Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

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СКАЧАТЬ Leo’s shoulder I could see a corner of the Adriatic – brilliantly blue and white-capped from a stiff wind that was making the shutters rattle. There’d been an attempt at making love earlier, but neither of us had been committed enough to keep going. It was a good thing, I supposed, that we weren’t afraid to show it when we were half-hearted. Still, low sexual energy was bad for the soul. Not to mention there were two more days to go in an under-heated room and there was nothing to do in Ancona when such attractions as it had were closed for the holiday.

      Christmas Day. The very words used to shimmer.

      ‘Leo!’ I tried to wake him nicely by curling my arm around his belly and stroking him gently. ‘Leo, sweetheart – go and see if the signora will make us a cup of coffee.’ Lifting myself on my elbow, I was as shocked as if I’d touched a live wire to see that he was wide awake and staring at the window.

      The next day we went to an organ recital in an exceptionally draughty unused church, where Leo disappeared into his completely attentive mode. You could stick pins into him when he’s listening to music and he wouldn’t notice.

      Things would have to change, I saw with bleak clarity as I sat there growing colder and colder. We were once – but I didn’t want to think about the marvellous lovers we’d once been. I could barely admit to myself that it was becoming harder and harder to lure him away, now that he had lost his villa, inland from Ancona, that he had hoped to turn into a small luxury hotel.

      I thought about Min instead.

      Somebody needed to be keeping an eye on her if she’d reached the point where she disgraced herself in public, and with Reeny these days caretaking an apartment complex in Spain, for the first time since the two of them were young women she wasn’t always at hand in the house next door. There was also the fact that in a few months I’d have finished my contract as a writer with the Information Unit of the EU in Brussels and I’d have a lump sum if I left – enough to keep me while I took my time looking around for the next job. Some of my colleagues actually retired at fifty-five, the ones who’d never liked their jobs and were good at saving. I couldn’t retire, and I didn’t want to. But I’d have enough with the lump sum to keep going for a year or two – maybe even three, if I went back to Dublin.

      And – I sent my tongue on a delicate walk around behind my teeth – the dentists in Dublin spoke English. W. H. Auden said that thousands have lived without love, not one without water, but he might well have mentioned teeth. I had no future of any kind if I didn’t look after the ones I had left.

      It was completely dark now outside the single slender window, high up in a peeling, ochre wall. A navy-blue sky, with one winking star. There’d been a cheerful-looking trattoria on the way to the recital and we could go there as soon as we’d collected a heavier sweater and more socks from the pensione. Then, bed…

      And what about all that? What about cafés and sex and sixteenth-century windows? One of the great things about Brussels was that I could very easily take a train to meet Leo. And I couldn’t bear to be long away from him, even now. I kept my hair a tactful ashy-blonde colour, and bought my clothes in boutiques in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium where even chic women loved bread and butter as much as I did and had the same build, and when I walked along beside him with my tummy held in and an interested smile on my face I felt like a woman alive in the world. In Italy, where we met more often than anywhere else, quite a few men had a good look at me before they turned away.

      But in Kilbride in Dublin… My birthday wasn’t till September but I’d be fifty-five then – barely tipping towards the second half of the decade, but heading that way. There’d never been unmarried women my age in Kilbride who considered themselves to be still in the game. Or maybe there had been, but they were too smart to let anybody know it.

      The audience were applauding with tremendous vigour. They must be trying to warm up. Leo gave me one of the smiles he didn’t know were lovely as he got to his feet. Music made him happy – well, music up to about the time women stopped wearing long skirts, no later.

      Oh. An encore.

      We all sat down again.

      Home’s most powerful lure, all the same, was an image, not an argument.

      If I went home to look after her, there was a certain way Min might be. I was charmed by her face anyway – so small and white, the black eyes so round and childlike. But I’d seen long ago what it could look like when it opened like a leaf in the sun.

      When I was a child, before my father died, the three of us used to go every summer to a wooden shack called Bailey’s Hut, out on the shelly grass beyond the last wharf of Milbay Harbour. My father’s mother, Granny Barry, could borrow us The Hut for our holiday because she worked for Bailey’s Hardware and Builders’ Providers.

      There was no running water, so we brought a jerrycan of tap water for making tea and otherwise we used the rainwater in the barrel at the door. My father would also use the rainwater to wash Min’s hair.

      ‘Right you are, Ma’am!’ he’d say, when she said this would be a good day to give her hair a good wash. He’d bring a basin of warm water out onto the grass, and then a bucket of rainwater. She’d kneel in her old skirt and her pink under-bodice that had a stitched cone on each side for her breasts. He’d sit on a box and with her head in his lap, he would shampoo her, using the tips of his fingers. ‘Mind that stuff in my eyes!’ she’d say. Then he’d leave her kneeling, her head bent, and he’d delicately pour the first trickle of rainwater onto her head and she’d jump and say ‘Ouch! That water’s freezing!’ But as he went on, the water flowed more evenly. She used her hands to distribute the water around her hair and he followed her with his stream of water and poured it where her hands went, exactly. Then he put down the bucket, and wrapped the towel firmly around her head. She lifted her blinded face, and he dabbed it very gently with a smaller towel.

      Her hair would dry then in the sun, combed forward to fall over her face, her thin shoulders peeking out at each side. Or she’d brush it in the hot air currents from the Aladdin heater they kept in the corner of the room behind chicken-wire, where I couldn’t touch it, and it would take on volume and gloss and vibrate as if energy ran through it.

      He’d say: ‘See your auntie’s hair? Your auntie Min has beautiful hair.’ He’d sound wistful. He’d sound as if he were talking about something long in the past, though she was right there in front of him and was not going to leave.

      I never forgot the way she lifted her unguarded face to his. He held it between his two hands for a few moments when she was waiting for him to dab the wet off, and she, who was always so wary and brisk, allowed herself to be held. Her eyes were closed but she rested in his care like a seabird coming down onto the water.

      That was the face she might turn on me. She might be like that with me.

      I’d take the lump sum.

      I went back at the end of the summer, and for the first two or three months I didn’t do much more than sit at the old kitchen table. It was as if I’d entered one of those forests in fairytales which surround the castle where the princess sleeps, where no leaves move and no birds sing. I was slowly thinking – you wanted this and you got it, but what do you do now? It was as if I’d been fractured from my own experience – as if most of what I’d learnt in thirty years of living and loving and working around the globe wasn’t relevant to where I’d now arrived.

      Nothing happened. It was an event when Bell the cat walked across the table an inch from my nose on her way from the window to the stairs to go up to Min. She walked past again on her way back out. Sometimes she condescended СКАЧАТЬ