It was quite a day. I suppose. I mean, it’s not every day you retire, is it? Especially if you’re like me and you give a big lecture at 5 o’clock and the Vice-Chancellor turns up and the most important history professors in the country are piped in on Zoom and MS Teams and scholars in European history from Humboldt and Leiden and Columbia and Monash and the Sorbonne and God knows where else.
And of course
the whole faculty are there and all the postgrads too. But you know they’re
feeling the same, let’s get through to the end of the old cow’s valedictory
lecture then we can get to the cheap warm white wine and the finger food that’s
been sweating in the summer heat, and after a decent interval we can slip home
in time for a cold beer with Channel 4 News.
I mean, none of them like me, do they.
I don’t blame them. I’m not very nice. “Horrid desiccated
mean old bitch,” I heard someone say after a faculty meeting once. She didn’t
know I heard her. Or maybe she did. And when I was young …the Fellowships not
renewed, the exile from Cambridge…
A big day today though.
Yet I sort of drifted off. I was sitting on the stage and
the Vice-Chancellor was on his hind legs introducing me. (His hind legs are
short though. He must have a hard time using his antlers in the rutting season.)
As always with him, his words sort of coalesced into a damp wet cloud that
rolled out over the room leaving everyone looking slightly depressed.
“Outstanding contribution,” he mumbled. “Deepened
understanding. The rural workforce. Plague. Enclosures. How we have become –
the scars on the land…”
I thought of Pietro. I hadn’t for years. Well, that’s not
quite true; now and then he snuck into my mind but I wouldn’t let him stay
there. I shoved him firmly out.
“…And it is my honour to present – our dear friend and
colleague, Helena Carstairs – distinguished Bardsley Professor of English
History…”
Thank God he didn’t go on about the Bardsley Professorship,
I thought. The chair had been endowed by a drunken Tory newspaper magnate,
baronet, ultra-patriot and noted appeaser whose divorce left the nation deliciously
appalled for some weeks as the war-clouds gathered. In time he repaired to
Antibes, where he drank himself to death in the company of various beautiful
young boys. He died long before I assumed the Chair, which was as well as I am
sure he hoped the incumbent would write reams on the glory of England, its
cuisine, Empire and Morris dancers.
“…And her final lecture as a regular member of the faculty.
Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Helena Carstairs presents her Valedictory
Lecture, The Long Road from the Black Death.”
I stood up. As always, before I spoke, I paused for effect.
Well partly for effect, but also to see who was in the audience. Know your
enemy. There was Professor Headley from Rutland University. How furious he’d
been when I beat him to the Bardsley Chair. Oh, what fun when he reviewed my
book a few months later. Unhinged. More vitriol than the Acid Bath Murderer. And
Jake Carter from Evil College, Oxford, the noted expert in medieval malaria
whose hands wandered in tutorials. Oh, there’s that ghastly undergraduate with
acne, the one who keeps complaining about his marks. It’s not fair! It’s not
fair! Thank God I’m retiring, I’ll never have another “snotfair” to deal
with.
“Good evening, everyone,” I begin. “I am delighted to see
you all, those here in person and those of you online. There are so many of you
I love and respect, and whose intellectual stimulation I will miss… so
much.
“I would like, tonight, to take you on a journey. A journey
that changed England through a thousand years of struggle. For there was no
Merrie England. There was no midsummer night’s dream, no rural idyll. The
powerful seized the common lands and the poor died in droves. We know from the
pioneer 19th-century demographer, John Rickman, that the England of Elizabeth
was a savage place. Rural parishes had a high surplus of births over deaths;
but towns had a high surplus of deaths over births. The poor were driven off
the land as they were born. They went to the towns and died there. And then, in
the 1690s, came Newcomen’s steam engine. And emigration. And it is written
across our landscape, as in a huge book. In my work, I have sought to help us
read it.”
Just for a moment I can see Pietro’s face. My voice wavers a
little, and then I continue. And when I finish, I give a little bow and
everyone applauds dutifully. There are no questions taken from the audience;
instead we troop into the hall outside and I am awfully polite to everyone.
“You were generous in your tributes and acknowledgements,”
said Professor Carter from Evil. “I was most humbled.”
“As was I ,” said Professor Headley. “I am glad so many of
us have helped you along the way.” He sleazed a smile, then frowned. “It was a
stellar list of the best in our discipline, but one name I did not recognize –
that foreign character – Pietro someone?”
“Pietro Mancini?”
“Yes. Who was he?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
The white wine was cheap and warm and would itself have dissolved
a body. There were crackers with prawns that had been baking in the heat, and
the cocktail sausages were as slimy as a rock pool in summer.
*
“Nana’s lecture was jolly good,” said Maggie.
“Nana’s lecture’s good! Good! Good!” said Chrissie, and she
danced around the garden, hands clasped above her head.
The teenage baby-sitter smiled at Maggie. “I’ll drop you at
home, dear,” Maggie said, and I watched Chrissie as she rolled around on the
grass. When Maggie came back she put her to bed, then sat down opposite me in
the garden, working the cork out of a Prosecco bottle. I looked at her face as
she did it, pleased that she did not look like her father. I had left him when he
hit me once too often. I was happier after that.
For a long time we said little but sipped wine together,
enjoying the deep blue of the gathering dusk as the flitting swallows were
replaced by the odd bat.
“I heard Professor Dickhead ask you about Pietro Mancini,”
said Maggie.
“Yes.”
“Who was he?”
“It’s a long story.”
“No,” said Maggie, “no, don’t just say that.” She smiled,
then frowned when she saw my face.
“Mum?”
“I was 17,” I said slowly. “I was doing my A-Levels. I
didn’t know if I would get into university, or what I would do there if I did.
But I knew I would soon have to make up my mind. Aunty Carol was about to go. Mum
and Dad invited an exchange student for a month. From Rome. And your Aunty
Carol went over there. They were both history students. And they were both in
their second year.”
“Did Aunty Carol have enormous tits even then?” asked
Maggie. She giggled. “He must have thought he was in paradise.”
“Not really,” I said. “It was too hot in Rome and there was
too much wine. I think she got horrendously pissed.”
“Italians don’t like that. Rather bruta figura.”
“Yes and I don’t think Carol was very nice to him anyway. He
was very good-looking, actually, but I don’t think he was her type. She rather
neglected him when he came over, and he spent most of his time with my parents.
His English was excellent, and he was ever so polite.” I thought for a
moment. “He even pretended to like baked
beans and sausages and mash. And greasy lamb chops. God knows how. And he was
nice to me. Though I wasn’t exciting. I was flat-chested and had spots. Anyway,
Mum and Dad were afraid he was bored. It was his last few days. I had just
passed my driving test, so one day they told me to take him up into the fells
to see the countryside and get some fresh air.”
I closed my eyes.
*
We’d had a cold, snowy winter, but the summer that followed wasn’t
bad. It was August and the very best of the season was over. But that day was
mostly bright, the odd bank of white cloud passing across the sun.
I’d been working that summer and saved some money; I had
£125 and spent it on a very old Mini. It cost £200, but Dad gave me the
difference, and paid for the insurance. It didn’t last long; it failed its MoT
a few months later because the subframe mounts were completely rotten and I’m
lucky I didn’t go through the floor, but I didn’t know that then. I called it
Minou, which was what I’d heard French people called sweet little kittens. It
can mean something else too, but I didn’t know that either at the time.
Pietro was quite tall. He coiled himself into the passenger
seat and tried to open the window; it took him a moment or two to work out the
Mini’s sliding arrangement. The seat creaked. I watched him get comfortable and
noticed that his eyes were deep blue and the lashes very long. I hadn’t seen
those things before, though I had
noticed his deep brown wavy hair. I opened my own window and we drove
off, though not before I had struggled to get into first, feeling for the slot
with the long, slack gear-lever. Second to third needed a second attempt too,
the first attempt engaging first instead; there was a loud graunching sound.
The second attempt was more successful. At length I was in top and the Mini scurried
along the windy B-road that led up into the valley that dug into the fells.
“I think you drive very well, ’Elena,” said Pietro.
“No I don’t,” I said. A country bus came towards us and I
veered towards the left-hand hedge, hearing a scraping sound as the brambles
scratched the paintwork.
At length I turned off into a country lane and followed it
to a small car-park from which one could walk up into the hills. We took our
rucksacks with water and sandwiches and tramped for an hour or so up a green
lane, saying little yet oddly relaxed in each other’s company. Once we crossed
an overgrown track along which ran a line of stones set across the track and
parallel to each other. I had seen this track many times and did not remark
upon it. But Pietro stopped, and looked fascinated.
“That is – what? Almost like a …primitive railway,” he said.
“I forgot – you’re a history student, aren’t you?”
He chuckled. “I am history student, yes. Look. Is that not a
railway track to you?”
“Dad says it’s something to do with the old mines on the
side of the fell,” I said. “They had horse-drawn carts and the used them to
bring coal down to the coast. In time they opened bigger mines on the coast
itself and colliers could load there, so these mines were abandoned.”
“What date?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “About 1720 I think.”
“Look,” he said. “The holes, where there must have been fastening
for the rails. Were they wood?”
“Our teacher said they were wood,” I said. “But later they
were replaced with iron.”
“That,” said Pietro, “is history.”
He was more animated than I had seen him before and I
laughed. “Pietro, you are from Rome,” I said. “You have history coming
out of your ears there. Really, ours can’t be very interesting.”
“But it is,” he said. He pointed to the row of stones. “You
are mining coal. The rails are of wood. But then they are of iron and then of
steel and they carry the coal to the coast where it fuels the furnaces where
the first machines are forged and one day someone builds a machine that can
pull the wagons in place of horses, and that machine links cities together and
the modern world is born. Look! There it is happening before our very eyes! And
you speak of Rome. All they did was whip their slaves and gorge themselves on lingua
alaudae and garum.”
“On what?” I was laughing.
“The tongues of larks,” he said. “And garum was fish sauce. That
they made with fermented fish innards.”
“That sounds quite disgusting.” I wrinkled my nose.
He was laughing too now. “Of course it was. The Romans, they
were disgusting. But your coal and steel took you across the seas and
built the modern world. And there it is.” He pointed to the stones again.
“Forget the fish innards and pervert emperors …Did you see the field we passed,
with the ridges still here from ancient furrows? Did you wonder who farmed
there, and what became of them?”
“The Black Death?” I suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe there were just too many people and the
soil could not support them. It happened. Italy too. You may take the train
from Roma to Sperlonga and you will see it; kilometre after kilometre of
abandoned, dusty terraces. Where did they go? What happened when they got
there?”
“I think the landscape speaks to you, Pietro,” I said.
“Speak to me? It will not shut up,” he replied.
We smiled at each other. And as we walked away, he took my
hand. It was a surprise, and at first I was taken aback; then I realised I was
pleased.
“Do you like Carol?” I asked.
“She is fine,” he said.
To this day I don’t know why I said it, but I did:
“She has awfully big breasts,” I said.
“So has my mother,” he replied.
We both burst out laughing, and I felt his warmth and his
laughter. And then he kissed me. I’d been kissed before, but this was
different; not a furtive fumbly sort of kiss that smelled of baked beans or
breakfast cereal, but something gentle and nice, and now I’m crying, and Maggie
is kneeling in front of me, anxious, holding both my hands.
*
So Maggie pours me a big glass of wine then sits down on the
grass beside my chair.
“Silly old cow,” I say, and sniff.
“No,” she says.
We’re silent for a minute.
“What happened? I mean, with you and Pietro?”
“Nothing.” Another snivel. “We were never alone together
again and three days later he went back to Italy. But we wrote each other. His
letters never mentioned romance. But they were warm and chatty and nice. He
talked about us meeting again. I think he wanted to. Then two years later the
letters stopped. I wrote several times more, then I got a letter from his
father. It was in Italian but I worked out what it said. In the summer Pietro
had gone up to the north of Italy to see friends from university. On the way
back he had to change trains in Bologna. It was the day of the bomb in the
station there. They planted it in the waiting room. His father said he must
have died at once.”
“Oh,” said Maggie. “Oh.”
She gazed up at me. “Mum, were you in love?”
“Yes,” I said.
I looked back at her.
“I’m not a bad person,” I said. “I just find it hard
sometimes …to be…”
“It’s all right,” she said.
She sat beside my chair until the need to sleep crept up on
me, and I felt at peace.
Pietro Mancini is a fictional character and no-one of
that name died in the Bologna station bombing; I was careful to check. However,
85 very real people did die in the explosion, on August 2 1980. It is usually
ascribed to an extreme right-wing revolutionary group, and was one of the
nastier terrorist atrocities of my lifetime. The dead are commemorated on a
plaque in the Bologna Centrale station, where it happened.
More short fiction from Mike Robbins
The End A gun on a brownstone roof
The Last Time A figure skater leaves the ice
After the Flood An end? Or a beginning?
Remembered Time The past is a dangerous place
A Train Journey One's sister comes to visit
Time After Time When you have to warn the children
Fashion Wokeness and subversion. With style
A Time of Darkness History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes
Another Time A tear in the fabric
Evolution The world is turning
When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square
Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala
A Man for All Seasons Net zero. The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip
A History Lesson Why do we study it? So we can spot it happening
The Creatives Meeting a tech bro
Cold Everything is cold here
Homecoming A sort of love story
Solitude A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography
Hiraeth A yearning…
Strange Places A spirit in the sky
A Sideways Journey Things might have been different
Displaced Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
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