The Italian Girl (3 page)

Drunkenness disgusts me. I recalled now that Isabel had said in a letter some time ago that she thought that her husband was taking to drink: and I recalled how I had thought then that Otto, at best an uncontrolled and sometimes a violent man, would make a horrible drunkard. I looked down at him with repulsion.

‘My lord, my lord, be quiet, be still.’ Levkin was speaking to Otto, sing-song, caressing and soothing him. I looked at the boy with surprise and with an equal dislike.

‘Let’s get him to the car,’ I said, I detest scenes and drama. Fortunately there was no one about. The two cars stood but ten yards off and beyond them the green trees of the Garden of Remembrance were resinous and sleepy in the sun. The women had not emerged from the chapel and our other attendants were not to be seen. ‘Get up,’ I said to Otto.

Levkin took one arm and I took the other and Otto rose between us like a giant log released from the sea bed. His face was now radiantly serene and he belched and hiccuped meditatively as we tacked and veered our way to the car. Levkin opened the door and Otto fell in. He smelt like an old bar-parlour of stale drink and tobacco. I did not care to go on seeing my brother in this condition and it seemed kinder to him too to curtail the experience. ‘Take him away.’

Levkin hesitated and then got into the car and began to turn it. The three women were now on the chapel steps. As I came back towards them I saw Isabel’s face bent upon me with a look of apology and appeal. Something in her eyes also said: This often happens, things are like this, do not make too much of it. Flora brushed past, tearing off her hat. ‘I’m going to walk home,’ she said brusquely to no one in particular. As she receded I saw her undo the pins in her red hair and let it fall down upon her shoulders.

‘Come with us, Edmund,’ said Isabel entreatingly.

I felt at that moment that I simply wanted to shake them off like insects from my sleeve. Otto’s laughter, Otto’s reek of alcohol, the messy, muddled, personal smell of it all seemed suddenly to represent everything I detested. There was no dignity, no simplicity in these lives. In a few hours, thank God, I could leave them forever. ‘No thanks. I’ll stay here now. It’s not far to walk back. Don’t wait.’

I watched the second car depart and then went slowly back into the cool chapel. It was not dark inside, plain windows and pale oak, but my eyes were dazed by the change of light and could not focus. Then I saw that the place was empty. Lydia was gone. The coffin must have receded through the curtains or sunk slowly into the floor, after the usual weird insipid rite of the cremation chapel. Lydia was in the furnace now.

I sat down and tried to compose my mind. I tried to think of her, to remember her goodness and her fineness, to remember how she had loved me and suffered for me. This was no moment for thinking of her frailty or for measuring her devastations. My petty judgements were put to silence in the presence of her mystery. I would study charity now, as I ought to have done before, as I ought to have done from the start. I tried to feel some remorse, a little sober regret for my own failure as a son, as a man. I must not flinch from a measure of that vast failure.
Nondum considerasti quantum pondus sit peccatum.

These were the thoughts which I attempted to think, looking at the blue curtain beyond which my once-dear mother had passed. But I could not think them. All that came into my mind was the image of Flora. How exceedingly pretty she had become. I wondered how old she was.

3. Isabel Feeds the Fire

‘You didn’t bring your car?’ said Isabel.

‘No. I hate driving northward.’

‘Have a drink? Some whisky?’

Isabel’s gramophone, turned down to an almost inaudible murmur, was playing Sibelius.

‘No, thanks. I don’t drink much.’ In fact I did not drink at all, only I always thought it sounded priggish and aggressive to say so.

‘Unlike your dear brother!’

‘How long has it been going on, the drinking?’

‘Quite long, but especially since Lydia got so ill. Lydia was the only person who could control Otto. Thank you, Maggie, that will do. Just put the sandwiches on the table.’

Maggie put down the tray and departed. With her neat black feet she seemed like a little donkey.

It was lunch-time. Otto had not reappeared and Flora had sent news of a headache, so Isabel had suggested a sandwich lunch in her own room. She wanted to talk to me, she said, privately.

Isabel occupied the bay-window bedroom in the front with the view over the lawn toward the camellias. Our house, bought by my father on his marriage, was a big ugly Victorian rectory, its red brick darkened by the sour wind that blew from the nearby collieries, whose slag heaps were invisible behind the trees. In his young socialist days my father, who came from hereabouts, had chosen this little northern town in the hope of establishing fruitful relations with the working people. But the silent suspicious miners had made nothing of that gentle personality; and by the time Otto and I were conscious of our surroundings he was already a defeated recluse. We grew up as children in exile.

The garden was immense, and had been part of the grounds of a much larger house which had been destroyed by fire. A little mountainy stream of clear brown water spilt in over the far boundary in a long cascade, obedient to the will of some long-dead landscape gardener, The stream meandered for nearly a quarter of a mile between high slopes of camellias and dense thickets of bamboos before it briefly touched the lawn and turned away to flow under iron bridges into the town. The camellia bushes, indeed most of them were by now trees, unkept and running wild, had grown into an almost impenetrable tangle of implicated vegetation. The course of the stream was marked by the greener line of bamboo, while high up above a birch grove led away into the open country. For us children it had formed a vast region of romance. I sighed. I could not remember being happy in childhood, but now it was as if the woods remembered it for me.

‘No thanks, Isabel, I don’t smoke. I’m out of date about Flora. What’s she doing now? I was surprised to see her so grown up.’

‘She’s at the technical college, doing textile design. She has a small flair for it. I expect she’ll get married young. She’s longing to go south.’

I sighed again. Through these various channels my father’s big talent was draining away.

‘Thanks, Isabel, just one sandwich. You haven’t anything soft, ginger beer? All right, tomato juice. What have you done to your hand?’

Isabel had a long pale scar across the fingers of her right hand.

‘Nothing. I burnt it here on the grate.’

‘You must be careful with that fire. It’s like a blast furnace. Surely you don’t need it in summer?’

‘It’s company. Like a dog. I enjoy feeding it.’

Lydia had always had a morbid fear of fire and kept at least six fire extinguishers in the house. Partly to annoy her, Isabel had always kept a very large open fire in her room which she piled high with wood and coal. It was roaring away now, a dazzling edifice of red and gold, although the sun was shining brightly outside. Isabel took some drooping flowers from a vase and threw them on to the blaze. There was a sizzling sound and the room filled with a sweet pungent smell.

Isabel’s room had always been something of a provocation. It was her hobby, doubtless her consolation. Whereas the rest of the house was still appointed in the narrowly fanciful style favoured by my father, a sort of Spartan
art nouveau,
Isabel had built herself a luscious and eclectic boudoir. The room was crammed with furniture and the furniture encrusted with objects, and my heavy tread on entering had set a myriad trinkets tinkling like little bells. It was an Edwardian room with dreams of the eighteenth century. I backed away from the fire and leaned on the end of the mantelpiece, carefully shifting some ivory water-buffaloes out of reach of my elbow.

‘Do sit down, Edmund. You’ll break something if you go on loping around. You’re much too big for this room anyway. Thank heavens Otto doesn’t come here any more.’ She added after a moment, ‘Ah, you were so right to get away from Lydia.’

Her voice with emotion became more Scottish. She was sitting now in a velvet sewing-chair which was treading upon the toes of a Georgian games-table and some ambiguous pieces of Chinoiserie. She must have changed some time after our return into what I had taken to be another dress but which I now saw to be a flowered summer dressing-gown. She had thrust her feet into fluffy backless bedroom-slippers. Since my last visit she had had her long hair cut off, though the elaborate curly coiffure had much the same curly appearance as before. Under the luxuriant hair her face was small, with little poised mouth and short pretty nose. She was thickly powdered, her eyebrows drawn in an exaggerated curve, and crude greenish smudges above her big round brown eyes. Below, her unpowdered neck, revealed by the open gown, looked gaunt and tired. I felt sorry for her.

‘I’ll stand if you don’t mind. I always prefer standing. How are things generally, Isabel? How is Otto, apart from the drink?’

‘All right, I suppose. He gets his work done. I never see him now. He sleeps in the workshop.’

‘I see he’s got a new apprentice. I think you mentioned it in a letter. What happened to the last one?’

‘Oh, he left early one morning with all the cash he could lay hands on and a lot of Otto’s clothes. Of course, Otto did nothing about it. Thank God Lydia was practically unconscious by then.’

‘What’s the new one like? The same old style? Otto can certainly pick them! He seems foreign.’

‘Foreign parents, I imagine. Russian Jew. He lives in the summer-house. I hardly see him either.’

The summer-house was a round stone building, originally an eighteenth-century decoration, which later vandals had turned, with red brick additions, into a gardener’s cottage. Yet it still looked pretty enough among the first trees of the camellia forest. Otto’s workshop, an unashamed monstrosity of brick and slate, was happily out of sight behind the house.

‘Where did he come from?’

‘Out of the blue. He arrived the day Lydia had her last stroke. He has a sister or something with him. He hasn’t done anything outrageous so far.’ She laughed her little laugh. Isabel had a tiny musical laugh which came out of her little mouth like a peardrop. She got up from her chair and minced, threading the furniture, to the windows. ‘You make me restless. I do wish you’d sit down.’

‘Sorry, Isabel. I’m afraid of breaking a chair like I did last time. Isabel, do turn that music off, would you? I can’t stand music in the background.’

She leaned to switch off the gramophone. ‘I need music so much. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Sometimes I wrap it round me like a wild cloak. Oh Edmund, I’ve been so lonely –’

I was a little nervous of the note of appeal in her voice. I did not want any display of Isabel’s emotions. I had no wish to hear her confessions and complaints. In any case I knew it all but too well. I said briskly, ‘Come, come, there’s always –’ I was about to say ‘Flora’, but felt suddenly that this might cause pain. I said ‘– the Italian girl. ’

‘Maggie and I are like the people in Dostoevsky who starved together in the hut for too long. We can do nothing for each other. Anyway, Lydia took over Maggie as she took over Flora. She took everything.’

‘Yes, I can imagine she would have swallowed down poor little Maggie quite easily.’

‘There’s a lot of Maggie left.’

‘There’s a lot of you left. I’m surprised you don’t get out more, do things in the town.’

‘Like
she
does. Maggie’s quite a do-gooder. She knows all the Italian community. But I don’t quite see myself as a baby-sitter.’

‘Surely it would help you to try to think about people other than yourself, other people’s troubles –’

‘You think I lead an idiotic self-centred life?’

I hesitated. There was an eagerness in her question. I did not really want to have this sort of conversation with my sister-in-law. Anything from me which savoured of rebuke would release some greater warmth into the atmosphere between us, and I shrank instinctively from this. I was, after all, only a passer-by. Yet I had to answer truthfully. ‘Frankly, yes.’

My frankness gave her immediate pleasure and she almost blushed with gratification. ‘You’re quite right. My life is a
divertissement.’
She moved from the window to the mantelpiece and began to drop dry shaggy bits of wood onto the fire. I backed away, edging my feet along the crowded floor.

‘And you –’ said Isabel. ‘Yes, you lead a simple good life. You help people. Oh, I know about it. I wonder if you think it’s easy to be like that?’

‘I’m selfish too,’ I said. ‘It just suits me that way. I have unworldly tastes.’ I added, ‘And of course I had such an example before me in my father.’ I was beginning to hate the conversation.

‘If only your father hadn’t met Lydia! He ought to have been a monk. But in a way you’re living his life for him.’

‘No one could live his life for him. He lived his own life. He was a much much finer person than I could ever be.’ Besides, I added to myself, I met Lydia too and at a rather earlier age. I looked surreptitiously at my watch and wondered if my brother was sober yet.

‘Yes, but you’re a free man,’ said Isabel. ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving. God, how I hate engravings! Sorry, Edmund, but there’s something about those black cramped things – it’s a Gothic art, a northern art. And why do engravers always choose such gloomy subjects? Hanged men, wailing women. You can’t be gay in an engraving. No colour. God, how I hate the north!’ She tapped her wedding ring with exasperation on the mantelpiece.

I knew I was not a free man, but I was certainly not going to discuss this with Isabel. ‘There were plenty of Italian engravers. It wasn’t all invented by Dürer. Mantegna, for instance –’

‘Otto’s Gothic, you know,’ said Isabel. ‘He is the north. He’s primitive, gross. Otto’s the sort of man who’ll pee into a washbasin even if there’s a lavatory beside him.’

I detest coarse talk in women and anyway would have thought it most improper to bandy words about my brother with his wife. I said in a cheerful leave-taking tone, ‘Ah well, Isabel, I think you are exaggerating. Even if you were imprisoned you are much more free now. And you can be free at any time if you choose to be. And now if you don’t mind –’