The Dividing Stream

by Francis King

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Contents

  Francis King

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chaper Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Francis King

  THE DIVIDING STREAM

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  Dedication

  TO MINA

  Chapter One

  THERE were three of them there.

  Of the two boys outstretched beside the Arno one from time to time shifted or muttered in his sleep, and the American, who had been perched for many minutes on a slab of stone from the ruins of the Trinità bridge, continued to watch him with a vague curiosity. It was that hour when a sudden relenting in the heat of the day lures the bathers out of the shrunken waters and makes those who sleep on the banks awake and reach for clothes with arms that all at once seem cold, hard and stiff. Although at this season no mist arises from the river and the dusk serves only to sharpen the town’s outlines as it sharpens the afternoon’s once drowsy appetites, yet in a moment the hills appear to be about to dissolve into the receiving sky beyond. The rattle of the trams becomes strangely muted, the balustrades of the Lung’ Arno are dark with leaning crowds.

  Suddenly, like an animal roused from sleep, one of the boys jerked upright, looked about him, gazed long and carefully at the watching American, and then once more sank his head back on to the rolled shirt on which it had been pillowed. He lay like that for a long time, his eyes half-closed, while the American, a man of forty-six with red hair en brosse and a still youthful physique spoiled only by a slight stoop and over-long arms, opened the case of his camera and began to fiddle with its gadgets. He attached a filter and then a lens-hood; but immediately he unclipped the filter and attached another; twice he changed the aperture. At last he rose to his feet, pointed his camera up towards the Ponte Vecchio and seemed about to take a photograph; but with a shake of the head the camera was once again lowered. One by one the stops were changed, the gadgets were unscrewed and placed in their separate boxes.

  Through all this routine he had been watched by the Italian boy; but some children had begun to pick their way over the tufts of bruised and burnt grass, their clothes over their arms or trailing from their hands, and seeing them, the boy turned from the American to let out a piercing whistle. They waved to him and shouted greetings, and one of them, a girl of sixteen whose sturdy legs were caked in mud, picked up a flat stone and threw it to where he lay, so skilfully that it skimmed across his naked body without doing him hurt. The boy shouted something obscene at her and they all laughed; then, still laughing among themselves as they attempted to push each other into the water, they moved on until they, too, were lost in the throng about the bridge.

  The American, who was called Max, had by then returned to his seat. He yawned twice and looked at his watch, disappointed that it was less late than he had hoped. He was waiting for his wife’s return, but it was unlikely that she had even left Viareggio yet; she had said that she would be back at eight, but she was always unpunctual, and on the days when they quarrelled unpunctuality became one of the many instruments used for his punishment. She would know that he was waiting for her, eager for forgiveness, and that knowledge would delay her; usually a reckless driver she would now on purpose drive slowly.

  The boy had reached for his shorts over the sleeping body of his friend and having searched in both pockets, he produced an inch-long stub of cigarette, stared down at it for a moment as if about to burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of hoarding such a fragment and then, looking about him in a pretence of not knowing that the American was the only person near, at last sauntered over for a light. He was well-built and he walked gracefully, but it was at once apparent from the leftwards sag of his body and a protruding bone that his collar-bone had once been broken and never properly set. When he was thirteen he had fought with an Arab in a street in Tunisia and had been thrown down a flight of stone stairs; but (he would always hasten to add) he had won the fight. Like this: and he would demonstrate how, bull-like, he had butted his opponent with his forehead, shattering nose, teeth and left cheek-bone. He rarely fought with his fists; this was better. And once again he would demonstrate the butt, the tightly drawn muscles of his neck making it seem coarse and ugly.

  ‘‘Grazie.’’ He drew three or four times on the fag-end, holding it between finger and thumb. His short toes, widely spaced from walking so often barefoot, closed and unclosed on a dusty clump of goose-grass as he attempted to wrench it from its roots. ‘‘Inglese?’’

  ‘‘No. Americano.’’

  ‘‘Ah, Americano.’’ He stared at Max for a moment and then shook his head. ‘‘Don’t seem it,’’ he said in Italian.

  ‘‘Don’t I?’’

  ‘‘You speak Italian well.’’ He perched on the stone beside Max but in such a way that, becoming top-heavy, it at once keeled over. He leapt up and then resettled himself; now his body, naked except for the bleached strip, leant against the other’s. He drew his knees up and hugged them, and a rank, not unpleasurable odour, such as often comes from the fur of cats in the south, filled the American’s nostrils. ‘‘You speak Italian well.’’ He repeated the compliment.

  ‘‘No. Only a little.’’

  ‘‘French too?’’

  ‘‘Yes, I speak French.’’

  ‘‘Vous parlez Français?’’

  ‘‘Out, je parle Français.’’


  ‘‘Mot, je parle Français.’’ He sucked for the last time at the cigarette and then threw it away with an exclamation as the red-hot tip touched his fingers. ‘‘Tunisian, moi.’’

  ‘‘Tunisian?’’

  He nodded. ‘‘Three years in Florence: In Tunisia my father had a large house—large, large.’’ He stretched his bare arms to their utmost extent, revealing under each a shadow of the only hair which could be seen on his whole body. ‘‘Pastry-cook. Then the French came back and we all had to leave. I was three days in the boat.… How many days did it take to come from America?’’

  ‘‘Oh, five or six.’’

  The boy looked crest-fallen at the comparison. Until: ‘‘All my family was very sea-sick,’’ he declared. ‘‘There was a terrible storm. Everyone was sea-sick, all over the deck.’’

  ‘‘Were you sea-sick?’’ Max asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘‘Me?’’ The boy pointed at himself in incredulity. ‘‘Me sea-sick?’’ He made a contemptuous-gesture of dismissal. ‘‘I’m never sea-sick.’’ He looked at the case of Max’s camera and pronounced with difficulty: ‘‘Ko-dak.… Is that your name?’’

  Max laughed. ‘‘No. That’s the name of the camera. My name is Westfield. Max Westfield.’’

  ‘‘Westfield.’’ He repeated the name, but on his lips the w became a v. ‘‘My name is Rodolfo. Rodolfo Binelli. My friend’’—he pointed to the sleeping boy who, having now turned over, lay with his face in the dust—‘‘is Enzo. He’s a Florentine.’’

  ‘‘I was wondering why he was so restless in his sleep.’’

  ‘‘He has a bad back, and when he lies down it hurts him. He doesn’t know what’s the matter.’’

  ‘‘Hasn’t he seen a doctor?’’

  ‘‘The doctor wanted an X-ray. Three thousand lire.’’

  ‘‘But there must be free hospitals.’’

  Rodolfo shrugged his shoulders; he had begun to fiddle with the catch of the camera case, and now he asked, ‘‘How much did this cost?’’

  Max first told him the sum in dollars, but the Tunisian asked for it in lire. Then he whistled. ‘‘Can I see it?’’

  ‘‘If you take care.’’

  As soon as he had grasped the camera, the boy leapt up and sprinted away, his bare feet scattering the dust. ‘‘Hey!’’ Max shouted. ‘‘Hey!’’ He rose and gesticulated vaguely and then decided that if he ever wanted to regain the camera he had better start running. But meanwhile Rodolfo had stopped some fifty yards away, his body arched forward and his hands on his knees; he was laughing uncontrollably. ‘‘Do you want your camera?’’

  ‘‘Yes, bring it here at once. At once!’’ Max shouted.

  ‘‘How much will you give me?’’

  ‘‘Don’t be a fool. Bring it here!’’

  ‘‘How much?’’ the boy shouted.

  ‘‘Do you want me to call a policeman?’’

  Still laughing the boy began to saunter forward while Max hurried to meet him. ‘‘Thank you.’’ Max snatched the camera.

  ‘‘Were you frightened?’’ the boy asked. Again he laughed, but seeing Max’s displeasure, he at once attempted to smother the sound by putting a hand over his mouth. A splutter emerged. Max did not answer. ‘‘Did you think I would steal your camera?’’

  ‘‘You might have.’’

  ‘‘No!’’ Suddenly serious, the boy raised one fist as if to strike the American in the face; but instead he gripped his arm, his eyes neared his.

  ‘‘No. I’m not a thief. Not a thief,’’ he repeated. ‘‘Never.’’

  ‘‘All right,’’ Max said drily. For a moment he still felt angry; then he realized how absurd the scene had been, and a smile broke on his heavy, vaguely Teutonic features, making the green eyes almost disappear under the red brows and showing a large triangular chip in one of the yellow teeth at the side of his mouth.

  Rodolfo at once smiled back. ‘‘Do you want to take a photo of me?’’

  ‘‘Not very much.’’

  ‘‘Like this,’’ Rodolfo suggested, posing with his hands on his hips.

  ‘‘No, thank you.’’

  ‘‘Why don’t you want to take a photograph of me?’’

  ‘‘Why should I? … Oh, I’ll take one if you like. If it’ll please you.’’ Max combined two of the dominant characteristics of the American abroad; suspicion of the foreigner, who apart from being likely to prove more astute, was certain to want something, probably dollars; and at the same time a longing for ‘‘madness’’, for acceptance in a society in which he never felt wholly at his ease. The boy was a guttersnipe and at best he would cadge a cigarette, at worst steal something; yet his impudence appealed to Max and, in his loneliness, the American responded.

  ‘‘I’ll wake my friend, shall I? Then you can take us both together. You’d prefer that, wouldn’t you?’’

  ‘‘I’m sure he’d rather sleep.’’

  But Rodolfo had already leapt down the incline to where the Florentine lay and was prodding him in the stomach with the toes of one foot. Enzo stirred, grunted and rolled over on his back, his hands going down to adjust his slip in a gesture of modesty; but still he did not wake. Scooping some water out of the river Rodolfo scattered the drops over the outstretched body and laughed as his friend shot up.

  ‘‘What the hell?’’ the Florentine asked, as with one hand he rubbed his eyes and with the other massaged his back.

  ‘‘Come, come, come!’’ Rodolfo beckoned with both hands. ‘‘The American wants to take a photograph.’’

  ‘‘What American?’’

  Rodolfo pointed, Enzo looked round; and it was typical of the Florentine’s nature that as soon as he saw Max his surliness at being woken should melt into a smile. He jumped to his feet.

  They posed against the water, their arms round each other’s bare shoulders, and Max photographed them, not once, but three times—he would never risk failures. Rodolfo lacked all self-consciousness, but Enzo, who was shy, spoiled the first snap by shifting suddenly from his left to his right foot, and the second by covering his face with one hand as he was seized with uncontrollable giggles. On both occasions Rodolfo, who held himself erect and motionless, shouted angrily at his friend in a slang which Max, perhaps fortunately, could not understand. The Florentine, his skin gold against the deeper, less glowing brown of his friend, had the better physique, with wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and a straight, sturdy stance, but his self-consciousness denied him the Arab grace of Rodolfo. Max noticed how his body was covered with a number of small, white scars.

  When he had finished, the American wondered why he had bothered. The photographs would be developed and printed, and then stuck in an album or left in a drawer or perhaps accidentally thrown away. Back at home when he showed guests his snaps of the trip someone would ask ‘‘Who are those?’’ and he would answer, probably truthfully, ‘‘I can’t remember.’’ And in a sense all the photographs, so carefully planned and posed, which he had taken in Europe would be equally futile. ‘‘What is that?’’ ‘‘That? Oh, that’s the Uffizi, and that’s San Miniato, and that’s Santa Croce—or it may be Santa Maria Novella.’’ He would know the names, or approximately know them, whereas already he had forgotten the names of the two Italian boys; but in both cases the photographs would evoke no real response, no quickening of the pulse, no agreeable rush of memory. For too long he had been emotionally dead to anyone but one person, to anything but one thing.

  As he packed away the camera, he asked: ‘‘ What did you say your names were?’’

  ‘‘I’m Rodolfo. Rodolfo Valentino. You remember him? … My friend is Enzc—short for Lorenzo.’’

  ‘‘Lorenzo the Magnificent,’’ put in Enzo, in allusion to an exhibition being held that year in Florence; he giggled at his little joke.

  ‘‘Have you a cigarette?’’ Rodolfo asked simply.

  ‘‘Sorry. Not here. I don’t smoke myself.’’

  ‘‘At the hotel?’’
>
  ‘‘Yes, at the hotel.’’

  ‘‘Which is your hotel?’’

  ‘‘That one. Just opposite.’’

  Rodolfo whistled and nudged Enzo. ‘‘He lives at the Palazzo D’Oro. How much would they rook him for there?’’

  Enzo was embarrassed by a question which it obviously had not embarrassed his friend to ask. ‘‘Four thousand lire a day,’’ he muttered in a husky voice which always made it seem as if he ought to clear his throat. ‘‘ Full pensione,’’ he added.

  Again Rodolfo whistled, shaking his right hand loosely from the wrist in a gesture which he used to express any superlative. ‘‘Enzo’s mother works at the Palazzo D’Oro. In the laundry.… When are you going back to the hotel?’’

  ‘‘Soon.’’

  ‘‘If we come with you, will you give us a fag?’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘If we come back with you——’’

  ‘‘Yes … all right.’’

  A year ago Max would never have dreamed of taking two half-naked urchins into the best hotel in Florence; but wasn’t it one of Karen’s chief complaints against him that he was so conventional, so ‘‘ stodgy”, as she put it? These days he was always catching himself trying to ‘‘show’’ her by some action which was wholly untrue to his real self; an admission, if any were needed, that that self had long since ceased to be satisfactory in her eyes.

  But, in truth, the reception-clerk at the Palazzo d’Oro saw stranger things in the course of a day and, in spite of Max’s fears, their entry passed without comment, probably without notice. They stood in silence as the vast iron and glass cage, flushed to a uniform rosy glow, swung them up and up to the sixth floor, and then, single-file, they clattered their way down a marble-paved corridor. From time to time Rodolfo looked over his shoulder to smile at his friend in triumph at their admission into this exotic world, but the Florentine made no response, thinking at that moment of how through seven layers of masonry, with antique furniture, concealed lighting and all the other expensive, incredible apparatus of civilized living between, somewhere, under his feet, his mother was at this moment touching the iron with a moistened finger to see if it sizzled, was swathed in steam as she lowered one padded half of the trouser-press or (the job of which she complained most) was sorting and counting the soiled heaps of laundry thrown haphazard by the chamber-maids on to the sweating floors. What would she think if she knew that her son was walking above her—was at this moment standing outside one of the terrace suites while the American fumbled with his keys before they could enter? A strange feeling of pity, combined with resentment, shook him momentarily through his whole frame.