Selected Stories полностью

‘Italy,’ my mother says. ‘The front at Bordighera.’

There is a photograph.

The ticket collector’s beard is flecked with grey, his uniform in need of attention. I know him well, for often I travel on his train.

‘Grazie, signora.’ He hands my ticket back, reminding me to change in Milan and Genoa. In the early afternoon the string of little seaside towns will begin, the train unhurried then, slowing, halting, juddering on, gathering speed again. That part of the journey I like best.

I wear blue because it suits me best, often with green, although they say the two are difficult to combine. My hair’s well tended, the style old-fashioned. ‘You’re an old-fashioned lady,’ my father used to say, not chiding me for that, his tone as light as ever. She liked my old-fashionedness, my mother said when I was very young. I’m in my fifty-third year now, a woman who has settled down at last in the forgotten Italian seaside resort where they met. In nineteen forty-nine that was, I calculate.

They died, he first – in his eighties – she less than a year later; and I, who should have known them better than anyone, did not know them at all, even though my mother did not release my hand all during her last night. The second funeral was conducted with the same simple formality as the first, the coffin placed beside the other in the small graveyard they had chosen, the place remembered from the summers we often spent in the Valle Verzasca. I walked away from both of them through cold winter air, snow on the ground but no longer falling.

A month or so later, calling in at the Poste Restante at Bad Mergentheim, as we had always done in their lifetime, I found a letter from Mrs Upsilla. Addressed as usual to my mother, it had been lying there for almost a year.

. . . I only write because it is so long now since I have heard from you. I am concerned but perhaps it is all right and you have been so kind to an old woman. The summer has not been good in Brighton but I struggle on, the season very poor. Several other landladies have given up and I read the writing on the wall and think how different life was once, those days in London! Well, I must not say it but there you are. I only write because I have not heard.

I knew at once that my mother had paid Mrs Upsilla all these years. Charles too, I imagined. The rich’s desperate bid for silence: I think of it as that; but no, I do not blame my mother. I replied to Mrs Upsilla, simply saying that my mother had died and asking her to pass this information on to Charles if she happened to be in touch with him. No acknowledgement ever found its way to me from either of them, but it was hearing from Mrs Upsilla that first made me want to honour my father and mother. For Mrs Upsilla would die too, and Charles would, and I myself in time: who then, in all the world, would be aware of the story that might be told?

In the hotel where I live, in Bordighera’s Regina Palace, my friends are the dining-room waiters, and the porters in the hall, and the bedroom maids; I do not turn away such friendship and I have myself for company too. Yet when my face is there in the glass of my compact, or reflected in shop windows when the sun is right, or glimpsed in public mirrors, I often think I do not know that woman. I wonder when I gaze for a moment longer if what I see is the illusion imposed by my imagination upon the shadow a child became, if somehow I do not entirely exist. I know that this is not so, yet still it seems to be. Confusion has coloured my life since my mother’s death; and the waking hours of my solitude are nagged by the compulsion to make known the goodness of two people. Obsessively there, beyond my understanding, that has become the insistent orderer of how things should be. Not ever finding the courage to make it known in the corridors and lounges of the Regina Palace, for years I travelled from my shabby old town by the sea to distant cities where I might be anonymous. Again and again I searched among strangers for a listener who would afterwards pass on as a wonder the beneficence of those two people, a marvel to be repeated at family gatherings, at dinner tables, in bars and shops, interrupting games of cards and chess, spreading to other cities, to villages and towns, to other countries.