She was grateful for the earlier centuries. Grateful that the present so quickly became the past and that the past was so pliable to the touch. The Ponte Vecchio, circa 1490, for example. She wandered across it, marvelled that the hawkers of cheese and olives already knew nothing of Dante, dead a mere two hundred years. Never ’eard of ’im, they said. ’Ave some olives, luv. Goldsmiths beckoned her, dangling bracelets like bait. Students in wine-splattered gowns ogled her and joked. Dante? they said. Well of course, but he’s so passé. A little embarrassing. Not to be considered typical of Florence. Somewhat blind (they winked knowingly at each other) to the sensual realities of the flesh. All this Beatrice stuff; everyone knows nothing ever happened between them. Perugino, now, and that wench he keeps in his studio, that’s a different story.
She meandered through Medici gossip, she listened for Savonarola in every piazza, the bright details of history buffeted her. She tripped on a basket of fish. The Arno stank. She was searching the crowds for Perugino, who had smuggled an Umbrian girl into Florence. The girl had been murdered by the Medicis. She watched for a man obsessed with a woman in black, haunted by the memory of her eyes.
Felicity sat at her desk and phoned Rome and Florence. She talked with others who sailed in the Renaissance, who were anchored safely outside the here and now. They discussed ongoing restoration, government permission and aid and interference, travel arrangements for the largest of paintings, insurance, the political and nationalist connotations of certain canvases. They gave every indication of expert awareness of today. This was their finest act of camouflage.
Somewhere toward the twilight of the Umbrian and Florentine schools, a secretary came slipping down between the tall colonnades that flanked the Uffizi, leaning into the fog of the desk lamp.
Was there some sort of problem? she seemed to be asking.
The Italian government, Felicity said, still has reservations about some of the requests.
No, no, the secretary said. Problems, she meant, with the two gentlemen who came in the morning, who were, according to Old Joe at the front desk, though this was surely ridiculous, from the FBI. Staff members were wondering if something was missing from the permanent collection?
Ah, Felicity said. That. No, no one should worry in the least. There was nothing the matter.
Would Felicity object, in that case, if her secretary left now, since it was well past five?
Felicity smiled ruefully. Of course not. You should know, she remonstrated gently, not to set your clock by me. Leave early tomorrow to compensate.
Felicity stretched luxuriously into the emptiness. She preferred to be alone with her own people, the crowd of framed witnesses. Possibly, some day, the gallery would acquire one of Seymour’s portraits. She liked the thought of her lopsided eyes continuing to look down on the flagstoned courtyard after she had gone. She wandered over to the windows of her loggia. Dogwoods flirted with their shadows, students leaned on their bicycles and unwound long, languid arguments as though summer would go on forever. And over there, blurry in the golden haze …
Giddiness seized her, she hit an air pocket of the present. He was there, leaning against his car, the gun blatant on his hip, confident, menacing, waiting. Hunter.
What now?
She paced the room, agitated, assessing. She paced the hallways where her people watched, sympathetic, no doubt, but impassive. A Titian head averted its eyes. In some situations, Gauguin admitted, the simple intensities of colour may not suffice. Braque offered only a rhomboid solution, impenetrable.
The telephone rang.
She jumped, returned, breathless, to her room, and answered it.
“I just want to reassure you that you’re under my personal surveillance at all times.” Hunter, like hot treacle, flowed into her ear. “No one else can touch you, you’re in my keeping.”
Felicity hung up. Her hand was shaking. She dialled her aunts’ number. No answer. Their tea-and-symphony night.
She tried Seymour again. No answer.
Aaron. She could not resist the temptation. He always worked late. But his secretary was still there too and said coolly, “I’m afraid he’s not available. I gave him your message.” (And how could Felicity blame him?)
Stay calm, she told herself. At the very worst, from the law’s point of view, I did something impulsive and misguided. (In the corners of her mind, there were whisperings that the nature of her transgression was not catalogued in the broad tables of the law.) Below her window, Hunter waited.
She would feel, not safer perhaps, simplyless exposed, if someone knew. It would be so soothing to hear Aunt Norwich say: Really, Felicity, such a melodramatic … It would be even better to turn to someone who acknowledged the seriousness …
Augustine Kelly! She rummaged in her wastepaper basket until she found the four pieces of his business card. She taped them together.
It was now after six — too late to phone his office. She summoned Winston, Ontario, from the electronic ether and his wife answered.
“Could I speak with Mr Augustine Kelly, please?” she asked, crisply professional. “This is a long-distance call, and it’s urgent.”
In the three seconds’ silence, and then the click, she read the solitude of several people.
She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes and watched until she could no longer tell whether the tossing black dot was a fishing boat or a fluorescent lightfleck on her retina.
Alone.
Of course, after the initial panic, one finds one can always go on. One turns and settles for the ayah’s hand, the next step. I’ll go on working, she thought, until the aunts get home from the concert. I’ll spend the night with them.
Telephone. As though an electric shock had been administered. Wary, she watched its shrill seizure. She raised the receiver an inch, cut off the call with her finger, and dialled Montreal.
“Oh Jean-Marc,” she said to the tape. “I’m so frightened.”
18
Felicity knows about fear. There are two kinds, she said when I was ten years old. I was bawling my eyes out in the woods. I was running away for good. I had pummelled her till I had no energy left.
“It’s all right, Jean-Marc,” she kept saying. “It’ll be all right.”
Maybe a certain kind of devotion sprouts out of desolation, I don’t know. They say that baby monkeys, taken away from their mothers and wrapped in terry cloth, fall in love with the piece of cloth. At ten, I suppose, one is desperate to find someone perfect, and it couldn’t be my own mother, who was just beginning to move away down the long corridor of new possibilities with a widowed carpenter. Her bitterness toward the Old Volcano slopped over on to me. (Really, how could I blame her? After each visit, my clothes stank of him. Literally. An odour of oils and paint thinner and self-indulgence.)
“There’s the fear,” Felicity said, “that you’re all alone in the world.” She was stroking my hair and I let myself grow still and settled my head against her shoulder. Her skin was creamy and smelled of gardenias. Even her hair was fragrant. It made me think of ferns and darkly brilliant flowers. (She has always smelled of the tropics. She still does.) And her voice went murmuring on: “That particular fear’s easy to handle. You just say to yourself, ‘I am all alone and I don’t mind. I like it that way.’ You see, Jean-Marc, the truth is that everyone is alone, and all the people who matter to you are going to leave you sooner or later. You expect it, so it doesn’t bother you.”
“My father leaves all his girlfriends,” I said. Pure reflex. The habit of turning any knife that lay to hand.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Of course he does.”
I thought about how I was going to stab him one day with the pointed handles of his paintbrushes. His blood would come squirting out like colour from a new tube of paint and I would dip a brush in it and make great smears of red across his paintings. I also thought about the time I was going to find him bleeding on his studio floor because someone else had stabbed him first (some enrage
d and abandoned woman), and how grateful he was going to be that I had arrived in the nick of time, and how sorry that he had never realized, and so on.
“The other kind of fear,” Felicity said, “is much worse, and I never quite learned what to do about it, though Hester said there was a trick.”
“Why?” I asked. “What is it? Who’s Hester?” I forgot I hated her. I forgot I was never going to speak to her. “Tell me about the other kind.”
“I don’t like to remember it,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about it.”
Tell me, tell me, I begged.
And so she did.
Once upon a time, she said, there was a Moreton Bay fig tree so big that if you sat under it, with your back against the trunk, you couldn’t see the sky at all. It grew in one corner of a schoolyard in Brisbane, Australia, and the teachers said it was at least two hundred years old. No doubt it’s still there, but I’ve never been back to see.
The tree spread itself like a great umbrella whose points almost touched the ground. Under this canopy the light was murky and green, no grass could grow, and roots lay in waiting in the dirt: long, bony fingers that might reach out and grab a passing child. Perhaps for this reason children avoided the cave beneath the branches. But also, and mainly, on account of the trenches.
There are ghosts in the trenches, a boy told Felicity. (She was ten years old, and new to the school, and many things seemed strange to her.) The boy pulled his mouth into a skeleton’s slit with his index fingers, made his eyes go big and whitely blind, and let a long, ghastly, ululating cry slide out of his throat. That’s the sound they make, he said. When it rains, you can hear them.
The trenches began in the corner of the schoolyard and ran along inside the fences like two arms of a compass set at ninety degrees. Each arm was about fifty feet long. Beyond the damp and shadowy circle of the tree, these old indentations were choked with soft grasses and wild flowers. They looked harmless and inviting: places to roll in, to hide in, to jump across.
But under the tree, where nothing grew, there was something frightening about the two scarred and naked wings of the ditch. They made one think of open graves. Or of the empty eye sockets of the giant creature whose root-fingers scrabbled at the ground. In the rainy season a porridge of red clay leaked into the eye sockets and made horrible sucking sounds.
At home, Felicity asked her grandparents: “What are the trenches for?”
“Good heavens!” said her grandfather. “Haven’t they filled those in yet?” He shook his head mournfully. “There’ll be an accident some day. A broken leg, or worse. What are they waiting for? The next war?”
“What are they for?” Felicity persisted.
“For in the war,” her grandmother said. “When the air-raid bell rang.”
“You see, we thought we might be bombed,” her grandfather said. “After the Japanese bombed Darwin, all the schools in Queensland had to dig trenches for air-raid shelters. There used to be sandbags along both sides. Your mother was teaching at your school then. Look, I’ll show you.”
There was a drawer in an old dresser that was crammed with photographs. When anyone opened it, the pictures would spill onto the floor like fish out of a burst aquarium. A waterfall of the past. All the pictures were a sort of creamy brown colour, not even proper black and white. It took her grandfather a long time to find the one he wanted.
“There!” he said at last.
Felicity saw the Moreton Bay fig and long lines of children wearing old-fashioned clothes and a young woman with cropped curly hair. The woman’s back was to the camera and her soft, lacy dress was caught in below the waist and fell to halfway down her calves. She was holding the hand of a child and pointing to the line of sandbags.
“That’s your mother,” Felicity’s grandfather said. “During an air-raid drill. The school bell used to ring and everyone had to stop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the trenches.”
Felicity looked intently at the back of the mother whom she had never met. But the people in the photograph seemed to be on the other side of a thin white cloud, as though sunlight had been spilled on the picture and had stained it with too much brightness. The harder Felicity looked, the hazier her mother became. If only she could make her turn around.
“Are there ghosts in the trenches?” she asked.
“Of course not,” her grandmother said.
But a teacher said yes, there was a ghost. One air-raid drill had lasted for hours. It was during the rainy season and the children and teachers had huddled together, cramped and wet and shivering, listening for Japanese planes. When the bell sounded the all clear and the roll was called, a Grade Two boy was missing. They found him in the corner of the trench, under the tree, hunched up into a little bundle, his arms locked around his knees. He must have fallen asleep and slumped, face down, into the red mud. The coroner said death by drowning.
“When it rains, you can hear him crying,” the teacher said. “So stay away from the trenches under the tree. They’re dangerous.”
An unnecessary caution. The circle of shadow around the Moreton Bay fig was taboo. Except for Felicity. And except for Hester. But then, they hardly counted. They were both peculiar. Like the boy who had drowned in the mud, they would pass into folklore.
Felicity was peculiar because she was wild. She could catch cricket balls like a boy, without flinching, and could climb the straight columns of the palm trees. Monkey girl, monkey girl, the children chanted, and threw pebbles at her. She would find her desk and her pencil case filled with nuts and leaves. Strangest of all, if you got her really mad, she would burst into some other language that no one knew. Jabbering. Just like a monkey. Every week she tore a dress. The teachers shook their heads, but were never angry. She’s Evelyn’s child, they would whisper. Poor little Evelyn who fell in love with a Yankee soldier. Poor little Evelyn who died in India.
No question, Felicity was the teachers’ pet because of poor Evelyn. And because of the way she could read. In the fifth grade she could read better than most Grade Eights. The headmaster, Mr Barlow, used to send for her and make her stand in front of the Grade Eight class. Grade Eighters were giants whose limbs hung over shrunken desks. Their arms were like vines run amok. They were a jungle crop of glowering eyes.
Mr Barlow would take the Grade Eight Reader and open it just anywhere and hand it to Felicity. She would be expected to sight-read aloud. She hated doing this. Each time she prayed for a page that would be too difficult, but Mr Barlow never found one. He would beam and pat her on the head and send her back to her own classroom. There, Miss Richards would smile and tweak her curls, oblivious to the fog of scowls rising from arithmetic books. Oh, Felicity was certainly peculiar.
Hester was also peculiar, but for quite different reasons. She was older, maybe as old as thirteen, but had been “kept back” in the fifth grade. She was slow. Her left leg was one of the seven wonders of the school, being only about one-quarter of the thickness of her right leg. The skin on it seemed to be stretched tight, and was very shiny, as though Hester worked on it with wax and a polishing mitt. She walked as a person walks who has one foot on a low fence and the other on the ground. On her left foot she wore a boot instead of a shoe, and the boot had a stirrup attached, from which iron rods ascended and disappeared up under her dress. It was rumoured that she wore an iron cage under her panties. It was also rumoured that she wore the cage over her panties, and that each night her mother had to unlock it and drain off the day’s pee and shit.
Felicity knew this was not true because of what had happened in the girls’ lavs. (Though one had to say, “Please may I go to the lavatory?” to teachers, among themselves the children always spoke of “the lavs”.) The doors in the lavs could not be fastened. They swung to and fro with a metal shriek. If you were sitting on the toilet, you had to hold one leg straight out in front of you so that no one could push the door open and stare. Though of course this happened all the time. E
veryone did it. You pretended you didn’t know there was someone already inside, and then you sang:
Higgledy-piggledy rub-a-dub dum,
I can see your big fat bum!
The best thing, when you had to go, was to take a friend who stood guard at the door while you went; then you stood guard while your friend went. But Felicity, being new and strange, had no friend to guard the door. And neither did Hester.
At first, on the day Felicity learned that Hester did not have to pee into an iron cage, she thought there must have been a terrible accident in the lavs. So much commotion! But then she heard someone say: It’s only Hester Ironpants. And indeed, several girls were helping Hester to show off the full length of her metal underwear. Her arms and legs were being held as though she were a letter X, and the skirt of her dress was pulled up over her head like a bag. She did not look human at all.
Felicity watched with the same awful fascination as everyone else. Just above where the leg cage passed through a metal garter, the left hip and buttock were unnaturally shrunken. Felicity thought of a balloon that has gone down, even though its neck is still tied — how it becomes a spongy wrinkled smallness. Disgusting, somehow. And contemptible. Around this shrivelled-up bum there was a system of metal bars and leather straps tying the whole contraption to the waist, and the skin that showed between was horribly pallid — the way skin goes under a Band-Aid that has been worn for several days.
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