‘Well, perhaps they will.’
I smiled at him again. He needed an excuse, a cover for what he saw as cowardice. ‘When in distress, pretend, my dear,’ Lady Daysmith pronounces in Precious September, and I pretended now, suggesting that his reluctance to return to England was perhaps because England was so very different from the country it had been in his Cotswold days. Tourists I’d talked to complained of violence in the streets, and derelict cities, and greed. Jack-booted policemen scowled from motorcycles. In television advertisements there was a fashion for coarsely-spoken people, often appearing to be mentally afflicted. The back windows of motor-cars were decorated with snappy obscenities.
‘I never noticed.’ His interest was only momentarily held. He rarely watched the television, he confessed.
‘Oh, I’ve been assured. Not once but many times. Corner-boys rule the roost in England’s green and pleasant land. The Royals sell cheese for profit.’
Pursuing the diversion, I threw in that Ernie Chubbs had managed to get the royal warrant on the sanitary-ware he sold, that there’d been a bit of a fuss when it was discovered he was using it without authority. The General nodded, but I knew I’d lost him: in their grey offices the solicitors were already droning at him through pursed solicitors’ lips. He stood forlorn among old books and box-files and sealed documents in out-trays. A lifetime’s bravery oozed finally away to nothing.
‘General, you’re welcome to remain here for as long as you feel like it. You’re not alone in this, you know.’
‘That’s a great kindness, Mrs Delahunty.’ The beaten head was raised; again, blank eyes stared deeply into mine. ‘Thank you so much,’ the General said.
A conversation with Otmar was similar in a way. In the salotto I had just lit a cigarette when he entered and in his self-effacing way slipped into an armchair by the tall, wide-open french windows. I smiled at him. ‘An uncle of Aimée’s has been found,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that good news at last?’
‘Oh, ja.’
He nodded several times.
‘Ja,’ he said again.
I didn’t press; I didn’t try to draw enthusiasm from him. But the fact was that someone would love Aimée now; and in time Aimée herself would love. I didn’t say to Otmar that there has to be love in a person’s life, that no one can do without either receiving it or giving it. I didn’t say that love, as much as a daughter and a girlfriend, had been taken away. I didn’t say that love expired for me on a Wall of Death. ‘They killed themselves in the end,’ Mrs Trice callously replied when I asked. ‘Stands to reason with a dangerous game like that.’ A thousand times I have mourned the passing of the people who abandoned me, the motor-cycle skittering over the edge, smashing through the inadequate protection of a wooden rail. To this day, the woman’s arm is still triumphantly raised in a salute. A red handkerchief still flies from her mouth, and the machine races on to nowhere.
‘Where did you learn your English, Otmar?’ I asked the question when I had poured the boy his coffee. I watched him awkwardly breaking a brioche.
‘I learn in school. I was never in England or America.’
A finger ran back and forth on the edge of the saucer beneath his coffee cup. Once Madeleine had been in England, he said, working in some relation’s business in Bournemouth. ‘Silk scarves. At first she is in the factory, then later in the selling.’
For a moment it seemed he made an effort, as the General had, to contain his tears: his eyes evaded mine when he spoke of Madeleine. He dipped his brioche into his coffee and I watched him eating it. In answer to another question he said he’d had hopes of becoming a journalist. It was in this connection that he and Madeleine made the journey to Italy – because he’d heard so much about the murderer of lovers who was known in Florence as the Beast. The murders took place at night when couples made love in parked cars. Otmar had a theory about it and wanted to write an article in the hope that a Munich newspaper would print it. Following a lead, they travelled down to Orvieto and it was there they’d decided to get married, even though Otmar was penniless. It was in Orvieto that Madeleine had telephoned her father in Jerusalem.
‘A cigarette?’
He took one and politely thanked me. It was the right arm that was gone. The coffee cup in his left hand, now placed on the table, was still unnatural. I smiled to make him feel a little more at ease. I lit my own cigarette and his, and as I did so my fingers brushed the back of his hand. I said:
‘How did you meet her?’
‘In a supermarket.’
She’d been reaching for a packet of herbs and had upset some jars of mustard. He had helped her to replace them, and later at the checkout they found themselves together again. ‘Come and have a coffee,’ he invited, and they walked through the car park and across a street to a café. I was reminded of the encounter in Petals of a Summer, but naturally I kept that to myself.
‘These are good cigarettes,’ Otmar remarked, rising as he spoke. ‘I must walk now,’ he said, and left me to my thoughts.
Such a romance had never occurred in Madeleine’s life before. I imagined her saying that to herself as they strolled together to the café, he politely carrying the plastic bag that contained her supermarket groceries. In the café he confessed he’d seen her on previous occasions, that he had often seen her. He had bided his time, he confessed, and spoke with passion of her pretty features – how they had come into his dreams, how he had wondered about her voice. ‘Oh, I’m not pretty in the very least,’ she protested, but he took no notice. He said he was in love with her, using the word that had so endlessly been on the lips of the Austrian ivory cutter. ‘Liebe,’ Otmar repeated as they passed again through the car park. ‘Liebe.’
Madeleine could not sleep that night. She tossed and turned until the dawn. If there could be a pretence about her prettiness there could be none about his. He was not handsome, even a little ugly, she considered. Yet none of it mattered. Never before had she experienced such intense protestations, not just of love, but of adoration.
‘O Otmar, ich liebe dich,’ Madeleine said exactly a month later.
When Dr Innocenti came the next time he complimented Aimée on her latest drawings and then drew me aside. He spoke of her uncle, a professor of some kind apparently. Their conversation on the telephone had been a lengthy one.
‘I have urged il professore that this tranquillity in your house should be maintained for a while longer. That she should not yet be returned to the United States.’
‘Of course.’
‘For the moment I oppose so long a journey for the child.’ He paused. ‘For you, signora, is inconvenient?’
‘Aimée is more than welcome here.’
‘You are generous, signora.’
‘Doctor, what do you believe happened?’
‘How, signora?’
‘What was the reason for this crime? The police still come here.’
He shrugged in his expressive way, eyebrows and lips moving with his shoulders, his palms spread in a question mark.
‘They still come because still they do not know.’ The shrug went on. ‘No one takes the blame.’
‘There must be a reason for such an act. Somewhere there must be.’
‘Signora, it is on all occasions the policy of our carabinieri to preserve a silence. They have the intention to entice forward some amateur tormented by their game.’
‘Or a lunatic. I’ve heard that mentioned.’
‘A clever lunatic, signora. A package that belongs to no one among the passengers placed on to a luggage rack. Terrorists, not lunatics, I think we guess.’
‘But which one of us were they seeking to kill? These are just ordinary people.’