The Dividing Stream (40 page)

After the peasant woman had gone, Karen sat on the arm of his chair and said: ‘‘ Glad to be up?’’

‘‘I feel terribly weak.’’

‘‘Well, of course you do, you poor darling.’’ She attempted to put an arm round him and kiss him but he said fretfully:

‘‘Don’t suffocate me— please.’’ He added: ‘‘I think I’d like my sketch-book.’’

‘‘You are a funny old thing.’’

The following day she said: ‘‘ I’m telling Anna to make up my bed with you again. Is that all right?’’ She had missed not sleeping with him and her whole being now craved for a renewal of their intercourse.

‘‘If you don’t mind I think I’d rather be alone just at present,’’ he said, without looking up from his sketching.

‘‘Oh.’’ She placed herself on the ledge of the terrace, her back to the view, and then said: ‘‘Why?’’ as calmly as she could manage.

‘‘Why?’’ he repeated. ‘‘Oh, because I do—that’s all.’’

She did not realize that he had always been unconsciously disgusted by the sexual act, and that he regarded it as an evil necessity rather than as a source of light and joy. Now, illogically, in the secret recesses of his personality, there had been established some connection between his illness and the hours of intense, unthinking pleasure he had snatched with Karen. The illness had been a retribution; he did not say that to himself and consciously he did not even think it. But he felt it in his whole immature, twisted being; and perhaps he was right. The subterranean guilt may have at last chosen to erupt in this manner.

‘‘All right,’’ she said listlessly. ‘‘I’ll stay upstairs. For how long?’’

‘‘Oh, I really don’t know. Do you mind?’’

‘‘Well, of course I mind!’’

‘‘It matters so much to you?’’ he said with a mixture of astonishment and repugnancy.

‘‘Yes.… You seem to think that I should be ashamed. You know it’s a Victorian notion that women endure that sort of thing but don’t really enjoy it.’’ But for ‘‘that sort of thing’’ she used a far cruder word.

He looked up at her now for the first time and stared at her. Then he suddenly burst into laughter; and that was his only comment.

For the next few days they ate together and sat together, as they had done in the past, and Anna ceased to spend her nights at the
villino
; but Karen felt that he now only tolerated her presence whereas before he had taken pleasure in it. He would go about his occupations of painting, reading and writing, and she herself would attempt to concentrate on some task which kept her beside him. But sooner or later, while she was darning socks, or shelling peas, or writing one of her short, illiterate letters, she would find herself watching his absorbed face with a bitter mingling of impatience and regret and a longing to be possessed by him. She would say something, and he would answer, briefly, in his staccato voice, and then he would return to what he was doing as if a door had been quietly locked in her face. One morning, as she finished a late breakfast, she heard him laughing with Anna on the terrace as she beat one of the mats, and then their voices, speaking Italian, began to weave an invisible net of sound in which she felt that her whole being was struggling for life and freedom. She held her coffee-cup in trembling hands and stared into its depths; until she noticed, with revulsion, that a black hair, obviously Anna’s, was clinging to one side. She thought, I knew the woman was dirty; and it was as if she had succeeded in scoring some immense, if subtle, triumph.

One day Frank decided to go out shooting, and slinging a rifle he had borrowed across his shoulders, he set off towards the ferry which would take him from their side of the river to the marshes on the other side. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki tunic whose breast-pockets were swollen with the cartridges he had put there; his brown, sinewy legs were bare except for some army boots and the short, thick army socks he had folded over them. He wore a straw sun-hat on his head.

When he had gone, Karen wandered out into the garden for the first time since the old house had fallen, and she was at once sickened by the sweet, pervading smell of corruption which hung on the air. It came from one particular spot under the rubble, and she guessed that there the carcase of the cat was dissolving in the summer heat. But she stayed out on the parapet, in spite of her nausea, because she wanted to see Frank. Far away the ferry began to move, with short jerks, across the shrunken waters; and he—how typical!—was helping the old man to tug at the cable, their two bodies straining side by side. He was always achieving this kind of simple comradeship with others, she thought; with men particularly and with those who were his inferiors. But with her it had seldom existed. And then, all at once, she remembered what he had said about the tedium he found in doing a thing once he had mastered it; and she supposed that she, too, was being relegated to the limbo which had swallowed up music, chess and flying. It was with a savage kind of relief that she at last faced this conclusion.

She heard two shots from the marshes and the whole sickly air seemed to jitter and sway. A covey of birds were blown upwards, as if by the force of the explosion, and then drifted across the river, while the ring of the shots still persisted in her head. Again the air swung hither and thither; it made her feel vaguely giddy, like a stunning blow. He was a good shot, and seldom failed to bring down a bird. Out of the bamboos and dwarf shrubs a number of small whiffs of smoke were wriggling, like grey worms, up the intensely blue sky behind. The reverberation was now almost ceaseless.

She turned to go in and then stopped appalled. Something large and almost the same colour as the rubble was picking its way slowly over a fallen column; and then, almost as if it knew she was watching it, it whisked away. After several seconds another grey form—or perhaps it was the same—appeared on another heap of stones. Its tail, like a length of wet string, seemed to be plastered to the masonry. Then it too disappeared. Somewhere in the depths and silence of the ruin the putrefying carcase was being devoured.

‘‘Anna!’’ Karen screamed. ‘‘Anna, Anna, Anna!’’ But the peasant woman had long since gone home. Once again the air swayed from side to side like a suffocating curtain in a wind.

When Frank returned that evening she noticed, with joy, that he was changed. ‘‘A wonderful day,’’ he said, flinging down on the terrace the birds he had shot in a bedraggled jumble of feathers, beaks stuck together with blood, and rigidly grasping claws. He put out his arms and she went to him, with the mingled fear and fascination of an animal lured into a snare. ‘‘Oh, Frank!’’ she whispered; and then mutely she welcomed the destructive rage of his passion as she welcomed the sweat of his body and the grime of his face and the blood of his hands. She felt she had never been possessed so utterly; so utterly annihilated by another human being. Until, all at once, she was alone on the wicker couch on the verandah, with her torn and aching body, and he had gone. She got up to find him again, but when she tried the door which led to his room, she could not get it open. She banged on it and called his name, and then walked round to the other door. Both doors were locked.

‘‘Frank!’’ she called. ‘‘Frank! What’s the matter? Let me in!’’ And then in desperation, on a single repeated note: ‘‘Frank, Frank, Frank.’’

She heard him move about and at last he came to one of the closed doors and said through it, in a level, authoritative voice: ‘‘Please don’t interrupt me. I’m trying to do some work. I want to be left to myself.’’

‘‘W
HY
won’t you come to the opera, Granny?’’

Pamela asked. Mrs. Bennett was sitting in dressing-gown and slippers,
Emma
face downwards in her lap. Her grey hair, brushed loose about her shoulders instead of being screwed into a bun, made it seem as if she were failing in a grotesque attempt to recapture a lost youthfulness. But the truth was that she had undone the hair and had then felt too tired to do it up again.

In answer to her grand-daughter’s question, she said: ‘‘Oh, for lots of reasons.’’

‘‘Such as?’’

‘‘I feel weary, and I don’t like music, and I don’t like crowds. And I want to be alone and read my book. And besides there is Nicko.’’

‘‘Nicko! That’s all you ever think about.’’

‘‘Someone must think about him, dear.’’

‘‘Yes, I suppose so.… Somehow I don’t think it’ll be much fun.’’

‘‘I don’t see why not.’’ The old woman gave a small, twitching smile as she added: ‘‘You don’t miss me all that much, do you?’’

‘‘What a thing to say!’’ Pamela exclaimed, putting her arms about Mrs. Bennett’s shoulders and kissing her on one cheek. ‘‘You do say such odd things.’’ She turned her head sideways to read the tide of the book and then said: ‘‘You’re breaking your resolution.’’

‘‘My resolution?’’

‘‘Last year you said you were never going to read another Jane Austen book until you were on your death-bed. You said you wanted to save her—remember?’’

‘‘Oh, I think that was rather an affected thing to say,’’ the old woman replied with what was almost crossness. She gave a jerk of her bony shoulders as if to push her grand-daughter away from her, and then looked up to Colin who had just come in: ‘‘You do look the little man-about-town,’’ she said, maintaining the same sharpness.

‘‘Do I?’’ Colin did not know whether to be flattered or riled at this comment on the suit which his father had recently had made for him by Rossi. ‘‘It fits well, doesn’t it?’’

‘‘Far too well for a boy of your age.’’

But Colin was too busy peering at himself in the mirror which hung in one corner of the room to hear this last comment. It was a long, rectangular mirror, in a dark brown wood frame; and after the manner of many old Italian mirrors, particularly in the country, it was divided down the centre by a crucifix, carved from the same almost black wood. Colin looked from the expert cut of the shoulders of his suit to the grotesquely sagging shoulders of the writhing Christ, and said: ‘‘What an odd mirror—I’ve never noticed it before.’’ There, in the left panel, was himself with his small, compact body and enormous eyes; and there, in the right panel, was his grandmother, her white hair straggling about her face, and Pamela still behind her; and there, in the centre, the crude Christ twisted in agony, black on his black cross. It was as if they had been snatched up into a timeless state, he and the two women frozen on either side of the frozen agony of the Christ, as in a nightmare where, try as one may, one cannot move an inch. He wanted to move but he could not do so; he could not even raise a hand or nod his head.

Suddenly the whole of Mrs. Bennett’s body jerked as if she had been pricked by some invisible instrument; her book tumbled noisily to the floor as, ‘‘ Oh,’’ she said. ‘‘Oh.…’’ She was still staring ahead of her.

‘‘What is it?’’ Pamela asked.

‘‘I don’t know.… The back of my head.… I had such a strange feeling. And I was looking in the mirror, and it seemed …’’ She began to cry, wrinkling up her face so that she looked like an aged monkey and making no attempt at concealment. ‘‘It’s horrible,’’ she said; but they did not know whether she was referring to the mirror or to an experience which she appeared to be incapable of describing in spite of their repeated questions.

‘‘I’ve never felt less like the opera,’’ Pamela whispered to Colin as they waited for Max to bring the car to the door of the hotel.

‘‘Why on earth?’’

‘‘Oh, I don’t know—Granny being so odd, and …’’ Her voice trailed off, because she could never express any but the simplest of her emotions. The truth was that she was feeling a mysterious kind of dread, not unlike what she had experienced before going to school for the first time; but this was worse, because she could not guess its cause. ‘‘Anyway, you don’t like opera yourself, do you?’’

‘‘Who said?’’

‘‘You came back jolly quick from that performance of
Madame Butterfly
.’’

‘‘That was because the singing was so bad.’’

‘‘You mean you were bored.’’

Colin did not bother to contradict her because the true explanation seemed even more discreditable to him. He had gone alone to the opera and, arriving early, had found himself sitting next to a young couple who, he decided, must have only recently got married. They scrutinized him, not surreptitiously as two such people would have done in England, but with so bold and frank a curiosity that they at once made him blush. Then they began to talk about him. They spoke fast and he could not understand all that they said; and though, in fact, they were commenting admiringly on his English clothes, he assumed that they were jeering at him. He attempted to outstare them but after a few seconds his eyes fluttered downward; he attempted not to listen; he looked at his watch and looked at the proscenium and looked at the other people filing in. At last, in a panic of self-consciousness, he rushed from the theatre.

It was not an incident of which he now felt proud.

Signor Commino, in a dinner-jacket green with age and a shirt whose soft collar had obviously been worn before, was rubbing his hands together and swaying back and forth, on his toes, like a balloon in a high wind. ‘‘You look wonderful, Lena,’’ he said. He scratched the top of his head with his forefinger as he repeated: ‘‘Wonderful.’’ Lena took no notice.

When Max drove up, Mino continued: ‘‘You should always wear beige.’’ With her sallow complexion, this was one colour which Lena should obviously never wear. ‘‘There is something very chic about you in beige—something almost Parisian. And those furs of your mother’s add just the right touch of sophistication. Yes, they are a great success, a great success.’’

‘‘Oh, shut up!’’ Lena said, as she climbed into the car. It was not so much the absurd compliments that angered her as his thus gratuitously informing Max and the children that the furs had been borrowed.

Mino, not at all defeated by her last remark, climbed into the car between the two children, and wriggling his body as if he were itching all over, chuckled: ‘‘How do you say in English? A rose between two—two spines.’’

‘‘Thorns,’’ said Colin.

‘‘Ah, thorns, thorns, thorns.’’