The Dividing Stream (37 page)

Max accepted; and at once Signor Commino again began to bow, murmuring over and over again ‘‘ Delighted … most honoured”, until Max cut him short by exclaiming: ‘‘Oh, I feel done in!’’ He yawned, stretched and then slumped into a chair, covering his face with his hands.

Lena looked at him for a moment, her beautiful dark eyes expressing a mixture of sympathy and exasperation, before she said: ‘‘Pamela, you must make your father work less. It is not good for him.’’

‘‘It’s nothing to do with me.’’ Pamela was secretly jealous of the devotion she guessed that Lena felt for Max. ‘‘Why don’t you try to persuade him?’’

Lena coloured as she said: ‘‘Because that is not within my province.’’

‘‘You buy his socks,’’ Pamela said, half as a joke and half in resentment.

‘‘Because her taste is excellent,’’ Max said. ‘‘I have yet to meet a woman who can buy socks as Lena can.’’

‘‘Oh, nonsense, Mr. Westfield!’’ Lena’s eyes darted in embarrassment about the room, as she fingered the belt of her dress. ‘‘ I am always willing to help,’’ she added. ‘‘But seriously, Mr. Westfield—you must not drive yourself so hard. It is not good for you. No, seriously.’’

Max laughed; and Signor Commino glanced at his watch and then put in, as if expecting a rebuff: ‘‘Lena, if we are to be at the station in time we must go now.’’

‘‘Oh, I don’t know that I want to go to the station,’’ Lena said, who only knew that she wanted to stay with Max.

‘‘Are you going away for the week-end?’’ Colin asked.

‘‘Good heavens, no. Your father wants me tomorrow morning. We still have a lot to do, haven’t we, Mr. West-field? No peace for the wicked.…’’ She brought out this last phrase a little dubiously; she had only just learned it. She went on: ‘‘No, it is those two Americans and the English lad. They are leaving and Mino said that we would go and see them off.’’ She smiled as she added, in a manner which she knew would wound Mino: ‘‘He said it, without even asking me. And now I suppose I shall have to go.… Oh, I can’t!’’ She flopped into the chair be side Max’s and, all unconsciously, imitated his exact gesture as she put her hands over her face, in a pretence of being tired: ‘‘You must go without me, Mino.’’

‘‘But, Lena——’’

‘‘No, I can’t, I can’t. They bore me so. And I do not even like them.’’

‘‘Where are they going?’’ Colin asked.

‘‘They say they are going to Paris. They think they will like Paris better than Florence. But they won’t. They will go to America.… Quick, Mino, or you will miss them.’’ She laughed: ‘‘And give them my love, and my apologies, and
buon viaggio
.’’

‘‘If you do not go, then I do not——’’ Mino began.

But: ‘‘Yes, yes,’’ she urged him. ‘‘They are your friends. You must go. Of course you must go.’’

‘‘When shall I see you? Shall I come back here?’’

‘‘Oh, I expect I shall be gone by then.’’

‘‘Then to the house?’’

‘‘Yes—no. I don’t know where I shall be. I may be there. I don’t know. I feel too tired at present to make up my mind.’’

Mino shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, and picking up the books in one hand and the portfolio in the other, lumbered towards the door. Suddenly he dropped the books, and slapped his forehead with his hand: ‘‘I have forgotten, I have forgotten! My mother keeps remembering me. Children, have you still the music-box?’’

Colin and Pamela exchanged glances, and Pamela at last said: ‘‘Oh, Signor Commino, we’ve been meaning to tell you. The spring went and broke. It wasn’t our fault, it wasn’t anyone’s fault.’’ She hurried on, the colour deepening in her cheeks. ‘‘One of the boys—the Italian boys—was winding it up and it just made a funny click, and that was that.’’

‘‘But we’re going to have it mended,’’ Colin put in, stricken by the look of dismay on Signor Commino’s face. ‘‘We took it to all sort of shops in Florence, but none of them could do it. So now Maisie says she’ll take it with her to Switzerland when she goes next week. It was made there, and she’s certain they can mend it.’’

‘‘It belongs to my mother,’’ the Italian said pitifully.

‘‘Yes, we’re awfully sorry.’’

‘‘Of course it was very old. But it worked for so many years.’’

‘‘It wasn’t the children’s fault,’’ Lena said sharply. ‘‘They’re doing all they can.’’

‘‘Yes, I know, I know. But I cannot help feeling sad.’’

‘‘These things happen,’’ Lena said.

‘‘Yes, that is true. These things happen. They are always happening.’’

It was absurd, the children thought; as he hurried from the room, his eyes were full of tears.

‘‘He
is
odd,’’ Pamela said. ‘‘So sentimental.’’

‘‘But I like him,’’ Colin put in. ‘‘Before I thought him awful. Now—I don’t know——’’

‘‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about him!’’ Lena exclaimed. ‘‘He gets so on my nerves. And he should be ashamed to go about like that—like a scarecrow. And that terrible portfolio—and all that scurf on his coat——!’’

Both children were shocked by this outburst, and Pamela said: ‘‘Don’t you feel in the least bit sorry for him?’’

‘‘No!’’ Lena was emphatic. ‘‘Why on earth should I?’’

‘‘Because—oh, it doesn’t matter. You’ll only say I’m being impertinent.’’

Lena hardly heard this last remark, she was so intent on watching Max, as he lay, eyes closed and hands over his stomach, in the arm-chair into which he had at first slumped. He had told her that he was not sleeping well, and she noticed, with a deep, thrilling pang of sympathy, how now that he was relaxed, all the lines of his face sagged downwards. Perhaps it was only the way in which he was hunched, but his clothes seemed far too loose for him and there were bruise-like patches under each of his eyes. Poor Max! She watched him as a mother watches a sick child; and yet she was, unconsciously, a little glad of that sickness because it made the child depend on her.

Suddenly Max opened his eyes and said: ‘‘Oh, I must have some fresh air. It’s days since I took any exercise.’’

Lena waited; she almost said, ‘‘Let’s go for a walk,’’ but she left it too late. Max was looking at Colin: ‘‘How about a walk, Colin?’’

‘‘Yes—if you like.’’

Max, in the abnormal sensitivity from which he always suffered in his relationship with his son, said: ‘‘Oh, not if you don’t really want a walk.’’

‘‘Yes, I should like a walk.’’

‘‘Good.’’

‘‘And Lena can help me with this hem-stitching,’’ Pamela said, not without a certain artful malice. ‘‘Would you, Lena?’’

‘‘Well, of course, dear.’’ Lena smiled at Pamela and she smiled at Max, and then she smiled at Colin; but there was an intense exasperation on her face when she picked up the work.

Colin and Max said little to each other in the tram which they took to Settignano; from there they were going to walk by the hill road to Fiesole. ‘‘ You buy the tickets,’’ Max said. ‘‘ Your Italian is already much better than mine,’’ He added with mock ruefulness: ‘‘You see, you’re already far too clever for me.’’

Colin remembered the remark; he felt it was almost a reproach, though his father had said it in joke, and when having descended from the tram, they began to trudge, in silence, up the dusty road, the boy suddenly said: ‘‘Do you think I’m conceited?’’

Max laughed: ‘‘ No, of course not. And even if you were, you’d have good reason to be.’’

‘‘I feel—oh, I can’t say it!’’

Max’s whole being shrivelled, but he forced himself to pursue: ‘‘No, please say it.’’ Since he was sure his son was going to attack him, it was with a pleasurable relief that he at last heard:

‘‘Oh, it’s just—sometimes I think that you think that I—I despise you. And I don’t! It just isn’t true. I—I only despise myself.’’ Max did not answer and they continued to trudge upward, passing cars choking them with a dust that had a vague taste of sulphur, until Colin gathered himself and said: ‘‘You do think that, don’t you?’’

‘‘No, of course not.’’ And then feeling that his son’s courage had earned a like courage from himself, Max said: ‘‘But sometimes I feel sad that we care about such very different things. I know that it can’t be helped. Music and books and pictures—I know that to you those things already matter much more than they have ever done to me. And so perhaps’’—again there was that taste of sulphurous dryness in the mouth as another car passed—‘‘perhaps, in a sense, you have outgrown anything I can do for you.’’

‘‘But it’s not true—it just isn’t true!’’ Colin halted, and turning to his father a face blotched with perspiration and dust, protested: ‘‘I’ve never felt like that.’’ Then he looked away at the falling landscape, shimmering in the heat-haze of the late afternoon; to gaze for long at it made the nerves of the eyes ache: ‘‘ There are so many things at which I am useless—which even Pamela can do better than I can do.’’ He smiled: ‘‘Mending fuses, and throwing cricket-balls, and riding bicycles—oh, hundreds and hundreds of things. I’m such an awful coward,’’ he added in a low voice. ‘‘You know that, don’t you? And I’ve thought that perhaps you must hate me for it.’’

‘‘Of course you’re not a coward—and of course I don’t hate you!’’ What had before seemed difficult now seemed easy, and Max slipped an arm through his son’s arm, as he laughed:

‘‘Imagine Lena recommending this walk! She must have been crazy. All this traffic, and the sun beating down on our heads.… Perhaps it’s different in the spring and autumn.… Let’s find somewhere cool.’’

They turned off the road and having followed a path up a hillside until their shoes became white with dust, they at last threw themselves down in the shade, and stretched to full length. Their heads throbbed, and they felt their hearts beating with an unnatural loudness against the baked soil. The air was loud with cicadas.

Colin covered his face with his arm, because a spear of sunlight had pierced the overhanging leaves, and asked: ‘‘When do we leave Florence?’’

‘‘I don’t know.’’ Max sat up and twisted a dead branch, with a single shrivelled leaf clinging to it, between two fingers. ‘‘Do you want to leave?’’

‘‘Yes, I think so.’’

‘‘I thought you and Pamela were both so anxious to stay.’’

‘‘We were—before. Not now.’’

There was a pause, and then, the dead branch still twisting in and out of the sunlight: ‘‘I’m sorry about that business with the Italian boys.’’

‘‘It was all my fault. I don’t blame Enzo for feeling he never wants to see us again.’’

‘‘I wrote to him,’’ Max said quietly.

‘‘You wrote to him?’’ Colin was astonished; he at once sat up.

‘‘Yes. I don’t know if I did right. But when you wrote twice and he still didn’t come—and I knew you wanted to see him.… I thought it might help if a letter of apology came from me. But’‘—Max suddenly snapped the twig between his fingers—‘‘I’m afraid it didn’t work.… You don’t mind my having written, do you?’’

‘‘Well, of course not. It was jolly decent of you.’’

‘‘Because I guessed that you were unhappy about it.… Tell me, Colin’’—Max screwed up his eyes as he gazed down at the shimmering white of the road—‘‘why did you take the brooch?’’

‘‘You’ve never asked me that before,’’ Colin said with a sudden tightening of his whole body. He rolled over on his stomach.

‘‘No. Mummy said you wouldn’t tell her and so I thought there was no point in my asking.’’

‘‘Then why—now——?’’ Colin queried; and then added with a laugh, in case Max should think this was a snub: ‘‘ I don’t mind trying to explain, only I don’t know that I can. I don’t know that I understand it myself.’’ Briefly, and with difficulty, he told the story of how he had overheard Karen and Frank through the communicating door, and as he did so his face unconsciously assumed an expression of disgust and hatred. ‘‘ I couldn’t bear to hear her speak like that about—about
her
brooch. Well, after all, it was she who stole it in the first place; it was always meant for Pamela—wasn’t it?’’ Max had given the brooch to Karen but he now made no attempt to refute the injustice of his son’s accusation. He merely nodded his head as Colin continued: ‘‘I didn’t decide to steal it, it was just an impulse, it just happened. I saw her door open and there it was, and I went in and put it in my pocket. I don’t know what I meant to do with it at that time.… But then, driving in the car with Maisie, I suddenly thought of how Enzo and Rodolfo had said that if only they had fifty pounds or so, they would be able to go to Tunis, and I—I decided to sell it. And so at Prato I went to that little shop, and as you know, he would only give me that fifteen thousand lire. He said it wasn’t worth more, and he wanted to know where I’d got it; so I had to make up some story about selling it for my mother, which I knew he didn’t believe.’’ Colin sucked a blade of grass, his face curiously still after this confession, and then went on: ‘‘Driving home I wasn’t at all frightened or ashamed. Oh, but I was mad to think she wouldn’t notice. By then, you see, I’d persuaded myself that I’d originally stolen the brooch in order to help Enzo—and Rodolfo,’’ he added as an afterthought. ‘‘I liked to think that; it seemed somehow brave and noble to have committed something wrong because one wanted to help someone whom one—loved.’’ He pondered, his brows drawn together: ‘‘Perhaps, really, that
is
why I stole the brooch, and then perhaps—oh, I don’t know!’’

‘‘Thank you for telling me,’’ Max said quietly. ‘‘ Of course, at the time, I couldn’t have cared less,’’ he went on, once again screwing up his small green eyes under their red-tufted eyebrows as he focused them on the road. ‘‘It seemed terribly unimportant that you should have—have done something like that, when—when so much else was happening. But of course it was just as important, in its own way.’’

Colin braced himself: ‘‘Are—are we staying on in Florence, because you hope—that perhaps——?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘That’s what Pamela and I both thought.’’ Again he braced himself: ‘‘You want her back very much, don’t you?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Do you think there’s any—any chance?’’

Suddenly Max turned over on his stomach and put his head in his arms; he lay very still.

He was thinking of a visit he and Karen had paid to Blenheim four days after Karen had heard the news of her lover’s death. They had driven in silence, put from Oxford through the close, winter lanes, and when they had arrived it was to find the sun already sinking. Momentarily the palace caught its rays and brimmed with fire, so that it seemed as if, even while they watched, the flames would burst through, the roof would collapse, and the whole vast edifice would disrupt, tumble, subside in a million particles of light. But in a few seconds all was over. The sun descended into mist; the fire ebbed; everything became bare, moist and cold.