Читать книгу Don't Fall In Love With Marcus Aurelius - Eva Lubinger - Страница 4

“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.

But at that point Agatha brought Marcus Aurelius into the reckoning. “Doesn’t that famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius stand in Rome, the one you told me about over and over again?” she innocently and quietly asked her. Emily had reacted in exactly the desired manner. She sat bolt upright in her chair and her eyes sparkled. “Marcus Aurelius,” she said in an animated voice, “the great prototype for every equestrian statue that followed. And of course Marcus Aurelius stands in Rome, and on the Capitoline Hill!”

After that everything else came easily. Agatha won the day. “And when we’ve seen Rome, wouldn’t it be nice to go to Venice for a couple more days?” she went on to ask fearlessly and then Emily knew all she needed to know. The unconditional affection and love for her friend of such long standing, usually masked by sternness, was awoken in her, and she smiled indulgently. She then answered, full of warmth and more softly than she usually spoke: “But of course my dear, we’ll go to Venice as well, if that’ll make you happy, for as long as you want, and we’ll also go out to the islands – Murano, Burano and Torcello. And then from Venice we’ll take a ship and go to Spain too for a couple of weeks.”

Agatha was very grateful and happy and in that moment she could have embraced her friend. How well they understood each other!…despite the occasional small skirmish, which was inevitable in this shared life of two women who no longer went out to work. And now she forgot the poplars and the groves of peach trees gliding past and she didn’t even look out the window, even now that the train was crossing the bridge that spanned the broad, tranquil Po, whose water hardly even seemed to be flowing. She sank into her cashmere shawl and into her memories: Gregory!

And with the monotonous turning of the wheels she was for a little while that young fleet-footed girl again, who had gone for a gondola ride with her beloved through the city of canals and who had led him laughing to the shore of the Island of Torcello, edged by tamarisk trees. Gregory had looked so good back then, and he was so young! It was when they were in Venice that he mentioned for the first time that he wanted to go to Canada to build this bridge – the awful bridge that cost him his life. The wedding was set for when he came home…Agatha shivered in her shawl.

No, now she didn’t want to think about it anymore. She wanted to draw out the precious hours of being together with the one person who mattered, like pearls from a jewellery box, and let them run through her fingers and through her heart during the long hours of this journey.

Agatha did not notice that they had left the Po valley behind them, and also long ago Florence and silver-green Tuscany, and now they journeyed through the Castelli Romani: Narni, Orte, and Terni. Emily’s snoring broke off abruptly; she woke, yawned discreetly, and said to Agatha sleepily: “Agatha, my dear, would you be so kind as to pour me a cup of tea from the thermos? My mouth’s quite dry.” Agatha dragged herself back to the present. Where had she put that confounded bottle? It wasn’t in the holdall, where it was supposed to be. Agatha fumbled anxiously in various handbags and even needlessly opened their hat boxes. At the same time she tried suppressing an uncomfortable memory. At home Emily had pressed the thermos of tea into her hand - that elixir, without which neither of them could possibly endure the journey. She did it so that Agatha would put it in the holdall.

But then the taxi arrived and you couldn’t keep him waiting. So Agatha, panic-stricken, had rashly stuffed the thermos into the large trunk. Yes, that’s what must have happened. So there was probably no point in suppressing that uncomfortable memory anymore, as Emily was now demanding her tea, in a louder voice and for a second time.

Agatha opened the trunk and a scent rose up from the clothes in there, which really should have been one of lavender or at worst Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass. But instead it was the strong and spicy smell of Earl Grey tea. With trembling hands she lifted a Shetland jacket and the lime-green skirt from Emily’s Sunday best outfit. Both were moist to outright wet and had taken on the blackish and obtrusive colour of stagnant tea.

Shaking, she removed one article of clothing after another: there was nothing that was not carrying the traces of Earl Grey tea soaked through like marble cake. Emily sat bolt upright in her seat, and her eyes had developed that piercing clarity, which was reserved in past times for major disciplinary hearings at her school. As Agatha now pulled out Emily’s white dinner dress, which bore on the chest an extremely unbecoming and out-of-place stain the size of a soldier’s badge, she threw herself down on the case with a shriek, pushed aside the unfortunate Agatha (who had broken out in a plaintive lament) and brought back to the surface at last the thermos flask, which was long empty except for an insignificant amount of leftover tea. Emily then drank it in melancholy silence, and Agatha didn’t have the courage to petition her for a few drops of the life-giving liquid, even though she was very thirsty and in need of consolation. Funnily enough, she could quite easily have extracted a whole bowlful from her new nightdress, but she wasn’t really bold enough to try that.

So she ended up only putting the ill-treated garments back into the case, and folded them up again, still with trembling hands, even though it was quite pointless, while Emily regarded the proceedings in grim silence. Neither of them saw the Roman aqueducts, which could be seen all across the Roman Campagna, like a light melancholy prelude heralding the Eternal City.

And while they were still concerning themselves with eradicating the last traces of tea from Agatha’s pink flowery hat, they rolled into Termini Station and were in Rome.