‘Signora Isabella, please, tell my signora not to throw herself away.’
‘Assunta’s right. What use is a title without any money?’
‘I’m not interested in his title or in marriage. I just adore talking to him.’
They shrug at each other and talk to me as if I was a retarded child. ‘In England men and women don’t go to bed together?’ Assunta asked.
‘Of course they do.’
‘You prefer it with women? Or dogs? I know you English are crazy about dogs,’ Isabella says understandingly.
‘No! It’s just him, this man. I really like him as a person, as a friend.’
‘Fine. Drink tea with him. But don’t waste too much time on him. I must say, you look fabulous. You’ve probably got about ten years before you go off. How old did you say you were?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Signora Jenny doesn’t look her age,’ Assunta says discreetly.
‘How many husbands, so far?’
‘Just Virginia’s father. He died in the First World War.’
‘Well, take my advice and marry the next man who comes along. Make sure you get his property – make sure he has some. It doesn’t matter if he’s old but, please, not some impoverished old fart. You’re beautiful! Make the most of it! Now there’s that tenor from Naples, Giuseppe, he fancied you. No money, though. And that violinist, but he’s broke, too. Come to Firenze with me next week and I’ll introduce you to my caro Guido, who has a leather factory. His wife has just conveniently died. When I think of the offers I turned down – but you don’t want to end up like me.’
‘Women need husbands,’ says the newly married Assunta as she hands me the peach she has peeled.
Poor languid Florence is dying. Max invites me to tea, lends me books, draws me and laughs at my jokes. Every time I see him he looks older, smaller, more transparent and frail. Voraciously, I read my way through his library, and we have friendly arguments.
‘I think Eliot’s much better than Ezra. I can understand his poetry.’
‘Can you really? More than I can. They’re both so obscure and – woozie-poozie.’
‘I like Eliot and Auden best, of the modern poets you’ve lent me.’
‘Tell me what it is you like about them.’
‘Some lines in Eliot are so beautiful. It makes my spine tingle when he says that we all go into the dark.’ (Except me, I thought.) ‘When he speaks of time past and time future I feel he’s bending over me, looking into my life, telling me it doesn’t have to hurt so much. Auden’s more human, warmer, his poems chatter to you, gossip with you. He understands all the twists and turns and cruelties and contradictions of love. I never get bored with his poems. I can read them again and again. Some of his poems are like songs, but the words of songs need music; his just fill all the emptiness inside me.’
‘Really? I’d give half a ton of Eliot and Auden for an ounce of Wilde’s wit and brevity.’
‘I don’t know what you see in Wilde. He’s so precious and affected.’
‘Ah well, I belong to that generation, don’t you know. A period piece. But you’re young, you belong to the future of TV and science and machinery and other things darling to the devil.’
‘I often think I belong to more than one generation.’
‘Mysterious Jenny.’
I’m still not sure how I feel about Max when Florence finally dies, at the beginning of 1951.
Assunta and I go to the Villino Chiaro to offer our sympathy. I run upstairs to his study and hug him, the only time I do. He feels small and frail in my arms. ‘I’m so sorry, Max. Can I do anything?’
‘I want to be looked after!’ he says petulantly, sounding so childlike that I have to repress a smile – and ask myself if I really do want to look after him.
Before there is time for a dilemma Florence is replaced. It turns out that while Florence was on her deathbed Max sent his friend Elizabeth Jungmann a telegram. She arrives, intelligent, efficient and attractive, a hero-worshipper in search of her next hero. As soon as I see her I know I haven’t a hope. She looks after Max selflessly until he dies five years later, and I’m still allowed to come to tea.
In the late fifties Isabella dies, too, of cancer, and I begin to feel lonely. I walk for miles, up in the hills and along the coast. Assunta calls me anima vagabonda, wandering soul. Rapallo is changing. Tracks have become roads and the main road has become an autostrada. There is ribbon development between Genoa and the French border. Only Portofino has preserved its pristine dignity as a very expensive fishing village, and I can’t afford to move there now.
George, who is my solicitor, writes to tell me that my money is running out and I may have to sell my villa as a hotel to feed the insatiable maw of the tourism that has destroyed the view I once loved. Assunta cuts corners and I live as cheaply as I can, but my life becomes sad, my isolation seedy rather than glorious. I’m almost the last of the expatriates left over from the twenties, and it’s not a role I enjoy any more.
There are plenty of lovers, but they’re too young to talk to properly. When I strip off my clothes my youthfulness is more of a curiosity than an asset, even in the dark. I start to miss you desperately, Leo. Memories of London during the war mellow and from the distance you look more exciting than dangerous. I demolish the worst of my memories of you, swing great weights of optimism against them like the cranes that destroy the huts and barns that once surrounded the Villa Ginestra. I remember the fun we had together in the early years of the war, our dancing and love-making. After all, you have kept your half of the bargain we made. I tell myself I’ve exaggerated your wickedness. Everyone kills during a war, and most men get medals for it. I tell myself it will be different next time, because I’ve become stronger and more intelligent and won’t let you push me around.
I sell my shabby villa, pay off my debts and spend most of the remaining money on Eugenie Bishop’s funeral. In September 1967 I watch my coffin as it is lowered into my grave. I’m dressed as my own granddaughter in a short black skirt and jacket. I do shed a few tears, thinking of Max and Isabella. What a waste of all the marvellous unique ingredients that go into a personality, to throw it away after a few decades like so much rubbish. I don’t enjoy my second funeral as much as my first. I’ve spent too much time in this cemetery recently, among the feathery cypress trees and well-manicured paths. No, death doesn’t interest me. If I stay in Rapallo I’ll run out of photographs to put on my own graves. I overhear the remarks neighbours and strangers make.
‘Quite a beauty when she was young.’
‘What was she? An actress or something?’
‘Strange woman. Lived all alone. Had an alcoholic daughter who did herself in years ago.’
Next time I won’t waste my life. I’ll reinvent myself as something remarkable, someone worth remembering. I’m eager for London and you.
Two weeks later I return by aeroplane, just to see what it’s like to fly. When Assunta and I go to Genoa airport to check in I have to pay so much in excess baggage for my trunk that I wish I’d got the train after all.
‘Goodbye, signora.’
Suddenly I remember all she has done for me. ‘Assunta, you’ve been wonderful.’
‘I was only following orders.’
‘Whose?’
‘From up there.’
‘I didn’t know you were religious.’
She smiles at me and we embrace. ‘I wish you could come to London with me. But I’ve no money to pay you.’
‘We’ll meet again, signora. Sooner than you think.’
I think she means life after death and don’t tell her I’ve no intention of finding out if there is one.
London
I’m on my way to you, Leo. I know you’re in London; I had a dream about you last night. You were walking across a park towards me, wearing a white suit and your most arrogant, mocking expression. Your dark-blue eyes expanded to the path, grass, even the sky until London was just a thought reflected in the
m and your shadow swelled to hide the sun. You’re a monster like me, Leo. I know you’re a trickster – yet how strange it is that the crazy bargain I struck with you wasn’t a trick after all. Here I am forty-five years later, still young and luscious. It’s 12 October. Tonight is the anniversary of that night at Giulini’s when I signed our contract in blood.
Good old George is going to meet me at the airport. Because I wrote and asked him to and because he’s what we used to call a brick. I need his sanity, and perhaps he needs me, too, because even a brick needs poetry. If you can’t rise above facts and time you have to serve them, and I’ll never do that. I’m coming to shatter George’s reality. What an entrance this is, flying above the clouds of his dullness, crashing through the barrier of his disbelief.
I’ve never been on an aeroplane before. It should feel mysterious to be flying above the clouds, but it’s all rather shoddy: the plastic interior, the inelegant hostesses, the tired snacks. If I’d known I would have caught the train from Nice instead of splurging my last money on an air ticket and paying the outrageous cost of my overweight trunk, made for transatlantic liners rather than flimsy sky bubbles. We all sit here like schoolchildren, passive in our rows, trusting a technology we don’t understand. What if we crash? Will I rise from the flames like a phoenix? I should have asked you about all this, Leo, while I had the chance.
I’m George’s dea in machina, and I’m tired of being behind the scenes. He’ll be old, he always was, even when he was a student and wanted me so much he shivered like a sick dog whenever I was near. I want to tell him my story, watch his face as he listens, his pink, round, hopelessly honest face as he tries to believe the impossible and rationalize the preposterous. He was the only one who cared enough to notice the change in me after that night when you and I struck our bargain. George said I looked thin and sad and lonely, and I laughed, thinking I was the most enviable woman in the world. Well, perhaps I am.
We’re cradled in snowy, glowing clouds, a cross between Siberia and heaven. Now we’re plunging down, and I can see my city spread out, a game on a board for me to win. Towers and high buildings everywhere, the bomb sites and smouldering ruins have been rebuilt and London’s face, like my own, has conquered the years. The smugness of a long peace is almost tangible on this aeroplane, smooth as an airborne department store.
I sit here reinventing myself, take my life in my hands and knead it until I become Jenny, my own granddaughter. I look the part, in my short emerald-green dress, platform shoes and my old black coat. Couldn’t afford a new one. I stared at fashion magazines so as to be able to imitate this new androgynous look, long hair and no curves. My thick, wavy black hair hangs loose down my back, and I’ve worked on my voice, too, which has already travelled so far, from cockney to the affected cadences of the years I called myself Eugenie. Now my vowels are flat again; I hear cockney’s all the rage.
As the plane dives my heart lurches with excitement and also fear that George won’t meet me after all. He’ll be ill or gaga or indifferent to me.
The shock in his eyes confirms that I really haven’t changed. He’s surprised when I look straight at him, picking out his face at once among the others waiting. I recognize him by his eyes, blue and vague and devoted. ‘Mr Dumphry? It’s so nice of you to meet me. All Grandma’s other friends seem to be dead.’
He’s too shocked by my resemblance to myself to kiss or hug me. He says I make him feel old, and I smile because my eyes don’t miss a wrinkle or a bulge or a broken vein. He’s fat and jowly, and his few remaining hairs are white. Whenever I look into the reflection of my true age I feel a mixture of triumph and horror. As Swift said, ‘Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.’ And no woman either.
We glide across London in his Daimler, a proper car, built like a tank and with leather seats. As the city slides past my window I have the curious feeling it’s on rollers, like the windmills and tulips when I sat in my horse and cart to sing my Little Dutch Girl number in a blonde wig – the only little Dutch girl in the business with huge dark eyes and a hook nose.
We stop at George’s house. He’s a Hampstead paterfamilias, and here comes his matronly Molly. The last time I saw that face was in a photograph George showed me during the war, when it was a fresh, round glow of innocence and sweetness. Twenty-eight years later, wrinkles entrenched with powder are forked paths leading to her eyes and mouth. Double chins wobble and broken veins dance like red apostrophes. She shouldn’t be wearing that pink floral pattern, thorns and roses stretched to breaking point across her arse. Her face is florid, too, and her ginger hair wants to go grey but isn’t allowed.
If that’s bitchy it’s nothing compared with the hatred radiating from Molly as she stares at me. She obviously doesn’t want me around. George must have presented me as a combination of Little Orphan Annie and Cinderella, all alone in the world and penniless. I try to look wide-eyed, but I see the jealous anger behind her smiles as she welcomes me.
This is the kind of room that would have intimidated me long ago, all velvet, damask and boule, red and gold, very grand in an old-fashioned way. Nobody seems to have told Molly and George that rooms are supposed to look bare and Scandinavian now. We’re enacting a drawing-room comedy, like the ones George used to back in his days as a theatrical angel. Molly wheels in a trolley loaded with plates of cucumber sandwiches and cakes. Between her and George there’s the infuriating contentment of decades, the pathetic illusion of security, which smells of polish, dried flowers and baking. Who has the key to reality, Molly? You with your civilized glaze or me with my raging knowledge that nothing’s safe?
Molly plies me with food and eager questions about my death. ‘Poor old thing! Could she walk, the last few months?’
‘She was about the same age as me. Not much older than you, in fact,’ George says mildly.
‘I bet she lied about her age,’ Molly retorts savagely. Then, resuming her compassionate voice, ‘All that Italian sun must have aged her. And being such a recluse. I suppose she became rather eccentric, in a Garboesque sort of way. I know she refused to see that Sunday Times journalist.’
‘My grandmother wasn’t senile. And she swam in the sea every day until her last illness.’
‘Did she really? How marvellous. And you, poor lamb, going from one ancient household to another. We’ll have to introduce you to our grandchildren. They’re about your age. You don’t have to help,’ she adds pointedly as she wheels out the tea trolley.
I wouldn’t know how. I stand outside the kitchen door, watching preparations for another enormous meal, listening. George has followed her into the kitchen, her territory, where he stacks the dishwasher while she bangs and mutters and stuffs a chicken. ‘Used to servants, I suppose. Well, that’s all over. She’ll have to pull herself together and make herself useful. Earn her living like everyone else.’
After dinner we go into the drawing-room for coffee and brandy. George and I are on one of the green velvet sofas and Molly is on the other. We face each other across the marble-topped coffee-table piled with recipe books and actors’ autobiographies. The sofas are just far enough apart to allow for a private conversation. I lean towards George, looking into his face. A standard lamp illuminates him so that I can see the grey bags under his eyes, the clumps of white hair in his nostrils and ears and the veins on his nose. George peers back at me, feels himself being sucked into pools of nostalgia by treacherous currents he resists. He’s a canny lawyer. There’s no place for demons and witches in his world. ‘I suppose you’ll think me a terrible old bore if I talk to you about your grandmother?’
‘No.’
‘Were you close to her?’
‘Very.’
‘I can’t get over the resemblance.’
‘I know.’
‘Did she ever mention a man called Leo?’
‘I don’t remember. There were so many men. Who was he?’
‘I used to call him her Svengali. He discovered her when she was very you
ng, made her career really. Sinister chap, though, I always thought.’
‘Was she any good?’
‘Not really.’ I catch my breath sharply, and he thinks I’m smothering a yawn. In Italy I used to tell myself I left the stage while I was still at the top. As much as the image of my own youth preserved, I’ve needed that conviction that I had a talent to give up. George is the kindest man I’ve ever met, which makes his dismissal of my career all the more cruel. ‘But you shouldn’t be sitting here talking to an old man like me about ancient history.’
Later, Molly goes to bed. ‘You must meet our grandson. David,’ George says.
‘Does he look like you when you were young?’
‘Very much. Although it seems to me I was even more naïve. Those were more innocent times, of course.’
‘Really?’ The ghost of that triangle hovers on the air between us.
George puts on his most sanctimonious expression. ‘Well, no, perhaps you’re right. Although I think we really were rather innocent, compared with young people nowadays. You must be careful in London, my dear.’ He laughs nervously.
‘You were going to tell me about Leo.’
‘Was I? I wonder what happened to him. He disappeared about the same time as your grandmother went off to live on the Riviera, in the early twenties. Pity, because if he’d stuck around he would have looked after her. There was some scandal. I think the police were after him – can’t remember the details now.’
‘Did this Leo love her then?’
‘Love’s not a word you could associate with him. They were certainly close. She was obsessed with him.’ Is that catch in his voice the ghost of jealousy? ‘Leo had an absolute genius for money. One of your grandmother’s admirers, Lord Somebody or other, died in the Great War and left her a couple of thousand. Jenny would have frittered it away on clothes and jewellery, but Leo took it, invested it for her and by the early twenties she had enough to retire.’
‘Was Leo my grandfather?’
Loving Mephistopeles Page 7