The years of chastity after Luisa ended when I paid a Chinese girl in Soho. I thought the dirty upstairs room in Greek Street was as far from Pozzuoli as I could imagine. From then on, I liked the idea of keeping it functional by handing over cash; I’d had enough of love mania. There was a friendly woman I used to see in Baker Street, but she became fond of me and started offering extra services for free; she wanted to come and stay the night. I started to care about pleasing her and had to stop going; she was no longer “other” enough. Then I met a Portuguese girl in a club. I saw her once a week for six months, and it began to irk me that I so much looked forward to going there. By the time I met Annalisa, I had decided that the idea of sexual passion was as much a snare as that of love. If desire failed, that was the sad end of an affair, but if it didn’t, if it carried on insatiably at such a pitch, then one was as hapless and pathetic as a junkie in a doorway. If I had to choose between a trickle and a torrent, it was clear the trickle was the better way to live. Annalisa was the first woman since Luisa for whom I’d felt something more than simple affection, but I’d made no attempt to keep her when the showdown came: I had put up no fight. In all that time, culminating in the call girl at Jonas Hoffman’s apartment in New York, I’d tried to make sex seem neither a part of some insane love longing nor a carnal grossness but a natural, even comic, part of everyday living. In this I had been unsuccessful. I was, after all, the man who had cauterized his own wounds by insisting that love was a neural malfunction and a category error.
* * *
IN THE SECOND week of January, I went to a gentlemen’s club to meet Tim Shorter. I had never, I need hardly say, been a clubman myself but had been perhaps half a dozen times to such places for a farewell party or a book launch. I knew the drill. I put on a suit and tie, in which I walked from the tube at Piccadilly Circus past the sale-stickered windows of Jermyn Street and down through St. James’s Square, where I returned La Conspiration de la Serre to the London Library, and then across Pall Mall. The club had a Portland stone façade blackened by traffic fumes.
“Mr. Shorter? Yes, sir, he’s in the Card Room,” said a porter in a booth at the entrance. “Second door on the right.”
This was a carpeted lounge with a bar at one end and furniture that looked as though it had been hired from a catering company. As I looked round the room, a man detached himself from the bar and approached me.
“Dr. Hendricks? Tim Shorter. Thank you very much for coming. Can I get you a drink before lunch?”
He was a man in his sixties in a gray suit and a striped tie; his manner was brisk and conspiratorial. He came back with a glass of sherry and a silver dish of peanuts, which he placed on the mantelpiece between us. There was a mock antique electric bar heater in the fireplace.
“Nice of you to come. Did you get my first message? Must have been in September.”
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a forefinger.
“I’ve been away a fair bit.”
“Yes, of course. I expect you’re very busy. Hope you don’t mind me ringing up out of the blue. I tracked you down through Directory Enquiries.”
“No, that’s quite all right.”
“Anyway. The form is we go upstairs to the Long Room for lunch. I’ve booked a table for two so we don’t have to sit with the others. Have you come far?”
I looked round the room. The other members were all men, mostly in groups of three or four; most showed a kind of camaraderie—there was the occasional loud laugh—but none of them seemed like friends. I had the feeling that I was the youngest person there.
It was time to go upstairs. “Shall I lead the way?” said Shorter.
The staircase had a blue carpet with a fleur-de-lis pattern, I noticed, as I followed my host. A woman in a uniform with a white apron, who seemed an important person to know, seated us at a table by the window.
“We’re famous for the mixed grill,” said Shorter, “but you’re welcome to anything at all. The soup of the day’s usually a good bet.”
Shorter pushed his glasses up onto his forehead while he peered at the menu; there was a muttered colloquy with the wine waiter before he opted for the club Rioja.
“All set,” he said, sitting back and rubbing his hands.
“Thank you.”
He crumbled a bread roll on his side plate. “I don’t want to keep you in suspense any longer. I wanted to talk to you about someone I think you used to know. She’s not very well.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s someone I think you knew in the war. Am I right in thinking you were in Italy?”
“For a year or so, yes.”
“Thought so … One of the D-day dodgers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The D-day dodgers. That’s what we used to call you. Because you missed the Normandy landings on your Roman holiday.”
I thought of Roland Swann dying of his wounds, Donald Sidwell killed in the mountains, A Company wiped out in its entirety, the body parts of Private Hall being carried back past the Dormitory …
“Go on,” I said.
“It was someone you may have met when she was working for the Red Cross. An Italian woman called Luisa. I’m afraid I can’t remember her maiden name. Was it Neri? Anyway, she was married to my brother, Nigel.”
I swallowed some of the club Rioja with a show of nonchalance. “Tell me more.”
“I don’t know how much you know. Did you keep in touch after the war? Did you write?”
“No. I was friends with Luisa and her sister and an American woman one summer, 1944. I was on leave, recovering from a shoulder wound.” I heard my voice flatly relating these things. “Luisa went back to Genoa to look after her husband, who was wounded fighting for the partisans. I rejoined my battalion. That was it. I had no address or anything.”
Putting the syllables of Luisa’s name into the air between Tim Shorter and me made me feel unwell. I didn’t want her to be contaminated by knowing this ordinary man.
“Ah, yes, the first husband, the Italian war hero. Ah, thank you, Maya. Smells good.”
The uniformed waitress put down some potted shrimps in front of me. There was a piece of lemon and a frill of lettuce to one side. The plate seemed so distant I wasn’t sure my arms were long enough to reach it.
“Go on,” I said again.
“Well, Nigel was working at the British consulate in … it must have been the early fifties. Marvelous job, just making sure the odd visiting Englishman had an adaptor for the local plug sockets, that sort of thing. Anyway, on one of their high and holy days he met Luisa and rather fell for her.”
“What happened to her first husband?”
“He died in the war. He was by all accounts a hell of a brave man. Some of the fighting up there got quite nasty.”
“So I understand. When did he die?”
“I’m not sure of the exact date. I didn’t know her till she and Nigel got married, which was in about fifty-five. Nice wedding. Small do in a village near La Spezia. Did you say you knew her sister?”
“Yes. Magda.”
“She was there—very nice girl, though not quite as much of a looker as Luisa. Old Nigel always had a way with the opposite sex.”
“What happened to them?”
“Happened? Nothing much: they married, had three children. Nigel’s job meant they moved around a bit. Not that he was ever a high flier in the diplomatic. On the contrary, ‘I’m a low flier,’ he used to say. ‘The original woodcock.’”
I had managed to get some of the potted shrimps into my mouth. “And what did you do in the war?”
“Royal Navy. Atlantic convoys. Are those shrimps all right?”
“Yes, thanks. I … seldom eat much at lunchtime. Did I understand that your brother’s dead?”
“Sadly, yes. He died two years ago. Stroke. He’d always had high blood pressure. Lived it up a bit, you know.”
“Did they have a good marriage? Were they happy?”
&nb
sp; “Oh, yes. I think so. Well, Nigel certainly was—happy as Larry. Luisa … She was a bit of a mystery to me—enigmatic, if that’s the word I want.”
I thought of Luisa singing Puccini in the back of the convertible on the coast road; I pictured her pirouetting half naked in the hotel room at Pozzuoli.
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad they had a good life. And now you say Luisa’s not well?”
“That’s right. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but then when Nigel died I was an executor, and there were all the papers to go through. At one point I had to go to Rome to see her.”
“Rome?”
“Yes, she moved to a flat there after he died.”
“What happened?”
Shorter paused to put mustard on the side of his plate where a steak, a kidney, a chop, and a sausage sat like something from a ghoulish parlor game. A mound of fish pie was in front of me.
“We had a chat, a really long talk. She was alone in this rather gloomy flat in a street near the Tiber. Do you know Rome?”
“I went there once … to a medical board. A couple of times since. Go on.”
“Luisa was very kind, very hospitable. But she looked thin. She was wearing dark glasses indoors.”
“How long ago was this?”
“About a year. She was already quite poorly, I think. Anyway, we drank a lot of wine. Late in the evening we became confidential. I told her about my marriage, stuff I shouldn’t really have let on about. At about one in the morning she began to cry. It was embarrassing. She told me there was one man she had loved. I assumed it was the Italian first husband. If it couldn’t be poor Nigel.”
“And who was it?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Dr. Hendricks. It was you.”
I looked at the polished surface of the table. I was thinking how she might have looked in her dark glasses.
“You don’t seem very surprised,” said Shorter.
“I’m not surprised. I’m relieved. And also…”
“Also what?”
“Sad.”
“Sad?”
“You could say…”
It was difficult to follow what Shorter went on to talk about, but it mostly seemed to concern Nigel’s estate and questions of inheritance tax. I was glad that it wasn’t more personal, as I needed time to collect myself.
“Anyway, she asked if I might be able to find you when I got back to England. I suppose she felt now she was a widow again there was nothing wrong in looking you up. She’d seen your name in a newspaper when you published a book, but she wasn’t sure it was the same person. So I said I’d try and find out if it was you.”
“I see. And what’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it’s something to do with the lungs. The doctor in Rome recommended she spend some time in the Alps, and that’s where she is at the moment.”
The waitress had taken away the fish pie; Shorter was running his last bit of sausage through the mustard.
“Does she want me to go and visit her?”
“Maybe. She didn’t say. She just wanted to find out if you were all right, I think. I said I’d report back.”
“And if I offered?”
“Well,” Shorter sat back in his chair and wiped his mouth. “She may not have a long time to live; so she’d probably be thinking, Why not? But one thing I do know, she seemed very concerned for you. She had a funny look on her face when we discussed it. When she mentioned your name. A sort of puzzled yet urgent and—”
“I know that look.”
“She said, ‘Only if he really wants to. Tell him that. And tell him that even if doesn’t come, tell him I’ll always love him.’”
I looked away and found I was staring through a painting of a horse. “She said that?”
Shorter laughed. “There! I’m afraid I’ve told you good and proper now.”
* * *
AFTER LUNCH, I took Tim Shorter’s address and, a couple of days later, wrote to thank him. In reply he sent me the name of the place where Luisa would be staying until the end of January. It was a hotel in Megève, a ski resort in the French Alps.
Clearly, I couldn’t go. I didn’t want to have Luisa transposed from the chiaroscuro of my memory to the strip light of the present. I was worried I would still love her as much as thirty-seven years ago; I was worried I would love her less. Her absence had defined my life since the war; it had given shape and identity to my adult existence and all its stunted relationships. If I discovered that in some way she was not worthy of that defining power, it would render my life not just sad but empty. Sadness I had lived with; sadness I could almost bear. But I couldn’t face the idea that it had all been wasted. If, on the other hand, I discovered that she was still indeed the missing heart of me, then that would remove any chance of salvation in this life.
So I couldn’t go. I had loved her too much, that was the fact. T. S. Eliot, a poet I had discovered late, was often quoted as having written that humankind could not bear very much reality. It seemed to me the thing humankind couldn’t bear too much of was love. And loving Luisa Neri too much had, by the normal standards of the world—by the lights of family, fatherhood, enjoyable engagement with one’s fellow beings—wrecked my life.
For all that, I had made something almost worthwhile with the pieces. It was a rickety artifact made from glued-together fragments: a patient helped; a published book, which, for all its exaggerations and shameful glossing over hard truths, had been appreciated by some; a sense of purpose briefly shared with colleagues; a kindness here and there that took the giver by surprise; a friendship with a creature of a different species. But the contraption made up by these bits was nothing like robust enough to withstand a meeting with the woman who had indirectly shaped it.
It was therefore with a kind of incredulity that on the twenty-eighth of January I found myself climbing into the backseat of an old diesel Mercedes belonging to Kensal Kars and telling the driver to head for Heathrow Terminal Two. He took me through the backstreets of Willesden Junction and White City before we made the open road. The smell of the air freshener was making me feel queasy, and I had to open the window to the gray afternoon.
The deal I had made with myself was that I could pull out at any moment. I expected that once I was in Megève my courage would fail. Being in the mountains, the resort should have bright sun as well as snow, so I could enjoy the reviving effect of the light for a couple of days, then head back to London.
The low-ceilinged Terminal Two had been the jumping-off point for my more enjoyable trips to the conference capitals of Europe; I felt exhilarated to be among the fur-wearing people loading their skis onto the check-in scale in the middle of the week. Upstairs, I went through passport control and into the waiting area, where I bought a newspaper and a bottle of whisky and settled halfheartedly into the crossword; my economy ticket denied me the airline lounge where I’d taken refuge on leaving New York.
A good deal seemed to have changed since that day. It was only a short time ago, but somehow the ground I’d covered with Pereira had given me an altered view of the world and my place in it. Whether this came from thinking about his life or mine was hard to say, but as I glanced up at the departures board I did think that something had been gained. The flight was boarding.
In Geneva I carried my case down the slope of the baggage hall and out through customs. The extra hour made it eight o’clock, and I wondered whether the hotel would still be serving dinner. The taxi driver, who shook my hand and introduced himself as Patrick, was a talkative man and asked a number of questions; I responded with a few of my own, and eventually the car began to gain altitude. There were dirty snowdrifts along the verges of the cow pastures. I’d never been skiing and found the climb towards the resort intriguing; it made me think of tubercular patients coming up by horse-drawn coach, thin girls wondering if they’d ever see the city or the plain again.
My hotel was near the center of town—a modest wooden building where,
sure enough, dinner service had ended at eight thirty. There were plenty of places in the streets off the square, however, and I found a pizzeria that produced food quickly and had some local red wine. On the bar was a wooden letter holder with maps of Megève, and I studied one as I ate. Luisa’s hotel was marked on a road a little way beyond the center, going west.
My bedroom was small and so well heated that I had to open the window on the freezing night; I sucked in some arctic air with relief. The bed itself was narrow and firm, but there was—a rarity in any hotel—a good reading light above it. For once I was not on the top floor but on the first, above the kitchens, where the pots and pans were still clanging.
As I switched off the light, I remembered the lines from “Burnt Norton” that broach the “very much reality” bit: “Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” I was trying to unravel my own “what might have been” and decide if it was still truly present when I drifted off.
* * *
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I had startling dreams; only the nights on which I didn’t might be worthy of comment. All of them related to Luisa and a lost life; they had the physical candor of the shameless dreamworld.
It was easy enough to look back on such things—sex and so on—in relation to Mary Miller, because we were young, and comic distance blurred some edges. To talk about the hooker in New York allowed me to vent some self-disgust. The episode with serious Anna was a once-only chance to use the absurd Latin words. When it came to Luisa, however, there seemed no readable way to describe it. As a child of my generation I naturally welcomed the new manners of the sixties—naked saunas, sex gurus, hippy musicals, love-ins, and so forth—but all that laissez-aller seemed to lack something vital: the sense of the forbidden being breached. Luisa was a big rule breaker.
The days themselves, when we were up and dressed, were ordinary, if anything could be ordinary in southern Italy in the summer of 1944. What I mean is, we didn’t parachute or deep-sea dive or sit twice through the Ring Cycle. There were simple picnics and short drives in a requisitioned car; there were cafés and drinks in the square; there were dinners outside in the walled garden that ran down to the sea. There was me sitting on the bed in her lodgings, talking, watching Luisa in her slip with the ivory lace hem as she leaned up towards the mirror to trace mascara on her lashes; and sometimes when I sat there dressed and ready to go out she’d do her makeup with no clothes on at all, in the same stance, craning up on tiptoe but bare, like a little girl. Above all there was talking. I was never much of a talker, but with Luisa I was a brook that kept on bubbling, because for the first time in my life I was with someone who understood me. That was where the shameless nights and the chatter of the day connected: in the exhilaration of being known. And the person she showed me, the image in her eyes, was not some Caliban in the mirror; what I saw was enough to make living what I supposed it might be for others: joyful, light. That was why I loved her.