that she was here and Angelica was not, it didn’t matter.
‘A pity you feel you can’t come out to Betona. The bus fare’s quite a bit, else I’d come in oftener while you’re here.’
‘Actually, to tell the truth, I’d rather we didn’t have to meet.’ Deborah’s tone was matter of fact and sharp. A note of impatience had entered it, reminding Oliver not of his wife, but strangely of his mother.
‘I only come in once a month or so.’ He slid a cigarette from his packet of MS. ‘Angelica tried to keep us apart,’ he said, ‘all these years. She made the most elaborate arrangements.’
Deborah rooted in her handbag and found her own cigarettes and matches. Oliver said he’d have offered her one of his if he’d known she smoked. She said it didn’t matter.
‘I don’t want any of this hassle,’ she said.
‘Hassle, Deborah? A cup of coffee now and again –’
‘Look, honestly, not even that.’
Oliver smiled. It was always better not to argue. He’d never argued with Angelica. It was she who’d done the arguing, working herself up, making it sound as though she were angrily talking to herself. Deborah could easily sleep in the downstairs room; there were early-morning buses to Perugia. They could share the expenses of the household: the arrangement there’d been with the bankrupt man had been perfectly satisfactory.
‘Sorry,’ Deborah said, and to Oliver her voice sounded careless. She blew out smoke, looking over her shoulder, no doubt to see if her friends were still hanging around. He felt a little angry. He might have been just anyone, sitting there. He wanted to remind her that he had given her life.
‘It’s simple at Betona,’ he said instead. ‘I’m not well off. But I don’t think you’d find it dreadful.’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t. All the same –’
‘Angelica was well off, you know. She never wanted me to be.’
Deborah missed her two o’clock lesson because it was harder than she’d anticipated to get away. She was told about all sorts of things, none of which she’d known about before. The Sunday afternoon she remembered was mentioned. ‘I wasn’t very well then,’ Oliver said. It was after that occasion that a legal agreement had been drawn up: in return for financial assistance Oliver undertook not to come to the flat again, not ever to attempt to see his child. He was given the house near Betona, no more than a shack really. ‘None of it was easy,’ he said. He looked away, as if to hide emotion from her. The photographs he annually received were a legality also, the only one he had insisted on himself. Suddenly he stood up and said he had a bus to catch.
‘It’s understandable,’ he said. ‘Your not wanting to come to Betona. Of course you have your own life.’
He nodded and went away. Deborah watched him disappearing into the crowd that was again collecting, after the afternoon siesta.
Who on earth would have believed that he’d outlive Angelica? Extra- ordinary how things happen; though, perhaps, in a sense, there was a fairness in it. Angelica had said he always had to win. In her unpleasant moods she’d said he had to cheat people, that he could not help himself. As a gambler was in thrall to luck, or a dipsomaniac to drink, his flaw was having to show a gain in everything he did.
On the bus journey back to Betona Oliver did not feel angry when he recalled that side of Angelica, and supposed it was because she was dead. Naturally it was a relief to have the weight of anger lifted after all these years, no point in denying it. The trouble had been it wasn’t easy to understand what she was getting at. When she’d found the three or four pieces among his things, she’d forgotten that they were his as much as his mother’s, and didn’t even try to understand that you couldn’t have told his mother that, she being like she was. Instead Angelica chose to repeat that he hadn’t been able to resist ‘getting the better of his mother. Angelica’s favourite theme was that: what she called his pettiness and his meanness left him cruel. He had often thought she didn’t care what she said; it never mattered how she hurt.
On the bus Angelica’s face lolled about in Oliver’s memory, with his mother’s and – to Oliver’s surprise – his daughter’s. Angelica pleaded about something, tears dripped from the old woman’s cheeks, Deborah simply shook her head. ‘Like cancer in a person’, Angelica said. Yet it was Angelica who had died, he thought again.
Deborah would come. She would come because she was his flesh and blood. One day he’d look down and see her on the path, bringing something with her because he wasn’t well off. Solicitors had drawn up the stipulations that had kept them apart all these years; in ugly legal jargon all of it was written coldly down. When Deborah considered that, she would begin to understand. He’d sensed, before they parted, a shadow of unease: guilt on Angelica’s behalf, which wasn’t surprising in the circumstances.
The thought cheered Oliver considerably. In his house, as he changed his clothes, he reflected that it didn’t really matter, the waitress running after him for the money. In all, over the months that had passed since this waitress had begun to work at the cafe, he’d probably had twenty, even thirty, second cups of coffee. He knew it didn’t matter because after a little time it hadn’t mattered that the bankrupt man had made a scene, since by then the roof was repaired and the plumbing completed. It hadn’t mattered when Mrs Dogsmith turned nasty, since already she’d given him the lighter and the cigarette case. That was the kind of thing Angelica simply couldn’t understand, any more than she’d understood the confusions of his mother, any more than, probably, she’d understood their daughter. You couldn’t keep flesh and blood apart; you actually weren’t meant to.
In the kitchen Oliver put the kettle on for tea. When it boiled he poured the water on to a tea-bag he’d already used before setting out for Perugia. He carried the glass out to the patio and lit a cigarette. The car seats were too hot to sit on, so he stood, waiting for them to cool. There’d been no reason why she shouldn’t have paid for their coffee since she, after all, had been the cause of their having it. Eighteen thousand lire a cappuccino cost at that particular cafe, he’d noticed it on the bill.
‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said.
His tone suggested a statement, not a question, but Grania did remember him. She had recognized him immediately, his face smiling above the glass he held. He was a man she had believed she would never see again. For sixteen years – since the summer of 1972 – she had tried not to think about him, and for the most part had succeeded.
‘Yes, I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Of course.’
A slice of lemon floated on the surface of what she guessed was gin and tonic; there were cubes of ice and the little bubbles that came from tonic when it was freshly poured. It wouldn’t be tonic on its own; it hadn’t been the other time. ‘I’ve drunk a bit too much,’ he’d said.
