The Dividing Stream (8 page)

Not that he had ever really enjoyed being Ethel’s hero. Even as a young man, when the taste of adoration is kinder to the palate, he had often wanted to vomit up her sweet, uncritical devotion. And indeed, what had first attracted him to Karen, apart from her pathos, was precisely her refusal to find him impressive, as Ethel had done. Moreover her very scepticism had driven him up and up to heights which he doubted if he would ever have scaled with only Ethel to satisfy. All at once, on marrying Karen, his ambitions had swollen; for, whereas, with Ethel, it had been enough to have made a success out of his uncle’s business in Detroit, to own a six-bedroomed house and a comfortable Ford tourer, and to have a single coloured maid, under Karen’s grudging eye these achievements soon began to seem small. And so the business ceased to be a Detroit business, or even an exclusively American business; and with a strange mingling of joy and fear he had discovered in himself abilities which, because of the atrophying effect of Ethel’s praise, he had never known he possessed. Karen demanded so much, the most ingenious and reckless of deals winning from her no more than a ‘‘Not bad, darling”, that each success only served to make him struggle higher in the determination that one day he would really show her, one day she would really be impressed.… And he had come so much to enjoy the tireless pushing upward, that sometimes the thought of attaining this object would make him feel afraid. After that, what would be left? he would ask himself. Would life seem all at once empty?

Ah, but the climbing so often made him feel giddy; and then, like the traveller in the desert who suddenly thinks nostalgically of tea in his suburban home (soggy toast, fruit cake and damson jam in a crystal dish), Max would think of the six-bedroomed Detroit house, of Ethel padding up and down stairs in slippers to ‘‘peep’’ at the sleeping children, of picnics, visits to the cinema, and holidays in a bungalow on the Cape. Perhaps he didn’t really wish to go back to these things any more than the traveller really wants to return to his suburb; but there were times when an intense, parched longing for them would fill his whole being. To return, only to return!

As if to break from this craving, he got off the bed and thumbed through some of the letters and papers which Lena had arranged on his desk. The man in Vienna was obviously inefficient, perhaps should be sacked. What news from London? Rome—he’d have to go there.… Suddenly, a physical giddiness, the counterpart of the mental unease he felt as he turned the typed papers, made him clutch the side of the desk. Up and up, up and up.… He remembered how at one of his college initiations he had had to climb a pole blindfolded, while below the members of the fraternity had belaboured him with plimsolls, belts and rulers. He had seemed to climb for hours to escape from their encouraging shouts, their laughter, and their sharp, stinging blows; nor had he ever wholly escaped from them, since in the end they had pulled him down and told him that would do.… ‘‘ That will do’’; he had never heard Karen use the phrase.

He wandered into her room and, as if deliberately to humiliate himself, began to pick up and sort the possessions she had strewn everywhere on chairs, floor, and bed. Dirty underclothes lay on clean dresses which the maid had brought the day previously from the laundry; her last night’s evening-dress had been chucked in one corner; on the dressing-table there was a handkerchief stained with lipstick, a confusion of bottles, pieces of soggy cotton-wool and odds and ends of paper, and littered among them, the whole contents of one of her jewel-cases. Suppose the maid had come in and taken something? And if she had, would Karen have ever missed it? Max began to take up the rings, brooches and necklaces and place them one by one in their crocodile-and-gold box. He liked Karen to dress well; and since, in spite of her untidiness, she succeeded in doing so, he never for a moment grudged her the money thus spent. But without being mean, he was naturally careful of money, and it grieved him that she should waste and spoil what he gave her by her indifference to its value. Whereas his own straitened upbringing had made him always ‘‘careful”, on Karen the same sort of upbringing had had the precisely opposite effect; marrying Max, she had decided that she would never again worry about money.

Sorting out the jewellery, Max came on a circular diamond-and-ivory brooch, in an old-fashioned setting, which he stared at for many seconds, holding it in both hands. It was one of the few, perhaps the only really valuable piece of jewellery he had given to Ethel; and when he had become engaged to Karen, it was the first of his many presents to her. The brooch had been his mother’s. Karen had never really cared for it and had talked of having it reset, without ever doing so; but when, the year previously, he had suggested that, since she never wore it, they might give it to Pamela, his daughter, on her sixteenth birthday, Karen at once refused. From then on she had worn the brooch at increasingly long intervals.

Unlike Karen, Ethel had never cared for jewellery, putting on the same few pieces day after day. There was her engagement ring, which he had bought for forty dollars because she wouldn’t let him spend more, her wedding-ring, a cultured pearl necklace, a hideous spray of flowers in jet and pearl—the bequest of an aunt—some diamond ear-studs, and of course this brooch. When she died, bleeding stanchlessly after child-birth, she whispered ‘‘I’ve nothing to leave you, dear. Just my few bits and pieces. And of course the kids.’’ He had told Karen this story and she had at once turned away, making him think she was smiling, because the remark had struck her as sentimental. But then she turned back; her eyes were full of tears, and he felt strangely and pleasantly relieved.

Having put the brooch away among the rest of the jewellery, Max set about collecting the soiled handkerchiefs, scraps of paper and cotton-wool. Ethel had been so tidy, so irritatingly tidy. (‘‘What’s the matter, darling?’’ ‘‘I can’t find my socks. I do wish you’d leave things where I put them.’’ ‘‘ But they’re not lost, darling.’’ And the socks would invariably be produced.) She wore heavily starched white blouses, her skin always smelled vaguely of coal-tar soap, and after each meal she would go into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She kept a Christmas-card list, sent and received.…

But now his whole being went out to the dead woman, as sometimes in the lonely years before he had met her, his whole being would go out to his dead mother. Yet, while he thought of her, it was only half her features that he saw. Strangely, the rest were the girl Lena’s.

‘‘I hope you don’t feel too uncomfortable after the luxury of your Packard,’’ Mrs. Maskell said.

‘‘No, of course not,’’ Karen assured her.

‘‘They’re plucky little cars, these Hillman Minxes.’’ On the back of ‘‘ Tiny’’ Maskell’s head there was a grey-flannel cricket hat such as Karen could not remember having seen since the days at her mother’s school. His heavy jowl shone after its morning shave like a slab of purple meat and she noticed, glancing at his massive hands on the wheel, that he wore a broad gold wedding-ring on his fourth finger.

‘‘You must be excited about the children,’’ Mrs. Maskell said, and then, clutching at her hair, ‘‘Could you shut the sunshine roof a little, Tiny?’’

‘‘What’s the matter? Losing the old toupée?’’ His bell-like guffaw jangled back and forth, deadened only by the stifling upholstery. ‘‘Yes, you must be pleased about the brats,’’ he said.

‘‘Have you any children?’’ Karen asked.

‘‘No,’’ Mrs. Maskell answered in a small voice from the back of the car.

Tiny sighed. ‘‘It’s not for want of trying,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s nothing we want more. Still, we have some nephews and nieces, we get a lot of fun out of them. And I always say a doctor has to be a father to his patients.’’

‘‘I love your dress,’’ Mrs. Maskell said. Unlike her husband she did not care to talk about their childlessness and believed him to be insensitive for doing so.

‘‘Do you? I’m so glad. I got it in Paris when we stopped there on our way through.’’

‘‘We hurried through Paris as quick as we could, to avoid the temptations.’’

‘‘What temptations?’’ Tiny asked jocularly, but Mrs. Maskell’s voice surmounted this obstacle, merely by rising a little, as the car was at that moment surmounting the bumps in the road:

‘‘Fifty pounds is so little,’’ she said. ‘‘One feels so ashamed, having to niggle and scrape all the time. It can’t be good for British prestige.’’ Plumply middle-aged, she had a fresh complexion, a round, indeterminate face and a tendency to wear the sort of clothes and hair-styles which she saw in fashion magazines on girls of half her age. At present, as she leant forward, the white flesh of her bare mid-riff was creased into three rolls. ‘‘Someone thumbing for a lift,’’ she said, as out of the dust before them a khaki-clad figure with a rucksack on his back could be seen with raised arm. ‘‘No, don’t stop,’’ she told Tiny who had begun to slow down. ‘‘ We’re cramped enough here already, what with the picnic basket and those two empty Chianti bottles I keep telling you to throw away.’’

‘‘Looked English,’’ Tiny said.

‘‘Probably one of those Scandinavian students who would sleep on the beach of our hotel at Nice. They do Europe on a shoe-string. I rather admire that, because I could never do it myself. They’ve got guts, those Nordic people. Don’t you think, Mrs. Westfield?’’ She fingered her hair which was brushed back in a straggling Dauphin bob. ‘‘Don’t you?’’

‘‘More than the Southerners, you mean?’’

‘‘Yes, more than the Southerners.’’

‘‘Chris always gets romantic about the North,’’ Tiny Maskell explained. ‘‘That’s why I’ve never dared to take her for a holiday up there. I think it began with a Swedish medical student she was walking out with before she met me.’’

‘‘Oh, don’t be silly, Tiny.’’

‘‘What was he called? Tore—Tore——’’

‘‘I can’t remember.’’

‘‘Of course you can,’’ he said jovially. ‘‘You’re only bluffing. I often wondered what happened to the chap? Nice-looking boy, he was.’’

‘‘I made a list of what we ought to see in Siena,’’ Chris Maskell interrupted. ‘‘At least, I made it with the help of an Italian friend of ours.’’ She added impressively: ‘‘The Marchesa di Canelelas.’’

‘‘Oh, yes,’’ Karen said.

Mrs. Maskell felt that some amplification was necessary. ‘‘Last year she fell suddenly ill during the night in our hotel at Salzburg and Tiny had to go along to see her. It was sheer over-eating, he says. But she thought he’d done wonders for her, and she told us to be certain to visit her if we came here. Well, when we arrived, of course like most of the best people she’d gone up into the mountains. But she invited us up to Vallombrosa where she was staying and gave us a gorgeous lunch and tea. She’s an awful darling, really terribly cultured as they all seem to be, and speaks the most lovely English—much better than the average Englishwoman. Anyway, I asked her about Siena and she gave me a list of ‘musts’—
and
——’’ Chris paused for emphasis—‘‘
and
an introduction to Count Chigi so that we can see the Chigi collection. You’ve heard of the Chigi collection?’’

‘‘Yes, of course.’’

‘‘Two Botticellis, I think she said, and something we must look at by someone called Sanso-something-or-the-other, and quantities of marvellous furniture, glass and so on. It was particularly kind of her to give us the introduction because, as you probably know, without one, one can’t get in.’’

‘‘Unless one tips the attendant two hundred lire,’’ Karen could not resist saying. ‘‘That’s what Max did.’’

‘‘Really?’’ Chris looked at her in dismay, and then added: ‘‘Oh, these Italians are so corrupt!’’

‘‘Well, anyway, what’s the plan of campaign?’’ Tiny asked.

‘‘I thought we’d keep the Chigi collection to the last—until the afternoon—and that before lunch we’d peep at the Duomo, the Palazzo Pubblico, San Giovanni’’—she continued to read from her list—‘‘ and the Accademia, and something here which I can’t quite make out.’’ She handed the list to Karen.

‘‘Oh, the Palazzo Buonsignori.’’

‘‘Yes, that’s right,’’ Chris said, without attempting to Pronounce the name. ‘‘ You’re not stopping again, Tiny, are you?’’ It was one of their jokes that he so often had to leave the car.

‘‘I’m not stopping,’’ he said. ‘‘But the old bus is. I wonder what’s the matter with her. Plenty of petrol.’’

One by one they all tumbled out into the heat and dust of the road. Tiny pulled up the bonnet of the car and put his head into it, clicking his tongue against his teeth. ‘‘Well, what’s wrong?’’ Chris asked, yet again hitching at her shoulder-straps. She perched on a stone by the roadside but at once leapt up. ‘‘Christ, it’s burning!’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘What’s wrong, Tiny?’’

‘‘How the hell should I know? Give a chap a chance.’’

Chris turned to Karen. ‘‘He’s a kid-glove driver. At home he can’t even mend a fuse. I think men should be practical, don’t you?’’

‘‘Oh, stop nattering, Chris!’’ Tiny growled, as he surveyed the car, leaning back with his paunch stuck out and his hands at the belt of the crumpled grey flannels which sagged low on his hips.

Two cars had already shot past, covering them with dust and choking them with fumes, but the third, a battered and rickety Fiat, at least twenty years old, drew up and, while two children peered from the back, an old man asked them in Italian if he could be of any help.

‘‘What’s he want?’’ Tiny demanded.

‘‘He wants to know if he can help,’’ Karen said.

‘‘No, I can manage on my own. Please thank him and tell him I can manage. It’ll only mean a large tip.’’

‘‘Oh, don’t be so obstinate, Tiny!’’ Chris exclaimed. ‘‘We don’t want to be stuck here all morning.’’

‘‘I can put it right in a jiffy. Anyway he doesn’t look as if he knew a thing about engines. He’s almost in his grave. I don’t want him meddling about, you don’t know what harm he mayn’t do.’’

‘‘Oh, all right, all right. Have it your own way.’’ Chris sank down on to a patch of grass under an olive-tree; but once again she had to leap to her feet. ‘‘Ants!’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘Oh, you are maddening,’’ she accused Tiny in a sudden fury. ‘‘ It’s always like this. If we get lost, he’s always too proud to ask the way. It’s so bloody silly. We’ll all get sunstroke,’’ she added peevishly. ‘‘And I’m dying of thirst.’’