Before All Else Read online

  “It’s just not…not…conducive.”

  “I’ll give you conducive! These are staying put,” Marcus insisted.

  Any victory had only been short-lived. As time went on, he seemed to fall out of favour with greater speed and regularity. The caravan filled up with boxes which, even he had to admit, contained a lot of useless crap. He gradually lost the will to march them back up the drive and into the house, so allowed them to accumulate, the cardboard gradually softening in the damp air and folding in on itself.

  Finally, the number of boxes in the caravan outnumbered Marcus’s possessions in the house.

  During those periods of awkward detente, his clothes still hung in the wardrobe, his shirts were still ironed for him, albeit with more of a slapdash lick than he’d been used to. A plate of food still appeared in front of him every evening, although the portions were less in his favour than they used to be. They’d long ago, laughingly, told the children that Dad sleeps in the small bedroom now because he snores like a rutting rhino. The small courtesies and politenesses were more often observed than not, such as two glasses accompanying a bottle of wine, a cup of tea, a collar tucked in. What else was a marriage built on? It’s not as if one really expected the grand passion to survive two children now packed off to university, one redundancy, one prostate scare, thread veins, myopia and all the rest. What did the old girl want? Was he really that terrible a husband?

  “This is bloody ridiculous,” he’d said to Velda one bright spring morning. “I feel like I’ve got no place in my own home.”

  “Well, if you treat it like something between a hotel and pigsty, then maybe you haven’t. Got a place. In this house.” He looked at her while marshalling his arguments. Something was different. She looked more…more…striking. Was that the word? A flush rose to her cheeks under his scrutiny. She lifted a hand to her face. That was it. Eyebrows.

  “What have you done to your eyebrows?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes you have. They look…” He searched for the word. Bigger? Bushier? Brassier? She’d always had virtually non-existent eyebrows, plucked to oblivion when such was the fashion. Now she looked as if they’d been reseeded with Miracle Gro or reapplied with a marker pen.

  “That is so not the point.” He was gratified, nonetheless, to see her blush darken. Another row was obviously brewing and it was pleasing to have scored a point so early in the debacle. “That’s just so bloody typical of you. You are always trying to do me down. At least I make an effort. Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  Marcus knew that little annoyed Velda more than a straightforward answer to a rhetorical question and so interrupted her tirade to answer, “Yes, this morning. When getting dressed. In the mirror behind the door in the smallest room in the house which I pay for and which I’m happy to call my own when not banished to the caravan. If I stand in the two-foot square of carpet allotted me and bend over backwards like some contortionist, then yes, I can just about see the top half of myself. In the mirror.”

  “And what did you see?”

  Marcus held out his arms, as if offering himself for inspection. “Me.”

  “Well, shall I tell you what I see?” Velda fulminated.

  “No, really, please don’t bother.”

  “Well, I see—”

  “I said don’t bother.”

  Marcus stood up, knocking the kitchen chair over behind him. “At least my eyebrows are my own.”

  Velda stood too, pushing her chair back with a scrape. “At least I don’t have to go into the garage to get a cheap thrill.”

  “Where do you go then?” Marcus jibed over his shoulder as he left the kitchen.

  And that seemed to be that.

  They were on their way.

  Marching towards divorce, singledom, packet suppers and one-bar electric fires.

  “Make sure she doesn’t fleece you, mate,” Brian Cattermole had cautioned during a long session at the Cock and Bottle. “Get yourself a good solicitor. Pays for itself in the long run. Cunning, these women. Don’t imagine that she won’t have clocked all your little policies, pensions, pots for rainy days. She’ll know exactly what you’re worth. Better than you probably.”

  Marcus stared gloomily into his beer. “There’s not much anyway. Never really gone in for saving.”

  “Fifty-three percent. That’s what the former Mrs C got her hands on. Fifty-three percent. Never did a hand’s turn throughout our entire marriage.”

  So it was that Marcus came home one day to the brown envelope on the hall table. Carden, Coddington and Clutton Solicitors, acting on behalf of Velda Imogen Blatt née Cartwright, advising him to give his instructions at his earliest opportunity in respect of Mrs Blatt’s request for a divorce.

  “What’s this all about?” he’d puzzled, wandering in to the now appropriated snug where Velda was welding bits of copper wire.

  “I’ve had enough, Marcus. I’ve served my time as your wife, cook, housemaid, nursemaid, bottle washer. I want to be on my own. I want my own space.” She’d looked vengefully up at him over the top of her glasses.

  “Is there nothing…I can do…say? What about those marriage guidance Jennies?” His heart was racing. A weakness overcame his legs. He wanted to sit down before he collapsed but didn’t feel he could in what was no longer his room.

  “I’ve made up my mind. There’s no future for us. It’s not as if we even love each other any more.” Marcus felt rather inclined to argue this point but the wind had gone out of him. So, sadly and dejectedly, the next day he made his way down to the solicitors on Queen Street for his initial half-hour free consultation. Once he’d put both feet on the treadmill, it seemed the process was unstoppable until he was ejected, staggering, at the other end.

  5

  Amelia

  Amelia leans against the door frame, her back to the first-floor balcony, watching Enzo. He is sitting in ‘the office’, a small space between the kitchen and hallway, staring short-sightedly at the computer screen, tapping an occasional key as if making a labyrinthine selection. She carefully folds Tilly’s letter and places it in her back pocket.

  She waits for him to ask who the letter is from. Smoke wreaths from his over-full ashtray. He continues to tap, tap, tap and takes no notice.

  The last time she had spoken to either of her sisters was when Cecily had rung several months ago to invite her to Mr Green’s funeral.

  “Why not come over? You said yourself it’s not a busy time.” Cecily’s voice faded in and out.

  She’d promised she’d see what she could do. “Better go now,” she said, knowing before the call was finished that she wouldn’t go, that it wasn’t worth the arguments. As she snapped the phone shut, beyond the extraneous noises of the long-distance call, she had caught a tiny resonance of home – the long-case clock chiming in the hall, a dog barking, a kettle whistling. Since when did Cecily have a dog?

  Let them bury Mr Green. Did she care? Not a lot. He belonged to a distant time, a distant place. This is her life now.

  Yet, what sort of life is it? How had it come to this? What had happened to the free-spirited traveller who had the world at her bidding? She’d been run into a corral ten years ago, and then held fast, held tight, given no way out. The more she struggles, the more the constraints tighten.

  He will ask her, eventually, who the letter is from. A trick of his, to spring a question, a conundrum, a crisis, just when she thinks she is in the clear. As with everything involving Enzo these days, every move, every word, has to be considered in the round, calculated, benefits weighed against pitfalls.

  A noise catches her attention. She turns to look down into the street where a vegetable seller is in heated conversation with a customer. Both hold on to the same bunch of tomatoes. Is it an argument or are they in vociferous agreement with each other? It is hard to tell in this country. A police ca
r whines along the shaded, dusty street watched by two old men sitting under a tattered awning.

  Not that it had always been like this but it is strange to think that, over time, even illicit love affairs are no more proofed against ennui, fatigue, disappointment than more conventional ones.

  It had promised well a decade ago when, early morning, she’d stepped off the small island ferry. She’d walked along the harbour wall towards the old town, past coils of rusting chains and frayed ropes, sidestepping lobster pots. A gentle on-shore breeze stirred the smells of the sea and human habitation.

  “Pretty lady. Come. Come. I insist.”

  A young man dressed in black trousers and white shirt was sitting at a pavement café, idly running a laminated menu through his fingers. She ignored him and fixed her eyes on the anglers perched on tumbled boulders casting their whip-thin rods out past the buoys.

  A gap in the concrete box shops, beach towels, crab nets, lilos and sharks swinging from their fixings, led up a steep cobbled street. Her plan was to ask at a few of the smaller hotels for work.

  “Excuse me. Sorry.” As she turned the corner to go uphill, she stumbled into a man sitting on the paving, leaning against the low wall of the Excelsior Hotel, watches, mobile phones and wallets spread out on a square of black material on the ground. He did not move but sightlessly let Amelia rearrange the goods she had kicked out of place.

  The street twisted and turned in shallow cobbled steps, narrowing as it rose between high stuccoed walls. A shallow-angled sun caught the top of the walls, turning them bright with colour. At ground level, the shade was still dark and cooling. On either side, she glimpsed secluded courtyards shaded by slender palms, soothed by gentle fountains. A man in overalls, bare-chested, hosed a veranda. “Any work?” she shouted through the elaborately wrought gate. He shrugged, palms lifted heavenward, as if such a thing could only be the gift of a higher authority.

  After a climb, the hill opened out into a medieval square and then continued upwards into a flight of graduating stone steps to a flat-fronted church. Three old women painfully made their way up the steps towards the elaborately carved doors, pulling themselves up, humble penitents, on a metal handrail.

  Amelia sat on the bottom step, stretching her bare legs out into the sunshine. A starved unkempt cat stalked towards her, her three wretched kittens dropping from her empty teats. “I have nothing to offer you.” She allowed the cat to writhe round her legs before shooing it away with the thought of scabs and fleas.

  Tall timber-framed houses occupied one side of the square, an antiquarian map- and book-seller’s, a solicitor’s office and a kitchen supplier squeezed together along the other side. No obvious work opportunity here. Better to head back to the harbour's tourist area. Maybe ask that waiter.

  For a few moments she allowed herself to sit and watch, tired after the overnight crossing. Long cool shadows fell across the square, deepening the colours, lending a more moderate, refined air to the area than the gaudy harbour front. The church bell rang out above her in a thin, querulous tone, creaking against its fixings. She moved herself into a corner, out of the way of the few approaching worshippers who nodded to her as they passed. Once the bell stopped, she gazed out to the sea beyond the bay. The ferry was pulling away, tumbling the foamy water behind it, gulls following like bonded courtiers.

  “Hey. Miss. Come. Come. I insist. Sit down.” She walked towards the waiter who had called out to her earlier, fixing her eyes on his steadily as she approached, assessing him. He was young, aged about nineteen, tall, slender in his overlarge shirt. A natural ease and fluidity about his movements, straightforwardly good-looking, he was surely simply offering her a cup of coffee. He pulled out a chair for her. She would observe the due processes and enquire after work, either here or elsewhere.

  “Coffee, lady?”

  “Yes please.”

  “You travel alone?”

  Amelia studied the menu, ignoring the question. “Just coffee please.”

  The waiter left her after an elaborate show of securing the cloth with steel clips to the table edge, returning after some considerable time with a glass of iced water, the ice cubes already smoothed to resemble sucked lozenges, a piece of green and yellow mottled lemon floating on the top. She did not look up or offer any thanks. She waited, watching the dampness from the frosted glass spread outwards onto the paper cloth, hands folded in her lap.

  Someone switched on a radio. Euro-music, derivative and catchy, blared from the dark cavern of the restaurant. A shout went up and the music quietened. A middle-aged woman hummed as she swept the dusty floor out onto the pavement, scraping the lightweight metal chairs to one side, clattering them back into place. Sparrows hopped on and off the decking locating crumbs. The woman glanced at Amelia and shouted through to the back. A man’s voice shouted back.

  “I apologise for my aunt. She is not the quietest first thing in the morning.”

  Amelia looked up as he brought her a large cup of coffee. “Compliments of the house,” he grinned ruefully, putting down a pastry onto the table. He didn’t voice what they both knew, that it was yesterday’s anyway.

  “Thank you.”

  The man seemed hesitant to go. The seconds lengthened and ballooned. She felt crowded, watched, as if the atmosphere was turning slightly hostile.

  “That’s very kind…”

  “Do you mind me asking…”

  Both spoke at the same time. Both laughed. The normal pace of life resumed.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was asking if you are a visitor for long time here.”

  “I don’t know. Have to see how things go.”

  He folded his arms and leant against a wooden support. “I am returning for the summer. This restaurant belong my uncle. In October I go back to Hamburg to continue my studies.”

  Her hand shook slightly as she lifted the coffee to her lips. It smelt stale, as if it had been kept on a hot plate all night. She took a small sip, holding it in her mouth before allowing it to trickle into her throat. She glanced from the oily film on top of the dark coffee to the sugary coating on the cake. It seemed rude to eat or drink too gustily with him standing above her, but she was starving and parched.

  She motioned to the chair opposite.

  “No, I must not sit. I must be busy. My uncle, he is…er…he make us work hard, not sit down and chat. He say, ‘Don’t let the goose eat your cherries.’” The waiter shrugged with a wry smile.

  Amelia laughed and nodded. She was being invited into his life, entrusted with a small detail about a tyrannical uncle with the typical work-hard attitude of a self-made man who only wishes he had half the privileges of the modern generation.

  “Does your uncle need any help by any chance? I might be looking for work.”

  A door slammed at the back of the restaurant, and the waiter glanced anxiously into the darkness of the café. “Come back this afternoon. I will ask.” The warmth of a confidence shared had gone.

  Amelia put coins on the table and stood to go. The young man helped her down the wooden steps to the pavement before hurrying away.

  And so it was that the Café Paradiso became her workplace and Uncle Enzo became her lover.

  He looked on her almost as a gift from God, a dono di Dio. A week earlier they had buried his father. Time for him to emerge into the light, bestow upon himself certain fruits. He put her up in a flat, one of several he owned on the road out to the industrial sector. There he visited her. She knew he was married. His wife never came into the café. Maybe the aunt with the broom kept her sister informed of Enzo and his new amante.

  Enzo had never made sex a condition of the job and the flat. But he had been hard to deny. After her first week at the café, he asked her to stay behind. The last drinkers had left at about three o’clock in the morning. She’d passed the time sitting on a high stool behind the wooden bar re
ading a phrase book, turning the words and phrases round her tongue like a warm worm. A string of naked bulbs danced in a line along the roadside, pinpoints of light in an otherwise velvet dark night. The waves had receded far out from the shoreline like players bowing out at the end of the night. All was quiet. Enzo pulled up a bar stool next to her. She was surprised to see that he had her rucksack from the hostel. “What are you doing with that?” she’d asked him.

  He turned her hand over and drilled his gaze into her palm. It tingled. His fingers were icy and damp from the two glasses of beer he’d poured for them. His head was slightly bent and she could see past the back of his neck down into his collar line. He seemed to be pleading with her, mutely. His shoulders were strong and still. After a period, during which Amelia swept her eyes over and over his bulk, noting every detail, he lifted his eyes up to hers. She nodded. He smiled and leant back, satisfied that a contract had been offered and agreed. They had an understanding.

  He reached behind the bar for a bottle of almond liqueur and two small glasses, pouring clumsily. He licked the spillage from his fingers in a matter-of-fact way, talking as he went on. He told her how his parents had come here forty years ago when the resort was newly opened, how it was important to work hard, pay the official taxes and the unofficial taxes. This place was his life. He and his wife had six children as well as other members of the family to support. And that she was oh so English.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look as if you don’t approve. I have a flat,” he continued in his matter-of-fact tone.

  In the early days, he revelled in her. He didn’t want her to cut her hair, insisting she let it grow so he could count how many revolutions a single lock could make round his ring finger. He watched her hair lighten and her skin darken. He smiled, indulgently, as she tripped over her new vocabulary. Rough winds had blown her off course and he nurtured and cared for her as might an explorer on the Beagle with an as yet uncharted find.

  He made her write out a list of all the jobs she had done, simultaneously searching the list for any hint of moral decline while delighting in the range and versatility. “OK, so chambermaid. Waitress. Bar work.” He pointed to each item on the list, his English faltering. “Tennis coach…”