My House in Umbria
1
It is not easy to introduce myself. Gloria Grey, Janine Ann Johns, Cora Lamore: there is a choice, and there have been other names as well. Names hardly matter, I think; it is perhaps enough to say I like Emily Delahunty best. ‘Mrs Delahunty,’ people say, although strictly speaking I have never been married. I am offered the title out of respect to a woman of my appearance and my years; and Quinty – who addresses me more than anyone else – once said when I questioned him on the issue: ‘ “Miss Delahunty” doesn’t suit you.’
I make no bones about it, I am not a woman of the world; I am not an educated woman; what I know I have taught myself. Rumour and speculation – even downright lies ’ have abounded since I was sixteen years old. In any person’s life that side of things is unavoidable, but I believe I have suffered more than most, and take this opportunity to set the record straight. Firstly, my presence on the S.S. Hamburg in my less affluent days was as a stewardess, nothing more. Secondly, it is a mischievous fabrication that at the time of the Oleander Avenue scandal I accepted money in return for silence. Thirdly, Mrs Chubbs was dead, indeed already buried, before I met her husband. On the other hand I do not deny that men have offered me gifts, probably all of which I have accepted. Nor do I deny that my years in Africa are marked, in my memory, with personal regret. Unhappiness breeds confusion and misunderstanding. I was far from happy in Ombubu, at the Café Rose.
In the summer of which I now write I had reached my fifty-sixth year – a woman carefully made up, eyes a greenish-blue. Then, as now, my hair was as pale as sand, as smooth as a seashell, the unfussy style reflecting the roundness of my face. My mouth is a full rosebud, my nose classical; my complexion has always been admired. Naturally, there were laughter lines that summer, but my skin, though no longer the skin of a girl, had worn well and my voice had not yet acquired the husky depths that steal away femininity. In Italy men who were strangers to me still gave me a second look, although naturally not with the same excitement as once men did in other places where I’ve lived. I had, in truth, become more than a little plump, and though perhaps I should have dressed with such a consideration in mind this is something I have never been able to bring myself to do: I cannot resist just a hint of drama in my clothes – though not bright colours, which I abhor. ‘I never knew a girl dress herself up so prettily,’ a man who sat on the board of a carpet business used to say, and my tendency to put on a pound or two has not been without admirers. A bag of bones Mrs Chubbs was, according to her husband, which is why – so I’ve always suspected – he took to me in the first place.
Having read so far, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’m a woman who prays. When I was a child I went to Sunday school and had a picture of Jesus on a donkey above my bed. In the Café Rose in Ombubu I interested Poor Boy Abraham in praying also, the only person I have ever influenced in this way. ‘He’s retarded, that boy,’ Quinty used to say in his joky way, careless as to whether or not the boy was within earshot. Quinty’s like that, as you’ll discover.
I am the author of a series of fictional romances, composed in my middle age after my arrival in this house. I am no longer active in that field, and did not ever presume to intrude myself into the world of literature – though, in fairness to veracity, I must allow that my modest works dissect with some success the tangled emotions of which they treat. That they have given pleasure I am assured by those kind enough to write in appreciation. They have helped; they have whiled away the time. I can honestly state that I intended no more, and I believe you’ll find I am an honest woman.
But to begin at the beginning. I was born on the upper stairway of a lodging-house in an English seaside resort. My father owned a Wall of Death; my mother, travelling the country with him, participated in the entertainment by standing upright on the pillion of his motor-cycle while he raced it round the rickety enclosure. I never knew either of them. According to the only account I have – that of Mrs Trice, who had it from the lodging-house keeper – my mother was on her way to the first-floor lavatory when she was taken with child, if you’ll forgive that way of putting it. Within minutes an infant’s cries were heard on the stairway. ‘That was a setback,’ Mrs Trice explained, and further revealed that in her opinion my father and mother had counted on my mother’s continuing performance on the motor-cycle pillion to ‘do the trick’. By this she meant I would be stillborn, since efforts at aborting had failed. It was because I wasn’t that the arrangement was made with Mr and Mrs Trice, of 21 Prince Albert Street, in that same seaside town.
They were a childless couple who had long ago abandoned hope of parenthood: they paid for the infant that was not wanted, the bargain being that all rights were thereby re-linquished and that no visit to 21 Prince Albert Street would ever be attempted by the natural parents. Although nobody understands more than I the necessity that caused those people of a Wall of Death to act as they did, to this day I fear abandonment, and have instinctively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt in happiness ever after.
Quinty is familiar with my origins, for nothing can be kept from him. In Africa he knew I had accumulated money, probably how much. In 1978, when we had known one another for some time in Ombubu, it was he who suggested that I should buy a property in Umbria, which he would run for me as an informal hotel – quite different from the Café Rose. Repeatedly he pressed the notion upon me, tiring me with the steel of his gaze. Enough money had been made; there was no need for either of us to linger where we were. That was the statement in his eyes. We could both trade silence for silence in another kind of house. Half a child and half a rogue he is.
Quinty was born in the town of Skibbereen, in Ireland, approximately forty-two years ago. He is a lean man, with a light footstep, gaunt about the features. From the outer corner of each eye two long wrinkles run down his cheeks, like threads. When first I knew him in Ombubu he was shifty and unhealthy-looking. ‘There’s a sick man here,’ Poor Boy Abraham cried, excited because a stranger had arrived at the café. I never knew where it was that Quinty had come from in Africa, or what had brought him to the continent in the first place. But I later heard, the way one does in an outpost like Ombubu, that several years before he’d tricked into marriage the daughter of a well-to-do Italian family, whom he had come across when she was an au pair girl in London. She ran away from him when she discovered that he was not the manager of a meat-extract factory, as he had claimed, and that he stole his clothes from D. H. Evans. He followed her to Modena, bothering her and threatening, until one night her father and two of her brothers drove him a little way towards Parma, pushed him out on to a grass verge and left him there. He did not attempt to return, but that was how he came to be in Italy and learned the language. When first he mentioned Umbria to me I’d no idea where it was; I doubt I’d even heard of it. ‘Let me have just a little money,’ he begged in Ombubu one damply oppressive afternoon. ‘Enough for the journey and then to look about.’ Africa had gone stale for me, he said, which was a delicate way of putting it; the regulars at the Café Rose had not changed for years. In other words, the place had become a bore for both of us.
He sang the praises of Italy; I listened to descriptions of Umbrian landscape and hill-towns, of seasons bringing their variation of food and wine. Quinty can be persuasive, and I was happy enough to agree that a time of my life had come to an end. He’d played a certain role during most of that time, I have to say in fairness, and I have to give him credit for it. When he raised the subject of Italy I did the simplest thing: I gave him the money, believing I’d never see him again. But he returned a fortnight later and spread out photographs of Umbria and of villas that might be purchased. ‘No one would care to die in the Café Rose,’ he pointed out, a sentiment with which I could not but concur. One house in particular he was keen on.