Learning by Heart (21 page)

Only last week she had been sitting with him on the floor of the kitchen at home, helping him look through photographs. It had begun with her trying to get the albums in order, and ended in the usual disorganization. Joshua had wanted to see the pictures of himself as a baby: he pressed them close to his face and studied them intently.

‘Me,’ he had said, holding up a picture in the maternity unit when he had just been born.

‘Yes,’ she had told him. ‘You were this big.’ And she showed him, holding her hands apart.

‘Me,’ he had repeated, delighted, fascinated.

She had looked at the photographs of her and Nick on their wedding day, her in a bar somewhere, holding up a glass, laughing, then asleep in a chair. Nick used to do that, she remembered. He always had a camera on hand and took pictures of her. It used to drive her mad; but when a girlfriend had told her that her own partner had never taken a single photograph of her and complained that he could not be interested, Zeph saw Nick’s preoccupation differently. He wanted to keep her, she realized. He wanted to look at her.

She had picked up the wedding-day photograph, and one taken much later, just after Joshua’s second birthday. She studied her expression as closely as Joshua had himself. There was a change in her: a closing down. There was a small downward pull at the corner of her mouth, a kind of subdued irritation. What had she been thinking of that day? she wondered. What had annoyed her? She seemed impatient; she wasn’t looking directly into the camera.

That meant she hadn’t been looking at Nick.

She hadn’t wanted to look at Nick.

In another photograph, she had Joshua on her lap, aged perhaps eight or nine months, and he was reaching up to her face. Their gaze was fixed on each other with total absorption. Those times were etched with utter clarity: her adaptation to the weight, the feel, the sensation of caring for a child. Joshua’s skin was so smooth, so soft; she remembered the first time that Nick had kissed her after she had come back from hospital, and being mildly shocked that his had been so rough. It seemed an obvious, perhaps idiotic, thing to say. Nick had not changed: he was just the same. But he seemed different. He seemed intrusive, too loud.

She dropped her hands and gazed out into the night. Strange, how relationships changed. It was imperceptible, like the leaving of the last light of day. One moment you were standing in the evening light, everything was clear and you had a sharp memory of the day that had passed and, seemingly in the next second, as if time had compressed inwards, you could no longer see the shapes of your surroundings. You passed from darkness to light, light to darkness.

Only sometimes there was no light.

Sometimes you stayed in the dark, plunged into the netherworld.

She looked away from the window, and back into the room. What could she do? How could she make a pattern, a life, here in the dark? She tried to turn her mind to practicalities. She didn’t want to go to another part of the country, somewhere strange, because she wanted – had always wanted – Joshua to know the kind of life she had known as a child. The open spaces, the freedom. She wanted him to run wild in the woods and orchards as she had when she was little.

She had a perfect memory in her head of herself, aged four or five, lying under the trees when they were heavy with apples just before harvest. The trees were small, no more than fifteen feet high, and their branches came right down to the ground. To crawl under them and look up through the red fruit hanging between the leaves to the sky was to own everything: the ground she lay on, the crop weighing down the branches, the light. Everything had been light then: the light streaming in through her window in the summer, the high white light of winter on the hill, the light reflecting from the blossom in the spring and making her eyes ache, such was its intensity as she had walked between the trees. Light and easy: like the effortlessness of running when you were a child. Life ran on like that. A country childhood. The idyll.

Zeph sat down on the window-seat, drawing a cushion beneath her against the slight dampness of the stone. Yet it hadn’t been like that at all, she thought. It had been an illusion. A lie. Nothing had been easy; her parents had not been happy. How could they have been, with that man in their lives, the Italian?

Everything was untrue. Her parents’ lives, her life with Nick. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to think of it more positively. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to look at her mother and understand her, let alone respect her. And yet she had to live here. She had to see her every day. She imagined her father, herself and Joshua standing on one side of a gulf with Nick and Cora on the other, an incomprehensible abyss between them.

She let her forehead rest on the cold window-pane. She could see her own cloudy breath.

But there were more than five people in the picture, she thought.

Two others stood behind them, shadowy figures who had set these events in motion. Nick’s lover, the girl in the newspaper photograph, and Pietro Caviezel.

She cast her mind back to the events of that morning.

She had truly thought that the package had been something to do with her mother’s finances or the farm; her motive had been to help her. Cora was so fond of projecting an image that she could do everything alone, that she could cope, and Zeph had been sure that this was just another business problem that her mother was trying to hide. She had reasoned to herself, opening the dresser drawer, that if she were to live in the same house, she needed to know the exact nature of the difficulties facing them.

It had been full of old mail and newspapers; the brown-paper package lay on top. As Zeph extracted it, she had frowned at the postmarks. Sicily. Syracusa. She had twisted it this way and that in her hands, then looked back into the drawer. There was nothing else remotely like it.

The first thought that came to her was that her mother must be planning a holiday, and that the envelope contained brochures. Her father had been in Italy and Sicily during the war; perhaps Cora was intending to revisit the places he had known. She had applied to somewhere directly, instead of going to a travel agent. Curiosity overcoming her, and touched by the idea that Cora might want to go where Richard had been, Zeph had opened the package and slid the contents on to the table.

She saw at once that it was a tattered leather journal. She picked up the covering letter and read it once, twice, three times. She had frowned. Caviezel? She had never heard the name mentioned at home. He wasn’t a family friend. Guilt touched her: she knew that she shouldn’t be looking at a private letter. A warning bell clanged in her mind. Her frown had become deeper, her puzzlement more intense. She didn’t remember any phone calls or letters from Sicily. Why would her mother, of all people, be sent this as a dying wish?

She had opened the book. Not at the first page but in the centre.

Caviezel. Pietro Caviezel
. There was something distantly familiar about the name. Now the warning bell rang louder. She hesitated. Consumed with curiosity, she looked at the text.

The handwriting was attractive: flowing and clear. The writer was describing a wedding. She turned the page back. There was a photo: a tall, handsome man with a woman on his arm. A man with thick, dark, curly hair, and a slim, lean body. The hand resting against his chest as he linked the woman’s arm was long-fingered and artistic. Zeph looked at the couple intently. The woman was rather plain, and older than the man. She turned the photograph over, but there was no inscription on the reverse. Then she saw the newspaper cutting. There was another photograph, with the man now standing beside a couple. ‘Gabriella e Giovanni Cimino,’ read the caption.

She put the photograph carefully back into the book, and turned to the first page. The date was 1973. ‘You remember there is a road that runs south …’

She read down the page, skipping sentences here and there. Something about building a house. ‘You told me how Richard had made a new house on land that no one wanted …’

This person knew about her father, she realized abruptly, and the house he had owned when he married her mother, the first house they had lived in, next door to her grandfather.

Then, as her eye drifted downwards, a single word leaped out at her.

Darling
.

She had looked back up the page. She had missed something, surely. Was this a woman? Perhaps the first page had been written by a woman who was her mother’s friend. And then …

I have thought of you …

She read the sentence beyond that. Her head spun. She read it again and again, then dropped the journal as if it were on fire. She stared ahead of her without registering a single thing other than that this man had been her mother’s lover.

She had got up, walked out of the room, along the hall, to the front door and flung it open. Cold air had rushed in.

I cannot put down on the page what my heart carries
.

She had stood on the step and stared in the direction that her mother had gone with Joshua.

It is a poem, just like us
.

After a minute or so, she had closed the door, walked back again, and stared down at the journal. It lay on the table, face down.

Just like us
.

The journal was made of beautiful soft, worn leather, rubbed to a pale red shine. Other scraps of paper had fallen from it. Slowly, she picked up receipts, tickets, cuttings. There was a table of tides and phases of the moon.

There was a rose-leaf in a small polythene holder for postage stamps.

There was an opera programme.

There was an embossed card, an invitation to an arts event, at the top the two masks of comedy and tragedy. Pietro Caviezel’s name was written in gold. The printing at the bottom of the card showed that he was the principal speaker at this black-tie evening in Paris nine years ago.

Zeph had put each item back on the table, exactly where they had fallen. Nine years ago she had been away at college. Her father had been dead for eleven years.

This man had been alive then, and her mother had been alone.

She felt the blood drain from her face. Very slowly, she had replaced all the items in the journal, turned it over, and sat with her chair facing the door, waiting for Cora to return.

Now, in the night, Zeph went back over that morning’s conversation. She had run it through her mind so often during the day that it made even less sense now and had merely become a puzzle of unrelated sounds. She felt both angry, and guilty. Unwittingly she had uncovered her mother’s past, and she had had no business in reading the journal. But knowing that didn’t lessen the impact, the insult, of what she had read. Her father had been betrayed, just as Nick had betrayed her.

She got up from the window-seat and walked back to the other end of the room, where Joshua was lying in a travel cot. She put her hand on its rail and looked down at him, curled on his side with his thumb jammed into his mouth. Traces of tears were still on his face from the tantrum he had thrown earlier. He had not wanted a bath; he had not wanted her to touch him; he hadn’t wanted to eat. He had screamed and struggled in her arms and she couldn’t bring herself to be angry with him, because she felt the same rage and frustration.

She had wished she could lie down like him, screaming her head off. Screaming, wailing and crying. Perhaps she should, she thought. Perhaps it would do her good. She got down on her knees, wet the edge of her thumb, and rubbed at the tearstains. Joshua stirred briefly.

He was so like his father.

The same colour hair, the same mouth.

It is a poem, just like us
.

Just like his father. Not dark, like her.

Just like us …

‘My God,’ she murmured. Suddenly she rocked back on her heels and put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God, my God, my God.’

Thirteen

A squall of rain swept along the street as Nick reached the restaurant. He stood inside the door, shaking his coat.

He could see Andy Tyler at the far side of the larger room, sitting at a table near the end of the bar. Nick made his way through the crowd, between tables sandwiched tightly together. The restaurant was in the heart of London’s Theatreland, and all round the walls, posters of films and stage shows gazed luridly down at the diners. A waiter stood to one side to let him pass.

‘Nick,’ Andy said loudly, standing up and shaking his hand. ‘Good to see you.’

Everything about Nick’s agent was loud: his voice, his clothes. He was known in the business for throwing the rowdiest parties in town, the ones at which, sooner rather than later, Andy would have a knock-down argument with someone. The last few months had seen him draw in his horns a little: at fifty-two, he had been diagnosed with diabetes. Nick saw at once that his friend had not taken the doctor’s advice: three bottles of champagne stood on the table in ice-buckets.

‘We’re expecting somebody?’ Nick asked, sitting down.

‘Are we ever?’ Andy laughed. He sat back in his chair and surveyed his author. ‘How’re you feeling today?’

Nick paused. He hadn’t said anything to anyone about Zeph. ‘I’ve been better.’ He glanced again at the bottles. ‘What is this? Somebody’s birthday?’

Andy suppressed a smile, then sighed dramatically. ‘Ought to be a wake,’ he said. ‘Several wakes. People dropping like flies.’

‘Oh? Such as?’

‘You remember Bisley?’

Nick frowned. ‘Should I?’

‘Alex Cowan and Madeleine Crowe’s agent. Got to be a big deal in the sixties, big client list after he landed Cowan’s first book, that little shitty novella.’

‘Uh, maybe.’

‘You met him at the book fair last year.’

‘The old guy?’

‘He was eighty-five,’ Andy told him. ‘He died on Monday.’

Nick shrugged.

‘Your mother-in-law knows him,’ Andy said. ‘She worked for him once.’

‘Oh,’ Nick said, dimly remembering. ‘That’s right.’

‘And Caviezel.’

Nick looked up. ‘Pietro Caviezel? What about him?’

‘He died this week, too. In Sicily. Cancer.’