by Jane Gardam
‘Look,’ says Peter, ‘there’s a star-fish. Pink as pink. Hey—take my hand. Mind out. You mustn’t slip.’ (This boy has long hard hands.) ‘The tide is coming in.’
How Anna cried.
The tide is coming in and it will cover the stone trees and then it will ebb back again and the stone trees will remain, and already the water is showing more growing things that are there all the time, though only now and then seen.
And Peter takes my hand in yours and I will never see you any more— How Anna cried. And things are growing in the cracks in the stones. The boy laughs and looks at me with your known eyes. Now that you are.
AN UNKNOWN CHILD
The bandaged della Robbia babies stretched their arms in blessing towards the piazza. Across the piazza the Englishwoman sat on a high window seat of the pensione and looked at them in the autumn evening light.
Her husband said, ‘Come for dinner.’
‘It’s a wonderful evening. Look at the della Robbia babies. It’s a pity about the traffic in between.’
‘They’ll want us to be in time for dinner. It’s a pensione.’
‘I’m glad the della Robbias are still there. They were there when I was twenty.’
‘They were there when your grandmother was twenty. And her grandmother. And hers. We ought to go in for dinner.’
‘Yes. Wait. I’m glad they haven’t hacked them off the walls yet. They took the frescoes off the walls you know. Some sort of blotting paper. We’ll see the marks where they used to be tomorrow. When I was here you could actually touch the frescoes. With your hands. Just going down the street. Like in the Renaissance. They survived the war but not the tourists. I’m glad they haven’t hacked off the babies.’
Every bit of the journey there had been babies. From London to Calais, Calais to Milan, Milan to Florence. A baby had watched them from the next quartet of seats on the Inter-city. Babies had screamed and chatted and roistered and roared, been carried and rocked and coaxed and shouted at on the boat. Larger, older ones had rushed about the deck, pushed their heads over the side between the spume and the seagulls, all the way to France. Two Swiss six-year-old babies with the heads of financiers had been absorbed in pocket calculators across the carriage from them all the way to the frontier. The night, from Switzerland to Chiasso, had been made sleepless by the wailing of an Umbrian infant with the toothache. From Milan, the corridor had been solid with nursing mothers.
He had said, ‘Evelyn, why the hell are we not travelling first class?’
‘I didn’t last time.’
‘My heaven—nearly twenty years ago. And you were fit then. You could have just about walked to Italy then.’
‘I’m fit now,’ she said. ‘A miscarriage isn’t an illness. It’s usual. A blessing. We know it.’
He was a doctor. That her miscarriage of a child was a blessing was a fact that he had levelly insisted upon since it happened, two weeks ago. The child, he had told her, had certainly been wrong. For the rest of their lives they would have been saddled with—
She had lain on the bed and said nothing. They had been married twelve years. For fifteen she had been doing medical research, as busy as he in the same teaching hospital. On her marriage she had made it clear that she had no intention of wasting herself—her youth, her training—in childbearing. Her brain was at its best. Children could come later. Good heavens, you could have a child at forty now. There was that top Civil Servant woman who had had a child—perfectly healthy child—at fifty. It had always been so—able women often produced children late. Mrs. Browning—(For Evelyn was properly educated: literary as well as medical.)
And she looked so young for her age. It had become a joke at parties, how young Evelyn stayed. ‘I’m Mrs. Dorian Grey,’ she said, though few of Mick’s colleagues knew what she meant. Mick had loved her first (it sounded crude) because of her health—her health, energy and bright eyes and shiny seaside hair and out-spoken Yorkshire good sense. In a rare moment of imagination—it had made up her mind to him—he had called her ‘The Scarborough Girl’. It had been her lovely, apparently indestructable youth and health and sense that had given him the courage to tell her at once after the miscarriage—directly after his consultation with her gynaecologist—that, at her age, there must be no more. To conceive a child again must be out of the question.
‘Why?’
He told her. She listened thoughtfully, with a careful, consulting room expression, not looking at him but at the waving top of the silver birch outside their bedroom window, for the miscarriage had taken place at home as they had so dashingly planned that the birth should do. The foetus had been between four and five months old. It had lain with her for an hour in the bed. It had had small limp arms. There was no telephone by the bed and she had waited an hour for him to get back from the hospital. The only sound in the empty house had been the whimpering and scratching of the dog at the bedroom door and her terrified, thumping heart fearing that it might get in. She had bled a good deal and had watched the birch tree turn its topmost leaves first one way and then the other in the evening light, had fainted as Mick arrived. As she fainted she had seemed to see his eyes in a band of brightness, separate from his face and filled with raw dismay. Afterwards—he had been so steady—she thought that this must have been a dream.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said now, ‘I didn’t know this place was opposite the Innocenti baby place. You should have let me book a good hotel. Just because you were here before— It’s no good trying to live things over again.’
‘I don’t try. It’s lovely here. I knew it would still be lovely, even with all the traffic now. When I was here before, the piazza used to be almost empty. In the early morning there’d be just one donkey and cart going across, and someone spreading out a flower stall round the feet of the statue. Now this huge great car park. But the light’s the same. And the buildings—the columns of the orphanage.’
‘Come and have dinner.’
‘And along here,’ she said, walking ahead of him down the narrow corridor with the old slit windows, ‘the floor used to crackle with the heat as if the boards were on fire.
‘And you could see mountainous great cedars—look. See them. Look. And just the top of the dome where the Michelangelo David is. Look how solid the trees are.
‘Oh—and the dining room’s exactly the same. Exactly. Look. Pure E. M. Forster. There’s even the same long table down the middle.’
They were shown, however, past the long table to one of the empty side tables. The long table, though fully laid, stayed empty.
‘I was here twenty years ago,’ she said to the waitress—who exclaimed and rejoiced. Afterwards Evelyn must come and see the old Signora—the very old Signora now. At once the girl would go and tell her. The old Signora loved people to return.
‘I was still a student,’ Evelyn told her as she came with the soup, ‘under twenty. Oh, it was wonderful to have free wine put on the table, just like a water-jug. We hardly drank wine in England then.’
‘You speak beautiful Italian,’ said the waitress. ‘Students have been coming here and learning good Italian, the old Signora says, for a hundred years. When were you here? Ha!’ (she clapped her hands) ‘Then I was the baby in the kitchen. Now’ (she stroked her stomach) ‘soon there shall be another baby in the kitchen.’
‘I’d like to be at the long table,’ said Evelyn over the pasta, which seemed very plain.
‘Nobody’s sitting there.’
‘Everyone used to sit there. All together. Like in A Room with a View. D’you think we could ask? Nobody’s sitting there.’
‘If nobody’s sitting there we might as well stay over here by the window.’
‘No—if we sat there, then other people would come. We could talk. Oh Mick—I wore such a dress. Tartan taffeta! Can you imagine? I thought you had to change for dinner, you see. I’d never been anywhere. Just r
ead Forster and Henry James. All the others were in beads and rags. It was the new fashion—rags. I hadn’t met it. I was terribly behind the times.’
‘This wasn’t the time when you were with The Love of your Life?’
‘No. I told you. It was just after Finals. Waiting for the results. I was with a girl who was chucking Medicine and going to be a nun. She went into a nunnery as soon as we got home. It was her last holiday.’
‘Must have been a jolly little outing.’
‘Mick’—Her laughter warmed him more than the eye-watering wine. He leaned across and took her hand. ‘I’m glad you didn’t go into a nunnery,’ he said.
‘Oh, I was pretty boring. I hadn’t even got hooked on Medicine then. I only wanted everyday sort of things.’
The door of the dining room opened and an English family—mother, father and five children—filed in and sat at the long table. The older children folded their hands. The younger ones sat still and good. The youngest, a girl about seven, sat on her hands, her short arms stiff at each side of her until the father turned bleak wire spectacles on her and said, ‘Elizabeth.’ Then she took her hands from under her thighs and folded them in her lap like the rest, but the corners of her mouth became very firm. She was unusually beautiful.
‘What a beautiful child,’ said Evelyn. Other people at side tables were looking too.
‘Yes. Come on, love, what shall we have next?’
‘No choice. It’s a pensione. Osso bucco every night. I told you. Mick—just look at that child.’
‘Yes. Let’s have some more wine. Leave them be.’
‘Why should I? I’m all right you know. You don’t have to worry. For heaven’s sake, look at them all. Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘The mother’s not,’ said Mick. ‘She looks worn out.’
‘Yes.’ Evelyn looked vaguely, but then back at the children, especially at the child Elizabeth.
‘What a father,’ said Mick, seeing the glasses gleam from one child to another, then the order given for all to say Grace. Five pairs of eyes shut around him. Five pairs of hands were folded together. The wife moved spoons about the cloth.
‘“For what we are about to receive,”’ said the father—
‘I don’t believe it,’ Mick said. ‘They must be ghosts. I’ll bet they’re from Hampstead.’
The children began to drink soup which had been rather laconically slapped down by the young Signora. The child, Elizabeth, looked round as the young Signora pranced by and the young Signora tickled the top of the child’s head. Again the father said, ‘Elizabeth.’ The mother continued to stare into space.
‘Shall we go to bed now?’ Evelyn was across the dining room almost before she had said it.
‘Aren’t we going out?’ He hurried after her. ‘For a walk? See the Duomo and all that? I think they floodlight it. It’s too early to sleep.’
‘No. You go and see it if you like. I’m tired. We’ll be out all day after this—every day from tomorrow morning. When Rupert comes there’ll be no cloister left untrod.’ Her face had lengthened and her eyes looked tired.
In his bed across the room from her he said, ‘You’re not sorry we came? It’s a busy place for a convalescence.’ He was staring at their painted ceiling, shadowy with carved angels.
She said, ‘I remember this ceiling. D’you know, I think we were in this same room. I wonder if—the girl who became a nun, goodness, I’ve forgotten her name—I wonder if she remembers this ceiling.’
‘You’re not sorry, Evelyn? It maybe has been a bit soon.’
‘Don’t be a fool. God—children have miscarriages these days. Abortions, abortions—you hear of nothing else. A clinical fact of life now. Unless you’re a Catholic. Even Catholics aren’t what they were. Catholic doctors now are doing abortions in Africa. In the famine places. It’s a rational matter.’
They both thought of the abortion reform posters they had passed, slapped over ancient buildings—church walls, palazzos—and modern banks and municipal offices, on the way from the station.
‘Not my line of business, thank goodness.’
‘Well, no—nor mine.’
‘You’re not trying to persuade yourself,’ he said, ‘that this is the same? This was no choice for heaven’s sake.’
After a time, as the old wooden room cooled and crackled in the early night she said, ‘No.’ Then, ‘What do they mean—choice?’
Rupert’s arrival was like a salt breeze. He bounced into the mahogany and plush entrance hall, arms astretch and talking, before the young Signora had finished opening the inner door for him. He was fresh from Cyprus—the archetypal, unwed, ageless English academic, rich, Greece-loving, sexless—all passions channelled into deep concern for friends: the man you meet at college who turns up about every five years looking exactly the same and remembering every last thing about you and telling you nothing of himself. One’s lynch-pin, one’s strong rock. ‘My dears—dears! Out. Out. Out we go at once before we’re eaten by the aspidistras.’ He wrapped Evelyn in his arms, gazed adoringly at the smiling young Signora over her shoulder and grabbed hold of Mick’s arm. Like many men with secret lives he touched people often and bravely, hating it.
‘What a place you’ve found. Is it real? I saw a troupe of little Nesbitts making for the Boboli Gardens with hoops and kites—a neurotic Mama and a father from the Iffley Road.’
‘We think Hampstead.’
‘My dears—Oxford. They can only be Oxford. Mum is a lecturer in—let’s see—Thermo-Dynamics and Pa is—Pa is—ha! He is a Biologist. He reads Peter Rabbit at home and picks apart little pussy cats in the day-time. He glares down microscopes at the death agonies of gnats. One day the children will all silently pack their bags and away to California. And Mama will take a tiny pistol out of her poche and shoot him through the head.’
‘You know them, Rupert?’
The three of them were clattering down the pensione’s stone stairs under the vaulted archway to the piazza.
‘But dozens of them. Whole families of them.’
‘Oxford rather than Cambridge?’
‘Oh—masses more of them at Cambridge. Cousins and cousins. But in Cambridge, dears, they don’t dress their children in Greenaway-yallery. It’s filthy tee-shirts and shaven heads. All reading Stendhal at six. Shall I tell you what happened to me last time I went to Cambridge?’ He was sweeping them along the Via Servi. The crowds smiled at him, parting before him. ‘Drinks,’ he said, ‘with a Fellow of Queen’s. Sitting there talking (Coffee? Coffee? Let’s stop here.)—oh, post-structuralism, Japanese realist fiction, usual stuff. Out from behind a sofa comes youngest child wearing nappies and smoking a cigarette.’
‘Pot?’ said Mick.
‘No no no—Russian Sobranie. Twenties stuff.’
Evelyn was laughing. ‘You made that up, Rupert.’
She sat back at the cafe table, looked at the small coffee cups, the glasses of water, the sugar lumps wrapped in paper decorated with little pictures of Raphael’s Virgin and Child. She lifted her face to the sun.
‘Come on Rupert, you did,’ said Mick. ‘These children were History Man children. University of E.A.’
‘Certainly not, dear. History Man children have nothing to do with Oxford. Nowadays they’re churchgoers—1662. Learning their Collect for the day. The parents toy with communities—not communes, communities. Firmly, firmly in their own beds most of the time. If not it’s away to the confessional and deep discussions over an evening milk drink. All terribly sweet. The children terribly ugly.’
Evelyn became still. She watched the sugar lump as the coffee turned it amber. ‘Those pensione children weren’t ugly.’
Rupert began to talk of Giotto saints and San Miniato, all of which he said if they hurried they could see before lunch. Evelyn wondered what he and Mick had said when Mick had telephoned Cyprus last week to
say that their holiday together was now going to be a convalescence. Rupert stood right outside this area of loss, outside all areas of marriage. On Rupert’s part the conversation would have been no more than a quick exclamation of regret—then details of his time of arrival.
Yet, as the days passed, it seemed odd how skilful Rupert was being at making Evelyn smile, in directing her away from precipices. As Mick stood vague before the Michelangelos, Rupert kept at Evelyn’s side. While Mick made no plans, Rupert had pages marked each day in maps and guide books. It was Rupert who saw to it (‘My dears, this is a holiday—not a penance’) that they ate all their meals away from the pensione except for breakfast which they ate alone in their bedrooms. The admirable English family faded as if they had been the miasma they had looked.
On Rupert’s last day, in the woods above Fiesole, they picnicked and talked and sunbathed and slept and Evelyn awoke feeling brisk and well. In her old, incisive mood she talked of packing and, back in Florence, Rupert even allowed her to do some of his for him. He smiled at her with love as they all three struggled through the screaming rush-hour traffic to the railway station in one of the painted, horse-drawn carriages he had insisted upon.
‘Dotty things,’ said Evelyn. ‘Sentimental, Rupert.’ When she had been here before they had been the only sort of taxi. It had been different then. Pretty. Romantic. But now they were going to miss the train. Times change. You have to face reality.
‘Don’t you, Rupert dear?’
‘No,’ said Rupert, kissing her, waving goodbye, scattering largesse to porters, leaping the train as it began to move out. ‘Not all at once at any rate,’ he called. ‘Give it time. Let it face you.’
It was quiet without him that evening. They were tired and the pensione was dark and still and nearly empty. The long centre table was no longer made up and they sat in their alcove with only one old lady, bent like a leaf over her library book, at another. The food was a little less staid than on their first night, the wine kinder, the noise of the traffic less disturbing. There had been one of the frequent Florentine power cuts and the stately young Signora had placed a candle inside a bell of glass on each table so that shadows made the white-washed walls serene. Evelyn and Mick sat long over their coffee. The old lady closed her book and crept away.