The Italian Girl (12 page)

‘You’ve broken it. Oh, you are a beastly clumsy animal. There’s no need to jump like that when I come near you. And how can you talk so crudely about Flora –’

I felt agitated, exasperated, confused. Somehow it was all too scandalous, too outrageous. Levkin must be made to go, Flora must be made to realize what she had done, Isabel must be made to take some responsibility for the whole scene. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I find it all pretty shocking and surprising. And you seem to be taking it so calmly.’

‘Calmly!’ She gave a deliberate grimace of pain which transformed her face into a violent mask. She moved to the gramophone, turned it up for a moment to a deafening roar, and then lowered it till there was nothing but a distant beat. ‘Calmly!’ she said more softly with her back to me. ‘One is not calm on the rack. One is not calm in the fire. Oh, you are stupid. And I looked forward to you so much.’

‘Isabel, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t heal you, I’m not good enough. I’m in a muddle myself. I just feel there’s something here I don’t understand. Could you explain it to me, please?’ I was certainly following Levkin’s instructions to the letter.

‘Yes, me. You don’t understand me. And neither do I.’ She fell on her knees in front of the fire, closing her eyes against the great heat. ‘I’m the missing link.’

I stared down at her. Her dark hair was unkempt, wispy, straying bleakly upon her neck. ‘How did you find out about Flora, anyway?’ I asked her.

‘David told me.’

‘What perfect effrontery! If Levkin –’

‘Do stop calling him Levkin. He’s practically one of the family. Oh, can’t you see, can’t you see? I feel it must be written on the walls of this room, written on my face, on my hands –’

‘What –?’

‘I love him, I love him, I love him –’

‘You mean –?’

‘David, yes, David. I love him, I’m crazy with love, overwhelmed, absolutely done for – Oh God!’ She suddenly rolled over on the floor at my feet and took a firm grip of one of my ankles.

I stood paralysed and speechless with shock and suddenly nauseated as if some overpowering smell had entered the room. Levkin here too, Levkin everywhere. I was utterly surprised and shocked at Isabel’s words and her whole being was for a moment repugnant. I began to mumble and pull myself away.

‘Yes, I love him.’ She let go, still lying there limp, face downward on the ground, her silky legs revealed. ‘I worship him. I want him, I want his child. I even wanted that child of Flora’s, the child she killed. If I could have had even Flora’s child to keep –’ Her voice became thick and trembling.

I kicked the disabled stool aside and sat down heavily in a chair. I could not forget that Isabel had made an appeal to me, an appeal which had touched me to the heart although I had rejected it. Now I saw her for an instant as she lay on the floor as an abandoned woman, a harlot. I wanted to shake her, to interrogate her. ‘I suppose Otto doesn’t know
this
?’

‘No, of course not. I am still alive.’ Her voice came muffled through her hair.

‘How long –’

‘Ever since he came. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him in Otto’s workshop, or it might have been the next moment. It was like a lightning flash and everything becoming golden, like the end of the world. Oh, you can’t conceive what a lonely idiotic life I’ve led. I’ve seen no one for years except that monster Otto and those dreadful boys. I know it’s my own fault. I somehow wanted it all to be miserable and dreary so as to punish Otto and Lydia. But then when David came, it was a vision of life, it was like seeing an angel, it was like seeing a god. Can’t you see even now how beautiful he is? Can’t you at all imagine being in love with him?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘oddly enough I can. But when you found he had – seduced Flora – surely –?’

Isabel sat up and adjusted her gown over her knees. Her face was calmer and rather dreamily deliberate. She patted a log back into the fire. ‘I had him first, you see,’ she said softly.

‘But –’

‘He only took up with Flora because I tried to break with him. He did it to spite me.’

‘He – then – loved you?’

‘I don’t know. He wanted me. He found he could have me.’

‘You mean you actually –?’

‘Oh yes, Edmund, everything. Everything, everything, everything. And if we could have thought of more we would have done that too. Otto with the sister and I with the brother. Oh, it worked wonderfully!’ She turned to look at me now with a dreadful bold calm. Her face shone with a resigned, broken beauty.

‘Oh, Isabel –’

‘You’re scandalized.’

I was scandalized, horrified. I was also, I had just realized, and the realization was sobering, jealous. I felt excluded. Yet surely I did not want to be inside such a circle of hell? ‘But you tried to break it off?’

‘Well, yes. Lydia was dying in the house, practically in the next room. I think I felt rather as Otto did. We both tried about the same time to break the – addiction. I felt sick with myself. Lydia suffering so dreadfully and all that at the same time. It was rotten. And of course I was scared absolutely stiff of Otto finding out. I am scared absolutely stiff.’

‘He’s got no notion?’

‘No. He can think of nothing but Elsa. It’s the first real relation he’s had with a woman in years, perhaps ever. It was never much good with me. They were both, for both of us, a godsend.’

I hated hearing her talk like this. ‘But Isabel – honestly I am rather scandalized. These are – purely physical relationships –’

‘Oh, Edmund, Edmund, Edmund,’ she said wearily. She rose slowly, laboriously, like a stout elderly person. I rose too.

‘But what are you going to do now?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know. Just go blindly on. We are both in the pockets of those changelings.’

‘You mean you would – re-establish relations with that boy – after Flora – ?’ I of Autun, the root of all evil. Isabel simply didn’t seem to know what she was doing.

‘I don’t think you’ve understood me, Edmund,’ said Isabel. ‘I am in love. I agree that this is a form of madness, but at least it’s a fairly well-known form. Or perhaps you don’t know about it? “An arrow in the side makes poor travelling, only not to run is a worse pain.”’

‘You are raving,’ I said. ‘Otto could so easily find out, and –’

‘I know. I feel like a ship moving steadily towards an iceberg. But I can no other. Don’t you see I’m
in extremis
? The only question is, when Otto finds out, will he kill David or me or both.’

She looked so pale and small, her arms hanging limply by her sides, as if she were already pinned helplessly to a wall. I felt suddenly sorry, and frightened for her. She looked like a victim. ‘What can I do for you, Isabel?’

‘One thing. Take Flora away.’

I half turned from her. The memory of my grapple with Flora came back with photographic clarity. That was the one rational thing which I could have done, protect Flora, and I had systematically and now completely made it impossible.

‘Yes, take her away, Edmund. She’s fond of you and she trusts you. Take her to your house. Her term isn’t starting yet and she simply mustn’t stay here. There’ll be some outrage. If she stays here, we shall all of us go mad.’

As I listened to her tones of entreaty I thought of another thing. Levkin would certainly tell Isabel that he had seen me seizing Flora. I was filled with confused angry distress. ‘Can’t you help Flora yourself, Isabel?’

‘Don’t be a fool. She loves him too. Flora will never forgive me between now and the end of her life. David told me he had made her pregnant. He returned to
me,
he came back to me with
that
confidence, with
that
simplicity. How can she ever forgive our having spoken of this together, consulted about her together? Don’t you know what the pride of a young girl is like? And the first time, the very first time. Ah, poor, poor child –’ Tears were coming to Isabel at last, big slow tears such as one can only weep for oneself when one pities oneself in the guise of another.

‘I agree Flora would be better out of the house. And then you –?’

‘And then I can get on with it? Well, that won’t be your affair, Edmund. You must leave Otto and me to our merry-go-round. You remember what I said about Saint Teresa’s cupboard in hell? You thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you –’

‘Oh, my dear, I will try and help. I’ll do what I can. I’m sorry I’m such a fool.’

‘That’s all right, Edmund. You’d better go now. Please look after Flora. And, Edmund –’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you mind if I kiss you? I’m sorry about the shock tactics last time. I was just a bit mad then because of David. I don’t know if you understand.’

I didn’t quite. ‘I understand.’ I took small, plump, tear-stained Isabel in my arms and kissed her hot eyes and her brow. Her arms clutched my neck violently for a moment and I let her find my lips. It seemed like a desperate farewell. As I held her then I felt sad and deprived in all my being and felt from top to toe the same sadness in her.

13. Edmund runs to Mother

‘Maggie.’

It was very quiet in the kitchen, with a kind of distilled quietness, after the recent hubbub of Isabel. It seemed a place of sanity and recollection.

Now Maggie had been washing Otto’s underwear. There was an intimate smell of warm wet wool. Steaming piles of vests and long pants lay in a big blue plastic basket. One by one she took the garments and stretched them into shape and laid them over the slats of a wooden drying-rail which had been lowered from the ceiling by a pulley. I recalled this ritual very well from childhood, the strong neat movement of the hands as they pulled the garments straight, the hands of Giulia and Carlotta and Vittoria. I sat down to watch, feeling with a mixture of shyness and familiarity included in the scene, comfortably included in her consciousness although she had not replied to my exclamation, had scarcely looked in my direction. My half-eaten orange and the pile of boxwood blocks lay still at one end of the table, and at the other were Maggie’s sewing, her work-box and scissors. I watched her quick rhythmical movements. The line of Otto’s things lengthened.

I looked up at her face and found her looking at me. Her eyes, with that damp strange animal look, seemed forbidding and suspicious. I felt troubled by a sharp need to talk to her, together with a paralysing absence of wit. I felt extremely upset, ill-used, lacerated, I wanted comfort: yet how could I ask for it here? I looked quickly down.

It was a dark rainy evening and the light in the kitchen was uncertain, as if things were constantly moving and shifting just at the corner of one’s vision. The twilight began to trouble me. I felt distressed in all my body and almost frightened. I knew I ought to go upstairs and sit alone and think about what Isabel had said to me, but I could not go away. I moved abruptly and switched the light on. There was a miserable glow, more like fog than like light, scarcely brighter than the damp sulphurous illumination outside. Maggie, who had jumped slightly at my movement, stared at me and then returned to her task.

I ranged about the kitchen in the dirty muted haze, touching things here and there. I ached with discomfort and distress. ‘God, what a rotten light. You couldn’t possibly sew by this light, I hope you don’t try. Lydia was so mean. Are there any stronger bulbs in the cupboard? Ah yes, a hundred watts, that’s better. Could you turn the light out again? All right, I’ll take my shoes off.’

I mounted on the table to fix the new bulb. My hair brushed the ceiling. Maggie was looking up at me in the shifting twilight, her face a blur, her eyes big and black. She stretched out a hand to help me descend. I felt the small hand warm and damp from the washing. It seemed a long way down. Then she moved to the door and a very bright light dazzled us. I covered my eyes. Yes, Lydia was dead.

The garden outside was suddenly a dark blue square, misty and insubstantial, withdrawn. I went to pull the gay red and blue William Morris curtains. The kitchen was enclosed and bright now like a compact little ship, everything in it brimfull of radiant colour. I felt a little better. Maggie spread out Otto’s pants upon the rail, a wide outrageous forked pennant. I sat on the table and began to destroy the remainder of the orange.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ I said to her.’ You must have been taller than me when we first met.’

‘No. You were already taller, much taller. You are thinking of Vittoria.’

‘Where do you come from in Italy, Maggie? I’ve stupidly forgotten. Verona?’

‘No, that was Giulia. I come from Rome.’

‘Rome, of course. I remember your showing us pictures.’

‘Have you been to Rome?’

It seemed odd she should not know. And yet why should she? ‘No. Florence, Venice. Not Rome. You remember you said you’d take us there, kidnap us? We had quite a fantasy about it. Or was that Carlotta?’

‘No, that was me. Carlotta came from Milan.’

Her voice was that of a cultivated English person with only a very light accent, She had been an educated intelligent girl. What had condemned her to a wasted life in this sombre household?

‘I’m afraid you’re all mixed up in my mind,’ I said. ‘I wonder where
they
are now –’

‘Married.’ She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.

In a sudden flurry of distress I went on hastily, ‘People in the north dream of the south. I wonder do people in the south dream of the north. Did you?’

‘I had a dream of the north once, a dream of strength.’

This distressed me too, though I could not say why. I watched her briskly haul the drying-rail up to the roof. Otto’s enormous underwear swayed in the warm air from the range, blatantly unmentionable.

Something in the sight of my brother’s things displayed in a row like a fatuous grinning army produced a rush of irritation and some more painful emotion. I wanted to sweep Otto right out of the way. Then I knew that I was going to leap the divide and appeal to Maggie for help. I said, ‘I’ve been a failure since I arrived here.’

Maggie slowly dried her hands on the towel. She looked at me with an expression of faint interest. She seemed aware of the extent of my appeal. But she just said, ‘And now you are going away?’