The Dividing Stream

by Francis King

  The boys’ inexplicable flurry of panic had long since ebbed, and they now slept, their fingers still interlaced, their legs still dangling above the high and gleaming bed. Enzo’s cheek had slipped on to Rodolfo’s shoulder, and the mouths of both of them were smeared with chocolate. The Florentine’s flesh seemed to have hoarded, like phosphorus, the sun which it had drunk during the long afternoon’s sleep in the dust by the Arno, and now it gave its treasures back to the apartment, glowing warmly against the cool glow of the coverlet. In comparison, Rodolfo’s body lay dim: but the stir of his breath gently trembled the hair at Enzo’s temple, from time to time a shudder ran through him, as through a sleeping animal. They were like animals, Mrs. Bennett thought, falling asleep in a strange room, on a strange bed, with a strange old woman scratching away at a block of cartridge-paper in front of them. She admired their beauty and their careless, unselfconscious grace; but above all she admired that ability to shut their eyes, to let go, to drop off over the precipice without a struggle.… She thought of the last night she had spent and its confused terrors and anxieties, appeased only by the transparent orange phial which she had at last fetched from her daughter’s room. On an impulse she got up and crossed over to the two boys, and lowering one hand, ran it slowly up the cheek of the Florentine. How smooth, how warm it was; and here she could feel some invisible vein throbbing rhythmically against the dry surface of her finger-tips. She gazed at the leaning head for many seconds, her hands still at his temple, and did not notice that all the time the Tunisian was watching through half-closed lashes.

  With a sigh she turned from Enzo, once again looked at the block on which she had sketched two sleeping bodies, and then, with a sudden, almost tearful irritability, threw it on the floor. Oh, it was hopeless. In England, when the whole family went on their holidays (to that farm-house in Montgomeryshire or camping at Studland Bay) between nursing Eric, minding the children, and doing the household chores, she had somehow found time to sketch; and she had always sketched with an intense pleasure, and the results, apart from regrets that she could do it so seldom, had always seemed satisfactory. But now.… Perhaps it was just Italy, or just Florence, the different light, the heat, or the fatigue of the journey. No one would think from that piece of paper that she had once won the Prix de Rome. But that was forty years ago; and so many people had won the Prix de Rome and never been heard of again.…

  She wandered out on to the terrace, in the hope of finding Max; but he was gone, and all she found was an incredible, brilliant sunset which filled her with despair. The Piazzale Michelangelo lay like a gutted fortress, with the David an avenging angel. The Arno, shrunk to a narrow gold thread, half lost itself in dense and dusty vegetation until suddenly at its furthest visible point to the west it seemed to swell upward like a vast gold bubble. How warm the balustrade was from the afternoon sun; like that child’s skin, and how cool the evening air. The long day had burnt itself out into a healing dew and a faint odour, as of bruised violets. For a long time she stayed there, the risen breeze shaking the folds of the old, shapeless, blue-cotton dress and stirring her grey hair so that occasionally a hairpin slipped, with a faint click, to the floor of the terrace. She no longer cared that she would now never paint anything worth while, and she had forgotten that in her room she had left two boys neither of whom might be trustworthy. Further down the Arno, beyond the Grazie bridge, was the pensione at which, forty years ago, she and her companion had been greeted by Mrs. Jennings crying: ‘‘I know just what you want, dears—a nice cup of tea’’; and that same evening, in the stuffy dining-room they had disagreed with the officious English man who had told them how unwise it was to drink the Florentine water. And he had proposed to her four evenings later; no, not on an evening as romantic as this, but in the Boboli Gardens, during a thunder-storm. And after wards he had confessed that nothing terrified him so much as thunder; but that was not true, for she had learnt that he was terrified of most things in life.

  Meanwhile, in the darkened room, Rodolfo had gently shifted Enzo’s weight off his shoulder and had lowered him on to a pillow which that night Mrs. Bennett would find smelling of cheap hair-oil; he had then tiptoed up to the table, to examine the drawing, but he hadn’t thought much of it (his face wasn’t the least like that, he decided) and so he had begun to turn over the other articles and papers that lay on the table: the letters which Mrs. Bennett had begun but never completed to each of her children, the 1899 Baedeker with the crushed flowers between so many of its pages, some knitting, some needle-work, and lastly, a gold fountain pen. He examined the fountain pen more carefully than anything except the Baedeker with the crushed flowers: he was fond of flowers. It was an old pen, cumbersomely heavy, and the nib was so broad that Rodolfo assumed wrongly that it had been broken. When he pulled a lever a bubble of green ink slowly appeared at a hole in the nib, and grew larger and larger until it all at once exploded, scattering small green beads over the glass-topped table. He wiped them away with his bare arm; then he put the pen in his trouser-pocket, returned to the bed, pulled Enzo’s head once more back on to his shoulder, closed his eyes, and soon genuinely slipped back into sleep.

  The tranquillity of the dusk was beautiful; and their tranquillity was no less beautiful, brought a no less acute pang to the heart (their breath so even, their bodies so utterly relaxed). Once again she felt the desire to touch that youthful cheek, and going over to the bed on tiptoe, she repeated the caress. There was a faint dust on the luxuriant eyelashes, pollen-like dust on the eyebrow: and here, where her finger touched the drumming temple, she seemed to feel the boy’s whole life under her hand. She drew from her belt a handkerchief smelling of lavender, the scent of old age, and used it to wipe away the chocolate stain from around the wide, slightly over-full lips. Then she looked down, and saw protruding from the trouser-pocket of the other sleeping boy a gold gleam which she knew at once to be her own fountain pen. She stared at it for many seconds but felt no astonishment; it was as if she had all along known this would happen and now accepted it, as earlier she had accepted the knowledge that she would never paint anything worth while. I should feel surprised, she thought; I should do something—call Max, or ring for the valet, or take it back while he sleeps.… But it didn’t seem to matter. Strangely, it didn’t seem to matter at all.

  She went back to the chair, sat down in it, folding her hands in her lap, and from there watched the two sleeping figures as the sky behind her slowly withered from azure to violet, and then went black. She did not sleep, nor did she move. She thought of nothing, unless the intense yet passive contemplation of their beauty was in itself a kind of thought; and when Max came in to fetch her to dinner and to wake and turn out the boys, she felt irritated with him as she would feel irritated with someone who spoke to her while she was listening to music.

  ‘‘One can’t help feeling sorry for them,’’ Max said when they were both gone.

  ‘‘I look a sight.’’ She stared at herself in the mirror and then said with a touch of petulance: ‘‘Why on earth should you feel sorry for them? I don’t feel sorry for them. I shall die soon and they’ll go on living for years and years and years; living here in Florence, too. I envy them.’’

  ‘‘It’s not much of a life.’’

  ‘‘And is yours much of a life?’’ She peered at the travelling clock on her bedside table: ‘‘Heavens, what’s happened to Karen? It’s gone nine o’clock. It’s so thoughtless of her to be late for meals. She knows that you won’t eat without her and how I hate eating alone. I’m hungry. And I went and gave those children my last slab of chocolate.… You know, Max, I was mean with them. I only gave them thirty lire each for all that time here. That was mean, wasn’t it?’’

  ‘‘You could have given them more.’’

  ‘‘Yes, I’m getting all the vices of old age—curiosity, and irritability, and greed, and meanness. They don’t hurt others much, there’s that to be said for them. But they’re so terribly unattractive—so much more una
ttractive than the really bad vices.… Oh, I’ve hardly a hairpin left. Thank you, my dear.’’ Max had picked two hairpins off the parquet floor. ‘‘ He took my fountain pen—the Tunisian.’’

  ‘‘What!’’

  ‘‘Just put it in his pocket, when my back was turned. Just like that. It was the only useful wedding-present I was given. Oh, that’s not quite true. We were given a dumbwaiter—a hideous thing—which was useful when the children were young. I could never teach them to pass anything at breakfast.’’

  ‘‘Do you mean—he’s got your——?’’

  ‘‘Yes. The funny thing was that I didn’t do anything about it. I don’t know why. I could have taken it back from his pocket while he slept. That would have been the thing to do, wouldn’t it?’’

  Meanwhile Enzo and Rodolfo were swinging each other round and round in the massive mahogany-and-glass revolving doors; and would no doubt have continued to do so for the whole evening if the reception-clerk had not shouted at them. They retorted with some rapid and pungent abuse, and then, laughing derisively, turned towards the Piazza Repubblica where, in the evening, an orchestra collected a dense, unpaying crowd before one of the city’s most expensive restaurants.

  Enzo pulled out the three thousand-lire notes. ‘‘ Look.’’

  ‘‘Mamma mia!’’ Rodolfo whistled. ‘‘ How did you get a chance to lift them?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t. He gave them to me.’’

  ‘‘Then he did——?’’ Rodolfo smiled knowingly. ‘‘ Something told me he was that sort.’’

  ‘‘No. He just gave them to me. Just like that. When I told him about my back he gave them to me. For the X-ray.’’

  ‘‘Come off it! He must have——’’

  ‘‘I tell you, he didn’t. It was a present—nothing more.’’

  ‘‘Yes, but why should a bloke like that——?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know. It seemed a bit crazy to me. Still, I wasn’t going to say, ‘No, thank you’.’’

  Rodolfo could never resist an opportunity to out-do his friend. ‘‘Well, look what I was given. I bet it’s worth more than three thousand lire. Look!’’ The pen flashed incandescent in the light of a street-lamp. ‘‘The old girl gave that to me.’’

  ‘‘Liar!’’

  ‘‘What the hell do you mean?’’ Rodolfo raised a fist. ‘‘I tell you she——’’

  ‘‘You pinched it. You did, didn’t you?’’

  ‘‘And suppose I did? Thirty lire each after we’d been making fools of ourselves for two hours for her benefit! And she came and messed you about while you were asleep. I saw her, though she thought my eyes were shut. It’s not a bad pen, either. Heavy.’’ As he weighed the gold barrel in his palm, it once again shot splinters of light into the surrounding darkness. ‘‘ Solid gold, I shouldn’t be surprised.’’

  Enzo snatched at it but Rodolfo leapt aside. Under the lamp-post at the end of the street, the two boys grappled, the night’s silence broken only by their heavy breathing, an occasional exclamation, and at the last, a clatter as the pen fell on to the cobbles. Enzo groped for it, and the Tunisian at once stamped on his outstretched hand. But the Florentine had the pen. Dishevelled and bleeding, they stood for a moment staring at each other as if they were strangers brought together by some arbitrary street accident: Enzo’s shirt was ripped from neck to waist, so that a bare, muscular shoulder gleamed from the shadows, while from the place where one sole of Rodolfo’s shoe had grazed his hand a number of minute, black beads of blood crawled, like ants, downward to the fingers. Suddenly they both began laughing.

  ‘‘You win,’’ Rodolfo said.

  ‘‘I’m going back.’’

  ‘‘For Christ’s sake!’’

  But Enzo had already trotted off into the darkness; and Rodolfo, hauling himself up on to the parapet beside the Arno, began to examine his injuries while he waited for his friend.

  Enzo had no handkerchief, and as he mounted the service stairs, the blood from his hand, flowing freely now, left a trail of bright red drops on the veined marble. The climb to the sixth floor made him more breathless, and when he stopped for a moment’s respite he saw, with dismay, that during his fight with the Tunisian the clip of the pen had been wrenched off and lost. They would never find it now.

  As he reached the last step, he was taken aback to see Mrs. Bennett and Max walking down the corridor towards him, on their way down to dinner. He slipped into the shadows behind the lift-shaft; then, as they rang for the lift, he came forward.

  ‘‘Scusi.’’ He held out the pen to Mrs. Bennett; his hand was trembling, either from nervousness or the exertion of the fight, and when he attempted to control it, he could not do so. ‘‘Scusi,’’ he repeated in his faint, husky voice.

  ‘‘Grazie.’’ Mrs. Bennett took the pen as if he were one of the hotel servants handing her an unimportant letter. Glancing up, Enzo was surprised to find her face lacked all expression; but, suddenly, before he looked down once more, the nervous tic, fluttering her left eyelid, made it appear as if she were gravely and deliberately winking at him. It was terrifying.

  ‘‘Buona sera,’’ he muttered. ‘‘Buona sera.’’

  In the silence of the long hotel corridor they could hear the magnified, echoing thud of his feet as he raced down the stairs.

  ‘‘He must have had to fight for it,’’ Mrs. Bennett said. ‘‘His shirt was torn, and his blood is on the pen. Look.’’ The pen seemed to have oozed red ink, but this ink was sticky. She pulled out the lavender-scented handkerchief and began to wipe the barrel.

  ‘‘That must have needed courage,’’ said Max.

  ‘‘And honesty—which is so much rarer.… Oh, let’s go and eat. We seem to be fated not to.’’

  Chapter Two

  IN the hotel-garage Karen switched off the engine of the vast, dusty Packard as Max greeted her. ‘‘Back at last, darling! I saw the car pass from the dining-room window. You must be tired. What happened to you?’’

  ‘‘Oh, I don’t know.’’ She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, staring ahead. If her face had been less pinched, her body less meagre, and her clothes and hair less untidy, her claims to beauty would have been indisputable; as it was, it was precisely these defects that gave to her the waif-like pathos which, for Max, had always been a lure more potent than any kind of beauty. Her wrists and arms were so thin, her collar-bone so fragile; when she spoke it was with the faint lisp of an adolescent. Recently she had allowed her fashionably bobbed hair to grow and it hung, straight and dishevelled from the drive in the open car, about her bare, slightly freckled shoulders. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and on one lid an inflammation which Max had already noticed and knew, with concern, to be the beginning of one of her styes.

  ‘‘You look tired,’’ he said tenderly.

  ‘‘Thank you. You know I hate to be told that. Now tell me that I look ill. And you look even more gloomy than when I left this morning. What’s the matter? Has the market dropped unexpectedly? … Yes?’’ She turned impatiently to the garage attendant, and learning that he wanted the car moved, exclaimed, ‘‘ Hell! Oh, all right, all right. But why didn’t you say so when I first came in?’’ Recklessly she swung the Packard backwards so that the rear buffer, lunging into another car, rocked it from side to side.

  ‘‘Hey, hey hey?’’ an English voice shouted, and a middle-aged Englishman of over six foot appeared, carrying a motoring-rug, a picnic basket and a bag full of golf-clubs. ‘‘Take care of my little bus. She’s got to get me back to England.’’

  ‘‘Oh, damn?’’ Karen muttered, grinding the gears: she made no apology.

  ‘‘Shall I do it?’’ Max suggested.

  ‘‘No, I’ll——’’ Once again she struggled. ‘‘Oh, all right. You might have offered in the first place.’’ She jumped out of the car, snatched her bag, and hurried away.

  The Englishman directed Max with bass shouts of ‘‘Whoa’’ and ‘‘Rightey-ho’’ until the Packar
d was eased beside his own Hillman. Then he said: ‘‘You could take the Minx for a drive in the back of that lorry of yours. Must eat up petrol.’’ He examined the car enviously. ‘‘You don’t often see the old G.B. plate on anything of that size—not these days. Here long?’’

  ‘‘Another week or two.’’

  ‘‘You’re not English, are you? Canadian, I suppose.’’

  ‘‘No, American. But I’ve been working in England since the war.’’

  ‘‘Then I was right! The wife and I had an argument. She swore that you were Canadian.’’ Max himself could not recollect ever having seen the man before. ‘‘But your wife’s English, isn’t she?’’

  ‘‘Yes, she’s English.’’

  ‘‘And that’s her mother, I suppose—the other lady?’’

  His curiosity was so naïve and good-natured that Max could feel no resentment.

  ‘‘Yes, that’s my mother-in-law,’’ he said.