The Heart Is a Burial Ground

by Tamara Colchester

  There was the sound of footsteps, slow and meandering, and a voice singing a broken Flemish folk song and everybody turned to see Diana appear around the corner.

  ‘Oh.’ She stopped and raised her eyebrows. ‘A committee. Saving the world or organising a tombola?’

  ‘We’re planning our party,’ Caresse replied.

  The company smiled shyly, they were all a little frightened of the daughter.

  ‘Where have you been, darling?’ Caresse said. ‘You look very nice.’

  Diana smoothed her emerald watered silk dress over her behind and sat down, brushing a curl off her forehead. ‘I had an appointment in Rome with my new lawyer.’ She grinned at Roberto as she took a piece of ham and wrapped it round a long grissino.

  ‘Oh.’ Caresse regarded her with interest. ‘You must tell me about him.’ She glanced at Roberto. ‘Right, let’s get back to business.’

  ‘Caresse,’ Roberto murmured stiffly, refusing to look at Diana. ‘Alessandro had an idea that he wanted to discuss with you.’

  ‘Wonderful, well do speak.’ She addressed the whole group, uncertain who Alessandro was.

  The boy who rose was about fourteen and only recently aware of his beauty. Diana watched him, recognising that budding awareness, and then glanced at her mother’s rapt face as she listened to the boy whose slender neck rose tenderly from the collar of his borrowed shirt.

  ‘. . . and so we thought,’ the boy was still speaking. ‘We thought that we might have this party to celebrate you.’ He glanced up and then back down at his feet, surprisingly clean inside his brown leather sandals.

  ‘For me?’ Caresse’s eyes shone brightly in her pale face.

  ‘Yes, Caresse.’ Diana’s eyes flicked between them. ‘He wants you to throw them a party in your honour.’

  ‘Hush, Diana. Well, Alessandro, you know I love giving parties.’ Something was stirred in Caresse and she sat forward. ‘But I really don’t think I can give one for myself.’ Seeing their disappointed faces, she held out a hand. ‘But if you like, you can prepare a little impromptu speech for after dinner. Make a note, will you, Roberto.’

  ‘Signora, we also need to look at our finances.’ A boy in a neatly ironed shirt spoke up.

  ‘Well done, Michelangelo. How much have we got saved?’

  The boy, whose name was Massimo, shifted in his seat. ‘We have thirty thousand lira.’

  ‘Such a lovely word, don’t you think, “lira”. So much nicer than that clumsy dollar or clunky pound.’

  The assembled group nodded tentatively. She held her glass up to the light so that the sun warmed the pale wine a rich, clear yellow. ‘Not until you feel the satisfying weight of a bag of gold do you understand the real cost of things.’

  ‘What exactly is it you all like about parties?’ Diana leaned back and lazily tossed another piece of ham into her mouth.

  ‘Everybody likes parties,’ Caresse said, also resting back. ‘There’s nothing quite so fun as supplying a group of people you really like with enough booze and food to keep you all together and in high spirits for a good few days. Oh, I love it!’

  ‘And we like’ – a girl with pale green eyes began moving her hands slowly – ‘the music. Signora Crosby’s bands stay all night so that we never have to stop dancing.’

  ‘I like the girls looking so beautiful,’ said Alessandro, turning his head towards Diana, who was next to him. The scent coming from her hair was unlike any flower he’d smelled. ‘Especially Signora Crosby.’ Diana’s smile faded.

  ‘You absurd boy, I’m older than these hills.’ But she laughed and it was so natural and full of joy that everyone laughed too.

  Diana watched them all. Honestly, this place was turning into a fucking cult.

  ‘I used to give so many parties. Do you remember, Diana? Well, you couldn’t remember all of them, you were too young.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Oh, do you?’

  Diana looked at her mother, wondering how far she should go. She had never worked out the impulse that compelled her to open the floor like this. She knew by now the endless drive, the relentless push that never let thought act as a barrier – she was like him in that way. ‘I grew up at my mother’s parties,’ she told the group.

  Roberto’s eyes moved between the two women. He did not like scenes.

  ‘There were so many it couldn’t really be helped, I suppose.’ Her mother closed her heavy-lidded eyes. Roberto watched her closely. They remained closed for so long that he wondered if she’d gone to sleep. She opened them suddenly. ‘I dream of that room in Le Moulin so often. Hardly even the room, just the colour of the walls, that deep violent violet. It was right at the top of the house . . .’ She smiled dreamily. ‘A large circular room with a fire at its centre. Zebra-skin shadows on the walls and everybody passed out in various dream piles on the floor. And that infernal cannon – it used to drive the animals quite wild.’

  Diana nodded, despite herself. The needle scratching round and round. Bodies pressing. The frenzied barking of the dogs. The desperate neighing of the donkeys. And occasionally, the roar of the leopard.

  ‘But the best of all was the party known as the Beaux Arts Ball.’

  Diana’s gaze remained fixed as though still looking into the open fire in the centre of that room.

  ‘My husband and I threw a drinks party every year for all the young artists studying around the corner from our house in Rue de Lille. Our poor chauffeur had to lift so many cases of champagne up to the library that it absolutely did for his back. He couldn’t work again, poor man. So sweet – do you remember, Diana? He was about four foot high. It used to look as though the car was driving itself.’

  ‘Of course I remember.’ Diana dragged her gaze towards her mother. ‘His bedroom was next to mine. He taught me to swim.’

  Roberto raised his eyebrows in interest, but Caresse carried on.

  ‘One year, the theme was “Inca”.’ She washed the image across the room with her hand. ‘I was painted blue from top to toe and wore nothing but a long turquoise wig that came down to my waist.’

  Diana closed her eyes. The noise of the graphophone being turned and then her door opening and a man making his way over to the bed, sitting down heavily, trapping her underneath his weight. She stayed very still . . .

  ‘Do you remember, Diana?’ She opened her eyes and her mother was looking at her expectantly, the gathered teenagers all watching wide-eyed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We walked in procession down the Champs-Élysées,’ Caresse continued. ‘I sat astride a baby elephant with my back straight and my chest forward.’ She demonstrated the pose and could feel her heart beginning to move with the memory, taking her up and down as she’d swayed along the light-strung street, the grey hide like a dry riverbed come to life between her legs . . .

  Caresse smiled. ‘It was a night I shall never forget.’

  ‘It was also a night I shall never forget,’ Diana said, drawing all the eyes in the room back towards her.

  ‘Harry had a string of dead pigeons round his neck, didn’t he?’ Her voice became stronger as she finally looked over at her mother’s pale face. ‘He held a bag of snakes.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And he was painted ochre.’ Caresse nodded, arms crossed over her chest. ‘A Red Indian.’

  ‘Yes,’ Diana said. ‘I remember finding a dead bird on the stairs. Its beak had been crushed into the stone and there was a stain beneath it.’ Diana looked at her mother, who was frowning, shaking her head.

  ‘You were quite furious with the maids for not being able to get the blood out of the stone.’

  ‘Well, the entire house was practically destroyed.’

  ‘And everything was stained ochre. It was all over my hair, my bed, my walls . . .’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that.’ Caresse shook her head again, her face clouded.

  ‘Oh, but I do.’ Diana put down her glass and smiled, baring her teeth. ‘It was the night you decided
that Paris was no place for little girls.’

  Switzerland, 1927

  ‘What’s your name?’ Diana asked.

  ‘Isobel.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘I’m ten.’

  The blonde girl was quiet and Diana kept her eyes on her. She looked like a little rabbit. Closing one eye, she turned her fingers into a pistol and imagined the ‘pop’ and then hanging the limp furry thing up by its legs.

  ‘Do you like this school?’

  ‘Yes.’ The girl nodded.

  ‘Come and sit on my bed with me.’

  The girl came over and sat down uncertainly.

  ‘You don’t need to be shy. That’s just a convention. If we want to, we can communicate without words at all.’

  ‘How?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Like this.’ Diana took the girl’s hand and looked into her eyes. There was a long pause. ‘Now what was I saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I was saying that you look like a rabbit. Try with me.’

  The girl looked into Diana’s eyes, then shook her head. ‘I don’t think I’m allowed to.’ She glanced at the door.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not Christian.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Diana smiled. ‘I don’t tell tales.’

  Alderney, 1993

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Church.’

  ‘I think you go to that grim little hut just to annoy me.’

  ‘I go because I find it peaceful and a good kind of sad.’

  ‘Sad it certainly is. Sexless puritans droning in a frigid room. Hell is organ music.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s best not to talk about it.’

  ‘I think Inés is to blame,’ Diana continued. ‘That’s where the rot set in.’

  Elena thought of the simple white room of the roadside chapel in Ibiza, the sound of the occasional car passing in the midday heat, waiting outside with Leonie while Inés knelt to pray (for you, two traviesas) in the cool darkness.

  Elena looked at her mother and then, remembering the words of the sermon, came and sat down beside her. She took her hand.

  ‘Ivan is coming at eight and you haven’t told me what we’re eating.’ Diana pulled her hand free.

  ‘James has ignored my suggestion that we make a fish stew and has bought lobsters.’

  ‘First sensible decision he’s made. As long as he paid, that is.’

  ‘Oh, he paid, Diana.’

  ‘I don’t want the children flying about.’

  ‘They’ll be in bed by the time Ivan arrives.’

  ‘Good.’

  Diana looked at Elena. ‘Why do you insist on going to that church? I know you don’t believe in all that really.’

  Elena looked at her mother wearily. ‘Why do you care? You hang your garland round every passing calf. The complexity and purposelessness of your rituals has never ceased to mystify me.’

  ‘A sense of awe is exactly what they should instil.’

  ‘I prefer something simpler.’

  ‘I blame Inés. I should have been far more careful with that woman. If I’d known she was quietly converting my children I’d have got rid of her far sooner than I did.’

  Elena stood abruptly, gathering up the folded clothes she held in her arms.

  ‘Never trust a converted Catholic,’ Diana murmured. ‘Your father was right about that.’ She glanced at Elena, but seeing that she had lost her, drained the remains of her glass and then dropped the empty tumbler onto the carpet with a thud.

  ‘You look lovely, Diana,’ James said, and Bay turned to watch her grandmother sway into the drawing room, a wide gold belt struggling against her waist, her eyelids swiped with bronze.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Diana,’ the white-haired man said, going forward to kiss her on each cheek. ‘Wonderful to see you.’

  ‘Ivan,’ she laughed, pressing a hand lightly on his chest. ‘It’s been far too long since you paid me a visit.’ She swooped the hand up in a gesture of mock outrage. ‘You’ll have to work hard to make it up to me.’ The room seemed uncertain in shape and, making out the solid form of a chair, she set her path towards it, aware they were watching. She turned, her feet seemed to be caught in some kind of glue, and gratefully lowered herself into it, shaking her hair back to try to hide the effort the action had cost her. ‘Now which one of you is going to bring me a drink.’

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and Elena rushed into the room.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late, somebody rang,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh, you’re already down.’ She looked at Diana apologetically.

  ‘Elena.’ Ivan came forward. ‘It’s been some time.’

  Elena smiled tightly as she received his greeting kiss and admiring stare, and then sat down in a straight-backed chair beside her mother, snatching up a handful of nuts from a bowl on the table.

  From the drinks table Bay made her way towards her grandmother, carefully holding a glass stacked with ice, gin and sherry.

  Frowning, Elena watched anxiously as she crossed the room unsteadily and handed the glass to Diana.

  Diana took a long swig and then placed the glass beside her.

  ‘Is that Seduction or Devil May Care?’ Bay asked, looking at the imprint of her grandmother’s lips on the glass. She’d been learning the names written on the bottom of each of the gold tubes of lipstick strewn across her grandmother’s dressing table. Her mother rarely wore make-up but her grandmother dragged it across her mouth without even looking in the mirror.

  ‘One shouldn’t draw attention to these things, it negates the whole exercise. But if you must know, I call this one Laudanum Red.’

  ‘Time for bed, Bay,’ Elena said.

  Elena pulled the covers back and Bay slipped between them. She stroked her mother’s pale mouth and then wound her arms round her neck, drawing her towards her. She smelled of full-blooming white flowers and her hair was pinned away from her face. It seemed to Bay that her mother was somehow impermanent, as though she might not ever come back upstairs at the end of the evening, and Bay clung to her neck, unable to stop breathing in her scent.

  ‘La salade doit être retournée comme une femme,’ James muttered as he turned the leaves in a wooden bowl, his hands becoming coated with oily dressing.

  ‘Tell me, Elena.’ Ivan turned to her with a diplomat’s smile. ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘I was born at sea,’ Elena said reluctantly, unwilling to be drawn into a tête-à-tête. She could sense her mother observing Ivan closely. ‘My father bought my mother a boat as a wedding gift. I suppose I was the bottle smashed across the prow.’ She repeated the familiar line, loathing herself for it all over again.

  ‘Do you still sail?’

  ‘No. These days I associate boats with nausea.’

  Ivan admired Elena’s profile. There was something fine and distant about her, he thought. Quite different from her mother. None of that raw danger. Meeting Diana had been like watching a lion unscrewing a jar of honey. Now of course . . . He looked at her across the table for a moment. She was regaling James with a lively story.

  ‘I used to see your father from time to time,’ he said, turning his gaze back to Elena. ‘We were both members of the same club.’

  She inclined her head dutifully towards him.

  ‘Very good oysters there.’ To his surprise, she shuddered.

  ‘I can’t stand them,’ she said, and then glanced at her mother. ‘Unlike some, I don’t like eating things alive.’

  Ivan laughed, causing Diana to turn and look at Elena. ‘Your father was known for being able to eat several dozen in a sitting.’

  Elena wiped her mouth with her napkin.

  That club. Those lunches.

  She recalled the last time she’d seen her father, just after she had discovered she was pregnant with Jake.

  She’d felt terribly sick on
the tube as she was carried through the bowels of London towards St James’s and had walked as slowly as possible towards the imposing stone building, had forced herself up the stone steps worn smooth by countless hard soles.

  They ate the same meal every time. Oysters. Montrachet. A grilled sole meunière in front of each of them, her father neatly separating the flesh from her bones.

  ‘Anthony?’ she’d repeated. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘I was thinking, Elena,’ he said reprovingly, as he leaned across the table to fill her glass, ignoring the shake of her head. He’d always loved her name and he savoured it in his mouth like a good wine. She could just make out the faint lemon cologne he wore. Had noticed it when he’d bent to kiss her hello, his liver-spotted hand on her shoulder. ‘Dealing with your mother takes a great deal of concentration, with the majority of the energy being completely wasted. Unless in bed, of course. There was no problem getting her to do as she was told there.’

  Elena busied herself with her napkin and pretended not to have heard.

  ‘Now, while I keep thinking about our little problem’ (she hated it when he called her mother that) ‘you must tell me a bit more about how you’re getting on. I haven’t seen you for quite some time . . .’

  But as she’d sketched a bare outline of the life she’d excluded him from, she caught the claret-heavy gaze of one of the other members. The way the man had looked between Anthony and herself had caused her to lose her thread.

  ‘So . . . What do you think?’ She returned to her point, hands twisting her napkin beneath the table.

  Anthony sat back and wiped his mouth slowly.

  ‘Your mother is a complicated woman. I can’t believe I lasted as long as I did. Surely it’s up to that boy to look after her now.’

  ‘The “boy” is why she wants to sell Ibiza, Anthony.’

  ‘Really?’ The still handsome face expressed some surprise. ‘I thought he’d married her for it.’

  ‘David’s not interested in her money.’

  ‘ “David”, eh?’ He glanced at her over the rim of his glass.

  ‘He’s married to my mother; I think first-name terms is fairly common.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s a good person. But it’s falling apart. She’s mad to sell her house and follow him to London. She’ll be miserable there.’