All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘She puts up with your nights being somewhere else?’

  ‘As if she has the choice.’ It is not as though commitment has ever been raised. He is the woman’s boarder, the rent a little less than if he kept to his own room, but there is no deceit about it. If there was no understanding how could there be? He says simply, ‘We needn’t think of that.’ Think of Angela with her dry-cleaning shop beneath the flat, a handsome good-natured woman too young to fear death which is not a problem but her anxiety at signs of age, her angling the bathroom’s magnifying mirror to catch the first etchings of time at the corner of her mouth, the spoke-lines from her eyes. And the unspoken question which she supposes is natural enough, should she lose this kindly enough stranger, whose work so demands his time away, might there be another with the same care for her? Her daughter who hugs her and assures her, But Mamma you are younger than any mothers who come to school! As if a child knows how to look at other mothers! In one of his notebooks Fergus had begun to write a story about her.

  He and Carol sit in the car. Neither wants to leave. But Franco has a dinner tonight with other business friends where she will be an ornament. Thank Christ there is a family across on the other side of the city so calls like this on her are few enough. Business trips, she jokes, oddly that’s when Franco needs me most. Men can be such bastards, he jokes back to her. Why we ever get caught up with foreigners! A new sharpness in their playing with each other.

  ‘Trying to make me feel bad?’

  ‘Just feel at all.’

  ‘Then we’d have nothing to share.’

  Yet no more than momentary, these quick jabs. Part surely of why they so get on. Who ever said love wasn’t given a nudge by the occasional sharp edge? That too becoming a joke between them. Feed me another haunch between the bars. The zoo, they had begun to call it. Her bedroom. The bed they shared several times a week. Franco part of the menagerie, but held fortunately on his family leash. No one gets their own way all the time. Fergus likes to hear her run through them, ‘the other cages’, he says. The Spaniard he likes, especially, that was years back but never mind, the motor mechanic for Formula One who spoke marvellous things in rotten English, who said her snatch was Compostela, men walked barefoot for weeks just to arrive. The lovers, the places, as she too asks him, tell me more about Alfonso? About the one who was a nun? Only once she teases him about his ‘missionary’. Her sister had mentioned it in a letter, the woman in the bakery telling Mum about it, the weirdest thing, all that study to be a doctor then haring off to Africa! The swotty girl from the chemist shop he couldn’t see past in those days back then, pedalling his bike round with her father’s name on it, wasn’t she a Jew as well? Did that make so much difference?

  ‘You’ve been in Italy too long,’ he accuses her.

  Carol quickly dropping to the fact that this was out of bounds. Verboten? she said, running her finger along his cheek. Leaving Lisa there until he was the one to mention her. As he did, but not for months. The timing strange, she thought. Early July, which can be so lovely. One of their rare quiet days together, a Sunday, when they played at tourists. They walked to a museum she had been to once, the week she first arrived, that’s how far back, but something there she would like to see again. That mad compelling woman turning into a tree, even her fingers in the first delicate thrusts to another life, her marvellous body turned and writhing into the bark she longed to become. To escape into. Carol unsure why the grotesque yet beautiful thing so held her.

  Fergus stood beside her, a little bored, she guessed, with these rooms of canvases and plinths. Her asking him, as if matter-of-factly and his seeming to accept it as that as well, ‘What do you think will happen? Once we’re burned up?’ Something was it in the strangeness of the room, the fact they were speaking in lowered voices, although no one else was there? A guided party had moved through, moved on, in a flicker of cameras, an urging from the woman who led them, tapping at her watch. The sense of being alone in a way that was seldom theirs. Fergus saying, ‘We’ll be the same as months ago, before we met.’ Not sure quite of why he said it, of what he meant. Carol smiling at him, the expression he was used to. ‘The born romantic,’ she told him.

  In the park outside she took his arm. They walked towards a man selling gelati from a wheeled cart like a big fringed pram. People sat on the benches, others walked the paths diverging from the main walkway, called out to children and laughed together, or ambled in silent couples. ‘I can’t get enough of it, can you? The glut of things.’ Saying the word so her mouth sounded crammed with it. And it’s then he tells her, as if it is an ordinary thing he speaks of, no great deal. He says he has heard from her. A letter. He will show it to her. Saving a child, that was the gist of it. Luckily, the kind of thing they could help with. He told her the little Lisa had passed on. Carol laughed, ‘Is that all?’ And then, ‘Franco will like the joke of it. It’s not gun-running but it could be fun. Helping out the Church.’

  It was several days, and then more than a week, as the chance to see each other eluded them. It was the beginning of high season for the tourists. Fergus’s editor had plans for a special supplement, extra advertising, an arty piece on Keats, a discreet guide to porno cinemas, a schedule of opening times for the catacombs. He had two weeks to get the whole thing together. His boss sitting there with proofs streamered out from his desk, his green eyeshade as if he thought he was editing La Stampa, his ridiculous belief he carried a torch for the free press. Fergus angry at it again as he thinks of it, this much later, telling the girl there with her bloody machine listening in on them that if there’s one thing they can do, those Italianos, it’s exploit a foreigner. Fucking brilliant at it. He had sat there in the office space you wouldn’t keep a dog in, slaving over his Brother portable, wonder the prick of a thing didn’t melt. Then Carol away in Volterra, don’t ask him where Volterra was, but Franco chose places where he could give la famiglia the slip. And so devoted to her, Carol said, he might as well have worn a blindfold.

  He had met Fergus and liked him. He bought the story that he was Carol’s cousin from the same town, it amused him to hear them talk about the people there they knew, the past they shared together. That he knew treasure when he saw it, pointing to the signed Number 10 Azzurri shirt framed above Franco’s desk, even knowing the name, the year. He liked it too that her friend was literary and a journalist, you had to remember further back than they could go, he said, to appreciate how freedom of expression was what civilised values were built on. Not that he personally had time to read. Amico, Franco liked to call him when they met up, it is important that someone does our reading for us. Then at the town where Franco said he would buy Carol alabaster but her skin was too pure for it, and settled for a red gem that she wore back to Rome burning at her throat, they had stood on a high wall and Franco out of the blue checked with her, ‘So it is planned, once she is here? That friend of Fergus we are helping?’

  ‘We just pick her up and take her there. To where she is going. Take two people there. And then come back.’

  ‘As quick as that?’

  ‘A hospital. An institution. San Spirito. Not even a hundred ks.’

  As she knew he would be, Franco amused at that, the idea of illegal ‘cargo’, the Church in it up to their soutane sleeves. But his saying sharply, when Carol supposed Ricardo would help her with the details, ‘I will help you. The van. The route. We shall plan all that together. Such things take care.’ As he early on had said to her, not with vanity so much as a simple assuring fact, ‘You would not believe it, how many men like to say if someone speaks of me, You know Franco? That Franco? He is the one to get things done.’

  Then in the last weeks before the rendezvous Carol and Fergus seemed to speak of little else. Although without apparent fuss, Franco took care of things in his office above the yard. As though no more than some routine consignment. They would take a van with tinted windows, they would act like friends driving about as tourists, they would be meticulous in the last
part of the event, that most of all: to meet the truck driven up from the port at Bari that would have dropped off its apparent cargo earlier that day, and then on to where they would meet. To do such things discreetly, one of Franco’s favourite words. The day they left he would tell them exactly. The meeting point. All that in good time. He has all that in hand. You must book somewhere close enough, he told Carol, so there is not far to drive next day. At least that he could leave to her.

  They played it up to each other, ‘the rescue’. Nine years, Fergus said, yes, nine years since he had seen her. The smart of it still there, her walking out on him from the tiny flat in Ravini Street. The trailing green tendrils from the plants on the balcony above, the splashing down on the barred window when the woman up there watered them. Moments coming back to him of such immediacy it hurt to think of them. The mistake now of trying to speak of it. Probity, he said, you had to use a word like that when you thought of her. Not that he ever had for anyone else. And yet a gift for wildness in her too, an iron recklessness once she made up her mind. Like when they had taken off for Greece, back then. The way she told her father as frankly, as calmly, as if they were going to Ruapehu for the weekend. The amazement too, looking back on it, that her family seemingly had taken it as calmly as they were informed. From the little she had told him of it anyway. She wasn’t one to rattle on.

  ‘Smitten,’ Carol said, a shade from mocking him.

  ‘Not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘Just knocked me when she left me.’

  ‘Black condoms for a year in mourning after that then, was it?’

  His quick anger at her shallowness, but he left it there, and Carol unbuttoning his shirt, commanding him, ‘Lighten up!’

  Next day as she leafed through a file of manifests a call came through and Franco, at his desk a few feet from hers, spoke quickly in dialect, losing her completely. ‘How was I supposed to follow that?’ Teasing him, as she knew he liked. ‘Was that a woman?’

  ‘These Southerners,’ he said, hunching his shoulders, spreading his hands. Mocking her a little, she knew that. He said, ‘Remember these. Don’t write them down.’ He gave her the time, the name to look for on the truck, the fact there was other cargo as well. Cover one delivery with another, there was nothing unusual in that. The quick throb of excitement now it was next thing to here. The Rescue. This as well as the rest of it. She said to Fergus later in the day, ‘I’ll be with Franco tonight. His mother-in-law has taken ill so his wife’s away. That’s the way it is.’ But Fergus too on edge now everything was in place. He surprised his landlady by asking would she like to have dinner at the trattoria along from the dry-cleaners. Angela kissed his cheek, wore the new navy top she had been saving, told her twelve-year-old to get on with her homework, she would know if she touched the television. Anything, Fergus thought, to take his mind off what was almost here. More troubling than he had expected, the thought of what it would be like. To see her. The condescension she would no doubt have for Carol, as she had back then, at the tennis courts. So much still that wasn’t clear. Whatever the story was, about the illegal native she hauled along with her. He is glad to be distracted. He amuses Angela with the stories he tells her. It is weeks since he has taken her out like this. And when she asks him, is he happy though, is he content the way things are between them, he asks, Who can ever answer that, on a particular day, in a world like ours?

  ‘It isn’t so difficult,’ Angela said. But writers like Fergus, she supposes, people who think more deeply about things, you cannot expect them to quite see things the way others of us do. She stretches out her hand to put it across his.

  ‘Take it a day at a time,’ he says. He sees the crinkling at the corner of her eyes. ‘We can’t do more than that.’

  They set out towards Bari, leaving a day to spare. An afternoon’s drive, had they gone directly, but Franco advised, ‘Enjoy the travelling, there is so much on the way.’ He told Fergus, There is more to this country than Rome, my friend. It is always beautiful, Carol added, even if driving through it can be hell. She knew the roads well, the pull-over areas, the likely trickier sections, where the traffic build-ups would be, the best stops for coffee. There was almost the feeling of holiday, of adventure, as the van drew out from the yard to the Via Salaria and headed for the autostrada. She switched on the radio and tapped the steering wheel as Lucio Battisti blared out his recent hit. Between the flow of pop songs the chatter was too fast, too laden with expressions he had never heard, for Fergus to pick up more than the name of the next number. He said, ‘I’d rather just look out at what we’re passing, do you mind?’ Carol pressed the control, and for several minutes, through the silence, only the burr of the tyres on the road. She asked him to light a cigarette for her. Then, ‘A law-abiding one, I mean.’

  ‘As if there’s the choice.’

  She laughed that he had taken her half-seriously. ‘Can you imagine foreigners like us pulled up with a joint by some small-town poliziotti?’

  How she talked like that to impress him, even now, months after they took up—Carol who knew the ropes, was up on the street lingo, got her way with most things, she said, because she did her homework. As if quoting from a B-grade movie, which very likely she was. She had told him early on, ‘It’s rattlesnake country out there. You’ve got to draw fast.’ They were on to that again now. Survivor tactics. Turn the other cheek in this world, she said, next thing you find you don’t have one to turn. The nine-pin element, she liked to call it. Bowl before you’re bowled. He wanted to tell her, Don’t try so hard. I wouldn’t use that even for the rag I’m underpaid to write for.

  He liked this though, taking in the country sliding past. Franco was right. How little he had seen, apart from the big city, apart from the climb into the hills above Genoa, the haze that so often softened the stretch of coast. But all this was new to him, vivid and set out there as though waiting on a million cameras, many of the names spelled out on the signs they passed ones he had known since he was a kid, scraps from those memories of sitting at the kitchen table as a boy and his mother’s sister from Australia handing round the photos, snaps that had her in tears, the grave of their brother dead in a place called Sangro. Not that they were anywhere near that now. But other names, strange how they lay like seeds inside you, blooming for the few minutes as you saw the places themselves far off against a hillside, across a flat stretch of land, then out of sight. Even Monte Cassino that he had heard of since he was a boy, the monastery he craned to look up to. He wondered at why we can be so touched by it. Drawing threads together as he was doing now, simply sitting here, the flowing hills, the towns, the bigger ones Carol took circuitous roads to avoid, the spread of farms and the ochre angular farmhouses, the nostalgia that rose in us for what was it, quite? The dullness of back there coming at him too, the placid yet smothering streets where he and Carol had lived within a stone’s throw of each other, she especially so desperate to ‘break out’, as she put it, but to what, exactly? Was this it? Then for a long time they drove without speaking.

  They stopped once for coffee, once to look at a famous church, huge against the small buildings surrounding it. Pictures and statues much as in any other they might have gone into. A dead man behind a pane of glass stuck there beneath an altar, a mask across his face, his hands brown and frail as leaves. At one point she told him the country round here was once famous for witches, he might have tasted Strega, had he, the liqueur made over here? Then an hour further on, Carol said, ‘We’ll stop soon. I’ve booked a place. Go over things.’ The mood between them changed. Efficiency. Care. She was good at those. Somewhere in the middle of a town, she said, the more people there are the fewer who bother to take notice of you. And how much better than to pull in at one of the big areas where truckies parked, where drivers grabbed a rest at quick turnaround routiers, where there was the chance of someone recognising her, the woman who worked for Franco. Not that everything wasn’t above board. But caution, there was no need to spell that out. Another lesso
n she said she had learned early on. Why ever make public what you have the chance to keep to yourself?

  This sense now of on the verge. Carol’s alertness, her own excitement as if crafting herself to something new, the adventure of discovering a fresh aspect of herself. Even to her telling him, soon after they had set out from the depot in Rome, that Franco always insisted that there was ‘protection’ when she drove, a gun in the glovebox in front of her, beneath the manuals, the maps. ‘Decoration,’ she joked to Fergus, ‘but you better know it’s there.’ She joked she was glad to hear he wasn’t frightened by it. It was routine. Like carrying a jack in the boot, a spanner for the wheel. They were back at games together. He knew when they stopped and he took their two light overnight bags from the back seat that she had transferred it to her shoulder bag. He pretended not to notice, and so each kept up the adventure of it. The fun of blurring lines.

  Carol had booked two rooms in a pink stucco hotel favoured by tourists who arrived by car, rather than the big coaches. Middle-aged people whose licence plates gave them away as mostly Spanish. The kinds of guests who liked to look at art and history during the day, and spend long late evenings in the dining room with its welcoming red and yellow flag and reproductions of paintings they would recognise. Not the kind of place Fergus would have expected her to choose. She surprised him again, having asked for separate rooms on different floors. As she told him now, Franco trusted her with his life, but if he should ever check, he would know he was right to trust her.

  After dinner they sat, like a holiday couple themselves, in the hotel’s lounge. They sipped at glasses of limoncello. Carol placed on the small table between them her opened book of maps for the region they were in. She knew the way all right, she said, she wasn’t worried about that, but the pick-up was a place she needed to check on. Her finger touched first on the port and worked back to where the truck would leave the autostrada and turn towards the network of minor roads, towards the farm where they would meet. She had once been close enough to the rendezvous, back in her early months with Franco. That time though it was a delivery, ‘medical stuff’ for some bigwig in Africa, the kind of thing only the rich could afford and not a chance of getting hold of any other way. Sounds dubious, Carol said, but apparently it wasn’t. ‘In this line you’re paid by someone because questions don’t occur to you. One of the reasons Franco finds me irresistable.’ But the joke falling flat. Better just to be quiet, Fergus thought. Does that not occur to her?