Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [51]
My aunt took me to Italy to visit the crater of Vesuvius when I was eleven years old. We travelled to the summit on the funicular railway. From the station platform one glimpsed through cloud the curve of the shore at Naples, the sea and the city gleaming in a net of gold thrown by the setting sun. A seven course dinner, served before we set off, was included in the price of the ticket. It began with soup and a rack of lamb and ended with ice-cream. The dining compartment was loud with the noise of champing and swallowing. I furled my tongue round the lump of ice in my glass of lemonade and sucked it small. Tie me, said Wallis. The train was worked by ropes which owing to the extreme tension creaked alarmingly as we climbed by fits and starts, the outline of the mountain edge running parallel to our course. The angle of inclination began at forty degrees, increased to sixty-three and decreased again as we gained the upper station. Alighting in the fiery darkness we passed through a gate punched in a wall of lava and walked higher. Not so fast, said Scurra. One of our group was foolish enough to pick up a blackened cinder that rolled beneath his boot. He was a gentleman, yet the stream of obscenities that issued from his anguished mouth set the women in the party trembling. Till then the rim of the old crater had stood between us and the new eruptive cone, but as we left the ash-strewn path a glow of burning light riveted us to the spot. Suddenly, preceded by a sound which is impossible to describe – something like an almighty blast of wind in the naked branches of a winter forest, or the fall of a crested wave on a shingled beach – millions of glowing particles, from the size of a cannon-ball down to a tiny spark, spattered the air and erected a fretwork of fire across the black heavens. The smell of sulphur made me catch my breath.
Scurra said, ‘Well, that was very satisfactory, don’t you think?’
Wallis said, ‘I want to die.’ Their laughter swilled round the room.
Soon after, they left. I emerged on all fours like an animal, nose sniffing the unnatural odour that stung the air. They hadn’t bothered to plump up the cushions, nor remove the length of cord, now uncoiled like a snake, dangling from the back of the sofa. I entered the bathroom and with a square of wet soap wrote fuck on the glass above the basin. Then I returned to my stateroom and slammed the door.
My feelings of humiliation, rage even, were as nothing compared to the relief I felt at having escaped without being exposed. I shook at the thought of what might have happened if they had tired of the sofa and staggered to the bedroom. I could hardly have pretended I was inspecting the plumbing. There were three whole days left in which I would meet them daily, exchange pleasantries, drink with them. In their company I would surely act like a man demented, their secret lodged in my breast like a gun primed to blow my heart to pieces. How I hated him! How I wished her dead – and on the thought understood Adele’s smile of radiant grief. Fists clenched, the blood pounding in my ears, I paced the room. I couldn’t get out of my mind that length of cord on the sofa. I saw it duplicated in the hang of the undrawn curtains across the porthole, the electric wire protruding from the desk lamp. Looking wildly about I caught my mother’s painted eyes gazing at me from the wall. Tearing the portrait off its hook I rushed into the passageway and up on to the boat deck. On the way I roughly brushed against Mrs Straus, who, on the arm of her husband, was tottering down the turkey runner of the Grand Staircase. Mr Straus rounded on me angrily and, blundering lout that I’d become I raced on regardless.
I don’t know whether I really intended to throw the painting of my mother into the waves. True, I wanted to cast her from me. It was she, not the fetid old woman