1
It’s the third time the boy has kissed the dead man’s forehead.
“Come on, Felix. Time to go.”
“Mum! You’ll never see him ever ever ever again.”
“Yes I will,” says Zinnia. “We still have our memories of him.”
“Memories don’t go forwards though,” he says, unwilling to take his eyes off the body on the bed that has ceased to talk or move or breathe.
“I’m not sure that’s true, dear,” she says, watching her son lean over the open-mouthed effigy of her father and daub on it another kiss, this time on the cheek. She wonders if it is natural for a child to be so excited by the presence of death.
Everything seems inappropriate to Zinnia – her dress with its hint of transparency, the flowers gloating with vitality on the bedside table, the television on its wall brackets whose blank screen reflects the dead man with the impartiality it reflects the carpet and the empty chair beside the bed.
Zinnia recalls a succession of expressions by which she knew her father’s face – tenderness, laughter, disapproval, anger. All of them more easily borne and assimilated than this final one sculpted on his sallow face. She can barely look at him because of the overwhelming sense she has of him no longer being there.
“Okay, let’s say goodbye now,” she says. She looks at the watch on her wrist that bewilderingly, cruelly, reassuringly is still counting off seconds, minutes, hours. Her need to reassert her pulse, restore a connection with the ticking continuity of her existence, compels her to check the contents of her bag, dust down the sleeve of her dress and then place her hand on Felix’s shoulder.
“Aren’t you going to kiss him goodbye, mum?”
“I’ve said goodbye in my own way, Felix,” she says.
Later, Zinnia is down on her hands and knees in front of her father’s wardrobe. She presses one of his shirts to her face. It’s a shirt she has never liked. A shirt that caused her embarrassment whenever he wore it in her company.
“What’s wrong with it?” he once asked when she made fun of it.
“It makes you look like you’re on a package holiday,” she said.
She is curled up inside his smell. He always made her feel both safer and smaller – the latter the price of the former. She wants to see her father again as a vivid living force, even as an obstacle, before her mother removes his memory from the room. This is his bedroom. The house’s most private and sacrosanct chamber. Even to enter is to feel a chill of heresy followed by the sludge of guilt. There is a masculine order here, as calculated and forbiddingly esoteric as the electronic components etched into a piece of silicon.
Zinnia invariably becomes a little girl when she thinks of her father. She wears the same floral dress, damp with grass stains, she made into a fan by twirling round in circles. It was while spinning thus that she felt she found the centre of her being. She remembers once handing her father a flower she picked and how in the act of giving she experienced herself as that flower - the sticky stalk resin, the hard green shoots, the sheltered stamens and raw red anthers. She needed him to understand her no less than she needed to remain a mystery.
There is a large cardboard box at the back of the wardrobe. She tugs at one of its flaps and slides it out into the light. Battered cardboard boxes remind her of Christmas decorations.
She was looking up at her father. He was half way up a ladder he had instructed her to hold steady. Her grip was not as firm as she might have wished. Her father was clambering up into the dark attic to reclaim the large cardboard box full of Christmas decorations. He held a torch. She watched him hoist himself up into the dark void, his legs dangling comically in mid-air. Zinnia felt in her own body the surge of effort with which he heaved himself up through the square gash of blackness. She heard floorboards creak overhead and imagined the feel of the splintered wooden planks beneath her own feet. Without authorisation she too decided to climb the ladder. If she rose on tiptoes on the unsteady top rung she could just see the wandering beam of the torch as it tore things out of the darkness - the sloping wooden beams, the rusted watertank, mysterious boxes and trunks.
“Can’t we bring everything down?” she said. She loved sharing conspiracies with her father, loved saying 'we' in a secretive intimate way.
Her father’s head appeared above her. He lit his face from beneath with the torch and made a ghoulish noise.
“Stop it,” she commanded. She did not like it when her father made himself look ugly. He reached out and grasped Zinnia by the wrists and heaved her up into the high air. For a moment she swung in space and felt the blood rush into all the secret corners of her body. She screamed with delight and fear. There were red marks on her wrists when her feet were back on the ground.
Zinnia sorts through the contents of the old box. She is looking for something that will make her cry. There are magazines, old newspaper cuttings, some official documents and certificates, a few photographs of people she does not recognise. Nothing that makes any emotional claim on her until she finds a notebook. The loose-jointed pages, dense with blanched hurried handwriting, stained with mulberry and rust smudges, curled up at the yellowing edges, are crisp and swollen with their secret scripture. There are small deposits of candle wax on some pages, like braille, and on another page there is an inked fingerprint.
Later she goes downstairs and hands her find to her mother.
“What’s that?”
“I thought you might know. Was it dad’s?”
Mrs St Aubyn takes the notebook without any of the reverence Zinnia feels for it. Brusquely she opens it and flicks through its brittle pages. Zinnia winces at her mother’s absence of awe, her lack of tenderness. A lonely once-upon-a-time smell is reawakened from its pages.
“I remember it now. The cleaner found it wedged between the headboard of the bed and the wall in the spare room. I thought it was your father’s but he said he had never seen it before. Long time ago, probably before Felix was born. It’s all come back to me. It was when we were arguing a lot and he started sleeping in the spare room.”
Zinnia watches as her mother begins to cry. She too, by reflex, feels her throat tighten and her eyes mist over and soon they are holding each other with a familiar awkward stiffness on the sofa. Her own tears seem to quickly dry up her mother’s, an emotional pattern Zinnia recognises well. Her mother has always had a kind of genius for outsourcing feeling.
“I remember it because it’s written in a foreign language, like a kind of code, and I wondered why your father would have it among his possessions. It was like a secret he was keeping from me. Until he explained that it had nothing to do with him. That it was as much a mystery to him as it was to me.”
“It’s Italian.”
“Well, you can speak Italian, can’t you? What does this say?” she says pointing to the large underlined words heading the opening page.
“Why I had to kill Mario Carità,” Zinnia reads out.
“You can keep it, if you like. I don’t want it,” says Mrs St Aubyn.
Zinnia goes to the computer and googles Mario Carità. He is known to the world. He has made history.
Mario Carità was the head of the Republican Fascist secret police in Florence, the Reparto Sevizi Speciali, or "Banda Carità " as they became known. Their eventual headquarters was in the infamous palazzo known as Villa Triste at number 67 via Bolognese. From late 1943 until the summer of 1944 Carità and his band unleashed a reign of terror on the city. They became feared and hated in Florence for the sadistic brutality with which they interrogated and tortured their prisoners.
She can find little specific information about the man except that it was his job to extract secrets. She thinks about her own secret. How the temptation to betray a secret is always there, always exhaling its hot intimate breath in your ear. Someone under torture would feel their secrets were distilled into their lifeblood, a living part of their organism. She suspects, conversely, it is an act of cowardice on her part that she has never spoken aloud what she did, what she knows.
What she has never told anyone took place in Florence. When she returns home she will begin translating the notebook of writing; she will return to Florence.