The Dividing Stream (7 page)

‘‘Y
OU
’
RE
later than usual,’’ Karen said to her mother who had only just arrived at the breakfast-table.

‘‘No, not later. Earlier. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up at half-past six and went for a walk. Now I’m hungry.’’ She turned round to click her fingers for the waiter. ‘‘ He’s half asleep—always is in the morning.’’

‘‘What was it like out?’’ Max asked, without any interest, since the mail had brought him a heap of business letters to keep him absorbed.

‘‘Oh, cool.’’

‘‘He’s not really listening,’’ Karen put in.

‘‘I know. That’s why I answered in only two syllables.’’

Beside the Arno Mrs. Bennett had found the once-dusty vegetation glistening with a heavy dew that wet her bare ankles and made her plimsolls squelch. She had walked into the sun which had at first appeared as no more than the tip of an opaque pink finger-nail through the mist on the hills; but as it rose higher and drank up the mist, her eyes began to ache from having to look at it and her skin to prick and itch with its slowly increasing warmth. All at once she felt tired and decided to sit down. The ground was still damp, but recently she had ceased to worry about such things, and finding a small, humped mound, she lowered herself on to it and stared at the water. How dirty it was, she thought: where it slapped the wrinkled mud there was a fringe of scum in which bobbed cigarette-ends, paper, and the other human filth of the city. Yet those two boys who had helped to make this filth—who daily bathed in it and sunbathed beside it—had been clean, so miraculously clean. And at the thought, she once more gave herself up—as she was always now giving herself up—to the recollection of their sleeping beauty on the dim, high bed.

She stirred from this reverie to notice some sunflowers growing behind her; and since they were larger than any she had seen in England, the vast orange petals curling outward to the warmth of the morning, she tottered up to pick one, not realizing, because there was no fence, that they were grown there for their seed. While her hand struggled with the stiff, prickly stem, twisting it from side to side without its once yielding, someone sneezed from the undergrowth at her feet and, to her astonishment, a voice asked: ‘‘
Che fa
?’’

‘‘Am I not supposed to pick it?’’ she answered in English.

Like some aged Caliban a man lumbered up out of the grasses and approached her, dragging a tattered army blanket in his left hand and carrying some boots in his right. His clothes, with their innumerable joins and patches, had the appearance of having once been sewn on to him and then never removed, in spite of an increase in his girth which threatened to explode them as the swelling seed explodes its pod. A grey lather of hair frothed from his head over his chin, the nape of his neck and the space where his shirt lay open. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, mended at one side with a piece of rag and cracked horizontally across both lenses. His mouth had fallen in about two long, decaying eye-teeth, the bridge of his nose had collapsed. Again he sneezed, and a thin thread of spittle glittered in the sunlight on his beard. ‘‘Ing-leesh,’’ he suddenly said, in a voice which wheezed and scraped as if some old engine had been started up after many years of idleness.

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘You-want-the-flower?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘
Un momentino
. A moment, please.’’ He sat down on the mound where she herself had been seated and began to tug his boots (they made her think of the early Charlie Chaplin) on to his blackened, sore-covered feet. Then, without doing up the laces, he went over to the sunflower and began to wrestle with it, his breath coming painfully in long, shuddering sobs, as if it were some creature he were trying to behead. ‘‘
Difficile, difficile
,’’ he muttered.

‘‘Oh, don’t bother, please don’t bother.’’

‘‘
No, no
.…’’ He swayed grotesquely from side to side, and the whole plant now swayed with him; then he tugged, tugged, tugged. ‘‘
Ecco
! … Please, lady.’’ With a strange little bow, almost as if he were parodying the manners of a dead generation, he held the bruised, battered head out towards her, the nails on his upturned hand curling round over each finger as if they were claws. Now a strong smell of turpentine from the bruised petals was mingling with the sweet-sour, almost intolerable odour from his mouldering body.

‘‘Thank you.’’

Suddenly, looking into his face and finding nothing uncovered by hair except the collapsed nose and mouth and a pair of blue, blood-shot eyes, whose red, sagging rims were smeared with what looked like golden eye-ointment, she felt an overmastering horror. ‘‘Thank you,’’ she repeated. She twisted the stem of the flower into the belt of her dress, and turned to hurry away.

But he was hobbling after her, gesticulating, talking Italian, tripping from time to time over the laces he had never done up, then all at once shouting, running as she ran, clawing at her arm.… She knew that at any moment she would fall, collapse, be left wholly to his mercy, and wondered whether to shout for help; until through the stream of Italian she heard, as if she were at last striking some solid object through water, the words ‘‘Tip … tip … tip’’; and then, in an enraged, tearful reiteration, ‘‘Hungry … hungry … hungry.’’ Turning her back to him in case he should try to snatch her bag, she pulled out the first note that came to her hand, unfortunately a thousand lire, and threw it to the morning breeze so that he had to grovel after it as it fluttered over the mud.… She did not wait to hear his thanks.

‘‘Well, what
was
it like?’’ Karen was asking.

‘‘Oh, as I say, cool. Pleasant. There were no bathers, not a soul.… I’ve just thought why I woke up so early this morning,’’ the old woman added.

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘Excitement.’’

‘‘Excitement?’’

‘‘Aren’t you excited? The children coming,’’ Mrs. Bennett explained.

‘‘Oh, the children,’’ Karen said.

‘‘Evidently not.’’

‘‘Now please don’t try to make out that I don’t care for them, Mother. I do. And I’ve been very much wanting them to come. I just don’t get excited over things before they happen, that’s all. Unlike Max. I think his most intense pleasures and pains are in anticipation—or in retrospect.’’

‘‘What’s that?’’ Max asked, looking up.

‘‘Nothing, dear. Mother and I are talking because, unlike you, we haven’t any letters to read. I do envy Max his letters. They give him a status—the assurance that he is necessary in the world.’’

‘‘The children should give you that,’’ Mrs. Bennett said, staring out past her daughter and then suddenly giving a small bobbing nod.

‘‘ ‘Tiny’ Maskell?’’ said Karen.

‘‘Yes, dear.… The servants here all speak such good English that I wonder why he imagines he has to shout in order to be understood. Edith Maskell is showing her mid-riff. It looks odd at breakfast.’’

‘‘May I look round?’’

‘‘Yes, but wait a moment. They’ve guessed that we’re talking about them. People always do.’’

Karen at once swung round in her chair, so that if the Maskells had previously been in any doubt they then must have been sure; covering her face with a hand, she began to giggle. ‘‘She’d never dare in Wimbledon—or did she say Putney? I wonder what Dr. Maskell’s patients would say. And all those shoulder-straps—I can count at least three. What do you suppose they all support?’’

‘‘Oh, nonsense, Karen.’’ Mrs. Bennett laughed and then added. ‘‘If you’re going with them to Siena to-day, aren’t you being a little rude?’’

‘‘You stared first.’’

‘‘Yes, but I didn’t have to turn round to do so.’’

‘‘You’re not going to Siena, are you?’’ Max suddenly asked, lowering his prospectus.

‘‘Yes.… Why not? I told you about it and you said you didn’t want to go. You didn’t seem to have any objections to my going.’’

‘‘But the children,’’ Max said.

‘‘Well?’’

‘‘You’re going to meet them?’’

‘‘The train doesn’t get in until after seven. Of course I’m going to meet them.’’

‘‘It’s a long journey. Suppose the car breaks down. You know how disappointed they’d be if you weren’t on the platform.’’

‘‘Oh, really, Max!’’ Karen laughed, but without any kindness. ‘‘It’s bad enough that we should have to be at the station two hours early when we’re catching trains ourselves. You fritter away so much time just waiting for things.’’

‘‘My own time,’’ Max said. ‘‘You prefer to fritter away other people’s time, by making them wait.’’ He had taken out a gold pencil and was jotting some figures on the back of an envelope; Karen leant over.

‘‘Counting it again?’’ she asked.

‘‘Counting what?’’

‘‘The money. All the money.… I must go and ask the Maskells when they expect to start.’’

‘‘She’s no better,’’ Mrs. Bennett commented, as Karen went away, and added, ‘‘I feel so dirty. I can’t think why.’’

Then she knew the reason. The old man’s feverish scrabbling at her bare arms had given her the sense of being soiled, almost infected.

M
AX
‘s Italian secretary, Lena, had large, masculine hands, a great deal of coarse black hair on her bare arms and legs, a figure which Mrs. Bennett had unkindly described as being ‘‘all anyhow’’ and a breathlessly efficient manner. Yet in spite of all these disadvantages Max had always thought her an attractive girl. She smiled readily and when she did so her oval, somewhat podgy face at once acquired charm; the teeth she showed were beautiful, her fine dark eyes glowed with good humour, a dimple appeared in her left cheek.

‘‘That’s enough for you to get on with, isn’t it?’’ Max had been lying full length on his bed, his hands over his eyes, as he dictated letter after letter to the girl.

‘‘If you’d like to go on, don’t worry about me,’’ Lena assured him. ‘‘Today I feel indefatigable.’’

‘‘Yes, but today I feel far from indefatigable,’’ Max replied with a smile. ‘‘It’s sweet of you to offer, though. I really ought to go on, because I know that to-morrow there won’t be a moment, with the children just arrived.’’

‘‘The children! Of course, I’d forgotten! They come this evening,’’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘‘How pleased you must be. And Mrs. Westfield too! I am so glad for you.’’

‘‘Yes, we are pleased,’’ Max said, feeling his words to be somehow limp and tepid after the girl’s.

She was pushing her dictation pad into the battered portfolio which she always took about with her as she said: ‘‘I think you work too hard, Mr. Westfield, considering this is your holiday.’’

‘‘The work has to be done. Besides I came here partly on business.’’

‘‘It must be a great strain, feeling that you are responsible for so much money, for so many people. And yet it must be exciting, very exciting.’’

‘‘Oh, I’ve long ago ceased to think myself important. Six months ago one of my fellow directors was killed in an accident. He had a great opinion of himself, obviously considered himself indispensable. But apart from a certain amount of administrative fuss and bother, the difference his death made to the firm was nil. That made me think.’’

‘‘I believe you’re too modest.’’ She sat looking at him, her portfolio clutched in her hands and her face glowing with the adoration she would never dare to voice. Nor was it necessary that it should be voiced, since Max had long since guessed.

‘‘Well, I think that’s all then, Lena.’’

‘‘Oh—I—I—wonder, Mr. Westfield,’’ she began as she went to the door, ‘‘I—I was wondering if—if I might be allowed to come to the station to encounter your children’s train. I’d keep in the background of course, but I should just like to see them. I’ve heard so much about them,’’ she ran on hurriedly, her face becoming more and more red and a chain of small bubbles appearing on her long upper lip. ‘‘ I feel I know them really well, and of course you needn’t introduce me or anything, it’s just if I can remain there and observe them, that’s all, just observe them. I should consider it indeed an honour,’’ she concluded breathlessly, and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve to run across the tip of her nose.

Max felt touched. ‘‘Of course you can come, the more the merrier. The children will be delighted to have a reception committee for them. I can pick you up in the car, if you like.’’

‘‘You mean I come here?’’

‘‘No, I can pick you up at your house. I have the address somewhere, haven’t I?’’

‘‘At my house?’’ As she echoed the words, a number of questions collided in her mind. What on earth would he think of the shell-chipped block of apartments? Should she ask him in? Introduce her mother? Offer him something to drink? ‘‘Oh, that’s really not necessary,’’ she said.

‘‘But why should you have the long, hot walk here?’’

‘‘I can bicycle.’’

‘‘Even bicycling exhausts one in this sort of weather. No, I can easily pick you up. At about seven o’clock.’’

‘‘I’ll be waiting on the steps so as not to delay you.’’

‘‘Is your mother better?’’ Max asked kindly as Lena prepared to go out.

‘‘She still has pain in her abdomen, Mr. Westfield.… If I close the shutters, perhaps you would like to sleep? You look tired,’’ she added tenderly. ‘‘You are Atlas supporting the world.’’

She reminded him of someone and when she was gone he lay for many seconds thinking who it could be. Each time that he was almost on to the connection, his mind seemed to shy away, as if it were afraid, until suddenly with an odd, jolting shock, he at long last knew: Ethel, his first wife.… Oh, they were not really alike, because Ethel had been frail, with mouse-blonde hair, a soft, almost inaudible voice and small hands which perpetually fluttered as she talked. But the smile, yes the smile; and the same douce, almost cloying, tenderness which at one and the same moment made him want to relax with a sigh and to run far away.… For both women his work was a mystic dedication to be spoken about as the wives of politicians speak about their husbands’ careers; whereas for Karen it was merely the source of holidays in expensive hotels, a town and country house, and the children’s education. Never for a moment did Karen flatter him with the thought that what he did could be done by no one else; but for poor Ethel, as now for Lena, that belief had been implicit.