A Bit on the Side

Solitude

I reach the lock by standing on the hall chair. I open the hall door and pull the chair back to the alcove. I comb my hair in the hallstand glass. I am seven years old, waiting for my father to come downstairs.

Our house is a narrow house with a blue hall door, in a square, in London. My father has been away and now he is back. The first morning we’ll go to the café. Ages ago my mother read what he had written for me on the postcard. ‘They’re called the Pyramids,’ she said when I pointed at the picture. And then: ‘Not long before he’s back.’ But it was fifty days.

I hear him whistling on the stairs, ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, and then he hugs me, because he has come in the night when I was asleep. He doesn’t believe it, he says, how I have grown. ‘I missed you terribly,’ he says.

We walk together, across the square to where the traffic and the streets are. ‘Coffee,’ my father says in the café. ‘Coffee, please, and a slice of Russian cake for you-know-who.’

But all the time there is what happened and all the time I know I mustn’t say. A child to witness such a thing was best forgotten, Mrs Upsilla said, and Charles nodded his long black head. No blame, Charles said; any child would play her games behind a sofa; all they’d had to do was look. ‘No skin off my nose,’ Charles said. ‘No business of a poor black man’s.’ And not knowing I was still outside the kitchen door, Mrs Upsilla said it made her sick to her bones. Well, it was something, Charles reminded her, that my mother wouldn’t take her friend to the bedroom that was my father’s too. At least there was the delicacy of that. But Mrs Upsilla said what delicacy, and called my mother’s friend a low-down man.

‘You’re learning French now?’ my father says in the café. ‘Do you like French?’

‘Not as much as history.’

‘What have you learnt in history?’

‘That William the Conqueror’s son also got an arrow in his eye.’

‘Which eye? Did they say which eye?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

In the café the waitress is the one who always comes to us. My father says that is because we always sit at the same table. He says our waitress has Titian hair; he says that’s what that colour is. My father is always commenting on people, saying they have this or that, guessing about them, or asking questions. Often he falls into conversation with people who enquire the way on the street, and beggars, anyone who stops him, anyone in shops. ‘Rich as a candy king,’ I heard someone in the café say once, and my father laughed, shaking his head.

All the time in the café I want to tell him, because I tell him everything when he comes back from a journey. I want to tell him about the dream I had that same night, all of it happening again. ‘Oh, horrid nightmare,’ my mother comforted me, not knowing what it was about because I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to.

‘The picture gallery?’ my father suggests when we have had our coffee. ‘Or the dolls’ museum today? Look, I have this.’

He spreads out on the table a handkerchief he has bought, all faded colours, so flimsy you can see through it in places. Old, he says, Egyptian silk. There is a pattern and he draws his forefinger through it so that I can see it too. ‘For you,’ he says. ‘For you.’

In the bus, on the way to the dolls’ museum he talks about Egypt. So hot it could make your skin peel off, so hot you have to lie down in the afternoon. One day he’ll bring me with him; one day he’ll show me the Pyramids. He takes my hand when we walk the last bit.

I know the way, but when we get there the doll I like best isn’t on her shelf. Unwell, the man says, getting better in hospital. It’s his way of putting it, my father says. He asks the man: that doll, the Spanish doll, will be back next week. ‘Well, we can come again,’ my father promises. ‘Who’s going to stay up for the party?’ he says when we’re back in the house.

The party is tonight. In the kitchen the wine bottles are laid out, two long rows all the length of the table, and other bottles on trays, and glasses waiting to be filled. Charles comes specially early to help when there is a party. There always is when my father returns.

‘You sit down there and have your sandwich.’ Mrs Upsilla’s grey head is bent over what she’s cooking; she’s too busy to look up. Charles winks at me and I try to wink back but I can’t do it properly. He passes close to where I’m sitting and then the sandwich I don’t want isn’t there any more. ‘Oh, there’s a good girl,’ Mrs Upsilla says when she asks if I’ve eaten it and I say yes. And Charles smiles. And Davie giggles and Abigail does.

Abigail and Davie aren’t real, but most of the time they’re there. They were that day, when the door opened and my mother and her friend came into the drawing-room. ‘It’s all right,’ my mother said. ‘She’s not here.’ And Davie giggled and Abigail did too and I made them be quiet.

‘My, my,’ Charles says in the kitchen when Mrs Upsilla calls me a good girl. He says it so often it annoys Mrs Upsilla. ‘Why’s he saying that?’ she asks me every time. ‘What’s he on about?’ And Charles always laughs.

I thank Mrs Upsilla for the sandwich I haven’t eaten because she likes me to thank her for things. On the way upstairs I remember that when the person in the café said as rich as a candy king I heard my father repeating that to my mother afterwards; he said that maybe what the person meant was he was rich to have so beautiful a wife. Or you could take it differently, Mrs Upsilla said when I told her: the person in the café could have been referring to my mother’s inheritance.

Upstairs, my father is standing at the door of their bedroom, my mother is tidying the bed. He has brought her a handkerchief too, bigger than mine, and already she wears it as a scarf. ‘So beautiful you are!’ my father says and my mother laughs, a sound that’s like the tinkling of a necklace he gave her once. The bath taps are dribbling in the bathroom, turned low for my mother’s bath. ‘Who’s going to help me take the corks out?’ my father says, and my mother asks him to open the window at the top. Her lips are soft when she kisses my forehead, her scent makes me want to close my eyes and always be able to smell it. ‘Good darling,’ she whispers.

In the kitchen my father draws out the corks and I make a pile of them, and count them. The red bottles are really green, he says, but you can’t see that until they’re empty. He cuts away the shiny covering over each cork before he puts the corkscrew in. ‘Well, that’s all done,’ he says and asks how many and I say thirty-six. ‘You take me to the picture gallery next time?’ he says, and the dancing ladies come into my head, and the storm at the cricket match, and Saint Catherine, and the portrait of the artist. ‘That to look forward to,’ my father says before he goes upstairs again.

We play a game in my room, Abigail and Davie and I. We pretend we are in Egypt, climbing up a pyramid, and Abigail says we should be wearing our cotton sun hats because the sun can burn your head even through your hair. So we go down for them but then it’s cooler so we walk about the streets. We buy things in a market, presents to bring home, rings and brooches and jars of Egyptian peaches, and Egyptian chocolate and Egyptian rugs for the floor. Then I go back to the kitchen.

Charles has gone out for ice. ‘You going to keep me company?’ Mrs Upsilla says, still busy with her cooking. ‘You’ll trip on those laces,’ she says, allowing the electric mixer to operate on its own for a moment. A nasty accident there could be, and she ties my laces. Always double-tie a shoelace, she says, and I go away.

In the drawing-room the bowls of olives and tit-bits are laid out; the fire is blazing, the wire net of the fire-guard drawn down. I watch the raindrops sliding on the window-panes. I watch the people in the square, hurrying through the rain, a woman holding an umbrella over her dog, Charles returning with the ice. The cars go slowly, the street lights have come on.

I sit in the armchair by the fire, looking at the pictures in the books, the old woman who kept children in a cage, the giants, the dwarfs, the Queen’s reflection in the looking-glass. I look out into the square again: my mother’s friend is the first to come. He waits for a car to pass before he crosses the square, and then there is the doorbell and his footsteps on the stairs.

‘Have one of these,’ he says in the drawing-room: cheese straws that Mrs Upsilla has made. ‘Time for your dancing lesson,’ and he puts the music on. He shows me the same steps again because I never try, because I don’t want to try. ‘How are they?’ he asks and I know he means Davie and Abigail; ever since my mother mentioned them to him he asks about them. I might have told him they were there that afternoon, but instead I just say they’re all right. Then other people come and he talks to them. I hate him so much I wish he could be dead.

I listen from one of the window-seats, half behind the curtain. A man is telling about a motor race he has taken part in. One of these days he’ll win, a woman says. In his white jacket, Charles offers the drinks.

Other people come. ‘Well, goodness me!’ Mr Fairlie smiles down at me, and then he sits beside me. Old and tired, he says, not up to this gallivanting. He asks me what I did today and I tell him about the dolls’ museum. He manages on his own, Mrs Upsilla told me, since his wife died. My mother went to the funeral, but he doesn’t talk about that now. ‘Poor old boy,’ Charles said.

You can hardly hear the music because so many people are talking. Every time Charles passes by with another tray he waves to me with a finger and Mr Fairlie says that’s clever. ‘Well, look at you two!’ a woman says and she kisses Mr Fairlie and kisses me, and then my father comes. ‘Who’s sleepy?’ he says and he takes me from the party.

It will be ages before he goes away again: he promises that before he turns the light out, but in the dark it’s like it was in the dream. He’ll go away and he won’t come back, not ever wanting to. There’ll never be the picture gallery again, our favourite picture the picnic on the beach. There’ll never be the café again, there’ll never be the dolls’ museum. He’ll never say, ‘Who’s sleepy?’

In the dark I don’t cry although I want to. I make myself think of something else, of the day there was an accident in the square, of the day a man came to the door, thinking someone else lived in our house. And then I think about Mr Fairlie on his own. I see him as dearly as I did when he was beside me on the window-seat, the big freckles on his forehead, his wisps of white hair, his eyes that don’t look old at all. ‘A surgeon in his day,’ Mrs Upsilla told Charles the morning my mother went to the funeral. I see Mr Fairlie in his house although I’ve never been there. I see him cooking for himself as best he can, and with a Hoover on the stairs. ‘Who’d mind being cut up by Mr Fairlie?’ Charles said once.

The music’s so faint it sounds as if it’s somewhere else, not in our house, and I wonder if they’re dancing. By ten o’clock the party will be over, Mrs Upsilla said, and then they’ll go off to different restaurants, or maybe they’ll all go to the same one, and some will just go home. It’s that kind of party, not lasting for very long, not like some Mrs Upsilla has known. ‘Here?’ Charles asked, surprised when she said that. ‘Here in this house?’ And she said no, not ever an all-night party here, and Charles nodded in his solemn way and said you’d know it. He’ll stay for an hour or so when everyone has gone, helping Mrs Upsilla to clear up. I’ve never been awake then.

Davie says it was some kind of game. Fun, he says, but Abigail shakes her head, her black plaits flying about. I don’t want to talk about it. A Wednesday it was, Mrs Upsilla gone off for the afternoon, Charles tending the flowerbeds in the square.

I try to think about Mr Fairlie again, having to make his bed, doing all the other things his wife did, but Mr Fairlie keeps slipping away. My mother’s dress was crumpled on the floor and I could see it when I peeped out, her necklace thrown down too. Afterwards, she said they should have locked the door.

The music is still far away. The noise of the people isn’t like people talking, more like a hum. I push the bedclothes back and tip-toe to the stairs to look down through the banisters. Mrs Upsilla is dressed specially for the party, and Charles is carrying in another tray of glasses. Mrs Upsilla goes in too, with two plates of tit-bits. Bacon wound round an apricot she makes, and sandwiches no bigger than a stamp. People come out and stand about on the landing. My mother and her friend are there for a moment, before she goes into the drawing-room again. He stays there, his shoulder against the wall by the window, the red curtains drawn over. ‘The child’s on to it,’ was what he said the day before my father came back.

I don’t want to go back to bed because the dream will be there even if I’m not asleep, Mrs Upsilla saying my father’s gone for ever, that of course he had to. When I look for it, the leather suitcase he takes on his travels won’t be there and I’ll know it never will be again. I’ll take out the Egyptian handkerchief and I’ll remember my father spreading it on the café table, showing me the pattern. ‘Our café,’ he calls it.

My mother’s friend looks up from the landing that’s two flights down. He waves and I watch him coming up the stairs. There’s a cigarette hanging from his mouth but he hasn’t lit it and he doesn’t take it out when he puts a finger to his lips. ‘Enough to make them drunk,’ Charles said when he saw the bottles opened on the kitchen table, and I wonder if my mother’s friend is drunk because he takes another cigarette from his packet even though he hasn’t lit the first one.

When he sways he has to reach out for the banister. He laughs, as if that’s just for fun. I can see the sweat on his face, like raindrops on his forehead. His eyes are closed when he takes another step. Slowly he goes on coming up, another step and then another and another. There’s a fleck of spit at the edge of his mouth, the two cigarettes have fallen on to the stair carpet. When I reach out I can touch him. My fingertips are on the dark cloth of his sleeve and I can feel his arm beneath, and everything is different then.

There is his tumbling down, there is the splintered banister. There is the thud, and then another and another. There is the stillness, and Mrs Upsilla looking up at me.

*

I watch them from my window, coming separately to the table they have chosen for breakfast in the garden of the hotel. They place their gifts by my place. They speak to one another, but I never know what they say in private. I turn from the window and powder over the coral lipstick I have just applied. On my seventeenth birthday nothing of my reflection is different in an oval looking-glass.

Downstairs, the salon I pass through is empty, the shutters half in place against the glare of sun that will be bothersome to the hotel guests later in the day.

‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ a waiter greets me in the garden.

Even in the early morning the air is mellow. Chestnuts have begun to fall; bright crimson leaves are shrivelling. The sky is cloudless.

‘Well, old lady,’ my father says. There is a single rose, pink bled with scarlet, which he has picked for me. On my birthday he always finds a rose somewhere.

‘What shall we do today?’ my mother asks when she has poured my coffee and my father remembers the year of the Pilgrims’ Way, when he took me on his back because I was tired, when we met the old man who told us about Saint Sisinnius. He remembers the balloon trip and the year of the casino. Birthdays are always an occasion, my mother’s in July, my father’s in May, mine in October.

We live in hotels. We’ve done so since we left the house in the square, all kinds of hotels, in the different countries of Europe, a temporary kind of life it seemed at first, acquiring permanence later.

‘So what shall we do?’ my mother asks again.

It is my choice because of the day and after I’ve opened the presents they’ve given me, after I’ve embraced them and thanked them, I say that what I’d like to do is to walk through the birch woods and have a picnic where the meadows begin.

‘Moi, je suis tous les sports,’ a man is telling his friend at the table next to ours. ‘Il n’y en a pas un seul auquel je ne m’ intéresse pas.’

I can hear now, thirty-five years later, that man’s rippling voice. I can see the face I glimpsed, bespectacled and pink, and hear his companion ordering thé de Ceylan.

‘It will be lovely, that walk today,’ my mother says, and we choose our picnic and after breakfast go to buy the different items and put our lunch together ourselves.

‘Why do you always find a rose for me?’

I ask that on our walk, when my mother is quite far ahead of my father and myself. I have not chosen the moment; it is not because my mother isn’t there; there’s never anything like that.

‘Oh, there isn’t a reason for a rose, you know. It’s just that sometimes a person wants to give one.’

‘You make everything good for me.’

‘Because it is your birthday.’

‘I didn’t mean only on my birthday.’

My mother has reached the meadows and calls back to us. When we catch up with her the picnic is already spread out, the wine uncorked.

‘When your father and I first met,’ she says once lunch has begun, ‘he was buying a film for his camera and found himself short. That’s how we met, in a little shop. He was embarrassed so I lent him a few coins from my purse.’

‘Your mother has always had the money.’

‘And it has never made a difference. An inheritance often does; but by chance, I think, this one never has.’

‘No, it has never made a difference. But before we say another word we must drink a toast to today.’

My father pours the wine. ‘You must not drink yourself, Villana. That isn’t ever done.’

‘Then may I have a toast to you? Is that ever done?’

‘Well, do it and then it shall be.’

‘Thank you for my birthday.’

In the sudden manner he often has my father says:

‘Marco Polo was the first traveller to bring back to Europe an account of the Chinese Empire. No one believed him. No one believed that the places he spoke of, or the people – not even Kublai Khan – existed. That is the history lesson for today, old lady. Or history and geography all in one. It doesn’t matter how we think of it.’

‘In German “to think” is denken,’ my mother interposes. ‘And in Italian?’

‘Pensare. And credere of course.’

‘This ham is delicious,’ my father says.

They took me from England because that was best. I never went to school again. They taught me in their way, and between them they knew a lot: they taught me everything. My father’s ambitions as an Egyptologist fell away. Once upon a time when he went on his travels – always determined to make discoveries that had not been made before – he scrimped and saved in order to be independent in his marriage, and in Egypt often slept on park benches. But after we left the house in the square my father had no profession; he became the amateur he once regarded as a status he despised. His books did not remain unwritten, but he did not ever want to publish them.

‘Oh, how good this is!’ he says, his soft voice hardly heard when my birthday picnic is over, the wine all drunk. We lie, all three of us, in the warm autumn sun, and then I pack the remains of the picnic into the haversack and think that my father is right, that this is good, even that it is happiness.

‘I worry sometimes he does not get enough exercise,’ my mother remarks on our journey back, going by a different way, my father’s turn now to be a little ahead. Often, it seems to me, it is deliberately arranged that I should always be in the company of one or other of them.

‘Doesn’t he get enough?’

‘Well, it could be more.’

‘Papa’s not ill?’

‘No, not at all. Not at all. But in the nature of things…’

She does not finish what she might have said, but I know what follows. In the nature of things neither she nor my father will always be there. I sense her guessing that I have finished her sentence for her, for that is how we live, our conversations incomplete, or never begun at all. They have between them created an artefact within which our existence lies, an artefact as scrupulously completed as a masterpiece on a mosaicist’s table. My father accepts what he has come to know – which I believe is everything – of my mother’s unfaithfulness. There is no regret on my mother’s part that I can tell, nor is there bitterness on his; I never heard a quarrel. They sacrifice their lives for me: the change of surroundings, constantly repeated, the anonymous furniture of hotels, nothing as it has been – for my sake, no detail is overlooked. In thanking them I might say my gratitude colours every day, but they do not want me to say that, not even to mention gratitude in such a manner because it would be too much.

‘Quel après-midi splendide!’

‘Ah, oui! on pent le dire.’

‘J‘adore ce moment de lajournée.’

Often my mother and I break into one of the languages she has taught me; as if, for her, a monotony she does not permit is broken. Does she – do they – regret the loss of the house in London, as I do? Do they imagine the changes there might be, the blue hall door a different colour, business plates beside it, a voice on the intercom when one of the bells is rung? What is the drawing-room now? Is there a consulate in the ground-floor rooms, stately men going back and forth, secretaries with papers to be signed? All that I know with certainty – and they must too – is that the violets of my bedroom wallpaper have been painted away to nothing, that gone from the hall are the shipyard scenes in black and white, the Cries of London too. They may even wonder, as I do, if the chill of the past is in that house, if the ghosts of my childhood companions haunt its rooms, for since leaving England I have never been able to bring them to life again.

‘C’est vraiment très beau là-bas,’ my mother says when we catch up with my father, who has already begun to gather chestnuts. We watch a bird which he says is something rare, none of us knowing what it is. There is a boy at the hotel to whom we’ll give the chestnuts, each of us knowing as we do so that this will become another birthday memory, spoken of, looked back to.

‘Ernest Shackleton was a most remarkable man,’ my father comments in his abrupt way. ‘Maybe the finest of all those men who were remarkable for making the freezing winds a way of life, and ice a landscape, whose grail was the desolation at the end of the world’s most terrible journeys. Can you imagine them, those men before him and all who followed later? Secrets kept from one another, ailments hidden, their prayers, their disappointments? Such adversity, yet such spirit! We are strangely made, we human beings, don’t you think?’

It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t taken me to see the Pyramids, not in the least does it matter, but even so I do not ever say I understand why he hasn’t. For that, of course, is best not said. I, too, prevaricate.

‘We’ve never brought you to Heiligenberg,’ he muses as we walk on.

The last of the autumn wild flowers would still be in bloom at Heiligenberg, and the hellebores out all winter. The hotel they know – the Zeldenhof – would be grander since their day, my mother says.

We’ll spend the winter in Heiligenberg, they decide, and I wonder if at Heiligenberg a letter might come from Mrs Upsilla. Now and again, not often, one arrives at some hotel or is discovered at a Poste Restante. Once I saw what I knew I should not have: the cramped handwriting I remembered, the purple ink Mrs Upsilla always favoured. Such letters that come are never opened in my presence; once when I looked in my mother’s belongings none had been kept.

‘We stayed at the Zeldenhof when we were married a month,’ my father says. ‘I photographed your mother at the refuge.’

I ask about that, and I ask where the little shop was where they met, when my father was buying a film for his camera.

‘Italy,’ my mother says. ‘The front at Bordighera.’

There is a photograph.

*

The ticket collector’s beard is flecked with grey, his uniform in need of attention. I know him well, for often I travel on his train.

‘Grazie, signora.’ He hands my ticket back, reminding me to change in Milan and Genoa. In the early afternoon the string of little seaside towns will begin, the train unhurried then, slowing, halting, juddering on, gathering speed again. That part of the journey I like best.

I wear blue because it suits me best, often with green, although they say the two are difficult to combine. My hair’s well tended, the style old-fashioned. ‘You’re an old-fashioned lady,’ my father used to say, not chiding me for that, his tone as light as ever. She liked my old-fashionedness, my mother said when I was very young. I’m in my fifty-third year now, a woman who has settled down at last in the forgotten Italian seaside resort where they met. In nineteen forty-nine that was, I calculate.

They died, he first – in his eighties – she less than a year later; and I, who should have known them better than anyone, did not know them at all, even though my mother did not release my hand all during her last night. The second funeral was conducted with the same simple formality as the first, the coffin placed beside the other in the small graveyard they had chosen, the place remembered from the summers we often spent in the Valle Verzasca. I walked away from both of them through cold winter air, snow on the ground but no longer falling.

A month or so later, calling in at the Poste Restante at Bad Mergentheim, as we had always done in their lifetime, I found a letter from Mrs Upsilla. Addressed as usual to my mother, it had been lying there for almost a year.

… I only write because it is so long now since I have heard from you. I am concerned but perhaps it is all right and you have been so kind to an old woman. The summer has not been good in Brighton but I struggle on, the season very poor. Several other landladies have given up and I read the writing on the wall and think how different life was once, those days in London! Well, I must not say it but there you are. I only write because I have not heard.

I knew at once that my mother had paid Mrs Upsilla all these years. Charles too, I imagined. The rich’s desperate bid for silence: I think of it as that; but no, I do not blame my mother. I replied to Mrs Upsilla, simply saying that my mother had died and asking her to pass this information on to Charles if she happened to be in touch with him. No acknowledgement ever found its way to me from either of them, but it was hearing from Mrs Upsilla that first made me want to honour my father and mother. For Mrs Upsilla would die too, and Charles would, and I myself in time: who then, in all the world, would be aware of the story that might be told?

In the hotel where I live, in Bordighera’s Regina Palace, my friends are the dining-room waiters, and the porters in the hall, and the bedroom maids; I do not turn away such friendship and I have myself for company too. Yet when my face is there in the glass of my compact, or reflected in shop windows when the sun is right, or glimpsed in public mirrors, I often think I do not know that woman. I wonder when I gaze for a moment longer if what I see is the illusion imposed by my imagination upon the shadow a child became, if somehow I do not entirely exist. I know that this is not so, yet still it seems to be. Confusion has coloured my life since my mother’s death; and the waking hours of my solitude are nagged by the compulsion to make known the goodness of two people. Obsessively there, beyond my understanding, that has become the insistent orderer of how things should be. Not ever finding the courage to make it known in the corridors and lounges of the Regina Palace, for years I travelled from my shabby old town by the sea to distant cities where I might be anonymous. Again and again I searched among strangers for a listener who would afterwards pass on as a wonder the beneficence of those two people, a marvel to be repeated at family gatherings, at dinner tables, in bars and shops, interrupting games of cards and chess, spreading to other cities, to villages and towns, to other countries.

Each time I found my listener, each time across a teashop table or in a park, there was politeness; and moments later there was revulsion. Some traveller killing tedious time in a railway waiting-room would look away and mumble nothing; or on a tram, or in a train, would angrily push past a nuisance. And the whisper of my apology would not be heard.

In my foolishness I did not know what I since have learnt: that the truth, even when it glorifies the human spirit, is hard to peddle if there is something terrible to tell as well. Dark nourishes light’s triumphant blaze, but who should want to know? I accept, at last, that I am not to be allowed the mercy of telling what is mine to tell. The wheels of my suitcase rattle on the surface of the railway platform at Bordighera and outside the station the evening is bright with sunshine. The taxi-driver knows my destination without having to ask. I might say, in making conversation, that there will not be another journey but enquire instead about the family he often tells me about.

‘Buona sera, signora. Come sta?’ The afternoon porter welcomes me in the empty hall of the Regina Palace, appearing out of nowhere.

‘Sto bene, Giovanni. Bene.’

Small and pallid, an elaborate uniform dwarfing him, Giovanni keeps the Regina Palace going, as much as Signor Valazza, its manager, does; or the stoutly imperious Signora Casarotti, who knew it from her Reception counter in its glory days. Fashion has long ago lifted its magic from what fashion once made gracious, leaving behind flaking paint and dusty palms. Masonry crumbles, a forgotten lift is out of order. But Camera Ventinove, the room I have always returned to from the failure of my journeys, has a view of the sea as far as the horizon.

‘We miss you always, signora,’ Giovanni tells me, practising his English, as he likes to in our conversations. ‘Was fine, your travel, signora?’

‘Was fine, Giovanni, was fine.’

The door of Camera Ventinove is unlocked as that lie is told. Giovanni stands aside, I go in first. There is a little more to the ceremony of my return, not much: the opening of the shutters, the view again remarked upon, the giving and receiving of the tip. Then Giovanni goes.

I hang some of the clothes I have travelled with in the wardrobe and write the list to accompany those that must be laundered. Unhurriedly, I have a bath and, downstairs for a while, finish the easy book I bought for my journey. I leave it with the newspapers in case it interests someone else.

I walk by the sea, my thoughts a repetition, imagining on this promenade the two people who have been rejected, who did not know one another well when they walked here too. The bathing huts of the photograph have gone.

‘Buona sera, signora.’

It is not an unusual courtesy for people to address one another on this promenade, even for a man who is not familiar to her to address a woman. But still this unexpected voice surprises me, and perhaps I seem a little startled.

‘I’m sorry, I did not mean to…’ The man’s apology trails away.

‘It’s quite all right.’

‘We are both English, I think.’ His voice is soft, pleasant to hear, his eyes quite startling blue. He is tall, in a pale linen suit, thin and fair-haired, his forehead freckled, the blue of his eyes repeated in the tie that’s knotted into a blue-striped shirt. Some kindly doctor? Schoolmaster? Horticulturalist? Something about him suggests he’s on his own. Widowed? I wondered. Unmarried? It is impossible to guess. His name is d’Arblay, he reveals, and when I begin to walk on, it seems only slightly strange that he changes direction and walks with me.

‘Yes, I am English,’ I hear myself saying, more warmly than if I had not hesitated at first.

‘I thought you might be. Well, I knew. But even so it was a presumption.’ The slightest of gestures accompanies this variation of his apology. He smiles a little. ‘My thoughts had wandered. I was thinking as I strolled of a novel I first read when I was eighteen. The Good Soldier.’

‘I have read The Good Soldier too

‘The saddest story. I read it again not long ago. You’ve read it more than once?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘There’s always something that wasn’t there before when you read a good novel for the second time.’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘I have been re-reading now the short stories of Somerset Maugham. Superior to his novels, I believe. In particular I like “The Kite”.’

‘They made a film of it,’

‘Yes.’

‘I never saw it.’

‘Nor I.’

There is no one else on the promenade. Neither a person nor a dog. Not even a seagull. We walk together, not speaking for a moment, until I break that silence, not to say much, but only that I love the sea at Bordighera.

‘And I.’

Our footsteps echo, or somehow do I imagine that? I don’t know, am only aware that again the silence is there, and that again I break it.

‘A long time ago I lived in a house in a square in London…’

He nods, but does not speak.

‘My father was an Egyptologist.’

*

Taped music reaches me in the bar, where once there was the chatter of cocktail drinkers and the playing of a palm-court quartet. I order Kir, and when the barman has poured it he leaves me on my own, as every night he does, since he has other things to do. I guessed this would be so and for company I’ve brought with me the temperate features of the Englishman on the promenade. ‘So much is chance,’ he said, and with no great difficulty I hear his distinctive voice again. ‘So much,’ he says.

I take that with me when I cross the hall to the struggling splendours of the Regina Palace’s dining-room. I take with me Mr d’Arblay’s composure, his delicate hands seeming to gesture without moving, the smile that is so slight it’s hardly there. Royalty has celebrated in this vast dining-room, so Signor Valazza claims. But tonight’s reflection in its gilded mirrors is a handful of travellers, shadowy beneath the flickering chandeliers. There is a man with a yellow pipe on the table beside him, and a couple who might be on their honeymoon, and two ageing German fräuleins who might be schoolmistresses just retired. Little stoves keep warm filetto di maialino and tortelli di pecorino. But all reality is less than Mr d’Arblay.

‘Si, signora.’ Carlo jots down my order: the consommè, the turbot. ‘E Gavi dei Gavi. Subito, signora.’

My mother gathered her dress from the floor, her necklace too, where she had thrown them down. The drawing-room was heavy with her scent and her friend put a record on the gramophone. The voice still sang when they had gone. And Charles came in then, and knew, and took me out to the square to show me the flowerbeds he’d been tending.

‘Prego, signora. Il vino.’

The Gavi is poured, but I do not need to taste it, and simply nod.

‘Grazie, signora.’

Mr d’Arblay has walked through our square; more than once he remembers being there. It is not difficult for him to imagine the house as it was; he does not say so, but I know. He can imagine; he is the kind that can.

‘Buon appetito, signora.’

A child’s light fingertips on a sleeve, resting there for no longer than an instant. So swift her movement then, so slight it might not have occurred at all: that, too, Mr d’Arblay can imagine and he does. The unlit cigarettes are crushed beneath a shoe. There is the crash of noise, the splintered banister. There are the eyes, looking up from far below. There is the rictus grin.

The man on his own presses tobacco into his yellow pipe but does not light it. Ice-cream is brought to the German schoolmistresses. The honeymoon couple touch glasses. Three late arrivals hesitate by the door.

‘Il rombo arrosto, signora.’

‘Grazie, Carlo.’

‘Prego, signora.’

Three lives were changed for ever in that instant. Whatever lies my father told were good enough for people at a party, the silence of two servants bought. My mother wept and hid her tears. But some time during that sleepless night was she – my father too – touched by the instinct to abandon the child who had been born to them? Was it more natural that they should, and do no more than call what had happened evil?

‘It is natural too,’ Mr d’Arblay replied while we walked, ‘to find the truth in the agony of distress. The innocent cannot be evil: this was what, during that sleepless night, they came to know.’

It was enough, Mr d’Arblay diffidently insisted, that what there is to tell, in honouring the dead, has now been told between two other people and shall be told again between them, and each time something gained. The selfless are undemanding in their graves.

I do not taste the food I’m eating, nor savour the wine I drink. I reject the dolce and the cheese. They bring me coffee.

‘Theirs was the guilt,’ Mr d’Arblay says again, ‘his that he did not know her well enough, hers that she made the most of his not knowing. Theirs was the shame, yet their spirit is gentle in our conversation: guilt is not always terrible, nor shame unworthy.’

Petits fours have been brought too, although I never take one from the plate. One night she may, is what they think in the kitchen, and even say to one another that one night when she sits down at this same table, as old as she will ever become, she will be lonely in her solitude. How can they know that in the dining-room where royalty has dined she is not alone among the tattered drapes and chandeliers abandoned to their grime? They cannot know, they cannot guess, that in the old hotel, and when she walks by the sea, there is Mr d’Arblay, as in another solitude there were her childhood friends.