‘I got to see the bodies after I left you,’ he said. ‘Mary-Lou’s was just the most indescribable mess. The baby’s was miraculously unblemished.’ Something then occurred to Alice to which she could hardly give voice.
‘You delayed your flight for me,’ she said. ‘You were booked to leave at six o’clock that morning.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Giovanni said grimly. ‘Nobody ever got impatient waiting around in the morgue.’ Alice said nothing. She considered morbidly how she had made him go in her place and watch Jem die; how she had despised him for his humanity towards Jem’s unprepossessing and undersized baby. It left her too deeply appalled even to apologize.
‘As a matter of fact you did me a favour that night,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t make a flight back home till morning and frankly I could see no point in passing up The Magic Flute. But it’s not much to be recommended as an escape from the rack, I guess. Instead you allowed me the privilege of watching you rip your hands open on old boards.’
‘Some privilege,’ Alice said.
‘For sure,’ he said. ‘It was a privilege and now I’ll tell you why. You were doing it to support your dying friend. I’d been giving you a hard time, Alice, but it made no difference to you. And then you yelled at me. I took a good look at you and I said to myself, “Keep looking, Giovanni. Keep looking at that woman. She’s yelling at you. So what? She’s got shoes on her feet like Minnie Mouse and she behaves like she never got screwed. She has furthermore attempted to wrap you in barbed wire and she has destroyed your clothes. She has caused you to miss the opera and she has damn near thrown you down a hole in the floor. So what? All around the rest of your life lies the shark pool. And here, under this precarious circle of golden lamplight is your guardian angel. You go easy on this woman, Giovanni, because this is the most beautiful, most loyal, most precious woman you are ever going to meet.” I said to myself, “Giovanni, fight dirty for this woman if necessary, but bind her to your body and your soul. È bella come la madre di Dio.” ’
‘Oh Giovanni,’ Alice said. ‘Oh Giovanni.’
Chapter 39
Throughout the remainder of the journey, Alice wove in and out of sleep.
‘As to an annulment,’ she heard Giovanni say, ‘I guess it won’t give the Vatican too much of a problem.’
‘What?’ Alice said.
‘Your marriage to Mr Riley,’ Giovanni said. ‘Given that it was never consummated.’
‘What?’ Alice said again. She wondered whether he had been proposing marriage to her in her sleep and whether, in that event, she had accepted him. She sat bolt upright at once, feeling the necessary propriety of adjusting her deportment in the face of so significant an offer.
‘It is perfectly apparent to me,’ Giovanni said, ‘that Mr Riley never brought you to climax. That constitutes an unconsummated marriage.’
Alice began to revel in Giovanni’s dottiness. It delighted her to reflect that while she would quibble with Father Mullholland about absolutely everything from the Woman of Syro-Phoenicia to the Holy Handkerchief, Giovanni blithely called himself a Catholic and believed whatever he liked.
‘You are as mad as a hatter,’ she said and it came to her in a glorious rush that Giovanni was very much like Jem. He had wrested the talisman from her, that was all. Sarastro had finally outwitted the star-crowned Queen. Or he had won more than a round or two, she had to concede. ‘I really love you, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Pray forgive me for having disliked you so much in the past.’
‘Now, it is my impression,’ Giovanni continued relentlessly, ‘that your adorable Father Mullholland is bent upon talking doctrine to you until the conversion of China. I would like it for him to receive you as soon as possible.’
‘Oh yes,’ Alice said, and she raised an eyebrow in the dark.
‘I’m sure that you will appreciate it’s essential for the children,’ he said. ‘And I have to admit that it will give great pleasure to my mother.’
Alice tried not to laugh. ‘The “children”? And your “mother”?’ she said. And she thought about Giovanni’s mother, dead in childbirth. And she thought again about Mary-Lou and the cookie sheets and the porn king with the bronze statue and the shirts being ironed on both sides and her whole soul filled with joy at the absurdity of it. Gullibility is the sin of stupidity, she thought. And what is the matter with me? I pick nits all day with Jem’s priest and yet I swallow, hook, line and sinker, a meshwork of wacky absurdity. A tissue of macabre and ridiculous fabrication. Infected stigmata. A porn king buggering a goat.
‘With your permission, it is my intention to adopt Pamina just as soon as we are married,’ Giovanni said. ‘I am, of course, more than ready to assume paternity for the unborn child. That goes without saying.’
‘Giovanni?’ Alice said. ‘Tell me now about the first Mrs Angeletti. Did she also “die in childbirth”? And was she “confined in the sixth month of pregnancy”?’
‘She drowned,’ Giovanni said.
‘She drowned?’ Alice said.
‘She drowned on her wedding night,’ Giovanni said.
Alice, caught all unawares, heard her laughter disgorge inelegantly, like a snort. She was deeply admiring of Giovanni’s effrontery. That he should call himself a ‘man of letters’ and then not even bother to fabricate something less purple. No wonder he did not balk at Carmen.
‘On her wedding night?’ Alice said gleefully. ‘I expect it was from a surfeit of sexual climax.’
‘She drowned in a hotel swimming pool,’ Giovanni said curtly. ‘She walked in her sleep, Alice. I didn’t know that before I married her.’
‘Oh what a pity,’ Alice said. ‘Had you not slept with her before?’
‘No I hadn’t,’ Giovanni said. ‘She was very young. We were both very young.’ Alice tried to envisage a very young Giovanni with his very young, virgin bride. His lank black hair falling unthinned into his hooded, predator’s eyes. Would she have wanted him like that? She decided no. The receding hairline had the effect of counter-balancing the jaw. And if it was true that people mellowed with age, well, Giovanni at twenty must have been all distilled assassin.
‘Was she “promised” to you at birth?’ Alice said.
‘We met in college,’ Giovanni said. ‘You are behaving very badly, Alice. Do you suffer from retrospective jealousy?’
Alice saw then that the sky was streaked with the first sweet signs of day and that Giovanni was approaching the convent gates. She could not remember ever having felt so completely, so divinely happy. Not since the day that she and Jem McCrail had shuffled into Miss Trotter’s office, wedged like pin cushions in the resolute shorts. And now Giovanni had asked her to marry him. She would go and tell Miss Trotter. She would climb in through the window of the assembly hall and confront Miss Trotter on the platform. ‘The fact is,’ she would say, all shimmering in her silks and fine array, ‘the fact is that Giovanni and I have become completely inseparable.’ Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann reichen an die Gottbeit an. Oh, the bliss of it! Then Giovanni turned in through the gates and stopped the car.
‘Dear Giovanni,’ Alice said. ‘Dearest Giovanni, you’re brilliant. And thank you so much for being a man.’ Giovanni did not turn to her, but stared out pensively into the foreground, somewhere beyond the windscreen. For a moment Alice paused to regard his profile. He was a grey, brooding silhouette in the delicate monochrome light. It did not surprise her to see, now, that Giovanni was awesomely beautiful. She kissed him at the angle of his jaw, below the ear. ‘I love you,’ she said. And she laughed a bit, through elation. ‘Please don’t crush me under a truck,’ she said. ‘Or heave me into a hotel swimming pool.’ The colour was high in her cheeks as she opened the door and got out. She closed the door quietly and leaned in through the window. ‘Don’t feed me from a dish of poisoned figs after a day out on the autostrada. So long, Giovanni. I’ll see you after Mass.’
Chapter 40
When the clock on the wall of Sister Teresa’s office s
aid ten past twelve, Alice knew for certain that Giovanni would not come. He would simply, sensibly, have rescheduled his flight and headed out directly for Heathrow. It was a thing for which his experience with her had given him much practice. And what could she expect?
In the bright light of noon, she examined her conduct in the car the previous dawn. She had as good as accused Giovanni of murdering both of his wives. Why ever had she done that? Why had she behaved so badly? He had asked her to marry him and had confided to her the most scarring and terrible secrets of his heart and she had laughed in his face and abused him for it. Had she really been quite awake, or had she been sleepwalking like the first Mrs Angeletti? And now Giovanni was gone. She would head out alone with Pamina and confront her parents in Surrey.
All that remained for her was to take leave of Father Mullholland. She picked up the baby in Giovanni’s basket and set her face towards the priest’s house.
Father Mullholland took the basket from her and ushered her into his sitting room.
‘Your baby is looking very fine,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Alice said. She had selected the most exquisite of Giovanni’s smocked garments to celebrate the baby’s departure from regulation hospital nightgowns and she had tied the Holbein hat under the baby’s chin. Father Mullholland drew up his large wing armchair for her until it faced the window and he placed the baby’s basket beside the chair. Once she had sat down, he approached a sort of old linen press in which he kept supplies of alcohol and glasses. He opened it and took out two tumblers and an unopened bottle of malt whisky which he proceeded to uncap.
‘Now you are surely not going to insist on drinking sherry?’ he said. ‘Not on a day like this.’
‘Yes I am,’ Alice said. ‘If I don’t shock you too much.’ She did not, in fact, want to drink anything at all, but she knew that he probably did and she was unwilling to be the cause of his deprivation. He traded the glass for a smaller one, after a little persuasion, and poured sherry into it and gave it to her. Then he poured whisky for himself which he drank neat, without any ice. He seated himself on the cushioned window ledge with his back towards the garden.
The garden was flowerless and darkly shaded with rather too many large trees. Ivy crept up the tree trunks and had begun to decorate the stone sill around the low bay window where he sat. Alice had always liked his garden. It was like a pleasant, Victorian graveyard which had been left in peace to harbour mosses and squirrels. And today, over and above these charms, his house was smelling curiously spicy as though somebody was baking a cake. She could hear that the daily woman was moving in the kitchen, making a soft clatter as she sorted cooking pans.
‘Your Mrs Murphy is turning out German apple cake for you,’ Alice said.
‘It is a well-known fact,’ said Father Mullholland, ‘that the clergy live in the lap of luxury.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said and she tried, not very successfully, to smile at the jape, because she was grieving for Giovanni and because, sitting there, it weighed on her how much she was going to miss Jem’s priest. In her friendship with him, as with so many things, Jem had handed her a kind of baton. She looked around the room, storing up its features.
‘Did Jem ever come here?’ she said. ‘I mean, did she sit here, in this room?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But that was before she got too ill of course.’
‘And did she sit in this chair?’ Alice said.
‘Oh yes,’ he said again. ‘Quite often.’ After that they said nothing. She sat and watched him as he took swigs at the whisky.
‘But you have come to talk to me,’ he said. Alice coloured a little.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I came to say goodbye to you, that’s all.’ She paused so long that he spoke again.
‘Yesterday you went to the opera with our mutual friend Giovanni,’ he said. He said it in a voice so neutral that it put her on her guard.
‘But is Giovanni your friend?’ she said.
He seemed to think rather carefully before he answered, but when he did, it was with certainty.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have known him no longer than you have, of course. But yes. Giovanni is my friend.’ He looked as if he were amusing himself with a sudden afterthought. ‘I have observed in that short time that he might make one a rather formidable enemy.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I spent a week with him in America,’ Father Mullholland said, making idle small talk into the silence. ‘He was kind enough to invite me and I must say that he proved to be a very delightful host.’
‘Your holiday,’ Alice said with feeling. ‘You spent it with Giovanni. And that was exactly when I wanted you most.’
‘But it seems that you managed very ably without me,’ said the priest.
‘All right,’ Alice said, reluctantly. ‘I was all right.’ She couldn’t but accept the reasonableness of his assertion.
‘Are you at war with Giovanni?’ he said. Alice considered this. Was she at war with Giovanni? Probably. It seemed that simply to co-exist with Giovanni implied a state of precarious truce.
‘I might as well tell you that I have a problem about Giovanni,’ she said. ‘I only discovered it last night. You see, I’m in love with him. But it’s all right. I’ll be all right. I’m quite safe now because he’s decided to abandon me.’
‘Has he?’ said Father Mullholland. ‘And why should he have done that?’
‘Because I accused him of murdering his wives,’ she said. ‘Which was hardly diplomatic in the circumstances.’
‘No,’ said Father Mullholland. ‘I suppose it was not – though he has admittedly managed to lose two of them and he is only thirty-five. You would have been completely justified in telling him it looked like carelessness.’
‘Well, it was unforgivable of me,’ Alice said. ‘But something must have made me say it. Don’t you see? Do I sense that Giovanni is the sort of man who would hound a woman to death? And then he would endow a convent full of nuns to say masses for her soul. Look, I wish you wouldn’t smile at me like that. He did ask me to marry him last night. And I do know for a fact that he’s making handouts to the convent.’
Father Mullholland seemed entertained by the imputation, though in general he took her seriously.
‘Oh come now,’ he said. ‘As I understand it, Giovanni is deeply and sincerely in love with you and I advise you to apologize to him at once.’
Alice narrowed her eyes as enlightenment came upon her. ‘He’s been tattling to you,’ she said. ‘And furthermore you know exactly where he is.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Father Mullholland. ‘He is in my kitchen where he has been busy all the morning. He is preparing a nice little leave-taking tea for his nuns.’
Alice found her indignation rising. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I see that the Catholic Boys’ Club has been in session again. Please don’t mind me, will you? Please carry on. Five minutes after you meet each other you’re exchanging razors and shirts.’
He looked at her a little sceptically. ‘You are a perfectly ridiculous girl,’ he said. ‘To be always making so much fuss about a razor and a shirt.’
‘Has it occurred to you that I’m jealous?’ Alice said. ‘Because I’m your friend too, aren’t I? So when are you going to lend me your razor and your shirt?’ It struck Alice all of a sudden that she was flirting with him and it made her blush. She hurriedly picked up the baby, who had begun to stir in her basket. She took a feeding bottle from a holder under the shawl and she turned in readiness to rise and go to Giovanni. After her initial indignation, she was suffused with relief to learn both that Giovanni loved her and that he was, after all, within reach.
‘Excuse me—’ she said.
‘If I may detain you a little longer,’ said Father Mullholland, unbearably. ‘I would like to talk to you about Giovanni.’ Alice conceded with enormous difficulty, because to know that Giovanni was in the kitchen was making it impossible for her to sit still.
&nb
sp; ‘It concerns me,’ said Father Mullholland, as if blithely unaware of her problem, ‘that Giovanni may be a little – how shall I say this? – a little dangerously impetuous with regard to your good self.’
Alice laughed at his diplomacy. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘ “Impetuous”? Well I must say that’s very politic, Father. You may as well call him a psychopathic bully. And manipulating—’ She stopped and laughed. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘He might hear me.’
‘If he bullies and manipulates you,’ Father Mullholland said firmly, ‘then you have a clear duty to teach him otherwise.’
Alice opened her mouth. She was all incredulity. ‘Well I hope you’re joking,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps you haven’t noticed that Giovanni is about three times my size? On top of that, he lifts weights. But I don’t suppose you’ve ever had cause to observe the power of dear Giovanni’s right arm.’
Father Mullholland seemed to brush this aside as if it were a minor irrelevance. ‘Giovanni is the only child of rather simple, wealthy and indulgent parents,’ he said. ‘It is hardly surprising that he plays the Grand Turk.’
‘And what about me?’ Alice said. ‘I’m also the only child of rather simple, wealthy and indulgent parents.’
Father Mullholland finished his whisky and put the glass down on the floor. ‘Then you are fortunate in being so much the moderate and reasonable person that you are,’ he said. ‘It is probably your sex which has helped to save you.’
Alice pulled a face; doubtful, contentious. She didn’t debate the point with him. She merely reminded herself that this was the same person who had so kindly put himself out writing letters on her behalf to reinstate her at Oxford. She resented deeply at that moment that his beautiful, seductive religion had made God carnate as a man. Not hermaphrodite, like Tiresias, biologically equipped to enter into the range of human experience across gender, but as a man. A celibate man who was nice to women. Like Father Mullholland. Et bomo factus est. The Flesh. Male Flesh. You are rather squeamish about the Flesh, Alice.
Temples of Delight Page 30