Two Lives

2

‘It’s Quinty come to see you,’ Quinty said. ‘You’re all right. You’re OK.’

He tried to smile. The lines on his cheeks had wrinkled into zigzags, but the smile itself would not properly come.

‘Is it Good Friday?’ I asked, confused, because Good Friday did not come into any of it. I heard myself talking about the Café Rose, how one particular Good Friday the Austrian ivory cutter had been high on the stuff he took, and Poor Boy Abraham had been upset on account of anyone being high on the day when Jesus suffered on the Cross.

There were hours of shadows then – they might have been years for all I knew – and through them moved the white uniforms of the nurses, one nurse in particular, with thinning black hair. ‘You’ve had a bang,’ Quinty said, ‘but thanks be to God you’re progressing well.’ He sniffed the way he sometimes does, a casual, careless sound, disguising something else.

‘What happened?’ I asked, but Quinty’s reply – if he made one at all – eluded me, and when I looked he was no longer there. I didn’t want to think; I allowed my mind to wander where it would, gliding over the past, swooping into it here and there, no effort made on my part, no exhaustion. ‘Have they paid?’ Mrs Trice asked her husband. She was always asking him that, he being a collector of insurance money. ‘You’re weak with them,’ she accused him. ‘Weak as old water.’ As a child, I lived for eight years at 21 Prince Albert Street before I realized that my presence there was the result of a monetary transaction. I’d always addressed the Trices as though they were my mother and father, not knowing about the people of the Wall of Death until Mrs Trice told me in the kitchen one Saturday morning. ‘They were paid a sum by Mr Trice,’ was how she put it. ‘They weren’t people you’d care for.’

Between sleep and consciousness the honest black face of Poor Boy Abraham edged out the Trices, his negroid features intent as he swept the veranda floor at the Café Rose, while the fans whirred and rattled. The four Englishmen played poker at the corner table. ‘Where would I be if I did not come with my woes to you?’ the Austrian ivory cutter asked and, as always, drew the conversation round to his hopeless coveting of some black man’s wife. The aviator who was a regular in the café had been a skywriter, advertising a brand of beer mainly.

I dropped into sleep and dreamed, as I had on the train. ‘Feeling better, girlie?’ Ernie Chubbs was solicitous in Idaho. ‘Fancy a chow mein sent up?’

A nurse spoke kindly in Italian. I could tell she was being kind from her expression. She rearranged my pillows and for a moment held my hand. I think I must have called out in my sleep. When I seemed calm again she went away.

When Ernie Chubbs suggested accompanying him to Idaho I did so because I wanted to see the Old West. To this day, the Old West fascinates me: Claire Trevor in her cowgirl clothes, Marlene Dietrich singing in the saloon. To this day, I close my eyes when a wheel of the stagecoach works itself loose; I’m still not quick enough to see a sheriff draw his gun. Mr Tree took me to the Gaiety Cinema on Sunday afternoons and we would watch the comedy short – Leon Errol or Laurel and Hardy, or Charlie Chase – and then the Gaumont News and the serial episode, and whatever else there was besides the main feature. Sometimes the main feature was a gangster thriller, or an ice-skating drama or a musical, and that was always a disappointment. I longed for the canyons and the ranches, for the sound of a posse’s hooves, the saddles that became pillows beneath the stars.

Idaho was a disappointment too. Ernie Chubbs, who said he knew the region well, assured me it was where the Old West still was; but needless to say that wasn’t true. A lifetime’s dream was shattered – not that I expected to find the winding trails just as they had been shown to me, but at least there might have been something reminiscent of them, at least there might have been a smell of leather. ‘You’re simple, Emily,’ the big doctor who came to the Café Rose used to say. And yes, I suppose I am: I cannot help myself. I’m simple and I’m sentimental.

‘How long is it?’ I asked. ‘How long have I lain here?’

But the Italian nurses only smiled and rearranged my pillows. I worried about how long it was; yet a moment later – or perhaps it wasn’t a moment – that didn’t matter in the least. The Idaho of Ernie Chubbs – his going out on business, the waiting in the motel room – must have made me moan, because the nurses comforted me again. When they did, the Old West filled my thoughts, driving everything else away. In the Gaiety Cinema there were no curtains to the screen. On to the bare, pale expanse came the holsters and the sweat-bands of the huge-brimmed hats, the feathered Indians falling one by one, the rough and tumble of the fist fights. I was seven, and eight, and nine, when Dietrich sang. ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ she commanded in her peremptory manner, ‘And tell them I’ll have the same.’ In my sedated tranquillity I heard that song again; and the Idaho of Ernie Chubbs seemed gone for ever. Young men I have myself given life to whispered lines of love to happy girls. The Wedding March played, bouquets were thrown by brides. The Café Rose might not have existed either.

*

‘Quinty.’

‘Rest yourself, now.’

‘There were other people. A young man and his girl who talked in German. Americans. Italians in dark suits. A woman in the fashion business. Three English people. Are they here too, Quinty?’

‘They are of course.’

‘Quinty, will you find out? Find out and tell me. Please.’

‘Don’t upset yourself with that type of thing.’

‘Are they dead, Quinty?’

‘I’ll ask.’

But he didn’t move away from my bedside. He visited me to see if there were grounds for hope, promise of a relapse. His eyes were like two black gimlets; I closed my own. Little Bonny Maye was employed in Toupe’s Better Value Store, attaching prices to the shelved goods with a price-gun. Small discs of adhesive paper, each marked with an appropriate figure, were punched on to the surface of cans and packets. At certain hours of the day she worked a till.

Little Bonny Maye was taken up by Dorothy, an older girl from the table-tennis club. Dorothy was secretary to a financier and had been privately educated. Her voice was beautiful, and so was Dorothy herself. Bonny couldn’t think why she’d been taken up, and even if Dorothy had a way of asking her to do things for her rather a lot Bonny still appreciated the friendship more than any she had known. She was only too grateful: all the time with Dorothy that was what Bonny thought. Her single anxiety was that some silliness on her part would ruin everything.

‘Did you ever read that story of mine, Quinty? Little Bonny Maye? I was surprised to hear myself asking Quinty that. It wasn’t our usual kind of conversation. He said:

‘It’s great you have your stories.’

‘I thought about them in the Café Rose.’

‘You told me that.’

‘I don’t remember telling you.’

‘You had a drink or two in, the time you told me.’

The three words of the title were blue on the amber of the book-jacket, the two girls illustrated below. I must have said so because Quinty nodded. Soon afterwards he went away. He might even have guessed I had begun to hear the girls’ voices.

‘Dear, there is an “h” in “house”, you know.’ Dorothy could bring out Bonny’s blushes, hardly making an effort. When they went on holiday together, while Bonny fetched and carried for the older girl, Dorothy drew up a list of words that Bonny should take special care with. ‘Our fork belongs on our plate, not in the air. I had a nanny who said that.’

When I dozed, the pain in my face sometimes dulled to a tightness and for the first time, probably, I tried to smile. The two girls were on holiday in Menton, and when Blane came into their lives he naturally took Dorothy out, leaving poor Bonny to mooch about on her own, since it wouldn’t have been right for her to tag along. ‘Of course I don’t mind. Of course not.’ She tried to keep her spirits up by eating ice-cream or going to look at the yachts.

I was aware of making no effort whatsoever. I controlled nothing. Faces and words and voices flowed over me. ‘Such an unhappy thing!’ Blane exclaimed. ‘Such rotten luck!’ Dorothy had developed appendicitis. An ambulance had come. ‘You need a cognac,’ Blane insisted. ‘Or a Cointreau. No, Bonny, I absolutely insist. Poor girl, how wretched for you too!’ Dorothy’s holiday was a write-off. Every morning Blane called for Bonny in his Peugeot and drove her to the bedside of her friend, who usually had made a list of things she wanted. Afterwards Blane and Bonny lunched together in the Petit Es-cargot.

Three months ago Blane had inherited Mara Hall, a great house in its own park in Shropshire. But as soon as he had done so he left England, being fearful of the house even though he loved it.

‘My mother died when I was one and a half. There was always just my father and myself.’

‘No brothers or sisters, Blane?’

‘No brothers or sisters.’

Bonny thought how lonely that must have been: a boy growing up in a great house with only his father and the servants for company. His father was severe, expecting a lot of his heir.

‘I’m a coward, I dare say. I’d give the world to take everything in my stride. I’m running away. I know that, Bonny.’

‘Was your father – ’

‘My father did things perfectly. He was a strong man. He married the woman he loved and never looked at another. The servants and his tenants adored him.’

There was a head gardener at Mara Hall, and several under-gardeners. There was a butler and a cook and old retainers in the way of maids, all of whom had been there as long as Blane could remember. Once there’d been footmen, but that was ages ago.

Mara Hall was more vivid than the shadows of nurses whose speech I did not understand, and the odour of an-aesthetic: the lawns and the tea roses, the mellow brick of the house itself and of the kitchen-garden walls, the old ornamental ironwork. I felt as Bonny felt – overawed with wonder. Bonny had not been abandoned in a bleak seaside town by a couple who rode a Wall of Death; but something like it was in Bonny’s past, even if it did not come out in the story. I felt that strongly now; I never had before.

‘It sounds so lovely, Blane. Your home.’

‘Yes, it’s lovely.’

They walked in the evenings on the promenade. He would marry Dorothy, Bonny thought, and take her to Mara Hall. Dorothy was capable as well as beautiful. Dorothy would gently lead him back to his responsibilities. He would become as strong as his father; he would do things as perfectly.

‘Dear Bonny,’ he said, in a tone that made her hold her breath. She could not speak. The sea was a sheet of glass, reflecting the tranquil azure of the sky. ‘Dear Bonny,’ he said again.

The doctors who attended me conferred. One spoke in English, smiling, telling me I had made progress, saying they were pleased.

‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ I replied.

‘You have been courageous, signora,’ the same doctor said. ‘And patient, signora.’

They passed on, both nodding a satisfied farewell at me. Blane took the modest creature’s arm; she trembled at the touch because no man had ever taken Bonny Maye’s arm before. No man had ever called her dear. She’d never known a heart’s companion.

‘Much better,’ Dorothy said, but it was their last day in Menton. She’d left her dark glasses on her bedside table and Bonny went to fetch them. Blane drove her to Bordighera and Bonny miserably ate an ice-cream on the front. She wrote the postcards she should have written before, to the other girls in Toupe’s Better Value Store. She’d be back before they received them.

Once only the story was interrupted by the ravenous features of Ernie Chubbs, his eyes seeking mine from the shadows of the Al Fresco Club, his fingers undoing my zips in the motel room. There was an old mangle in the motel room, and a tin bath in which kindling was kept. I knew all that was wrong. ‘It wouldn’t do to tell,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Good girls don’t tell, Emily.’ That was wrong also. It wasn’t Ernie who’d ever said good girls don’t tell, and Ernie Chubbs hadn’t been ravenous in that particular way.

The chill fag-end of a nightmare, darkly colourless, something like a rat in a drawing-room, went as quickly as it had arrived, crushed out of existence by a warmer potency. ‘Well, really!’ Dorothy was a little cross when they returned from Bordighera. She lay down to rest and complained that the bedroom was too hot and then, when the window was opened, that the draught was uncomfortable. She wanted Vichy water but they brought her Evian. Impatiently she stubbed out a cigarette she had not yet placed between her lips.

‘Bonny,’ he said, leaning on the open door of the little Peugeot. ‘Oh, Bonny, if I could only make you happy!’

He is the kindest person I have ever known, she thought. He knows I love him; he knows I have been unable to help myself. This is kindness now, to speak of my happiness when it is his and Dorothy’s that is at stake. They have had a little tiff this afternoon, but soon they will make it up. Tonight he will ask Dorothy to marry him, and after tomorrow I shall never in my life see either of them again. Dorothy’ll be too busy and too full of happiness ever to return to the table-tennis club. There’ll be the wedding preparations and then the honeymoon and then the return to Mara Hall.

‘Look, Bonny,’ he said, and in the sunlight sapphires sparkled. He had snapped open a little box; the slender band of gold that held the jewels lay on a tiny cushion. ‘I bought it for her,’ he said, ‘three days after we met.’

‘It’s beautiful.’ The words choked out of her. Tears misted her vision. She tried to smile but could not.

‘I have to tell you that, Bonny. I have to tell you I bought it for Dorothy.’

She nodded bleakly.

‘I might have offered it to Dorothy this afternoon. I could not, Bonny.’

Again she nodded, not understanding, trying to pretend she did.

‘I can only love you, Bonny. I know that, if I know nothing else in this world.’

‘Me? Me?’

‘Yes. Oh yes, my dear.’

His face was smiling down at her bewilderment. His lips were parted. She heard herself saying she was nothing much, while knowing she should not say that. She heard him laugh.

‘Oh, but of course you are, my dear. You are everything in this world to me. Darling, you are the sun and the stars, you are the scent of summer jasmine. Can you understand that?’

She flushed and looked away, thinking of Dorothy and feeling treacherous, and more confused than ever. She wanted to laugh and cry all at once.

‘Darling Bonny, you have the lips of an angel.’

His own touched the lips he spoke of. The gentle pressure was like fire between them.

‘Oh Blane, Blane,’ she murmured.

‘Say nothing, darling,’ he whispered back, and in some secret moment the sapphire ring found her engagement finger.

I would like to have married and had children. But Ernie Chubbs, swearing to me that he took precautions, never did so. In my association with him I had no fewer than four abortions, the last of them in Idaho. I would not have children now, they told me then. ‘Sorry, girlie,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Fancy a chilli con carne sent up?’

Crimson spread on denim. A hand that was crimson also bounced back from the ceiling, dangled for an instant in the air, fingers splayed. A screeching of terror was different from the screams of pain. Even while it was happening you could hear the difference.

‘Twenty pound,’ Mrs Trice said. ‘That’s what he give. He likes a child, Mr Trice does. He got the dog for nothing.’ Rough type of people she said, to profit from a baby. ‘You bloody give it back,’ I said to him, ‘but they was gone by then. Fifty they ask, twenty he give.’ Rum and Coca-Cola, Ernie asked for in the Al Fresco, a fiver a time. ‘Easy money,’ Mrs Trice said, lifting a slice of Dundee to her lips. ‘Travelling people’s always after easy money.’

‘Lightning,’ I said myself. ‘The train was struck by lightning.’

The strength of the drugs was daily reduced; tranquillity receded little by little. At 21 Prince Albert Street I stirred milk in a saucepan, and Mrs Trice was furious because the milk burnt and milk cannot burn, apparently, while it is stirred. It was in the back-yard shed at 21 Prince Albert Street that the mangle was, and the kindling in the bath. It was in the back-yard shed that the man I took to be my father wept and said we mustn’t tell, that good girls didn’t. It was his face that was ravenous, not Ernie Chubbs’s. Ernie loved me was what I thought.

Mr Trice possessed a smooth-haired fox terrier, a black and white dog of inordinate stupidity. With the chopping of kindling, washing up, and frying the breakfast, a task when I was nine was to exercise this animal, which refused to leave the confined space of the Trices’ back-yard of its own accord. It would amble reluctantly behind me down Prince Albert Street and on the damp sand of the seashore. Seagulls would sniff it when I sat with my back against a breakwater and it stood obediently on the sand. They sometimes even poked at it with their beaks, but the dog displayed signs neither of alarm nor pleasure, seeming almost to be unaware of the seagulls’ attention. When other dogs ran snarling up to it Mr Trice’s pet stolidly sat there, unimpressed also by this display of hostility. If actually attacked, it would cringe unemotionally, tightly pressed to the ground, eyes closed, hackles undisturbed. ‘A gentle creature,’ Mr Trice would say if he had chosen to accompany me, which now and again, to my dismay, he did. We would walk by the edge of the sea and Mr Trice would attempt to entice his pet towards the grey waves. But it always stubbornly resisted the temptation of the stones that were thrown and the whistles of encouragement that emanated from Mr Trice. ‘It’s a sign of intelligence,’ he would remark in defeat. ‘There’s many a dog doesn’t spot cold water before he’s in it.’ Mr Trice and I sat down by the breakwater and he always glanced over his shoulder before he put his arm around me to cuddle me. ‘Tell your Daddy you love him,’ he would urge, and I did as I was bidden, thinking it would be unobliging not to. Mr Trice would glance about him again. He would hold my hand and kiss the side of my forehead while the dog stood beside us, not seeming to know it would be restful to sit down also. The cuddles and the kisses were all Mr Trice ever went in for on the seashore. In the back-yard shed he took me on to his knee, and in the darkness of the Gaiety Cinema he kept a hand on my leg for all the time we were there, all the way through Destry Rides Again and Stagecoach War. It wasn’t until later, when I was eleven, that Mr Trice took me into the bedroom when Mrs Trice was out at the laundry where she worked. He gave me a penny and I promised. People got the wrong end of the stick, he said.

Lying in that Italian hospital, I had no wish to dwell upon the uglier parts of my life yet could not prevent myself from doing so. In my fifty-sixth year, I had my beautiful house, and as I lay there that was where I endeavoured to see myself. But again my thoughts betrayed me. Wholly against my will, I was snagged in another kind of ugliness, keeping company with the tourists who over the years had gathered at my table. The mother and the nervous son, the homosexuals with Aids, the ménage à trois and all the others: so many tell-tale signs there were, in gesture or intonation. Long ago the mother had instilled fear in her son in order to keep him by her. The younger of the homosexuals had been unfaithful but was forgiven; both soon would die. The women who shared a lover had each settled for second best. In my dining-room or on the terrace Rosa Crevelli filled the tourists’ wineglasses and offered them fruit or dolce. Wearily I rose from my table, drained by such human tragedy.

How joyfully then, how warmly, I kept company with pert Polly Darling or Annette St Claire! From pretty lips, or lips a little moist, poured whispers and murmurs and cries of simple delight. Dark hair framed another oval face, eyes were as blue as early-summer cornflowers. Often it was half-past three or four before I replaced the cover of my black Olympia. New light streaked the sky when I smoked, on the terrace, the last of the night’s cigarettes. A lovely tiredness cried out for sleep.

They dabbed at my forehead. They bound the blood-pressure thing around my arm. They stuck in a thermometer. Their tweezers pulled out stitches.

‘No harm in secrets,’ Mr Trice said. ‘No harm, eh?’

‘No.’

After the third time he’d given me a penny I put the chair against my bedroom door, but it didn’t do any good. So on the day before my sixteenth birthday I packed a brown cardboard suitcase, and left five shillings in its place because the suitcase was Mrs Trice’s and we’d been taught not to take things at Sunday school.

‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the woman in the public house said. ‘Have you served at table before?’

I never had, so they put me in the kitchen first, washing up the dishes. ‘Gawky,’ the woman said. ‘God, you’re a gawky girl.’ My hair was frizzy, I couldn’t keep my weight down, my clothes were bought in second-hand places mostly. Yet not much time went by before other men besides Mr Trice desired me and gave me presents.

*

‘A timed device,’ Quinty said.

‘I thought it was lightning.’

‘It was a timed device.’

‘Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?’

‘It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.’

‘Is that why the police came?’

‘That would be it.’

Early on in my hospital sojourn the carabinieri had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts. Their dark blue uniforms trimmed with red and white, revolvers in black holsters, the grizzled head of one of them: all this remained with me after they had left my bedside, slipping in and out of my crowded fantasies. If conversation took place I do not recall it.

Later, in ordinary suits, detectives came with an interpreter. There were several visits, but soon it became clear from the detectives’ demeanour they did not consider it likely that I, in particular, had been the target of the outrage, though they listened intently to their interpreter’s rendering of my replies. A hundred times, it seems like now, they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual, either as I stepped on to the train or after I occupied my seat. Repeatedly I shook my head. I could recall no one skulking, no sudden turning away of a head, no hiding of a face. Each time, the detectives were patient and polite.

‘Buongiorno, signora. Grazie.’

‘Good day, lady,’ the interpreter each time translated. ‘Thank you.’

Carrozza 219 our carriage had been. I remembered the number on the ticket. Seat 11. In my mind’s vision the faces of the people who’d been near me lingered: the American family, the lovers, the couple and their elderly relative. The fashion lady and the businessmen in lightweight suits had gone to lunch.

‘They are here,’ Quinty said, and glanced at me, and added: ‘Some of them.’

Of the three English people, only the old man was alive. Of the German couple, only the boy. In the hospital they called the little American girl Aimée: the family passport had been found. She was the sole survivor of that family, and there was difficulty in locating someone in America to take responsibility. It even seemed, so Quinty said at first, that such a person did not exist. The information that filtered through the carabinieri and the hospital staff appeared to indicate that there were grandparents somewhere, later that there was an aunt. Then we learnt that the child’s grandfather suffered a heart condition and could not be told of the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild; the grandmother could not be told because she would not be able to hide her grief from him. Lying there, I approved of that: it was right that these people should be left in peace; it was only humane that elderly people should be permitted to drift out of life without this final nightmare to torment them.

‘They’re having difficulty in tracking down the aunt they’re after,’ Quinty reported. ‘It seems she’s travelling herself.’

She was in Germany or England, it was said, but the next day Quinty contradicted that. It was someone else who was travelling, a friend of the family who’d been assumed to be this relation. The aunt had been located.

‘Unfortunately she can’t look after a child.’

‘Why not, Quinty?’

‘It isn’t said why not. Maybe she’s delicate. Maybe she has work that keeps her on the go all over the place.’

I thought about this after he’d gone. I wondered what kind of a woman this could be, who, for whatever reason, could be so harsh.

‘They got it all wrong again,’ Quinty said on a later occasion. ‘That woman’s the aunt of someone else. The same story with those grandparents.’

I wouldn’t have known any of this if Quinty hadn’t been interested in questioning the carabinieri on the matter. From what I could gather, the policemen did not themselves appear to know what was happening in the search – so far away – for possible relatives or family friends. The hospital authorities were worried because the child would not, or could not, speak.

Apart from the victims of Carrozza 219 no one on the train had been injured, and no one of political importance had been on the train in any case. The old man’s son-in-law had had something to do with a merchant bank apparently; the American father had been a paediatrician. Yet a bomb had been planted, deliberately to take life, ingeniously and callously placed where those who by chance had been allocated certain seats would be killed or maimed.

What would one see, I wondered, in the perpetrators’ eyes? What monstrous nature did such human beings seek to disguise? There’d been crime, often more than petty, on the S.S. Hamburg. Living human embryos had been scraped out of my body and dropped into waste-disposal buckets. Seedy confessions had surfaced in the Café Rose. An ugly guilt had skittered about in the shifty eyes of Ernie Chubbs. Yet no crime could rank with what had happened on the train I’d caught at 11.45 on the morning of 5 May 1987. In search of consolation, I wrote down the few lines I had composed in Carrozza 219, the beginning of the work which had come to me through its title. 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. But I found it difficult to continue and did my best, instead, simply to recover.

The old man and I suffered from shock. I’d had splinters of glass taken from the left side of my face; he from his legs and body. The German boy, called Otmar, had lost an arm. The old man was a general.

‘An irony,’ he murmured in the corridor where he learned to walk again. ‘It was I who’d reached the end of things.’

He made the statement without emotion. I remembered his daughter as a pretty woman in a gentle, English kind of way, quiet and rather slight, a little faded. Aries probably.

‘We are fortunate to be alive, General.’

He turned away his head, half shaking it as he did so. I told him about the child called Aimée, about the search for relatives in America. I hoped to involve him in the pathos of the child’s predicament and perhaps to make him realize that someone else had lost even more than he had. He did his best to respond, later even to smile. With military stoicism he appeared to be resigned to what had occurred, his vocation no doubt demanding that. A sense of melancholy did not come from him, only one of weariness. I left him soldiering on, precisely obeying the nurses’ strictures, marching with the aid of a metal stick, back and forth between his bed and a curtained balcony at the corridor’s end.

‘I’m sorry, Otmar,’ I commiserated, and in a soft whisper, speaking quite good English, the German boy accepted the sympathy: that it was offered because of the loss of his sweetheart or a limb was barely relevant. In the train he had been wearing a red and yellow lumberjack shirt and rather large glasses, which were shattered in the blast. He wore other spectacles now, wire-rimmed, and jeans and a plain grey shirt. His features were sallow, the eyes behind the magnifying lenses still terrified. Unlike the General, he did not attempt to smile. There was a cornered look about Otmar, as if the horror he had woken up to was too much for him.

‘We must hope, Otmar. What there is left to us is hope.’

Every time I returned to my own room, and to the ward when I was a little better, I endeavoured to proceed with my new work, but still I found it difficult to continue. This had never happened before: with reason, I had been confident on the train as soon as the girl appeared in my mind’s vision. Yet now it seemed as though a film had halted within seconds of its commencement. The fluttering of the girl’s dress was frozen, her carefree mood arrested in a random instant. Was there some companion of whom my broken cinematograph held the secret, some figure waiting to step from the garden’s shadows? Would the carefree mood become ecstatic? Would a gardenia nestle in the long fair hair? I did not know. I knew neither what joy nor sorrow there was; my girl was nameless, without detail in her life, vague as to parentage, born beneath a choice of all the stars. The title Ceaseless Tears appeared so naturally to belong to the suffering on the train that greater bewilderment, and blankness, was engendered. I was aware of a sensation that caused me to shiver in dismay, as though all that had been given to me had been snatched away. Then one day Quinty said:

‘They could stay a while in the house, you know.’

A week ago the General had murmured that he would find the return to England difficult, and wished he did not have to face it immediately. ‘The struggle back and forth,’ he said. ‘The bed, the corridor, the holy statue in the wall, the balcony. The faces of the patients, the smell of ether. You feel that’s where you belong.’

Quinty was clearly out to profit from misfortune, but even so I saw nothing to object to in his suggestion. ‘You would find it peaceful,’ I told the old man. ‘My house is high enough to be cool. Sometimes a breeze blows over the water of Lake Trasimeno.’

He nodded, and then he thanked me. When he sought me out two days later I explained that we were used to catering for strangers, that for many years we had taken in passing tourists when the hotels of the neighbourhood were full.

‘I would insist on paying,’ he gently laid down. ‘I told the man I would insist on paying whatever rates you normally charge.’

‘It is he who sees to all that.’

I’d known army officers of lower rank before; never a general. He had the look of one, sparely made, his hair the colour of iron, great firmness about the mouth, a grey moustache. He was a man of presence, but of course he was not young: touching seventy, I guessed.

‘A week or two,’ he agreed with unemphatic graciousness. ‘That would be nice. But are you certain, Mrs Delahunty? I don’t want to be a nuisance at a time like this.’

‘Indeed I’m certain.’

Otmar refused at first. Poor boy, with every day that passed he seemed more wretchedly unhappy and I sensed that, even more than the General, he did not know how to return to the world he was familiar with.

‘You are most good.’ His voice echoed the distortion in his eyes. Often, in speaking to him, I found myself obliged to turn my head away. ‘But it should not be. I have not money to pay this.’

Quinty cannot have known that, and I resolved, if necessary, to pay for Otmar’s stay myself. I said the money didn’t matter. Some time in the future, when everything had calmed for him, he could pay a little. ‘If you would care to, Otmar, the house is there.’

The doctor who looked after the American child was a Dr Innocenti, a small, brown-complexioned man with gold in his teeth. He was the English-speaking one among the doctors and the nurses, and had often acted as interpreter for the specialists who were more directly concerned with the General and Otmar and myself. When he heard that hospitality had been offered in my house he came to see me and to thank me.

‘It will do some good,’ he said. ‘I would prescribe it.’

He wore a pale brown suit and a silk tie, striped red and green. When I said the child also would be welcome in my house he doubtfully shook his head. The carabinieri would have to be consulted, he explained, since the child – being at present without a guardian – was in their charge. ‘In Italy we must always be patient,’ he said. ‘But truly I would wish the little girl removed from the hospital ambience.’

‘Is she recovering, doctor?’

In reply the little shoulders were raised within the well-cut suit. The hands gesticulated, the nut-brown head sloped this way and then that.

‘Slowly?’ I prompted.

Too slowly, a contortion of the neat features indicated: it was not easy. At present the prognosis was not good.

‘The child is more than welcome if you believe it would be a help.’

‘So Signor Quinty explain to me. There is nowhere else, you comprehend.’ He spoke gently. His jet-black eyes were as soft as a kitten’s. Piscean, I guessed. ‘I will speak with the officers of the carabinieri. Red tape may be cut, after all. To be surrounded by people whose language she understands will be advantageous for Aimée.’

Later I learnt he’d been successful in persuading the carabinieri to agree to his wishes. They would visit us two or three times a week to satisfy themselves that the child remained safely in our care, and report their satisfaction to the American authorities. Dr Innocenti himself would also visit us regularly; if there were signs of deterioration in the child she would be at once returned to the hospital. But he believed that the clinical surroundings were keeping the tragedy fresh in her mind and preventing her from coming to terms with it.

‘You are generous, signora. I have explained to Signor Quinty the expenses will be paid when the person they seek in America is found. My friends of the carabinieri have reason to believe that this is not a poor family.’

We were all discharged on the same afternoon and the first night in my house we sat around the tiled table on the terrace, the General on my right, Otmar on my other side. The child was already sleeping in her bed.

Rosa Crevelli brought us lasagne, and lamb with rosemary, and the Vino Nobile of Montepulciano, and peaches. A stranger would have been surprised to see us, with our bandages and plaster, the walking wounded at table. I was the only one who had not lost a loved one, having none to lose. As I dwelt upon that, the title that had come to me floated through my consciousness, golden letters on a stark black ground. I saw again a girl in white passing through a garden, and again the image froze.