Chiara hears the words as if from under a waterfall.
‘I can’t love him only halfway,’ she says. She is shouting to be heard above the thunderous noise. ‘And what do you know about it? You gave all of your love to a married man. You didn’t keep anything back, did you?’ Chiara’s fists are clenched, and tears are streaming down her face.
Simone’s head moves again. It is more like a tremor than a shake.
She didn’t like that, Chiara thinks.
‘We’re not talking about me,’ Simone says. She lifts her head, looks up now at Chiara and raises her eyebrows.
Chiara is vaguely aware that Simone has said something else, something mild and deflating. Let’s have a row, she thinks. Let’s splatter the room with the mess of all these unsaid things.
But while she is calculating how best to goad Simone, another part of her mind is chasing another strand of thought, something she knows that Simone doesn’t, something she has been holding in reserve that will clinch the argument. She clutches it and says it aloud.
‘Nonna baptised him,’ she says.
Simone wrinkles her nose. ‘So?’ she says.
‘It means he is a Christian. He has to be brought up a Christian.’
Simone bites her lower lip. Chiara has seen that look before.
Chiara was there when the doctor came to see Nonno and listened to his wheezing old chest. She saw Nonna’s face as she took in what he was saying. The realisation that the prognosis was worse than she had thought. That is how Simone is looking at her now.
Neither of them speaks for a minute.
Simone takes a breath and opens her mouth. She has the air of one about to impart bad news. ‘If you are saying—’
Chiara lifts her hands as if in surrender. ‘Don’t,’ she says.
But Simone is relentless. ‘—that because your nonna splashed water over the boy’s head and muttered some arcane words, you won’t have to give him back?’
Chiara lifts her hands to her face and presses her cold fingers into her cheeks, staring at Simone over her fingertips.
‘I’m not saying half love him,’ Simone goes on. ‘Love him with all your heart. What other way is there to love? And let’s face it, the poor little bugger needs it. But just, somehow, hold the idea too that it probably isn’t for ever. That when this is all over and better times come, you can get on with your life, marry perhaps, have children of your own.’
‘What if I don’t want that?’
‘Of course you want that. We all do. We don’t all get it.’ She gazes intently at Chiara. ‘I am not just thinking of you. I am thinking of the boy. He doesn’t need to be in a ghetto, that one; he carries it about with him.’
Chiara stops protesting. She lets what Simone is saying sink in. ‘What can I do?’ she says.
The answer comes so promptly it is obvious Simone has been thinking about it.
‘I wondered,’ she says, ‘about getting him to write letters to his mother?’ She holds her hand up again as if Chiara is about to interrupt, which she isn’t. ‘You could supervise him and you–we–can ask him where his mother used to take him, if she had a favourite place, and then you could go with him and hide the note and, I don’t know,’ she shakes her head, ‘I don’t know if it will do any good or if it will help that sad little boy or you, but… ’
SEVENTEEN
The signora was scrubbing a coarse stalk of celery under a running tap, rubbing the grime off with her thumbnail. Maria watched with fascination.
In Maria’s opinion, there was no excuse for celery. At best, it was pointless, a quasi non-vegetable, a texture rather than a taste. Her mother usually served it unadorned in a glass tumbler, trying, perhaps, to pass it off as a table decoration. At worst, as part of a school dinner, stewed as an accompaniment to gristly mince with all the crunch–which was the only thing in its favour–lost, it was an insult to the name of vegetables. Sometimes, when guests were coming and she was preparing a buffet, her mum would smear its hollow with cream cheese, sprinkle it with chives and chop it into segments, and it would take its place alongside the cocktail sausages, the tinned asparagus rolls and the vol-au-vents, made with puff pastry and filled with a grey mushroom goo, which was actually, Maria remembered, slimy but tasty. Her mum was good at mushroom goo.
‘Tell me all that you have learnt today,’ the signora said.
Maria reeled off a list of seven irregular verbs. ‘Shall I conjugate them for you?’ she said.
She repeated them in the present tense and then with their past participles while the signora brought the celery to the chopping board and, using a sharp little knife, sliced the stalk almost through, then stripped away the threads running down its spine.
‘I wanted to ask you. What happened to the mushroom hat?’ Maria said.
‘Eh?’ the signora said, tossing the diced celery into a pan over a low flame.
‘The mushroom hat you were going to wear,’ Maria said, ‘when you met me at the station?’
‘It’s not the season for mushrooms,’ the signora said. She peeled an onion and popped two garlic cloves out of their skins. ‘If you’re still here, I’ll take you.’
She looked up at Maria and gave a little nod, the promise of treats to come.
‘Take me where?’ Maria said, wondering at the turn the conversation had taken.
‘The best place I know, here in Rome, is up in the gardens above Trastevere. There was a, ah, the word escapes me, a bunch, is it? A gathering? There is a very good word in English. I know it. Anyway, I found the spot two years ago. Huge porcini. Amazing.’
Porcini. Little porky things? Maria had asked about a hat and now they were talking about what might be piglets.
The signora made a curved shape with her hands, holding an imaginary ball, adjusted it to about the size of a football, nodded and resumed her chopping. ‘Big as plates,’ she said. ‘The weather was perfect for them that year.’
‘Porcini?’ Maria said.
‘Yes, you know, what do you call them in English?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Neither do I,’ the signora said. ‘Look in the dictionary.’
There was a whole row of dictionaries on the bookshelf in the salon. One of them was only in Italian but had illustrations. Maria brought that and an English–Italian one.
‘Clump,’ the signora said. ‘I remembered. Clump. Good word, isn’t it?’
Porcini were a kind of mushroom. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a proper word in English,’ Maria said, doubtfully. ‘We can say cèpes, which is the French, or boletus, which is Latin.’
‘Perhaps they do not grow in Wales.’ The signora added the garlic and onion to the pan, and the celery odour was subsumed.
Maria examined the pictures. They were like big brown buttons. ‘Is your mushroom hat like a boletus mushroom then?’ Maria asked.
‘My hat! You mean my hat. I lost that hat, I forgot about it,’ the signora said. She came and looked over Maria’s shoulder. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t very much like a mushroom. Not really,’ she said. ‘I think I lost it when I fell down on Sunday.’
‘Oh, what did the doctor say?’ Maria asked.
The signora went to the store cupboard and took out a small screw-top jar, packed with curled and shrivelled slivers. ‘It is a thing to do with my inner ear. And it will pass.’ She unscrewed the top and held it under Maria’s nose. ‘Sooner or later.’
Maria breathed in a deep, earthy aroma of mushrooms that was on the edge of being rather unpleasant.
‘Porcini,’ the signora said. ‘I dried them myself.’
She returned to the pan, gave it a stir and tipped in some white wine from the previous night’s leftover bottle.
‘That smell is fab,’ Maria said. ‘Fabulous. I can’t even smell the celery now. I’d like to learn to cook.’
‘I make you green vegetable risotto. Like Nonna used to make.’
Maria’s own gran–her former grandmother rather, Barry’s mum–made risotto
too. Vesta beef risotto, it was called, and it came in a cardboard packet with a picture on the front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You had to add boiling water to the contents to make the rice, dried veg and little cubes of meaty stuff swell up. It was one of her gran’s better meals. It was nothing like the small bowl of gooey rice with broad beans and peas (in which the taste of celery was now undetectable) that the signora presented her with. They sprinkled over the top a heavenly and pungent cheese. It was parmigiano, the signora said. Maria looked in the dictionary to check this meant Parmesan. That was what they called the cheese powder they had at home that came in a small plastic tub and smelt like sick.
By the end of the meal, Maria knew that this apartment had belonged to the signora’s grandparents, her nonna and nonno, and that the signora had taken it on when they moved permanently to the countryside where they had a farm. The Italian word for ‘farm’ sounded as if it meant ‘factory’. It was one of those false friends, like the word for ‘bored’ being more like ‘annoyed’ and caldo, which should mean ‘cold’, meaning ‘hot’ instead.
‘I have just one picture of them,’ the signora said. ‘I will show you.’
She left the room, returned a moment later and placed in Maria’s hands a faded sepia photograph in an ornate gilt frame. It showed a middle-aged couple, the woman with her dark hair looped up into a bun, a full-length dress and white gloves, the man in a dark suit with a waistcoat and what might have been a chain across his middle, hair smoothed to one side, mustachioed, smart and serious. They stood in front of a painted background of trees.
The signora, preparing the coffee at the stove, was prattling on about her nonno but she was speaking too fast. Maria, sitting at the table in a kind of post-prandial stupor, pleasantly replete, understood only the odd word. ‘Bird’ was one; ‘hills’ another. She moved her thumb idly up and down the side of the picture frame, where the photograph slotted in between glass and backing. She was very sleepy. Something, an older photo perhaps or a piece of card, protruded along the edge of the picture and she patted it back into place. She wished she had a bedroom of her own and she could go into it now and lie down, just for five minutes.
All of a sudden the photograph was snatched from her hands. The signora stood with it tight against her body with one hand and the other held to her head, as if in pain.
‘Oh,’ Maria said, taken aback. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
The signora spun as if on a pivot and shot out the door, clutching her head. Perhaps she had thought Maria was going to drop it.
‘Here is one of my mother and father,’ she said on her return, as if that were the explanation, as if Maria had said, I’m bored with this one, show me another. ‘It’s their wedding picture.’
The coffee was bubbling up and the signora went and switched off the gas. Maria gazed dutifully at the print on the table. She didn’t pick it up in case there was some etiquette to holding family photographs that she had unwittingly breached once already.
‘Look at the hands,’ the signora said, going back to speaking in English.
Perhaps Maria had done nothing wrong after all, had simply misread the signora. She looked at the picture.
‘Do you see her fingers are crossed? I noticed just the other day. Wishing for good luck, I suppose.’
‘If you cross your fingers when you make a promise, you don’t have to keep it,’ Maria said, not thinking at all about what that might signify in the context of a marriage, taken up instead by her study of the man’s hands. She was trying to discern whether the ring on the little finger of his right hand was the same one she had in the side pocket of her shoulder bag.
‘Really?’ the signora said. ‘I never heard that before.’
‘She looks very young,’ Maria said.
‘She was sixteen.’
Maria’s head snapped up. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘My age?’ She gazed back at the girl. ‘How come she got married when she was only sixteen?’
‘I recount you the story,’ the signora said. ‘I tell you in Italian, yes, and you ask me demands if I go too fast or if you don’t understand.’
And she told the tale of her father Alfonso’s wooing of her mother Antonella when her mother’s family was about to emigrate to Argentina.
It was so cosy and delicious, sitting in the relative cool of the signora’s old-fashioned kitchen.
‘And Daniele Levi,’ Maria said. ‘My babbo.’ She smacked her lips over all the Bs, still gazing at the photograph of the signora’s parents. ‘When he lived here, did he use to eat in the kitchen with you? Or did he sort out his own meals?’
No reply came, and when Maria raised her head she saw the signora across the table, her eyes unfocused, as if she were looking through a rent in the fabric of the room, this solid kitchen with its old square table and its yellow cupboards, upon a scene of sorrow.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
The signora blinked and recovered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This dizzy thing. It comes and goes.’ She swirled her forefinger around the crown of her head. She jumped up and clapped her hands. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s get this show on the road. That’s how you say, isn’t it? The Colosseum won’t wait for ever.’
‘Am I all right to go like this?’ Maria asked.
She was wearing one of the dresses from the signora’s collection: a red and white spotted one with a sweetheart neckline. The full skirt shimmied and bounced around her legs as she walked.
The signora looked her up and down. ‘Perhaps a little jacket, for the evening chill later?’ she said. ‘In case we delay.’
Maria selected a linen bolero from the rack in the dressing room.
‘Perfect,’ the signora said and they spilt out into the melting golden afternoon.
They went by bus. They didn’t need to book a professional guide, the signora said, because she had a book.
They started with the Forum, which was opposite the Colosseum. Maria trailed behind the signora, who read aloud from an out-of-date Michelin guide, enlivening dry facts and dates with a spirited delivery. They stood on a grassy mound with the sun beating down on the backs of their heads in front of a row of three columns.
‘The Temple of Dionysius,’ the signora read. She opened wide her hand introducing the columns to Maria, Maria to the columns.
‘Yes,’ Maria said.
The signora threw back her head as if to lead by example in admiring the intricacy of the capitals. Then she cried out and she was falling, the book flying from her flailing fingers.
It was as if a hockey ball had slammed into the side of her head. Maria lunged forward to catch her before she hit the ground. She flung her arms under the signora’s, encircling her torso, feeling the wildly beating heart within, and they both subsided backwards to the ground, Maria’s wide skirt ballooning out around them on the grass.
The signora’s yelps died away.
How extraordinary to hold a grown-up in her lap, to feel that this small person with her bony little ribcage was somehow in her care. Maria’s thoughts flew to her little brother and sister.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m here, I’ve got you.’
‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ the signora whispered.
Maria saw the word as if it were handwritten there in the air between them, the curly-topped Rs. So sorry.
She put the signora in a cab.
‘The doctor told me not to do that thing with my head, but I forgot,’ the signora said. ‘I will lie in bed, have a little sleep. I will be fine later. You can find your way home from here, isn’t it?’
‘Can’t you,’ Maria said, automatically.
‘Eh?’
‘You need to say, “can’t you”, not “isn’t it”.’
‘Ah yes,’ the signora said. ‘Haven’t I? Don’t we? Shouldn’t they? Thank you, Maria. Again I say you sorry.’
She gave a woebegone smile from the back of the cab.
Maria flicked her hand in the air as if she were banishing whatever
it was and smiled at the signora. ‘You’re forgiven,’ she said.
Oh dear, she thought as the cab pulled away and she saw the signora’s face crumple.
‘The Colosseum is also known as the amphitheatre of Flavio, and is the largest such in the world,’ she read.
A guide leading a bunch of Americans walked by, and she tagged along, putting the book away. The group descended a ruined staircase and looked through a railing at a place where the gladiators used to prepare before going into battle, but Maria couldn’t see it properly because she was at the back. The guide was speaking English with a strong accent.
‘They used to do their toilet here,’ she said.
Maria left the group and climbed back up into the sunshine. She spread out her skirt and sat on the stump of a pillar, gazing at the rows of colonnades and arches. It was nice to be alone. She leant back against the cornerstone and felt its warmth against the curve of her back, seeping through her dress to the damp skin. She loosened the tight belt around her waist one notch to let some air circulate. She loved being this hot. Never before had she walked about being hot all the time. All over her skin and in the folds of her skin, the backs of her knees, under and between her breasts, her eyelids. It was new to her but also familiar and almost comfortable as if she had known it before, in an unremembered time.
She took Daniele Levi’s ring out of her handbag and held it in her palm. If it really was the same ring that the signora’s father was wearing in the photograph, what would that mean? Had Daniele Levi stolen it? Ought she then to return it to the signora? But then the signora would know that he was a thief. Perhaps there was a different explanation.
On the other side of the walkway from where she sat, a child clambered onto another pillar stump, unsheathing a plastic sword from a plastic scabbard. He reminded her of her little brother.
She put the ring away. When she was alone in the apartment, she would have a closer look and compare it with the photograph. She might take another look at the other picture too, the one the signora had snatched out of her hands.
Early One Morning Page 28