Selected Stories полностью

I watch them from my window, coming separately to the table they have chosen for breakfast in the garden of the hotel. They place their gifts by my place. They speak to one another, but I never know what they say in private. I turn from the window and powder over the coral lipstick I have just applied. On my seventeenth birthday nothing of my reflection is different in an oval looking-glass.

Downstairs, the salon I pass through is empty, the shutters half in place against the glare of sun that will be bothersome to the hotel guests later in the day.

‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ a waiter greets me in the garden.

Even in the early morning the air is mellow. Chestnuts have begun to fall; bright crimson leaves are shrivelling. The sky is cloudless.

‘Well, old lady,’ my father says. There is a single rose, pink bled with scarlet, which he has picked for me. On my birthday he always finds a rose somewhere.

‘What shall we do today?’ my mother asks when she has poured my coffee and my father remembers the year of the Pilgrims’ Way, when he took me on his back because I was tired, when we met the old man who told us about Saint Sisinnius. He remembers the balloon trip and the year of the casino. Birthdays are always an occasion, my mother’s in July, my father’s in May, mine in October.

We live in hotels. We’ve done so since we left the house in the square, all kinds of hotels, in the different countries of Europe, a temporary kind of life it seemed at first, acquiring permanence later.

‘So what shall we do?’ my mother asks again.

It is my choice because of the day and after I’ve opened the presents they’ve given me, after I’ve embraced them and thanked them, I say that what I’d like to do is to walk through the birch woods and have a picnic where the meadows begin.

‘Moi, je suis tous les sports,’ a man is telling his friend at the table next to ours. ‘Il n’y en a pas un seul auquel je ne m’ intéresse pas.’

I can hear now, thirty-five years later, that man’s rippling voice. I can see the face I glimpsed, bespectacled and pink, and hear his companion ordering thé de Ceylan.

‘It will be lovely, that walk today,’ my mother says, and we choose our picnic and after breakfast go to buy the different items and put our lunch together ourselves.

‘Why do you always find a rose for me?’

I ask that on our walk, when my mother is quite far ahead of my father and myself. I have not chosen the moment; it is not because my mother isn’t there; there’s never anything like that.

‘Oh, there isn’t a reason for a rose, you know. It’s just that sometimes a person wants to give one.’

‘You make everything good for me.’

‘Because it is your birthday.’

‘I didn’t mean only on my birthday.’

My mother has reached the meadows and calls back to us. When we catch up with her the picnic is already spread out, the wine uncorked.

‘When your father and I first met,’ she says once lunch has begun, ‘he was buying a film for his camera and found himself short. That’s how we met, in a little shop. He was embarrassed so I lent him a few coins from my purse.’

‘Your mother has always had the money.’

‘And it has never made a difference. An inheritance often does; but by chance, I think, this one never has.’

‘No, it has never made a difference. But before we say another word we must drink a toast to today.’

My father pours the wine. ‘You must not drink yourself, Villana. That isn’t ever done.’

‘Then may I have a toast to you? Is that ever done?’

‘Well, do it and then it shall be.’

‘Thank you for my birthday.’

In the sudden manner he often has my father says:

‘Marco Polo was the first traveller to bring back to Europe an account of the Chinese Empire. No one believed him. No one believed that the places he spoke of, or the people – not even Kublai Khan – existed. That is the history lesson for today, old lady. Or history and geography all in one. It doesn’t matter how we think of it.’

‘In German “to think” is denken,’ my mother interposes. ‘And in Italian?’

‘Pensare. And credere of course.’

‘This ham is delicious,’ my father says.

They took me from England because that was best. I never went to school again. They taught me in their way, and between them they knew a lot: they taught me everything. My father’s ambitions as an Egyptologist fell away. Once upon a time when he went on his travels – always determined to make discoveries that had not been made before – he scrimped and saved in order to be independent in his marriage, and in Egypt often slept on park benches. But after we left the house in the square my father had no profession; he became the amateur he once regarded as a status he despised. His books did not remain unwritten, but he did not ever want to publish them.