The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (9 page)

Paradoxically, though, and not surprisingly, it was this one great difference between them that could have caused some sort of passion to grow up between them, and was the cause of Giuseppe’s feelings for Amelia developing into that grave and silent love that only he, and his wife, were aware of.

Was it this love, however, that if she wasn’t aware of it consciously, she might in the back of her mind have realised existed, that caused Amelia to make the offer she made at the beginning of that August? Or was it rather her affection for her admirer’s wife, allied to her ingrained sense of guilt, and her still more ingrained sense of what was economically desirable, and who was not merely exploitable, but was actually willing, and eager, to be exploited? Maria didn’t know; and it was something about which she preferred not to think, neither when the offer was made, nor for some time after. As she preferred not to think about Giuseppe and her own motives for accepting that offer. Amelia had made it; they, after a minimum of discussion, had said yes, if with a mutual, faint and inexplicable sense of shame, and foreboding. That was all there was to it; and whatever the motives of the parties concerned, it hardly affected the result.

The nature of Amelia’s offer was the following. As Giuseppe and Maria were well aware, The Villa was too big and grossly underused. ‘I mean I know we’ve spent all this summer here, but’, (this with a look of terrible appeal, as if everything
depended on the two people to whom she was so anxiously talking) ‘there’s no way of knowing whether we’ll come again next year.’ Moreover, the surrounding garden was huge,
unmanageable
, and even with constant and expert care was never likely to amount to much, ‘not with this wind blowing all the time,’ the pale, thin woman said, waving a hand towards the sea, but in a tone that suggested she was talking about some affliction of the soul. ‘Not here, on the hill, and being so exposed. I mean the best we could hope for would be a few woody shrubs and that sort of thing. When what I’d really like’—and now, surely, she was talking of some interior landscape—‘would be a sort of English garden. You know, all lawns, and big shady trees, and great banks of flowers that look wild but aren’t, and roses, and honeysuckle, and everything scented, and sweet.’ A pause. ‘That’s my dream. However, since that’s not possible here and since Santa Teresa is growing by the minute, and apart from the wind and the position, it makes no sense to have a garden this size in what will be almost the centre of town in a few years time, my husband thought that the best thing to do would be make a low wall across the garden there’—she indicated a point about four metres from the back of The Villa—‘and put up some holiday apartments. He suggested a building of four or five floors, with, say, four apartments on every floor. That way, we’d solve the garden problem, we wouldn’t be wasting all this ground, we wouldn’t be interrupting our own view of the sea and, if the apartments were built carefully, most of them could have terraces that would also have sea views. Those that didn’t would be cheaper of course, but the thing is, and this is why I wanted to talk to you …’ She looked from one to the other now and seemed to be imploring them to say ‘no’, in advance, to whatever it was she was going to propose. ‘My husband said that if we did do that—and as long as we get permission I think it could be done fairly quickly—we’d have to have someone permanently on the spot to take care of the place. A …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, a porter, in a sense, I suppose. But,’ she rushed
on, to cover her confusion, ‘more than that really. A caretaker, a … I mean not only in the summer, when there’d obviously be things to do, but all year round. You know, someone who can paint the apartments in the winter, go and make sure the wind hasn’t blown the shutters off, make sure … Oh, you know,’ she repeated, ‘everything. And naturally, I mean, I hope you don’t mind, I thought of you two. You see, we do want people we can trust. The work wouldn’t be hard. I mean, in the winter, Giuseppe, when you come home from work, maybe just half an hour a day. And Maria, instead of going from place to place, and doing an hour here and an hour there … And the thing is, over the road there …’ She pointed now across the dusty track that ran by the side of the villa and petered out on the crest of the hill in what was at present an unofficial car park, to which the young people of the town came at night. ‘Where those garages are, and that storeroom, my husband thought he’d build four little houses. Three of them we’d let too, as holiday homes, but one—the one at the end, I thought, so it’d have views as well—would be for you. And I mean, we could design it together, so it’d be exactly as you wanted it. That would be the first thing to be done, so you could move in immediately and keep an eye on the work while they were doing the building behind here, and … and that’s it, really. I’m sorry to spring this on you and I know you’ll want to think about it, but’—and now, in her eyes at least, she practically went down on her knees and took their hands in hers, though at this point apparently urging them to say yes, rather than no—‘I would love it if you did accept. I mean, it’d be so wonderful having you so close and if you did accept, well, probably it’d make us that much more eager to come again next year, and the year after, and the year after that. We’d be … it’d be as if we were all part of the family. And I know Dario would like it and the girls, and—as I say, I’d love it. Truly. So do, please, think about it, and let me know what your decision is. And then maybe tomorrow, or the day after …’

She was already, in her mind, selecting tiles for the bathroom and discussing with Maria what colour the kitchen should be.

She had asked them to think about it. However, just as, both at the time and afterwards, Maria preferred not to reflect upon her motives for accepting, so, beforehand, she preferred not to reflect upon whether she should accept. And part of that faint sense of shame and foreboding she felt when she and Giuseppe did sit down over the kitchen table and say, rather stiffly to each other, ‘Well’, came from her knowledge that whatever there was to consider regarding this quite major change in their lives, she wasn’t going to. Of course they would go to the new house, she told herself—and saw that Giuseppe was telling himself—and of course they would take up their new jobs. They’d be mad not to, wouldn’t they? After all, when you looked at where they were living now, in this old dark apartment with its cracked walls and floors, its dampness in the winter and suffocating heat in the summer, its views only of other damp, dark apartments, and narrow, sunless streets, I mean, really, she thought, who in the world
wouldn’t
move and what
is
there to think about? Unless, perhaps, what colour the kitchen should be …

The other thing, the greater thing, that made Maria and, she was sure, Giuseppe, feel that faint sense of shame and
foreboding
, as they had their brief and useless discussion about their future, was the idea that by accepting Amelia’s offer they were delivering themselves a little too thoroughly into the hands of the Cavalieri family and were, as a result, losing their freedom and putting themselves into some sort of danger.

Still, she told herself, there’s probably nothing to worry about. If we do find ourselves becoming too involved, well, they’re only here for two or three months a year. And when you think of a new house, and the extra money, and a view …

She hardly slept that night, and gave Amelia her answer first thing next morning.

*

Later, Maria was to think that if only she had realised that her sense of foreboding was justified as soon as it became so, she might have been able to pull back. But it became so so very soon and so obliquely that she didn’t, at the time, nor for some time thereafter, make the connection.

‘I mean,’ she would sometimes tell herself, ‘I was looking to the future, at all the summers to come. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening there and then. Besides, all the other events of that summer seemed totally separate from the issue of our acceptance. As in a way, I suppose, even now it could be claimed they were. So how, when I was in the thick of things, I could have been expected …

‘Though it’s possible,’ she would sometimes add, ‘that even if I had made the connection I might not have pulled back. Because I was so excited at the prospect of having a new house. And since by then it was too late
anyway
…’

The first thing to occur in the post-acceptance part of that summer, as it became clear that whatever restrictions there were regarding the development of The Villa’s garden, they were going to be ignored by Amelia’s husband, was that Giuseppe, quiet and neat at the best of times, now became almost
obsessively
so. It was as if he were guarding his quietness and neatness, and were afraid of seeing them damaged. He let himself into the apartment so silently that half the time Maria didn’t know he was home. Having always changed after work into clothes that, though sober, were comfortably informal, he suddenly started to dress up, so that as he sat at the kitchen table eating his dinner, he looked as if he were at a wedding, or a first
communion
dinner. And from being a man of merely few words when he was around the house, he became a man of virtually no words at all, and while remaining as courteous and kind towards his wife and daughter as ever, expressed his courtesy and kindness only in a series of melancholy, strained
expressions
and the occasional gesture that was made not as if it
were natural to him, but as if he were forcing himself to make it.

A state of affairs which both Maria and Elisabetta commented upon, but which Giuseppe simply shrugged off, telling them, with an air of desolation that made nonsense of his words, that he just felt like being quiet at the moment, and wanted to dress up.

‘But in the summer, Papa?’ Elisabetta asked, laughing and throwing her black hair back, and looking beautiful in a bright orange and yellow dress. She stroked her father’s grey hair with her sun-brown, pink-nailed hand. ‘And anyway, even in the past you’ve never been this quiet.’

Event number two consisted of Gisueppe’s telling Maria, one night in bed when she asked him again why he had been so silent of late, that he was very sorry and he knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t bear the idea of losing Elisabetta; whose marriage and subsequent transferral to Cagliari were fast
approaching
.

‘I mean, I know Piero is a very nice boy and we couldn’t hope for a better son-in-law. I’m sure they’ll be very happy together. But she’s so beautiful, isn’t she, and so alive, and being our only child and … Oh, you know.’ Of his telling Maria this, and of his starting to behave thereafter not just as if he were the possessor of some sad secret, but as if he had suffered some unendurable blow and were mourning a loss for which he would never be consoled.

His mourning took the form of his going every day now to The Villa, to work on what would remain of the garden after the new apartment house had been completed, or, in contrast to his silence at home, to spend hours standing under a tree talking to Amelia Cavalieri about, Maria gathered, English gardens, his coal-mining father, the way that Santa Teresa was changing and the way the world was changing. Talking to her, it occurred to Maria when she saw them together, as if Amelia alone understood the nature of loss; and as if Amelia alone,
just by understanding, could at least give him the scent of consolation, even if she couldn’t present him with the flower itself.

Event number three of that confused and turbulent summer consisted of Giuseppe’s telling her, the very evening of
Elisabetta’s
wedding-day—a wedding-day throughout which, after all, he had seemed to be in the best of spirits and had made Maria think and hope that he was starting to come to terms with his daughter’s departure from the family home—that he had been in great pain the whole afternoon. ‘All my jaw,’ he said, ‘and the inside of my cheek and nose. I think if it isn’t better tomorrow I’d better go to the doctor.’ Of his telling her this, and of his being told by the doctor—an opinion that was soon confirmed by a specialist in Sassari—that he had a rare and malignant disease of the membranes of his cheek and nasal passages. A disease that, though treatable, was incurable, and while it would go through periods of remission, would ever more frequently cause recurrences of the pain he was feeling at present, and would slowly and inexorably, as it ate away the bones of his jaw and nose, disfigure him.

And events numbers four and five, after the shock of this news, consisted of Giuseppe’s not quite announcing to Maria that he had lost his faith, but of his making her understand it anyway; and of Maria’s coming to realise that she too, in a funny sort of way, was ‘in love’ with a member of the Cavalieri family.

But first: Giuseppe’s loss of faith.

Maria herself was a reasonably devout Catholic, and either because of this, or because she was temperamentally inclined to accept rather than reject, and make the best of a situation, however wretched it was, she could never bring herself to think that society should be changed in order to improve the material circumstances of people like herself. This despite the fact that if now she was middle-aged she was almost comfortable, she had been raised in a poverty still more extreme than Giuseppe’s. If
change was desired it was up to the individual to change, that was how she looked at it; and if things were in a sorry state, then it was God’s will that they should be so. ‘One is born holding a particular piece of music,’ she was taught by her thin, bitter, wheezing father, ‘and either one sings that tune, to the best of one’s ability, or one doesn’t sing anything at all. One simply rants and raves, and makes a noise, and in the end come to silence anyway.’ A lesson she came to believe.

She came to believe it. That did not make her believe however, like her father, that the people who had the best tunes, so to speak, were also the best people. Nor did she think that because it was God’s will that things were in a sorry state, they were not really in a sorry state at all. They were, she knew: one only had to look around to see that. And though she accepted those things and believed it was up to the individual to make changes in his or her own life, if he or she so desired and were capable of it, she couldn’t help admiring those who did not sing the tune they had been handed at birth, and did rant and rave.
She
believed, but she didn’t see why everyone should. Moreover, those who didn’t, well, it was only right that they should make themselves heard in whatever way they chose. She loved her father, and felt sorry for him, and she was grateful for what he had taught her. All the same, she couldn’t help wishing at times, for his own sake more than hers, that he had taught her something else; and couldn’t help thinking that if he had he might have been a happier, healthier man. For the tune that he sang was a
depressing
, discordant dirge, destined to be brief and to finish
unresolved
; and probably, in his case, rants and raves would have been sweeter.