The Dividing Stream (31 page)

‘‘Mummy should have put off the dentist,’’ Pamela said as they unpacked their picnic lunch in a bay beyond Livorno. ‘‘ It was silly of her.’’ She handed round napkins, plates, forks and spoons, and ugly plastic beakers. ‘‘You’ve taken more than your share,’’ she told Lena, who was helping herself to cold chicken. ‘‘And now that’s too little. Let me do it.’’ She began to separate the meat on to the six plates and then gave them round.

‘‘You have such a sense of justice,’’ Mrs. Bennett said. ‘‘That is something one learns at school, where everything is ‘ fair’. And then one goes out into the world where nothing is ‘ fair’ and of course one is outraged.’’

Nicko, who was still peevish from being car-sick, all at once cried: ‘‘Oh, there’s a worm in my chicken!’’

‘‘Don’t be silly, that isn’t a worm,’’ Pamela said. ‘‘It’s a bit of sinew.’’

‘‘Don’t want it, anyway”; and before they could stop him, he had flung the leg of chicken into the sea.

No one said anything; and soon he began to whimper, clutching the plate with both hands to his chest, his face turned sideways. Max gave a brief exclamation, but he was too inhibited by the memory of the scene with Nicko to do anything more. He was now ashamed of that act of savagery, particularly before Pamela and Colin, and wondered if they remembered and held it against him.

Lena said: ‘‘Here, Nicko. Have half of mine.’’

‘‘Don’t want it.’’

But she knew that he did, and having separated a piece of the wing, she shifted it to his plate. In her white silk dress, against which the brown of her bare arms and legs glowed in the sun, she looked more attractive than any of them had ever seen her. She never ceased to watch Max, and whenever he made one of his jokes, so dry that the children never laughed at them, it was as if her whole body were being consumed by mirth as, at the other times, it was as if it were being consumed by devotion.

Such a response would inevitably either flatter or madden a man; and Max was in a mood for flattery. Dear Lena, he thought. She was so capable and sensible and kind, and yet, unlike most people who possessed those qualities, she had such a sense of humour. Physically she had always a little repelled him in the past, with the thick black hair that covered her arms and legs and made a small moustache on her upper lip, and those ugly feet, calloused and misshapen, which she insisted on exposing by wearing no socks and sandals; but these details no longer worried him. They were ‘‘all of a piece”. He decided she was charming.

‘‘Oh, it’s so hot,’’ Mrs. Bennett exclaimed. ‘‘ I feel I shall suffocate.’’ She got up from the party and wandered away, some twenty or thirty yards, where she placed herself on a small rock in the shadow of a larger one. The two rocks were covered with a greenish-purple moss from which seeped a vaguely disinfectant smell, reminiscent of the wards of public hospitals. Seen by the others Mrs. Bennett’s faded blue dress merged into the shadow cast by the rock overhanging her; but the straw hat, bought at a street-market when they had motored through Arles and worn by her ever since whenever she went out, made a bright, shimmering hole in this peace of coolness, depriving the eye of rest. She sat huddled, her knees wide apart and her arthritic hands clasped between her knees, as she watched the sea pounce inwards on the smooth, hard sand. In spite of the heat, her headache and a feeling of suffocation, she was now completely happy. A month ago she would have fretted with a pencil and a sketch-book, attempting some communion with the landscape before her; and the communion would have been impossible, and the realization of this would have filled her with a vindictive kind of frustration. But now she was resigned; such communion had at last ceased to matter. Here she was, and here under her fingers was this greenish-purple moss, as if the rock had grown a diseased skin, and there before her was the sea, hurling its glittering knives against the quiescent sand. And there were Max, Lena, and the children, with their white napkins, their red, plastic beakers, and their green picnic basket. No, she no longer wanted communion with them either. They looked beautiful like that, the sunlight glinting on Nicko’s fair hair and Lena’s ready smile, and it was enough to see them, without that desire to be identified with what one saw. Like the sketching, intimacy was too costly, too frustrating, too great an expenditure of oneself—and all for what, for what?

‘‘I think I shall go in now,’’ Pamela said.

‘‘Is that wise,’’ Lena asked, ‘‘so soon after a meal? What do you think, Mr. Westfield?’’ She leaned over to Max, who lay outstretched, his arms behind his head, so that her face was only some six inches distant. He opened his eyes, and the red eyelashes flickered in the dazzle as he said: ‘‘Wait for half an hour.’’

How strong he seemed; and how clean, in his white silk shirt, at the opening of which she could see the coarse hair growing. His hands were so clean, with the wide, beautifully kept nails and the palms whose skin, even in this weather, had a slightly chapped look as if from too much scrubbing. He was wearing some beige linen trousers, with a silk scarf twisted round his waist, and as he lay there in the sunlight, the trousers were rucked over his thighs, as if they were too small. She wanted to twine the hair at his throat round her large, competent fingers; to pick at the knot of the silk scarf.

But how sad he looked, even in repose. And all because of that minx, who was willing to spend his money, though it was obvious she refused to sleep with him. Lena hated Karen; and now, as she thought about the other woman, a sullenly voracious expression came over her face, making Colin say: ‘‘A penny for your thoughts.’’

She ran some sand through her fingers and said: ‘‘Oh, nothing.’’

‘‘I bet you were thinking about Signor Commino,’’ Pamela laughed.

All at once Lena was inexplicably angry. ‘‘ Oh, you children, you really are absurd! It’s so ill-mannered, Pamela, to talk in that way. Don’t you see that it’s ill-mannered? I don’t understand you.’’ Then she fell silent, and again brooded on Max’s shut face.

Nicko had wandered off into the heat of the afternoon, and Mrs. Bennett called: ‘‘Put on your sun-hat.’’

‘‘I don’t want to, Granny.’’

She said nothing more; and soon he walked back to the others, picked up the hat, and pulled it over his ears. He began to grub for shells. ‘‘Look,’’ he called. ‘‘ Look what I’ve found!’’ He ran up to his grandmother and held to her ear a shell so gnarled and brown that it looked like a fragment of old bone; and to fortify this impression, brown strands of dry seaweed hung from its orifice like attenuated sinews. It smelled of salt and decay.

From its depths came a strange, high-pitched singing; at first Mrs. Bennett supposed it was some noise in her own head. ‘‘Strange,’’ she said; and the child, hearing the word, chanted out, ‘‘Strange, strange, strange!’’ as he wandered off from her, bearing his trophy. But soon he tired of it and let it drop from his fingers; in the bright glare it lay like the rotten, half-buried remains of some man or animal, deep orange against the lighter orange of the sand. Mrs. Bennett imagined that she could still hear its high-pitched trilling in her ears.

After a while Lena disappeared behind a rock and reappeared, shivering a little with excitement, in a white silk bathing-costume for which she had had to pay nearly a quarter of her monthly salary. ‘‘Oh, it’s wizard,’’ Pamela exclaimed, as Lena had hoped she would, to attract Max’s attention.

His eyes flickered up: ‘‘Very nice, Lena,’’ he said, as she placed herself, somewhat self-consciously, on the sand beside him. ‘‘It’s like that one of Karen’s,’’ he added and of course did not notice the immediate darkening of the girl’s face.

‘‘Are you coming in with us, Mr. Westfield?’’

He yawned: ‘‘Oh, I expect so—later. I feel so sleepy. Don’t wait for me now. I’ll join you when I’m ready.’’

‘‘Colin?’’ Lena asked.

Colin pulled a face, as he flicked one stick after another, with a plop, into the sea.

‘‘Ready, Lena!’’ Pamela called, and she emerged from behind a rock while she was still pulling up one shoulder-strap to cover her right breast. Her back was red and peeling and the sun had brought out freckles on her arms and legs. But as she and Lena ran down to the sea together, she had acquired an effortless speed and grace and beauty which made Lena seem all at once dull by comparison. These were the qualities of youth, and in a year, or two years, or three years, she would inevitably lose them; but because of them, Max was now watching his daughter and not the woman who imagined she was being watched by him.

He peeled off his shirt, rolled it into a ball to put under his head, and was about to close his eyes again when Colin said:

‘‘You’re going to peel terribly. You know you always do.’’ He was sitting, with a bored, slightly disconsolate expression as he still threw stones at the waves.

Without opening his eyes, Max said: ‘‘I brought some oil, but really I can’t be bothered.’’

Colin scrabbled in the picnic basket, and having found the bottle containing the oil, went across to his father: ‘‘ I’ll do it for you,’’ he said.

‘‘Oh, don’t trouble.’’

‘‘No, I’ll do it.’’ He spoke almost sullenly, tipping some of the amber liquid into the palm of his hand.

‘‘I think I’ll have a dip first,’’ Max said, raising himself on an elbow. Colin felt cheated, as he let the oil trickle into the sand; he watched it as it glinted downward, large, rich drop by drop, and was then sucked into the universal, glaring dryness. ‘‘Oh, all right,’’ he mumbled. He wiped his palm on his own bare leg; he had a slight headache.

‘‘What about you?’’ Max said.

‘‘I don’t think I want to.’’

Max was pulling his trunks over his naked thighs as he said gently: ‘‘You must learn sometime.’’

Colin had the impression that this had all happened before; and then he remembered the scene by the Arno, with Frank Ross’s malicious taunts. The connection once established, a connection of mood also took place; he wanted to defy his father, as he had attempted, so feebly, to defy Frank Ross; and because he was not afraid of his father, whereas he had dreaded Ross, he hoped to atone for having been so weak then by being firm now.

‘‘I’m not interested in learning,’’ he said abruptly, still massaging his greasy palm against his leg.

‘‘That seems to be rather silly.’’

‘‘I dare say it does.

Max looked up from fastening the belt of his trunks. ‘‘Come along, come along!’’ Lena was shouting, but Max took no notice of her as he wondered, sadly, what he had done to deserve his son’s hostility. He hesitated and said: ‘‘I’m sorry if sometimes I don’t seem to try to understand you.’’ Colin remained silent, his eyes focused on the anchor which his father had had tattooed on his arm during his service in the Navy during the Great War. ‘‘Because I
do
try,’’ Max continued, now gazing out to where Lena and Pamela were splashing and screaming. All at once he hated their high-pitched, hysterical fun. ‘‘ I
do
try,’’ he repeated, like a stubborn child in a school classroom. He put out an arm, the muscle swelling beneath the anchor, and attempted to draw his son to him; but the boy had moved away.

At that moment, Colin longed to be folded in that embrace; and yet, at the same time, he was filled with a savage pride which would not let him yield. He could not understand it, and he was frustrated almost to the point of tears.

‘‘When I’ve had my bathe, let’s go for a walk, shall we?’’ The iron had been removed from the boy’s leg three or four days previously. ‘‘ Just us two. Shall we?’’

‘‘I thought I’d go to the cinema.’’

‘‘The cinema!’’

‘‘They’re showing
Johnny Belinda
—I saw as we drove through. It begins at three. It’s a good way of learning Italian.’’

‘‘But not on a day like this,’’ Max protested.

‘‘All days are like this in Italy.’’

Max gave a not altogether happy laugh. ‘‘ That’s true. But you could have gone to the cinema in Florence, couldn’t you? There’s not much point in driving all the way out here——’’

‘‘Oh, well, if you want me to sit on the beach all day!’’

‘‘Don’t be silly. Do just as you like.’’

‘‘I shall need some money.’’

‘‘Yes. How much?’’ Max reached for his trousers and put a hand in one pocket.

‘‘Two hundred and fifty lire, I expect. That’s what it usually is.’’

‘‘Well, here’s three-fifty.’’

Colin took the notes and pushed them into his shirt-pocket, mumbling, ‘‘Thank you’’ almost inaudibly.

‘‘Enjoy yourself!’’ Max called after him.

When the boy did not answer, or even turn, his father dropped the trousers which he had been holding, as if his whole firm, sinewy body were oppressed with a sudden fatigue. Then he straightened himself, and began to sprint over the glaring sand, scattering a fine drifting wash behind him.

Lena and Pamela both raised their arms at his coming, and shrieking and laughing, began to scoop at the water and splash it towards him. But he took no notice. He plunged into a breaker, and then with long, powerful strokes swam far, far out where he knew that neither of them could reach him. Then he lay on his back, floating, his eyes closed and his face strangely white against the redness of the hair on the rest of his body.

Meanwhile Colin was tramping up the innumerable steps which wormed between heavily scented bushes of oleander and syringa, to the glitter of die town above him. His breath came short and he was on the verge of tears. He stopped and looked back behind him, and saw Lena and Pamela still playing their games and Max, barely discernible, like a log of wood in the deep, distant blueness. Nicko was building a sand-castle; but he had started it too near the incoming tide, and each time that a breaker pounded downwards, he would scurry away in terror. It made Colin smile. Mrs. Bennett he could not now see, for with the moving of the sun the shadows of the two rocks had slowly opened like some vast, purple jaws and she, yellow sun-hat and all, had been swallowed downward. If he strained his eyes, he thought he could just see her; but it was something infinitely blurred and transparent, like a bad image on a television-screen. Suddenly he wanted to shout to her, for he felt, he did not know why, that she would never come out. She would dissolve there, in the shadow, as jelly-fish dissolve in the sun, and when they went to look for her they would find nothing but a pool of sticky liquid and the yellow straw hat. He felt sick with dismay at the thought; and it was only by an effort of will that he at last conquered the irrationality of such a mood. For, of course, she was still there, he told himself; and of course they would find her.