Learning by Heart (25 page)

She smiled back. ‘Where exactly is this?’

‘A glorious place. Andalucía.’

‘I can’t imagine you out of London.’

‘Neither could I,’ he said. ‘I bought it from one of my authors.’

‘You aren’t totally reformed?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t given up smoking?’

‘Don’t be foolish!’ He stood a pace away from her. ‘So, where is Richard?’

‘You’ve missed him,’ she said, ‘but come into the house. Let me give you lunch.’

They sat at the table in the kitchen, Bisley watching her as she warmed some soup. For a while, they ate in silence, Cora feeling herself under his scrutiny.

‘Tell me what you do with yourself all day,’ he said finally.

‘Well, I work here,’ she said. ‘We have contracts to supply people, and we grow fruit to sell.’

‘It sounds like hard labour.’

‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘It was at first – bringing in better soil, improving it year by year, building the walls and terraces, but there’s not so much of that now. Everything’s established.’

‘It must be very pretty when the trees blossom. Will it make you rich?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I doubt that very much.’

Slowly, he pushed aside his plate. ‘Are you happy?’ he asked.

She didn’t reply immediately.

‘With Richard,’ he added. He paused. ‘After London.’

‘Yes,’ she answered candidly. ‘I never saw that other man again.’

‘I hope you understand what a bastard he was.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know now that it wasn’t my fault.’

He nodded, satisfied. ‘Well,’ he said, letting the subject go, ‘do you keep up your reading?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, enthused. ‘I was reading
Alexander’s Feast
last night. And I have Robert Graves’s book. I like Louis MacNeice. And Yeats. Lots of Yeats.’

‘My God,’ he said, pretending to look horrified. ‘Dryden to Yeats. A whole anthology.’ He leaned on the table. ‘MacNeice,’ he mused. ‘A departure for you. A modern poet.’

She mirrored his posture. ‘Do you know that poem “Snow”?’

‘Yes.’

‘About light and dark? About roses?’

‘Yes.’

She sat back, smiling. ‘I often think about it,’ she said. ‘The glass between the snow and the pink roses on the windowsill.’

‘In what way, particularly?’

‘That the world is plural …’

‘“The world is crazier and more of it than we think.”’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There is more than glass between the snow and the roses.’

‘You’ve become a philosopher,’ he said.

‘I have time to think,’ she answered, blushing.

‘And you think that the world has its light and shade.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’

‘Be careful with him,’ Bisley said. ‘You know what else he said – “We cannot cage the minute.” You have changed,’ he said admiringly. ‘I rather like you now.’

She laughed and he patted her hand. ‘I always thought of you as a kind of daughter,’ he said. She squeezed his fingers, touched. ‘And what does Richard think of all your reading?’

Cora shrugged. ‘He probably thinks it a bit odd,’ she admitted. ‘He doesn’t read. He’s not one for poetry, really, but he doesn’t object.’

Bisley nodded, and was silent for a moment.

‘What is it?’ she asked, after she had waited for him to speak. ‘There’s something. You didn’t turn off the motorway just to see how the trees looked.’

He gave her a brief smile. ‘I have a letter for you.’

‘From whom?’

‘The person you used to share a house with, Jennifer.’

Surprised, Cora took the envelope he was holding out to her.

He was smiling. ‘Those Saturday parties in your mews house.’

Cora frowned. ‘Did I invite you?’

‘You did once,’ he said. ‘But I knew Terry anyway.’

At the mention of Jenny’s husband Cora said, ‘They married.’

‘Of course they did,’ Bisley retorted. ‘I’m not a complete recluse, you know.’ He shook a cigarette out of a packet, and lit it. ‘I’ve seen them, on and off, at parties for the last ten years. Heard the gossip about them, too.’ He squinted at her through the smoke. ‘I expect that’s what this is about,’ he said, nodding at the letter.

‘What gossip?’

‘Oh, Cora,’ he said, ‘don’t be silly. She told me you went to visit her.’

‘Only for a day.’

‘Even so, you must know about her darkie.’

Cora frowned again. She didn’t like to hear him use such words, but he was from another time, another generation, of the Raj and the empire. Bisley leaned back in his chair. ‘Do open it and put me out of my misery,’ he said.

The envelope simply had Cora’s name on it, nothing else.

‘Why didn’t she send it to me?’

‘She said she’d lost your address,’ he replied. ‘She came to my house, shoved it into my hands and said I was to give it to you when I saw you.’

Cora opened the letter.

Cora

I’m afraid I shan’t come and see you after all; and I shan’t be in London the next time you come
.

You won’t think badly of me, will you? I have left the boys and Terry. If they ask you, you’ll be able to say you don’t know where I am
.

To be honest, Cora, I don’t care about the house or the business, or anything I have here. Or don’t have here. I want to be with Vinny
.

Don’t worry about me is all I wanted to say. And swim, when you have the chance, sweetie.

Jenny

Cora looked up. ‘I was thinking about her this morning,’ she said.

‘Are you in touch with her?’

‘I wrote to her before Christmas,’ she said.

‘Did she write back?’

‘She never does.’

She put the letter on the table. Bisley lifted it and read it, then looked at Cora over the paper. ‘They were all saying that Terry had finished her off,’ he said. ‘It seems not.’

Cora stared at him.

‘There was a rumour in town,’ he said. ‘People said that he was violent to her.’ He touched her hand across the table. ‘He put her in hospital,’ he said. ‘He fractured her jaw.’

‘When?’ she gasped.

‘Last year.’

She was silent with shock. Then the memory of Terry Ray’s hand on Jenny, soon after they had met, rushed back to her. The bullying hand, and the bruises.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bisley said. ‘He confessed it to someone I know. Very remorseful, apparently.’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘To my knowledge, she told no one.’

‘Oh, my God,’ she murmured. ‘Poor Jenny. No wonder she left.’

Bisley put the letter down. ‘What does she mean, swim?’ he asked.

Cora blushed. ‘To strike out for oneself … I don’t know,’ she murmured.

Bisley was smiling. ‘To warm before the fire?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed slowly. ‘Perhaps. To live.’ And she thought of the photograph of Jenny’s two sons propped against the kitchen dresser; and of Vinny’s broad, gentle hand in the small of Jenny’s back as he and she had crossed the road in front of her.

When Richard came home the next evening, he had made up his mind. Putting his arm round her shoulders as they walked to the house, he said abruptly, ‘I think we’ll go to Sicily.’

Cora stopped, astonished. ‘Sicily?’ she repeated. ‘When?’

‘As soon as we can.’

‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why now?’

‘I’d like to see Alex Carlyle,’ he told her. ‘He’s not well. He asks me every year to go back.’ He stroked her hair. ‘Would you like to go?’

‘Well … of course. What made you think of it so suddenly?’

‘I don’t take you out enough,’ he said, as if he had finally come to this conclusion. ‘We haven’t had a proper holiday in two or three years.’

‘I’m not here to be entertained,’ she pointed out.

‘Look after you more, then,’ he said. ‘I don’t do enough of that either.’

‘Can we afford it?’

‘We could go by train,’ he said, ‘and stay with Alex. I know he would have us.’

‘But we’ve not been abroad since our honeymoon.’

‘All the more reason to go now.’

She looked around herself, at the greenhouses where she had been working yesterday and today. ‘But what about the garden?’

‘If we go at Easter we can be there and back before the season begins.’

She inspected his face intently. ‘Are we running away?’ she asked. And the most peculiar feeling went through her.

Jenny’s voice echoed in her mind. Since Bisley had left her yesterday, she had been thinking about the hidden expression in Jenny’s face, the one clear picture of happiness. She had been imagining Jenny stepping naked into the sea, her back turned on all she had left behind. And last night, as she drifted into sleep she had felt herself – perhaps even dreamed it – running down the sand after her friend, racing headlong into the water, which was as warm as the day, and the waves closing around them both, the sun beating on their shoulders.

She had woken up this morning and wondered about it.

I want to disappear
, she had thought suddenly.
I want to be somewhere else
.

I want to run away, too
.

She had felt ashamed of the thought, confused and surprised by it.

‘Running away?’ Richard had repeated, laughing. ‘For two weeks?’

They began to walk again; he held open the door to the house for her.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘Taormina in the spring – Sicily in the spring. You have never seen anywhere more beautiful.’

Fifteen

It was late in the evening when they reached Taormina.

When they got out of the car at Alex Carlyle’s house, they saw that, all the way up the steps from the street, there were candles in metal lanterns, lavender and lemon trees; and Alex had been waiting for them, a man much older than Richard, bent over a walking-cane upon which he leaned.

‘Welcome to Taormina,’ he had said. ‘Welcome to Sicily.’

The two men gripped each other’s hands. Thirty years separated their meetings. When Alex turned to her, Cora saw how the sun had lined his face, scored deep white lines where his smile relaxed; she noticed his faint accent, which was explained when he began to talk to the maid in soft, fluent Italian.

‘Come in,’ he had said, and held out his hand to Cora. ‘We’re all so excited to see you.’

She caught Richard’s eye. He put his hand under her elbow to guide her into the house.

He had been watching her since they first arrived in Italy, seemingly concerned at the length of the journey, the noise of Naples, the stifling confinement of the boat. He had told her he thought it might be too much for her, especially when, in Naples, the weather had turned unseasonably hot, like a blast from the tropics.

‘I’m not as fragile as you seem to think,’ she had told him, smiling, as they lay in the small hotel room, and he opened the windows to a panorama of roofs crammed together, and the milky blue sky of the morning.

‘Anyone would be fragile in this heat,’ he had commented.

The closer they got to Italy, the more silent he became. She felt different, energized by the changing scenery. The journey through France had been monochrome, full of endless stops. They had looked out on some stations, disembarked at others, and it had been grey, with rain-heavy skies over the fields and the small anonymous towns. The first night, in the sleeper compartment of the train, she had drifted off wondering where they were, which country was outside the carriage window, trying to assess their speed by the rattle of the wheels on the track.

But the second morning was different. She awoke to sun: they were coming down through northern Italy.

‘Where will we stop?’ she asked Richard.

‘Florence, Pisa …’

‘Can we get out?’

‘Our tickets are for Naples,’ he told her. ‘We’ll stop there, if you like.’

She had to defer to his arrangements; she could see that it mattered to him. There was some sort of struggle going on inside him: sitting opposite him in the carriage, she could see that he was keeping his impressions, his memories to himself. At one point, she put her hand on his knee. ‘You travelled through this part?’

‘Not here,’ he said.

‘Somewhere close?’

He didn’t reply. She tried something else. ‘Tell me about Taormina,’ she said.

‘It was very small when we were there,’ he told her. ‘They say it’s grown since.’

‘Is it pretty?’

‘The prettiest place in the world,’ he said. ‘There’s a wonderful Greek amphitheatre that overlooks the sea, and a piazza half-way down the main street, the Corso Umberto. You’ll like it.’

‘You were stationed there,’ she said. He had told her this much, no more.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll walk down to the piazza and have a drink there one evening,’ he said. ‘Every evening, if you like. It will be warm. It’s already warm in Sicily.’

‘Where did you live when you were there?’ she asked.

‘There was a film unit,’ he said, ‘a photographic unit attached to the army. After I was injured, I stayed with the officers in a villa until I could be transferred. It was high on the hill overlooking Giardini Naxos. Every night we would watch the sunsets.’

‘A photographic unit?’

‘They came through with us, every step.’

‘Do you have photographs of the time in the villa?’

‘No.’ He gazed out of the window. The train was drawing into Milan. ‘I used to have some of the terrace, of the view. I had one of myself sitting with another officer, in those cane chairs …’

‘Like we have at home?’

‘Like that.’

‘But where are these photos?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never seen them.’

‘I destroyed them,’ he said. ‘It seemed indecent to keep them.’

‘Why?’

‘To enjoy those days when everyone else was at war.’

‘But you had been wounded. You were waiting to go back to Egypt. You had earned the sunsets.’

‘I earned nothing,’ he said. And he had looked out of the window, closing the subject.

Alex’s house was lovely. Built in the Moorish style, it resembled two latticed white boxes placed one on top of the other. Each floor had lancet windows; at the very top a roof terrace was edged with a wide black lava frieze inlaid with white stone. Richard and Cora’s bedroom adjoined the roof, with a door opening out on to the flat space. When Cora went on to it after her bath, the stones were warm to her bare feet. She had stopped a moment to luxuriate in the feel of it. The night was black, humid, scented; she let her towel drop and stood naked, feeling the air cling to her.