by Francis King
‘The water looks so inviting,’ Tim went on. ‘But it’s probably fearfully cold. Do you think one can swim in it?’
‘If it is too cold, the Serbelloni has a pool,’ Ma retorted even more crossly.
‘Bob can’t swim,’ I announced.
‘You can’t swim!’ Ma turned towards him. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. A boy of your age!’
Bob grinned, not all upset by the revelation. ‘Everyone at Gladbury is supposed to be able to swim. But I just sink like a stone.’
‘I’ll teach you,’ Tim said. ‘ Tomorrow. In the pool or in the lake, whichever is warmer.’ Ever since our arrival, he had been going out of his way to be friendly and helpful to us.
‘No thanks! I loathe water.’
‘Is that why you wash so little?’ Ma asked, making it sound like a joke, although I knew it to be a jibe.
Bob laughed. ‘Yes. I suppose so. I also loathe soap.’
‘Well, I’m hungry,’ Ma said. ‘Let’s see what Maria has prepared for us.’
Maria and her daughter, Violetta, had come with the house.
That afternoon Ma was lying out on the terrace in a bathing costume unusually skimpy for that period. She was avidly reading The Constant Nymph, the author of which, Margaret Kennedy, she had once or twice met as a neighbour. ‘One wouldn’t have thought that a woman like that could have written anything so racy,’ she told us.
Bob came into my bedroom, where I was loading my Box Brownie, and peered out of the window. Then he exclaimed: ‘Gosh!’
‘What is it?’
‘Come and take a dekko at this!’
Ma had rolled down the upper part of her bathing costume, to reveal her surprisingly large and firm breasts.
Bob, elbows resting on window sill and chin resting on hands, stared downwards. ‘They’re super! Just look at them! You’d never think she was a day over twenty.’
I glanced down, then turned away and returned to my camera. I was not merely embarrassed to look any longer; I was also panicky.
‘Oh, Christ. I’m getting a hard on!’
‘Get away from there! Bob! Bob!’ I strode over, caught him by an arm, and tugged him away.
‘Hang on a mo!’
‘No! Just behave yourself!’
‘What am I to do about this?’ He pointed to his erection, all at once reminding me of that time when he had masturbated before me.
‘I’ve no idea. I’m certainly not going to do anything about it.’
‘Oh, come on!’
Was he joking or was he serious?
‘Let’s get going!’ I said crossly. We had hired bicycles and were planning, over-ambitiously, to circle the lake.
‘Let me have just one more peek!’
‘No!’
I bundled him through the door.
Violetta could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen. Her cheeks were round and red and there was a deep dimple in her chin. A plait of thick black hair fell over a shoulder, and there was a faint shadow of hair along her upper lip. Her breasts were firm and large and her bare legs muscular, no doubt from the long walk up from the village to the villa high up on its spur of a hill. During lunch and then again during dinner I had been aware of Tim constantly, if furtively, examining her. I was sure that Ma was aware of it too.
After dinner Ma said: ‘You’d think they’d have taught that girl to wait properly at table. She just thrusts the food at one. And she kept appearing on the wrong side.’
‘What is the right side?’ Bob asked.
Ma ignored him. ‘When I tried to talk to her, she seemed to be half-witted,’ she went on.
‘Perhaps she was confused by your Italian,’ Tim said.
‘My Italian is perfectly adequate. No Italian ever has any difficulty in understanding it.’
‘I meant, darling, that perhaps she speaks some dialect. Your Italian is lingua toscana in bocca Romana. Which is as it should be.’ He was clearly mocking her. He had already told us that his own Italian had been learned as a boy, when his parents had taken up residence in Alassio because the cost of living was so much lower in Italy than in England.
Ma sighed. ‘If only one of these louts could play bridge, we could have a rubber together.’
‘We could teach them,’ Tim suggested.
Surprisingly Ma welcomed the suggestion. ‘ Oh, all right. Do go upstairs and fetch the cards, Mervyn. They’re on my dressing-table.’
I was a hopeless pupil, Bob a brilliant one. As an adult, he was often to play championship bridge.
‘I can see that you’re much brighter than my poor son,’ Ma told him.
‘Of course he is,’ I agreed. ‘He’s already in the sixth and I’m still stuck in the remove.’
‘Well, your father never had much brain, either.’
His bathing things in a rolled-up towel under an arm, Tim was talking to Violetta in the hall. From the sitting-room I could hear them. So could Ma, who was writing some postcards on her knee, with a large, old-fashioned rolled-gold fountain pen, once Aunt Bertha’s. Head on one side and tip of tongue protruding from between her glistening, scarlet lips, she listened for a while. Then she jumped to her feet and strode to the door. ‘Violetta!’ I heard her call. ‘Violetta!’ There followed a stream of no doubt inaccurate and mispronounced Italian, intermittently interrupted by Violetta’s frightened ‘Scusì, signora, scusì!’
Then Tim was saying in a bored, languid voice: ‘Oh, Bella sweetie, don’t, please don’t, be such a bore!’
‘Would you mind! I’m talking to the girl, not you. This house has to be cleaned and now is the time when she ought to be cleaning it. Now!’
Bob sneaked into the room. ‘They’re having a terrific row,’ he whispered.
‘Just an argument,’ I corrected. ‘I think they really enjoy them.’ ‘She’s jealous.’ ‘Rubbish!’ But of course he was right.
Having bicycled a considerable way round the lake in one direction on the previous day, we now set off in the opposite one. We pedalled lazily, zigzagging from side to side, since there was virtually no traffic, while talking to each other.
‘What do you suppose they do, actually do?’
‘Oh, shut up!’
‘I mean, do you think The One and Only fucks her? He looks as if he must be a queer. But she wouldn’t want to go around all the time with a queer, would she? And if he were a queer, he wouldn’t be so interested in Violetta.’
I shot ahead of him, bicycling hard. I hated the subject, I was frightened of it.
‘I wish she’d get interested in me.’ He had overtaken me.
‘Some hope! You’re far too young. And ugly. And smelly.’
He laughed, not in the least offended. ‘She seems to like them young.’
Eventually we halted so that I could have a swim. Bob got into bathing trunks but refused to enter the lake with me. Instead, he sat out on the bank, arms crossed and feet dangling in the water.
I soon emerged, shuddering. ‘ Golly, it’s cold! Freezing!’
‘It’s all that water coming down from the Alps.’
Briskly I began to rub myself down with a towel, while Bob began to dress.
‘While you were in there,’ he told me, while pulling his vest over his head, ‘ I was thinking of colour blindness. Did you realise that Tim is colour blind? Your mother asked him for one of those sweets; she said: ‘‘Give me the green one,’’ and he hadn’t a clue which one to give her. It’s odd, you know, colour blindness is found more often in men than in women. The reason is that a father transmits his X-chromosomes to all his daughters but to none of his sons, whereas a mother passes one of her two X’s to each of her children. Did you know that?’
I shook my head, uninterested.
‘Genetics are fascinating,’ he said. ‘I really want to learn German so that I can read Mendel’s paper in the original. He was an amazing man.’
‘Yes, you’ve told me all about him.’ I almost added: Often.
Dressed, Bob pointed
: ‘ Look at all those roses! Have you ever seen roses like that?’
Beside us, there was a low wall and, beyond it, a large, modern villa. In front of the villa there was a formal garden, scrupulously weeded, with beds of hybrid roses, such as Ma would never allow in the Campden Hill Square garden, finding them ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’ – two favourite epithets of hers.
‘I’m going to pick some,’ he said.
‘You can’t. It’s a private garden.’ Just as he was naturally lawless, I was naturally law-abiding. ‘Bob!’
He had begun to climb the wall. As he did so, I heard the frenzied barking of a dog.
As soon as he had jumped down on the other side, an Alsatian, head lowered and coat bristling, rushed up. I watched in horror, certain that the dog would maul him. With his usual fearlessness, Bob stooped, lowered a hand, made encouraging noises. In a moment, the dog had slunk up to him and had begun to lick his fingers.
Followed by the dog, Bob walked over to one of the rose bushes. He struggled to break off a branch and eventually succeeded in doing so. He approached another bush and, tugging at it, swore ‘Fuck!’ as he scratched a thumb. Eventually he clambered back over the wall, a huge bouquet gripped in a hand.
‘I thought you were going to be torn apart.’
He sucked at the scratch. ‘Dogs are like humans. You must never show them you’re frightened.’
Having tied the roses on to the carrier of the bicycle, he jumped astride it. ‘These roses are for someone very special,’ he said.
I did not need to ask him who the someone very special was.
Ma examined the roses. ‘Oh, how kind of you, Bob,’ she said in a perfunctory voice. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘An old woman was selling them by the roadside,’ he lied.
Ma again examined them. She wrinkled up her small, retroussé nose. ‘I hope you didn’t pay too much,’ she said. ‘They’re really rather past it,’ She gave the bunch a shake. Like the bouquet brought by Mrs Pavlovsky to Dad’s funeral, this one at once shed some petals. ‘You can always rely on an Italian to do you down,’ Ma said.
The next morning, Bob asked me: ‘Where do you think she put the flowers?’
‘What flowers?’
‘The roses, idiot! I can’t see them anywhere.’
‘Perhaps they’re in her bedroom.’
He shrugged, unconvinced.
That afternoon we were exploring the large, overgrown garden, which fell down, in a series of crumbling terraces, to the lake. There was a small wooden summer-house, which could be rotated on an axle to catch the sun. There were also chicken hutches and a chicken run, enclosed with wire netting, but no chickens; an asparagus bed, in which the asparagus was as tall as the cow-parsley around it; and a rusty incinerator, from which acrid smoke was mounting in lethargic coils.
Bob peered into the incinerator. Then he coughed, as the smoke crept into his lungs, and cried out: ‘Take a look at this!’
I went over. On top of a smouldering mound of vegetable peelings, old newspapers and wrapping paper, some roses were scattered, their petals shrivelled and brown, their stems black.
‘My roses,’ he said.
‘Are they? They must be some other ones,’ I said, although I knew that they were his.
Again he leaned over the incinerator and again he coughed from the smoke.
‘Why do you think she threw them away? Why?’ He turned and faced me. ‘Your fucking mother threw them away!’
It was from that time that I noticed a total change in his attitude to Ma. He had loved her. Now he hated her.
The abruptness of this change, as though a once brilliantly lit room had, at the touch of a switch, been plunged into darkness, has never ceased to puzzle me. In my own case, the transition from love to loathing was infinitely slow, paralleling the medical history of a neighbour of ours who died a month or two ago. Over the years, even though he continued successfully with his job as a dentist, this man’s behaviour became more and more erratic. Now he seemed to be in a state of vegetable torpor, now in one of feverish excitement. Then, after some kind of seizure in the high street, he was discovered to have a brain tumour. Apparently he had had it for ten or eleven years. The hatred within me grew with a similar slowness. But Bob succumbed to his hatred with the devastating speed with which, in a tropical country, a man totally healthy one day has expired by the next.
Chapter Twenty Three
We had hired a boat. I was rowing, since Bob was so clumsy at doing so, and he was lolling at the other end, the strings of the rudder in his hands.
‘What’s your mother doing?’ he asked.
‘She said she was going to have a siesta.’
‘She’s still got a hangover.’
‘No, she hasn’t. Don’t talk bilge.’
‘All that drinking last night. First the row, then the drinking.’
‘That wasn’t a row. That was just an argument.’
‘If you ask me, he’s not fucking her enough. Women get like that when they’re not being fucked as much as they want.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
‘It’s well known. And a woman as highly sexed as your mother … That’s probably the main reason why she gave your father the push.’
Scowling, as I panted at the oars, I said nothing. Perhaps, probably, what he was saying was true. But, as so often when he had some criticism of Ma, I did not want him to put it into words, I did not want to hear it.
Suddenly I was aware of the din of a motor boat approaching.
‘Look out!’ Bob warned.
As the motor boat roared past, our little craft rocked frantically from side to side. What would happen if it capsized? Since Bob could not swim, he would probably drown.
‘Shits!’ I muttered.
Then Bob said: ‘Golly! Do you know who was on board?’
I rested the oars. ‘ Who?’
‘Tim. And he was wearing your sweater again. And he was with that American who’s staying at the Serbelloni.’
‘Which American?’
‘The one Tim talked to by the pool. Don’t you remember? You must remember. You thought he must be a pansy.’
On that previous occasion, the elderly American had been wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, white shorts which revealed legs on which the varicose veins stood out like knotted red and purple cords, and huge sunglasses which covered more than half his face. He had sat in a deck-chair reading the New York Herald Tribune. From time to time he had lowered this newspaper in order to stare at me, while I lay sunbathing not far from him and Tim was trying to teach Bob to swim. Later, he and Tim had gone into the hotel bar for a drink, leaving Bob and me by the pool. Later still, on the way home, Tim had told us airily that the American was ‘ someone involved in show business’, whom he had met at a London party.
‘What’s going on?’ Bob asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why should The One and Only be with him? He said he was going into Como to do some shopping. Remember? He was going to take the vaporetto.’
‘Perhaps he missed it.’
‘Then he could have taken the next. They go every twenty minutes … What do you know about Tim?’
‘Very little. Dad called him a chorus-boy.’
‘A gigolo more likely. Your mother’s batty to waste so much money on him.’
That evening Tim eyed us warily. No doubt he was fearful that we would betray to Ma, either deliberately or accidentally, that we had seen him in the motor boat with the American.
‘Are the shops in Como any good?’ Ma asked, removing the dark glasses which she had obviously been wearing because of her hangover.
Tim shook his head. ‘Not really.’
‘Did you buy anything?’
‘I almost bought a tie. But it was ridiculously expensive. I could buy one like it for half the price at Sulka’s. And I almost bought you a bag,’ he added. ‘ Rather attractive. But again … I’ll buy you one in London instead.’
&
nbsp; Ma smiled at him and then impulsively put out a hand to his cheek. ‘You’re so good to me!’
‘And you’re so good to me!’ He took the hand and pulled it to his chest.
It amazed me that he should be able to lie with such facility.
Chapter Twenty Four
I have just left Noreen at the Royal Sussex, where she is to have the first of a series of gold injections.
‘It sounds terribly extravagant,’ she told me as, with a grimace of pain, she settled herself into the seat beside me in the car and fastened the safety belt.
‘Don’t worry. You’re worth your weight in gold.’
She liked my silly joke. ‘In lead more likely,’ she said. ‘I get so tired of heaving this ancient carcass around.’
‘Now don’t talk like that!’
We both laughed.
Now I am in the reference room of the public library, turning over the pages of Who’s Who. Of course Bob will be in it, whereas I should qualify only for a volume of Who’s Nobody. Ah, here he is! The knighthood. The foreign orders. The membership of innumerable committees and societies. The professorship in England and the subsequent one in the States. Yes, the entry gives a private address. I was afraid that, like many eminent people, he might withhold it. I write it down. It is not all that far away, in a village the other side of Canterbury. I could drive there easily.
Back in the car, I wonder yet again why he should have sent me the typescript and enclosed no covering letter or even an address with it. Was he trying to punish me? Or taunt me? Or provoke me? Or challenge me?
As always, I cannot be sure of his motives.
Chapter Twenty Five
As Bob and I walked up from one crumbling, overgrown terrace to another, we heard the angry voices. What would the two elderly women in the next-door villa be thinking? They spent most of the day at their needlework out on their terrace. Each had a sallow, lined face, and grey hair pulled back into a small, tight bun. Each hobbled on a stick. Tim thought that they were twins, but Ma, pointing out that one was taller than the other and had a bigger nose, was sure that they were ‘girlfriends’. When they saw Bob and me over the low wall, they would always call out a greeting in Italian, their voices strident and hoarse.