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3

Miss Alzapiedi, our Sunday-school teacher, was excessively tall and lanky, with hair that was a nuisance to her, and other disadvantages too. It was she who gave me the picture of Jesus on a donkey to hang above my bed; it was she who taught me how to pray, pointing out that some people are drawn to prayer, some are not. ‘Pray for love,’ Miss Alzapiedi adjured. ‘Pray for protection.’

So before I ran away from 21 Prince Albert Street I prayed for protection because I knew I’d need it. I prayed for protection when I worked in the public-house dining-room and the shoe shop and on the S.S. Hamburg, and when Ernie Chubbs took me to Idaho, and later when he abandoned me in Ombubu. Even though I was trying to be a sophisticate it didn’t embarrass me to get down on my knees the way Miss Alzapiedi had taught us, even if there was a visitor in the room. To be honest, I don’t get down on my knees any more. I pray standing up now, or sitting, and I don’t whisper either; I do it in my mind.

At the end of my first year in this house I finished Precious September. I wrote it just for fun, to pass the time. When it was complete I put it in a drawer and began another story, which this time I called Flight to Enchantment. Then glancing one day through the belongings of a tourist who was staying here, I came across a romance that seemed no better than my own. I noted the publisher’s address and later wrapped Precious September up and posted it to England. So many months passed without a response that I imagined the parcel had gone astray or that the publisher was no longer in business. Then, when I had given up all hope of ever seeing my manuscript again, it was returned. We have no use for material of this nature, a printed note brusquely declared. I knew of no other publisher, so I continued with Flight to Enchantment and after a month or so dispatched it in the same direction. This elicited a note to the effect that the work would only be returned to me if I forwarded a money order to cover the postage. When that wound had healed I completed another story quite quickly and although it, too, was similarly rejected I did not lose heart. There was, after all, consolation to be found in the tapestries I so very privately stitched. They came out of nothing, literally out of emptiness. Even then I marvelled over that.

We are interested in your novelette. I found it hard to believe that I was reading this simple typewritten statement, that I was not asleep and dreaming. The letter, which was brief, was signed J. A. Makers, and I at once responded, impatient to receive what this Makers called ‘our reader’s suggestions for introducing a little more thrust into the plot’. These arrived within a fortnight, a long page of ideas, all of which I most willingly incorporated. Eventually I received from J. A. Makers an effusively complimentary letter. By now many others among his employees had read the work; all, without exception, were overwhelmed. We foretell a profitable relationship, Mr Makers concluded, foretelling correctly. But when I received, after I’d submitted the next title, a list of ‘our reader’s suggestions’ I tore it up and have never been bothered in that way since. That story was Behold My Heart! Its predecessors, so disdainfully rejected once, were published in rapid succession.

Something of all this, in order to keep a conversation going, I passed on to the General. I knew that conversation was what he needed; otherwise I would have been happy to leave him in peace. I wanted to create a little introduction, as it were, so that I might ask him to tell me about his own life.

‘If you would like to,’ I gently added.

He did not at once reply. His gnarled grey head had fallen low between his shoulders. The Daily Telegraph which Quinty had bought for him was open on his knees. My eye caught gruesome headlines. A baby had been taken from its pram outside a shop and buried in nearby woods. A dentist had taken advantage of his women patients. A bishop was in some other trouble.

‘It sometimes helps to talk a bit.’

‘Eh?’

‘Only if you’d like to.’

Again there was a silence. I imagined him in his heyday, leading his men in battle. I calculated that the Second World War would have been his time. I saw him in the desert, a young fox who was now an old one.

‘You’re on your own, General?’

‘Since my wife died.’

His eyes passed over the unpleasant headlines in the newspaper. There was something about a handful of jam thrown at the prime minister.

‘Things were to change when we returned,’ he said.

I smiled encouragingly. I did not say a word.

‘I was to live with my daughter and her husband in Hampshire.’

He was away then, and I could feel it doing him good. Only one child had been born to him, the daughter he spoke of, that faded prettiness on the train. ‘Don’t go spoiling her,’ his wife had pleaded, and he told me of a day when his daughter, at six or seven, had fallen out of a tree. He’d lifted her himself into the dining-room and covered her with a rug on the sofa. She’d been no weight at all. ‘This is Digby,’ she introduced years later while they stood, all four of them drinking gin and French, beneath that very same tree.

‘I couldn’t like him,’ he confessed, his voice gruff beneath the shame induced by death. I remembered the trio’s politeness on the train, the feeling of constraint, of something hidden. I waited patiently while he rummaged among his thoughts and when he spoke again the gruffness was still there. If the outrage hadn’t occurred he would have continued to keep his own counsel concerning the man his daughter had married: you could tell that easily.

He spoke fondly of his wife. When she died there’d been a feeling of relief because the pain was over for her. Her departure from him was part of his existence now, a fact like an appendix scar. When I looked away, and banished from my mind the spare old body that carried in it somewhere an elusive chip of shrapnel, I saw, in sunshine on a shorn lawn, a medal pinned on a young man’s tunic and a girl’s arms around a soldier’s neck. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes!’ she eagerly agreed when marriage was proposed, her tears of happiness staining the leather of a shoulder strap. You could search for ever for a nicer man, she privately reflected: I guessed that easily also.

‘No, I never liked him and my wife was cross with me for that. She was a better mother than I ever was a father.’

Again the silence. Had he perished in the outrage he would have rated an obituary of reasonable length in the English newspapers. His wife, no doubt, had passed on without a trace of such attention; his daughter and his son-in-law too.

‘I doubted if I could live with him. But I kept that to myself.’

‘A trial run, your holiday? Was that it?’

‘Perhaps so.’

I smiled and did not press him. Jealousy, he supposed it was. More than ever on this holiday he had noticed it – in pensiones and churches and art galleries, permeating every conversation. No children had been born to his daughter, he revealed; his wife had regretted that, he hadn’t himself.

‘Have you finished with the Telegraph, sir?’ Quinty hovered, not wishing to pick up the newspaper from the old man’s knees. Rosa Crevelli set out the contents of a tea-tray.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with it.’

‘Then I’ll take it to the kitchen, sir, if I may. There’s nothing I like better than an hour with the Telegraph in the cool of the evening. When the dinner’s all been and done with, the Telegraph goes down a treat.’