by Allan Massie
“Oh yes, this is perfect. If it could always be like this.”
“So, what’s wrong with Franz?”
“He likes it that I’m having an affair with David, just as he did when it was you. Do you know, when Luke was here, I really believe Franz hoped I would go back to Israel with him. That’s not normal.”
I slipped my hand under her thin cotton skirt, decorated with poppies.
“That counts as an offence against public decency, here,” she said.
“There must be a lot of it about.”
There were good moments: a day in the Castelli, when we ate strawberries and cream at Nemi, and Franz laughed, playing with Jessica; an evening that began in the little English-language cinema in Trastevere, where we saw a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and identified Burt Lancaster as one of the audience, and which continued at Sabatini’s restaurant in the Piazza, and ended with Franz playing the “St Louis Blues” on his trumpet; a day spent exploring Ostia when I realised that Franz had set himself to learn about the economy of Ancient Rome, and had indeed learned enough to interest a historian ignorant of the period.
Such moments take on an added happiness in recollection. Memory works in such a manner that it is tempting, in certain moods, to suppose that they represent the true sum of that visit to Rome.
But there was too much on the other side. Worst of all was the realisation that, finding them together, one was breaking into a silence, not interrupting a conversation.
Or there was the evening David took me to a birreria and moved from jokes and happiness to a dazed perplexity as he talked of them. He was frightened. He had told Becky that he was leaving Italy – he had been offered a job in America – and she had threatened suicide. He hadn’t supposed he had done anything to bring that upon himself. Their affair, which he didn’t deny – and why should he? – had seemed light-hearted, physical, to him. He said several times that he knew she wasn’t in love with him. So why this?
“Is it just talk?” he said. “Or does she mean it?”
What could I say? It was impossible to forget the warning which that doctor had delivered in that London hospital.
Or the afternoon when Franz insisted that I accompany him to a housing estate, one of the many on the periphery of the city into which the poor have been decanted, to rot, forgotten, conveniently out of sight. Those were, more or less, his words.
“There’s this sort of thing everywhere,” I said.
“It’s capitalism,” he said. “It’s evil.”
“But Italy is scarcely a capitalist country.”
Yet I couldn’t disagree altogether. These barrack-like structures, with waste lands between them, gave off an air of sullen hopelessness. Life was diminished even under that sun and those blue skies. You couldn’t even kid yourself that it felt dangerous, though it may have been dangerous, I wouldn’t know. It didn’t feel dangerous; it felt only dead.
“There’s got to be a clean sweep,” Franz said. “All this needs to be swept away, exterminated. There’s got to be a new start.”
“But, Franz,” I said, “there are places like this everywhere. You get them the other side of the Curtain – the outskirts of Prague and Budapest and Leipzig. It’s not capitalism, it’s not Communism, it’s not the Church, it’s not even bloody Zionism, or whatever bloody Ism you choose, that causes them. It’s just the way things are.”
His tongue licked the sore at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re talking like … oh, I don’t know … Eva Peron perhaps,” I said. “The revolution of the Shirtless Ones. You can’t think a revolution would make things better. You can’t be that naive, not in the second half of the twentieth century. We’ve surely had it up to here with revolutions.”
He turned away from me.
“No,” he said, “there’s got to be a clean sweep.”
FOUR
David Williams left for New York. A couple of months later Becky followed him, taking Jessica with her. It wasn’t a success. Dai had in those two months found himself an American girlfriend. She was a girl of his own age, which was five years less than Becky’s. The difference is not great, but there was more distance than years between them. He was frightened by what Becky had gone through. He wasn’t anyway willing to assume the responsibility of a woman who claimed she had left her husband for his sake. I suppose he knew it wasn’t true. Away from Rome, he found her demands tiresome. She embarrassed him, and that killed their affair. She was in a bad way emotionally. His girlfriend said Becky should see a shrink; Becky threw a bottle at her head, cutting her brow. But the question of analysis was allowed to drop.
Nell telephoned me. She was worried about Becky’s state of mind, she said, and still more anxious about the effect all this might be having on her granddaughter.
“Becky’s devoted to Jessica,” I said.
“Well, her devotion takes a peculiar form. And what about Franz? He needs her help, clearly, and so she walks out on him. It’s so irresponsible. I’ve lost patience with her. She’s no reason to indulge in these games. It’s nothing but self-dramatisation.”
I thought it was more than that, and said so.
“And Franz is difficult,” I said. “There were times when I was in Rome last year when I thought he hated Becky.”
“Only because of the way she was behaving. You don’t need to tell me about how Franz feels. I’ve had the poor boy on the telephone by the hour. Sometimes in tears.”
She said this, as if it established her daughter’s guilt.
“And it’s not right for Jessica to be taken away from her father.”
* * * *
It was raining the day Becky returned to England. I drove to Heathrow to meet her. I was living in a decayed seaport on the Kent side of the Thames estuary, from which thousands commuted to Charing Cross every day. I had bought a semidetached bungalow in a street built between the wars. The previous occupant had filled the garden with dahlias, now in lugubrious bloom. My neighbours were a couple who owned or managed the local launderette, and a red-faced retired Commander (RN) who now worked as a travel courier. “Only the Japs or the Yanks, mind you,” he said. “The Brits are too poor to be properly appreciative.” He had put me up for membership of the Conservative Club, a yellow-brick building with a sham classical portico in the High Street, and I sometimes played billiards with him there at lunchtime. When acquaintances expressed surprise that I chose to live in such a town, I told them it was “forever England for me”. They thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t. Nobody there gave a damn for abstract ideas.
I hadn’t been there a month before half-a-dozen people told me that the Naval Commander had done twelve months for GBH, after sticking a kitchen knife into his “good lady” when she accused him of having an affair with the blonde who worked behind the bar at the Four Feathers. “He was dead lucky,” they said. “It was worth two years to be rid of that bitch.” Nobody thought it odd that he hadn’t been asked to resign from the Conservative Club, where he had stood a round of pink gins on the morning of his release.
People are incalculable. Commander Pilkehorne (Ted) approved of Becky from the moment of their meeting. They got each other wrong too. He told me she was “a regular goer”; what he liked about her of course was that she was, despite everything, what he still called “a lady”; and that she didn’t evince any disapproval of him. It hadn’t occurred to me, until she pointed it out, that below the veneer maintained by the pink gins and pints of bitter, he was wary of such disapproval. Perhaps he always had been, even before prison; they said his wife had nagged him for years, that her jealousy had been pathological and that she had never ceased to reprove him for his failure in life, or what she interpreted as failure. “She married me,” he once said, “because she was told I would make Admiral. Of course her own father didn’t get that far.”
Becky found a new interest thanks to Ted; they studied the Sporting Life together. He fell into the habit of calling in for coffee about eleven
o’clock every morning, and they would brood over the day’s racecard. I don’t suppose she’d ever thought of racing before; now they plotted doubles, trebles and accumulators together. They had a lot of fun out of it, though they didn’t approach it as light-heated fun, and occasionally picked a winner. Jessica adored Ted Pilkehorne. She liked to sit on his knee and light his cigarette for him. (He smoked Gold Flake, thirty years or more out of fashion.) Ted gave her a kitten, then apologised to me, “Should have asked you first, never know if people like cats or not. Always loved them myself.”
Mrs Chartered (the launderette woman) sniffed, “Shouldn’t like to leave my daughter alone with Ted Pilkehorne, has a reputation that way.”
“Beastly woman,” Becky said.
I hadn’t expected Becky to take up residence when I drove to Heathrow that morning. She had merely asked me to collect her. Then it was clear that she had no other plans. She was in flight, couldn’t bear the notion of landing herself on Nell. It sort of happened therefore that she moved in. We were soon sleeping together again. For Becky it was reassurance. “I’ve been through almost more than I can take,” she said. She tried to laugh about it. Her looks were going, or they were in abeyance.
She was setting out to be a character, in consequence.
It was all right by me, having her there. Besides, I was Jessica’s father. So we settled into a sort of ménage. Jessica went to the local primary school and made friends and copied their accents.
“So what?” Becky said, when Nell objected. “That sort of England’s finished. Even old Ted knows that.”
Of course she had never really known any sort of England herself.
We were a ropey sort of couple, but it was a ropey sort of time, the mid-Seventies, when things were falling apart all round, and our being together seemed some kind of assurance. No more than that. We often bored and irritated each other. Becky hated my snap judgements, though she wasn’t short of them herself. There were money problems. I had given up on my academic career, or it had given up on me. In pompous moments I said I could no longer believe in historical truth, but that wasn’t the real reason. It was just that it all seemed futile: researching, teaching, everything. None of it made sense, and I couldn’t stand my colleagues who pretended that it mattered. I looked around the town where we lived and saw that there was no connection between education and happiness or even decency. I fell in love with the smallness of English lower-middle-class life, with its rejection of the possibility that horizons mattered. I was becoming an urban peasant, reverting to the narrow ways of my Welsh farming forebears. This was some sort of relief to Becky. Indeed it was what made our life good for her.
And it was good, for a time. We were helped of course by the fact that she was still getting an income by way of Franz, though for more than a year there was no other communication from him; just the banker’s order paid monthly into her account at the local branch of the NatWest. We had many good moments, in bed and even out of it. I wasn’t faithful to her; the way she had landed herself on me, making me responsible, meant that that clause wasn’t in the contract. There was a girl in London, a married woman, whom I saw once a week. Becky knew of it and shrugged it off.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said, “what you do.”
“No, you’re still in love with Franz.”
“I never want to see him again.”
Both statements were true. She was still in love with the boy she had known in Buenos Aires.
She had no interest in what the man whom that boy had become was doing now. She had written him off. It would be something that she found either absurd or offensive.
Once, we went to London to see Barbara as Rosalind in As You Like It.
“She’s too old for the part,” Becky said. “The whole point about Rosalind is that she has the confidence of a girl of eighteen.”
But Barbara made herself that age. I dislike Shakespeare, though the comedies a little less than the so-called tragedies, but I was captivated; she made everything seem possible. “I can see why Franz…” I said.
“Oh quite, she would appeal to anyone who refused to grow up,” Becky said.
I didn’t add that Franz himself had complained to me in Rome of Becky’s disinclination to do just that. What was the point? Nobody agrees with another’s definition of what constitutes grown-up life. One of the things Becky liked about Ted Pilkehorne was the manner in which he shied away from any discussion that moved from the particular.
It was for Ted she left me. His sister, a childless widow, had died of cancer, leaving him a little money and a small-holding in Hampshire where she reared turkeys. Ted was going to take over the business and live there.
“But he can’t be alone,” Becky said. “It scares him. So he’s asked me if … and I’ve said, yes. You don’t mind really, Gareth, you’ll be glad to be free of me.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “You on a turkey-farm, Becky? You’ll go mad.”
“Ted needs me,” she said. “You don’t. It’s nice to be needed.”
“You’re crazy,” I said again. I was surprised to find myself jealous. The silly bitch, I said to myself, after all I’ve done for her.
“Franz needed you,” I said. “That got on your nerves, you couldn’t stand the weight of it.”
“Oh fuck off, Gareth, leave Franz out of it, will you.”
“And what about Jessica?” I said.
“She can go to the village school. She’ll love it.”
“She’s my daughter,” I said.
“Is she?”
“You’ve always said so.”
“You didn’t show yourself so eager to take responsibility for her when I was with Franz. Anyway you can still see her, I’m not proposing to cut us off from you.”
“Franz was different,” I said.
“Besides, Ted adores her, you know that. And she him.”
“Humbert Humbert,” I said.
“God, you’re foul. Besides, if you must know, that old cow next door got it all wrong. It’s not little girls that’s been Ted’s problem.”
“Oh,” I said, “I see.”
“He’s frightened of being alone, that’s why … He’ll be all right with me, I’ve always been a queer’s woman.”
“I still think you’re crazy.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
In a curious way she was right. Her five years with Ted, before he too got cancer (in his case, of the liver) were good ones. She didn’t exactly take to the simple rural life, and they got through a bottle of gin a day between them, with wine and other drinks on top. But Ted was happy, and she was happy to have made him so. Jessica flourished. Ted bought her a pony and drove her to Pony Club rallies and gymkhanas. It was, in a somewhat rackety fashion, English life as one likes to think it is. I used to go and spend weekends with them, often enough in the first years until I got married myself, and Ted would tell me these were the best years of his life and he owed it all to Becky.
“What about Franz?” I asked her.
“He writes me crazy letters. He’s still in Rome. Reading between the lines his political group is not far from the violent ones, you know, the Red Brigades. It’s mad. I ask myself if it’s my fault. Well, sometimes, I ask myself that. He keeps in closer touch with Nell, and he still sends Jessica presents at Christmas and her birthday.”
“But do you miss him?”
“Often. But there it is.”
“Ah yes,” I said, “and things are as they must be.”
“Don’t be philosophical,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”
FIVE
So far it has been easy, this part, this account of my own personal, if often detached, relationship with Becky and Franz. But now comes the hard part: Franz himself, Franz alone, Franz moving quite beyond me.
In his essay on the Aldo Moro Affair, the Sicilian author Sciascia (one of the few modern writers who seems to me to tell the truth about the way things are) asks this question: “Why do
es the Moro Affair give the impression of something already written, something inhabiting a sphere of intangible literary perfection, something which can only be faithfully rewritten, and, while being rewritten, be totally altered without altering anything?” “There are many reasons,” he adds, “not all of them comprehensible.” I like that final phrase, that suggestion that even Latin lucidity stops short on the borders of personality. But he goes on to say, “The impression that everything which occurred in the Moro Affair did so, as it were, in literature, derives mainly from the elusiveness of the facts – when they occurred and even more so in retrospect – a sort of withdrawal of the facts into a dimension of unfailing imaginative or fanciful consequentiality, from which a constant, stubborn ambiguity overflows. Only in fantasy, in dreams is such perfection achieved. Not in real life.”
By his own token, borrowing an idea from Borges, I have changed these words by writing them down in a different context. Or rather the words remain the same; it is the significance which has altered.
Because you see that is the way I feel now about Franz: that his life existed to be read.
Of course you could certainly say the same of Jesus Christ or perhaps of any of the saints, in whom I nevertheless decline to believe, except when I read their stories. The life which you read takes on its own authority, and achieves a perfection which its original could not have, or could not have known himself to have.
What puzzles me about Franz is why he sought commitment, when he had its awful lesson before him. But he did, lurching like a drunk man in search of support from one cause to another.
It is easy to say that he made of his life an act of atonement for his father’s sins. I suppose that is the way some people naturally think, and it is certainly true that his attachment to causes could always be justified by a sort of idealism. But when that idealism expresses itself in violence, the argument withers. He was, I am sure, a member of that little group called the Proletariato Armato per il Comunismo, which, during the Moro Affair, or a couple of days after, shot and lamed two Italian doctors, one of them belonging to the National Institute for Insurance against Illness.