The Garden of the Villa Mollini Page 9

  He’s sharing a room with Robin. In the room are twin beds, covered with white Portuguese lace, a painted chest of drawers, an oak wardrobe, a blue and yellow china lamp and a dusty bit of rattan serving as a mat. This modest arrangement of furniture now contains the bountiful happiness of Gerald and the silent misery of Robin. As a kind of poultice on his wound, Robin remembers the room at the Jean Bart and the carrying of broth and Gerald’s sweet gratitude. ‘I’d have died if it wasn’t for you, Robin,’ he said. Now, in Corsica, with these two dark, thick-browed women and Gerald’s fair hair going pale as honey, Robin feels he’s dying. Not precisely of love, but of his own foolishness. He can live without Gerald. What he can’t seem to manage is to live with him and yet without him.

  ‘I know,’ he says one night to Gerald, ‘you’d probably like to stay on here. But there’s a ferry back to Nice tomorrow and I think I’ll get on it and then press on to Italy like we planned.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you like it here? You don’t like Palomina, do you?’

  ‘I just want to get to Italy.’

  ‘Don’t you love the mountains? You love the river, don’t you?’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘You mean it’s churches and paintings and things you miss? But you saw Napoleon’s House, didn’t you. You liked that.’

  ‘I want to leave, Gerald.’

  ‘But we agreed, Robin, we’d have this holiday together.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So you can’t just desert me. And, listen, Palomina’s father’s arriving tomorrow. We’ll get taken to more things. He’s a big wheel. The Tomasini family are big wheels here.’

  I should, said Robin to himself, twenty years later, have left the next day. Why didn’t I leave? Why did I do what Gerald wanted?

  Obediently, he puts on a clean shirt and trims his startling beard for the return of André Tomasini. This man, who has made a lot of money by Corsican standards, arrives in an ancient Chevrolet and is accompanied by four slender-hipped young men, wearing medallions. These men are embraced by Palomina like brothers. Tomasini is a small, cruel-faced man, whose authority seems to reside in his thin-tipped Roman nose. He greets Gerald and Robin unsmilingly (‘oh, I see, my daughter invited you, did she?’), covers Palomina’s face with intimate kisses and ignores his wife until she informs him that lunch is ready, when he bangs her bottom like a dinner gong.

  They sit down to the meal. Tomasini begins a lengthy, superstitious grace, invoking the name of ‘notre ancêtre illustre, Letitzia Ramolini, mère de l’Empereur’. What this had to do with the eating of saucisson and trout remains, to this day, a mystery to Gerald, part of all that he suddenly couldn’t understand. Now, the house where he’s lived in ecstasy is invaded with conversation and gesture and innuendo and private knowledge from which he’s deliberately excluded. Outside, the light is as fierce, the crickets as noisy, the horses as elegantly restless as on all previous days, yet Gerald knows – in Tomasini’s patriarchal behaviour, in the reverently lowered eyes of Palomina, in the withdrawal of Jeanne’s friendly conversation – that his status is altered. No matter if Palomina works au pair in his family, here it’s only the Corsicans who count. The strangers are inferior. Gerald looks helplessly at Robin, who is eating his trout primly, in utter silence. He refuses to catch Gerald’s eye. His lowered and impassive face is, the boy supposes, still dreaming hopelessly of Florentine marble. Fleetingly, he envies Robin his detachment.

  ‘Who,’ says Tomasini, as the meal ends, ‘is coming riding with me this evening? Palomina?’

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  There are four horses. Two of the young men are invited. Gerald thinks of Palomina’s bouncing bottom and her mane of brown hair and stares with dismay at his mess of trout bones. Palomina and the young men have started to giggle at some private joke. Then the afternoon unfolds: Tomasini takes his wife to bed; Palomina and the young men and Gerald go down to the river. While the others play like children and splash about, Gerald sits on his towel and feels too large, his skin too pale, his hopes too serious. Robin goes and lies down on the Portuguese lace. He can hear, on the other side of the wall, Tomasini’s brief and ritualised exertions. With a kind of weariness, he tugs out his diary and writes: NNN. Negative. Null. Nothing.

  The following morning, Gerald wakes as usual at dawn. In this valley, the importance of each unfolding day seems to fatten with the sunrise. He stands with his eyes narrowed to the crack in the shutters and is filled with his own longing. The house is silent. Towards midnight, the young men drove away in the Chevrolet. Robin sleeps. Gerald’s tall, brown body is twenty-six paces from Palomina’s bed. He wants, in the touch of Palomina’s stubby hand, to be forgiven his jealousy and restored to favour. He feels old – at the very centre of his life. The boy who played Antony is far off, left behind in his silly paper armour. Antony the man is here, clenching and unclenching his man’s fist. He pulls on his shorts, glances at Robin’s face made gentle and sad by sleep, and goes out into the dark passage. The tiled floor is icy under his feet. He’s afraid. He thought love was easy, just as Latin verse and cricket and the worship of God were easy. Until yesterday, he thought this.

  He’s at Palomina’s door. He opens it as slowly, as silently as he can. On the other mornings, her room has been dark, darkness his ally, shaping the room softly round him as he slipped under the thin sheet. Today, light startles him. He stares, his eyes wide. Palomina sits on her bed eating a nectarine and smiles at him. Juice from the fruit wets her chin. Not far from the bed, sitting in a wicker chair, wearing a towelling robe, is André Tomasini. Gerald draws in a breath, begins to back out of the room.

  ‘Come in, come in, Gerald!’ Tomasini calls kindly.

  He hesitates, his hand on the door. Palomina sucks her nectarine. ‘Come in and sit down,’ says Tomasini. Gerald moves into the room and looks blankly at the tableau of father and daughter. Palomina looks at him wistfully, but her eyes are hard. ‘Sit down,’ says Tomasini again. He perches on a hard chair, where some of Palomina’s clothes are strewn, smelling of sun oil and her ripe body.

  ‘Now,’ says Tomasini, ‘don’t look so alarmed, Gerald. We’re not barbarians here, you know, we’re not banditi like you English always suppose, but we like to get everything right for our families, you understand?’

  ‘How do you mean, “right”?’ says Gerald.

  Palomina licks the nectarine stone. Tomasini lights a cigarette.

  ‘My daughter is twenty-two,’ says Tomasini. ‘Do you think I want her to spend her life au pair in England?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘No. This is for learning a language, no more. She is twenty-two and she must have a future.’

  ‘Of course she must . . .’

  ‘Boys of eighteen do not marry.’

  ‘I could –’

  ‘No, no. Don’t be silly. Boys of eighteen do not marry. Now, I think you have had some hospitality in this house from my wife, no?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we have . . .’

  ‘Good. So you will tell your parents we made you welcome?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Good. But this is enough. You understand?’

  Gerald gapes. Palomina turns her head to the window. ‘I think you understand,’ says Tomasini, ‘I think you’re a clever boy, Gerald. I think you’re going to do well at Oxford.’

  ‘Sir, I –’

  ‘And a boy who’s going to do well at Oxford can understand what is being asked.’

  ‘You want me to leave.’

  ‘Of course. And your friend. You take the ferry today.’

  Finding no words in him, Gerald merely nods. Palomina. Paradise. Over. She won’t save him. He stares in silence at her as she puts down the nectarine stone and licks her fingers, one by one.

  During the lunch in Covent Garden, Gerald said, lighting one of the cigarettes he was trying so hard to give up, ‘I suppose our happiest time was after Corsica, in I
taly.’

  Robin, who didn’t smoke, passed Gerald the ashtray. ‘I’ve always,’ he said, ‘loved Italy. I always will, I expect.’ And he smiled across the table at his friend, to whom it was pointless to say, no, Italy was worse than anything. All you thought about was that stupid Palomina. Standing in front of the David, even right there, I could still see it in you, your silly longing. It marred everything we did.

  ‘I go to Nice sometimes,’ Robin said, taking a toothpick out of a white china jar. ‘Once I went to look at the Jean Bart.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Jean Bart. Our hotel.’

  ‘Was that what it was called?’

  ‘Yes. It’s still there. Our room’s still there. The room where you were ill, remember?’

  ‘Oh that was an awful time, wasn’t it! Poor you. You were so kind to me. I remember you used to have these dreams about an aunt or someone you thought had died.’

  ‘Aunt Mabel. Yes. She had died. She died the day we arrived in Ajaccio.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Robin.’

  ‘Yes. She was lovely. She’s buried in Tintagel.’

  ‘Tintagel?’ said Gerald, raising an arm to summon a waiter. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever been there. Time to get the bill, do you think?’

  Wildtrack

  MICKY STONE, WEARING camouflage, crouches in a Suffolk field, shielding his tape recorder from the first falling of snow. It’s December. Micky Stone, who is approaching his fiftieth birthday, perfectly remembers touching his mother’s fingers as she stood at the metal window of the cottage kitchen, watching snow fall. She was saying something. ‘Isn’t it quiet?’ she was saying, but ten year-old Micky was deaf and couldn’t hear.

  Now, in the field, holding the microphone just above his head, he hears the sounds it gathers: the cawing of rooks, the crackle of beech branches as the birds circle and return. He hears everything perfectly. When he looks down at the tape machine, he hears his head turning inside his anorak hood.

  Seven operations there were. Mrs Stone, widowed at thirty-five, sat in the dark of the hospital nights and waited for her son to wake up and hear her say, ‘it’s all right.’ And after the seventh operation she said, ‘it’s all right now, Micky,’ and he heard. And sound entered his mind and astonished him. At twelve, he asked his mother: ‘who collects the sound of the trains and the sea and the traffic and the birds for the plays on the wireless?’ And Mrs Stone, who loved the wireless plays and found in them a small solace in her widowhood, answered truthfully: ‘I’ve never thought about it, Micky, but I expect someone goes out with a machine and collects them. I expect a man does.’ And Micky nodded. ‘I think I’ll become that man,’ he told her.

  It was a job you travelled for. Your life was a scavenge-hunt. You had lists: abattoir, abbey, accordion, balloon ascent, barcarole, beaver and on and on through the alphabet of things living and wild and man-made that breathed or thumped or yodelled or burned or sang. It was a beautiful life, Micky thought. He pitied the millions who sat in rooms all their working days and had never heard a redshank or a bullfrog. Some people said to him, ‘I bet it’s a lonely life, just listening to things, Micky?’ But he didn’t agree and he thought it presumptuous of people to suggest this. The things he liked listening to least were words.

  Yet Micky Stone had a kind of loneliness in him, a small one, growing bigger as he aged. It was connected to the feeling that there had been a better time than now, a short but perfect time, in fact, and that nothing in his life, not even his liking of his work, would ever match it. He remembers this now, as the sky above the field becomes heavy and dark with the snow yet to fall: the time of Harriet Cavanagh, he calls it, or in other words, the heyday.

  Suffolk is a rich place for sound. Already, in four days, Micky Stone has collected half an hour of different winter birds. His scavenge list includes a working windmill, a small town market, a livestock auction and five minutes of sea. He’s staying at a bed-and-breakfast in a small town not far from the cottage with the metal windows where he heard his first sounds. He’s pleased to be near this place. Though the houses are smarter and the landscape emptier now, the familiar names on the signposts and the big openness of the sky give him a sense of things unaltered. It’s not difficult, here, to remember the shy, secretive man he was at nineteen and to recreate in the narrow lanes the awesome sight of Harriet Cavanagh’s ramrod back and neat beige bottom sitting on her pony. The thing he loved most about this girl was her deportment. He was a slouch, his mother often told him, a huddler. Harriet Cavanagh was as perfectly straight as a bamboo. And flying like a pennant from her head was her long, straight hair, the colour of cane. Micky Stone would crouch by the gate at the end of his mother’s garden, close his eyes and wait for the first sound of the horse. It always trotted, never walked. Harriet Cavanagh was a person in a hurry, flying into her future. Then, as the clip-clop of the hooves told Micky that the vision was in sight, he’d open his eyes and lift his head and Harriet in her haste would hail him with her riding crop, ‘Hi, Micky!’ and pass on. She’d be out of sight very quickly, but Micky would stand and listen till the sound of the trotting pony had completely died away. When he told his mother that he was going to marry Harriet Cavanagh, she’d sniffed and said unkindly, ‘oh yes? And Princess Margaret Rose too, I dare say?’ imagining that with these words she’d closed the matter. But the matter of Harriet Cavanagh didn’t close. Ever. At fifty, with the winter lying silently about him, Micky Stone knows that it never will. As he packs his microphone away, the snow is falling densely and he hears himself hope that it will smother the fields and block the lanes and wall him up in its whiteness with his fabulous memories.

  The next morning, as he brushes the snow from the windscreen of his car, he notices that the driver’s side window has already been cleared of it – deliberately cleared, he imagines – as if someone had been peering in. Unlocking the door, he looks around at the quiet street of red Edwardian houses with white-painted gables on which the sun is now shining. It’s empty of people, but the pavement is patterned with their footprints. They’ve passed and gone and it seems that one of them stopped and looked into Micky Stone’s car.

  He loads his equipment and drives out of the town. The roads are treacherous. He’s looking forward to hearing the windmill when, a few miles out of the town, it occurs to Micky that this is one of the stillest days he can remember. Not so much as a breath of wind to turn the sails. He slows the car and thinks. He slows it to a stop and winds down the window and listens. The fields and hedgerows are icy, silent, glittering. On a day like this, Harriet Cavanagh once exclaimed as she passed the cottage gate, ‘Gosh, it’s beautiful, isn’t it, Micky?’ and the bit in the pony’s mouth jingled as he sneezed and Micky noticed that the animal’s coat was long and wondered if the winter would be hard.

  Now he wonders what has become of the exact place by the hawthorn hedge where he used to stand and wait for Harriet on her morning rides. His mother is long dead, but he suspects that the cottage will be there, the windows replaced, perhaps, the boring garden redesigned. So he decides, while waiting for an east wind, to drive to the cottage and ask its owners whether they would mind if he did a wildtrack of their lane.

  It’s not far. He remembers the way. Through the smart little village of Pensford Green where now, he notices, the line of brick cottages are painted loud, childish colours and only the snow on their roofs unifies them as a rural terrace, then past two fields of apple trees, and there’s the lane. What he can’t remember now as he approaches it is whether the lane belonged to the house. Certainly, in the time when he lived there no cars ever seemed to come up it, only the farmers sometimes and in autumn the apple pickers and Harriet Cavanagh of course, who seemed, from her lofty seat in the saddle, to own the whole county.

  Micky Stone feels nervous as the lane unfolds. The little car slithers. The lane’s much longer than he remembers and steeper. The car, lurching up hill, nudges the banks, slews round and stops. Micky restarts the engine
, then hears the wheels spin, making deep grooves in the snow. He gets out, looking for something to put under the wheels. The snow’s almost knee-deep and there are no tracks in it except those his car has made. Micky wonders if the present tenants of the cottage sense that they’re marooned.

  Then it occurs to him that he has the perfect excuse for visiting them: ‘I took a wrong turning and my car’s stuck. I wondered whether you could help me?’ Then, while they fetch sacks and a shovel from the old black shed, he’ll stand waiting by the gate, his feet planted on the exact spot which, thirty years ago, he thought of as hallowed ground.

  So he puts on his boots and starts out on foot, deciding not to take his machine. The silence of the morning is astonishing. He passes a holly tree that he remembers. Its berries this year are abundant. His mother, tall above her slouch-back of a son, used to steal branches from this tree to lay along her Christmas mantelpiece.

  The tree wasn’t far from the cottage. As he rounds the next bend, Micky expects to see it: the gate, the hawthorn hedge, the graceless little house with its low door. Yet it isn’t where he thought it would be. He stops and looks behind him, trying to remember how far they used to walk, carrying the holly boughs. Then he stands still and listens. Often the near presence of a house can be heard: a dog barking, the squeak of a child’s swing. But there’s nothing at all.

  Micky walks on. On his right, soon, he sees a break in the hedge. He hurries the last paces to it and finds himself looking into an empty field. The field slopes away from the hedge, just as the garden used to slope away. Micky walks forward, sensing that there’s grass, not plough under his feet and he knows that the house was here. It never belonged to them, of course. When his mother left, it returned to the farmer from whom she’d rented it for twelve years. She’d heard it was standing empty. It was before the time of the scramble for property. No one had thought of it as a thing of value.