son-in-law of keeping prayer beads in his trouser pockets, but she tried intermittently to pick her daughter’s brain on related matters pertaining to the maintenance of mumbo-jumbo rituals. She had tried, for example, to find out whether Alice gave any leisure hours to scraping wax from votive candles off old iron candelabras. Or did she darn and spray-starch altar cloths? Or what was that white nightdress thing that priests wore under their gladrags?
‘It’s called an alb,’ Alice said, but she never actually answered her mother’s questions. She just sat there, smiling, like a person who had eaten enchanted mushrooms.
‘It’s the children I feel sorry for,’ Granny P said. ‘All that mumbo-jumbo.’
Pam did not enjoy these discussions. She usually climbed on to Joe’s or Alice’s knee and began to suck her thumb. Her heart exuded pity for the beggar-man who had no legs. She prayed for everyone to understand that he – along with the triplets in the wheelchairs, and all the maimed and all the festering, and all the abhorrent and abhorring; all the victims and all the perpetrators – that they, that he, that all of us are a part of the body of Christ.
Christina, who thrived on argument and was excited by rising tension, enjoyed any situation where she could take sides with her grandmother, because this so patently irritated her father, even though he pretended indifference.
Once, when she had wheedled two Polo mints from Granny P’s handbag in the moments before her parents had taken her off to Sunday Mass, she had succeeded – but only by sucking persistently – in getting him to lose his cool.
‘Well, I must say,’ Granny P observed, disdainfully. ‘A grown man. All this palaver about a Polo mint. It’s no bigger than a penny –’
‘Mum,’ Alice said, ‘Joe’s point is that Chrissie should abstain.’
‘– it’s even got a hole in the middle,’ Granny P said.
‘Terrific,’ Joe said. ‘Valerie, that’s illuminating. Now you go devise some method whereby you can offer my daughter the hole without the substance and I’ll be more than happy with that.’
‘Joe –’ Alice said.
‘And in the meanwhile,’ he said, ‘I’d be even happier for you to stop corrupting my children.’
‘Joe –’ Alice said.
‘Your children?’ Granny P said pointedly. ‘Corrupting?’
Afterwards – after Joe had given his mother-in-law a bunch of star-gazer lilies wrapped up with a cloud of feathery gypsophila – they had all sat down to an uneasy Sunday lunch during which he had laboured to praise the joint and the gravy and the potatoes and the beans and, most especially, Granny P’s dessert.
‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘Just look at that, girls. A chiffon pie. Isn’t that just the most exquisite thing you ever saw?’
‘Joe,’ Alice said, once her mother had gone off to fetch the whipped cream, ‘give it a rest, my love.’
‘Give what a rest?’ he said.
‘You don’t have to carry on as though the pudding was made in heaven,’ she said.
The girls began to giggle. ‘Papa’s in love with the chiffon pie,’ Christina said. ‘He thinks the chiffon pie is his girlfriend. He wants to kiss it. Go on, Papa, don’t be shy now.’
‘And what have I done now?’ Granny P said stiffly, upon her return. ‘Or have I got egg on my face?’ She seated herself with a pointed dignity and placed the cream jug before her on the table.
‘Oh please Mum, it’s nothing,’ Alice said. ‘It’s Chrissie. She’s being idiotic, that’s all.’
‘See, Papa wants to marry the chiffon pie,’ Christina said. ‘But he can’t because he’s already married to Mama.’
Granny P’s state of mind was not improved by the contemplation of this particular intelligence. She sat in silence while the girls still giggled together.
‘Chrissie does not deserve her dessert,’ Joe said. Granny P promptly rose like a lioness to defend her younger granddaughter.
‘Angelmouse!’ she said. ‘Pettikin-pie, of course you do! You come here to Granny-pegs, my precious, and help to serve the lovely pudding.’
‘Oh, boy,’ Joe said. But that was all he said as Christina minced smugly towards her grandmother and wriggled on to her lap. He watched her take up the large silver knife and the spatula. He was anxious, for Alice’s sake, to keep the peace.
Let us offer each other the sign of peace.
Pam was not a Doubting Thomas. Her second name was Mary. Her names were Pamina Mary. She had been named after a person who was the female hero in an opera and she had been born on the Day of the Assumption. She could sing beautifully and had always sung perfectly in tune. Joe called this ‘Pam’s gift’, and since he enjoyed extravagant gestures just as much as he enjoyed travelling, he had made a special point, one summer, when the family visited Venice, of taking the girls to a concert in the Ospedale della Pietà where Vivaldi had trained his choir of orphan girls.
The sisters had been captivated and afterwards it materialized that Pam could sing great chunks of the Vivaldi Gloria from the memory of having heard it just that once. Christina, as she heard Pam’s voice steer its clear, melodious course through the repeating undulation of the phrase, propter magnam gloriam tuam, could not but once again consider how fortunate, how glamorous it might be to discover oneself an orphan; a six-year-old musical orfana.
The visit had closely preceded their annual July stop in England with Granny P, where, among Alice’s extant children’s books, Christina had fall
en upon one about a little girl whom she at once took to be an orphan. The child was a French orphan, a Parisienne. This was obvious because in the pictures she walked past the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame and all along the Seine.
Christina fell easily into an identification with the fictional heroine since, like herself, the storybook child was not only small for her age and pert and possessed of two little braids, but she was sparky, conspicuous and accident-prone. She went to bed in a dormitory with eleven other little girls and they walked the streets two-by-two in the company of a kindly nun who made the gendarmerie stop the traffic for them.
‘Ah,’ said her grandmother in passing. ‘You’ve found Madeline. How nice. That was always one of Mummy’s favourite books.’
‘What’s an orphan in French?’ Christina said.
‘Oh dear,’ Granny P said. ‘Orpheline, I think.’
Christina was captivated – so much so that when Joe came in that evening, after his day visiting publishers in London, he found her still deep in the pages.
‘Hi, Chrissie,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m not Chrissie,’ she said. ‘You have to call me Madeline.’
‘Madeline,’ Joe said. ‘No problem. How are you, Madeline?’
‘You have to ask me in French,’ Christina said, ‘because I’m French.’
‘Okay,’ Joe said. ‘French.’
Joe was fully aware that his younger daughter was throwing him a challenge. He was not that good at French and he knew that Christina knew this. She knew it from when they had gone to a restaurant in Paris and he had experienced a little difficulty in getting the waiter to understand him. He had wanted to tell the waiter that Christina did not eat meat.
‘Ma fille n’aime pas manger la carne,’ Joe said.
‘La viande,’ Alice said. ‘Joe, he doesn’t understand you.’
‘So what the hell’s wrong with carne?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ Alice said. ‘Except that it happens to mean tickets. You know. Carnet. A book of tickets for the métro. You’re telling him your daughter doesn’t eat tickets.’
It had been a perfectly logical error, he considered, especially for an Italian-speaker, but thanks to Alice, the girls had then got so tenaciously silly about it that he had had to come on heavy.
‘Yummy yum,’ Christina had persisted tediously, making gnawing gestures on her napkin. ‘Mmm, yum-yum. Tickets, tickets.’
‘From now on, Chrissie,’ he said, ‘you will eat what I put in front of you.’ He had had no idea that her sudden mood of sobriety had been induced by a morbid contemplation of squid and the pancreas of calves.
‘Madeline only understands proper French,’ Christina said to him. ‘So you have to speak it properly.’
‘Okay,’ Joe said. ‘Properly. Comment ça va, ma petite Madeline?’
‘Is that proper French?’ Christina said.
‘Sure as hell it’s proper,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to spank you in French, Madeline?’
‘I’m an orpheline,’ she said in reply. ‘I live in Paris with a whole lot of other orphelines. I don’t even live with you any more.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Joe said. ‘That’s a real shame.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Christina said. ‘It’s nice. Look.’
Joe took up the book and volunteered himself to read her the story, during which it transpired that Madeline was not in fact an orpheline. She was away at school, that was all. And the kindly nun was a certain Miss Clavel who merely looked like a nun because she wore a headdress in the manner of a World War I nursing sister, or an Edwardian nanny. And at the end of the story Madeline’s father turned up to visit her in hospital.
‘See, she is not in an orphanage. She’s in a boarding school,’ Joe said. ‘That’s a school where you sleep over at night. You come home on the vacation.’
‘Then I’ll go to a boarding school,’ Christina said. ‘Like Madeline.’
‘Maybe,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll see about that when you’re older.’
Because Pam’s interaction with adults was always less shot through with tension, Christina had made the deduction that grown-ups liked Pam better – even sensitive grown-ups, she thought, who affected impartiality. This was perfectly understandable because not only did Pam have exciting origins and obvious talents, but she was beautiful and kind and she was never any bother. She was thoughtful and compassionate towards every creature. In the country she rescued spiders from puddles of rainwater and petitioned her father, in the most reasonable tones, please not to poison the mice.
She read books on making splints for birds with broken legs; and one Christmas, when Joe’s mother, Grandma Angie, came with gifts of dolls wrapped in tissue paper and a closet full of little clothes, Pam became the dolls’ mother, not intermittently for minutes here and there, but for weeks and months and years. She sewed for the dolls and took them on outings and read them stories and gave them turns at sitting beside her at the dining-table.
Joe was especially charmed by these manifestations of Pam’s femininity and when he did the cooking, as he always did on Saturdays and Sundays and holidays, it gave him enormous pleasure to produce exquisite culinary miniatures for the dolls. So that when the family sat down to their veal scaloppine – and Christina chose instead to fork half-heartedly at a half-dozen canned lima beans which she ate with a spoonful of green tomato relish – the dolls had their veal on the saucers from little espresso cups.
Occasionally Joe sought out miniature corn-cobs and zucchini for the dolls in the food markets and he served them their rum chocolate mousse with tiny swirls of whipped cream in crystal liqueur glasses on stems. Once, on Pam’s birthday, and birthday breakfasts always came special, Christina could remember that her father had made everybody eggs en cocotte, only for the dolls he had cracked open two little quails’ eggs while the family’s eggs came from chickens; two exquisite miniature eggs, their yolks the size of buttons, blushing under a translucent veil of warmed cream.
The problem was that while the sight of them turned Christina’s gastric juices all to bile, it did not make her wish to play with the dolls. And later that day, when Joe asked her to be his assistant and help him make pancakes, she refused, even though she loved it when he swathed her in a giant kitchen towel and stood her on a chair to pour the batter into the pan.
‘Oh, come on,’ Joe said. ‘My best pancake assistant? I need your help. Say, are you sulking, Chrissie? What are you sulking about?’
‘I don’t seem to like your pancakes,’ Christina said. ‘That’s all.’
‘You don’t “seem” to,’ he said. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? You love pancakes.’
‘Well, I don’t seem to like your pancakes,’ Christina said.
Joe emitted a knowing, sceptical laugh. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ Christina said. ‘Except that I don’t seem to like your pancakes.’
‘Uh-huh. So whose pancakes do you “seem” to like?’ he said.
Christina gave the matter some thought. There was only one person upon whom she could bestow a preference in this respect, whose nomination would seriously wound him, and that was Granny P, who had passionately detested him from the beginning and who evidently found it difficult, even now, to hide her antipathy.
‘I only like Granny P’s pancakes,’ she said. ‘See, she doesn’t put all that sloppy stuff in hers.’
She meant ricotta cheese. Her father was wont to fold his pancakes round little mounds of ricotta cheese, spiced with cinnamon and sugar.
‘No problem,’ Joe said between clenched teeth, and he looked close to committing assault upon her with the bowl of his wooden spoon. ‘You go ahead and like whatever you need to like, Chrissie. That is really no problem for me at all.’
Christina did occasionally play dolls, but only on condition that Pam consented to play hospital or school. During these enactments she became wonderfully tyrannical with the dolls and fixed on one or other o
f them as subjects for sacrificial treatment.
While Pam manufactured little school books, or turned down the doll’s bed sheets, Christina pronounced upon death and punishment.
‘Suzanne’s dead,’ she announced decisively. ‘She died of a fever.’
The morgue was behind the bookcase. When a doll died, Christina stuffed her behind the bookcase. When they played school, the same venue became the punishment block. When a doll misbehaved in school, Christina shook her and whacked her before stuffing her behind the bookcase.
‘How does she come to be so dictatorial?’ Joe said. ‘Put her in charge and she behaves like a parade sergeant.’
‘She’s learnt it from you,’ Alice said, and she kissed him.
‘Say, Chrissie,’ Joe said. ‘Tell me. When one of your patients dies, you shove her behind the bookcase, right? The bookcase is the boneyard.’
‘What if I do?’ Christina said.
‘And when one of your students shirks on her classwork, first you spank her and then you shove her behind the bookcase. Right again?’
‘Anyway, it’s none of your business,’ Christina said.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business. I merely observe that it is evidently better to lose your life than to shirk on your classwork. I hope you will bear this in mind, Chrissie, now that you are yourself in school.’
‘Don’t tease her, Joe,’ Alice said.
But he loved to tease her, because she would always bounce back so rewardingly. The name-saints had been just such a case in point.
The girls had recently entered first grade and one day their teacher sent them home to find out all they could about their name-saints. Joe had at once brushed aside their cloying and inadequate little tracts and had taken down his copy of Butler’s Lives.
‘Now, then,’ he said, ‘let us see what we can do with Christina.’
St Christina had materialized as a sort of twelfth-century bag-lady with powers of levitation since, during the Agnus Dei at her own Requiem Mass, she had suddenly risen from her coffin and had zoomed right up to the roof beam. There she had sat, refusing the parish priest’s earnest exhortations to come down. She was ‘escaping the stench of sinful humanity’, she said.
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