The Complete Stories (16 page)

The boy's mouth fell open, and Charlie saw in the look of sudden enlightenment in his eyes that the child had taken the word literally, as a claim on Charlie's part to be the presiding genius here who had turned a bit of the local and familiar into something extraordinary, and for a moment Charlie actually felt a breath of what the child's belief had accorded him.

A girl of ten or eleven appeared, also skinny but more vigorously red-headed than the boy. She took him sternly by the hand.

“Kelvin,” she scolded in a whisper, "you know you're not allowed!” Fiercely protective, she cast a baleful look in the direction of the stranger who had been
speaking
to him. But the boy, suddenly defiant, broke away, and with arms outspread launched headlong into a flock of gulls, which lifted with excited shrieks and went flapping past his head. Glancing back a moment to make sure that he was the one who had been the actual cause of this commotion, he tilted his arms like outstretched wings and made another rush among the birds.

Charlie turned away, lightly amused. But he would think of this inconsequential moment afterwards as being for him the end of one thing and the beginning of another, though which element in it, if any, had been decisive he would never know: the translation of the park to
another shore; the boy Kelvin's mistaken belief that, like a conjuror at a children's party, he had produced all this shifting light, all these plump white bodies, out of his sleeve; the sister's defiance of him as a dangerous stranger. Perhaps it was all these in odd collusion with one another, or in collusion with something in himself that had been waiting for just this concatenation of small events to touch it awake and open a way to the future. Or something else again that he had no possibility of bringing to consciousness. Some chemical change in him even more miraculous at one level, though ordinary and explicable at another, than the appearance overnight, out of nowhere as it were, of a thousand sea creatures so far from the sea.

Walking home he had no sense that anything momentous had occurred. He was aware only of his immediate mood; an amusement that continued to work on him, quiet but quickening, and a glimpse— for the moment it was no more than that—of how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change.

He did not know as yet that there
was
a change. Only that it was possible, and that the agents of it could be small. But that, for the moment, was enough.

W
hat came to her ear was the hovering close by of mechanical wings, that had come, she thought, to carry her off. In her dream-state she felt only the relief it would be to pass the weight of her body, light as it now was, to some other agency.

The wings beat closer. She started awake, and the familiar objects of her upstairs sitting room, as if a second earlier she might have surprised them in a temporary absence, settled back into place.

The TV screen was dancing, white with static. It was after midnight. For a good hour and a half, it seemed, she herself had been absent. She reached for the remote. But the sound out of her dream persisted. It was the clatter of the filter boxes in the pool two levels below. A breeze must have sprung up. She stirred herself, gathered up her things.

But against the blue Tuscan night the cypress tops in the window were as still as if they were painted.

She stepped out on to her terrace and, half hidden in shadow, peered down through the darkness of pomegranate and bay. Someone was down there, swimming. All she could make out were the streamers of light at his shoulders, and when he came, too quickly, to the end of a length, the heap of silvery bubbles he left as he tucked over into the turn. Up and down he went, in a dozen powerful strokes, and the pool, which for so many weeks had lain heavy and still in the heat, under a mantle of olive florets, drowned midges, beetles paddling in clumsy circles, expanded and contracted like a living thing.

If Gianfranco was here, or one of her sons, Tommy or Jake, what a ruckus there'd be! They'd feel bound to go down and shout at the fellow. Chuck him out.

Well, she wasn't going to try that. She was alone in the house, a kilometre from the village. No neighbours in calling distance. But she felt no particular alarm. Only surprise, and a kind of delight at the unexpectedness of it, exhilaration in the presence of so much effort. As if she had got herself hooked up to some new chemical—neat starlight— that glowed in her veins and quickened her awareness of her own body, but as a thing alive and part again of the living scene.

With her elbows propped on the parapet of her terrace, she watched—hard to say for how long—and was taken out of herself, till at the end of a length like any other he did not tumble into a turn, but with his head streaming moonlight came to his feet, and in the same agile movement sprang on to his splayed hands, heaved himself up, and was out.

No one she recognised.

A sturdy peasant type, in a bathing-slip that might have been red.

She stepped back in case he glanced up and caught her there.

But he was too absorbed for that. Standing with his arms forced back hard behind him, fingers linked, he did half a dozen stretching exercises, dipping his head swiftly like a bird; then straightened and moved out of sight under the pergola.

The pool, meanwhile, had settled to clear moonlight again.

She felt let down, as if he had taken with him part of the night and what was vital to it. Was it over? Was that it?

She stood peering into the darkness of the pergola. He must have gone already, through one of the gaps in the fence. The fence had gaps, but there were so many brambles along its length, and the bank was so steep, that they hadn't bothered to have it mended. Was he really gone?

A gust of fragrance came on the air, then thinned and came again. So strong! Her lime tree.

Out of sight on the other side of the house, and taller now than the house itself, its scent was so overpowering on these warm May nights that in her mind she could actually see the great dark mass of it looming against the stars.

How good it is to be here, she thought, at just this moment. With the moon resting like that on the tip of a cypress, the air freighted with the scent of
tiglio,
the clear bright notes of the nightingale dropping so precisely into place, off in the dark. It was a moment, she thought, when
all things were just as they should be. Not a degree lighter or heavier or louder or more intense.

Ah, her swimmer!

Wearing rough workman's trousers but still bare-chested, he moved to the edge of the pool and stood there towelling his hair with his T-shirt; then, rather dreamily, began to dry his chest.

He might have looked up then and seen her. She drew back. But something else had caught his attention.

He was gazing out over the wall of bay to the hills with their swathes of blue-black
macchia.
Looking, perhaps, for where the nightingale was dinning from its post in the olive grove, establishing, note on note, its claim to territory.

There, she could have told him. Further to the left. Down there.

He turned his head as if he had heard, but in the wrong direction. Then kneeling, laced his sneakers and, with the soaked T-shirt across his shoulders, ducked down beside the fence and was gone.

She continued to stand. Looking at the place where he had vanished, but with no sense of being left. Rather of remaining, of being here and in possession of all this. The place. The hour. Most of all, of herself.

The moon, which just a moment ago had been straw-coloured, when she looked at it now was paling, as if it had been subjected to immersion in some fast-working chemical. Again the scent of lime came to her, and with it the quickening sense of a whole world astir and on the move. Small nocturnal creatures, destructive in fact—but so what—were nosing in around the fleshy roots of her iris. A cat was on the prowl—or was it a fox? Other lives, intent on their interests. Invisibly close and companionable.

She felt settled, wonderfully so. And by a situation that on another occasion or in a different mood might have alarmed her. Why hadn't it? She did not know and did not need for the moment to ask. What she needed now was to tumble into her bed and sleep.

She was alone because she chose to be. Later it might not be possible, she knew that, but for the time being she could manage, and it was what she preferred. She had worked through her period of rage and hard words, but wasn't sure she could trust herself, just yet, with others.

Each night at seven she boiled herself an egg or heated a pan of soup, and at half past, right on the dot, Gianfranco rang. She was comfortably settled in her routine.

No, she told him, everything was fine, just fine. Marisa came to clean each morning. Corrado looked after the
orto
and the pool.

Gianfranco, she knew, was nodding, but what she could hear in his silence, even at this distance, was the terrible humming of anxiety in him, the fear that there was something—there was always
something
— that she was holding back. She raged up and down beside her kitchen cupboards, the receiver tight in her fist. But her voice when she spoke was soothing (or so she hoped).

“No, no,” she cooed. “Gianfranco! Darling! I'm perfectly okay, I promise I am. Stop fussing.”

She gave a little laugh that was meant to assure him that this, like all the other things he fretted over—the boys, his office, money, the house—was nothing, he was being silly.

He said goodnight, made her promise to ring if there was the slightest problem, the least change.

Then waited, as he always did, for her to reconsider and tell him the bad news. She refrained. And in fact there
was
none.

At last, on his third goodnight, he rang off.

She gave a subdued scream of a theatrical kind—seeing herself in a jokey, self-dramatising way helped to keep up her spirits—and sat down hard on a stool.

But it was over. She was alone again. Free. The whole night before her.

She thought sometimes that she would like it if Tommy was here; Jake, her second son, was mid-Atlantic somewhere on someone's yacht. There were afternoons when she found herself gazing out of her window and wishing she could just call down to the terrace, where, his mobile on the glass-topped table within easy reach, Tommy would be lazing on a daybed. She would get him to come up then and put on one of the Roy Orbison albums she liked to listen to only when he was here. Or wishing that she would look up, having caught a scent, and find him there in the doorway of her room, filling its space with his hungry presence.

What she meant was, she would like it for about
five minutes.
Any longer and she would discover all over again the things about this favourite child that exasperated and enraged her.

The way he stalked about, clutching his mobile like a small instrument of torture. Waiting pathetically for someone to call.

And when he gave in at last, and himself did the calling, the way he pursed his lips at the thing, as if it was a mouth; arguing with his ex-wife and sounding so mild and reasonable, or sweet-talking some girl he'd picked up on the train. Then, the moment he hung up, going glowery and dark again, casting about, like the bewildered four-year-old she saw so clearly at times in the big unhappy man, for some mischief he could get up to that would make someone pay.

Somebody, it didn't matter who.

She had been paying for more than thirty years.

Well, she could do without that just for the moment. What she needed, just for the moment, was solitude, and blessd, blessd routine.

Three days each week she went up to Siena for her chemo. They taped a plastic bubble like a third breast to the soft flesh below her shoulder and it fed mineral light into her at a slow run. The nausea it left her with was like space sickness. As if they were minerals from another planet, changing her slowly into a space creature who would be free at last of the ills of earth.

Well, she knew what
that was
code for!

Between visits she wore a holster packed with a flattish canister that for twenty-four hours a day played with the weather of her body—its moods, her dreams; filling her mouth with the taste of metals straight off the periodic table, getting her ready for the thing itself—the taste of earth.

For Siena she had a driver from the village and a big old Audi. Soft-leathered, air-conditioned. She sat in magisterial coolness, closed off from the straw-coloured, treeless hills, the vine rows where the grapes, as yet, were like hard little peas, but swelling, swelling towards October.

At intervals along the highway, black girls in six-inch heels toting fake Gucci handbags paced up and down in the dust. Some of them in skintight leather miniskirts, others in gold Lurex pants tight at the ankle. In the middle of nowhere! With nothing in sight but oakwoods or a distant viaduct, they paced elegantly up and down beside the hurtling traffic, in a tide of ice-cream sticks, paper cups, dried acacia blossom.

She watched them from the closed-off sanctuary of the car, and sometimes, to pass the time, kept count. On long car journeys in her Queensland childhood, she and her brother had watched for white horses. The appearance in the timeless Tuscan landscape of opulent, overdressed black girls seemed no less marvellous.

They came from as far away as Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, these girls, and drove out here in taxis to wait for the long-distance lorry drivers. Their managers (or so she had heard) were women: big African mammas who were also witches and used old-country spells to keep them in fear of their lives, or their children's lives, but to be doubly sure held their passports—a modern touch. In bodies that seemed entirely their own, and giving no hint of being fearful or enslaved, they walked up and down as if the dirt under their heels were the paving stones of some fashionable piazza in Florence or Milan.

She watched them. Hard not to envy, whatever the facts, the grace and assurance they brought to this new version of pastoral.