She was scowling.
‘Where’s Liz?’
‘Upstairs talking to Beta.’
She picked up a tea-towel and began drying the plates vigorously, as if she were wiping the nose of a petulant child.
‘God, he makes me sick!’
‘Who?’
My question was faux naif.
‘The poor girl’s in a dreadful state up there. Your lather tried to seduce her. He just can’t control himself. Even shits on his own door-step.’
‘He’s done it before?’
Mum wrinkled her forehead. I knew the answer. My question had been prompted by a prurient fascination with the minutiae of Dad’s indiscretions.
‘Sylvia: I caught them snogging on the sofa. Fat lump of Swiss lard!’
I remembered Sylvia, bad-tempered and unfriendly with long black hair. I used to lift her skirt to see her knickers, which really irritated her. Now I was glad I’d humiliated her, but annoyed that while I was indulging in horseplay it appeared that Dad had been getting the real thing.
‘What did you do?’
‘I was furious with him.’
‘What about her?’
‘Oh, that silly tart! She didn’t have long to go with us.’
‘So you let her stay.’
‘I needed help, Mark.’
‘How could you after that?’
‘I told Brian that if it ever happened again he’d be out.’
‘So what’s going to happen now?’
‘I don’t know.’
Mum began to sob uncontrollably and I gave her a big hug. I found it easier to cope when she was angry, but when she started to cry, I felt useless and angry at myself for not being able to be angry with Dad, but I so wanted her to stop. I stroked her back as she hugged me more tightly. There was a crack on the stairs. I didn’t know what to say if Dad should catch us. But it was Liz, irate yet in control.
‘He’s a bastard.’
Mum broke out of our embrace.
‘How’s Beta?’
‘She’s very upset. The stupid fucker. Christ! He’s so fucking immature. He just can’t control himself. It’s got nothing to do with you, Mum.’
‘Of course it has!’
‘It hasn’t. He just has this constant need to prove that he’s still attractive, but he loves you very much.’
‘How can he?’
‘Oh Mum, of course he does. You know that.’
For the next few weeks Dad’s behaviour was as well groomed as his appearance. His stubble was only ever shaved when there was an attractive young woman in the house, but now he also seemed to have discovered a previously unsuspected flair for kitchen chores.
Any lingering family tensions evaporated in the warm sea air of the Adriatic. My parents had rented an isolated villa fifteen minutes from the resort of Fano, approached via a winding, mile-long mud track. I was sharing a room with Liz – and Beta who would parade round it in the morning, naked but for utilitarian white cotton pants. I’d heard that the doctors in our local surgery admired Beta’s large nipples and now I could see why, although her breasts were as boyish as her underwear. I’d always be sure to remain in bed until she’d dressed, and watch her pull on her tantalisingly tight jeans.
Down on the beach the temptations were, if anything, greater. Firm bronzed flesh beckoned and winked. It was torture. The trouble was, at sixteen plus they were all a couple of years older than me, which didn’t prevent the girls inviting me to the disco, but did disincline my parents from letting me go.
‘They’re interested in older boys. You’ll only end up wretched.’
Each day the offer would be renewed. Each day I was forced to refuse, and while they discoed the dusk away I’d be lying in bed nursing a painful erection, Beta almost naked beneath the sheets in the bed opposite, my imagination rampant with visions of voluptuous Italian girls engaging in every conceivable form of sexual act with me.
To make matters worse, every day a sports car would negotiate the track beneath our house, veering off to a secluded, abandoned building in the abutting woodland with its booty. The female passenger was different each time, the driver the same. Our car making regular journeys was rendering the track almost impassable. Two would eventually lead to us having to be towed out by oxen – or so Dad reasoned. Next time the local Lothario’s glinting silver car appeared, the males of the Glanville family marched on the intruder. Dad thumped on the only internal door long enough for trousers to be pulled up and skirts adjusted. A bearded man appeared, smiling amiably, and proffered his hand to be shaken in turn by all three of us.
‘Buon giorno. Sono il proprietario!’ (Good morning. I’m the owner.)
Looking at the decayed plaster, broken floorboards, exposed brickwork and glassless windows, the only response could be pity. Dad warned him he was rendering the road impassable and that the next time he saw him he would call the carabinieri, all in fluent Italian. We never saw him again. Toby and I went back later and booted a gaping hole in the door to his harem.
The region also fostered nobler forms of love. At Gradara castle we saw the room where Gianciotto Malatesta had supposedly murdered his brother and wife, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, whose eyes and lips had met for the first and last time only an instant before the descending knife sent them to an endless embrace in the second circle of Hell. Dante was so moved by Francesca’s account of their plight, an echo of his own unsatisfied love for Beatrice, that he fainted with grief and consigned the wronged assassin to Caina, the lowest circle of all. I bought a postcard of Rossetti’s representation of the unhappy pair, their pre-Raphaelite hair flowing in an eternal, ethereal embrace, and promptly found my own Francesca on the beach. Pale amid the dark Italian girls, she was an Austrian with hair that twisted and tumbled down her back like Francesca’s in the picture. An earthy naturalness made communication with the other girls easy, with or without language, but I felt that my heroine floated on a higher plane, and I could only watch from below, in love and awe, suffering an unrequited passion she knew nothing of. Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet had affected me the same way months previously. Devastated by the grief and suicide of Olivia Hussey’s beautiful Juliet, I’d gone to the bottom of the garden in tears and made a rather half-hearted attempt to hang myself from the swing on a triangular piece of metal.
When frustration had turned to pain I stopped going to the beach, and fell back on my favourite pastime of combat with insects. By day I fought a colony of red ants that infested a crumbling, lime-painted wall; by night I’d chase the gigantic moths that batted against the polystyrene-tiled ceiling in the bathroom and frightened my sisters. It was whilst chasing one such creature with an oar that I first noticed the little walled town in the distance, across the sloping fields at the back of our villa. To my overwrought fourteen-year-old mind it gradually acquired almost magical properties; it was a place of tranquillity and happiness immured against the woes of the world I was currently living in. One afternoon I persuaded Mum to stay behind while everyone else went to the beach, and walk there with me, cross-country, through the yellow wheat-fields to the enchanted city. After a while the sea appeared to our right, and the carbuncle coastal towns seemed safely distant. Reaching the town was the realisation of a fantasy, and knowing its name, to hold a powerful talisman. Novilara. It was only later I discovered that it was the town to which Gianciotto Malatesta had retreated after Paolo and Francesca’s murder. Men in caps and waistcoats playing boules on a freshly concreted surface, spoke what sounded like a Spanish-riddled dialect, older and different from the language ten miles away on the coast. Drinking coffee here I could