‘Are you all right?’ She shut the door and the music was muted. ‘Shall I get the nurse?’
‘No.’ Caresse put out her hand with difficulty. ‘I just . . . need to be still.’
‘Can I pour you a drink?’
Her mother shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. Diana poured herself one and then came and sat beside her.
‘You look wonderful,’ Caresse said with some effort, smiling.
Diana ran her hands over her severe black dress, a high black mantilla draped over her hair and shoulders. ‘I don’t normally care for fancy dress, but I feel good in this get-up. A lapsed Catholic.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘All full of sorrow and prayer.’
‘How do I look?’ Caresse asked, her eyes shining. Diana had never heard her mother ask that question before, she’d never needed to, and she took a moment to answer.
‘You look wonderful.’
Her mother’s grateful smile was so unfamiliar that both were silent, save for the sound of Caresse’s laboured breath.
‘It reminds me of that gold suit you used to wear,’ Diana said, sweeping her hand down the molten run of silver.
Caresse nodded, her eyes closed.
‘That caused a stir.’ She opened one eye and half-raised a smile. ‘Though I remember you saying I looked like a clown.’
‘Did I?’ Diana blushed and looked away. ‘I was probably jealous. You should get into bed.’ The way her mother was breathing was making her nervous. ‘You’re not well enough to come downstairs.’
‘I don’t want to miss it.’
‘Come on, let’s not argue. You know what the nurse will say.’
‘I’ll only stay a short while.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘I’ll sit on the balcony, so I can look down at the dancing. They’ll be terribly disappointed if I don’t make an appearance.’
‘They’ll be much too busy to notice anything. It’s not your duty.’
‘No, it’s my joy.’
Diana remembered her mother’s words on the morning of her first wedding.
‘We follow desire, Diana,’ she’d said.
‘And what about duty?’ Diana had asked, looking at her mother in the dressing table mirror as she fastened heavy diamond clips into her hair.
Her mother had thought for a moment and then set her words down decisively. ‘We choose yes, duty is no.’
‘What about love?’ Diana bit her lip. ‘Doesn’t that become duty?’
‘Choose desire and you can’t help but be love. I always have been, and I’ve always been loved.’ And she was gone. Up and out, Narcisse trotting after her, like nails drummed impatiently on a polished table, so that Diana had walked down the dark stone staircase to the car alone.
‘How are you feeling now?’ Diana brought herself back to her mother.
‘Do you really want to know? For God’s sake, don’t ask to be polite.’
‘When have I ever been polite?’
‘In truth, I feel a little unwell, but I don’t enjoy being forced into bed, Diana, not alone anyway. I will go when I’m ready.’
The nurse came in and both women looked up gratefully. ‘Oh good, you’re here.’ Diana jumped up.
‘Go downstairs, Diana. You’ll have to be the hostess.’
Diana took a deep breath. ‘Yes, all right,’ she said falteringly and met her mother’s anxious gaze. ‘I’d like that.’ She stood. ‘I’ll go down and explain.’
‘Don’t explain anything,’ Caresse said sharply. ‘The last thing people want to think about at a party is sickness.’
Diana nodded, surprised at her mother’s choice of words.
As the door closed behind her and the nurse began to undo the small covered buttons that ran up Caresse’s sleeve, Caresse laid her head back and thought of the way that gold suit had shone under the lights on the staircase of the Bal Nègre, setting green eyes flashing, and later, the way he’d picked the spill of it up from the floor and held it to his face so that he could inhale the smell of her in its creases. Yes, people had always been a little envious of her, there was nothing she could do about that.
It was lucky, she reflected, that it had never been something she suffered with.
Jealousy was really for those who didn’t have enough – it was a lack of imagination about one’s own abundance.
The nurse began to take her blood pressure.
‘You know,’ she looked at the blonde woman bending before her, her hair threaded with silver, ‘Edith was jealous of me too. She couldn’t bear it when I was the hostess.’ Caresse paused to catch her breath. ‘Uncle Walter loved Harry and loved me. And oh we both loved Uncle Walter.’ She smiled at the nurse. ‘Walter Berry, do you know of him?’
‘No, signora,’ the nurse murmured, shaking her head and smiling apologetically.
‘As Harry’s wife, it was right that I should act as hostess at his parties, do the menu, make it swing, that sort of thing. We were new in Paris . . . Harry was terribly young, only twenty-two, and though I was a bit older and already a mother, Edith felt we were quite unable to manage the grand social event of a formal dinner.’ The nurse put her hand on Caresse’s forehead and frowned. ‘But Walter and I had great fun choosing the guests for those meals; a perfect purée of wit, beauty and bitchery. I think he just liked the way I made a party go . . .’ The room was silent save for her laboured breath. ‘Edith would often refuse to come . . . which I thought,’ Caresse lowered her voice conspiratorially, ‘was a bit wet. After all, Giulia, it’s how we behave in defeat that is the measure of the man. Or indeed woman. After Walter’s death, she tried her best to make off with most of the library that he left Harry. It was all very awkward and bitter. I don’t doubt she loved Walter – called him the love of her life – but they were so formal with one another. He described her as “his good friend” in his will – can you imagine?’
The nurse was busy with her instruments.
‘Though,’ Caresse looked down at the sheets, ‘I suppose that’s better than nothing . . . People can be so careless with what they leave behind. Perhaps they forget that it can be the one thing that threatens to wipe all the other memories clean away.
‘It was the times, of course, Edith and Walter were of a quite different generation. Jazz didn’t touch them. But I often wondered, as I would look at her across Walter’s beautiful table, what she would look like with her hair let down across the sheets, naked and laughing. I was very sexual then, though I wouldn’t have called it that. In those times it was simply love. An expression of desire. The body’s dance. But love always, even the parts that hurt terribly.’
Her voice was quiet and sad. ‘Harry adored making love to me, of course – all my husbands did – but I liked making love with Harry the most. It always felt as though we were getting somewhere, as though each climax was the beginning of the next part of the journey towards the place we return to. Perhaps where I am heading next.’ She laughed, her eyes brightening. ‘La petite mort, Roland called it. Well, there was never anything petite about it, in my experience. It was everything. More and more. A glimpse of the cosmos.
‘I never did understand my girlfriends in Boston. They were so strange about all that, could hardly bear to touch it, as a topic. But I loved it. Even as a girl I would often feel things there, sitting on a tree or riding my horse. That lovely feeling that made me so happy that I was a girl. It was all the greatest fun. What do you think?’ She looked at the nurse with interest.
‘Signora, my husband left me a year after we were married. I’d saved myself for him. I can’t say I cared for it. Not his way, anyway.’
‘And no one else?’
‘No.’ She smiled shyly. ‘No one else.’
‘How interesting. Do you miss him?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘He was uno stronzo. I only married him to keep my mother happy and I only saved myself because no one else asked.’
Caresse was thoughtful. ‘We must find you a lover. I
t is important to explore that side of life, Giulia. There’s a whole world in there.’
‘Oh no, signora. There’s a whole world up here too.’ She pressed her heart. ‘And I feel happy alone.’
Caresse gripped her hand. ‘What wonderful words. Thank you! I do that too. I also travel in here.’ She pressed her fist to her own heart. ‘Where I’m going is a mystery, but I also travel happily alone.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, suddenly very tired. ‘Yes, love is wonderful, but it’s . . . not easy.’ Caresse allowed the nurse to slip the dress from her shoulders and lead her towards the bed. ‘I’ve never been jealous myself, not of anybody. Well, that’s not quite true. I was a little jealous of the others . . .’ Her voice was slowing, becoming thicker. ‘We had so many others and I didn’t always want to share . . . and of course there was that . . . woman . . . and Diana . . . was trying . . . It was all a little trying . . . having to protect and defend all at once . . . it was all a little . . .’
The nurse waited a few moments to see that she was asleep. And with a click turned out the light and tiptoed from the room.
Switzerland, 1928
‘Diana, you shouldn’t have those aspirin. You’re going to get in trouble if they find out.’ Isobel stood by the bed, wearing her coat.
‘Well, they won’t find out, will they?’ she said, staring at Isobel. ‘Not unless somebody tells.’
‘I’m sorry my parents won’t let you come and stay this time.’
Diana shrugged and rolled over in bed. She waited a beat, then, sensing her friend coming close, turned and saw Isobel’s concerned face above hers. Snaking her arm round Isobel’s neck, she pulled the head towards her and kissed the half-parted lips.
‘I love you, Isobel.’
Isobel’s breath was shuddery and strange and Diana kissed with more force, trying to push open the clenched teeth with her tongue.
Roccasinibalda, 1970
‘Yes, yes, I’m coming back for the speeches, just give me one moment,’ Diana called behind her, walking briskly down the hallway away from the shrieking noise of the party. She passed a group of masked youths and then two women carrying an enormous platter on which lay the plump golden bodies of at least twenty roasted doves.
Pushing at the first door she came to, she closed it behind her, her breath the only life in the darkness. Feeling blindly with her hand over the wall she caught the switch – nothing happened. So stretching her arms straight she made her way slowly into the dark, grimacing in preparation for the inevitable bump, but then stopped in surprise as her hands met something curved and familiar.
She ran her fingers gently along their spines.
Books.
She was in a room full of books. Moving along the shelves, she inhaled the rich dusty musk of them. Her hands reached the slats of the shutters and she levered them open, so that a rectangle of moonlight stretched across the floor and from somewhere out in the garden the music of the band floated in. She ran her eyes over the titles nearest to her, pulled The Count of Monte Cristo from the shelf and turned the familiar blue cloth cover over in her hands. It was one of the first she’d ever read (hidden inside the cover of Ulysses) on those afternoons in the empty gymnasium while that little friend of hers . . . Isobel? . . . prayed for her in the chapel with all the other girls. She had liked those quiet hours, sitting at the solitary desk as she watched the sun move across the floor, knowing that back in Paris he too was sitting at his desk. Some ideas were easier than others to take in. Dantès struck a little deeper than dead-weight Dedalus wandering about like a lost smell on a windy afternoon in Dublin. She walked her fingers along the titles her mother had kept. This was the family her mother had drawn around her, Hemingway, Crevel, Boyle, Jolas, Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce . . . all bound together and stamped with suns of gold. Diana looked at their stiff spines and familiar names, wondering where they were now. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Mr Knife Miss Fork, The Pleasure Garden, The Rubaiyat . . . The great gift of Cousin Walter. She remembered the men in overalls rolling the endless bookcases into her nursery.
‘Books book books,’ he’d shouted. ‘Into our heads to feed our guts.’
She continued to trace along the rows of familiar titles, and stopped when she saw her mother’s name on a series of pale grey volumes. She removed a slender book and opened it past the rich crimson frontispiece. She read a verse, mouth moving in whispers around her mother’s words.
Life is a picture-puzzle
Of a thousand silly bits
Of every shape and colour;
Yet how lovely, when it fits!
If there had been someone there with her she would have mocked, but alone in the darkness she did nothing more than finish the poem and place the book carefully back among the other titles.
Perhaps, she shook her hair back, she should try to write another book. Something a little more experimental.
Set it all down. The story of her childhood.
There was plenty to say. Too much, perhaps. Where would one start? So much of her childhood was covered in a kind of mould that made her feel grim to even think of it. She could have been a great writer, if she’d had any kind of an education. The repressed ramblings of a bunch of nuns was hardly a foundation for great literature . . .
A shout disturbed the familiar line of thought and she went over to the window. Lights had been strung across the courtyard and beneath them a couple was coming to rest on a large bed that had been dragged outside. Well, that’s the natural play of a party, she thought. Everybody up up up and then drifting down. Hadn’t it always been like that, all those bodies standing about and she like a little ball, bowling them all over. Her and Clytoris, lying on the bed listening to the stream of guests at Le Moulin, the gurgle of laughter and tangled words below her window, music slowing to a scratch and then the rising screams and shouts of the guests who never stopped coming. Her and Madame Henri killing themselves to get all the food and rooms ready. Diana had helped – no one could say she’d never worked – cleaning out the animals (that unhinged leopard), taking water to all the rooms and watching the couples heaving on the beds or smashing things and each other because they could not make the words go. René Crevel screaming from the tower: ‘Do not succumb to domestic fires. They are death, they will eat you!’ She laughed softly, that must have been rather a rub to Madame Henri, busting a gut to prepare dinner for twenty cooked on a fucking candle.
Below her, a woman with a white halo of frizzed hair entered the courtyard and staggered along a wall, staring at the couple on the bed. Diana drew back into the dark room, aware that she needed to return to the guests. As she retraced her steps through the now silvery dark of the library she pictured everybody spread around that violet firelit room, eyes half closed after the heavy blessing of the pipe, as easy in their drugged sleep as the discarded clothes on the floor. And a strange woman, hair blonde, tight and curled – terribly ugly – eyes smeared with black, saying, ‘Is she yours, Harry? I didn’t know you had a little girl.’ And then catching her foot on a body so that she stumbled into the two of them. ‘Isn’t it time she was in bed?’ the woman had laughed and her teeth were yellow inside her red lips. ‘Time is the disease, madam,’ he’d replied. ‘And it’s rotting your soul quicker than your face.’ Diana ran her tongue over her own teeth. She must go to see the dentist when she was next in Rome. Drinking all this red wine.
She heard car horns down in the village. People were leaving, she noted in surprise.
Well, she wasn’t ready for bed. Didn’t she still have a life ahead of her . . . there was so much to do . . . her body still firm . . . she’d go back and indulge that man a little longer and then she and David could go to bed. She hoped David was tired. She wasn’t that young any more. Still, she straightened her black lace dress on her shoulders, a get-up like this shouldn’t be wasted in a library.
‘A toast, a toast!’
‘Not another performance, Ellis,’ someone said.
‘Worry not,’ he laughed. �
�A simple toast to the wonderful Caresse.’
Glasses were raised, and there were shouts and whoops and a smash as someone threw theirs from the window.
‘What about Diana?’ David asked Ellis with a smile as people relaxed into small groups. ‘Would you dare leave her out if she were here?’
‘She deserves her own toast,’ Ellis said, sitting down on the chair next to him in the light-strung courtyard, his eyes watching the couple moving on the bed. ‘Probably a few. That woman’s got more twists than a length of rope.’
David nodded. ‘There’s a lot to unravel.’
‘Apparently, around occupied Paris she was known as la débrouillarde – Diana the resourceful.’ Ellis took the joint handed to him by David and took a long pull. ‘A compliment paid by Marshal Pétain, no less.’
‘She’s an impressive person.’
‘A handful, I imagine,’ Ellis said.
‘A little untamed,’ David laughed.
‘That’s often used as a euphemism.’
‘I’m no walk in the park, myself. Perhaps that’s why we like each other.’
‘She was taught well, I suppose.’ Ellis coughed. ‘From the way she speaks, it sounds as if Crosby dug a deep groove.’
‘The prophet poet.’
‘A minor poet, if that.’ Ellis swigged from a bottle of Cutty Sark and David raised his eyebrows briefly, deftly rolling and sealing another joint.
‘But dedicated?’
‘Oh, by all accounts, lived and breathed it. That “frail and glittering literary interlude of inter-war Paris” or whatever schmaltz is now being applied. “A lost generation.” Too much money and too much gin – shit will happen. It’s the same now in Brooklyn, although there it’s too little money and too many bennies. But before you cut me off,’ he laughed, holding up his hand, ‘I do not downplay the horror of the war that led to that time, nor the quality of the work that sprouted from it, only the lumping together of so many stories in a single silk stocking. Some of those people were truly lost. Some just wanted a little vacation.’
The Heart Is a Burial Ground Page 17