by Francis King
‘‘Good God!’’ Tiny strode over to the bed, and stood over her, his six-foot-two of loose flesh quivering with indignation. ‘‘You have a nerve. When you’ve been carrying on with that bounder under my very nose—your—your—gigolo—cheques—my money, too—money I’ve earned with the—with the sweat of my brow——’’ Not naturally eloquent, he swung his arms in wild gestures as he attempted to find words.
Max went up to him: ‘‘Look, old man, how about you leaving her until she has recovered? Let her get over the shock of it all. Come and have a drink with me. Come.’’ He put an arm round the massive shoulders, heaving under the blazer with the crest of the minor public-school, and coaxed him from the room. ‘‘You look after Chris,’’ he said to Mrs. Bennett.
‘‘Oh, he’s awful,’’ Chris said, her sobs ceasing as soon as Tiny had left the room. ‘‘If he’d been different, it all would never have happened. Never!’’ She turned on her back so that the tears trickled down her temples and lodged in her hair. With one hand she kept clutching and unclutching the crumpled bedspread, while with the other she pressed her handkerchief to her hose. ‘‘He was so boring,’’ she said. ‘‘I felt I had to do something or I should have gone off my head. And coming to Italy, to Florence, where one feels so free and everything is so—so——’’ Mrs. Bennett hoped she would not say ‘‘romantic’’ but unfailingly the word came. ‘‘So romantic,’’ she gulped. ‘‘At first I thought Béngt loved me. He was so sweet, you know, so attentive, in a way Tiny had never been. And—and I thought it was my only chance. Probably no one would ever love me just like that again. I’m not young, you see, and I know I’m not pretty, and I don’t dress well.…’’ Her candour was appalling, and it appalled Mrs. Bennett; and yet there was a pathos in it which made the older woman feel she would do anything to help the younger. ‘‘ Bit by bit, of course, I began to realize. I couldn’t help it. I knew that it wasn’t the real thing, but by then I’d ceased to care. I was content to have him with me, to have him make love, even though I knew.…’’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘‘Oh, you must look down on me!’’
‘‘Of course I don’t.’’ Mrs. Bennett thought of the years of ugly, laborious devotion she had given to a man whom she despised and in the end hated. She had never been unfaithful to him; but unlike many other women, she did not believe that that fact gave her the right to be Chris’s judge.
‘‘It was awful to give him all that money, and there were times I was suspicious. But I so wanted to believe in him, I so wanted him to be all the things he said he was. Perhaps, all along … Oh, I was blind. I blinded myself, because I didn’t want to see.’’
Max came in: ‘‘How is she? I’ve left Tiny downstairs with Karen and Frank Ross. They’ve just got in.… Cheer up, Chris,’’ he said clumsily; he put but one of his large, freckled hands and attempted to touch her forearm. ‘‘But look—what about the police? Don’t you think we ought to tell them.’’
‘‘Oh, no!’’ she at once wailed, huddling herself round so that she again faced the wall. ‘‘Let him go. What does it matter?’’
‘‘But the money——’’ Max began, genuinely baffled.
‘‘I don’t care about the money. And I don’t care if I find myself in the—in the Old Bailey, for passing those cheques. I don’t care!’’
‘‘Then why all these tears?’’ Max asked brightly.
‘‘Oh, Max, do try to understand——’’ Mrs. Bennett began quietly, but Chris had sat up in bed and had begun to spit out in Max’s astonished face:
‘‘Because I loved him. And love him still. And because I shall never see him again. Never, never, never. And because I shall have to go on living with Tiny to the end of my days, knowing he always has this against me. Now do you see?’’
‘‘Yes, I’m sorry,’’ Max said humbly.
He, alone, of all those concerned had never realized the true nature of the affair. ‘‘But I’d never thought it was serious,’’ he said to Mrs. Bennett afterward. ‘‘I’d never guessed. I thought it was just one of those things.’’
Mrs. Bennett looked at him closely; then putting both her hands on his shoulders, she said: ‘‘Just one of those things so often becomes serious before you realize it.’’
He knew, then, that she referred to Karen and Frank Ross.
Chapter Twenty-Five
LENA was on her bed, staring up at a ceiling painted garishly with acanthus leaves, red and white roses and, in the centre, the head and shoulders of a woman. She had hated this ceiling ever since they had come to the flat, but they had never been able to afford to have it painted over. One day, Lena had decided, she would paint it herself; but that decision had been made more than three years previously. She now lay, thinking of nothing but experiencing a vague, persistent desolation of the spirit. It was hot, and she sat up on the bed and pulled off her blouse, and then she kicked off her shoes; finally she removed her skirt. Each of these actions she performed as if the objects removed were things extremely distasteful to her.… Oh, Max, she thought. For now he was always ‘‘Max’’ to her in her thoughts about him. She turned over on her side and stared at the wall, instead of the ceiling. She crooked one arm over her head, revealing a moist patch of hair, and drew a deep sigh.… She and he were driving in a fiacre along the Viale Michelangelo and the night was late. A light breeze had risen to quicken the dying air; the scent of box eddied all about them. From far off there penetrated to their ears the music of a cheap, sentimental waltz coming from the Piazzale; but heard at this distance, with the whole city suddenly revealed to them, far below, through the breaks in the foliage, it had a solemn kind of nostalgia. The horse’s hooves struck a constant echo from the hill on their right: plock, plock, plock. It was as if someone invisible were striking a pick-axe into stone. The hand with the small, reddish-brown freckles and the lighter red hair was resting on hers; she could feel the weight of his shoulder, the pressure of his knee; his lips at her throat.…
Now they were walking, down the ghostly hillside, their feet sometimes scattering small granules of earth after them, the place was so steep. Each of the olive-trees was like a puff of mist, and either they or the earth itself gave out an odour of mustiness and age. She shivered a little, in her light silk dress, and he drew her closer to him. They came to a water-course, where like a scar in the hillside, the ground felt all at once tender under their feet. There was a subterranean murmur, seeming strangely loud in the loneliness and the darkness, as if some imprisoned spirit were crying to be released. ‘‘The grass is soft here; it must be green.… Oh, and the water’s so cold.’’ Under the wide sky she lay open to his love. She kissed the place where that morning he had cut himself shaving; a blade of grass tickled her ears; the intense throbbing of the water seemed to have become a no less intense throbbing within her own being.…
Oh, but it was disgusting! She jumped off the bed and pulled on her clothes; but a recollection of these waking fantasies still persisted, giving a dazed languor to each movement that she made. From her mother she had inherited a disgust with the physical demands of love, from her father a spirit which perpetually craved to yield to them. For many weeks now, through this long, breathless summer, her mind had been filled with nothing but such thoughts of Max; and only in intense activity could she escape them. As a result she wore herself out with work that was often unnecessary, turning out cupboards, making preserves or mending clothes she had long since discarded, with an angry impatience which left her weak and limp when each task was finished.
Often she would stride out for a walk; and it was now a walk she took, thrusting her way through an afternoon that was listlessly declining into evening. Few people were about in the Cascine where she went, and most of these lolled on the stone benches or lay full length in the grass. A vespa churned past, the stench of stale fumes making her feel vaguely sick. She walked on and on, with the sun in her eyes, until at the far end of the park she came to the hideously pathetic monument to the Indian pr
ince who, dying of tuberculosis in Florence at the age of twenty-one on his way out from Oxford to India, had been buried where the two rivers, the Arno and the Mugnone, joined their parched streams. The turbaned head, modelled in terracotta with a daubing of gold paint, stared at the dustily drooping foliage with eyes as blank and characterless as all its other features. There was a dreary, forlorn sadness about it all, and Lena quickly turned away, taking a path that would bring her down to the Arno.
Suddenly, against the peeling brown of the river’s edge, she saw a figure, legs apart and the whole body slouched in a posture characteristic of a young boy. She hesitated, and then called: ‘‘Hello.’’
‘‘Oh, Lena,’’ Karen said without either pleasure or surprise. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’
For no reason, Lena suffered an acute embarrassment; and her face became red. ‘‘I was taking a walk,’’ she answered; and it was almost as if she imagined that Karen knew of the afternoon’s long fantasies about Max.
Karen had begun to bite the nail of her middle finger and her small, white teeth could be heard clicking like a pair of scissors. ‘‘What an odd time to walk,’’ she said.
‘‘It is hot,’’ Lena agreed feebly. Then, gathering courage, she retaliated: ‘‘ But you must have walked here, too.’’
‘‘Me? Oh, we bicycled here.’’
‘‘We?’’ Lena thought; and her whole spirit seemed suddenly to cleave to the back of her mouth as she guessed that Max must be near.
‘‘You know Frank Ross?’’ Karen went on; and swinging round, Lena saw Ross walking towards them from a clump of trees, a hand still fumbling at one of the buttons of his khaki shorts.
‘‘Yes,’’ Lena said, and as Ross drew near, she nodded to him, attempted to smile and said ‘‘Good afternoon.’’
‘‘Hello,’’ he said, like Karen without either pleasure or surprise. He lowered himself on to the grass and, clasping the lean brown wrist of his left hand in his right, he too gazed at the opposite bank until Lena said with a certain forlornness:
‘‘Well, I suppose I must be going.’’
They did not contradict her.
‘‘Bye-bye,’’ she said.
‘‘Goodbye, Lena,’’ Karen responded, without even turning her head. Then she shouted after the retreating girl: ‘‘Oh, Lena.’’
‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘I quite forgot the most important thing. Max tried to ring you at your home, but the number was engaged and he had an appointment. I think he wanted you for something, though I can’t remember what. Perhaps he wanted you to type something for him? Yes, that was it. He sent you away early this afternoon, didn’t he, because he was feeling tired? Well, now he’s stopped feeling tired and he awfully wants to get whatever it is finished. And so he won dered if you could look in this evening, after dinner, say—about nine or half-past?’’
Having delivered this message, Karen at once turned away, as if there were nothing more to be said.
‘‘Yes, I’ll do that,’’ Lena said. ‘‘ Would you please tell him I’ll come as soon as I can after dinner?’’ But she might have saved her breath; for neither Karen nor Frank took any further notice.
Angrily she began to trudge up the bank, but her anger soon melted into a deliriously voluptuous pleasure. That evening she would see him; and the fact that she had accepted an invitation from Signor Commino to go to a concert worried her not at all. She was not naturally inconsiderate or selfish, and in the past she had always shrunk from the pain she must cause this man whom she could not love; but since she had begun to work for Max, she had found a secret, shameful release for her pent-up frustrations by humiliating her Italian suitor. It was not pleasant and she knew it was not pleasant; indeed she despised herself for the manner in which she treated him. But she could not help it, she told herself; she just could not help it.
Having reached the top of the bank, she halted, not to regain her breath, but because a thought had suddenly come to her. She was smiling to herself, like a mischievous child, as she walked into the clump of bushes from which Frank had emerged. No, they had not seen her; and from here, holding down this branch, she could see them. She waited, straining on tiptoe, while the perspiration on the arm she had raised to hold the branch glistened in the sunlight. Near her, among the bushes, some creature—lizard, bird, or snake-—pattered and rustled. It was even more suffocating here than out in the sun, and a faint whiff of corruption was rising from the soiled scraps of newspaper that stuck to the ground. Lena’s arm began to ache, her eyes to prick; her whole being felt an intense, physical oppression. Unconscious of her Ross and Karen talked, several inches between them; and still Lena waited.
Oh, she knew it! Suddenly Karen put a hand out to ruffle Frank’s hair, he caught her by the wrist, and they both began to wrestle. Lena could hear Karen laughing, and as she laughed, exclaiming: ‘‘No … no … that hurts, that hurts.’’ The scrimmage was brief, for Karen had already thrown herself on Frank and having pretended to be about to bite him in self-defence, had pressed her lips to his. Thus they remained locked for what seemed to Lena interminable seconds.
The bitch, the little bitch! But there was a wild, animal exultation in the way in which Lena said the words. Hers was a plain face except at such moments when her response to some other person was intense enough to change it. It was changed now. Her fine, dark eyes glittered; the slack outlines of the figure which Mrs. Bennett had described as ‘‘all anyhow’’ were now drawn taut. But the exultation was momentary. She let go of the branch her arm held down, and her view at once obscured, leaned with her back against the hard, crinkled trunk of one of the trees. She thought she might faint in the heat, the closeness of the foliage, and that pervasive, sickening odour of decay; she thought she might cry.
Grief flooded her; and as she gulped for air, it was as if she were gulping that grief in, with the element which she breathed. Grief seemed to saturate the whole atmosphere, as it was saturated with heat and with dust. Mouthful after mouthful she swallowed, until her whole being drowned beneath its oppression, and still out of the invisible air it poured into her body.
Suddenly she screamed; she could not control herself. A snake, no bigger than her own index-finger, had wriggled across her shoe in a flash of brown and purple spots. Or so Lena thought. Afterwards she told herself that it must have been a leaf. She put her hand to her mouth, appalled at the thought that Karen or Frank might have heard her. She waited. Until, at last, she again pulled down the branch and peered cautiously out.
The two bicycles had gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘‘I HOPE you don’t mind,’’ Mino said when he called round for Lena. ‘‘I’ve asked an Englishman and two Americans to have dinner with us.’’
‘‘That’s a good beginning to an evening.’’
‘‘You do mind?’’ he exclaimed in immediate distress, holding his mouth open long after he had finished what he was saying, as if he expected Lena to pop a letter in. It was a mannerism which always annoyed her.
‘‘Oh, I don’t really care,’’ she replied languidly.
‘‘This is terrible, this is terrible. What was I to do?’’ He paced up and down the room in his light green suit whose trousers were hitched too high and whose coat rode perpetually above his buttocks, while the lines came out one by one on his bulging dome of a forehead as if drawn in by an invisible hand. ‘‘They came into the American Express, they came to me for advice. They were lost, Lena, completely lost; they were terrified—terrified of this city of ours.’’ He made a dramatic upward gesture with his right hand, as if he were pulling at something in the air. ‘‘They had come to Italy to learn to be painters and they knew nothing, did not know where to turn, what to do, how to live. I felt sorry for them. You would have felt sorry for them—you will feel sorry for them. So—what could I do?’’ He turned to her, his shoulders raised expressively, and the green coat, covered with darker stains, bulged about his collar-bone. ‘‘I
had to do something. Do you know, they are thinking of returning to America and England. After coming so far, with eleven trunks in bond in the Florence Customs, they are thinking of going home! I felt that I must dissuade them. Don’t you agree? And how could I do that better than by some act of friendship. ‘Here, friends’——’’ He put out one of his small, plump hands as if to greet an invisible person—‘‘ ‘Florence, our city, greets you. We greet you.’ What else could I do for them? If you could have seen them!’’ He came across and attempted to take the girl’s arm, but impatiently she pulled away. ‘‘Say you’re not angry, Lena.’’
‘‘I’ve told you, I don’t care.’’
‘‘It’s not as if we have to spend the whole evening with them,’’ Mino went on. He opened his snuff-box and scrabbled at the powder. ‘‘They understand that. They just want some advice, the sort of advice that you can give so well. About flats, and cheap pensiones, and the price of food and fuel. The Englishman has no money and the two Americans must keep him and themselves on the grant the American Government pays them. You must help them—you will, Lena, won’t you? They are very young, very inexperienced, very unsophisticated. This old world of ours terrifies them. Everything terrifies them.’’
Lena knew that he was genuinely stirred by the plight of these exiles, and on any other day she would have liked him the more for it. He was generous and kind, and she herself shared in those qualities and admired those that had them. Indeed, she would probably never have been able to have borne with his physical peculiarities and ugliness if it had not been for her knowledge that if anyone was good Mino was good.… But he was such a fool! And at this moment, her irritation made her want to hurt him. ‘‘And how do you propose to get rid of them after we’ve stood them dinner?’’ She purposely emphasized the word ‘‘ we”, making him hurriedly assure her:
