Molly Fielding’s daughter Alice and the woman Molly Fielding had liked and had left a ring to were sitting together drinking under the stone canopy and inside the forest of pillars of the great piazza of Cremona. It was a month or so after old Molly’s funeral.
They had been a little nervous of going on holiday together. It had been rashly, emotionally arranged, the ghost of the old woman the only bond, for as girls they had not got on, Alice too vehement and self-conscious for the other one.
And their lives and marriages had been very different. The friend was a reticent widow whom Alice had always found rather dull, and Alice was a recent divorcée whom the friend had always thought shallow and too talkative. They were relieved now to find that their conventional upbringing was helping them through the blind spots and the dark pools, that they knew the antique rules for Englishwomen of a certain age on holiday abroad. ‘Mustn’t forget the postcards. God, so expensive!’ ‘How about doing our sums? You did these drinks. I paid for the tummy medicine’—and so on. They had looked up assiduously the opening and closing times of the galleries, underlining everything marked with two or three stars.
Alcohol had helped as it does after funerals. They were drinking vermouth now out of little gold-rimmed glasses shaped like convolvus flowers and thinking contentedly that it would soon be lunchtime when there would be wine. After a long siesta they would then set off and wander in the cathedral again, maybe take a little carriage and jingle round the streets of the city. And then—my dear, a divine dinner in the dark hotel with the dazzling white cloths thick as blankets, and those great jars of crystallised fruits gleaming on the central table. ‘Like Mantegnas,’ said the educated friend, and Alice said, ‘And we’ll try the fegato.’
They sighed and leaned back gazing at the piazza; sixtyish, well-heeled, well-dressed and pleased not to be young.
‘I’m pleased not to be young.’ The friend examined old Molly’s ring on her finger.
‘Italy tore me to bits, you know, when I was young,’ said Alice.
‘All that passion. God—how did we survive? How did we get anything else done? Why does time go by so much faster now that we’ve nothing to do—nothing to obsess us? D’you realise, nobody will ever kiss either of us any more.’
The other one looked across the sunny square crisscrossed by Romeos and Juliets on glittering scooters. The girls tossed their hair and clasped their hands round the boys’ waists, rested their beautiful faces sideways against the boys’ leather backs. Frighteningly positive, they didn’t look as if they dawdled over kissing. The friend knew, and so did Alice, that she had meant to say fuck not kiss, but it had not been possible. They were too old to be able to say aloud the once unthinkable word without seeming outrageous or pathetic, just as they could not wear a skirt halfway up the thigh.
It was not characteristic, rather drunk-sounding, for Alice to say next, ‘You can tell when women have stopped being kissed, it’s when the lips go indistinct round the edges and the lipstick goes jammy. That was one of Ma’s little adages: “Over fifty and lipstick goes jammy.”’
‘I fell in love with a German in Florence my first time in Italy,’ said the friend, ‘when I was eighteen. Just after the war. He looked wonderful, like Galahad. I was confused. We’d all just seen the Belsen films. He was so gentle.’
‘I came to Italy as an au pair about then,’ said Alice, ‘to a grand Roman family. Their last au pair had died in a bath at the other end of the palazzo and they hadn’t found her for three days. They thought it was funny! So poor! They were so poor there was only pasta. I did learn how to eat it though, not to wind it round the fork like the servants do, or so I was told. Some foreign royalty came once and the daughter really did take down curtains to make a dress. Eighteenth-century curtains. All dust in the folds. It was a wonderful dress, too. The Conte made the usual passes. No, he wasn’t the one. It was the gardener. Under the olives. On the Campagna. Marvellous. Ma came out to get me back when I wouldn’t come home. Thank God, I suppose. Well—I suppose. She dragged me off to Parma to buy a ham on the way back! “So cheap, dear.” A great purple shank of it. And me weeping.’
‘Molly could be pretty ruthless. I saw a photo of her mother once, your grandmother. I suppose that’s where it came from.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Alice. ‘No, no, not from her mother. Not from Granny Ironside. Granny put up a good act but she wasn’t ruthless in the least.’
‘But you never could have met her, Alice. She died before your mother married. How do you know she wasn’t ruthless?’
‘Mother told me. In a way.’
‘But she told me, Molly told me, not long ago, the day she came to lunch last winter and ran about the common, Molly told me that she’d been very frightened of her mother. Said she was a cruel and terrible woman. Well, but you and I talked about it. Awful.’
‘Oh, Granny Ironside frightened her all right. Granny Ironside wasn’t exactly maternal. But she wasn’t ruthless. It was Molly, my ma, who was the ruthless one. Pitiless to herself, too. Ma dealt with her passions like a nun. She seemed—well, she was—affectionate later on, but, you know, amusing, charming Ma was really cold as a fish. She was totally unintuitive and she hadn’t a clue about her mother. Her mother needed a mighty rescue.’
‘You mean from—where was it—Wigan?’
‘Shipley. No. Not a rescue from Shipley. Granny Ironside needed a rescue from her awful fate, her awful, sealed-off, uneducated, empty life. She was a more significant woman than Ma. She went a bit mad, you know. A lot of those women did. That photo of her is a bit mad when you look at it. Dangerously pent-up. She’s supposed to have fallen in love with someone absolutely impossible after Grandpa Ironside died. Ma never said who, but she knew. Something to do with a measles epidemic, so maybe it was a doctor. No, I mean it. God knows who he was, it’s all garbled. Look, Granny was ugly and sixty and over-rich and the only man she’d ever known was a Shipley builder who left the town only once to go on a builders’ spree to Dusseldorf and was out every night of the week in a Shipley pub drinking with his men. She had one child—Ma. Ma, who liked only fast cars, and was cold and bored. Poor Granny—no lover. Nobody loved her. Nobody really liked her much. She didn’t know how to be likable. And she’d grown far too rich for her country childhood friends.’
‘But there was a lover? You said so.’
‘I said she fell in love. She was being manipulated in some way, so the story goes. Ma knew it all but she pretended to forget. What she did say was that Granny and nobody else except the solicitor knew that Grandpa had left all the money to her, to Molly, when she was thirty-five. Do you know, it’s the cruellest thing a man can do, a will like that? No, maybe it’s crueller not to tell the wife and let her find out. Granny did know. All Grandpa Ironside left her was his tinted photograph to wear as a brooch. She wore it, too. And full mourning for a year. D’you think she was hoping for pity when Ma came into the money? The lover I suppose must just have faded out.’
‘But wasn’t she a dragon? I can see that Settimo photograph now. The first and famous Settimo. My mother had a copy. Settimos are collectors’ pieces now.’
‘That was the only way she knew how to look. She’d never had a touch of tenderness. D’you know how Granny Ironside died? Do you know what happened?’
‘Well—nobody knew. That’s what I heard. It was here in Italy. In Cremona. Something not good about it. Didn’t Molly somehow miss the funeral? Some scandal?’
‘I know. I know Ma’s version anyway. I got the hang of it through Ma’s craziness at the end. I know why she was scared of Grandma’s ghost. The ghost that lay in wait.’
‘But what had she done to Molly?’
‘She took her off. Made her leave Shipley. A matter of hours after she realised the lover wanted only Ma’s money. She rushed Ma out of England. All Shipley laughing.’
‘At Molly?’
‘No. At her. At poor old Florrie. She’d been conned by the mysterious lover and they all knew. She, iron Mrs. Ironside of The Mount. She’d been wild for him the last weeks. Hung about outside his house, followed him in the street, showered him with presents. Then she must have found Ma was after him too, or he was after Ma when he somehow found out about the money. She wasn’t going to leave Ma behind for him, so she swept her off to Italy. Ma (can you believe it?) caught measles. I haven’t found out all about these measles or where they came from but there was something. Ma had measles not badly but badly enough and when they’d reached Milan and she was getting better she used to sit forlorn in the hotel while Granny went violently about seeing the sights. There’s a Last Supper or something. Well, in the hotel there was a middle-aged Englishman in a nice checked suit. He had sandy hair like Ma’s father. He was the only man Ma had ever been in a room alone with and he was as bored as she was with Italy and they talked about cars. He drove a Lagonda and lived near Epsom. Perfect for her, my old Pa. They were engaged in five days.
‘She never said a word of course. Granny hurtled her off to Florence and Siena, and bashed her round galleries, churches, the lot, beating down her own humiliation, wild as a fury till Ma was tired out and said, “No more. I want to go home.”
‘They had reached here, Cremona. Granny had got stranger than ever. She was tramping the city alone at night. She would come back at midnight and fling herself across a bed. Whaleboned, stout Victorian matron, taught that you never go out unchaperoned and never show your love.
‘The evening Ma broke down and said she was going to get married to the man in the checked suit they were in the hotel dining room. It might even have been this one. It probably was. It’s still the only good one. Granny took a great bottle of those fruit things and flung it to the ground and smashed it. And she took hold of Ma round the neck and shook and shook her. Yes. The management had to separate them and put Granny Ironside to bed. Can you imagine! “Inglese! Non possibile!” etc. And off goes Ma on the train the same night, all alone, to Milan and the founder member of the Lagonda Club. My father-to-be.’
‘But whatever—?’
‘Whatever happened to Florence Ironside? She caught the measles and died. She “had them on her”, as they say. She caught them badly and her heart gave way. She’s buried here—well, you know that, I told you. My poor old grandmamma. Daddy came from Milan and saw to it all. Consul, telegrams, funeral. Ma told me that he thought she should have come back here with him, but she sat it out in Milan. That’s why she wasn’t at her mother’s funeral.
‘I didn’t know till Ma’s end, her terrible end when her mother’s presence was eating away under the surface of the memory—the awful last bit, when Florrie stood about the streets and lanes of Rickmansworth watching for her daughter, in the corners of rooms or peeping from windows or just inside the front door of her little house at the Final Resting Place. But it was then, when Ma had begun to plead with me to buy her dead mother sponge cakes for tea, that I began to think about Grandma.’
‘Not to start liking her?’
‘Understanding her. A little. I know now that what she was saying to Ma in the Last Battle of Cremona, throwing the fruit about, was that Ma should marry only for love. It wouldn’t matter if the man did not love her. Forget that. If she never out-and-out loved someone (and you know Ma never did; not out-and-out; certainly not me; certainly not Pa, she didn’t bother with him much even when he was dying, she was at a car rally), if her daughter was never going to love someone, love till it aches, said Granny Ironside, she’d be dead for ever. To marry for escape, to marry for money, to marry from boredom, or for protection or security were immoral motives. Granny Ironside was ahead of her time. She had come to see—God knows how—that Victorian, middle-class marriage was most terribly sad.
‘“And disgusting,” apparently she roared at Ma, at Molly her taut little daughter. (And think: sex was never mentioned then between mother and daughter except in a creepy whispering way.) “You’ll lie there in the bed every night putting up with it, going through with it, maybe in the end not altogether disliking it, even in a vague way looking forward to it, at last treating it like a ridiculous duty. Immoral! Pathetic! Oh, you antiseptic, grasping girls.” “For God’s sake, love,” she was crying, and all the Piedmontese as shocked as an English boarding house as they dragged her up the stairs. All so sorry for Molly sitting there clutching her dinner napkin. Such a bleak little face.
‘So Ma left Cremona an hour later. Left her mother the bill, and it was vast because of the broken fruits, and sent Daddy to clear up.’
‘But Molly did love people, Alice. She loved lots of people. Look at the huge funeral.’
‘She was affectionate—as affectionate and nice as pie. But I don’t think Daddy had much of a time. It was separate rooms from the start, you know, and you never saw a cooler widow. I’m very much an only child. After Pa, it was always women friends. No more men. And she was always bringing them to Italy. No reverberations. Just charming, leisurely little motoring tours. God—how could she? Lipstick, permed hair, good clothes and everything treated lightly. She kept clear of thinking. No religion, no politics (except you couldn’t even know a socialist), no failures, no pain. Not a weed in her garden. Her table silver always shining, and a garage like an operating theatre, not a spot of oil on the floor. Love? Not a breath of it, ever.’
‘She did mock, rather.’
‘Oh, she mocked me about loving Italy. She came here, it always seemed to me, to cock a snook at it. “You never caught me, see!” But she used to say to me, “You’re being Italian again, Alice, with your big black eyes. I wonder where you came from? If you’d been Granny’s daughter not mine we wouldn’t have been surprised.”’
‘It sounds as if Florrie’s lover was Italian.’
‘The only Italians in Shipley were ice-cream sellers and organ grinders. Unless of course it was Mr. Settimo, the photographer. The mind boggles. Maybe Ma had had a Settimo fling. No, I was born years later. My black eyes must be telegony.’
‘What’s telegony?’
‘Well I never!’ Alice looked just like Molly for a moment. Molly’s glint. ‘And all your brains! You ought to do crosswords. Telegony is when sexual intercourse produces offspring who look like a previous impregnator.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Of course not. Yet farmers believe it. It happens to sheep and cattle. And Crufts won’t look at a bitch that’s been out with a mongrel, even if there’s been no issue. Royalty feels the same, come to that. Telegony is the belief that the female can be changed metabolically by a particular lover.’
‘That’s rubbish. Ridiculous. Necromancy.’
‘I know. Yet why are we in Cremona? It’s not on the tourist beat for a tiny ten-day Italian holiday.’
‘We’re here partly, I thought, to visit your Grandmother Ironside’s grave with your granddaughter who’s arriving any minute. And it’s a month after your own mother’s funeral. And Cremona must have been a refrain in your family for years. Almost in your genes.’
‘Exactly. Metaphorical telegony.’
‘Oh, Alice, what cock! Everyone looks up family graves. It’s ancient custom. A taste people have.’
‘I wonder if it will be Avril’s? She’s probably furious with me for dragging her here when we could have met her in Venice.’
‘I don’t think so, Alice. New Zealanders never mind going places. They’re like Scottish people. They mostly are Scottish people. What does she look like, your granddaughter? I hope she’s not like Florrie Ironside.’
‘I’ve not seen her in years. Her father, my ewe lamb, was dark, of course. Very. The mother—oh, I don’t know. She comes from Dunedin. Anyway, Avril will be here any minute, dear thing. I left a note in the hotel to say where we would be.’
But Avril from Dunedin didn’t show up as they sat in the piazza, and it was late evening before a lanky, delicate emu of a girl in long khaki shorts and a cowboy hat and bearing an enormous pack appeared before them in the restaurant of the hotel. Gently mannered, hesitant, she greeted the wrong woman as her grandmother before being redirected.
And she was certainly not telegonic Italian. Even metaphorically. She was yellow-haired, quiet and mild, and her thoughts were far away.
Yes, she’d come from Venice. She had been there for a week. Yes, she was travelling alone—well, sort of alone. There was someone she had come back to Italy to meet.
Well, had expected to meet; but just at present he had not got in touch. She’d left messages behind in Venice. Yes, an Italian (the freckly Scottish skin blazed). She had met him when she was in Italy two years ago. ‘But look, it doesn’t matter. Grandma, could I have some of those bright fruit things in the jars?’
‘Of course,’ the waiter said and smiled, fishing down into the vast glass bell with tongs, breaking the spiral pattern within, holding out a tiny pear the size of her thumb, so transparent you could see through to its spine and brown-gold pips. Then a grape like a water drop, then an amethyst plum, a ruby currant. An apricot dipped in sunset.
She asked for more.
‘Signorina, five is enough.’
She watched them glowing on the shiny white plate. ‘So lovely. I’d like a photograph.
‘Oh, help!’ she cried. ‘But they’re hot! They are killing me. They are burning my throat. They are burning right down to my heart.’
‘They are mustards, signorina. Beautiful mustards. They look so sweet but they are mustards. Very ancient. “The mustards of Cremona.” And see—you will find them only here.’
They laughed together, she and the waiter, as her blue eyes ran with tears. And then someone came to the table to say that there was a telephone call for the signorina, and she fled from the restaurant.
And her cup runneth over.
The next day was Sunday. The grave-seeking had been postponed. The granddaughter was not with the two elderly women. She had gone to the station to meet his train.
The two English women walked about in the spring sunshine and sat again in the Piazza Cathedrale. They listened to the great bells. They watched a priest freewheeling out of the cathedral doors on a bicycle, feet in the air, grinning for Easter.
It was a fashionable, traditional day for weddings and at about eleven o’clock they began. Brides stood in the piazza at the centre of their attendant family groups, and each group was sucked, eddy by eddy, into the cathedral and each group emerged again with a foamy wedded bride.
Then each group stood for a moment uneasy in the sunlight after the darkness of the church, and from the crowd before them stepped out the photographers. They stood for an instant in charge of time, each one the conductor of an orchestra, a judge at tribunal, a general before battle. They cried out. They moved people to different positions. They demanded the buttoning of coats, the arrangement of hands, the carriage of heads.
‘Look at her. Look at each other,’ they cried. ‘Now at me. Look at me. Look into each other’s eyes. Now—kiss her hand. Exactly so.’ Then back within the crowd they stepped, or paced impatiently in the square, awaiting their next victims.
Wedding after wedding after wedding, bride after bride, like puffs of foam, surrounded by bouquets of bridesmaids. Stiff egg-white dresses swung in the breeze, a veil suddenly flew up in the air like a pillar of salt. Wedding after wedding after wedding floated and chattered its way down the steps. Each bridal party floated and chattered, floated and chattered its way into the side streets of the city.