Trio Read online

  ‘And women pharmacists called dottoressa who in fact act like doctors, all serious attention to people who are sick. But they didn’t have any boxes, just these small packets.’ She recounted how the plump pharmacist in her white coat had looked fruitlessly through an enormous cardboard box which stood on the floor, rummaging through it with her bottom in the air like a badger cleaning out its burrow, but had to admit finally that they didn’t seem to have any. Celia did all the actions in this pantomime.

  ‘What a hoot,’ said Marcia, chuckling. ‘But an old lady came in quite distressed about her ear and the chemist gave her a proper examination while everyone waited patiently. She had all the equipment to examine ears. And such an air of expertise. Made a diagnosis. None of this: Best to get your doctor’s advice caper, as they tell you in Australia. No cringing deference.’

  Marcia was doing some neck exercises while Celia finished her nails and held them up at arm’s length to assess her paintwork: ‘The beaches are stony around here aren’t they; did you cut your feet to ribbons getting to the water? Actually you look a bit different – distracted, or something. Pink. Are you all right?’

  ‘Well it’s been quite hot after all. Yes I’m fine. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks,’ said Celia, regarding Marcia.

  Celia, after seeing the monastery, had driven around the small town that wasn’t far from Sanlorenzo, but big enough to have a municipal park. Parks were not as common or as popular in this country, she noticed, as they were in England and Australia. The piazza was the main meeting and relaxing place, where you found out whatever was important. But this park was beautifully kept and she walked around it, noting the flowers, reading the names and looking up the translations. The entrance had an arresting Notice to Users of the Park with the following directives:

  •It is forbidden to walk on the grass

  •Do not lie on the seats

  •Dogs must be on a lead and be muzzled

  •Walk do not run

  And on it went. How they love to make lists here, thought Celia. Surprising, actually: something you wouldn’t have expected in Italy. It may have been that it was the wrong hour or too hot for there were not many strollers about. Nevertheless there was a female warden here, amiable enough but in uniform, walking around, visible to any likely transgressors. Celia was glad Sanlorenzo didn’t have a park.

  Back in the village that had become their own for these past weeks, she wandered down a road where a marketplace was set up, for it was Saturday. The usual array of produce she’d seen in many markets was there: vegetables and fish, and further along clothes, shoes, linen, crockery and jewellery. But a lot of this was of a humbler quality. Brown-skinned men from Africa gravely lined up their pendants, rings and bracelets, so that they were in perfectly straight rows for public viewing. Then they would sit back, patient as the mountains, to perhaps sell something. She sauntered up and down and bought a green necklace and then a pair of sandals that were made of cork and leather; they looked as though they could have been made by someone in an old stone cottage in the countryside.

  She looked at her sandals from every angle and questioned the African man on their origin but his cheerful Italian, heavily accented yet musical, still didn’t make it clear to her.

  Of the few bars in the village she went to the one she favoured, with the bigger trees and tables outside and a view of the church, where she had a lemon drink and examined her wares. Behind the church rose the mountains that thrilled her, and frightened her a little. She had been reading books on the Sicilian and Calabrian Mafia, the latter being called the ’ndrangheta, and she asked Sandrina about captives held in caves in the mountains. ‘Oh but that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore,’ smiled Sandrina.

  Walking to Sandrina’s car which she had left quite distant from the market, she passed by a small square of grass – you couldn’t call it a park – with a statue she’d not noticed before. There was no bench or seat of any kind around; it seemed that the monument didn’t expect to attract more than a passing glance. Approaching the sculpture to read the inscription, she saw that it was a relatively recent work; the subject, a young woman. She was naked with perfectly formed legs and breasts, quite modern-looking proportions, long hair flying in the wind, her right arm stretched out as if she were on a cross, the other arm bent and thrown over her head which was straining towards the sky. It was a posture of utter abandonment. On close inspection she saw that the inscription was a memorial to our fallen sons in WWII. She’d have to tell Marse about this to see if she could provide a meaning to such incongruity. Mickey would have some ideas on it.

  Later, in the large kitchen – the best room in any house, in Celia’s view, she was washing lettuce three times in and out of water in the painstaking way that made Marcia smile. Since Marcia’s return from her jaunt the air was quiet between them.

  ‘Come and sit down, Cele. I’ll help with that later.’

  Celia caught the tone, soft but insistent, and sat opposite her friend. It wasn’t often Marcia issued an order, proffered with a hint of cajoling so that the imperative was gentle.

  ‘I’m not very forthcoming at times.’ It sounded a little as if Marcia was making an apology and was saying something rehearsed.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s because I’m used to being secretive. I always have been.’

  Celia nodded. ‘I know you are,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a bit like that myself.’

  ‘Yes, but not for the same reasons. Let me tell you something.’

  And the light changed as Marcia talked about the lovers she used to take not too long before she met Celia and Mickey, how she was hooked on sex, or maybe not sex itself but on proving she was desirable, because she had been a homely-looking child.

  ‘So I had a busy time of it, in good old London. The pill by then had been invented, you’ll remember.’ Celia shrugged, pulling a face. ‘Anyway, I once did an estimate: I’d say that I slept with about three hundred men over two years.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ Celia considered this for a while. ‘That’s about … two and a half a week.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Nearly three different men each week for two years.’

  ‘I’ll be forced to go and buy some cigarettes if you carry on like this. There’s more. I started doing this again about a year ago, whenever I was out of London.’

  ‘Who with? With whom?’

  ‘Anyone who was nice to me.’

  ‘Mickey is nice to you.’

  Marcia looked away. ‘Too nice.’ She started working her hands as if she was putting on hand cream, in a meditative sort of way, looking down, examining them. ‘I love Mickey, you know. And I love you. And sex is very often not about love, you must know this.’

  Celia dismissed the idea. ‘I don’t know much about either.’

  The sun began to fade and shadows were coming through the long windows.

  ‘I thought I knew you.’

  ‘That sounds like a reproach,’ said Marcia. ‘Are we talking about the same thing?’

  ‘No, no. You say you love me. Everyone knows I love you, would do anything for you.’

  ‘Yes, darling, but you and I couldn’t be intimate together in bed. It would be easy to have all sorts of romps, the three of us. But it would spoil everything in the end. And that’s not what loving people is about.’

  ‘Oh Marcia, for heaven’s sake. What kind of a conversation is this?’ She stared at a wall for clarification. ‘You seem to have come to all sorts of conclusions and not told me anything. You know I like to face up to things. I’ve always liked women, but never found one I liked quite enough. Whereas you liked men. It’s probably because you loved your father.’

  ‘Well let me tell you.’ Calm and steady, almost with a little smile Marcia said: ‘I hated my father. I rejoiced when he died.’

  She got up and took a glass down and poured herself some water. ‘My father molested me when I was a child. Habitually. I’ve never told anyone
before. That’s the main piece of intelligence I’ve always kept to myself.’

  Celia waited a while as they looked at each other.

  ‘I see, Marse. When did it start, darling?’

  ‘I can’t remember when we were not doing it together!’

  ‘From the time you were a tiny tot?’

  ‘I think he fondled me from the time I was a toddler, or even before … but the main memory is from when I was six.’

  Marcia nodded, getting the age right, blowing her nose, breathing deeply. When she was eight, she said, and began to understand about sin and going to hell it was already too late for confidences in her mother. And in any case her mother was too busy saying rosaries and doing novenas. She always told Marcia to say her prayers and God would help, whenever any little difficulty raised its head. But God wasn’t any help at all to Marcia, though she prayed very hard.

  ‘But Marcia, your father: I thought he was a dilettante scholar who was always helping you to look up things in the encyclopaedia.’

  ‘And so he did introduce me to the encyclopaedia. Critical all the time of my ignorance. Telling me I knew nothing, as well as being plain. The plainest kid in the town, he told me.’

  They looked at each other across the kitchen table. ‘I had another vision of your childhood. I knew there were money problems, yes.’

  ‘He was a drinking man, with barely a good word to say to me. Except when he got a little bit drunk. Not rotten drunk, when he’d throw things, when he couldn’t contain his anger at the universe and would hit and punch mother until she fled to the church. But when he was in that state of semi-intoxication he became charming towards me and acted a bit like a real father.’ She talked slowly, deliberately. When he had just enough drink in him, he stopped deriding Marcia’s poor handwriting; desisted from scoffing at her arithmetic answers, left off telling her she was neither pretty nor clever. She found out later that her parents had stopped having sex when she was very young. Her mother couldn’t bear it. Marcia could picture the little shudder of revulsion from Mother, about to off-load her so-called responsibility onto her daughter.

  He had a voice that was like velvet, James Baxter, when he was courting her. She knew from those days that a good voice was persuasive. Her mother’s voice – Mrs B. – she of the pursed mouth and sandy eyebrows, also spoke in the Yorkshire vernacular but with a hard, plaintive edge to it.

  ‘Why did they ever get married, I wonder?’

  Marcia thought it was a mutual misunderstanding, or a folie à deux. He thought he could bring passion into her life, or more likely could bring her down by it, and she believed she could convert him to temperance. A determined churchgoer, she had been initially a little vague, it seemed, about Marcia’s place in her life. As if having given birth to a child whose existence she could hardly believe in and for whom she could not find any rationale, forced her to succumb early in her marriage to fits of the vapours and an increasing need to attend Mass with Holy Communion. She tried to convert her husband to her ways: that is, punctual, sober, quiet, reserved and respectable. With the heart of a medieval zealot she strove to win him over from drinking by the power of her prayer and piety.

  Always on the verge of a close-lipped sniff, she wouldn’t, on the other hand, have anything to do with him. But she prayed for him each day, every week. This was bound to save him from his demons. Little wonder he lashed out at her now and then.

  ‘What I can’t forgive is the way he tricked my mother into colluding with him. The first time I remember. One day he told her that while she was out he was going to have a nap. I was to wake him so he wouldn’t oversleep. He said the alarm clock was broken; it was he who broke it intentionally. My mother was at evening devotions.’ Marcia made a quick hand-wringing gesture and stared at her palm, into her past as a small child. ‘So I duly went to wake him up at five o’clock. His pyjamas were open. It started in earnest from there. I shook him to wake him up and he feigned sleepiness but he’d been waiting for me. Look at our little toy, he said. And I did. I was interested.’

  ‘You were six.’

  But Marcia wanted to please her father. And she could remember that it was from this time that she started having seriously secret times with Daddy, the times when he was nice to her, when he held her hand and guided it and told her she was his little girl. In these times together he told her she was clever and pretty to boot, and they mustn’t ever tell Mummy or anyone else the nice things they did together because you had to learn to keep a secret in this world.

  Other kids might have had nightmares but for her the reality became Daddy, drunk, as she matured, coming in to her bedroom at night, just as any husband might. It became more routine as she got used to it. And he didn’t bother being nice anymore. Drunk or sober he was with her; in her bed, down in the shed or on the kitchen table.

  ‘I felt like a workhorse. Also rather confused; I didn’t know whether I had begun to like it or not.’ Marcia turned her face towards Celia. ‘At that age you don’t know about your wishes or your rights; you don’t know the word coercion. Or know about your place in life, or that your innocence has been taken.’

  She stood up and got another glass of water, then one for Celia before sitting down again. ‘As I grew older my skinny ugliness started to change and my looks gradually improved. Finally I realised when I was about twenty-one that I did have good features that others didn’t: good teeth anyway, and they told me my skin was flawless.’ She looked back into her memory of the young Marcia. ‘I never had problems with acne like some of those poor kids. Strange, I was middle-class in my tastes; you know, took naturally to literature, classical music. But I wasn’t brave enough to express anything as a child, or to go against my father.’

  ‘No. You were a frightened, obedient little girl,’ said Celia. ‘Did you never tell your mother about it?’

  ‘Yes, when I turned thirteen, and I understood that I could get pregnant but didn’t know what to do or who to go to.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she told me not to tell anyone.’

  Celia snorted, shaking her head.

  ‘And did he continue – after puberty?’

  ‘Oh yes, he took precautions some of the time,’ said Marcia with a bit of a laugh.

  ‘And, did he …?’

  ‘We did everything.’ And she actually did laugh, her friend noticed. But not a real one.

  ‘And – when did he die?’

  ‘When I was twenty-one. I came home one night from a Church Youth meeting and my mother said, quite without preamble: Your father is dead. He was found drunk and dead in a ditch. I don’t think she knew about being alliterative. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ I said. And she didn’t say anything much after that. Didn’t chide me for my blasphemy’

  ‘God, Marcia, this is making me bloody well sick.’

  Marcia heaved a great sigh. ‘So you see, when I was a child I was more than interfered with or damaged, I was knowing. I sure knew a lot of men at the time you introduced me to Mickey. And it should shame me to say that it wasn’t altogether satisfactory with him.’ There was a short silence. ‘But oh, it was OK. Poor Mickey. He hasn’t much sexual vitality I suppose. But he’s a love. And has no idea about me,’ she added.

  The hours had gone by and the sky was darkening. They had drunk their water. Celia stood up and got together some olives, wine glasses and a bottle, and sat down again.

  ‘What appals me about this, Marse,’ she said, ‘is that we know it’s not only ancient, this … this habit, this vice; it’s almost a commonplace custom, almost a right that goes back to antiquity.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know I was by no means the only little girl, or small child, on whom the father was asserting his demands.’ She absent-mindedly reached for an olive but didn’t eat it. ‘When I was about, oh, twenty-three, before I met you and Mick, I thought I was being terribly hip and glamorous in London, drinking, smoking, playing loud music, going to those dreadful parties, having regular sex with awful young m
en. Meeting you and Mickey with your comparative innocence, your sense of fun, your sensibilities, it has been like a blessing. I loved you both from the start, you see. And I still do.’

  They reached for each other’s hand. Celia made a fist of their hands and pressed it to her face.

  ‘We’ve been too shy to say anything about love until today, Marse, but thank you for saying that, all of that. It’s too easy to misunderstood people,’ said Celia. ‘Lucky altogether really, the three of us knowing each other.’ By now they were eating and drinking, as if life had been able to return to normality.

  Marcia sipped her wine. ‘Good friendship is love unfettered by physical demands. I can see how sex must become irrelevant when one becomes old, but friendship never does.’

  ‘My dear. How wretched you must have been, not confiding in anyone all this time.’

  ‘Shall we have another?’ asked Marcia, indicating her glass. ‘I bought some crackers and this cheese on the way home, fully matured, so it’ll play havoc with the breath.’

  ‘But that can be rectified,’ said Celia, reaching across to cut the cheese.

  ‘Everything can be rectified.’

  ‘Ah, no it can’t. This kind of stuff can’t be buried. Please don’t say it’s all right, that it’s in the past. That bastard infected your whole life with his vileness. Bad enough that men like him can penetrate the body of a child. But that your mother knew and still didn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘I think she let him know that she knew but she put it in religious terms – you know, that it was wrong and she was going to pray for him!’

  ‘Not bash him over the head with a saucepan or call the police, or take you away … something useful.’

  ‘She couldn’t afford to do that.’ And they sat there quietly.

  ‘The important thing that I started out to explain, is that I decided I was able to belong to myself, deep within my soul, where no one could reach. And that’s what I’ve been doing, all these years. I didn’t have help from my mother and I couldn’t tell anyone else about it. I took over his shame. But I had myself.’