Trio Read online

  ‘At the moment I’m an alacyte,’ he’d said.

  ‘An acolyte?’ she asked, momentarily puzzled, accepting his payment.

  ‘Yep.’ He was pleased she recognised his status in the church.

  His look of satisfaction revealed the understanding that he was presently on the lower rungs of the ladder to priesthood. She gazed out of the window so that he wouldn’t see her thinking, wondering if she was giving him lessons on false pretences. He thought, or so it seemed to her, that taking three lessons a week, rather than one, would accelerate his move along the priestly way. But there was something else: he appeared to know that she needed the extra money. She was certain he saw himself in the position of usefulness to her, helping to pay her bills. He turned up to lessons weary, sometimes still getting lost. Marcia realised that she’d been having an honest-to-goodness relationship with Luke for some years; nothing sexual (she called that a love affair) but a pleasantly familiar, companionable unity, the kind of comfortable, putting-heads-together that teachers and students enjoy within bounds, and without the tethers of expectations.

  A three-month qualification to teach English was now available to her. One could teach the disabled – those with mild speech defects (she might approach that ABC news presenter) – or semi-literate people, or foreigners. Choose your specialty, she was told, or specialise in two areas and you would never be out of part-time work. The agency would assess potential clients and allocate them a teacher. Marcia felt a quickening in her pulse at the possibilities. She had already fallen into her own area with Luke, of teaching someone who was mildly impaired in thought and memory processes. Now she would have the academic backup to support her teaching. The money outlaid for the course would be recouped within a short time.

  And so she paid her money and waited for work. There would be small classes at the Centre and she also had the choice of teaching privately from home. It felt like the old days, waiting for a call, and she was nervous. Some of the clients had suffered a stroke or some trauma and had finished the recovery process with a speech therapist, if one can ever fully recover from these things, and would now be her pupils. Others had never learned to read and write their own language. Still others had no handicap other than being non-English speakers. All needed some kind of help in facilitating their language. When she received a call her first task was to ascertain their precise needs and decide on a suitable pace. Luke still attended loyally and she couldn’t overcome a particular guilt that she had learned how to do all of this on him. But nothing in his demeanour suggested that he might consider this.

  From the start it went well. The attachment to the Centre touched her in a way that the usual teaching of English hadn’t. Not since her early training in drama years had she considered words and the producing of them in such depth, and the relish in learning them that her students took. She remembered when she was a child in the Yorkshire Catholic school there were strange, old words: parlour, scullery, refectory. The boarders used words such as dormitories and cubicles, counterpanes, serviette rings, and they had to wear knickers called bloomers. All the girls wore blouses and ties over vests and tunics. Then there was the manner of comporting oneself: a decorous code of conduct in those days – one thought then that it was the established order and would do for the rest of one’s life. But it hadn’t prevailed in schools. Things change – thank goodness!

  One of her private pupils, Andrew in fact, had been the catalyst to make her wind down private teaching. He had one day written in a story for homework that something was a ‘crock’ and when she questioned the term, it turned out to be short for a ‘crock of shit’. Not original, then, she had said to him, docking her irritation.

  ‘Ah, I’m sick of these fuckin’ English lessons,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Andrew,’ she said, pleasantly, ‘we don’t do fucking English here. We do English. And you’re free to leave at any time.’ She placed her pencil down neatly. He hunched his shoulders as if he were cold and mumbled ‘Sorry’. So of course she softened.

  ‘I can teach you to be rude with much better language than that – if that is the aim,’ she smiled. Andrew grunted, at a loss. But she thought she had had enough of him.

  The people she taught at the Centre were more than polite, they were humbly appreciative. Who couldn’t respond in kind to such a position?

  But how to improve Luke’s lot? Whenever he came to mind she was forced to think of Mickey. It wasn’t physical characteristics, because Mickey’s eyes were blue and Luke’s a light shade of brown, or no, a dark gold. It was his attentiveness or fragility that reminded her of Mick. Even when Luke was telling her something he thought she ought to know, when his face was at its most luminous, something of a plea rested behind his gaze. It was unsettling because she then felt responsible for him. How his speech would lunge from one thing to another!

  She wanted some action for him: that is, betterment of his lot. For some time he had been saying how much digging he was being given at work. There was a hint of something he couldn’t explain but she understood it to be fairly steady derision from a particular workmate and too much back-breaking yakka. It wasn’t just that he looked to be drooping with fatigue some days, there was a mild restlessness she sensed in him and she took it upon herself to encourage his ability in helping people.

  Painstakingly, with two fingers, she typed out a resumé for him, getting as much information as she could about his schooling and church activities, and made enquiries for his application for a position as trainee caregiver. He was by now enthusiastic about the project, giving her accounts of his elderly aunt and how he had helped her with a sprained ankle the week before.

  The nursing home she approached listened to her explanations about his attributes. Male caregivers were regrettably thin on the ground, Lynette the director said with a smile. They would be interested.

  As the weeks passed, Luke, still looking tired, nevertheless gave her good reports about his training. He had thrown in his job and he said that was a good thing because the bloke he worked with was always laughing at him and giving him the worst work to do all by himself. ‘And you know what, Marcia? There’s difference between working with someone and working for someone isn’t there?’

  There certainly is, said Marcia, pleased at such discernment. She had done something towards improving his life; she was mentally wiping her hands in satisfaction, or else something else – feeling of control, maybe, because she had actively rerouted someone’s life? Nevertheless, maybe she had effected a better outcome for him. The good that men do, she thought, is indeed oft interred with their bones. One or two people had said to her that a chance remark of hers had altered their way of looking at life’s offerings and had, as a matter of fact, sent them on to a new field of study that had changed what they thought was their destiny. In the days when she had sold bed linen a co-worker had told her that. This had astounded Marcia, but until now she had never consciously taken steps herself to help someone out. Anyway, soon she’d contact Lyn at the nursing home and see about his progress.

  With Luke sorted, she made a call to the Language Centre to confirm extra classes they wanted her to take on the following week. The person she spoke to sounded Italian and she was pensive, putting the phone down. It was a voice that played upon her musings; she had been thinking about Italy lately and that memorable holiday – how they had thought they would go back there again and again. But they never did. Calabria was a past dream that had to be put aside with reluctance. And perhaps she’d never get back that proximity to Celia. Not to mention the man on the beach! Now, what was his name?

  The south of Italy! Mountains and myths and things going wrong and feeling right. Mickey had gone off to Ireland for some reason she couldn’t remember and Celia was living in Rome learning about set design in movies. Come to the Med! she had exhorted in a phone call. And Marcia hesitated at first, then recalled thinking: I think I just might.

  It wasn’t ideal – people who say they had a perfect ho
liday aren’t telling the whole truth – but it was the most memorable. It was like gazing upon a collection of jewels, thinking of that time. The most priceless gem was the evening when they were walking slowly uphill on one of the cobbled streets in the old part of Naples to look back at a view and they were stopped dead, of one mind, as they heard from an upstairs apartment someone playing the piano – a Beethoven sonata. It was played from beginning to end with barely an imperfection by someone – they didn’t want to know who – but surely a professional musician? Neither she nor Celia wanted or needed to move or speak until it was over. They stood thus, hands in their pockets, heads raised then lowered, at times looking at each other and Celia didn’t try to hide her tears, at the composer’s gift and the pianist’s virtuosity. Cele had confessed later:

  ‘It was very important to me, that summer.’

  ‘And to me,’ said Marcia. ‘What was Italy about, do you think?’

  ‘Apart from understanding you better? Um, it was about the Red Brigade and bombs going off in banks, public political concerns. But Italy was for me the sense of the possible; where pageantry was the norm. Where people are fully alive.’ She took a breath and thought. ‘What northern Europeans have to learn, Italians do by instinct: the looks on faces as they attended Mass, for example, each and every sinner. They know that there must be recognition. I valued the giving full due to everything even when vendors set out their wares at the market. And of course that sonata we heard, by chance, one evening.’

  ‘It was a half-hour of magic, that.’ And there was a lull between them while they thought of the times when they’d had to separate for a while, to have their time alone. ‘But it was for me an ugly awakening, in some ways: a troubling reminder of the other side of humanity. The family across the way, for example. You remember them, Cele.’

  ‘The noisy ones?’

  ‘Yes the despairing ones, rather. The couple who had given up on sanity and were dedicating themselves to destruction while their adolescent children hovered around corners, huddled together outside the house, looking afraid.’

  ‘Good God, did I miss something?’

  ‘You slept through most of it, I think.’

  Marcia nodded to herself, remembering the conversation, her own distress as a witness out of sight. That family’s conflict had touched upon an exposed nerve, forced into her memory scenes she’d worked hard to forget.

  Many of those people in Italy, especially their hosts, would certainly be dead by now. She turned the radio on. Here was Roberto Alagna, overstating the case in the depths of the temple, going for the top C, tonsils straining. The anxiety made it hard for the listener. Mickey – tin-ear Mick, let’s be honest – professed to know and love this tenor from the days when the singer did nightclub numbers. Mickey was the kind of man who, funnily for an Irishman surely, loved Gilbert & Sullivan and Flanders & Swann. That English haw-haw humour, that enjoyed sending up classics such as the Trumpet Voluntary. This meant for Marcia that of course the piece, after being subjected to such treatment, could never again be taken seriously. Just as she and Celia could only later see poor Cristina in Sanlorenzo as a comic figure once someone had taken away their compassionate opinion of her.

  After a few more weeks had gone by she quizzed Luke about his progress and received nebulous responses. On meeting Lynette the nursing home director by chance one day, she asked her outright. To her dismay the sympathetic woman told her that he couldn’t be made to assert himself with the sick and infirm but held back; the self-assured young man Marcia knew had all but disappeared in the face of reality; a timidity took hold of him, said Lyn, in the face of a real patient he was asked to attend to.

  ‘He didn’t seem to understand fully what was required in showering people, for example,’ said the director, ‘even after he’d been shown several times.’

  ‘What was it, do you think, modesty?’ asked Marcia, remembering his happy repetition of Dr ABC and how he had helped her not so long ago in her episode.

  ‘I’m not sure, maybe an awkwardness with people he didn’t know.’

  It was a jolt for Marcia, a crushing blow, as Mickey might have said. She had always been impressed by Luke’s apparent competence (as described by him, come to think of it now) in all matters of help, from first aid to demonstrating the healing powers of Tai Chi. And he had certainly helped when she’d had her ‘funny turn’, as well as her headache massage. He had even demonstrated some magic tricks he always did with his young nephews. So was Lynette right, was it with strangers that he lost that buoyant confidence so much a part of his English lessons? She heaved a sigh. It was probably plainly and simply a matter of being unable to grasp and hold fairly basic information. It was her fault. Once, she had given him a short passage to read (already suspecting this?) of a man and a woman having a conversation where the man was being solicitous. ‘Solicitous simply means being kind towards someone,’ Marcia explained and he nodded. They took it slowly and read on for a little, then she stopped.

  ‘Now tell me, Luke, how many people are in that passage we’ve read?’

  ‘Ouf, lots.’

  ‘Lots? Who are they all?’

  ‘Well you’ve got all those solicitors, for one thing.’

  She regarded him for just a second too long. ‘Ah no, Luke, that’s a different word,’ she smiled, and turned towards the book, but not before she saw the humiliation in his eyes.

  And now he was without work at all, because she had encouraged him to give up the job that seemed to be wearing him out, in favour of what she wrongly guessed would be perfect. Yet he seemed cheerful on the phone. He had little money now for English lessons but he was still an alcolyte, he told her, still serving at Mass.

  She did think they had run aground now and began to doubt her own perceptions in teaching. She’d always believed he understood finally, only to realise that any comprehension would leak out of his mind within a day, like jewels spilling from an insecure container. Perhaps she should just leave him alone now. She had interfered with his life, wanting to get him some justice. God, she wished she had Celia here to talk about it with.

  It was early morning in the season of storms again. She went into the back garden to view the chaos. Tree litter everywhere and some damage. She never experienced a storm without shivering, thinking of Celia. No, she wouldn’t think about that, making herself miserable.

  And Mickey’s decision to go back. What was it about the Old Dart – it was like a magnet, for all its squalor, dubious morality and low-hung sky. But no, not for her: Marcia was content here. Why couldn’t people stay put?

  She surveyed the ruined birdbath. It was beyond redemption. A new one would have to be bought and installed by someone with stronger muscles than hers. Ivor naturally came to mind but maybe Luke could be prevailed upon, for a fee of course. He was uneasily hovering in the shadows of her mind, a good idea gone wrong. Maybe, she thought, she could help him out with odd jobs from now on. She fretted over the whole business. Her certainty that this would be his métier, that he would take well to helping handicapped people or old folk was in tatters, like her garden. As she had imagined it, he would leave his heavy-duty job that without a doubt was sapping his energy. Once his training was accomplished he’d slide effortlessly into his new role. She had thought that in the company of residents who found it a triumph to comb their own hair he would be a prince among men. How many people who try to help others make it worse?

  She slumped into a chair. Daytime television had never been an attraction for her; it was something bored or geriatric folk did. But the day was cold and dreary, and here was this year’s crew on the sports programme. A group of Australian men had won a yacht race and were busy doing that thing with the bottle of champagne; shaking it into foam and aiming it at each other. Mickey would have had something to say about that. He gave barely a passing nod to sport. Celebratory rituals, Marcia thought, were truly as ludicrous here as in any undeveloped country. What a waste of champagne, even if it wasn’t r
eal – as senseless as the Greek tradition of smashing plates for fun.

  As she sat there she put a hand under her armpit. Her body had issued a warning and she was having treatment but she was less alarmed than others, as it happened. James for example became very twitchy about her medical problems. He had become quite querulous in his old age, on the rare occasions they met. He and Celia had been good mates before and would be again by now if Cele had in fact returned – back to the place that was her birthplace and Marcia’s adopted home. But indeed she did know that Celia was back, since James had said so in passing – one of those little bits of information that are so important to the listener but dropped by the speaker on his way to some other remark. He wasn’t a gossip, James, not at all. But perhaps he had told Celia that she, Marcia, had been unwell in the past and that the future didn’t look too good either.

  The fact was, she had just gone on being Marcia; working as if she was good for another twenty years. She didn’t want to talk about it, not even with Celia – who would look at her too earnestly, perhaps care too much. Emotional talk was very draining and Marcia would rather put it off, skirt around the estrangement. After all, they hadn’t quarrelled, the door had been left ajar.

  She switched off the programme and considered James. The way he talked was engaging, a reminder of the way English speakers from good schools in any country used words and grammar of a bygone era. Vocabulary had gone through enormous changes since James’s youth; it’s remarkable how accommodating we are, she thought. Not only speech but fashions, houses, culture generally. Manners were more casual. The way she (and more so James who had a good few years on her) had been brought up would now be seen as something comical from some ancient regime, yet it had been only the twentieth century.

  Slang had changed and with it all understatement had gone. Celia had a good way with slang, not necessarily strong sayings; she always used the latest words, then when other people cottoned on she’d discard them. But what Marcia had to do now was deal somehow with this legacy of inexcusable longing for the past, something she hadn’t indulged in as a rule, but some sort of maudlin hankering had overtaken her lately, thinking of a time where they were all strong and brave and optimistic, when life was raucous fun and took outrageous turns.