‘At peace today,’ Monsieur Paillez reported in the trattoria with the vine. ‘Yes, more at peace today.’
It was usually so, he explained: when his wife had had a bad spell there was often a period of tranquillity. Because of it he did not visit the asylum in the afternoon, but returned with us to the Villa Parco and joined us when we swam again.
‘It is almost certain that Claudia has secured the part,’ Signora Binelli announced on the terrace before dinner. ‘All day long the telephone has been ringing for her.’
My mother and Monsieur Paillez smiled, though without exchanging a look. Claudia, arriving on the terrace, said the part in Il Marito in Collegio was far from certain. The telephone ringing was always a bad sign, implying indecision.
Just for a moment on the way in to dinner Monsieur Paillez’s hand gently cupped my mother’s elbow. Tonight he sat with us also, even though his spirits were no longer low, and as he and my mother conversed I again felt happy that she had a friend in San Pietro, one who could be called that more than the Binellis or any of the other guests could. That night I woke up once, and listened, and heard the murmuring.
On the way back to Linvik – in Hamburg, I believe it was – my mother said:
‘Let’s forget about that day we went to Triora.’
‘Forget it?’
‘Well, I mean, let’s have it as a secret.’
I asked her why we should do that. She did not hesitate but said that on that day, passing a shop window, she had seen in it what she wished to buy my father for Christmas. She had not bought it at the time, but had asked Monsieur Paillez to do so when he was next in Triora.
‘And did he?’
‘Yes, he did.’
Monsieur Paillez was just my father’s size, she said: whatever the garment was (my mother didn’t identify it), he had kindly tried it on. ‘I shall not say much about Monsieur Paillez,’ my mother said, ‘in case I stupidly divulge that little secret. When you talk about a person you sometimes do so without thinking. So perhaps we should neither of us much mention Monsieur Paillez.’
As I listened, I knew that I had never before heard my mother say anything as silly. Every evening after the day of our excursion to Triora Monsieur Paillez had stepped out of his taxi in front of the hotel and had joined us on the terrace. On none of these occasions had he carried a parcel, let alone handed one to my mother. In Triora I could not recollect her pausing even once by a shop window that contained men’s clothes.
‘Yes, all right,’ I said.
That was the moment my childhood ended. It is the most devious irony that Dr Edlund’s bluff assurances – certainly not believed by him – anticipated the circumstance that allows me now to look back to those summers in San Pietro al Mare, and to that summer in particular. It is, of course, the same circumstance that allows me to remember the rest of each year in Linvik. I did not know in my childhood that my mother and father had ceased to love one another. I did not know that it was my delicate constitution that kept them tied to one another; a child who had not long to live should not, in fairness, have to tolerate a family’s disruption as well as everything else.
At the Villa Parco, when we returned the following summer, Monsieur Paillez was already there, visiting his mad Italian wife. The very first night he shared our table, and after that we did everything together. Signora Binelli and her daughter were not at the hotel that year. (Nor were they again at the Villa Parco when we were. My mother and Monsieur Paillez were relieved about that, I think, although they often mentioned Signora Binelli and her daughter and seemed amused by the memory of them.)
‘We had snow in Lille as early as October,’ Monsieur Paillez said, and so the conversation was on this night, and on other nights – conducted in such a manner because my presence demanded it. Later my mother did not say that we should avoid mentioning Monsieur Paillez when we returned to Linvik. She knew it was not necessary to go through another palaver of silliness.
When I was sixteen and seventeen we still returned to San Pietro. What had begun for my mother as a duty, taking her weakling child down through Europe to the sun, became the very breath of her life. Long after it was necessary to do so we continued to make the journey, our roles reversed, I now being the one inspired by compassion. The mad wife of Monsieur Paillez, once visited in compassion, died; but Monsieur Paillez did not cease to return to the Villa Parco. In the dining-room I sometimes observed the waiters repeating what there was to repeat to younger waiters, newly arrived at the hotel. As I grew older, my mother and I no longer had adjoining rooms.
In Linvik my father had other women. After my childhood ended I noticed that sometimes in the evenings he was drunk. It won’t be long, he and my mother must have so often thought, but they were steadfast in their honourable resolve.
Slow years of wondering washed the magic from my childhood recollections and left them ordinary, like pallid photographs that gracelessly record the facts. Yet what a memory it was for a while, his hand reaching across the tablecloth, the candlelight on her hair. What a memory the smoke trees were, and Signora Binelli, and Claudia, and the sea as blue as the sky! My father was a great horseman, my mother the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. ‘Ti diverti?’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice was hardly raised as he swam by: how pleased I was that he had chosen to address me!
In my borrowed time I take from an ebony box my smudged attempts to draw the smoke trees of San Pietro and reflect that my talent did not amount to much. Silly, it seems now, to have tried so hard to capture the elusive character of that extraordinary foliage.
Virgins
Like a wasp, Laura says to herself, as she invariably does in the cathedral of Siena, with its violent argument of stripes. An uneasy place, her husband had been remarking only the other night, informing some other tourists in the Palazzo Ravizza.
In several languages, guides draw attention to the pulpit and Pastorino’s Last Supper. Wilting Americans rest on chairs, Germans work their cameras. An old Italian woman lights a candle, children chatter and are silenced. With dark glasses dangling from her fingers, Laura makes her way through the cathedral crowds, having quickly verified that Francesco Piccolomini became Pius III. She knew she’d been right; her husband had said it was Pius II Her husband is often wrong, about all sorts of things.
‘Laura? Is it Laura?’
She stares at the round face, flushed from the August heat. Hair, once coppery red, Laura guesses, is peppered now with grey; a dress is less elegantly striped than the architecture, in lettuce-green and blue. Laura smiles, but shakes her head. She passes her glance down the tired dress, to legs on which mosquitoes have feasted, to sandals whose shade of blue once matched the blue of the cotton above. She smiles again, knowing she knows this woman of fifty or so.
‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ the woman says, and immediately Laura remembers because the voice is as it has always been. Polite to say she hasn’t changed a bit; politely she lies herself.