Review
Charles Lambert's ‘Entertaining Friends’ contains writing that is charged and memorable – with a powerful sense of place. Compelling reading. (Patricia Duncker )
Charles Lambert writes as if his life depends on it. He takes risks at every turn. As an editor, this is exciting to see, and as a fellow writer, it is inspiring – particularly when the results are so marvellous. In ‘The Scent of Cinnamon’, Charles Lambert pulls out the deepest-held emotions of his characters – love and desire and loneliness and hope – until they ripple across the page, and the reader feels them too. (Hannah Tinti )
About the Author
Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, the United Kingdom, in 1953. After going to eight different schools in the Midlands and Derbyshire, he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge from 1972 to 1975. In 1976 he moved to Milan and, with brief interruptions in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since then. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, he now lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE SCENT OF CINNAMON
Dear Mrs Payne
I have been given your name by the Reverend Ware, vicar of the English community here. I am a blunt man, and I shall come straight to the point. Ware tells me that you have recently lost your husband and are without means. He has suggested to me that you may be interested in marriage with a man who can provide you with the security and affection you require. He has indicated to me that I may be such a man. I have every reason to trust Ware's judgement in these matters, above all because he knew you as an unmarried girl and speaks highly of your breeding, modesty and intelligence. For my part, I offer you a man of thirty-seven years, of which nineteen have been passed outside his own country. I have a farm that would comfortably contain an English county. I am fit, healthy and, if Ware is to be trusted also in this matter, of sufficiently pleasing appearance to make my appeal for your hand appropriate and possessing of some possibility of success.
I enclose a photograph. The dog's name is Jasper.
I look forward to receiving your reply.
Yours sincerely
Joseph Broderick
It would do, he thought. He looked at the photograph for a moment and saw a man, a liver-spotted dog, a house, then folded the sheet of paper around it and slid them both into the envelope. Miriam Payne, he murmured, writing these words in his small clear forward-sloping hand, and beneath them an address in Cornwall, a county he had never seen. Miriam Payne he repeated in a stronger voice, then: Miriam Broderick. Yes. It would do.
The reply arrived six weeks later and was brief.
Dear Mr Broderick
Thank you for your letter and the photograph enclosed, both of which have given me much food for thought. I shall say at once that I am prepared to consider your offer. However, before doing so, I too shall be frank. I would like you to answer me one question, which may appear impertinent but is, I believe, quite the opposite. Dear Mr Broderick, have you ever been in love?
I also enclose a photograph. As you see, I have no dog. I am not sure that I like dogs, nor that dogs like me.
Yours sincerely
Miriam Payne
The woman in the photograph was younger than Joseph had expected. Her hair was long, caught up on one side by a clip of some kind and loose at the other to hang across her shoulder. He couldn't tell its colour but imagined it deep and dark and heavy, a lustrous red. Her eyes and eyelashes were also dark. Although she wasn't smiling, the set of her mouth suggested that smiling were its purpose; even solemn, its owner had small dimples in both cheeks. She was dressed in widow's weeds, which made her form hard to decipher, but she appeared to be slender and even elegant. Her hands, crossed on her lap, were small but strong. He closed his eyes and she was still sufficiently there for him to move her and place her beside him, on the other side from Jasper, in front of the house he had built for himself and a wife he had never had. He saw them together and felt his heart beat faster, as though he had chased a runaway sheep across a field. He replied that same day.
Dear Mrs Payne
Thank you for your letter and photograph, both of which considerably eased my mind. The fact that you are prepared to consider my offer fills me with hope and, if I may admit such a feeling, trepidation. As to your question, which is more than pertinent, I can answer without shame that I have never been fortunate enough to have known love, convinced though I am to possess the faculty for it.
I look forward with some anxiety to your reply.
Yours sincerely
Joseph Broderick
Another six weeks passed. Broderick began to see the house he had built with his own hands through other eyes, through the dark and deep-set eyes of the woman in the photograph. The tamped earth floors, shiny with wear as if waxed, the stone and whitewashed walls, the bareness of the shuttered uncurtained windows, which before he hadn't noticed or had maybe thought appropriate to his single life, as hard and bare as his surroundings, now distressed and embarrassed him. The straight-backed chairs became uncomfortable, unyielding. How could a lady sit on them? How could a lady live in a house so male and austere and unadorned?
He would have asked another woman what could be done to make his house acceptable, but there was no married woman in the neighbourhood he could trust to take him seriously. There was no one with the taste required; the women around had neither breeding nor education. Besides, he would look ridiculous if Miriam decided not to marry him, a single middle-aged man, alone in a house full of frills and ribbons. He could have asked Reverend Ware, who had an eye for such things, but didn't.
And what would she bring herself, if she did decide to come, he wondered. Paintings, embroidery, cushions perhaps. A musical instrument of some kind. Perhaps the wisest choice would be to wait in the bare house and allow her to mould it into the place she could most comfortably consider her own, her new married home in her new world. And then he imagined her trunks stacked neatly beside her on the quay, a dozen iron-bound trunks, his cart weighed down with them. Sometimes the vision of her was so vivid it seemed that she was already there beside him and he would shake his head until she had gone, and then feel desolate.
When her second letter arrived, his hand began to tremble. Jasper barked and clawed at his waist. ‘It's all right, lad,’ Broderick said. ‘It's all right.’
And it was.
