‘I’m OK,’ he insisted. ‘Things are different.’
‘Of course. It is hard. You liked your mother,’ she said, offering a finger for Maximilian to grasp. ‘It was hard for me, and I did not like my mother very much and she did not like me.’ She smiled at Maximilian, making big eyes for him.
‘Why didn’t you like her?’ asked Alexander.
‘I did not like her because she did not like me and she did not like me because I did not like her. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She has been dead for many years, and we are talking about you. I think you are not fine. I think there are other things. Shall I tell you what I think?’
‘I think you’re going to,’ said Alexander, but Cornelia did not smile.
‘It is your life that is wrong,’ she asserted, smoothing Maximilian’s hair as though to ease the shock of her statement.
‘My life?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s serious,’ he laughed, but he felt like someone beginning to recognise the accuracy of a caricature of himself.
‘To me it is obvious. It has always been obvious. You are not truly a shopkeeper, Alexander. It is not a bad thing, to be a shopkeeper. We need to buy things. But you must have money in your heart to do it. You do not have money in your heart, and so I think you are in the wrong life. You do not have the soul of a shopkeeper. Roderick thinks the same, but he would not tell you. I am more honest than Roderick,’ she said, and she jutted out her lower lip, in truculent apology for this fault. Repositioning Maximilian in her lap, she added: ‘A shop is not a poetic thing, but there is something poetical in you. I believe so.’ Cornelia narrowed her eyes enigmatically, like a fortune teller, and smiled.
Alexander looked away, embarrassed at being so mistakenly described. ‘I never thought of Roderick as a diplomat,’ he replied.
‘He is English. But you are changing the subject again. The subject is you.’
‘And my uncommercial soul.’
‘Alexander, do not make fun. I am giving you advice because I care for you. But if you do not want my advice –’
‘No, please. I do,’ he said.
For a moment Cornelia stared into his eyes, as if to gauge his honesty. ‘To me it is obvious,’ she repeated, less forcefully. ‘What is it you are doing with your life? You are working in a shop. Why are you working in your shop? Is it a tradition in your family?’ she demanded.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Can you say you like your work?’
‘More than most people, I suspect. Work is work. It has its good days. And I’m my own boss.’
‘How long have you been in your shop?’
‘It’s the only place I’ve ever worked.’
‘No,’ Cornelia gasped. Catching her breath, she placed a hand on her chest. ‘No. This cannot be true.’
‘It is true.’
‘No. That is a tragedy.’
‘Cornelia, it is not a tragedy. Sleeping every night in a shop doorway might be a tragedy. Running a shop is not. You might think it’s boring, but I’m satisfied.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she responded.
‘It’s true.’
She made wide eyes at Maximilian again, as if encouraging him to share her incredulity. ‘You should leave your shop,’ she said emphatically. ‘Leave it. Leave London. That’s what I think.’
‘And become a gentleman of leisure?’
‘Alexander, you are being silly. You know what you should do. It is obvious.’
‘To you, evidently.’
‘To anyone.’ Crossing her hands on Maximilian’s chest, Cornelia closed her eyes in an attitude of meditation, with a smile that seemed to signify her confidence that enlightenment would quickly come to Alexander. After a minute she opened her eyes and blinked at him.
‘Well?’
‘Oh, Alexander,’ she sighed. ‘It is so very obvious.’ Her right hand drew a semicircle in the air and uncurled to indicate the lawn on the opposite bank. ‘Look. A big garden. And next door? Another big garden. And next to that? Another one. You think that people with gardens like these have the time to look after them? Of course not. Not all of them. It’s a lot of work. Too much work for a lot of people. Some are too busy, some are not strong enough. They need help, and they will pay for it. Not much, but do you need much?’ she asked, and Alexander agreed that he did not. ‘No, you don’t. You are – what is the word? – frugal.’ Alexander regarded the garden on the other side of the water and Cornelia watched him, as though awaiting his opinion of something she had created. ‘Why do you do all the work in our garden? It is not only because we are friends, is it? No. It is what gives you pleasure, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’
‘There are so many big gardens here, I think you could pick and choose. I’ll prove it,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘There is nobody to stay for, is there? You have friends, but there is nobody more than a friend?’ she asked, in the manner of a clerk taking details for a form.
‘No.’
‘Well then,’ she smiled, and gave a soft clap. ‘Roderick would be happy if you were here. And Max.’ She started to untie the pouch, picking at the knots in the small of Alexander’s back. ‘And me,’ she added.
As they walked through the town, digressing down roads to peer over fences at gardens that Cornelia presented to him as if making a gift of them, Alexander imagined the rooms of his flat, and already they seemed like rooms he had left some years before. And the following night, before returning home, he drove past the shop and parked within sight of it. He turned off the engine but did not get out. For more than an hour he sat in the car, staring indifferently at the black glass and at the letters of his name. He had started to work there in 1957, he told himself. He counted the years, and felt that he should be appalled, but was not. Cornelia misunderstood, he thought, and then it seemed that Cornelia did not misunderstand. He contradicted himself again and again, and it was like a broken switch flipped on and off, on and off.
52. The father
It was almost half a year after the conversation with Cornelia that Philip and Jane moved into the house that Philip had bought with the money he had been left in his father’s will. On the evening of the day they went to view it, Jane phoned Alexander. It was an enormous house, in a Victorian crescent, she told him, and there was a flat in the basement, which they would let out, sooner or later. She had discussed it with Philip. He had no objection to taking Alexander as a tenant, none at all, she assured him.
On a Sunday afternoon in January, soon after contracts had been exchanged, Alexander went with Philip and Jane to look at the house. Setting out from the study in the loft, Philip conducted Alexander through the building, pointing out the floors that would be relaid, the windows that were to be replaced, the walls that would be ripped down. ‘This has potential,’ he stated, looking out of a back window at the cracked concrete terrace, from which a flight of concrete steps descended to a garden of rain-flattened grass and unkempt rhododendrons, and then he noticed, in a corner of the room, a small pool of water on the floorboards. While Philip investigated the damage, Jane took Alexander down to the flat.
Each of the rooms in the basement was small, and the room at the front was so dark that they had to switch a lamp on, but the dull light off the sodden lawn put a tinge on the walls of the kitchen that was as soothing as moss, and the air held a refreshing perfume of mint and wet brick. Rainwater falling into a clear glass jar on the outside sill of the kitchen window made a sound like a xylophone note, and outside, on the small square patio, there stood a bucket-sized terracotta pot that held nothing but soil. The soil was black and deliquescent, as lustrous as the skin of a seal. Looking out of the window, for an instant he was not certain whether that year’s Easter had passed or not, and it was then that Jane said: ‘You could stay here until you find somewhere else.’
Philip’s footfalls crossed the ceiling. ‘Are you sure about this?’ asked Alexander.
She looked at hi
m as if she might decide to take offence at his question. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Are you?’
‘About the flat?’ he replied.
‘About everything. About leaving London.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and he felt, for the first time, that he was.
They went back upstairs. ‘When a man is tired of London, he has finally seen sense,’ said Philip, and he shook his hand in congratulation. ‘You’ll be expected to do the garden, you understand,’ he added, peering at a patch of discoloured plaster above Alexander’s head.
Mr Ibbotson, it turned out, was culpable of nothing more than being, as Gavin Tully put it, luckless, ill-informed and inappropriately confident. As if to make amends for having raised his client’s expectations with talk of criminality and prosecution, Mr Tully applied himself vigorously to the transfer of the lease and all the attendant legalities, and by the end of April the shop belonged to Charlie Williamson and the overdraft had been cleared. Alexander went to live in Brighton.
The advertisements he placed in local newspapers and shop windows in Brighton and Lewes brought work as quickly as Cornelia and Jane had predicted. Within the month he was making a herb garden for Mrs Webb in Kingston, whose recommendation led to work for her neighbour, Mr Siviter, for whom he built an oak belvedere in an alcove of roses and night-scented stock. Before he had finished at Mr Siviter’s he was called by Mr Sorley in Ditchling and Mrs Nicolson in Robertsbridge, both acquaintances of Mrs Webb, with gardens that Alexander was to tend, once or twice a week, for several years. By the summer every weekday was occupied.
He replanted and maintained the garden for Jane and Philip, with whom he spent little more time than he did with Roderick and Cornelia. Every couple of weeks or so they would invite him upstairs for a drink or occasionally a meal, generally in the company of other guests. Philip was always affable, in a manner that seemed not insincere but nonetheless often implied a degree of effort, as a man might behave with a distant relative of his wife. Although Philip sometimes drank more than Jane seemed to think was sensible, their evenings were pleasant and were soon forgotten. But then there was the day in September, when Sam and Liz were visiting.
In the middle of the afternoon, soon after the three of them had returned from the shops, Jane knocked on the back door and asked them if they’d like to join the barbecue that she and Philip were having that night in the garden, with a few of the students from Philip’s school. Six were expected, but only four arrived: a Portuguese lawyer called Rosana; a Finnish engineer named Esa; Claudia, a film student from Modena; and Matteo, her boyfriend, who worked for Alfa Romeo.
‘Every boy should have an Alfa, once in his life,’ Philip told everyone, putting an arm around Matteo’s shoulders. ‘Not more than once, though. Ever had an Alfa, Alex? No? I had one. Bought it as soon as I could afford a car. Lovely thing. Sexy as a snake. Sweetest engine you ever heard. But the stuff wrapped around it was junk. Bag of rust inside a year. The engine costs £10,000, the bodywork’s free. That’s what they used to say, isn’t it?’ he smiled, and left them before either of them could say anything.
Having learned from Jane that Alexander’s family came from Scotland, Matteo asked if he had ever seen the Dolomites, and on being told that he had not, described for Alexander, with an ingenuous ardour, the precipitous terrain around the mountain village where he was born and his parents still lived. You could walk in the mountains along paths that were marked for many kilometres, but in places the paths were so difficult that there were iron ladders in the stone that you had to use, he explained, and he acted out a clamber on a steep rock as he looked over Alexander’s shoulder at Claudia, who was following Esa and Rosana on a tour of the garden, while Philip cooked the food and drank from a glass that never seemed less than half-full, and Jane talked to Sam and Liz, whom she had last seen at the funeral of Alexander’s mother.
They sat on white plastic chairs ranged around a table on the lawn. Esa told a circuitous story about a corrupt architect back home, which nobody appeared to follow through all its digressions except Rosana, who seemed to decide quite early in the narration that she should take the responsibility of understanding it. Sam stared at the leaves of the beech tree, to stop himself from laughing, Alexander could tell. Liz alternately took small sips of her wine and smiled at Jane or Matteo or Claudia. No longer sober, Philip went back to the grill to bring second helpings, and Claudia followed to help him. When everyone at the table had been served, she stayed with Philip for a moment. In a low voice she said something to him, and Alexander heard Philip reply: ‘Ask. Go on. You never know. Ask.’ Looking at Alexander, Claudia shrugged.
To break the silence that followed the demise of Esa’s story, Matteo told an anecdote about some arms deal he had heard about, in which each party had somehow ended up bribing the other. There was another silence, then Philip remarked to Rosana: ‘You know about Claudia’s film?’ Bolting a mouthful of pasta, Rosana mumbled that she did not. ‘Claudia’s going to make a film, over the summer,’ Philip told the group. ‘Most of it, anyway. That’s the idea, isn’t it?’ he asked Claudia, who leaned forward to take her glass from the table.
‘A little film,’ said Claudia diffidently, swiping her hair from her brow. ‘Video film.’
‘With some of her friends. A Pasolini kind of project. Amateurs for maximum authenticity.’
‘And minimum cost,’ added Claudia.
‘A sort of fable,’ said Philip. ‘Shall I tell them the story?’
‘If you like,’ said Claudia, to Philip and then to the others.
‘Correct me if I go wrong,’ said Philip. ‘It’s set somewhere in Italy, in the third quarter of the last century. The heroine is Chiara, daughter of a lawyer. A beauty. To be played by Claudia’s friend, Elena.’
‘Eliane.’
‘Eliane. She’s being courted by a young man, Domenico. All of a sudden his interest wanes. She has no idea why. Eventually she discovers what Domenico had found out – that she is not her parents’ daughter but a foundling. Her natural father was one of Garibaldi’s Thousand, but he is dead now. The mother is God knows where.’
‘But she finds her,’ Claudia interrupted.
‘Eventually she finds her. She’s living in a religious community out in the countryside. A back to basics kind of outfit. Very hair-shirt. The leader of this community is an example to them all. Fifty licks of the lash at dawn, then a breakfast of grass and grit. Lives in a stone cell’
‘I’ve got it,’ Sam butted in. ‘The holy man turns out to be the girl’s father.’
‘Exactly,’ said Philip, raising his glass to Sam. ‘The mother was ravished by him, then abandoned the consequent child and withdrew from society in shame. But this isn’t clear at first.’
‘And he was never a hero, of course,’ said Esa.
‘Oh no. He was a hero. A big hero and a big sinner.’
‘How does it end?’ asked Rosana, out of politeness rather than interest it seemed.
‘The daughter hears her mother’s story, and after a bit of nifty deduction, and the revelation of an incriminating scar on the holy man’s neck, she works out that the poor woman has unwittingly become an acolyte of the man who abused her. The girl denounces her father, who is seen walking off into the rain.’
‘This is why we can make this in England,’ Claudia intervened. ‘The rain.’
‘So the girl returns to the town, where Domenico, chastened by the heroine’s love for her mother, comes to his senses and marries her.’
‘An uplifting story,’ Sam remarked.
‘Very,’ said Liz, fastening the buttons of her cardigan.
Philip replenished Liz’s glass and offered the bottle to Esa. ‘The coda,’ he resumed. ‘The preacher in exile. He lives in a cave, gets a reputation as a saint. Villagers come to him for guidance. He speaks to them through a chink in the rock. Tells them he is a terrible sinner who should be left to rot. One day a woman hikes up the mountain, bringing her blind daughter. In a frenzy he rush
es out of his cave, clutching the rock he uses to beat his chest all day long, and he smacks the child across the head with it. Woman flees, bearing the unconscious girl. Hermit dies. But then we see, at the same moment as the old man expires, the blind child asking its mother to move a candle closer. How’s that? What pathos, eh?’ Philip shouted, swigging the last of his wine. ‘And Mr MacIndoe –’ he prompted, waving the tongs at Claudia.
‘Perhaps you could be the father?’ Claudia asked Alexander. ‘If I make the film, would you be him?’
‘I don’t think it’s something –’
‘Non-speaking role, virtually,’ Philip broke in. ‘All you have to do is look as if the end of the world is nigh.’
‘You have such a face,’ said Claudia.
‘Thank you, but –’
‘I don’t see Alex as a soldier,’ said Liz, at which Jane shook her head in agreement.
‘You have seen Alex as a soldier,’ Sam reminded her. ‘Not an Oscar-winning performance, I admit.’
‘You would be perfect,’ Claudia persisted. ‘If you had a beard, it would be an El Greco face.’
‘Go on,’ Philip goaded. ‘You’d be great.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why not? You’ve been in showbiz before. He used to be a singer, in a pop group,’ Philip told Claudia, who looked admiringly at Alexander.
‘We were terrible.’
‘Your voice is very nice,’ pleaded Claudia.
‘I couldn’t, really –
‘Please,’ said Claudia.
‘Please,’ echoed Philip.
‘I can’t,’ said Alexander, offering the bottle to Rosana, who declined.
Claudia’s film remained the subject for a few minutes more, and when Alexander went into the house to fetch some candles and a jug of water Claudia followed him, and asked him again if he would help her. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen with her arms limp by her sides, in a posture of meekness. He was sorry, but he could not, Alexander told her; he put a jug in her hands and turned to fill another. Perhaps he could think about it some more, she suggested, and she carried the jug away. From the kitchen window Alexander observed her cross the lawn, watched by Matteo and by Philip, who tilted his head at her quizzically as she approached. She was talking about the cathedral in Modena when Alexander put the jug on the table. It was where the idea for her story had come to her, she explained. She saw a young woman with her mother, praying, and it was the way the young woman glanced at her mother, when her mother’s eyes were closed in prayer, that inspired her, she said, looking at Alexander as though this detail might persuade him of her integrity.
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