Under the Rose Read online

  At the time I was telling you about I hadn’t come round to accepting this.

  I had the shackles. I put them on my own legs: sourly modelling them. They cut my shins. If ever they were to be used they must be padded. I cut up a red velvet cushion – cardinal-red, rather pretty; I had made it during my playing-house phase. Now I used it to swathe and upholster the shackles. I thought of other things while I sewed. Then I hid them.

  The ferraiuolo meanwhile sold me an iron bedstead with a wrought-iron back and base: one of those period extravaganzas in which twining vines and fronds fan out from an enamelled picture – this one is of the Madonna – in a network more appropriate for a gate or balustrade than for a bed back. They are usually brass. This one is iron. As you know they are fashionable again and fairly expensive. However, I happened to have received a cheque from my mother a little time before. Her second family absorbs most of her attention but when she does think of me she is quite generous.

  I got the ferraiuolo to help me down to the cellar with it, telling him that I was keeping it as a surprise for my husband’s birthday. He assembled it and I put a mattress on it and laid the shackles on the mattress. Then – as though I had paid my fantasy sufficient tribute – I managed to put it out of my mind.

  Next came a goodish period. Carlo and I went to Milan for a fortnight and were quite close. When we came back I found I’d skipped a period. I didn’t tell him. Here, Signora, is the page I promised you in my note:

  Carlo, as you know, insisted on our having a church wedding. I agreed easily. I was in love with him and with Italy and a church wedding seemed the appropriate ceremony to celebrate both loves. Its binding nature did not bother me since, as a non-Catholic, I could disregard its purely spiritual bonds the day the marriage proved unworkable. I could get an English divorce. I fully expected that this might happen. My mother and father are divorced and quite happily remarried, so divorce has always seemed normal to me. First marriages – my mother calls them ‘trial marriages’ – especially between foreigners are often impermanent. The words of the marriage ceremony are to me pure ritual: nicely put but rescindable. It follows that I had no intention of getting pregnant by Carlo. Unknown to him, I had been on the pill from the time we started living together. Unfortunately, I did not always take it regularly – no subconscious conflict here, just plain sloppiness. So when my period didn’t come I was worried. Having no friends in Volterra, I had no way of finding an abortionist there and no money to pay one if I did. It looked as though I might have to go to England for an abortion and, as getting the money and setting up a cover-story for my trip were likely to take time, I had plenty of reasons for anxiety. You may imagine my mood. By the way – I have letters to and from my mother written when I was contemplating marriage to Carlo. They prove that my attitude at the time really was the one I have just described.

  OK? Do remember to extract this page and send it to your canon-lawyer friend. I remind you lest the rest of this missive end in the incinerator or be torn to ribbons by your enraged and thriftless fingers. But do read on before doing anything unconsidered. This document is not being written purely for my sake but also for a purpose which must jibe with your own: it is a barrier to keep me from coming back.

  You know – or perhaps you don’t, so let me tell you – that between a man and a woman who are deeply involved sexually – I shy a little doubtfully at this stage from that puffball word ‘love’ – atrocious injuries can be forgiven. It is not impossible that Carlo and I, even now, might be reconciled. You don’t believe this? You think me simple-minded? But you have not experienced the perverse pleasures of our fighting-life. I forgave him repeatedly. He forgave me – oh yes, Signora, even before my lead-pipe days, I managed to give back something of what I got – acutely embarrassing scenes in which he cut a wretched figure before friends. Brutta figura! Into that Achilles heel, the rotting soft spot of the vain I could always stick a claw!

  It is to that same vulnerability, his fear of brutta figura, that this letter is addressed. By letting you, la Mammina, into our noisome secrets, it makes it harder for Carlo to forgive me. Forgive-and-forget is a package deal. But who can forget when there is a witness close to one who knows all and reminds one that she does by constant jibes? I rely on you for this. You will keep him from me and me from him – which, sadly, is what we need.

  It occurred to me that if I did have to make a trip to England, Carlo would be alone in the house; he might visit the cellar and see the objects there. I was acutely embarrassed at the thought. Fantasies and their props are private: painfully so. At least they are for me. While fantasy stays in one’s head, it is safe. Once it has confronted reality – like now – shame no longer attaches to it. At the intermediary stage at which mine had got stuck, while my props lay unused in the cellar, discovery can only be humiliating.

  I decided to do away with the fetters. The bed was not compromising. I would pretend I had bought it as a surprise and was keeping it for Carlo’s birthday or our anniversary. Indeed, as I thought about it, I became convinced that this was the truth. But the fetters with their home-sewn red velvet padding would be harder to explain. They must be got rid of. The question was how? The Volterra town council had recently been issuing plastic bags for householders’ rubbish and our rubbishmen were no longer prepared to deal with the heavy old dustbins. My fetters with their bars and chains would not fit into the new little bags. I could throw them into our well but it was sometimes cleaned and they might be dragged up again in the spring. I could not bear the thought. Burying them was just as risky. The thing to do was to put them into the boot of the car, drive into the country and drop them somewhere. Unfortunately, just as I came to this conclusion, our old Giulietta got battery trouble and had to be hauled off to the garage for a week.

  It was during this week that my scenario escaped me. I had decided to scrap it and instead it began to act itself out.

  Carlo got a notion that we ought to put down some wine. A friend of his had joined some club which imported French wines at cut prices. This, the friend claimed, was a once-in-a-decade year for Rhine – or Rhône? I wouldn’t remember – wines. He advised Carlo to buy all he could afford and put it down. Carlo decided to inspect our cellar.

  ‘The bulb’s broken,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been meaning to get the yard man to change it. It’s too high for me. I’ll get him to do it in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll do it. I know where he keeps the ladder.’

  ‘Carlo, you’ll fall. Let him do it.’

  This was the wrong tack. Vanity, the old weak spot, must not be injudiciously touched. Carlo gave a manly laugh, equipped himself with torch and ladder, and set off down the cellar stairs. I ran down behind him. It was wonderful, I said sarcastically into the blackness, how pathetically true to type he ran. Putting down wine indeed when we hadn’t enough money to run a decent car. Was he laying it up for his children’s baptism parties, assuming we ever had any?

  Carlo set up his ladder. In one hand he held a fresh bulb, in the other his torch. He shone it around. Its beam caught the curlicues of the bed.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked indifferently, and began to climb the ladder. ‘I’ll have this bulb in in a jiffy. Switch on the light when I tell you.’

  ‘You’re not even listening!’ I screamed. There was nowhere for me to hide those fetters which would be in full, disgraceful view the moment I switched on the light. ‘You might discuss this with me before earmarking all our money for useless, snobby French wine! Damn you, Carlo, will you answer!’

  Carlo removed the old bulb. He was having trouble holding the torch and keeping his balance on the ladder. ‘I need three hands,’ he said. ‘What are you on about now?’

  ‘Come down, Carlo, please! I want to talk to you. Now!’ I shook the ladder.

  He fell. His head banged against the iron bedpost and he lay very still. He had knocked himself out.

  *

  It was funny: sickly so, if you like. You see I might n
ever have done it! I think I wouldn’t have. I was so terrified of breaking his conceivably paper-thin cranium and then – my guardian angel or bad spirit did it for me. Ah well. Of course you are thinking and saying and will endlessly repeat – I can hear you as I write! – that what I should have done at this point was to ring a doctor. I had ample time now to find a temporary hiding-place for the shaming fetters and even if I had not, Carlo’s health, his very life, you will say, demanded a doctor.

  Well, as it turned out: they didn’t. Carlo was right as rain in an hour. When he came to, lying on the bed, his feet threaded through the fetters – I had used them after all – the worst he was suffering from was a headache. In no time at all, I will admit, he was suffering from incredulity, shock, rage and sheer, unmanning bewilderment. He had no stomach for cunning that day. He failed to play the one card which would have won his release: it never occurred to him to pretend he was badly hurt.

  No need to tell you about our first conversations. Carlo will describe them. I imagine I have left you matter for several years’ chat – unless the subject is declared taboo. Even if it is, it will stick around: a memory responsive to hints and nudges.

  Quickly then: there were rages, roars, sulks and refusals to speak. Unfairly, he looked his worst: cheeks fat with fury and black with a stubble of beard. Only on the third day did he think of reasoning with me:

  ‘How do you think you’re going to get away with this?’

  ‘I don’t expect to.’

  ‘Then why are you doing it? What do you expect to gain?’

  ‘Only what I’ve got now.’

  ‘What have you got? You must want to force me to do something! What?’

  ‘Nothing. I just want you like this.’

  ‘To humiliate me?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘And what the hell do you think is going to happen when you release me?’

  I had no answer to that one.

  He was quite confident at first. He couldn’t believe I’d keep it up or that someone wouldn’t hear him or wonder where he was and come looking for him. He shouted a lot the first day or two, but I played the radio full-blast upstairs to show him how badly sound carried. With the basement and cellar doors shut, he couldn’t hear it, so there was little chance of anyone’s hearing him. Gradually he gave that up. Still, he relied on his colleagues wondering about his sudden disappearance from the office. I told him I had written a letter of resignation purporting to come from him, explaining that an opportunity to work in London was being offered him by his stepfather-in-law, that he had had to take a sudden decision, was sorry for the inconvenience caused but hoped they would understand.

  ‘I forged your signature. I’ve been practising.’

  ‘The letter’s sure to be full of appalling grammar. They’ll know there’s something wrong.’

  ‘No, it’s all formulas. I looked through your files of old correspondence and lifted all the ready-made office jargon I could. I write better Italian than I speak. You can see the rough copy if you like.’

  ‘They’ll think it extraordinary my giving notice like that.’

  ‘They’ll be annoyed but they won’t investigate. People never do.’

  They didn’t. Apart from one phone call which I answered saying yes, Carlo was in London, no, he didn’t plan on getting back soon, we heard nothing from the office. Later in the week I went in to collect a few of his things and repeated my story to two of his colleagues. If they thought about Carlo at all, they probably thought he had been too embarrassed to show his face, envied him his influential father-in-law and forgot about him.

  What followed was totally different from the scene imagined in my dream-scenario. There action had been fast and satisfying. I triumphed. Carlo cringed. I, like God, was in control. I spoke persuasively and Carlo saw my point. I was free. The choices were mine. Instead: I was not free since I was afraid to release Carlo. I disliked myself, had strong feelings of nausea, was not persuasive and, in fact, hardly spoke. My mind, as though it had been I and not Carlo who had fallen on my head, was in a state of stunned lethargy. It could cope with no more than the mechanics of the situation, the physical routine required to keep the status quo: answering phone calls and letters, buying food, emptying his slop bucket, et cetera. When it came to thinking of the future, thought switched off. When he reasoned with me or tried to cajole me, I shrugged. I had imagined that I would use the time I held him prisoner to explain my grudges, to make him see how intolerable it can be to be always on the losing side, the weak partner, the one who must submit. I think I had supposed that his own position would make this clear to him in an immediate way. Zing! Message lodges in brain. Dominant partner apprehends reality of subject partner. True dialogue based on a shared premiss can now commence.

  Haha! Permit me to laugh, Signora. It is at myself. Nothing of the sort happened or – I began to see – was likely to, unless Carlo was kept chained to the bed for ten years. Chained up or free, Carlo was still Carlo – in the short run anyway – and I was still myself.

  I began to understand this on the fourth day.

  We had begun to settle into a routine. Carlo was letting me feed him – at first he had refused to eat. I was looking after him, necessarily, in a more intimate way than I ever had before and this aroused inappropriately motherly feelings in me. I found myself cooking his favourite food, worrying about his comfort and generally behaving more like the tender-hearted daughter of the despot in prototypal prison stories than like the implacable despot himself. He noticed this eventually – one thing that might be said to have been achieved was that Carlo had to start studying me and wondering how I ticked. He was learning the techniques of the underdog.

  On the sixth day I came down with his lunch and found him reading a paperback I had left for him. I had not used the second pair of shackles for his arms but had looped their chain around his elbows attaching these behind his back to the bed back, then bringing the chain forward to circle his neck so that if he tried to pull his arm free the pressure would be on his own throat. His hands however were free and he could eat, drink, hold a book and manœuvre himself towards the slop bucket. The iron bar threaded through his leg-fetters was itself pierced by chains which hung down, one on the left the other on the right side of the bed, and were padlocked together underneath. These chains were long enough to allow him to adjust his position by moving to the right or left or by bending his knees as he had done on this occasion so as to form a support for his book.

  ‘Do you want lunch?’

  ‘You know what I want.’

  ‘Do you want lunch?’

  ‘How the hell can I eat lunch? My neck is rubbed raw by this bloody chain. Every move I make it rubs. I could strangle myself in my sleep. What are you trying to do? Unman me? Why don’t you castrate me and be finished? You’ll probably be locked up in a lunatic asylum for life when they get you. Do you want me to have to join you there? A fine future for us. Tell me, I can’t think why I never asked: is there madness in your family?’

  ‘I’m the mad Englishwoman, you’ve driven me mad!’

  ‘Christ, you are at that!’

  ‘Do you want lunch?’

  ‘Una, it’s you I worry about. I keep puzzling: what did I do? I mean tiffs and squabbles don’t normally lead to this sort of thing as far as is generally known. Or do they in England? Is there a whole, submerged, unreported section of people’s lives where the primitive urges are given leeway? Incest? Mayhem? Murder perhaps?’

  The ironic look on Carlo’s face slipped. He had frightened himself. Murder was, after all, one logical way for me to get myself out of the fix I had got into.

  ‘Una,’ it was a little boy’s voice. ‘Una … I …’

  I watched him watch me as I stood there with the cooling lasagne. I could see doubt ooze through him.

  ‘Give me the lunch.’ He ate it silently, wiped his lips with the napkin I had brought, shot me one shifty look, then another. ‘That was … good
… Una?’

  I took his plate and left, shutting cellar and basement doors carefully behind me. When I reached the kitchen I smashed the dirty plate hard into the sink, sat down at the table and rested my face against its scrubbed surface. So this was where we were at now! He thought I was mad! Was trying to humour me. Shared premiss indeed! We were communicating less than before. What a laugh! We never seemed to get our wires uncrossed.

  ‘You don’t know how to talk to people!’ I accused him some hours later. ‘You talk at them or get round them. You don’t respect anyone enough to try and meet them half-way – certainly not your mother. Not Giovanna. Let’s not mention me. It’s the same with your men friends. You either tease them or defer to them. You trust nobody.’