Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  ‘He wanted me out of the country.’

  She is still for a moment then she nods. ‘Sensible enough.’ Her eyelids droop. ‘I always rest after lunch.’

  I glance at the slicked wet terrace. The rain is falling in flat sheets from the beaten grey sky. ‘I might go for a walk.’

  ‘Oh, no, my dear,’ says Rosza. ‘It’s too wet for that. Mudslides are common. You will rest in your room.’ She stands up. ‘Build up your strength for your Mr Devlin.’

  She is watching me. There is nothing I can do but nod.

  In my room, I open the balcony doors. Pools of black standing water are cupped irregularly down the slope. The trees bow under the weight of water, the clouds make knotted fists of shadows across the plain to Santa Margherita. I think of the crest on the bottle of wine in the cellar. I think of wolves.

  Under the dark reaching arms of the trees on the edge of the forest, a silhouette watches me. Devlin. I raise my hand. He stands. The trees shift in the wind, the shadows move and he is gone.

  After dinner that night, we sit in the living room looking at photo albums from Koloshnovar. The photos are of her husband’s Polish family, Rosza says. She turns over pages of women in corseted dresses, men with stiff white bibs and precisely creased trousers, some with slim elegant dogs, their noses raised, sniffing the wind. Here and there is a dried flower so colourless, it is hard to even tell what is pressed between the pages. One page has an embroidered handkerchief pinned to the stiff cardboard.

  ‘I always wonder what happens either side of the photo,’ says Pietr, stooping over the back of the sofa, swirling brandy in a large glass. The light illuminates the liquid’s inner fire. ‘There.’ He taps the page. ‘That’s the perfect moment. But the perfect moment is always backed by messiness and sweat.’

  ‘Like the plain brown paper behind the silver mirror,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly.’

  I smell the delicate aftershave he used. He has changed for maybe the third time today. There are cufflinks at his wrist. I look to see whether they have the wolf’s crest. But they are plain mother-of-pearl.

  ‘Poor Georg.’ He points at a photo of a thin worried-looking man hovering at the edge of a tennis party. ‘In his suit and tie, trying so hard to fit in. Always so anxious at weddings, luncheons.’

  ‘A failure,’ says Rosza. ‘Expecting pity.’

  ‘Vulnerable,’ says Pietr. ‘He would hold onto my pocket and say, What shape is yellow?’

  ‘Synaesthesia,’ I say. ‘The ability to blend two senses. It’s a mark of creative people. Some ability to leap between left brain, right brain. All the great poets have it.’ I feel the brandy slide down my throat. ‘Rimbaud was famous for it.’

  ‘Georg was a failure,’ says Rosza. ‘I never expected anyone in this world to give me anything before I proved myself. No-one deserves respect unless they contribute.’

  Behind me, Pietr says, under his breath, ‘Unless they win at any cost.’

  ‘But you have the right to expect respect as a human,’ I say.

  ‘No.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Why?’

  The rain beats down. The terrace spotlights fall away into the black air. Through the dark, a drawn-out sound crosses the plain. Not so much a sound as a ghost falling through two dimensions.

  ‘Wolves,’ says Pietr. ‘At Margherita.’

  Rosza turns over the pages of the album.

  ‘Who took these early ones?’ asks Pietr.

  ‘Your grandfather,’ says Rosza. ‘My husband’s father,’ she says to me. She taps a photo of a fierce-looking man with very black hair and a handlebar moustache who stands in a garden filled with black roses. By his side is a dark-skinned youth, bare-chested with loose flowing trousers and a curved dagger in the sash around his waist.

  ‘It’s another world, isn’t it?’ says Pietr.

  ‘That’s the servant he brought back from Morocco,’ says Rosza.

  ‘Slave, I would more believe,’ says Pietr.

  Rosza stares down at the photo. ‘Your grandfather didn’t like me at first. Natural, I suppose. The foreigner. The peasant girl.’

  ‘You said it was guilt,’ says Pietr.

  ‘He was crazed by the death of his son,’ says Rosza. ‘He blamed himself for Czeslaw leaving.’ She puts her thumb over the face in the photo. ‘He felt something in his own past had driven away his son.’

  Pietr reaches down. After a small hesitation, Rosza lifts up her hand. Pietr turns the next few pages and says, ‘Here we are.’ Tall, perfectly matched and spaced poplars run beside a long straight road to the white chateau in the distance. The house itself is only glimpsed through the trees but I know what it looks like: the huge bay windows along the broad stone terrace, the narrow balconies jutting out from the second storey, the tall pointed turrets. But when I saw it, the windows were broken and gaping, the roof was missing its tiles, the poplars were snow-blighted.

  ‘Poland,’ I say. ‘Koloshnovar.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pietr as though I had asked a question. ‘I remember my grandfather’s voice echoing down the long halls. You couldn’t get away from him. And the incredibly heavy red curtains. Red velvet wallpaper. All the colour of blood. Oh, and horses’ heads looking over the half doors in the stables.’

  ‘That was a story of your father’s,’ says Rosza. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pietr. ‘Because he couldn’t.’

  He turns another page. ‘There should be a view of the stables. Here.’

  This was a photograph taken in a cobbled courtyard of a glossy black horse – a thoroughbred – being brushed down by a boy in shirt and braces. Nearby, a gate opened onto a field, bushes in the distance, a light hovering sky, the darker hump of low windowless buildings.

  ‘Those fields are famous,’ says Rosza.

  ‘Infamous,’ says Pietr. He says to me, ‘The Polish cavalry rode out to meet the German tanks there in World War II. All the men in silver and tassels. Swords. Of course it was total carnage. My grandfather gave them horses but refused to go himself. He said it was madness. He wouldn’t let my father go either.’

  ‘He saw it though,’ says Rosza. ‘He watched it all from a ditch. It made a terrible impression on him.’

  ‘You never told me this,’ says Pietr.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Rosza. ‘I am sure that is why he wanted to become a monk.’

  ‘Until he met you,’ says Pietr.

  Rosza nods.

  ‘You had so much in common,’ says Pietr.

  ‘We did,’ says Rosza, meeting his glance squarely. ‘I was more mature than most girls my age. You don’t know what it is like to go through a war. The things you see.’

  ‘I think all my father wanted,’ says Pietr, ‘was to be pure.’

  ‘That is impossible in this world,’ says Rosza. ‘The best you can hope to be is changed.’

  The beat on the roof slows, the rain easing. Pietr touches the photo. ‘There should be a memorial there.’

  In the voice of one who has argued the point before, Rosza says, ‘We had to put the landing strip in. The business was in trouble. We needed to make use of every acre.’

  ‘Leasing out is not making use,’ says Pietr.

  ‘We survived, didn’t we? You enjoy the comforts of it now, don’t you?’

  He looks out the window. The sound of the sea is clear from this side of the house.

  I turn the page. There are more shots of the house and the flat fields which stretched to the horizon under a sky of threaded blue fringed with clouds. Next came the moustached man flanked by two unsmiling black-haired young men; the one on the left had a duelling scar on each cheek.

  ‘The sons from his first marriage,’ says Pietr.

  Rosza mutters under her breath, ‘Bastards.’

  Pietr frowns. He says to me, ‘Literally, bastards. My grandfather disinherited them for me. They were very bitter. One shot himself, the other drank himself to death.’ He turns over the page. In the next photos, his grandfather had
grey in his moustache; he stood beside a small woman with very light eyes and hair a shade deeper than Pietr’s platinum. Next to her was a little girl, with almost the same colour hair.

  ‘My mother-in-law,’ says Rosza. ‘The Count’s second wife. That’s her daughter Agnieska. A pigheaded girl.’

  ‘My father’s younger sister,’ Pietr says to me. ‘She was the only person my mother could never bend to her will.’

  ‘She was too much like her brother,’ says Rosza.

  Pietr says slowly, ‘A solitary.’

  I touch Agnieska’s white hair. ‘Striking.’

  ‘Her hair darkened when she got older,’ says Pietr. ‘I wonder if Father – if his would have darkened, later.’

  In the silence, I open another album. More shots of the family and servants at work in the garden. There were hedges, a fishpond, a maze, views of a lawn sweeping down to a tennis court, a bench with an elderly woman sitting under a huge spreading oak tree; servants carrying trays which glinted sunlight in silver out to a long table under a marquee.

  A baby started to appear, a child with gleaming hair who gradually became a slender boy with a wistful expression, a youth with the same expression, a young man in boating clothes, overalls, riding outfits. He seemed happiest next to one of the glinting cars which gradually shrank over the years to become a sleek, bullet-shaped convertible. But the colour of his hair didn’t change. It was an impossible shade of silver – the colour of light reflected off the small statuette of the winged woman on the bonnets of the cars behind him.

  ‘My father,’ says Pietr.

  ‘Czeslaw,’ says Rosza. ‘My husband.’

  She looks at her watch. ‘You should show her.’

  Pietr beckons me to the window. The rain has cleared the air. He points. At first I see nothing but the dark trembling carpet of sea.

  A light beams across the water. It winks three times and stops. A long pause, it winks again.

  ‘The buoy,’ says Pietr. ‘The rocks are deadly if you don’t know the coast.’

  ‘Something to swim to if a boat goes down,’ says Rosza, bringing me a small cup of coffee. I thank her but say, ‘Not at night.’

  She nods. ‘Hot milk, that is best for you.’

  I look out to the flat, shifting darkness. I imagine my boat breaking up, the sound of creaking timber, cracking ice, the slow descent to the bottom through dark green water and clinging seaweed.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t have a lighthouse here,’ I say.

  ‘There’s been talk for years,’ says Pietr. ‘But with so little traffic it’s not worth the expense.’

  ‘It’s mostly local fishermen,’ says Rosza, ‘trying for extra on the table.’

  We look at the light sending its long wavering beam across the black water. The sea rolls over and over in a steady rhythm. The wind has dropped.

  ‘Another quiet day tomorrow,’ says Pietr.

  SATURDAY

  It rains again the next day; hail coming down irregularly. We stay in the warm living room. Rosza spreads her accounts on the corner table, the smoke curling up from her cigarette. Pietr and I sit on the floor and play card games. I surprise myself that I can laugh so much.

  When I come down for lunch, they are nowhere to be seen but the door behind the staircase is open and I guess they are downstairs.

  A sixth sense warns me not to go down. I go into the living room and kneel on the sofa and stare at the clouds drifting past.

  When they come in, Pietr is holding a map. He drops it next to me as he goes to mix a drink.

  I expect them to say something about Devlin but over lunch they discuss the flooding in the next village, a shipwreck off Trepani. After the first course, Pietr unfolds the map. ‘Have you seen one of these?’

  ‘It looks like a satellite map.’ I search for the misty outline of the house on Devlin’s map. I find it, a speck next to a vast mass of blurred shadows and peaks. Something which looks like the desert but is not.

  ‘Not land?’ I say.

  Pietr nods. ‘The sea. Another country entirely.’

  I trace a path through the dark valleys and troughs, the ripples sweeping across from Africa.

  ‘The old philosophers believed that reflections double the world,’ I say. ‘Water creates another world in the sky, a world peopled with shadows and thoughts.’

  Rosza looks at me curiously. The water streams down the windows. I feel the house swimming through its oceans of water and wind. I think, Water is the greatest kingdom; it absorbs everything without killing it like fire. Water is my substance.

  ‘It is as important to us as any estate,’ says Pietr.

  ‘You talk like a fisherman,’ says Rosza.

  ‘You never like coming down off the mountain,’ says Pietr.

  ‘I always thought water was an invitation to be consumed,’ I say.

  ‘I always thought if you gazed too deeply at dark water it was like a dark mirror. It revealed what was inside you,’ says Rosza.

  We look at each other in strange sympathy.

  ‘I pity you both,’ says Pietr, ‘if you ever find yourselves in the desert.’

  Rosza taps the map. There is a signature I know in the bottom corner.

  ‘Your father’s map,’ says Rosza.

  ‘My father was no fisherman,’ I say. ‘His interests were – ’

  Rosza moves her hand across the deep blue to where a lighter mass shows on the far side of the sheet.

  ‘Africa,’ she says.

  WEDNESDAY

  I tell Devlin that on the days when I don’t see him, I take long walks by myself. It is partly true. Often after lunch, I follow the back path through the woods. Usually I won’t go far, sometimes only to the road or down to the pool. Sometimes Pietr comes with me. More so, after he gives me the camera.

  On that afternoon, when Rosza has dozed off over her knitting, I go to my room and find something wrapped in black velvet on the bed. I pick it up – it is heavy, a hard skeleton of metal. Under the velvet is an old Hasselblad camera, the kind that you open with both hands, like opening an accordion, so that the heavy metal lens pushes forward like the flowering heart of a silver rose.

  Pietr is in the garage, bent over the engine of a vintage car, under a bonnet that folds up and back. He says, ‘My father meant to take the camera with him on the last trip to Paris. But he left it and my grandfather gave it to me.’

  I grip the leather case.

  ‘You can use my darkroom,’ says Pietr. ‘Whenever you want.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I feel the deep, warm cracks made by harsh sun and mountain rain.

  Pietr says, ‘Photos on these old cameras have an entirely different feel.’

  ‘They capture ghosts,’ I say. ‘That’s what my art teacher used to tell us.’

  He stands for a moment, a spanner in his hands. Outside, the rain falls in sheets. ‘Another bleak December,’ he says, ‘another morning marooned in rain.’

  I look across the courtyard to the drop over the valley. The clouds rush past, blown upwards, rising at an angle, colliding and merging and dissolving.

  ‘It seems odd to see you with a spanner,’ I say.

  He stares at the tool as though he has forgotten what it is for, turning it over in his long delicate hands.

  ‘I like the focus on detail,’ he says. ‘Having a hobby is a form of unconsciousness. I would have liked to have been a mechanic.’ He shrugs.

  ‘Devlin needs a hobby.’

  ‘He needs an outlet,’ says Pietr. ‘For his disillusionments.’

  ‘That supposes he had illusions to begin with.’

  ‘There is nothing as dangerous as an idealistic man in the process of becoming a cynic,’ says Pietr. ‘The rage overwhelms him.’

  ‘So it is better to . . . ?’ I say.

  ‘Be disillusioned young,’ says Pietr. ‘It becomes part of you, like dragon scales.’ He bends over the car again. ‘Sometimes I think I only took this up,’ he says, ‘because I thought it brou
ght me closer to my father.’ He wrenches at something under the bonnet. ‘Stupid,’ he says.

  I say, ‘The last time I saw my father was in the courtroom. With all the public gawkers.’

  Through the doorway, the trees slap against the hillside, the winter light struggles through the rain. The air is the colour of grey water.

  I make a decision. ‘You know this is all a public relations exercise.’

  Pietr stays bent over the engine.

  ‘The Americans need scapegoats,’ I say, ‘for the missing art from the Baghdad Museum, for all the other – ’ as always I find it hard to say the words – ‘the lootings.’

  ‘That is what my mother thinks.’

  ‘You don’t seem worried.’

  ‘We’ve got insurance,’ he says. ‘It’s just a matter of letting the right people know.’ He straightens and says, ‘Does Devlin know about Poland?’

  ‘I don’t know about Poland,’ I say. ‘What is Poland?’

  Pietr says, ‘The insurance.’

  He takes me back to the house. I automatically turn to the living room but he crosses the lobby to the rear of the staircase and I realise that he is going to show me the rooms below.

  He unlocks the door with a small silver key and we go down. As he unlocks the right hand door, he catches me looking at the door on the left.

  ‘Is this the – ?’ I can’t remember whether I have been told about the cellar or not.

  ‘The cellar,’ he says. ‘Not very interesting.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say after a pause. ‘Stefano mentioned it.’

  He motions me in. The light falls on his hair; the fine cheekbones make luminous shadows. So unlike Devlin’s ravaged darkness.

  I move past him into a small, windowless room with grey concrete walls. There is another desk, one I hadn’t seen through the doorway, and a felt board on which were pinned maps of the local coast, and computer print-outs of what look like weather maps and shipping lanes to Africa. The third wall has floor-to-ceiling shelving. A very wide steel box, the height of a man, lines the last wall. It makes the room look like a bunker.