Marco could manage to leave Eleanora behind, it would be almost as good as if he and I were to take a trip alone together.
‘You will have your own room?’ Marco asked.
I laughed. ‘D’you think I’d be put in with Daddy?’ Perhaps in Italy a girl wouldn’t be allowed to have her own hotel room.
Now Marco was turning his attention to the next point: ‘Eleanora gets sick from the car, anyway – she won’t want to come on bad roads, and you can get stuck, God knows what. No, it’s quite all right, I will tell her it’s no pleasure for her.’ At the prospect of being in each other’s company for whole days and perhaps nights we couldn’t stop smiling, chattering and kissing, not with passion but delight. My tongue was loosened as if I had been drinking wine.
Marco spoke good English.
The foreign turns of phrase he did have were familiar to me. He did not use the word ‘mad’ in the sense of angry. ‘I would become mad’: he meant exactly that, although the phrase was not one that we English-speaking people would use. I thought about it that night, alone, at home; and other nights. Out of his mind, he meant. If Eleanora slept with another man, Marco would be insane with jealousy. He said so to me because he was a really honest person, not like the other grown-ups – just as he said, ‘I like your father, eh? I don’t like some of the things he does with the road, but he is a good man, you know?’ Marco was in love with me; I was his treasure, his joy, some beautiful words in Italian. It was true; he was very, very happy with me. I could see that. I did not know that people could be so happy; Alan did not know. I was sure that if I hadn’t met Marco I should never have known. When we were in the caravan together I would watch him all the time, even when we were dozing I watched out of slit eyes the movement of his slim nostril with its tuft of black hair, as he breathed, and the curve of his sunburned ear through which capillary-patterned light showed. Oh Marco, Eleanora’s husband, was beautiful as he slept. But he wasn’t asleep. I liked to press my feet on his as if his were pedals and when I did this the corner of his mouth smiled and he said something with the flex of a muscle somewhere in his body. He even spoke aloud at times: my name. But I didn’t know if he knew he had spoken it. Then he would lie with his eyes open a long time, but not looking at me, because he didn’t need to: I was there. Then he would get up, light a cigarette, and say to me, ‘I was in a dream . . . oh, I don’t know . . . it’s another world.’
It was a moment of awkwardness for me because I was entering the world from my childhood and could not conceive that, as adults did – as he did – I should ever need to find surcease and joy elsewhere, in another world. He escaped, with me. I entered, with him. The understanding of this I knew would come about for me as the transfiguration of the gold tooth from a flaw into a characteristic had come. I still did not know everything.
I saw Eleanora nearly every day. She was very fond of me; she was the sort of woman who, at home, would have kept attendant younger sisters round her to compensate for the children she did not have. I never felt guilty towards her. Yet, before, I should have thought how awful one would feel, taking the closeness and caresses that belonged, by law, to another woman. I was irritated at the stupidity of what Eleanora said; the stupidity of her not knowing. How idiotic that she should tell me that Marco had worked late on the site again last night, he was so conscientious, etc. – wasn’t I with him, while she made her famous veal scalop-pini and they got overcooked? And she was a nuisance to us. ‘I’ll have to go – I must take poor Eleanora to a film tonight. She hasn’t been anywhere for weeks.’ ‘It’s the last day for parcels to Italy, tomorrow – she likes me to pack them with her, the Christmas parcels, you