Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  ‘Because I hadn’t heard from him.’

  ‘But would you have expected to?’ A pause. ‘He wouldn’t necessarily keep in touch with his ex-landlady, would he?’

  Chiara tried to think. Caution was needed.

  ‘He left some of his belongings here. He was going to come and collect them, but he didn’t return,’ she said.

  ‘His things,’ the girl exclaimed excitedly. ‘What sort of things? Is there anything you could send me?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Chiara said. ‘This was many years ago. I couldn’t keep them all.’

  With that, a sudden vision of the loft space above the junk room opened as if it had been hammered shut in her own head. She saw the workmen fitting the boards across the struts and Simone supervising the lifting of the crates.

  ‘No, no. Of course not,’ the girl said. She was trying not to cry again. ‘Oh God,’ she said and the line went dead.

  Chiara looked at the receiver and then replaced it. That was a strange and unsatisfactory conclusion. She had promised herself more. It was like the first of her ultimate cigarettes. It didn’t count.

  She stayed where she was, thinking the girl would phone back any minute.

  She gazed at the photo of her parents. Antonella and Alfonso in 1907. Neither of them smiling. Antonella appeared childlike. Coils of thick black hair down to her waist. She was wearing a short lace headdress more like a mantilla than a bridal veil, pinned in place with flowers.

  ‘I took her with nothing,’ her father liked to joke. ‘Just the clothes she stood up in, her blessed parasol, and a trunkful of prejudices.’

  As Chiara stared at the photograph, she spotted something she had never noticed before. She lifted the picture off the wall to examine it more closely. Her mother held a posy of the same flowers as were in her hair, dark roses encircled by clouds of tiny white flowers, and the second finger of the hand that held the posy was unmistakably crossed on top of the forefinger. She pondered that. Her mother, on her wedding day, had her fingers crossed.

  She rehung the photograph and sat back down on the stool. The telephone rang.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Signora Ravello,’ the girl said.

  ‘It is not a problem,’ Chiara said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude but I heard my mum come in. I couldn’t talk with her in the house.’

  There was a sneer in the way the girl referred to her mother. ‘Does your mother know that you telephone me in Italy?’

  ‘No,’ the girl said.

  ‘You were born in 1957?’ Chiara said.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said, expectantly.

  ‘I don’t know how it was in those times in England, or in Wales. It might not have been as, how do you say, restrictive, no, more than that, suffocating, yes, as in Italy, because here, you know, we have the Catholic Church. But an unmarried girl who became pregnant. My God, you cannot imagine the shame. The terrible shame.’

  The girl didn’t say anything.

  ‘The pressure,’ Chiara said.

  ‘Pressure?’ Maria said.

  ‘They would send you away. Hide you in a convent. They would make you have the baby adopted. You were not fit, you see. Not fit to raise a child.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it was like that here,’ the girl said.

  ‘Ask your mother,’ Chiara said. ‘Ask if she had to fight to keep you.’

  Silence again.

  ‘Daniele liked jazz music,’ Chiara said. ‘He used to listen to West Coast American jazz. The trumpet was his favourite instrument. Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie. He had some records, and I used to allow him to play them on my gramophone player in the evening.’

  He had taken her in his arms, high as a kite and stinking of whisky. ‘Come on, Ma, come and dance with me,’ and they had stumbled around the salon, banging into the furniture.

  ‘I know those records,’ the girl said. ‘My mum has some of them.’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything else,’ Chiara said. ‘I didn’t know him very well.’

  She wondered whether that was true. It must be, or she would know where he was now, if he was now.

  ‘If you were looking for him, what would you do? How would you go about it?’

  ‘I would renounce.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Renounce.’

  ‘Give up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Maria said in a little defeated voice. ‘You think he is dead, don’t you?’

  There was a silence in which Chiara listened to the girl breathing and resisted saying more. She was struck by her own hypocrisy. Renounce, indeed. She was good at handing out the advice but not so good at listening to it herself. She who had never given up.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I have to go back to work now. So I will say goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, signora,’ Maria said.

  As she walked to Gianni’s, Chiara congratulated herself on having held the girl at arm’s length. There was a sense of relief. She knew there would be a sort of grief later, but it would probably be an entirely manageable sadness like when your neighbour’s dog went missing, or the government fell.

  Something still nagged at her, though. It was to do with the name, Levi. That Daniele had told the girl’s mother his birth name.

  She sat at the window with her cappuccino and the paper.

  ‘Still off the fags?’ Gianni said.

  ‘Yes,’ Chiara replied and instantly wanted to run to the tobacconist and buy a packet. ‘Three days,’ she said.

  ‘I am impressed,’ Gianni said.

  She could have drawn the child, who was at a very vulnerable moment, into a circle of pain, but she hadn’t. She would have liked a photograph, but it was better this way. Maria had an image to store away of Daniele, the music lover, the handsome one. Chiara herself had the knowledge that Daniele had fathered a child and that, out there, completely divorced from her and not in need of her contribution, he lived on, through Maria.

  Chiara felt much better after a few days of not smoking. She was learning moderation at last, she reflected. Everything was slotting into place. She would be able now to resume her life and maybe even to add something new. Not tango. A socially useful voluntary activity. She would steer clear of politics, though. She could emulate Simone and teach adult literacy classes.

  Of course Simone had the advantage of not having to earn a living any more and so had more time, and Simone, anyway, would say that every act was political. Whatever, the feeling of spaciousness was beginning to return in which she could make choices about how she spent her non-working time.

  Gianni was wiping down the tables.

  ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ Chiara said.

  Gianni looked around. ‘What’s got into you?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know really,’ she said. ‘But everything feels rather hopeful again.’

  ‘Does it?’ he said, pointing to the paper where there was a picture of a barricade of burning cars on Via Merulana.

  She went on to the pontifical library, worked with great efficiency and speed on the page proofs and completed them in three hours. The post office was closed because the postal workers were on strike in solidarity with the car manufacturer unions in Turin, and so she caught a bus out to the publishers and delivered the proofs by hand.

  She was sitting in her editor’s office when a colleague of his popped in and she was introduced. His translator had been taken ill, leaving him with an unfinished manuscript.

  ‘I’m free,’ she said, ‘and available.’

  The man looked at her dubiously. It was a new translation of Keats’s letters.

  ‘I’m a Keats specialist,’ she said.

  It was her dream job. One door closes and another one opens, she thought as she set off home with the parcel in her bag.

  ‘You’re back in the land of the living then?’ Simone said when she called.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Chiara said.

  ‘Good, because it is so mu
ch duller when you’re not around,’ Simone said. ‘Can you come for dinner on Saturday? Umberto the third is cooking.’

  ‘Who is Umberto the third?’

  ‘You have been out of action for so long. He is my new cleaner. He’s from the Philippines and he’s a wonderful cook. He can do all sorts, actually. He’s going to do something with fish and spices.’

  ‘Can I bring my nephew?’ Chiara said.

  He had come to Rome from Calabria to study architecture at the university. She was supposed to be casting an occasional eye on his activities.

  ‘You know, my cousin’s son, Beppe?’

  ‘Not your fascist cousin?’

  ‘Ex-fascist. He put away the riding crop and the fez a few years ago now.’

  ‘Is he good company?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ve only just made his acquaintance. But he’s very decorative.’

  ‘Bring him then. Of course. But what about your secret lover?’

  ‘Oh, he left,’ Chiara said. ‘I sent him packing, I mean.’

  ‘Did he get too uppity?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I often think,’ Simone mused, ‘that men are like spices. They need to be crushed to get the full flavour.’

  ‘I haven’t had a cigarette in a week,’ Chiara said.

  ‘That’s what the purdah has been about!’ Simone was unimpressed. ‘I don’t see how you can be so addicted when you didn’t even take up smoking until you were about forty.’

  ‘That’s still over twenty years.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Simone said, ‘and you but a slip of a girl. How can that be possible?’

  Chiara laughed. ‘I am rather proud of myself,’ she said.

  To have emerged from whatever this test had been, relatively unscathed, was nothing short of amazing. She, who never got away with anything. She felt her dissipated and squandered life forces coming back to her, reassembling in the home that was her self.

  The girl was in a terrible state, crying and snuffling at the other end of the line. It was difficult to make out what she was saying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Chiara said.

  She should have said, Why on earth are you calling? This has nothing to do with me, whatever it is. Haven’t I made that clear?

  But the girl was so upset. An awful row, she was saying, with her mother and him, her so-called father.

  As the girl wailed and sobbed down the phone, Chiara realised that any clarification there might have been had taken place only inside her own head. But it had never occurred to her that the girl might want to continue the connection with someone she thought of as Daniele’s erstwhile landlady. The poor creature. She was so upset. Chiara would have to say something quite pointed and no-nonsense to make her understand that such calls were not welcome.

  ‘They’ve found out,’ the girl said.

  The telephone bill had arrived, and her family had discovered she had been making these calls to Italy and at peak time, which made it worse. It was going to cost a fortune.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Chiara heard herself saying. She would hear out the girl’s woes first and then she would tell her.

  And Maria hadn’t sat her exams, important, public exams. Her parents had discovered that too.

  Chiara didn’t need to ask why not. She knew all about the protests of the powerless, the slapping-yourself-in-the-face kind of protest. But that couldn’t be helped. She must not get involved. She steeled herself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ she began but faltered. She was going to have to find the right words to push this child away. Daniele’s daughter.

  ‘Can I come and stay with you?’ the girl said.

  ‘What?’ Chiara said.

  She felt the blood drain from her face. She reached for something, anything, to stop the girl right there, but no words suggested themselves. Nothing had prepared her for such a proposal. Her brain was clogged. The girl had lost all sense of proportion. She was ranting. Come all the way to Italy to stay with a virtual stranger! As if her parents would even let her.

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ Chiara managed to say, eventually.

  But the girl was telling her that her mother had agreed, if she worked hard and sat the rest of her exams, to pay her fare. Her mother had even telephoned an old friend who lived in Rome, but she didn’t have room to put Maria up, she had a houseful. And then Maria had thought of Signora Ravello and if her father had lodged there, then perhaps she could too.

  Chiara shook her head to clear it and something whirred. She steadied herself against the door jamb. She was like a little planet spinning out of orbit, pulled by strong magnetic forces.

  ‘We don’t even know each other,’ she said. ‘Not really. We’re strangers.’

  Maria was undaunted. She had stopped crying and was pressing her case. It was as if she knew that, whatever Chiara might say, she did not feel entirely entitled to turn down her preposterous request.

  ‘Please,’ Maria said. ‘Just for the summer. I wouldn’t get in your way. I could learn Italian properly. I’ve been teaching myself. I could help you with your translations.’

  Chiara’s defences were imperfectly erected. There was a hidden tunnel that she had neglected to barricade because nobody ever used it any more and somehow Maria had known to come that way. The girl needed her. Daniele’s child was asking for her help.

  ‘We could have a trial period,’ Maria said. ‘Two weeks. And if it worked, I could stay for the summer, and if it didn’t, you could send me back.’

  Those were the words that clinched it. Send me back. Chiara thought of all the times she had wished she could send Daniele back.

  ‘A fortnight’s trial?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Will you speak to my mother?’ the girl said.

  Chiara found herself assuring Maria’s mother that it would not be inconvenient at all, that she needed some help with her translation work and that she would set out terms and conditions in a formal letter. She wrote the letter quickly before she had time to reflect. It would be a month before the girl came because she had to sit the remaining exams first.

  A month was a long time. The girl might change her mind. Or Chiara might find a way of calling off the whole venture. All sorts of things might happen. There were a hundred let-out clauses. Anyway it was only for a fortnight. She wasn’t going to think about it. She was going to put it out of her mind. It was a whole month away.

  SEVEN

  The wine has gone to Chiara’s head. She gets groggily to her feet and gazes over the slumped shapes of the dozing passengers through the window to the platform beyond. She strains to believe that the child is in a safe place. Knowing no different, she might as well believe it. By some mysterious process, he has been spirited away. And she was never in a position to take him on in the first place. Not really. Not with Cecilia.

  A train thunders by at high speed, setting the lamp swinging, which makes the shadows in the room elongate and then ping back. She wraps herself in her blanket and lies down on her side, her legs bent and her feet resting against someone’s suitcase in the aisle. She faces into the dim underworld beneath the bench where stockinged and trousered legs, a dangling shoeless foot, stacked cases, rolled-up coats and the occasional body, stretched out or curled up on the floor, form a composite pattern. There are puddles of relative light between larger blocks of dark.

  She becomes aware of a faint rise and fall somewhere to the right, a subtle movement in her peripheral vision. The blanket is scratchy against her cheek as she tilts her head to peer at an area of particular density, there under the bench, a place where the darkness itself is not static. She discerns a paler patch within, which slowly forms itself into a small face. She gasps, sucks in air through her mouth in little bursts like sobs and holds the breath in, her heart flapping like a landed fish. Once she recognises the face, she is able to configure the rest of the dark patch into the form of the child. Now that she can feel as much as see the gleam of his
eyes and know they are wide open, she realises that he is lying as still as a small, restless boy can. He is less than a metre away, flat on his stomach, his hair grazing the underside of the bench.

  She lets out her pent-up breath. ‘Clever boy,’ she whispers.

  It must have been in the moment when Cecilia first started to moan, when Chiara turned away to face the soldier, that he scuttled or rolled under there. Cecilia’s fit was timed perfectly to cover the boy’s vanishing act.

  ‘You can come out now,’ she says.

  He does not respond. She can hear his breathing. It is fast and shallow.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ she whispers, ‘you can come out.’

  He neither moves nor speaks.

  It wasn’t only the soldiers that he was trying to escape from.

  With this realisation comes a profound sadness. It cuts a channel between all her previous pools of sadness so that they flow into each other and she is cast adrift in their chilly, swirling waters. Lying at the feet of her bovine, dependent sister, an arm’s length from the child who has no friend in the world but her and yet rejects her, she feels again the chill in the middle of her spine and is certain that it is spreading outwards to claim her entirely. If she reached out a hand to the boy, he would not take it. If she woke her sister and asked for understanding, she would not get it. Each of them will drown in their own separate pool, and there is nothing she can do.

  She turns over to face the wall and pulls the blanket over her head. But instead of the cold comfort of hopelessness, what floats into her mind is a phrase from the book she has been reading, a tattered old copy of Keats’s letters that she covered with brown paper in case reading in English were deemed subversive by the authorities in this part of Italy.

  I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

  The words so exactly express her sentiment that the feeling itself seems to her like a bubble in the water, and it immediately pops. Somehow, despite herself, she is already kicking back up.

  He’s only a little boy, she thinks. A lost little boy. There are people who are not at all fit or ready to be parents and yet they manage. She has to be more able than that. She thinks of her own useless mother and has a momentary vision of her leaning against a door jamb, wailing like a spoilt child. She has to be better than that. She thinks of all the children with deformities or maladies, and here he is, a child of staggering perfection, a boy healthy and, until now, cared for and loved. All she has to do is accommodate his grief. She’s good at grief, surely. She has had enough practice.