The Dividing Stream (36 page)

‘‘You know my Italian——’’

‘‘But heavens above, you can speak the language—after a fashion.’’

‘‘Yes, but they’re always so helpful there—they’re like old friends.’’

He smiled sardonically and shrugged his shoulders as if this last remark were too fatuous even to be worth an answer.

Then, as so often, he all at once changed. He checked her, as she rose to fetch the fruit, and carried it himself from the sideboard. ‘‘Peach?’’ he asked. ‘‘Or banana?’’

‘‘Peach.’’

‘‘Shall I peel it for you?’’

‘‘Please.’’

She watched him as he took a small silver penknife which hung from his belt, opened it and began deftly to remove the skin between his brown fingers. The juice trickled down one arm and cascaded in a number of opaque pearls on to the marble-topped table. He cut the peach into slices and fed them to her one by one. Suddenly he seemed to be overflowing with tenderness and consideration, and when the peach was finished, she rose and sat in his lap, her head on his shoulder. ‘‘You find me a terrible slut,’’ she said.

‘‘Yes.’’ But the words lacked any sting. He kissed the back of her neck, and said: ‘‘I don’t suppose that you’ll ever learn. And I don’t really care. I like you as you are; with the kitchen dirty, and a hole in your stocking, and this awful dressing-gown thing which you will always wear.’’ He pulled the kimono open. ‘‘I don’t care,’’ he repeated, as he slipped it from her shoulders. She sat staring at the lamp, impassive as a doll; but her whole being was waiting for him and she gave a small cry when at last his touch came.

Afterwards he told her that he was going to scrub and tidy the kitchen. ‘‘But I only did it two days ago,’’ she protested.

He laughed. ‘‘Now you run along; and come back in an hour and you’ll see how a kitchen should really look. All right?’’

She pouted as she replied, ‘‘You make me feel so useless.’’

‘‘Absolutely useless!’’

‘‘Let me help,’’ she urged.

‘‘God forbid! Have you forgotten when you helped to paper the room? No, you go and see to those letters you always complain you haven’t the time to write. And try not to get ink on your fingers,’’ he added, in the same jocular mood which nevertheless filled her with a vague resentment.

She did not write the letters; she wandered out into the overgrown garden, one corner of which Frank had already begun to tame, and made her way along a path flanked with straggling box hedges, to the wall above the river. It was a night without a moon, but the whole garden and the sky round it gave off a subtle radiance. The box hedge scratched at her kimono and her slippers, flapping at the heels, seemed to make an unnaturally loud clatter in all that silence. She stared down for a moment at the sunken rectangle of stones, like the foundations of some miniature house, which had caused her and Frank so often to wonder; he said that there had once been a greenhouse there and she, more imaginatively, a tomb. None of the villagers appeared to know anything about it.

After the heat of the day the stone balustrade over the river still felt warm. She perched on it, leaning forward as if she expected to have to jump off at a moment’s notice, and looked back at the
villino
where she could see the lamp still burning on the kitchen dresser and Frank moving briskly about his tasks. She took a childish pleasure in seeing him thus when he could not see her. He had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, and a lock of grey hair had fallen across his forehead. Suddenly she felt the impulse to go to him again and put her arms round him, but she knew he would be angry.

Beside the
villino
was the tall shell of what had once been the big house, destroyed in a bombardment. There were two walls, stretching as high as the highest trees, and a few heaps of rubble, buried in dock, nettles and bindweed; and sometimes, in the stillness of such nights, if one listened, one could hear a sudden plop and rustle as yet another fragment of stucco crumbled away. The peasants said the old house was haunted, because in the bombardment some Germans had been killed, and certainly now it was eerie, rising up like a blank wall notched with narrow spaces of black where the windows once had been, and housing stray cats, birds and some strange yellow-winged insects which had flown up into Karen’s face, buzzing loudly, on the only occasion when she had dared to penetrate within. No, it frightened her; and she gave a little shudder as she twisted round from it to gaze at the river.

The Arno here curved wide and shallow, and in its crook were the marshes from which, throughout the day, there would ring the shots of those who came out from Florence on their bicycles and
vespa’s
with guns strapped on their backs. A bright yellow under the sun, the water now spread grey, with a few wisps of mist dinging to it and meeting the vertical black of the trees which fringed its distant edges. Some kind of river-fowl was calling through the greyness with an insistent, plangent note, and then over her head Karen heard a sudden flurry and creak of wings.

She looked back at the old house, with its blank, imperious façade, and all at once her mind returned to the Palazzo d’Oro. She had left without saying goodbye to any of the children, because she had feared the ‘‘ scenes’’ which, all her life long, she had done everything to avoid. ‘‘Say good-bye to them for me,’’ she told Mrs. Bennett and her mother had answered with the indifference which now seemed to govern all her actions: ‘‘As you wish.’’ … Staring at the white ruin for which Frank was always elaborating plans—he would pull it down and use the bricks to build another
villino
, or he would train vines or some other creeper to cover it picturesquely—Karen felt a desolation strike at her heart. When she walked out of the hotel, she had so gladly divested herself of all that had belonged to that former life; but, from time to time at moments such, as these, she would be visited by an intense, parched regret. It was of Mrs. Bennett and Nicko that she chiefly thought. There was nothing to prevent her seeing either of them whenever she wished it, but she had discovered that Frank nursed a secret jealousy of whatever belonged to her and could not belong to him, and he discouraged her, more by an attitude than any actual words, from too often going into Florence to see her son or her mother. Besides, after such visits she returned to the
villino
full of a vague, nagging restlessness and it would take many hours before she was once again lulled back into her former well-being.

‘‘Did Nicko cry when you told him I’d gone away?’’ she had asked Mrs. Bennett at their first meeting.

‘‘Well, what do you think?’’

There was a silence, and then Karen asked: ‘‘And Max—how did he take it?’’

‘‘How angry you’d be if I told you he hadn’t cared!’’

‘‘Oh, you’re so unsympathetic, Mother. You usen’t to be like this.’’

Mrs. Bennett had shrugged her shoulders, and then stooped over the cup of chocolate the waiter had brought her.

… Now, as once again there was that wild, plangent note of the bird calling out from the marshes held in the dark elbow of the river, Karen felt her eyes fill with tears. She was even thinking with tenderness of Max: of the small, daily decencies of their life together, of his consideration and his tolerance for all she did. It was absurd never to be satisfied. But I am satisfied, I am satisfied, she said over to herself in a passionate agony of spirit. I love Frank. I am happy with him. I want nothing more. And as if to reassure herself of these facts, she sought reassurance in the way she always sought it from him; from his mere physical presence. He was still there, moving back and forth across the small, square window, and his shadow moved behind him on the white-washed wall. She plunged down into abysses of fierce, aching longing. But she must wait; he would finish his job, and then, the kitchen scrubbed and tidy, he would come out to her or call to her to go in to him. She must wait.

Suddenly she turned in horror. Without a sound the whole high, blank face of the old, bomb-dilapidated shell of a house was slowly curling forward. It seemed to stretch itself, like a vast piece of rubber, and then, with a noise like the explosion of a high sea on shingle, it plunged downwards, as Karen covered her head with her arms. Stones scattered around and she could even feel them stinging her own body. Trees cracked and split and were wrenched from their bases; the old wall parted like a wooden fence, buckling inwards to let a cascade of masonry slither with a crashing recoil of water into the river. A cat, pinioned somewhere in the darkness, screeched like a child in pain, through the strange crescendo of noise made by birds racing across the river into the safety of the marshes. Then, when Karen looked again it was as if a ghost of the old house were slowly rising up to take its place. A wall of glimmering white dust slowly unrolled upwards from the ruin, until bursting through it, she saw Frank racing towards her. ‘‘Karen!’’ he was calling. ‘‘Karen, where are you? Are you all right? Where are you? Karen?’’

She could say nothing; could not even move. When he found her and gripped her convulsively to him, pressing his lips on her face and saying over and over again ‘‘Thank God … thank God …’’ she remained stiff and silent. ‘‘Oh, I was so afraid, so terribly afraid. It was hearing that cat—it sounded almost human.’’

Still she did not answers; and looking down at her rigid, strained body he said with a tenderness she had never before known: ‘‘My poor darling. I’m afraid it’s been a terrible shock for you.’’

Suddenly she burst into a hysterical weeping. ‘‘That cat … find that cat!’’

P
AMELA
was stitching the nightdress she had long ago cut out, with Lena’s assistance, for the music-mistress, Miss Preston. She sewed clumsily and the seam of white chiffon was grey where her-hot hands had clutched it. Her hair kept falling across her face, making her brush it away at intervals with a gesture of impatience. ‘‘Oh, don’t be so restless,’’ she suddenly exclaimed to Colin, who was wandering about the lounge. ‘‘What’s the matter with you?’’

He had raised the lid of the piano which stood, untuned, in the corner of the room and was picking out’’ Auld Lang Syne”, the tune which Enzo and Rodolfo had always been singing, with the fingers of one hand. ‘‘It’s so lonely,’’ he sighed. ‘‘There’s nothing left to do.’’

‘‘You miss them, don’t you?’’ she said. He did not answer, and after a moment she looked up again from her work: ‘‘Colin?’’

‘‘I wish we could leave here,’’ he burst out, slamming the lid of the piano.

‘‘So do I.’’

‘‘Everything seems to have gone wrong, and I’m mostly to blame.
She’s
left, and Granny’s unwell, and Daddy is miserable.’’

‘‘Why did you do it, Colin?’’ his sister asked softly. It was the first time she had ever mentioned the theft of the brooch, and she was not surprised when he turned on her:

‘‘Oh, mind your own business!’’

‘‘I remember when Rodolfo took Granny’s pen and you said——’’

‘‘Shut up, shut up!’’

‘‘All right. Keep your hair on.’’ She half-smiled to herself in satisfaction at not having lost her own temper. ‘‘You do get easily upset these days.… If you’re so bored, why didn’t you go with Maisie to Rome when she offered to take you?’’

‘‘Because she’s a fool. And I can’t stand her voice. And anyway, she didn’t really want me. She offers these things and then she regrets them—and then she takes it out of one.’’

‘‘I thought you liked her.’’

‘‘Well, I don’t!’’

‘‘Dear, dear,’’ Pamela said in a maddeningly restrained voice, as she reached for some pins.

The children did not again talk until Signor Commino arrived, his portfolio in one hand and a pile of books, tied with string, dangling from the other. His collar was yellow, rumpled and soggy round his neck and there were beads of perspiration along each of his shaggy eyebrows. ‘‘Lena?’’ he asked, sinking into a chair and drawing out a handkerchief with which he proceeded to mop his face.

‘‘I think she’s still with Daddy,’’ Pamela said, and added when Signor Commino pulled his watch from his pocket: ‘‘I know she’s meant to finish at half-past but it’s always nearer six.… Where are you taking all those books?’’

‘‘To a bookseller.’’

‘‘Oh, are you going to sell them?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ he said simply. ‘‘I am short of money—again.’’ He slowly brought his two podgy hands together, as if he were playing a concertina, and emitted a long sigh as he added: ‘‘Money, money, always money.’’

‘‘How are you going to marry Lena, if you haven’t any money?’’ Pamela pursued ruthlessly.

‘‘How indeed!’’ Then, all at once he looked cross: ‘‘ You are extremely impolite. I suppose it is the American way of bearing. You must not ask such questions.’’

Pamela laughed; she could not help herself: ‘‘Why ever not? It’s true, isn’t it? You want to marry Lena.’’

With an exclamation of disgust Signor Commino gathered himself and went to the open window. Once there, he stood for many seconds, tapping his foot on the wainscot and clicking his fingers. Surprisingly, when he turned, his resentment had gone. ‘‘ I have an invitation for you,’’ he said. ‘‘For all of you. Saturday is for me an especial day, a day of much importance.’’

‘‘Why?’’ Colin asked.

‘‘Because on that day, forty-one years ago, Mino Ignatius Loyola Commino was given to the world! And next Saturday, in the Cloister of the Oriouli, they sing
Tosca
—you know
Tosca
?’’ He began to sing the famous love-duet from the first act in a thin falsetto, swinging from side to side, his hands clasped, until the children both had to burst into laughter and he joined in. ‘‘
Dunque
—we shall be a party—your daddy, your grandmother, Lena and you—and me! Is that good?’’

‘‘Colin is mad about opera,’’ Pamela said, who hated it.

‘‘Is——?’’ Signor Commino did not know the expression.

‘‘He loves it. Don’t you, Colin?’’ Colin nodded.

‘‘Ah, Lena!’’ Signor Commino greeted her, as she at that moment entered. ‘‘I have spoken to them about the opera, and they will come. Good afternoon, Mr. Westfield,’’ he added, swinging round with both heels together, to greet Max, and then bowing and making small flustered movements with his hands. He repeated the invitation.