Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  Something jolted through Maria’s body, as if she had a ­skipping rope or a whip inside and it was being flicked. She thought she heard it crack. Her spine arched.

  ‘No,’ she said, looking at her dad.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘we should have told you before.’

  ‘No,’ Maria said.

  She was sitting on the edge of the swivel chair, the rim pressing into the back of her thighs, and she felt as if she were falling backwards, her back arching further, her legs flailing, an involuntary reverse dive from a high board.

  They told her things; they held hands while they did it.

  He loved her as much as Pat and Nel, he said, he always had, since he’d first set eyes on her when she was three years old. He had meant to tell her, they had meant to, always meant to, but it was never the right time, they loved her so much, she was their precious, pretty, talented girl.

  ‘No,’ Maria said, tumbling backwards and down, plummeting in free-fall.

  The phone rang out in the hall, and they let it ring. Pat answered it eventually and shouted that it was Brian.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ her mum said. ‘I can tell him you’re not well or something and that you’ll phone him later.’

  ‘No,’ Maria said. She went into the hall.

  ‘You didn’t phone me back,’ Brian said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to see Planet of the Apes?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Something else then?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She replaced the receiver.

  Her parents were waiting for her to return. She went up to her bedroom, shut the door and pressed herself flat against it, the painted wood under her palms, her face buried in the folds of her dressing gown that hung from a hook. She was falling backwards and she was knocking forwards. The thud of her knocking head was muffled by the dressing gown. She wanted to be let out. Or to be let in. Out or in, anywhere but there. Where? There, inside her skin. Let me out.

  The telephone rang again. There was a pain in her throat, an acid burning, and her stomach cramped. She clambered onto the bed, dragged the bedroom window open, stuck her head out and vomited onto the front path. She watched and heard it splatter. She couldn’t sit down. She couldn’t stand. She banged her head against the door again. There was nowhere to go.

  They came and they tapped. One at a time. But she didn’t speak to them and they went away again. A note was pushed under her door. She trod on it, grinding it into the carpet. Her non-biological father called up that they were taking the kids over to Gran’s house and would be back in ten minutes.

  ‘Yuck,’ she heard Pat say, ‘someone’s been sick on the path.’

  As soon as they’d gone, she pulled on her boots and jacket, rinsed out her mouth quickly under the cold tap and shot out of the house. She let herself into the next-door neighbours’ with the key they’d left her. It was quiet and still in there.

  She looked at the picture on the neighbours’ wall, a winter tree against a swirling setting sun, gloopy lumps of oil paint, laid on thick, black and orange and red. A horrible, ugly, desolate scene. She touched the ornaments on the mantelpiece as if they might be fake, a porcelain shepherdess with her gold-tipped crook. Her coy partner kneeling, posy in hand.

  She turned and ran from the house. She ran along the path beside the lake, up to the end and into the little wood there. It was getting dark. No one walked there in the dark. She plunged off the main path into the undergrowth, crashing about between the trees, scratching her arms and legs on small branches, trampling white flowers under her feet so they sent out a strong, pungent smell. Jumping and stamping on the blooms, skidding on the mud beside the stream.

  She heard a voice. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ it said.

  And she ran away, along the lake, then up into the unlit back lanes, panting as if a wild beast were at her tail. She slipped back into the neighbours’ house seconds before her parents’ car pulled up.

  They shouted so loudly for her that she could hear them through the walls.

  THREE

  Chiara reverently unwrapped her new purchase at the kitchen table. The man at the market had swathed the red glass bowl in layer upon layer of newspaper, assuring her that she had acquired a bargain. It was a piece of murano sommerso, an inner layer of crimson submerged in an outer clear layer. The crack in the base didn’t detract from the beauty, only from the price, the man said.

  She knew it was a sales pitch, but he needn’t have bothered because she was going to buy it anyway. It seemed to her the colour of solace. The cat came slinking in, leapt onto the table, sniffed the bowl and purred.

  ‘You’ve got your own bowl, Asmaro,’ Chiara said, lifting him down. ‘This one is just for me.’

  The doorbell buzzed.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Simone said through the intercom. They were going to the cinema.

  ‘Come up a minute,’ Chiara said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  Down below in the street, Simone sighed. ‘We’ll be late,’ she said.

  It wasn’t true. They had plenty of time, but Simone wouldn’t lightly undertake the stairs to Chiara’s apartment. There had to be the promise of a dinner at least.

  ‘I’ll bring it down,’ Chiara said.

  She snatched up a piece of the newspaper to protect the bowl and was half out the door, keys in one hand and glass bowl in the other, when the telephone rang. She ought to get it because it might be the translation agency with another job. Or the publisher about collecting the page proofs of the book she had just finished working on. She dithered an instant, and the ringing stopped after only three trills. It couldn’t have been important. She went on down.

  Simone was peering into the window of the antique shop on the other side of the narrow street. The proprietor knelt there, arranging a standard lamp at an angle to a wing-backed armchair beside a shelf crammed with pieces of glass, costume jewellery, mosaic-covered ceramics. Clad in a green satin summer coat with a mandarin collar, her dyed chestnut hair held in place with a jewelled clasp, gem-encrusted ballet pumps on her feet, Simone would not have looked out of place in the window display. She was, as always, her own extravagant work of art. Just to see her there, in all her radiant and age-defying glamour, gave Chiara a warm feeling. To be bound up with this full-bodied, generous-spirited woman, this lover of abundance and outcasts, this relentless seeker of the bright side, was good for Chiara’s soul. As it had been good for her father’s too, back in the day. She wanted to hug her.

  She stepped across, tapped Simone on the shoulder so she swung round, and clasped her in a one-armed embrace, the bowl held out at an angle, standing on tiptoe and burying her face in Simone’s shoulder. Simone’s perfume evoked roses and vanilla. Chiara was embraced in return, her hair ruffled and patted as if she were a small dog or a child.

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ Simone said. ‘You’re in a jolly mood. What’s that about?’

  Chiara handed over the bowl and, as she made her points, counted them off the fingers of her left hand with her right.

  ‘One. The proofs of the book I translated have arrived and I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out. Two. I’m down to five cigarettes a day. And three, this exquisite new bowl.’

  Simone looked at the piece of glass.

  ‘Actually, it’s since I sent that letter,’ Chiara said. ‘I feel more spacious. As if I have discovered a chamber in my apartment I didn’t know was there.’ She drew a big square with the newspaper, as if creating the extra room in the air.

  ‘What letter?’ Simone said, without looking up. She turned the bowl over. ‘It’s got a crack on the bottom,’ she said.

  ‘I know it has,’ Chiara said. ‘The letter to the woman in England.’ She tutted at herself. ‘I mean Wales,’ she said.

  Simone raised her gaze. Her eyes swivelled from side t
o side as if she were reading an invisible noticeboard. ‘No,’ she said eventually, ‘what woman?’

  Chiara realised with a jolt that she hadn’t told Simone yet. She had intended to, but not about the turmoil into which the letter from the woman in Cardiff had thrown her. Nor that it had awakened her ghosts from their slumber, the pair of them, Cecilia and Daniele, dropping with silent screeches from the hidden alcoves in the rooftops of her mind. Not that, no. But what she had done about it. How she had used it as an opportunity. Her measured response. She didn’t need to tell Simone, in fact. This was about her, not Simone.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It was to do with a piece of work. I thought I’d told you.’

  She had sat at the kitchen table and fed a piece of airmail paper into her Olivetti typewriter. With an eye for grammatical accuracy, she had assembled words that were individually neutral into phrases that expressed her ignorance of Daniele’s fate. When she had read it through, the tone had seemed too formal. It didn’t acknowledge any of the sorrow or anguish that might accompany this uncertainty about a man and his life. She had added a handwritten note at the bottom, which included the word ‘sorry’. She had resisted scrawling it a hundred times. Once was enough, if it was sincerely meant. She had refrained from even hinting at her own connection with Daniele.

  There were only three overt reminders of Daniele still around the flat, and none that would be apparent to anyone else.

  His leather jacket hung underneath a slew of other outdoor garments on the coat rail in the entrance hall next to the hatstand. It was like the jacket Marlon Brando wore in The Wild Ones.

  The trivet he had made in metalwork stood on the work surface in the kitchen. She used it every day for the hot coffee pot.

  The photograph of him was concealed behind one of her grandparents and stood on her bedside table. The design of the frame, an old-fashioned gilt thing from the flea market, allowed the pictures to slide in and out from the side and did not require the removal of the backing. She had only to turn the frame on its side and tap, and the hidden picture of Daniele would pop out. She liked to think of Daniele tucked in with Nonna.

  She had gathered them up, these three things, wrapped them in brown paper and deposited the parcel out of the way in the junk room.

  Chiara had taken the letter from the unknown woman in Wales, about whom she had deliberately and effortfully refrained from speculating, as an invitation to bid Daniele goodbye. The posting of those words, the physical letting go of them and their consignment to the wider world, had allowed her to feel that a knot that had been lodged behind her breastbone was starting to unravel. Daniele was gone. She had not seen him for a decade. She might never know what had become of him, but it was over. She had purposely shut a door that had remained propped open for too long.

  ‘How much did you pay for this?’ Simone said.

  ‘Five thousand lira.’

  ‘Shall we ask him what he makes of your find?’ Simone said, with a nod at the antique-shop man.

  ‘No,’ Chiara said. ‘Let’s not.’ She reached out to take back the bowl.

  ‘Hang on,’ Simone said. ‘Let me have a proper look.’

  While Simone examined the piece, turning it round in her hands and holding it up so it caught the light, Chiara read the crumpled newspaper page in which she had wrapped it. The right-wing bomber who had accidentally blown himself up on the Turin train was out of danger and had been transferred from hospital to prison.

  ‘Whoever is with us awaits the moment to leap from the trench and into the fray, to strike, strike, strike,’ was the slogan of his organisation, New Order. It might sound stupid, but it didn’t stop them being dangerous.

  She couldn’t keep track of all the neo-fascist groups. It made her feel scared and hopeless about what was going on in society, but it didn’t dampen this inner feeling of space and possibility. She might take up tango, she thought, tucking the paper under her arm and arching one shoulder in what she felt might be a tango pose.

  ‘Do you know what this reminds me of?’ Simone said. ‘It’s the red lamp they keep lit in church to show God is present or the Eucharist is blessed or whatever it is.’

  Chiara looked again at her new acquisition. Simone was holding it balanced on the palms of both hands, like a votive offering.

  ‘Your mother’s daughter, despite everything,’ Simone said. ‘Catholic to the core.’

  ‘I am not,’ Chiara said, offended. ‘Actually, it’s more like the light in a brothel. It’s you who’s seeing the sacred in the profane. Not me.’

  Simone smiled. ‘It’s very lovely,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait for you down here. No rush. I’m going to have a nose in the shop here. We’re meeting Silvia and Nando in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Oh, are we?’ Chiara said.

  She had forgotten they were coming too. She carried the bowl back upstairs. She went slowly so as not to drop it and held the rail with the other hand because the stairs were steep and the stairwell dark. Her new-found spaciousness made her want to take deeper breaths, to fill her chest cavity with fresh air, which was how she had discovered that her lung capacity was reduced.

  ‘Compromised,’ old Doctor Bruni had said and then cackled raspingly as if he had made a great joke. He had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth at the time. He didn’t seem to think her condition was anything to worry about but, still, she was trying to cut down on the fags. A wheeze that pooled at the bottom of her lungs wouldn’t shift, and she wanted to be able to trot up the stairs again.

  She placed the bowl on the shelf in the entrance hall. Now that it had been pointed out, she saw it was indeed the same colour as a sanctuary light. Religious red. But that wasn’t why she liked it so much. It was reminiscent of something else. She groped about for what, and then it came to her. It was the lamp that used to hang in her bedroom when she was little. In their bedroom, hers and Cecilia’s, in the San Lorenzo apartment.

  The phone rang again. Even though Simone was waiting down in the street, Chiara decided to answer it this time. She was thinking about the red lamp in a sconce on the wall, and the way their mother would light the candle in it with a taper before they said their prayers. When she was very young she used to think it was a magic wand, that taper.

  Distracted, she couldn’t understand what the person on the other end was saying. A female voice, speaking in a whisper. ‘Pardon?’ she said.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ the woman said, in English. She had a young voice, very soft.

  ‘Yes,’ Chiara said, thinking it must be an offer of some work.

  She didn’t normally take on interpreting jobs because her spoken English wasn’t nearly as fluent as her written, but she had just finished a book translation and there wasn’t anything else on the horizon. At the other end she could hear the person breathing.

  ‘I do indeed speak English,’ Chiara added to encourage her and to demonstrate that she was up to whatever task. The doorbell buzzed.

  ‘Are you Signora Chiara Ravello?’ the woman said. She pronounced Chiara as if the ‘ch’ were soft, like ‘church’ in English.

  ‘Chiara Ravello, yes,’ she said with the correct pronunciation.

  ‘I’m calling to ask… ’ The quiet voice was almost obliterated by the sound of the doorbell again. Simone must be holding her finger on the buzzer.

  ‘Wait one moment, please,’ Chiara said. ‘One little moment. I will return.’ She put the receiver on the hall table and hurried to the salon window. ‘Telephone call,’ she shouted down.

  Simone tipped her head back to look up and mercifully released her finger. She cupped her hand to her ear.

  ‘I’m on the telephone,’ Chiara shouted again, holding an imaginary phone to her face.

  Simone flashed up the fingers of both hands.

  ‘Yes, I’ll see you in ten minutes in the piazza,’ Chiara called.

  Simone signalled her agreement and sailed off towards the square in her unhurried and stately fashion. Two y
oung people on bicycles rattled past speaking loudly. ‘It’s anarchy,’ one of them said. They passed either side of Simone, talking over the top of her head, skimming her sides so that she wobbled a moment like a big old hull buffeted by the wake of speedier craft. There was barely room for three abreast in the narrow street.

  Chiara returned to the telephone and picked it up, putting the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I can hear you now.’

  The line was dead.

  She decided, as she moulded her hair into place and applied some lipstick, that what she would say to Simone was, ‘You will be pleased to know that I have finally closed a door on the past. I am no longer waiting for Daniele to reappear or mooning over my lost boy. I am entering a new phase. So, let’s talk about him, not in a maudlin way, but about the good times.’

  Or words to that effect.

  But, instead of the good times, what came to mind was an image of Simone’s grim face as she eyed Daniele. And he, fourteen and newly lanky, lying on his bed with that skullcap perched on the back of his head and a sort of sneer on his face.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Simone had said.

  ‘Ask her,’ he had replied, glancing at Chiara, crowding in behind.

  The skullcap had an edging of red and purple embroidery that might well have been hand-stitched. The first time Chiara saw him wearing it, she thought that it must have come out of the treasure chest, the great oak sideboard in what they still called the chickens’ room. But it was odd, a skullcap. It jarred. Then, when she commented that it looked like one of those caps the Jewish men wore for prayer, he told her he had got it from the synagogue, and she had felt the first flutter of fear.

  ‘They have these hats in a basket by the entrance, for men who have forgotten their own. Kippeh,’ he said, reaching up and taking it off his head. ‘It’s called a kippeh.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had been to the synagogue,’ she said carefully.

  ‘You do now.’ He twirled the hat round on the end of his finger.

  She thought, He knows. How does he know? Don’t be silly. He couldn’t know.