‘It may be that I have no brief for speaking to you like this,’ he said. ‘In which case I hope you will tell me so. But you really ought to recognize your responsibilities with regard to Giovanni.’
Alice allowed her pique to vent itself in sarcasm. ‘Oh that’s right,’ she said. ‘But of course. Make me responsible for Giovanni. And then you can sit back and say, “Oh but how she failed him, poor little thing. And dear impetuous Giovanni is so special. What a pity she wasn’t adequate to wheedle away his lunacies with a few more feminine wiles.” ’
Father Mullholland watched her without blinking. ‘You think it is none of my business,’ he said.
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Please—’ She shrank, like an awkward schoolgirl, into the chair and strove to avoid eye-contact. She stared down at the baby who was clamped to the teat of the feeding bottle.
The priest continued, undaunted. ‘Giovanni is very determined to be your husband,’ he said. ‘Now I may as well tell you that I believe he would make you a very suitable husband. He loves you and he has a great deal to give—’
‘I don’t believe this,’ Alice said. ‘But I expect they still have marriage brokers in certain parts of Ireland.’ He ignored her.
‘– and I don’t mean money, of course, though it is true that Giovanni is very comfortable—’
‘And fixing for male supplicants has always been part of the priestly function after all,’ Alice said, though he seemed not even to hear her.
‘– he is enormously able and generous and passionate,’ Father Mullholland was saying. ‘Passionate about all those things for which you yourself have such enthusiasm, Alice. Books and music and paintings …’ He paused. Alice wanted suddenly to weep with the truth of it. ‘Passion and love don’t come to us so often that we can afford to quibble them away,’ he said. ‘I am speaking about human love, of course.’
She wanted to tell him that he moved her with his good sense but she could not. ‘And he’s Catholic,’ she said, bitchily. ‘Only think. A proper Catholic father for Veronica’s baby. Good old Sarastro. He strides in and takes the centre stage. He can take on Pamina and everything will be just fine and tickety-boo.’ She raised the baby to her shoulder and stroked the small of her back.
‘Why yes,’ he said calmly. ‘It is true that I think Giovanni would make a very good parent for Veronica’s child. Just as you do, Alice. Why are you so angry with me? If it is because you are certain that you do not want to marry Giovanni, then forgive me.’
Alice was completely thrown by his directness. ‘Do I get to name the day?’ she said. ‘Or has that been fixed as well? And as to my bottom drawer – I’ve got all the stuff, don’t worry. Cartloads of it. I’m also a dab hand with a needle, as you know, so to hem sheets in a hurry is really not a problem for me.’
‘When you have quite finished talking nonsense,’ he said, ‘my point is precisely this. Giovanni is not your husband. Not yet. Nor ought he to be for a considerable time if you, at least, are capable of exercising your sense. You have your degree to complete and it may have struck you that Giovanni has only recently emerged from a personal experience which has disturbed him very greatly. So have you. Isn’t it possible that right now you may easily help to drown each other?’ Alice noticed that, as her hand shook, the baby momentarily lost her grip on the teat and nuzzled efficiently until she found it again. ‘I beg you to consider for a moment what Giovanni’s second marriage has really been like for him, Alice.’
Alice tried hard to think seriously about Mary-Lou and the bronze goat and MacMahon, but she could not. It was all so far beyond her own experience that she blinked and gave up.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘It all sounds to me like a tasteless and overblown melodrama. And how Giovanni could ever have got himself embroiled with a woman like that is completely beyond my understanding.’
‘Because he is impetuous and rich and he expects that people will capitulate to him, which they nearly always do. Because he stamps his foot and flexes his right arm and reaches out for whatever he wants.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said and she remembered vividly the occasions on which Giovanni had stamped his foot and reached out and flexed his right arm.
‘He is also, I think, rather susceptible to glamour.’
‘Glamour,’ Alice said woodenly, and she cast an eye involuntarily over her navy skirt and her white blouse.
‘The woman’s face appeared on magazine covers,’ said Father Mullholland. ‘You have probably seen her at the newsstand.’ Alice tried to drink this in. Mary-Lou, embalmed on magazine covers and she in her sensible laced shoes. ‘Yet, for all that, I think you will agree that Giovanni is a person of considerable stature and distinction.’
‘Oh yes,’ Alice said. ‘More so than anyone. Well. Except for you, I suppose.’
‘Thank you, Alice,’ he said. ‘But I will continue if I may.’ Alice began to think that he would never stop. Giovanni would be out through the back door and on to his plane bound for J F K before the priest had stopped talking. ‘Now, Giovanni loves you because you are steadfast and honourable and because, in the first instance, you stood your ground with him so splendidly in the matter of Veronica’s manuscripts.’
‘Oh, good Lord!’ Alice said. ‘But really. I’m by nature so weedy and pliable. I’m the original shrinking violet. And haven’t you noticed how I stammer?’
‘No,’ said Father Mullholland and he laughed at her. Alice became quite urgent in her need to force home the point.
‘Well I do,’ she said. ‘Maybe I don’t when I’m with you, that’s all. Or with Giovanni. Anyway, it’s only when I’m with Giovanni that I discover such a talent for self-assertion. It’s only because he needles me so much. I mean, if people didn’t stand up to him he’d be always having them for breakfast.’
Father Mullholland said nothing. He sat and smiled at her. When he finally spoke, it was as if rather casually.
‘And am I right in thinking that Giovanni is very fond of children?’ he said. In the use of that sly plural, Alice understood at once that the priest had been adequately briefed on the possible effect of Mr Riley’s emissions. It made her indignant, almost beyond bearing, that Giovanni had taken that liberty with her confidence. Damn and blast the man. He had had no right to go co-opting her body and pre-empting any decision she might wish to make by tattling like that to her friend. Not when her friend was a Catholic priest. She was quite sure he had done it on purpose.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘So Giovanni has told you. I must say, he hasn’t wasted any time. And to think how much he enjoys withholding information from me.’
‘I think,’ said the priest slowly, ‘that Giovanni’s marriage has perhaps left him out of practice for dealing with a woman of integrity. Now if you allow Giovanni to take your integrity from you – as he will surely try to do in the process of his obsession with possessing you – then where will that leave you, my dear? And where will it leave Giovanni? He will be like a spoilt child who has been given the rainbow in a bottle.’
Alice could suddenly not bear it any longer. Her impatience revealed itself as irritability. She put away the feeding bottle and began to gather the baby’s things. She almost stamped her foot.
‘So why didn’t he come for me?’ she said crossly. ‘Why did he stand me up like that?’
Father Mullholland watched her carefully as he spoke. ‘He is not very happy about the things you said to him. But neither is he happy about his own conduct towards you last night.’
‘Conduct?’ Alice said.
‘Because his late wife behaved reprehensibly,’ said the priest, ‘that is no reason for him to go venting his anger and hurt upon a blameless young woman in a hotel room.’
Alice found that she had got beyond embarrassment. She resigned herself to the fact that Giovanni had told him everything. The masonic handshake had extended into the bedroom. She wondered whether to feel betrayed by it. Curiosity caused her to speculate about what exactly Giovanni could have said
. I fucked her like a maniac, Father, until I made her cry. And after that she was sugar and spice. Vanilla and hot fudge sauce. I do not know what it is about her that closes and opens. I only know, in retrospect, that I was a little over-emphatic.
‘I don’t think Giovanni did anything wrong,’ she said curtly, wishing not to pursue it. She saw him weighing her words.
‘That may well be what you think,’ he said. ‘But it is not what Giovanni thinks. Giovanni has been brought up to revere a woman’s body as the temple of the Blessed Virgin Mary.’
Alice gulped. ‘You’re not serious?’ she said. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘Holy shit!’ she heard Giovanni say loudly. The expletive had followed upon the crash of earthenware which had come from the region of the kitchen. This was followed by the sound of cupboard doors banging open and shut in quick succession.
‘I think,’ Alice said, ‘that Giovanni is being a little dangerously impetuous in your kitchen.’ Then, though her chair was turned against his entrance, she heard Giovanni burst in through the door.
‘Michael!’ he said irritably. ‘Does your kitchen not support such an item as a floor cloth?’
Father Mullholland gazed at him serenely. ‘What is the matter?’ he said.
‘The matter,’ Giovanni said, ‘is that I just dropped all my nougat. Your whole goddamn kitchen is awash with egg yolks and crap.’
‘Leave it,’ said Father Mullholland. ‘Let it be. There is a person here, Giovanni, who has been waiting to see you all the morning.’
Giovanni was silent for something like five seconds.
‘Alice is here?’ he said edgily. ‘Where?’ Alice shrank with a kind of terror into the chair.
‘Here,’ said Father Mullholland. ‘She has her back to you, that is all.’
When Giovanni came into her line of vision, Alice saw that he was no longer wearing his exercise suit. He was wearing a beautiful rose-pink shirt, with finely tailored pocket lapels, which was open at the neck. Over his black trousers he had pinned, in lieu of a cook’s apron, an Irish linen glass-cloth with a red stripe running through the middle. His sleeves were folded back to the elbow and his fine, long hands, which he held delicately upwards, were coated with what looked and smelled like ground almonds.
Giovanni’s dressiness once again amused her and delighted her, lifting her into a state of sudden exhilaration. Did he change his clothes in telephone boxes, she wondered, like Mr Clark Kent? She hoped that he would kiss her, but he did not. He showed no sign of affection towards her and merely stood there on his tall legs with a demeanour balanced halfway between confrontation and sulkiness.
‘I thought you had abandoned me,’ she said.
Giovanni ignored her. His eyes came to rest upon the baby at her shoulder and he assumed an expression of tenderness. He stepped forward as Alice watched and extended the back of his hand. He brushed Pamina’s cheek delicately, leaving it touched with slight evidence of ground almond.
‘Giovanni,’ Alice said, in gentle reproach. ‘It’s half past two and you said that you would come for me after Mass.’
Giovanni made as if to look rather casually at his watch, but found that his wrist was bare. ‘I took my watch off to cook,’ he said. ‘I guess the time ran away with me.’
‘That’s not true,’ Alice said. ‘I have been waiting for you since dawn.’
Father Mullholland rose. ‘But I think,’ he said appeasingly, ‘we might go and see what Giovanni has made.’
‘Watch your feet,’ Giovanni said irritably as they followed him into the kitchen. ‘My nougat is all over the floor.’ His nice little leave-taking tea, on the other hand, was all over the priest’s kitchen table. Alice saw at once that what Giovanni had created for ‘his nuns’ was certainly no mere tea. It was nothing short of an orgasm in confectionery. She wondered, with a degree of ambivalence, whether she ought to envy the nuns their explosion in sugar when she had got the rack of crucified inkfish.
‘Gosh,’ Alice said and she stared in wonder at the table, because, standing taller than the rest, darkened with flaked, bitter chocolate and reeking of cognac, stood a vast, elaborately layered, cylindrical cake. Around it stood a variety of prettier, lighter cakes – so light in fact that they looked more like soufflés. Giovanni had made them, Father Mullholland proceeded to explain, with frothed egg whites and sugared cream cheese. In front of these stood an extraordinary jewelled miscellany of pastries and sweetmeats upon which Alice feasted her eyes like a child in Santa’s grotto. There were meringues spread with whipped cream and spiced chestnut purée. There were small, layered flaky things, bursting exuberantly with almonds and candied peel. There were apricots glazed with sugar and cubes of what looked like dense chocolate fridge-cake with fine mine-seams of marzipan running through their centres. And splashed on to the floor at her feet, lying among a dispersed scatter of broken earthenware, lay the yolks of something like sixteen eggs, all ruptured into a gunge of melted chocolate and butter.
‘Gosh!’ Alice said again and she burst out laughing. ‘Giovanni! What can I say? I’m really very sorry about your nougat.’ Giovanni continued to ignore her. He was busy at the workboard where he was committing scraps of pastry to a plastic dustbin, along with about four dozen egg shells.
‘Giovanni’s parents are pastry cooks,’ Father Mullholland offered amicably into the tension. ‘Has he ever told you that, Alice? They own a number of justifiably profitable bakeries which supply all of San Francisco.’ Giovanni had begun to scuffle aggressively at the sink. He was gathering dishes and cutlery on to the old wooden draining board by a system of dauntingly rational classification and he was frowning with displeasure as he did so.
‘I don’t know why you pamper that girl with reality,’ he said. ‘She prefers to believe that I depend on what I harvest from stolen manuscripts.’
Something occurred to Alice at that moment, which warmed her heart and made her feel more tenderly towards Giovanni than she had ever felt so far. It was not his publishing house which made him rich! No, of course not! The publishing house would all be floating on the proceeds of Italian sweetmeats. Because what sort of funny little publishing house would take a risk on a book like Jem’s? No! Giovanni was the pampered child and grandchild of adoring Italian pastry cooks. They had been diligent enough and skilled enough and lucky enough to have made an absolute pile. And the publishing house was Giovanni’s shiny toy. Mr and Mrs Angeletti would have taken their clever, expensively educated son into whatever was the equivalent of Hamley’s toyshop and watched his terrifying, snot-green hawk’s eyes light with pleasure. And that, she thought, would go for the summerhouse as well. The ‘cabin’ in New Hampshire. With the proceeds of Angeletti pasticceria, Giovanni would have bought himself the summerhouse – not any old summerhouse any old place, but the Golden Pond scenario. Alice’s love for him grew and surged in the wake of this delicious speculation. Giovanni had acquired a summerhouse among descendants of The Mayflower. A summerhouse in which to read manuscripts and scribble a bit. Giovanni ‘coughed in ink’. Was that his ‘profession’? Or was it his ‘hobby’?
‘Dear Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Dear Giovanni, don’t be grumpy. I think your cakes are completely beautiful. I think you are the most extraordinary man.’
She reached out then for a cube of Giovanni’s fridge-cake, since there was so much of it, after all, and since it looked so wonderfully tempting. And since, anyway, she had not yet had any lunch.
‘Don’t touch that!’ Giovanni said viciously, with eyes in the back of his head. ‘Not one crumb of that is for you, my girl. Touch that and you don’t get lunch!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said. ‘I’m a bit hungry, that’s all. I haven’t really eaten since yesterday’s lunch.’
Giovanni addressed Father Mullholland in a fit of petulance. ‘The woman’s appetite is gross beyond imagining,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s in the nature of her condition.’ Father Mullholland fetched her a bread board and a knife. He placed a loaf on th
e board and got her some butter. ‘Don’t stuff her with bread,’ Giovanni said. ‘I’m taking you both out for lunch.’
‘Will you let her alone?’ said Father Mullholland mildly. ‘And not behave so much like a tinpot dictator, Giovanni?’ He turned then to Alice. ‘You would like some cheese with that, Alice,’ he said.
Alice nodded on a mouthful of dry bread. ‘Yes I would, please,’ she said. Father Mullholland fetched a cheese dish from his cupboard.
‘Giovanni’s father taught him to make pastry and his mother taught him to read,’ he said, engaging her attention with agreeable small talk. ‘Both of them excellent teachers, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Oh yes,’ Alice said. ‘Oh yes. And Giovanni so remarkably precocious, of course – with his reading, at any rate. Bit like St Nicholas really. I think he leapt, reading, from his mother’s womb, don’t you? She died while giving birth to him, you see.’ Father Mullholland studied her curiously. Then he looked, with some amusement, at Giovanni.
‘Take the child from her, Michael!’ Giovanni said, sounding like a playground bully. ‘Give her a floor cloth, will you? Get her to wash the floor!’
‘Your mother, Giovanni?’ Father Mullholland said, mildly.
‘Do it!’ Giovanni said. ‘Give her a cloth! That’s unless you want eggs and crap all over the hem of your cassock!’
Father Mullholland and Alice looked at each other and smiled. Giovanni caught the end of the smile which provoked him to further annoyance.
‘Or failing a cloth,’ he said, rising wonderfully. ‘Get her to lick the floor!’ And he rammed a mountain of silverware into the sink with a clatter like that of pounding scrap metal. Alice and the priest colluded enjoyably in laughter.
‘OK,’ Giovanni said in fury, and his voice got louder and louder. ‘OK. Laugh. It’s funny. So maybe I told her something like that. I produced it as a mere hypothesis. And let’s remember my wife died that day. She died in childbirth, didn’t she? She died screaming.’ Both of them had stopped to stare at him and their laughter had abruptly ceased. ‘And all the while,’ Giovanni said. ‘I had this’ – he indicated Alice with his forefinger – ‘this two-bit suffragette person gorging on the contents of my skull. God forgive me, Michael, but maybe you can’t appreciate what she’s like.’ He tore off the glass-cloth from around his waist and he threw it over the nougat. ‘My wife got killed that day!’ he yelled. ‘I hounded her to her death didn’t I? – Her and the unborn child. You think I felt especially good that night? You think I felt ready to open my heart for real to little Mrs Cromwell here? Little Mrs John Knox with her house in a cuckoo clock and her mind in a plain-sided strong box?’
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