by Rosie Thomas
‘Grass,’ she said softly. ‘Leaves and bare earth. Flowers. They’re there, underneath it all, aren’t they?’
Josh came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. ‘Restless? It’ll be time to move on, pretty soon.’
Julia had known that the sentence must be pronounced, but she was angry with herself for being the instigator of it.
‘I’m not restless. I’d like to stay here for ever.’
Josh laughed. ‘Well, I’ve got to get back and rake together some dollars to pay for our pleasures. But what would you say to going south just for a few days first?’
She looked at him, knowing that she would follow him anywhere. ‘South of what?’
‘Italy. I’ve never seen much of it.’
‘I’d say yes.’
Josh’s energy was impressive. Once anything was decided, arrangements were made at whirlwind speed. Maps were consulted and tickets were bought, a farewell party was held in the Swann Bar, and they were on their way, all in the space of twenty-four hours. Belinda and Sophia and Felicity came down to Lauterbrunnen to wave them off.
‘Bye—ee! See you next year? Promise? Really and truly?’ They meant Julia as well as Josh. Josh only grinned at them, but Julia murmured, ‘I’ll try.’ A year with Josh was unimaginable, but it was unthinkable without him.
She felt cold as she sat down opposite him.
The train journey took them from Berne to Turin, from Turin to Rome, and from Rome to Naples. The landscapes sliding past the smeared windows of the hard-seated Italian railway carriages conquered even Julia’s impatience with long journeys. She watched entranced as the world changed from white to brown, and from brown to rich, succulent green. South of Rome there were silvery olive groves and vines that had put out fresh leaves, men working in the fields and wild flowers scrambling over the banks beside the track. After the hard white Alps the fecundity made Julia feel drunk. The train slowed beside a country road, and there was an old woman in a black dress trudging beside a donkey, its wicker panniers full of yellow flowers.
‘Look.’ Julia pointed, her eyes shining.
Josh took her hand. ‘I like travelling with you. Everything hits you square in the face.’
‘It’s because I’ve never seen anything before,’ Julia told him. She wanted to fix everything inside her head, so that she could remember it when it was all gone. They reached Naples, and found a crumbling hotel to stay in. Julia made Josh buy a guidebook, and led him through tiny, teeming streets into musty churches, down rancid alleyways into food markets, up steps and round corners into blind turnings. The smells and the crowds and the colour and sudden violence of street-life fascinated her. She was alternately shocked by the poverty and charged by the pure vitality of the people. Josh was less drawn to it all. He had an American distaste for their insanitary hotel, and a positive mania about the Neapolitan ingenuity at relieving him of his money.
‘Damn cities,’ he grumbled. ‘I didn’t come to see places like this, and one old church is pretty much the same as the next one. Let’s get out of here and find a country place.’
They went on southwards to Salerno, and from Salerno they rode on country buses through wide green fields dotted with herds of slow-moving buffalo. The sea glittered at the end of empty roads, bluer than the postcard cliché that Julia had envisaged. In the end it was Julia who saw the perfect stopping place. A steep hill reared out of the coastal plain, and thick stone walls and a skirt of houses clung to the top of it, looking down over a blanket of scrubby trees and bare outcrops of rock to the Gulf of Policastro at its foot.
She only knew three words of Italian, but somehow she made the bus driver understand what she wanted. ‘Questo è Montebellate,’ he told her.
Obligingly, he stopped to let them off. They climbed down with their heavy suitcases and stood blinking in the sunshine, much too hot in their thick clothes. The bus trundled away and left Julia and Josh staring at the tortuously steep road that led up to Montebellate.
They were lucky. A dusty pick-up truck driven by a nut-faced man stopped, and they climbed into the back. They wound upwards, the ancient engine labouring, and slowly the Campania countryside and the shimmering sea spread out beneath them. Julia saw that the rough grass between the rocks was starred with wild flowers, flowers that looked like English harebells and ladies’ smock, but bigger and brighter. The pungent scent of herbs was everywhere, reminding her sharply of Felix, cooking at home.
‘Italy,’ Julia murmured voluptuously.
If only Felix could see this. In the square, in London, it was mid-March and the bare plane trees would be shiny-black with rain.
When they reached the little houses clinging under the shelter of the stone walls, their driver shouted a torrent of Italian and stopped with a jerk outside a little pink-washed house. The door was painted the same blue as the harebells, and above it was a hand-painted sign, Pensione Flora.
‘Can we stay here?’ Julia breathed.
Josh hauled cheerfully at the luggage. ‘Why not?’
A woman in an apron came out of the pensione and stared at them. Josh opened the phrase-book they had bought in Naples and began to ask.
Julia couldn’t bear to listen in case the woman said no. She crossed the road and folded her arms on the top of the warm stone wall. The hill rolled precipitously from its foot. Below her was the sea, fringed with white and gold, and the ochre and spring-green and amber squares of the land.
Josh came back and leaned beside her. The sun laid a buttery light on his head.
‘She says they’ve only got one room. I couldn’t pretend we’re married, because she’s quite likely to ask for our passports.’
Julia’s heart dropped like a stone, and she wondered why he was smiling. ‘But she says that there are two beds. I explained that in that case we would be happy to take the one room.’
‘Oh, Josh.’
The signora took them upstairs.
There were two beds with elaborately wrought-iron bedheads, bare floorboards and a massive wardrobe, and a marble-topped washstand with a tin jug and basin on it. When the blue shutters were opened they framed the incomparable view.
When Julia remembered the few days that she spent in Montebellate with Josh, the same sharp mixture of delight and agony always came back to her.
She had never imagined anywhere so perfectly beautiful. There was nothing jarring, nothing ugly at all, not even a tablecloth with a strident pattern, a shiny car or a gramophone to remind her of her own world. Everything in Montebellate looked as if it had occupied its own place, exactly as it was meant to do, for hundreds of years. Behind the stone walls at the top of the hill was a pink-walled medieval palazzo, now housing a nunnery. The chapel bell rang the hours over the roofs of the village and Julia and Josh kept their time by it, leaving Josh’s watch on the marble washstand in the bedroom. They walked through the twisting streets until they knew every doorway, and they climbed over the rocks on the hill to look at the flowers. They sat for hours on the low walls and looked out over the sea on one side and the land on the other. They ate the platefuls of pasta that the signora put in front of them, and struggled to understand her jovial husband’s well-meaning conversation. At night they made love, over and over again, with appetites that seemed to grow steadily sharper. They were as quiet as they knew how to be, but Julia was afraid that their hosts must hear them. In the mornings the signora impassively served them warm bread and local honey, and coffee with a steaming jug of hot milk.
But the beauty and the calm of Montebellate stabbed at her. Montebellate had all the time, and Julia was afraid that she had only a few days. She wanted to fix herself and Josh, as Montebellate was fixed, but with Josh there was nothing to hold on to. He was wonderful company and he was generous and kind to her, but he gave nothing away. No promises, not even any talk of next week, next month. Julia longed to be satisfied with as much as they had, but she was greedy for more, and she was helpless. Every time she heard the flat notes of the
chapel bell and imagined the nuns’ habits sweeping over the hollowed steps, she was dreading that Josh would say, ‘Time to move on, pretty soon.’
The peace grew threatening and their unbroken intimacy only reminded her that it must end, soon.
On the fourth morning, as they sat drinking their coffee at the table in the window of the Pensione Flora, Julia knew that she would have to burst the bubble for herself, before Josh could do it.
Her hands shook and her cup rattled against her plate.
‘What’s wrong?’ Josh asked quietly.
It occurred to her that they had lived through all these hours together, and Josh had grown to matter more to her than herself, but still they seemed hardly to know each other. She was afraid of the detachment that might be behind his eyes. The tears stung in her own eyes, but she stared hotly through them.
‘We have to go soon, don’t we?’
He nodded.
The tears ran slowly down her cheeks now. Josh wasn’t looking at her.
‘I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you. Josh, what will happen to us?’
He looked down at the tablecloth. It was scattered with fragments of broken bread. Josh marshalled the crumbs with his forefinger.
At length, he said, ‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’
Julia wanted him to say, Come with me. Live with me. Be my woman, or my wife. She knew that he wouldn’t, but she had clung absurdly to the hope. But what he said was, We had.
She nodded, wiping the tears away with the flat of her hand. ‘Yes. I never thanked you properly.’
Josh sighed, and closed his fingers round her wrist. ‘You did.’
The chapel bell was ringing again. With a separate chilly part of herself Julia wondered if it was for refectory, or prayers, or work in the kitchens and garden. She stood up, not looking at him.
‘I’m sorry. I wish I could make things easy. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Julia …’
‘Don’t. Just don’t.’ She shook her hand free of his. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
After she had gone Josh sat staring at the tablecloth, still heaping the fragments of bread with his finger. For a moment he wasn’t thinking of Julia. Her words, or perhaps the way she had pulled away and run out of the room, had reminded him of something else. In place of the Pensione Flora he saw the kitchen table back at home, even the loaf of bread and the jar of jelly next to his plate. He had been having his tea. The porch door opposite him still rattled in its frame. His mother had run out, banging it behind her, and the silence that had descended when she was gone was doubly ominous because of the noise that had gone before. Shouting. They were always shouting at each other, at least his mother shouted and his father sat, numbed by it. It had been the worst of all, that time.
In the quiet afterwards his father sat perfectly still, looking nowhere, rubbing his big hand up and down his face.
That was the last of those times, of course. She hadn’t lived in the timber house with them, after that.
Josh made two concentric circles with his heap of crumbs. He was wondering why the net of memories had come back to him here, on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean. It wasn’t just a door banging, of course, or a cloth scattered with crumbs. Josh frowned. In a life consciously dedicated to enjoyment, plain thinking didn’t give much comfort. But he had seen Julia’s face smeared with tears and he wanted to make the way straight, now, for her sake.
He thought of high school, and the year at the University of Colorado, mostly spent on skis, before he had set off for Europe and drifted finally to Harry Gilbert’s air-freight base. All through that time, popularity had followed him like a shadow in sunlight. And Josh was shrewd enough to know why men and women liked him. Not always for the right reasons, but it was more comfortable to be liked than otherwise. He had loved some of them in return, of course. But with circumspection, and only for as long as it did stay comfortable. Josh didn’t like scenes. Scenes were naked displays of anger or passion or despair, and he recoiled from them. Perhaps, he thought with a touch of bitterness now, that was why he and his father had lived together so safely for so long. By backing away from any more danger. By pretending nothing dangerous existed.
With a sudden savage movement, Josh swept the crumbs off the table and on to the floor.
Julia was different. He had taken her up because he had wanted her, more keenly than usual, but it had happened a dozen times before. He had done it with misgivings, but he had found that he had already gone too far to step backwards again. And he had discovered, comparing her with Sophia Bliss and all the others at Wengen, even here in the last days in their Italian paradise, how dangerous Julia was. She wanted everything, all of life and not just himself. She was raw and hungry and contemptuous, but she was more anxious to give than anyone he had ever encountered. Josh knew that he had always found it easier to take. He looked out of the little window into the sunshine without any liking for himself, but with a certain knowledge of what he must do.
He got up slowly and ducked through the low doorway. Then he walked across the road and sat down on the wall to wait for Julia.
She had lingered outside for a moment, looking at the blue haze hanging in the sky. It was like a veil over the land.
Suddenly Julia didn’t want to look at the view any more. She walked quickly up the hill, hugging the high stone wall that enclosed the palazzo grounds. It was so steep that she was panting when she reached the top. There was a little square with plane trees just coming into leaf, and a seat built round the trunk of one of them. Julia sat down, painfully picking at the tree bark. It made her think of the London square, and going unwillingly back to it.
There was a beating need inside her and she knew that there was no outlet for it. She jumped up, trying to contain the pressure, and ran across to the palazzo gates. The iron curlicues were rusty. Beyond the pink walls she could see the corner of a garden. There were dark trees and hedges, breathing neglect. The nuns didn’t work the gardens, after all.
Julia’s fingers wound round the metal bars and she stared through, trying to catch her breath in even gasps that would half fill her lungs.
She stood for a long time, looking in at the glimpse of overgrown garden.
When she turned back to the square again she saw that one of Montebellate’s black-clad old women had appeared. She had driven a goat up with her, and now she tethered it to a post driven into a tiny square of grass. The goat put its head down at once. The old woman nodded to Julia and shuffled to the seat. She fumbled in her black pouch bag and produced her crochet-work. Julia saw that it was a tiny, lacy diamond. The white thread was as fine as a cobweb. The crochet hook flickered and the old woman stared with milky eyes over the goat’s back to the blue line beyond the roofs.
Very slowly Julia let her head fall back against the gates. Nothing moved, and there was no sound except the goat’s rhythmic cropping.
She had a sense of years, stretching away, waiting for her. The enormity of it frightened and frustrated her, because it lay out of her grasp. Yet the prospect soothed her. It was all far distant, immense and hazy, like the view from the hill. Julia wondered for how many years the old woman and her goat had looked at their own view before achieving their postures of perfect mutual calm.
She watched them for a little while longer until her breath came smoothly. The hammering inside her body had stopped. The tears still lay behind her eyes but she knew that she could go back to the Flora and face whatever Josh would tell her.
She went back down the hill, listening to the steady clopping of her shoes over the cobbles. Josh was sitting on the wall opposite the pensione, looking down, and Julia went and stood beside him. They watched the view in silence for a moment, but it was just a view again, opaque, almost over-familiar now.
In a clear voice Josh said, ‘I can’t give you what you want. There isn’t anything of me. Nothing that you should want, or need, anyway. You’ll see that for yourself before long, bu
t I don’t want you to be hurt while it happens.’
Clumsy, inept words, Josh thought. But for once he meant them.
Julia’s answer came at once, violent, spilling out of her. ‘How could you hurt me except by not letting me be with you? I do want you. I love you and I need you. No one has ever made me happy like you, and I don’t want anything else. Nothing at all, nothing out of life if you aren’t there. Don’t you understand?’
It helped, to abase herself. It made her feel that there was no more she could do. She had held out the offering for Josh to take. Take it, she implored him. Don’t say what I’m afraid of.
‘No,’ Josh said, very gently.
There.
Julia nodded her head, just once. The words had been said, all their words. She discovered that she had pride, too.
‘What will happen?’ she asked.
Josh said, ‘I’ll take you to Agropoli and put you safely on the train.’
‘The train to where?’
‘To London.’
London. There was nothing in London. Julia’s eyes were dry and hard. She wouldn’t cry now. There would be enough time for crying later.
‘And what about you? What will you do?’
‘I don’t know yet. Some flying. Something.’
Julia lifted her hands from the crumbling stonework of the wall. ‘I’d better go and pack my things up.’
They turned to each other then. She buried her face against his shoulder and he held her, and then he lifted her face between his hands and kissed her eyes and her mouth. They knew that the signora could see them out of her lace-hung window and they stepped awkwardly apart again.
‘Will we … will I see you any more?’
‘I hope so,’ Josh whispered. Faltering, at the end.
Julia looked at him. She was remembering that way his hair fell over his forehead, the lines that his eyes made with his mouth and cheekbones. The same as the first time she had seen him.
‘I hope so,’ she echoed. Her longing was already touched with bitterness. ‘I hope so too, my aviator.’