The Bay of Noon

by Shirley Hazzard

  I thought of how Gioconda had said to me, ‘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.’

  I had put Gianni’s flowers in a big glass vase, and they stood on a table near the windows, immense snapdragons, dozens of them, fierce and velvety, purple and orange and red. They had lain all afternoon on the bedroom floor.

  ‘They’ll revive,’ I said. ‘The flowers. Tomorrow they’ll be fine.’ I began to dread tomorrow and how this might seem then. Finding Gianni there.

  Gianni said, ‘They’re Gioconda’s favourite flower.’

  In this way it came about that on the following Saturday Gianni returned to Naples and did not go to San Biagio dei Librai.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Today I went out, some few miles above Seville, to see the ruins of Italica. Do you remember I laughed, Jenny, at the idea of leaving Italy to visit Roman ruins – yet there I was walking a rough path among long dry grass, as grateful as any legionary for these familiar sights. Civis romanus sum, it would appear. Because the walls are all down, and the site on high ground, there is an open, windswept atmosphere up there – difficult to imagine that the mosaic pavements were ever enclosed in houses or that the skyline was ever obscured by something more than the few cypresses that stand today. At the gate of the place, where one pays to enter, there was a poem inscribed that I thought you would have liked – a Spanish poet, and all I can remember is a reference to the weeds growing over the ruins like a public insult. In contrast with such astringency, such light and air, Herculaneum seems claustrophobic, a dense, decadent little enclave – too pleasurable, too ingrown. Too much like home.

  ‘Otherwise — I have been in a great cathedral here in Seville, and walked under screens of vines in charming streets, visited the Alcazar. The avenues are lined with orange trees, the parks are still filled with flowers. It is all as mournful to me as if it were draped in black. Once I stopped at the edge of a garden to look at an inscription on a pretty house, thinking it perhaps another poem: instead it announced the headquarters of the Falange. Spain seems all like that – you never know whether it is to be poetry or horrors, or the two combined. Something evil is always turning up to remind me how things are, how I am.

  ‘What I would like is – to come home. Instead, tomorrow, I am going to Madrid, then to Nice, at last, to Luciana. I will be back at Naples before the end of the year. If you can bring yourself to regard this as what it is – a low point in life, in my life – perhaps we shall meet … This evening I spend sitting here with the potted palms in a huge glassed-over courtyard of the hotel — cold in spite of heating and in spite of a tumbler of Spanish Scotch. There are two or three other people in a far corner who are whispering as if this were the cathedral itself, and the air of sobriety would be total were it not for a poor mad girl in beautiful clothes who sits talking to herself and occasionally gets up and wanders round the empty tables pulling the flowers out of their little vases as if she were rehearsing Ophelia. She is fair and quite lovely, though emaciated, and the most dreadful thing of all is the gravity with which the waiters answer her preposterous questions, conspiring against her with her infirmity. What else can they do? but this alone would be enough to make one mad.

  ‘When this is no longer bearable, I’ll go and have dinner – in a vast restaurant off the courtyard, in which at this season only one or two tables are occupied though all are laid – then go upstairs. My room has a solemn luxury – dark wood, double doors with polished fittings, exquisite linen; being comfortable is not something taken lightly here. It is all wonderfully dated, yet wonderfully kept up to date, like one of those antiquated motor-cars that has never been bettered and is in perfect running order – you know the kind, when you lift up the bonnet the engine is immaculate, its caps and taps glittering, all bronze and brass … In fact this hotel seems to be expecting, even to merit, something better than human guests – as if it had been intended for some superior order of being. I feel it must regard us, poor crazed and muddled mortals trailing over its marble floors, as a public affront, like the weeds of Italica.

  ‘Again – I would like to come home; and to have familiar things, things that would make me less unfamiliar to myself. Today the hairdresser told me that my hair is “muy castigado” from the summer teasing; I too am much punished from the summer teasing, and wish I were leaving for Naples, not for Nice …’

  Years later I arrived one spring evening in Seville, not alone, and sat in the glass-domed courtyard of Gioconda’s letter, among the ferns and palms. Watched over by a sombre waiter and one or two wintry guests, the two of us made up, from a dish of salted crackers formed in letters of the alphabet, lovewords that we spread out on our little table. We had managed to compose an indecent phrase or two before the waiter’s approach forced us to eat our words. Looking out our bedroom window before dawn we saw a group of cab-drivers in the street below warming themselves at a bonfire lighted on the pavement, while one of their number read to them from an outstretched newspaper. The following morning we were told that the Pope had died.

  Walking out in the city for the first time, we found it swathed in black, draped, wreathed, shuttered, depopulated: grotesquely adapted to the image of Gioconda in her sorrow walking these same streets, as if the city were, nightmarishly, living out one’s private associations with it.

  What stayed with me after reading Gioconda’s letter was the completeness of Justin’s disappearance from our lives. She asked nothing better than to take up her life as if he had never entered it; just as I wished now to go on, leaving him behind. Her chaotic flight had freed Gioconda from unnatural sacrifice; it had freed me from idealization of her. Even Gianni, according to my reasoning, stood, in his grief, to regain himself. Only Justin remained unaccounted for, not a beneficiary under this distribution of spoils. He seemed fictitious, a sort of sub-plot, something that had no existence other than to augment her experience and mine, to contribute to our legend. He himself had strengthened this impression by the defences – of language, of manner, of making love – he had constructed; had become their victim, like those heavily fortified towns that invite their own downfall by suggesting that there is something within to be assaulted.

  He had made himself appear, in retrospect, too easily elucidated - more so than Gianni who was constantly exposing and betraying himself, and of whom there had yet remained something to discover.

  Folding Gioconda’s letter and putting it carefully back – as carefully as Gianni had done – into its envelope, I said aloud the name not mentioned in it: ‘Justin Tulloch’. The words made no change, did nothing to bring him to life; unless by leaving, echoless, the sense of incompletion.

  Justin, if I hoped to exorcize you by pronouncing your name that day, for the last time, I was unsuccessful. For no name has haunted me as yours has. Why – when a single properly directed inquiry would have provided the answer – have I looked for you and failed to find your name ever since? – in telephone books, thin or weighty, from Brussels to Chicago; and once in Hollywood, balancing the flopping volume on my knee and turning pages while a voice droned on in the receiver about the creative impulse. Justin Tulloch – Tulloch, Justin; Tulloch, Justin P.; Tulloch, J. P. — it was your name that came to find me, after all, one day.

  This summer – the summer, that is, of this year that has just passed – my husband, who is a lawyer, had business to do at Pinner. Pinner was once a pretty, village-like place, and not, as it has now become, a suburb of London. It was a Saturday late in August when, after weeks of icy rain, the weather had suddenly turned hot, brilliant, and dry. While the business was being done, I walked through the town. The High Street (I suppose it was a High Street) ran down a short hill, and boasted, as the quite inappropriate saying goes, a number of tea-rooms. The one I turned into was, like all the tea-rooms of childhood, a combination of dun distemper and darker varnish. No arrow of that bright afternoon could pierce its leaded dark-grey panes, glassily dimpled
as though by the impression of innumerable fingertips; or illumine the pinched lady – counterpart of a thousand others – who with a schoolroom gesture of her furled menu pointed out an empty chair at the end of the low, close room.

  The place was hot with summer and humanity. In tea-rooms in England one must often share a table. Tea and cakes for the three other women at my table – there was not one man in that crowded place — had just been brought on a wooden tray. The ringleader of the three dispensed cups and saucers, forks and plates to her friends, reaching out in constricted gestures. She wore a sleeveless cotton dress printed with pink flowers, and her middle-aged, sunless white arms were too prominent – vulnerable and touching; she herself seemed conscious of the exposure as she repeatedly extended and withdrew them.

  The waitress took my order, and I picked up from the floor by my chair somebody’s discarded copy of that day’s newspaper. By pushing the chair back a little against the mustard wall, I could open the paper in my lap.

  Flowered woman set hand on flowered teapot. ‘Shall I be Mother?’

  Cups, not matching, were extended. ‘Just as it comes.’

  I turned pages of the newspaper, in the total privacy of these few inches that were my inviolable claim on our table. We exchanged no looks, no words; unaffectedly they spoke, as if I were not there. I liked their ability to carry this off.

  ‘I heard they went to Venice for the honeymoon.’

  ‘But only for a week.’

  When the tea came I managed to re-fold the newspaper, my elbows gouging my sides, and propped it between me and the table. It was placed so that the lower section of a page was visible. I helped myself to tea, and to a yellow cake that looked like a small segment pried out from the wall at my back, and I was able to read an item that came just below the crease of the page. It was a dispatch from an island in the Caribbean.

  SEARCH DISCONTINUED FOR SEAPLANE

  The search has been abandoned for a twin-engined amphibious plane overdue here since Thursday evening. The plane, which was returning from a scientific expedition to a nearby island, is presumed to have developed engine trouble in the last stage of its flight … In addition to a crew of three, the plane was carrying two unidentified passengers and a British scientist. Professor J. B. Tulloch from Edinburgh University … Professor Tulloch leaves a widow, Mrs Lorna Staines Tulloch of Elgin Crescent, Edinburgh, and two young sons.

  ‘Another cuppa anyone?’

  ‘Not me. In this heat.’

  ‘He has to have a dressing every day, like I was telling you. Well she said, I’ve got used to it now, you can get used to anything, but at first I can tell you my stomach turned over.’

  The cup in one hand, a forkful of cake in the other, I lowered my head over your name, Justin, at last, in that tea-room in Pinner, inches from the fair, greying topknots of my chattering companions. My stomach turned over, I can tell you, but one gets used to anything. The pang of irrational posthumous jealousy, the shock of your alien new life that had already closed before I learnt of its existence; and your name I had sought everywhere. The middle initial, of which you were proud, was misprinted, there is always some irrelevancy of the kind. We had an appointment in Pinner, your name and I, and now I will never need to look for it again. The search has been abandoned.

  Gianni raised himself on his elbow. The fold of the linen sheet stood up stiffly, whitely, around his shoulders, like the robe in a Bernini sculpture. ‘Now what’s the news?’

  ‘Several things,’ I said. ‘How do you know I have news?’

  ‘Because you haven’t asked me if I have any.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we’ve had something to eat.’

  In the wake of the disease I had developed gluttony, as if every organ were crying out for replenishment. As soon as Serafina washed up the lunch dishes and departed each afternoon, I would go into the kitchen and open tins, slosh soup into a saucepan, hack off slices of bread and cheese. During the previous night I had eaten up most of a cooked chicken and polished off a tin of Indian Pudding from the PX. I stayed a little longer at Gianni’s side, but all I could think about was food.

  He followed me to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, thrusting his arms into his shirt. ‘What a lot of waste in tomatoes,’ he remarked, as if he had never seen them sliced before. He passed his hand up my neck, under my hair. ‘The yellow is fading.’

  ‘So I hope. I’d begun to think I was yellow for life.’

  ‘This illness of yours – it gives the thing a more macabre character than ever.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m infectious any more.’

  Gianni groaned. ‘Oh lord, I hadn’t even thought of that. No, I didn’t mean that, though … It’s like … It’s slightly -’

  ‘Necrophilous.’

  ‘Well – you’re on the right track … Your toenails, even your toenails are yellow, Jenny.’

  I laid out strips of ham on a platter with one hand, and with the other put a folded slice into my mouth. Gianni watched me pile up a tray with bread and mozzarella, and fruit in a bowl of water. ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘I’m not all that hungry.’

  ‘I am, though.’ I took two napkins from a drawer and stuffed them in the pocket of my dressing-gown.

  ‘Another glass,’ said Gianni as I took up the tray.

  ‘I’m not allowed wine.’ I had never been really sick before and enjoyed citing these prohibitions. ‘Or vinegar,’ I added — though even this could not move Gianni to carry a tray.

  We sat on the terrace. It was another mellow, still afternoon, and I stared at the city, at the mountains, at the sea, at the fluted palisades, far off, of Sorrento, enlarging my eyes to take them in. Impression, sensation, experience were famished too, and asking for replenishment: my eyes were as big as my stomach.

  ‘Yes, you’re looking better,’ Gianni said. He put the bottle of mineral water down in the shade beside his chair. ‘Now tell me. You’ve heard from her.’ I nodded, with my mouth full. ‘And I have not. Will I see the letter?’

  ‘Could. But it isn’t necessary.’ I wanted, most particularly, to keep it to myself, this final communication between Gioconda and me.

  ‘Does she mention me?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Gianni is only one word,’ he pointed out, to cover his disappointment.

  I said, ‘She was alone when she wrote. By now she’ll be at Nice with her sister.’

  Gianni tore off a frond from a bunch of grapes. I watched the fruit tremble in his fingers, as delicately as though it were still on the vine. ‘Is it over, then?’ After a minute he got up and leant on the rail with his back to me eating the grapes and tossing the seeds into the sea. At last he threw the stern away and came back and sat beside me. He took up my hand and laid it against his face and dropped it again.

  ‘Gianni,’ I said. ‘In a word: Gianni. Go and fetch her.’

  Gianni put his bare foot up against the railing. ‘It could so easily go wrong, you see.’

  ‘It’s what she wants.’ When he looked at me, I added, ‘Not that she says so.’

  ‘Well there you are.’ But I could see that he would go. When he went on, ‘I’ll have to get the car back,’ I thought of Gioconda getting a new dress for Tripoli, and wished the memory away. ‘How long will she stay there?’

  ‘Till Christmas or so.’

  Gianni rocked himself back in his cane chair with his foot braced on the railing. Eventually he said, ‘You had something else to tell me. Several things, you said.’

  ‘Yes. They have asked me to go to America.’

  He and I stared at one another. ‘O Dio.’

  ‘I would have to be there in November. To present the report of this joint commission I’m with here. To submit the report, whatever that means.’ I saw myself walking up the steps of the Lincoln memorial, which was the only building in Washington I knew the look of, an immense manuscript in my extended hands – something like the Presentation of the Virgin. ‘It’s to do with la
st-minute changes, that sort of thing. I would have to sign on for at least another year.’

  ‘The last minute appears to be somewhat prolonged,’ Gianni observed. ‘How is the salary?’

  ‘Low. But they will pay my fare, and I can go by ship.’

  ‘Will you be well enough?’

  ‘By that time, yes.’

  ‘Do you know anyone there?’

  ‘No. But I didn’t know anyone here either.’

  ‘And now look at you.’ Gianni smiled, glancing up my bare legs to where my shoulder was coming out of the dressing-gown.

  I laughed, I said, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s having been sick, I suppose.’

  Gianni shifted his chair beside mine. ‘It’s terrifying,’ he said, reaching down to move the mineral water. ‘That’s why.’ He took my right hand in his once more and I wiped my eyes with my left.

  We sat still with our hands linked. I said, ‘We must look like Darby and Joan. Though I can’t say I ever pictured them sitting beside the Bay of Naples.’

  ‘Ma chi sono?’

  ‘Oh God, don’t ask – they’re a comfy old couple who sit by the fire.’

  ‘Well, since I am to be this comfy old John —’

  ‘It’s Joan, not —’

  ‘- let me tell you my comfy old idea. I am going to telephone, now, to the shipping company and find out what ship you can take. I am not going to Gioconda until I see you settled, no matter what happens. I will put you on the ship.’ He released my hand and got up. ‘Quiet. Quiet. Let me telephone, and afterwards we can talk about it. It would be better this way, it gives us more time.’

  I said, ‘I don’t need more time.’

  ‘I meant – forgive me – for her and me.’

  He went in, and was back a second later. ‘Where’s a pencil and paper?’