Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

I was sitting next to Stephen.

‘I have an apology to make, old man,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago.’

‘No, it’s important. I promised Sophie I would make it, and I will.’

I listened.

‘I don’t apologize for marrying Sophie, but I behaved like a cad when we were driving down here that summer. Of course I knew how you felt about her. I should have told you right away. It would have been unpleasant, but you would have found out soon enough. Which of course you did. So — sorry.’

I smiled. ‘Apology accepted. Gratefully.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, does your old mucker Suetonius have anything to say about this place we’re going to?’

‘No idea. I haven’t read Suetonius for a long time.’

‘Glad to hear it. He always struck me as a bit fishy. Even in the original Latin.’

Anacapri was much less sophisticated than Capri town, and it was also a couple of degrees cooler. It was a pleasant walk from the village down through farms and smallholdings of vineyards, olive groves, vegetable gardens and lemon trees. The villa itself turned out to be a pattern of low ruined walls in a field of flowers, grasses and thistles, guarded by a round medieval watchtower. Another cliff edge, another stunning view of Ischia.

Tony had brought along bread, cheese, Italian ham and many bottles of light rosé from Ravello. It was a hot day, but the breeze drifting in from the sea made it bearable. I lay back on one of the walls, closed my eyes and pointed my face towards the sun. Birds chirped lazily from the shrubs behind me. Bees murmured as they plundered the flowers. Butterflies hopped and skipped. Conversation drifted around me in a gentle swirl, interspersed with trickles of laughter.

I let my head loll to the side and opened one eye. Sophie was sitting on a low wall opposite talking to Nathan. She might be thirty and a mother of two, but she was still very pretty. As was Madeleine. Girls in summer dresses at picnics were a good idea, I thought.

Sophie wasn’t mine, and that was all right. There would be other women. There was a student nurse called Gillian with whom I had been out three times. She was much younger than me, but she made me laugh. Not as pretty as Sophie, though. I would have to learn to live with that; most girls just weren’t as pretty as Sophie.

For some reason, just then, she turned quickly to glance at me. She caught my one eye staring at her. I closed it.

‘Hello.’ It was a voice from behind me. An American voice.

I hauled myself up on my elbows. Elaine had sat down on the wall next to me, with a glass half full of rosé. A cigarette was hanging from her open lips. I realized that was why she had struck me as louche. It was her mouth: her full lips that never quite closed. They were sloppy, uneven, sexy.

She puffed at her cigarette. ‘You poor darling,’ she said. ‘You look quite exhausted.’

‘It’s the wine. And the sun. And the view.’

‘Here, let me get you some more.’

I didn’t object and she brought me a glass. We sat in silence looking out over the bay at the mysterious island of Ischia. There was something unsteady about Elaine’s silence.

‘It must be lovely living here,’ I said.

‘It is,’ said Elaine. A pause. ‘It gets a bit dull after a while.’

‘What are the people like?’

‘The expats are all old. Old queers. Old lesbians. They are quite fun in their way but, like I said, it gets dull.’

‘Tony likes it, doesn’t he?’

‘Tony loves it. And I love Tony.’ She sighed. ‘It would be nice to go up to the Riviera. Antibes. Juan. Cap Ferrat.’

‘That shouldn’t be too hard from here.’

‘It shouldn’t be, should it?’ said Elaine. ‘But it turns out we don’t have enough money. I thought Tony had a lot of money. He doesn’t really. And neither do I.’

She didn’t sound bitter. Just disappointed.

‘Shame Uncle Alden gave all his money to those two.’ She nodded at Nathan and Madeleine.

‘He gave some to Tony,’ I said.

‘Yes, he did,’ said Elaine. ‘But he had other nephews and nieces, not just Nathan. Me for instance. He didn’t leave me a bean.’

I didn’t reply. My own opinion was that Alden had realized that Nathan would make something of the family company, but it was probably best not to share that thought with Elaine.

‘It’s ironic really,’ said Elaine. ‘Considering it was Nathan who killed him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘That doesn’t seem quite right. That Nathan should have gotten all the dough.’

‘It was an accident. You were there.’

‘I suppose it was,’ said Elaine in a tone that suggested she supposed it wasn’t. ‘Do I make you uncomfortable?’

‘No,’ I said, lying.

Elaine slowly turned her gaze towards me. Her brown eyes held mine. Her lips lolled, glistened. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ I said, briskly. I pulled out my pipe. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Elaine, turning away from me. ‘I was just hoping you would make Capri a little less dull.’

We went to Gemma’s again that evening for dinner, and then staggered back to Tony’s villa for limoncello, looking out over the moon-striped water far below. Between us, we had put away a lot of alcohol. We were all drunk, all in our different ways.

Madeleine became sleepy. When Elaine began to look ill, she took her up to bed. Or rather to the lavatory. The heave and splatter could be heard down on the terrace, much to Stephen’s amusement.

Stephen was becoming aggressive, his drinking taking on a steady determination. ‘Can I have another one, old man?’ he asked Nathan, after finishing his third or was it fourth limoncello. Nathan poured him a glass. The rest of us refused: Elaine’s retching had introduced some wariness of the sweet yellow liquid around the table.

‘So what was the war like for you, Angus?’ Stephen asked.

‘Oh, you know,’ I said.

‘I’ve had to play all sort of fellows who have been involved in real fighting,’ said Stephen. ‘I find it helps to ask them what it was really like.’

‘Getting thrashed by Rommel was unpleasant,’ I said. I had no intention of ruining my evening by dragging Gazala on to Capri. ‘But I seem to have spent much of the war running away. Playing hide-and-seek with the Jerries in the desert and then in Germany and France.’

‘Can’t you tell us about that?’

‘Actually, I plan to put it in a book,’ I said. ‘When I was in the stalag, I got caught trying to escape in the back of the laundry wagon. They threw me into the cooler for three weeks. I amused myself by trying to write a book in my head, and then memorizing it. I’ve got quite a lot of it down on paper now; I’m surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed writing it. But I’ve no idea if anyone would be interested in reading it.’

‘I would,’ said Tony.

‘Shame you didn’t fight, Nathan,’ Stephen said. ‘In the war.’

‘I feel bad about that,’ said Nathan. ‘But I genuinely thought I could be more help at Wakefield Oil. I think I was probably right.’

‘But Angus fought. And Tony.’

‘You didn’t though, did you, Stephen?’ said Sophie.

‘I joined up. I did my duty. I wore a uniform. I was ready to fight. It wasn’t my fault they put me in front of a camera.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t get shot at, did you?’ said Sophie. ‘You were just the same as Nathan, doing your bit for the war effort.’

Stephen glared at his wife. ‘No, Sophie, it’s entirely different. I was prepared to fight for my country, Nathan wasn’t. It’s as simple as that.’

I found Stephen’s haranguing difficult to listen to. The war had been necessary, but it had been ghastly. It had changed me, damaged me, and millions of others like me, and actually millions totally unlike me: children, mothers, Russians, Germans, Italians. Some had been fortunate never to step over or on to a dead body, never to have been terrified that they were going to be next to die. Nathan seemed to understand that, Stephen didn’t, but I didn’t want to explain it to either of them.