Two Lives

My House in Umbria

1

It is not easy to introduce myself. Gloria Grey, Janine Ann Johns, Cora Lamore: there is a choice, and there have been other names as well. Names hardly matter, I think; it is perhaps enough to say I like Emily Delahunty best. ‘Mrs Delahunty,’ people say, although strictly speaking I have never been married. I am offered the title out of respect to a woman of my appearance and my years; and Quinty – who addresses me more than anyone else – once said when I questioned him on the issue: ‘ “Miss Delahunty” doesn’t suit you.’

I make no bones about it, I am not a woman of the world; I am not an educated woman; what I know I have taught myself. Rumour and speculation – even downright lies ’ have abounded since I was sixteen years old. In any person’s life that side of things is unavoidable, but I believe I have suffered more than most, and take this opportunity to set the record straight. Firstly, my presence on the S.S. Hamburg in my less affluent days was as a stewardess, nothing more. Secondly, it is a mischievous fabrication that at the time of the Oleander Avenue scandal I accepted money in return for silence. Thirdly, Mrs Chubbs was dead, indeed already buried, before I met her husband. On the other hand I do not deny that men have offered me gifts, probably all of which I have accepted. Nor do I deny that my years in Africa are marked, in my memory, with personal regret. Unhappiness breeds confusion and misunderstanding. I was far from happy in Ombubu, at the Café Rose.

In the summer of which I now write I had reached my fifty-sixth year – a woman carefully made up, eyes a greenish-blue. Then, as now, my hair was as pale as sand, as smooth as a seashell, the unfussy style reflecting the roundness of my face. My mouth is a full rosebud, my nose classical; my complexion has always been admired. Naturally, there were laughter lines that summer, but my skin, though no longer the skin of a girl, had worn well and my voice had not yet acquired the husky depths that steal away femininity. In Italy men who were strangers to me still gave me a second look, although naturally not with the same excitement as once men did in other places where I’ve lived. I had, in truth, become more than a little plump, and though perhaps I should have dressed with such a consideration in mind this is something I have never been able to bring myself to do: I cannot resist just a hint of drama in my clothes – though not bright colours, which I abhor. ‘I never knew a girl dress herself up so prettily,’ a man who sat on the board of a carpet business used to say, and my tendency to put on a pound or two has not been without admirers. A bag of bones Mrs Chubbs was, according to her husband, which is why – so I’ve always suspected – he took to me in the first place.

Having read so far, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’m a woman who prays. When I was a child I went to Sunday school and had a picture of Jesus on a donkey above my bed. In the Café Rose in Ombubu I interested Poor Boy Abraham in praying also, the only person I have ever influenced in this way. ‘He’s retarded, that boy,’ Quinty used to say in his joky way, careless as to whether or not the boy was within earshot. Quinty’s like that, as you’ll discover.

I am the author of a series of fictional romances, composed in my middle age after my arrival in this house. I am no longer active in that field, and did not ever presume to intrude myself into the world of literature – though, in fairness to veracity, I must allow that my modest works dissect with some success the tangled emotions of which they treat. That they have given pleasure I am assured by those kind enough to write in appreciation. They have helped; they have whiled away the time. I can honestly state that I intended no more, and I believe you’ll find I am an honest woman.

But to begin at the beginning. I was born on the upper stairway of a lodging-house in an English seaside resort. My father owned a Wall of Death; my mother, travelling the country with him, participated in the entertainment by standing upright on the pillion of his motor-cycle while he raced it round the rickety enclosure. I never knew either of them. According to the only account I have – that of Mrs Trice, who had it from the lodging-house keeper – my mother was on her way to the first-floor lavatory when she was taken with child, if you’ll forgive that way of putting it. Within minutes an infant’s cries were heard on the stairway. ‘That was a setback,’ Mrs Trice explained, and further revealed that in her opinion my father and mother had counted on my mother’s continuing performance on the motor-cycle pillion to ‘do the trick’. By this she meant I would be stillborn, since efforts at aborting had failed. It was because I wasn’t that the arrangement was made with Mr and Mrs Trice, of 21 Prince Albert Street, in that same seaside town.

They were a childless couple who had long ago abandoned hope of parenthood: they paid for the infant that was not wanted, the bargain being that all rights were thereby re-linquished and that no visit to 21 Prince Albert Street would ever be attempted by the natural parents. Although nobody understands more than I the necessity that caused those people of a Wall of Death to act as they did, to this day I fear abandonment, and have instinctively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt in happiness ever after.

Quinty is familiar with my origins, for nothing can be kept from him. In Africa he knew I had accumulated money, probably how much. In 1978, when we had known one another for some time in Ombubu, it was he who suggested that I should buy a property in Umbria, which he would run for me as an informal hotel – quite different from the Café Rose. Repeatedly he pressed the notion upon me, tiring me with the steel of his gaze. Enough money had been made; there was no need for either of us to linger where we were. That was the statement in his eyes. We could both trade silence for silence in another kind of house. Half a child and half a rogue he is.

Quinty was born in the town of Skibbereen, in Ireland, approximately forty-two years ago. He is a lean man, with a light footstep, gaunt about the features. From the outer corner of each eye two long wrinkles run down his cheeks, like threads. When first I knew him in Ombubu he was shifty and unhealthy-looking. ‘There’s a sick man here,’ Poor Boy Abraham cried, excited because a stranger had arrived at the café. I never knew where it was that Quinty had come from in Africa, or what had brought him to the continent in the first place. But I later heard, the way one does in an outpost like Ombubu, that several years before he’d tricked into marriage the daughter of a well-to-do Italian family, whom he had come across when she was an au pair girl in London. She ran away from him when she discovered that he was not the manager of a meat-extract factory, as he had claimed, and that he stole his clothes from D. H. Evans. He followed her to Modena, bothering her and threatening, until one night her father and two of her brothers drove him a little way towards Parma, pushed him out on to a grass verge and left him there. He did not attempt to return, but that was how he came to be in Italy and learned the language. When first he mentioned Umbria to me I’d no idea where it was; I doubt I’d even heard of it. ‘Let me have just a little money,’ he begged in Ombubu one damply oppressive afternoon. ‘Enough for the journey and then to look about.’ Africa had gone stale for me, he said, which was a delicate way of putting it; the regulars at the Café Rose had not changed for years. In other words, the place had become a bore for both of us.

He sang the praises of Italy; I listened to descriptions of Umbrian landscape and hill-towns, of seasons bringing their variation of food and wine. Quinty can be persuasive, and I was happy enough to agree that a time of my life had come to an end. He’d played a certain role during most of that time, I have to say in fairness, and I have to give him credit for it. When he raised the subject of Italy I did the simplest thing: I gave him the money, believing I’d never see him again. But he returned a fortnight later and spread out photographs of Umbria and of villas that might be purchased. ‘No one would care to die in the Café Rose,’ he pointed out, a sentiment with which I could not but concur. One house in particular he was keen on.

Imagine a yellowish building at the end of a track that is in places like a riverbed. White with dust unless rain has darkened it, this track is two hundred metres long, curving through a landscape of olive trees and cypresses. In summer, broom and laburnum daub the clover slopes, poppies and geraniums sprinkle the meadows. Behind the house the hill continues to rise gently, and there’s a field of sunflowers. The great lake of Trasimeno is on our doorstep; only thirty kilometres to the south there’s a railway junction at Chiusi, which is convenient; and in the same area there’s a health spa at Chianciano. In Quinty’s photographs of the house there were out-buildings, and machinery that had rusted, but all that has changed since.

Of the house itself, the window shutters are a faded green, and the entrance doors – always open in the daytime – are green also. Further doors – glass decoratively framed with metal – separate the outside hall from the inner, and the floors of both, and of the dining-room and drawing-room – called by Quinty the salotto – are tiled, a shade of pale terracotta. Upstairs, on either side of two long, cool corridors, the bedrooms are small and simple, like convent cells. All are cream-distempered, with inside shutters instead of curtains, each with a dressing-table, a wardrobe and a bed, and a reproduction of a different Annunciation above each wash-stand. What luxury there is in my house belongs to the antique furniture of the downstairs rooms and the inner hall: embroidered sofas, pale chairs and tables, inlaid writing-desks, footstools, glass-fronted bookcases, the dining-room’s chandelier.

When the tourists come to my house they pull the bell-chain and the sound echoes from the outer hall. Then Quinty, in his trim white jacket, answers the summons. ‘Well?’ he says in English, for one of his quirks is not immediately to speak Italian to strangers. ‘How can I help you?’ And the tourists cobble together what English they can, if it happens not to be their native tongue.

A handful of travellers is all Quinty ever makes welcome at a time, people who have spilled over from the hotels of the town that lies five kilometres away. A small, middle-aged woman called Signora Bardini, dressed always and entirely in black, is employed to cook. And Quinty found Rosa Crevelli, a long-legged, dark-skinned maid, to assist him in the dining-room. He presents us to our visitors as a private household, not at all in a commercial line of business. From the outset my house was known neither as an albergo nor a pensione, nor a restaurant with rooms, nor an hotel. ‘This is what suits?’ he suggested.

Being profitable, it was what suited Quinty, but for other reasons it suited me also. Once, somewhere, I have seen a painted frieze continuing around the inside walls of a church – people processing in old-fashioned dress, proceeding on their way to Heaven or to Hell, I’m not sure which. Over the years the tourists who have come to my house have lingered in my memory like that. I see their faces, and even sometimes still hear their voices: tall Dutch people, the stylish French, Germans who brought with them jars of breakfast food, Americans delighting in simple things as much as children do, English couples suffering from digestive troubles. Chapters of books have been read, postcards written, bridge played in the evenings, even pictures painted, on the terrace. I have suffered no bad debts, nor have there ever been complaints about the bedrooms or the food. Quinty gave Rosa Crevelli English lessons and took up something else with her in private, but I asked no questions. Instead, within a month of settling in this house, I taught myself to type.

All this began nine years before the summer of which I write – the nine years in which I left the past behind, as title succeeded title: Precious September, Flight to Enchantment, For Ever More, Behold My Heart! and many others. My savings had bought the house; now – though after difficult beginnings – there was wealth. One day it would be Quinty who woke up rich, yet he could not possibly have predicted what would happen here: that I would sit down in my private room and compose romances. As far as Quinty knew, there was nothing in my history to suggest such a development; I was not that kind of woman. To tell the truth, I’d hardly have guessed it myself. As a villa hostess in an idyllic setting, I would make a living for both of us out of a passing tourist trade, as I had made one in a different role in Africa. That’s how Quinty saw the future and as far as it went he was right, of course. He’s cute as a fox when it comes to matters of gain, that being his life really.

Besides the tourists, our visitors are rare: a functionary from the tax office, or would-be thieves arriving with some excuse to look the place over, a traveller in fertilizers seeking directions to a nearby farm. Ever since the summer of 1987, which I think of to this day as the summer of the General and Otmar and the child, and which I remember most vividly of all the seasons of my life, nothing has been quite the same. That summer and for a few summers after it no tourists were received. Yet had you, for some other reason, gained admission during that summer Quinty would have led you through the outer hall and through the inner one and into the salotto, to wait there for me. Depending upon the time of day, the General would probably have been reading his English newspaper in the cool of the shadows, the child engrossed in one of her drawings, Otmar soundlessly tapping a surface with his remaining fingers. Many times that summer I imagined a voice saying: ‘I have come for Otmar,’ or: ‘I understand you are keeping an old Englishman here,’ or: ‘Gather up the child’s belongings.’ Many times I imagined the car that had drawn up, and the dust its wheels had raised. I imagined a little knot of official people outside our entrance doors, one of them lighting a cigarette to pass the time, the butt later thrown down on the gravel. In fact, it wasn’t like that in the least. All that happened was that Thomas Riversmith came.

That summer the child was eight years old, Otmar twenty-seven, the General elderly. They were three people on their own, and so was I. ‘Heart’s companion’ is an expression I used to some effect in Two on a Sunbeam, and the fact that it lingers still in my mind, so long after the last paragraph of that work was completed, is perhaps significant, personally. I have always been the first to admit that in this world we are eternal beggars – yet it is also true that alms are not withheld for ever. When I was in the care of Mr and Mrs Trice I longed for a cowboy to step down from the screen of the old Gaiety Cinema and snatch me on to his saddle, spiriting me away from 21 Prince Albert Street. When I was a girl, serving clerks in a public-house dining-room, I longed for a young man of good family to draw his car up beside me on the street. When I was a woman I longed for a different kind of stranger to appear in the Café Rose. That summer, in Umbria, I had long ago abandoned hope. In my fifty-sixth year I had come to terms with stuff like that. My stories were a help, no point in denying it.

The winter and the spring that preceded that summer had been quiet. From time to time bundles of fan mail had arrived, forwarded by the English publishers. There had been invitations to attend get-togethers of one kind or another – I remember in particular a title that struck me, a ‘Festival of Romance’, in some Iron Curtain country. I have never gone in for that kind of thing, and politely declined. A man wrote from New Zealand, pointing out that he enjoyed the same surname as one of my characters – an unusual name, he suggested, which indeed it was: I imagined I had invented it. A schoolgirl in Stockton-on-Tees poured out her heart, as schoolgirls often do. An elderly person chided me for some historical carelessness or other, too slight to signify.

In January a pet died. Years ago a lame Siamese cat had wandered into the grounds one day, a pathetic creature, all skin and bone. Signora Bardini befriended her. She called the creature Tata and attached a little bell on a chain around her neck so that a gentle tinkling became a feature of my house. We watched her health recovering, her coat becoming silky again, contentment returning. But Tata was never young and never sprightly: we knew from the beginning that all she could give us was what remained of a mostly spent life. She grew old gracefully, which is nice, I think, for any creature, human or otherwise. Signora Bardini put a little wooden board up, that being her way.

Signora Bardini is a widow to whom no children were born. When her husband, a carpenter by trade, died in 1975 she apparently took some time to come to terms with her solitude. Although she speaks no English, I believe she was not happy again until she came to work in my house. Her life might have been perfect here were it not for Quinty, towards whom from the first she displayed an undemonstrative antipathy. Clearly she does not care for his relationship with Rosa Crevelli, nor his cheese-paring in household matters. But Signora Bardini is not, and never was, a woman to raise any kind of fuss.

That, then, was how things were at the beginning of the summer I write of. The house smelt faintly of paint, for some redecoration had recently been completed. ‘We must have a garden,’ I had repeatedly said that winter and spring, saying it mainly to myself. ‘It is ridiculous that a house like this does not have a garden to it.’ That was a little on my mind, as it had been for years. One April, passing through a railway station here in Italy, I noticed a great display of azaleas in pots. I did not then know what that flower is called, but later described it to Quinty, who found out for me. Ever since I had longed for an azalea garden, and for the lawns that I remember in England, and for little flowerbeds edged with pinks.

You may consider I was fortunate to lack only a garden and a particular friend, and of course you are right. I was, and am, immensely fortunate. Not many of us acquire the means necessary to occupy a place such as this, to choose as I may choose, rarely to count the cost. Not many pass a winter and spring with only the death of a lame cat to grieve over. In the eyes of the tourists who came here I was a comfortably-off English-woman, well looked after by my servants. Quinty no doubt struck them as eccentric, if not bizarre. For one thing he has a way of arbitrarily allocating to other people a particular obsession in order to hold forth on it himself. From encyclopaedias and newspapers he has acquired a wealth of chatty information on many subjects – royal families, the Iron Age, sewerage systems, land speed records, the initiation practices of blind Amazon tribes. A score of times I have heard him supplying some unfortunate tourist with the history of the Japanese railways or the nature of the jackal. ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi gave his name to a biscuit,’ he has confided in my hall; ‘the city of Bath to another. Hard tack the first biscuit of all was called, and had to be broken with a hammer.’ Jauntily gregarious, he endlessly leant against a pillar in the salotto that summer to conduct with the General a one-sided conversation about sport. When Mr Riversmith arrived he was imbued with an interest in holy women, although it could hardly have been clearer that Mr Riversmith’s subject was ants.

In other ways Quinty can be dubious to a degree that makes him untrustworthy. One day in the April of that year Rosa Crevelli was rude to me in Italian, scornfully curling down her beautiful lower lip as she muttered something. Quinty observed this, but did not reprimand her. For the first time, I realized, he must have broken the unspoken agreement that had existed between us ever since we’d left the Café Rose: he had told this girl about the past.

Later I taxed him with this treachery. He laughed at first, but then he turned away and his cheeks were damp with tears when again he faced me. ‘How can you make such an accusation?’ he whispered in a broken voice, and went on for so long – professing loyalty and faithfulness, uttering statements to the effect that he and the girl would lay down their lives for me, and protesting their desire to be nowhere else on earth but in my house – that I forgave him. ‘I’ve poured you a nice g and t,’ he said with a smile, coming to find me that evening in the salotto. When I met her next Rosa Crevelli curtsied.

Of course I could not be certain: maybe they sniggered, who can say? That I have a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt is either a weakness or a strength, but whichever it is I certainly don’t claim it as a virtue. In fact, for very good reasons, I claim very little for myself: there’s not much to me, and I’m the first to confess it. Nor do I claim anything mystical for that particular summer, no angels making their presence felt in my house, no voices heard. The child was an ordinary child, and I believe the others were ordinary too. Yet I don’t think anyone would deny that it was a singular summer, and constituted an experience not given to everyone.

On 5 May, in the morning, wearing a suit of narrow black-and-white stripes, handbag and shoes to match, I left my house to travel to Milan. Quinty drove me to the railway junction and gave me my ticket on the platform. I can manage to travel very well on my own, despite my limited understanding of the Italian language. I recognize the familiar phrase when the ticket collector demands to see my ticket. In Rinascente and all the other stores I shop successfully, and in the Grand Hotel Duomo, where I always stay, excellent English is spoken. I look forward to shopping for clothes and shoes, taking my time over their choosing, going away to think things over, returning twice or three times: all that I love.

No one was staying in my house that day; no tourists had been sent on by the hotels since the end of last year’s season, and we didn’t expect any until the middle of June at least. Not that it is ever necessary for me to be there when visitors do arrive, but even so I like to welcome them. In the dining-room we sit at one round table and if English is spoken we talk of this and that, of places that have been visited, of experiences while travelling. If English is difficult for my guests, they speak in whatever language their own is, and I am not offended. There are never more than five in my dining-room or at the table on the terrace when we choose to dine outside.

In the train I imagined Quinty driving from the railway junction and shopping in the town, the large, grey, open-hooded car parked in the shade of the chestnut trees by the church. He would call in for a coffee and then return to the house, where he and Signora Bardini and Rosa Crevelli would have lunch in the kitchen. I imagined them there, the three of them around the table, Quinty repeating new English words and phrases for Rosa Crevelli. I wondered if Signora Bardini, too, had also been told about the past. Determinedly I pushed all that away, and then my mind became occupied by a title that had occurred to me at the railway junction. Ceaseless Tears. So far, that was all I had. A heroine had not c ome to me: I could not even faintly glimpse a hero. Yet that title insisted itself upon my consciousness, and I knew that when a title was insistent I must persevere.

The train was a Rome express; it had come through Orvieto before I boarded it; Arezzo and Florence lay ahead. Imagine the stylish interior of a First Class rapido, the pleasant Pullman atmosphere, the frilled white antimacassars, the comfortable roominess. Diagonally across from where I sat were a young man and a girl: you could tell from their faces that they were lovers. An older couple travelled with the father of the woman: you could tell that was the relationship from their conversation. This threesome spoke in English, the lovers in German. A mother and a father travelled with their two children, a boy and a girl: I could not hear what they said, but everything about them suggested Americans. A woman who might have been in the fashion world was on her own. Italian businessmen in lightweight suits occupied the other seats.

I watched the lovers. He stroked her bare arm; you could tell how much she was in love with him, though he wasn’t exactly handsome or even prepossessing. Did the older couple find the father a tiresome addition to their relationship? If they did, their politeness allowed not a single intimation of it to show; but, oddly, that politeness worried me. The Americans were stylish, the children arguing a little as spirited children do, the parents softly conversing, sometimes laughing. The mother was a particularly appealing young woman, fair-haired and freckled, with dimples in both cheeks and a flash of humour in her eyes.

Increasingly, I liked the title that had come to me, yet could still find no meaning in it, no indication of this direction or that. I recalled Ernestine French-Wyn, who had caused Adam to weep so in Behold My Heart! But one story rarely prompts the secrets of another and to avoid the nagging of my frustration I forced myself to observe again my fellow-travellers. The heads of the lovers were now bent over a scrap of paper on which the girl – she had a look of Lilli Palmer in her earliest films – was making a calculation. The daughter and son-in-law read; the old man had taken his watch off and was meticulously re-setting it. The little American boy was being reprimanded by his mother; the little girl changed places with him and took her father’s hand. Somewhere in my mind’s vision a description of this scene appeared: darkly-typed lines on the green typing paper I always use. I had no idea why that was.

The train moved swiftly, flashing through small railway stations and landscape still verdant after the rains of spring. The ticket collector appeared. Then the restaurant-car conductor hurried by, tinkling his midday bell. The businessmen went to lunch, so did the fashion woman. Out of nowhere, words came: In the garden the geraniums were in flower. Through scented twilight the girl in the white dress walked with a step as light as a morning cobweb. That evening she hadn’t a care in the world.

It would go on. I would sit down at my little black Olympia and paragraph would obediently follow paragraph, one scene flowing into the next, conversations occurring naturally. I turned the pages of Oggi, but soon lost interest. Where would I be, I found myself thinking, if late in my life I had not discovered my modest gift? At my age there were women who still served clerks their plates of food in public-house dining-rooms. There were women who sold shoes – as I have also done – or swabbed out cabins on ferry-steamers. It had never seemed like good fortune that I’d found myself in the Café Rose, but in fairness to fate I have to say it was. I ran the place in the end – everyone’s friend, as they used to say there. I was fortunate, I must record again, because without the Café Rose I don’t believe I’d ever have put pen to paper.

I must have slept, for in a dream Ernie Chubbs approached me outside the Al Fresco Club and exclaimed, just as he had in reality, ‘Hi, sugar!’ He told me he loved me in the Al Fresco Club; he wanted to sit with me all night, he whispered. Ernie went on buying drinks, the way they liked you to in the Al Fresco, and when another man came up and bought drinks also Ernie was furious, and told him to go away. Then, as abruptly as it always is in dreams, I was shopping in Milan, trying on long suede coats in different colours – next season’s cut, the assistant said. I liked the wrap-around style and was saying so when my eyes were wrenched open by a burst of noise. There was glass in the air, and the face of the American woman was upside down. There was screaming, and pain, before the darkness came.