A Bit on the Side (12 page)

‘We’ve never brought you to Heiligenberg,’ he muses as we walk on.

The last of the autumn wild flowers would still be in bloom at Heiligenberg, and the hellebores out all winter. The hotel they know – the Zeldenhof – would be grander since their day, my mother says.

We’ll spend the winter in Heiligenberg, they decide, and I wonder if at Heiligenberg a letter might come from Mrs Upsilla. Now and again, not often, one arrives at some hotel or is discovered at a
Poste Restante.
Once I saw what I knew I should not have: the cramped handwriting I remembered, the purple ink Mrs Upsilla always favoured. Such letters that come are never opened in my presence; once when I looked in my mother’s belongings none had been kept.

‘We stayed at the Zeldenhof when we were married a month,’ my father says. ‘I photographed your mother at the refuge.’

I ask about that, and I ask where the little shop was where they met, when my father was buying a film for his camera.

‘Italy,’ my mother says. ‘The front at Bordighera.’

There is a photograph.

*

The ticket collector’s beard is flecked with grey, his uniform in need of attention. I know him well, for often I travel on his train.

‘Grazie, signora.’
He hands my ticket back, reminding me to change in Milan and Genoa. In the early afternoon the string of little seaside towns will begin, the train unhurried then, slowing, halting, juddering on, gathering speed again. That part of the journey I like best.

I wear blue because it suits me best, often with green, although they say the two are difficult to combine. My hair’s well tended, the style old-fashioned. ‘You’re an old-fashioned lady,’ my father used to say, not chiding me for that, his tone as light as ever. She liked my old-fashionedness, my mother said when I was very young. I’m in my fifty-third year now, a woman who has settled down at last in the forgotten Italian seaside resort where they met. In nineteen forty-nine that was, I calculate.

They died, he first – in his eighties – she less than a year later; and I, who should have known them better than anyone, did not know them at all, even though my mother did not release my hand all during her last night. The second funeral was conducted with the same simple formality as the first, the coffin placed beside the other in the small graveyard they had chosen, the place remembered from the summers we often spent in the Valle Verzasca. I walked away from both of them through cold winter air, snow on the ground but no longer falling.

A month or so later, calling in at the
Poste Restante
at Bad Mergentheim, as we had always done in their lifetime, I found a letter from Mrs Upsilla. Addressed as usual to my mother, it had been lying there for almost a year.

… I only write because it is so long now since I have heard from you. I am concerned but perhaps it is all right and you have been so kind to an old woman. The summer has not been good in Brighton but I struggle on, the season very poor. Several other landladies have given up and I read the writing on the wall and think how different life was once, those days in London! Well, I must not say it but there you are. I only write because I have not heard.

I knew at once that my mother had paid Mrs Upsilla all these years. Charles too, I imagined. The rich’s desperate bid for silence: I think of it as that; but no, I do not blame my mother. I replied to Mrs Upsilla, simply saying that my mother had died and asking her to pass this information on to Charles if she happened to be in touch with him. No acknowledgement ever found its way to me from either of them, but it was hearing from Mrs Upsilla that first made me want to honour my father and mother. For Mrs Upsilla would die too, and Charles would, and I myself in time: who then, in all the world, would be aware of the story that might be told?

In the hotel where I live, in Bordighera’s Regina Palace, my friends are the dining-room waiters, and the porters in the hall, and the bedroom maids; I do not turn away such friendship and I have myself for company too. Yet when my face is there in the glass of my compact, or reflected in shop windows when the sun is right, or glimpsed in public mirrors, I often think I do not know that woman. I wonder when I gaze for a moment longer if what I see is the illusion imposed by my imagination upon the shadow a child became, if somehow I do not entirely exist. I know that this is not so, yet still it seems to be. Confusion has coloured my life since my mother’s death; and the waking hours of my solitude are nagged by the compulsion to make known the goodness of two people. Obsessively there, beyond my understanding, that has become the insistent orderer of how things should be. Not ever finding the courage to make it known in the corridors and lounges of the Regina Palace, for years I travelled from my shabby old town by the sea to distant cities where I might be anonymous. Again and again I searched among strangers for a listener who would afterwards pass on as a wonder the beneficence of those two people, a marvel to be repeated at family gatherings, at dinner tables, in bars and shops, interrupting games of cards and chess, spreading to other cities, to villages and towns, to other countries.

Each time I found my listener, each time across a teashop table or in a park, there was politeness; and moments later there was revulsion. Some traveller killing tedious time in a railway waiting-room would look away and mumble nothing; or on a tram, or in a train, would angrily push past a nuisance. And the whisper of my apology would not be heard.

In my foolishness I did not know what I since have learnt: that the truth, even when it glorifies the human spirit, is hard to peddle if there is something terrible to tell as well. Dark nourishes light’s triumphant blaze, but who should want to know? I accept, at last, that I am not to be allowed the mercy of telling what is mine to tell. The wheels of my suitcase rattle on the surface of the railway platform at Bordighera and outside the station the evening is bright with sunshine. The taxi-driver knows my destination without having to ask. I might say, in making conversation, that there will not be another journey but enquire instead about the family he often tells me about.

‘Buona sera, signora. Come sta?’
The afternoon porter welcomes me in the empty hall of the Regina Palace, appearing out of nowhere.

‘Sto bene, Giovanni. Bene.’

Small and pallid, an elaborate uniform dwarfing him, Giovanni keeps the Regina Palace going, as much as Signor Valazza, its manager, does; or the stoutly imperious Signora Casarotti, who knew it from her Reception counter in its glory days. Fashion has long ago lifted its magic from what fashion once made gracious, leaving behind flaking paint and dusty palms. Masonry crumbles, a forgotten lift is out of order. But Camera Ventinove, the room I have always returned to from the failure of my journeys, has a view of the sea as far as the horizon.

‘We miss you always,
signora,’
Giovanni tells me, practising his English, as he likes to in our conversations. ‘Was fine, your travel,
signora?’

‘Was fine, Giovanni, was fine.’

The door of Camera Ventinove is unlocked as that lie is told. Giovanni stands aside, I go in first. There is a little more to the ceremony of my return, not much: the opening of the shutters, the view again remarked upon, the giving and receiving of the tip. Then Giovanni goes.

I hang some of the clothes I have travelled with in the wardrobe and write the list to accompany those that must be laundered. Unhurriedly, I have a bath and, downstairs for a while, finish the easy book I bought for my journey. I leave it with the newspapers in case it interests someone else.

I walk by the sea, my thoughts a repetition, imagining on this promenade the two people who have been rejected, who did not know one another well when they walked here too. The bathing huts of the photograph have gone.

‘Buona sera, signora.’

It is not an unusual courtesy for people to address one another on this promenade, even for a man who is not familiar to her to address a woman. But still this unexpected voice surprises me, and perhaps I seem a little startled.

‘I’m sorry, I did not mean to…’ The man’s apology trails away.

‘It’s quite all right.’

‘We are both English, I think.’ His voice is soft, pleasant to hear, his eyes quite startling blue. He is tall, in a pale linen suit, thin and fair-haired, his forehead freckled, the blue of his eyes repeated in the tie that’s knotted into a blue-striped shirt. Some kindly doctor? Schoolmaster? Horticulturalist? Something about him suggests he’s on his own. Widowed? I wondered. Unmarried? It is impossible to guess. His name is d’Arblay, he reveals, and when I begin to walk on, it seems only slightly strange that he changes direction and walks with me.

‘Yes, I am English,’ I hear myself saying, more warmly than if I had not hesitated at first.

‘I thought you might be. Well, I knew. But even so it was a presumption.’ The slightest of gestures accompanies this variation of his apology. He smiles a little. ‘My thoughts had wandered. I was thinking as I strolled of a novel I first read when I was eighteen.
The Good Soldier.’

‘I have read
The Good Soldier
too

‘The saddest story. I read it again not long ago. You’ve read it more than once?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘There’s always something that wasn’t there before when you read a good novel for the second time.’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘I have been re-reading now the short stories of Somerset Maugham. Superior to his novels, I believe. In particular I like “The Kite”.’

‘They made a film of it,’

‘Yes.’

‘I never saw it.’

‘Nor I.’

There is no one else on the promenade. Neither a person nor a dog. Not even a seagull. We walk together, not speaking for a moment, until I break that silence, not to say much, but only that I love the sea at Bordighera.

‘And I.’

Our footsteps echo, or somehow do I imagine that? I don’t know, am only aware that again the silence is there, and that again I break it.

‘A long time ago I lived in a house in a square in London…’

He nods, but does not speak.

‘My father was an Egyptologist.’

*

Taped music reaches me in the bar, where once there was the chatter of cocktail drinkers and the playing of a palm-court quartet. I order Kir, and when the barman has poured it he leaves me on my own, as every night he does, since he has other things to do. I guessed this would be so and for company I’ve brought with me the temperate features of the Englishman on the promenade. ‘So much is chance,’ he said, and with no great difficulty I hear his distinctive voice again. ‘So much,’ he says.

I take that with me when I cross the hall to the struggling splendours of the Regina Palace’s dining-room. I take with me Mr d’Arblay’s composure, his delicate hands seeming to gesture without moving, the smile that is so slight it’s hardly there. Royalty has celebrated in this vast dining-room, so Signor Valazza claims. But tonight’s reflection in its gilded mirrors is a handful of travellers, shadowy beneath the flickering chandeliers. There is a man with a yellow pipe on the table beside him, and a couple who might be on their honeymoon, and two ageing German
fräuleins
who might be schoolmistresses just retired. Little stoves keep warm
filetto di maialino
and
tortelli di pecorino.
But all reality is less than Mr d’Arblay.

‘Si, signora.’
Carlo jots down my order: the consommè, the turbot.
‘E Gavi dei Gavi. Subito, signora.’

My mother gathered her dress from the floor, her necklace too, where she had thrown them down. The drawing-room was heavy with her scent and her friend put a record on the gramophone. The voice still sang when they had gone. And Charles came in then, and knew, and took me out to the square to show me the flowerbeds he’d been tending.

‘Prego, signora. Il vino.’

The Gavi is poured, but I do not need to taste it, and simply nod.

‘Grazie, signora.’

Mr d’Arblay has walked through our square; more than once he remembers being there. It is not difficult for him to imagine the house as it was; he does not say so, but I know. He can imagine; he is the kind that can.

‘Buon appetito, signora.’

A child’s light fingertips on a sleeve, resting there for no longer than an instant. So swift her movement then, so slight it might not have occurred at all: that, too, Mr d’Arblay can imagine and he does. The unlit cigarettes are crushed beneath a shoe. There is the crash of noise, the splintered banister. There are the eyes, looking up from far below. There is the rictus grin.

The man on his own presses tobacco into his yellow pipe but does not light it. Ice-cream is brought to the German schoolmistresses. The honeymoon couple touch glasses. Three late arrivals hesitate by the door.

‘Il rombo arrosto, signora.’

‘Grazie, Carlo.’

‘Prego, signora.’

Three lives were changed for ever in that instant. Whatever lies my father told were good enough for people at a party, the silence of two servants bought. My mother wept and hid her tears. But some time during that sleepless night was she – my father too – touched by the instinct to abandon the child who had been born to them? Was it more natural that they should, and do no more than call what had happened evil?

‘It is natural too,’ Mr d’Arblay replied while we walked, ‘to find the truth in the agony of distress. The innocent cannot be evil: this was what, during that sleepless night, they came to know.’

It was enough, Mr d’Arblay diffidently insisted, that what there is to tell, in honouring the dead, has now been told between two other people and shall be told again between them, and each time something gained. The selfless are undemanding in their graves.

I do not taste the food I’m eating, nor savour the wine I drink. I reject the
dolce
and the cheese. They bring me coffee.