He looked through the open door and saw the young man bending over a table with the menu in his hand, explaining it to one of the stolid-looking Germans. It came to him at that moment that in this out-of-the-way corner of Sicily he had discovered what every art dealer dreams of — a painter of tremendous talent still unknown in the wider world, an artist who could become one’s protegé in the fullest sense of the word, whose talent could be fostered, the work promoted, until it received the attention it deserved. What with his suddenly having been catapulted into a state of love, and then discovering that the object of his infatuation had produced these extraordinary paintings, his heart and brain were in such turmoil that he felt the need to sit down at one of the tables.
“I’d like to talk to him when he’s free, if I could,” he said, bringing the words out in a rush, “but I’ll wait.” He raised a hand to indicate his patience. He was still breathing rapidly. “There’s no hurry, none at all. What’s the young man’s name? Come si chiama, il giovanotto?”
“Si chiama Paulo,” she replied, smiling.
6
When he first walked through the massive iron-studded front door of Harvey Rak’s house in Richmond, Edward couldn’t believe this was really a place where people lived and ate their meals and went to bed. It was immense and dark, crammed full of heavy furniture and strange terrifying objects. In the gloom of the front hall there was a huge vase covered in a design of purple flowers, a jar so big it could have held a dwarf, or a genie. Next to it was a big black dragon whose scaled back rose in writhing coils to support a brass tray, and on the tray a vase of dusty-looking peacock feathers arranged like a bouquet of flowers. He caught a glimpse through a partly open door to the right of a ferocious grinning figure, carved from some kind of green stone, sitting cross-legged on a pedestal — an ogre, maybe. The staircase facing him was as wide as a room, with blackish carved wooden newel posts and a runner of purple carpet going up the middle of the steps. The walls and ceiling of the hallway were made of rough-looking yellowish plaster, like the inside of a cave. Were they really going to live here? The place was horrible, ugly, frightening, not a beautiful house at all, but some sort of dungeon. Edward was exhausted from the ocean voyage and the long train ride to Richmond. The thought that he and his mother were going to have to stay in this house was too much for him. He collapsed on the slippery oak parquet at his mother’s feet and howled in despair.
“Tell the child to stand up!” Rak barked as Dolly bent over her son patting and cajoling. “He’ll learn to behave if he’s going to live in this house!”
That night Dolly pleaded with her new husband, and Edward was allowed to sleep, as a purely temporary arrangement, it was understood, in the bedroom next to the one they occupied rather than in the nursery on the floor above.
“Just until he gets used to being in a room by himself, Harvey,” Dolly begged. “He’s never been alone at night before.”
“Thoroughly spoiled, I’m afraid. You should have been stricter with him, my dear.”
“I’m sure I never meant to spoil him, Harvey. I was doing the best I could.”
“Well he’ll stay down here only until I find a woman to look after him. After that it’s up to the nursery with him.”
“I’m sure that will be fine with Edward — won’t it, darling, when your new daddy finds a lovely nanny to look after you?”
Edward wanted none of it, not a lovely nanny, not a bedroom of his own, not this horrible house, and not, not, not this new daddy. He hated Mr. Rak. It was clear to him that his mother was afraid of the man, that they were both his prisoners, and so he was afraid too. The so-called nursery was a large room with sloping eaves up in the attic, along the hall from the tiny bedrooms where the servants slept. When he and his mother had explored the house together she’d told Edward it was a playroom for rainy days, but it seemed Mr. Rak expected him to live up there and hardly see his mother at all. Anyway, after what happened that first night, even the dreadfulness of sleeping so far away from her almost seemed better than being down there where Rak was.
Some noise wakened him during the night. He was frightened at finding himself alone in a strange room, so he slipped out of bed and crossed the floor, padded along the hall to his mother’s room where a strip of light shone under the door. He heard a coughing noise, turned the knob very quietly, and peeked in. His mother was sitting on the low bench of the dressing table with her pink nightgown pushed down off her shoulders so it was around her middle, leaving her top all bare. Mr. Rak was standing in front of her, naked, blotchy, hairy, horrible, clutching her head with both hands, bending back her neck with his fists full of her blond hair, pushing his stomach against her face again and again while she scrabbled at him helplessly with her hands. Edward screamed and ran back to his bed and hid under the blankets, terrified. He knew Rak would be coming after him next, as soon as he’d finished killing his mother.
A few minutes later Dolly came into his room. “Edward, it’s all right, darling,” she said, crying a bit. “That was just something grown-up people do sometimes. It means they love each other, that’s all. Mr. Rak wouldn’t do anything to hurt Mummie.”
Edward knew she was lying. He turned over in the bed and hid his face so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
The very next day Nanny appeared, a sour-faced old woman dressed all in grey, with a veil over her head like those nuns back in Toronto, the ones his mother had always given wide berth to when she met them coming and going on Brunswick Avenue. This person now became Edward’s constant companion. She was way past retirement age, his mother said, which was why she was available on such short notice. Harvey Rak informed the woman in Edward’s hearing that her charge was to be kept in firm check, she wouldn’t be expected to go running after him from morning to night. When he came home from school in the afternoons she took him for slow, slow walks by the river, clutching his hand firmly in her own to keep him from tumbling mindlessly into the Thames, or so she said, more probably just to check his speed to match her own varicosed and bunioned pace. As soon as she was installed in the house he was banned forthwith from eating at the table with Mr. Rak and his mother, excepting on Sundays when Nanny had the day off. The rest of the time she trudged up the two long flights carrying Edward’s meals on trays and sat beside him while he ate under the glare of her beady eyes, listening to her hectoring nasal voice.
“Hold your fork properly, the way Nanny taught you. Don’t drink your milk with your meat. Chew that bite thoroughly before you swallow it. Eat those sprouts, I didn’t give you too many. No! There won’t be any pudding until those creamed onions are all eaten. I don’t care whether you want your pudding or not, those onions will be on your plate at breakfast if they’re not finished now.”
Edward learned before long how to bring on a fit of gagging merely by thinking about such disgusting things as creamed onions for breakfast, and when his retching reached the point of threatening to return the whole meal Nanny relented, no doubt to save herself trouble, and slapped down the dish of cooked apple drenched in unappetizing yellow Bird’s custard.
“You’re a wretched picky boy. Poor people in the London docks would think those onions were a feast!”
He had been enrolled in a preparatory day school in Richmond soon after Nanny arrived, and his loneliness at being separated from his mother all night and most of the day became a chronic ache, a pain he couldn’t get used to. He felt weak and hollow inside as if something had been torn right out of his body. He cried off and on during the nights, and spent his days waiting for the little time he and his mother now spent together. He knew she must be missing him just as much as he missed her, but sometimes she seemed not even to notice how sad and desperate he was.
Mr. Rak announced one day that he was going to take Dolly up to London to shop for new clothes — “a wardrobe properly suited to my lovely wife’s station in life” — and afterward they would have dinner at the Savoy Hotel “to celebrate.” Dolly kissed her son goodbye while Nanny was getting him ready for school and left in the car with Harvey Rak. By teatime that afternoon Edward was frantic with