by Francis King
‘‘Thank you for telling me,’’ Max said quietly. ‘‘ Of course, at the time, I couldn’t have cared less,’’ he went on, once again screwing up his small green eyes under their red-tufted eyebrows as he focused them on the road. ‘‘It seemed terribly unimportant that you should have—have done something like that, when—when so much else was happening. But of course it was just as important, in its own way.’’
Colin braced himself: ‘‘Are—are we staying on in Florence, because you hope—that perhaps——?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘That’s what Pamela and I both thought.’’ Again he braced himself: ‘‘You want her back very much, don’t you?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Do you think there’s any—any chance?’’
Suddenly Max turned over on his stomach and put his head in his arms; he lay very still.
He was thinking of a visit he and Karen had paid to Blenheim four days after Karen had heard the news of her lover’s death. They had driven in silence, put from Oxford through the close, winter lanes, and when they had arrived it was to find the sun already sinking. Momentarily the palace caught its rays and brimmed with fire, so that it seemed as if, even while they watched, the flames would burst through, the roof would collapse, and the whole vast edifice would disrupt, tumble, subside in a million particles of light. But in a few seconds all was over. The sun descended into mist; the fire ebbed; everything became bare, moist and cold.
All that day it had been thawing and now, as they began to tramp through the solitary park, the slush wet their feet and the trees wet their clothes. Noises of invisible dripping were all round them. Far off, they could hear a roar of water descending into ‘‘Capability’’ Brown’s artificial lake. Yet, for all the melancholy and dampness, the place had its beauty; the lake, stretching on into the mist, the faint, barely perceptible outlines of the tress and, beyond, the fantastically uncertain silhouette of the Palace—all these things by their fugitive and unemphatic presence combined to make a profound impression on his mind. Now his grief and resentment over Karen seemed to have taken on an external form, and viewing it thus, he felt somehow comforted and assuaged.
All at once Karen’s foot touched ice; she slipped, lost her balance, and was only saved by the hand he put out to help her. How it happened then he did not know. ‘‘Take care!’’ he cried out; and a moment later they stood clutching each other through long, aching seconds, tensed, waiting, as if a bomb were about to explode; terror, not joy, seemed to hold them there. Karen’s face was pressed against his coat; ceaselessly the trees dripped water down on to their rigid bodies.
Then as it were nerve by nerve that wild, unreasoning panic left them. She was pushing him away from her: ‘‘No, no! I can’t! I can’t!’’ She was sobbing and a wet strand of hair clung to her cheek. Through the years of separation he had waited for this embrace, and its difference from what he had imagined left him stunned and appalled.
They walked on; and as they walked, he seemed to descend, step by step, into a profound darkness beyond all hope of escape or rescue. This was the woman, he knew now, for whom he would sacrifice himself, not once, but a thousand times over; and the bitterest irony was that that sacrifice would never have the smallest value in her eyes. And yet—desperately he sought for some light through the black gloom in which he found himself—was not love like charity, supreme when it was expended without either possibility or expectation of return? Was not that the largest triumph? And under the dripping trees he again and again pressed that icy comfort to him.
As now, once more, with the cicadas loud in his ears, his being reached to enfold it. In the long, unsleeping anguish of nights without Karen; in the persistent desolation of days spent in attempting to concentrate on things which seemed all at once to have lost meaning; in those sudden, yet more terrible, moments of night or day when he seemed to topple, to fall, as from some abruptly subsiding cliff, down and down through limitless gulfs of pain and humiliation: always he sought that same illusory refuge.
As now he did. But no, no, no. He flung round on his back, an arm over his eyes, and put the comfort from him.
He heard his son’s voice say ‘‘ Daddy?’’
There was no answer; and after having extended a hand which he at once withdrew, Colin sat and waited in silence for the end of this grief.
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘‘IT’S not very good,’’ Frank Ross said. Seated in nothing but a pair of shorts, he was painting the river.
The flesh of Karen’s bare arms and legs seemed strangely white against his brown as she leant over his shoulder and said:
‘‘I like it.’’
He had never had any use for the admiration of those he had enslaved and he now said: ‘‘Yes, but it’s not very good.’’
‘‘Meaning that I know nothing about painting?’’
‘‘Meaning precisely that.’’
She laughed, but once again he had wounded her. ‘‘ You are funny with your crazes,’’ she said.
‘‘My crazes?’’ he asked coldly.
‘‘The way you take up things for a few months and drop them. Or even for a few days, or a few hours. When we first came here, you would do nothing but potter about the garden. And now all the weeds are up again.’’
‘‘You know I haven’t been feeling any too well these last days.’’
‘‘Yes, I know, darling,’’ she conciliated. But she could not resist once again playing on this sensitive place she had discovered for herself. ‘‘ You said it was the same with the piano—do you remember?’’
He thought for a moment, turning the canvas this way and that in his strong, competent hands and then said: ‘‘Yes, I suppose it is true. I’m only interested in mastering things—and once I have the mastery, I don’t want to use it any longer. It cloys the palate.’’ He looked at her so closely with his sharp, glinting eyes in his burned-up face, that she felt herself redden, she could not have said why. ‘‘It took me six months to be able to play averagely difficult music at sight. That was enough.’’
‘‘And when you can paint averagely competent pictures, that will be enough too.’’
‘‘Perhaps.’’ He yawned and stretched, wriggling his bare toes, and again concentrated on the picture. After a while he said: ‘‘ It was your mother who gave me the idea. Do you remember—that wonderful sketch of the two sleeping boys? If I could do something like that, I’d never want to draw or paint again.’’
‘‘Why wouldn’t you accept it, when she said you could have it?’’
He shrugged his bare shoulders. ‘‘Oh, one has one’s pride,’’ he said. ‘‘Did she mind my not taking it?’’ he continued.
‘‘No. She has no pride.’’
He was tenderly pressing the finger-tips of one hand against the sides of his throat, and she said: ‘‘It’s hurting you.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘I know it is. What’s the use of pretending? Let me paint it for you again.’’
‘‘Oh, don’t fuss so!’’ he exclaimed irritably.
‘‘But I’m worried. Why won’t you see the doctor? It’s not fair to me. I know that you’re ill.’’
‘‘I’ve been iller than this. In the jungle. Where there aren’t any doctors even if you’re willing to see them. I shan’t die.’’
‘‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. If only there was something I could do for you.’’
His teeth glittered in his burned-out face as he smiled and said: ‘‘There is something. Cook me something which I can swallow with ease this evening.’’ He was referring to a disastrous soup of the night before in which most of the diced vegetables had proved to be as hard as pebbles. ‘‘Will you do that?’’
‘‘I think it’s beastly of you to go on about the soup.’’
‘‘I never mentioned the soup,’’ he said with feigned surprise.
‘‘But that’s what you meant.’’
She went
angrily into the house and threw herself on to the bed with a book he had lent her: Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. She could not read it, and after a few minutes she went to the window where she leaned on the sill and watched him at his work. The heat was intense, and her whole being seemed about to faint from the mingled remembrance and expectation of his body.
That night she again applied the Mandl’s paint she had bought at the English chemist’s. She was nervous as she did so, and she did not wish to look closely at the slough, like yellow cotton-wool, on either side of his swollen throat. A number of small ulcers had begun to make his mouth painful. Her hand shook and he exclaimed: ‘‘You’ll make it so much sorer if you’re not careful. Besides making me retch. It really can’t be all that difficult to get the brush in the right place.’’
‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she said in exasperation.
‘‘And then you at once fly off the handle.’’
‘‘I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m so worried about you.’’
‘‘Oh, for heaven’s sake——’’
‘‘I’m sure you have a temperature.’’ She put a hand on his forehead: ‘‘Yes, I know you have.’’
‘‘Well, you’re not going to take it. That’s one thing I won’t allow. I don’t believe in it, never have.’’ His cheeks were flushed, his eyes glittered with obvious fever. ‘‘It’s probably my old malaria. I can never quite shake it off. Perhaps I’d better stay in bed tomorrow. I think I’ll go on a fruit diet, that always works. Yes, that’s a good idea. Just fruit, fruit-juice, nothing else.’’
‘‘Can’t I get the doctor?’’ Karen again pleaded.
‘‘No! I will not see a doctor.’’
‘‘If it’s the money——’’
‘‘The money!’’
She said no more.
Waking in the middle of the night, she found that in spite of the August heat which was making her sweat, his body was being shaken by convulsive tremor after tremor. She put out an arm and attempted to draw him towards her, as if contact with her own health could somehow destroy his illness. But, whether in sleep or not, he at once pulled away. Soon she could hear his teeth grinding together. It was a sound which filled her with an inexplicable terror and yet she dared not wake him. She sat up on her elbow and peered at his face, working so noisily in the summer moonlight, and then she attempted to go to sleep and pay no attention. But she could not do so. At the last she had to get up and go and sleep on the sofa in the drawing-room. She crept back into the bed in the early morning so that he should not notice.
There was no doubt, when he woke, that he was really ill. He could only swallow with difficulty and rather than force his saliva, with agonizing effort, back down his throat he preferred to spit into the basin which she had given him. She felt physically nauseated when, as she ate her own breakfast in the kitchen, she could hear his repeated attempts to clear his throat, followed by the sounds of expectoration. Again she pleaded that she must get a doctor, and again, this time with a kind of weary but terrible anger, he told her to mind her own business. She painted his throat and saw that it was almost closed. She was tearful with frustrated anxiety and kept repeating, though she knew it annoyed him: ‘‘You poor darling … you poor thing …’’
‘‘Oh, shut up!’’ he shouted at her in the end. ‘‘Who’s ill? You or I? … Fetch me my sketching-block.’’
‘‘Do you think you really ought——?’’
‘‘Oh, very well.’’ He swung his legs out of the bed and she at once went and fetched it.
She had arranged to meet Mrs. Bennett in Florence that day, but she told Frank that she could, of course, put her off. But she had looked forward to the encounter, as she had never done previously, feeling for the first time in her life the need to confide in, and lean on, her mother.
‘‘You must go,’’ Frank said, when she told him that she was going to telephone to the hotel.
‘‘But how can I? I can’t possibly leave you——’’
‘‘Don’t be silly,’’ he croaked. His voice had almost gone. ‘‘The woman comes to clean to-day, doesn’t she?’’ Exasperated by Karen’s failure to keep the house tidy, he had recently engaged a peasant woman to come in twice a week. ‘‘She can fetch me anything I need.’’
‘‘But she’s dirty! And she never hears what one says. You can call and call and she won’t come to you. No, really, Frank——’’
‘‘You’re going into Florence,’’ he said. ‘‘Now please don’t argue. My throat is too sore.… Perhaps you’d just tidy the bed first, though?’’ Once again her nervousness made her clumsy, and as she pulled one of the pillows from under him she accidentally pulled the other too, thus making his head jolt downwards. He said nothing, but she saw his face tighten with pain and displeasure.
Florence was suffocating, and she dragged listlessly from shop to shop paying more for things than she knew Frank would allow. When at last she met Mrs. Bennett at Doney’s, she had made a number of useless purchases and had at the same time failed to buy at least a quarter of the items on her list. She had feared that her mother, in the strange mood of fatalistic indifference in which she now seemed to exist, would show little sympathy; but in that she had been wrong. True, Mrs. Bennett had no practical suggestions, beyond gargling with peroxide, and she did little more than listen as Karen unburdened herself of her misery. But her ancient eyes seemed to express an immeasurable pity and even love for the daughter whom, she had so often confessed in the past, she had never understood. She held the girl’s hand in her own and said: ‘‘Poor Karen, my poor Karen …’’; and the words themselves, spoken in a husky voice which seemed only a shadow of the decisive voice of the past, somehow had the power to heal and to allay fear.
‘‘It’s been so wonderful, seeing you, Mother,’’ Karen said. ‘‘ I feel so much better.’’
In the rush of her anxiety and grief she had failed to notice that Mrs. Bennett was herself looking extremely ill.
‘‘Well, how’s the patient?’’ Karen asked on her return. She put a hand on his forehead, to which a few strands of hair had stuck, and then said: ‘‘ You’re wringing wet. You’d better change those pyjamas.’’ Then, as she stooped above him she could hear a strange, guttural rattle in his throat. ‘‘Do you feel bad?’’ she asked.
‘‘Oh, don’t go on asking such silly questions! Fetch the pyjamas.’’
When she returned, she noticed that an earthenware bowl was standing on the bedside table, with a black sediment at its bottom; she tilted it to the light as he explained: ‘‘It was some concoction of Anna’s—herbs and mulled wine.’’
‘‘Wine—with a temperature!’’
‘‘It made me feel much better. Why not? These peasant women know far more about nursing than we do.’’
‘‘Nonsense! You’ll have her bringing in a witch next.’’
He smiled weakly. ‘‘ She made me wear this.’’ And as Karen helped him off with his pyjama jacket she saw that he was wearing an amulet round his neck: what looked like a worn penny, with a lamb on one side and a hand raised in a blessing on the other.
‘‘It’s absurd!’’ she exclaimed. She dried his body with a towel, reiterating, ‘‘It’s absurd … such superstition …’’ and then clumsily pulled the pyjama-trousers over his loins. ‘‘You’d better gargle now and then I’ll paint your throat.’’
‘‘Oh, she can do that,’’ he said, sinking back on to the pillow, his hands crossed over his stomach.
‘‘Who can?’’ Karen asked sharply.
‘‘Anna.’’
‘‘Anna!’’
‘‘She did it when you were out.’’
‘‘But the woman’s filthy. And she can never have painted a throat in her life.’’
‘‘Well, she did it as if it were the commonest thing in the world.’’ He closed his eyes, and gathering all the husky remnants of his voice, commanded: ‘‘Please send her.’’
‘‘But an ignorant woman like that——!
You must be crazy. No, really, darling, why can’t I do it?’’
Without opening his eyes again he said: ‘‘Because you don’t do it nearly so well. And because you know you hate doing it. You do, don’t you?’’
‘‘Well, there’s gratitude for you!’’ She went out, slamming the door, and then crossed the narrow, white-washed passage to the kitchen: ‘‘Oh, Anna,’’ she said. ‘‘ The Signore wants you.’’
The peasant woman was about thirty, the unmarried mother of two children, one of whom had had a German father and the other an English: she looked much older and there were already streaks of grey in the black, greasily dull hair which straggled to a bun at the nape of the neck. In the house she worked barefoot, with a rag tied over her ears. When she talked it was her habit to run the palms of her hands over her massive breasts and down her thighs, as if she were attempting to mould her far from shapely figure. Karen instinctively distrusted her; and now, absurdly, she had begun to feel jealous. ‘‘What was that drink you gave him?’’ she asked. She had heard that in country districts the peasant women were always administering love-potions of catamenal blood, and she suspected that, like most women, Anna found her exuberant temperament responding to Frank.
