I did not live with Norah and Edmund. But digs were found for me near their first flat in Sloane Avenue, and now I partook of their own Sunday lamb, served up on wedding presents, while Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wondered if their courtship had been, for her, something of the same – my brother draped over a chair for the statutory length of time, to see if she could live with him. In that case she might have noticed that he did not really go with the surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match.
To me it was quite incredible that they should be married and have a private life of lovemaking, of confidences exchanged and silences shared, of bills and latchkeys – their personalities converged so little and so seldom. Even Norah’s married name, Norah Unsworth, struck one as unlikely, the two blurred vowels coming together awkwardly and the whole sounding as if it belonged to the heroine of a schoolgirl’s story.
The thing was, my brother adored her. That was the great and touching thing. The strength of his passion had somehow carried them both through the forms of betrothal and marriage, and continued to make a synthesis of their disparate personalities. He did not require of her that she be sympathetic to him, or intelligent about others: it was enough for her to sit there on one of those cretonne-covered chairs, holding up her Minton cup and saucer, for him to feel satisfied with his choice. For her part, Norah showed no more curiosity about Edmund than she did about anyone else – never asking his opinion or encouraging him to reveal himself; but she too was borne along by her effect on him – it was as if the active force of his love kept her upright on her flowered chair and stabilized the cup in her hand, like some proposition in physics. She was exceedingly pretty, with fair, silky hair that hung straight down like Joan of Arc’s, and fine little features. Her skin was pale, but she had vivid pink cheeks and would refer to ‘my English complexion’, as if she might have had some other kind. (Only her hands were strangely broad and strong, with a vehement, wrenching grip; as a fat woman will have trim, delicate feet, so did fragile Norah have these masterful large wrists and grasping fingers.)
Girls are not now described as dainty, but dainty was the word for Norah. Edmund loved to look at her: I had not realized, in Africa, how much he felt the lack of England.
At the same time, he had still, then, other requirements. That was where I came in – literally, since I took to coming in as often as they asked me and supplying missing links. It was not that my brother and I talked about our own concerns in Norah’s presence, but there was always the silent assumption that I would overlook Norah’s triviality and would go on wadding up, around her little speeches of censure and self-centredness, enough indulgence to absorb them. And this made it appear, for a time, as if Edmund and I were in league with one another, not against Norah but in her favour; almost as though he and I were the married couple, and she some third party whom we had agreed to humour.
I have never spent so much time with a being who had no interest beyond herself. Norah talked a lot about human relationships, as she called them (for she had picked up some kind of jargon and was always saying ‘identify’ and ‘communicate’, could scarcely look at Edmund and me without the word ‘siblings’ popping out), but spoke as if these were a special subject, like lepidoptery or tropical plants, of which one could hardly hope to encounter interesting examples in daily life.
Like many English people she passionately wished to attach herself to the well born and well known. Adulation of the royal family was too commonplace for her, and she had amassed instead a great deal of information on fashionable life, from magazines and newspapers. Once in a while, at some large cocktail party or benefit performance, her life did glancingly touch this coveted sphere, and it was as if she spent the long intervals preparing for such moments. She had never been to Cap Ferrat or Corfu, but knew who had villas there and where one ought to stay. She could tell you which Honourable Amanda was going with what younger son, and how the parents felt about it. As a scholar might value some revelation that extended his concept, so did she receive the discovery that the Belvoir Hunt was pronounced ‘Beaver’, or that the name Leveson Gower should be said ‘Looson Gore’; her joy in such details was the measure of her relief at the revelatory gaffe she had been spared.
She clung to these social canons and cyphers as desperately as if she had been raised among anarchists.
With all this went an obsession for getting behind the scenes, being shown over by someone in the know. With her I went to television stations, to film sets, to tea on the terrace at Westminster – and even, once, up narrow stairs and down long corridors to the board room at Paddington Station, a large white oblong containing, like one of those oriental sets of diminishing boxes, a green baize oblong only slightly less large, and lined with huge, faded photographs of locomotives with names like the Windsor Castle and the Lancashire Witch.
One day, poor Norah, she would get behind the scenes once and for all, lost for good. Only my brother’s patient love drew her out by its thread, time after time, from those labyrinthine inner circles where she sought to invest herself with the trappings of authority or of social standing; to enter a company to which she felt herself – perhaps rightly – entirely qualified to belong.
They were an odd lot, Norah and her family. No, that’s not it – they weren’t odd enough, and that’s the truth. They belonged to the pre-war British middle class that feels itself to be in ambush in this world; were full of the petty derelictions of the neighbours, the local legends of bad deeds. They had no friend whom they did not, in absence, constantly and treacherously deride. They suspected me of being odd, and tried to settle me down, down, with bachelors from their own circle. These young men also existed in a continual state of righteous exasperation, saying things like ‘That could have been foreseen’, and being ‘Fed to the teeth’. They were of that type described by Gogol, men who ‘itch to maintain discipline everywhere and to enforce their views on station-masters and cabmen’. One of them, I remember, wrote a letter to The Times urging that Teddy-Boys be ‘firmly suppressed’.
Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases – ‘I fail to understand …’, ‘I cannot bring myself to overlook …’, ‘Tolerance is all very well up to a point …’ – as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.
If this was an aspect of the England I had left, it was by no means the one to which I most wished to return.
We put up with our state of affairs, Edmund, Norah, and I, for nearly three years; I suppose that is a short time, really, for it is in the nature of such things to go on for a lifetime. For a while, Edmund truly welcomed it because, as long as I would complement his marriage, it was a happy, even an ideal one. Like other persons who are described as weak, he rigorously commanded protective services from others. Norah put up with it because she enjoyed having me to patronize, and having those requirements of Edmund’s – humour, curiosity – that she could not meet supplied by me; in the way that a frigid wife might have unconsciously encouraged her husband to take a mistress. And I put up with it because I was in love with my brother.
In the telling, it is obvious. In the telling, all things are. If one says that one was young at the time, that alters nothing. One is always something, after all, at the time: one is old, one is young, one is in love, or in trouble, or poor or over-worked. It does not much matter what the extenuating circumstance is, and youth is mentioned here merely as the key to this particular piece of obtuseness.
It was when this love dawned on me – as it literally did, one grey sunrise, while I stood at my window looking at the brick backs of the houses on the Fulham Road – that Edmund began to wish me away; in becoming aware, I had outlived my usefulness. Now he must go on, take different measures, take a mistress, collect stamps, stay late
at the office. It was then that I resigned from my job at Pascoe and Wingrove (Norah’s father’s firm), and applied to be sent to Naples.
CHAPTER THREE
It was a surprise, after Gioconda’s photographs, to have her friend appear fully, even heavily, clothed, in a worn camel’s hair coat and a blue woollen scarf. Yet there was in Gianni’s attitude, as he appeared in her doorway a moment after my own arrival, so much of the triumphant, fish-catching stance that I should truly have known him anywhere. Though his face, with high forehead and high-bridged nose and expressive contours, was that of a city person, there was an athletic proficiency about his body. There were always certain borderline aspects to Gianni’s style: his proud walk might, on a bad day, almost have been called a strut; his litheness was the professional grace of someone who keeps himself in what is called ‘condition’.
Gianni, then, was forty-eight years old.
At once I found myself mildly resenting, on Gioconda’s behalf, the way in which he made himself at home. I had understood he was Gioconda’s lover (that very evening it was made known to me that he was, separated from his wife and could not get an annulment); but he took satisfaction in making this clear, as if I had been a rival for her affections. Letting Tosca, who was half his height, take his coat, he asked her what there was for dinner. In no time he was making drinks for us on the marble-topped chest that served as the bar, unerringly reaching – as he turned his head to talk to me – for the right bottle or placing his hand on a dish of lemons. If something was in his way he moved it without hesitation – chucking a magazine on to the sofa, dumping a pot of cyclamens on Gioconda’s blotter. While these confident gestures were not quite made for one’s benefit, it was evident that Gianni enjoyed the resolute exercise of his limbs and the accurate, unapologetic placing of his well-shod feet on the earth: I slouched more than ever into my chair in defiance of his good example. In a way I liked watching it, all the same.
As I was to learn, it was not hard to entertain Gianni; for he loved to talk about himself. In a world populated, as he never tired of illustrating, by cretini and analfabeti Gianni always triumphed, one gathered, with crushing ripostes or by reckless action. The catalogue of his victories was like a comic-strip serial, always following the same pattern: Gianni, intrepid, took arms against envy, stupidity or cowardice, and routed them. The forces of envy, stupidity and cowardice, endlessly returning, were endlessly put to flight. Bulletins of the campaign were interspersed with accounts of the gratitude of fair women, of feats of physical strength, or of the manifestly misplaced confidences of the celebrated. A lot of this was funny stuff, and the whole made tolerable by the same stylish self-assertion that showed in Gianni’s bearing and gestures.
Nevertheless, watching him that first day in Gioconda’s room, I wondered how she put up with him.
Later, when I saw more of Gianni, his attraction for Gioconda was to become more of a puzzle. Where Gianni was concerned it was as if she forfeited her critical faculties – at least I could not tell what she made of his boasting and his magisterial ways. He liked, for instance, to humiliate Gioconda in small things – ‘Your nails need doing’, or ‘It turns out you were quite wrong about …, but when, once or twice, I protested these remarks and took Gioconda’s part, she herself upheld him, saying ’‘ell, he’s right after all’, or ‘I must have got it wrong, then’, and Gianni would give me a smug glance, like a child that has scored over another child with the grown-ups.
He would even, at his worst, lead her on, encouraging her to speak of some incident or impression in order to demolish all the more conclusively her point of view; or her affectionate mood would be developed so that it might be all the more grossly ruptured: he was kind, in fact, in order to be cruel.
The likeable side of Gianni was inextricable from all this, and made itself felt in flashes of directness or practicality that gave an idea of how he conducted his work. For Gianni made films, and it was Gianni who had directed the film made from Gioconda’s book: in this way they had met. There was a compensating generosity in his nature, that would rush in to fill the cavities gouged out by his own unkindness. Unexpectedly he would remember some interest you had expressed, or some small object admired in a window would turn up for you in his pocket. The mention of an injury you had suffered would instantly have him crying down the imbecile who had offered it – and in this respect he was a true friend, hardly ever indulging the fiction that there are two sides to every question.
That first evening when we had our drinks and I got up to go, it was his generosity – and I think, too, a sense of not having been a success with me – that moved him to take me by the hand and ask me to spend the following day with them: for the Colonel had given me, for the first time, a Saturday free.
‘We’re trying out my new car,’ Gianni said. ‘Driving to Herculaneum, and on to Sorrento for lunch. Gioconda, tell her to come.’
Gioconda looked pleased, as if he did not always approve her friends. ‘What a good idea. Of course.’
‘There you are. You must.’ Gianni let go of my hand. ‘It’s a Maserati.’
At the front door I said to Gioconda, who had come to let me out, ‘It’s kind, but I won’t.’
‘If you’re free, why ever not?’
‘Because this is your time together.’ I had learnt that Gianni came at week-ends, and drove back to Rome on Sunday evenings.
‘Oh, if it’s only that – ’ Now Gioconda took my hand, as Gianni had done, and then released it. I was reminded of how she had quickly squeezed the cat. ‘We’ll pick you up at ten, say.’
‘But can you bear to have me there? When you might be alone together?’
Gioconda considered this, then said reasonably, ‘Of course I could not bear it if, at the end of the day, it was you who were to go to bed with him.’ She laughed at my surprise as she closed the door. ‘About ten, then.’
On my way back to the hotel I bought a bunch of yellow roses from a stand in Via Santa Lucia. A strong, gritty wind had blown up, and it snatched out of my hands the fragments of change I had been given. The five and ten lire pieces came, then, in wrinkled miniature banknotes instead of coins, and two or three of these wheeled about the footpath, creating false opulence around me and giving desperate exercise to a group of urchins with fierce, elderly faces. When I unwrapped the roses in my room, I found I had been given only the broken heads of flowers, discards of some florist; but these had been fixed to their false stems with such patient professionalism – so intricately wired and laced, so ingeniously sheathed in green – that one seemed almost to have profited from the deception. They lasted few days, these ironic flowers of Naples, though perhaps as long as any roses at that season.
The same evening I wrote to my brother, ‘All the bananas in Italy are from Somaliland. Every day, somewhere, I pass a stall of Somali bananas – the fruits, quite literally, of your labours.’ When I wrote this sort of thing to Edmund I had to wonder if I were not excluding Norah, still invoking the existence that Edmund and I had once shared. Yet – so I thought – it might be as well to leave them a little something to put up with: I knew, and the knowledge gave pain, how often Edmund would assure himself that my disappearance was the best thing for everyone concerned – it is what people always say when they have arranged something exclusively to suit themselves. If he no longer wanted to learn about himself, why should I assist in that deception? In Africa I had been young enough to enjoy my influence over him without recognizing that it originated in his weakness.
This reasoning covered the wish to hurt him. But resentment begets perception, of a kind, and the reason itself was true – the part about Edmund’s not wishing to know himself. He was catching slogans from Norah and, if he did ever speak of his own character now, it was to inter it in a heap of abstractions. ‘I’m something of a masochist,’ he would write to me, as casually as he might have said, ‘I’ve joined the Athenaeum’; or: ‘I’m in my manic phase’. Thus, gratefully, he renounced uniqueness fo
r a textbook anonymity. ‘That’s just people’ had become his favourite phrase.
His opinions too had taken on much of Norah. She put words into his mouth; and they emerged, lightly coloured like Litmus paper by his own mild reaction.
The habit of meeting Edmund’s requirements was strong in me, all the same, and my letters home were in general as bland as the replies that came back, ‘I have been befriended here by an Italian woman …’, thinking as I wrote how Norah and her circle, with their conventional anglicized idea of all south Italy, would imagine Gioconda, if they imagined her at all – picturing her squat, voluble, perhaps with a light moustache. I even played up, involuntarily, to this misconception – it is useless to offer true impressions of one’s life to those who actively desire not to learn of it in other than untroublesome terms; one might as well subscribe to whatever fiction is imposed. Beyond this was the instinct, of self-preservation, to keep this tentative new existence to myself.
My sister-in-law’s letters were vehement in their wish to forestall any suggestion of infelicity on my part. If this was to be the best thing for everyone, there was to be no possibility of second thoughts. ‘Good to know you are so happy,’ she would say in every letter. Assiduously she built up a climate into which the realities of a life as formless and solitary as mine could never intrude. ‘You must be very happy,’ she would direct me; ‘I tell everyone how happy you are,’ she would warn, producing witnesses. These letters arrived without mercy at every crisis of my life, and they do so still.
On the other hand, she got edgy if, compliantly, I spoke of genuine pleasure. When I wrote of the white steamers setting out for Capri, she replied, ‘Capri must be very spoilt now.’ If I mentioned the streets of Naples, she wrote back, ‘I can never forget that American gangsterism originated there.’ My smallest achievement must be minimized: ‘Lucky you.’ With Norah the unconscious was always uppermost: you had to dig down to find the conscious.
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