The House at the Edge of Night (29 page)

“What about the love you felt for me?” asked Maria-Grazia, very coolly. “Was it that kind of love?”

“Yes,
cara.
It was—it is—of course it was. But I wasn't sure of your feelings. It was all such a long time ago.”

“I loved you, too,” said Maria-Grazia, stung. “I was just a girl, but I loved you. I would have waited if you'd asked.”

Now buoyed with a little hope, he forged on. The only thing he told her about the glasshouse, the military prison where he had served his sentence, was that a kind church woman had talked to him, a charity visitor, and asked him about his arrest, and that afterward, some months later, she sent him the books with which he learned Italian. “Couldn't she have sent me a letter?” demanded Maria-Grazia. “Couldn't you have asked her to?”

And Robert said, startled, “But,
cara,
I did. She did. She sent ten or fifteen letters.”

But apparently, those letters had never reached Castellamare. Now he began to understand her indignation.

“What are you doing here?” she asked now, still unbending. “You've six more years to serve in prison, according to your tale.”

So he should have had. But four years into his sentence, a colonel had come to the glasshouse requesting prisoners with good conduct who might be deployed to the north to work in the undermanned coal mines. A northern man, born in a mining village, eager to earn himself an early discharge, Robert was put forward. He received a slip of paper to be exchanged for a train ticket. “You can go home now,” said the colonel.

Robert hitchhiked to Dover and boarded a ship for Calais. This time, he met no military policemen. He begged lifts, he walked when no lifts were forthcoming, and he made his way down the continent. Before crossing to the island, he had washed in the ocean with a bar of carbolic soap, trimmed his hair and shaved in the mirror of a motorcar, and purchased from a peasant for a few
lire
a set of new clothes. It had been Bepe who had carried him across the ocean. Timid with hope, Robert had asked the old man about Maria-Grazia, and Bepe with a shout of joy had recognized the Englishman. “I'm not here to cause trouble, if she loves somebody else,” Robert murmured. “Only tell me, is she married? Do I have any hope? She never replied to my letters.”

“Go up to the House at the Edge of Night and see for yourself,” counseled Bepe.

By the ferryman's continuing roars of joyful laughter, by the welcome he had received as he disembarked at the quay, he had understood that there was some remnant of hope. Now he was less certain.

Strange what short work he had made of those years, when he told them. “I'll be wanted as a deserter if I'm found,” he said. “That's the difficult situation I'm in. I should have done my time in Holland, and waited to get discharged properly—that was my mistake, and even if I could have written I wouldn't have dared to ask you to wait ten years for me because of it. But it was never lack of love, Maria-Grazia. Don't accuse me of that.”

He had chosen the particular word for a difficult situation,
frangente,
which was also the word for the long white breakers of the sea, and she found herself stirred with emotion at the way he laid it before her, tenderly, hesitantly, as Andrea d'Isantu had once offered her a flower. “You can't go back?” she asked at last, a little timid at the rage she had flung at him.

“No,
amore.
I can't go back to England.”

She bent and touched the cool tiles before her, without knowing why, until it came to her that it was the ground of home that she was touching. His predicament frightened her: to be condemned never to return home to the earth that had made you, never to be lulled by the familiar noise and hush of its ocean, never to be comforted and infuriated by the narrowness of its walls.

But she must have spoken some or all of this aloud, for Robert said, quietly, “This island is the earth that made me. Not there.”

And now a strange thing happened. Now she found that her impatience to leave, that pain that had goaded her for years, like the sting of invisible cactus needles in the hands that persists for days after gathering prickly pears, was healed in her, was gone.

“Do you believe me?” he said.

“Yes,” said Maria-Grazia. “I believe you.”

Robert, moved, said, “Dear Mariuzza,
cara mia
.”

“I believe you,” she said. “But you haven't made amends yet. Not nearly.”

She would not kiss him, would not embrace him, but she consented to take his hand. After she took it, she found it very difficult to let go. So they stood like that a long time, formally, as though newly acquainted. “Do you think you ever could love me again?” asked Robert.

“I don't know,” said Maria-Grazia. “But stay here.”

Concetta, still concealed behind the gate, saw their two shadows approach and capered in silent joy.

When Robert and Maria-Grazia came back into the bar apparently reconciled, hand in hand, there was a great eruption of joy in the House at the Edge of Night. But it soon became apparent that there was no wedding fixed, no imminent return to their old status as lovers. It was even rumored that Maria-Grazia had exiled the Englishman to the top of the house, to sleep on the old velvet sofa to which Amedeo had once been banished, instead of inviting him to her little room with the vista of palm trees.

This was the perfect truth. Over a bottle of
arancello
that afternoon, Amedeo attempted to console Robert a little. “She's a fierce girl, my Mariuzza,” he murmured. “She always has been. She needs time. She loves you. Only she's making you wait a little, as you made her, while she examines her own feelings on the matter. She isn't one to be rushed or bullied into making up her mind.”

“I made her wait five years,” said Robert. “Surely she doesn't mean…”

“Give her time,” counseled Amedeo.

Robert sipped the
arancello,
and it seemed to cling to his mouth, a coarser thing than the bright liquor he remembered. “Speak to her,” said Amedeo at last. “Tell her all the things you could never have told her before, when you couldn't speak our language. Tell her about your childhood, your youth. The ordinary things that lovers talk about. You're a stranger to her now, at least a little. Tell her your stories. Bring her round to you that way.” For Amedeo had never discovered any means more certain of winning a person's heart.

MARIA-GRAZIA WOKE THE FOLLOWING
morning in the middle of a sort of argument with herself. She dressed calmly, washed her face, braided her hair, and descended the stairs with resolution, ready to bear the truth that Robert's return had been a hallucination. And instead there he was, seated between her parents, peeling figs with his steady, rough hands. He leapt from the chair and drew hers out as she approached. “Good morning,
cara mia,”
he said carefully, studying her face.

Maria-Grazia took the tea Pina offered. Then, as her parents left the table with hasty excuses, she found herself assailed by stories. Robert was laying before her a great rush of Italian, telling her of his childhood, his infancy, his youth.

He began with his home in the north, in a mining village, two straight terraces of houses set upon a patch of green, under a gray sky. Its name had been Aykley Moor. The story of his family was that he had none, except an elderly aunt and uncle who had brought him up halfheartedly between them. His mother, a repertory actress, had died of the Spanish influenza when he was a few months old. Robert had been there at the time, sleeping in his baby carriage in the corner of some provincial dressing room. In the rush to cart the dead woman off without causing a scene, he had been quite forgotten. It was only the caretaker, locking up, who was drawn by the ghostly wails and found the boy. After this, the child's mother was identified as the poor dead actress, and her aunt and uncle had been summoned to fetch him.

Maria-Grazia set aside her tea, for she could not drink it. “Why are you telling me this story now?” she asked him.

“Because,
cara
—” He took her wrist. English in all things, he had always held her tentatively, as though it were an imposition. Even that first day on the beach. “Because I intend to ask you to marry me,” he said. “And it's only fair that you know me a little better than you did last time.”

The upsurge of joy that accompanied these words threatened to reduce her to tears. Instead she beat it down, suppressed it. She allowed him to continue his story. He told how his aunt and uncle had considered abandoning him. On the long train journey north, while the boy stared at them with cold blue eyes, they resolved to deposit him in a boys' home in Newcastle. This they had related to him many times, as though it were proof of their kindness in the face of his cold nature. For reasons never disclosed to Robert, they had relented at the gate and brought him home. As though to make up for this weakness, they never afterward allowed themselves to show him generosity. They were to treat his presence as an imposition until the day—aged seventeen—that he left their home, a cardboard suitcase in one hand and a new-pressed suit on its wooden hanger in the other, in search of a better life.

“What is Newcastle?” asked Maria-Grazia in English.

And Robert said, in Italian, “A great city in the north, full of arches and bridges.”

Later, though she would never have admitted it, when he had gone out to pay his respects to those islanders who had not yet heard the news of his arrival, she ran upstairs and searched for the place in her mother's schoolroom atlas. For the story had stirred something in her. Quite suddenly, stacking boxes in the little storeroom of the bar, she found herself weeping and weeping for joy, bent double over a crate of
arancello,
both hands pressed over her mouth to stifle the noise.

That evening, across the counter of the bar, she asked him, “What kind of a boy were you? When you lived in Aykley Moor?”

Robert scrambled for language, desperately grateful at this sign of her favor. “Small,” he said. “Quite narrow.” He meant thin, she understood, from the pinching motion he made with his hands. “I was always as white as chalk,” he added, and she found herself marveling: What an odd, schoolroom figure of speech he used, when on the island they would have said “as pale as
ricotta.
”

“What else?” she asked.

And Robert, who had been assembling phrases with a desperate fever, now poured forth all the Italian he could muster at once: “I had an eye which wandered. I had to wear a big sticking plaster over it. When I didn't get up quick enough in the mornings, my aunt would make me scrape the ice off the inside of the windows. She'd pull me from window to window by the ear.”

“The inside of the windows?” said Maria-Grazia, and Robert said,
“Sì, cara.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I got strong,” he said, “and quick enough that she couldn't catch me. To get away on Saturdays, I began to run cross-country. Out on the moors, on the hills, for hours. I got to be the best student in the school—I had the highest marks—and I decided to get out of that place.”

By these and other fragments, which he murmured to her later that evening at dinner and over the washing-up in the stone kitchen, and as they climbed the stairs to bed—he keeping a respectful distance—she began to understand that he, too, had once been a child, an adolescent, a youth. Always, before, his air of miracle had been part of her adoration for him: a stranger who had appeared out of the ocean fully formed and returned to it again, like some wayfarer in her father's book of tales. “May I?” he said at the door of her room, trembling a little as he touched her wrist, and she said, “No,
caro.”
But that second night, when she heard him move about in the room at the top of the house, she saw the many younger Roberts he had been and stirred again with tenderness: a boy with a patched eye, scraping ice in that arctic place with little chalk-white hands; a youth running across gray English wastelands, coiled with a fierce determination to get out of that place. She had never told him of her leg braces, had burned with shame whenever she thought of them lying in the Campari liquor box during those months when they had been lovers, though he must have noticed how she limped. She had not yet told him anything about the bottle stuffed with banknotes down the side of her bed. Now she felt that he might have understood.

HER MOTHER AND FATHER
regarded them each morning over the breakfast table with cautious eyes, breathless with expectation. And the bar was no better, for whenever Maria-Grazia tried to speak with Robert, as he sat bearing her steadfast company each day behind the counter, the elderly
scopa
players turned their chairs around and stared, as though this return of Signor Carr had been laid on for the sole purpose of their entertainment. How could anyone speak freely in such conditions? “I'm going to the scrubland,” she murmured to him, the next afternoon. “To harvest prickly pears.”

Allowing a respectable time to elapse, he followed her. While Maria-Grazia, hands wrapped in rags, salvaged the fruits from the cacti, he began to speak again of his past life. Now he told her of his youth, his flight from the village. A grammar school pupil, while the rest of the boys from his village went down the mine, he had abandoned home and ridden his bicycle east toward the ocean, holding his suit high with one arm to protect it from the mud of the road. He was apprenticed to the drawing offices of the Furness Shipbuilding Company. Here he had lived alone in the back room of a senior clerk. In the evenings he had bicycled along the seafront to a place of learning he called the Literary and Mechanics' Institute, where he read books on engineering and physics, and studied pictures of the stars.

Half comprehending, self-conscious, he had devoured the works whose names had been revered by his grammar school masters. He was determined to travel, to be an educated man. He seized upon every object that tasted of learning: Dickens, Shakespeare, a secondhand box of engineer's tools unearthed one rainy Saturday in a junk shop. It was in memory of this that he had almost wept when he first encountered Pina's translated
Opere di Shakespeare
and
Racconto di Due Città
.

In 1939, he confessed to Maria-Grazia, he had even applied to take the entrance examination of the University of London. He had never been to London, and it was for this reason that he chose it. Everything about his childhood and youth seemed drab to him, a thing without consequence, a thing best recounted in a paragraph. That was how he recounted it to her now, and she found herself turning away, not in anger this time but at his capacity still to stir her to tenderness, something that she did not want to admit to him just yet. She had never once spoken to him of her prize books, put away before she had even opened them, the pictures of mainland universities in the encyclopedia over which she and her mother had once pored. The war had put an end to all that. While she hesitated, unsure whether to bring forth these confessions, he unbuttoned his shirt and caught in it, gallantly, the prickly pears that were overflowing from her hands.

AND THEN, AS SHE
climbed on a chair to hang the garlands for the Sant'Agata festival, he told her of the war. For war was really at the heart of all this. It was war that had bundled him away from his life in the north, leaving the examination for the University of London forever unsat, his apprenticeship forever uncompleted, and his library copy of
Bleak House
forever abandoned at chapter five
.
War had interrupted that paragraph of a life, made of it merely a preamble to some greater, unrelated history. War had ended everything, and yet not everything, for it was war that had brought him to her. It made her reel a little to hear him, in his approximate Italian, describe this war in the same way she had always thought of it: as a great monster that had swallowed cities, islands, men, and then, in the end, given one thing back only—the Englishman, appearing like a strange blessing out of the sea. War had ended everything, and war had brought him to her.

Now she found herself curious about the kind of war it had been for him—what he had suffered, while she was diluting the coffee with chicory and water, navigating the separate silences of her parents, digging for snails.

He spoke to her about the long hard slog of El Alamein, and the desert camp where everybody went about dust caked, squinting. He told her of his friends, briefly, without describing them, for they were gone and it was safer to refer to them only by name, not attribute. Jack Snapes, who had first told Robert of the news that they were looking for men from all battalions to form an airborne division. Robert's application for transfer had been accepted, Jack's rejected on account of his imperfect eyesight. That was the last Robert saw of him. Jack, he learned later, had died of gangrene in Normandy. Paul Dodd, who had leapt beside Robert from fifty gliders, a northern man, too, a Newcastle man, their paths through the war eerily aligned until the night when the storm had drowned Paul and spared Robert. It had been Paul, mostly, he had thought of during the hours that he had spent drifting toward Castellamare, believing the hazy rock before him to be some odd hallucination, some fevered dream.

“You've never seen the island from the outside,” he told her. “But it looks strange,
cara.
A sort of apparition. As though it's covered in fog.”

“It's the heat making the water evaporate,” she murmured. She had seen it before: The fishermen's boats when they got far out were often shrouded in such vapor. But it was his other words she marveled at:
You've never seen the island from the outside.
It was true. She had never left its shore, except once or twice to orbit it by boat on a summer swimming expedition. And didn't it seem an odd thing, she murmured aloud, that she who had never left this place and he who had been buffeted about the continent by the tides of war should ever have coincided on its shores?

“Sì, cara,”
he said.
“Un miracolo lo era.”
A miracle it was.

It cut at her heart a little, how he spoke of it as belonging to the past. She set aside her garlands of trumpet vine and looked down at his impossible, straw-colored hair, his thin shoulders, turned slightly inward as they always had been, his spectacles. Spectacles! For days she had been trying to place what was altered about his face. There it was. Not some dark difference, some sinister alteration, but merely spectacles. “You wear glasses now,” she said.

“Yes,
cara.
All that reading.”

Tenderness moved her. She reached down and touched the side of his head, where the arm of the spectacles rested on one ear. This touch was witnessed, for the bar was illuminated like a lantern at this hour across the dark piazza, and by morning it was known all over the island that the Englishman had begun, a little, at last, to regain Maria-Grazia's heart.