by Joseph Hone
‘I love olives.’
‘Have another one.’ I took one myself. She looked at me, startled, as if waking from another dream.
‘No. No, I won’t.’ Controlled again, reverting to her earlier mood.
‘Go on, for goodness sake, if you like them!’
She looked at me again, seeming to draw confidence and daring from my gaze. ‘All right, I will!’ She took another olive, then a third. ‘I’m sorry to be greedy.’
‘You’re not. Expected thing to be at an Irish wake … and thirsty.’ I raised my glass. ‘Happiness,’ I said. ‘I don’t care for “Cheers” or “Your health”. I’d prefer a good whack of happiness, whether I’m cheery or healthy or not.’
She raised her glass and took a fourth olive. Gorging on the juicy fruit, fingertips becoming purple, our rapport changed: we might have been old friends. People were pushing around us, chattering, she had to raise her voice. ‘I do have some excuse, being greedy with the olives. I’m doing a book about them.’
‘About olives?’
‘Yes, olives and olive oil. The history and culture of the fruit, the different lands and landscapes which nurture it, its culinary, medicinal and other uses.’
‘That sounds like the stuff they put inside the jacket.’
‘Yes, it is. Just that.’
‘Someone’s actually going to publish it?’
‘Yes, in New York. I’ve done several other books. I travel round different countries, meeting the chefs, the cooks, making notes. Then I write it all up when I get back. Travel, comment, cookbook.’
‘Tremendous!’ I meant it, but I could see she thought I was being ironic. ‘Where do you get back to?’
‘New York … I have an apartment there. With frequent trips over here since my father became ill.’
‘Well, we’ve all got to drop off the perch sometime. Make room for the rising generation. World’s chock-a-block already, isn’t it?’
I took another gulp of wine, swaying slightly. I realized she was astonished by this drunken, tactless comment. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been under the weather recently. Forgive me.’
I shepherded her away from the crowd round the drinks table, towards one of the big mullioned windows looking over the bay. We stood there silently, looking over the bright summer view, the unexpected clump of palm trees at the end of the garden, the crescent beach with its bathers and deckchairs to the left, the boathouse with my father’s old motor cruiser, the Sorrento, inside to the right and the blue waters of the bay straight ahead.
‘It’s supposed to be like the Bay of Naples,’ I remarked, quieter now, ‘which is why my father wanted to live here. I’ve not seen the bay of Naples, but I bet the light would be quite different, and the colours. You’d get that whitish Mediterranean blue inshore, off the shallow rocks. Ultramarine, then deep Prussian-blue farther out. The headland over there – that’d be washed umber, a touch of bright ochre.’
‘You’re obviously a painter,’ she said abruptly.
‘Yes.’
‘What sort?’
‘Just paintings.’ I continued to study the view. ‘It’s funny – your father and mine, if they were old friends – they might have stood here, right at this window, years ago, looking at exactly the same view. I wonder what they were talking about?’ I turned and looked at her, blinking after the glare of sunlight coming off the water. ‘Strange to think of one’s parents, all the vast amount of things we don’t know about them. What they did before we were born, and afterwards, when we weren’t with them? It’s the supreme egoism of children, isn’t it, to think their parents only had a life when they were physically with them, playing or reading to them or whatever, when of course that was only the tip of the iceberg of their lives.’
‘I suppose so.’
We looked out to sea, yachts and dinghies sailing over the choppy water, whitecaps riding further out in the bay. I turned to her again. ‘So maybe there’s no simple answer about why your father told you to come to the funeral, what it was that I was to “explain” to you. But we could work on it.’
‘Yes, perhaps. We’ll see.’ She stalled. It was clear she didn’t want to work on it, wanted to cut her losses and get away from me.
A big man, a building contractor, a client of my father, interrupted us then. ‘Your dear good mother, Benjamin …’ He grasped my hand for several minutes, maudlin, full of phoney commiseration and bonhomie.
After I’d done with him I looked round for Elsa. She’d gone. Just upped and left. We hadn’t said goodbye, and there was still the mystery of our family connection to resolve. The way she resembled Katie – what did this mean? Was fate giving me a second chance? Did I want this? Katie had behaved appallingly and I surely didn’t want a repetition of that.
I suddenly wanted this new woman Elsa – this Jekyll to Katie’s Hyde. I’d contact her later – if I felt like it. Bloody rude of her, disappearing like that without a word. Just like Katie, I thought, so often vanishing in the middle of a meal or during an interval at the theatre. Contrary. I went back to the big table, refilled my glass, and set about provoking the other guests.
Later, with all the convivial mourners gone, I stumbled around, alone in the drawing room, a little drunk.
Taking an opened bottle of the white Châteauneuf I moved about the house, from one overstuffed room to another. Mostly heavy Victorian furniture, but some fine Gothic revival pieces as well. My father had liked the style and collected it from various antique dealers. There were several original William Morris pieces: a dining table and chairs, an oak cupboard in the hall, a chest of drawers, cabinets and other pieces upstairs.
I swayed up the wide polished oak staircase to the bedrooms on the first floor and looked into the rooms – the guest rooms, my father’s bedroom (in my memory my parents had always slept apart) where there was an extraordinary piece of furniture, a dressing-room toilet cabinet designed by William Burges, a splendidly quirky Victorian architect and furniture maker. The cabinet was delicately made, beautiful – largely done in pine, painted in red, yellow and black washes, with intricately worked brass fittings, cornerings and handles.
I opened it, displaying the rows of little drawers inside, pigeonholes, a mirror, various clever places for toilet knick-knacks, a cupboard below containing a chamber-pot, washbowl and jug, all painted with garlands of bluebells and daisies.
I pulled out one of the little drawers. A cut-throat razor, a decayed shaving brush, an old bottle of Collis Browne’s Tonic.
At the back of another drawer was a collection of small black-and-white photographs. My parents at the Dublin Horse Show years before. But then, beneath these, I came across something quite different. An older photograph. My father as a young man in an Italian army officer’s uniform, smiling, pleased with himself. I’d not known my father had been in the army and thought he’d been exempted. Then I noticed the pith helmet and the Africans.
Of course. This was before the war, Mussolini’s barbarous campaign in Abyssinia. My father had served out there, and here he was, at the head of a line of bedraggled, wounded and manacled Abyssinians. And my father holding the first of them, pulling him by a chain attached to his neck. I was surprised.
I went into my mother’s big bedroom looking out over the bright, early-evening light on the bay. I sat down on the canopied four-poster bed. There was a formal studio portrait on a bureau nearby. My parents shortly after they’d married, sometime in the early fifties. They were smiling at each other. Not like later.
My father, small with darkly brilliantined hair, neat moustache, suave good looks, very Latin; almost a caricature of an Italian. His chest puffed out, with the same aggressive confidence of the earlier African photograph, but matured, diluted in this later portrait by his dark bedroom eyes, softened with intimations of passion, warmth, even nobility.
Cruelty and warmth. The photographs reflected the extremes in his character. He’d been a man of extraordinarily varied and unsettled temperament. Quick to anger,
with a ruthless edge to him, but then as quickly silent, as if stunned, when he became gentle and penitent, filled with tearful innocence.
His eyes in this photograph showed something else beyond the seductive Latin airs, the genial man about town with other Dublin businessmen, drinking gin and tonics in the old buttery bar downstairs in the Hibernian hotel. There were shadows in his eyes, the haunted look of a man who, at thirty, had seen and experienced the very worst in Auschwitz.
My mother, by contrast, showed a complete innocence in the studio photograph. A pleasant, round face, untouched by life. She was not like that later, when experience had laid hands on her. A face increasingly racked by pain and bitterness, vented often on me – I’ve never known why.
Taking the bottle I went up to the second floor where there was a long, glass-roofed landing with rooms to either side, guests’ and maids’ rooms years before. It was hot under the glass roof, where the sun had blazed down all through the long hot day. I sat on the floor, back against the wall, took the bottle, drank, closed my eyes and tried to laugh at my life.
I’d been a good all-round athlete at St Columba’s College, my school up in the Dublin mountains: a first-team cricket and rugby player, and I became a quick hand at boxing too, as a middleweight, taught by a burly cocksure ex-army sergeant, Johnny Branigan, who I had once surprised with a fast left hook to the jaw, stunning him for a moment, before he tried to do the same to me. After making a century in a cup match, I’d thought about becoming a professional cricketer with Middlesex. But when I was sixteen I fell in love with my father’s motor cruiser, the Sorrento, still moored in the boathouse, crewing it with my father in all sorts of weather, up and down the Irish Sea. The passion I came to have for boats then, thinking I might join the British navy, until I got the recruiting brochure and application forms, and felt the cold shadows of hierarchy, duty, restrictions – not the freedom of the seas.
Eventually I realized I was best of all at painting and sculpting. A gift for drawing and colour, and handling clay. The art master at St Columba’s encouraged me. So at sixteen I finally decided to be a painter. I remember the day in the art class when, annoyed at the general standard and leaning over a painting of mine, and in front of all the other boys, he said, ‘Contini here, you’ll never take a leaf out of his book. He has the gift, and you lot of pampered little jades don’t.’ The man was queer and fancied me as well as my work, but all the same he was probably right. I did have a gift. So I’d said to him, just to give cheek, ‘Yes, Sir, I’m going to be a painter!’ Then added for good measure, ‘And a sculptor.’ In fact, I was just an ambitious and aggressive schoolboy.
In any event my mother thought my being a serious painter was a hopeless idea, but my father encouraged me, paid my fees at the old College of Art in Kildare Street, and did the same later, financing me at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I studied painting and sculpture. My father was always keen for me to do well as an artist, and I liked him for that as much as anything. Now, thirty years later, I was still a painter – but blocked. Nothing decent done since the trouble with Katie brewed up two years ago. It used to be portraits and nudes, good stuff usually. Forceful, strong colours, the right lines and musculature. Paintings, and some commissioned sculpture, where there was nearly always more than the sum of the parts. That surprising extra – a hidden thought or sexiness in the sitter revealed, but in the art world now a painter scorned, with hardly a penny earned from my work in the last two years. I took another swig of the Châteauneuf.
I’d started out well enough after I’d left the Beaux-Arts, and stayed on in Paris. I’d soon come to sell my work well at a small Left Bank gallery. I’d begun painting in the manner of several artists. Something of Utrillo, then Soutine, Modigliani. School of Paris style. Street scenes, portraits, nudes. Particularly nudes. I’d been fascinated by women’s bodies ever since I was a child, about eleven, in bed with flu, and had a big Phaidon art book, Modern Masterpieces, which I’d found in the library. Halfway through there was an erotically reclining nude by Modigliani: it struck me with a blood-tingling sensation. I was startled by the provocative ease and availability of the woman, eavesdropping on her at a very private moment.
The picture stirred me sexually, so that I’d taken paper and traced it, my flu-fever seeming to increase the stimulation I took from it, copying it repeatedly, as if the better to possess every line and contour, every secret part of this marvellous woman. My mother found some of these tracings in my bed after I’d got up one day. She was shocked. ‘What’s the matter?’ I’d challenged her. ‘It’s a modern masterpiece. It says so on the cover of the book.’
Later on in Paris the lines of my work became more rounded, the colours softer and more varied – Pissarro and Bonnard became the great influences. Pissarro for his street and river scenes, Bonnard for his nudes.
The way Bonnard handled the flickering points of light in a bathroom, on the tiles, a mirror, the bath water, on the skin of his wife immersed in the mottled, green-blue, seemingly molten liquid. There was a hidden sexuality in the colourings and the vague composition that made the woman seem ethereal and unavailable, all the more desired.
Portraits and nudes. The first became my bread and butter, the second my passion – when I returned to London in the seventies and married Angela – living in London near Primrose Hill, where the two children had been born, Molly and Beatrice, before the marriage started to disintegrate.
Angela had eventually taken up with an older married lover, an architect in Yorkshire, who wouldn’t divorce and marry her. The usual story. She’d gone up to live near him in Yorkshire, where the two girls had gone to a Quaker boarding school that I’d paid for in those financially balmy years.
I rarely saw Angela now. Our relationship had drifted into indifference on her part and dulled incomprehension on mine. I’d never understood what she saw in the architect – a rather pompous, abrupt little man with a cracked front tooth, called Arthur. I always thought I had much more going for me.
I saw the two girls now and then: we were good, if rather distant friends. Molly, the elder at twenty and at university in Scotland, wants to be a forester. She has a boyfriend in the Highlands who works for the Forestry Commission. Beatty, two years younger, is still at the Quaker school doing A levels. Angela survives financially. A little money of her own and the lover subsidises her. Of course I should have divorced her years ago. She had behaved badly, running off like that with the shyster architect, but why divorce when no one else had come along whom I wanted to marry?
Until Katie, four years ago. I wanted to marry her all right. After three years of barely flawed happiness, I certainly wanted that. When I eventually asked her she said yes. The next day no, then finally chucked me, and then killed herself. Was it an accident? Perhaps the diary and scrapbook I found in her canvas bag will explain things. The bag she’d left last week, after I’d talked again about a proper future together, before she’d refused my offer and driven off without another word. A journal of some sort, when I’d looked at it briefly, but interleaved with dried wildflowers, Paris Metro tickets and the like from our country walks and trips abroad. An Album Consolatum, it might have been.
She’d had no need of this, I thought. She’d lived with me so tentatively and abandoned me so unexpectedly and completely a week before – why should she ever need to console herself for something she had never lost? She left me half an hour after we’d made love that summer afternoon – a last gift, and a permanent goodbye. I jumped into my old Bentley and followed her up the mile-long farm track that leads from my old barn in the Cotswolds to a small road at the top.
Near the top of the track I saw her car, rammed into the big beech tree in the flax field. By the time I got there the engine was on fire, flames licking up from the badly crushed bonnet. I thought she was dead, slumped over the wheel, the rim pressed into her chest. She wasn’t dead. She pulled herself back and opened her eyes, and then the engine began to flame viciously, fire starting
to engulf the car.
The windows were closed. ‘Get out, for God’s sake! Open the door, the windows!’ She wouldn’t. She sat there, immobile, her hair starting to singe, the body I had made love with half an hour before being consumed by fire, incarcerated in the steel oven of the car.
I pulled at the door handle. I couldn’t open it. ‘Open the door, Katie! Open, push it!’
She wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Instead she turned her head, and out of the pall of smoky fumes that were beginning to envelop her, she looked at me dismissively in that silent way she had of saying no. Elusive, unpossessed to the last. I kicked at the door like a madman. I didn’t know if I was trying to save her or punish her, if I wanted her dead or alive, for I had come to hate her in these last years as much as I loved her.
I managed to get the door open at last and tugged at her, trying to drag her out, but she clung fiercely to the wheel, the flames leaping up from the dashboard, and my hair was beginning to singe. I had to retreat. ‘Get out, Katie, for God’s sake. Get out!’ I screamed.
Then I heard a shout behind me. I turned. It was Tom Phillips, my farmer landlord who lived at the head of the track, running towards me.
‘Quick!’ I said when he reached me. I had to save her life, which was mine as well, I realized, for I loved her then without reserve, knowing there might be only seconds left to save us both.
Tom and I, diving into the smoke and fire, finally managed to drag her out of the car. We were too late. Her dark hair was gone and only the stubbled, sooty crown of her skull was left. She was half-naked, her clothes burnt away, some still burning. Patches of the skin on her face had peeled away, displaying little volcanoes of bubbling, bleeding red – the fatty flesh of her breasts and biceps blistering, suppurating. She fell out of the car into the flax field, like a collapsed scarecrow, still smoking. And my last sight of her, before I had to turn away, was her face among the crushed blue flax, a happy-anguished face, seeing all that was special there for an instant, that particular nose that had rubbed mine, the small mouth that had kissed, the eyes that had seen, ears that had heard – all her senses that I had shared, the whole life that I had loved burnt out of her. The ambulance came and took her away. Tom took me back to his house, where I called one of Katie’s grooms at the riding school she owned, and told him what had happened – that Katie had been taken off to the hospital in Oxford. The groom, a taciturn fellow, barely responded, as if I’d just called to say she’d be late for tea. Since Katie hadn’t any close relations, I told the groom to call her friend, Monika – the only friend of Katie’s that I knew about – who lived next-door to the riding school. ‘Ask Monika to go to the hospital, deal with things,’ I told the man. Then I could speak no more. Katie was surely dead.