Two Lives

5

The telephone in my house rings quietly, but never goes unheard because there is a receiver in the hall and in the kitchen, as well as in my writing-room. It was I myself, in my private room, who answered it when eventually Aimée’s uncle rang.

‘Mrs Delahunty?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs Delahunty, this is Thomas Riversmith.’

‘How d’you do, Mr Riversmith.’

‘May I inquire how Aimée is?’ He sounded as if grit had got into his vocal cords – a tight, unfriendly voice, unusual in an American.

‘Aimée is beginning to return to us.’

‘She speaks now every day?’

‘Since the afternoon she spoke she has continued.’

‘I’ve talked with your doctor many times.’ There was a pause and then, with undisguised difficulty: ‘I want to say, Mrs Delahunty, that I appreciate what you have done for my niece.’

‘I have not done much.’

‘May I ask you to tell me what the child says when she speaks to you?’

‘In the first place she asked where she was. Several times she has mentioned her brother by name. And has spoken of being scolded by her mother.’

‘Scolded?’

‘As any child might be.’

‘I see.’

‘If Aimée wakes in the night, if there is a nightmare, anything like that, a cry of distress would be heard at once. Otmar sleeps with his door open. In the daytime there is always someone near at hand.’

At first there was no response. Then: ‘Who is it that sleeps with a door open?’

‘Otmar. A German victim of the outrage. Also in my house is an English general, similarly a victim.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s strange for all of us.’

That observation was ignored. There was another pause, so long I thought we’d been cut off. But in time the gritty voice went on:

‘The doctor seems anxious that the child should make more progress before I come to take her home.’

‘Aimée is welcome to remain as long as is necessary.’

‘I’m sorry. I did not catch that.’

I repeated what I’d said. Then formally, the tone still not giving an inch, socially or otherwise:

‘Our authorities here have informed yours that I will naturally pay all that is owing. Not only the hospital fees, but also what is owing to yourself.’

This sounded like a speech, as though many people were being addressed. I did not explain that that was Quinty’s department. I did not say anything at all. A woman’s voice murmured in the background, and Mr Riversmith – having first questioned some remark made – asked if I, myself, was quite recovered from the ordeal. The background prompt was repeated; the man obediently commiserated. It had been a dreadful shock for him, he confessed. He’d read about these things, but had never believed that he himself could be brought so close to one. You could hear the effort in every word he spoke, as if he resented having to share a sentiment, as if anything as personal as a telephone conversation – even between strangers – was anathema to him.

‘That is true, Mr Riversmith.’

The solemnity and the seriousness made me jittery. He was a man without a word of small talk. I knew he hadn’t smiled during all this conversation. I could tell that smiling didn’t interest him. Again I reflected that he wasn’t at all like an American.

‘If I may, I’ll call again, Mrs Delahunty. And perhaps we might arrange a date that’s convenient to both of us.’

He left a number in case of any emergency, not asking if I had a pencil handy. He had no children of his own: Dr Innocenti hadn’t told me that, but I guessed it easily.

‘Goodbye, Mr Riversmith.’

I imagined him replacing the receiver in its cradle and turning to the woman who had shadowed the encounter for him. In the lives of such men there is always such a woman, covering their small inadequacies.

‘Not an easy person,’ I remarked later to the General and Otmar – which I considered was a fair observation to make. I repeated as much of the conversation as I could recall, and described Thomas Riversmith’s brusqueness. Neither of them said much by way of response, but I sensed immediately their concern that a man whom it was clearly hard to take to should be charged with the care of a tragically orphaned child. Already all three of us knew that that felt wrong.

The General walked with the assistance of a cane and always would now. But he walked more easily than he had at first. My neck and my left cheek had healed, and what they’d said was right: make-up effortlessly obscured the tiny fissures. By now Otmar could light his own cigarettes, gripping the matchbox between his knees. He had difficulty with meat, and one of us always cut it up for him. He’d have to learn to type again, but cleverly he managed to play patience. ‘Solo?’ Aimée would say when a game had been resolved, and after they’d played a few hands she would arrange the draughts on the draughts-board. There was another game, some German game I didn’t understand, with torn-up pieces of paper.

The old man told her stories, not about his schooldays but concerning the adventures he’d had as a soldier. They sat together in the inner hall, he in a ladder-backed chair, she on one of my peacock-embroidered stools. He murmured through the quiet of an afternoon while the household rested, a faint scent of floor polish on the air. They chose the inner hall because it’s always cool.

As for me, on all those days I stared at the only words I had typed on my green paper since the outrage. I counted them – thirty-six, thirty-eight with the title. Everything that should have followed I was deprived of, and I knew by now that this was the loss I must put beside the greater loss of a girlfriend, and of a daughter, and of a father, a mother and a brother.

The private room set aside for my writing is a brown-shadowed cubicle with heavy curtains that keep both heat and light out, the ornate ivy of its wallpaper simulating a further coolness. Besides the glass-faced cabinet that contains my titles, there is my desk, surfaced in green leather, and a matching chair. Here I sat during those days of June, the cover lifted from my black Olympia, my typing paper mostly blank. I could not glimpse my heroine’s face, nor even find her name. Esmeralda? Deborah? I could not find the barest hint of a relationship or the suggestion, however foggy, of a story. There was still only the swish of a white dress, a single moment before that flimsy ghost was gone again.

‘Apparently, a scholarly gentleman, this Mr Riversmith,’ Quinty remarked one evening after dinner, interrupting my weary efforts by placing a glass of gin and tonic on the desk beside me. ‘I don’t think I ever met a professor before.’

I hadn’t either. I sipped the drink, hoping he’d go away. But Quinty never does what you want him to do.

‘The doctor tells me Mr Riversmith’s never so much as laid an eye on young Aimée. Did he say the same to you? A rift between the late sister and himself?’

I shook my head. Briskly, I thanked him for bringing me the drink. I hadn’t asked him to. One of Quinty’s many assumptions is that in such matters he invariably knows best.

‘What I’m thinking is, how will the wife welcome a kid she’s never so much as laid an eye on either?’

Again I indicated that I did not know. It naturally would not be easy for Mrs Riversmith, I suggested. I didn’t imagine she was expecting it to be.

‘Interesting type of gentleman,’ Quinty remarked. ‘Interesting to meet a guy like that.’

He stood there, still tiresome, fiddling with objects on my desk. They’d never find the culprits now, he said; you could forget all that. As soon as Riversmith came for the child the old man and the German would go. That stood to reason; they couldn’t stay for ever; the whole thing would be over then. ‘You’ll pay the German’s bill, eh?’

‘I said I would.’

He laughed the way he does. ‘You’ll get your reward in heaven,’ he repeated for the umpteenth time in our relationship. A kind of catch-phrase this is with him: he doesn’t believe it. What he knows – though it’s never spoken between us – is that the house will be his and Rosa Crevelli’s when I die. My own reward has nothing to do with anything.

‘Roast in hell, the rest of us,’ he said before he went away.

Mr Riversmith telephoned again; we had a similar conversation. I reported on his niece’s continuing progress, what she had done that day, what she had said. When there was nothing left to say the conversation ended. There was a pause, a cough, the woman’s voice in the background, a dismissive word of farewell.

A few days later he telephoned a third time. He’d had further conversations with Dr Innocenti, he said; he suggested a date – a week hence – for his arrival in my house. There was the usual prickly atmosphere, the same empty pause before he brought himself to say goodbye. I poured myself a drink and walked out to the terrace with it. The awkward conversation echoed; I watched the fireflies twinkling in the gloom. How indeed would that woman react to the advent of a child who was totally strange to her? What was the woman like? With someone less cold, the subject of what it was going to be like for both of them might even have been brought up on the telephone. Thomas Riversmith sounded a lot older than his sister. Capricorn, I’d guessed after our first conversation. You often get an uptight Capricorn.

On the terrace I lit a cigarette. Then, quite without warning, monstrously shattering the peaceful evening, the screaming of the child began, the most awful sound I’ve ever heard.