by Rosie Thomas
Julia would wave, and walk on down to her little house. Sometimes Nicolo would come to have dinner with her. He looked older now, and his joints had lost some of their elasticity, but he was as acute as he had ever been. Julia loved his company. Without him, for all her friendships with the nuns and the patients and the villagers, she would have felt her isolation.
It was during the moped summer that a letter came for Julia. The stamp was Italian and the print on the back flap read Hotel Garibaldi, Rome, so at first she didn’t register the handwriting on the envelope front. Then she looked more closely, and saw that it was indeed from China.
China announced that since she was, as she put it, getting so horribly old, she had decided to take one last continental holiday. Travelling alone, she had been to Paris and Florence and Siena. She had visited old friends, and been to the Louvre and the Uffizi, had looked for the last time at Brunelleschi’s dome. She was now in Rome, and would Julia be willing to show her the famous gardens if she came to Montebellate for a night or two? She would put up in an hotel, of course. And at the same time she could see Lily, and Julia herself, if that would not be an inconvenience.
From Nicolo’s house, because she still didn’t have a telephone of her own, Julia rang the hotel at once. She told China that she must come to stay in her house, and that it would give her more pleasure to show the gardens to her than to anyone else in the world.
Two days later, Julia and Lily drove to Naples to meet her.
China was in her seventies, but she still held herself erect, with her head up. She commanded the same speculative glances, too. She was immaculate after the short journey. Her grey-blonde hair had turned silver, but she kept it in the neat chignon. She was wearing an uncreased cream suit, with crocodile shoes. Her ankles were still trim, in fine, pale stockings. She made Julia feel, acutely, her own complete lack of grooming. But China kissed her cheek and murmured, ‘You look well, Julia.’
Lily’s bedroom in the village house was little more than a cupboard, so Julia gave up her bedroom to China and slept downstairs. China demurred, but she was clearly touched by Julia’s hospitality.
Julia smiled at her. ‘There are no proper hotels in Montebellate.’
‘Thank heaven,’ Lily said. ‘Otherwise the place would be full of tourists, wouldn’t it?’
The three of them laughed, and sat down to eat the meal that Julia had prepared.
Afterwards, when Lily had gone off with Tomaso and the others, China and Lily walked slowly up the hill to the palazzo. They made a slow, complete circuit of the gardens. Julia was proud to show them off, and China was a knowledgeable observer. She knew the plants, and their histories, and the formal discipline of the Italian gardens. The bridge that their letters had established between them held firm, strengthened by Julia’s pleasure in her achievement, and China’s admiration of it.
At the end of their exploration they stood on the top terrace again, looking at the symmetry spreading below them. China said, ‘And this was really a wilderness before you came?’
‘The skeleton was here, covered in decay. I only put the flesh back. With much help from everyone. From you, China.’
China inclined her head in acknowledgement. I like her stateliness, Julia thought. I assumed it was coldness before, but it isn’t. She is uncompromising, that’s all. When I first knew her I couldn’t even see clearly that people exist as themselves, and not just in relation to myself. That’s why I never understood her.
‘How long have you been here?’ China asked.
‘Four and a half years.’
China thought for a moment, then inclined her head again. ‘I congratulate you on your achievement. It is magnificent. And unusually generous.’
Julia knew that she meant what she said. She felt a fierce flush of pride. ‘Thank you.’
They passed the arches that looked inward into the secret garden, and the concentrated scents drifted out to them. They went on, back to the courtyard, and Julia took China to meet the different children who still played with her presents of draughts and snakes and ladders.
Nicolo Galli entertained them to dinner, with great success. They dined in the refectory, the next night, with China sitting straight-backed next to the Mother Superior. But Julia and Lily were unable to persuade China to stay in Montebellate for longer than three nights.
‘I’m keeping you from your bed,’ China said firmly. ‘And it is time I went back to my own garden.’
Julia understood that.
On the third evening, after their refectory supper, Julia and China sat on one of the stone seats in the secret garden. The last of the summer’s great flush of roses hung raggedly over their heads. Behind them, the chapel bell tolled. As always, the warm air muffled the peals. Lily had gone with Tomaso, down to the coast to see a film at the open-air cinema.
‘Are you happy here?’ China asked.
‘As happy as I need to be.’
Julia had the sense, as she had done all through the three days, that China was observing her.
‘Is that a riddle?’
Julia laughed briefly. ‘I didn’t intend it to be. It’s just that the necessity for happiness – my own happiness, I suppose – seems diminished here. Through seeing the nuns and what they do, and the lives of the people who come to the ospedale. And in watching the gardens. Perhaps I’ve learned to be a little bit, a very little bit unselfish.’ She laughed again, trying to dispel the seriousness. ‘Not before time, you might say.’
‘When will you come home?’
‘Home? There’s nothing to come home for.’
‘And if there were?’
Julia was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I can’t imagine what it would be.’
‘Alexander, perhaps.’
The words were spoken lightly but Julia had the sudden, vertiginous conviction that all China’s visit had been leading up to them. Had she come from Rome to suggest as much? From Paris? All the way from her green Wiltshire garden? Julia’s heart lurched, and the blood buzzed in her ears.
She managed to say, ‘Alexander and I have been divorced for a long time.’
‘Yes. Do you know, Julia, that one of the realities of old age is that one’s perspectives change? The problems of other people begin to look very simple, because one’s own are over. One begins to imagine that one can solve them. The arrogance of that.’
Listening to her, Julia was trying to remember. What was it that China had said, long ago, at Ladyhill? On Lily’s first birthday. My husband was a difficult man. Yours is not. Alexander was not simple. None of the knots that he and I have created, Julia thought sadly, can be easily unravelled.
She waited for China to go on, but there was nothing. China was not arrogant, of course. Nor would she interfere.
Julia began to wonder if she had made more of the few words than China had intended her to. There was no message from Alexander in them. Alexander would send his own message, if he wanted to.
They began to talk about other things, and then they stood up and made a last slow circuit of the secret garden. In the arched doorway, looking back, China said musingly, ‘I think you used to be jealous of me, all that time ago. Perhaps we can be friends now? I have enjoyed being here with you and Lily.’
Julia took her hand and held it. ‘I’d like that. I was jealous of you and Alexander. I was jealous of everything, once. But I’m not, any more. I don’t think I’m even jealous of Clare.’
China’s profile was immobile. But she said, ‘I don’t think you need to be jealous of Clare.’
They walked back through the dusk to the little house. When they reached it, China said she was very tired, and went straight up to her bed. Julia sat up, pretending to read, waiting for Lily to come home. The significance of China’s words flickered and faded.
There was nothing to go home for. This was home.
When it had been dark for a long time, and she was just beginning to worry, Julia heard Tomaso’s moped bumping over the cobbles at
the corner.
Lily had followed Tomaso, walking in his footsteps over the sand although she knew the way as well as he did. The sea lay directly behind them, and the moon made a silver streak over it that pointed at their backs.
They were heading for their special place. The sand was soft underfoot now, and they scrambled up the lip of a sand dune, with coarse grass brushing their bare ankles. The canopy of pine trees closed over their heads, and Lily breathed in the resinous scent. A few yards ahead there was a hollow, enclosed by the pines. Tomaso jumped lightly down, and held up his arms to Lily. He took her hands and swung her down beside him. They looked around, into the dim emptiness, and then laughed, a little shakily. Then, very slowly, they knelt down facing each other.
‘I love you,’ Tomaso said, in English.
Lily answered him, in Italian.
Tomaso took off his jacket and spread it out for her. Lily lay down. Her fingers brushed the sand. The evening air had cooled the surface, but as she burrowed downwards she found the stored warmth of the sun. Further down it was cool again, and damp. She turned her head a little.
They had come here, to the hollow in the pines, often before. They had kissed each other in the sand, licking the salt of the day’s swimming off each other’s cheeks like warm animals.
Tonight was different. They had decided it. Tomaso had brought a packet of things, in the pocket of his jeans. Lily didn’t ask where he had got them from.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ he had asked. ‘With me?’ But his face had split into the disbelieving, delighted smile that Lily loved.
‘I do,’ Lily had said, seriously.
It was the truth, Lily loved Tomaso, but even though she would have denied it fiercely, she knew that she wouldn’t go on coming back here to him, every summer for ever. It was partly because of her sense of the fragility, the impermanence, that she wanted to seal something between them. The first time would always be there.
They had come to the sand hollow by mutual, silent agreement. Romantic Lily wanted the place to be right, and there was no righter place than here, with the black pines meeting over their heads and the sound of the sea cutting them off, from Montebellate on its hill, from the world.
Seeing her mother and her father’s mother together had given Lily a sharp sense of time, of years beginning to click past all of them like the beads on the nuns’ rosaries. There was no always, Lily realised. Not even at Ladyhill. Especially at Ladyhill. In the last few months there had been another change. Clare had gone, stayed away, then come back again. Lily had begun to see that Clare and her father didn’t make one another happy. The recognition had come with a chilly, adult awareness. She had folded it away, never mentioning it to anyone. Here in Montebellate, sharing the little house with her closest female relatives, Lily had understood what shaped her and linked her to the two older women, and because of it she had felt the imperative need to separate herself, and make her own individual claims to experience and memories. She felt hungry, and jubilant, and melancholy, all at the same time. Granny Bliss looked frail and Julia herself had acquired a sort of unexpectant patience that made Lily unaccountably sad. And at the same time, she felt inside herself the bursting knot of her own strength and eagerness. Fiercely she whispered, ‘Tomaso, I love you.’
It lasted barely a minute. Tomaso was helpless, and when he came his head reared up and he shouted her name. Lily held him, his weight on top of her, feeling the pressure seeping away inside her. She had felt almost nothing, after the first urgency and then the brief shock of pain, but she didn’t care about that. Her fingers fluttered over Tomaso’s back. Sweat had gathered in the indentation of his spine, trapped by the developed muscles. She had a sudden memory of Tomaso working, shirtless, in the palazzo gardens. The muscles contracted as he bent and straightened. Julia was there too, her sunhat shading her face. They both stopped what they had been doing and turned to look at her as she came down the steps. The vision seemed very precious, clear-edged and significant. Lily screwed her eyes more tightly shut, to store the memory, guessing presciently that it was the one that would come back to her, not this sandy clearing, when she thought of Tomaso.
When she was Julia’s age. When she was China’s age.
Lily found that she could easily imagine it, now, the way in which the years would click past. She had lost the careless, childish expectations of eternity. I have grown up, Lily thought portentously, and half smiled at the obviousness of the occasion.
She opened her eyes. The stars were faint points of light between the lacings of the pine branches. She realised that she felt happy, lying there, with Tomaso still inside her. She was glad it was Tomaso. She was glad it had been as she had imagined it. Lily was romantic, but she was also a child of her generation. She had never expected pulsing tides and soaring violins. She and Tomaso had done it together, sealed it between themselves, for ever. That was what mattered. There would be other times, other sensations. Other men, Lily was sure of that. But only this first time.
Tomaso stirred, lifted his weight. They separated, very carefully, looking down at themselves. Tomaso tied a knot in the rubber and buried it in the sand.
‘We should make a stone, to mark the spot.’
‘We’ll remember anyway,’ Lily said.
Tomaso took her hand, as if they had only just met, as if she was a princess released from a tower. He thought she looked like the signora. Tomaso always thought of her as the signora, never as Julia.
‘Thank you, Lily,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Tomaso,’ she repeated.
The seriousness burst like a bubble. They laughed, a little wildly, looking at each other’s nakedness in the sand. Tomaso brushed the crusting of it from Lily’s cheek and stomach.
‘Hey. Ouch,’ she shouted at him. When they had stopped laughing Tomaso seized her by the wrist, hauled her to her feet.
‘Swim?’ he asked her.
‘Race,’ Lily answered.
They scrambled over the lip of the hollow and ran, over the soft sand, down the beach. The black water was laced with silver foam. They plunged into it, whooping, and the coldness took Lily’s breath away. She swam, fierce strokes, then rolled over on to her back and felt the salt wash scouring her. She dived, slick as an eel, and touched the rippled sand. When she burst to the surface again, with Tomaso splashing beside her, she trod water with the cold drift of the sea between her legs. She felt sharp, and clean, and exultant.
After their swim, they dried each other with Tomaso’s T-shirt. Then, with Tomaso bare-chested, they straddled the moped. Sheltered by Tomaso’s warm back, Lily breathed in the hot, vegetable scents of the south as they rode up to Montebellate where she knew that Julia would be waiting for her.
‘Good film?’ Julia asked, putting aside her book and smothering a yawn.
‘Yes, really good,’ Lily answered composedly.
‘Where’s Tomaso?’
‘He’s gone straight home.’ Lily went to her, put her arms around her mother’s neck. ‘I love you, you know.’
Julia smiled, to Lily’s opened eyes suddenly seeming almost shy. ‘That’s good. That’s very important. I love you too. You’re a good girl, Lily.’
Lily looked over her head, out at the darkness pressing against the uncurtained window.
‘I hope so,’ Lily said, wondering.
Twenty-five
1977
The two women had been sitting at the corner table for a long time.
The waiters glanced speculatively at them. When the blonde came in, one of them had sketched a suggestive little gesture to his colleagues, but she didn’t see it. She had gone straight to the dark one, who was sitting in the corner waiting for her. They had put their arms around each other, holding themselves apart still so that they could look at one another. Then they had started laughing and crying at the same time. When the blonde took off her dark glasses and nested them in her mass of hair, one of the waiters insisted that she was a film star, although he couldn’t
remember her name. The others shrugged. This was Naples’s best restaurant. Film stars were not exactly thick on the ground, but they were not unknown either.
The two women made an odd couple. When the blonde came in she was swathed in a long, furred jacket against the January cold. Then she took the jacket off, to reveal a tight, dark dress that bared the tops of her breasts. They were full and white, with a blue shadow between them, and when the waiters brought up the silver dishes they leaned forward to peer into the inviting cleft. The dark one was quite different. She was tall, and thin to the point of gauntness. Her clothes were tidy, but slightly faded, as if she required nothing from them but decency. Her hair was cut short, not very expertly, but the ragged points of it framed her dark, arresting face. She had high cheekbones and a long, mobile mouth bare of lipstick. She ordered their food in idiomatic, locally accented Italian, gesturing with her brown hands. The fingers were ingrained with dirt like a labourer’s, in bewildering contrast to her friend’s shiny crimson talons. But together the two of them spoke English, torrents of it. And they drank, too. The blonde tipped it back, although the dark one only sipped warily, at the beginning. But then the first glass warmed her, and she began to keep pace with her friend. The wine waiter brought a second bottle, then a third.
They laughed too, the two of them. Their laughter grew louder, attracting covert glances from the other tables, but by then the long Neapolitan lunchtime was almost over, and the restaurant was beginning to empty.
‘Oh, Mat,’ Julia sighed, leaning back in her padded chair with a full glass. ‘Why has it been so long?’
Seeing Mattie across the table, with her same hazy, sexy, reckless and short-sighted smile, and the light behind her turning her hair into a fuzzy halo, Julia thought she looked no different from when they had first known each other. At the very beginning of their real lives. And their real lives had twisted together, still knotted and curled together. The breach was forgotten. It seemed long ago and trivial, now that they were here together.