Giovanni bent to scoop the spillage. He paused, staring hard at the floor. He was concentrating so intensely on the glass-cloth that Alice, who was watching him, did not register at first that Father Mullholland had taken the baby from her. Then she bent down and took the cloth.
‘There is something else you ought to tell her, Giovanni,’ Father Mullholland said quietly. Then he left the room with the baby.
Alice scooped up nougat and took the cloth to the sink and rinsed it. She bent beside where he was squatting on his haunches and she scooped again.
‘It was only a joke, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Please. I’m sorry. I’m deeply sorry about everything that I’ve said or done to hurt you.’ And she waited in trepidation to hear what he had to disclose.
‘OK,’ Giovanni said. ‘Alice. I oughtn’t to have yelled at you like that. I hope you can overlook it. I was planning on not telling you this. Not yet. But I guess you have a right to know.’
‘What?’ Alice said. ‘Know what?’
‘I’m infertile,’ Giovanni said.
‘What?’ Alice said and she let the glass-cloth drop out of her hand. ‘What did you say, Giovanni?’
‘I’m infertile,’ Giovanni said, in a voice like ash in a graveyard. Alice stared at him and blinked.
‘So Mary-Lou’s child?’ she said. ‘Giovanni? That was not your child? Well, I’ll try not to say that I’m glad.’ And she smiled at him with a smile like benediction.
‘Alice, what I am saying to you,’ Giovanni said emphatically, ‘is that I cannot father your children.’
‘So what?’ Alice said, in some puzzlement. ‘So what, Giovanni? Who cares?’
Giovanni stretched out his arm and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. He looked at her with the kind of tenderness with which she had seen him look at the baby.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘Maybe right now I care a little less than I did.’
Chapter 41
The leave-taking tea marked the departure of Alice and the baby with a certain stylish aplomb. Giovanni was undoubtedly the star, of course, the padrone, the big smell at the top. His spirits had lifted considerably since lunch and his confectionery certainly hit the mark. He cut a dashing figure in his pale pink wool jacket, which he wore thrown unbuttoned over the morning’s rose-pink shirt. And Alice knew, because Father Mullholland had whispered it to her during the course of the proceedings, that in the pocket of the pink jacket Giovanni had not one air ticket, but two.
‘It is not for me to say that one of them is for you,’ Father Mullholland said, and he adopted a manner of darkly teasing conspiracy with her. ‘But I saw him check his pocket this afternoon just before we left the restaurant.’
Alice gawped at him incredulous. ‘But I didn’t see him,’ she said.
‘Excuse me,’ he said politely. ‘But that is because you did not accompany him to the men’s lavatory.’ Alice began to laugh. ‘Now, as you will know,’ he said, ‘it is no longer necessary for a person such as yourself to have a visa before entering the United States. It seems that the immigration authorities have recently amended their regulations for the purpose of pleasing Giovanni.’
‘Devious bastard!’ Alice said.
‘Look to your passport,’ Father Mullholland said. ‘We are not meaning to do Giovanni down here, you and I, but we are in solidarity with Homer and Hesiod.’ Giovanni had been far too busy uncorking champagne to notice the exchange. He dandled the baby and embarked just then upon a somewhat audacious speech in which he explained to his audience of rapidly mellowing nuns that dear Mrs Riley, who was not in fact Mrs Riley, was to become the third Mrs Angeletti instead. He gave account of this felicitous development by reference to the power of prayer. Giovanni then wound up the proceedings by producing a group ticket to a West End theatre, making provision for over fifty nuns to attend a revived performance of The King and I. After that, he embarked with Alice on the short drive back into Surrey.
‘But what an appalling show-off you are,’ Alice said. They were at last decisively on the road. ‘Do you have no sense of restraint, Giovanni? What I mean is, fifty nuns in a theatre at a musical about a harem? I hope you are truly ashamed.’
‘We have things to be grateful for,’ Giovanni said. ‘Plus it happens Sister Teresa was an admirer of Yul Brynner.’
‘And how do you know that?’ Alice said. ‘Does she confide to you all her secret lusts?’
Giovanni appeared unamused, deadpan. ‘She told me so one time,’ he said. ‘There is a significant difference, my girl, between admiration and lust.’
Alice digested the put-down with glee. ‘She’s an “admirer” of yours and all,’ she said. ‘And I wonder what it is that you and Yul Brynner could have in common.’ Giovanni’s grip on the steering wheel tensed so markedly, she thought, that she fell then to contemplating what it might possibly feel like to be Giovanni – to be thirty-five and infertile and to be losing one’s hair and to care so terribly about these things, when they seemed to Alice so profoundly unimportant.
‘Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Did you ever believe me about Matthew?’
Giovanni laughed. ‘I guess only until I got you in the chapel,’ he said. ‘Until just before I left. You’re a natural Catholic, Alice. You’re impelled towards the confessional.’
‘But you wouldn’t let me confess,’ Alice said. ‘And when I turned round you weren’t there. I hope you realize that was a terrible thing you did.’
‘I wanted you to miss me,’ Giovanni said baldly. ‘Plus I wanted to make you sweat.’
Alice lapsed into a moment’s impotent sarcasm. ‘And all that “Mrs Riley, is your husband Catholic?” ’ she said. ‘I hope you’re proud.’
‘Oh come on, I needed to know,’ Giovanni said. ‘Had Mr Riley married you in the Catholic Church? It was important to me, Alice. Look at it my way. You think things weren’t bad enough for me without you telling me you were married? You damn near destroyed me, you know that? That night in the flophouse.’
‘That was no flophouse,’ Alice said. ‘That was an “inn of character”. It had a Jacobean settle in the vestibule.’
Giovanni ignored the correction. ‘You lied to me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’
‘You left me on my knees,’ Alice said. ‘Grovelling in a church. I thought that what you were saying to me was I needed a Catholic husband. I thought you were saying they wouldn’t let me have the baby. You put the fear of God into me.’ She saw him turn and look at her, carefully, from head to foot. She could tell, in the look, that Father Mullholland was right and that Giovanni loved her deeply. Then he turned back to the road.
‘Is that so terrible, Alice?’ he said. ‘To fear God?’
Two things happened after that, and everything fell into place. The first occurred as they passed the sign giving promise of Farnham and Aldershot.
‘Roland saved my life,’ Alice said. She said it clearly and out loud. ‘It wasn’t Matthew at all.’ And then she told Giovanni about Roland for the very first time. She told him because it was all at once so apparent. That Roland had been about to make love to her and that, rather than have him do that, she had driven his beautiful old Citroën into the river at great risk to both their lives. Giovanni said nothing. He listened to her and he drove.
‘Roland had an ice pick in the car,’ she said. She talked as if transfixed. ‘He was about to take a party of schoolboys to Snowdonia. He knew all about survival. He’d been playing soldiers for most of his life. Roland could get people out of burning aircraft, Giovanni. He came to see me in hospital and he tried to shake my hand. He had lacerations on his forearm. He held out his hand to me, Giovanni. He held it out and I couldn’t take it. It was like trying to run in a dream, Giovanni. I couldn’t make the limb move.’
‘It sort of figures,’ Giovanni said.
‘Roland is a kind of prince,’ Alice said. ‘He’s handsome and honourable and brave. I behaved very badly to him.’
‘And Matthew?’ Giovanni sai
d.
‘Matthew was driving the van,’ she said. ‘When I came round, Matthew was there and Roland was gone. The circumstances made it so easy for him. My parents loved him and Roland was gone. He fell into picking up the credit. That’s not so unthinkable really. No worse than Papageno – and don’t we all have a soft spot for him?’ The likeable birdman. The prince and the snake. It all made sense just as Jem had said. Deeply at the centre of one’s being. Papageno, the eternal wheelbarrow, glad to be of use. Standing with such apparent stability, wherever the last man has pushed him. He wins friends. He loses friends. Easy come, easy go. In the end the loss is his. He can never make it into the holy place. The portals of the temples are closed against him. For a little while he inhabits the spaces because he climbs in at the window. And he carries those enchanting bells which are easy on the listener’s ear.
‘I will have to apologize,’ she said. ‘I will have to go and see Roland.’ And her eyes were fixed on Giovanni’s left hand as he struggled a little with the manual gears of an English car.
It was nothing dramatic that happened to Alice next. No tongues of fire descended. She was not blinded or struck unconscious, or lifted by anti-gravitational force to a place distant from the passenger seat of Giovanni’s hired car. It was more like realizing with mild surprise, after years of attention to grammatical exercises, that one can understand a foreign language when one hears it alive on a stranger’s tongue. It was more like the point of intuition in a mathematical puzzle, when the fact of congruency rises towards one like a gift of grace from the web of intersecting lines.
‘ “I believe”,’ she said, but she said it only inside her head. And to hear her mind say it made her feel like dancing; like tracing out a pattern with her feet, slow and rocking and graceful, as if to that part in the Schubert Credo marked out like a pastoral canon. And she registered, again, with the mildest surprise, that she was still focused on Giovanni’s hand and that Giovanni was still changing gear.
‘You’re not very good at that, are you?’ she said, and she smiled at him and she put her hand, for a moment, over his on the gear lever. And then, because it had only just struck her, she said, ‘You’ve taken off your wedding ring, Giovanni. Or did you do that a long time ago?’ And that was all.
‘I think,’ she said some minutes later, ‘that I began to believe with Jem’s funeral.’
‘And you imagine,’ Giovanni said crassly, ‘that a funeral like that didn’t cost me?’ But Alice had ceased to care. He no longer had the power to outrage her. It no longer seemed terribly important to her, against the weight of her new understanding, that Giovanni, whom she loved so passionately, had played such games with her; that he had played hookey from his dead wife in the morgue for her and had forked out the cost of a first-rate choir to sing the rite and the liturgy for a woman whom he had met only once and that at the hour of death; that he had fed her sadistic food in the forest and had got her heady on sparkling wine and had dressed her up in the guise of a lesbian schoolmarm and had rudely forced her in a hotel bedroom where she was playing Mrs Knox with her mind in a box.
‘I want you to be nice to my parents,’ Alice said. ‘Please, Giovanni. Especially to my father. This isn’t going to be easy for either of them.’
‘My darling!’ said Mrs Pilling. ‘This is really very well timed. But where on earth have you been?’
‘In Hampshire,’ Alice said. The two women embraced each other and Alice noticed that her parents were still so recently returned that their luggage stood out in the drive.
‘But you’re looking so pale,’ said her mother. ‘You funny little things – you and Matt. All the islands and the costas to choose from and you bury yourselves in Hampshire.’ Mrs Pilling glanced, without much interest, at Giovanni who, she noticed, was carrying a baby. She was sporting a most becoming golden tan which set off the blonde highlights in her hair. She wore high-heeled sandals and her lip gloss smelled of ripe peaches. Alice felt sure that Giovanni would appreciate her.
‘And where is Matt?’ said Mrs Pilling.
‘This is Giovanni,’ Alice said.
Mrs Pilling held out her hand. ‘What a dear little baby,’ she said politely. ‘Is she yours, Mr— er—?’
‘Angeletti,’ Giovanni said, taking her hand. ‘How are you, Mrs Pilling?’
‘She’s my baby, Mum,’ Alice said, jumping in more through nervous excitement than through precocious intent. ‘Jem left her to me. But she’s really just as much Giovanni’s. He was there when she got born.’ Mrs Pilling looked somewhat nonplussed.
‘The baby is the child of Veronica McCrail,’ Giovanni said, intervening with a cautioning sobriety. ‘She’s the child of your daughter’s deceased schoolfriend.’
‘Deceased?’ said Mrs Pilling.
‘Jem died,’ Alice said. And then, wishing not to dwell upon a matter which might provoke in her mother certain symptoms of guilt, she fixed her mind instead on the excitement of all that had happened. She was pleased to see her mother again and unable not to communicate the giddiness of her last two days.
‘Giovanni has been her fairy godmother,’ she said. She looked delightedly at the baby, who made her finger ends twitch. ‘He bought her that beautiful hat,’ she said. ‘Giovanni is rather good at hats.’
Mrs Pilling regarded her in some confusion. ‘Where is Matt?’ she said.
‘In Paris?’ Alice hazarded. ‘But that’s all rather complicated.’ She saw that the baby looked irresistible there in the grip of Giovanni’s prodigious arm and she longed to snatch her up. ‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ she said. ‘But isn’t she just the loveliest little baby? You must say that she’s beautiful.’
Giovanni cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Pilling,’ he said. ‘Your daughter is in point of fact the legal guardian of this child. The mother died seven weeks ago, leaving a will to that effect.’
Mrs Pilling, suddenly enlightened, looked protectively at Alice. ‘But my darling!’ she said. ‘What does Matthew think? Oh wait and have your own, my lovey. Go on now, sweetheart. You and Matt. That way you’ll know what you’re getting.’
‘Oh Mum,’ Alice said. Her mother’s remark, in front of Giovanni, touched her vicariously with shame. Mrs Pilling was evidently distressed.
‘I mean surely?’ she said. ‘Why you? There must be an aunt or a grandmother or somebody. I do remember Miss Trotter telling me that the girl had a father somewhere. Italy. That was it. There’s an Italian father.’
Alice gulped down a sense of hurt that her mother had known these things, but she wanted the hurt not to surface.
‘Giovanni’s Italian,’ she said hopefully. ‘Well, his family is, anyway.’
‘Alice,’ Giovanni said firmly, ‘you are screwing up.’ He looked again at Mrs Pilling. ‘My role in this matter,’ he said, ‘was in the first instance, as Mizz McCrail’s publisher. She wrote a little book a while back, which gave your daughter cause to liaise with me.’
‘Someone stole Jem’s novel,’ Alice said. ‘And then they flogged it to Giovanni.’
‘Will you shut your mouth?’ Giovanni said. ‘I am talking to your mother.’
‘Who is the baby’s father?’ Mrs Pilling said sharply and she looked at Giovanni with such undisguised suspicion that Alice couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Some Roman bike mechanic,’ she said. ‘Jem picked him up on the Appian Way. He’s completely untraceable, that’s the point. He was a very casual, one-night stand.’
‘That girl!’ said Mrs Pilling. ‘That wretched, trouble-making girl! Excuse me, Mr— er—’
‘Angeletti,’ Giovanni said.
‘Ah—’ said Mrs Pilling.
‘Mum,’ Alice said. ‘Can we come in, please? I really need to change the baby and do you mind if Giovanni smokes?’
Alice terribly wanted her parents to admire and love Giovanni just as she did, yet they were inexplicably short on rapture. All through dinner – and with Pamina belly-down across his lap – Giovanni had been the very soul of charm
and grace. Yet it was perfectly clear that her father did not care for him and that her mother wished him dead. Mrs Pilling had even gone so far as to serve him mussels – a thing she had done to no man since the demise of Flora’s father. But Giovanni did not die. He ate the mussels with every sign of satisfaction, and afterwards moved through into the sitting room where he conversed with Alice’s father and drank cognac and smoked cigars.
‘Darling,’ said Mrs Pilling rather urgently to Alice. They were in the kitchen together making coffee. ‘Oughtn’t you to think again about this baby? Now, of course you and Matthew would love to have a child, but there’s really no hurry, my lovely. Good heavens, you’re only just twenty. You’re not even married yet.’ She placed her hand coaxingly on her daughter’s neat blonde head, offering protection and love. ‘Your father and I,’ she said, ‘we waited four years for you, my precious.’
Alice summoned her courage. ‘And I waited four years for Jem,’ she said. ‘And you kept her letter from me. And she died before I could see her.’
Mrs Pilling winced. ‘Oh, my lovey,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know. I only meant to keep it until you were a little bit stronger—’
‘You treated me as if I was crippled,’ Alice said. ‘The constant special treatment. The constant special voice. Look, Mum. I’m all right. I’m saying that I waited, too. That’s all. I waited for Jem and now she’s dead. You never understood. You never began to try. And now you’re trying not to understand all over again. I love the baby. I love Giovanni. And for all I know Matt is probably back in Paris after all. Wherever he is, I don’t care. I don’t want him any more and nor does he want me. It was perfectly obvious to me that he was in love with Flora.’
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