Two Lives

6

Dr Innocenti came at once. He was calm, and calmly soothed our anxiety. He placed Aimée under temporary sedation, warning us that its effects would not last long. He maintained from the first that there was no need to take her into hospital again, that nothing would be gained. His strength and his tranquillity allowed me to accompany him to the bedside; afterwards he sat with me in the salotto, sipping a glass of mineral water. He wished to be within earshot when Aimée emerged from her sleep, since each time she did so she would find herself deeper in what seemed like a nightmare.

‘You comprehend, signora? Reversal of waking from bad dreams. For this child such dreams begin then.’

Together we returned to the bedside when the screaming started again, but Dr Innocenti did not administer the drug immediately. Aimée sobbed when the screams had exhausted her, and while she threw her head about on the pillow a dreadful shivering seeming to wrench her small body asunder. I begged him to put a stop to it.

‘We understand, Aimée,’ he murmured instead, in unhurried tones. ‘Here are your friends.’

The child ignored the sympathy. Her eyes stared wide, like those of a creature demented. More sedation was given at last.

‘She will sleep till morning now,’ the doctor promised, ‘and then be drowsy for a little time. I will be here before another crisis.’

From the hall he telephoned Thomas Riversmith to inform him of the development. ‘May I urge you to delay your journey, signore?’ I heard him say. ‘Three weeks maybe? Four? Not easy now to calculate.’

It was impossible not to have confidence in Dr Innocenti. All his predictions came naturally about, as if he and nature shared some knowledge. There was compassion in the cut of his features, and even in the way he moved, yet it never hindered him. Pity can be an enemy, I know that well.

His presence in my house that night was a marvel. It affected Otmar and the General: without speaking a word, as though anxious only to be co-operative, they went to their rooms and closed their doors. I alone bade the doctor good-night and watched the little red tail-light of his car creeping away into the darkness, still glowing long after the sound of the engine had died.

‘Very presentable, the doctor,’ Quinty remarked in the hall, even in these wretched circumstances attempting to be jokey or whatever it was he would have called it.

‘Yes, very.’

‘A different kettle of fish from a certain medical party who had better stay nameless, eh?’

He referred to the doctor who’d been a regular in the Café Rose, a man whose weight was said to be twenty-four stone, whose stomach hung hugely out above the band of his trousers, whose chest was like a woman’s. Great sandalled feet shuffled and thumped; like florid blubber, thick lips were loosely open; eyes, piglike, peered. ‘We could make a go of it,’ was the suggestion he once made to me, and I have no doubt that Quinty knew about this. I have no doubt that the offer was later guffawed over at the card-table.

‘I’ll say good-night so,’ Quinty went on. ‘I think it’ll be best for all of us when Uncle comes.’

‘Good-night, Quinty.’

*

I could not sleep. I could not even close my eyes. I tried not to recall the sound of those screams, that stark, high-pitched shrieking that had chilled me to my very bones. Instead I made myself think about the obese doctor whom Quinty had so conveniently dredged up. You’d never have guessed he was a medical man, more like someone who drilled holes in the street. Yet when an elderly farmer sustained a heart attack in an upstairs room at the café he appeared to know what to do, and there was talk of cures among the natives.

In my continued determination not to dwell on the more immediate past I again saw vividly, as I had on my early-morning walk, the hand of Otmar’s girlfriend reaching for the herbs in the supermarket; I saw the General and his well-loved wife. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Beeds on to you,’ Mrs Trice shouted the day she came back early from the laundry. ‘Lay another finger on her and you’ll find yourself in handcuffs.’ The man I’d once taken to be my father blustered and then pleaded, a kind of gibberish coming out of him.

All through that night my mind filled with memories and dreams, a jumble that went on and on, imaginings and reality. ‘Please,’ Madeleine begged, and Otmar moved his belongings into her flat. When she was out at work he drank a great deal of coffee, and smoked, and typed the articles he submitted to newspapers. Madeleine cooked him moussaka and chicken stew, and once they went to Belgium because he’d heard of an incident which he was convinced would make a newspaper story: how a young man had ingeniously taken the place of a Belgian couple’s son after a period of army service.

‘So’s you can’t see up her skirts,’ a boy who had something wrong with him said, but no one believed that that was why Miss Alzapiedi wore long dresses. Miss Alzapiedi didn’t even know about people looking up skirts. ‘If you close your eyes you can feel the love of Jesus,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘Promise me now. Wherever you are, in all your lives, find time to feel the love of Jesus.’ Nobody liked the boy who had something wrong with him. When he grinned inanely you had to avert your gaze. The girls pulled his hair whenever he made his rude noise, if Miss Alzapiedi wasn’t looking.

‘Ah, how d’you do?’ the General greeted his would-be son-in-law beneath the tree I’d heard about. The drinks were on a white table among the deck-chairs, Martini already mixed, with ice and lemon, in a tall glass jug. ‘So very pleased,’ his wife said, and he watched the face of his daughter’s fiancé, the features crinkling in a polite acknowledgement, the lips half open. The intimacy of kissing, he thought, damp and sensual. His stomach heaved; he turned away. ‘So very pleased,’ he heard again.

The aviator who wrote messages in the sky wanted to marry me before the obese doctor did. He had retired from the skywriting business when I knew him, but often he spoke of it in the Café Rose, repeating the message he had a thousand times looped and dotted high above Africa: Drink Bailey’s Beer. A condition of the inner ear had dictated his retirement, but one day he risked his life and flew again. ‘Look, missy!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried excitedly, pulling me out of the café on to the dirt expanse where the trucks parked. ‘Look! Look!’ And there, in the sky, like shaving foam, was my name and an intended compliment. A tiny aircraft, soundless from where we stood, formed the last few letters and then smeared a zigzag flourish. ‘Oh, that is beautiful!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried as we watched. ‘Oh, my, it’s beautiful!’ Fortunately Poor Boy Abraham could not read.

‘He forgot to lock the windows,’ Aimée repeated firmly at the railway station. The Italian woman was angry and almost stamped her foot; the man was smaller than she was, with oiled black hair brushed straight back. ‘More likely he left something turned on,’ Aimée’s brother suggested. ‘Maybe the stove.’ Aimée disagreed, but then the train came in and they had to find their way to Carrozza 219. When the train moved again Aimée gazed out at the fields of sunflowers, at the green vine shoots in orderly rows and the hot little railway stations. She stared at the pale sky, all the blue bleached out of it. Some of the fields were being sprayed with water that gushed from a jet going round and round. In the far distance there were hills with clumps of trees on them. ‘Cypresses,’ her father said as the bell of the restaurant attendant tinkled and the businessmen and the fashion woman rose. The woman would have turned off the stove herself, Aimée whispered, and her brother turned grumpily away from her. ‘Stop that silly arguing,’ their mother reprimanded.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Madeleine said when Otmar asked if his friends might come to the flat when she was out. His friends were intense young men, students or unemployed, one of them a girl whom Madeleine was jealous of. When Otmar and Madeleine were in Italy two of them came up while they were sitting in the sun outside a café. They gave Otmar the name of a cheap restaurant, but afterwards he lost the piece of paper he’d written it down on. ‘Look, there’re your friends,’ Madeleine said a few days later, pointing to where they sat at a café table with two other men, but Otmar didn’t want to join them, although they could have given him the name of the restaurant again.

‘Rum and Coke,’ Ernie Chubbs ordered in the Al Fresco Club, and the Eastern girl brought it quickly, flashy with him as she always was with the customers. They didn’t put any rum in mine although Ernie paid for it. They never did in the Al Fresco, saying a girl could end up anywhere if she didn’t stay sober. ‘Now then, my pretty maid,’ Ernie Chubbs said in our corner. I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know what it looked like because it was shadowy where we sat and I’d only caught a glimpse of it on the street. ‘Often come here, darling?’ he chattily questioned me.

Best White Tits in Africa! the writing said in the sky, but in my dream it was different. Angela Fresu, aged three, it said, as it does in marble at Bologna.

When I awoke next there was a dusky light in the room. I reached out for a cigarette and lit it, and closed my eyes. ‘I shall love you,’ Jason says in For Ever More, ‘till the scent has gone from the flowers and the salt from the seas.’ But Jason and Maggie are different from the people I’d kept company with in the night. You can play around with Jason and Maggie, you can change what you wish to change, you can make them do what they’re told.

I must digress here. To compose a romance it is necessary to have a set of circumstances and within those circumstances a cast of people. As the main protagonists of a cast, you have, for instance, Jason and Maggie and Maggie’s self-centred sister, and Jason’s well-to-do Uncle Cedric. The circumstances are that Jason and Maggie want to start a riding stables, but they have very little money. Maggie’s sister wants Jason for herself, and Jason’s Uncle Cedric will allow the pair a handsome income if Jason agrees to go into the family business, manufacturing girder-rivets. You must also supply places of interest – in this instance the old mill that would make an ideal stables, the little hills over which horses can be exercised, and far away – darkly unprepossessing – the family foundry. You need dramatic incident: the discovery of the machinations of Maggie’s sister, the angry family quarrel when Jason refuses to toe his Uncle Cedric’s line. None of it’s any good if the people aren’t real to you as you compose.

In the early morning after that unsettled night it seemed to me that the only story I was being offered was the story of the summer that was slipping by. The circumstances were those that followed a tragedy, the people were those who had crowded my night, the places you can guess. Ceaseless Tears was a working title only, and that morning I abandoned it. All I had dreamed was the chaos from which order was to be drawn, one way or another. Everything in storytelling, romantic or otherwise, is hit and miss, and the fact that reality was involved didn’t appear to make much difference.

I prayed, and then I finished my cigarette and soon afterwards rose. I walked about my house in the cool of the morning, relishing its tranquillity and the almost eerie feeling that possessed me: inspiration, or whatever you care to call it, had never before struck me in so strange a manner. I poured myself some tonic water and added just a trace of the other to pep it up. It seemed like obtuseness that I hadn’t realized the girl in the white dress was Aimée.