Authors: William Trevor
They dabbed at my forehead. They bound the blood-pressure thing around my arm. They stuck in a thermometer. Their tweezers pulled out stitches.
‘No harm in secrets,’ Mr Trice said. ‘No harm, eh?’
‘No.’
After the third time he’d given me a penny I put the chair against my bedroom door, but it didn’t do any good. So on the day before my sixteenth birthday I packed a brown cardboard suitcase, and left five shillings in its place because the suitcase was Mrs Trice’s and we’d been taught not to take things at Sunday school.
‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the woman in the public house said. ‘Have you served at table before?’
I never had, so they put me in the kitchen first, washing up the dishes. ‘Gawky,’ the woman said. ‘God, you’re a gawky girl.’ My hair was frizzy, I couldn’t keep my weight down, my clothes were bought in second-hand places mostly. Yet not much time went by before other men besides Mr Trice desired me and gave me presents.
*
‘A timed device,’ Quinty said.
‘I thought it was lightning.’
‘It was a timed device.’
‘Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?’
‘It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.’
‘Is that why the police came?’
‘That would be it.’
Early on in my hospital sojourn the
carabinieri
had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts. Their dark blue uniforms trimmed with red and white, revolvers in black holsters, the grizzled head of one of them: all this remained with me after they had left my bedside, slipping in and out of my crowded fantasies. If conversation took place I do not recall it.
Later, in ordinary suits, detectives came with an interpreter. There were several visits, but soon it became clear from the detectives’ demeanour they did not consider it likely that I, in particular, had been the target of the outrage, though they listened intently to their interpreter’s rendering of my replies. A hundred times, it seems like now, they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual, either as I stepped on to the train or after I occupied my seat. Repeatedly I shook my head. I could recall no one skulking, no sudden turning away of a head, no hiding of a face. Each time, the detectives were patient and polite.
‘Buongiorno, signora. Grazie.’
‘Good day, lady,’ the interpreter each time translated. ‘Thank you.’
Carrozza 219 our carriage had been. I remembered the number on the ticket. Seat 11. In my mind’s vision the faces of the people who’d been near me lingered: the American family, the lovers, the couple and their elderly relative. The fashion lady and the businessmen in lightweight suits had gone to lunch.
‘They are here,’ Quinty said, and glanced at me, and added: ‘Some of them.’
Of the three English people, only the old man was alive. Of the German couple, only the boy. In the hospital they called the little American girl Aimée: the family passport had been found. She was the sole survivor of that family, and there was difficulty in locating someone in America to take responsibility. It even seemed, so Quinty said at first, that such a person did not exist. The information that filtered through the
carabinieri
and the hospital staff appeared to indicate that there were grandparents somewhere, later that there was an aunt. Then we learnt that the child’s grandfather suffered a heart condition and could not be told of the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild; the grandmother could not be told because she would not be able to hide her grief from him. Lying there, I approved of that: it was right that these people should be left in peace; it was only humane that elderly people should be permitted to drift out of life without this final nightmare to torment them.
‘They’re having difficulty in tracking down the aunt they’re after,’ Quinty reported. ‘It seems she’s travelling herself.’
She was in Germany or England, it was said, but the next day Quinty contradicted that. It was someone else who was travelling, a friend of the family who’d been assumed to be this relation. The aunt had been located.
‘Unfortunately she can’t look after a child.’
‘Why not, Quinty?’
‘It isn’t said why not. Maybe she’s delicate. Maybe she has work that keeps her on the go all over the place.’
I thought about this after he’d gone. I wondered what kind of a woman this could be, who, for whatever reason, could be so harsh.
‘They got it all wrong again,’ Quinty said on a later
occasion. ‘That woman’s the aunt of someone else. The same story with those grandparents.’
I wouldn’t have known any of this if Quinty hadn’t been interested in questioning the
carabinieri
on the matter. From what I could gather, the policemen did not themselves appear to know what was happening in the search – so far away – for possible relatives or family friends. The hospital authorities were worried because the child would not, or could not, speak.
Apart from the victims of Carrozza 219 no one on the train had been injured, and no one of political importance had been on the train in any case. The old man’s son-in-law had had something to do with a merchant bank apparently; the American father had been a paediatrician. Yet a bomb had been planted, deliberately to take life, ingeniously and callously placed where those who by chance had been allocated certain seats would be killed or maimed.
What would one see, I wondered, in the perpetrators’ eyes? What monstrous nature did such human beings seek to disguise? There’d been crime, often more than petty, on the S.S.
Hamburg
. Living human embryos had been scraped out of my body and dropped into waste-disposal buckets. Seedy confessions had surfaced in the Café Rose. An ugly guilt had skittered about in the shifty eyes of Ernie Chubbs. Yet no crime could rank with what had happened on the train I’d caught at 11.45 on the morning of 5 May 1987. In search of consolation, I wrote down the few lines I had composed in Carrozza 219, the beginning of the work which had come to me through its title.
In the garden the geraniums were in flower. Through scented twilight the girl in the white dress walked with a step as light as a morning cobweb. That evening she hadn’t a care in the world
. But I found it difficult to continue and did my best, instead, simply to recover.
The old man and I suffered from shock. I’d had splinters of glass taken from the left side of my face; he from his legs and body. The German boy, called Otmar, had lost an arm. The old man was a general.
‘An irony,’ he murmured in the corridor where he learned to walk again. ‘It was I who’d reached the end of things.’
He made the statement without emotion. I remembered his daughter as a pretty woman in a gentle, English kind of way, quiet and rather slight, a little faded. Aries probably.
‘We are fortunate to be alive, General.’
He turned away his head, half shaking it as he did so. I told him about the child called Aimée, about the search for relatives in America. I hoped to involve him in the pathos of the child’s predicament and perhaps to make him realize that someone else had lost even more than he had. He did his best to respond, later even to smile. With military stoicism he appeared to be resigned to what had occurred, his vocation no doubt demanding that. A sense of melancholy did not come from him, only one of weariness. I left him soldiering on, precisely obeying the nurses’ strictures, marching with the aid of a metal stick, back and forth between his bed and a curtained balcony at the corridor’s end.
‘I’m sorry, Otmar,’ I commiserated, and in a soft whisper, speaking quite good English, the German boy accepted the sympathy: that it was offered because of the loss of his sweetheart or a limb was barely relevant. In the train he had been wearing a red and yellow lumberjack shirt and rather large glasses, which were shattered in the blast. He wore other spectacles now, wire-rimmed, and jeans and a plain grey shirt. His features were sallow, the eyes behind the magnifying lenses still terrified. Unlike the General, he did not attempt to smile. There was a cornered look about Otmar, as if the horror he had woken up to was too much for him.
‘We must hope, Otmar. What there is left to us is hope.’
Every time I returned to my own room, and to the ward when I was a little better, I endeavoured to proceed with my new work, but still I found it difficult to continue. This had never happened before: with reason, I had been confident on the train as soon as the girl appeared in my mind’s vision. Yet now it seemed as though a film had halted within seconds of its commencement. The fluttering of the girl’s dress was frozen, her carefree mood arrested in a random instant. Was there some companion of whom my broken cinematograph held the secret, some figure waiting to step from the garden’s shadows? Would the carefree mood become ecstatic? Would a gardenia nestle in the long fair hair? I did not know. I knew neither what joy nor sorrow there was; my girl was nameless, without detail in her life, vague as to parentage, born beneath a choice of all the stars. The title
Ceaseless Tears
appeared so naturally to belong to the suffering on the train that greater bewilderment, and blankness, was engendered. I was aware of a sensation that caused me to shiver in dismay, as though all that had been given to me had been snatched away. Then one day Quinty said:
‘They could stay a while in the house, you know.’
A week ago the General had murmured that he would find the return to England difficult, and wished he did not have to face it immediately. ‘The struggle back and forth,’ he said. ‘The bed, the corridor, the holy statue in the wall, the balcony. The faces of the patients, the smell of ether. You feel that’s where you belong.’
Quinty was clearly out to profit from misfortune, but even so I saw nothing to object to in his suggestion. ‘You would find it peaceful,’ I told the old man. ‘My house is high enough to be cool. Sometimes a breeze blows over the water of Lake Trasimeno.’
He nodded, and then he thanked me. When he sought me out two days later I explained that we were used to catering
for strangers, that for many years we had taken in passing tourists when the hotels of the neighbourhood were full.
‘I would insist on paying,’ he gently laid down. ‘I told the man I would insist on paying whatever rates you normally charge.’
‘It is he who sees to all that.’
I’d known army officers of lower rank before; never a general. He had the look of one, sparely made, his hair the colour of iron, great firmness about the mouth, a grey moustache. He was a man of presence, but of course he was not young: touching seventy, I guessed.
‘A week or two,’ he agreed with unemphatic graciousness. ‘That would be nice. But are you certain, Mrs Delahunty? I don’t want to be a nuisance at a time like this.’
‘Indeed I’m certain.’
Otmar refused at first. Poor boy, with every day that passed he seemed more wretchedly unhappy and I sensed that, even more than the General, he did not know how to return to the world he was familiar with.
‘You are most good.’ His voice echoed the distortion in his eyes. Often, in speaking to him, I found myself obliged to turn my head away. ‘But it should not be. I have not money to pay this.’
Quinty cannot have known that, and I resolved, if necessary, to pay for Otmar’s stay myself. I said the money didn’t matter. Some time in the future, when everything had calmed for him, he could pay a little. ‘If you would care to, Otmar, the house is there.’
The doctor who looked after the American child was a Dr Innocenti, a small, brown-complexioned man with gold in his teeth. He was the English-speaking one among the doctors and the nurses, and had often acted as interpreter for the specialists who were more directly concerned with the General and Otmar and myself. When he heard that hospitality had been offered in my house he came to see me and to thank me.
‘It will do some good,’ he said. ‘I would prescribe it.’
He wore a pale brown suit and a silk tie, striped red and green. When I said the child also would be welcome in my house he doubtfully shook his head. The
carabinieri
would have to be consulted, he explained, since the child – being at present without a guardian – was in their charge. ‘In Italy we must always be patient,’ he said. ‘But truly I would wish the little girl removed from the hospital ambience.’
‘Is she recovering, doctor?’
In reply the little shoulders were raised within the well-cut suit. The hands gesticulated, the nut-brown head sloped this way and then that.
‘Slowly?’ I prompted.
Too slowly, a contortion of the neat features indicated: it was not easy. At present the prognosis was not good.
‘The child is more than welcome if you believe it would be a help.’
‘So Signor Quinty explain to me. There is nowhere else, you comprehend.’ He spoke gently. His jet-black eyes were as soft as a kitten’s. Piscean, I guessed. ‘I will speak with the officers of the
carabinieri
. Red tape may be cut, after all. To be surrounded by people whose language she understands will be advantageous for Aimée.’
Later I learnt he’d been successful in persuading the
carabinieri
to agree to his wishes. They would visit us two or three times a week to satisfy themselves that the child remained safely in our care, and report their satisfaction to the American authorities. Dr Innocenti himself would also visit us regularly; if there were signs of deterioration in the child she would be at once returned to the hospital. But he believed that the clinical surroundings were keeping the tragedy fresh in her mind and preventing her from coming to terms with it.
‘You are generous, signora. I have explained to Signor Quinty the expenses will be paid when the person they seek in
America is found. My friends of the
carabinieri
have reason to believe that this is not a poor family.’
We were all discharged on the same afternoon and the first night in my house we sat around the tiled table on the terrace, the General on my right, Otmar on my other side. The child was already sleeping in her bed.