CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER Page 10

  And of course the petty annoyances were endless—like having to don a dressing gown on his way to and from the bathroom. He didn’t own pajamas, hadn’t since he was a kid himself, and had grown reflexively used to walking naked round his home, for if anybody else was there, she’d likely shared his bed the night before.

  Worse, though, was having to turn down the next really juicy assignment offered by TV Plus. According to rumor, rabid rats had arrived in Kent through the pilot workings for the Channel Tunnel. During its final series Continuum had covered hydrophobia, which year by year was drawing closer to the coast of France, so Peter would have been an ideal choice to handle the story. Instead, he had to plead helplessly, “Ellen’s a victim of the Heathrow disaster—I’ve got to find a school for her, can’t leave her by herself because she’s far too young, and anyway after what she’s been through…”

  “I’ll have to try someone else, then!”

  Click.

  With which, the prospect of a company car receded over the horizon.

  Yet maybe worst of all was the fact that this timid, fawn-eyed creature, this fragile worse-than-orphaned plaything of malevolent chance—this not-yet person whose existence was admittedly his fault—was so desperate to please! She didn’t want to be what she realized she was: a nuisance. So she begged to be allowed to keep out of his way, to do the washing-up, to launder her own pitifully few clothes which he had to supplement on much-resented shopping trips, to sit immobile in front of the TV wearing headphones so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the sound…

  No. That wasn’t the worst. The worst was when the suspicion stole into his mind that he might have been better off had he coaxed Kamala out of her fit of fury after she found out about—well, what he’d done that made her lose all patience with him. He had been very fond of her: a slim and pretty nurse, met while he was a medical student. Then thanks to a terrible mischance…

  He shut out the notion, or rather tried to. Against his best attempts, images leaked through of what his life might have been like by now: as a GP with an established practice and a supportive wife, a daughter at the local school—

  Stop! They’d have been stoning me on the streets!

  If WPC Prentis was anyone to go by…

  Some problems evaporated with amazing swiftness. He had paid no attention at the time, but among the selling points listed by the estate agents through whom he had bought his new flat (and when was his old one going to be sold? “For Sale” signs were infecting London like measle spots, and as if he didn’t have enough trouble already, one prospective buyer had been ruled ineligible for so large a mortgage, so he was the involuntary owner of two homes!) had been the fact that there was still a school within walking distance. He visited it with Ellen, told her story to the head teacher, and met with nothing but sympathy. Strings would have to be pulled, and she might have to join her class a week late, but—well, it could be arranged.

  That marked the first time when he consulted his daughter’s opinion directly, apart from trivia such as what to buy for dinner. There in the head teacher’s office he reached out for her hand and asked, “Will it be all right if you come here?”

  Her eyes were still puffy; most nights he heard her cry herself to sleep, and more than once she’d woken screaming from a nightmare full of burning houses. But she smiled and returned the squeeze he gave her fingers.

  “Yes, Dad. I think I could get on here very well.”

  It was that evening, when he’d cobbled up a meal, that for the first time he called her to it saying, “Darling! It’s ready!”

  Followed the first time that she kissed him good night.

  Next day she ventured the news that at her former school she had been taught how to run a computer. Was there any chance…? Because having watched him at work—

  He had a spare one he’d been planning to sell when he found a customer. Well, it wouldn’t have fetched much more than scrap price anyhow. He plugged it in; it proved to be still functional. When he said it was hers she hugged him—for the first time—and thereafter seemed quite content to sit alone in her room and play with it. Or watch his old television, or listen to his old stereo. Sometimes, too, she asked to borrow one of his old books, saying she’d never seen so many except in a public library.

  Reach-me-downs.

  It wasn’t right, yet the phrase rang in his head. He recalled it not from his own childhood but from what he had been told about then. It seemed to imply something he couldn’t quite define.

  Not, at least, until resonance from it led him to another half-forgotten term:

  Latch-key kid.

  In other words, a child who returned from school to an empty house because both parents were still at work. He’d been one himself, though fortunately for a very brief while after his father left his mother for another woman…

  That put him on the phone to the head teacher again, in search of someone prepared to mind children during the late afternoon. Yes, there was such a service, owing to the high incidence of single parents in the area.

  The fees were disproportionate. Recklessly he committed himself to meeting them on the grounds that if he were not free to work he couldn’t pay for a dependent, which and who so ever. And when he asked Ellen how things had gone during the first day at her new school, and whether she had been properly looked after before he returned, she gave a nod, and then a surprising grin, and hugged him again.

  Maybe Kamala wasn’t doing quite such a good job after all… Job! Mine is turning out to be a brute! Keeping me up until all hours—!

  Back to it. Right now, with Ellen apparently content to turn in early and leave him to get on with it.

  Apparently. That didn’t mean truly. Did it?

  In spite of all, however, he felt an absurd sense of achievement as he sat at his desk after dinner, sorting out his commitments for the morrow. There was a warm glow in the back of his mind, as though he had passed some particularly daunting interview for a new post.

  Things were falling tidily into place in spite of all. Now Ellen was going to school, now the teachers and even apparently the pupils were showing sympathy about her loss—she was invited to a tea party on Saturday (weird, weird to look at his on-screen list of engagements and see another set of commitments listed alongside his own!)—now he could set aside his more ridiculous worries and get back to making plans. For instance, the Comet was still afloat and rumor had it that extra money was being pumped in. Before the transfusion dried up he stood a chance of—

  “Dad?”

  In Ellen’s usual diffident tone, redolent of insecurity. He turned to her with a sigh.

  “Dad, I’m dreadfully sorry, but I’m bleeding! I got undressed and went to bed, and I was half asleep when I found I’d made a dreadful mess on the sheets! Mum warned me to expect it about now, but I never thought…! I’m sorry!”

  And a wail, and tears she struggled to repress.

  It was something that had never struck Peter before because he had never lived with a woman. He had only been frustrated by it during an affair. Naturally, being a nurse, Kamala had taught Ellen the facts of life, but between the theory and the reality—!

  Yet of course one knew in the abstract that the onset was sometimes precipitated by stress. What worse stress than the disaster she had undergone?

  He improvised. He felt when the task was over he had improvised exceptionally well. The new woman was provided with cottonwool to staunch the flow and a tight pair of panties to hold the pad in place, albeit she must spend tonight in a tattered sleeping-bag and he had to revise his schedule for tomorrow yet again to take account of a long visit to the launderette…

  But he had cuddled her, and asked if she was in pain, which she was not, and remembered that Kamala too had often been taken by surprise (one time in bed…) and made her a cup of reassuring tea, and left her watching the TV, and generally impressed himself with his ability to cope.

  If only it matched my ability to make a living I’d be quids i
n, home and dry!

  The telephone rang.

  “Oh, shit! Yes?”

  Cool, detached, a woman with an American accent: “You sound as though you have as many problems as I do.”

  Blocks of awareness clashed inside Peter’s head like icebergs. He blurted, “Claudia Morris!”

  “Yes. Were you expecting my call? Were you sufficiently in touch to hear before I did that another bastion of rationality has fallen?”

  “I…” But it was stupid to explain. Instead he parried, as though caught up in a pointless fencing match.

  “How did you trace me? I’ve moved!”

  “Ach!” And a sound like spitting. “I was wrong on more points than one! I thought this country was webbed with secrecy. Only your government is armored. You want to find out about a private citizen’s affairs? You grease the proper palm—”

  “Don’t say such things on the phone!”

  “They got you snagged along with all the rest, did they? Then I bet you’re wearing a red-white-and-blue ribbon on your business suit these days—like a good boy!”

  “Claudia, for God’s sake—!”

  “Stuff the paranoia.” Her tone was suddenly shrill. “I need to talk to you, and analysis of intercepted calls is exponential. Listening to what our people and yours recorded last year alone would take till Doomsday. I want you to meet me at—”

  “I can’t!”

  “Ah, they trod on you, too. Well, too bad. I’m very sorry for you.”

  “Wait!”—at the last moment halving his volume so as not to disturb Ellen.

  “And for why?”

  “You haven’t told me why you want to talk to me!”

  “You didn’t hear? The puky funders got the better of the other funders—”

  “Oh. Wait. I think I do know what you mean. But I haven’t been keeping up with the news.”

  “It’s your profession, isn’t it?”—mockingly.

  “I got lumbered! My daughter!”

  “That doesn’t sound like the most fatherly of—”

  “Oh, stop it, will you? Her periods started tonight and I’ve been trying to comfort her.”

  There was a pause. Eventually Claudia said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were married.”

  “I’m not. In fact”—he sought the antique phrase that hovered in a distant corner of his mind, and trapped it as a hawk might catch its prey—“she’s a byblow. But her home was burnt out in the Heathrow disaster, so I’ve taken her in charge.”

  Next time Claudia spoke, her tone was noticeably more cordial.

  “I still want to talk to you. In fact I need to talk to you. Can you meet me at—?”

  “Come out this evening? You must be precessing with all your gyros! Leave on her tod a kid who’s having her first period? More likely I’ll be sitting up beside her bed!”

  “Then can I come to your place?”

  Peter thought for a long moment, torn between duties. Eventually professionalism won.

  “All right,” he sighed. “What time?”

  “I can make it in about half an hour.”

  “Okay. Let me tell you how to get here—”

  She cut him short.

  “If I didn’t know how to find you, how could I have called you up? But don’t worry. All record of the circuits I used will self-erase the moment I put down this phone… Oh! One other thing!”

  “Yes?”—impatiently, for he found Ellen’s large sad eyes on him.

  “What computer do you have?”

  He named it.

  “That’s fine, then. I’ll bring a disk with me. I think you’ll be interested… See you in half an hour.”

  Ellen needed more cottonwool. The flow was considerable for a first time. When it was stanched she asked whether she must go back to bed immediately. Feeling as though, if he insisted, she would regard it as a rejection, he said she could wait up until his visitor arrived. At once she curled up on the couch beside him, to watch the TV news.

  Who am I? Where am I? Am I caught in a trap worse than the worst my nightmare could contrive, or am I on the verge of a breakthrough that will make my name and reputation? Worst of all: am I on the track of a major story that I can’t follow through because of Ellen?

  She’s a sweet kid. She’s so nice she’s made me regret not patching matters up with Kamala. But nonetheless she feels like shackles!

  Renato Tessolari was immensely proud of his son—his only child—GianMarco. As he was fond of saying, the boy had his own black hair and his wife Constanza’s brown eyes, even though there was little noticeable resemblance in other respects.

  And to think he had been born after seven fruitless years! When Renato was indeed beginning to fear that the fault might lie on his side, for he had had his share of youthful escapades, and not once had any of the girls he’d lain with…

  Well, in the end it had turned out for the best. And he owed a tremendous debt to GianMarco’s uncle, his brother-in-law Fabio Bonni, who knew so much about advances in modern science and had suggested that Constanza visit England, where doctors were making amazing new discoveries in the field of infertility.

  The treatment had been like a miracle! Within a month of her return she had come smiling to him to report her pregnancy, and it was as though a colossal weight receded from his mind.

  For, without an heir in the direct line, what would happen to the estates the Tessolari family had owned since the seventeenth century? They would pass perhaps to cousins—but most of them were in the north, making money in ways far removed from Mother Earth. Not for them the patient cycle of the seasons, pressing oil, treading grapes, reaping maize, drying tomatoes. No, they preferred the hustle and bustle of big cities: Milan, Turin, Marghera. The ancient traditions of the Mezzogiorno had grown alien to them, as though they were foreigners in their own homeland, and if the estates fell to them as an inheritance they would be most concerned about how soon and for how much they could be sold.

  So at least Renato felt, and loudly and vigorously Fabio concurred, occasionally winking unnoticed at Constanza.

  In turn, little by little, GianMarco learned to be proud of his father. When he was eight or nine, he began to understand the workings of the adult world; by the time he was ten, he fully appreciated the fact that—because his family had been landowners here for so long—no decision was taken by the town council that might infringe Tessolari interests. Renato was of course a councillor himself, and had been mayor. So had his father, his grandfather, and countless of his uncles. And the family’s influence extended to the provincial level, too, and even as far as Rome.

  What was more, there were other matters he was encouraged to take pride in. The rambling house where he grew up might have patches of stucco missing from its façade—but it had once sheltered one of Garibaldi’s agents on a secret mission. The cars his parents owned might be commonplace Fiats rather than spectacular Ferraris—but Great-great-grandfather Ruggiero had been the first person in the region to possess a car, and many were the amusing stories related about how the peasants panicked when a carriage with no horse to draw it rolled down their streets.

  Nonetheless, he sometimes asked Renato why the family was no longer so exceptionally rich as it must have been in old Ruggiero’s day, and was always rewarded by the same lecture concerning the true nature of wealth. “Suppose,” his father would say sententiously, “there were another economic crisis. Money might be worthless again, as it has so often been in the past. Then you’d see our ‘wealthy’ relatives come crawling to us for help—to us who can grow food! That’s the ultimate source of all riches: the land. I shan’t be around for ever, you know. But I shall leave you the finest patrimony anybody could wish for. Now come along. We have to visit”—and he’d name one of the tenant farmers, perhaps because he was growing slack about his duties, perhaps because a member of his family was sick and he needed a loan to pay the doctor. With his tenants, Renato behaved as he did toward his son: strictly or leniently as the occasion ca
lled for. When the boy was twelve, and therefore of an age to be involved (and moreover he had physically entered manhood), he was permitted to sit in a corner while his father held discussions with his bailiffs, and heard him utter judgment: this man was feckless and must be turned out, but this other who had done worse yet had after all lost his wife last year and not yet found another, so he could be forgiven…

  GianMarco preened, looking forward to the time when he too could assist his father in such weighty matters.

  His chance came sooner than he had expected.

  One day in the autumn of that same year, when the harvest was in, Renato drove him to visit relatives in a town fifty kilometers away. His mother did not go with them, allegedly because she felt unwell—yet she had shown no sign of illness. However, her brother was at home to keep her company, so… And off they went: two men together, as Renato chaffed.

  Something intangible conveyed to GianMarco that for the first time he was directly involved in adult business. He waited in excitement to discover what it was.

  They stayed late. It was full dark before they set out homeward—and then they took a slightly different route. At first GianMarco was puzzled. Then, little by little, he started to recognize the area they were traversing. They were on land that did not belong to the Tessolaris or any of their friends. Abandoned at the end of World War II, it had been taken over by a peasant cooperative. It was rich soil—as rich went in the hot dry south of Italy—and there were several long-established olive groves and vineyards on it. Consequently the old families whose lands abutted it had spent fortunes in lawsuits designed to dispossess those they regarded as mere squatters. But courts in distant Rome, after years of litigation, declared they had no valid claim, and authorized the former landless peasants to grow rich, put on airs, and ape their betters.