After Hannibal (30 page)

She had welcomed the idea of buying this house in the heart of the Umbrian countryside. A beautiful, peaceful place, a kind of retreat where she and Harold could be alone together. They had been drifting further apart but this would bring them close again. Or so she had pretended to herself. The real motive had been that she might learn not to dislike Harold quite so much. It was strange that such a simple, elemental thing as dislike could go by other names, could elude the conscious mind for months and years. She had run it to ground here in this house, which was to have brought them closer. The house was the tomb of their marriage and the Checchetti were even now heaping the earth over.
The tomb of our marriage
, she repeated to herself. She felt a detached, dream-like sense of liberation. She
would leave a brief note for Harold. He had taken the car but there was a bus stop on the road below the village. Or she could phone for a taxi from the bar—Harold would never dream of looking for her in a bar. It would mean something of a struggle with her suitcase but she felt capable of anything; the spirit of enterprise coursed through her. Some suffering was only right, in any case; one had to pay one’s dues. Passport, Visa card, enough cash for the moment. She would get to Perugia station, take the first train to Rome …

She pressed down on the suitcase so as to bring the zippers around and close it. It was a small case and rather full and she had to press quite hard. Afterward she was never able to be sure whether her impressions of the next few moments were the result of these exertions coupled with her unusual state of mind or whether there was some cause in the world outside. The suitcase was on the bed and her pressure forced the mattress down in a rather lopsided way, but she seemed to feel some extra instability not connected with her efforts. There seemed to be a sliding of light in the room, a stretching and contracting of sunlight and shadow, very brief. At that moment she heard a peculiarly protracted grinding crash from somewhere outside, not far away.

She went rapidly downstairs and out by the back door of the house—the sound had come from this side. She followed the curve of the road, glanced up the track that led to the Greens’ house, felt for a moment that she had made a mistake, taken the wrong turning, because the Greens’ house was a house no longer. All one side of it, including the main entrance, had collapsed, leaving the roof gaping wide and a huge heap of rubble mounded up around the well of what had been the staircase. The great oak roof beams which had
been such a feature of the house lay among the ruins, together with the heavy stones of the lintels and the shattered window frames. Puffs and wisps of dust floated over it all like steam over a garbage dump.

Cecilia stood for a moment or two, coping with the shock of this devastation. Then there came to her the fear that the Greens might be lying underneath, crushed and broken. It would have happened without warning and they must have been at home—their car was standing at the edge of the road. But glancing less wildly she saw now that the American couple were in fact sitting quite still in the car, side by side, looking up at the ruin of their house. They must have arrived almost at the moment it happened, Cecilia thought with something like awe. They did not seem to have noticed her yet. She wondered whether she should steal away, giving the Greens the time they would need to absorb such a disaster. But then they emerged from the car in the stiff-limbed way of the elderly and came slowly toward her. They looked as if they were walking in their sleep. Neither of them said anything.

“I heard the crash,” Cecilia said. “There might have been another tremor just now. I don’t know if you felt it? Perhaps in a car one doesn’t.” There was no reply to this and she hurried on. “Well, in any case, the first one would have been enough. Then, just some little shift … Maybe just a single brick shifting. I heard this tremendous crashing sound and I came to see … I really am terribly sorry about what has happened to your house.”

She should go, she thought. They would want to be alone with their loss; they might want to start retrieving what they could from the ruins and that would be too terrible a thing for an outsider to
assist in. The evidences of occupation were still pathetically there. A pink and white sponge-bag lay amid the rubble and a brass scuttle stood beside the blackened shell of the fireplace. On an internal wall, still improbably intact, was the framed print of Verrocchio’s
Baptism of Christ
, slightly askew. Perhaps she should take the Greens to her house and make them a good strong cup of tea. The trouble about this course of action was that Harold would be back before very much longer. The thought put steel into her. She would have to leave the Greens to it, neighbors or not.

This decision caused a clash of behavior codes in Cecilia. There was the code of reticence in which she had been brought up: one simply did not speak to relative strangers about marital breakdown, one’s own or anyone else’s. On the other hand, there was the duty of proper apology for failure of kindness: the Greens must understand why she was proposing to just walk away from them.

It was the latter course that won the day. “I shall have to go, I am afraid,” she said in her light, clear but somehow wavering tones. “You see, I am just in the midst of leaving my husband and if I delay things much longer he’ll be back before I can get clear.” She had hoped for some response to this but the Greens maintained their stunned silence. “Of course, if you want to come and use the phone, you are welcome,” she said.

Mrs. Green spoke at last. “Don’t let us keep you, my dear. You must go to him with all speed.”

“No, I am leaving him,” Cecilia said. She looked from one to the other of the two old people and saw that they were only waiting for her to go. She said, “I am terribly sorry, I really am,” and turned away from them toward her waiting suitcase.

Cecilia’s departure was a relief to the Greens and Mrs. Green relaxed enough to weep a little. Mr. Green put his arms around her and held her close to him. “We’ll have to salvage what we can,” he said. “Italy is finished for us.” Over his wife’s shoulder he surveyed the ruin, saw their picture, hanging crooked on the bare wall, the reaching gesture of the Baptist, Christ’s meek head, the beautiful, deferential angels. “I wouldn’t have the heart to try again, even if we had the money.”

As often, the protective embrace came from him, the words of comfort from her. “We have got each other,” she said through her tears. “We might have been inside there when it happened.” She managed to smile as she drew back and held up her handbag. “We’ve got everything we need here.”

Mr. Green looked from her to the still smoking wreckage of their Italian future. “What do you mean?” he said. “Everything we brought with us is under there.” He paused. In the face of disaster we snatch at trivial consolations. “Well, there is one thing about it. Those crooks don’t get another cent.”

His wife was still holding up the handbag. “Credit cards, checkbooks, driving licenses, passports.” She had found a source of consolation more durable than his own. “You always tease me for sticking so close to this bag,” she said. “We can cut our losses, we can just walk away from here.”

“No claim on the builder, no further claim on us,” Mr. Green said slowly. “No legal process either way.”

“We can sell for what we can get. There is the land, nearly five acres, and the planning permission for the building volume already obtained.”

“It wouldn’t be much.” Mr. Green jerked his head toward the remains of the house, for which he was now trying hard to generate dislike and contempt. “They would have to clear this mess away and build a new house.”

“We have our pensions and something still in the bank.” Mrs. Green paused for a moment, then said bravely, “We can still afford the apartment in Florida.”

“Yes, we can still afford that.” Tidewater Towers, Fort Lauderdale. They had gone to view it while still undecided. A place expressly designed for old couples. Thirty floors, three hundred two-room apartments. Beach location, uniformed security man in the lobby, parking lot for residents marked out with white lines, open-air pool …

Mr. Green remembered the pool well. He had looked down on it from the twenty-sixth floor, from the narrow balcony of the apartment they were viewing. He had come out there alone while his wife and daughter discussed points with the agent. Something like a keyhole in shape with white enclosing walls and stepped terraces and shimmering, electric-blue water. It was a January day, late in the afternoon, and as the sun declined a tide of shadow crept moment by moment across the terraces and across the tiled area around the pool. Some of the residents were down there in the warm shelter formed by the walls, sitting with faces turned to the sun. As the creeping shadow reached them they got up and moved the chairs a few feet back, away from the water, toward the white wall behind. And each time this happened they were brought closer together. Slowly, relentlessly, the shadow was driving them into closer and closer proximity in the shrinking zone of sunlight. So geometrical
the lines seemed from that height, drawn with ruler and compass on a flat plane, the sharp edges of the terraces, the semicircular curve at the shallow end of the pool. And the people themselves so diminished, so docile. It had seemed to him that they would end all huddled together in the last shreds of light … He had never spoken of these impressions to his wife though they generally shared such things. It was certainly not the time to speak of it now. “We’ll need help before we can do much here,” he said.

“We can rescue the Verrocchio if we can get across to it.”

The courage of these words moved Mr. Green deeply. He raised a hand and laid it against his wife’s cheek. “Honey, we’ll go to see the original, we’ll go to the Uffizi Gallery and see it like we always said we would. Why should we let those bastards cheat us out of that too? We said we would go when the house was finished and by God it is.”

Harold Chapman had said he was going to see Mancini but this was not really a settled intention. Mainly he had wanted to get away on his own for a while. He had been cut to the quick by Cecilia’s words to him as they stood together witnessing the self-abasement of the Checchetti; and more wounding even than the words had been the scorn writ large on her face.

As he turned onto the road that led to Perugia he felt at first too unjustly treated even for anger. In front of other people too. The Checchetti didn’t know any English but they would have understood the import of Cecilia’s words well enough, would have had the
satisfaction, even in the midst of defeat, of knowing that here was a man whose wife could insult him in public, abuse him, walk away and leave him standing there, stripped of all dignity. She had poisoned his triumph, that was what it came to. She had made him a laughingstock before that gang of evil peasants. Worse still in a way, she had sullied Mancini’s majestic design.

Ahead of him he noticed a bar beside the road with an open space in front of it and a few tables and chairs set out among scattered pine trees. On an impulse he turned off, parked his car and sat down at one of the tables. It was afternoon, a quiet time—none of the other tables was occupied and he heard no sound from inside the bar. After a minute or two an elderly, grizzled man came out and Chapman asked for a double
grappa
and drank it rather quickly.

The sense that he was embarked on a course distinctly unusual, drinking spirits on his own, in the open, before it was even teatime, gave an edge to his brooding, a quality of bitterness and abandonment. This was, he felt, his real condition. He was alone in the world. No one so alone as a man with a wife who does not appreciate and understand him.

He began to review the whole course of events since the morning the Checchetti had come to report the collapse of their wall. Cecilia had been unhelpful from the start, she had not supported him, she had left the defense of their common interest to him alone. She had taken a negative attitude, that was the only way to put it. She could afford negative attitudes of course, and all manner of fine feelings—she always had him to fall back on. Good old Harold. Lacking in refinement, but a good thick screen when the going got tough. Her face when he had dared to make a joke about the Madonna’s
detached left tit in that picture gallery. As if I had let off a thunderclap fart in the middle of a sermon. That was what it was of course, that was what Cecilia went in for, sermons about art. Pigsick of it, he thought.

The waiter must have had some way of keeping the outside world under surveillance because he appeared again now, almost as soon as Chapman’s glass was empty.

“Another
grappa
. A double.” Chapman raised his hand, made a space between forefinger and thumb. “
Un doppio, per favore
.”

Yes, he thought, halfway through this second one, he could manage in Italian without Cecilia’s help. She had never done a proper day’s work in her life, that was the trouble. She had no idea of the real world. That job in the art gallery owned by one of Daddy’s pals, that could hardly be called a bloody job at all, just going around in sandals and one of those shapeless dresses or some kind of cardigan down to her knees, hair all over the place, talking about paintings. It was his work, his money, that had provided a roof over her head—two roofs now. And this was the loyalty and support she gave him. He would sell the house—it was in his name, by God, yes, I wasn’t born yesterday. With the improvements he had made he would more than get his money back. I may not know much about Raphael but I know something about land values in Umbria. So watch out. That would teach her, that would bring her into line. Fine feelings depend on having somewhere nice to feel them in and that means money in the bank. What was that bit in
Othello
? Iago’s advice to someone or other,
put money in the bank
, something like that. There was a man who knew the world.