“You’ve heard of Romulus and Remus?” asked Domenica.
“They were brought up by wolves. Well, they were feral. And there were many others. Wolves, monkeys, even gazelles. Animals can make very good parents, you know. And they tend not to be too pushy – unlike those people downstairs.”
“Yes,” remarked Domenica, noticing Pat’s interest. “It is a bit of a mess this room. That wall over there, with its photographs, is a bit like one of those Italian restaurants where they have pictures of the well-known people who have eaten there. Usually these days it’s Sean Connery, but I really can’t imagine that he’s spent all hours in those Italian restaurants. Where would he find the time to get on with being famous, poor man? And if you go to Italy, all the restaurants have photographs of Luciano Pavarotti, who also couldn’t possibly have been to all the places which claim him. It’s rather like the cult of saints and their bones.
There are so many bits of the more popular saints that one could assemble several hundred skeletons of each of them. St Catherine of Siena for example – she of the miraculous water barrel – must have had
Pat laughed. “I find those old bones a bit creepy,” she said.
“But I suppose that some people like them.”
“Yes, I understand that Neapolitans and the like find great consolation in such things,” Domenica said. “But you are a most tolerant girl. Yours is a tolerant generation. The religious enthusiasms of others can be a bit trying, but they are important, don’t you think? They allow people to express their sense of the spiritual.”
68
– though the Scottish Episcopal Church doesn’t go in for elephants very much, alas. I can see a bishop on an elephant, can’t you?”
Pat had noticed the prints on the wall, and the metal candlestick on the table, in the shape of a three-headed cobra. And on Domenica’s desk, in a small porcelain pot, a bundle of joss sticks.
“Yes,” said Domenica, who seemed to have an uncanny facility for guessing exactly what it was that Pat was going to ask.
“Some mementoes from India. But actually I was born right here in Scotland Street.”
“Right here? In this building?”
Domenica nodded. “In those days people were born in places where people lived. Astonishing, but true. I came into this world, would you believe it, in this very room. It was my parents’
bedroom and their bed was over there, against that wall. I was born in that bed. Precisely sixty-one years ago next Friday afternoon. There was a war on, as you may recall, and I had been conceived when my father came back on home leave from convoy duty. He did not survive the North Atlantic, I’m afraid, and so I never knew him.” She pointed to a photograph above a small, corner fireplace. “That’s my father there.”
Pat got up and crossed the room to stand before the
photograph. A tall man was standing on what seemed to be a dune, the grass about his feet bending in the breeze. The face was an intelligent one, the mouth relaxed into a smile. His hair was ruffled, blown by the wind.
“I loved him very much,” said Domenica. “Although I never knew him, I loved him very much. Does that sound odd to you?
To love somebody you never knew?”
Pat thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. People fall in love with all sorts of people. People write letters to one another and fall in love even if they never meet. That happens.”
Domenica nodded. “It’s a special sort of love that one has for such a person. It’s an idealised love, I suppose. You’re in love with a memory, with an idea of somebody. And I suppose that for some people that’s all they have.”
For a short while there was silence. Pat looked again at the picture of Domenica’s father and then returned to her seat. She had always imagined that the saddest fate for a child would be to have no parents. But perhaps it was sadder still to have parents who did not love you. At least, if you had no parents you could think that they would have loved you, if they had been there.
But if you knew your parents did not love you, then you would be denied even that scrap of comfort.
She looked at Domenica. “I’m sure he would have loved you,”
she said. “I’m sure that he would have loved you a great deal.”
“Yes. I think he would.”
They said nothing for a moment. Then Domenica looked at her watch. “We must go through to the kitchen,” she said. “And then while I’m getting dinner ready, we can talk a little more. I don’t want to bore you, though. Sixty-one can be very boring for twenty whatever it is you are.”
“Twenty. Just twenty.”
“A good age to be,” said Domenica. “As is every age, I imagine, except for the years between fourteen and
