Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  Alice consulted her recipe cards and pulled ingredients from her new fridge-freezer. She prepared small wood pigeons for roasting in a bain-marie of red burgundy, having first stuffed the cavity with pine nuts and raisins, just as her mother had shown her. She made a cranberry sorbet which she froze in the shells of three hollow oranges. Once she had made dainty matchsticks of her vegetables, she sat down and drank a cup of coffee. Then she turned to count vol-au-vent cases. She prepared a filling for them, of asparagus and herbs and double cream, to be spooned in and warmed up later. Finally, because the day was long, she turned her attention, prematurely, to the art of laying her table.

  She arranged the place settings with care, making pretty starched crowns of the three plum-coloured napkins and organizing her cutlery on the matching plum-coloured cloth. Her plates and her candlesticks were all a pleasing, shiny white with a single decorative outer rim the colour of blackberry fool. Alice stood back and plumped the sofa cushions and tidied Matt’s computer magazines. She swallowed one of her little white pills. The clock said half past twelve.

  Mrs Pilling’s assistant created a diversion, calling by with such of the day’s business post as required attention. She also brought two letters addressed personally to Alice. Having delivered them, she left at once. Alice began with her own two letters. One came from David Morgan. The other, which sat fatly in the envelope, had been addressed in flamboyant copperplate and written in brown ink. Burnt Sienna. It was a letter which Alice, over the past four years, had given up hoping for.

  Jem had written from a Catholic hospital in Hampshire. The letter, which covered sheets and sheets, contained a five-pound note and had a magazine extract stapled to its final page. The letter went as follows:

  Dear Alice,

  I hope this letter finds you happy and well, as you surely deserve to be so. In truth, I hope that it finds you at all. I hope also – (so much hoping, dear friend, and all in the first three lines!) – that you will believe me when I say that I always meant to write to you. Always, but never quite yet. Not yet. Not until I could give good account of myself; not until I had accomplished something worthy of bringing before you. What a dismal show-off I always was and now I have missed my chance with you.

  I write to you now, having nothing to boast of and nothing to display except my continued affection for you and my remorse at having treated you so badly. I write to you, I confess it, only because my dear friend here – (my other and more recent ‘dearest friend’) – has urged me so insistently to do so. At the risk of sounding tediously melodramatic, he has urged me to do so while my hand can still hold the pen. He is Father Michael Mullholland and he is helping me, very assiduously, with the business of dying.

  Dear sweet Alice, I am dying. Try not to let this cheaply emotive reality distress you too unduly, since it is in truth a very workaday affair and nothing quite like the bombshell that it sounds to the uninitiated. At the moment, it is not even more than tolerably painful. None the less, having made such a monumental shipwreck of my life, I am applying myself conscientiously to getting the dying part of it right.

  The dear adorable man I refer to has just this morning been haranguing me on your behalf against my ‘talent for excess’. This as I take up my pen. He says that I must write to you a ‘straight’ letter, without all this emotional string-pulling, and that I must not bounce so theatrically between flaunting and sackcloth. Alas these are the twin sides of my deficient psychopathology. And I have tried to counter by pointing out to him that death itself is a kind of excess, is it not? Especially at my age. But still, he is my constant solace and while I cannot hope to be his, I have finally this morning extracted from him an admission that I entertain him more than any other case of terminal decrepitude that he has encountered along the way. I am more than a little in love with him, of course, but this is merely routine and nothing very much to worry about, since all Catholic women must fall in love with priests the way that other women must fall in love with psychotherapists. And how can it signify, now that I am seriously on the blink?

  Here then, told to you ‘straight’, is my story: I have no family and I never had. But then by now you will have worked out for yourself that Gordon and Minette and the whiskery cousin etc. were all no more than so much eyewash. I always read voraciously and I discovered with you, my darling friend (and only friend, since I was always wildly unpopular with my peers, not to mention my elders), a kind of talent for social ventriloquism. My disadvantageous background probably explains in part why I adored your parents so much and why they always viewed me with such alarm. I believe they saw me as some aspirant cuckoo in the nest which they had so carefully made for you. In order to steal some of your enviable magic, I once nicked a five-pound note from your mother’s purse and a bracelet from her jewel box. I herewith return to her the five-pound note but, if I may, I would like to keep the bracelet because it is all that I have in the way of a keepsake from your household and she would not deny it to me now. I have it on my wrist and, in a few weeks’ time, when I undergo some minor surgery from which I will certainly not recover, I intend to lobby even then to wear it into the operating theatre.

  As to my parentage. I was got upon a pretty Celtic peasant by an Italian medic who had read Samuel Johnson, though, unlike Gabriella Gallo, my mother was never a chieftain’s daughter and – again unlike Gabriella – I never found any trace of my father’s bones. He has always been immensely careful to cover his tracks, clever man, though he did provide me with an expensive education until the year I turned sixteen. That was the year Miss Trotter gave the scholarship to Flora. She explained to me that – in spite of my somewhat freakishly high IQ – Flora was a ‘steadier’ proposition than I – and it is only since talking with Father Mullholland that I have begun to concede the truth of this without too much poisoning bitterness.

  Flora, I think, was my first major reason for neglecting to write to you, my friend. I could hardly think of you without pain. And, having used all my wiles to wrest you from that girl, I found that calling you to mind only tormented me with the thought that Flora had probably got you back again. The other was simply that my material circumstances were such that I felt compromised and snobbish and ashamed. My mother, you see, had long since ceased to be an apple-cheeked Celtic peasant and had become (that other predictable stereotype) an urban Celtic drunk. She was, as they say in Scotland, heavily given to bevying. In short, having been sent packing and having in my mind the resolution to do my A levels at the local comprehensive school, I couldn’t, in the event, cope with the business of living at home with my mother. I promptly gave up school, raised some money – not quite as elegantly as Gabriella I’m afraid, but then I wasn’t quite as elegantly slim. I worked as a cocktail waitress in a club for slightly bent businessmen. (Don’t laugh, dear friend. All it took, quite frankly, was decent tits and a willingness to flirt and bleach one’s hair. And once ‘twas discovered I had the equivalent of three and a half brains compared with the rest of the workforce, I got to fiddle the roulette.)

  Then I went to Italy. I ‘smelled Naples’, dearest Alice, and I ‘lived’. I bummed around and found little jobs and in short had a rather exquisite time, though I never once encountered the Demon Padrone. (Did you?) Only think if we could have done it all together.

  After I left, my mother quite simply continued the process of drinking herself to death. She had got to that point, even before I ignominiously took flight, where she was no longer actually recognizable as the core of the person she once had been. I can say, without exercising any talent for excess – nor even any talent for bitterness – that she would have sold me boots an’ all to the glue factory to fund her next half-jack of vodka.

  But ah, but o! dear Alice. Italy is the most marvellous, the most wonderful place. And oh that poor Miss Aldridge with her warts and corsets to be so sadly blind! And then – damn and blast it, Alice – I got so very ill. Having (of course) no medical insurance and no leg to stand on, and being (of course) il
legally employed, I came back to England about six weeks ago – five months pregnant. (Again, perhaps, ‘of course’ – for my life is rather embarrassingly like a cheap novel.) I believe the father of my child to be a wholly untraceable Roman bike mechanic; the consequence of a one-night stand, but even now, I can’t, quite honestly, be sure. I came upon him in the dusk on the Appian Way where he was tinkering with his back wheel, and something, I suspect, about his activity and his sweetness reminded me of that first time I ever met your father who was mending a push-bike for me on the front lawn. Worse and worse, as you see. The murk within is thick as witches’ broth.

  Anyway, to be as brief as possible, dear Alice, I am sick and here I am. The invisible worm. I do not think I will take up my bed and walk, though Father Mullholland assures me that it happens quite often in these parts. One of the few things I ever told you which was true was that I was a Catholic, as indeed I still am, though I hope a slightly better one for this last difficult month than I ever was till now. My baby is almost certainly viable, according to the medicine men who troop in to touch me up three times a day, and that has rather ruled out chemotherapy in my case. I have never even begun to consider it. The great bore of this is that it means I cannot live, but there it is. Not the great bore, sweet Alice. No. Why don’t I speak the truth to you? The great heart-ache. The great grey greasy grief. ‘Tis better to Die, after all, than to Lie, and so I tell you, Alice, the appalling, throat-lumping grief of not seeing one’s dear own baby – that is possibly all I could want to live for and it is the reason why I can’t. Yet the neatness of it pleases me. I believe that in my flesh I shall see God. Pray for me dear Alice – if you can possibly see your way to such an expedient – and come sometime to see my charming priest, who will put you in touch with my baby. I do so want my baby to know you. You knew me, you see, before all this rot and putrefaction. I send you my love and my sincerest good wishes.

  Veronica Bernadette McCrail. (Alias Jem.)

  PS I forgot to tell you I was expelled from the convent school for stealing. I repeatedly stole from the stockroom cupboard and the library in spite of constant warnings. I also stole money.

  PPS You will notice that I have appended to this letter, a pre-publication puff for one ‘Aoin le Fey’. She is about to be launched, as you see, by an American publishing house called ‘Angeletti’. I clipped it from a newspaper which somebody’s transatlantic visitor had left here in the lobby. It seems – or am I hallucinating? – that she has plagiarized my novel. Is’t not moderately diverting, dear friend? Are you acquainted with this Woeful Lunatick, or who in the world is this person? (Doubtless another Celtic drunk if her name is aught to go by.) I include it for your amusement only and please do not think that I mind. I have no further use for such stuff, as you will surely understand. I can hardly take it with me and my guess is that My Last Duchess will not keep Miss le Fey in bagels and lox for very long at all.

  Love again,

  Veronica.

  Once her weeping had abated, Alice got up and paced the floor. She was overcome with shivering, though the day was warm, and her teeth were knocking together so that she could hear them like a manic drumbeat. To read the letter over and over had taken more than an hour. And infiltrating ever more strongly into her horror and sadness and longing were uglier, more sullying emotions of rejection and doubt and resentment. Jem lay dying. She hadn’t even said what of. Some form of cancer, presumably, given the reference to chemotherapy. Before that happened, she would undergo surgery, she said, from which she would not survive. Surgery to extract the child? She besought Alice to visit the child through her go-between; her ‘more recent dearest friend’, the ‘adorable’ priest with whom she was half in ‘love’. Nowhere in the letter was there the faintest suggestion that Jem actually wanted to see her. Why not? Instead, she had devoted whole paragraphs to praising some killjoy priest who was lecturing her on ‘excess’ and was colluding with her to give up her life. Was Jem no longer interested in renewing acquaintance with the living? Was the priest’s advantage that his stock-in-trade was suffering and death? Or was Jem – dared one think it – manipulating her? Playing her against a rival? Had Jem always done that? Played her against Patch and Maddie and Minette and the man of letters? No! But was the whole thing – again, dared one think it – a bundle of macabre fabrication? The infected stigmata writ large?

  Then there was the extraordinary business of the plagiarized manuscript, about which she affected not to care. If she did not care, why had she appended the cutting? Was it an accusation? Alice was invaded with guilt that all these months gone by she had left the cardboard box of convent exercise books in the attic of the Morgans’ house. God in heaven, she had actually handed My Last Duchess to Iona Morgan on a plate!

  Alice went determinedly to the telephone. She first called National Directory Enquiries and she then called International. The first call confirmed for her that the Catholic hospital existed. The second call yielded up the number of a New York publishing house in the name of Giovanni B. Angeletti. Then she sat down and tried to read David’s letter, the first she had had from him. In normal circumstances it would have been a lovely surprise.

  David wished her well and said he was in hopes of having her return to her room next term. He had been playing squash with Roland, he said, and had recently experienced a satisfactory leap forward with his research. Everything at home was delightful, since Maya, who had left him in the spring, he said, had changed her mind and come back. She had come back with a haircut and a part-time job and pretty clothes and she seemed like a woman re-born. Everything was going very nicely there, not least because Iona had left them and gone to America. Maya, who had previously destroyed her novel, had moved with her typewriter into Iona’s room, had scraped the matt-black paint off the windows and had started again from scratch. This time something wholly new and the writing was giving her great joy. Iona, who was staying with her father in California, was herself having some success with literary endeavours, he said, but he would tell all when she came back. He was clearly concerned for Iona, who, it seemed, had had some sort of sexual imbroglio with the villainous Paul Koplinski. But David’s major emotion was quite evidently relief. Maya was employing a twice-weekly cleaning woman and William was, at last, in nursery school. They were all off next day to the Peak District for a family holiday, he said. Now that Maya had her cashcard to herself, they could afford such pleasant things. Thomas and Sophie had progressed from The King of the Golden River to Treasure Island and The Secret Garden, he said, and both of them sent her their love. Roland, too, had said to convey his good wishes, though he thought it sensible not to write himself.

  The letter, in the circumstances, caused some muted stirrings in Alice’s consciousness, like troubled twitchings in a dream. She understood that somewhere there was a sub-text involving Roland and David and a desk with a row of books. The desk said ‘Jeffreys is a dunderhead’ across it. But right now the major thrust of the nightmare had all to do with Jem. Perhaps it always had?

  Alice got up and rang New York. The call gave access to the answering machine of Giovanni B. Angeletti. First it played her some Marvin Gaye. Then it spoke to her in transatlantic tones which she found offensively confrontational.

  ‘There is nobody here wishes to speak with you right now,’ said the voice of Giovanni B. Angeletti. ‘If your message is urgent and you cannot write, you have one minute after the bleep. Make it good.’

  Alice made it good. She was too angry to notice quite how good. Or that the stammer had departed like chaff before the wind.

  ‘My name is Alice Pilling,’ she said. Then she gave her telephone number. She paused briefly, but only to grind her teeth. ‘You have a novel in your possession,’ she said. ‘My Last Duchess. You think you are going to publish it, but you will do so over my dead body. Iona Morgan, alias Aoin le Fey, has plagiarized it lock, stock and barrel from its author who is Jem McCrail. You will phone me back within the hour, Mr Angeletti, or I will spea
k to you only through the courts.’ And she sent the phone crashing on to its cradle.

  When the telephone rang twenty minutes later, she knew it would almost certainly be Angeletti, but it was not.

  ‘Tell-me-you-love-it. Tell-me-you-love-it, tell-me-you-love-it,’ said the heavy breather, in a state of evident arousal. ‘Suck me off now, Princess Piglet,’ he said. Alice put the phone down and checked the progress of her cranberry sorbet. The telephone rang again.

  ‘You’re squealing for it, Piglet,’ said the heavy breather this time. ‘Higher now baby-love. Harder now. Harder.’ Alice put the phone down and gave the asparagus and cream a stir. Then the telephone rang again. It was not Angeletti. It was the heavy breather.

  ‘You’re coming,’ said the heavy breather in a condition of rhythmic convulsion. ‘You’re coming now baby-love; you’re coming; you’re coming.’ Alice dropped the receiver and left it to dangle on its flex. She tried hard not to cry. The day had been a difficult one.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ she said firmly, speaking low. At this point I sometimes have to warn my ladies to pull themselves together. Alice felt profoundly violated and sick with fear. She wasn’t ‘coming’. She never had. She had no idea about what it could feel like. There was possibly something the matter with her and the heavy breather had sussed it. He had picked her out from the multitude in the phone book. He would find her out and expose her. And would Matthew and Flora, oh please God, return before there came the heavy tramp of his ominous boots on the gravel! Jem was dying, or pretending to die, while some barbarous, ill-mannered publisher was busy stealing her novel. The morning had been full of green plastic bags and particles of human skin. She ought, she thought, to get up and bathe and put on prettier clothes. She was wearing a navy skirt and lace-ups and a rather spoil-sport, missish white blouse. But she could not take her clothes off. Not now when the heavy breather might appear like the Commendatore. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.