The Garden of the Villa Mollini Read online

  ‘Tanks?’ says Bob.

  ‘Yes,’ and she nods towards the wall facing the bed, ‘the fish.’

  Bob walks past her into the room. It has a musty smell that reminds him of the smell of the silos. There are three aquaria, dimly lit, arranged with stones and coral and fern. ‘The thing is,’ says the woman, ‘they’re not silent. It’s the aeration.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bob and glances from the fish tanks to the window, against which the rain begins to hurtle.

  ‘They need to breathe,’ says the woman and for the first time smiles tenderly at Bob. ‘Some find it company.’

  That night, John Sparrow dies in his bed.

  Mary straightens the candlewick counterpane and sits with a little lamp on and tries to imagine her future, but her future seems flat. John Sparrow imagined his flat, featureless land, but he was tall in it. Where he went, Mary’s eye followed.

  So blind and cold in the landscape does Mary feel now that she creeps from the room and goes to the kitchen to boil milk for a hot drink. The blue digits of the oven clock flick on: 2:41. She waits and stares. 2:42. She thinks of her son.

  The storm over London has moved on. Bob Sparrow wakes and stares at the ghostly light of the fish tanks and his head throbs. The bubbles rise and sigh. His tired eye becomes a swimmer and inquisitive swift visions pass into his mind. The bodies of the fish are soft, delicate as a brain. They’re supple and fragile and streaming with colour and light. And Bob Sparrow remembers a day in summer when he creeps in secret in the jungle of raspberry canes and pops his eye through a dark gap in the leaves and sees a burst of red where the fruit hang. His nimble child’s brain marvels and his child’s hand pushes up and cups the berries and he squashes them on his tongue. And he darts on up the row, where the patterning of light and leaf is intricate and restless, always changing and moving, yet always there. He runs, playing games with the shadows and the raspberry field is beautiful and his soft limbs running are the most beautiful things of all.

  Bob Sparrow snaps on the bedside lamp. For an instant, all the fish are still, as if immobilised by an electric shock. He looks away from them. The lamp casts a corn-coloured glow on the unfamiliar room. He searches in his briefcase for aspirin, swallows two, then lies on his back looking at the square ceiling. He doesn’t glance again at the fish and tries not to listen to the sighing of the oxygen in the water. The throbbing in his head gradually ceases, but he can’t sleep. He turns out the light and covers his face with his pillow. As time passes, he sees daylight at its edges and thinks of the dawn breaking on the rim of his land and of the harvest to come. His brain gathers it. His hard brain like a safe stores it and locks it. And nothing moves.

  In the morning, the fifty-year-old woman cooks sausages for him and shows him her dog trophies. Bob Sparrow is polite. He admires the ugly trophies and then, as he’s leaving, asks without interest why she keeps the fish.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘they’re a feature. Tropical fish are a feature.’

  ‘Do you know their origins?’ asks Bob, and the woman shrugs.

  ‘I don’t think those ever had origins,’ she says. ‘Or they might have done. In fact, I think they did because they’re tropical, pet. But I’ve forgotten. It’s the kind of thing you just forget.’

  On the Monday that follows Bob Sparrow’s return is old John’s funeral. Mary’s face at the graveside is white and still.

  A year or so from this date, Bob Sparrow buys a light aircraft and beneath its elegant fins sees, to his satisfaction, his land become small: a square.

  La Plume de Mon Ami

  ON AN APRIL THURSDAY, Maundy Thursday in Gerald’s Letts Diary, Gerald strolled in his city suit through the lunchtime crowds in Covent Garden and saw, through the window of an expensive shop, Robin buying knitwear. Until this moment – Robin, moving towards a full-length mirror with a beige and burgundy cardigan held tenderly against his shoulders, glances up, and his round blue eyes that haven’t faded with time behold, through the artful display of home-knitted jerseys on wooden poles, Gerald looking in – Gerald and Robin hadn’t met for twenty years. If they sometimes thought about each other, or had a dream in which the other appeared, or sent, on impulse, a Christmas card, they also knew that their friendship belonged too delicately to the past to survive the present or the future. They doubted they would ever meet again.

  Gerald, at thirty-eight, was a tall, powerfully fashioned man, with a fleeting, blazing smile of touching emptiness. Robin, at forty-two, was neat-waisted, springy, very hesitantly balding, small. As they sighted each other, as if through an ancient, long-discarded pair of binoculars, both knew unerringly what the other would see: their separate mortality. Both felt, on the same instant, sweet sadness. Gerald smiled and walked into the shop. Robin, still holding to his chest the burgundy cardigan, moved neatly towards him and silently embraced him.

  Because it was lunchtime and because, as Gerald neared forty, he had become an innocently gourmandising man, he prolonged this meeting with Robin by the space of a meal, during which they discussed – very gently, so as not to lay on this fugitive encounter a feeling of heaviness – the past. That night, they went to their separate homes on different sides of London and began to remember it.

  Gerald liked to remember things chronologically: cause and effect; beginning, middle and end. So he started by remembering the play – the Crowbourne school production of Antony and Cleopatra, in which he’d played an acclaimed Antony and in which at the last minute, because of the appendectomy of a dark-browed boy called Nigel Peverscombe, Robin had played a petulant Cleopatra. Hand in hand with his memories of his Crowbourne Antony went Gerald’s memories of Palomina, his first woman.

  Robin preferred to remember more selectively, starting with days, or even individual moments when he’d been happy or at least carefree, and only then proceeding, holding fast to the rim of his duvet in his dark and reassuring room, to those other times when he’d begun to see himself as a clown, a fool, a player in a tragedy even. He managed, however, a rueful smile. His life since that time hadn’t been disagreeable. Certainly not tragic. Next term, he was taking over as Housemaster at Shelley, Crowbourne’s premier house.

  Gerald remembers staring, smiling as he bows, beyond the hot flood of the stage lights on their scaffolding, at the dark space above the heads of the audience, and feeling the future touch him lightly and beckon him out. School is over. He is eighteen and a man. Palomina is out there, applauding. Ahead is the summer. No child’s beach holiday with his mother and father and his two baby sisters, but a journey this year, a man’s adventure, two months of travel before the start of the Oxford term. He wants to applaud with the audience. Applaud his good fortune, his youthfulness, his potency. He wants to shout. ‘Bravo!’ cheer the Upper Sixth, sitting at the back. Gerald and Robin move forwards, separating themselves from the rest of the cast. The clapping and stamping is thunderous. Gerald shivers with ecstasy and hope. He smiles his captivating smile. ‘We did it,’ Robin whispers. And Gerald’s wellspring of optimism is turned to admiration and affection for Robin, the young teacher, his Oxford already in the past, producer of the play and, finally, its bravest star. ‘You did it, Robin,’ he corrects.

  He remembers nothing about the school after that night. Not the farewells, nor the packings of trunks, not even the last singing of the school song. It fell away from him and he cast it aside. It was strange for him to imagine, as he sat on the deck of the channel steamer with Robin and watched the English coast become thin and insubstantial that Robin would be returning to Crowbourne in September. Why live through Oxford and get to know the proper world and then go back? I will never do this, he promises himself, I will never go back to Crowbourne except as the father of future Crowbournians. Robin will teach them and remember me. In his repetitious life it will be me, not my sons, who will count.

  It’s chilly on the boat, windy and grey. Near Dieppe, it gets rough and Gerald and Robin sit huddled up in their coats. Robin produces a hip flask of
brandy. The silver mouth of the flask has a warm and bitter taste. They don’t talk much.

  At Dieppe, their legs unsteady after the long boat crossing, they lug their suitcases to the Paris train. This was before the days of backpacks and weightless, shiny bags. For two months, they carried those heavy cases around, re-labelling them for each new stage of the journey. They were scraped and scratched and dented and buffeted and sat on. Arriving back at Victoria, they seemed like the sad trophies of a battle. Gerald can’t remember what became of his suitcase, but he remembers the look and feel of it in his cheap Paris room, opening it and laying out on the shiny coverlet a clean shirt and the kind of striped jacket that used to be called ‘casual’. Men’s clothes. He’d become a man. Now Robin would show him France. All the places he’d learned about he would see and touch, wearing his casual clothes. With Robin he walks out into the Paris night. Robin leads them unerringly to a noisy, whitely lit brasserie and advises Gerald, ‘Have pied de porc. They know how to cook it here.’ When the meal arrives, Gerald stares at the trotter on his plate and thinks, good, from now on I shall seek out the unfamiliar. That night, he has a dream he’s snuffling for truffles.

  Of course, says Robin to himself, as if in answer to a question, I remember Paris! We were in the sixième. The hotel proprietor wore an eyepatch. I had room No. 10. We didn’t go into each other’s rooms, but stood only on the thresholds. Paris was the threshold of the journey. Gerald wore clean, smart clothes that got dirtier as the summer went on. He seemed large in that French city. I was a better size for Paris. He was golden and greedy and loud. I disliked him, suddenly. He tried to make me get up early to take him to the Louvre, but I didn’t want his enthusiasm for the pictures, I wanted to go on my own and spend some time with the Cézannes. I felt in need of foliage and quiet. I said, ‘Go on your own, Gerald. I’ve seen the Louvre.’ I walked in the Luxembourg Gardens where, every time I’ve been there I seem to see a nun, and started writing my diary. I’d arranged to meet Gerald there and he came running at me, waving like a lunatic. I blushed for him. ‘Leave me here,’ I wanted to tell him, ‘go on on your own.’ But he sat down and began to chivvy me about – of all people – Rubens. ‘I can’t stand Rubens,’ I told him. So he shut up and sighed and began to kick dusty pebbles like a boy. Yes, I disliked him then. Some nuns passed and he smiled at them. I started to write down ‘N’ in my diary for every nun I saw. I decided they were bad omens.

  Another thing I didn’t like about Gerald then was his piety. It was a false piety, born out of his successes at Crowbourne and his romantic love of the girl, Palomina. He displayed it, though, in all the grand churches, Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the Sacré Coeur. Of these three, only the Sainte Chapelle is quiet and the other two mill with tourists in ugly clothes, exhibiting their own brand of false piety by lighting candles for people far away. Watching them, I try to imagine the names of the people getting the candles. Over the years, the names have changed. Now, they’re mainly Japanese: Kyoko, Nukki, Yami, Go. Then, twenty years ago, they were American: Candice, Wilbur, Nancy-Anne, Buck. They disgusted me. Gerald’s lighting of candles disgusted me. I was, then as now, a very unsentimental man. I saw several N’s in the three churches that day. N’s look as if they’re always whispering to Jesus and I can’t abide these private conversations. They could be talking to God about me.

  Of our three nights in Paris, I prefer to remember the third. We are asked – a prearranged date – to dine with Monsieur and Madame de Bladis, friends of Gerald’s parents. Gerald refers to these people as ‘The Bladders’. Brushing our cuffs, shining our shoes with paper hankies, we take the Métro to Neuilly, where the Bladders have a maison particulière. ‘She’s rather fun,’ Gerald tells me, ‘she has a sense of humour.’ And the thought flits into me like a bat: do riches alter the jokes you make, the things you laugh at? I feel poor on the stuffy Métro. For the first time since leaving England, I’m at peace with Gerald’s size and air of wealth. I decide, on the morrow, to grow a beard. My first beard. I don’t tell Gerald my decision. I’ll let him notice it himself.

  The de Bladis house is emphatically grand. Porcelain blackamoors hold on their turbaned heads a marble table in the hall. Madame de Bladis is chiffoned, pearled and rouged and sweeps down her cascading staircase like a dancer. She leads us to the roof, where there is a canopied garden, complete with a tiny fountain, the noise of which creates in my own bladder a perpetual yet not unexciting desire to piss. ‘Gerald, Gerald,’ she says in her soft French voice, ‘you are getting so beautiful. Why don’t we have a daughter to offer you?!’ Gerald is quieter here, awed by the roof garden, very beautiful indeed. And it’s to me, in his shyness of these people, that Gerald turns – for encouragement, for the right word in his hesitant A-Level French, for confirmation of an idea or an opinion. I become the teacher again and the old intimacy we had for the weeks of the Cleopatra rehearsals and then lost as we arrived in France, returns. As Gerald’s friend, I am made welcome. We are served anguillettes – a kind of minuscule eel I’ve never eaten before or since – as a first course. All along the roof, as the sky deepens, pink lanterns are lit. Above and between these, tilting back my happy head, I see the stars. ‘Your friend is smiling,’ says Madame de Bladis, ‘I like this.’

  Gerald remembers a feeling of admiration, of envy almost for Monsieur de Bladis. A bank to run, a sumptuous house to own, a pretty wife with a plump, high-sitting bosom to be deliciously unfaithful to – these earthly rewards could be worth striving for. I will, he decides, watching the plash-plash of the fountain, watching the gloved hands of the servant who brings a hot chocolate soufflé, try to make a success of things. Oxford and the Law. The route is straight. I’m on my marks. Yet there’s a little time, such as now, sitting on a roof in Neuilly on a warm night, to be savoured before the race begins. Even Robin is allowing himself to savour this night. He’s stopped feeling cross. He’s started to enjoy himself. And tomorrow we go south, as far as the Loire.

  ‘Ah,’ says Robin, ‘ah, yes, yes,’ as we see, admirable and stately above the town, the Château de Blois. And I know that this little lisp of pleasure he lets sigh conceals his abundant knowledge of French and Italian architectural caprice, that he will guide me through the complexities of the building in the same delighted way he guided me through Shakespeare’s verse. He’s twenty-two. How has all this knowledge been crammed into him? I feel as empty of history as a willow bat. As Robin prances round the dark well of the François Ier staircase, he murmurs, ‘Brabante, you see. Used by II Boccadoro. Note the balustrade. Shallow relief ornamentation. Very Brabante.’ And I want to mock him. ‘Very Brabante, Robin? Really?’ But I don’t. I let him bound on, gazelle-like in his light-treading reverence for stone, and I am invaded with my longing for Palomina. I want her there and then on the staircase. Her pubic hair is lightly brown. I want to tangle my life in her little brown briar bush. I lean on the balustrade and look down into the sunshine. A couple below me seem small and I’m dizzy with my Palominalust. ‘Gerald!’ Robin calls sternly, ‘come on!’

  The pension Robin has found near the station is poor. Outside my window is a vegetable garden where an old man works till dusk, hoeing and coughing and lighting thin cigarettes. His cough wakes me in the morning. The place has a cold, green painted dining room where, for dinner, we’re served a watery consommé followed by some lukewarm chicken. We don’t dare ask for vegetables, though in the garden I’ve seen peas and beans and marrows, but a dish of these arrives long after we’ve eaten the chicken. ‘Je m’excuse,’ says a thin, vacant-eyed waitress as she plonks the dish down. We eat the beans obediently and talk about money. We should economise on rooms, says Robin. All right, I say.

  I’ve begun to worry about how, in all the weeks to come, I’ll ever get my underpants washed. At school, you put out all your dirty clothes on your bed on a Friday morning and made a list of them and they were returned to you, washed and ironed, the following week. Who washed and ironed them exactly, or where, I’m
not able to say. I’ve never washed any clothes myself ever in my life, though I’ve heard there’s something called Tide you’re supposed to use. Can one buy Tide in France, or is it called something else? ‘Marée’, for instance? I sense, by the set of Robin’s nostrils as he plans our next day’s visit to Chambord, that he’s become too unearthly for these kind of questions. But I rather love and admire his enthusiasm for buildings and feel pleased I asked him to come with me. I notice, in the cold light of the green dining room, that he’s unshaven for the second day running. Is he, I wonder, going to model himself on more intrepid travellers than us? Scott, for instance? Or Alfred Russell Wallace? But I don’t ask him this. We go to bed rather early, me to write to Palomina, he to write his diary.

  Extract from Robin’s Diary. July 31st 1964.

  Ch. of Blois v. calming. Size has a tranq. effect on me. Renaiss. arch. seems so sure of itself, so sophisticatedly playful, nothing mean in it. Not hard to imag. my life in a turret.

  G’s arms and face are getting quite brown from sitting about. I think there’s a kind of impatience in him to get south. I shall rein him back – he my horse, me his chevalier!

  This room is mournful.

  Saw two NN at the Ch.

  Chambord tomorrow, hooray.

  Extract from Gerald’s letter to Palomina. July 31st 1964.

  My darling Palomina,

  One week since I saw you. I miss you, my darling. Do you miss me? I miss you so much. Please write Poste Restante to Avignon or Nice.

  I saw a fine Renaissance staircase today. I missed you on it. Do you miss me on staircases?

  At Chambord, Robin remembers, he was still in his carefree time. After Blois and now here, he’s becoming a François Ier admirer. At Chambord, the great king had a river, the Cusson, diverted to his castle’s feet. Robin lies on the sunny grass, eating bread and a carton of brawn salad, and imagines all the everlasting things he would like to re-route towards his master’s cottage at Crowbourne: the Spanish steps, Michelangelo’s David, Cézanne’s jungles, Dylan Thomas’s house-high hay, the golden vestments of Saladin. He’s aware, with his face tipped up to the blue sky, of the Loire valley as a kind of cradle where he and the grand houses can quietly affirm their remoteness from the modern, the discordant, the utilitarian and the plebeian. Tiny orchids, wild as weeds, grow near his head. Bliss. Order and beauty and grace. Blissful. He doesn’t move. Gerald gets up and struts around, taking photographs. Robin thinks of the frail King Charles IX who would hunt in this park for ten hours at a stretch and blow his hunting horn till his throat bled. Gerald is daring like this with his limbs. In the high-jump, he’d hurl his big body at the bar. ‘Run, Gerald!’ Robin wants to call to him. He loves to see him run. But he’s gone off somewhere with his camera and Robin is alone.