The Garden of the Villa Mollini Read online

  He’s gone off, in fact, to try to buy a stamp for his letter to Palomina. He thinks the little kiosk where they sell postcards and slides might also sell him a stamp, or rather several stamps, because he plans to write to Palomina a lot. He’s heavy with his Palomina-lust and writing to her assuages it. ‘Ah non, Monsieur,’ snaps the kiosk woman, ‘nous ne sommes pas un bureau de poste.’

  ‘Pardonne . . .’ says Gerald, ‘pardonnez-moi.’

  ‘Allez!’ says the woman with a sniff. It’s as if he’d asked for a French letter. He blushes.

  Robin remembers the Avignon train. It’s the Boulogne night train, but there are no sleepers, nor even any seats. It’s crammed with Parisians going south, sitting wearily shoulder to shoulder, like in wartime. He and Gerald stand at a corridor window and as the darkness comes, they begin to sense the air getting warmer. They’re lulled by the thought of a lavender sunrise in Provence. They lie down in the corridor with their heads on their suitcases and doze and all the shoulder-to-shoulder people lean and nod and pull down their blinds and a general tiredness overcomes the train.

  The train stops several times, but no one seems to get on or off. Robin sits up and stares at the names of stations: Vienne, Valence, Montélimar . . . Gerald seems to be sleeping soundly, enfolding his suitcase like a lover, his long legs in creased trousers heavy and still on the dirty floor. Robin takes an old cardigan he used to wear at Oxford out of his own case and covers Gerald’s shoulders with this.

  At six o’clock at Avignon-Fontcouverte, where the air is chilly and white with a dense mist, they stumble out, shivering, and follow the upright Parisians to a clean, new-seeming station restaurant serving croissants in their hundreds and large cups of coffee.

  Now, tasting this good, hot coffee, they feel the traveller’s awareness of deprivation and blessing, warmth after cold, shelter after storm. They don’t talk, but each is privately happy. And they’re south at last. Along the station platform, a hazy yellow sun disperses the mist and starts to glimmer on the plane trees. Gerald’s hair is tousled, giving him a shaggy, unruly look that Robin finds disturbing. On his cheek is a pink blotch, where it’s lain pressed against the suitcase lid.

  Gerald remembers how they walked through suburbs where buildings were sparse then, past plumbers’ yards and garages and a vast, empty hippodrome to the centre of the city, lugging the heavy cases. Buses passed them, taking people to work. Gerald suggested they should get on one of the buses, but Robin said no, he wanted air. So they walked till the city streets started to narrow round them and the Pope’s Palace was there above them, then sat down at a pavement café and saw from the milling crowds and fluttering banners and flags that Avignon was in the middle of a festival. ‘There’ll be a problem with rooms,’ Robin said, and in the hot sun Gerald felt tired and sleepy. Then he remembered that at the central post office there might be a letter from Palomina, and wanted to run to the letter and press the envelope against his nose, breathing in the translucent airmail sentences of his woman.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the post office,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour.’ And he darted away, leaving Robin sitting on his own with the luggage.

  The room is shadowy, remembers Robin, in a kind of well of buildings which shoulder off the light. There’s a double bed with a hard bolster and no pillows. The bedcoverings feel heavy and chill.

  They’re lucky to find the room. All the cheap places have complet signs up. This is the last vacant room in the last hotel . . .

  On either side of the bed, back to back they lie in the early evening and try to sleep. Robin is acutely aware of Gerald’s breathing. On a rusty washbasin near the bed stands an orange packet of Tide Gerald has bought. In the absence of any letter from Palomina with which to pass a secret hour before dinner, he’s washed out all his underpants. They’re hung on a rail at the side of the basin and drip steadily onto the lino floor. He’s naked in the bed except for a short sleeved T-shirt, and as well as his breathing Robin is aware of his firm, round buttocks very near to his own, and feels, for the first time since the night of Cleopatra, a fatal stab, of desire. He buries his face in the bolster and forces himself to remember the dark, Italianate features of the girl Gerald loves, Palomina, four years older than him, staying au pair with Gerald’s family, helping with the baby sisters. She’s a plump girl, not beautiful, but wide-eyed and wayward-seeming, with a mane of brown frizzy hair. The antithesis of blond, handsome Gerald. Yet pious like him, probably, with an exaggerated, lying Catholic piety. Confessing after he fucks her.

  The room’s above a café in the tiny, hemmed-in square. At the window, Robin can hear swallows and the sound of tables being laid for dinner.

  Extract from Gerald’s letter to Palomina. August 8th 1964

  My dearest Palomina,

  I’ve written to you almost every day. When we got here (to Avignon) I went straight to the PTT and God I was so miserable when there was no letter from you. It was so beastly, and I began to ask myself jealous questions: have you found another boy? Please reassure me, my darling, that you still love me. I feel like dying. This dying feeling is so horrible I think I must break my promise and visit you when you get to your parents’ house on the 23rd. Please say I can. I’m in torment without your breasts.

  Extract from Robin’s Diary. August 8th 1964.

  Prog. into Avig. is through draperies announcing a music and theatre festival. So no rooms of course. Boulevards choc-a-bloc with German youth. Thighs etc.

  Tourists are teeming coarsefish. G. and I try to behave like surface feeders, Mayfly gourmets. This will be diffic. here. We’re sharing a room, for reasons of econ. mainly. G. is washing his knickers in Tide.

  Had a dream last night in the train corridor Aunt M. was dead. Hope she isn’t. She’s the only intell. woman my family produced.

  Avig. teeming with NNs.

  Lost count after 9. Bad sign.

  NB. P. des Papes looks monolithic, just right for the Church, but wrong for me. Adieu la renaissance.

  Gerald remembers waiting in Avignon for the letter that never came. Day after day, he goes to the central post office and says his name, Gerald Willoughby. Je crois que vois avez une lettre pour moi, Gerald Willoughby.

  ‘Non,’ they say, ‘non, rien pour vous.’

  He dreads it then: rien pour vous. You have nothing, Gerald, are nothing without the embrace of Palomina.

  The city is hot, choked, dusty. They follow the tourists in a line up the ramparts of the Pope’s Palace. The wind brings gusts of litter. One night, they sit on planks to hear the voice of Gérard Philippe reciting Victor Hugo at a Son et Lumière performance, and the vast walls of the Palace are lit with strange violet light, behind which the sky seems violet and the bats like black musical notes, bodiless, flying to nowhere. They return penniless and sorrowful to their room. Robin’s wallet has been stolen. They spend the next day telephoning Lloyds Bank and Thomas Cook and Robin’s mother in Swindon and wait, with the letter that doesn’t come, for money to be sent to them.

  They walk out to the famous bridge, the Pont St Bénézet, and the Rhône is slow, majestic and green as the Amazon. Gerald remembers the blue of the Loire and feels the change in river colour to be one among very many confusions: Palomina’s silence, the mood of sadness that seems to have settled on Robin, the feeling of heaviness this city imparts. For the first time since leaving England, he’s lonely.

  Robin spends hours at the Musée Calvet. He tries to perceive where, in the Daumier drawings, amid the torrent of lines, the artist has changed his mind. Unconsciously, he’s seeking out the rage in the pictures, yet hoping to be calmed by them. He sits down very frequently on the hard banquettes and the image of Gerald’s turned back in the bed comes unasked-for into his mind. And he looks round and sees Gerald some way off, staring at the paintings, but not entering them, as Robin does, just vacantly gazing, unmoved, untouched.

  On the eighth day in Avignon replacement traveller’s cheques arrive and Gera
ld re-packs his underpants which have dried stiff and powdery, not quite like they were in the days of the school laundry. ‘I expect there’s a knack to washing, is there?’ he asks, as he examines the French writing on the Tide packet. Robin merely shrugs and touches his new beard, in which there seem to be little clusters of grey. It’s only since the night of Son et Lumière that he’s stopped answering all of Gerald’s questions. Very often, the boy looks hurt.

  The absence of an airmail letter from Palomina is hurting. All Gerald can think of now is getting to the central post office in Nice. He can see the letter in its little metal compartment. He can see Palomina’s bunched-up continental writing. Yet the thought that Palomina has stopped loving him is giving him pains in his bowel. ‘I feel strange,’ he tells Robin, as they climb onto a hot, mid-afternoon train and sit down opposite two nuns, ‘I feel weak.’

  He leans his head against the burning glass of the train window and closes his eyes. The train’s crowded with young people, German, Dutch, American. The seats opposite the nuns were the only two available. ‘Milano!’ asks a big Italian with hairy thighs, as he pushes past with his rucksack. ‘Non,’ says Robin.

  The Italian looks distractedly up and down the train. A tin mug, strung onto a canvas loop of his haversack, almost bangs the wimple of the outer nun, who lowers her pale face and folds her arms. ‘Questo treno. A Milano, non?’ the Italian asks the nuns. ‘Nice!’ they whisper, in unison. ‘Ah fucki shiti!’ he says, seizing a hank of springy hair, and pushes himself towards the door, arms held high, like a wader. Robin smiles, liking the horror on the faces of the Sisters. ‘God!’ says an American girl, ‘wait till I tell Myrna I touched Gérard Philippe. She’ll die!’

  The train starts to move. Cool air comes in above Gerald’s blond head. Gerald remembers, on this train, the feeling of becoming very ill. He remembers falling in and out of a deep and sickly sleep and dreaming of the sea. He remembers the nuns looking up at him under their pale brows. He remembers Robin soaking his handkerchief with Evian water and giving this to him and, when it touches his head, feeling cold to his marrow. ‘I’m sorry, Robin, so sorry . . .’ he keeps repeating. And he walks past all the hot Dutch and German bodies to a foul-smelling toilet and shits his soul out into the stained pan. There’s no paper in the lavatory. With shaky hands, Gerald pulls his wallet from the shorts that lie round his feet and wipes himself with two dry cleaners’ tickets saying 2prs gr flannels and 1 blue blzr. His school clothes. Swilled away somewhere between Brignoles and Vidauban.

  Over Nice, where they arrive towards six o’clock, rolls a gigantic thunderstorm. Outside the crowded station, the rain begins to teem and Gerald’s enfeebled brain wants to cry for England and familiarity and shelter. He’s forgotten the letter waiting for him at the central post office. He’s incapable of Palomina-lust. He can barely walk. Sweat is running off him like the rain off the station roof. ‘Stay here,’ says Robin, sitting Gerald on a bench with the luggage. ‘I’ll go and find us a room.’

  And he watches hopelessly as Robin darts out into the forecourt, where people mill and shout and wait for taxis and buses. NICE COTE D’AZUR says a white and blue sign, and Gerald remembers that they are, at last, by the sea. Yet the bench towards which his head soon falls and rests smells of city soot. He puts a limp arm round the suitcases and longs for Robin to return.

  It’s dark by the time a Citroën taxi takes them into the vieille ville. The storm has moved inland and is hurtling far off, over the mountains. The sea’s calm in the big bay, silvery in its glut of reflected light. ‘What a show,’ Gerald mumbles, ‘Nice is.’

  Their room is an attic. Robin remembers the pigeon’s noisy existence on an iron window bar and the depths of quiet falling away below them into a courtyard. For most of his life, at least two or three times a year, in a dream, he’s returned to this room with its view of gutters and chimney pots and balconies and washing. The hotel is called the Jean Bart. There’s one lavatory every other floor. In the room below them an eighty-year-old Finnish woman struggles with the stairs. She tells Robin she’s well known in her country for her translations of D.H. Lawrence. Robin feels light and happy among the roofs. Twice a day, he carries bouillon and bread up all the flights of dark steps to Gerald’s bed. He and a pert maid tidy the room around their golden invalid, who is humble in his sufferings, cut down to size. For three days, Palomina isn’t mentioned. At night, Robin and Gerald lie side by side in the dark and talk of going on into Italy. Robin writes a postcard to his mother in Swindon saying: Arr. Nice. Old Town v. congenial. Trust yr hip not playing up in hot weather. Blessings, Robin. Gerald sleeps. Robin unwinds the sellotape from the Tide packet and washes, with gentle attention, his patient’s underwear and his own. He dries the clothes at the window where the male pigeons wear their showy tailfeathers like long kilts.

  Gerald remembers his resurrection on the fourth day. He’s standing in the PTT. The building has a vaulted roof like a church. It’s cool and dark. An Irish girl is weeping and being comforted by a friend she addresses as Dilly. ‘Oh Jesus, Dilly,’ she sobs, ‘oh Dilly, Dilly . . .’ And a pale PTT employee snaps, ‘Monsieur Willuffby?’ and slides a glass grille open and pushes towards Gerald an airmail letter.

  That night, as Robin and Gerald sit on a pavement in the vieux port and eat red mullet and a brilliant sunset the colour of the mullet tails descends on the cloudless evening, Robin takes out his postcard to his mother and adds, in angry schoolmaster’s red biro, PS. Weather here lousy. Gerald looks helplessly from Robin’s card to the sky and sighs. It’s intolerable, Robin, he wants to say.

  The house of Palomina’s parents in the hills behind Ajaccio is remembered entirely differently by Gerald and Robin, the smell of the maquis and of the eucalyptus trees being the one sweet, sad memory common to both. Robin remembers the unpleasant feeling of grit under his bare feet on the tiled floors. Gerald remembers gliding on these same floors like a silky ghost to Palomina’s bedroom door. Robin remembers the terror of finding himself, for the first time in his life, astride a horse. Gerald, on a bay mare, remembers the joy of it, and the blissful sight, not far in front of him, of Palomina’s bikini-clad buttocks going up and down on her Mexican saddle. Robin remembers the feeling, in these hard hills, in the shadow of the granite mountains, of becoming soft, boneless, vulnerable, too easily crushed and bruised, the feeling of helpless flesh. Gerald remembers arranging his big body next to Palomina’s in the sunshine and letting his eyes wander in the topmost pinnacles of rock, and thinking, I could climb those. With my bare hands and wearing only my football boots, I could master the Monte d’Oro.

  The storms have gone north. Over all of Corsica shimmers the breathless heat that seems, in Robin’s brain, to suspend time, to make every day long and blinding and purposeless, a month of empty sabbaths, everyone and everything monotonously sighing and humming and burning.

  The house sits on a small hill, itself contained in a wider valley hemmed in by the mountains. Below the hill is a stream, torrential in winter, now slow but cold and clear and full of minnows. Each evening, Robin comes down here and lowers his hectic head into the water and opens his eyes and sees in the green river his own foolish lovesick feet planted on the sand. He wishes it was autumn. In the crisp beginning of the new school year, there was purpose and dignity. In his diary, which he can hardly bear to write during this futile time, he makes plans to abandon Gerald and go on into Italy on his own. His writing in the diary is so bad, the language so truncated, he has trouble, some years later, deciphering what he wrote.

  Extracts from Robin’s Diary. August 24th – August 30th 1964.

  Miserab. arriv. G. so puffed up to see P. I cld wring his neck.

  No car avail. So we’re stuck in this idiotic ‘ranch’.

  G. thinks he’s Yul Brynner. Or worse.

  G. gets me on a f. horse. Failure.

  Lg to see some sights, even if it’s only Napoleon’s House.

  Boredom.

  P’s mother, Jeanne,
is an enig prd shallow persec woman. You sense no one loves her. We Inch in Ajacc. Then she show us the fam. tomb. Hideous. 4NN.

  Alone today. G., P., and J. went riding. Allwd car. Saw N’s house. Dispp. One gd portrait by Gros. Also Chap. Imp. Welcome brush with Renaiss. order. Coming out into the sun again, wanted to die.

  Mst get to Italy. Flor. Siena. La bella Toscana. Je souffre. Je souffre. Dream again Aunt M. died. Buried her behind some frescoes.

  For Gerald, this valley contains like a casket the precious possessions which are Palomina’s ruby nipples, her amber arms. His body is a slow avalanche of desire, engulfing, obliterating. Palomina. Paradise. His blood enquires about nothing but the act of love on Palomina’s single bed at dawn, before her mother is awake, before Robin comes sighing out of his dreams, before the sun has fallen across the shiny rumps of the horses in their dusty stables. He remembers a thin line of white six o’clock light coming under the shutters. Day. Everything in this coming day glitters with hope: the smile under the lipstick on the lips of Palomina’s mother; the sun on his knuckles as he eats his breakfast melon; the silver of the shivery eucalyptus; the fatal, alluring, far-off blue of the horizon. I’m in paradise. He wishes that he was keeping a diary like Robin’s, so that he could record each new ecstasy.