The bag was a love gift from early on in her marriage. Francis had bought it for her in a rare moment of largesse from a boutique under the arches of the rue de Rivoli; it was her birthday – her twenty-sixth, I think. If I hadn’t been told otherwise, I would have thought it was made like the windowpane sugar on Beata’s crème caramel, or a slice through agate – gilded sweetness fused with light set hard through fire or ice long ago. But ‘bag’ really isn’t the mot juste, since it suggests something soft and shapeless, whereas this objet de luxe is rigid and architectural, like a jewel box or some kind of superior picnic kit, but wonderfully delicate: an ornament, a centrepiece, an exhibit to add to the display she’d make every evening she and Francis went out into the Cairene social round.
I prised up the catch on the clasp, the chrome a little peppered by age, and lifted the deep lid on its tiny hinges of copper – one screw has worked loose over the years and the shell has warped a little – and from the empty and silent box rose the hubbub of a warm summer night in Gezira, laughter and snatches of talk, whisperings and exclamations, the clatter of china and chink chink of crystal from the drawing room, blurred names being called out at the door by the suffragi, a car door slamming in the street below, more laughter, the curtain on a verandah slapping in the night breeze from the river below, the shout of a carter with his donkey caught in the melée of the traffic, the patter of casino chips and ricochet of the ball against the rim of a roulette wheel, the spurt of a cigarette lighter being lit, a guffaw from Francis, a car starting up and driving off, at speed, slower traffic from the street moving haphazardly towards the Qasr el-Nil Bridge, the evening call to prayer from the mosque across on the other side, distant music from the barges moored downstream on the left bank of the pulsing river, stars falling into the dark water, Beata coaxing and Beata cooing, Beata waving, flutter flutter, swish swish, with her Japanese-style fan, smoothing the folds of her dress, the rustling cream organza over layered petticoats of tulle, scattered with sequins she’d stitched in arabesques that curled up the bodice and picked up the glitter from her eyes. She had her admirers – she called them cavalieri serventi – and all the time I was still living at home there was always someone in her life who came and went, and Francis sometimes loved him too, but not always.
After Beata died, I heard from Selma, who was her confidante from those days and afterwards, in London, that at one time my mother had come very close to leaving Francis, but that she had stayed with him for my sake, for my sake and my sister’s.
‘Who was he, Selma?’ I asked. ‘Please think back.’
‘He was quite a high-up, and seemed a bon parti. He was doing some business in Africa. He was mad about her. Everybody was mad about her. But this time it was a near thing, I’m telling you. Thanks be to goodness your mother thought twice about it. He went to the bad. I heard that later he was put in gaol.’
‘You must remember his name! What did he do? Who was he?’
‘It’s all too long ago.’ Selma shook her head and gave me the names of some old friends to ask. ‘If they’re still alive,’ she added.
A few months ago, before I’d sorted all her possessions and before I felt able to give away her clothes, a flyer came through the door saying that the Antiques Market telly programme was to come to our area, and would be setting up shop in the local library, and we could bring along any mystery objects for the experts to identify and value.
Tortoiseshell is now an illegal substance, its export prohibited under severe penalties, as notices at airports constantly warn travellers. At Gatwick and Heathrow there are those dilapidated Wunderkammern, with their dusty and higgledy-piggledy displays of conch shells and crocodile skins, pelts of rare cats and snakes, ivory tusks and carvings – they also include, often enough, turtle shells and a few gnarled objects made out of them. I wondered what Beata’s evening bag would be worth these days, or if it would even be seized.
The programme’s young researcher thought the bag was sufficiently unusual to be featured, and I was taken to meet the expert who’d conduct the interview on camera later. She was a young woman called Dido, very long and slender with her red hair in a colourful bandana tied up with a flourish; she had a funny deep voice that made everything she said sound italicised and bristling with exclamation marks.
‘Ooh! Vintage contraband!’ She picked up Beata’s bag, and ran her long hands with their slender fingers tipped in green lacquer over the smooth surfaces. ‘Gorgeous! Glamorous! Almost edible, no?’ Her fingertips were remembering, through the unexpected temperature, neither cold as metal nor warm as amber, this material’s reptilian origin. ‘Delicious – but only as a dragon or a python might be. A strong taste. A very strong taste. A fashion accessory for a woman of style, a sensational woman … your mother? Wow, this was your mother’s?
‘Well, I can see her now in you, yes, that’s it.
‘A museum – and that’s really the best place for such a piece – a real talking point. To explore bespoke artisan industries in Paris couture. On eBay, you’ll probably get £200, £300 if you’re in luck.
‘But I’d keep it if I were you. Take it out now and then. Like a musical instrument, such an item needs a bit of TLC.
‘Meanwhile, for the rest of us, faux tortoiseshell, Bakelite best of all, passes all right these days – like faux ocelot, faux zebra. You take your pick, and no harm done!’
She asked me about Beata and Francis and I spoke a bit about them, the life they led in Cairo where my mother would wear her special evening bag from Paris to the tea dances and cocktails and soirées and charity galas and other dos they went to every evening. I brought out a photograph of a Christmas staff party with Beata in the foreground wearing a paper coolie hat with a streamer and smiling in unselfconscious gaiety at the camera, which must have been held by Francis, as he isn’t in the picture.
About a month later, a handwritten letter arrived, forwarded from the television company.
The writer had seen the programme and wanted to tell me:
I recognised the bag – it all came back to me, the parties, the fun, that time I was passing through Cairo on my way back from Addis where I was teaching English literature at a school there. It must have been 1954, and your mother – and your father – were wonderfully kind to me.
You reminded me of her – may I ask, is she still alive?
She was a marvellous free spirit.
Yours, with best wishes,
Ronnie Quigley
The writing paper was quality rag, the address – in Jane Austen’s village of Chawton – nicely set out and embossed, the hand shaky but shapely.
On an impulse, I did not write back a routine acknowledgement as I would normally (if I got round to answering at all), but rang the number included in the address on the headed paper. A quiet, agreeable voice; old but not entirely moribund. We talked a little; the dates fitted, it seemed to me, and from what he said on the phone he’d led an adventurous life, mostly in Africa. He invited me to lunch at a small place he knew in St James’s; he would come up to London from where he lived in the country to meet me again, he said, as he had known me when I was a little girl.
I arrived first, on purpose as I wanted to see this old admirer of my mother’s, Ronnie Quigley, come through the door, and, if possible, take stock of him before he saw me. It was almost certain he’d be the only guest of his age arriving at the restaurant. But what did I want, now? What did I expect? Did I want him, this one, to be the one for whom Beata nearly ran away from Francis, but didn’t because of me and my sister?
This old man, now giving our order to the waitress – two Kirs to celebrate, trout paté for me, soup for him, then Dover sole for two with a bright Pinot Grigio? (‘Yes, perfect,’ I murmured) – is tall, bulky, with ruddy colour on his veined cheeks and hands; hooded, colourless eyes; leathery jowls; careful good clothes, the collar and tie knotted high to conceal the tortoise ne
ck; but swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals. A widower, he informs me; he clearly has savoir faire and old-world gallantry, he is suggesting the opera, talking of his neighbours in Hampshire, and the gardens that open to the public in his village; this old man in his old school tie is in his mid-eighties, florid and dilapidated, but still, doing well for his age, not altogether implausible in the role of a romantic adulterer in the tropics many decades ago; his old flat clumsy feet mourn the dancing partner who took Beata by storm. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, they were her idea of a man: a certain caddish allure, the effrontery of their self-delight. But then Leslie Howard and, later, Anthony Perkins moved her to tears: the ‘gentle’ in ‘gentleman’ matters, she would say. Ronnie Quigley here at the restaurant, drinking his soup with as little mess as possible, could never have been as suave as Clark Gable or as sweetly cissy as Tony Perkins, but you never can tell.
‘Could you bear to hear the story of my … friendship … with your mother?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m grown-up. She’s dead. She died five years ago.’
‘On a scale of one to ten, how much of the truth can you take?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I was startled. ‘It rather depends what it is. But I would like to know.’
I’d expected the reminiscing to be nostalgic, tender, but I straightened up as Ronnie Quigley was holding a tight smile on his dry, narrow mouth.
There were many things he began saying that matched what I know about those days:
‘We first met at a terrific bash your father gave. At the Sporting Club, at Gezira. I was teaching, but I was considering the business I then took up – educational publishing for Africa. So I’d met Francis, of course. We’d common interests, and he invited me along. He was very hospitable. I was immediately overcome by your mother – everybody was. She was – well, you know. Who would have ever imagined a man like your father would be married to such a stunner!’
I shook my head, drank my Kir.
‘She sent a note round after that first evening, asking me to come to tea. So it began. She was a free spirit. Your father was so much older, you know that. She was frustrated, stifled – she needed someone younger. I was younger. And more virile. I was that, too. I had the impression they had not been … well … lovers for some time when we met.’
I winced, I nodded, I chewed on a piece of bread and paté.
‘She was very direct. No, feisty. She was feisty.’ He brought out a clipping from a newspaper. ‘Look, here’s a piece in The Times I cut out which talks about the meaning of the word “feisty”.
‘Your mother all over.’
Over the next few years, work brought him back to Cairo at intervals, he said, from Botswana and Kenya and the Sudan where he was supplying schools and the universities that were just beginning throughout the continent. He’d visit Beata in the afternoons.
‘One time, she sent me a note saying she was taking the boat from Alex and to meet her there to see her off. You were there, you were a little girl then. She told you to go and play on the deck where there were quoits and other games, and then she and I …’
I was following, making pictures in my mind as he was speaking, and they kept assembling and disassembling, between what I remembered of Beata, what I never knew, what I might never have known about her except for this old man with his lightless eyes, who was drinking and eating with appetite as he talked.
‘There in the cabin, you know, I showed her ten inches of hard young male, which was much to her liking, and we did it there, in the cabin.’
‘No more!’ I waved my hand at the old, bluish, dry lips, the rheumy, slightly bulging eyes. ‘Please.’
It made no sense; I couldn’t bear it to make sense.
There were some corroborating circumstances:
‘Your father helped me out, one time. Good chap.’ Later, over the Dover sole, Ronnie Quigley went on, ‘I’d run into a spot of bother in Addis with the authorities. The Consul there got in touch with our man in Cairo, and he fixed things, but there was some money involved. Francis stumped up, you know. He said he knew Beata liked me.’
But there were also discrepancies: the timings, the places. For one thing, Beata suffered horribly from seasickness: she never travelled anywhere by boat.
And there were other sides to the story Ronnie Quigley told me that veered wildly from what I knew; some won’t bear repeating. For she was never bold, my mother, never direct, hungry, never ever ‘feisty’. Weepy, guilty, whispering her prayers every Sunday, fastidious and full of decorum, however flirtatious.
I told Ronnie Quigley he had things all wrong, but he said he had told me everything, just as he remembered it.
That was a few months ago and now that I have had time to gather my wits together – and rinse my mind of the confusion and distaste he caused me – I can look at what he told me in a number of ways:
I can give him the benefit of the doubt, and imagine he has simply mixed my mother up with another woman, or with other women who he’s been entangled with in the course of what has been, according to his own boasting, a very long and adventurous life.
Or, his mind is going: like a demented and senile ape he’s trying to stir up his dead embers by talking dirty to strangers.
Or, he’s made it all up: he’s discovered a clever way of dating women who catch his eye on television – especially ones who might have a background with nice things. After he told me his so-called memories of my mother and I rebuffed him, he simply returned home and waited for another possible candidate to appear, to whom he could write a charming and mysterious letter suggesting he had known her mother rather well. He could take up Facebook, Facebook dating for Bluebeard, online lonely hearts for senior citizens.
Or I can believe him. I’ve heard from friends how retrieving the past can lead to disillusion. One young woman I know went looking for the mother who had given her up for adoption – but the first thrill of the reunion soon faded and perplexity set in, with the added sadness of entering a deeper level of estrangement based now on choice, not fate. Recognition in real life feels very different from that enthralled bliss that sweeps over dramatis personae and audience alike when the curtain falls on the foundling refound, the lost mother regained. My mother didn’t give me up – she held on, against her own interests perhaps. But meeting her in Ronnie Quigley’s story brought me face to face with someone I don’t know. The family romance itself sours – the other family whose true child I am or might be brings nothing but disappointment in the end. And besides, when it comes to a stepfather manqué, another father who never was, the romance quest leads astray. My attempt to understand Beata’s unhappiness will never be complete. It is possible that it’s inspired not by what happened to her, whatever it was, but by my need to find she was more fulfilled than it appeared because she so often seemed deprived, constrained in her marriage to my father, and consequently envious of the freedom that life had lavished on me and my generation.
Or I could be looking for Ronnie Quigley, I could be inventing Ronnie Quigley, because he’d give me a reason not to feel guilty about that unhappiness of hers, that gaiety of hers that had so little chance for expression, guilty that sexual liberation came easily for me in my time and not for her in hers. Even though it would still be my fault that in the end she didn’t run away.
Letter to the Unknown Soldier
41 Stannington View Road
West Bar
Sheffield
Dear Jobie,
Since my last letter I have had no answer from you. We all hope you are safe but it is hard to keep our spirits up. The house rings empty for Mother, she says she misses your banging the door shut when you come home and is sorry she bawled at you when you did so. I see her on my day off from the family, but she feels your not being there more. I gave you our news in my last but I’m giving it again in case that last was lost. Miss Edith says she will keep me
on colouring and painting her fancies, as I am so clever at it, so I shan’t have to go to make shells in the mill with the others next year when I turn fourteen. I told her the noise and tumult and the thought of what they’re for make dark thoughts come too powerfully. I have added my favourite fancies here so you can see what your little sister can do – rosemary, that’s for remembrance, says Miss Edith, and pansies, that’s for thought. She draws them on hankies she gets from Tucker’s by the dozen and note cards from Apsley’s, too, like this paper, and some of them are to be Valentines. They’re to have different pictures and borders and she says she’ll teach us lettering too and curlicues like this:
Don’t laugh – do you like it?
Her older brother Charles – you may hear of him soon she says – he is going great guns in London. He is an artist and has won a scholarship to go on to study in London. She says his works are much appreciated and that he is going to make statues of our boys like you who are giving everything for us and we can be very proud of you. She says maybe he will make your picture! I can see you already in in my mind’s eye standing there so grand in your cape and boots and helmet.
But it is hard not to know about you. I pray you are safe.
Miss Edith has helped me with the spelling and other things and she sends you her best wishes for a safe return home.
Please write and send me and Mother your news,
Your loving sister,
May
Forget My Fate
i
When Barbara May left her house to walk in the opposite direction towards the corner shop, her steps were drawn to the knot of tension tightening in the street; someone was standing in the middle of the road and the noise of the stalled traffic was mounting. At first, she thought it was a prank. But then she saw that the commotion was being caused by Nino, Nino Sanvitale, her neighbour and a kind of friend from her school, where he’d taught music until he’d retired a few years before.
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