BREAKFAST WITH THE CONTESSA - Short Story by Roger Harvey

 

 

BREAKFAST WITH THE CONTESSA

by

Roger Harvey

 

Vesuvius opposite their window: amazing. From the balcony the great sweep of the Bay of Naples seemed more amazing still. Alan knew this image would be cherished into futures he couldn’t imagine.

“Was it like this in your day, Dad?”

“That makes me sound old. It was only the Nineteen Sixties.”

“The Swinging ’Sixties, eh?”

“The early ’Sixties. They hadn’t swung too far--well, not in the way you imagine. But,” his father indicated the twinkling coastline with his cigar, “the tall buildings were beginning, the sound of scooters came up just like tonight, plenty of tourists around. The place hasn’t really changed, and that view is timeless, thank God. ‘See Naples and die’ was the old catchphrase. Only you want to live, and come back.”

“Like you. You lived, and came back.” Alan lost his smile as a savage glowing of his father’s cigar punctuated words he wished he hadn’t said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it.....that way.”

“’Course not.” The cigar stub was thrown over the balcony.

“It wasn’t your fault. Everyone knows it was that fool in the van going far too fast. Mum was just unlucky. You mustn’t feel guilty.”

“I’m not sure I do. Do you know about guilt at sixteen?”

“Dunno. Sorry, I don’t even want to talk like this, but sometimes I have to--even if you think I sound stupid.”

“I don’t think that.” His father’s voice had softened, releasing floods of affection in Alan.

“Well, am I going on too much? I need to talk about it sometimes. It isn’t going to get better; it’s going to get worse. I mean I’m going to miss Mum more. I wish she was here.”

“Sally wouldn’t have liked it here: too hot.” His father broke into a chuckle just when Alan thought he would be more serious than ever, “We mustn’t stop using the words ‘die’ and ‘live’ just because your mother is dead and I’m alive.”

“Okay,” Alan swallowed, “you’re right.” The view scintillated across his eyes, their wetness making shooting-stars from the necklace of lights around the Bay.

“Let’s eat.”

 

                                              * * *

 

Alan sat on the balcony reading a guide-book to Pompeii, but it wasn’t a night for study. Mediterranean sounds floated up: honking horns, people laughing, distant hootings of the harbour. Smells teased his senses. Among them he imagined expensive perfume.

“Tell me more about this Contessa.”

His father lit another cigar.

“Well, I knew her mother. The girl will be in her sixties now. Sally and I met her mother in London; lovely woman. Sally didn’t want to travel in the heat again. I came out alone, found our Italian friend was having a baby, tremendous celebration. I hadn’t realised how rich they all were ’til I saw the house. They were generous too; made me a kind of godfather. Not in the Christian sense; and don’t laugh, not in the Mafia sense either; a kind of godfather, who’d look after the daughter’s interests when he could. I’ve kept in touch. Now her mother’s dead I thought you should meet her. You feel grown up?”

“Sometimes.”

“So, you’re ready for her.”

“But is this famous Contessa ready for me?” Alan poked his father’s arm playfully. “Fresh-faced English youth, you know; devastating for an older woman.”

“Mmm.” His father’s smile was broad. “Wanna be fixed up with a classy Italian? She’s rich. The Count lives apart, doesn’t seem to care. She would make sure you wouldn’t be knifed in a Sorrento alley--not by her husband’s lot, anyway.”

They shared wicked grins.

“That’s what I love about you, Dad: you have my interests at heart.”

“Oh I do.” 

“So, what’s she like?”

“She’ll have changed since I last saw her. I’m not sure what this marriage has done for her, apart from giving her a title and more money than ever. As I say, the husband appears to have gone off on his own, or to another woman. I don’t really know what she’ll be like.” Their joking was over. Uncomfortable feelings stirred in Alan as he watched his father pace about. “I do hope she’s like her mother, though. She was a very rare and special person.” His father looked into the night. “How to illustrate this? A real Twentieth-Century girl; tender but vivacious. You know when an orchestra plays An American in Paris and a whole era seems to sing? Modern but Romantic. She was like that. Have I explained that properly?”

“You’ve explained that perfectly.” Alan had gone red, and then white. “You were in love with her.”

“In a way, yes.”

“What way? And don’t say I’ll understand when I’m older.”

“Well,” his father remained calm, “I was in love with her the only way I could be. The annoying thing is, you will understand it better when you’re older.”

A foot stamped in Alan’s brain, and in his voice.

“I understand why you never told us while Mum was alive.”

“There you are then.”

“I kind of knew this all along. I wish you’d told us then.”

“No you don’t.”

“You should have said.”

“Yes,” his father held the cigar tenderly, “I should have said. Unless they’re really going to hurt people, try always to say things, Alan: difficult things, even obvious things--or they slide into the Great Unsaid of English Life. Think about it.”

He thought about nothing else, and went sullenly to bed. So it had all been a sham. While his mother had been running the family his father had been in love with a foreign woman. He hadn’t seen her, but done as he’d promised, sent presents to the daughter, the woman who had gone one better than her mother and become a Contessa. Why should he want this woman to meet his son? Because they had both lost mothers? Some promise or tradition he couldn’t understand? Alan wanted to toss and turn all night, rage about it, analyse it--but the dinner and the wine sent him to sleep.

 

                                              * * *

 

Rising early, they walked up to the pink-roofed villa, hiding like a secret in the trees. A maid showed them through a room of gilded furniture to a terrace with yet another view of the Bay.

There was a wait. There was always a wait in Italy. Here, was it to put them in their place as visitors, foreigners, inferiors? When she came to greet them Alan found her fairer than he had imagined, but with very dark eyes. Long, brown-sinewed arms swung from her bony shoulder-line and thin-strapped dress.

They shook hands, then kissed her hand, as he knew they should, Alan enjoying the civilised sensuality of it. One ring, a golden bracelet, no other jewels, expensive shoes. His father presented his son to the Contessa di Fiorenzuola.

“A mouthful, isn’t it?” she smiled in more casual English than he’d expected. “Better call me Carla.”

The maid brought coffee and rolls. The Contessa poured the coffee herself and spread jam. The sense of ceremony disappeared, as if they’d known one another for years.

“In England I could be called Charlie,” she added with a giggle.

“There was a show called Charlie Girl in London years ago,” said his father languidly, “around the time you were born.”

“What did you last see in London?” The question to Alan made him feel inadequate. He supposed she meant shows in the West End. He had never been to one. They hardly went to London at all. What would she think of deepest Derbyshire? He would have to lie.

“Um--the last Bond film, I think.”

“Ah yes,” she smiled. “Sean Connery is my favourite Bond.”

“Isn’t he everybody’s?” said his father.

Brown and sinewy she sat; one slender shoe clicked off, a bare sole stroked the warm terrazo, purple varnish flashed as her toes found the shoe again. His father was saying Alan was at a crucial time in his education with his future to decide. Alan hated to hear this; had no idea what his future would be. School exams and the stress of University lurked round too many corners of his mind and were somehow reflected in the Contessa’s bracelet. Was it all about getting rich? Did he want that? And a rich woman, a foreign woman with gilded furniture and painted nails, was that who his father wanted him to have? At no particular moment he could have identified, he realised his father really was offering him to the Contessa, or the Contessa to him. He’d been brought here on approval, to continue the tradition: the father with the mother, the son with the daughter. Was this a subtle Continental thing he was supposed to understand but not mention, or just a sordid scheme of his father’s? Was he to sleep with her, learn sex with an older woman, start a lifelong affair like his father’s? And when his older lover died, would he do this for his son if he had one? Was it disgusting? Was it just pathetic? He wouldn’t do it for his father, or anybody.

He pulled himself back to the coffee, the view, the flowers. The things he cared about were the excitement of travel, the history, the ancient atmosphere. Would he earn the leisure to enjoy them after more study and all the stress of jobs and work and the horrors he saw older people buried up to their necks in, or by pretending to love this complete stranger and giving himself to her? She must be effortlessly rich, born to big money, married to it, now--in a sense--widowed to it. Her husband, the rich Count, had left her. Was she sad and lonely? She seemed content, contained, doing more than all right in her beautiful house. The worst thing of all, the most shocking thing, was how ordinary it all was. The conversation was ordinary. The glamorous Contessa he’d imagined for so long sitting in her gilded villa above the exotic Bay was ordinary. She spoke ordinary English and tolerated his father’s ordinary jokes. She was elegantly dressed right enough, but quite ordinary to look at.

“Isn’t it beautiful here, Alan? Don’t you love to have breakfast with a new friend out here in the sunshine, enjoying life?”

Enjoying life: the hackneyed phrase was suddenly true. Yes, it was enjoying life that mattered, and he was enjoying it. He was smiling his reply but looking hard at her, realising he admired not her hair, but its shimmer of light; not her lips, but their pout; not her body but its vitality. Her very ordinariness--which a moment ago he had been ready to despise--was as much a feature of life as the heat in his own body. The Bay was blue beneath her balcony. White boats glimpsed through olive trees and pines were like flecks of happy childhood on a tapestry of blue that was the real and lovely present.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it’s beautiful here.”

“But you will go home again to England and have only the memory.”

“Yes, but that will be thanks to you.”

Suddenly, the rolls they were eating seemed so fresh that they were very life itself they ate, the coffee an offering to gods of sea and sky and body in the sun. So Alan sat newly at peace, and loved her smile. But he couldn’t love her. Nothing to do with his father and his dead mother, nothing to do with being brought out here for an inspection of goods in a curious deal, nothing to do with sex. He smiled. It was to do with his coming from Derbyshire. His Northern soul was not at home here in the languid sun, where dazzled waves of light were flung across the sea. Now she swept her arm across the view to say the Romans built a villa there. He found the confidence to tell her that when the Romans had come to his colder lands they’d had to build a wall to keep his own ancestors out.

She said she knew that Northern men could not be slaves, and looked at his father. Suddenly he did love her, without wanting her. Would his father understand that?

‘Contessa’, thought Alan, ‘with coffee at your lips and darkness in your eyes, you’ve given me full and happy breakfast. We know each other, see the cruel and meek. We’re having our love affair right here: not the one my father’s tried to fix, not with each other, with life. What joy it is to eat and drink together in Italian sun, and watch a white wave curl against the rocks.’

“This time next week we’ll be home,” he told her, and felt perfectly content.

 

Poet, novelist and playwright Roger Harvey was born in 1953 and lives in Newcastle. His recent books include MAIDEN VOYAGE, THE SILVER SPITFIRE and PERCY AND DINAH, all available on Amazon UK. More details are at

RogerHarvey—writer.blogspot.com.