Aphrodite’s Hat

‘It is a mortal sin you are committing, Joseph, to leave your lawful married wife, now. One that the Holy Father in His blessedness, mind, can never forgive.’

A bleak ember of anger began to smoulder again, threatening to break into that consuming flame. She came across and put her arm in his. ‘You can show me, then,’ she suggested, ‘all the churchy bits I don’t understand.’

But most of the church was a puzzle to him too, hardly like the churches he knew from home at all. Those were modern, with coloured paper flowers on the altar, and new pine, waxy and yellow. This one seemed a kind of emporium of pagan imports – on the worn marble floor peacocks picked at grain, a fox was unfathomably strung between two roosters; and the leaf-scrolled capitals crowning the grey-granite columns seemed to belong more in a pagan temple than a church. Only the slight young woman, in the background of soaring gold, with the still more golden halo round her chaste head, was familiar to him.

‘I expect they took half this stuff over from earlier times,’ she said, comfortingly. ‘Anyway, it’s all worship, isn’t it?’

They stood before a bank of glimmering candles, the long youthful Virgin above them. From the guidebook he read aloud, ‘The relics of St Donato are in the church; also, the relics of the dragon he killed may be seen behind the high altar.’

‘There!’ she pointed. Four lanky ribs hung incongruously suspended beneath the Virgin, who rested lightly, on one foot, on her cushion above. ‘See, the dragon!’

‘It must be a bull or an ox or something, I suppose,’ he mused.

‘No, it’s a dragon. It says so.’ She was prettily defiant.

‘Yes,’ he said, prepared to be amused, ‘of course it is a dragon.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

‘Well …’ he was at a loss, not knowing what she wanted. He had tried to play the game: ‘Not really, but …’

‘But you believe in the Holy Ghost – Spirit – whatever you call it. Why not dragons?’

He didn’t know that he did believe in the Holy Spirit: fat Father Michael had spoken of eternal damnation. ‘It is hell now you are looking to spend your unnatural days in, Joseph.’

‘Dragons are legend.’ His voice in the huge church sounded squeaky and insignificant. To his alarm he heard a crack in it – it would be terrible if he were to cry in front of her. ‘The Holy Spirit’s different.’ He pressed his voice into a cheerful certainty he was hardly equal to feeling.

‘Why? Why is it different?’ She was frowning now. A group of people had come into the church. A guide, a woman, was pointing with an unfurled umbrella at the all-comprehending Virgin. ‘Isn’t your religion all legend too? You believe that she,’ her rising voice made the underlining, ‘was fucked by God, don’t you?’

The candid eyes of the blue-robed Virgin, whose hands seemed so uncompromisingly to ward off evil, gazed down upon them. He had lied to his wife – pretended that there was no one he was leaving for. ‘We were married too young, Josie,’ he had said, trying desperately to staunch her weeping furious questions. Had it made any difference that they had, both of them, almost the same name? Maybe it prevented him from seeing Josie as she was – different from him. But that wasn’t true either. Once, if you had asked him, he would have said he would have died for his young bride. People where he came from didn’t ask such things – but there was no one he would have died for since as he would have done for Josie.

‘Yes, but …’ The truth was he was shocked. How did you explain the Immaculate Conception?

‘I don’t rubbish your beliefs – you shouldn’t mine.’

It was the picture of her, in her grey fluffy coat bent over her book, for which he had left Josie; his daughter now would not even let him visit his grandchildren. He felt the back of his throat prick again. ‘I wasn’t rubbishing …’ He knew she knew that he wasn’t. This was one of those inexplicable, unpredictable things which women did to you – pretended you were treating them badly when all the time they must know how hard you were trying. He had been so pleased to take her to see the dragon’s bones. And Josie – there was no help for it. In his heart he knew he had treated her badly.

The girl turned away and stalked down the side aisle towards the door. She no longer looked like a bird – unless it were something wild and dangerous which might flash suddenly at you with its beak and cut your flesh to the bone. To his horror he saw she was about to address the guide of the party. In this mood she might say anything.

Hurrying after her he understood suddenly, why, in the days before he left, Josie had gone about the house without a bra. Her nipples protruding through her cardigan had startled, then revolted him. He had backed away from the thought of it. Now, in a flash, he saw that she had been trying – poor Josie – to rekindle his interest in her.

He caught up with the girl and grabbed her arm just as he heard her say, ‘Excuse me, the dragon …?’

‘Si, signora?’ The guide, a short stocky woman with a white face and a faint trace of moustache, stared at them with a tincture of insolence. It must have been obvious they were having a row.

‘We were wondering – St Donato killed it … when?’

‘It was eight, nine century, signora.’

‘And was it why he was made a saint?’

Looking down at the intricate marble patterns of the floor he was conscious of the Virgin’s measureless blue gaze above.

‘Si, signora. He kill the dragon which make all the people afraid.’

‘You see,’ she said, triumphant, disengaging his grip from her arm and placing her own under his, ‘even your stupid old Church believed in it!’

She was smiling again, and in a rush of joy that the matter of the dragon had been settled – slaughtered for good, he hoped – and that she was back with him again, he was about to propose lunch in the trattoria they had passed when she continued:

‘Where shall we go for lunch?’ – and before he could answer – ‘Or, let’s just have a snack now, shall we? Then we can eat properly for once tonight. At the Danieli, or that one I read about, where the film-stars go, the Cipriani. We can, now, can’t we …?’

THE HAWTHORN MADONNA (#ulink_8be31f1c-4dec-566c-9512-c54358776ce9)

Every Easter, Elspeth and Ewan stayed in a cottage loaned them by Mrs Stroud, who had been a school friend of Ewan’s Aunt Val. Not that the two old ladies ever saw much of each other in their latter days. Still, it was recognisably Edie Stroud in Aunt Val’s photo album – the girl with the almost coal-black hair, very bobbed – unless that was Mary Squires, after all, who died of tuberculosis after her fiancé shot himself. When Mrs Stroud herself died, the cottage passed to her nephew who worked in Amsterdam – something to do with diamonds, someone had said, though that might have been wishful thinking. He was glad enough to let it without trouble to a couple who did not mind that there was a greenish fungus around the window frames and that you had to hang the bedding before the fire to air each night before you went to sleep. Indeed, they would have missed the nightly ritual, Elspeth and Ewan, if Mrs Stroud’s nephew had done what his aunt had always been saying she would do and have a proper damp course laid down.

Luckily, Mrs Stroud herself was now laid down instead and the fingers of moisture were allowed to settle inside the glass of the windows unhindered and make little feathery rivulets down the pane and emanate out into the general air of the place.

Elspeth and Ewan had never had any children. In the early days when they went to ‘Brow’ they had gone with the plan of serious lovemaking. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows ‘serious’ lovemaking is not the most successful kind. When it became clear that for one reason or another (they never tried too hard to discover which) they were not going to have children they tacitly dropped such plans. This did not mean that they were not affectionate with each other. People often said of them that they were an exceptionally warm couple – really, it did you good to be with them. In bed at night they held each other close even years after the lovemaking had been dropped altogether, except for birthdays and Christmas. But it was Easter when they always went to ‘Brow’ which seemed not quite to qualify …

This Easter was particularly cold, though Elspeth said that all Easters were cold these days and it must be to do with climate change. She believed that something had happened to the calendar since they were young. Not at all, Ewan said. The Met Office had produced statistics which demonstrated that the weather had been much the same, give or take the odd fluctuation, for the past two hundred years. That was just like men, Elspeth had retorted, to dismiss everything the scientists tell us if it didn’t suit their prejudices. They were driving, as usual, down the M3 and off the A303 past Stonehenge and into the heart of Somerset, if such a promiscuous county could be said to have a ‘heart’.

The cottage was called ‘Brow’ because it stood on the brow of a low hill – hardly a hill at all, really, more a kind of hump. It stood alone at the end of a lane, which fortunately had never been surfaced and therefore discouraged picnickers.

Elspeth unpacked the box of groceries she had brought from London to save having to go too often to Brack, the nearest village, or to Wells for decent wine. Ewan went at once to inspect the woodshed. Yes, plenty of sawn logs stacked – so Tim, the young man who seemed always to be smoking joints but who for all that kept the hedges neatly clipped, had done his stuff. And there were enough candles too for when the electricity tripped off. All in order, then. And it never took long to heat up the tank for a bath.

It was still cold the next day when they went for one of the walks which over the years they had taken possession of – behind the hill and along the track through the plantation, towards Wells. You could just see the twin honey-coloured cathedral towers in the distance below them. ‘Shall we go to Wells tomorrow?’ Elspeth asked. ‘Tomorrow’ was Good Friday. But in the end they decided not – it wasn’t a big thing with them, church at Easter – just that Elspeth liked the pageantry.

‘It’s going to snow,’ Ewan remarked as he opened the wine for supper. They were to have boeuf en daube, brought all the way from Highgate in a casserole. Years ago Elspeth had learned the recipe from reading To the Lighthouse but these days she never imagined herself as Mrs Ramsey.

‘“Nudity banned until this appears in hedges” – eight letters?’ Ewan asked later by the fire. Although Elspeth had quite a different cast of mind, and never got crossword clues, for twenty years he had persevered in asking her advice.

‘Hawthorn,’ she said, proving that it is right never to stop trying.

‘Why so?’

‘“Ne’er cast a clout till may be out.” People think it’s the month, but in fact it’s the may flower. Don’t you remember? I’ve told you that millions of times!’ But a mind that grasps crosswords will usually be too reasonable for rhymes or folklore.

Perhaps it was the extreme temperature but by Saturday Ewan had contracted a cold. They ate toasted hot-cross buns by the fire and he went to bed early. Elspeth wished they had packed whisky and Ewan wished she wouldn’t fuss.