Page 79 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
While he gravely folded my coat over a chairback and I had interesting thoughts about Leather Food, Rosetta said reproachfully: ‘Oh Dante, you haven’t eaten any of those lovely sandwiches I made foryou!’
‘I was waiting for Cass – we’ll share them,’ he said guiltily.
Clearly the urge to fatten Dante up is endemic in the female of the species. I was just surprised she hadn’t also felt the urge to sneak in while he slept and do a definitive Delilah to that shaggy mane with the kitchen scissors, because I certainly wanted to.
Rosetta cast us a dubious look before leaving that plainly said:‘Now, don’t argue, children!’
But I for one had no intention of arguing, especially after I stopped thinking about various kinds of hides and really started to take in what Dante had begun to tell me about his book.
It was evident that he reallydidneed my advice, but wasn’t going to find it easy to talk about what had happened to him.
‘I know all about the hostage thing and how your wifedied,’ I told him helpfully. ‘Orla got it all off the internet – all the newspaper articles and stuff.’
‘Right,’ he said, rather bitterly. ‘Well, that’s the part that my publishers are particularly interested in, obviously, but I want the book to be more than just another hostage story. I want it to be a celebration of Paul – my friend’s – life, too. And I’ve got all this stuff I’ve written down,and I don’t know where to go from here.’
He ran his hands though his black hair, which didn’t do much for it since it sprang back into dishevelled waves as soon as it was released. ‘I don’t want to go over it allagain – reliving it – but I think that somehow I’ll feel better when I’ve done it.’
Clearly writing it was a painful pilgrimage into a past that he would like to forget but could not;and he might achieve some kind of catharsis through setting it all down. And the more he talked about his experiences, the more I felt that he was telling me something he hadn’t been able to share with anyone else, opening himself up to me in a way that made him appealingly vulnerable.
‘I did write an article about it soon after I was released, but I wasn’t really very fit, mentally or physically.And coming home and dealing with the loss of Emma, and having to go through those seances and stuff her mother insisted on – well, it was pretty well the last straw.’
‘I should think it was!’ I agreed.
‘And then I really needed to go and see Paul’s widow, who’d gone back to her family in Alaska, although I’d already passed on all the messages Paul had sent in case I made it and he didn’t … ButI felt guilty somehow that I’d survived and he hadn’t, and I just spent months travelling around the States, making notes for the book, and putting the trip off.’
‘You were travelling in America for nearly a year, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, thinking about things, sleeping in anonymous motel rooms, slowly going north towards Alaska. Somehow I was afraid to face Paul’s widow, Kathy. But then finallyI drove up through Canada to Prince Rupert, and took a seaplane to Ketchican, where she lives.’
‘And found her?’ I prompted, since he seemed to have gone silent on me.
‘Yes, I found her, and she was pleased about the book. She was also desperate to talk about Paul, and I’d made her wait for nearly a year before I went there, thinking she’d blame me for surviving. How selfish is that?’
‘I don’tthink you came out of the hostage thing entirely sane and sensible, Dante,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s no point in flagellating yourself for not being Superman.’
I was turning over the photographs on the table, some of a slight, fair man, his pretty wife and two small daughters.
‘Paul?’
‘Yes, Paul and his family,’ Dante said. ‘There are more there of him as a boy, and some of his better knownphotographs … all sorts of stuff Kathy’s loaned me.’
‘And is all this the rough draft of the book?’ I asked, pointing to the heap of American Five Star notebooks on the trestle table.
‘Yes, but I just started to put everything I remembered down as it came back to mind, so it’s all out of sequence, and sometimes something I saw while I was travelling would spark off a recollection … I put thedate and where I was every time I started writing, so at the moment it’s more a series of travel diaries with memories than a biography.’
He looked at the table and shrugged despairingly: ‘See what I mean about not knowing where to start? How do I even begin to get the story out in chronological order?’
‘Can I look at one or two of the notebooks to get an idea of how it’s written?’ I asked cautiously.‘Perhaps just the first?’
‘I suppose so,’ he agreed in his usual gracious way. ‘I’ll make coffee – I’ve got a coffee-maker and stuff set up through there.’ He nodded to a door. ‘How do you like it?’
‘Hot, strong, no milk,’ I said, perching on the edge of the table and starting to read the jagged black script that told of a journey to hell … and, hopefully, back.
Eventually I looked up and noticedthat he’d returned, and was sitting in one of the armchairs with the coffee before him and a patient expression. My leg had gone dead when I got down off the table, so I must have been reading for quite some time.
Putting the notebook carefully back in its place on the table I hobbled over and fetched the plate of sandwiches Rosetta had made.
‘Eat!’ I said, putting them down in front of him,and feeling a need to feed one kind of hunger at least.
