Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  Have almost finished with the McMordies when – sitting at the table on the terrace – a remarkable pain appears: it seems to strike at the spine and set it ringing; shock waves of pain peal through the body, from hip to throat. I cannot prevent a gasp from coming out, and Janina, taking the sun on the lawn, turns to me. She hurries over. ‘What can I do?’ she asks; there are tears in her eyes. ‘What’s happening?’ She seizes me by the shoulders. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘there is a great big fucking pain.’ Her eyes, terrified, are just three or four inches from mine. ‘Where?’ she cries. ‘What kind of pain? Tell me.’ With clawed hands I make gestures that encompass the entire torso. The waves soon subside; I tell her that there’s no point in trying to describe the sensation. I can’t describe it. A pain cannot be described. ‘What’s a cup of coffee taste like?’ I ask. She takes the remark as you’d take an utterance from a man who’s delirious, and curls her fingers over my wrist; an unprecedented intimacy, and an arresting sight – her long pale fingers look as if they are grasping something on the sea-bed. Her hand is cool, and an exquisite object; she’s leaning over me in such a way that I glimpse the skin – buttermilk-coloured, tight, unmarked – that covers her breastbone. In other circumstances I’d have had half a mind to get excited. ‘That helps,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not joking. That helps.’ I tell her she’s lovely; I actually say it – ‘You’re lovely.’ Behind her smile she is clenching her teeth, which are also perfect.

  Charlie has an email from Celia. She’s sent him some more figures, but the sums are completely mad, he says. At the table there’s a lot of talk about Celia. ‘She’s a very good teacher,’ says Charlie, four times at least. And because she’s such a good teacher it shouldn’t be much of a problem for her to find a good job, he opines. Janina agrees, naturally, and adds that Celia’s problem is that she’s still too emotional about things. ‘She needs to settle down,’ I concur. Janina takes this at face value and says I’m right: what Celia needs is to find a good man and settle down. ‘Easier said than done,’ says Ellen; supportive smile from Janina. ‘The basic problem,’ states Charlie, ‘is that she’s living in the wrong country.’ She’s too trusting and too naive, he says. She needs to be in a place where people say what they mean and mean what they say. Living in Italy, she’s always going to have people taking advantage of her, he says. He mentions Mauro. ‘Say no more,’ says Janina, raising her eyes to heaven. ‘We refer to him as the duplicitous prick,’ I tell Ellen. ‘Though, as Celia has pointed out, that’s a contradiction in terms.’ Janina and Charlie gather the plates. ‘That kid with the ponies, he’s got a lot to answer for,’ he mutters, departing. A questioning look from Ellen. ‘Tell you later,’ I whisper.

  Celia knows she is living in ‘the wrong country’, and that’s the point: she likes living in a place where she doesn’t quite belong. Of course, she doesn’t quite belong in England, but that’s not the same kind of misfitting: in England the distance between herself and her surroundings is a measure of disenchantment. And in Spain the perceived mismatch of world-view and temperament between Celia and the natives proved to be too great. The situation in Italy is not the same: there the fit is comfortably loose, or sometimes lightly chafing. The degree of separation, to put it another way, is enough to permit a pleasurable clarity of observation. Whereas in Spain she was watching the game from the sidelines, in Italy she’s playing it. Yet she is still the foreign player, and always will be.

  (In the early years of what has turned out to be her career, Celia’s appetite for being out of place was somewhat stronger than it is now. Indeed, she once entertained the idea of working in Japan, after a term of teaching a group of especially amiable Japanese students – none more amiable than the ingenuous, garrulous and ever-gleeful Kachiko. ‘Come to Tokyo. Every day you see something you not understand,’ said Kachiko, for whom nothing was better for the soul than a dose of strong bafflement, such as London provided for her on a daily basis. Making her case, Kachiko showed Celia pictures of a sign-choked Tokyo street and translated the scene for her. She brought to class the comics sent by her half-sister Yuko, and taught Celia the magical phrase of Creamy Mami: Pam-Pululu Pim-Pululu Pam Pim Pam. A recurrent subject of conversation was Kachiko’s father. Celia thought her own father had worked too hard at times, but he was Mr Sloth compared to Mr Inoue, who was at his desk by eight, rarely left it before ten, and slept four nights per week in a rented cubicle in the neighbourhood of the office. The hours of sedentary misery were alleviated by bouts of self-annihilation in backstreet drinking dens with his colleagues from Research and Development, sessions which might end with Mr Inoue and his team on their backs, shoe-to-shoe in a star formation – the Busby Berkeley salarymen. Kachiko proved beyond question that every day in Tokyo would be extremely weird for a Londoner. But there was, Celia decided, such a thing as too damned weird. What is one to make of a country in which a luxury car is branded the Cedric? What is one to make of a place where, after a janitor has been sacked for closing the school gates on the stroke of the hour and thereby crushing a child to death, scores of parents petition the school, protesting that the man has been punished unfairly for simply doing his job? Celia never went to Japan.)

  It makes Celia furious that around ninety percent of the women on Italian TV are fabulous specimens with great legs, superb chests and hair as glossy as a mink’s pelt, and that every prime-time programme, whether it be a games show or football analysis, seems to require the presence of an attractive young woman with no discernible function other than to be decorative. She shakes her head in disbelief at the shopping channels, with their delirious women screaming about the wonders of the latest buttock-firming apparatus, and bald blokes in shiny suits shouting ‘Buy my carpets! Buy my jewellery, for God’s sake!’ hour after hour after hour. She can’t resolve the contradictions of a country where spontaneous generosity is as likely to be encountered as petty deviousness; where a predilection for emetically sentimental ballads accompanies a disconcertingly hard-headed approach to interpersonal relationships (friends summarily discarded, to be barely acknowledged when they pass on the streets); where veneration for tradition competes with an infatuation with the latest technology, however low the standard of manufacture (the toilet in Elisabetta’s apartment wouldn’t look out of place on the Acropolis, but it doesn’t flush properly; her brother-in-law’s Ferrari is as fragile as a newborn giraffe); where sophistication and the maintenance of la bella figura are of primary importance, while the television programmes are the most infantile and demeaning in the world; where there’s a church on every corner yet religion often seems a form of social decoration, albeit a form of decoration that’s essential to life – ‘It’s like the wallpaper is holding the house up,’ Celia wrote from Rome. She’ll never make sense of Italy, but that’s the attraction, or a major part of it, which is something Charlie will never understand, she says. But he does understand it, to an extent. He can understand how one might find it interesting for a while, for the duration of a holiday; he just doesn’t understand how an English person – an English woman, especially – could live there.

  And now to the subject in hand: what can be recalled of the kid with the ponies, the lad with whom Celia’s infatuation with Italy supposedly began? Gianfranco was his name. He was fourteen years old, a year older than Celia, with a fetchingly piratical proto-moustache and goatee. Every afternoon he took tourists pony-trekking from the farm that his family ran, which was about half a mile from the house we’d rented for that summer’s holiday. We walked across a field of poppies to get to it, and our mother made us wait with her until Gianfranco and Celia and four or five other youngsters had ridden out of sight, up the flank of the valley. It was hard to watch them, the hills were so bright under the sun. Other than the poppies, everything was the colour of khaki that had been boiled for days. Charlie’s hair looked as if he’d just stepped out of a shower, and the ground crackled when we walked. Later in the week, Celia was allowed to go down to the farm on her own. We were
to reconvene at the house between five and six, but at six o’clock there was no sign of Celia. Eventually she appeared on the path above the house: her red T-shirt was visible from a long way off. The sight of the blanched field and the spot of red moving down it, with a spot of azure alongside, is still clear, as is the sight of the azure spot taking its own path, leaving Celia to walk alone (her hand blithely swatting the air around her face) into the glare of her mother, who was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, wristwatch prominently on display. Charlie, in the kitchen with his father when the miscreant was escorted to her room by our mother, heard a long argument through the bedroom door: there had been such confrontations before, but this one was the fiercest yet. ‘Leave her be,’ our mother ordered us, coming into the kitchen, then nothing more was said about Celia until Charlie was instructed to tell her that food would be served in five minutes. During the meal, she spoke to Charlie, very politely (‘Could you pass me the water, please?’), and to nobody else. Neither parent, in turn, spoke to her.

  The next day was a heavy-duty session of sightseeing in Pisa. Sulky Celia, three steps to the rear, was vehemently bored. A few days later, realising that non-compliance was a self-defeating policy, she forced herself (the effort was perceptible) into resuming her participation in the daily outings and was rewarded, after protracted discussions between the parents, with permission to go riding again, albeit with Charlie as chaperon – an unnecessary precaution, in the event, because Gianfranco that day was in charge not just of two Brennans but also of an extended Dutch family who seemed barely to know which end of the horse should be pointing forwards, so he was too busy to give much attention to Celia. Weeks later a postcard arrived from Italy. Charlie, passing her room, seeing her holding the card, asked her if she was OK; she, in tears, told him to piss off – for which she apologised, after a delay of approximately a week.

  If asked about Gianfranco, Celia will say that she can picture only a blue football shirt, heroic dark hair, the demi-beard, and eyelashes like a pony – that’s all that remains of him. The afternoon she had come down the hill looking dishevelled, there had been one little kiss, a light but lovely collision of the lips, that’s all. Gianfranco had talked to her about horses and his family, but they didn’t talk much because they couldn’t understand each other very well; most of the time they had just lain in the hot dry grass, bare arm close to bare arm, taking the sun. This proximity and languor had been delight enough for her, though part of the delight had been her anticipation of a day to come, a day that never came, when things would change between them.

  Celia’s afternoon with Gianfranco was something to be held apart from the family. Even if Charlie hadn’t been Charlie she wouldn’t have talked to her older brother about him; and Charlie being Charlie it would have been inevitable – even if he’d sworn not to – that at some point he would not have been able to resist making fun of her, because Charlie was incapable of understanding what she was feeling. Chronologically he was four years ahead of her; in terms of emotional development, however, gauche and chubby Charlie was lagging far behind. He wouldn’t have known what to do with a girl if she’d handed one to him in a paper bag. One afternoon during that holiday they were strolling through Lucca when a resplendent young woman – thick black hair; Sophia Loren mouth; rear end of outrageous curvatures – went past them on a bike, and Celia jabbed Charlie in the ribs, whispering: ‘Look at that one.’ And Charlie’s reaction? ‘Very nice,’ as if passing comment on the bike.

  By contrast, Charlie was nearly wetting himself with excitement, as Celia tells it, when we arrived at the marble quarries. ‘It was like a kid discovering that Santa’s grotto is real after all,’ says Celia, imitating her brother’s wonderment at the sheer cliffs of snowy stone. For Celia it was a cruelly boring jaunt, but she attended uncomplainingly, as her penance for the imagined misdemeanour with Gianfranco. Similarly she submitted in silence to the tedious and revolting spectacle of the Chapel of the Princes in Florence. A room made of solidified vomit, Celia called it, but Charlie was in ecstasy, dumbfounded by that ice-slick floor of multicoloured rock. Putting a finger to the inlays of golden and steel-blue and straw-yellow stone, he named them: Breccia Lavante and Breccia Pernice; Rosso Pistello and Rosso Atlantide; Rosso Orbico; Rosso Lavante. The names were pleasing to pronounce, and Charlie took great pleasure in uttering them, despite corrections of his thick-tongued diction from Celia. As Celia saw it, his enjoyment of the hideous chapel confirmed that Charlie had the mind of a trainspotter. So obsessed was he with the naming of things that he couldn’t see how ghastly they were. But Celia was wrong: the material itself, not its label, was what fascinated Charlie. ‘This,’ he said, patting a grey column in the nave of a church, ‘is pietra serena,’ and he stood back to marvel at it as if it were a beautiful tree that had risen through the pavement. Somewhere else – a chilly, pale and high-ceilinged room in which only he and I lingered – we crouched to take a closer look at a tiny figure of a golden saint, set on a seat of lapis lazuli. The saint swooned between miniature columns of glassy purple stone; behind him rose stone steps the colour of mixed butter and blood. ‘Disgusting isn’t it?’ Charlie commented. And then: ‘But amazing, no?’

  A digression beckons. In many ways, as has been noted, Charlie is very much the son of his father. And for both of them the experience of Italy was something that addressed the essence of who they felt themselves to be. A crucial distinction is to be made, however. Whereas Charlie at the Carrara quarries can be seen as a young man gazing happily down the long straight road of his future life, for his father the discovery of Italy had brought about the discovery of something within himself, and the awakening of an ambition that could never be fulfilled.

  When the senior Charles Brennan’s national service was completed, it was understood by his father that he would shortly begin working for the family firm, a service to which it was expected (as one expects the sun to rise tomorrow) that he would devote the entirety of his active years. (As with the younger Charles, there was no demurral – not the faintest inclination to demur, as yet.) Assured of his son’s lifelong commitment, and confident of his son’s ability, Stanley Brennan granted Charles special dispensation to take a brief break between the army and the office, and an allowance to pay for a modest trip abroad – though this was more of a loan than an allowance, as it was offered on the understanding that Charles, on his return, would for a period be working for a minimal salary.

  I first heard of my father’s trip to Italy when I was nine or ten years old. Looking through an album of photographs with my mother, for some reason I now asked for the name of a man I’d seen many times before (at the end of the back row of a company of young men in baggy suits; my father was next to the face in question) but had previously regarded as belonging to the shadowy pre-history of our parents, a mysterious time-place to which we children were admitted only by invitation, and in which we rarely had much interest anyway. The face was that of Bill Cowdrey, my father’s closest friend during his national service. They were not congruent characters. Bill was garrulous, quick-tempered, quick-witted, and did things with a somewhat showy panache (reversing his truck at speed, one-handed, with barely a glance at the mirrors; playing the tenor sax as blithely as whistling), and yet taciturn Charles soon came to like the cut of Bill’s jib. He amused him more than anyone he had met before. (It’s a possibility – once raised by my mother – that a residual affection for Bill Cowdrey was a factor in his leniency towards Celia’s transgressions.) And, after a slightly longer delay, Bill in turn came to appreciate the unflamboyant qualities of Charles. A consummate skiver, Bill was adept at minimising the discomforts and inconveniences of barracks life, but his sloppiness often landed him in trouble – and would have done so many more times had it not been for Charles Brennan’s skill with the blanco and polish, and his overdeveloped sense of comradeship.

  Whereas Charles asserted the moral value of hard work, Bill lacked all aptitude for toil; he had simply been born
without it, he said, as some people are born without a limb; if something didn’t come easily to Bill, it was never going to come to him. There was an appropriateness, then, to the circumstances in which Charles and Bill set off on their foreign escapade: the former financed by an advance against future labour, the latter funded by two pieces of extraordinary good fortune. The first of these was that a cantankerous old woman known to Bill’s father as Aunt Dolly (she was only a neighbour), who had survived a direct hit on her house during the Blitz (she was found in the back garden, beneath an upturned bath-tub), had died a month after Bill’s call-up, having tripped over one of her cats and plummeted down the stairs; in her will Dolly left most of her estate (which was of a decent quantity: her husband, an actuary, who had predeceased her by more than thirty years, had made some astute investments shortly before his sudden stroke, and Dolly had barely touched the money) to the members of the fire crew who had rescued her from underneath the bath-tub, and much of the remnant to Bill’s father, for no better reason – as far as he could see – than that, as a boy, for a year or two after the premature death of Dolly’s husband, he had done her shopping for her on a regular basis. The second piece of luck: a few months before Bill’s demob, his mother was informed that a remote relative – so remote that she hadn’t the faintest recollection of ever having met the woman – had passed away and bequeathed to her a box of old coins by which, apparently, Bill’s mother had been entranced as a child. This box contained a rarity in very good condition, which fetched a large sum at auction a matter of days before Bill came home. A portion of these twin c was diverted into Bill’s pocket, in order that he might see a bit of the world before turning his mind to the question of gainful employment. (His father, an engineer turned senior manager at Rolls-Royce, saw that it would be folly to hurry his son; he esteemed precision in all things, said Bill, and it was his conviction that the blueprint must be finalised before you begin making a life for yourself.)