How joyfully then, how warmly, I kept company with pert Polly Darling or Annette St Claire! From pretty lips, or lips a little moist, poured whispers and murmurs and cries of simple delight. Dark hair framed another oval face, eyes were as blue as early-summer cornflowers. Often it was half-past three or four before I replaced the cover of my black Olympia. New light streaked the sky when I smoked, on the terrace, the last of the night’s cigarettes. A lovely tiredness cried out for sleep.
They dabbed at my forehead. They bound the blood-pressure thing around my arm. They stuck in a thermometer. Their tweezers pulled out stitches.
‘No harm in secrets,’ Mr Trice said. ‘No harm, eh?’
‘No.’
After the third time he’d given me a penny I put the chair against my bedroom door, but it didn’t do any good. So on the day before my sixteenth birthday I packed a brown cardboard suitcase, and left five shillings in its place because the suitcase was Mrs Trice’s and we’d been taught not to take things at Sunday school.
‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the woman in the public house said. ‘Have you served at table before?’
I never had, so they put me in the kitchen first, washing up the dishes. ‘Gawky,’ the woman said. ‘God, you’re a gawky girl.’ My hair was frizzy, I couldn’t keep my weight down, my clothes were bought in second-hand places mostly. Yet not much time went by before other men besides Mr Trice desired me and gave me presents.
*
‘A timed device,’ Quinty said.
‘I thought it was lightning.’
‘It was a timed device.’
‘Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?’
‘It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.’
‘Is that why the police came?’
‘That would be it.’
Early on in my hospital sojourn the carabinieri had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts. Their dark blue uniforms trimmed with red and white, revolvers in black holsters, the grizzled head of one of them: all this remained with me after they had left my bedside, slipping in and out of my crowded fantasies. If conversation took place I do not recall it.
Later, in ordinary suits, detectives came with an interpreter. There were several visits, but soon it became clear from the detectives’ demeanour they did not consider it likely that I, in particular, had been the target of the outrage, though they listened intently to their interpreter’s rendering of my replies. A hundred times, it seems like now, they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual, either as I stepped on to the train or after I occupied my seat. Repeatedly I shook my head. I could recall no one skulking, no sudden turning away of a head, no hiding of a face. Each time, the detectives were patient and polite.
‘Buongiorno, signora. Grazie.’
‘Good day, lady,’ the interpreter each time translated. ‘Thank you.’
Carrozza 219 our carriage had been. I remembered the number on the ticket. Seat 11. In my mind’s vision the faces of the people who’d been near me lingered: the American family, the lovers, the couple and their elderly relative. The fashion lady and the businessmen in lightweight suits had gone to lunch.
‘They are here,’ Quinty said, and glanced at me, and added: ‘Some of them.’
Of the three English people, only the old man was alive. Of the German couple, only the boy. In the hospital they called the little American girl Aimée: the family passport had been found. She was the sole survivor of that family, and there was difficulty in locating someone in America to take responsibility. It even seemed, so Quinty said at first, that such a person did not exist. The information that filtered through the carabinieri and the hospital staff appeared to indicate that there were grandparents somewhere, later that there was an aunt. Then we learnt that the child’s grandfather suffered a heart condition and could not be told of the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild; the grandmother could not be told because she would not be able to hide her grief from him. Lying there, I approved of that: it was right that these people should be left in peace; it was only humane that elderly people should be permitted to drift out of life without this final nightmare to torment them.
‘They’re having difficulty in tracking down the aunt they’re after,’ Quinty reported. ‘It seems she’s travelling herself.’
She was in Germany or England, it was said, but the next day Quinty contradicted that. It was someone else who was travelling, a friend of the family who’d been assumed to be this relation. The aunt had been located.
‘Unfortunately she can’t look after a child.’
‘Why not, Quinty?’
‘It isn’t said why not. Maybe she’s delicate. Maybe she has work that keeps her on the go all over the place.’
I thought about this after he’d gone. I wondered what kind of a woman this could be, who, for whatever reason, could be so harsh.
‘They got it all wrong again,’ Quinty said on a later occasion. ‘That woman’s the aunt of someone else. The same story with those grandparents.’
I wouldn’t have known any of this if Quinty hadn’t been interested in questioning the carabinieri on the matter. From what I could gather, the policemen did not themselves appear to know what was happening in the search – so far away – for possible relatives or family friends. The hospital authorities were worried because the child would not, or could not, speak.
Apart from the victims of Carrozza 219 no one on the train had been injured, and no one of political importance had been on the train in any case. The old man’s son-in-law had had something to do with a merchant bank apparently; the American father had been a paediatrician. Yet a bomb had been planted, deliberately to take life, ingeniously and callously placed where those who by chance had been allocated certain seats would be killed or maimed.
What would one see, I wondered, in the perpetrators’ eyes? What monstrous nature did such human beings seek to disguise? There’d been crime, often more than petty, on the S.S. Hamburg. Living human embryos had been scraped out of my body and dropped into waste-disposal buckets. Seedy confessions had surfaced in the Café Rose. An ugly guilt had skittered about in the shifty eyes of Ernie Chubbs. Yet no crime could rank with what had happened on the train I’d caught at 11.45 on the morning of 5 May 1987. In search of consolation, I wrote down the few lines I had composed in Carrozza 219, the beginning of the work which had come to me through its title. In the garden the geraniums were in flower. Through scented twilight the girl in the white dress walked with a step as light as a morning cobweb. That evening she hadn’t a care in the world. But I found it difficult to continue and did my best, instead, simply to recover.
The old man and I suffered from shock. I’d had splinters of glass taken from the left side of my face; he from his legs and body. The German boy, called Otmar, had lost an arm. The old man was a general.
‘An irony,’ he murmured in the corridor where he learned to walk again. ‘It was I who’d reached the end of things.’