That Summer in Ischia

by Penny Feeny

  A taxi throbbed in the street outside. The front door slammed. Michael was back. She could hear the clank of his golf clubs as he deposited them in the corner of the cloakroom, the snuffling of Rolo’s greeting, his heavy tread as he went through to the sitting room to pour himself a nightcap. She suspected he’d already had several pints in the clubhouse. They both drank too much. When she’d been preparing for IVF she’d abstained totally, but it hadn’t made any difference. Afterwards, alcohol had comforted her.

  She expected him to switch on the television, wrinkling his nose at the scent the visitors had left behind. The chairs were still arranged in a circle because she hadn’t felt up to pushing them back into place. While he was reorganizing them she could save the message into her drafts folder. It was too abrupt, it needed more explanation.

  ‘Good chinwag then?’

  He must have crept up the stairs; she hadn’t heard him approach her door. She swung around too quickly in her seat; all of a sudden the pain sliced into her again. She gave an involuntary cry.

  ‘Something the matter?’

  Michael was a large, rumpled man with a lived-in face and an unexpectedly tender touch. She would no more want to hurt him than to hurt Rolo. ‘I pulled a muscle this morning,’ she said. ‘Or trapped a nerve or something. It’s been agony.’

  ‘D’you want me to fetch you anything? Hot water bottle?’

  ‘I tried that. And painkillers. I think they’re wearing off, that’s all.’

  ‘You could rub in some muscle relaxant.’

  ‘I thought we had some in the bathroom but it must be finished and I couldn’t get out to buy more because I had the book group coming.’ She knew she sounded woeful. What would be nice, she thought, is if he would pick me up, carry me into the bedroom, undress me and give me a massage. In the past, that’s what he would have done. When they couldn’t get enough of each other. When love-making was an adventure and a passion, before it became a chore regulated by thermometers and hypodermic syringes and stupid sticks you had to pee over. Now sex was a means to an end and pleasure had been leached from it.

  Michael entered the room and swayed a little. His breath was malty with Guinness. He bent over her and nuzzled her neck. ‘I’ll make it better,’ he crooned in her ear.

  She squealed again, which he took to be protest. He glanced at the screen. He couldn’t have had time to read the message, she told herself afterwards, and anyway there was nothing incriminating in it.

  ‘I’ll take care of it, love,’ he said reassuringly, and clicked the send button.

  PART THREE

  CASA COLONNATA

  14

  A school party, a phalanx of skinny limbs and bouncing backpacks, filed past the kiosk ahead of them and was swallowed into the ruins. Shrieks of laughter spun and eddied in the hot air but might have belonged to ghosts: in the maze of fallen masonry and ancient brick walls no one was visible. Unlike the Forum and the Palatine where crowds thronged as thickly as they did in Roman times, Ostia Antica was practically deserted. Rows of Doric columns guarded grassy roofless temples. The curving rows of the amphitheatre banked upwards, glistening white and vacant. At ground level a desultory spray of sand masked the fin of a mosaic fish, the tail of a dog. At waist height a marble counter beneath an archway indicated a 2000-year-old bar. A fringe of cypresses sealed off the modern world.

  Allie settled herself in the shady corner of what had once been a public bath-house and flipped open her water bottle. The excited children sounded distant and unreal; close by insects rustled through dry leaves. She’d left Dom and Meg wandering around the old market place, holding their cameras aloft like talismans against the sun, pointing and shooting. She hoped they wouldn’t hurry to find her. She didn’t usually crave solitude, but she hadn’t anticipated her current situation.

  There had been four of them to begin with. Four girls meeting at Victoria to board the boat train to Calais at the start of their expedition. It had not worked out as planned. Paris proved too expensive so they’d taken the TGV down to Nice. Nice had promised much: a budget hotel room with four beds, basking sunshine, an astonishingly azure sea, an abundance of vivid flowers spilling from baskets, clumped into galvanized buckets, bursting from terracotta pots. They’d snacked in ethnic cafés, danced in dim-lit cellar clubs and got headily drunk.

  And then Char had her bag stolen with her money and her passport and her precious InterRail ticket in it and everything was soured. Jess had gone on about the idiocy of keeping all her stuff in one place and the row had further spoiled their harmony. They’d spent two days hanging around the Consulate and the police station, filling in forms. Char declared she wasn’t in the mood for any more holiday: she would go home, claim on her travel insurance and splash out at the Leeds Festival or something instead.

  Allie and Jess and Nita continued around the coast into Italy and stopped to take stock in Florence. Wilting in a slow-moving queue in the Uffizi cloisters, besieged by touts offering handbags, cigarette lighters and cheap pizza deals, Jess had suggested they scrap the rest of Italy – ‘too many fucking coach parties’ – and travel east. Allie was furious. She’d set her heart on getting to Rome, and then, if appropriate, suggesting that Ischia might be a good place to chill for a few days. But the others had dismissed her objections and they’d ended up shuffling through the galleries in miserable, mutinous silence.

  It was later in a bar, when all three girls were resolutely not discussing their itinerary, that they met Dom and Meg. They overheard them discussing Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and debating whether it had altered their views of the works.

  ‘Hey,’ said Jess. ‘Weren’t you guys in the Uffizi this afternoon?’

  ‘Man, what a scrum!’ said Dom. ‘But we’ve got this pass so we can go again. Get there, like, really early tomorrow morning. Off to Rome the day after.’

  ‘So are we,’ said Allie. ‘I mean . . .’ She frowned at her friends’ blank faces. ‘I mean that was our original plan. Only . . .’

  ‘I’m ready for another drink,’ said Jess. ‘Anyone else?’

  By the end of the third litre of wine Dom and Meg were inviting Allie to join them and Jess, relieved, was saying: ‘No worries, Al. You know you wanted to go down there. And we can hook up later on in’ – she screwed up her face as if imagining the mass of interconnecting railway lines – ‘maybe Krakow or somewhere.’

  Which was how Allie found herself in the silted-up ruins of the ancient port of Ostia with a couple of earnest postgraduates in hiking boots whom she hardly knew. She could hear Dom calling her name – Allie? Allie! – the sound of it bouncing off the marble columns, getting closer. Then he was standing in front of her. With legs apart, arms akimbo, and a neat pointed beard, he was a series of triangles against the clear blue sky. ‘There you are! I was getting worried.’ Since the moment they’d mounted the high steps of the train at Florence station, he’d treated her like a bird with a broken wing. ‘Sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m cool, thanks.’

  Meg joined them. A frizz of brown curls bubbled on her head; she spoke in a soft plaintive monotone. ‘Don’t you think this is such an amazing place? Abandoned all those thousands of years ago and still nobody comes here. It just aches, doesn’t it, with loss?’

  ‘In point of fact,’ said Dom who carried a small library in his backpack, which wrenched his shoulders into military stiffness, ‘some rather crude reconstruction has been attempted in the past. Sections of walls randomly rebuilt. You wouldn’t get away with it these days.’

  Dom and Meg were avid sightseers. They bought passes that gave you entry to the maximum number of museums. They consulted guidebooks and printed pages off the internet and bound them into a folder between coloured dividers. They drew up schedules and calculated timetables. They were in their early twenties but reminded her of her teachers. They also had a surprising capacity for alcohol, which was why they’d been such good company that first night. After a session getting wasted, they were
able to wake up fresh and lively and with perfect recall – which Allie thought was an unfair advantage.

  ‘The problem,’ Dom said, lowering himself to her level, ‘is that we could lose each other in this place if we’re not careful. You should make sure you keep your phone switched on. Now it costs silly money to make the call, so what I propose is we ring each other’s number a few times and then hang up.’

  Allie was mystified. Dom often came up with curious penny-pinching suggestions. Some, like filling your water bottle from a street fountain, were sensible – if obvious. Others, like validating your bus ticket at the end of your journey to gain you more time, were unnecessarily complicated. ‘How does that help?’ she said. ‘If the person doesn’t answer, how do you know where they are?’

  Dom licked his finger and held it up. ‘No wind, you see. Listen to the crickets! You’ll be able to hear the ringing miles away and you can go on calling until you track each other down.’

  ‘Why don’t you just shout the person’s name? Like you did before.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘You didn’t answer.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Meg, ‘I’ve got a whistle.’ She ferreted in her backpack. ‘It’s one of those things they recommend you keep with you as a woman traveller. You should really have one, Allie, since you’re by yourself. Here, take it.’

  It dangled from a piece of white ribbon. Allie blew a piercing blast and thought how useful it would have been when they were arguing interminably in Nice and Florence.

  Meg pressed her hands over her ears. ‘At least we won’t lose you again.’

  ‘Time for a break anyway,’ said Dom, sitting cross-legged and gulping his water.

  ‘It’s brilliant, isn’t it,’ said Meg, ‘to have the whole place to ourselves. I wonder how it will compare with Pompeii.’ She peeled an orange in neat strips and insisted on dividing and sharing the segments equally. ‘How well do you know it, Allie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pompeii.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t. I’ve never been there.’

  ‘But your father’s from Naples, right?’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what you said last night.’

  ‘Christ, did I?’ She swallowed a too large piece of orange and choked. ‘No, no, you’ve got that wrong. My dad lives in Scotland.’

  Meg pursed her tiny mouth in her heart-shaped face.

  ‘I didn’t mean, I don’t actually know . . .’ It was the sambuca’s fault; disgusting, sickly drink.

  ‘Your biological father,’ said Meg helpfully. ‘You’re looking for your roots.’

  A lizard scuttled into a crack in the stone, a dark safe crack beyond prying eyes and predators. Allie downed some water to soothe her throat. ‘Oh my God, I do come out with utter crap, don’t I? Sorry, guys.’

  ‘We’d be happy to help, you know,’ Dom said. ‘Naples is a big place and quite dangerous in parts. You don’t want to go tramping the streets there on your own.’

  She was trying to laugh it off. ‘But now I have my whistle!’

  He fingered his beard, drawing it into a peak. ‘Even with a whistle.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s what I said? Only, the man I think might be my father – and I know it sounds ridiculously Victorian or soapy or something – but anyway, I understood he came from Rome. That’s the reason for the trip: I was born here.’

  ‘So why are you going to Naples then? You could just look him up in the phone book.’

  Well, she’d tried, but his name wasn’t listed. And how could she have phoned up out of the blue, blundered into a stranger’s life? This was an enterprise that needed cautious tactics: one step at a time along the route that had led to her existence. And it had fitted in well with the general holiday plans until they got screwed up. ‘I’m going to Naples for the same reason you are. To see Pompeii and Herculaneum.’

  ‘Right.’ Meg nodded, flashes of sunlight sparking from her frizzy halo. ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, then I’ll do what we fixed up in Florence. Get the sleeper north and meet the girls in Romania or wherever.’

  ‘Saves paying for a hotel,’ observed Dom. ‘Sleeping on the train, even cheaper if you don’t book a berth.’

  Allie winced. She wished they’d stop crowding her. And it didn’t help that they had all sorts of stuff on her because they could remember what she’d let out when she was lashed and she couldn’t. Plus, it made her queasy to be with a couple who held hands all the time. Holding hands had never been Sam’s style. He didn’t care for public displays of affection; you might alienate your fans. He’d always introduce her in a casual offhand way: this is Allie. She’s on drums. Not: she’s the girl I love, the girl who warms my bed, who scores my songs, who never misses a fucking beat. Not that she wanted to be reminded of Sam – which was another problem with being in this awkward configuration of three.

  Meg tidied away her orange peel and took out her notebook. ‘I’ve got down Villa Giulia for tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We can catch the train late afternoon and get up early for Pompeii first thing the next morning. Apart from anything else, you wouldn’t want to be traipsing around it in the midday sun.’

  ‘You don’t have to wait for me. I’m not really a morning person.’

  ‘Nonsense, we’ll make sure you’re awake.’

  ‘And entry is majorly expensive,’ said Dom, ‘even for concessions, so you’ll want to get full value from the visit. And after that . . .’

  ‘Actually,’ said Allie. ‘I might give myself a day off, take a boat out to one of the islands for a change of scene.’

  Meg cocked an eyebrow. ‘Oh, which one?’

  With a sudden whooping, an outcrop of the school party chased each other past the entrance to the bath-house. Allie watched their stampede and mumbled, ‘I was thinking of Capri.’

  15

  Allie woke in an unfamiliar room in the spare light of dawn. It had been cheaper to book a triple. (No worries, Dom said. We don’t mind if you don’t.) Her bed was in a corner alcove, at right angles to theirs, and nearer to the bathroom. They were both sleeping face-down. Meg muttered and kicked at the cotton coverlet. The alarm wasn’t due to go off for another hour, but already there were brakes screeching and gears grinding from traffic at the nearby intersection, the gurgle of plumbing and the rattle of news from televisions turned up too loud.

  She thumped the pillow which was giving her a crick in the neck and it bounced like rubber under her palm. She knew Dom and Meg were well-intentioned. They were members of Greenpeace. They’d protested against the war in Iraq (well, who hadn’t?). They were a source of information (in English). They didn’t fret or miss trains or lose their possessions. But she didn’t think she could handle another minute of their company. If she didn’t bail out now, their nerve-jangling pedantry would flip her into a pit of despair.

  She stole into the bathroom with a pen and her diary. Dear Dom and Meg, she wrote on a page ripped from December, I’m making an early start and didn’t want to wake you. Hope you have a great time checking out Pompeii. She paused. They might think she was going on a day trip. If she didn’t return as expected, they might report her missing. She could hardly say: please don’t try to find me. She wasn’t going into hiding. Many thanks for everything should do it. You wouldn’t write that to people you were seeing later for supper. She added a couple of kisses after her name so it looked more affectionate and crept back into the bedroom. Dom had turned over; his beard was jutting towards the ceiling, his arm was trailing to the floor. Luckily there were clean clothes at the top of her backpack. She buckled the straps silently but the teeth of the zipped section grated. A feral cat yowled below their window.

  Allie felt shitty, leaving her pathetic message by her empty bed and slinking out of the door, but she couldn’t see any alternative. She knew they’d keep on at her until she agreed to stick with them and then she’d hate herself even more for not taking the initiative. That’s your trouble, Sam had told her, s
hortly after composing a totally weird and to her mind totally wonderful new song. You don’t strike out often enough. Beat your own path.

  In the small reception lobby, she paid her third of the room bill to a wall-eyed porter. Then, in the gentle warmth of a new day, she made her way to the ferry terminal.

  She was unprepared for the staggering beauty of the bay of Naples, even as glimpsed through the smeared and spattered windows of the hydrofoil. Why didn’t anybody tell me? she marvelled. When the dark mossy folds of Ischia reared before her she felt a curious tingling in the pit of her stomach. As they approached she made out bright clusters of buildings stacked above each other, canopies of palms and umbrella pines punctuated by slim columns of cypress. Yachts with their sails furled rocked gently within the perfect circle of the harbour; a large cruise liner had anchored further out to sea. Gulls screamed overhead and dived at floating scraps of litter.

  The gangway unfolded on to the quayside and Allie waited her turn to disembark. The bustle around her didn’t tally with Liddy’s description of sleepy tranquillity. She had to leap out of the way of a speeding Lambretta and by mistake tagged on to the tail of a tour group who were mounting a coach bound for the gardens of La Mortella. Everybody, it seemed, had a destination in mind, they all knew where they wanted to go. Allie, who had no idea, decided she should calm her stomach with breakfast. Once she’d safely crossed the street she had a choice of bars, but she picked the most basic: a long, plain counter with snacks trapped in display cases, a handful of tall plastic stools, a couple of fruit machines in a dark recess. The clientele here was mostly bus and cab drivers with dark glasses and tanned forearms. They were tossing back espressos and munching slices of pizza: the air was scented with marjoram, roasted tomatoes and black coffee.

  Allie pointed to the biggest custard-filled cornetto and took it, with her café latte, to a small round table. A folded newspaper was lying on the surface. A man standing nearby, burly, paunchy, tucked it under his arm and indicated with a flourish that the table was hers. Then he took off his sunglasses and grinned at her. She smiled back. She saw him again, outside, when the caffeine and the sugar boost had done their work. He was standing at the door of a bus, calling across the piazza to a colleague. His whole manner was genial and good-humoured so, when he swung with surprising agility into the driver’s seat, she pointed at Liddy’s rough sketch map and asked if he knew the Casa Colonnata.