by Francis King
Meanwhile, Karen had approached Chris Maskell: ‘‘I’m afraid you both must have been awfully cross with me for my rudeness.’’
To her surprise Chris Maskell at once caught her hand, smiling conspiratorially. ‘‘Of course not, my dear! Tiny was a little put out, at first, but I soon squared him. I hope you had a lovely time,’’ she added, squeezing the fingers she still held in her own.
‘‘Yes—yes, thank you,’’ Karen said, taken aback by this unexpected cordiality. ‘‘It was such a coincidence. I ran into this old friend——’’
‘‘Old friend!’’ Chris exclaimed. ‘‘My dear, I saw you as we passed that café place. His rucksack caught my eye, you know—through the window. Tiny wanted to join you, he’s so tactless, but I soon knocked that little idea on the head. He never understands, I’ve lost all hope of teaching him.’’ Giggling, she added: ‘‘And I had my own little adventure, you’ll hardly believe it.’’ Suddenly a blush of agonizing intensity swept up her face, as she said: ‘‘We climbed all those steps—four hundred and something of them—up the Torre di Mangia, and Tiny wanted a photograph of the two of us against the view, so, as luck would have it, there was this perfectly charming Swede standing there and Tiny asked him and of course he was only too delighted, and then we got into conversation, and it turned out he was coming to Florence.’’ Again she gave a short, breathless giggle as if it hurt her to do so. ‘‘It was so funny after what Tiny had said about my having a thing about Scandinavians, because of course it’s quite true. Anyway he’s staying here, he’s the son of a baron, he told us, and I very much—— Oh, here he is, with Tiny!’’
A tall young man, so blond that he almost seemed albino, in a suit cut ostentatiously wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, was walking down the stairs with Tiny beside him. ‘‘ May I present—Count Béngt von Arbach,’’ Chris said. This time the giggle came like a convulsive swallow: ‘‘Have I got it right?’’ she asked. ‘‘It’s such a mouthful.… Mrs. Westfield.’’
As von Arbach bent low over Karen’s hand, repeating his name, she at once noticed the oddly Mongolian cast of his features—the cheek-bones high, the eyes at a slant, the nose flat and broad, the eyelids almost invisible when the eyes were open. Yet, for all that, he was an attractive young man.
‘‘Who is that tall person with the Maskells?’’ Mrs. Bennett asked as Karen returned to the table.
‘‘He’s wonderfully glam,’’ Pamela remarked.
‘‘Wonderfully what?’’ Mrs. Bennett queried.
‘‘Oh, he’s someone Chris met in Siena,’’ Karen said absently, busy going over the lies she had told in the new knowledge of the Maskell’s having seen her and Frank together. ‘‘He’s Swedish,’’ she added, ‘‘or perhaps she said Danish. He’s the second of their discoveries to-day; when the car broke down, an odd Englishman helped to mend it and then we kept running into each other, as one does on such occasions, until we exchanged addresses. He’s in Florence,’’ she continued, deciding that, since there was a danger that one of the family might meet him, truthfulness was now the best policy. ‘‘He’s doing it rough. Funnily enough he was in the bus in which I came back. An odd character, odd,’’ she said, repeating the adjective since it expressed her own baffled estimate of him. ‘‘Called Frank Ross.’’
‘‘Frank Ross?’’ Max queried. ‘‘You don’t mean the Burma man? Colonel Ross,’’ he added when Karen looked blank.
‘‘Mummy, you must have heard of Colonel Ross,’’ Pamela said.
‘‘Well, I haven’t.’’
‘‘But everyone has heard of him.’’
‘‘I never met him,’’ Max said. ‘‘ I’d like to have done, because opinions were so divided. I know that some people thought him a military genius—but others, whom I respected, said that he was a selfish and ambitious charlatan. Of course they said that of T. E. Lawrence, too—and there’s no doubt that Ross did almost impossible things in the jungle.… The professional soldier always finds it hard to forgive the successful amateur.’’
‘‘Do you mean you’ve met him, Mummy?’’ Colin asked with mounting excitement.
Karen laughed. ‘‘I really don’t know. He’s called Frank Ross, and as he has a wound which he got in the war, I suppose that it’s possible. But he seems to have no money, he carries nothing but a rucksack. I thought he was some sort of tramp.’’
Max smiled. ‘‘That sounds like Frank Ross.’’
‘‘Will he be coming to see you?’’ Colin asked, and almost simultaneously Pamela exclaimed: ‘‘ I hope that we can meet him?’’
‘‘I hardly know him,’’ Karen said. ‘‘ We only talked for a moment—as I say, he mended the car in five minutes after Tiny had been trying to mend it for more than half an hour.’’ There was a subdued note of admiration in her voice as she said this, then she yawned: ‘‘He was quite amusing but odd—definitely odd. I should quite like to see him again,’’ she added. ‘‘The people one can’t understand are the people one wants to see again—aren’t they?’’ she appealed to the whole company.
There was no one to disagree with her.
Chapter Ten
ENZO and Rodolfo were seated on their perch before the hotel, but when the Tunisian attempted to tease or have horse-play with Enzo, the usual ways in which they passed the time when they had nothing else to do, he noticed a lethargy in all his friend’s responses. ‘‘What’s the matter?’’ he asked, at the same time turning his head to gaze after two American girls who had passed, skirts swinging from their freely striding thighs. He gave a provocative whistle, and then shouted some abuse when they did not look round. ‘‘What’s the matter?’’ he repeated, putting a hand on Enzo’s shoulder.
The other, who was rocking back and forth on the balustrade, his arms clasped across his stomach, said no more than one laconic word: ‘‘Hungry.’’
Rodolfo turned out the pockets of his shorts but nothing was to be found except two fag-ends, a lottery ticket and a quantity of dust. When he held out one of the fag-ends in an outstretched palm his friend shook his head: ‘‘I feel sick.’’
‘‘Can’t you get something at home?’’
‘‘I’ve had another row with the old man—says I can’t even sleep there tonight. It was my fault. I told him what I thought of him. But he’s a bastard …’’ He continued with a string of obscenities, his eyes fixed moodily on the swing-doors of the hotel as they sucked in and ejected a ceaseless stream of well-fed, well-dressed foreigners. Already the boys’ visit to the Palazzo d’Oro had achieved all the qualities of a dream; and indeed its details had long since merged into the details of the real dreams that had followed it, with a confusion of opulent detail. But, strangely, like most Italians, Enzo felt no resentment when he compared that life of extravagant richness with his own life, but only wonder and a kind of sad, futile desire somehow to better himself.
‘‘Wait a moment,’’ Rodolfo said, and flashing a smile, he sprinted off into the darkness on noiselessly swift feet.
Karen came out of the swing doors, and shuddering slightly in the night breeze, turned to Max who had followed her. ‘‘Be a darling, and fetch my fur. I’m feeling rather cold.’’ She crossed the road, dubiously, as if she expected a robber to spring out at her, and standing no more than five feet from Enzo, looked at the water. He looked at her; and then, involuntarily, as it were as a tribute to her beauty, he began to sing one of the popular songs of the day in a soft, barely audible voice. It was ‘‘Auld Lang Syne’’ and all over Italy that year it was being danced as a slow waltz. Karen recognized it, but the Italian words and the boy’s light, nasal tenor seemed to blur the melody, to make of it something fluid, insinuating, cloyingly tender. As she listened to it, a strange, romantic longing and despair filled the Englishwoman, though she could not have said for what she longed, for what despaired. She walked slowly back to the hotel and a moment later Max joined her, slipping the fur over shoulders which gleamed white for Enzo through the surrounding d
arkness.
‘‘Look!’’ Rodolfo dived into his shirt and produced three cakes, pastry horns, a little battered after their journey and oozing a green, pus-like custard.
‘‘Where did you get them?’’
‘‘Eat first.’’
‘‘You have one.’’
‘‘No, I don’t want one, I’m not hungry.’’ But when Enzo insisted, the Tunisian placed a whole horn in his mouth at one go. Chewing it noisily and laughing at the same time, so that flakes of pastry kept showering from between his small, white teeth, he told the story of how he had gone to the small store at the corner of the street and had found, as he had hoped, that there was no one serving but the old woman, one of whose eyes, sealed by a cataract, bulged from its socket with the greenish-blue sheen of a hard-boiled egg. He had asked for some ink and while she had turned to rummage with arthritic fingers in a shelf below the counter, he had deftly slipped aside the glass panel which covered the cakes, at the same moment releasing a satiated blue-bottle, and had grabbed the three horns. She had suspected nothing, and had even apologized when he had told her that the ink was the wrong colour.
Enzo laughed: ‘‘When I have some money, I’ll go in and pay her.’’
‘‘Fool?’’ Rodolfo spat into the darkness. ‘‘You and your conscience! If you hadn’t been so honest about the three thousand lire, we could both have gone to the ‘casino’—and had something to spare.’’
‘‘Oh, shut up, shut up! I’ve heard enough of that three thousand lire.… I saw the American, just now, while you were away. With a woman—ids daughter, perhaps.’’
‘‘Go on! What did she look like?’’
‘‘A lovely bitch.’’ Enzo described Karen in the crude terms in which the boys usually discussed such topics; until, suddenly, the conviction slipped in on him that whatever he said fell somehow short of life, indeed only travestied it. He had never experienced this before, and he at once became silent.
‘‘Well?’’ Rodolfo prompted. ‘‘Go on.’’
‘‘That’s all,’’ the Florentine mumbled. ‘‘I couldn’t see her even. It was only for a few seconds. But she was beautiful.’’ He sighed, putting one of his hands to his face and rubbing an eye, as if he were tired.
‘‘I could do with a woman,’’ Rodolfo said. ‘‘ Like that,’’ and he indicated with an obscene gesture yet another American passer-by.… ‘‘How’s your brother?’’ he next asked, chuckling in reminiscence of Giorgio and the epileptic Bella. ‘‘Any more fits?’’ And he punched the Florentine in the ribs and repeated: ‘‘Any more fits?’’
But Enzo could not regard that incident as a joke; and whenever Rodolfo mentioned it to him he again felt a shadow of the terror he had experienced when his mother’s gentle rubbing of the oil had been interrupted by the girl’s shrill scream. That scream had always frightened him, as if it came from another world, but it had never frightened him more than on that night. Now he said nothing, locking and unlocking his fingers and kicking with his heels against the stone parapet.
‘‘You’re not much of a companion this evening,’’ Rodolfo grumbled. ‘‘ That long face of yours! What’s eating you?’’
‘‘I’ve told you, I’ve quarrelled with the old man.… Oh, and it all seems so hopeless,’’ he mumbled on. ‘‘ It’ll never be any better.’’
But these were things which Rodolfo never said, even if he sometimes thought them, and he at once leapt lightly down from his perch and announced that he was going to Piazza Repubblica to listen to the music. ‘‘Coming?’’ he asked.
Enzo shook his head.
‘‘Have this fag now,’’ Rodolfo said kindly, once again offering the grubby, inch-long stub on the palm of a hand whose lines were furrowed with dirt.
‘‘No, you have it,’’ Enzo said. ‘‘It’s your last, isn’t it?’’
‘‘I’ll find plenty in the Piazza. Have it—go on.’’ Rodolfo peered at it, holding it between finger and thumb, and then read out, pronouncing the words so that they were almost unrecognizable: ‘‘Player’s Navy Cut.… Good cigarette, American,’’ he said, with a certainty of a connoisseur.
‘‘English,’’ Enzo corrected.
‘‘What d’you mean English?’’
‘‘English,’’ Enzo repeated.
‘‘Player’s English?’’ Rodolfo asked in scorn.
An argument followed. It was as if they were playing a game which, though it bored them both, had to be dragged out to its conclusion, since neither would give in; and the game was a long one.
But at last Rodolfo trailed off into the darkness, and Enzo, having stayed to smoke the fag-end to the last bitter, scorching puff, also left the Lung’ Arno, wandering as the spirit took him back and forth in a zigzag pattern through the darkest alleys of the town. It was thus that he met his mother, carrying under one arm a wicker-basket whose weight made her limp and stumble over the cobbles as if she were drunk. Her head was bent forward from her exertion, a small bald patch, the size of a florin, gleaming strangely white in the reflection of a street-lamp; she did not see him until she was upon him.
‘‘What are you doing, Mother?’’
‘‘I’ve just knocked off. They asked me to take this mending.’’ She drew aside a protective layer of brown paper to display the clothes below. ‘‘I thought I’d better not say no.’’
‘‘But it’s far too late. It’s gone ten o’clock.’’
‘‘They mightn’t give it to me again, if I refused this time.’’ She put the basket down on the cobbles between them, and began to tidy her hair which was always limp and lustreless from the excessive damp of the laundry. Under her eyes there were a number of small vertical puckers as if the brown skin had been drawn together by an invisible needle. She wore the black dress which she always wore to work, and a pair of black shoes whose surface leather had been rubbed grey at the heels. These shoes, which had been presented to her by one of the hotel guests for having worked all night at repairing an evening-dress, were too large and gave her feet a pathetic appearance of shabby and ill-fitting elegance.
‘‘Well, let them go to hell!’’ Enzo exclaimed.
She smiled, since even twelve hours of work could not extinguish her spirit. ‘‘I wish I could. But they can so easily do without me, and we can’t do without them. If I lost the job I don’t know how we should manage.’’
Enzo had picked up the basket with a sigh and she at once attempted to take it from him. ‘‘Let me have it. It’s not heavy. You were walking the other way.’’
‘‘Don’t be silly, Mother. It’s far too heavy for you. No wonder you have back-ache.’’ Each word he spoke seemed to be dragged lifeless out of some secret pit of despair. For, once he had seen his mother stumbling over the cobbles, the light gleaming on that pathetic bare patch of scalp, he had plunged from his former mood of mild pessimism into depths into which his naturally hopeful spirit as a rule seldom penetrated. He had always hated the ugly fact that she should support them, dulling her youth that his father might drink, his brother whore, and he wander the streets and play an occasional game of football; but this hatred had never been so intense as now.
For, tonight, he seemed to have acquired a new vision which made him see things with desolating clarity instead of through the old, good-natured haze; and just as he had suddenly rebelled against the worn, obscene phrases in which he and his friends discussed women, so now he rebelled against the idea, once accepted but now atrocious, that his mother should slaye twelve hours a day to support three men.
‘‘But you don’t want to come home yet,’’ Signora Rocchigiani protested, still struggling with the handle of the basket as she panted beside her son. ‘‘It’s far too early for you.’’
‘‘I’m not coming home at all tonight, Mother.’’
‘‘Oh, Enzo!’’ The exclamation of disappointment was pitiful. ‘‘Not again! Why do you do it?’’
‘‘I did nothing,’’ he said with sudden hardness, removing the arm he h
ad put round her shoulder. ‘‘ But I won’t have him insulting me. Next time I’ll hit him,’’ he said, scowling and drawing down the corners of his mouth.
She laughed, but she was almost on the verge of tears. ‘‘You look so frightening like that! Please don’t pull such faces.’’ He smiled, against his will, and she said: ‘‘That’s better.… But why do you two always quarrel? And always when I’m not at home.’’
‘‘It’s got to stop, Mother, it can’t go on like this. I shall have to go away, that’s all.’’
‘‘Oh, don’t be so silly, don’t say such things!’’
‘‘But it’s true,’’ he said gloomily. ‘‘I must go somewhere else. He hates me,’’ he added.
They said nothing more until they reached the corner of the Borgo, and then Signora Rocchigiani pleaded: ‘‘ Come back with me and say you’re sorry. Just say you’re sorry. Enzo—please!’’
But he remained stubbornly mute, and taking the basket from him with a light yet inexpressibly mournful sigh and a shrug of the shoulders, she went on her way. He watched her as she moved between the tall, dilapidated houses until she put down the basket, fumbled in a pocket and came hurrying back. ‘‘You’d better have this,’’ she said. ‘‘It was a tip, so he needn’t know about it. I expect you’re hungry.’’
‘‘No, really, Mother——’’
‘‘Take it.’’
In despair he took from her outstretched hand the grubby, tattered bundle of five and ten lire notes; and in despair he found himself wandering on and on through the town, like an automaton, heedless and tireless, while the crowds slowly thinned, the noise from the open-air cafés sank into silence, and the houses, their lights one by one extinguished, stretched upward, narrowed and became less and less friendly to the homeless wanderer. But the Uffizi had always been friendly to such as him. From the deserted Signoria a river of moonlight flowed between the two colonnades until, making a delta of the terrace beyond, where a few lonely figures could still be seen crouching or leaning, it tumbled, like some sudden new tributary, into the Arno below. On the first bench a woman slept clutching a child whose back-tilted head gave the impression of being half-severed from a neck that curved swan-like in the moonlight. On the second bench an old man crouched, appearing to have suddenly woken to face death as one hand pulled what was either a tattered rug or an overcoat up to his chin. On the third bench Enzo lay, and putting his arms under his head as a pillow, gazed up at the dusty, cob-webbed panes of the electric lantern which dangled from the vaulted ceiling on the end of a rusty iron chain. There was interest in the extreme despair of his expression and beauty in the extreme languor of his pose, and so it was not surprising that passers-by, usually foreigners, should from time to time slow their homeward pace to stare. To-morrow they would be staring with the same mixture of bewilderment and admiration at the pictures in the gallery beneath which Enzo, and the rest of the city’s outcasts, now sheltered like insects under some vast, elaborate stone. But that was an irony which he, who had never visited the Uffizi, probably failed to appreciate.
