A Dog's Life(34)

Giovanna ruled, or tried to rule, over a troubled household. Her sexually inadequate husband’s face was set in a permanent scowl. He spent his days in the streets, out of the sight and sound of the wife he loathed. He spoke solely to himself at all times, in a mixture of Ukrainian and English. When he came home at night, he slumped in his chair, Giovanna informed me, and slept. He wasted none of his precious words on his sons, Andrea and Enrico, except to shout at them occasionally, when they presumed to address him.

Ivan was born and raised in Kiev. He arrived in England as a young man in the late 1930s. He worked for a considerable period as a sous chef in one of the grand London hotels, but was sacked after his excessive drinking became problematic. He met Giovanna, who came from a small town in the Veneto, and whose first job in England was as a maid at Eton College. Their house in the west London street where I still live has four storeys, so they must have been doing reasonably well when they moved in during the 1950s. It is hard for me to imagine the desiccated Ivan and the grossly fat Giovanna, her legs swollen from rheumatism, as ever being youthful and attractive, so cruelly had circumstances treated them.

Why did they never separate? Giovanna was staunchly Catholic, and the idea of divorce was not countenanced. In a peculiar sense, they were separate in each other’s unacknowledged company, as they sat night after night – she staring at the television; he snoozing, or remaining stubbornly silent, in his chair – like two characters out of Strindberg performing in dumbshow. I learned of this bizarre domestic routine from Giovanna, as she stooped to stroke Circe, whom she called la bella cagna. I learned, too, of her younger son’s drug addiction and his battles with the police, and that her eldest boy, who had once been happily married, was now back with his doting mother. He was the only member of the family, apart from Tito, who really appreciated her cooking. His English wife had murdered the pasta he loved.

Giovanna introduced me to Andrea, her bello ragazzo, who instantly turned ‘Paul’ into ‘Paolo’. I was Paolo thereafter. He was invariably cheerful as he jabbered in Italian or English of banal concerns, yet I quickly detected that behind his sunniness was someone seriously disturbed. He had a slight hold on reality, I discovered – the cause, perhaps, of the failure of his brief marriage. He reminded me, and continues to do so, of those unworldly, childlike grown-ups in Dickens’s novels – Mr Dick in David Copperfield; Fanny Cleaver, alias ‘Jenny Wren’ in Our Mutual Friend; even the pathetic Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. He had lost certain essential bearings, and needed Giovanna’s protection, as much as she – it transpired – needed his. He was a beaming outcast in that world in which most of us function. He probably still is.

There was nothing sunny about Enrico, who was known as Rico to the addicts and drunks who were his frequent companions. He was surly and short-tempered, given to sudden rages when he was not brooding on whatever was obsessing him – his next heroin fix, more likely than not. He would disappear for months at a stretch and then return to torment his mother, now almost wholly reliant on the support of Andrea. The police, to Giovanna’s understandable distress, were regular visitors to the house, especially when Rico was missing. Giovanna was not at all happy when her renegade son brought Alison, an ex-prostitute, home with him. He took her to his bedroom, which she occupied when she wasn’t in detention or prison. Alison’s command of language was severely limited, like that of the owner of the Staffordshire bull terrier, to one or two oft-repeated expletives.

Silent and sullen misery was now replaced by high drama. Alison and Rico screamed at each other with such ferocity that Ivan felt compelled to join in. Once, during yet another of Rico’s mysterious absences, Giovanna bolted the front door against Alison, who eventually availed herself of a brick which she hurled through a window. The police carted her off, to the echoing cries of her favourite word, which were aimed at the sick and increasingly desperate woman who lived in dread of becoming her mother-in-law.

With Rico on his travels and Alison locked up, peace of a kind descended on the house again. Giovanna prepared delicious meals for Andrea and Marshal Tito, and the single annoyance to cope with, by way of ignoring him, was her moody husband, who returned every night to sulk or sleep. The former chef ate in a workmen’s café in Shepherd’s Bush when he felt like eating, but he was generally sustained by the gin he consumed in amazing quantities, to judge by the empty bottles he deposited in the litter bins in Ravenscourt Park, where I exercised Circe each morning and afternoon.