短篇小說｜Tessa Hadley：

09-13

Cecilia awakened from her childhood while she was on holiday in Italy, the summer she turned fifteen. It was not a sexual awakening, or not exactly—rather, an intellectual or imaginative one. Until that summer, the odd child she was had seemed to fit in perfectly with the oddity of her rather elderly parents. Her father, Ken, worked at a university library, and her mother, Angela, wrote historical novels, and when they came late to marriage—and then to childbearing and child rearing—they saw no reason to change the entrenched pattern of their lives, or to become more like ordinary people. No one who knew them could quite imagine afterward how they had managed nappies and dummies and spooning in baby food; they themselves couldn』t really remember how they had managed it. A squalling baby must have been an eruption of anarchy in lives that were otherwise characterized by restraint and irony.

It was only the once, in any case. There was just Cecilia, and she hadn』t squalled for long.

Even when her father was still carrying her in a backpack, she had looked around her with those wise huge eyes that were so like her mother』s, pale and heavy-lidded, drinking everything in with appetite and wonder, but not participating in it. Soon she had learned to hate children』s parties, preferring a trip to a museum or a castle—or rambling in the Lake District, pressing flowers for her collection. She had a stamp collection, too, and she and her father made what he called 「stinks」 with a chemistry set—although she quickly knew, as she said, that science 「wasn』t her thing.」 By the time she was nine, she had read 「Middlemarch」 and most of Dickens; she learned the violin and played it scratchily but at a tremendous pace, advancing through all the grades. She took extra Latin lessons at school because it helped her grasp the roots of her own language. Her teachers encouraged her and showed her off but didn』t like her, with her curious mixture of assurance and shy clumsiness. Cecilia wasn』t afraid of adults in those days, only of other children. Finicky about food, for years she was miniature, like an elf or a wizened old woman; at puberty, she grew suddenly tall and got an appetite, her limbs and her waist thickened, her skin became waxy, and her hair, which had been fair, turned to mud-brown. She was affronted by this bodily assault; discreetly, Angela supplied her with sanitary pads. Mother and daughter conferred only briefly and abruptly about such facts of life. Female biology seemed a disenchantment, after the pure thing Cecilia』s childhood had been.

Still, biology had produced Cecilia, and she was a marvel. If her parents mourned the fey little sprite she had been, they loved her too tenderly to give her the least sign of it. The three of them did everything together. They liked the same things and shared the same jokes: most of all, they liked the past. It was as if the past in some sense belonged to them, because they knew about it and understood it, whereas in the present they were submerged among so many alien others, such hostile crosscurrents, in such oceans of what was crass and wrong. You could feel their relief when they stepped out of the crowd in the high street of any provincial English town, spoiled by its Poundworlds and its McDonald』s and identikit shabby chain stores, and into the embracing quiet of some Tudor or Georgian house, open to the public, where a ticket seller dozed behind a few faded postcards. They even regretted it if the National Trust got hold of such a place and jazzed it up. Try on the crinoline, the wig! See if you can write a poem like Coleridge』s! The more austere the history the better, as far as Ken was concerned. Angela teased that he was never happier than when he spotted dense information boards, complete with floor plans, color-coded for different historical periods. She and Cecilia preferred a family tree, finding out which haughty beauty in a portrait had married whom, which children had died tragically young.

Angela was dreamy when she got up close to the past. She liked to close her eyes, breathe in the smell of a place, and feel its ghosts around her. In her own childhood, she had read so many books in which a house』s past was actually alive in the next room: you had only to open the right door to come across the Edwardian children who』d once lived there, or the Tudor plotters, or some powdered, jaded aristocrat bent over his papers or her embroidery. Reading aloud to Cecilia when she was small, Angela had loved re?ntering the spirit of those books, and was sometimes so absorbed that she went on reading long after Cecilia had fallen asleep. Of course, it had to be an old house for the time travel to work. Angela had resented, when she was growing up, the smart modern homes her parents preferred, their showy windows, their roots planted so shallowly in history. She had yearned to own a house with a priest hole—or an attic, at least, with a trunk full of yellowed letters and long dresses. In real life, needless to say, she and Ken had had to make do with less, but she』d held out for a brick cottage in Coventry which had an air of harboring long-ago secrets, though it was rather swamped by the city』s postwar redevelopment.

Yet Ken and Angela weren』t cowardly, or even timid. They confronted their present cheerfully enough, were mostly quite happy in it and not na?ve about its advantages. Angela was a feminist, grateful to be liberated from the tyranny of pleasing; Ken was a socialist, so couldn』t regret the end of feudalism or of the aristocracy. He even, in the abstract, hoped for a better future, though he was afraid that the best days of socialism were behind them, and its best minds. Of necessity, because of his work at the library, he was an early adopter of new information technologies, though he regretted their consequences in the wider society: he was involved in setting up Early English Books Online. Slim and compact and not unhandsome in his dark suit, he was small—by the time Cecilia was thirteen, both his women overtopped him—with a neatly trimmed beard and brown eyes that were unexpectedly limpid and expressive, suggesting that he held back strong feeling. His speech was constrained and quick, and at the library he was respected and even feared, passionate in support of his ideas, contemptuous of interference. He might have lived entirely sufficient to himself if he hadn』t once, on an improbable occasion—he didn』t, as a rule, attend evening receptions at work—encountered Angela, with her startled look and faintly panicky laugh. She had said something original and not stupid about the Tudor mentality.

Angela could have been very pretty if she hadn』t so determinedly refused that cup, willing it to pass from her. She was fine-boned and dainty, with a translucent complexion—though if she looked in a mirror, she avoided her own eyes. Her pale silky hair, cut short, seemed to lift in a perpetual breeze of static; as she searched for the right sentence, or the detail of a scene, she combed her fingers through it unconsciously until it crackled and stood on end. She didn』t wear any makeup or perfume. Her mother, Cecilia』s grandmother, who was elegant and drank and had lovers, had remonstrated when Angela was younger: if only she』d move more gracefully, less jerkily, if only she』d try contact lenses and wear dresses instead of shirts and slacks. Angela had advanced unhappily toward middle age, when such pressures would surely come to an end. And then before she was forty, when she was on her third book—her second had been a minor hit—and just around the time that she met Ken, her mother died, and so never knew that her awkward daughter had succeeded in hooking a man after all. Weeping angry tears, Angela allowed herself this bitterness when the funeral was over, mocking herself and her mother—but only when she was alone, in her most private thoughts.

It was as if, on the first morning of that holiday in Florence, Cecilia simply woke up inside the wrong skin. She was on a pullout bed in her parents』 hotel room—they couldn』t have afforded a separate room even if it had crossed their minds that she needed it. When she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was at first, saw only the bright bar of sunlight slanting across the shadows from the window, whose blind fitted imperfectly, and felt its alien heat press on her limbs. She』d kicked the sheet down to her feet during the night, and her nightdress had snaked up under her arms and was wrapped around her like a twisted rope, as if in her sleep she』d tried to tug it off. Really, the bed was too narrow for her, and too short. It was a modest hotel, so it didn』t have air-conditioning, although it was clean; they had stayed there before, and at home in England they referred jocularly to Signora Petricci, the proprietress, as if she were an old friend. Actually, that was Cecilia』s first coherent thought, once she』d opened her eyes: that when they had spoken with the Signora last night on arrival she had not, after all, been the creature of their fond recollection, their possession. She had been perfectly polite and smiling; she』d said she remembered them. But hadn』t Cecilia caught, while her father unzipped pockets inside his bag, retrieving the passports and a printout of their reservation one by one from where they』d been meticulously stowed, a momentary flash on the Signora』s face—vividly swarthy and brooding, like the faces on Coptic sarcophagi—of suppressed impatience or distaste? Or, worse, indifference. She did not really like them; she didn』t even dislike them. It was as if Cecilia had heard distinctly, in a moment when no one was actually speaking, Signora Petricci』s idle thought: Fussy little man.

Although Cecilia』s Italian was limited, and she certainly didn』t know the word for 「fussy,」 she had seemed to hear the thought in Italian and not in English—with all the eloquence of Italian, the assertive pleasure in its own music and rhetorical flourish, so sublimely confident of its way. It had never fully occurred to Cecilia before, though of course she had known it rationally, that the lives of the people they encountered on holiday, the hoteliers and waiters, continued here for the rest of the year while they were absent. Last night, in the restaurant, the waitress had slammed down their plates of pasta so hard that they had exchanged surreptitious smiles; now Cecilia remembered the shameless curve of that waitress』s haunches in her tight, short skirt, her face coarse with makeup—eyeliner and thick green eyeshadow—and felt afraid of her. When they had been at home in England, planning their trip, everything in Italy had seemed to belong to them, as if it were their refuge. Now that they had arrived, she understood that abroad was not really safe, in the way a museum was safe. Yet they』d been abroad so often: they saved every year for their trips to Italy and France and Greece, and Cecilia had never been afraid before.

No doubt she could easily be rid of this fear, she thought. There would be a trick to it. She just needed a different way of looking at what she seemed to have seen. For reassurance, she glanced at her parents』 sleeping forms in the bed at whose foot her own little truckle was made up, but they were only mounds under the white sheet, their stillness for the moment too monumental to disturb. In any case, she hardly knew what question to ask, what answer would put her mind at rest. Pulling her nightdress down, making herself decent, she turned on her side to try to sleep again. The sleeve of her mother』s checked cotton shirt intruded into her awareness, dangling beside her pillow, where Angela had hung it the night before, over the back of a chair. This shirt was so intensely familiar: soft with washing, sweet with the smell of her mother』s soap, innocent, derided—because Cecilia and her father weren』t above sometimes teasing Angela about her indifference to what she wore. Cecilia seemed to have a memory from early childhood of sleeping with it pressed against her face for comfort, although that surely wasn』t the same shirt. In the beam of hard new light, however, she was ashamed of it. The cloth was faded, its pattern blurred, and the frayed cuff sprouted a fringe of broken threads where the interlining showed through.

She remembered how yesterday, when Signora Petricci had laid out on the reception desk the necessary forms for signing, her lace-trimmed cuff had been impeccably laundered and pressed, brilliantly white against her dark skin; links in a gold chain had stirred and glinted with her wrist』s authoritative movement, in a way that seemed to have some meaning for Cecilia, to send some message. The Signora』s cuff and her bracelet were breaches in the fortress of familiarity, through which doubt flooded.

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

September 17, 2018

She had hoped that breakfast would dispel these troubles. Her mother loved the breakfasts at the Hotel Salvia, and said they were 「the real thing」 that all the hotels had served when she』d come to Florence as a girl: a jug of coffee and a bigger jug of hot milk, fresh rolls, and white unsalted butter, not much else. The little dining room spilled into a courtyard, where oleander and bougainvillea grew in terra-cotta pots and tables were set out under a striped awning. Boldly, Angela ordered in Italian, smiling and gesturing with her hands more than she did at home: not tea, no, thank you; yes, they were English, but they wanted coffee, they loved the coffee here—and hot chocolate for their daughter. Ken spread his guidebook and map out on the table and began planning their day; he was annoyed that there was no signal for his smartphone, and the hotel Wi-Fi didn』t seem to work in the courtyard.

「I hate to be a downer, but, statistically, people are more likely to die from heart disease than by getting hit with one of those things.」

Everything wasn』t all right, though. Cecilia』s unease persisted; she writhed with self-consciousness. There was something wrong with her top, and with her trousers—they didn』t fit, or they didn』t look right. The Italian girls at the next table, around her own age or younger, looked right: with their Lycra shorts and white crop tops, their dancing, bare midriffs so flat and brown, veils of shining hair flying behind them when they turned. Cecilia had liked her own clothes when she packed them, but overnight they had transformed into a torment, their wrongness burning against her skin. Which wasn』t flawlessly brown—because it wasn』t just her clothes, it was also her body inside them. She had understood before, when she looked at certain girls at school—even certain scowling ones, who hated lessons and slouched in their uniforms with half the buttons undone, and spent their lunch break swooning over their phones—that she wasn』t beautiful. But there had seemed then to be something unassailable in her, balanced against her lack and compensating for it. If they were beautiful, at least she was the one who saw it, saw everything. That had set her apart. Now, on this awful morning in Italy, seeing things and knowing them seemed an inadequate defense. Those girls at the next table were silly, but they were worldly, she thought, trying out the word. They were in the world, and she and her parents were somehow shut out of it. When she dipped a buttered roll into her hot chocolate, the hot chocolate dripped onto her top, which was the last straw; blinking back resentful tears, she pushed the cup away. Her parents picked up on her mood, exchanging concerned glances. Everything was ruined, she exclaimed. Angela reassured her that the top didn』t matter—they could soak it.

But everything was ruined. In the streets that day, and on all the subsequent days of their week in Florence, Cecilia suffered because she felt sure that she and her parents weren』t welcome. She seemed to intercept glances of open hostility which stung like lashes, so that she flinched and hunched her shoulders, though she knew this wasn』t attractive. Or she was aware of a disdain that refused even to see them, as if they were only absences cut out against the air—which was pungent with heat, meat, garlic, wine, car exhaust, an undertow of rot from the river. Her father had explained how Italians had come to resent the tourism that ate at the physical and social fabric of their cities, but she hadn』t really imagined, and perhaps he hadn』t, either, that this opprobrium was meant for them. It was meant for the other tourists, surely: the ones who left litter and drank beer in the street, or snaked numbly without enthusiasm after the ignorant guides holding their flags or umbrellas aloft. The ones who didn』t appreciate what they were seeing. And yet she wondered now how the Florentines were supposed to distinguish, among the hordes wandering up and down. Didn』t a discriminating tourist look much like an undiscriminating one?

On Wednesday, when they』d finally gained entrance to the Uffizi Gallery, after an hour or so of waiting in the queue for ticket holders, and then more unzipping in her father』s bag, and quarrelling over the printouts of his bookings, and his extreme exasperation with the inefficient system—so that Angela had to take over, flustered, appeasing and apologizing—Cecilia saw the paintings they』d anticipated so eagerly with a kind of horror. She』d visited the gallery at least twice before on previous holidays, and she』d always believed that she loved it. She was so interested in art history, her parents had boasted. She』d been quick, even when she was quite little, to pick up on the logic of the changes between different periods, the evolution of realism in perspective. In the past, she thought now, there must have been some kind of veil between her eyes and these paintings, so that she could look at them unharmed, without actually taking in their stories. Today, that veil was ripped away. There was so much nakedness, to begin with—bodies stripped for torture or crucifixion, or for torturous pleasures. A scaly demon was tethered on a chain like a pet. There was such flaunting wealth and beauty, such exotic, improbable belief and such ostentatious performances of piety, such cruelty, such laying on of gold. Abraham held down his own son』s head with a practiced hand, ready with the knife for his neck, and in the son』s face was his whole dreadful knowledge of the world. Cecilia glanced quickly at her parents, to see if they saw in the Caravaggio what she did. But Angela was enraptured, her cheeks pink; Ken stared at it obstinately, only pretending to be absorbed. He was refusing to move aside for a Spanish boy in shorts, who wanted a photo of his girlfriend standing in front of it.

On their last day, late in the afternoon, they went to San Miniato al Monte. It was a long walk in the heat, up a winding road, and they went the wrong way for a while. Yet, when they arrived at the church at last, Cecilia was almost able to enjoy it. Her relief at the thought that their holiday was nearly over seemed to join with the lightness and grace of the temple-like white fa?ade, perched high above the sweltering city and its sluggish shallow river, where on their way they』d stopped to watch a heron fishing, up to its knees in the green water, among the weeds and washed-up heaps of plant debris. On the hill, a breeze stirred the tall cypresses; swallows darted, shrilling, in the great bowl of light below them. Warily, almost grudgingly, something that had been tightly compressed unfurled in her, and she allowed herself to know that the place was lovely. It was lovely if you knew how to open yourself to it, take it inside. She felt herself breathing freely for the first time in days.

Her parents were grateful for this reprieve. They, too, were smiling, relaxing into the moment; Cecilia knew that she had spoiled the holiday for them with her mute rebellion. She hadn』t protested explicitly, or made any actual scenes apart from the one at breakfast over the hot chocolate, but the muscles of her face had seemed set hard in their heavy sulk, even if she tried to smile, and she』d moved everywhere as reluctantly as if her limbs were made of wood. If her parents spoke to her, she could reply only curtly, in monosyllables. Ken and Angela had kept up a bright appearance of enjoying themselves, but it was threadbare, and the strain had told: they had quarrelled more tensely than usual over directions and plans. Their quarrels weren』t tempestuous, only dry remarks and things not said. Once or twice in the evenings Angela had put a hand on her daughter』s forehead as if she were ill; Cecilia had shaken her off, frowning. But now she was moved by the sudden thawing of her mood to put an arm around her mother』s shoulders. 「This has always been my favorite place,」 Angela eagerly concurred with her.

They moved inside the shadowed church, submerging themselves in a cool dimness that was like a bath for the spirit, and as their eyes adjusted they took in its high solidity, supported on mighty pillars; underfoot, the floor was patterned in skeins and knots of black-and-white marble, woven with symbols. The place was busy with tourists, as well as with worshippers arriving for Vespers. The three of them went around together as they had in the old days, commenting in subdued voices; Ken read aloud to them from the guidebook, while Angela noticed oddities and quirky characters in the margins of the pictures and carvings. A blade of brilliant light struck through the mysterious darkness, as the sun declined behind the tall windows. It made the gold mosaics gleam, and picked out the jewels in the halos of the gigantic figures arrayed in their glory in the curve of the dome: Christ and the Virgin and St. Miniato, who had apparently picked up his own head and carried it here after his martyrdom. Cecilia felt that she, too, was ready for something extraordinary. And at the appointed hour, just as their guidebook had promised, the transfiguring music of plainsong rose from the crypt below them, a few wide steps down from the main body of the church.

Angela pointed out that, now that the service had begun, they weren』t supposed to go down these steps, but Ken insisted—he didn』t want to miss the Spinello Aretino frescoes in the sacristy. As they descended past the crypt, looking respectfully and almost shamefacedly away from the congregation and the choir at their worship, an ancient monk in a white robe, bent and leaning on a stick, hobbled over to block their way. As striking and exaggerated as a work of art, he could have stepped out of one of the paintings they』d been admiring. His bald skull was polished a deep yellow-brown and spotted with age; when he accosted them, his loose old lips were stretched in a wide smile, but it wasn』t kind, and his eyes glinted with anger in their shadowy sockets. He seemed like fate, or doom, to Cecilia. 「Che fate voi qui?」 His singsong speech wasn』t personal; it was like the chanted responses, an incantation passed down through the centuries. Ken pretended not to know what he meant, or perhaps really hadn』t understood; he smiled blankly at the monk and continued down into the sacristy. Angela tried to say something in Italian about how much they loved the church, but the old man fastened his gaze on Cecilia, as if he knew that she was the most guilty, or the most susceptible. She had no defenses, no layers of justification or self-possession, and she quailed under his scourging, remorseless look.

What were they doing here? His smile was full of knowledge of them and their type. Cecilia hated the old man, but felt in the churning of her adolescent shyness that he was right: this was his place, not theirs. Their poking over the church, with their puny interest in art, was obscene. She appealed to her mother, pulling at her arm. She had period pains, she said. She wasn』t feeling well and wanted to go back to the hotel—could Angela please give her the key card for their room? Angela was dismayed: was she sure she knew the way back? Of course she knew it, Cecilia said, glowering. She wasn』t an idiot.

Angela hated the idea of her fleeing alone through the city, and wanted to go after her, but Ken said that would only make things worse. He was severe, as if even Cecilia had finally crossed some line beyond which there was only implacable judgment. They would have to get used to this sort of thing now that she was a teen-ager, he said in a tone full of foreboding, trying to hide his disappointment and hurt.

And Angela knew that he was probably right. Cecilia wanted to be alone. If she made an effort, she could imagine her daughter hurrying through the crowd in the streets, as clearly as if she were clairvoyant; writing her novels was like clairvoyance sometimes, and involved this same intense sympathy, alongside insights that were more ruthless. Cecilia』s fists were clenched at her sides, her head was down. She was hot, and she strode clumsily, planting her feet like a child, as if she didn』t love herself—though her anxiety was subsiding as she got closer to the familiar terrain around their hotel and farther from her parents and their burdens of expectation, their oppressive familiarity. Unexpectedly, Angela found herself thinking, in a spirit of protecting Cecilia from all the dangers out there, Move more gracefully, less jerkily. Look up, don』t hunch your shoulders.

She imagined her arriving back at the hotel, getting past the reception desk and letting herself into the room, the sheer blissful relief of it, alone at last, with the beds made neatly and the shutters closed on the semidarkness inside. She would flop down on the bed—their bed, not hers—and feel herself seeping gradually back into her own shape, belonging only to herself. But she wouldn』t fall asleep, and after a while when she was rested she』d begin to prowl around the room, snooping idly, the way girls do, through her mother』s toiletries and in the chest of drawers where they』d unpacked their clothes. And then Angela remembered for no reason a lipstick she』d picked up from her mother』s dressing table after she died, when they』d been sorting out the house. She had kept it in a pocket of her bag for years, though she didn』t know why—she never wore lipstick, and this one was nothing special, its ridged gold case scratched and grubby, the orange color inside worn to a nub. Its cloying, cakey perfume had reminded her of her mother, she supposed, though she』d taken it out only once or twice to sniff it. When she was a little girl, she』d been enchanted by twisting the cylinder, winding the pillar of lipstick up and down. After a while, she』d forgotten it was in her bag, though sometimes, accidentally, searching for keys or an aspirin, she』d touched its cool, inert shape, meaningful like a bullet or a submarine. Anyway, she didn』t have it now; it had been left behind somewhere.

Angela was remembering all this, and feeling such a strong surge of sorrowful loss, and at the same time she was studying with interest the miraculous rescue of St. Placidus from drowning, painted on the wall in the sacristy of San Miniato. St. Placidus was rolling fatalistically amid the blue waves of his pond, while one of his comrades, endowed with special powers by St. Benedict, came walking across the water to save him. In the picture it looked like such a harmless little pond, carved into the earth as neatly as a circle of stamped-out pastry, or a hole cut into ice for fishing.

作者：Tessa Hardly

來源：紐約客（2018.9.17）

【更多紐約客短篇小說】