I stared out of the window trying to think of a similar outrage that Vivian had committed against me so as to erase his moral superiority, but I couldn’t remember any. The cruellest thing my brother had done had been completely unintentional. He had grown four inches taller than me by the time I got back home from my first term at university. And he not only had usurped my height, but had taken on a kind of sneering superiority in his way of speaking that can only have been an imitation of me. Everything he didn’t like was dismissed as ‘sad’ or ‘tragic’, which was slang for ‘contemptible’, and while I still caught glimpses of the old, soft Vivian when I overheard him talking to his friends, I never saw it again myself.
About a year after that, I found a diary in the drawer of his desk when I was looking for a pencil sharpener and leafed through it – pretending to myself that I wasn’t sure it was a private notebook – and found myself referred to as ‘that weirdo Damien’. I carried on reading it in the hope of finding something complimentary as an antidote, but only discovered further remarks in the same vein and a couple of short sentences where he said I was so staid that he felt sorry for me. I think I was hurt, apart from anything, by how little I featured in his internal life, more than by the tone of my few appearances there.
‘What was the kid’s name?’ my brother asked suddenly.
‘Which kid?’
‘The kid at your cook-out.’
‘Nathan?’
‘Nathan.’ My brother pronounced it with a sonorous finality, as though it were the tag on a folder of observations he was tucking away into a mental filing cabinet. ‘I’m hungry. There’s a couple of Twinkies in the glove compartment,’ he said.
I opened the packet and passed one to him: sticky and corn-coloured like a barely damp bath sponge. He stuck half of it into his mouth. ‘Want one?’ he said – except his mouth was so full it sounded like Wampum?
‘No thanks.’
At the airport drop-off I hugged him awkwardly. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.
‘No sweat. Judy and I are flying back to LA in a week, but please look us up if you’re out there.’
‘Did you give her a sleeping pill?’ I said.
‘She’s had a busy week,’ he said.
‘Up early for kindergarten?’
‘Don’t spoil it, Damien.’
‘Sorry.’
We shook hands.
‘I promise to return your calls if you promise not to have your assistant make them,’ I said.
‘Deal.’
He walked me to the check-in desk. ‘You’re flying to Frankfurt?’ he said. ‘Why the hell would you want to go there?’
‘It’s the transport hub of Europe, mate. Connecting flight to Pisa.’
He looked at me in astonishment. ‘You’re going to see Dad?’
TWENTY-NINE
MY FATHER’S HOUSE was an hour’s drive from the airport. He had a big villa that looked out over olive terraces. I suppose the landscape had been chopped out of the hillside by the Etruscans, but the depth of my historical reference is such that winding roads and hills and vineyards mainly evoke a mythical location which I think of as Car Advert Country.
I parked on the verge and walked through the front gate. The housekeeper indicated in signs that Signor March was round the back, tending to his garden somewhere.
I found him at the foot of the slope, among his beehives. He wore one of those veiled hats and was moving an object that might have been a wooden tray, but that was obscured with teeming black bodies. Around him, the bees seemed to make solid shapes in the air, like translucent curtains being pulled this way and that by the wind.
‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘I’m moving the queen.’
‘No gloves, Dad? Don’t they sting you?’
‘They sting me – but it prevents arthritis, so I’m happy to put up with it.’ His voice was slightly muffled through the layers of cloth around his face. ‘I forgot where you said you were staying.’
‘A schoolfriend of Laura’s has got an old mill outside Lucca,’ I said. I decided it wasn’t really a lie, since the statement was true, even though the inference I expected him to draw was false. Laura and I had spent the New Year there ten years earlier, but I hadn’t seen the woman since.
‘Woman friend?’ asked my father.
‘Yup.’
‘You should have brought her along. Is it a romantic entanglement?’
For some reason I thought of the moustachioed dragon who had studied my passport photo like a chess puzzle before giving me a room in her guest house. I smiled. ‘No. Unfortunately not.’
When my father took off his hat, I noticed he had lost weight. It made his features more prominent. His hair had been cropped into an unintentionally fashionable style, and with his beaky nose and beady eyes I thought he bore a striking resemblance to a baby eagle.
‘Vivian told me you’d been ill,’ I said.
He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Nothing worth bothering with.’ Then he changed the subject. ‘You’ve never been here before, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you have time for the tour of the house?’
He showed me round briefly. His living rooms were plain and sparely furnished. His tiny study was dominated by a wall of legal textbooks. A big photograph of Vivian and me jumping off a sand dune in Truro hung above his desk.
I had come to take my father to dinner. He chose the restaurant, a local place called Il Vecchio Pazzo. I had made it clear that I would be paying, over his protestations. It made me feel more up to the task at hand to be in the driver’s seat in this way. The power of being the giver amounted to a slight equalling of our respective positions. Although, when I worked it out, I realised that his dead brother’s mistress’s husband was the real sponsor of our reunion. But money’s weird like that.
My father insisted on changing for dinner. I waited in his tiled sitting room, worrying that he would appear in an opera hat and tails as though dressing for the captain’s table on some prewar Atlantic liner, but he put on nothing more formal than a navy-blue, brass-buttoned blazer.
The waiters clearly knew my father. I overheard one of them referring to him affectionately as ‘Il Ingles’, and he seemed pleased when I mentioned it. He introduced me to the maître d’ and chatted away to him about the menu in Italian. Once his detailed inquiries had been satisfied, he turned to me and said, ‘You could follow that, couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t speak Italian, Dad.’
‘Well, it’s all basically Latin.’
‘Never my strong suit, I’m afraid.’ I helped myself to water from the bulbous carafe. My father was turning over the napkin in his lap slightly nervously. I remembered that there was always something distracted in his manner – he had a restless energy that was only still when he was at his desk working. But he seemed a little more twitchy than usual. He probably thought I wanted to interrogate him about his illness. Still, he was handling the situation with great aplomb.
He broke up a piece of bread and used it to sop up some olive oil. ‘How’s life at the Beeb? It’s terrible what they’re doing to the World Service.’
‘It doesn’t really apply to me,’ I said.
‘Well, of course, I know you work for the TV part.’
‘I mean, I haven’t been in London for a while. I’ve been on Ionia.’
‘Ionia?’ As he said it, I was struck by what a beautiful word it was. He repeated it softly; his surprise gave it a sense of wonderment and his sonorous voice lingered on the vowels. I remembered the sound the breeze made when it sprang up to rustle the pine trees in the late afternoon. ‘Is the water still as cold as it used to be?’
‘Most definitely.’
‘I remember taking you and Vivian to the beach there before either of you could swim and having to watch you both like a hawk.’ He pronounced ‘hawk’ hock; it was one of the Medfordisms he could never shake off.
‘I saw Vivian a few days ago.’
&nb
sp; ‘You saw Vivian there?’
I nodded. ‘He told me about your operation.’
‘How is he?’
‘Strength to strength, I gather. I was staying at Patrick’s.’
My father raised his eyebrows, but it could have been in surprise, or because, at that moment, the waiter was sliding a plateful of ravioli under his nose. I was having the same: it had a delicious, indefinably meaty filling.
‘What is this, pork?’ I said.
‘Coniglio.’
I shook my head.
‘Bunny rabbit.’
‘It’s good.’ I tore up some bread and swirled it in the garlicky sauce. ‘I figured I’d spend the summer there – swim every day – reminisce. Do a spot of painting. I couldn’t think why else he would have left me the house.’
‘He was a truly strange man, Damien. I say that as his brother. I could show you letters I got from him that would make your hair curl – abusive, deranged, cruel.’
‘I know, I know. But I was talking to his lawyer about it. Apparently he told the guy that I’d know what to do with it. But what? After about ten minutes I realised I’m sure as hell not supposed to live in it. But I figured it out. It’s a museum. It’s an unofficial museum, and I was supposed to be the curator.’
‘You’re not eating your ravioli.’
I spooned a couple into my mouth and the waiter took my plate away. ‘Tell him they were great.’ I said. ‘Delicioso.’
My father murmured something to the waiter, who seemed to retire through the swing doors satisfied.
‘I brought you something, by the way,’ I said, passing him the envelope of photos I’d found in Patrick’s library.
‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said. ‘This is from before your mother and I were married.’ He went through the photos twice, pausing on each shot as though in front of a painting in a gallery, absorbing details of the figures, the composition, the relationship of the figures to one another. I sensed he was a million miles away.
‘Well,’ he said, passing them back to me.
‘Keep them, Dad. I brought them for you.’
‘I’m touched, Damien.’ He sounded slightly abashed. I looked down at the crumbs on the table in front of me.
My father had chosen the wine for the main course, which was some kind of slow-braised lamb – shanks, I think. The wine was a deep, deep red and sat shimmering in the glass. The flavour was so full, it made me think of arterial blood – if that can be a pleasant quality in a wine.
‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ I said. I wanted it to mean the whole thing – me being there, me and my dad, in Italy, eating dinner.
But my father chose to understand it less emotively. ‘Yes, this was a great find. I’m very fond of this place. One of the things that I’m most proud of in life is that the chef here uses my honey on his baked figs. That’s quite an accolade, I think.’
‘It is. It is.’ I took a sip of my arterial blood. I was thinking that my dad was – emotionally speaking – a fiddler crab, backing away into his tiny hole at the slightest approach, beadily scouring the beach, and impossible to dig out. He had to be stalked stealthily.
The main course arrived and we had to postpone our conversation while the waiters went through a little masque of giving my dad the best service in the restaurant. I liked the fact that he was popular with them.
‘I was in the middle of telling you something,’ I said, when they’d gone.
‘Don’t let it get cold.’
‘Okay, Dad.’ I ate some of the lamb – it was soft and aromatic from long cooking. I noticed he seemed preoccupied – maybe the photos? – so I decided to postpone what I had to say until after the meal.
We had the baked figs and the chef emerged like a deus ex machina from the bowels of the kitchen to drink a toast to my father’s bees, Then we took our vin santo out to the terrace and sat staring at the darkened valley. The yellowy moon picked out the neat rows of vines in front of us.
‘I made a big discovery on the island,’ I said.
‘On Ionia?’
‘Yes. On Ionia.’ I liked hearing him say the word almost as much as I think my father enjoyed saying it. ‘I turned up a manuscript of Patrick’s with some unpublished stories in it.’
‘That is a find. What were they about?’
‘It’s called The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes. You know, Sherlock’s older brother. Do you ever read Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Not now, no. I’d have thought those stories were pretty well unreadable now, at my age.’
‘There’s some good stuff in them. I reread them when I was trying to get to the bottom of Patrick’s stories. I had to do some detective work of my own. Do you remember the Sign of Four?’
‘It’s been years since I read it, Damien.’
‘That’s the one where Sherlock says: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.” That’s good, isn’t it? It sounds like a maxim of jurisprudence.’
‘Say it again.’
I repeated it and my father said the words slowly to himself. ‘Yes, that is good,’ he said thoughtfully.
I took a sip of my wine. It gave me a thrill to think that it had grown in the earth which I could smell cooling below the terrace we were sitting on.
‘What happens in the last story – briefly, so you don’t have to wade through it. Mycroft – who’s kind of a layabout – meets this fellow, Abel Mundy, who has a deaf wife and kids. Mundy’s a nasty piece of work – this is, like, high melodrama – and Mycroft ends up topping him. Simple enough.’
‘Simple enough,’ my father agreed.
‘But here’s the weird part. Patrick really had some deaf neighbours. And being a little literal-minded, I thought: It’s a confession! – maybe he’s trying to tell us something. Maybe he’s offed this bloke, Fernshaw–Mundy.’
‘Who?’
‘Patrick. It sounds ridiculous, but I really did believe it, I think, for a moment anyway. That he might have been capable of murder.’
My father shook his head. ‘He was capable of a lot of things, but not that.’
‘No, you’re right,’ I said. I took another sip of the wine and it seemed to leave a trail of stars across my tongue like the one above us. ‘You’re absolutely right. I looked into it further and it turned out that the villain in the story is actually a composite. He’s based on two characters, two brothers, who have a pretty interesting story of their own.’ I broke off. ‘You know what? I think I left those photos indoors.’
‘No, I have them right here. You gave them to me, remember?’ My father patted the inside pocket of his blazer.
‘Of course I did. My memory is going. What was I saying? This story. It was a basically a love triangle: two brothers in love with the same woman. I’m not even sure how the three of them met, but I have a feeling they were all foreigners abroad and just sort of fetched up in the same city. The brothers were close in age but quite different. The younger brother was rather conventional, hardworking and – not dull – what’s the word? Prosaic. Maybe a little more prosaic than the other.’
‘You don’t mean “prosaic”, surely?’ said my father.
‘Don’t I?’ I wished I’d held off the vin santo. Trust my dad to be listening to my tale of heartbreak with one eye on Fowler’s Modern English Usage. ‘Let’s just say “prosaic” for now. I need to tell you about the other brother. I suppose I think of him as poetic, but he wasn’t a poet. Actually, he was a bit feckless, and found it hard to keep himself to one thing for any length of time. They were both complicated people. I don’t know about the woman, presumably she was too. But the older brother was definitely more glamorous, funny and unpredictable, and the kind of man women like to be with. Or this woman did, at any rate, because she was totally smitten with him, and probably didn’t even notice the younger brother. They had that “hearts and flowers” phase of the romance and she got pregnant.
‘So now, she
’s pregnant and looking for some help, but as I said, the older brother wasn’t able to commit to anything and he just fucked off. He disappeared, went, I don’t know, to Russia. He went away, God knows where. Poof! Just vanished.’
I was trying to sense my father’s reaction to what I was telling him, but he sat there beside me in absolute silence.
‘You can imagine the state the girl was in,’ I said. ‘This was a different time. Being pregnant and unmarried was seriously bad news. Oh yeah, and to make things worse, she was a Catholic – all three of them were, in fact.’ I paused. ‘You’ll never guess what happened.’
He said nothing – the only sound was the slow sigh of his inhalation.
‘The younger brother stepped in. He loved her anyway, and he may have had faults, but pride wasn’t one of them. I mean, he didn’t need to punish her for preferring his brother. And he was hard-working. It may sound strange, but I think he believed in hard work in the way some people believe in God – and that through hard work, he’d make her love him. More wine, Dad?’
My father shook his head – I sensed the movement in the darkness, but nothing else.
‘To cut a long story short – although you might say it’s a bit late for that – they got married and things worked out quite well and they had a second child together. Then she died suddenly. It was a terrible blow, but it had one surprising consequence which was that the brothers became friends again, tentatively. I think with all brothers there’s so much similarity, you know, that even after a row, they continue to look at the world in the same way.
‘So there was a sort of rapprochement. It was a bit tense, I gather, perhaps because the older son was never told about, well, what I’ve just told you. And in the end the strain grew – you know how old men get weirder as they get older – and the friendship became impossible to sustain.
‘That’s more or less the story. The reason I’m telling you is that I found it very touching. The younger brother never took credit for what he’d done. I can’t imagine that he was ashamed about it. He brought the child up as his own, loved it in his own way, and had the usual parental failings, but didn’t favour either of his sons, even got them mixed up at times, which, given the circumstances, is quite lovely, I think.
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