David Lodge - Small World (18 page)

“‘Ow are you travelling to Bellagio?” Fulvia asked Morris, as they stood in line.

“The villa said they would send a car to meet me. Is it far?”

“Not so far. You must visit us in Milano during your stay.”

“That would be very nice, Fulvia. Is your husband an academic too?”

“Yes, ‘e is Professor of Italian Renaissance Literature at Rome.” Morris pondered this for a moment or two. “He works in Rome. You work in Padua. Yet you live in Milan?”

“The communications are good. You can fly several times a day between Milan and Rome, and there is an autostrada to Padua. Besides, Milan is the true capital of Italy. Rome is sleepy, lazy, provincial.”

“What about Padua?”

Fulvia Morgana looked at him as if suspecting irony. “Nobody lives in Padua,” she said simply.

They got through customs with surprising speed. Something about Fulvia’s elegant, authoritative mien, or maybe her velvet knickerbockers, attracted an official as though by magnetism, and soon they were free of the sweating, milling, impatient throng. On the other side of passport control, however, was another sweating, milling impatient throng, of meeters and greeters. Some held up cards with names printed on them, but none of the names was Zapp.

“Don’t let me keep you, Fulvia,” said Morris, unhappily. “If nobody shows I guess I can take a bus.”

“The buses will be on strike,” said Fulvia. “Do you have a phone number for the villa?”

Morris gave her the letter confirming that he would be met. “But this says you are arriving last Saturday, at Malpensa—the other airport,” she observed.

“Yeah, well I changed my plans, to take in Rummidge. I wrote them about it.”

“I don’t suppose they received your letter,” she said. “The postal service here is a national disgrace. If I have a really urgent letter for the States I drive to Switzerland to mail it. Look after the bags.” She had spied an empty phone booth, and swooped down on it, snatching the prize from under the nose of an infuriated businessman. Moments later she returned to confirm her guess. “As I thought, they ‘ave not received your letter.”

“Oh, shit,” said Morris. “What shall I do?”

“It is all arranged,” said Fulvia. “You will spend tonight with us, and tomorrow the villa will send a car to our ‘ouse.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you,” said Morris.

“Wait outside the doors with the luggage,” said Fulvia, “and I will bring the car.”

Morris stood guard over their bags, basking in the warm spring sunshine, and casting a connoisseur’s eye over the more interesting automobiles that drew up outside the terminal to collect or deposit passengers. A bronze-coloured Maserati coupe which until now he had seen only in magazines, priced at something over $50,000, drew his attention, but it was some moments before he realized that Fulvia was seated at the wheel behind its tinted glass and beckoning him urgently to get in. As they swept through the airport gates, she appeared to shake her fist at the pickets, but when they smiled broadly and responded with the same gesture, Morris realized that it was one of solidarity with the workers’ cause.

“There’s something I must ask you, Fulvia,” said Morris Zapp, as he sipped Scotch on the rocks poured from a crystal decanter brought on a silver tray by a black-uniformed, white-aproned maid to the first-floor drawing-room of the magnificent eighteenth-century house just off the Villa Napoleone, which they had reached after a drive so terrifyingly fast that the streets and boulevards of Milan were just a pale grey blur in his memory. “It may sound naive, and even rude, but I can’t suppress it any longer.”

Fulvia arched her eyebrows above her formidable nose. They had both rested, showered, and changed, she into a long, loose flowing robe of fine white wool, which made her look more than ever like a Roman empress. They faced each other, sunk deep in soft, yielding, hide-covered armchairs, across a Persian rug laid on the honey-coloured waxed wooden floor. Morris looked around the spacious room, in which a few choice items of antique furniture had been tastfully integrated with the finest specimens of modern Italian design, and whose off-white walls bore, he had ascertained by close-range inspection, original paintings by Chagall, Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. “I just want to know,” said Morris Zapp, “how you manage to reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist.”

Fulvia, who was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, waved it dismissively in the air. “A very American question, if I may say so, Morris. Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege”—here Fulvia spread her hands in a modest proprietorial gesture which implied that she and her husband enjoyed a standard of living only a notch or two higher than that of, say, a Puerto Rican family living on welfare in the Bowery—”we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not by the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role that we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity. Whereas to be poor with dignity, poor as our Italian peasants are poor, is something not easily learned, something bred in the bone, through generations.” Fulvia spoke rapidly and fluently, as though quoting something she and her husband had had occasion to say more than once. “Besides,” she added, “by being rich we are able to ‘elp those ‘oo are taking more positive action.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, various groups,” Fulvia said vaguely, as the telephone began to ring. She swept across the room, her white robe billowing out behind her, to answer it; and conducted a conversation in rapid Italian of which Morris understood nothing except an occasional taro and, once, the mention of his own name. Fulvia replaced the receiver and returned more deliberately to her seat. “My ‘usband,” she said, “‘E is delayed in Rome because of the strike. Milan airport is closed. ‘E will not return tonight.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Morris.

“Why?” said Fulvia Morgana, with a smile as faint and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s.

“Won’t you go back home, Bernadette? Your Mammy is destroyed with worrying about you, and your Daddy too.”

Bernadette shook her head vigorously, and lit a cigarette, fumbling nervously with the lighter and chipping her scarlet nail polish in the process. “I cannot go home,” she said in a voice which, though hoarse from too many cigarettes and, no doubt, strong drinks, still retained the lilting accent of County Sligo. “I can never go home again.” She did not raise her eyes, under their long, mascara-clogged lashes, to meet Persse’s, but shaped the tip of her cigarette in the green moulded plastic ashtray on the white moulded plastic table in the Terminal Two snackbar. A ham salad, of which she had eaten barely two mouthfuls, was on a plate before her. Cutting up his own food, Persse studied her face and figure, and wondered that he had traced in them, as she passed him in the chapel, the lineaments of Bernadette as he had last seen her: on a family outing to the strand at Ross’s Point, one summer when they were both thirteen or fourteen, shy and tongue-tied with each other. He remembered her as a slim, wild tomboy, with tangled black hair and a gap-toothed smile, running into the surf with her best frock tucked up, and being scolded by her mother for getting it soaked with spray. “Why can you not?” he gently pressed her.

“Because I have a child and no husband, is why.”

“Ah,” said Persse. He knew the mores of the West of Ireland well enough not to discount the gravity of this obstacle. “So you did have the baby?”

“Is that what they think, then?” Bernadette flashed at him, looking up to meet his eye. “That I had it brought off?”

Persse blushed. “Well, your uncle Milo…”

“Uncle Milo? That auld scheymer!” The memory of Dr O’Shea seemed to bring the brogue flooding back into her speech, like saliva into the mouth or adrenalin into the bloodstream. “What the divil does he have to do with it?”

“Well, it was through him that I found out about your trouble, just the day before yesterday. In Rummidge.”

“Been up there, have you? I haven’t been near the place in years. God, but that was a terrible gloomy old house in, what was it, Gittings Road, that you had to lug the vacuum up three flights of stairs and you could break your neck it was so dark on the landings because himself was too mean to put proper bulbs into the lights…” Bernadette shook her head and snorted cigarette smoke through her nostrils. “A slave I was there—working in the hotel in Sligo was a rest cure in comparison. The only mortal creature who was kind to me was a lodger they had on the top floor, an American professor. He used to let me watch his colour telly and read his dirty books.” Bernadette chuckled reminiscently, displaying teeth that were white, even, and presumably false. “Playboy and Penthouse and that sort of stuff. Pictures of girls naked as God made them, bold as brass and letting their names be printed underneath. It was a real eye-opener to an innocent young girl from County Sligo, I can tell you.” Bernadette glanced slyly at Persse to see if she was embarrassing him. “One day my Uncle Milo caught me lookin’ at them, and beat the livin’ daylights out of me.”

“Where is your child now?” Persse asked.

“He’s with foster parents,” said Bernadette. “In London.”

“Then you could go back home on your own?”

“And abandon Fergus?”

“Well, for a short visit.”

“No thank you. I know too well what it would be like. The looks from behind the curtains in the windows. The starin’ and whisperin’ after mass on a Sunday morning.”

“So what are your plans for the future?”

“To save enough money to retire, buy a little business—a boutique maybe—and have Fergus back to bring him up myself.”

“Retire from what, Bernadette?”

“I’m in the entertainment business,” she said vaguely. She glanced at her wristwatch. “I must go soon.”

“First, give me your address.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have one. I travel about a lot in my work.”

“I suppose Girls Unlimited would forward a letter?”

She paled under her makeup. “How do you know about that?” Then the penny dropped. “You shouldn’t read other people’s private prayers,” she said indignantly. “Or what’s written on the other side of them.”

“You’re right, Bernadette, I shouldn’t have. But then I’d never have recognized you. Now I’ll be able to tell your Mammy and Daddy that you’re safe and well.”

“Don’t tell them about Girls Unlimited, whatever you do,” she begged.

“What is it that you do, then, Bernadette? You’re not one of those hostesses, are you?”

“I certainly am not!” she said indignantly. “There’s no money in that unless you sleep with the customers afterwards, and I’ve had enough of sleepin’ with.” She lit another cigarette and looked at Persse appraisingly through the smoke. “I’m a stripper, if you must know,” she said at length.

“Bernadette! You’re not!”

“I am, so,” she said, brazening it out. “I do a little dance, and I take off my belongings one by one. My best act is called The Chambermaid. Marlene the Chambermaid—that’s my professional name, Marlene. I’m better rewarded for takin’ that uniform off than I ever was for puttin’ it on, I can tell you.”

“But how can you bear to…”

“The first time was hard, but you get used to it quick enough.”

“Used to those men staring at you?”

“You needn’t act so superior, Persse McGarrigle,” said Bernadette, tossing her head. “What about that day in the cowshed at your people’s farm, when you begged me to let down my drawers and show you all my secrets?”

Persse blushed furiously. “We must have been mere children then. I can hardly remember it.”

“I remember you wouldn’t show me your own little gadget, anyhow,” said Bernadette drily. “Wasn’t that just typical? Honest to God, when I see the men starin’ at me in the clubs, when I’m doin’ my act, and I’m down to my G-string, they look just like a bunch of dirty-minded little boys. What do they keep comin’ for, I ask myself. Are they expectin’ to see somethin’ different one day? Sure, every woman is made much the same in that portion of her anatomy. What’s the fascination?”

Persse evaded the question by asking one of his own. “What about the father of your child?” he said. “Shouldn’t he be helping you with money?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Wasn’t he a guest at your hotel? It should be possible to trace him from the register.”

“I wrote him a letter once. It came back with ‘Not Known At This Address’ on it.”

“Who was he? What was his name?”

“I’m not telling,” said Bernadette. “I’ve no wish to get involved with him again. He might try and get Fergus off me. He was a queer gloomy sort of fellow.” She looked again at her watch. “I really must go now. Thanks for the salad.” She looked at it apologetically. “Sorry I had no appetite.”

“Never mind that,” said Persse. “Look, Bernadette, if you ever change your mind about going back to Ireland, there’s a priest in Rummidge who will help you. He has a fund for repatriating young Irish people. The Our Lady of Knock Fund.”

“Our Lady of the Knocked-Up would be more like it,” said Bernadette, sardonically.

“Knocked-up?”

“Haven’t you heard that expression before?”

“Indeed I have. Anyway, this priest is called Father Finbar O’Malley—”

“O’Malley, is it? Sure his people have the farm three miles up the road from ours,” said Bernadette. “His mother is the biggest gossip in the parish. He’s the last person in the world I’d go to. Remember now—don’t tell Mammy and Daddy what I’m doing. You can give them my love.”

“I will,” he said.

She leaned across the table and brushed his cheek with her lips. He inhaled a heady waft of perfume. “You’re a good fellow, Persse.”

“And you’re a better girl than you pretend,” he said. “Goodbye,” she said huskily, and hobbled away without a backward glance, unsteady on her gold high-heels.