“And everyone knows why the major favoured slick Franco,” she hissed through her frothing teeth, and her pack of supporters made knowing “tch-tch” noises at each other, till she again ordered them to shut up.
Also, as a shrewd woman, she distrusted something in Jerry’s make-up. A hardness buried in the lavishness. She had seen it with Englishmen before, but the schoolboy was in a class by himself, and she distrusted him; she held him dangerous through his restless charm. Today, of course, one could put down those early failings to the eccentricity of a noble English writer, but at the time the postmistress had shown him no such indulgence.
“Wait till the summer,” she had warned her customers in a snarl, soon after his first shambling visit to her shop—pasta, bread, fly-killer. “In the summer he’ll find out what he’s bought, the cretin.” In the summer, slick Franco’s mice would storm the bedroom, Franco’s fleas would devour him alive, and Franco’s pederastic hornets would chase him round the garden and the devil’s red-hot wind would burn his parts to a frazzle. The water would run out, he would be forced to defecate in the fields like an animal. And when winter came round again the scented pig major could sell the house to another fool, at a loss to everyone but himself.
As to celebrity, in those first weeks the schoolboy showed not a shred of it. He never bargained, he had never heard of discounts, there was not even pleasure in robbing him. And when, in the shop, she drove him beyond his few miserable phrases of kitchen Italian, he did not raise his voice and bawl at her like the real English but shrugged happily and helped himself to whatever he wanted. A writer, they said; well, who was not? Very well, he bought quires of foolscap from her. She ordered more, he bought them. Bravo. He possessed books: a mildewed lot, by the look of them, which he carried in a grey jute sack like a poacher’s, and before the orphan came they would see him striding off into the middle of nowhere, the book-sack slung over his shoulder, for a reading session. Guido had happened on him in the Contessa’s forest, perched on a log like a toad and leafing through them one after another, as if they were all one book and he had lost his place. He also possessed a typewriter of which the filthy cover was a patchwork of worn-out luggage labels: bravo again. Just as any long-hair who buys a paint pot calls himself an artist: that sort of writer. In the spring, the orphan came and the postmistress hated her too.
A redhead, which was half-way to whoredom for a start. Not enough breast to nurse a rabbit, and worst of all a fierce eye for arithmetic. They said he found her in the town: whore again. From the first day, she had not let him out of her sight. Clung to him like a child. Ate with him, and sulked; drank with him, and sulked; shopped with him, picking up the language like a thief, till they became a minor local sight together, the English giant and his sulking wraith whore, trailing down the hill with their rush basket—the schoolboy, in his tattered shorts, grinning at everyone, and the scowling orphan, in her whore’s sackcloth with nothing underneath, so that though she was plain as a scorpion the men stared after her to see her hard haunches rock through the fabric. She walked with all her fingers locked round his arm and her cheek against his shoulder, and she only let go of him to pay out meanly from the purse she now controlled. When they met a familiar face, he greeted it for both of them, flapping his vast free arm like a Fascist. And God help the man who, on the rare occasion when she went alone, ventured a fresh word or a wolf call: she would turn and spit like a gutter-cat, and her eyes burned like the devil’s.
“And now we know why!” cried the postmistress very loud as, still climbing, she mounted a false crest. “The orphan is after his inheritance. Why else would a whore be loyal?”
It was the visit of Signora Sanders to her shop which had caused Mama Stefano’s dramatic reappraisal of the schoolboy’s worth, and of the orphan’s motive. The Sanders was rich and bred horses farther up the valley, where she lived with a lady friend, known as the man-child, who wore close-cut hair and chain belts. Their horses won prizes everywhere. The Sanders was sharp and intelligent, and frugal in a way Italians liked, and she knew whoever was worth knowing of the few moth-eaten English scattered over the hills. She called ostensibly to buy a ham—a month ago, it must have been—but her real quest was for the schoolboy. Was it true? she asked. Signor Gerald Westerby, and living here in the village? A large man, pepper and salt hair, athletic, full of energy, an aristocrat, shy? Her father, the General, had known the family in England, she said; they had been neighbours in the country for a spell, the schoolboy’s father and her own. The Sanders was considering paying him a visit. What were the schoolboy’s circumstances? The postmistress muttered something about the orphan, but the Sanders was unperturbed.
“Oh, the Westerbys are always changing their women,” she said with a laugh, and turned toward the door.
Dumfounded, the postmistress detained her, then showered her with questions.
But who was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background. The father, a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, kept racehorses; she had met him again not long before his death and he was still a man. Like the son, he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right—was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.
“It is not the English habit, as a rule, to accord distinction to journalists,” she explained, in her classic Roman way of talking.
But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was all that about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her—for no one in his right mind would light a fire up there in summertime. Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters. So she tried, she really tried to oblige. Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said, coming back to the counter and putting down her parcel. Today all journalists were travellers, of course—breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi—but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.
But why had he travelled, the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal; why?
For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently; for wars, pestilence, and famine. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?” she asked.
The postmistress shook her head wisely, all her senses fixed upon the revelation: the son of a blond equestrian lord who bellowed, a mad traveller, a writer in distinguished newspapers! And was there a particular theatre? she asked—a corner of God’s earth—in which he was a specialist? He was mostly in the East, the Sanders said after a moment’s reflection. He had been everywhere, but there is a kind of Englishman for whom only the East is home. No doubt that was why he had come to Italy; some men go dull without the sun.
And some women too, the postmistress shrieked, and they had a good laugh.
Ah, the East, said the postmistress, with a tragic rolling of the head—war upon war, why didn’t the Pope stop it? As Mama Stefano ran on this way, the Sanders seemed to remember something. She smiled slightly at first, and her smile grew. An exile’s smile, the postmistress reflected, watching her; she is like a sailor remembering the sea.
“He used to drag a sackful of books around,” she said. “We used to say he stole them from the big houses.”
“He carries it now!” the postmistress cried, and told how Guido had stumbled on him in the Contessa’s forest, the schoolboy, reading on the log.
“He had notions of becoming a novelist, I believe,” the Sanders continued, in the same vein of private reminiscence. “I remember his father telling us. He was frightfully angry. Roared all over the house.”
“The s
choolboy? The schoolboy was angry?” Mama Stefano exclaimed, now quite incredulous.
“No, no. The father.” The Sanders laughed aloud; in the English social scale, she explained, novelists rated even worse than journalists. “Does he also paint still?”
“Paint? He is a painter?”
He tried, said the Sanders, but the father forbade that also. Painters were the lowest of all creatures, she said, amid fresh laughter; only the successful ones were remotely tolerable.
Soon after this multiple bombshell, the blacksmith—the same blacksmith who had been the target of the orphan’s pitcher—reported having seen Jerry and the girl at the Sanders’s stud, twice in one week, then three times, also eating there. And that the schoolboy had shown a great talent for horses, lunging and walking them with natural understanding—even the wildest. The orphan took no part, said the blacksmith. She sat in the shade with the man-child, either reading from the book-sack or watching him with her jealous, unblinking eyes; waiting, as they all now knew, for the guardian to die. And today the telegram!
Jerry had seen Mama Stefano from a long way off. He had that instinct; there was a part of him that never ceased to watch. A black figure hobbling inexorably up the dust path like a lame beetle in and out of the ruled shadows of the cedars, up the dry watercourse of slick Franco’s olive groves, into their own bit of Italy, as he called it, all two hundred square metres of it, but big enough to hit a tethered tennis-ball round a pole on cool evenings when they felt athletic. He had seen very early the blue envelope she was waving, and he had even heard the sound of her mewing carrying crookedly over the other sounds of the valley: the Lambrettas and the band-saws. And his first gesture, without stopping his typing, was to steal a glance at the house to make sure the girl had closed the kitchen window to keep out the heat and the insects. Then, just as the postmistress later described, he went quickly down the steps to her, wineglass in hand, in order to head her off before she came too near.
He read the telegram slowly, once, bending over it to get the writing into shadow, and his face as Mama Stefano watched it became gaunt, and private, and an extra huskiness entered his voice as he laid one huge, cushioned hand on her arm.
“La sera,” he managed, as he guided her back along the path. He would send his reply this evening, he meant. “Molto grazie, Mama. Super. Thanks very much. Terrific.”
The other English managed grazie tanto, but not the schoolboy.
As they parted, she was still chattering wildly, offering him every service under the sun—taxis, porters, phone calls to the airport—and Jerry was vaguely patting the pockets of his shorts for small or large change; he had momentarily forgotten, apparently, that the girl looked after the money.
The schoolboy had received the news with bearing, the postmistress reported to the village. Graciously, to the point of escorting her part of the way back; bravely, so that only a woman of the world—and one who knew the English—would have read the aching grief beneath; distractedly, so that he had neglected to tip her. Or was he already acquiring the extreme parsimony of the very rich?
But how did the orphan behave, they asked. Did she not sob and cry to the Virgin, pretending to share his distress?
“He has yet to tell her,” the postmistress whispered, recalling wistfully her one short glimpse of her, side-view, hammering at the meat. “He has yet to consider her position.”
The village settled, waiting for the evening, and Jerry sat in the hornet field, gazing at the sea and winding the book-bag round and round, till it reached its limit and unwound itself.
First there was the valley, and above it stood the five hills in a half-ring, and above the hills ran the sea, which at that time of day was no more than a flat brown stain in the sky. The hornet field where he sat was a long terrace shored by stones, with a ruined barn at one corner which had given them shelter to picnic and sunbathe unobserved until the hornets nested in the wall. She had seen them when she was hanging out washing, and had run in to Jerry to tell him, and Jerry had unthinkingly grabbed a bucket of mortar from slick Franco’s place and filled in all their entrances. Then called her down so that she could admire his handiwork: my man, how he protects me. In his memory he saw her exactly: shivering at his side, arms huddled across her body, staring at the new cement and listening to the crazed hornets inside and whispering, “Jesus, Jesus,” too frightened to budge.
Maybe she’ll wait for me, he thought.
He remembered the day he met her. He told himself that story often, because good luck was rare in Jerry’s life where women were concerned, and when it happened he liked to roll it around the tongue, as he would say. A Thursday. He’d taken his usual lift to town in order to do a spot of shopping, or maybe to see a fresh set of faces and get away from the novel for a while; or maybe just to bolt from the screaming monotony of that empty landscape, which more often was like a prison to him, and a solitary one at that. Or conceivably he might just hook himself a woman, which occasionally he brought off by hanging round the bar of the tourist hotel. So he was sitting reading in the trattoria in the town square—a carafe, plate of ham, olives—and suddenly he became aware of this skinny, rangy kid, redhead, sullen face, and a brown dress like a monk’s habit and a shoulder-bag made out of carpet stuff.
Looks naked without a guitar, he’d thought.
Vaguely, she reminded him of his daughter Cat, short for Catherine, but only vaguely, because he hadn’t seen Cat for ten years, which was when his first marriage fell in. Quite why he hadn’t seen her, he could even now not say. In the first shock of separation a confused sense of chivalry told him Cat would do better to forget him. Best if she writes me off. Put her heart where her home is. When her mother remarried, the case for self-denial seemed all the stronger. But sometimes he missed her very badly, and most likely that was why, having caught his interest, the girl held it. Did Cat go round like that, alone and spiked with tiredness? Had Cat got her freckles still, and a jaw like a pebble?
Later, the girl told him she’d jumped the wall. She’d got herself a governess job with some rich family in Florence. Mother was too busy with the lovers to worry about the kids, but the husband had lots of time for the governess. She’d grabbed what cash she could find and bolted, and here she was: no luggage, the police alerted, and using her last chewed banknote to buy herself one square meal before perdition.
There was not a lot of talent in the square that day—there never was, really—and by the time she sat down, that kid had got just about every able-bodied fellow in town giving her the treatment, from the waiters upwards, purring “beautiful missus” and much rougher stuff besides, of which Jerry missed the precise drift, but it had them all laughing at her expense. Then one of them tried to tweak her breast, at which Jerry got up and went over to her table. He was no great hero—quite the reverse, in his secret view—but a lot of things were going around in his mind, and it might just as well have been Cat who was getting shoved into a corner. So, yes: anger. He therefore clapped one hand on the shoulder of the small waiter who had made the dive for her, and one hand on the shoulder of the big one who had applauded such bravado, and he explained to them, in bad Italian, but in a fairly reasonable way, that they really must stop being pests and let the beautiful missus eat her meal in peace. Otherwise he would break their greasy little necks.
The atmosphere wasn’t too good after that, and the little one seemed actually to be squaring for a fight, for his hand kept travelling toward a back pocket, and hitching at his jacket, till a final look at Jerry changed his mind for him. Jerry dumped some money on the table, picked up her bag for her, went back to collect his book-sack, and led her by the arm, all but lifting her off the ground, across the square to the Apollo.
“Are you English?” she asked on the way.
“Pips, core, the lot,” Jerry snorted furiously, which was the first time he saw her smile. It was a smile definitely worth working for; her bony little face lit up like an urchin’s through the grime.
So, simmered down, Jerry fed her, and with the advent of calm he began spinning the tale a bit, because after all those weeks without a focus it was natural he should make an effort to amuse. He explained that he was a newshound out to grass and now writing a novel, that it was his first shot, that he was scratching a long-standing itch, and that he had a dwindling pile of cash from a comic that had paid him redundancy—which was a giggle, he said, because he had been redundant all his life.
“Kind of golden handshake,” he said. He had put a bit down for the house, loafed a bit, and now there was precious little gold left over. That was the second time she smiled. Encouraged, he touched on the solitary nature of the creative life: “But, Christ, you wouldn’t believe the sweat of really—well, really getting it all to come out, sort of thing—”
“Wives?” she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, “None active,” as if wives were volcanoes, which in Jerry’s world they had been.
After lunch as they drifted, somewhat plastered, across the empty square, with the sun pelting straight down on them, she made her one declaration of intent: “Everything I own is in this bag, got it?” she asked. It was the shoulder-bag made out of carpet stuff. “That’s the way I’m going to keep it. So just don’t anybody give me anything I can’t carry. Got it?”