‘Le guerre non fanno la pace,
i popoli fanno la pace.’
Caresse Crosby
(War does not make peace,
people make peace.)
Prologue
This is a story about a woman I never met and the lives she created. Examined from the outside and imagined from within.
It is as though I live on the ground floor of a tall house and she lives at the top. On the floor above me lives my mother.
On the floor above that my grandmother.
And way up above, in impossibly large rooms crossed with sun and shadow, lives my great-grandmother, Caresse.
I long to go up and meet her. I wish I could walk in those rooms. Lights go on and off. Sound filters down (often only the empty scratch of a gramophone needle going round and round and round), sometimes voices – laughter that could be the cry of a seabird, or the high pitch of weeping that clings too long to one note – but might only be the sound of the wind. The bang of a door moved by that wind, shocking the silence out of itself.
Mostly though, there is nothing.
My mother describes things as best she can, when I ask. But there are some things that make her hands go cold where she holds me, and I don’t like to press her there.
So it is inwards that I go to meet them. For they are in my blood, these women, in my bones; there is no choice in this matter. Led by a twisted gut feeling, I walk in the overgrown garden of my imagination where remembered tales grow tall. This is private, family property where I can search uninterrupted, away from the cold facts and ordered paths of chronology and into the darker corners, unvisited. Here I can collect the dropped stones, half hidden in the past, that led nobody home and lay them before me until a pattern begins to emerge – a mosaic of fractured images cast in the hard light of my present experience.
I will describe it as best I can.
This is their story.
Or perhaps just mine.
Let us begin, again.
Hotel des Artistes, New York, 1929
They had to break the door down to get in.
And there they were, lying fully dressed like brother and sister with only their feet naked, her stockings like two shed snakeskins in a heap on the floor. The tattooed suns on the soles of his long, gentle feet gave the police cause to raise their eyebrows but it was his ochre-painted toenails that really got them talking. Every newspaper mentioned it as though it meant something, as if it were a clue or even an answer. For many it was evidence enough. BOSTON BANKER AND HIS BRIDE IN SUICIDE PACT, said the headlines.
Well, they were wrong on two counts.
Harry was a poet, not a banker, and that girl was not his wife.
Roccasinibalda, Italy, 1970
Damn. She knew she should have brought a coat.
Diana slammed the car door, cutting off the man talking in the front seat. She looked up at the walls of the castle that straddled the low mountain and felt the wind move through her dress, making her shiver like the tops of the cypress trees just visible above the battlements. The sound ran through the forest that covered the hills around them – a river of shh shh shh – and Diana turned her head and sniffed the air. Someone was burning dead leaves, the rich smell sinking quickly into her hair and the soft wool of her cardigan.
A white flag flapped in the wind.
She had a flag now? Christ. Well, the sooner she organised things . . . the sooner she could leave. She wrapped her arms round herself. Why the hell was it so cold?
The other door to the car opened and the man got out, still talking. ‘This needs to be handled with care. Your mother is very . . .’
Diana looked at the lawyer’s face, still thick with sleep, and the greying hair sticking out over one ear. She couldn’t stand people who showed signs of the night before.
‘That’s enough, Roberto. Besides,’ she leaned across the roof of the car, ‘you didn’t care about all that earlier, did you?’
His eyes travelled down to the low neck of her dress. She rolled her eyes – too bloody easy – and began walking towards the vast wooden doors that stood wide open before them.
‘Who was it for this time?’ Diana sat in a low chair by her mother’s bed, inspecting her hands. There were the beginnings of some pale brown marks on their backs – sun damage – and she stretched her fingers and looked at them appraisingly. Still pretty good.
‘For all the young,’ her mother said in a Boston drawl as long and elegant as the curve of Back Bay, though roughened a little to a cat’s scrowl now, as she rested her head back against the banked pillows. Diana could tell the eyes were closed behind the dark glasses as she remembered. ‘We decided on a masquerade and had a great sugar-crusted cake covered with little flags to announce the different nationalities present.
‘At midnight there was a symbolic cutting of the thing and then a collapsing of each of their kingdoms into a sweeter world. There was a yoni – carved in rose marble by a new arrival, a most invigorating Lebanese – in front of each girl’s plate and a lingam for the men. A man from Japan sang a weird tragedy and there was a long recital – rather too long in Ellis’s case. I think his last poem might need a little edit; people were becoming somewhat restless towards the end. But the fireworks were wonderful. One girl screamed like a banshee – it might have been Paola, the baker’s girl – every time one went off, or perhaps she was just making love, I don’t know. And the Japanese singer drank everything in sight and kept shouting “Banzai!” at the top of his lungs for no clear reason. I could hear them all shrieking till dawn. Oh, it was marvellous, Diana, we were just on velvet.’
‘And what did this one cost?’ Diana asked in a voice that was not unlike her mother’s, but that drifted towards English, the vowels a little French.
‘What a prosaic question, in the face of a night that was pure poetry.’
‘There is a great distance, Caresse, between good poetry and bad.’
‘Well, this was good.’
‘As good as yours?’ Diana asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘Oh, you’re impossible. Hand me my glass.’ She held out a hand.
‘Isn’t that why I’m here?’ She fixed her mother with a level gaze as she handed her the water. ‘To see the lay of the land?’
‘You’re here,’ her mother said quietly, ‘of your own volition. I’m happy to see you, of course, but you didn’t need to come.’
‘The doctors said that you—’
‘I know what the doctors said,’ Caresse interrupted, and they were both silent.
‘It’s looking very well, the place.’ Diana got up and looked out the window, her stomach dropping at the sight of the trees so far below. She stepped back. ‘You should come and see the house in Ibiza. It’s looking spectacular. It’s just been photographed for a book called The Allure of Interiors. The photographer was the most hopeless fruit. He stayed for a week and kept drifting about in velvet flares calling everything “charmant” and drinking “fizz”. I thought I would strangle him with my belt.’
‘Yes, I must try and visit . . .’ Caresse said in a vague voice. ‘Perhaps next winter, when the storms come.’
‘Yes.’ Diana looked at her elderly mother where she lay in bed, her face unusually pale against the pillows. ‘Perhaps.’ She turned and ran her hand along the curved back of a chair upholstered in faded rose silk. ‘Strange to see these here.’
Her mother looked over. ‘I did wonder if the furniture wouldn’t be dwarfed by the space, but it looks quite right.’ The two women often returned to politely furnished conversation like this. It was the Boston in them, the dollar-bill green that still coloured their blood. ‘We’ve now decorated thirty-two of the rooms and the fres
coes we’re uncovering are quite astonishing.’
Diana watched her mother as she continued speaking, but her mind was moving with her hand over the curve of rough silk, picturing him seated in the very same chair, untying his shoelaces with vicious movements and then pulling his inked foot free.
‘I have new shoes, Rat.’ He reaches into a cloth bag and removes two hard black shoes, looks at them for a moment, then puts them to one side before picking up the battered old pair with the tender care of the newly bereaved. ‘But these have been my faithful friends since I returned from the dead in 1919. How many hundreds of thousands of steps have I walked in them? How many stairs have they mounted? How many rendezvous have they taken me to, how many storms have they passed through?’ He looks down at them and they seem limp and worn as the dead rabbit she’d watched floating past in the current of the stream while the grown-ups ate and laughed on the far side of the garden. ‘I shall bury them.’ He smiles. ‘They must be exhausted.’
‘. . . I shouldn’t be surprised if we uncover a Michelangelo or a Raphael.’
Diana looked up, startled to hear her mother still speaking.
‘The eternal optimist,’ said Diana, her throat dry.
‘Bars or stars, darling. It is a choice, you know. And you’ve arrived just in time – the roof’s almost finished. What a thing. I’ve promised a huge dinner to all the workers.’
‘A dinner for all of them?’
‘I’m hardly going to invite some and not the others. Each of their hands have contributed to the warmth and security of this castle and we must honour them for that service. I’m planning an Umbrian feast with an extraordinary recipe for roast turtle doves. You can stay for it.’
‘No, I won’t. I have to get—’
‘As you wish.’ Caresse shrugged the sentence off and smiled at the nurse who had quietly entered the room.
‘I have to get back,’ Diana continued, clenching her fists, ‘to finalise the divorce. Anthony’s being difficult. He’s retreated to his frigid country house to bang away at all the birds he likes. Takes absolutely no interest in Elena and has allowed himself to be snared by one of his secretaries. A ghastly little something called Anita.’
‘Bruised male ego and a jealous woman. Jeepers. I hope you’ve got a good lawyer, darling.’
‘Yes,’ Diana looked pointedly at her mother, ‘I have.’
Her mother returned her gaze levelly.
‘Anyway,’ Diana gave a little toss of her head, ‘I have my own guests arriving . . .’
‘Well, you’ll do what you will, as always.’ Caresse leaned forward as the nurse pushed up the pillows behind her. ‘Those endless divorce papers,’ she said fondly. ‘Such a bore.’
Diana picked something invisible from her sleeve and said nothing.
‘Don’t be cross with me for not writing to you,’ Caresse said after a pause. ‘Your letters can be so gloomy.’
‘I’m not cross with you. I know you don’t like my letters.’
‘Those listless sheets you used to send from school,’ Caresse continued.
That weren’t intended for you, Diana thought, watching the nurse roll up the draped sleeve of her mother’s heavily embroidered dressing gown, revealing the pale softness of the once strong arm. She wrapped a thick black band round it.
‘I’m not angry,’ Diana said. ‘I was only upset to hear about your heart. The doctors said—’
‘Well, what’s done is done, isn’t it.’ Caresse reached for her diary with her free hand as the nurse pumped one, two, three and then released, carefully watching the dial. ‘Let’s look at today, that’s much more interesting. You’re staying for what, two weeks? A month?’ Diana glanced at the nurse uncertainly, but she made no sign, so she looked back at her mother.
‘Let’s say . . . a month.’
‘Wonderful! You can have the run of the summer palace across the courtyard. It’s quieter over there – I know you need your sleep. I’m sad Elena couldn’t come with you, she was so charming when she was here last. There was a poet who was wild for her. How is she? Grown into a beauty?’
‘Of course. She has your breasts.’
Her mother smiled. ‘Good.’
The door opened again and an olive-skinned girl in a simple cotton dress entered with a tray holding a bottle of wine and two green glasses.
‘Elena’s a mystery,’ Diana went on. ‘Never speaks, but it’s as plain as day there’s something getting at her. She gives off a sense of continual disappointment, like a whipped dog. Eats absolutely nothing. What she does say is that I was wrong to get rid of Inés, which is absurd.’ Diana drank from the glass that had been placed in front of her. The wine was good and cold. ‘Whenever she’s down from Oxford she retreats to Inés’s little flat in Battersea. I had to practically threaten her with violence to get her to come and spend some time in Ibiza.’
‘Who is Inés?’ her mother said vaguely, bending down the top of the manuscript she was half-reading.
‘My old Spanish housekeeper. She lives in England now. You’ve met her several times.’
‘Ah, of course.’ Caresse brought her hands up to her hair to wave it back off her forehead. ‘How old is Elena now?’
Diana thought for a moment. ‘Nineteen?’
‘You were very fond of that awful Belgian, despite her being a reprobate.’ Caresse raised her eyebrows as she swallowed the pills handed to her by the girl.
‘Mette wasn’t awful . . . I loved her rather. And I was still a child, Caresse. I needed someone.’
Her mother said nothing and the silence hung heavily between them.
‘Well, Elena should have come here.’ Caresse broke the silence. ‘Tell her to come here.’
Diana shook her head. ‘She’s writing a paper about contemplation or some other whitewashed juju.’
‘Has she a lover?’
‘Yes, another one who wants to marry her. I picked him up from the side of the road in Ibiza. Terribly handsome.’ Diana smiled and Caresse laughed. ‘It won’t last though – she maintains a cool distance with all her men. Enough to catch a chill.’
‘Perhaps she’s trying to communicate something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Maybe she’s a lesbian.’
‘Perhaps. Though I’d be the last person to know if she was. Inés has the keys to that kingdom.’
‘Well, all will be revealed in time,’ Caresse said.
‘And has . . . Leonie been in contact with you?’ Diana asked, looking over her shoulder at the view through the window.
‘Yes,’ Caresse said quietly, ‘she has. She called me from the hospital in New York a few days ago.’
‘And . . .’
‘And she doesn’t want to see you, I’m afraid.’
Diana’s eyes glittered. ‘She told you that?’
‘In as many words.’
‘Well . . . she’s old enough to do what she wants.’ Diana could not look at her mother and focused instead on the arch of her foot. She had wonderfully high arches. Sculptural, really.
‘The doctors say she’s recovering very well. No lasting damage, slight scars.’
‘It’s good that I didn’t flog all the way over there, then.’
‘Yes, she mentioned that you hadn’t.’
‘Is that why she won’t see me?’ Diana’s voice rose in anger.
‘It’s not easy is it, darling, getting it right?’ Caresse said thoughtfully. Then her voice changed, surging in a new direction. ‘Children are strange things. I wonder why it is that we have to have them – women, I mean.’
‘Some kind of punishment, I suppose. They certainly take it out of you.’ Diana finished her glass and then looked around the room, stopping when she noticed a portrait hung between the two windows.
‘You’ve kept it,’ she said, surprised.
‘Yes.’ Caresse turned to see what she was looking at. ‘I’ve always liked it. I think he got you very well.’
‘I thought you’d got rid of it.
’ She smiled and turned to face a mirror, arranging her hands in the same position and tilting her head, until she caught her mother’s amused glance in the bed behind her.
‘Why would I do that?’ Caresse said mildly.
Diana looked at her in the reflected glass and then shook her head, turning away. ‘I don’t like this place,’ she said decisively. ‘It’s too big. These thick stone walls keeping nothing out or in. Your houses are always too big.’
Her mother looked at her over the top of her glasses. ‘Places are just people, Diana. Places are just you. Why are you so touchy anyhow? Who’s your lover?’
‘I saw your flag flapping about outside.’ Diana ignored the question. ‘How is the great political party?’
‘It’s not political, it’s anti-political.’
‘Flags are always political.’
‘This is a place of true democracy,’ her mother declared. ‘A Republic of the Arts.’
‘And were you elected as divine ruler?’
‘Oh, Diana,’ her mother laughed. ‘You’re impossible. The Città della Pace is a peaceful philosophy that Ezra and I—’
‘Peace? Really? Why, that’s as worthy an aim as happiness. Far better to make peace with war, Caresse, it’s the only constant. And that old bastard Pound was always trying to get me on the stairs outside the nursery with his horrible scratchy beard. What the hell does he know about peace? It had hardly been two weeks . . .’ But something in her mother’s eyes seemed to block the words, so she changed tack. ‘He barely waited till you were out of mourning before throwing his horrid checked hat in the ring.’
Her mother looked at her for a long moment, but then, seeming to decide something, laughed. ‘He wasn’t that bad. And when the thoughts are as good as that, well . . .’ She held up her hands. ‘Anyway, when you’ve lived through two wars, you see that peace is the only thing worth fighting for. And peace is possible where people refuse to judge . . . Besides,’ she said lightly, ‘I remember you quite liking some of those kisses.’
Diana’s nails dug into the familiar tenderness of her palm as, from somewhere below, the round metal sound of the gong signalled lunch. She stood and smoothed her skirt down.
The Heart Is a Burial Ground Page 1