As we greeted one another and she stood aside, tripping the cat, to let me enter, Tosca – presumably it was Tosca – appeared at last from the furthest corner of a dim hallway and stood for a moment there like a figure barely discerned in the background of some dark canvas – a presence made mysterious, perhaps, simply by the fact that it is indistinct.
Gioconda brought me into a high room closed off from light and air by outer and inner shutters, and by the custom of southern cities unalterable on the coldest days; smelling of wax, of winter, of mildew and precautions against mildew. The walls were darkly red, narrowly banded at floor level with grey and topped with a two – foot frieze of a grey geometrical design whose regularity was flawed here and there by age or damp. There were thick curtains, thin carpets, worn velvet chairs and footstools. There were pictures, and a mesh-fronted bookcase of bound books paired with a glass-fronted cabinet of porcelain. Two small sofas were ranged by an immense cold fireplace that, like a dormant Vesuvius, presided over everything.
I took note, that first time, of all these fittings and fixtures I was never to notice again; imagining them, then, to have some bearing on her life as I was to know it. But she led me through the room as if it had been no more than a passage, into a small study filled with light and littered with papers and books. Plants and vases, pencils and matchboxes had arranged themselves there with a look of purposeful incongruity, like objects for a still-life grouped about an artist’s studio. The windows were unshuttered, and a maltreated Empire desk, from which some of the bronzes were missing, stood between them. There was a cushioned chair, in bad shape, on which the cat at once circled itself; and a striped divan on which we sat, she and I, speechless and inquisitive like children at first school.
‘So here you are,’ said Gioconda, as if she had been awaiting my arrival for a long time – or as if, entering into my own point of view, she could regard my presence in her room as the fulfilment of an intention, even though not her own. It was curious to think, then, how I had for weeks been aware of her, while she had not known of my existence.
‘Your street,’ I said to her. ‘Your street is marvellous.’
‘Oh – this street …’ She thought so too – so much so that good manners called for her to depreciate it. ‘They’re always telling me – my friends – Why don’t you move? Because it’s rough round here, you know, a kind of important squalor.’
‘Not squalor exactly – ’
‘Not squalor!’ she cried. ‘If this street isn’t squalor, I’d like to know what is.’ We both laughed at her indignation, she putting her hand up to her mouth in a gesture so completely hers that the picturing of it brings her more before my eyes than any photograph could do – it was as if she were, quite irrationally, self-conscious about her mouth or her teeth, or unavailingly wished to be more moderate in her responses. ‘This is Naples with a vengeance – and literally so, since we have the vendetta round here: I’m always hearing the grocer was stabbed, or that they’re on the lookout for the dry-cleaner. But there it is – it’s what I’m used to, I couldn’t live elsewhere.’ Saying this, her expression clouded, as if being bound to that place was a disturbing rather than a stabilizing attachment. ‘I was born here.’ She turned to me and asked, again as if we were children exchanging information, ‘Where were you born?’
It isn’t so much where one was born (as a matter of fact, in my case, it was in Notting Hill Gate), but what one remembers. I told Gioconda how, as a child, I had been sent with other children on a ship to Cape Town to escape the Blitz. How my mother died at the end of the war and my brother came out to Africa to work in Somaliland, and I moved there with him, and at last went back to London.
‘London is nice,’ she said. ‘I was there not so long ago. We’ll talk about it another day, when there’s more time.’
This assumption of our friendship moved me, in my loneliness, with a sort of joy – that this lovely, vital creature was to attach her life, however lightly, to mine. I was touched, but showed no pleasure – just as when I had stood in the Piazza del Gesù, and walked under the windows of San Biagio dei Librai. In fact I was often, later on, to act out with Gioconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent; her openness evoked discretion.
‘I’m called Jenny,’ I told her, in answer to her question – for we were pursuing our child-like exchange, as if we might at any moment have come out with ‘How old are you?’ or ‘What does your father do?’
‘It’s not your name, then?’
‘Jenny is a bureaucratic accident. My name is Penelope. When I was put on board the ship for South Africa at the beginning of the war, I was called Penny. But there were so many of us – so many little Mollies and Timmies and Patties – that the woman in charge of us got the names mixed up. Jenny was as close as she ever came to mine. I was not of an age to make an issue of it. I went on board as Penny and disembarked as Jenny.’
Gioconda said nothing – imagining, I knew, the journey. Whenever the matter came up, people expressed anguish over that uprooting of mine. Yet – although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable – children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world. Other, unconfided things were worse to me, at the time, than the actual fact of my removal to South Africa – for that searing displacement at least bore official sanction in the minds of adults and was shared with hundreds of others. The loss of my name, and for such a reason, did not offend me until much later; indeed – for even a child can wish for the illusion of a new identity, arriving in a strange country, purged of the past, starting afresh; in fact a child is more entitled to the delusion – I fancied, as I landed at Cape Town, that the voyage was enabling me to begin what, with no sense of comedy, I identified to myself as a new life. A double life, rather, for in my letters and my homesickness I remained Penny. As a little girl, however, I saw myself as such, insignificant in the convulsions of war, and believed I had no cause for complaint in a world where soldiers died and cities were devastated. It is only in retrospect I know myself to have been among the victims of war, and dare not mention that at the time I suffered, more grotesquely, over exclusion from a school party, or from the fear of punishment in connection with a torn blazer.
That stranded childhood comes back to me in curious ways with unlikely associations. The sea, for instance – in those years of war children were greatly aware of the sea and of those imperilled on it. It was the ocean, its impassability, that lay between me and the natural course of my life; between me and home. The ships of my childhood figured like heroes in their disasters – the City of Benares, the Jervis Bay, the San Demetrio, the Ark Royal, the Graf Spee. We used to see ships, shabby, painted grey, put in at Cape Town harbour, to disappear in the night and perhaps for ever. We knew their shapes and tonnages, we accumulated stories of the Atlantic crossings and the Arctic convoys. We knew that the Queens could outpace any U-boat and carried eight thousand troops, and that you could stay fourteen days in a neutral port. By contrast it seems now that the sea has almost retired from our lives, and that ships are leading a marginal, twilight existence, like senior officials who resist being pensioned off.
Gioconda said, ‘Yet I think you look more like Jenny than Penelope. I could never picture Penelope with that colour hair.’
‘Sometimes, though, I still feel like Penelope. When I fill out a form, it feels appropriate.’ I remarked on her own name.
‘It is not uncommon in Italy. Or common either.’ The cat, she said, completing the game of names, was called locasta; had been thus renamed, from Innocente, after conceiving kittens with its own son. In commendation or sympathy she snatched it up round the middle, with both hands, as a child might – gave it a squeeze and set it down again on its chair, where it smoothly resumed a wash interrupted in mid-lick. ‘Come on to the terrace and tell me if
it’s warm enough to lunch out there.’
That room of hers gave on to a terrace, long and wide and sheltered at one end by a pergola draped with the wintry skeletons of vines and by wisteria that still showed, here and there, a purple tassel or a frond of green. At the other end there were stone boxes of marigolds. A table had been laid for us in the pale sun, and one of its legs was lengthened with a wedge of paper to meet the uneven tiles.
‘It’s heaven,’ I said. We leant on the balustrade and looked down. On the opposite side of the cortile there were two or three small businesses – a woodworker’s, a printer’s giving out a clackety rhythm, and a narrow archway marked ‘Autoscuola’.
‘Yes, truly, it’s a garage, a driving school,’ Gioconda’s hand went to her mouth. ‘I suppose you qualify for the licence if you can get the car out of this courtyard.’
It was not, after all, the good old family palazzo. Her father had owned a larger part of it until the war. ‘What I have now – they made an entrance, broke up the enfilade of main rooms – it’s just what you’ve seen, with another room or two … The thing was to keep this.’ She meant the terrace, patting the stone railing with the flat of her hand.
She still had relatives in Naples – ‘Too many by far’ – but they were cousins and second cousins. She had a sister she was fond of, much older, who lived at Nice. ‘Luciana. She married a Frenchman. Before the war. He was killed in ’44.’ She broke off to lead me to the end of the terrace. ‘From here you can see everything.’
It was almost true, this everything, for the arches and towers and polychrome domes were stacked there beside and behind each other like so much scenery backstage at a theatre, all painted by Monsù Desiderio. There was no tracing the streets that unrolled like ribbons among them, no accounting for the cloisters and vast gardens that appeared at intervals, like optical illusions in the foreshortened scene – the congested, backstage effect heightened by the fact that we were looking into the city and away from the sea. There was no outlook, in any usual sense; except to our left where, painted by a different hand, a segment of the Vomero rose up in tiers of fields and buildings.
‘That red curve of houses follows the wall of the theatre where Nero sang.’ The big thing below the cathedral had been a paleo-Christian temple. Those columns came from a temple of the Dioscuri, that church was the site of the Roman basilica. The question ‘What is it?’ took on, here, an aspect of impertinence; one might only learn what it had successively been.
Gioconda told me that San Biagio was the patron saint of throats; little children prayed to him about their tonsils, he had an attraction for singers with laryngitis. I recalled a variety of labral discs among the silver offerings on sale in the street, and knew these, now, to be throats.
When we sat down to our lunch, she asked me, ‘How did you arrive in Italy?’ and I told her how I had been flown to Milan with my military men for a conference there; and sent on by train. I was grateful to her for mentioning the journey. At that time, when the mere idea that I was, for example, on the Lombardy Plain could keep me enchanted through mile after mile of level countryside, the excitement of entering Italy had gone undivulged. And I enumerated the farms and castles and cities that lay along the length of Italy as if she herself had never known of them.
She filled our glasses, and said, ‘I hope you’ll be happy here,’ as though she were responsible. That struck her too, for she remarked, ‘I talk like a landlady who is taking in a new lodger.’
I told her I had seen nothing of Naples until that day, how it had come about that I was free to telephone her, and I looked at my watch. At once she asked when I could come again. I had to go to the airport on an errand the following Friday afternoon, and I said I could drop in on the way back.
‘Yes of course, come, come,’ she said, as she had on the telephone. ‘Friday, a friend arrives … from Rome. He’ll be so pleased to meet you.’
I wondered if it were the friend of so many photographs – in her room, on the desk, on the mantelpiece, ranged on a low bookcase; snapshots of a white, sunburnt smile on a stony beach, of muscular legs in shorts climbing a cliff-face, or bare arms tensed to suspend a heavy fish on a hook; one foot placed on a step or a rock, one hand bracing the trunk of a confident tree. The name she now said was new to me; though her glance, tentative, inquiring, might have suggested otherwise. I thought, the map of her existence is soon to be flagged, for me, with these encampments and shrines, these centres of interest; and again the notion gave pleasure.
When I got up to go, she held out her hand. She surprised me by asking, ‘What is he like, your biologist?’
‘He’s a Scotsman.’
‘A sandy, bristly little chap, then?’
‘Not at all. Lean, dark, restrained. Like a furled umbrella.’
‘When he speaks, can one tell that he’s from Scotland?’
‘Sometimes. Some words quite a bit.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Tulloch. J. P Tulloch. That’s all I know.’ This Neapolitan curiosity infected me, though, for in answering it I brought out more than I thought I knew. I said. ‘He reminds me of my brother.’
CHAPTER TWO
My brother’s wife is an emphatic little woman. When I first knew her, she could look delicious even so, an infuriated kitten. ‘Oh, it’s outrageous,’ she would say, flashing neat little teeth in her rage, ‘one has to take a stand’. Or ‘I don’t have to put up with this sort of thing’. And I would agree: ‘Absolutely,’ I’d say, or ‘Absolutely not,’ according to the occasion, not caring, not even hearing, but looking emphatic too, just to please. Just to please, not Norah, but my brother.
At the end of the war, when I might have expected to return to my relatives in London, they prevailed on me instead to stay in South Africa to finish grammar school. England then was no place, it was agreed among them, for me or for anybody – no visible end to the rationing of food, the shortage of fuel, the lack of every comfort and of some necessities. My mother came out to South Africa to see me, during the terrible English winter of 1947. I had grown up without her, and now I was old enough to be touched by what I recognized in her as the ravages of war. She was exhausted, from sleepless nights, from fearing death, from longing for me and grieving for others, from standing in queues and mending old clothes. It showed in her distinctly, it would set her apart at once from others in a Cape Town street, even though she was an ordinary, fair, little woman. She wasn’t unlike my sister-in-law to look at, as a matter of fact – though Norah used to be glamorous, which my mother never was. But my mother didn’t have that emphatic quality of Norah’s either, or those reserves of antagonism that generate the energy for working out one’s will.
My mother died suddenly a few months after her return to London. She had been too much depleted. During her last days at Cape Town I remember plying her with extra nourishment and setting her in the sun, as if she were a shrivelled plant one were attempting to coax back to life. They wrote to me, ‘Her heart gave out’ – her heart that had, I suppose, been giving out always, to everybody, with no revitalizing intake of grievance or self-pity. For some time after that it seemed I could not urge reconsideration of my future – a future that was being consumed in its very abeyance: they had too much on their hands, must not be asked to think about more, so I reasoned, as if I had no existence other than as an extra item for someone else’s consideration, a potential last straw. There was a lot of such abnegation among young people then – we lived as a foil for the concerns of our elders. When I was told that in another year, a year or two, I would be sent for, I simply began to put that time behind me. Time is said to belong to the young, but it is only the young who can be so prodigal of it, looking forward to faroff events and wishing away the intervening weeks or months as if they were no more than an impediment to a goal.
When, eventually, recall was settled on, it was not easy to get a passage. And the same week that the ticket was written out by the Shaw Savill Line, my brother cab
led me to stay where I was, for he was coming out to Africa. He had taken a post as an irrigation engineer in Italian Somaliland, as we called it then, with a new development agency, and the idea now was that I should go with him to Mogadiscio and keep house there.
And so it happened that I spent three years on the coast of East Africa before at last I came home to England – more, as my father (remarried now, and keeping clear, in Yorkshire) remarked, like Ulysses than Penelope.
It was when my brother married Norah that I came back. Edmund had been recalled from Somalia to London in connection with a possible promotion. During his absence I ran our little house, did some typing for an import-export firm, and saw the few people we were in the habit of seeing. When I was asked about my brother’s return, I would say ‘Very soon,’ or ‘Any day,’ believing I had the information to give. All this time, change was heading for me unapprehended, like a torpedo or a crocodile: while I was typing out somebody’s invoice, or going to the beach in someone’s Land-Rover, or fishing the wedge of orange out of my Pimm’s Cup, Edmund was taking Norah to the pictures, or to see the London production of South Pacific, or kissing her goodnight (for couples, in those days, still did kiss goodnight) in the hallway of her parents’ house in S.W.7 after a family Sunday of roast lamb and denunciation of Sir Stafford Cripps. When Edmund decided to remain in England it was assumed that I too would settle there – just as it had earlier been assumed that I would stay with him in Africa. I don’t know why it was taken for granted; like so many arrangements that should have been contested, it was described as a foregone conclusion.
Returning to England had lost its initial meaning and taken on another. If it could no longer assuage a homesickness that, after its heart-splitting genesis in childhood exile, had not so much abated as become a permanent sense of lack, it gave, in compensation, unlooked-for, adult pleasures. It pleased me, for instance, that the plants and seasons now corresponded to literature; that Nature was not the sole index of age; that the rewards of one’s surroundings were rendered in architecture, rather than in the unearned prestige of Table Mountain.
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