Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Mozart is very Catholic,’ she said. ‘In the operas, I mean.’ Giovanni kept on reading. ‘He’s very Catholic about marriage,’ she said.

  ‘Go to bed,’ Giovanni said. ‘Take the child and go to bed, Alice.’

  ‘And he’s very sexy,’ she added hopefully. Giovanni kept on reading. ‘Especially in Don Giovanni. All that “Andiam, andiam”. Well. That’s if it means the same thing in Italian.’ She thought that she detected a faint, responsive twitch in Giovanni’s right shoulder, but still he kept on reading. ‘Does it?’ she said.

  ‘Go to bed, Alice,’ he said. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘And you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sleepy,’ Giovanni said.

  Alice retired and brushed her teeth, defeated by Eastern Standard Time. She placed the baby in the basket beside the bed. For a while she lay awake, staring at the ceiling. She envisaged her parents in their house in Surrey, grieving together over the departure of Matthew Riley and over the sorry fate of their precious only daughter, who had so perplexingly fled the dream-home with intent to cleave to the hangman in a children’s television cartoon. The balding and impotent Mr Alphabetti-Spaghetti. She understood now, that they would never see how gilded were the masts of his tall ship.

  Alice slept fitfully through that night and churned in the bed somewhat. Towards morning she had a dream. She was in the convent bedroom, but one of its walls was not there. In its stead was a sheet of plate glass, like a shop window – or perhaps like that hostile, impenetrable expanse of glass through which she had first viewed Pamina’s long toes. She stared through the pane rather anxiously to find that it overlooked the school playing field. At the far end, if she trained her eyes, Alice could see that Jem was telling a story to two little girls who sat near her on the grass.

  Though the two girls had their backs to her, Alice understood that they were Claire and Flora. Jem was not the emaciated woman whom Alice had embraced in the hospital bed, but the tall, flamboyant schoolgirl with rich brown curls and large feet in unpolished shoes. They were all in a state of childhood. Except Alice. Only Alice was trapped, high in the present, behind the prison of the plate-glass window. Jem, she could see, was striking attitudes as the story proceeded. She was tossing her head and spreading her hands. It shamed Alice, in the dream, to recognize that there was something in Jem’s manner too fanciful for adult tastes; something rather too blatantly attention-seeking. Perhaps almost a bit like Iona Morgan. It was perfectly apparent to her that Jem was unhappy. Alice yearned to join her. To touch her. To love her. She felt profoundly that she was failing Jem; had always failed her. She did not believe that Jem was shutting her out. Did not. Nor was Jem consciously playing her off against the others. No. And then she heard Jem’s voice, clear as a bell across the passing time.

  ‘Umberto needs her to give him an heir for the palazzo,’ Jem said. ‘Because both his other wives have died childless in “mysterious circumstances”.’ She turned and looked straight up at the plate-glass window, but she did not seem to see Alice there and she turned back slowly to the others. And then it was all quite different. The scene had cut and the figure was no longer Jem at all. And the person who had moved into close-up was standing within the glass. She was between Alice and the picture of Jesus exposing his heart. A person capable of moving through locked doors and fastened casements. She was wearing blue mascara and her lip gloss smelled of ripe peaches. ‘Try giving up that baby,’ she said. ‘And see how long he sticks around.’

  When Alice woke up she was badly needing to pee. Her heart was pounding with anxiety. She looked for Jesus on the wall, through the first glimmer of day, but the picture was not there. And the bed was different and Pamina was no longer in the basket beside the bed. And there was a letter to her lying in the basket addressed in Giovanni’s hand. Alice grabbed it and leapt up. She ran like a hare on unshod feet to the living room with the letter crushed in her hand. There, to her immense relief, she saw that Giovanni had fallen asleep in his clothes. He had moved from the chair to the sofa, that was all, and Pamina, wrapped in her shawl, was lying asleep on his chest. Her body was moving gently with its rhythmic rise and fall, her almost non-existent nose bedded comfortably in the fabric of Giovanni’s rose-pink shirt. The biography of Mozart was on the floor beside them and so was the empty bottle from the baby’s two o’clock feed.

  Alice breathed relief. She hovered for a moment to watch them. Giovanni, she was touched to realize, had let her sleep through the night. He had got up in the small hours and had taken the baby from the attic. He had warmed her bottle in the Morgans’ kitchen and had fed it to her and kept her company in sleep.

  Alice went to the bathroom. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen where she sat down at the table to drink a mug of instant coffee and to open Giovanni’s letter.

  Dear Mrs Angeletti, [said the letter]

  Forgive my surly inattention to your supplicant ass this night. At the risk of incurring your fine wrath yet again, I do not mean to do it with you until such time as I have weeded the wormwood from my soul.

  Alice gasped in panic. She caught coffee in her larynx and sputtered it over the page. Beneath this communication, after a gap, Giovanni had written:

  You are adorably right about Mozart and marriage, but then, as I have observed to you before, you have a sharp and penetrating mind. That is, for a woman.

  Under this, after another gap, he had written:

  Do not let me sleep after seven. I have a plane to catch.

  Alice got up and went vengefully to the sofa where he slept. She could not wait until seven but bashed him awake at once. Giovanni opened his eyes and blinked a little at the crumpled letter which she brandished at him in her fist.

  ‘You devious bastard. You swine, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘How can you do this to me?’ Giovanni sat up slowly, inching up with care. ‘You’re trying to make me miss you,’ she said. ‘You’re trying to make me sweat.’

  ‘Take the baby from me and sit down,’ he said. ‘Here. Try not to wake her.’ Alice took the baby from him. Then she sat down. She watched Giovanni push his feet into his shoes and reach for his pink wool jacket. He looked at his watch and got up. ‘I guess I have time to shave,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t do this to me, Giovanni. Please. I don’t care about my degree. Not any more. And what if I am pregnant? I can’t be pregnant without you.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Giovanni said. ‘I’ll see to it you have all the backup you need. I won’t let you down.’

  Alice watched him with increasing resentment as he gave his attention to undoing the buttons of his shirt. ‘I wish that you would go to hell,’ she said.

  ‘Now that,’ Giovanni said dryly, ‘is precisely what I am striving to avoid. And I expect to have your support, Alice. For God’s sake help me to deserve you. Don’t be a pain in the ass.’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I know you’re got a ticket for me in your jacket pocket.’

  Giovanni smiled at her tenderly. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Because I’m not gullible, that’s why,’ Alice said. ‘Not any more.’

  Giovanni brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘You get better all the time,’ he said. ‘Do you know that?’ He took out the ticket. She watched him slowly tear it in half and then in quarters. After that he put the pieces into his trouser pocket. ‘Go make me some coffee,’ he said. ‘I need the bathroom.’

  Alice returned to the kitchen. She took her handbag from the coat peg and groped in it for her Kleenex. She put the bag down on the table beside her mug of cold coffee and got the baby’s bottle from the fridge. Then, having steeped it a moment in hot water, she sat down and put the teat into the baby’s mouth. Tears fell on to the baby’s shawl which she smudged away with her hand. Then she smoothed Giovanni’s crumpled letter and read it again. At the bottom of the letter Giovanni had written his name, larger and more flamboyantly than all the rest, in his loop
ed American cursive. Alice noted now, as she had done once before, that his writing was really quite a lot like Jem’s.

  Her hand began to shake as her eyes fixed on the letters. G-I-O-V-A-N-N-I. For a moment it froze. Then she drew Jem’s letters from her handbag. Both of them. The one which she had received in Surrey and the one which Sister Teresa had found in the bedside locker after Jem had died. She scanned the pages for all the letters i and a. Alphabetti-Spaghetti. She checked Giovanni’s letter against the posthumous letter which had given her the baby. Then she checked both of these against the only one which Jem had actually written.

  Giovanni’s effort was terribly good, of course. Marvellously well done. But then Giovanni was extremely competent and he knew how to make things happen. Nobody else would have been able to tell the difference. Certainly Father Mullholland hadn’t noticed and even she, who knew Jem’s handwriting better than anyone, had noticed nothing until that moment. There was something just faintly different, not only about the letters i and a, but also about the final r in ‘Veronica McCrail’ – as though Giovanni, having accomplished his task with such brilliant virtuosity almost to the end, had allowed himself to relax. He had looped the letter, albeit minutely, in the region of its top left.

  Alice cradled the baby and stared down stunned into the pages. The sisters had given Giovanni access to Jem in the hour before her death. He had been with her in the minutes before she had been taken to the operating theatre. After that, Giovanni would have been alone with Jem’s bedside locker which had contained her writing pad and her fountain pen, still filled, as ever, with brown ink. Burnt Sienna. He had also had the genuine letter on his person to assist him in the venture – the one which had provoked Alice’s first and only telephone call to Giovanni’s office in New York.

  Giovanni must have concocted the second letter while Jem was under anaesthetic, during the difficult and critical birth of the baby. He had aped not only her calligraphy, but had made a more than creditable effort at aping her style. It certainly made up in charm what it lacked in legal validity. But then Giovanni was a man of letters, was he not? And he was Jem’s editor. First he had changed the end of her story. And then he had changed the end of her story. And now he was intent upon restoring his soul. Whatever could he have in mind? To ‘go with speed to some forlorn and naked hermitage’? Or what? And who, if anyone, had been his confessor? Obviously not Father Mullholland. It was quite certain that Father Mullholland did not know. It was also quite certain that Giovanni was slightly mad.

  Everything fell into place for her. It was all so perfectly obvious. It accounted for why Jem’s letter had made no mention of her intentions for the baby. It accounted for what Alice had read as Father Mullholland’s faint sense of betrayal that Jem, even to the last, should have been so incapable of putting all her cards on the table. Alice’s heart went out to him now. Jem had been very precious and special to him. She had always understood that. Jem had also, quite obviously, flirted with him. None the less, he had scrupulously helped her through the appalling and protracted act of dying and had duly gone about the business of making provisional adoption arrangements for her child. That Jem, in the last resort, had seemed to behave so skittishly towards him must have struck him as both unworthy and distasteful.

  He was no fool, Jem’s charming priest. Alice respected his intellect enormously. It was perfectly understandable that he hadn’t quite sussed Giovanni. He had vested interests in Giovanni. Giovanni was a new and delightful friend. A man of honour and high standing. A man who, by additional and extraordinary good luck, had presented himself as an ideal Catholic father for Veronica’s precious baby. His words of the previous day struck home to Alice now with a new, ironic force. ‘If you allow Giovanni to take your integrity from you, where will that leave you?’

  Alice put down the bottle and lifted the baby to her shoulder. She held Pamina so much more tightly in her embrace than was necessary that the baby’s habitual burp induced a splat of white milk curd which soured the shoulder of her nightgown. Pamina was her baby. Her baby for whom she would live and die if necessary. And cheat and perjure herself? And Giovanni was the man she loved.

  When Alice looked up from the table, she saw that Giovanni was standing in the doorway. He had taken off his shirt in order to shave and he was leaning his sinewy right arm against the door jamb. His beautiful, almost hairless chest was rising smooth and brown from the black trousers. He was staring down at Alice’s arrangement of letters. Then he looked at her. Tears sprang to her eyes as she looked back at him but she did not sob and her eyes did not release them. The tears shone suspended in the corners of her eyes. Then she dabbed them away with her index finger. She was overcome by his extraordinary beauty and power as he stood there framed in the doorway. And she wondered, had his brightness tarnished with his fall, but it seemed to her he was bright as ever. Bright, terrible and stunning, like the iron angel of the Annunciation.

  ‘She never gave me the baby,’ Alice said. Her voice was clear and composed. ‘Jem didn’t give me the baby.’

  ‘I gave you the baby,’ Giovanni said.

  A Note on the Author

  BARBARA TRAPIDO was born in South Africa and is the

  author of six novels – Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner

  of a Whitbread special prize for fiction), Noah’s Ark, Temples

  of Delight (shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of

  the Year Award), Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer

  (shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award),

  and Frankie and Stankie. She lives in Oxford.

  Praise for Temples of Delight

  ‘Trapido is standing in for Miss Spark, who is on sabbatical in Italy’ Financial Times

  ‘Temples of Delight is so readable, so full of incidental pleasures and curiosities, that one could easily overlook its terrifying honesty … In her readability, her richness, her plain, clear style, Trapido is quite like what Iris Murdoch is supposed to be’ Guardian

  ‘Trapido’s characters are wonderful, springing to life from the page. This is one of those funny, warm, original stories that leaves you wishing there was a sequel’ New Woman

  ‘Magical and addictive’ She

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Barbara Trapido, 1990

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978-1-4088-2275-3

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