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 cafe where we wrote our daily postcard to my father.
‘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
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
