Eva Lubinger - Don't Fall In Love With Marcus Aurelius

Eva Lubinger

DON’T FALL IN LOVE WITH MARCUS AURELIUS

An Italian Journey

Illustrations by Thomas Posch

ENNSTHALER VERLAG STEYR

www.ennsthaler.at

eISBN 978-3-7095-0028-6 (EPUB)

eISBN 978-3-7095-0029-3 (MOBI)

1 stedition 2013

Eva Lubinger • Don’t fall in love with Marcus Aurelius

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2012 by Ennsthaler Verlag, Steyr

Ennsthaler Gesellschaft m.b.H. & Co KG, 4400 Steyr, Österreich

Cover: fotolia.de

verlag@ennsthaler.at

“I think we should go travelling one more time,” said Emily Woods dreamily, while she gave an invigorating shove with her left hand to the swing in the canary’s cage. As a result it swayed wildly back and forth; all the tiny bells hanging off it jingled and rang, and the yellow bird took off all flustered from its perch.

“We have been at home such a long time,” she continued, putting down her tea cup, “that I can now imagine the shape of every tree and the contours of the hill outside the window without even needing to look.” She stared disdainfully at the delightful, gently undulating landscape of hills covered with large deciduous trees.

“Would you perhaps like another cup of tea, my dear?” answered Agatha with some unease and dragged her friend back, without her being quite aware of it, to familiar safe territory. Changes or even just the hint of them always had an effect on her like a blast of cold water and she needed a long time just to get used to them.

“Aren’t we a bit old now to be undertaking such long trips?” she added and filled Emily’s tea cup, which Emily was holding out silently towards her. “After all, it was only a couple of months ago that we spent that week in Little Cockington. Don’t you remember the lovely cream teas we had there, with the scones and strawberry jam?”

“Little Cockington!” Emily said disdainfully, while she crushed a chocolate biscuit between her fingers. “After Little Cockington we deserve another hundred years of travelling. That wasn’t a proper journey. No, I mean some genuine travel: Africa for example or South America or at least somewhere on the continent; and on top of that we would have to stay away for at least six weeks.”

“Yes but just remember what happened to poor old Uncle Eustace. He flew to Australia when he was seventy-six to visit his nieces: he suffered a stroke while surfing and never came back”, Agatha suggested anxiously.

“Oh Eustace was always a weakling,” Emily answered with that deep voice of hers, which when she had been headmistress of a large girls’ school had always terrified her pupils.

“A much better example would be Uncle Hilary. He did a bike tour of Belgium when he was ninety-two and it thoroughly agreed with him. He converted the cellar of his house into a gym, and continued to use it till well after his ninety-eighth birthday. If he hadn’t broken his neck mountain climbing in Wales, he would still be in great shape.” Emily emptied her third cup of tea and fell silent, full of sad reflection.

Agatha was drinking tea with small sips. Between each sip, she chewed absent-mindedly on her Scottish shortbread and looked anxiously at the tree-crowned hills outside the living-room window. Her heart started to beat faster, while images, thoughts and overflowing desires filled her soul – travelling, the act of leaving everything familiar behind, all these memories now discoloured by the dust of passing years - and then her thinking about them made those once luminous experiences glow with vibrant life again, evoking happiness, joy and a greater zest for life. It was almost as if these memories were forcing themselves back into her mind.

“We’re both old, Emily,” she said quietly. “Think about your poor eyesight. Why just recently there was that cyclist you didn’t see. You came within a hair’s breadth of being knocked over by him. And there’s your heart! How would your heart cope with the weather abroad and the different food? And look at me: my rheumatism has been especially bad this year…remember my right hand.” She lifted her delicate arm in front of the window so that the swollen bone on her wrist stood out against the incoming light. “I have no strength in this hand. I can’t even carry hand luggage, let alone a suitcase.” She fell silent and carefully pulled the cuff of her cardigan over the offending joint.

“Who said you’ll have to drag along a suitcase, Agatha? What complete nonsense! I can’t carry a suitcase either; I had a heart attack as you well know. All over the world they have porters for this sort of job. Or at the very least young men who have been brought up to be polite and helpful.”

Agatha looked at her friend with misgivings. On her part she wasn’t so sure that the youth of today would be scrambling to carry old ladies’ luggage or to protect them from the rigours and hardships of the world. Emily however was still the schoolmistress who still made her way in life with gravity through large crowds of people who to her may as well have been her students.

“All the same, we are old,” Agatha repeated with that gentle yet persistent tenacity, which sometimes brought a flush of anger into Emily’s plump cheeks. Emily placed her tea cup with some emphasis back down on the table, which made the canary flutter on its perch. She turned her face towards her friend and regarded her with a warning look from her sharp blue eyes, which once upon a time had made not just four hundred girls but the whole teaching staff tremble:

“Did you say we’re old, Agatha? How did you come to this absurd assumption? I am seventy-six and, as I recall, in three months’ you’ll be celebrating your seventy-fourth birthday – you are plainly still a greenhorn, not to mention the fact that you are never going to grow up properly anyway.” Agatha looked at her friend with that smile of resignation, reflecting both subordination and constancy, and said nothing.

"Old," Emily went on and she placed the empty cup on the tray, "you start getting old after eighty. But before that, you are elderly at worst - elderly but not old! "

She got to her feet ponderously. Ultimately Emily had come to weigh a solid eighty-five kilos, despite belonging to a weight watchers’ group; which was definitely too much when compared to her height of one metre sixty-five. Then she trudged determinedly down the passage which joined the living room and kitchen. Agatha rose too, picked up a small table brush and swept the crumbs from the place settings. In contrast to her friend, she was delicate and slender and had a certain girlish grace, which was however falling increasingly victim to the effects of rheumatism. Because of her looks, people had always wondered why she had never married, while just a glance at Emily’s appearance answered the same question immediately and decisively.

Emily wasn’t beautiful – she never had been and wasn’t even close to being so. However she radiated integrity and efficiency in such quantities that she came across as positive and cheerful, and it never even crossed anyone’s mind to find her ugly.

While the train rolled through the Po Valley, Emily slept under her green velvet hat, sunk into the corner of her seat and snoring gently. Agatha looked pensively out the window. She couldn’t believe that she and Emily were now actually on the continent and on Italian soil. The night ferry from Dover to Calais had been pleasant and up to now there had in reality been no difficulties with finding porters. While Agatha wrapped herself tighter in her cashmere scarf and watched the thin lines of poplars glide past, she thought with a shudder that they had almost travelled to Africa, then almost to India, then even almost to the Persian Gulf, where there almost certainly wasn’t going to be anything except heat and stench. But then, with the gift for diplomacy that had developed through their many years of living together, she had awoken Emily’s interest in Italy, in that country which, throughout her whole life, she could not put out of her mind. She had told stories about Rome and its countless fountains, until that background noise finally penetrated her stern schoolmistress’s temperament. And yet she still hesitated.