Learning by Heart (16 page)

‘I can smell the Cussons rose,’ he said. ‘It must have its first flowers.’

‘The what?’

‘Don’t you have roses?’ he asked. ‘A new hybrid.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the names of anything. Mother planted one last year, I think. Just below the terrace.’

They walked out into the growing dusk. A long way down the garden, they could hear several birds calling. The lawn was damp: she could feel the slight resistance of moisture as they walked. They stopped by the new roses, noticed their luminescence, the heavy density of their scent. Older varieties grew all around them, but the few early cerise flowers dominated the bed, their colour striking and solid against the low wall of the terrace, even in the twilight. Then, after a moment, Richard walked towards the fruit cages at the edge of the grass.

Cora followed him. Then she heard what had drawn him there: the fluttering of wings inside the netting.

‘There’s a bird caught,’ he said.

‘There can’t be,’ she told him. ‘How could it get in?’

Richard had opened the netting door, and stepped inside. ‘Are these raspberries?’ he asked, stretching out his hand in the shadows.

‘Loganberries,’ she said, and brushed against the slightly serrated edges of the leaves.

‘I can smell these too,’ he said.

It was true: the leaves had a rich, slightly acidic scent. It was all-pervasive in the small enclosure. When the fruit came, it would be overpowering. She saw Richard move slowly along the flimsy wall. ‘It’s here,’ he said.

She found him kneeling. The netting was moving: a bird was struggling, caught in its folds near the ground.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Something little,’ he said. ‘A sparrow, I think.’

He stayed where he was for a moment.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘I can’t get it free,’ he said.

She knelt down next to him. The bird had encased itself in the rolled border of the net. ‘It’s stuck,’ she murmured.

‘Can you feel it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She could feel the rapid, panicked beating of its heart under her fingers. It was no stronger than the scratch of a leaf against glass.

He began to untwine the threads with enormous patience from the bird’s feet. It took a minute, two minutes; eventually its heartbeat slowed. She was aware of holding a scrap of life in the arch of her palm.

‘Be quick,’ she whispered.

‘Pass it under the netting,’ Richard said. ‘That way, when I get it free, it won’t fly back into the bushes.’

She did as he asked, kneeling awkwardly with her hands under the net floor, which was pegged down for several feet further along to either side of her. ‘I must see to this gap,’ she murmured, ‘in the morning.’

‘I’ll do it for you,’ he replied. And then, a second later, ‘That’s it.’

They stood up, heard the tumble of wings, and saw the brief shape of the sparrow spiralling upwards, trying to gain momentum. ‘I thought it was dying,’ Cora said. ‘I thought it had frightened itself to death.’

True dark had descended now; only the sky above showed a vague reflection of light from the west.

When he kissed her, it was with the same fragile lightness that had been in her hand, the same rapid trembling. His mouth was cool. Almost immediately, he stepped away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I’m nothing like you imagine,’ she said. ‘I’m not good for you. For anyone.’

He put his hand on her waist and, very slowly, drew her to him.

She saw him look away, to one side; above them, the first stars clouded, then were revealed, and hidden again just as swiftly by racing grey ghosts. Richard’s eyes were on the ground where the bird had been. Her body ached; her skin became warm where his hand rested. She wanted to close her eyes; she wanted to sleep and be carried away. She was so tired of trying to hold everyone apart from her, of the enormous burden of making herself function. She felt almost exhausted, as if she had made a journey, like the journeys he and her father had discussed.

One night that summer, Richard would tell her about those miles as she sat with his arm around her shoulder: she would hear the litany of names, of places, until they became a kind of song in her memory, until it was almost as if she herself had lived them. As if it had been she, late in 1941, travelling the endless rail to Ranchi from Calcutta, then onwards from Ranchi to Karachi. From the Gulf of Oman to Basra and Abadan, in what was then called Persia, from the camp at Kermanshah, to Qum, and Baghdad. And then across the trans-Jordanian desert to Syria, to be stationed at Ismailia; and across the Mediterranean, in a crowded ship, with the drone of aircraft overhead, to a beach called Cassabili, where dawn was breaking as the boat moved to the shore.

He would say that there had been nothing left of him worth having when it was over, after Sicily, after London and the end of the war; and that he had drifted for a long time afterwards, and tried to go home, and failed at the sight of the heights he had once scaled, and been afraid of everything that moved, even of water breaking on sand, the sound of waves, of planes overhead, even of the waters rushing down the Langdales into Great Langdale Beck.

And that he had gone away, anywhere, without plan, without interest, almost waiting to be obliterated – hoping for it almost – by space and emptiness. How he had gone to Italy again, and come down through France and Spain to Morocco. Despaired of noise and the flat light, the seas flatter and bluer than the light, and come home, one December, to rain and the rolling, uninterrupted green of southern England.

And he had bought a piece of land, built a house and been alone.

And there had been no one, no one at all for him, until he saw her that day at the abbey as she came out.

She put her head on his shoulder, in the dark of the garden.

‘Let me look after you,’ he said. ‘That’s all I want to do.’

They were married four months later, in the first week of September.

L’Angelo

I am going to Caltagirone
.

It is four months since you were here
.

You are not coming back
.

Despite all that we promised each other, that I have done everything you wanted, that I have waited for you, I know what perhaps you already knew in your heart as you went back to England. That you would not see me again
.

The world has changed for me. My father knows. And now I must do as he tells me, or there is no future for me here. Occasionally, he talks to me, to tell me of the work in Caltagirone, of how to ask my cousin there for my money. He tells me in short sentences, as if I’m a child. Because he says I have disgraced him, that I can no longer be regarded as a man and that I can no longer be trusted
.

I can’t look him in the face any more, and neither can he look at me
.

I am forbidden my friends, who have knocked at the door to see me, to drink with me. They are curious. They want to know if the gossip is true; if I have really done what they have heard. But I am treated like a baby who cannot walk anywhere alone. I am shackled, by my father’s will and by what I have told him. He has stood over me and threatened to disown me – as if I cared about that. I don’t. I despise him for his money and what he likes to imagine is his influence
.

The house is silent. It’s as if there has been a death. My mother turns her face away and won’t touch me. I think she asked my sisters to do the same, and they keep away, but at least they glance at me. Valeria is sorry, I think. She looks as if she might cry when she sees me. She understands because she is the oldest; because she has fallen in love herself, and is waiting to be married. I think perhaps she is consumed by a little of what consumes me. But no one comes to my room. I have the highest room in the house, and I can see the ocean from the window, and I want to stand on the roof and fly across it. I imagine myself flying at the dead of night, escaping the last conversation with my father
.

It began on Sunday. We had gone to the cathedral. I was thinking of what it had been like that Friday when we were first together, may God have mercy on me. I was thinking during communion, during the sacrament, of what my father calls my unforgivable sin
.

I was thinking of you, the colour of your skin, your face next to mine, your hands, the sound of you, the way you whispered and the way I took you. I was thinking of that as the blessing was pronounced over me, and I am willing to accept that this was wrong, but I am not willing to accept that I am the first man to have thought of such things, the touch of a woman, the sound of a woman, while the sacrament was in his mouth. Because you are greater than heaven to me, and the thing that is between us has the same holiness, and this is my declaration to God, on the Day of Judgement, even if it confines me to hell for eternity, that to have you in my arms was a blessing
.

But Sunday. You know how, in the cathedral, there are the angels that guard each side of the aisle just before the altar? On the day that it happened, this Sunday three weeks ago, I was thinking of how afraid I had been as a child, and I was looking at the angels, because the night before I had dreamed of them
.

All my life I have seen those faces. I used to think they were very white, and they had thin features, not like most Italian faces. And they had yellow hair and white robes with a yellow star. They were like princesses, the kind you see in Disney films. Like the princess in
Cinderella.
I was in love with them, I think, when I was a little boy. I was going to marry someone like that, not an Italian. I had your picture in my mind even before I met you. Do you see that? I was always going to have a woman like you in my arms. I was going to be her husband. I was going to lie next to a kind of saint like this, a kind of angel, with her white face, long hair and blue eyes, just like yours
.

I had a dream the night before it happened. I dreamed that the angels got down from the walls and came towards me, rising up from the floor, their great wings beating; but as they drifted from the wall and hovered an inch above the floor, their wings unfurling, their faces bore a painful look, a contortion, as if the unfurling wings were agony to them. And sure enough, as the wings spread out to either side of them, the tips of their feathers spilt drops of blood onto the floor, spattering against the feathers and onto the angels’ feet too
.

And their faces weren’t the faces of girls any more, but of old women. I don’t know why this was terrible, so terrible, for why should angels not be old, old with wisdom of many years, old faces with kindliness in them? Angels’ faces like the face of the Madonna, are always untouched and unmarked, and bear no blemishes, as if they are above the suffering of the world. But an angel would know everything, surely; an angel would be an old man, an old woman with experience scored into their face
.

And I don’t know if I had ever thought this before, or had been thinking it on the day before, but suddenly in my dream that night the faces were old like that. And then the worst thing of all: they began to burn
.

Smoke poured from their backs, mouths and hands, and their robes shrank to black shrouds before they, too, began to smoulder. And they circled, like birds, going higher and higher into the roof, everything about them now burning and blackening. And their wings extended to their full width and showered ash. And everyone in the church was covered with embers that ignited hair and clothes, and sent people shrieking out of the doors. Only I stayed, and they descended on me
.

When I look back on this dream, I can hardly remember a before time – before you, before the kiss in the doorway in the dark, before I felt you beneath me in that bed, in the room under the eaves of the house, the white wood bed, the folded blanket instead of sheets, the sound of the birds beneath the tiles – before all that, I was like the others
.

I was thinking of the next term in Rome. You won’t believe what the next most important thing was in my head before I met you. It was to buy the French boy’s motorcycle. I can’t help laughing when I think about it. Joachim’s motorcycle. I wanted it so badly. That, and to win at
scopo.
To win at cards
.

I am nineteen years old. I used to be told that I had a future: I would inherit my father’s business, step into his shoes and be the rich man driving a Mercedes, like his, with a family of five or six children, like his. Now I don’t think anyone would tell me I had a future, because I am the boy with a crack in his character, like a hand-wide crack running down a badly built building. I had a woman and it went to my head
.

Worse still, I had the English wife of a kind and honourable man who was nursed by my own grandmother, a man my grandfather and father respect, a brave man. I have taken his wife behind his back and I don’t have the wit to understand that such a taking is not love, but theft
.

I tried to tell him that we made love to each other, and I began to weep when I remembered, and I think it was this, the weeping, the evidence of weakness, that made my father more furious than what had gone before: the confession outside the church
.

We had been at mass, and I don’t know what happened to me. I saw the angels and I remembered the dream, and I couldn’t breathe suddenly. The air felt full of dust. I went outside, and I saw the arch of the white sky, the impossibility of the distance between us. I knew that I would have to find you
.

My father came out of the church after me
.

‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked
.

I looked at him. All the consequences of what I wanted to say seemed like nothing. I could only think of the arch of the sky and wanting to get to you, that I hadn’t heard from you and that your silence might mean you were ill, or in need of me. I thought I would choke, suffocate, that I would die there on the steps if I couldn’t leave
.

‘
I’m going to England,’ I said. And I told him why
.