All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Esther looks from the big window to the workman seated on a mower near the distant trees. The old man at his inflamed forearm, his intense blue eyes watching her, the curious impression they give of still being young, their body too old for them. Fascinating even, she thinks, an absurd word and yet a just one, for her sitting here with her pad, her tape recorder, paying him the regard he craved, in this yellow room with its bright red couches. Her waiting for a disturbed ‘patient’, as the language of the institution insisted he be called, to indulge her, indulge himself, with the story she must listen to ‘objectively’. The lie of that as well. Her Honours paper required an interview as a ‘case study’ and he had jumped at it when she wrote to him. Up front and honest and saying who she was and she knew the man the public read of years back when the story was news was not the man she felt he truly was. Everything would be in confidence and she signed a form to say she would publish nothing he did not approve of, but the privilege too should he agree. She said she knew of her aunt’s affection for him. She knew of their time in Greece, years before she herself was even born. She so wanted the end of the story as only he would know it. Her thinking again, not proud of herself yet realistic, When he looks at me, he will want to talk. He will not be able to resist it.

  Fergus coming back to his Italian friend. ‘At least places I saw with him I’d not have seen by myself. Berlin. Prague. I drove and he sat beside me. He was devoted to me. He cried at operas and called me an ingrate when I once said I should look for work. So I stayed and travelled with him and refused to admit even as I thought it that I was a cross between a gigolo and an indentured serf.’ Esther picking up the satisfaction as he demeaned himself. From time to time they would return for several weeks to stay high up among the rich houses, the secluded properties, above Genoa. He said he had tried to write but what might she expect, the shit of someone who pretended to more talent than he had? ‘But the notebooks I used had prendere nota di vita written on them so that at least was literary.’

  They stayed up there in La Fonte Clara as it was grandly called, huge and ugly and as you drove towards it, the building like a rotten old tooth you saw through trees. Alfonso’s mother was English and wore wispy chiffon scarves and flirted in her geriatric way and hated and loved her flaccid son in pretty much equal proportions. She went to bed incoherent after the long summer dinners that were made and served by a graceless woman with a cloudy eye, it was as if Hammer Films had made a movie about high bourgeois decay. While she and her son bickered and again made up, until her head drooped and at times Alfonso would lean forward and say Scusi, mamma and take the cigarette from her fingers before they burned. She would tease her son about not being a real man and he would place his hand in his friend’s, and there were occasions when they sat there quietly and the swallows dipped and cavorted only feet away, and the evening drew back, and Fergus held the hands of mother and son to either side of him. A mosaic of perfect boredom. When the old lady went to bed they would go into a spacious room referred to as the library in honour of the two glass-fronted cases of mostly English detective stories no one read, Edmund Crispin and Edgar Wallace and Dorothy L. Sayers, and older soft-covered French novels with deckled edges whose authors’ names meant nothing. A yellow kayak lay along one wall. One night as they sat there and Alfonso sighing like an emperor among his ruins, Fergus felt a flake fall on his wrist from the dim painted ceiling, from its gambolling shepherds, its maidens trailing ribbons, high kitsch from another time. ‘If you’re looking for symbols,’ telling Esther, ‘then I’m your man.’

  He wanted her to know the enchantment of it. Hate her to miss out on that. Alfonso telling him at times, half-pissed and easily moved, aristocratic and vain, how he envied his young friend, a mind unhampered by anything but what it sees, that history left unmarred. A mind pure and simple. Then one morning Alfonso tapped at his door. (Mamma at least alert to what rooms people woke in.) He wore a powder-blue robe he had taken years ago from a hotel in Cairo. He said his mother could no longer extend the hospitality she had until now been so pleased to offer him, and that he himself, as an only child, in deference to her years and her ailments, regretted but must accept her wish. ‘He bloody talked like that. Christ knows how that particular family story ended but it could hardly be a good one.’ But that morning, Fergus said. The gown his friend wore swinging loose as he stood beside the bed with his apologetic news. Fergus raised his hand and put it on his friend and sucked him off by way of arrivederci. It was the least he could do.

  Etsi ketsi, he said now. That’s what they say in Greece. It means so it goes. Fuck all you can do about it. And so it was back to earning a living and the train to Rome. Something generally turns up. You have to believe that. His saying so almost as if this was advice he was offering the young woman who watched and listened to him, rather than a credo he had lived by. But that is enough, he now bluntly decides. If she thinks he is going to wear himself out rattling on for her sake she can think again. The next bit is too big to start on anyway. Next week, if he is up to it. The bit he knows she is waiting for. As if he can’t see through that.

  He has shaved, and wears a tie he may have borrowed, sprinkled with what looks like army insignia and badges. He nods rather than speaks, and sits with his fingers laced on his knees, while she adjusts the machine that will hold his story for her to go over and hear again, would want to hear again, or why want to capture it? But his unexpected calm is soon enough dispelled. His first words when Esther nods at him that they are set to go, ‘Carol Sheridan then, Jesus!’

  The past as if rising like reflux from his stomach, tasted in his mouth, the funnelling together of his jokes, the fear behind their bravado, even the tennis club, those years again at West End Road. Carol back then and as much as when he sees her again, her glamour, her blazing hair, as if as the Stoddarts said she was a barn on fire, she’d singe your arse a hundred yards off. The way she’d stare back at you, certain of herself as stone. You said hello and looked at her, a minute later sport, if you weren’t cut down to size then there was no size to begin with. As if this pale slip of a girl he spoke to would have an inkling, how fucking could she, but he’d tell for all that. That slow curve of Carol’s mouth that was not a smile and not contempt any more than any other word would serve for it, although the image was there perfectly in Athens, he remembered that, in the big museum, those huge carved figures from before the beginning, before the later sculptors smoothed things out and made bodies look like the rest of us, give or take, figures with one leg stepping out from whatever past it was they had but did not let on, their hands held as fists beside them, male and yet oddly not male too, an excitement in that even. But their lips, that was the thing. Broad and beginning just to smile, yet the curve there too of indifference, cruelty if there had to be, a distance you would never cross. Esther thinking he must have loved her to talk like this. But the shock of it as he guesses at what is in her mind, and disabuses her. ‘I fucking hated her.’ His laugh then as he puts her right. His so apparent satisfaction that he disgusts her.

  Then the rambling account begins of Carol before that, before they met up by chance. Esther had picked up some of it from her father, and more from Stephen on those weekends when she stayed with him out at the bach, as they walked at that time of day he loved when the tide drew back and the wet sand stretched out shining as a dance floor. Carol whose havoc placid Westmere so remembered her for. David’s contempt as details came back to him, but her grandfather trying to speak of her without rancour. Some people are born wild, he said, you cannot change that. And Fergus now traversing it again, the running off with Mr Taylor when she was eighteen, the chaos trailing behind her, so Esther thinks randomly of those scenes you see in movies, an invader running through wheat fields with a burning flare, a city torched for the fun of it. The reckless and bizarre comedy of it too, the way the elopers were sprung by a woman from Richmond Road spotting as her holiday photos were developed back home the figures she hadn’t picked up at
the time in the crush and clamour of the leather market in Florence, Mr Taylor there, middle-aged, grinning among the hanging racks of handbags, the girl who had babysat the young Taylors for years, looking up to him as she stroked the bronze nose of the famous touristy pig. But that was years back. Years.

  Fergus off again on his own tack. The dreariness of before that, he is telling her, before fate hurling him and Carol together and everything changing forever. After those easy months with Alfonso and then straight into working for this shithouse paper in Rome, an English-language giveaway for foreigners to pick up in railway stations, in the lobbies of hotels, in budget restaurants that took out advertising. The inane fatuous stories he wrote to keep the Roman wolf from the door. It would have been gutter journalism if the paper’s sights had been higher. His self-contempt taking off as he speaks of it, of the scum-arse editor, the innate Italian genius for making a balls-up of anything they touch. Read Italian history half an hour, he challenges her, find me five years, five months, since Julius Caesar the arsehole, they didn’t make a hash of?

  She reins him back. ‘But meeting her?’

  For the moment he has simmered down. He tells her, a routine assignment for the crap he was underpaid to churn out for them. That’s the scenario. To travel with a coachload of dyed-in-the-wool Australian pilgrims, a mob not content to gnaw on what Rome could throw at them, the cathedrals and catacombs and human remains galore in their vaults and boxes, as if that’s not enough and now this drive to Castel Gandolfo, an indulgence was it for gawping at where il Papa takes his collar off for the summer break, stretches out in the sun for all we know about it behind the walls, martinis from Mary Magdalen at the end of the day? So he’s in this smart hotel with his well-heeled Aussies, accountants from Hobart, Canberra civil servants, the missus in tow with most of them. The odd widow on the prowl. Not that they didn’t slop the house bar until the small hours, don’t think that. The tour leader was a famous tennis player so everything they could dream of, the inside story on the Australian Open and incense thrown in as a package deal. His brief was to spend two days with them and write it up, and another feature on the town itself, on Lake Albina, the usual tourist shite, the rowing course for the Rome Olympics, who the hell cares—who even remembers that far back? The first night he’s there he drinks himself to floor level with a dwarf Neapolitan who works at the summer residence. He laughs thinking of it. ‘One of my scoops. That’s how I angle it. The inside story as an outsider invents it.’

  Then the next evening there she is, across the marble lobby with its tricksy mirrors, her hair scorching the whole place, reflected over and over. Skin that startling white you don’t see that much of over there. Anywhere. Tits there should be a blast of trumpets for. All that dirty kid talk from West End just flooding back, Fergus says, I have to remind myself I’m grown up. I even think there for a moment how Lisa would have laughed at it, we used to joke about her. About the Sheridan sisters. Back home. Then Athens. Never mind all that. Carol had come up to him as if it was only days since they’d talked at the bus stop as now and again they did, not much, but sometimes they had. Everyone had wanted to. Just to be seen talking with her. So there was that between them right away. Everyone else so suddenly strangers and remote, you know that way when you meet someone from home? That was the trouble. The appeal. They saw through each other for what they were. Carol said she had come in for a friend of hers, an interpreter who had taken ill, so she was filling in with the Aussies. Quick to tell him she didn’t do this sort of thing for a living, she didn’t want him thinking that. Pouting her lips to show what she thought of all this, the hotel, the tourists’ voices. Her leaning towards him, confiding. ‘Things we do for a crust,’ Fergus had said. Or don’t do, she came back at him.

  Like that then from the start. Bullshit, but my God was it well cooked. They sit up late in the bar after her charges, and his copy, have gone to bed. She says she has an Italian boyfriend, an older man. She at once revises that, a sort of boyfriend. A man who likes to look after her and she works for his business. She seems eager to let him know. She knows about importing and transport and Franco, that’s her good friend’s name, even has government contracts, food deliveries from other countries, trucks at times as far as Russia. His big warehouse, his capannone, out at Monterondo in the shit industrial zone with other haulage depots, twelve miles from the centre but near the Tiber still, if you think polluted rivers give a touch of glamour. This and that on the side. Under the radar, she says. She pulls down one lower eyelid with her forefinger, making him laugh at it, the game they play together, his too talking up the kind of writing he does. Sitting up there at the bar on tall black stools. While he talks she watches him, her lips in that faint curve.

  They order another glass. ‘The pilgrims’ tab’ll pick it up.’ She wants him to know she is at home here. She notes his own Italian isn’t up to much. She is talking again about her work. About his too, in a way. It’s a fine line, she is saying. She means between what people back home would solemnly call above board, between that and knowing life here is ‘a little more flexible’. Fergus likes it that she uses the phrase. As if, he says. As if he hasn’t picked that much up.

  Amazing, how quickly they felt at ease. He knew they were showing off, tilting their lives so the light would slip across them as kids at school turned their shiny rulers to skid reflections till they were whacked for it. A game they were good at. He supposed she had done it a hundred times, a thousand, since she was back there knowing the boys on the bus were unaware of anything but her, her laughing at innuendo, her throwing glamour at each as though for him. As Fergus knows now she must have liked him, the ease as the evening went on, their performance together. Christ, are we a team!

  Their affair began from there, in their fabrications about the past, their exaggerations, their seeing each other for what they were, one mirror to the other. Weeks later Carol said, of the way they’d taken to each other, ‘It’s like wearing clothes when we’re naked, running round starkers when we’re dressed.’ Laughing at the sheer extravagance of it, yet how it rang like truth. You had to lie to get to bedrock. And that frisson when each knew the other was speaking the same, her secretive smile, her hair as he ran his hand across it, her raised eyebrow in cine noir coolness as she quizzes him, ‘No shit, Sherlock?’

  The play acting, he will tell this younger woman, Lisa’s dead spit as he thinks of Esther decades further on. Their exciting each other, he and Carol, with the fact of this is how we are, but not exactly. Fergus with his quick bland images that amused her, the sex lit between them like a bonfire in a paddock, he tells her, his constant talking through their love-making, Carol’s rapid coarse commands.

  The months then that followed their meeting in the town where, as his article had put it, ‘even pontiffs earn their spell of R and R’. They spent every hour together they could wangle from the assignments Fergus worked on for the readers he despised, Carol away from co-ordinating timetables and routes in the office above the big yard where the trucks pulled in after turning from the ring road, her efficiency in moving the coloured magnets about on the wall maps of where the shipments moved, the cargoes were delivered. Franco was proud of her. The drivers liked the amusing foreign woman in her black skirts that swung like a bell and the tight pale sweaters she wore with them because she knew men didn’t mind being given instructions, filling in schedules and flowcharts, if it was for someone like that, a woman who could banter back and match them if a bit of spice was called for. Mio tesoro, no wonder Franco called her that, telling her their being lovers was everything to him and more than that, she stroked his very soul. He joined the tips of his fingers and kissed them when his foreman Ricardo said, ‘She is a wonder, Franco, what she does for you. For the business. For those who see her.’

  Ricardo who was Franco’s uncle and loved the truckyard and the warehouse and the offices above the loading docks as he would have loved the family he had not got round to having. One damned thing, he wo
uld say, there is one damned thing and then another, and you get to where I am now, an old man who is still young. Before he worked for Franco he had been for twenty years the chauffeur for politicians, he knew what he called ‘the moving world’, the connections, the levers, a man in this line of work must know. He meant the intricate connections and conflicting interests, the numbers to call, the men to avoid, in this universe of camions and long-haul vehicles, the web of a thousand strands that ran the length of Italy, that linked with Spain and African ports and as far as the Ukraine. You sit at this desk, Ricardo said, and you feel it. He was Franco’s man to ask favours from, who handled the delicate placement of tangenti, that word which crude translations, ‘bribe’ or ‘pot-de-vin’ or ‘graft’, did such injustice to. For Ricardo would also say, to the few he might trust, that Franco his nephew was a good and straightforward man who asked no more than to be judged by his girlfriend’s tits, but leave the business side of things to him. He told Carol she was indispensable to both of them. ‘Success is using the gifts God bestows on us,’ Fergus tells her. She touches his leg beside her as she drives him back to Trastevere. We are so alike.

  Carol turns from a busy road into a dull street of post-war flats. Not your tourist Roma by a long shot. She pulls into a strictly no-stopping zone fifty yards from the building he will walk to when she leaves.