‘Ah,oui,’ he replied. ‘I have returned.’
In English he had difficulty with his h’s, but only when they came at the beginning of a word. Sometimes he repeated what he’d just said, in order to set that right. He nodded after he’d agreed he had returned. He listened while Signora Binelli said everyone had missed him.
‘Monsieur Paillez is safely here again,’ she pointed out to her daughter when she arrived on the terrace. ‘He has not gone without farewells.’
‘Never,’ Monsieur Paillez protested. ‘Never would I be guilty.’
That evening – no doubt because of his low spirits – Monsieur Paillez sat with us for dinner. ‘I do not intrude?’ he said. ‘I would not wish to.’ My mother assured him he did not, and I do not believe she once observed the staring of Signora Binelli across the crowded dining-room, or Claudia’s pretence that she had not noticed.
‘Tell me what you like best to draw,’ Monsieur Paillez invited me, ‘here in San Pietro.’
I could not think what to reply – the rocks where we bathed? the waiters? the promenade when we sat outside a café? Claudia or Signora Binelli? So I said:
‘The smoke trees because they are so difficult.’ It was true. Try as I would, I could not adequately represent the misty foliage or catch the subtlety of its colours.
‘And no drawing of course,’ my mother said, ‘could ever convey the smoke trees’ evening scent.’
She laughed, and Monsieur Paillez laughed: at some time or another, although I could not guess when, his error in imagining that the smoke trees gave off a night-time perfume had become a joke between them. Sitting there not saying anything further, I received the impression that my mother had come to know Monsieur Paillez better than the moments after breakfast on the lawn, and the whiling away of their aperitifs, allowed. I experienced the bewildering feeling that their exchanges – even those in which I had taken part – conveyed more than the words were called upon to communicate.
‘My dear, go up,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll follow in a moment.’
I was a little shy, having to leave the dining-room on my own, which I had never done before. People always looked at my mother and myself when we did so together, some of them inclining their heads as a way of bidding us good-night, others actually saying ‘Buona notte’ or ‘Bon nuit’. No one bothered with me on my own, except of course Signora Binelli, who remarked: ‘So they have packed you off!’
‘Buona notte, signora.’
Claudia clapped together the tips of her fingers, pleased that I spoke in Italian because she had taught me a few phrases. I had said good evening beautifully, she complimented, calling after me that certainly I had an ear.
‘That poor child,’ her mother tartly deplored as I pushed at the dining-room’s swing-doors. ‘What a thing for a child!’
That night I had a nightmare. My father and I were in the rector’s house in Linvik. The purpose of our being there was mysterious, but having eaten something with the rector we were taken to a small room which was full of the clocks he collected and repaired as a pastime. Here, while he and my father were in conversation, I stole a clock face, attempting to secrete it in my clothes. Then it seemed that I had stolen more than that: springs and cogs and wheels and hands had been lifted from the blue baize of the table and filled all my pockets. ‘I insist on the police,’ the rector said, and I was made to sit down on a chair to which my father tied me with a rope. But it was not the police who came, only the old man who delivered firewood to us. ‘This is a new treatment,’ he said, taking from the blue baize cover on the table the minute hand of a grandfather clock and inserting its point beneath one of my eyelids.
‘Now, now,’ my mother said. ‘It’s only a nightmare.’
Her embrace protected me; her lips were cool on my cheek. The garlic in the veal escalope had made it rich, she said, and begged me to tell her the dream. But already it seemed silly to have been frightened by such absurdity, and although I told her about the woodseller’s punishment I was ashamed that in my dream I had not been able to recognize this for what it was.
Behind my mother as she bent over me there was an upright rectangle of light. It came from the open doorway of her bedroom: because of my delicate constitution we always had adjoining rooms in the hotels where we stayed. ‘Shall we have it like that tonight?’ she suggested, but I shook my head, and rejected also her suggestion that my bedside light should be left burning. It was cowardly to capitulate to the threat of fantasies: my father may once have said so, although if he had he would not have said it harshly, for that was not my father’s way.
I believe I slept for a while, impossible to gauge how long. I awoke abruptly and recalled at once the rector’s clock-room and the fear that had possessed me. Without my mother’s consoling presence, I did not wish to return to sleep, cowardice notwithstanding, and was immediately more wide awake than I had been when she’d come to put her arms around me. I lay in the darkness, fearful only of closing my eyes.
I heard the murmur of voices. A crack of light showed beneath the door that led to my mother’s room. I stared at it and listened: my mother was speaking to someone, and being spoken to in return. There would be a silence for a while and then the murmur would begin again.
When the door unexpectedly opened I closed my eyes, not wishing my mother to know I was frightened of sleeping. She came softly to my bedside, stood still, and then re-crossed the room. Before she closed the door she said: ‘He is sleeping.’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice replied that that was good.
Their quiet exchanges began again. What did they say to one another? I wondered. Had she told him about my delicate constitution? Had she said that in spite of Dr Edlund’s bluff pretence it was accepted by everyone that I would not live beyond my childhood? I imagined her telling him, and Monsieur Paillez commiserating, as my mother would have over his mad Italian wife. I was glad for her that she had found such a friend at San Pietro, for she was so very kind to me, travelling this great distance down through Europe just for my sake, with nothing much to do when she arrived except to read and swim and exchange politenesses. I was aware that it had not been possible for my mother to have other children, for once I had asked her about the brothers and sisters who were not there. I was aware that sacrifices had been made for me, and of the sadness there would one day be for both my mother and my father, when my life came to an end. I should feel no sadness myself, since of course I should not know; I expected nothing more, beyond what I’d been promised.
I slept and dreamed again, but this time pleasantly: my mother and father and I were in the restaurant I had been taken to after my father’s success in the jumping ring. Around us people were laughing and talking, and so were my mother and father. There was no more to the dream, but I felt happy when I remembered it in the morning.
‘There is a fine Deposition in Triora,’ Monsieur Paillez said on the lawn after breakfast. ‘You might find it worth the journey.’
My mother answered as though she’d been expecting the suggestion. She answered quickly, almost before Monsieur Paillez had ceased to speak, and then she turned to me to say a visit to Triora might make an outing.
‘There is a pretty trattoria not far from that church,’ Monsieur Paillez said. ‘Its terrace is shaded by a vine. Once or twice I have had lunch there.’
And so, after our swim that day, my mother did not lie on the inflated cushions nor I on the white rock I had made my own, but dressed ourselves and were as swift as Monsieur Paillez about it. The taxi he took every day to Triora was waiting outside the hotel.
I enjoyed the change in our routine, though not the Deposition, nor the church which housed it. We didn’t spend long there, hardly more than a minute, finding instead a café where we wrote our daily postcard to my father. We have come today to Triora, I wrote, with Monsieur Paillez, who is visiting his mad Italian wife. We have seen a picture in a church. At last there was something different to write and for once the words came easily. I was smiling when I handed the postcard to my mother, anticipating her surprise that I had completed my message so quickly. She read it carefully, but did not immediately add her own few sentences. She would do that later, she said, placing the postcard in her handbag. (I afterwards found it, torn into little pieces, in the wastepaper basket in her room.)