UNLIKE ZAHRA, Ernestina was clearly not a walker in the old ways. She was full of what probably sounded to her revolutionary utterances, one being that in no circumstances would she marry an Italian, and on second thoughts she would do her best not to marry at all, although this did not rule out the possibility of living with a suitable male – above all one who was not her parents’ choice. She also said that she despised religion, and more than religion itself the educated Latins of her acquaintance who paid lip-service to a faith they regarded as intellectually inadmissible. Sicilians, she said, were the worst of the lot, the insincere tag-end of a society in decay. She contrasted them with the English of the books she had read and the lectures she had attended, by comparison so devoid of deviousness, so upright in all their dealings, so bound by their word.
One of her theories – and it was one held by so many continentals – was that the weather had made them what they were. Ernestina had lived in hot climates and studied their enervating effect upon those who had to support them. Here the cold and the rain protected you from the siesta and kept you on your toes. Now the picnic over, she turned down a suggestion from Alexander that we should give up and go home, and urged further exploration of the sodden landscapes of Essex.
Another meeting was arranged for the next Saturday evening, but my instinct warned me that Zahra would not appear, and she did not. Instead Ernestina was there on time outside Euston Station, bearing a brief note from her to say that she had a cold. Reading through its sparse lines Alexander was inclined to the belief that he had seen the last of her. Meanwhile it was clear that Ernestina expected to be taken out, and the awkward prospect of a threesome was settled by his withdrawal.
Ernestina and I then walked down Tottenham Court Road and settled for dinner at the Corner House. St Giles’ Circus might have been Xanadu as far as either of us was concerned, and little did we know that the audience played to by Lionel Falkman and his Apaches was composed in the main of intelligent au pair girls, and that such Lyons establishments were beneath the notice of native Saturday night pleasure-seekers from Finchley and Golders Green. Lionel in his embroidered Balkan blouse made the routine round with his fiddle and we were pleased and a little surprised when he halted to play a few bars at our table. Ernestina had nothing but enthusiasm for her surroundings, for the elegance and restraint of the decor, the immaculate table linen, the sheen of the cutlery, the decorum of the clientèle, the democratic consideration with which customers summoned a waiter with an unobtrusive gesture instead of hissing or clapping their hands, the dignity with which he took the order, the wholesome simplicity of the food he brought and the noble indifference with which he collected a tip without so much as a glance at it. A suspicion grew that this was the first time she had been alone with a male escort, although there was grudging reference to an admirer who called at her house from time to time to hold her hand in a deferential fashion and recite Spanish lyrical poetry, which she thought was pretty poor stuff.
There was something she found distinctly Parisian about the atmosphere and style of the Corner House, although it lacked the familiar grubbiness of an equivalent establishment in Paris. She had seen something of the great cities of Europe, and described and compared them with vivacity. Here was cosmopolitanism indeed. After Santander in North Spain she had been sent to be educated at Beauvais, then back to the University of Madrid. She was fluent in five languages and prepared to quote and discuss Proust, Dante and Cervantes in the originals. All I could offer by way of linguistic accomplishment was a half-dozen sentences in Welsh, drilled into me in the infants’ school of the Pentrepoeth, and in the sphere of literature a nodding and uncritical acquaintance with Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. In spite of these cultural shortcomings and the fact that my travels had carried me no further than the soggy villages of South Wales, we found a good deal to say to each other.
After several more outings Ernestina peremptorily decided that the time had come for me to meet her parents. I was given no advance warning of this and therefore no time to prepare for the experience, which proved overwhelmingly strange. I was shown into a large room in the family house at 4 Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, which was lit as powerfully as if for a stage presentation. A strong overhead light in a chandelier was supported by a complex of lamps behind frosted panels at each corner of the ceiling. Pieces of period furniture had been placed here and there on a small prairie of magenta carpet, and my attention was captured by a gilded door, its panels incised with an abstract geometrical design. This was setting for the surrealistic happenings of a Buñuel film to come. I became aware of my crumpled suit of inferior cloth, of trousers that were too short and sleeves too long, of untended fingernails and creaking shoes, of the untidy parcel of books I was carrying and the badly folded evening paper stuck into my jacket pocket. ‘My father is very informal,’ Ernestina assured me. ‘He is easy to get on with, and you will like him. He will not understand your English, and you will not understand his Italian, but that doesn’t matter.’
A moment later the gilt door swung open and a short, corpulent man entered the room. He was dressed in a dark suit of conservative cut which he might have been wearing for the first time. His eyes were black and protruding, and his black hair was brushed close to his scalp and no expression showed in his face as he came towards us, taking short, shuffling steps. We shook hands, he gave me a quick, mechanical smile, and said something incomprehensible in a language which I presumed to be Italian in a cracked, grating voice that managed in some way to be pleasant. ‘Daddy is welcoming you to our house,’ Ernestina said. ‘He asks you to make yourself at home.’ I bowed and, stricken momentarily with my old speechlessness, produced a faint, inarticulate gargling, before seating myself, still gripping my frayed parcel, on the edge of a small golden throne. Thus begun my long acquaintance with Ernesto Giovanni Batista Corvaja, a singular man.
At this point my attention was distracted from his somewhat hypnotic stare by the entrance of his wife, Maria Corvaja, a short, smiling over-elaborately dressed woman who, to my enormous relief, turned out to speak excellent English. We sat facing each other and a maid brought wine in cut glasses that added their iota of scintillation to the sheen and the glitter of the surroundings. All the interiors of my life until this moment had possessed their nooks and their crannies, places where untidy parcels could be stuffed out of sight, the alcoves and the recesses of rustic architecture which promised concealment in emergency. Here we sat together transfixed by protocol in our cube of pitiless light, from which there was no escape.
Madame Corvaja poured out routine affabilities, criticised Stalin and praised the Marriage of Figaro being performed in London at that time. But it was clear that the real business of the moment was with Ernesto, from whom I was divided by a linguistic chaos. Sometimes, I judged by the rise in his tone of voice and his eyebrows that I was being questioned, and I was obliged to reply by mumbling almost anything that came into my head. I was irresistibly reminded of a waxwork grouping at Madame Tussaud’s, to which a miraculous animation had been added.
Eventually the presentation was at an end. Following instructions I bent over Madame Corvaja’s hand and brushed it with my lips, Ernesto gave me a limp hand, and renewed his perfunctory smile and the parents withdrew. I was told that in leaving the room Ernesto had said to his wife, ‘Machè? È un cenciauolo?’ (‘Has she brought a rag-picker home?’) for which, when his comment was repeated to his daughter, he received a severe reprimand.
A month or two later, to the huge surprise of those who knew us, we were married. It was to be a marriage with a difference, a bold experiment undertaken with open eyes, a step in a new direction. Society – in this case represented by Ernestina’s father and mother – would demand a signed legal paper, and they should have it. Thereafter concessions would stop. We agreed that a working partnership between a man and a woman could be a valuable arrangement, but there were to be no ties or sanctions. Ernestina would keep her own name, and we declared ourselves free to come and go as we pleased, and to part – if it ever came to that – without claim on each other. Needless to say, we were both earnest students of the doctrines of Bertrand Russell, and much as we agreed with his views on the subject of free love, we proposed to go a step further. This, we agreed, was not a love match. Romantic love was dismissed at best as an invention of Victorian novelists, at worst as a psychotic interlude. It was an arrangement inconceivable in any period outside the Thirties when revaluation of social customs could take extreme forms, and it was destined not to work as well as we had hoped it would. Later, in retrospect, I was more and more inclined to see the union as a way designed by Ernestina of freeing herself from the claustrophobia of family relationships, and from a Latin tradition she was at that time set upon renouncing – perhaps at any cost.
Inevitably all the circumstances attendant upon the ceremony were perfunctory and austere. Vows were exchanged in a quick embarrassed mumble in the prosaic setting of the Henrietta Street registry office, the witnesses being Alexander and a current Hindu mistress, said to be heiress to a Bombay garment-making fortune, who suffered from a streaming cold. Following the ceremony the Woolworths ring was thrown in the nearest dustbin, after which the ticklish problem presented itself of breaking the news to the Corvajas.
*
We found Ernesto and his wife under the blazing lights of the drawing room of Number 4, Gordon Street, neither of them having received the slightest warning of what was about to happen to them. Ernestina delivered a short take-it-or-leave-it speech, and as Ernesto listened, a grey patina seemed to spread across his cheeks. In silence he drew a hand across his face and the shadow was gone, and a defeated looseness of the jowls was drawn tight.
‘Show me the paper,’ he said in Italian, and Ernestina took the marriage certificate from her handbag and gave it to him. He read it very slowly, his eyes moving from side to side as he followed the lines of print, halted by so many unfamiliar words before plodding on. He examined the stamp and the signatures, nodding in the end his stunned conviction. At his back Madame Corvaja, a bloodless smile carved in her face, had been turned to a pillar of salt.
‘Non è uno scherzo, Papa,’ Ernestina assured him, eyes sparkling with a kind of triumph. I began to understand how firmly she was in command of the situation, and how in some way this was for her a moment of victory in her relationship with her father.
Suddenly Ernesto shook his head – as if to free himself from a web clinging to his face. He straightened and smiled at me, a little wolfishly, I thought. What I was witnessing was a classic example of the stoic Sicilian reaction to irretrievable calamity, known in their enigmatic island as ‘swallowing the claws of the toad’. As if he had remembered an essential part of a religious ceremony, he next stepped forward a little stiffly, and took me into his embrace, stretching to his full height to squeeze his cheeks against mine and kiss the lobe of each ear. For a moment he rummaged through his stock of English for the proper words. ‘I will give you my blood,’ he then said.
Madame Corvaja, released from her spell, had rushed from the room and was now back with a maid, carrying a tray with champagne.
I moved on a temporary basis into the Corvajas’ house, being instantly and wholly accepted as a member of the family. The situation is a familiar Mediterranean one where, by the survival of an ancient custom, it is normal for a husband to live – often for some years – with his in-laws before setting up a separate household, although the reverse is less frequently encountered. The tensions inherent in such an arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon world are rarely present in such cases, and the English stereotype of the overbearing mother-in-law is absent. Almost overnight I was absorbed into the traditional Latin family. Being a Sicilian household this ‘Latin-ness’, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, was exaggerated, seeming to call upon the individual member to surrender a little of his separate identity in exchange for the solidarity and protection of the tightly knit family group. Despite this highly traditional background, the senior Corvajas faced each new situation as it arose in an alien land with an extraordinary openness of mind, and whatever astonishment they may have felt when Ernestina announced to them that we should be occupying separate rooms, nothing of this showed in the quasi-oriental composure of their faces.
Neither of the senior Corvajas ever permitted themselves a criticism of me, except on the single occasion when, as we were about to visit a restaurant together, Ernesto suggested that I should smarten up my appearance. To this, as if inspired by an afterthought, he added, ‘– and always strive to develop character.’
Rootlessness and isolation were prime factors in our being married. I was isolated and Ernestina was even more so, isolation in her case being largely a product of the excessive cosmopolitanism of her upbringing. The Corvajas were a family of Spanish origin who had settled in Sicily in the seventeenth century while it still remained attached to the Spanish Kingdom, and it was perhaps to retain some link with the ancestral country that Ernestina had been sent to complete her education in Spain. It had been first Sicily, then the United States, followed by Spain, France and England. Thus she had never lived long enough in any country to soak up the prejudices and adopt the standpoints by which a personality is to some extent defined. She, like her parents, was devoid of class-consciousness, religious belief, and patriotism. There was not even an anchorage for her in a true native tongue which, even for a polyglot, is the vehicle for thought, because she spoke English, Spanish, Italian and French with equal fluency, and I am sure that there were times when she was not sure which language she was speaking. She was in urgent need of a tradition, a sense of history, allegiances, attitudes and a firm point of view, and I was the last person to be of any assistance to her in the attainment of any of these things.
Imprisoned within the intensely parochial life of the outer suburbs, the working day surrendered to sales patter for yeast tablets and the fraudulent elixir, the glum pick-ups in Church Street, Enfield and Hilly Fields Park, the teeth-baring bonhomie of the saloon bar of the George and Dragon, and the Saturday night hop at the Oddfellows’ Hall, I had lifted up my eyes to the expansive horizons of the cosmopolitan world. But the situation in which I found myself was not quite that. In their way – and with good reason, as I was to find – the Corvajas joined me in the search for escape, although we pursued always fugitive ends in markedly different ways.
There were four in the Corvaja family, including a teenage son, Eugene, who went to a London school, and was becoming rapidly and fairly painlessly Anglicised. How far this process had gone can be gauged from his reaction to a family ceremony which had taken place a few years before. A number of Ernesto’s friends had called at the house, and Eugene had been instructed to remove his trousers and climb on a table to permit his penis to be examined, to ritual cries of astonishment and delight. This would have been of no importance to a Sicilian boy steeped in the local tradition, but, infected as he was by this time with Anglo-Saxon prudery and reserve, it was an incident Eugene remembered with some embarrassment.
My mother-in-law, Maria, conducted the usual household tasks aided by a pair of young Welsh girls imported from some wretched mining village in Wales, who suffered the normal degree of exploitation that was the lot of so many of the daughters of that martyred country. What time that was left over from her severe and exacting surveillance of their work she would devote to the making of unsuitable shepherdesses’ dresses, or the reading of literary classics in several languages. The possession of a near-photographic memory – this she had passed on to her daughter – enabled her to read at great speed and to devour books at a rate of never less than one a day.
Ernesto might have been regarded by an outsider as the most interesting member of the family. His ancestor, Prince Corvaja, had bought his princedom (one of 147) from the Spanish crown for 2,000 scudi, and built the small but exquisite Corvaja Palace in Taormina, now a national monument. Some of the new princes and dukes who had had to scrape together the money to pay for their titles remained poor for the rest of their lives, others became some of the richest men in Europe. The Corvajas did well out of sulphur, scooped up by child slaves in the most fiendish of all mines, crawling through tunnels that were too narrow to admit an adult. These were the facts of history and his family’s past which Ernesto declined to discuss. Withdrawn in manner as he was, and dressed always as if attending at an important funeral, he was obsessed by an appearance of gaiety, with brilliance and light. The decorated gilt panels on the doors of his drawing room were his own work, and their Arabian motifs and geometric abstraction were repeated throughout the house. Having finished with the doors he began work on the ceilings, painting them with cheerful and indulgent scenes of fat-limbed putti bouncing on haloed clouds, his personal inspiration reinforced by Michelangelo’s oeuvre in the Sistine Chapel, of which he possessed an excellent set of hand-painted illustrations.
Strong light shone everywhere in the Corvajas’ house. They eschewed shadows and the dark. There was no unlit corner, no spookiness under the stairs, no heavily draped curtains behind which an intruder could lurk. Every cupboard, when opened, was flooded with refulgence from high-powered lamps. Occasionally, when it seemed to Ernesto that a total of several thousand candle-power offered insufficient illumination, a spotlight of the kind used on a film set would be switched on as soon as a visitor appeared in the doorway. Sometimes Ernesto, described in his passport as a diamond dealer, would take a fine lawn handkerchief from his pocket in which, in professional style, he sometimes carried his diamonds. Placing a square of black cloth on the table immediately beneath the chandelier he would pour the diamonds from the handkerchief which, as they fell, made a faintly watery sound, the hiss and crackle of a high, thin waterfall tumbling offer a distant cliff. I had no evidence of his ever buying or selling a single diamond, but this was an operation from which he clearly derived much aesthetic satisfaction.
*
The central feature of life in the Corvaja household was the evening meal. By day the house was a quiet one. Ernesto was normally engaged in a struggle with problems of perspective in ceiling-painting in one of the upper rooms. Maria would be gulping down snatches of Stendhal in brief interludes from the vigilance maintained over the work of her Welsh drudges. Eugene was at school and Ernestina had just taken employment with the firm of Lever Brothers where she worked on the translation of confidential documents into a number of languages under security conditions resembling those of a military establishment.
In the evening the family came together for the dinner ritual, conducted in a scene of the greatest animation. In their contacts with outsiders the Corvajas were quiet and undemonstrative, and although I have no way of knowing that this was the case, it was my theory that they sought release from the restraints they imposed upon themselves each day in what may have been a traditional Sicilian way. Breakfast and lunch were regarded as unimportant, and consumed rapidly and in near silence, but the evening meal was elaborate and lengthy, eaten in the usual glare of lights, and to music – always excerpts from the operas of Verdi or Puccini, to which the elder Corvajas were passionately devoted – played on a first-rate gramophone turned up to an almost unendurable pitch.
Ernesto imported his own wine from Sicily, a lusty, full-bodied vintage with an alcoholic content causing it to be bracketed with sherry for the purpose of the payment of duty. The wine was imported in casks and siphoned with a rubber tube into innumerable bottles – a task which occupied many hours. By the time it was over, Ernesto’s normally cadaverous complexion was suffused by the vinous flush caused by unavoidable swallowing over a long period of tiny amounts of wine. Under this unsuspected intoxication his normal reserve dropped on one occasion, and I was astonished to hear him talking of Palermo of the far past, shaking his head at the folly of which the young of his day had been capable. One day he had been driving with a friend in the Parco della Favorita, and the coachman, boasting of his skill with the whip, had pointed to a cat by the roadside and said to them, ‘If I can kill it with a single blow, will you eat it?’ The bet was taken, and the coachman killed the cat, and Ernesto and his friend descended from the carriage and set about preparing the meal. Branches for firewood were taken from convenient bushes, someone was sent for a pot, for olive oil and tomato sauce, and the stew was prepared and eaten on the spot. ‘It was impossible to welsh on the bet,’ Ernesto said. ‘A man of honour cannot go back on his word.’
The park was a place where up-and-coming young males went to prove themselves, sometimes in a desperate fashion. Another acquaintance of Ernesto’s, seeking to ‘make his bones’, as the Sicilians put it, provoked an encounter with a prestigious rival, and received a knife thrust delivered with such practised skill that he was virtually disembowelled, without however the actual severance of an intestine (Ernesto, who may have been joking, said that such thrusts were practised on pigs or sheep). It was a moment, as the victor wiped his knife on his immaculate handkerchief, bowed smilingly and withdrew, which called for coolheaded action, and this the wounded piciotto took. Gathering his entrails with no signs of dismay, let alone panic, into his hat, he stopped a passing fiacre, got in, and had himself driven to hospital. In a couple of months he was out again and back in the park, settling to wait for weeks, months, if necessary years, for the opportunity to settle accounts. ‘He showed great presence of mind,’ Ernesto said.
After two or three glasses of Ernesto’s powerful wine an extraordinary change came over the members of the family. As if by agreement they began to argue with each other, arguments leading to quarrels of a violence I had never experienced before, with members of the family screaming to make themselves heard over the powerful operatic bellowing of Caruso or Tito Gobbi. Whenever this happened the terror-stricken cats shot under the table, and the fairly tame kestrel, equally startled, took off from the reproduction Donatello’s David on which it normally perched, to flap in a distraught fashion round the room before coming to rest again on David’s head upon which it would invariably release a copious dropping.
These nightly disputes arose over the most trivial causes, differences of opinion as to the highest building in New York, or the number of children given birth to by Queen Victoria. They were accompanied by terrible oaths in various languages, Eugene having recently been able to increase the repertoire of family invective by listing all the swear-words in English he had picked up in school.
Suddenly, at a moment when I felt sure that real violence, even tragedy, was not to be averted, the storm was past, and reason and urbanity reigned again. Ernesto would settle himself, benign and contemplative, with a small brandy, Maria might pat her temples with eau de cologne, while Eugene would avail himself of the moment of reconciliation to take off ‘Your Tiny Hands are Frozen’, and replace it inconspicuously with the new Duke Ellington.
The two most vociferous disputants were always Ernestina and her father, and despite the almost purely ritual character of these daily rows I began to suspect beneath the familiar histrionics the reality of a latent antagonism. It was some months before Ernestina admitted that so far as she was concerned this was the case.
The story was that shortly before being packed off to school in Spain, a nanny had been brought into the house to look after her brother and herself, a pretty girl about whom her mother had instantly had her doubts. Ostensibly the girl was the daughter of an old friend Ernesto wanted to help out, but, employing a private detective, Maria soon discovered that she had been Ernesto’s mistress for some time before he had conceived the daring but ill-starred plan for making her person more readily available by smuggling her into the family home. With extraordinary professional competence the detective had been able to discover Ernesto’s password by which he obtained access to his safe deposit in Chancery Lane, from which a number of letters were recovered full of amatory material of the most explicit character. What I was not told, but learned from a gossiping in-law much later, was that Maria waited for Ernesto just inside the front door when he returned home that evening and shot him at close range with the ridiculous little .22 pearl-handled revolver she still carried in her handbag when I first knew her. The occasion was dramatic but the damage slight, for the bullet, aimed at the heart, stuck in the gristle under the collar bone. Ernesto took a taxi round to the doctor who readily extracted the slug, and was back within the hour, by which time Maria had doused the nanny with the contents of a slop-pail kept ready for the moment and thrown her into the street. A fulsome reconciliation followed, and life at Gordon Street went on as if nothing had happened.
It remained a mystery to me that, while the relationship between husband and wife had settled to an obviously affectionate one, Ernestina should have decided to take up a cause her mother no longer had the slightest desire to defend. I could only suspect the existence of obscure psychological factors of which Ernestina herself may have been unconscious. Up to this time the relationship between father and daughter seemed to have been an exceptionally close one. Ernesto had made sure that his eldest child should have – as he saw it – the best of everything, while up to and through her adolescence she made it quite clear that he had occupied the centre of the stage of her life. Each saw the other as a paragon. Everyone complimented Ernesto on the possession of a beautiful and talented daughter, on her great store of precocious knowledge, her charm and her wit. She in turn constantly witnessed the deference shown her father by visitors to the house from Europe and the United States, how they bowed themselves into his presence and, if from Sicily, frequently pressed his hand to their lips. Now, suddenly, womanhood had taken her unawares, demoting an immortal father to common humanity, exposing his innumerable fallibilities, and she was guilt-ridden and resentful that her love for him should have failed. So this sordid little passage salvaged from the past had come to her aid. It was impossible to say to him, ‘I no longer love you.’ Far easier, ‘You betrayed my mother.’
The watershed, as it seemed to me, in the relationship between my father-in-law and my wife, was reached as a result of the episode of the emerald ring, although this too, I suspected, was no more than an excuse to open up a campaign on a new front, when the quarrel over the fake nanny had begun to flag.
Ernesto had bought his daughter several valuable necklaces, a diamond-encrusted wristwatch, a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring, and for her seventeenth birthday he had made the journey to Santander to present her with a plain gold ring in which was set a large emerald.
She was proud of the journey, undertaken with some effort at that time, as well as the ring itself. ‘He was three days on the train,’ she said. ‘All that way to be with me on my birthday. I was the envy of the whole school. The diamond ring is more valuable, but I don’t like it so much.’ She would slip off the emerald ring, twist it under a lamp and laugh with pleasure, or hold it against a background of a silk scarf, or her dress, so that the emerald tempered the colour of the silk with its secret viridescent flash. Spanish was the language reserved for the praise of the emerald: ‘Ay qué bonito! Mira los colores. Es exquísito. No te parece?’
But one day Ernestina’s suspicions about the ring seem to have been aroused. She took it to a Bond Street jeweller, under the pretence of offering it for sale, and he put a glass in his eye, examined the back of the stone, shook his head and handed it back. Briefly he told her that the emerald was a ‘chip’ cut from a larger gem and that, possessing a flat base, was of far less value than a perfect stone shaped as a rhombohedron.
Possibly by Ernestina’s design I was present when the inevitable confrontation took place.
‘Did you know the emerald was a chip?’ Ernestina asked, deadly calm in her manner.
Ernesto said, ‘You were a young girl. Only an expert can tell the difference. It was an expensive ring.’
‘You deceived me,’ Ernestina said. She took the ring from her finger, walked to the window and threw it into the street. Now she had discovered a personal grudge with which to reinforce vicarious injury.
*
The formal visit by the Corvajas to my parents in Enfield took place shortly before the opening of the breach. Ernestina and I had been to Enfield on many occasions, but by the time the Corvajas had brought themselves to the pitch of journeying to the outer suburbs a coldness had developed between Ernestina and my mother, the fault lying largely with my mother. Ernestina got on well enough with my father, who was warm in manner, more adaptable, and could even be gallant, but my mother exhibited all the traditional defects of an Anglo-Saxon – or in this case, Welsh – mother-in-law, and it was clear to all of us that Ernestina would never be received by her as a daughter, however much Ernesto and Maria Corvaja treated me as a son.
The Corvajas rarely left their house except to visit the opera or once in a while for some celebratory meal, eaten in an upstairs private room in Gennaro’s restaurant in Frith Street. The journey to Enfield involved them in much forethought and planning. Sicilians are the most urban of people, with an affection for bricks and mortar and the consoling familiarities of the home. Largely this is a response to an environment which has compelled people to draw close together for protection, in a country with no isolated houses, no villages and no town so small that it could not muster a defence force in an emergency to fight off an attack by an armed band. As late as the period immediately following the last war there were some twenty of these at large, spreading terror through the countryside.
In the Corvaja household one minded one’s own business and asked no questions. So engrained is this traditional Sicilian reserve that I was sometimes inclined to the theory that normal human curiosity, as we understand it, did not exist among them. Sometimes however, grudgingly, reluctantly, sensitive facts could no longer be suppressed, and what began to look like more and more extraordinary security measures controlling the family’s movement had to be explained. Ernesto, Maria explained, had to be on his guard against a visitor from America who might visit London with the intention of killing him. Hence the ineffective pistol carried in her handbag. Hence the imposing snub-nosed (and loaded) revolver in the top drawer of Ernesto’s desk. She added one further piece of information: that Ernesto had narrowly escaped death in an ambush a few days before they had taken the first ship out of New York, his hat on this occasion having been blown off his head. On these matters Ernesto himself preferred to add no comment.
The visit to Enfield must have seemed to the Corvajas as novel and strange as a traveller’s first experience of the Amazon rainforest. They knew nothing of England outside a square mile of London’s West End, and the ten-mile drive in the old Bugatti through some of Europe’s seediest suburbs came as an eye-opener to them. Maria, a kindly and compassionate woman, although imbued with a ‘let them eat cake’ attitude where the poor were concerned, could not understand how people could consent to live in Tottenham and Edmonton, and why there were no taxis about. Forty Hill, Enfield, bewildered the Corvajas for other reasons. Apart from the rusty planes growing in Gordon Square, Ernesto had seen few trees since the old days of the Parco della Favorita in Palermo. Now, suddenly, he found himself deep in flowering cherry orchards, reacting to them with a curiosity not wholly free from suspicion. Sicilians had good reason to distrust wooded places, so much so that precautionary deforestation had left a single sizeable reserve of woods in the whole country, the Ficuzza, which still gave shelter, I was informed, to numerous outlaws.
Our small house must have astonished them too, in its terrible vulnerability. We trudged together up the garden path, and it occurred to me that this might have been the first time in twenty or thirty years that the Corvajas had walked on anything but lush carpets and city pavements. The unfamiliar presence and scent of foreigners set all the local dogs barking, and Ernesto nodded his approval of their outcry. It was good to have reliable watchdogs about the place.
The meeting, from the very beginning, showed signs of being a great success, and the Corvajas, who had probably prepared themselves to crunch on the claws of more toads, were clearly delighted to find that my father and mother were normal human beings, eccentric perhaps in their choice of living accommodation, but no more than that, certainly harmless and reasonably intelligent in a cold-blooded English way. Ernestina, who was exceedingly vivacious when pleased, made a successful effort to be kind to my mother, and my father nodded instant agreement when I asked him to switch off the musical box tinkling ‘Guide Me Oh Thou Great Redeemer’ in the background.
After the brilliant emptiness of life at Gordon Street, our modest house, the garden and the surrounding orchards seemed to the Corvajas encrusted with small wonders, which they investigated with the delight of children collecting offerings left by the sea on a sandy beach. The exotic birds in my father’s garden aviary entranced them, and Ernesto wondered if he could not build something similar into one of his bathrooms. My father amazed them with the present of a pot plant which had been in some way cajoled into becoming host to mistletoe. Best of all for them were the weird-looking Polish Fancy chickens that lurched about the place half-blinded by their feathered crests, and Ernesto took the name of the last remaining supplier, determined to buy some to relieve the squalor of his back garden. Although both my father and Ernesto could only normally be understood by members of their own family, it was quite extraordinary the degree of communication they established, although my father admitted later that it had proved a disappointment to find that his dog Latin did not help.
Maria, grossly over-painted, frilled and flounced, danced from plant to plant in the garden, insisting that everything she found growing there was edible if cooked with the right herbs. For once the sun shone, the trees held their umbrellas of blossom over us, hundreds of blackbirds were in full song. A spotty local girl on the arm of her lover arrived to deliver a pot of cream, and Maria said it reminded her of a scene from Cavalleria Rusticana. What could be greater tribute to Forty Hill, Enfield on a May morning than that it should be seen so closely to imitate the opera? Life, displayed here in so many small facets of delight, must have presented a moment of joy of the kind the Corvajas had not known for years.
The Corvajas had brought with them the ritual gift of panetone, the bread of love from pagan times, exchanged by all Italians on feast days, and in particular at Christmas. When removed from its festive wrappings of blue and gold paper, what remains is in fact stale bread dressed up to look like cake, but my parents munched it with a civilised pretence of relish. Ernesto had also brought a bottle of Gancia along to wash the stuff down with, and this was opened up. My father had his fair share of Welsh hypocrisy where alcohol was concerned, and normally let himself be seen only drinking Wincarnis, which he claimed – despite his contempt for medicines – that he took for health reasons. He had to be persuaded that Gancia was its Italian equivalent before he consented to take a glass – although this was soon followed by a second.
It was inevitable that my mother, refusing to be guided by me, should have gone to her friends for advice as to what her foreign guests would like to eat. The general agreement was that where Italians were concerned one could not go wrong with spaghetti, and this view received further support from the strong body of vegetarians in the movement, who declared this to be a vegetarian dish. When informed at the last moment that this was what was proposed, my heart sank, for spaghetti like panetone is ritual food, bearing as prepared in the average English home little resemblance in appearance, substance or flavour to the Italian original. The Corvajas, moreover, were tremendous gourmets. Maria was an exponent of the refined north Italian cuisine in which a strong French influence is to be detected, while Ernesto’s preference was for typical Sicilian dishes. These suggested the survival of a Moorish tradition, and whenever an excuse could be found the meat they contained was spiced with such ingredients as ginger, cumin, coriander, cardamoms, and saffron to which might be added various kinds of chillies, and above all an abundance of garlic. The Corvajas rarely bothered with spaghetti, but when they did it was cooked with rare expertise, and finnicky attention to detail.
My mother led me away to inspect the dish in course of preparation. I found it to be a coarse version of macaroni, the only form of pasta to be had locally, a rank of thick-walled, rubbery tubes simmering in cream in a dish under a layer of tomato sauce squeezed from a tube. My mother from a cookery book which suggested a cooking time of thirty minutes, but she was allowing forty minutes to be on the safe side. By this time I foresaw that the macaroni would be reduced to a pulp.
In due course we were seated at table and the guests were invited to serve themselves from the ochreous mess sizzling in the dish. Gastronomic disaster was confronted by the Corvajas in the same adventurous spirit with which the other incidents of their day in the country had been faced. The Gancia was now at an end, but my father produced a bottle of Wincarnis, of which, for his health’s sake when the rest had been served, he permitted himself a half-glass.
Despite everything, and largely due to the Corvaja enthusiasm and resilience, things were going remarkably well. Ernestina had put on the best possible front with my mother, and insisted on helping out with small domestic tasks, and now they frequently exchanged sickly smiles. Watching my father closely however, I detected certain familiar and worrying symptoms. They were picked up by my mother too, who began to wave her hands about vigorously as if to dissipate a cloud of smoke. Ernesto and his wife paid not the slightest attention to this behaviour which they probably assumed to be part of a traditional welcoming ceremony in a British household.
I knew only too well now what was about to happen. After a decade of mediumship my father had never developed predictability or controllability. At his best his performance probably surpassed that of the average professional medium, but these, whatever their limitations, accomplished what was asked of them in a subdued and orderly fashion, and with as much regard for the niceties of time and place as, say, an insurance broker. My father had never achieved anything approaching this bland professionalism, and there was something haphazard and all too spontaneous about what he had to offer. A group which had gathered for a seance might sit for hours on end in a fog of incense, to chant Sankey and Moody and set the musical box endlessly tinkling, and absolutely nothing would happen. Father dealt in the unexpected. It was a painful fact that at no other time could he call up the souls of the dead with greater ease than at the table set for Sunday lunch, with possibly a couple of relatives present, when without the slightest encouragement or preamble and before the guests had had time to dip their spoons into their soup, he would unleash his apocalyptic torrent.
These experiences, to which I never became hardened, caused me paralysing embarrassment. The first time at the age of twelve or thirteen, when trapped in such an ordeal, I scrambled under the table and remained there until it was all over, and later I got out of the room as fast as ever I could, on picking up the first warning sign. But now, knowing what was coming, there was no escape. My mother’s gesticulations of exorcism would clearly fail, and the stern commands with which she ordered the hovering spirit not to intrude upon our lunch party would also, as I could see, have no effect. My father closed his eyes, and began a soft, preliminary braying, the knife and fork fell from his hands, and he began to writhe and sweat.
All these goings-on appeared to escape the Corvajas’ notice, as they continued to tackle their macaroni with imperturbability. Ernestina, who had been warned by me that such things could happen, looked down and dickered with the mess on her plate. My father, ceasing to writhe, had now begun to babble softly, and this was a danger sign. My mother, realising that the thing was out of control, had given up and was murmuring a prayer, eyes closed. I gripped the edges of my chair, ready for the worst, while the unshakeable Corvajas continued their mastication.
There was a moment of electric silence, then a child’s voice spoke. ‘Mamma, mamma, mamma.’ It was impossible to continue with the farce of pretending to eat. We exchanged bewildered, stricken looks. My embarrassment bordered on panic. I longed to get up and dash from the room.
‘Mamma,’ the voice said again. ‘Mamma.’ It was thin, and unearthly and troubled, and I felt Maria at my side go tense.
‘Yes, darling. Darling, I’m here. This is mamma.’
Now I was confronted with the second shocking aspect of this situation. Maria Corvaja, a self-proclaimed atheist, had been taken by surprise by belief.
‘Mamma, oh mamma.’
‘I’m here, darling. I’m listening,’ Maria cried out. ‘Where are you? Talk to me.’
The thin, whining little voice had become progressively weaker, and now it trailed off into silence. It was all over. My father opened his eyes, blinking, still far away from us, and my mother was ready with a sponge and cold water with which she sponged his forehead. Then we all got up and went into the garden, where Maria affirmed her conviction that the voice was that of her second child, who had died some ten years before. For me the voice could have been that of any young child, but it remained a puzzle and always would, how it could have been produced by the vocal cords of a man of sixty. I had no way of knowing whether my father had ever heard of the existence of this second daughter.
The visit had two lasting effects on the Corvajas’ lives. Maria became a clandestine Spiritualist, although to me her furtive incursions into that uncharted and illusory territory in which my parents had so long wandered in search of their lost one, suggested little more than the exchange of resignation for heartache.
An unimportant development was that Ernesto now became even more of an animal-lover than he had been, adding to the dog, the cats, and the tame hawk so often encountered in Italian families, a brood of chickens in which he delighted, and which for him typified the delights of the rustic scene. Since Polish Fancies and other freakish breeds of the kind recommended by my father could not be procured at short notice, my mother-in-law went to the pet shop in Tottenham Court Road, bought a dozen week-old Rhode Island Reds, plus a sizeable coop, and installed this in their bedroom – a large semi-basement chamber in which an almost complete absence of daylight was compensated for, in Corvaja style, by a huge excess of electrical voltage.
The chicks’ stay in the coop was short. During the daylight they had the run of the room, fouling the Bokhara carpet to their heart’s content, and at night they slept in the matrimonial bed. Both Corvajas took an interest in their diet. They were fed the best Italian food, chopped mortadella, Parma ham, and rice flavoured with garlic and saffron, plus occasional cannibalistic treats of chicken flesh cooked in various complex styles. The result from this remarkable start in life was that they all developed extreme cases of rickets, staggering through the basement rooms, balanced on their wing tips, upon grossly bent and distorted legs, although otherwise in good shape and possessed of exceptional sexual energy. Like all other mild eccentricities abounding in the Corvaja household, the poultry-keeping mania was accepted by Ernesto and her brother with extreme phlegm.
All in all the trip to Enfield could be counted a success. The Corvajas and my parents had taken a liking to each other, and Ernestina now did her best to conquer her dislike for my mother, and to make allowances for her absurdly over-possessive attitude towards her only son. There followed regular visits by my parents to Gordon Street, where they were entertained – in the preferred English way, as the Corvajas believed – invariably with the accompaniment of hot crumpets and strong tea.