‘But don’t you hate it?’ she said.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘The Church is not a society for aesthetes and clever undergraduates like yourself. It is a very broad-based institution. Forgive me for observing that the Church is “catholic”.’ It was nice of him, she thought, to call her a ‘clever undergraduate’, when she was really a bit of a drop-out with a kitchen file-box and a festoon blind collecting dust in Surrey and a pot of small white pills which she had neglected to bring with her to the hospital. And she had the baby. That was marvellous, but it was surely the end of Homer. She tried to remember which galling male it was who had observed that the pram in the hall was the enemy of promise.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I oughtn’t to be so offensive. I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that religion is about spirituality. And – well – to worship bits of the body of God – doesn’t that place the emphasis on something inappropriately physical? Well, doesn’t it? I mean a heart is a muscle after all; a lump of flesh. It’s a thing that one sees oozing blood in a butcher’s shop. Or in biology textbooks.’
‘You are really very squeamish about the Flesh,’ he said.
‘What?’ Alice said.
‘The Flesh,’ he said. ‘Why do you balk so at the Flesh?’ The remark surprised her, coming as it did from a celibate priest. ‘Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh,’ he said. ‘The Word made Man. Not the Word disguised as a Man. That is the whole crux.’
Alice found that the idea crashed suddenly into her rather rarefied modes of thought as a jarring, powerful reality, every bit as compelling as it was repulsive. It threw at her disturbing images of the Five Wounds and the Passion, of the nails and thorns and the stripped garments bedded with blood and skin. Things which had been only words to her in the past. And she saw in her mind the jam-coloured blood that trickled from the ugly statue and it made her feel like retching.
‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘I really find that a very disturbing idea.’
‘Religion is often very disturbing,’ Father Mullholland said. ‘Disturbing and adventurous. That is to say, it is anything but “convenient” and “safe”. Though the “badge of membership” can be a gratifying source of comfort and support.’ And he smiled at her as though she had arrived at something. Alice said absolutely nothing. ‘But you will either believe, or you will not believe,’ he said. ‘And I really think it is quite likely that you will. One day – you might be walking in the park, or frying eggs, or taking the train to meet a friend – you will pause in your head and think “yes”, “now I see it”, “now it all makes perfect sense to me”.’ Alice still said nothing.
‘Tell me about your life at Oxford,’ he said. So she told him about Homer and Hesiod and about David and Maya Morgan and the children and the filthy, congenial house, and about crazy Iona and the typewriter, and about dear, kind Roland who had taught her to drive, but who had finally, sensibly, given up on her after her touchiness about Pyecroft and the cricket fixture and her squeamishness about the flesh. And she told him about Matthew Riley, and about the curious feeling of longing and deprivation she had experienced when she had gone into her attic bed-sitting room and had found her essay half finished upon the desk, but how she had not been able to linger, because Angeletti had been grinding his teeth in the kitchen with a rent in his gabardine coat.
‘Well,’ said Father Mullholland, just as though there were no obstacles in the way. ‘It is perfectly obvious that you must return to Oxford in October in time for the new term. From what you have told me about Dr and Mrs Morgan, I hardly think that an additional young child will present too much of a problem. And I am quite certain that some adequate form of child care will be procurable. That is, for a young woman such as yourself who is not wholly devoid of means.’ Alice blinked at him but words failed her. ‘Now, it may be that you would like me to write some letters on your behalf to the various authorities in question.’
‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘yes, please.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then we will consider it settled.’ Father Mullholland got up and went to the cupboard. He produced from it, with a certain comforting show of camaraderie, a Sony Walkman and a cassette of the Schubert Mass in E Flat Major. ‘You may like the loan of it,’ he said.
‘Well, yes please,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you. I’ve got a little Walkman just like that in Oxford.’
‘But yours is not with you,’ he said. ‘You may have mine while I am away.’
‘What?’ Alice said. Because it transpired that, just when she really wanted him, he had arranged to be away on holiday.
Chapter 34
Angeletti appeared, quite unexpectedly and with maximum inconvenience. He came on the very morning of the day in early October when she was due to return with Pamina to Surrey en route to her digs in Oxford. Her parents were returning from Spain the following day and, since she had told them nothing either about Matthew or the baby, she was anxious to get there ahead of them.
Angeletti looked most extraordinary. He was standing in the doorway of the convent porch, taller than the doorway itself. His hangman’s face was half hidden under a white panama hat and he was dressed top to toe in a white linen suit of stunningly elegant cut. Under the jacket he had on a silk polo neck the colour of cinnamon sticks and in his left hand he was holding an absurd explosion of small pink rosebuds. Angeletti, but for his olive skin, was as ludicrously pink and white as the pair of coconut-ice brides.
‘Mrs Riley?’ he said. Alice was wearing the Marks and Spencer school uniform. He took off his hat and stepped into the porch. When he took her hand and bent to kiss her cheek, he gave off a dandified odour of designer soap and aftershave. Then he gave her the flowers. She thanked him and got down to business.
‘So where are Jem’s books?’ she said. Angeletti was constrained from making a reply because Sister Teresa had just then come bustling into the hall.
‘Dear Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Come in. Come in.’ Alice did not know at what point in their acquaintance Sister Teresa had got into Christian names, but it was evident to her that Angeletti inspired no lessening of palpitations in that lady’s breast. She had clearly been forewarned of his advent and she swept forward to greet him as if he were a favourite nephew. Angeletti entered the hall where she pointed him hospitably to the settle. ‘You will make yourself entirely at home now,’ she said. ‘While Mrs Riley gets her bits and bobs together.’
‘Bits and bobs?’ Alice said and she tried not to think that the invitation to Angeletti sounded just a shade Boccaccio. The nun was drawing forth a small hard chair for herself. She and Angeletti smiled at each other, evidently wreathed in mutual affection.
‘Sister means your pocket book,’ he said. ‘I came by to take you out, Mrs Riley. Sister felt you might like a break.’ Sister Teresa brought her hands together purposefully.
‘Mr Angeletti has plans for a picnic,’ she said. ‘And the weather is so very suitable – a real Indian summer.’
Alice looked from one to the other. Picnics would not be Angeletti’s genre, she reflected cynically. For all his physical strength, Angeletti was too much a city slicker; too much a man to snap his fingers at a bell boy. He was a man in possession of a mobile telephone. A man too easily put out of countenance by a hotel bathroom without shampoo. Sister Teresa, on the other hand, would picnic to the manner born. She would spread groundsheets with the best of them and issue sandwiches filled with egg and cress. Her spirits would remain undampened by rain clouds gathering overhead. No, Alice thought. Angeletti had somehow got this delightful, competent and trusting woman to collude with him over the morning’s engagement. Once again Sister’s best little grade school reader, her most avid and scheming little pedlar of Holy Childhood stamps, had been operating for some devious purpose of his own. She glanced at him in his white linen. Angels are bright still, she thought, though the brightest fell. And did the brightest angel relinquish all his brightness with the fall? She would have to ask Father Mullholland.
‘Excuse me,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll go and see to the flowers.’ She heard Sister Teresa’s voice as she made her way up the stairs.
‘But Mrs Riley must show you the baby,’ she said. ‘Little Pamina Mary. Oh but you must go at once and admire your baby!’
Before the picnic could proceed, Angeletti took from his hired car a Pentax camera with a flash attachment and a telescopic lens. He also took an abundance of soft-soaping gifts. To the nuns he gave large boxes of hand-made chocolates and useless, expensive lace handkerchiefs. To the baby he gave a cobweb-fine lace shawl, a quilted rush basket containing an assortment of smocked silk and lawn romper suits and a small silk cap with beaded quilting of the sort worn by infants in Holbein paintings. In addition he gave her a book, bound in white leather and cloyingly illustrated in the post-Murillo style, entitled A Catholic Child’s Missal and Prayerbook. He also gave her a silver fork and spoon.
Angeletti seemed entirely to lose his head over the baby and behaved with her like an irritating and highly partisan parent. He took a great number of photographs. Then he tutored Sister Teresa in the management of his camera and, having settled the infant in the cradle of his forearm, he got the nun to take his photograph. The others meanwhile plied him with coffee and biscuits, displaying a solicitude which might have been more appropriate, Alice thought, had it been employed on a visiting bishop.
‘She’s tired,’ Alice said tetchily and she immediately felt small-minded. For six weeks now she had existed in a community of women without any such feelings of ownership and encroachment. She had been perfectly happy for Pamina to pass from hand to hand like an infant with ten mothers. Now, suddenly, she felt not only that the baby was her own exclusive property, but that Angeletti was trying to supplant her. How dare he choose the baby’s clothes and have himself pictured with her? How dare Sister Teresa, in chatting with him, refer, however innocuously, to the child as ‘your’ baby? He had admittedly been present at the moment of her birth, but only as Alice’s messenger. And why, right now, had someone else so suddenly swooped down and carried off Pamina to her cot as if Alice were a mere bystander?
Alice walked with Angeletti towards the site of his hired car in a state of sullen confusion.
‘What’s going on here, Angeletti?’ she said. ‘Why did they take my baby away? I mean why are they suddenly shunting me out with you like this?’ Angeletti kept on walking.
‘ “They”?’ he said.
‘Them,’ she said. ‘You. Everybody …’ She paused. ‘You walk in here like a GI handing out Hershey Bars and suddenly everyone is singing choruses to you. What have you done, Angeletti?’
‘Mrs Riley,’ Angeletti said. ‘It’s a nice day. We are going to eat lunch in the forest, OK?’
‘And when I get back?’ she said. Angeletti’s laugh – the third she had now been witness to – was, as always, brief, unpleasant and sardonic.
‘You think those Romans are conspiring to abduct your child?’ he said. Alice bit her lip in some embarrassment.
‘Well, it’s only because of you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought like that for over a month. Not since you said they might not let me have her …’
Angeletti looked at her a little quizzically. ‘I said that?’ he said. Alice stared at him with loathing.
‘You implied it,’ she said. ‘So just you swear to me now that there’s no sort of funny business going on.’ Angeletti disdained to reply. He kept on walking. ‘What I mean is,’ she said with feeling, ‘I’ll bet you wouldn’t swear to it on that cruddy little propaganda book you’ve just seen fit to give my daughter.’
Angeletti appeared to find her vehemence entertaining. ‘You’re very gracious with me today,’ he said. ‘I’m delighted to see that life in a convent has left you so unbowed.’ Then he opened the passenger door and held it while she hesitated. ‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘Get in. We have business together. Are you planning to turn down a working lunch?’
On the back seat, alongside his telephone, there was a sort of The Wind in the Willows picnic basket and a carrier bag from Saks.
‘I don’t mean to sound so ungracious,’ she said, capitulating. ‘But why do you behave like this, Angeletti? You tell me absolutely nothing. You carry away my friend’s books. You turn up out of the blue – all kitted out like the Great Gatsby and behaving like Toad of Toad Hall—’
‘Oh my,’ said Angeletti. He turned from the wheel for a moment and smiled at her, coconut ice, in his milk-white clothes. Then he turned back to the road.
‘So why?’ Alice said. ‘Or are you chronically incapable of putting your cards on the table?’ She paused. ‘You walk in here. You start manipulating everyone. This time it’s with gifts. Well, I’m sorry to say so, but it’s true. Even if your gifts are beautiful. Even if they hoodwink Sister Teresa. She’s in love with you, I hope you realize.’
‘Sister Teresa,’ Angeletti said resolutely, ‘is a woman consecrated to God.’
‘She seems equally consecrated to chocolates and lace-trimmed snotrags,’ Alice said irritably. ‘But since they come from you they probably classify as holy relics.’ Angeletti concentrated on changing gear – a thing which evidently gave him trouble. Her outburst, on reflection, had left Alice feeling cheap.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I love and admire Sister Teresa. I love all of them. They’ve all been marvellous to me. It’s only you, Angeletti.’
Angeletti changed the subject. ‘So how’s life with a baby?’ he said.
‘Oh, life with a baby is wonderful,’ she said. ‘Why are you keeping me from her?’ Angeletti ignored her. He leaned his left arm over the back of the seat as he drove and reached for the carrier bag from Saks which he dropped into her lap. Inside it was a dress made of pale sea-green silk.
‘So what’s this?’ she said.
‘A dress,’ he said.
‘Well I can see it’s a dress,’ she said.
‘I have plans to prolong your deprivation, Mrs Riley,’ he said. ‘I have tickets for the opera this evening.’
Alice contained anger only with difficulty. ‘I don’t remember your asking me,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember saying that I’d go.’ She seethed in silence for a moment. ‘And I’ll bet it’s Carmen,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with Carmen?’ he said. ‘You don’t like a strong, difficult heroine?’
Alice closed her eyes. She would be required to mark time all day in the forest, pandering to Angeletti’s preening ego and, all the while, itching to be with her baby. And then, on top of that, she would have to sit through bloody Carmen.
‘I’m not going,’ she said with finality. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to the opera with you.’
Angeletti drove her into the forest in silence and parked the car. Then they got out and sat down. He took a contract from the inside pocket of his jacket and gave it to her. Alice looked it over. She gleaned from it that Aaron Schmutzburger, who had evidently drawn it up, did not after all have an m in his name. He was called Aaron Schutzburger. The document pertained to My Last Duchess and it was full of percentages and words like ‘hereinafter’. The book had been attributed to Veronica Bernadette McCrail and the contract made provision for the author’s issue, in the person of Pamina Mary McCrail, to be in receipt of any royalties etc. It then protracted itself into a string of jabberwocky about film rights and serialization, and, finally, awaited her signature. When she had read it she looked up.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She felt compromised by her previous suspicions. ‘I’m really sorry if I seemed a bit paranoid.’
‘Now look,’ he said. ‘If you’d feel more comfortable seeking legal advice before you sign that, you go ahead, Mrs Riley.’
‘Oh no,’ Alice said. ‘No really …’
Angeletti took a fountain pen from his pocket. He unscrewed the cap and handed it to her. ‘Both copies,’ he said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
Alice signed. First one copy, then another. Then she gave him back the contracts toget
her with his fountain pen.
‘I guess we ought to drink on that,’ he said. He fetched a bottle from the car and two glasses and other miscellaneous items. Then he opened the bottle and filled the glasses and gave her one of them. ‘We’re going to do well with that little book,’ he said. ‘You excited? I’m excited, Mrs Riley.’ He gestured briefly with the glass and drank. Then he placed before her a small, rather exuberantly decorated cake box containing a single, very small spiced pastry. After that he gave her Jem’s page proofs, bound between plain paper covers. He handed her, along with the proofs, a rather ornate-looking book jacket, heavy on chiaroscuro and gold paint.
‘I’d like to have you to read these while I take a nap,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but I just got in this morning. As far as I’m concerned it’s five a.m.’ He set a button on his wristwatch and stretched himself horizontal on the floor of the forest with the panama hat over his eyes. Then he fell asleep.
Alice approached the page proofs in a state of high excitement. It was delightful to see My Last Duchess printed like that, with Jem’s name on the title page and, on the following page, opposite the publication date and the catalogue number, it startled her to see her own name. The dedication said ‘for Alice’. That was all. And reading it confirmed for her that the story was enchanting. It was like hearing again the pointed cadence of Jem’s own voice.
Alice poured some more to drink from Angeletti’s bottle. She had almost finished the reading and Angeletti was still asleep. It had taken her nearly three hours. She had begun, with the reading, to flow with gratitude for Angeletti. For his extraordinary effectiveness, for his efforts on Jem’s behalf. That was until she came to the end. Angeletti had changed the end. In it, Alice read how the Highland brain surgeon, while homing in for the rescue, had got his head cut off by falling sheet metal from the back of a small white van. She stared in disbelief at the camped-up words on the page. ‘This is no sight for my dear young wife to witness,’ Umberto said and he steered the Ferrari deftly round the cascade of gleaming sheet metal under which the Scotsman lay beheaded …
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