We had been treated with consideration on the ferry from Calais. Presenting passports on board, you were naturally obliged to explain why yours was a temporary document: without needing to go into any of the details beyond the bag-snatching in Rome, berths were provided, and a purser conducted us off the ship ahead of the queues and the crush at the dockside.
Back in London, we walked across the dusty dead ground beneath the Westway’s fly-over at Royal Oak. Going up the stairs to your flat, you were relieved to find the children’s quarters silent, the entrance to their living room closed. You had opened the door to that large, still under-furnished flat; two tower blocks, a cream and brown speckled church spire, and, further, a great gas cylinder appeared in the broad picture windows. The room had that silent inertness of a place just returned to, as if its few things were rebuking our presence, our having been absent. Your large black and white television stood in the angle by the window, a stereo rested on a low wooden table, its two vast speakers at the room’s far corners, cushions and rugs neatly arranged on the floor. And there were my winter clothes, my books, paint boxes, sketchpads, art history notes—scattered about like the relics of an altogether different life.
The first thing you did was to telephone the doctor. He arrived soon after, and saw you in your bedroom. After just a few moments he reappeared clutching his bag; he glanced at me by the sink and stove, then hurried out of the door. I went to your bedroom: you were sitting on the eiderdown, a look of blank amazement on your face.
‘So what happened?’
‘I told him about the chill on my kidneys, and he was going to examine me. Then I mentioned Italy, in case of complications, and he just recoiled in horror.’ You made the theatrical gesture with raised palms, wide eyes, and a twisted mouth. ‘He said he couldn’t touch me. As if I’d get him struck off or something.’
It was then you decided we should go to your parents’ house in Portsmouth.
Your father met us off the London train. Once arrived, we were put into the different rooms and went straight to bed.
Feeling a little better now, despite the chill on your kidneys, you had started to report a conversation that morning with your mother.
‘Mum’s been in touch with Mr. Draper. We’re going round to see him at his offices this afternoon. There may well be some things he can do,’ you were explaining. ‘Do you want to call your mother?’
‘No. No, I don’t think so—as far as she’s concerned, I’m still on holiday with you. No need to upset her unnecessarily. No need to upset her at all.’
‘So that’s it, is it?’ you came back. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention any of this to your mother!’
‘I don’t think she’d be able to cope. Better keep it between us.’
‘Right then,’ you said. ‘Get that jacket. We’ve got a bit of shopping to do.’
Your mother had also arranged an appointment with a local doctor friend of hers. The fact that she didn’t consider saving her daughter the public embarrassment by examining her herself only seemed to show how uneasy were your relations with your mother, or how what happened had only further troubled them; or perhaps it merely meant your mother wasn’t qualified to ascertain whether any physical damage had been done.
When we reached the surgery, I stayed in the waiting area while you went through to a consulting room. Beside me sat a pregnant woman smiling with a mixture of awe and pity at a mum opposite her. The mother had a baby with a scalp rash, cradle cap, and there were two moaning twins at her ankles. Next to her was a grey-haired man with grey complexion, sunken eyes, and bony fingers intertwined upon his lap.
There were the usual heaps of women’s magazines, day-old newspapers, and some brightly coloured plastic toys that the twins were ignoring. Public advice posters lined the walls: one suggested I have a full check-up if over thirty-five; another recommended that I try to avoid over-eating and to maintain a balanced diet; was I recently bereaved? Here there were some phone numbers I could ring. Wasn’t it time I gave up smoking? As I strained to read a notice about cancer research without my glasses, a prolonged piercing shriek came through the thin partition between the waiting and consulting rooms. It was you. The others there looked up, startled. All of them sat as if bracing themselves for the next cry of pain. But only the sniffles of the twins disturbed the waiting room’s silence.
Seven minutes later, you emerged with a nurse who smiled a kindly farewell and, glancing round the waiting room, said ‘Mrs. Weekly’. The pregnant woman struggled to her feet and followed the nurse out of the holding area.
‘What did he do? Why the scream?’
‘You won’t want to hear,’ you said, now that we were safely outside. ‘He was looking for damage …’
‘Did he find any?’
‘You want to know?’ you asked me, then relented. ‘We have to wait for the results … He had to insert a speculum. “This won’t hurt,” he said. They always do. “We’re just going to take a little look inside and have a scrape around.” It’s cold when they first put the thing in. That’s when I yelled. He said, “Now don’t be silly.” I really hate that.’
A stylist on Elgin Road gave your hair a trim without an appointment. Now a slight breeze ruffled the hair, cut to fall from its centre parting in two layers, thick and curving inward to the neck, then in a fringe down to the shoulders. We were walking between rows of redbrick terraces, narrower streets where the house-values declined. Identical door and window frames, foreshortened by perspective, succeeded each other, the one design repeated ad infinitum: but here with turquoise snowcem, there with Cotswold-stone faced walls; and now one had some coach lamps screwed into a featureless door surround. Here the old red brick was distempered pink. A sailing ship had been picked out in the front door’s frosted glass. The house fronts were like thick make-up on anxiously aging faces.
We had got as far as the cemetery’s few acres of white-veined marble, overhung by weeping branches of diverse species. Here was the gardener’s house, outside it a standpipe and the buckets to help tend graves. Now we were glancing into windows of house-clearance businesses down the Albert Road: fender irons, sewing machines, electrical goods, unwanted presents, musical instruments, fog lamps for cars …
‘She’s offered to pay for a few days at a hotel in Dorchester if we’ll go.’
‘Who has? Your mother?’
‘Who else? I’ve still got some holiday and mum thinks it would do me good to have time to recuperate. But that’s not the reason. Actually, she’s finding it difficult to have us both in the house. She wants rid of us. Over there we’ll be safely out of harm’s way.’
I was gazing abstractedly into one of the junk shop windows. It had an enormous heap of sand and wheelbarrow on display. So now they’re reduced to selling the beach. About to make the remark out loud, I thought better of it, and turned instead to say:
‘Maybe I should go.’
‘Wouldn’t make any difference. It’s me that’s the problem.’
Which sounded like an invitation not to keep my distance.
‘How much does your mother know?’
‘I wrote to mum when you’d gone on holiday with her,’ you said, ‘and I told her we were planning to meet up, then travel to Italy, but, you see, I didn’t think we’d be staying together. When you left Paddington for the Harwich ferry, everything was over, I thought, and so that’s what I told her. Then this morning when she asked me to tell her what had happened, I did, but she’d no idea what to do or say. She didn’t even seem shocked, just numb. I’d hoped she might say something, anything, but she just couldn’t. It’s understandable, I suppose. But she’s my mother, for God’s sake. She probably thinks I’m tainted—more tainted than before. And I told her it was all right because I got my period almost immediately. No need to worry on that score.’
‘Did you tell her about the gun?’
‘I did, yes, because of course she asked where were you all the time, and I told her you were there.’
‘What about your father?’
‘They’ve probably talked about it by now.’
‘Do you think they’ll say anything about it?’
‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t think so. He never believes a thing she says, anyway. “Invention is the necessity of mother” and all that.’
On we went past the second-hand bike shops, antique businesses of the poorer sort, the junk dealers, sellers of soiled paperbacks, nearly-new clothes stores, a closed-down launderette, two off-licenses, a done-up stripped pine furniture business, a gun shop, three or four dingy cafés. Behind lay the crumbling commercial façade of a once prosperous seaside resort where Sherlock Holmes’s author had set up in practice, a place still home to the exiled Sultan of Zanzibar and his wives.
‘Town gets worse all the time,’ you said, in a voice that didn’t quite exclude a fondness for those streets that had certainly seen better days. ‘Anyway, I said we would take the coach to Dorchester tomorrow, so we’d better go and book some tickets.’
Then you went into a chemist’s for something to relieve your kidneys and upset stomach.
Mr. Draper had agreed to see us a little after two thirty. A late lunch finished, your mother drove us out to the appointment. At that time she was approaching sixty, but seemed much older to me, for she walked with a slight stoop, and her face was tightly wrinkled, especially round the lips; yet her eyes had a watery gleam when she smiled—and good bone structure meant that she’d retained the ghost of her youthful beauty.
You were sitting beside your mother, your small-featured face reflected in the driving mirror. We were being taken through the rings of urban growth, brick terraces with primary colours painted on gutters, doors and windows; the clear sky taut with vapour trails, brown leaves on the clearway’s tree-lined flanks beginning to tumble; high-cambered, even curves led from the trunk road into an inland district of the city. Your mother’s pale blue, slightly rusting Wolseley Hornet with its soft suspension rolled into corners as she swung the wheel.
The offices of Erwin, Sons & Draper were composed of two houses in a crescent of Edwardian terraces with rooms branching off from a central hallway, reached through an outer office. The entrance had an open door, a polished brass nameplate on the brickwork; an inner door, being opened by your mother, with a frosted glass window and the names of the solicitors again in gold lettering, let into the outer office with a desk and a bright-faced receptionist.
‘Mr. Draper is expecting us,’ your mother announced.
The receptionist stood up, left the room, returned and gave a fresh formal smile.
‘This way, please.’
She was showing us into a spacious office with, for the solicitor, a leather-topped desk and chair behind it, for his clients, a number of lower, more comfortable armchairs in which to sink. As we followed her, your mother called to you from the door.
‘I’ve some shopping to do, but will be back to drive you home, as soon as Mr. Draper’s ready. I won’t be long.’
Then she smiled at the solicitor and hovered at the doorway.
‘Hello, Mr. Draper,’ she added. ‘I’m sure you’ll do everything you possibly can.’
‘Of course,’ said the man. ‘It must be a great relief to have your daughter back with you.’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘You’re both well, I hope? How are the children? Then I won’t disturb you any longer.’
Your mother closed the door.
‘Please do sit down. Please,’ said Mr. Draper, gesturing with his hand towards the armchairs.
The solicitor was in his middle fifties, partner in a provincial firm with offices in many of the towns in Hampshire. His light hair was brushed firmly back from his temples, greying with distinction at the sides. Mr. Draper’s face was large and round, with a small nose, clear smiling eyes, a mouth that when set between speaking suggested some discomfort, present or conditional. He sat slightly forward at his desk, which was tidily arranged, with a file ready beneath Mr. Draper’s eyes. The desk included space for two photographs: one of his wife, a fashionable woman with something of a pout, exaggerated perhaps by age; the other of his son and daughter, Sarah smiling more than James in their double frame. Mr. Draper opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a sheet of paper and unscrewed the cap of his black fountain pen.
‘So, how are you?’ the family solicitor graciously began, addressing you directly.
You thanked him for his concern and assured him that you were feeling much better than you had some forty-eight hours before. Then you asked the solicitor how Sarah was doing with her Tort exams. Mr. Draper was confident that your school friend would pass this time.
‘Based on what I understand from your mother,’ Mr. Draper continued, getting down to business, ‘I’d say you’re both lucky to be alive.’
You gave a slight nod in recognition of this, which the solicitor took as his cue to continue.
‘There are one or two inquiries and approaches I can make on your behalf,’ he began, still addressing you alone. ‘I shall be writing to Roy Jenkins at the Home Office today. He will be able to make inquiries at the Italian Embassy. You understand, I’m sure, that to do this I will need a clear picture of everything that occurred. I appreciate that this may be difficult and painful for you, and we can stop immediately should you feel at all distraught or in any way unable to continue.’
You were studying the pattern on your blouse, rolling and unrolling between your fingers the loose hem, worn outside an olive green cord skirt. You looked up and nodded at Mr. Draper with a serious expression.
‘How did you come to be travelling like that, and in the middle of the night?’ Mr. Draper began.
‘We were camping in Rome: there’s a campsite in the suburbs. It was early afternoon and we were somewhere near the Tiber, looking for a restaurant, somewhere not too expensive or crowded. We’d gone down a narrow, quiet street with high blank walls on either side …’
‘And a bar at the far end.’
Mr. Draper glanced up at me, and gave a faint smile; then, shifting his eyes back towards his family friend’s daughter, invited you to continue.
‘I was on the outside of the pavement and I remember hearing a scooter rev up, then looking back over my shoulder and seeing the Vespa with two boys on it moving very slowly at the far end of the street. I thought nothing of it. The next thing I knew, it had come up fast behind us and one of the boys was grabbing hold of my bag, which was held on a strap round my wrist. The strap snapped off when the scooter accelerated away.’
Mr. Draper was making notes.
‘Could you tell me what there was of value in the purse?’
‘I was taking care of almost all the money,’ you explained, ‘and carrying my passport too. We needed to change some cheques. All our traveller’s cheques were in my name. I was carrying them with me. Richard’s passport was in his pocket, and we also had a small amount of change in the tent.’
The high blank-walled street came back to my mind’s eye, and again the commotion in the bar on the corner. We were chasing helplessly after the scooter.
‘Come back!’ you shouted. ‘Come back!’
Then you dashed into the bar with its lime green tiled walls, calling out that you’d been robbed—in English. Neither of us knew the Italian word, but somebody understood and phoned the police.
A rifle lay between the seats of the car in which we were taken to the central police station. There, to our dismay, we discovered a long queue of tourists who had all been robbed that morning. After some time spent waiting in glum silence, you were able to give details of the stolen things to a police official. He completed the form, and gave us clearly to understand that there was, in fact, little likelihood of the property being discovered and returned. Sitting there waiting, I kept living over the moments leading up to the theft, as if trying to restore our earlier, fraught, though relatively secure condition. It had been too suddenly snatched away and couldn’t be connected with the precarious and powerless state into which we had now been hurled.
Mr. Draper’s office was illuminated by sunlight coming through a high window let into the wall opposite the door. The sash had been lifted a few inches to allow fresh air to circulate. Above the sound of your voice there came the songs of birds. Up over the roofline, a mass of swallows was gathering to migrate. Warm brown colours of the Roman buildings in the heat haze from one of its seven hills came back, and the tiredness on that long day’s wander round the English Cemetery looking for the Pyramid of Cestius, then through Saint Peter’s and under the Sistine Ceiling. While eating yet another ice cream, we came upon the Trevi Fountains. We sat on a stone beside the Colisseum, and smelt the dry grey dust of its excavated walls. Descending the Spanish Stairs from the twin towers of the Trinità dei Monti church, past the palm trees and Egyptian obelisk, we went on into that famous café just beyond the Keats-Shelley house at the corner of the Piazza d’Espagna. Later, after visiting the Villa Borgese and seeing a modern art gallery of Italian Impressionists, we stopped under a pergola to nurse sore feet and drink a coffee. That was the day before everything went so horribly wrong.
Now your account had reached the Villa Wolkonsky. Mr. Draper, minutely attentive, continued to take down notes. You were saying that, of course, we barely slept the night after your bag had been snatched. The police had advised visiting the British Consulate in that elegant villa on Via XX Settembre, just by the Porta Pia. We arrived early that Friday morning, carrying all our belongings through the gate. Towards the curving stairs of an entrance we climbed—one that would become only too familiar as the day wore on. Despite all our efforts to be early, we nevertheless found ourselves at the back of a queue waiting for its doors to open in the gathering heat. Pushing inside at last, we entered the small public reception area crowded with people requesting permission to enter the British Isles.
‘You were getting all hot and bothered, weren’t you, because nobody seemed at all concerned about what had happened,’ you said, glancing at me. ‘Doubtless, for them, it was just another case of robbery. I imagine there’s at least one every day. But you kept seething at the bureaucracy and officialdom. Which obviously didn’t help at all. Yes, it was very trying. So, when, finally, it was our turn, the woman at the counter explained that I could have a document called a temporary passport—which would be valid for one journey only, direct to the United Kingdom, which had to be completed within three days. But her difficulty was, the official said, that the Consul couldn’t issue any documents unless we could show we had means enough to make the journey home. Your first grant cheque will only arrive in October, and there were none of your savings left in England. So I was going to have to arrange for some money to be transferred from my bank in Paddington …’
The Consular official suggested we go to a branch of Thomas Cook in the Via Veneto, no less, and showed us where to find it on a map. So then there was another tiring walk through a hot and dry late morning. But at last we arrived, two scruffy young people, in one of the city’s most fashionable quarters. At the embarrassingly luxurious Thomas Cook’s, the company would gladly arrange to have your money telexed, but needed your passport to do it. Without documentation they couldn’t complete the papers to authorize the transfer. You explained that you couldn’t have a passport until you received the money, but it made no difference. We would have to return to the Consulate and ask again to be issued with the temporary passport.
Back through the stifling heat we went. By now it was already after twelve-thirty and shops were closing for the long Italian lunch. At the Consulate, the same official repeated her statement that the document could not be issued to anyone without means to make the journey back to British soil.
‘This was when you got really fractious and lost your temper with the consular people,’ you were saying, to my embarrassment, ‘but it wasn’t their fault, and I had to quiet you down, didn’t I, before asking the assistant again what more we could possibly do …’
The imagined sounds of moral disapproval and accusations of cowardice had been echoing around my head all day, but now there was this revelation reverberating in a stranger’s ears. Yet everything you said was true. I had lost my temper with the wrong person. Whether because of that misdirected outburst or the nasty fix we were in, there at the Consulate you couldn’t stop yourself from collapsing into tears. At this the desk clerk said that perhaps, in the circumstances, were she to speak to someone, it might be possible to make an exception. We were asked to wait while she had a word with her superior. The official’s demeanour was entirely altered when she returned and beckoned, for the Consul himself had intervened on our behalf.
‘So that’s why we were hitchhiking,’ I put in when you paused a moment, hoping to move the story along. This time you too glanced round before continuing.
The Consul had phoned Thomas Cook’s, you continued, and been told that the company could not possibly consider bending its rules. Most unsatisfactory of them, but the young official explained that she could see their point. So the British Consul authorized, this once, release of the document without final signature, on the understanding that you returned immediately to the travel agents and arranged the telex. Then you would have to come straight back to the Consulate and have the passport validated.
At the Via Veneto once again: Thomas Cook’s was closed for lunch. To kill the time, we took a look at the Carmelite Chapel made of bones, then sat on the rim of a fountain and pondered. Finally the cashier at Thomas Cook’s told you that your bank in Paddington would not accept the temporary passport as proof of your identity. How did they know it was Miss M. J. Young there, and not someone using the document to defraud them? Signatures could not be matched, and they had no photograph of the client on file in London, nor would they accept answers to obscure personal questions that can sometimes be used when the banking arrangements are of considerable longstanding. You had moved what money you possessed only a few weeks before, when starting work at Belle Vue House.
‘Soon as we get back I’m closing my account with that bank!’ you hissed through gritted teeth.
Nothing remained but to go back to the Consulate. It was mid-afternoon, and still painfully hot. We had eaten nothing all day and were once more walking past the restaurants, pizzerias, and cafés with their various aromas. So what could the Consul suggest we do now? We were quite willing—as you said—to hitchhike back home. It was how we had reached Rome in the first place. But you were exhausted, dehydrated. You were anxious, and hungry. All you wanted was to be sent your money, and be allowed to take the first train for Paris. At the Consulate a third time, the officials were beginning to identify their professional status with our predicament. The Consul himself took up the matter by noting down details and telephoning your bank manager in England.
‘And he told us, didn’t he, that they’d not believed it was the British Consulate in Rome either, so he’d said, “Look me up in the telephone book, call me back, and if I answer perhaps you will believe it is the British Consul here.” And they did too, didn’t they …’
‘Please,’ said Mr. Draper decisively, ‘would you mind allowing Mary to tell me herself in her own words exactly what happened?’
My eyes lowered, half out of focus, to the mustard-brown carpet of Mr. Draper’s floor.
‘So the bank finally agreed to telex thirty pounds,’ you recounted. Then, in Thomas Cook’s, waiting for the telex to arrive, we talked it over and you decided you’d had enough of Rome. With only three days to get home anyway, we would go straight to the railway station and book ourselves onto the first express heading north. When your money had arrived we returned to the Consulate and finally had the temporary passport validated.
But a strike of railway men and stationmasters had been called on the whole network for forty-eight hours. There were notices everywhere saying as much. Neither of us could bear the thought of another night at the campsite. There was barely enough money to get back home, a hotel would be far too expensive, and, besides, we had no way of knowing whether the strike would be over in two days anyway. We’d had good luck hitchhiking in Italy, and decided we could make it in a night as far as the Swiss border. Then there would be trains for Paris.
A bus set us down near the autostrada and we walked into the gloom of a gathering dusk. It took almost an hour to be offered a first lift. An unending procession of headlights scrutinized us indifferently as we perched on the curved metal rim of a dusty crash barrier in near total darkness. Then it seemed our luck was holding. A red Alfa Sud stopped, its driver wound down his window, and when you shouted over the traffic roar, ‘A Svizzera?’ the man replied, ‘Milano, ma sì …’ As was customary, we made a few attempts to talk. But the driver didn’t understand. Through the night in total silence he drove us northward at top speed.
While you dozed off in the back, beside the driver I stared out at the road. The lightning started beyond signs for turnings to Siena. So finally, that September night, after uninterrupted months of sun, the rain returned. Bolts and flashes of lightning illuminated the entire deep blue sky, picking out pylons and power lines strung above surrounding mountain slopes. Rear lights of vehicles blurred across the screen as we passed. It was as if all the strains and stresses of our days in Italy had come to a head. Now they expressed themselves with all the power and force of that electric storm, its sheet and forked lightning, and the pelting rain that beat on the Alfa’s windscreen as the car sped north.
The rain had been sheeting down for hours by the time the sports car pulled into a small service station, its asphalt forecourt badly pitted and now deeply puddled, glistening in the dark. After having his tank refilled, the driver went into the station’s office and asked the mechanics playing cards in the back if there was anyone going further who might be willing to give his two passengers a lift. No one appeared to volunteer, but the Alfa drove off, leaving us there in the petrol station’s office.
A short, dark-haired man with a moustache and a maroon tie came in some moments later. He spoke with the mechanics, and then made us understand, mainly by gestures, that he had to go away but would return. The man intended to come back shortly, yes, and take us on to Como. He asked did we have any money. Glancing at each other, we said we didn’t—for safety.
‘We felt so relieved,’ you were saying. ‘We thought we’d made it. Only there was something unnerving about the fact that he didn’t pay at the toll. That was when we should have got out, at the toll. The man had already put his hand on my knee. I don’t know why we didn’t get out. And the attendant in the cabin seemed to know the driver too.’
Mr. Draper made a note of that.
‘The driver couldn’t speak any English,’ you were adding. ‘I’d been trying to talk to him in Spanish as he put our rucksacks into the boot of his white Ford Escort. So, coming round by the side of the car, I got into the front seat beside him, because it was my turn to talk, while you got in the back.’
‘You were sitting in the back seat when the crime took place?’ Mr. Draper had looked up from his desk and asked me directly.
‘He was pointing a gun at my head.’
‘Lucky to be alive,’ the solicitor murmured, and jotted down another note on his sheet of paper.