The Light of Evening (21 page)

Scene Eleven

eleanora has discovered a little private room, the door covered in baize, shutting off all sound and all intrusion. She has gone in there and even helped herself to a pear liqueur that she found after searching in a cupboard.

Georgette, the haughty padrone, has retired with Gianni, up the side stairs, he unpinning her chignon as they climbed.

Eleanora sits for a long time, undone from the day’s jangle, the heat, the traipsing through streets, alleyways, and enclosures, the lady guide, a connoisseur as Gianni had described her, enjoining them, she and the few gullible stalwarts who had gone on the history tour, to please observe this fortification, that beautiful portico, that stone escutcheon, stopping at buildings with coats of arms that straddled centuries from Antwerp’s golden age onward. Then into galleries, wall after wall of paintings, animal and fruit paintings, dead birds, the vivid greens and russets of their plumage so lifelike and the hunting dogs, unsatiated and bloodthirsty.

It had been a sweltering day. Flight after flight of steps, gasping in the heat, pausing for breath, the men with their handkerchiefs as topnotches to protect themselves from the sun, looking ridiculous, the women swollen and expiring and she herself swollen and expiring; naves, chancels, crypts, an infinity of sacred suffering, the waxen buckled hands of a shrouded martyr in a reliquary, the ravishing reds of the triptychs, Christ carrying the cross, Christ meeting his afflicted mother, Christ nailed to

the cross, the ocher trickles of coagulated blood along his loins, Christ down from the cross, weeping women, the cheek and chin of one particular virgin as the guide pointed out, not done by the master but by another hand, as was the right sleeve of Mary Magdalene.

Inside one of the larger churches she struggled with a giddiness that was getting more and more extreme, held on to a pew and just as she thought she had overcome it, the blue-winged angels in the ceiling above her began to totter, began to fall from their perches of cloud as she did, as she came crashing onto the dark, near-invisible tiles, and their running to help her, Violet with the smelling salts, others fanning her, all putting her little tumble down to the heat, to sunstroke, to the strong coffee that she was not accustomed to, whereas she knew it was something other, she knew she would have to go skewey in order to leave him, because they had both strayed too far from the path of reasonableness.

She carried her shoes upstairs and could hear and almost put a name to the various snores.

Her husband was asleep. She lay in the twin bed next to him, bells rang repeatedly from the several churches, thrumming the air, bells metal-hard and vigorous, the stronger peals purposing to drown out the littler peals as from behind the wainscoting rats scurried in what seemed to be delirious glee, their patters light yet menacing, then a scraping sound and she imagined them gnawing their way through, spitting the wooden pulp and the bells even louder, even lustier, jabbering away to herself, and realizing that the avalanche of the day, sights and sounds and heat, were threatening to engulf her, repeating the clichés of the lady guide, merely for something to hang on to:

Chicory is a Belgian endive better cooked blanched since adolescence. Leopold the Second resolved to create a Belgian

colony in Africa. The first diamond polisher originated near the central station. At the naval battle of Lepanto, the Ottoman Turks were defeated by the Christian League.

All of a sudden she pictured little dwarf Klara in a niche above that museum, named for the orphans that had been left by their wayward mothers, their coats, caps, and wooden porridge bowls next to the halved playing cards that had been allotted to them, the other halves in the keeping of the mothers who never returned.

She pictures her children, halved, quartered, torn between her husband and herself, her children asleep in her mother’s house at that moment, oblivious of the rupture that is to come, and powerless to stop this influx she gets out of bed and kneels and prays, “Oh God, let me not crack, oh please, God, let me not crack in this foreign city with the ghost of the slaughtering King Leopold.”

Scene Twelve

they came away from the lowlands, from the silver flash of the rushing rivers, away from the harvested fields and the wandering drifts of poppies to more rugged terrain, the coach winding through a long narrow defile and gorges down below with rags and tatters of lodged yellowing snow. Mountain peak after mountain peak met them, snow-capped and luminous, while down the sheer slopes fir trees in thickets and elsewhere single ones like inky obelisks in silhouette, black-green monkish figures signaling the way.

As a farewell gesture Gianni read from a guide book, read the height of the various mountain ranges, the characteristics of the plateau, the population of the villages tucked into the valleys, the wines of the various cantons, and an anecdote relating to Protestant peasants who slew a Capuchin monk at the time of the Counter Reformation. Wagner, he told them, had made the region historic because having heard the alphorn on his visit he was inspired to compose the herdsman’s air for Tristan.

When the coach lumbered through a gateway that was barely wide enough to allow it to squeeze past, they clapped and cheered, craning with curiosity, the levity of the first morning restored to them, yet before many minutes expired, tempers had flared and indignation ranged all around.

It was a huddle of low wooden buildings of various heights, narrow barred windows that looked onto a sweeping concrete

forecourt and a parapet with a few wilting yellow marigolds scattered in a crescent of parched brown grass. At the entrance door a lady with close-cropped hair, who was dressed in a blue smock, kept beckoning and gesticulating to the driver to avoid the flowers and grasses, entreaties that were wasted on him.

“It’s a dump.”

“It’s a shed.”

“It’s a rat hole.”

“Where’s the sea, where’s the bloody blue sea, Geoffrey?”

“Where’s the fucking alphorn?”

“I tell you what … they won’t get away with this, Dudley.”

“You can look out at the mountain, dearie … when in Rome,” Dudley answered, and his wife huffed and nettled, strode across in her serviceable leather sandals, resolving to have her money refunded, plus compensation.

The woman in the blue smock called out each name or each pair of names, checking them on her notepad, then directed them to be registered, be given room keys and written instructions regarding meal times that, as she said, must be strictly observed.

“Where’s the swimming pool?” she was asked.

“Wie bitte?”

“The swimming pool, ducky.”

“Yoah yoah,” she replied.

“Yoah yoah … there fucking isn’t one.”

Their bedroom turned out to be small and stifling, two bunk beds with two massive white quilts folded to suggest two bunched-up corpses. The wooden walls were burning, so that bright blisters of creosote bubbled out of them, reminding her of a fob of amber that she had seen in a shop and longed to buy, a nugget of wettish gold that she imagined would bring her good luck. Her husband had given her an allowance for the journey, enough to cover the cost of postcards and the occasional cup of coffee. It was a curiosity shop that sold braids, buttons, tassels,

and thimbles, white china thimbles decorated with posies, which the women asked to be let try on. Slipping them onto their fingers, they played sparring matches with one another in retaliation for irkings along the way. Many of the men, meanwhile, had gone down the cobbled side street, only to be flabbergasted, or so they said, by saucy sights in a window, mannequins with whips in oilskin raincoats, posters of brazen fraus in garter belts and fishnet stockings, ogling for custom.

Flung at last upon each other in that cramped room without the cheer and safety of their children, each waited for the other to charge, yet instead they unpacked and placed their clothes on separate shelves of the built-in plywood wardrobe.

“We’ll share them, we’ll share them,” she said. She was trembling as she stood there in her white slip, in a room too small to hold their despair, purple dark rims under his eyes from lack of sleep, but the eyes themselves on fire, as if he was looking right through her, right into her, and seeing only hollowness within.

“You played fast and loose with me and my children for long enough … one more deception and you’ve lost them forever … forever,” and picking up a towel and a clean shirt he fled the room in search of some sanctuary.

The postcards she had bought in the art gallery where they had stopped all seemed inappropriate to send to her mother
—
Bacchanalian scenes of Pieter Brueghel’s, dwarfs and huntsmen under whey-green skies, young debauchees stretched along the floor, broken delph, an eggshell slashed through with a knife, all evidence of a plundered feast. Even the one of the Virgin, sumptuously draped and with her stomach thrust forward to proclaim her pregnancy, seemed too brazen, too corporeal altogether.

She wrote without thinking, because were she to express her plight, her mother would see the outcome:

Dear Mother, we have arrived. I hope the children are behaving themselves and not tiring you too much. The hotel is high up, almost two thousand meters they say, one asthma sufferer has already complained of trouble with his breathing. Otherwise all is well. See you a week from Tuesday.

*      *      *

“He trained in Lausanne, you know.” It was a running joke concerning the one doddery waiter who shook as he wrote their drinks order in a minuscule notepad, shook as he moved the faded sheet of violet copying paper for the next order and the next and later almost dropped the laden tray as he sought to place each person’s order at the correct setting.

They had resolved to make the best of things. The women had dressed as for a gala and the men were freshly shaven and wore clean shirts, mostly white shirts that made them look like a troup of itinerant musicians. Her husband, separate from them as he had been throughout, wore a black polo-neck sweater but she could see that he was animated and even drank a whiskey, animated as he told Mona and her husband about his house by the lake, the vegetables he grew, the marrows and tomatoes under cloches in a kitchen garden.

June got a round of applause when she appeared in swathes of pink tulle and very high heels, tottering like a flamingo, as did the two Violets with their faded satin handbags and almost identical polka-dot dresses.

Eleanora sat next to Jesse, who wore a linen jacket that was both creased and several sizes too large for him. They had become friends since that day crossing a field to fetch water, when wild dogs had descended on them, came bounding out of nowhere, their tails low, their snarls ominous, sniffing them, sniffing her especially, smelling her menstrual blood, and Jesse saying, “Don’t run, don’t run” and she replying, “I have my period, I have my period” and he telling her to walk backward and

she did, the stubble sharp and thorny, walking slowly backward like he said. She saw him fend them off in play, the one huge dog and the two littler ones who soon tired of it, then removing his red bandanna, his cherished red bandanna, he played with the big dog, bull and matador at play, under the scorching sun, the beautiful passes that intrigued the animal, until at last they approached the bus and it saw that it was being bamboozled, then bit into the flesh of Jesse’s hand and he hitting back, ugly determined swipes, until the driver came with a jackhammer and the animal had to let go, the thick tongue hanging out in rage and drops of blood on its front molars. Once inside the bus, Jesse fainted, fell flat on the floor and refused to be consoled and refused to have the hand looked at or dressed. He lay there, cradling it, silent, his eyes looking inward and upward, like a boy angel in a fresco. That evening in a restaurant in one of those shady squares, where the party had stopped for a drink, lanterns in the trees, dishes of olives on the several tables, he accepted the silk scarf she had bought for him, simply said, “No sweat, John, no sweat, John” and made himself a new bandanna.

The lettuce was indeed limp, but who cared, and the antipasto of sausage, cut in thick chunks and dyed an unfortunate overrealistic red, was rubbery, but who cared. They swigged their drink and toasted each other
—
“It’s good, it’s great, it’s the Continent”
—
all the while laughing at how exceedingly the waiter shook.

The conversation fell to recollection of unforgettable holidays and excursions, June saying there was no place like gay Paree, the Tuileries, the Folies Bergere, Pigalle with its naughty lingerie, Violet One remembering her apprenticeship as a young girl in service, the braces of pheasants that had to be plucked after the shoots in August, sitting by the back kitchen door, she and another girl plucking, plucking, the bustle in the kitchen, while Mavis, who had been a pastry cook in another stately home, recalled how her boss had reserved his own little dining room at

Ascot, whole rows of dining rooms, some far larger than his, rented by the hoi polloi, who clustered onto the balcony between courses to watch the race and guess what, a Royal, a first cousin of the Queen, was on a balcony two down from them.

The main course of pork and sauerkraut met with some disdain, but as Dudley pointed out, “When in Rome …” and asked the waiter for second helpings of chips and boiled potatoes.

Dishes of sorbet, spiked with sparklers, were put down and the overhead lights lowered to signal the entertainment.