Maria sat on the bed. Her body did feel strong and her mind was full of distances: thoughts of the journey ahead had begun to revolve with pictures of the past. Now she was ready in her raincoat and shoes, her hair shiny and fair, held in a short pony-tail, just as she had liked to have it when she was young and practising hand-stands against the wall of the gym hall.
Michael stood on the path outside the house that morning and thought of it as the house of a missing person, not the kind people hear about on the news or see on posters, but another kind altogether, the sort who disappear into public view, who lose themselves in recognition and are never heard of again. All the personal belongings had gone from the house. He locked the door and stood for a moment and the street was quiet with its drawn curtains and the wheely-bins out on the paving stones. He walked across the street to the postbox, dropped the keys into a Jiffy bag, then felt its weight and looked at the stamps and the address written out, Marion Gaskell Associates, Top Floor, 71 Denmark Street, London w1. Lifting up the suitcase and the rucksack he walked back over the road and noticed as he walked that pigeons were flying over the houses and some were perched on the television aerials. The noise of the black cab pulling away made the birds scatter in the air.
*
Kevin Goss was parked outside the Old Operating Theatre Museum in St Thomas Street. In the middle of the morning he saw them coming. Maria was hardly recognisable, filled-out, fatter-faced, with a raincoat over her arm and wearing a pretty dress, the boyfriend in a suit and laughing with bags in his hands. To Kevin’s eyes the boyfriend faded away and it was just her at the gates. He reached to open the door; he saw her face smiling, looking shy, normal, not as he remembered it on television or when he’d seen her before in the street. Kevin had one foot on the road then a cab stopped on the opposite side. He watched her climbing into the back and he shook with nerves and closed the car door.
Maria sat back and Michael stroked her hand as the cab moved down Southwark Street; the people outside stood at bus stops or crowded the pavement looking enraptured at nothing. Michael was checking the tickets and he said the word ‘Domodossola.’
‘So that’s the end of the train?’ she asked.
‘I’ve rented a car from there,’ he said. ‘That way we can take it slowly through the countryside.’
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘You know something? This woman, someone my mother knew, has a delicatessen in Edinburgh, her father walked all the way from Tuscany to Scotland in the 1920s, just to get work and he started his own shop.’
‘You’re kidding?’ Michael said.
‘No. He walked all the way.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m wearing my good driving shoes so don’t start getting any ideas.’ Maria smiled then and cosied into his arm, blowing air out of her lungs, pursing and unpursing her lips as the cab moved on.
Kevin stalled the car coming out of Stamford Street onto the roundabout at Waterloo, he kept looking ahead and turned the key, cursing himself, and quickly he was moving again and could see he hadn’t lost much ground, the cab was just turning into York Road and not far in front. As the car moved forward his frustration became more like excitement so he pushed a tape in: Maria’s powerful singing voice from ten years before ripped through the car and Kevin kept his head down and drummed the steering wheel in time to the music he loved.
Oh-oh-over and over
I’ll prove my love to you
Over and over, what more can I do?
Over and over, my friends say I’m a fool
But oh-oh-over and over
I’ll be a fool for you.
Michael was looking out of the window on his own side. ‘Before long people won’t go to Victoria,’ he said. ‘The train through the Tunnel’s going to leave from here.’
‘Waterloo?’
‘Yep. No getting off on the way. Straight through to Paris.’
‘I don’t think I could do it,’ she said.
‘So fast though, and they say it’ll be smart. You can have a drink and everything.’
‘If I can’t fly nowadays I can’t see me going into a tunnel,’ she said.
‘That’s not going to be for ever.’
‘No. Probably not. I hope not.’
‘A lot of Italians used to live round here, a really big community,’ said Michael as the cab reached the end of York Road. ‘Your uncle Alfredo told me Waterloo and Clerkenwell were full of Italian shops at one time.’
Maria looked out of the cab window. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said.
Love –
Cause you got a great big heart
Well over – and over
I’ll be a fool for you
Well, well, well over and over
What more can I do?
Kevin spun onto Westminster Bridge and nearly bumped a red bus. He could see the water sparkling under the bridge and his eyes were screwed up against the light. There seemed to be hundreds of people walking along the pavements at each side of the bridge. He became sick of looking at people and the traffic was getting bad. He started swearing louder and twisting the volume control back and forward so the song became distorted.
They passed the Houses of Parliament and Maria looked up at the windows and realised she had never seen them before. Michael whistled to himself and the cab moved into Victoria Street. They hadn’t noticed any of the other cars in front or behind them, but Maria got lost for a second looking at a row of people on one of the buses, and she was truly solitary in that instant, as she imagined the people were too, with their own stories and their own lives, and she was aware suddenly of the great many people on the bus, and the many buses on the road, and the roads going out in all directions. She knew she was now one of a horde of people, travelling, moving, standing or sitting still, and it began to appeal to her, the thought that she and Michael and the cab driver were being drawn further into the unconscious actions of a crowd.
Kevin by then was in a panic about losing them. He strained his eyes and turned the steering wheel next to the Apollo Victoria Theatre, then he stopped, scanning the black cabs that were dropping off in front of the station, his breathing wild, clouding his rear-view mirror. The cars behind were beeping and he banged the dashboard with his fist, tears welling up, then he climbed out the car leaving the keys in the ignition. The door wasn’t closed and the cord of his seatbelt trailed out of the door onto the road.
He walked quickly and wept, which made him angry because it meant he couldn’t see properly. Wasn’t that the back of her head gone through the arch? He pushed past the people going into the Underground, almost slipping when he stepped onto the station concourse. He looked over the crowd, blinked rapidly, and turned his head from side to side as if taking snapshots, but it was hopeless, nothing was still and nothing was entirely itself, the crowd hid everything except its own sweep and noise, colour seemed to blaze and retire, starlings swept past in one black movement overhead, and the only voice was the one falling from the air announcing the departures of trains.
Kevin saw everything freeze to a whiteness. His hands pressed deep in the pockets of his coat, he wandered forward and staggered and was short of breath, and he fell into people, noise rushing into his ears, then he stopped against the window of the Wimpy. At some great distance he heard music in the burger bar, saw colours passing, laughter, and up ahead the terrible flicker of the passenger information boards. Dropping his eyes he saw Michael Aigas standing on his own under the board.
It was as if the field had cleared. Everyone else in the station vanished now and the starlings moved slowly from beam to beam. The concourse was polished and Kevin walked forward and saw the person up ahead as a version of himself, and digging his hands in his pockets again he believed there was something terrible and familiar about Michael Aigas, this man with clean hair and a blue suit so smart as he looked up at the board and down at tickets. Kevin stood a few yards behind Michael and said to himself he could walk straight through the man and absorb eve
rything. Four steps and he could replace him in his black shoes. But no. Noise flooded into Kevin’s ears again and turning his head he found what he was looking for: ‘Ladies’.
Going down the stairs, Maria had walked under a hot-air vent, and she felt just then a luxurious apprehension, as if she were about to step into a warm bath. The tiles at the bottom were shiny; a smell of pine rose from the newly cleaned floor and made her think of fresh Argyll days she had known once upon a time, days in her childhood when the wind tasted of trees. A wet mop stood under the towel dispenser. She smiled at a woman who was applying lipstick, then she ran some cold water over her own fingers and smoothed back her hair. Drying her hands with a paper towel, she felt her wrist and realised she was still wearing her hospital name-tag. She squeezed it off and looked at her face in the mirror. Her eyes were clear and steady with only a little worry at the centre, the irises calm and green, the pupils black as full stops.
Kevin came into the Ladies but it was empty. He went to the sinks and ran some water and reached out for the soap. He was weeping to himself and looked around but she was nowhere to be seen. Then he saw the plastic name-tag two sinks up and he took it in his wet hand. His heart froze over, he gasped: ‘Maria Tambini’. He tried to pull the name-tag over his hand – it wouldn’t go very far, just onto his knuckles – and then he put the hand into his pocket and stepped to look at himself in the mirror. There she was, behind him, looking into his eyes.
‘Such a talented wee thing,’ he said.
Maria, in one intake of breath, drew all the moments of her life together, and reaching over pain, over doubt, she became perfect in that fraction of a second as the knife’s silver glinted and rose with his fist. She pushed forward with all the force of love’s opposite, the pressure of decades flying into the motion to protect herself from the brutal lie of his affection and his grip on the knife. Her soul bounded forward in that moment, she pushed hard, and his feet slipped apart on the wet tiles. He fell back among the sinks with a thud and hit the floor, and he lay there, the knife with his hand clasped around it stuck in his throat.
He tried to say something but the words poured out as blood. Maria was shaking against the door of a cubicle but she felt alert to the urgency of the moment. She stepped forward and pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, then without delay or reflection loosened her name-tag from around Kevin’s hand and scrunched it in the paper towel and put it in the pocket of her raincoat.
‘What is it?’ Michael asked.
She cried into his shoulder and shook.
‘You’re chalk-white, Maria, what’s the matter?’
‘Just got a bit frightened,’ she said. Her voice was trembling, but she was unbreakable in those minutes, as if at some level of herself, out on the concourse, she knew this might be the last and most decisive performance of her old life.
Michael lifted the bags. ‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right once you’re on the train.’
15
Maria
I always liked the trips over to Wemyss Bay and the way the seagulls followed the boat. It was so lovely to see the foam going back to the place you had left. Every time they threw the ropes from the pier I said goodbye as if it was the last time, and we had so much to look forward to, our bags packed for the next big thing, and the island got smaller behind us until it was gone.
The Dover cliffs are something else again and Michael is leaning over the side to get a good look. It’s nice up here, you can taste the sea-salt in your mouth, and there are children laughing and running on the deck. Just now Michael kissed me and I could smell something great like lemon on his hands and he looked back, what a distance now to the white cliffs. He closed me in next to him and I’m here now and calm. I dropped a ball of paper from my pocket over the side and it was there on the waves for a second then it opened up and was washed away.
‘Hey, litterbug,’ he said.
There will always be the words to other people’s songs, but Michael is here now, and I am here, and the fresh air my God you wouldn’t believe it. When I look up I think of all the miles the air has come to reach us, I think of it passing stars and planets, falling through clouds, and blowing over the English Channel, our mouths open to catch the air and to say what we want to say, to speak now, to speak out loud, and before long the land begins to appear over there, another coast. The day is beautiful, we are far from home, and the boat moves like a prayer over the water.
Acknowledgements
A number of publications were helpful to me in the writing of this novel. There are many, and I mention the main ones here. At several points in the narrative I draw on these sources, or import words from them, without reference being given in the text itself. I would like to express my thanks to the authors.
Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography
J. J. Audubon, The Birds of America
Françhise Cachin et al, Cézanne (exhibition catalogue: Grand Palais, Tate Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (trans. George Martin)
David Cesarini and Tony Kushner, eds., The Internment of Italians in 20th-Century Britain (Miriam Kochan’s study of women in the camps was invaluable)
Terri Colpi, Italians Forward
Errol Fuller, Extinct Birds
Hughie Green, Opportunity Knocked
Compton MacKenzie, Life and Times: Octave Eight
George Martineau, Sugar
Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike
Doreen Orion, I Know You Really Love Me
Wilhelm Hermann Solf, unpublished memoir
Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, From Fasting Saints to
Anorexic Girls
The Buteman newspaper
The Rothesay Academy Magazine, 1951–9
About the Author
Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone’s/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives in London.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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All rights reserved
© Andrew O’Hagan, 2003
The right of Andrew O’Hagan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26835–1
Personality Page 35