Alice raised the receiver to her ear in agitation. ‘But that’s not true,’ she said. ‘Her letter never said that.’
‘Her wish is for you to raise the child,’ he said. ‘I’d read it to you but the letter’s with her priest. Listen. Father Mullholland is anxious to meet you, Mrs Riley. I really think it inadvisable for you to keep him waiting. It’s my impression that he’s pushed for time right now.’ He paused effectively. ‘I need not remind you that it’s his business on occasion to undertake emergency baptism,’ he said.
‘What?’ Alice said.
‘Emergency baptism,’ he said. ‘I guess none of us likes to place an immortal soul in jeopardy.’ Alice became transfixed. ‘The child is female, incidentally,’ Angeletti said.
‘What do you mean “in jeopardy”?’ she said. ‘Angeletti, she’s not going to die, is she?’
Angeletti sounded equivocal in reply. ‘The baby seems pretty well OK,’ he said. ‘She’s underweight, of course. She was delivered six weeks before full-term, Mrs Riley. And in rather critical circumstances. It’s my impression she’s doing all right. She’s on a respirator.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll be there.’ She got up as she spoke and pushed her feet hastily into her shoes. ‘Forgive me, Angeletti. I’ll telephone for a taxi right away.’
‘No need,’ Angeletti said. ‘I called it for you already. It’s waiting for you outside.’
Chapter 29
In the taxi, in order to keep at bay her terror that Jem’s baby would die, Alice fixed hard upon the baptism. Jem’s priest was waiting for her and she would have to be ready with the baby’s name. She recoiled a little from the business, about which she knew almost nothing. Would the baby have to be named after a saint, or was it possible to have her called Jem? Would Father Mullholland – the ‘adorable’ priest – be sufficiently adorable to contemplate calling a child after a jam sandwich? Or would he not? Alice rather thought the latter. Then the baby would be called Veronica. Once she had established this, it gave her a tenuous kind of poise. It gave her sufficient composure to step purposefully from the taxi, where Angeletti was waiting.
Angeletti was standing in the hospital driveway like the centrepiece of a triptych. He was flanked by a nun and a priest, but he broke ranks when the taxi pulled up and came over to open her door. Then he paid the driver. The nun was dressed in those awkward, halfway civvies which made her look, Alice thought, as though she had taken the scissors to the hem of her habit. The priest, who wore glasses, was a head shorter than Angeletti, though he was similarly broad in the shoulder. He was thick-set and had curly fair hair and a fleshy, deeply cleft chin. Angeletti led her, by the arm, back to the nun and the priest. Alice found herself warmly enveloped in a cloud of crisp convent linen.
‘It’s the little mother,’ said Sister Teresa. ‘Welcome, Mrs Riley.’ There was something in the woman’s determined radiance which caused Alice to react against her. She tensed, feeling that yesterday’s sweat and dust were adhering to her clothes. And she found that Sister Teresa’s resolutely sanguine goodwill was an affront to her feelings of bitterness, disappointment and loss. She was acutely and painfully aware that, somewhere in the building before her, her dearest friend lay dead on a slab, with an ugly scar across her abdomen where a doctor had extracted a child. She was painfully and morbidly conscious that Jem’s perplexingly month-old letter – written in the last five weeks of her life – had been in receipt of no reply.
‘Mrs Riley?’ Angeletti said, once Sister Teresa had released her. ‘Meet Father Mullholland.’
The priest shook her by the hand. ‘How do you do, Mrs Riley,’ he said. Alice tried hard not to stare at him. Her impulse was to scrutinize his features for giveaway signs of Jem’s devotion. What clues were there to those elements of his being which had so endeared him to Jem that they had qualified him for the role of more recent ‘dearest friend’? Nothing. Nothing beyond the priestly function about which she felt herself wholly inadequate to judge. She registered, rather irrelevantly, that he wore trousers under his cassock.
‘I’m sorry that I’ve kept you all waiting, like this,’ she said. ‘Forgive me. Mr Angeletti has explained the urgency.’
Sister Teresa turned to Angeletti and smiled her radiant smile. Alice could hardly believe it, but she took him by the hand. Then she addressed herself to Alice.
‘You poor dear creature,’ she said. ‘You’ve been worried sick about the baby. I know it. But you can rest easier, Mrs Riley. The little girl is quite safe now. The doctors anticipated all the difficulties. They were very well prepared. Indeed, we were all very well prepared for Veronica’s precious baby.’ Alice considered that she had finished speaking, but then the nun went on. ‘I hope Mr Angeletti did not alarm you with his telephone call,’ she said, ‘but we all felt we would like to have you here as soon as possible. The baptism was an emergency, as I’m sure he will have explained to you. It is a great pity that you could not have been with us, but never mind, Mrs Riley. You are with us now.’ She smiled again at Angeletti and gave his hand a little squeeze. ‘ “Pamina”,’ she said. ‘Not “Pamela”. Pamina Mary. Beautiful names, for a beautiful little girl.’
Alice turned her gaze upon Angeletti in outrage and disbelief.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Riley,’ he said, sounding just a little cautious. ‘As Sister says, there was an emergency. And I thought that since we had both of us missed the opera last night – and today being the Day of the Assumption – Look. You’ll have to forgive me.’
Alice stared at him in disbelief. ‘You told me her immortal soul was in jeopardy,’ she said.
‘Now those were not exactly my words,’ he said. ‘I guess you jumped to conclusions.’
Alice lost her rag. ‘Bastard!’ she said. She spoke so intensely that she found herself fighting back tears. ‘You absolute bastard, Angeletti! How could you do this to me?’
‘Come on, Mrs Riley,’ he said. ‘You’re upset. You’re in a state of stress. You’ll feel a little better tomorrow.’
‘Quite right!’ said Sister Teresa, seizing eagerly upon Angeletti’s clichés in the absence of comprehension for Alice’s indignation. ‘That is exactly right. You must try to relax a little now and not worry too much, Mrs Riley. You will feel a little less wretched tomorrow. Your friend Mr Angeletti has been a wonder and a marvel, coming as he did. So much in the nick of time. That was a comfort to dear Veronica, I know it. To have news of you and of her little book. And all just before she died.’ She smiled again at Angeletti. ‘Mr Angeletti came to us like one of God’s angels, Mrs Riley. He has been a “little angel”, as his name so aptly implies.’
Alice felt her gall rise as she watched Angeletti play to his audience. In the context of this day-to-day, practising Catholicism, where she felt herself more and more uncomfortably marginal, Angeletti was behaving as though he were in his own backyard. And so he was, of course. He stood there with his hand in the nun’s, just as if he had been transported back to his parochial grade school. He was once again Sister’s ‘best little reader’ in all of the diocesan elementary school. Alice envisaged him, venomously, as an infant black marketeer in sacramental holy cards. And then, to crown it all, as she stood in her jaded garments, giving off an odour of yesterday’s sweat, she noticed suddenly that Angeletti had shaved and that he was wearing a different shirt.
‘Where did you get those clothes from?’ she demanded. ‘And how is it that you’ve shaved?’ Angeletti and Father Mullholland looked at each other. It was clear that they were striving to suppress any hint of improper eyebrow-raising in the face of what they read as her unreasonable indignation.
‘Say, cool it, Mrs Riley,’ Angeletti said. ‘Father Mullholland was kind enough to lend me his razor, OK?’
Alice was aware that the priest was regarding her with interest. He spoke soothingly.
‘As it has turned out, Mrs Riley,’ he said, ‘Mr Angeletti and I share a collar size. That is really all there is to it.’
/> Alice turned her fury upon Angeletti. ‘God Almighty,’ she said. ‘If it isn’t the Catholic Boys’ Club, networking here at HQ. You sound like a pair of Freemasons!’
For a moment the three of them blinked at her with curiosity. Then Sister Teresa stepped forward, capably determined upon forgiveness and understanding. She enveloped Alice once more in the convent linen.
‘My poor lamb,’ she said. ‘You will feel so much better after a good cup of tea and a long night’s rest. Come along now, dear Mrs Riley.’ Tears began to spill from Alice’s eyes on to the cloth. Tears of exhaustion and disappointment and loss. Tears of sudden, enormous gratitude for the woman’s seemingly unending and uncritical kindness.
‘That’s better now,’ Sister Teresa said. ‘There now. Veronica was a brave and exceptional young woman. You are grieving for her, Mrs Riley. Of course. That is exactly what all of us would expect.’ She fumbled briefly among the folds of her habit, but gave up as Angeletti passed over his handkerchief. The nun took it and used it to mop Alice’s eyes. Then she tucked it up Alice’s sleeve. ‘Now I’ll take you to your friend,’ she said. ‘Once you have had that cup of tea. You will be longing to see her, I am sure.’
Chapter 30
Jem’s body was covered with a sheet which Sister Teresa drew down to the waist. Under it the body was clothed in a short-sleeved, back-fastening surgical gown from which the head emerged, ash-coloured and skeletal. Jem’s hair, which had grown thinly to the shoulders, was arranged in neatly combed, clod-coloured curls about her neck. The orifices of her face had become so predominant that she appeared to Alice all dental arch and eye-socket. Her arms, covered patchily in raw, mottled skin, were wide at the elbow and ended in large bony hands on which the skin hung slackish over the knuckles. The cuticles of Jem’s fingernails were thickened and fissured while the nails were whitish and displaying dry, fluted grooves. Fixed to the wrist of her left arm was a narrow silver bracelet with a raised floral motif which Alice could dimly remember as having once occupied her mother’s jewellery box. Jem’s hip bones made two gaunt peaks under the white gown, between which Alice envisaged the surgical wound, and below that, under the sheet, were two further peaks formed by her feet.
‘What did she die of?’ Alice asked tonelessly.
‘Ovarian cancer,’ the nun said. She placed a plastic stacking chair beside the bed. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ she said. ‘Take as long as you like, Mrs Riley.’
Alice sat down. She did not look at the body at first, once Sister Teresa had gone. She put her head in her hands. Small inhuman noises began to emanate from her throat, like those made by a cold, abandoned puppy. The noises went on and on. When Alice finally became aware that she had saturated her lap, she stopped to stare absently at the unattractive compound which Koplinski’s plaster dust and her own tears had made of her skirt. Then she got up and approached the bed. She stared hard at Jem’s face. Gradually, as she became accustomed to its gauntness and pallor, she was able to relate it, tentatively at first, to the face of that tall marvellous girl who had stood with such definition in the form-room doorway on that magical Wednesday afternoon, dragging a canvas toolbag. Alice stretched out her hand to stroke Jem’s cheek, feeling only love and tenderness for the curious absence of elasticity under the skin. Then she bent her head and kissed the cheek where her hand had been. Two heavy tears rolled from her eyes and fell in runnels down the body’s face. Alice took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped them off. As she was doing so, she realized that she was using Angeletti’s handkerchief.
‘Sorry, Jem,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a snivelling weed. It’s only because I haven’t seen you for such ages and ages. Honestly.’ Her tears began to flow more copiously. ‘I’m not saying that you can’t be dead or anything. I’ll always like you the best, Jem. Even if you’re dead. It’s so amazing to see you again. I wanted to see you again more than anything in my whole life.’ She blew her nose hard on the handkerchief. Then she looked at Jem’s face and she laughed. ‘Angeletti’s noserag,’ she said. ‘First he’s so revolting that he makes you snivel and then he lends you his snotrag. Did you notice that about him? How omnipotent and bossy he is. Like God. “Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.” All that sort of sado-God-the-Father crap. Oh crumbs, Jem. Sorry. I’m probably even insulting your religion.’ She laughed again between sniffs. ‘What I mean is, can you trust him, that’s all? He sets himself up like the high priest of the Brotherhood. I’m sure that you will know just what I mean.’ Then she ran her hands slowly like a blind person down the length of Jem’s body from her jawline to her feet. She sat down on the bed beside the body. ‘You’re so tall, Jem,’ she said. ‘You always were. And you’ve got such huge feet. Whatever happened to those shoes you had that shocked my poor mother so much? “State of the girl’s shoes, Harry!” ‘ Alice nudged the body gently, wishing to conspire with it against the adult world. ‘All of them – all the grown-ups – they all thought you were such a subversive. They must have known you were brilliant. You scared them, that’s all.’ Alice kicked off her shoes and lifted the sheet. ‘I wish you would budge up a bit,’ she said. ‘But I don’t suppose you can really, if you’re dead. God, if I had just half your powers of intercession, I’d probably have you standing up and walking around by now, never mind budging up.’ She covered herself with the sheet and stretched her legs, struggling downwards with difficulty until she felt her feet against the body’s feet.
‘I didn’t exactly come clean with you either, you know,’ she said. ‘Though even the skeleton in my cupboard looks a bit puny next to all of yours. I was called Alice after Alice Springs in Oz. Do you realize that? Not after Alice Liddell at all.’ She giggled at the body. ‘I wish we could have grown up together,’ she said. ‘Gosh that would’ve been lovely. I’d really love your opinion about men for a start. Frankly, I’m completely baffled by them. I somehow haven’t thought about him for months and months, but all through last year there was Roland. I was really fond of Roland. I don’t know why but he always made me stammer. We had an accident in his motor car. He never came to see me after that. So strange. When I came round there was Matthew Riley. Like a dream. Maybe all of life is a dream? Matthew pulled me out of the river. That was no small thing really. Somebody saving your life. Well. No offence of course. If you’re alive, I mean. I was going to marry Matthew but now he wants Flora. I don’t really mind as much as I ought to. Not yet. I minded far more about you. They told me about it yesterday. Flora and Matthew.
‘God in heaven, Jem! Yesterday! That was the worst day of my life, if you can believe it – well, except for today. And for the day you left me. Flora and Matthew were only a part of yesterday. And for all I care they can spend the rest of their lives slurping that oil-globule soup together and chewing on gristle and Bisto.’ Alice paused and sighed. ‘I don’t really,’ she said. ‘I do care. I’m a bit too manic to take any of it in as yet – what with your letter and the heavy breather and Flora’s relatives in plastic bags and Angeletti making me excavate for your exercise books before he’d believe a word I said. And now today. This business. This business of finding you dead and the local Roman collective all pre-empting me over your baby’s name.’
Alice sighed and lay back with her head beside Jem’s. ‘Look. I’m a bit knocked back by the baby. I wasn’t expecting it. I haven’t even seen her. But don’t you worry about it. I’ll look after that baby somehow. Better than I looked after your stories, anyway. And frankly, I’m terribly honoured. I have always honoured you, Jem. I have honoured you in everything.’ She kissed the body’s cheek. ‘It’s so lovely to be with you again. She was sweet to me, that nun. Letting us be together like this. If you try not to mind about being dead, I’ll try not to mind either. Look at it this way, my dearest friend. You may be dead but so what? At least you made it. At least you sort of drank your beaker full of the warm south. You didn’t just stay at home like some of us, letting your parents ponce up a house for you and do a rethink o
n pastel and cane interiors. And then there is the book. My Last Duchess. I know you say you don’t care about it, but it’s all dead glamorous, Jem. Even you would have to admit. You’re a “woman of letters”. Who needs a “man of letters”, whether he’s real or not?’ She smiled at Jem’s face and leaned up on one elbow. Then she gave the body’s cheek another, final kiss. ‘Goodbye, Jem,’ she said. ‘God, my darling. You really did smell Naples and die.’ Alice then turned to get up off the bed. It was as she did so that she noticed Angeletti. He was standing in the doorway and watching her.
Chapter 31
Alice leapt clumsily from the bed, feeling her heart knocking against her ribs. She looked at him for a moment like a hunted animal, but, whatever Angeletti was thinking, he wasn’t letting on.
‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘I startled you.’
Alice groped along the floor with her right foot until the foot encountered its shoe. Then she did the same with her left foot.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not at all. I was only – I was only—’ Alice broke off, being unable to find the words. I was only in bed, with a dead woman, she thought. And kissing a dead woman’s cheek.
‘That’s OK,’ Angeletti said quickly. ‘I only just came.’
Subtly, with her back to the bed, Alice tried pulling up the covering sheet which she had rumpled as far as Jem’s thighs. All the while she kept her face turned towards him.
‘Come see the baby,’ he said. He took her arm and walked her through a brief, unintelligible maze of passageways for which he had evidently already acquired a reliable internal map. They came to a narrow corridor with glass panels which gave on to small, cell-like cubicles. Angeletti stopped alongside one of the panels of glass. When Alice stared through the panel, she saw, lying alone under a transparent perspex barrel vault, a small, doll-sized form; an elongated parody of human bones and skin with plastic tubing taped to the face somewhere in the region of the nose. The naked vertebrae ran prominent down the centre-back to the waist, from which point the form was encased in a vast, plastic-coated nappy. Below the nappy, Alice could see only the soles of two grotesquely wrinkled feet, topped by the prominent underpads of ten disproportionately long toes.
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