by Rumer Godden
The only sounds that came here were from the road or lake and none of them were anything to do with Fanny: oars were dipped as Mario took his boat out, wet clothes were slapped on wooden washboards from the villa’s own beach or from the hotel foreshore as Giulietta or the village women or the hotel’s two maids did the washing. ‘We don’t have many laundries in Italy,’ Renato had told her. There was a spluttering, now and then, from an outboard motor, the grander rush of a speedboat and, every hour or so, the distant churning of the steamers on their way from Riva to Limone, Limone to Malcesine. Sometimes greetings were called across the water; Celestina’s voice rang out as she shouted to Giacomino or to Giulietta, or the postwoman, or the butcher in his white apron with his napkin-covered basket, or to the old milkwoman who wore the black and brown striped skirt, black shawl, and kerchief of the peasant women and brought the milk in old wine-bottles, ‘Open to all the dust,’ said Fanny. ‘Not very hygienic,’ said Rob, ‘but Madame Menghini has been drinking it for thirty years and is still alive and well.’
At Stebbings everything had concerned Fanny; here she could not even understand what was said and she was concerned in none of it. She had not ordered the meat, or the milk. Celestina did the housekeeping.
Traffic on the road made a continual hum. Rob complained that there were too many cars but to Fanny it was only a distant drone; the olive grove lay between and even the maddening scooter explosions sank to a faint whine. With the advent of the little cars there were, Rob said, far fewer scooters. The bus horn made its two notes every four hours, but Fanny need never catch that bus.
Morning, midday, evening, if the wind were not too fierce, she heard the bells. Each village had its fine church with a turret roofed with brown tiles, a wide piazza, an interior of paintings and marbles. The churches seemed too big and grandiose for villages, but, ‘See them on Sundays,’ said Rob. Sometimes the bells were only that faint quivering in the air; sometimes she heard only the one from Malcesine, but they seemed to measure off the hours into peace and stillness.
When they sounded at midday, Celestina would send Giulietta out to lay Fanny’s lunch outside on the stone table. The pink stone bench was sun-baked by twelve o’clock. Often Celestina would bring the coffee herself and stay to talk in her broken English-German, in the midst of much Italian and dramatic mime. Fanny could have learned a great deal about Celestina’s family, about Celestina’s life in the war, Celestina’s marriage, but as she listened with one ear she let it slide out of the other. Celestina was not Fanny’s business.
After lunch she would sleep, often on the grass under the cypresses that made another private little garden above the villa’s beach. She would listen to the lapping of the waves until she fell asleep.
‘You look as if you hadn’t slept for months,’ Rob told Fanny.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You can sleep now.’
She could not have enough of sleep; there had been so many nights spent penned in Stebbings, or pacing the floor of her narrow old room at Aunt Isabel’s, or unable to sleep because of the stuffiness of the London hotels, and Fanny slept as if she were drugged.
When she woke, often she would go out in the car. It was a new delight to drive Rob’s Mercedes after years of the old Rover. At first Rob had been anxious. ‘Will you remember to keep on the right? And Italians drive fist,’ but Fanny had laughed. ‘I have been a chauffeur more than half my life.’
‘Far too much of a chauffeur,’ said Rob. It was a new experience for Fanny not to be allowed to drive when she was tired.
In those afternoons she drove up the lake to Riva, the little town with its mountain-locked harbours where weeping willows swept their fronds into the water, and roses even climbed up the lamp-posts. It had good shops in the streets around the big cream church. Fanny would go to the cleaners, the tintoria where a row of young girls stood at their ironing-boards, ready to press clothes while the customer waited, and the doors were kept open because of the fumes of the dry-cleaning machine, so that the chatter of voices came out into the street. She would drive down to Malcesine to buy newspapers or go into the post office for Rob, then sit outside one of the cafés on the quayside, drinking coffee or eating an orange ice and watching the steamers come in, the slow and the aliscafo with its two-note horn. The motorboatmen, headed by Salvatore, grew to know her as they already knew Rob; she talked to his favourite waitress, Rita, little and swarthy in her black, with a tiny immaculate apron that hid the cloth pouch of change money. Fanny knew the hotel porters, who were always outside their hotels, bowing invitingly to every car; she knew the car-park man, whom Rob called the Bandit, as she knew the police, the carabinieri, in their dark blue coats and trousers with a red stripe, their cocked hats, swords, and snow-white gloves. Now and again she would come on a procession of toddlers, little boys, pale-faced, in blue pinafores and peaked caps, from the Colonia Infantile to which children were brought from the slums of Milan; every day they paraded solemnly down to the harbour, walking two by two, each child holding on to the tail of the pinafore of the one in front. Fanny always walked quickly past them, as she walked past the children playing in the piazza, the babies feeding the pigeons on the steps of the church.
Sometimes she would drive farther, right down the lake, past the little harboured towns with their pink stone or stuccoed houses, their olives, cypresses, and oleanders, their stalls of oranges and lemons: Torri, Bardolino with its vineyards, Lazise with another old red castle, Garda, so much smaller than one expected of the lake’s name town, right down to Peschiera.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see Verona, Mantua, Cremona?’ Rob would ask, but Fanny seemed held to the lake; she had a feeling she would break the magic of their contentment if she went out of sight of its blue, and no matter where she had been, she was always back in time for Rob, and it was always with a quickening of her heart that she came round the last bend of the lake road and saw the villa cypresses serried above the water, the lights on in the kitchen and in Rob’s window above. She would drive in through the gates, turn behind the flowering thorns, leave the car for Mario to put away, and go silently up to her room to bath, change and wait in the sitting-room or on the terrace until Rob came down.
This was the time she loved best, to sit or walk with him in the twilight, when the mountains opposite grew dark, their edges sharp as black-green paper cuts against the sky. Clouds, still bright with sunset, were reflected in the lake which slowly withdrew into stillness and turned colourless except for a faint silver. There would be an occasional light, red or green, from a passing steamer; or a fishing-boat’s headlamp would make a spark, small and lonely on the lake’s width. There was always one star, directly opposite, as if it were hung there for the villa. ‘It’s the evening star,’ said Fanny, but it seemed their star. It shone with such intensity that a spear of light was thrown across the water almost to their feet, but the star always dropped below the mountain with extraordinary swiftness. Then the familiar beaded lights began to appear along the shore, and in clusters on the mountain. Car headlights made white flares in and out of the tunnels on the occidentale, the lake road opposite, or came on unknown twisted ways down from the mountains. ‘Time to go in,’ Rob would say. ‘I’m starving – and burning for a drink.’
It was a pattern of sun, quiet, work, and slowly Fanny began to unwind, as if the tight thread that had held her, cutting my heart in two, thought Fanny, was loosening. One day I might even be whole again, almost, thought Fanny.
When she lay in the garden in the sun and shut her eyes, the light shone through her lids and it was scarlet. Was that symbolical? ‘But it was not like that,’ she could have cried. She had only to open her eyes and the light was clear, gold, warm. ‘And that is reality. I can’t go on being haunted for ever,’ said Fanny.
‘Men don’t like tears.’ She could imagine Madame Menghini saying that. Women in Edwardian days may have been hypocrites but they kept their faces and they had backbone; ‘And so must you,’ Fanny to
ld herself sternly. ‘Now you can do this: untangle the thread of all this, follow it through for the last time. Then wind it all up in a ball that you can keep hidden in your hand or in your heart, and not talk of it any more. You can tell it all out,’ said Fanny, ‘from the beginning.’
4
It had been the last Sunday in May – nearly a year ago, thought Fanny, only a year, for all this! – she had dropped in at the Davenants’ house in Whitcross to take back a book; Margot had most of the new books and was generous in lending them. ‘Anthea’s here,’ Margot had said. ‘She has brought some of the film people. They have a scene about a poacher and they wanted Sydney’s advice.’ Sydney, Margot’s husband, was a Justice of the Peace. ‘They are in the garden now. Come out and you shall meet Rob Quillet.’
She spoke as if she were conferring a royal favour, but, from the French doors that led out from the drawing-room, Fanny looked at the thin dark man talking to Sydney and, ‘Is that Rob Quillet?’ she asked. ‘I have met him.’
‘Met him? Where?’ and, ‘Where could you meet him?’ asked Anthea. The surprise was as unflattering as was the emphasis on the ‘you’, but Fanny was used to Margot and Anthea and, ‘I met him in Derrick’s shop,’ she said. ‘You remember Geoff Derrick had his tonsils out.’
‘What in the world have Geoff Derrick’s tonsils to do with Rob Quillet?’ ‘Everything,’ Fanny could have said now.
It was one of those chance winds – or not ‘chance’, thought Fanny. Geoff did the deliveries for Derrick’s shop all over Whitcross and, ‘while he was in hospital we had to fetch our groceries ourselves,’ said Fanny. Hers had made two large boxes on the counter. ‘Can you manage?’ asked Mrs Derrick, and a stranger looking at the stands of flower seeds had turned and said, ‘Those are too heavy for you. Let me carry them.’
‘That was the first time I heard your voice,’ Fanny told Rob.
‘Those are too heavy for you.’ She had given Rob a fleeting smile, said, ‘That’s very kind of you,’ and led the way to the Rover. ‘I can remember your hand, stroking Danny,’ Danny’s gold and white head where the dark-tipped ears fell over; it was a thin hand, olive brown, with long fingers. ‘Your hand and your eyes,’ she could have said. Before she drove off she had looked up and met the stranger’s eyes, brown, oddly thoughtful and gentle in a face that was – sardonic? asked Fanny, but that was not quite right; it was not bitter or scornful, only aloof. ‘But it still did not occur to me he was Rob Quillet,’ she told Margot.
‘With the whole village buzzing about the film for weeks? Didn’t you look at his clothes?’
‘No,’ said Fanny. ‘What about them?’
‘My dear innocent. Don’t you know a suit like that and handsome shoes when you see them?’
‘For a guess I was wearing a sweat shirt, jeans, and espadrilles,’ said Rob, when Fanny told him this, but, ‘No,’ said Fanny to Margot. ‘I just thought he was nice.’
‘Nice! He’s Rob Quillet, probably our best director. They say he will be a de Sica or a Renoir,’ but, when Fanny repeated that with pride to Rob, it made him angry. ‘I’m a beginner, not halfway there, nor ever will be. Renoir! He has a humanity none of us will reach and he’s never afraid.’
‘Are you afraid?’
‘Yes. Blast me!’
‘Ask anyone,’ Margot had said, but Fanny did not ask anyone. She kept her usual reticence. ‘You weren’t interested,’ Rob teased her.
‘I wasn’t then. I hadn’t really seen you.’
‘I saw you,’ said Rob, ‘and I went straight back into the shop and asked who you were.’
Most lovers, thought Fanny, ask each other, Where? When? Why? I shall never know why, nor could she exactly say when she had first known the stirrings of this strange, unreasonable, satisfying, never satisfied love. I suppose one day I shall settle down with it, it may even become humdrum, thought Fanny, but she knew that it never could. It was too piercing. No, she did not know why, or when, but she could, a little, trace out where; Margot gave a dinner, thought Fanny.
‘Odd of Margot to ask you when Darrell is away,’ Lady Candida had said.
‘She needs an extra woman.’
‘And there are no single women living in this village of single women, I suppose?’ But Fanny knew why Margot had asked her. She could be trusted not to get in the way. Margot had got Rob. She talked of ‘getting’ people as if she were catching butterflies and ‘I have got Rob Quillet,’ she told Fanny on the telephone. ‘But you were unkind,’ Fanny told Rob. ‘Margot thought you were really interested. She knew enough to know it wasn’t likely you would dine out when you were in the middle of a picture.’
‘I came because she said you would be there,’ said Rob. ‘I wanted to look at you again.’
‘And you did look at me, all through dinner.’
Fanny had always been ashamed of how far behind she was with books and plays and fashions, ‘and facts,’ Darrell sometimes said, though kindly. ‘You dream too much.’ At that dinner Margot had talked of the new Swedish film Skärgård, ‘The Archipelago’.
‘I haven’t seen it,’ Fanny had to say.
‘But, Fanny, everybody’s seen it!’
‘Who is everybody?’ asked Rob, but Margot did not hear.
‘It’s the religious conflict after the abortion that makes it so topical,’ she was saying earnestly. ‘That superb shot of the girl racked with pain on the edge of that pretty little bed that had been hers as a child.’ Fanny knew enough now to burn for Margot; after all, we were brought up, at least Aunt Isabel brought me up, not to talk to a doctor about illnesses, to a judge about his trials, but Margot had not been worrying Rob, he had simply not been listening; he seemed curiously abstracted and fidgety, twisting his wineglass, shamefully maltreating Sydney’s splendid Chambolle-Musigny. Sydney must have been thinking that film people were vandals, and that Margot’s party was not being the success she had hoped, and Fanny had wondered what was the matter with this dark stranger. ‘Dark stranger’ sounded like fortune-reading in a teacup, but it was as she thought of him. Why was he abstracted? His hand had left the wineglass and was playing with the roses in the crystal bowl lit with a green light, when, suddenly interrupting Sydney, he had leaned forward across the table that Margot had arranged so carefully – crystal candlesticks with black shades, black porcelain saltcellars and pepper-pots, black plates, the lit roses – and he had asked, ‘Is there a rose called Fanny Clavering? If there isn’t, there ought to be.’
‘That was all over the village by the morning,’ Fanny told him. ‘Sarah Ogilvie was in the room. We could never have a party without Sarah Ogilvie to help us. She went to each of us in turn and it was in turn,’ said Fanny, ‘a kind of tit-for-tat; “I asked you. It’s your turn to ask me”; dinner for dinner, drinks for drinks.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ said Rob.
It had been all over the village. The voices could not reach Fanny in the villa; though she had shut her ears and her mind to them for a long time, all this last year they had always been there; not, to begin with, anyone outside, not even Anthea or Margot – because they did not really know, thought Fanny, until I left Stebbings for good – but there were important voices, intimate, that had ruled her life: Darrell, Aunt Isabel, Lady Candida, and suddenly she thought, I shall never have to listen to Lady Candida again.
There was one voice Fanny could not shut out, her own. ‘I know now,’ said Fanny, ‘that people do have a voice of conscience.’ It had spoken clearly, steadily, all this time; she had not been able to stifle it, only refuse to listen as she had not listened to it that morning after the dinner, when Rob had telephoned.
‘Rob Quillet here.’ He had sounded curt, almost clipped. ‘Will you have dinner with me?’
‘I?’ Such complete surprise had showed in Fanny’s voice that, Rob told her afterwards, he had not been able to help smiling. A pause, then: ‘I think perhaps you are confusing me with Margot Davenant,’ said Fanny gently.
‘I most certainl
y am not. Will you come?’
There had been a longer pause before Fanny answered him. Clearly and insistently that voice was saying, ‘No. Don’t go,’ and, ‘There will be trouble,’ but instead of listening she had scolded herself: ‘You are being ridiculous. Are you turning into one of those middle-aged women who imagine that any man … It’s simply that he is bored in Whitcross,’ she told herself, though that did not seem likely in the middle of Haysel to Harvest, and the voice still said, ‘Don’t go.’ Fanny went.
It had been another Sunday and, as Rob waited for her in the hall – she had run up for a handkerchief – idly he had looked at three letters ready for the post on the table. ‘H. D. Clavering, The School House, Strode, Wiltshire.’ ‘Miss Candida Clavering, St Anne’s School …’
‘My children,’ Fanny had explained.
‘Do you write to them every Sunday as if you were at school too?’ Rob had asked.
She had not thought of it that way, as if she too were bound by a set of rules, yet I suppose I was, thought Fanny. Even then, by that first going out with him, she felt as if she were breaking one. Children bound one into a rule, thought Fanny, and, ‘If you hadn’t sent us to boarding school, this wouldn’t have happened,’ said Caddie.
Rob never came to Stebbings again. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair,’ he said. ‘Though none of it was fair, of course. At least it made me feel a little less guilty when I had you on my own ground.’
‘But we didn’t have any ground for a long, long time,’ said Fanny. ‘Not until you took me to Chirico’s and we made it our own. All those out-of-the-way places where we knew we shouldn’t meet anybody.’ Those little inns, restaurants where Rob was not known – I wasn’t known in any, thought Fanny. Cheap ones sometimes: there was one in the Fulham Road with red plastic lampshades on the tables, and a little Spanish one where the waiter thought we were married. ‘It had the quince jelly I liked and you didn’t,’ she reminded Rob.
