I have little faith that you will open this letter, the most recent in the series. If you do, you will understand it is the last, that I have reached my limit.
If you do not, I live still.
Antonella laid the envelope flat upon Malory’s pillow, with a fresh sheet upon which she wrote the single word — Malory.
And then, because she knew it would be her last time at Cranmer Road and worried that Malory might not have taken his key, she left the door unlocked and made her way by foot out Grange Road to the Fen Causeway, past the train station to Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
3/7
HERE ARE CERTAIN MOMENTS IN THE YEAR WHEN ROME — A CITY that has seen its share of awakenings and slumbers — is so deserted that a traveler might imagine that the buildings are equally hollow, a set for a warehoused opera, and that a quick dash behind the Baths of Domitian or the Palazzo Massimo would reveal plywood and braces stenciled with the name CINECITTA in capitals. Only a few other travelers stepped down from Malory’s train, testifying to the emptiness. For all he knew, they might have been choristers on the way to an early morning rehearsal of Tosca. The fountain at the center of the Piazza della Repubblica was dry, the roundabout empty, the newspaper kiosks and bookstalls shut tight. The first light of mid-August picked out the sanpietrini in such pockmarked detail that Malory wondered how the stagehands, the grips, the best boys, or whatever the movie people called them — Antonella always insisted on staying in the Cambridge Arts Cinema to laugh at the credits that, even after decades in England remained exotic — could lay them all down in this brief moment when Rome was deserted. Was this a national holiday, a saint’s day, Malory wondered? Was there a crucial football match or rugby or whatever they played in the summer that had kept the entire population off the streets? Had he purchased a special out-of-class fare that had switched him onto a siding that led to a private Rome? Had it been this quiet when Newton first entered Rome and rode with his college friend up the Aventino to the Villa Septimania?
Malory saw Rome with a transparency and the sensation of a twinkling dark matter, as a breathing city that he hadn’t experienced in the forty-three years since he’d first arrived with only his canvas Kit Bag, his toiletries in Tesco’s plastic, and the letter from his grandmother. He walked along the Via Nazionale, past the English church, the Irish Pub. He crossed by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where the street sloped down to its medieval level at the Basilica of San Vitale. He knew there was something Roman below the church, and below that something Mithraic, and so down and down, each blind stone trusting the shoulders of the ones beneath it. He walked past the massive flanks of the insurance agencies that backed onto Trajan’s Forum, past the lonely column graffitied with the Emperor’s conquests over Tibor’s ancestors from which he had long ago surveyed a kingdom of hopeful actors. He crossed Piazza Venezia, turning left at the Palazzo Caetani, where Aldo Moro was found crumpled in the trunk of a red Renault 4 to the horror of Anna Ford and Antonella and half the citizens of Italy. And though Malory knew no more about that mystery than he had all those years before, the transparency with which he walked through Rome assured him that he had chosen correctly. Rome. This was where Antonella wanted Malory to bring her.
Antonella was more Roman than Catholic, after all. None of the few members of the Cambridge Maths Faculty who came around to Cranmer Road to give their condolences objected or even noticed when Malory arranged for the Huntingdon Road Crematorium to handle the funeral. Malory couldn’t imagine Antonella imagining a ceremony at Our Lady and English Martyrs, which was such a pale imitation of the churches of her hometown, with none of the Lippis or Caravaggios that made the worm-eaten relics and the waxy air of the altars manageable. He gave no thought to contacting Antonella’s invisible children. Nor did he believe he would stay much longer by himself in the house at the end of Cranmer Road. His decision to bicycle out to St. George’s Church, with what remained of Antonella in the blue marbled biodegradable cardboard box that Huntingdon Road had so solemnly handed over to him, was made in the sincere belief that Antonella had become part of the family, part of Malory’s family, and that it was fitting to scatter her on the ground that held Old Mrs. Emery and in the air that had borne the Pip.
Malory hadn’t visited Whistler Abbey, hadn’t chosen to tune or play its organ since he had returned to Cambridge, hadn’t seen the church since the day of his grandmother’s funeral. Nevertheless, the bicycle path by the river was where both had always been. It was older, much older, as was he, and had resisted the improvements and regulations that generations of planning councils had brought to the Coton and the Histon footpaths. He negotiated its summer dips and baked ridges more nimbly than he had years before. Antonella’s box rode secure inside his Kit Bag, which rested snugly in the basket on his front handlebars. He dismounted in the garden of the Orchard and walked the bicycle across the Cambridge Road, up the ramp to the wooden gate of St. George’s. He had thought of taking Antonella inside, even of carrying her up to the steeple and scattering her ashes through the slats that not only brought air into the bellows but breathed out into the fens beyond. But Malory knew enough physics to know that even if he were fit enough to climb the ladder to the organ loft, there was no going back in time to the afternoon in 1978 when he had been surprised to see a young girl crossing the Cambridge Road from the Orchard, entering the church and climbing the ladder only to see him, Malory.
Instead, Malory wheeled his bicycle around the back of the church and propped it against the yew, unchanged in the brief span of yew-years since Malory had last stood in its shade at the grave of Old Mrs. Emery. The grave itself had been well-tended — he could only imagine the arrangements for its manicure, made long ago by Settimio. Surely this was a safe and comforting place to scatter Antonella, perhaps the one place I might return at least occasionally, Malory thought, although he wondered how much returning there might be for him, how much longer he might be able to straddle a bicycle.
He opened the flap of his Kit Bag, the stenciled letters entirely faded, the strap more hole than canvas and restitched several times, most recently by Antonella herself. The blue marbled box was a simple thing of cardboard, large enough for a cat, small enough to fit in a Kit Bag, but entirely inappropriate for a woman as generous as Antonella. Malory hadn’t been shocked by the phone call from Adden brooke’s. He had felt the force of Antonella’s goodbye that morning as he’d cycled away up the Coton footpath, even if he hadn’t understood all its applications. What surprised him, when he was left alone with Antonella’s body after signing the papers set in front of him, was how warm her hand was in his. It was the same warmth, in the same key, as the warmth he had felt when he read the letters she had left on his pillow. It was the warmth of the Queen of Septimania. It was the warmth of the woman who had loved her Isaac enough to disguise herself more completely than Haroun al Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, himself. It was the warmth perhaps of Aldana, daughter of Charlemagne, who had cloaked her heart in memory and the thousand and one stories she brought to her bed every night. Natural causes. Malory had no idea from what the Queen of Septimania had died. But he imagined it was from the same “Natural Causes” on the certificate Malory signed below the signature of some anonymous Addenbrooke’s doctor. Antonella had been a queen, was a queen, would always be a queen in whatever part of Septimania still survived in Malory’s universe.