by Rosie Thomas
‘Hey. Ouch,’ she shouted at him. When they had stopped laughing Tomaso seized her by the wrist, hauled her to her feet.
‘Swim?’ he asked her.
‘Race,’ Lily answered.
They scrambled over the lip of the hollow and ran, over the soft sand, down the beach. The black water was laced with silver foam. They plunged into it, whooping, and the coldness took Lily’s breath away. She swam, fierce strokes, then rolled over on to her back and felt the salt wash scouring her. She dived, slick as an eel, and touched the rippled sand. When she burst to the surface again, with Tomaso splashing beside her, she trod water with the cold drift of the sea between her legs. She felt sharp, and clean, and exultant.
After their swim, they dried each other with Tomaso’s T-shirt. Then, with Tomaso bare-chested, they straddled the moped. Sheltered by Tomaso’s warm back, Lily breathed in the hot, vegetable scents of the south as they rode up to Montebellate where she knew that Julia would be waiting for her.
‘Good film?’ Julia asked, putting aside her book and smothering a yawn.
‘Yes, really good,’ Lily answered composedly.
‘Where’s Tomaso?’
‘He’s gone straight home.’ Lily went to her, put her arms around her mother’s neck. ‘I love you, you know.’
Julia smiled, to Lily’s opened eyes suddenly seeming almost shy. ‘That’s good. That’s very important. I love you too. You’re a good girl, Lily.’
Lily looked over her head, out at the darkness pressing against the uncurtained window.
‘I hope so,’ Lily said, wondering.
Twenty-five
1977
The two women had been sitting at the corner table for a long time.
The waiters glanced speculatively at them. When the blonde came in, one of them had sketched a suggestive little gesture to his colleagues, but she didn’t see it. She had gone straight to the dark one, who was sitting in the corner waiting for her. They had put their arms around each other, holding themselves apart still so that they could look at one another. Then they had started laughing and crying at the same time. When the blonde took off her dark glasses and nested them in her mass of hair, one of the waiters insisted that she was a film star, although he couldn’t remember her name. The others shrugged. This was Naples’s best restaurant. Film stars were not exactly thick on the ground, but they were not unknown either.
The two women made an odd couple. When the blonde came in she was swathed in a long, furred jacket against the January cold. Then she took the jacket off, to reveal a tight, dark dress that bared the tops of her breasts. They were full and white, with a blue shadow between them, and when the waiters brought up the silver dishes they leaned forward to peer into the inviting cleft. The dark one was quite different. She was tall, and thin to the point of gauntness. Her clothes were tidy, but slightly faded, as if she required nothing from them but decency. Her hair was cut short, not very expertly, but the ragged points of it framed her dark, arresting face. She had high cheekbones and a long, mobile mouth bare of lipstick. She ordered their food in idiomatic, locally accented Italian, gesturing with her brown hands. The fingers were ingrained with dirt like a labourer’s, in bewildering contrast to her friend’s shiny crimson talons. But together the two of them spoke English, torrents of it. And they drank, too. The blonde tipped it back, although the dark one only sipped warily, at the beginning. But then the first glass warmed her, and she began to keep pace with her friend. The wine waiter brought a second bottle, then a third.
They laughed too, the two of them. Their laughter grew louder, attracting covert glances from the other tables, but by then the long Neapolitan lunchtime was almost over, and the restaurant was beginning to empty.
‘Oh, Mat,’ Julia sighed, leaning back in her padded chair with a full glass. ‘Why has it been so long?’
Seeing Mattie across the table, with her same hazy, sexy, reckless and short-sighted smile, and the light behind her turning her hair into a fuzzy halo, Julia thought she looked no different from when they had first known each other. At the very beginning of their real lives. And their real lives had twisted together, still knotted and curled together. The breach was forgotten. It seemed long ago and trivial, now that they were here together.
‘Five years,’ Mattie answered, ‘A bloody long time. But we wrote, didn’t we?’
‘I wrote.’
‘But if you insist on interring yourself out here, and never come home …’
‘Home is where you are, Mat,’ Julia said sentimentally. Mattie raised her glass. ‘Here’s to home, sweet home.’ They drank, gleefully. Five years seemed no longer than an afternoon.
The elegant room was deserted when their waiter brought the elaborate bill at last, and laid it between them.
‘Mine,’ Mattie said firmly. She unfolded it, then shrugged and dropped a credit card on top of it. ‘I’m not much good at bills and all the rest of it. Mitch does them, or the studio, or somebody.’
‘I’m glad you’re happy,’ Julia said, meaning it. They squeezed hands, rough against smooth, on the white tablecloth.
‘Let’s go home,’ Julia begged.
‘I thought you were home.’
Outside, walking into the fresh bite of the brief southern winter, Julia lurched against Mattie.
‘Oh dear. I’m not used to drinking.’ Mattie was none too steady herself. ‘Good job I didn’t drive up here.’
‘Didn’t you?’ Mattie asked, surprised.
‘I haven’t got a car. I used to use Nicolo’s, sometimes, but it’s broken, and we can’t seem to get it mended. And the two of us have stopped being able to think of reasons for ever leaving Montebellate.’
They steered each other to a taxi, asked for the station, and sank back into the smoky interior.
‘Julia, what do you do for money?’
Julia blinked. ‘I haven’t got any. I did have, you know that, from the house and the business. But most of that went, on the gardens. Do you have any idea what good topsoil costs, down here?’
‘None at all,’ Mattie said drily.
‘Well. Lots of money. And marble masons, and contractors, and hundreds of dozens of beautiful bulbs. And now the gardens are all lovely. People come to see them, you know? They pay money, and that keeps one gardener. Then there’s me, and some of the men from the ospedale are able to do some of the work. That’s all all right. The gardens will be kept up, whatever happens.’
Julia had evidently worked it all out. She had worried about it, and then rationalised it for herself. Mattie looked at her again. Her thinness and her odd clothes seemed suddenly to do with need, rather than deliberate eccentricity.
‘Jesus, Julia. How much do you want?’
Julia laughed, bewildering Mattie with her obvious, genuine amusement. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all. It makes everything very simple. I have re-educated myself.’ She was as triumphant, in her own way, as Mattie had been. They linked hands once again, and looked at each other.
At the station they found the train, and seats side by side. They had barely left behind the heaped-up, teeming Naples tenements before they fell asleep, their heads resting together. At Agropoli Julia jolted awake again, and shook Mattie. They yawned and rubbed their eyes, dazed and somnolent.
‘Just like old ladies,’ Julia protested.
‘Well, I’m staring forty in the face,’ Mattie said gloomily.
‘Do you feel it?’
They were standing on the platform, surrounded by Mattie’s expensive luggage.
‘Do I?’ Mattie’s face split into her smile again. ‘Most of the time I feel just the same as I did at the Blick Road first years’ party.’ And then, with the blue-overalled workmen and black-shrouded old ladies trudging past them to the exit, they faced each other, struck a pose, and sang ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me’.
In the second taxi, grinding up the hairpin bends to Montebellate, Mattie peered upwards and then down at the gulf behind them. The sea was shr
ouded in its white winter mist, and the land lay indistinct under a fine veil of it.
‘It’s like a fortress in a fairytale,’ she said.
‘My fortress,’ Julia answered. She didn’t know herself, now that Mattie was here, whether it was a strength or a weakness.
In the little house, Mattie looked disbelievingly at the bare walls pressing in on them, the two chairs on either side of the cold stove. She shivered a little, even in her furred jacket, because some of the plains’ mist seemed to have followed them and seeped between the blue-painted shutters.
‘You’re right. You have re-educated yourself.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said simply. ‘You’re not seeing it at its best, that’s all. It’s a summer house. But I don’t think much about comfort, any more. Look, I’ll light the stove. It only takes a minute to get hot. Are you hungry? Do you want a glass of wine? There’s some local stuff. It’s not bad.’
They sat down, facing each other in the two chairs. The stove’s belly glowed a dull red, and the room grew comfortably warm. Mattie took off her jacket, and propped her feet on a wooden stool. They drank the bottle of wine, and they talked.
They talked, seemingly, without stopping.
The avenues had opened up again, and they wandered down them.
‘When I was at Ladyhill, with Alexander,’ Mattie said, ‘I wasn’t trying to make him mine, or exclude you, or help myself to anything that I knew was yours.’
‘I know that, Mattie.’
Mattie stared at the stove’s red centre. ‘We always liked each other, Alexander and me. And we were just there together, in that beautiful place. It was a happy time, that’s all.’ She looked up, suddenly. ‘We were both lonely, I told you that. It wasn’t meant to last, although it was sad when it didn’t. Most of all, it wasn’t meant to hurt anyone.’
‘I understand,’ Julia said.
Mattie went on, determined to say now what they had never touched on before. ‘I didn’t know, you see. I’d never thought, until the moment I saw you watching us through that glass door. That you still loved Alexander. Even though I knew you so well. Thought I knew you so well.’
Julia cut her short. ‘It’s long ago, Mattie.’
But Mattie persisted. ‘Do you still?’
Julia gestured at the room, the bare essentials that furnished it, illustrating from it the bare essentials by which she had learned to exist. ‘I’m here, now.’
‘You don’t have to be.’
Julia smiled. ‘I don’t think I know how to do anything else, after five years.’ She stood up, leaving her creaking chair and crossing to Mattie’s side of the stove. She put her arm across Mattie’s shoulders and rested her cheek against the familiarly scented, intemperate hair. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve missed you so much. We’re still friends.’ It was a statement at last, not a question.
‘Yes.’ That was all Mattie said. They wouldn’t need to talk any more to fill the breach. Julia said later, as lightly as if it was any piece of gossip, ‘Lily told me that Clare isn’t at Ladyhill any more. She told me, in fact, that Clare is on the point of marrying someone else.’
Mattie raised her eyebrows. She peered at Julia, focusing as sharply as she could through the haze of local wine. ‘And so?’ she demanded. But Julia’s face looked smooth, and perfectly tranquil.
‘And so here we are in our separate strongholds. Me in Montebellate and Alexander, I imagine, at Ladyhill. It’s safe, Mattie.’ She brandished her glass at the thick walls, to the wintry silence beyond them. ‘It’s perfectly safe, living like this.’
‘Oh, well,’ Mattie answered, despairing of her. ‘If it’s safety you want. I’m going to go upstairs to bed.’
Julia led the way up the narrow stairs, into her own bedroom. She had moved out into Lily’s cupboard, in Mattie’s honour. She showed her the rudimentary bathroom, and Mattie eyed it without enthusiasm. Julia remembered the flush of dolphin-headed taps and tinted double handbasins at Coppins.
‘Hmm. Does Felix approve of this?’ Mattie frowned.
‘He does rather, as a matter of fact.’
Felix had visited Montebellate when he could, although not very recently. Apart from Lily, Felix was still Julia’s most reliable link with the world that had once been hers.
‘He would. He’s got very minimalist, lately.’
‘You wouldn’t go for that. No one could accuse you of minimalism, Mat.’
That seemed uproariously funny to both of them. They laughed so much, standing in the cramped angle of the stairs, that they had to hold on to each other for support. Julia was still smiling when she fell asleep, with the curling photograph of Tomaso pinned to Lily’s wall staring down at her.
In her short stay at Montebellate, Mattie seemed to recreate the old days so vividly for Julia that they became almost more real than the palazzo and the terraces and parterres. Julia took her out into the gardens. They leaned over the top terrace, looking down at the bare earth and the pruned branches, the startling green of the first spring shoots showing between the cold statues. Mattie shook her head in amazement.
‘I can’t connect all this with you.’
‘You’re not seeing it at its best, exactly,’ Julia defended it.
‘I can imagine how beautiful it must be. But it’s a life’s work, Julia.’
‘Tell me about your work,’ Julia asked. There were fewer questions for Mattie to ask. Julia’s life lay around them, clear to see.
‘I haven’t done much stage work lately,’ Mattie sighed. ‘Mitch doesn’t like it when I’m out every evening for weeks. I don’t like being away from him, either. A month or two of concentrated film work is better, because then he can come with me. But I get sent a lot of shit to read. I did a James Bond a couple of years ago, that was the biggest thing. Did it show out here?’
Mattie mentioned the film’s title and Julia frowned. ‘I’m sure Lily and Tomaso saw that one. They never mentioned seeing you in it.’
‘Probably didn’t recognise me. You should have seen the clothes they made me wear. You think these are tarty.’ Laughing, they stood up and took a last turn between the parterres, then walked through the silent courtyard and down the cobbled street to Julia’s house.
It wasn’t until almost the end of Mattie’s visit, lubricated with wine again, that Julia said, ‘Mitch. Tell me about Mitch now.’
She had seen it as the last taboo between them, the fact that they hadn’t talked about Mitch. She knew that it was in order to get back to Mitch that Mattie was leaving Montebellate the next morning, and she had an uneasy sense of the shadow of him still between them. Julia didn’t want anything separating herself and Mattie. Not now, not any more. And in her turn, Mattie had been sensitive to Julia’s isolation. She hadn’t wanted to talk too much of her own happiness.
Now, she said, ‘He’s a good man. There isn’t anything about him I don’t love. Nothing I can’t admire. There aren’t many people to say that about, are there?’
‘Almost none,’ Julia said softly.
‘He makes me happy. He’s always there, like a rock, whatever happens.’ She laughed, half to herself. ‘It’s not like at the beginning, when we could hardly get out of bed.’
‘I remember.’
Mattie blushed a little. ‘That changes. But it’s better, even. Coppins is a place for us. We go out if we have to, then we come back, to be together. Mitch does little things in the house, mends things, you know. It’s very comfortable. It’s very simple, when everything used to be so complicated. You always seemed to know what you wanted, Julia. Even when I was working, I was bouncing from one thing to the next. Men. Sisterhood. Political platforms. Booze.’
‘I remember,’ Julia said again.
‘With Mitch, I’m solid. He makes it possible for me to do everything else. That’s all there is.’
Looking at Mattie, at the smooth swell of her calves, and the rings on her fingers that Mitch had given her, and the way her hair coiled and sprang behind her ea
rs, and most of all at the light in her eyes, Julia saw the proofs of happiness and love. And she had come herself to the point of equilibrium, at last, when she felt neither envy nor bitterness. The shadow lifted.
‘I’m so glad, Mat,’ Julia said.
They held on to each other again, wordlessly, as they had done under the waiters’ eyes in the Naples restaurant.
‘I wish you didn’t have to go,’ Julia whispered.
‘Come with me.’ Mattie gripped her arms. ‘Why don’t you come home?’
There was a silence, and then Julia shook her head. ‘No, Mattie. I’m going to stay here.’
I know where I am, here. I know that, because there’s no further to go.
They had drunk a lot of wine, on that last evening, and before they went to bed they went out into the little street to breathe in the cold air. There were lights in Nicolo’s windows, and the voices and music of a television programme were audible through another window beyond it.
‘The joint is really humming tonight,’ Mattie murmured. ‘Hoo. Wow.’
They were giggling, leaning against the wall with their hands pressed to their mouths, like schoolgirls. Then they heard someone coming towards them. Julia recognised the faint click of beads before she saw the nun’s grey and white habit. It was Sister Maria degli Angeli.
‘I’ve been trying to take Julia away from you, Sister,’ Mattie called boldly. ‘Telling her to come home.’
Julia’s voice was much lower. ‘I’ve told her I won’t go. I’m going to stay here for ever.’ She knew that the nun must have heard their laughter; and that she saw their unsteadiness as they held on to each other. Sister Maria’s face was a calm oval in the darkness. Nothing would surprise or shock the Sisters of the Blessed Family, Julia thought. Nothing that she or Mattie could do.
‘For ever? There is only one certainty about for ever,’ Sister Maria said tranquilly.
In the morning, Julia went back to Naples with Mattie. She stood watching the Alitalia jet as it tipped its nose upwards, kept her eyes on it until it slid into the clouds. Mattie was gone, and Julia was left standing on her small patch of ground. She tried to fix her thoughts on it; on the gardens, waiting for her, and the safe horizons of Montebellate.