On the Blue Train (18 page)

‘We'll tell him we're engaged.' The matter might already have been decided.

‘That I'm your fiancé?' he clarified stupidly. ‘And that will convince him to let you go?'

‘It will help. We could
suggest
. . .
insinuate
that we have no choice.'

‘No choice? Oh, I follow you.' He felt like a young yokel. Their eyes were on the nightfall. ‘Couldn't you just tell him you don't, well, love him anymore?'
Did
she love him?

She shook her head slightly. ‘It will be easier for him to accept if there's another man. Better for him.'

There was warm-heartedness in this, Harry thought. His appointment the next day was for the lunch hour, so most of his afternoon would be free. He was to leave Trieste by an evening service. Both exhilarated and strangely calm, he assented to the scheme. He was pleased to have a lark to fill his spare time with, and more of the company of this girl who was so spontaneously trusting—or using—him.

When the next day he saw her waiting as agreed by the fountain in Piazza Grande, she appeared tense, or remote,
and the whole idea much less frolicsome. After the previous mild evening, it was a chill white-sunned day, with a wind of surprising strength that he would later be taught to call, in reverential tones, the
bora
.

He came up to her and she pulled the glove off her left hand. ‘I borrowed this,' she whispered, although they were not in danger of being overheard. She waggled her fingers to show him the evidence of their engagement.

He hadn't reflected on the need for anything so concrete. He nodded. She slipped her glove back on and, fast and solemnly, kissed him on both cheeks in what he supposed was the Austrian or the Italian way, as if this intimate convention would make the lie of their love more authentic. Or had they become friends? It felt stilted, formal. Her face was cold. He examined the fountain's spouting fish and the rest of that rocky, ragtag monument apparently representing the different continents from which the marvels of trade streamed into Trieste. A clunky thing.

‘So, you don't love him anymore? That's why you're breaking it off?' it occurred to him to confirm, at the last minute, as they hastened across the square to the rendezvous at the Caffè degli Specchi.

Her cheerless smile struck him as the most articulate expression he'd seen her features assume. ‘I'm breaking it off because I'm not happy, of course.'

Giacomo Petri was at a table by one of the long windows giving on to the square. He rose, seeing her. They kissed as she and Harry had just kissed, and he continued to stand while Valeria removed her coat, gloves and scarf. A little behind her, Harry managed to disentangle himself from his own.

‘This is my friend Harry,' she said in English.

Giacomo was confused and perhaps disappointed, but he nodded and politely extended his hand. ‘Hello, pleased to meet you.' His English was uncertain.

Harry knew that he was much older than Valeria, married and the father of children. Still, he looked fairly young, credulous and defenceless. If physically nondescript, he was very well groomed, and his olive-skinned face gave an impression of softness and assiduous personal upkeep. Impossible to tell whether he suspected that something unfortunate was about to befall him.

They switched to Italian, but had hardly begun to converse when the waiter came to take the order. When he'd gone, Valeria gave a low, deliberate speech, Harry considering his knees. The coffee arrived. They did not touch it. Harry drank his rapidly: singularly good. Short bursts of questioning from Giacomo, one or two concise answers from her. A quiet, desperate-sounding appeal from him. Harry was sharply aware of the absurdity of his own position. Once he caught Giacomo staring at him in a manner that could have been challenging, imploring, or merely curious. Harry tried for a
congenial, philosophical demeanour, but soon dropped his eyes. Some time after, he saw Giacomo move to take her hand—she refused to allow it. Only later did it cross Harry's mind that this gesture must have been a risk. They would have been accustomed, in public places, to dissimulating any signs of particular closeness.

The full force of Valeria's beauty became apparent as she was denying it to Giacomo, downing her espresso like a nip of liquor before standing to signal that it was all finished, as far as he was concerned. Her eyes as black as her hair, dignified in their determination. The exchange could have lasted fifteen minutes.

Giacomo stood too, very quickly, as if afraid of missing his chance to do so. She conceded his final ritual kisses and he suffered the farewell like a wooden mannequin, arms inert at his sides.

He didn't volunteer his hand again and Harry didn't blame him. Harry let himself look at Giacomo's face properly just once. His eyes were fixed and glossy but it was especially from his listless mouth that you guessed at how deeply he was affected. There was no show of anger.

They were quiet for some minutes after leaving the café. At the road running along the sea they turned right towards San Carlo Wharf where, bizarrely, they had met just the night before. A man with an air of the eternal student passed them, slowing to study Valeria approvingly.
Indeed, her eyes were still very vivid and she walked with prowling elegance. Her movements were like her beauty more generally: you could fail to notice them, and then
notice
them. Abruptly she came forward, as it were, from the background. Harry never knew whether she somehow operated such changes on purpose. Ignoring the admiring man, she looped her arm through Harry's. He glimpsed moisture on her cheek.

‘Are you all right?'

‘I told him I would go to London to be with you.'

‘Won't he know, if you don't?'

‘I've broken his heart, he says.'

He pictured Giacomo's emptied face. ‘Poor chap.' He thought of the years during which they had been intimate. A nibble of jealousy. ‘Can't dwell on that, though, can you?'

‘Thank you. For helping me.'

‘We're getting married and I know so little about you,' he said lightly. Mentioning their fictional engagement pleased him.

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Oh. Was your childhood happy? Sorry, silly question.'

Their pace grew dawdling, her child-thin arm holding him tightly, her hand virtually on his ribs, his arm brushing her compact body.

‘Of course.'

‘Oh? Well, could you tell me . . . some memory?'

She mused. ‘When I was small'—staring at the sea, she appeared to be reciting—‘for carnival we dressed up, and my mother brought us to Piazza Grande.'

‘That sounds like fun.'

‘One year I was a queen. My mother had made me a beautiful costume. It had a very long dress, red and gold, that almost touched the ground. She made me promise not to run. I was so proud. Then I ran. Maybe I forgot. I was running fast through all the streamers and the confetti, chasing someone—or they were chasing me, I can't remember—and I tripped. The dress was ruined. I looked down and it was
ruined
. Torn. Dirty. I could see my ankles through a big hole. My mother found me, and said, “What have you done?”'

‘How sad.'

She pouted. ‘Now you.'

‘Me? You want one of
my
childhood memories? They're quite boring. We lived on an orchard. I moped around, when I could get out of working on it.' He reflected. ‘I walked back and forth along the fence line, speaking French to myself. Highly adventurous, you see. I seemed to spend hours staring at the tops of some handsome old gum trees that grew in the valley below. I listened to magpies.'

‘
Mag
. . . ?'

‘Magpies. A kind of Australian bird.'

‘They sing?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘How is it?'

‘You'd have to hear them. Melodic, pitched lowish. It's a fluted warble, somehow watery, and it goes with the approach of dawn, or twilight. Sorry, it's indescribable—though lovely. Nearly human, I sometimes thought.'

‘A nice memory.'

He laughed. ‘Is it? I do miss that sound.' He was losing his heart to her.

‘Will you go back to Australia?'

‘To live? Oh, I don't think so.'

‘London is a good place to live?'

‘Yes—for me, anyway. There's always something interesting to look at. The people, all sorts of people. You can lose yourself in a crowd if you've a mind to. Hear foreign languages. Potter around in the parks. Excellent parks. Like the gardens of country estates, or open fields. Smashing old pubs, like homey sitting rooms. As fine, wayward cities do, it irks you, and then calls to you like a siren.'

Proceeding at a crawl along the jetty, they were almost at the spot where they had first spoken.

She said, her tone analytical, ‘We're getting married and you've never kissed me.'

His breath caught in his chest. ‘That's true, isn't it?'

‘You're timid like an Englishman.'

‘Yes.'

She released his arm and he was cold where the faint warmth of her had been.

‘You might come to London, you know, to visit,' he said to cover his embarrassment. He was acting at being a man. He was a maladroit boy.

‘To visit you?'

‘Why not?'

She kissed him. In the whipping wind that made him want to latch on to her, Valeria's mouth was prime-coffee-scented, apathetic, and incongruously hot. The skin of her lips was slightly broken and this delicate abrasion hypnotised him. Her lazy laughter announced that it was over. Stunned, he tried to laugh too, bracing himself against another of the
bora
's squalls.

Speeding that evening out of the Stazione di Trieste Centrale, he knew that the encounter with Valeria, while so accidental, had hit him hard. He had been only a pretend husband-to-be but somehow the role had not felt untrue. He was already embroiled.

More than a year later, after the war had begun, her family sent her to London. And she did seek him out, at the address on the piece of paper he'd pressed into her hand as they took their leave of one another.

In greeting, she said bluntly, ‘Hello, husband,' to which he responded, with equal forthrightness, ‘Hello, wife.'

She didn't visit her family again until peace was reinstated and Trieste had passed from Austrian to Italian dominion (Piazza Grande now renamed Piazza dell'Unità), and then just briefly. Long before that Valeria and Harry had made their own peaceful tumult of a married life as real as any. They were never engaged. It would have seemed redundant.

‘A needle bath now, to get that off you.' He liked the painful sound of it, though how much could water prick? Not the same white-suited fellow as before, which was just as well, given how besmirched Harry was with mud. This one was bare-chested and clad in shorts, ready for the dripping prehistoric creature into which Harry had transformed, a visitant from a nightmare's murk. ‘You should find the inflammation much reduced,' he affirmed in a rich Glaswegian accent.

Harry remembered mumbling some improvisation about being gouty to justify his interest in peat. ‘I sincerely hope so,' he said.

The highly pressurised water did in fact come harder than you would have expected, stinging certain areas of the body when directed in the right way.

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