Turning Back the Sun(52)
“What”s happened to Adelina?”
“She married and went away too. She lives in the west somewhere. Very happy.” He picked up his glass again. “But I see Jarmila sometimes … poor Jila …”
Then it occurred to Rayner how little he had understood any of their childhoods. They had appeared seamlessly happy and privileged. Yet already serpents were being born. A light tension came fanning up in him when he asked, “And what about Miriam?”
Leon smiled at him. “She still lives here. She”s had a little girl.”
Rayner felt an obscure, foolish pang. “I didn”t even know she was married.” But what did it matter? After fifteen years she would not be the Miriam he remembered: the girl whose air he”d breathed among the damselfish.
Leon said, “She”s not married anymore. That didn”t last long.”
Rayner knew his heart skip was as absurd as its hurt had been. But he cried out, “Tell her to visit me!”
Overhung by a tasselled parasol, Aunt Birgit was sitting in the shade. Her eyes were shut. The moving air was laced with the sea, and the box trees in the garden smeled of Italy.
Rayner sometimes sensed that when she closed her eyes like this, sitting straight-backed and perfectly conscious, she was practicing death. She never spoke about her illness, but he knew that it was liver cancer from her diet, and from the yellow discoloration in her skin and eyeballs, and that there was nothing to be done. At first he felt guilty that he, a doctor, was living here and unable to save her. Then he realized that his aunt was more reconciled to death than to life. Almost all her relatives and friends had predeceased her, and she would routinely refer to people living not by their Christian names but as “the Melchert son” or “the Garcia girl.” The passions and personalities which had shaken her whole generation—and she had been a political liberal during the worst years—had fallen bleakly redundant, together with the fashions and clubs, the film stars and opera singers, even the connotations of certain words, as if meaning itself had preceded her into the dark.
She was not grieving, but stoic and sometimes censorious. She shared with his father, and with himself, a cruel bluntness. He had come to realize that it was pointless to be oblique with her, and now, sitting beside her in the garden, he felt able to say, “I can”t have interested you as a child, Aunt Birgit. Why are you leaving me this house?”
From the parasol”s shade she tried to seek him out with her eyes. They flinched against the glare. “Because I loved my brother, and he always had high hopes for you. You”re like him. He cut his own way.” She lifted her hand above her eyes. Their pale glitter reached him at last, but he could not tell what she was seeing. She said, “You were rather a lonely child.”
Perhaps some loneliness in her, Rayner thought, had gazed out and recognized him. Had she given him the house, then, as an anchor or compensation? But soon afterwards she said, “You may do what you like with it. It”s never been much to me.”
Rayner wondered in astonishment: what, then, was much to her? She had lived here more than forty years.
But she went on stiffly, “Perhaps this house would remind you too much. No one should live in the past, and yours wasn”t easy.”
Rayner said, “Mother was all right to me. It was only her drinking. You know she couldn”t stand it when he died. She lost her grip.”
But his aunt said, “Whatever she drank for, whether it was loneliness or remorse, drink never cured anything.”
Rayner said edgily, “Remorse?”
“Well, your father was so much older, and she was a romantic creature.”
Rayner knew, suddenly, that he was above an abyss. Yet his mother”s life seemed eons ago. She stood arranged in his memory, completed by death. She could not now be changed. Whatever was true. On his aunt”s lips “romantic creature” carried no softness. She had always despised his mother. He caught the tremor in his voice: “You mean Uncle Bernard?”
“That was a foolish young man.” Her lips tightened. “Your father never liked him.”
“My mother wouldn”t have done that.”
“I don”t know what he was to her.”
Into the silence Aunt Birgit”s cat—a plump Persian—dropped from its tree and settled under her chair. For years Rayner had conceived of his mother only by a handful of mental images, and the last of these—her sallow face, as she climbed into the car which would kill her—flickered up behind his eyes.
He had not been an ideal son. Even before his father”s death he had retreated into his own privacy and into the world of his friends. But he wanted to exonerate her, and a hardness appeared in his voice. “My mother at least gave me my freedom. She never pleaded for my help or made me feel bound to her. I know she was frail, but I loved her. I don”t think my childhood was unhappy. Quite the contrary …”
His aunt seemed to relent. “I didn”t mean to say she was a bad woman. Only she could be scatterbrained.”
“But she was there when it was important. She even saved my life when I was little. It was only in the last few years she started to break up. My early memories are all of her smiling, laughing …”
“When did she save your life?” In his aunt”s rasping voice, the idea sounded sentimental.
“During the fire. You remember we had a fire?”