The summer morning sparkles with mad optimism as we take off again, me and the pigeons, and fly to the coast where gulls escort us across the Channel. Sky and sea are hinged together like the pearly interior of a mussel shell, and as I gaze at the shimmering pink and silvery blue I sing into the dead intercom ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘Bella Ciao’, ‘There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover’ … I burst into hysterical laughter as they appear below, not white at all but grey and beige, bristling with guns, concrete and barbed wire. She skids on the grass and dies beneath me as I release the pigeons, innocent of messages, as an offering to any gods who might be watching.
I crawl out, suddenly exhausted, stiff, thirsty and hungry. A couple of soldiers run over with cigarettes and a flask of water and listen to my tales of heroism with fascinated disbelief. They send a telegraph to Brize Norton to say I’ve survived and let me sleep in a bunk in a Nissen hut on the cliffs for a few hours. I return by military lorry and have time for a cold shower and a plate of greasy stew before debriefing.
Briefings and debriefings are masterpieces of euphemism. They never mention people. Targets are factories or military centres, not screaming women and roasted babies. Actually my refusal to die is becoming something of an embarrassment. They can’t court-martial me for surviving, but my luck is statistically impossible. However, they can’t prove anything against me, and they are desperate for experienced pilots.
At the end of my modest, fluent account, the C-in-C, a man in his fifties who fought in the last war, frowns. ‘I suppose we’ll have to give you another medal, Flying Officer Bishop. You must have quite a collection.’
‘Will I be flying tonight? Terrible to have lost the whole crew.’
‘Oh, we’ll find a new crew. Got to keep the sausage machine turning.’
About a month after D-Day I manage a night in London. Jenny is so loving that night, so ripe and luscious. Even when she finds my collection of passports and logbooks I don’t expect her to get upset. When she walks out I tell myself she will come crawling back before my next leave. But she doesn’t. She disappears, and it’s no fun coming back to an empty flat.
In the spring of 1944 St James’s Square is bombed, and when I return on pass a few days later I look up from the pavement opposite at our top-floor flat, a doll’s house that a capricious giant has had a tantrum with. The oyster satin night-dress flaps from a hole in the wall, and for a savage moment I wish Jenny was inside it.
Towards the end of the war my spirits sink. All that optimism and moral righteousness are profoundly depressing. Flying over the burnt-out ruins of Germany, I pity the ragged, starving refugees who are just as much victims as those who died in Auschwitz or Stalingrad. Soon they will be just as dead. Well, I’ve always been allergic to esprit de corps. As the survival rate in the RAF improves my little adventures are no longer possible, I have to toe the line and listen to the nauseating complacency of my fellow officers. I consider joining the Werewolves, the wild bands of ex-Nazi guerrillas fighting the Allies in the devastated cities. I’ve always got on rather well with werewolves, and lost causes are more sympathetic than found ones. But I don’t want to kill anyone else.
Just before Christmas 1944 I do the decent thing and stage a crash followed by a nervous breakdown. I am invalided out of the RAF and spend the last months of the war in a remote cottage near Sherbourne, where I grow vegetables, lick my wounds and inwardly rage at Jenny. I’m not entirely alone; my tragic looks and medals attract several local women, and I submit to being mothered.
At the end of the war I am summoned to London by the Banca Metafisica and told that as a reward for my excellent war work I have been made a director. They pay me an enormous salary in return for helping them to expand into mass tourism and space exploration. I buy the vast, hideous house on the Cromwell Road for £2,000, let the upstairs floors and live in the basement. When Assunta telegraphs me to say that Jenny has returned to Rapallo I tear up the piece of paper.
My new status at the Fizz means that I can move freely in its underworld. One evening in the early fifties, maudlin-drunk after some reception, I wander down to the cave-like corridor where the contracts are stored and have a look at Jenny’s. It’s quite clear: she has to love me. She has swindled me, deserting me while hanging on to her beauty. Holding the hot, quivering document, I contemplate destroying it and her. I could kill her by remote control. Without her contract she would be over fifty, a raddled alcoholic who would soon be polished off by a quarter of a century of suppressed ailments. I could go to Rapallo and watch her die, pointing out my gifts to her as they vanish one by one.
Instead, I replace her contract in the vault. Jenny is far too ignorant and undistinguished to be the consort of a successful man. If she hadn’t left me I would have got rid of her anyway.
Rapallo
As soon as it’s possible to travel again after the war I return to Italy. When I get off the train at Genoa I’m shocked to see how great chunks have disappeared from the centre and the port. Assunta hasn’t replied to my telegram, so I have to accept that she might be dead and my villa might be a heap of rubble like the restaurant near the station where I used to eat. I get a taxi, a broken-down pre-war Mercedes, all the way to Rapallo. As soon as the driver realizes I understand Italian he launches into a passionate account of the last seven years. Death, starvation, defeat, bombs; he points out all the bomb sites along the coast and sings Resistance songs – they were all partigiani, he tells me, all happy now that Musso and his whore are dead. He addresses me by the Fascist voi, but I don’t smile; I know the truth is flexible.
As I listen, I work out my own truth. He calls me signorina: I’d better be Virginia until I can find a way to kill her off. If my villa has been bombed I may have to live in the ruins, I don’t think the income from my investments will be enough to rebuild it. Will I get compensation? How much is my income worth in this strange post-war world? Even if I have nowhere to live I’m determined to stay in Italy and never return to you.
Amazingly, the Villa Ginestra is still there. It was requisitioned and then looted; the rooms are empty except for a few souvenir turds. Most of the windows are broken, and there’s no water or electricity, but I don’t care.
At sunset I walk through my house, high heels clattering on the marble floors. The view from my terrace is still as lovely as ever. On impulse I rush down the hillside and bathe in the June sea, washing off the humiliation of my London war. By the time I’ve climbed back on to the rocks and dressed it’s dark and I’m ravenous. At a little trattoria on the main road the padrone, Mimmo, brings me spaghetti alle vongole with a half carafe of red wine. The pasta is wonderful, I tell him, the best food I’ve eaten for years.
Mimmo pounces with joy on the crazy Englishwoman who used to live alone in the villa above Milord Max. Mimmo is relieved that the foreigners – and our money – are returning. His wife comes out from the kitchen and the three of us gossip until late that night, not survivor guilt but allegria, for we all know how lucky we are to be alive. Many of the people I remember from before the war haven’t returned to Rapallo: the German dramatist, the retired British skipper, the bankrupt Italian prince descended from Charlemagne, the vicar of the English Church they used to call ‘Devil Dodger’. Mimmo speaks of Ezra Pound as a monster, but I only remember the tall restless man with a patchy red beard feeding stray cats under the palm trees. Ezra believed the lies most other people believed, so they put him in a cage and now he’s locked up in a loony bin in America. I remember him sitting in the café in the piazza shouting at Yeats. I couldn’t understand Ezra’s poetry, but I loved Yeats’s, although I was always too shy to tell him so.
I tell them I haven’t a stick of furniture, and Mimmo and his wife insist on giving me their son’s mattress. He was killed in the Abyssinian campaign so he won’t be needing it. Mimmo and his surviving son carry it up the dark hillside to my bedroom, where I fall asleep on it to the welcoming chatter of crickets and the scent of rosemary.
>
In the morning Assunta is on my terrace with eggs and rolls and milk. I embrace her solid, dark warmth, and we stand back to look at each other. The bun she drags her hair into is still black, and she seems to be wearing the same black dress, but it hangs more loosely on her. Assunta says I’m sempre bella, and I tell her she’s ageless. She helps me to sort out the bureaucratic red tape over my villa, and I find there’s enough money in my bank account to live modestly. After my initial euphoria I shrink into the shadows of a monastic life, reading and writing and swimming. My pre-war friends have left Italy or died or, more depressingly, grown old.
I bump Virginia off. I announce that my daughter, who grew up in England and has been visiting me for Christmas, has taken an accidental overdose of sleeping pills on New Year’s Eve, 1948. Death certificates, like birth certificates and passports, can easily be bought in Italy, and the local undertaker is Assunta’s friend. I squander six months’ income on killing off my alter ego.
Assunta arranges everything. We have a beautiful funeral. Italians are so good at sex and death. Black-edged posters all over town, a horse-drawn hearse, my photograph on my grave up in the olive groves above Rapallo. Outside the works of Edgar Allan Poe very few people check the contents of coffins.
We have a marvellous wake, nothing flashy, all very dignified and subdued, for I’ve learnt the value of good taste. I don’t like other people’s funerals, but I thoroughly enjoy my own. I feel like dancing on my grave: it’s such a relief to be rid of Virginia, that stupid, ignorant, drunken woman. With the money I give her for colluding in Virginia’s death Assunta buys a fishing boat for her lover Stefano and marries him. The spectacular funeral and wedding brighten that gloomy winter and give me a recognizable identity: a tragically bereaved mother. Black suits me.
I’ve always envied your wit and eloquence and George’s quiet intelligence. I used to think intelligence came with money. Then I got the money and acquired a certain style and called myself Eugenie but still had no brains. I can make people laugh, but what I want is the juice that flows in books. So I spend my fifties and sixties extracting it.
I order crates of books from England. Assunta tells me the local children believe they contain the corpses of babies whose blood I suck to stay so young, and I roar with laughter, although it’s no more improbable than the truth.
I stop sunbathing, wear hats and veils and generally disguise my youth, which is becoming an embarrassment. I don’t go out much but sit in my marble salotto with the shutters closed and read novels, poetry, history and philosophy in English, French and Italian.
After Virginia’s funeral there’s a note from Max offering his condolences and inviting me to tea. He has lived in the Villino Chiaro, between my villa and the coast road, for forty years. Before the war we would occasionally see each other in the bar at the Excelsior, but I know he has always avoided the English community, so I’m flattered by his invitation.
Lady Beerbohm, an elderly Pre-Raphaelite damozel in a flowing purple gown, shows me into their drawing-room. Their villa is smaller and uglier than mine but far more comfortable, encrusted with books and pictures and hefty turn-of-the-century furniture. Max is getting ready, Florence explains. Conversation with her doesn’t exactly flow; she’s nervous and confused and I have the impression she’s vetting me to see if it’s safe to leave me alone with her husband. Her refined American voice quivers and fades out in mid-sentence as we talk about the war.
Max is a long time getting ready, but the result is worth it. He’s dressed for an Edwardian garden party in his shade-of-primrose suit, a gardenia in his buttonhole and patent-leather pumps on his tiny feet. Above his white moustache his heavy-lidded blue eyes bulge, kind yet detached.
He’s a quarter of a century older than me. I realize at once that he’s an extraordinary man – well, not exactly a man, which is part of his enormous charm. But he does like women. When I’m with him I’m in the London of my youth, which he still personifies, for in spirit he has never lived in Italy and doesn’t even speak Italian. Florence drifts away, and I tell him how much I enjoyed his broadcasts during the war, particularly the one about music halls. I talk about my career, and for once I don’t pretend to have been more successful than I really was. We gossip about Marie Lloyd, Little Tich, Augustus John and many other acquaintances, most of them dead. Florence joins us for tea from a vast silver teapot and small, triangular egg-and-cress sandwiches. I leave immediately after tea, frightened of outstaying my welcome and disrupting the fragile museum of their routine.
Later meetings are warmer, although Max always preserves a certain formality. We can see each other from our terraces, but I still feel I must wait for a written summons to tea. When I invite him to bring Florence to lunch with me he winces at the effort of climbing up the hill. Max never walks if he can help it.
That spring we spend hours talking on his big roof terrace, with Etruscan oil jars full of gardenias and camellias he picks for his daily buttonhole and wonderful views of the sea and Portofino. He calls me Jenny Mere. ‘Why?’
‘She was the heroine of a little book of mine, The Happy Hypocrite. Awful twaddle, but you can borrow it if you like.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Good and beautiful, a most unlikely combination, with raven locks. Her lover was Lord George Hell, who somewhat resembled the sinister young pilot I saw you with at the Café Royal a few years ago.’ I’m surprised he thinks of me as having an existence outside our timeless, peaceful, beautiful hillside and even more surprised when he adds, ‘In order to deserve his Jenny, Lord George Hell had to wear a saintly mask and, eventually, he lives up to it. How beautifully you live up to yours.’
‘How do you know it’s a mask?’ I ask nervously.
‘We all need masks, my dear.’
‘What would happen if we didn’t wear one?’
‘Then we’d walk into one of the invisible traps in our own characters, as most of us do anyway.’
We’re sitting on his terrace, in his ship’s cabin of a study, when we have this conversation, one glorious afternoon in May when the flawless blue of the sky merges with the gentle sea and the olive and lemon groves glow sleepily. ‘It’s hard to believe Shelley drowned in that sea,’ I say.
‘I think he wanted to.’
‘He was so young. Such a waste of his genius.’
‘Perhaps he knew he’d done his best work. And geniuses are generally asinine.’
‘I prefer Keats.’
‘I quite agree. You must go to Rome and see his house.’
‘Will you come with me?’
‘I’m far too old for cities now, don’t you know. I can’t bear all the chatter and clatter and hustle and guzzle.’
‘But you must have friends in Rome?’
‘That’s just the trouble. Expatriate life. The unfrocked, the drummed-out and the struck-off-the-rolls.’
‘Is that how you see me?’
‘There is nothing vulgar or commonplace about you, Jenny Mere. Besides, you have the charm of widowhood – I mean bereavement, of course.’ He smiles down at the drawing he’s doing of me. He never actually says he doesn’t believe a word of my story, and he can’t possibly have guessed the truth. We recognize each other as fantasists and also share the bond of nostalgia for a London that doesn’t exist any more.
I’m falling a little in love with Max. I’m fascinated by his contradictions: he’s sceptical about democracy but was staunchly anti-Fascist before the war and thought Ezra was crazy to fall for Musso. Despite his title and fame Max and Florence are more hard up than I am, and he isn’t a snob. Distinguished visitors descend on him, but he never pursues them.
‘Come to Rome with me. Just for a few days. Please.’
He continues to stare down at his drawing while a crimson flush spreads from his white silk cravat to his forehead, making his moustache and hair look like snow. ‘Quite impossible. I’m too old.’
‘Too old for what, Max?’
‘Now
don’t be horrid. You know what I mean. Poor darling Florence has been ill again. I can’t possibly leave her. You must find yourself a virile young admirer.’
‘I’d rather have you.’
‘Now that’s quite enough.’ He hums. ‘How does it go again?’ And we sing ‘Oh Mr Porter’, Marie Lloyd’s great hit and the signature tune of our friendship. Our laughter disturbs Florence, who has another headache, and I tiptoe out.
Over the next two years I realize Florence is dying, and I do consider marrying Max. There’s no passion in him, but he’s so charming, intelligent, funny and civilized. I even consider telling him about Leo and my contract. I feel he’d be more amused than shocked.
I confide in Isabella, my new friend, who used to be Puccini’s mistress. A Jewess, she spent the war hidden in the labyrinthine Teatro di Marcello in Rome. ‘With the cats and the meths drinkers,’ she remembers acidly. ‘Lovers and husbands, where were they then?’
Isabella has been a beauty. Now she’s hugely fat and her once-Titian hair is a frizzy pink. She’s squeezed into a glamorous, black, sequinned evening dress, one of the few trophies she has salvaged from her past. Isabella rents a tiny room above a Pasta e Olio shop and regards my looks as valuable capital I’m squandering.
We’re sitting in my dining-room, which now has some furniture in it, overlooking the bay on a clear summer night. I’m staring at the corner of the Villino Chiaro, which has come to loom over the coast. That summer Max is always on my mind.
‘So, tell me about your old man. Is he rich?’
‘No.’
‘Is he a great artist?’
‘No.’
‘Good in bed?’
‘He’s not interested in sex.’
‘Ma … !’ Isabella stares at me incredulously. Assunta brings in a plate of cheese and prosciutto and olives and a bowl of peaches and sits down to join in the discussion.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 6