The Collected Stories

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.

‘Nor you, now that I look, Margaretta.’

But her tone is nervous, and her confidence melts as they stand among the tourists and the angry stripes. How odd to meet here, she says, knowing it is not odd at all, since everyone’s a tourist nowadays. She wishes they had not met like this; why could not Margaretta just have seen her and let her pass by?

‘It’s lovely to see you,’Margaretta says.

They continue to look at one another, and simultaneously, in their different moods, their distant friendship possesses them. Two marriages and their children are irrelevant.

The Heaslips’ house was in a straggling grassy square, dusty in summer. A brass plate announced the profession of Dr Heaslip; the oak- grained hall door was heavy and impressive, with brass that matched in weight and tone the nameplate. Near by, the Bank of Ireland was ivy-covered, less gaunt because of it than the Heaslips’ grey stone facade. Other houses, each detached from its neighbour, were of grey stone also, or colourwashed in pink or cream or white. In the approximate centre of an extensive area of shorn grass, green railings protected an empty pedestal, which Queen Victoria in her day had dominated. A cinema – the De Luxe Picture House, as antique as its title – occupied a corner created by the edge of the square and the town’s main street. Hogan’s Hotel filled the corner opposite.

One day in June, during the Second World War, a day when the brass plate shimmered in warm sunshine, a day Laura for all her life did not forget, Mrs Heaslip said in the drawing-room of the house:

‘Laura, this is Margaretta.’

Laura held out her hand, as she had been taught, but Margaretta giggled, finding it amusing that two small girls should be so formal.

‘Margaretta! Really, what will Laura think? Now, do at once apologize.’

‘We’re all like that in Ireland,’ Margaretta pronounced instead. ‘Bog-trotters, y’know.’

‘Indeed we’re not,’ protested Mrs Heaslip, a thin, tall woman in a flowery dress. With some panache she wore as well a straw hat with a faded purple ribbon on it. The skin of her face, and of her arms and legs, was deeply brown, as if she spent the greater part of her time outside. ‘Indeed, indeed, we’re not,’ she repeated, most emphatically. ‘And do not say “y’know”, Margaretta.’

They were nine, the girls, in 1941. Laura had been sent from England because of the war, called in Ireland ‘the emergency’: there was more nourishment to be had in Ireland, and a feeling of safety in an Irish provincial town. Years before Laura had been born, her mother, living in Ireland then, had been at a boarding-school in Bray with Mrs Heaslip. ‘I think you’ll like it in Ireland,’ her mother had promised. ‘If I didn’t have this wretched job I’d come with you like a shot.’ They lived in Buckinghamshire, in a village called Anstey Rye. In December 1939, when the war had scarcely begun, Laura’s father had been killed, the Spitfire he’d been piloting shot down over the sea. Her mother worked in the Anstey Rye clothes shop, where she was responsible for the accounts, for correspondence with wholesalers and for considerable formalities connected with clothing coupons. It was all very different from Ireland.