‘Much better,’ Dorothy said, but it was their last day in Menton. She’d left her dark glasses on her bedside table and Bonny went to fetch them. Blane drove her to Bordighera and Bonny miserably ate an ice-cream on the front. She wrote the postcards she should have written before, to the other girls in Toupe’s Better Value Store. She’d be back before they received them.
Once only the story was interrupted by the ravenous features of Ernie Chubbs, his eyes seeking mine from the shadows of the Al Fresco Club, his fingers undoing my zips in the motel room. There was an old mangle in the motel room, and a tin bath in which kindling was kept. I knew all that was wrong. ‘It wouldn’t do to tell,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Good girls don’t tell, Emily.’ That was wrong also. It wasn’t Ernie who’d ever said good girls don’t tell, and Ernie Chubbs hadn’t been ravenous in that particular way.
The chill fag-end of a nightmare, darkly colourless, something like a rat in a drawing-room, went as quickly as it had arrived, crushed out of existence by a warmer potency. ‘Well, really!’ Dorothy was a little cross when they returned from Bordighera. She lay down to rest and complained that the bedroom was too hot and then, when the window was opened, that the draught was uncomfortable. She wanted Vichy water but they brought her Evian. Impatiently she stubbed out a cigarette she had not yet placed between her lips.
‘Bonny,’ he said, leaning on the open door of the little Peugeot. ‘Oh, Bonny, if I could only make you happy!’
He is the kindest person I have ever known, she thought. He knows I love him; he knows I have been unable to help myself. This is kindness now, to speak of my happiness when it is his and Dorothy’s that is at stake. They have had a little tiff this afternoon, but soon they will make it up. Tonight he will ask Dorothy to marry him, and after tomorrow I shall never in my life see either of them again. Dorothy’ll be too busy and too full of happiness ever to return to the table-tennis club. There’ll be the wedding preparations and then the honeymoon and then the return to Mara Hall.
‘Look, Bonny,’ he said, and in the sunlight sapphires sparkled. He had snapped open a little box; the slender band of gold that held the jewels lay on a tiny cushion. ‘I bought it for her,’ he said, ‘three days after we met.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ The words choked out of her. Tears misted her vision. She tried to smile but could not.
‘I have to tell you that, Bonny. I have to tell you I bought it for Dorothy.’
She nodded bleakly.
‘I might have offered it to Dorothy this afternoon. I could not, Bonny.’
Again she nodded, not understanding, trying to pretend she did.
‘I can only love you, Bonny. I know that, if I know nothing else in this world.’
‘Me? Me?’
‘Yes. Oh yes, my dear.’
His face was smiling down at her bewilderment. His lips were parted. She heard herself saying she was nothing much, while knowing she should not say that. She heard him laugh.
‘Oh, but of course you are, my dear. You are everything in this world to me. Darling, you are the sun and the stars, you are the scent of summer jasmine. Can you understand that?’
She flushed and looked away, thinking of Dorothy and feeling treacherous, and more confused than ever. She wanted to laugh and cry all at once.
‘Darling Bonny, you have the lips of an angel.’
His own touched the lips he spoke of. The gentle pressure was like fire between them.
‘Oh Blane, Blane,’ she murmured.
‘Say nothing, darling,’ he whispered back, and in some secret moment the sapphire ring found her engagement finger.
I would like to have married and had children. But Ernie Chubbs, swearing to me that he took precautions, never did so. In my association with him I had no fewer than four abortions, the last of them in Idaho. I would not have children now, they told me then. ‘Sorry, girlie,’ Ernie Chubbs said. ‘Fancy a chilli con carne sent up?’
Crimson spread on denim. A hand that was crimson also bounced back from the ceiling, dangled for an instant in the air, fingers splayed. A screeching of terror was different from the screams of pain. Even while it was happening you could hear the difference.
‘Twenty pound,’ Mrs Trice said. ‘That’s what he give. He likes a child, Mr Trice does. He got the dog for nothing.’ Rough type of people she said, to profit from a baby. ‘You bloody give it back,’ I said to him, ‘but they was gone by then. Fifty they ask, twenty he give.’ Rum and Coca-Cola, Ernie asked for in the Al Fresco, a fiver a time. ‘Easy money,’ Mrs Trice said, lifting a slice of Dundee to her lips. ‘Travelling people’s always after easy money.’
‘Lightning,’ I said myself. ‘The train was struck by lightning.’
The strength of the drugs was daily reduced; tranquillity receded little by little. At 21 Prince Albert Street I stirred milk in a saucepan, and Mrs Trice was furious because the milk burnt and milk cannot burn, apparently, while it is stirred. It was in the back-yard shed at 21 Prince Albert Street that the mangle was, and the kindling in the bath. It was in the back-yard shed that the man I took to be my father wept and said we mustn’t tell, that good girls didn’t. It was his face that was ravenous, not Ernie Chubbs’s. Ernie loved me was what I thought.
Mr Trice possessed a smooth-haired fox terrier, a black and white dog of inordinate stupidity. With the chopping of kindling, washing up, and frying the breakfast, a task when I was nine was to exercise this animal, which refused to leave the confined space of the Trices’ back-yard of its own accord. It would amble reluctantly behind me down Prince Albert Street and on the damp sand of the seashore. Seagulls would sniff it when I sat with my back against a breakwater and it stood obediently on the sand. They sometimes even poked at it with their beaks, but the dog displayed signs neither of alarm nor pleasure, seeming almost to be unaware of the seagulls’ attention. When other dogs ran snarling up to it Mr Trice’s pet stolidly sat there, unimpressed also by this display of hostility. If actually attacked, it would cringe unemotionally, tightly pressed to the ground, eyes closed, hackles undisturbed. ‘A gentle creature,’ Mr Trice would say if he had chosen to accompany me, which now and again, to my dismay, he did. We would walk by the edge of the sea and Mr Trice would attempt to entice his pet towards the grey waves. But it always stubbornly resisted the temptation of the stones that were thrown and the whistles of encouragement that emanated from Mr Trice. ‘It’s a sign of intelligence,’ he would remark in defeat. ‘There’s many a dog doesn’t spot cold water before he’s in it.’ Mr Trice and I sat down by the breakwater and he always glanced over his shoulder before he put his arm around me to cuddle me. ‘Tell your Daddy you love him,’ he would urge, and I did as I was bidden, thinking it would be unobliging not to. Mr Trice would glance about him again. He would hold my hand and kiss the side of my forehead while the dog stood beside us, not seeming to know it would be restful to sit down also. The cuddles and the kisses were all Mr Trice ever went in for on the seashore. In the back-yard shed he took me on to his knee, and in the darkness of the Gaiety Cinema he kept a hand on my leg for all the time we were there, all the way through Destry Rides Again and Stagecoach War. It wasn’t until later, when I was eleven, that Mr Trice took me into the bedroom when Mrs Trice was out at the laundry where she worked. He gave me a penny and I promised. People got the wrong end of the stick, he said.
Lying in that Italian hospital, I had no wish to dwell upon the uglier parts of my life yet could not prevent myself from doing so. In my fifty-sixth year, I had my beautiful house, and as I lay there that was where I endeavoured to see myself. But again my thoughts betrayed me. Wholly against my will, I was snagged in another kind of ugliness, keeping company with the tourists who over the years had gathered at my table. The mother and the nervous son, the homosexuals with Aids, the ménage à trois and all the others: so many tell-tale signs there were, in gesture or intonation. Long ago the mother had instilled fear in her son in order to keep him by her. The younger of the homosexuals had been unfaithful but was forgiven; both soon would die. The women who shared a lover had each settled for second best. In my dining-room or on the terrace Rosa Crevelli filled the tourists’ wineglasses and offered them fruit or dolce. Wearily I rose from my table, drained by such human tragedy.