‘I can see.’
‘Me and Nancy had a child. A boy. He’s called Dick. He’s nine years old and he’s coming home soon to live with us. I want you to meet him.’
Alice didn’t say nothing. She sat there on the bench looking straight ahead of her over the grass towards the trees. There were tears running down her face on to her collar, just silent tears running down. She looked so far away I wondered if she’d gone away again into her illness.
She held my hand for more than an hour while the people came and went, the mothers and the couples arm in arm and the children running after hoops and balls. Still the silent tears were running down her face.
It was starting to grow dark and the park-keeper sounded a bell. Alice turned her face towards me and squeezed my hand.
‘Can we go home now, Billybones?’ she said.
‘Yes, come on then.’
We stood up and started walking. ‘Can I take your arm some days?’ she said. ‘When there’s no one else?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, you can.’
In the next few years we had a lot of deaths. First it was Ma Smith and then old Stevens downstairs. We did up Stevens’s room so it looked as good as new and Alice moved in there. She took in some work for pin money, sewing and that, but she had her meals with us and cooked a fair bit too.
Then one summer my pa was taken ill. He took to his bed one day and said he was never getting up again. I did get a doctor to come and see him but he said there was nothing he could do, the cancer was all over him. This doctor told me where I could find some medicines that would help the pain and make him sleep.
I sat by his bed and I thought about him when he was a young man and he had his business and twelve men working for him. He’d had a bit of a twinkle about him then. He thought things would work out all right for him after all.
Now I saw his unshaved face and his sunken eyes. He was a man on his last legs.
‘Did I ever tell you, Billy,’ he says, ‘about the ones we lost? Your ma and me? There was another little girl besides Meg. We lost her when she was four or five. And there was a stillborn, a boy, between Meg and you.’
‘P’raps if that boy had lived I’d never have been born,’ I said.
‘P’raps.’ He heaved up a big sigh. ‘I sometimes think I wasn’t a good father to you, Billy. When I had to send you to the Union. But you was the only one who’d survive it. And otherwise we was going to starve.’
‘I understand.’
Then my father said, ‘Being a father … When you’re a lad you think your pa knows it all. He’s like a god to you. But he doesn’t. You just make it up as you go along.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘And then you know you got it wrong. But it’s too late.’
‘You didn’t mean no harm,’ I said.
I looked down at his bed and into his eyes, which had all red rings round them. He was finished. Once he thought he could win, but life had beaten him, like it beats everyone.
We carried on living in Crow Street till my younger girl May got married too, then I took all the money I could from the business I had with Worthington and I paid down a deposit on a cottage in Clapham which had belonged to a railwayman. I took a loan from a mutual society and me and Nancy and our boy Dick moved in.
Arthur went off to Australia where he hoped to meet his mother, my mother, though I don’t know if he ever did because he couldn’t write. For a time Alice was the landlady in Crow Street, but her health wasn’t so good really and Nancy said she should come and live with us in Clapham. I was very pleased with this and I was glad it was Nancy who suggested it. So now it’s the four of us. And this is where we are.
Alice has a room on the back of the house that looks out towards the railway. She sits by the window there quite a bit of the day, and sometimes she goes down into the little square of garden at the back. She’s got quite a knack with flowers and she’s planted some tomatoes under the window, where they get the sun.
Nancy’s taken my name, she’s Mrs Webb now, and Alice has gone back to being Smith. No one in this part of London knows any different. Nancy’s very good to Alice, she’s careful not to crow. She’s generous with what we’ve got and what we’ve made together.
Once I came home early and I saw them playing cards in the front room. It was like all the years fell away and they was in the mothers’ room in the Union house on a Sunday, waiting for the bell to go. It was like nothing in between had ever happened. They didn’t hear me come in and I stood in the doorway looking at them. Alice’s eyes were fixed on Nancy’s face while she dealt the cards. She looked quite calm, but puzzled.
I don’t think you ever understand your life – not till it’s finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
Dick’s a bright lad and he did well at the Board school. Now he’s got a job as a clerk in the City. He goes off early in the morning in a collar and tie. He’s a good, clean-living boy and he wants to make an impression.
And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They’ll know nothing of grinding stones and lying down to sleep in what felt like a coffin and being hungry and ashamed all day and night and being beaten by a teacher who couldn’t write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you had no thoughts at all. And that’s what I’ve done for them, that’s my gift to them and to all their children ever after, so don’t talk to me about being hard.
PART III – EVERYTHING CAN BE EXPLAINED
2029
ELENA DURANTI WAS a wild girl who spent most of her time alone in the woods near her parents’ farm. Her mother said she was ‘shy’, but the truth was that she found other children irritating. She knew what they were trying to say even as they began to labour slowly towards it; and when they got there it hardly seemed worth the trouble. She wasn’t proud of this impatience and felt uneasy about being friendless, but she had only to spend a lunch hour hearing Bella make conversation with Jacopo to know that she was better off on her own.
Elena’s father, Roberto, was a boatbuilder and the only human being she was never bored by. Perhaps this was because he said so little as he stood at the bench in his workroom, planing yellow curls from the planks of wood or bending over them with his set square and spirit level. He had long, shaggy hair that hung over his eyes and a beard that even in his thirties was threaded with grey. Elena would stand in the sawdust, her skinny legs bare beneath a cotton dress, hoping that Roberto would occasionally remember she was there. She watched how he measured and sawed, how he made the joints firm with screws and glue, and tried to remember it all for when she would build her own private hideaway.
She pestered her parents for a bicycle. Her mother, Fulvia, worked as a cleaner at a school in the nearby city of Mantua, and one day Elena pointed out to her a showroom that made her sick with longing. The black tyres had a new rubber smell and the colours on the metal frames – purple, lime and gold – were entrancing. She spent a long time looking at the straps and buckles on the saddlebags. Above all, it was the handlebars she craved; she pictured herself with her backside stuck high in the air, crouching with her face over the front wheel and her hands on the racing grips; she would raise one arm to swipe a bottle from a drinks station and ease her aching back. But the machine that arrived as a present from her parents on her ninth birthday in June 2029 had neither fluorescent paint nor fragrant tyres; it was the cast-off of a neighbour’s son who had outgrown it. It had no saddlebag or lights; and worse, it was – and there was no denying it – a boy’s bike.
Determined not to let her parents see her disappointment, Elena rode off as fast as the machine would let her. Within a week she had stripped it down and oiled it up; she fixed the gear-change and with some savings bought an elementary tool kit. She longed for a puncture. Ignoring Fulvia’s cries of alarm, she went out on to the main highway
s, then lanes and farm paths and eventually off-road into the woods and hills. One day, deep in a glade she was fairly sure no human being had ever visited, she found a clearing that she thought ideal for a hideout. With timber offcuts from Roberto’s workshop and some old tools he’d passed on to her, she set to work. For a roof she used a piece of corrugated iron she’d seen abandoned by a path, and for guttering some scraps from a skip at a building site. What she was most proud of was the drain: a three-metre run that voided into a natural ditch.
Inside, she put up shelves; and on these she put a few action figures, dolls and other toys she thought robust enough for the outdoor life. The place of honour was taken by a French eighteenth-century plaster Madonna that her father had picked up in a junk shop on a visit to a client in France. It had been badly knocked about over the years, but Elena repainted it a virginal blue. Through the centuries the figure had retained a one-eyed, minatory stare that was both comic and alarming.
The Madonna was left on the shelf, but the others became actors in long-running stories concerned with natural disasters. There was never a question of mothering them, or putting them to bed or seeing them marry one another; the American doll with the yellow hair had no time to spare for the fashion catwalk when she was needed to mastermind an airlift from a flooded infant school. Elena had a number of plastic soldiers she deployed in battle formations, trying to give the Indian braves a fair chance against the Soviet artillery, but the killings and explosions bored her and she preferred to integrate the military into the lives of the town.
Here their stories became more personal. Where she had been happy to tell her parents at the dinner table about fire and avalanche, she was reluctant to reveal too much of her suspicions about the closeness between the head firefighter and his deputy.
‘She has no friends,’ said Fulvia to Roberto. ‘It’s not natural.’
‘She’s happy, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but living all day in that make-believe …’
‘The teachers told me she’s doing well,’ said Roberto. ‘She reads a lot up there in her little hut. She studies animals. She knows about the planets. And solar navigation.’
Fulvia was not convinced. ‘Maybe she studies too much. I see her bedroom light on till all hours. And she’s so thin.’
Roberto laughed. ‘Listen, if you’re worried, take her to see the doctor.’
Fulvia smiled and shook her head. ‘She’s just your little pet, isn’t she? For you she can do no wrong.’
‘She is what she is. We’ll never change her.’
The local doctors’ surgery had been reduced by lack of funds to little more than emergency services, but eventually Fulvia was able to secure an appointment for her daughter. The afternoon was airless and hot; they sat in a dusty waiting room for almost two hours until at last the name ‘Duranti’ was called over the system.
The doctor was a bearded man in shirtsleeves. He looked exhausted. There were blooms of sweat in the armpits of his shirt and heavy bags beneath his eyes. He made Elena strip to her underwear, then bent her arms back and forth. She touched her toes. He shone a light in her eyes.
‘Does she have periods yet?’
‘Not yet.’
Elena was taken away and put in a tube that rumbled. A nurse took her back to the doctor’s room with a batch of blurred photographs. She felt humiliated at having to walk along the stone corridor in her vest and pants. The doctor told her to sit down while he took her blood pressure. Then he rubbed the inside of her elbow with alcohol and slid a needle into her vein; as he leant over her she could smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes. He put a small test tube of her blood into an envelope in his out-tray as he sat back in his desk chair and riffled through the scans.
‘Skinny little thing, isn’t she?’
‘Well, she eats enough for two,’ said Fulvia. ‘I promise you she—’
‘I understand. You have a family history of heart problems, it says on her notes.’
‘Yes,’ said Elena’s mother. ‘My mother died when she was forty-nine and her mother at the same age.’
The doctor put down the scans. ‘Well, despite all that Elena’s heart is normal,’ he said. ‘Physically, she’s perfectly well.’
‘She has no friends.’
For the first time, the doctor smiled. ‘A few years ago we might have sent her to a counsellor for that.’
‘And now?’ said Fulvia.
‘For people like us, ordinary people, that profession has disappeared. Take your little girl home, Signora, and stop worrying. She’s a funny little monkey, but if I were you I’d just enjoy her company when you can.’
Later, on the bus going home, Elena said, ‘Why did he call me a monkey, Mama?’
‘It’s just a friendly word. It doesn’t mean anything.’
Elena could see that her mother was disappointed that the doctor had found no cure for her. Fulvia’s face looked strained and old as she rested it against the bus window. Will my mother also die at forty-nine? thought Elena. Will I?
‘Shall I tell you why I’m not a monkey?’
‘If you must,’ said Fulvia.
‘It’s because a monkey doesn’t know it’s a monkey. A human being knows it’s human. That’s what sets us apart from every other animal on earth.’
‘If you say so, Elenissima,’ sighed her mother. ‘What would you like for dinner?’
It was not at first the idea of the monkey’s brain that interested Elena, but its looks. She inspected herself in the mirror and came to admit that she was, in the word of a book she had studied, simian in appearance. She had furry arms, large eyes and a flat chest. She didn’t have the golden skin of Cinzia, or Laura’s long and slender legs. So be it, she thought. The project of my life is to make the most of what I have.
Although she read electronically at home, the library at school had printed books they let her take away; Elena carried them up to her hut in her new saddlebag. The teachers at her school were startled by the range of what she knew and allowed her to attend some of the senior classes, sitting at the back, taking notes in her small, exact handwriting. But before she settled down each afternoon to read in the old car seat she had lugged up to her hideaway, there were sporting activities.
She divided Italy into its regions and represented each in turn over a cross-country course of her own devising. The gearing on the bicycle was primitive and some of the ground was boggy, so there were parts of the course where she had to dismount and push, at the run. The Tuscans were accident-prone, she discovered. Her local district of Veneto tended to place well, though it was always hard to beat Campania, especially if the dashing Emilio Rizzo was in the saddle. She tried hard not to have favourites, but it was surprising how certain riders came to dominate the timings.
She waited till it was almost dark before she closed the padlock on her hut, jumped on to the bicycle once more and sped back out of the woods, down the hill, bumping over the paths and then along the main road back to her parents’ farmhouse, where the lights were coming on for dinner and Pedro, the sheepdog, was waiting anxiously for her to feed him.
One rainy evening she hurried home particularly fast because they were expecting Roberto back from a business trip to Trieste. When she had fed the dog, she helped Fulvia prepare a sauce for the pasta, then settled down to wait. The electric car made no sound, and the first thing they knew of its return was when the door swung open to reveal not just her father, with rain dripping from the brim of his hat, but a second person: a boy in a ragged cape with hair more tangled even than Roberto’s. Elena could not make out in the dim light of the kitchen whether he was brown-skinned or just dirty.
‘I’ve brought someone for you to play with, Elena,’ said Roberto.
‘Why, Papa?’ said Elena, appalled.
The boy took a step into the room.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Number Two Hundred and Thirty-Seven. I took him from an orphanage near Trieste.’
‘But w
hat’s his real name?’
‘He won’t say. Maybe we’ll call him … Trieste. Where I found him.’
‘He’s not a dog.’
‘What do you suggest, then?’
‘We should ask him. Does he speak Italian?’
‘Yes,’ said Elena’s father. ‘But he’s quiet.’
The boy took a step back towards the door.
Elena stared at him and wrinkled her nose. ‘Perhaps Bruno. Because he’s brown with dirt all over.’
The boy took a step forward again, and became Bruno.
‘Let me show you where the bathroom is, Bruno,’ said Elena’s mother.
‘How long is he staying?’ said Elena.
‘For ever,’ said Roberto. ‘We’re adopting him.’
Elena fumed. For a week she refused to speak to her mother or father, let alone the intruder. She ate dinner in silence, then cleared her plate, went upstairs to her room and locked the door. Bruno gazed at her with dark, puzzled eyes. He could speak Italian fluently, it turned out, though with an accent, and in a harsh, high voice. Scrubbed, dressed in clean clothes and shorn by the barber, he looked clean, but still, to Elena’s eyes, barbaric.
When the registration paperwork was finally done, they put Bruno on the school bus with Elena. She sat at the back with Jacopo and Cinzia, leaving him to find a seat for himself; her fear was that since they were the same age they might put him in her class. At school, he was sent for assessment and, to Elena’s relief, was placed in the B stream, which was taught in a different building; she could continue to pretend that he did not exist. By day, she redoubled her concentration on the work at school and in the evening she leapt on to her bicycle and disappeared to her hideout in the woods.
‘It’s not natural,’ said Fulvia. ‘Poor little boy.’
For want of other company, Bruno allied himself to Pedro, and spent the early evenings throwing stones over the field with the dog at his side. He tried to teach him to fetch sticks, but Pedro seemed to have no retrieving instinct. He regarded Elena’s father, meanwhile, with a steady reverence and worried for his well-being; when a contract for a boat went to a different company, Bruno took some convincing that it was not the end of their livelihood. Like Elena before him, he watched Roberto at work with drills and planes, though, unlike her, he didn’t want to copy him or take part. He liked to stand nearby at all times, slightly closer than was comfortable, as though he feared his protector might vanish as inexplicably as he had appeared.
A Possible Life Page 12