by Francis King
When he had gone, Karen wandered out into the garden for the first time since the old house had fallen, and she was at once sickened by the sweet, pervading smell of corruption which hung on the air. It came from one particular spot under the rubble, and she guessed that there the carcase of the cat was dissolving in the summer heat. But she stayed out on the parapet, in spite of her nausea, because she wanted to see Frank. Far away the ferry began to move, with short jerks, across the shrunken waters; and he—how typical!—was helping the old man to tug at the cable, their two bodies straining side by side. He was always achieving this kind of simple comradeship with others, she thought; with men particularly and with those who were his inferiors. But with her it had seldom existed. And then, all at once, she remembered what he had said about the tedium he found in doing a thing once he had mastered it; and she supposed that she, too, was being relegated to the limbo which had swallowed up music, chess and flying. It was with a savage kind of relief that she at last faced this conclusion.
She heard two shots from the marshes and the whole sickly air seemed to jitter and sway. A covey of birds were blown upwards, as if by the force of the explosion, and then drifted across the river, while the ring of the shots still persisted in her head. Again the air swung hither and thither; it made her feel vaguely giddy, like a stunning blow. He was a good shot, and seldom failed to bring down a bird. Out of the bamboos and dwarf shrubs a number of small whiffs of smoke were wriggling, like grey worms, up the intensely blue sky behind. The reverberation was now almost ceaseless.
She turned to go in and then stopped appalled. Something large and almost the same colour as the rubble was picking its way slowly over a fallen column; and then, almost as if it knew she was watching it, it whisked away. After several seconds another grey form—or perhaps it was the same—appeared on another heap of stones. Its tail, like a length of wet string, seemed to be plastered to the masonry. Then it too disappeared. Somewhere in the depths and silence of the ruin the putrefying carcase was being devoured.
‘‘Anna!’’ Karen screamed. ‘‘Anna, Anna, Anna!’’ But the peasant woman had long since gone home. Once again the air swayed from side to side like a suffocating curtain in a wind.
When Frank returned that evening she noticed, with joy, that he was changed. ‘‘A wonderful day,’’ he said, flinging down on the terrace the birds he had shot in a bedraggled jumble of feathers, beaks stuck together with blood, and rigidly grasping claws. He put out his arms and she went to him, with the mingled fear and fascination of an animal lured into a snare. ‘‘Oh, Frank!’’ she whispered; and then mutely she welcomed the destructive rage of his passion as she welcomed the sweat of his body and the grime of his face and the blood of his hands. She felt she had never been possessed so utterly; so utterly annihilated by another human being. Until, all at once, she was alone on the wicker couch on the verandah, with her torn and aching body, and he had gone. She got up to find him again, but when she tried the door which led to his room, she could not get it open. She banged on it and called his name, and then walked round to the other door. Both doors were locked.
‘‘Frank!’’ she called. ‘‘Frank! What’s the matter? Let me in!’’ And then in desperation, on a single repeated note: ‘‘Frank, Frank, Frank.’’
She heard him move about and at last he came to one of the closed doors and said through it, in a level, authoritative voice: ‘‘Please don’t interrupt me. I’m trying to do some work. I want to be left to myself.’’
Chapter Thirty-Four
‘‘WHY won’t you come to the opera, Granny?’’
Pamela asked. Mrs. Bennett was sitting in dressing-gown and slippers, Emma face downwards in her lap. Her grey hair, brushed loose about her shoulders instead of being screwed into a bun, made it seem as if she were failing in a grotesque attempt to recapture a lost youthfulness. But the truth was that she had undone the hair and had then felt too tired to do it up again.
In answer to her grand-daughter’s question, she said: ‘‘Oh, for lots of reasons.’’
‘‘Such as?’’
‘‘I feel weary, and I don’t like music, and I don’t like crowds. And I want to be alone and read my book. And besides there is Nicko.’’
‘‘Nicko! That’s all you ever think about.’’
‘‘Someone must think about him, dear.’’
‘‘Yes, I suppose so.… Somehow I don’t think it’ll be much fun.’’
‘‘I don’t see why not.’’ The old woman gave a small, twitching smile as she added: ‘‘You don’t miss me all that much, do you?’’
‘‘What a thing to say!’’ Pamela exclaimed, putting her arms about Mrs. Bennett’s shoulders and kissing her on one cheek. ‘‘You do say such odd things.’’ She turned her head sideways to read the tide of the book and then said: ‘‘You’re breaking your resolution.’’
‘‘My resolution?’’
‘‘Last year you said you were never going to read another Jane Austen book until you were on your death-bed. You said you wanted to save her—remember?’’
‘‘Oh, I think that was rather an affected thing to say,’’ the old woman replied with what was almost crossness. She gave a jerk of her bony shoulders as if to push her grand-daughter away from her, and then looked up to Colin who had just come in: ‘‘You do look the little man-about-town,’’ she said, maintaining the same sharpness.
‘‘Do I?’’ Colin did not know whether to be flattered or riled at this comment on the suit which his father had recently had made for him by Rossi. ‘‘It fits well, doesn’t it?’’
‘‘Far too well for a boy of your age.’’
But Colin was too busy peering at himself in the mirror which hung in one corner of the room to hear this last comment. It was a long, rectangular mirror, in a dark brown wood frame; and after the manner of many old Italian mirrors, particularly in the country, it was divided down the centre by a crucifix, carved from the same almost black wood. Colin looked from the expert cut of the shoulders of his suit to the grotesquely sagging shoulders of the writhing Christ, and said: ‘‘What an odd mirror—I’ve never noticed it before.’’ There, in the left panel, was himself with his small, compact body and enormous eyes; and there, in the right panel, was his grandmother, her white hair straggling about her face, and Pamela still behind her; and there, in the centre, the crude Christ twisted in agony, black on his black cross. It was as if they had been snatched up into a timeless state, he and the two women frozen on either side of the frozen agony of the Christ, as in a nightmare where, try as one may, one cannot move an inch. He wanted to move but he could not do so; he could not even raise a hand or nod his head.
Suddenly the whole of Mrs. Bennett’s body jerked as if she had been pricked by some invisible instrument; her book tumbled noisily to the floor as, ‘‘ Oh,’’ she said. ‘‘Oh.…’’ She was still staring ahead of her.
‘‘What is it?’’ Pamela asked.
‘‘I don’t know.… The back of my head.… I had such a strange feeling. And I was looking in the mirror, and it seemed …’’ She began to cry, wrinkling up her face so that she looked like an aged monkey and making no attempt at concealment. ‘‘It’s horrible,’’ she said; but they did not know whether she was referring to the mirror or to an experience which she appeared to be incapable of describing in spite of their repeated questions.
‘‘I’ve never felt less like the opera,’’ Pamela whispered to Colin as they waited for Max to bring the car to the door of the hotel.
‘‘Why on earth?’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t know—Granny being so odd, and …’’ Her voice trailed off, because she could never express any but the simplest of her emotions. The truth was that she was feeling a mysterious kind of dread, not unlike what she had experienced before going to school for the first time; but this was worse, because she could not guess its cause. ‘‘Anyway, you don’t like opera yourself, do you?’’
‘‘Who said?’’
&
nbsp; ‘‘You came back jolly quick from that performance of Madame Butterfly.’’
‘‘That was because the singing was so bad.’’
‘‘You mean you were bored.’’
Colin did not bother to contradict her because the true explanation seemed even more discreditable to him. He had gone alone to the opera and, arriving early, had found himself sitting next to a young couple who, he decided, must have only recently got married. They scrutinized him, not surreptitiously as two such people would have done in England, but with so bold and frank a curiosity that they at once made him blush. Then they began to talk about him. They spoke fast and he could not understand all that they said; and though, in fact, they were commenting admiringly on his English clothes, he assumed that they were jeering at him. He attempted to outstare them but after a few seconds his eyes fluttered downward; he attempted not to listen; he looked at his watch and looked at the proscenium and looked at the other people filing in. At last, in a panic of self-consciousness, he rushed from the theatre.
It was not an incident of which he now felt proud.
Signor Commino, in a dinner-jacket green with age and a shirt whose soft collar had obviously been worn before, was rubbing his hands together and swaying back and forth, on his toes, like a balloon in a high wind. ‘‘You look wonderful, Lena,’’ he said. He scratched the top of his head with his forefinger as he repeated: ‘‘Wonderful.’’ Lena took no notice.
When Max drove up, Mino continued: ‘‘You should always wear beige.’’ With her sallow complexion, this was one colour which Lena should obviously never wear. ‘‘There is something very chic about you in beige—something almost Parisian. And those furs of your mother’s add just the right touch of sophistication. Yes, they are a great success, a great success.’’
‘‘Oh, shut up!’’ Lena said, as she climbed into the car. It was not so much the absurd compliments that angered her as his thus gratuitously informing Max and the children that the furs had been borrowed.
Mino, not at all defeated by her last remark, climbed into the car between the two children, and wriggling his body as if he were itching all over, chuckled: ‘‘How do you say in English? A rose between two—two spines.’’
‘‘Thorns,’’ said Colin.
‘‘Ah, thorns, thorns, thorns.’’
‘‘Take care, take care!’’ Lena exclaimed to Max, and she gripped his arm, as he swerved to avoid a lorry.
‘‘Sorry, I’m driving abominably,’’ he said gloomily. ‘‘I wasn’t thinking. I was thinking of something else.’’
She looked for a moment at his face in profile. Her hands, the square nails of which she had painted especially for this evening, were holding her furs together in a gesture which, though she imagined it to be seductive, in fact only served to emphasize the raw-boned ugliness of her shoulders. Her lips were apart, their outsides crimson and their insides pale pink. There was lipstick on her teeth. ‘‘I hope you will enjoy this evening,’’ she said; and the strange thing was that in spite of all the grotesque details of her appearance, her love for Max lent her at that moment what was almost a grave beauty. Her dark eyes had never seemed more tender, or the irregularities of her face more attractive.
He suddenly said: ‘‘You have helped me so much, Lena,’’ taking advantage of Mino’s uproarious laughter with the children in the back of the car.
‘‘I?’’
‘‘Yes, you.’’ He was naturally sentimental and he added: ‘‘I look upon you as another daughter, you know—a grownup daughter.’’
Anyone who was not in love with him might here have flinched; but Lena only said: ‘‘I’m glad, Max.’’ He had asked her to call him Max the day before.
The performance was to be held out of doors, and they had to make their way to their seats down a narrow lane of canvas sagging inwards on rickety bamboo poles. Mino who, for some inexplicable reason, had brought a large umbrella with him on this hot night of August, began to run it along the canvas as he walked so that it made a loud, rasping noise. ‘‘What are you doing?’’ Lena said crossly; but he was in such high spirits that he only guffawed like a naughty child and continued the action. ‘‘Why bring an umbrella, anyway?’’ she demanded: and when he did not answer at once, she snapped: ‘‘Mino! Listen to me!’’
‘‘Because it matches my evening-dress,’’ he explained gaily.
‘‘No, it doesn’t. The umbrella is black and your evening-dress is green,’’ she retorted rudely.
Suddenly his laughter died and the umbrella fell limply from the canvas. But that evening he was irrepressible and no sooner had they seated themselves than he began to ask the children Italian riddles which he invariably had to explain to them, at great length and to their obvious boredom. At last, more to escape from him than from any real inclination, they announced that they must be excused before the performance began and chased each other, giggling wildly, along the canvas lane which led to the cloak-rooms. Lena was looking over Max’s shoulder at the programme, and Mino was now meditatively rubbing the handle of his umbrella, stained black with sweat, as he gazed in turn at the curtain and at the two others. It was a strange handle which just failed to make a proper curve owing to some fault of seasoning.
Mino suddenly said: ‘‘ Look at my umbrella.’’ He held it high; and Lena at once knew, from a familiar glint in his eyes and an expression of suppressed mirth, that he was going to make a witticism. When the witticism came, it was even more appalling than she had imagined possible: ‘‘ My umbrella has no self-control.’’ He indicated the outward thrust of the handle. ‘‘No self-control,’’ he repeated; and Lena and Max both stared at him with expressionless faces while he chuckled, checked himself, and then slowly began to go crimson with embarrassment. From time to time it was his habit to come out with some ribaldry of this kind.
Colin and Mino evidently enjoyed the opera, though it made Max and Lena yawn, and Pamela giggle. The stage was so narrow that the singers kept colliding with each other, the back-cloth suggested the tour of a musical comedy in the Far East, and the tenor, who was some five feet high, was wearing high heels. But Mino hummed the music to himself, falsetto, with his hands clasped between his knees, and Colin nudged Pamela indignantly when she lost all control of herself. Lena gazed occasionally at the stage, but more often at the sky above her, at the audience before her, or at the face at her side. Max shifted uneasily because the wooden slats of his seat were pressing into him.
After the first act, Mino bought them glasses of a sticky orangeade which Max and Lena placed surreptitiously under their seats after they had drunk no more than a quarter; fortunately Mino was too busy making gurgling noises in his own glass with a straw to notice this abstinence. He had also bought some equally sticky nut-brittle, which he twisted this way and that in his perspiring paws in an effort to break it into pieces. He laughed and gesticulated and continued to make outrageous jokes, but some part of his gaiety seemed to be incessantly trickling away, as if through an invisible puncture. One end of his black tie was beginning to work loose.
At the conclusion of the second act, Lena whispered to Max: ‘‘Let’s go out. I shall need something more intoxicating than that filthy aranciata if I’m to survive.… No, don’t ask him too,’’ she at once checked Max. ‘‘Let’s go alone. He can keep an eye on the children. We’re just slipping out a second,’’ she announced to the others. ‘‘Goodbye.’’ She waved a hand, and as soon as she and Max were out of the row, exclaimed: ‘‘Saved! I was sure he would follow us.’’
‘‘Where shall we go?’’ Max had not failed to notice how Mino, having gathered himself to follow, had then sunk back into his chair on realizing they did not want him. A rush of guilt made him answer sharply: ‘‘There’s such a crowd! We’d have done better to stay where we were.’’
‘‘Now don’t be so grumpy. We can slip out through here”—Lena pulled apart two of the flapping canvas sheets—‘‘and there’s a little bar just across the road. I know
it well.’’ She laughed: ‘‘It will be good for you to see how we of the other half live. Come!’’ With a certain self-consciousness she linked her arm in his and drew him through the crowds.
‘‘What will you have?’’ she asked when they were standing before the veined marble counter.
‘‘Damn!’’ He had placed his elbow in a smear of coffee and began to mop at himself with a handkerchief. ‘‘Let me do this,’’ he said.
‘‘No, no, of course not. I asked you.’’
‘‘Well, what do you suggest? I’ll have what you have.’’
‘‘Due Americani,’’ Lena said to the man behind the bar.
They carried their glasses, misty with ice, over to a small wicker table and sat down, Lena slipping off her furs to reveal shoulders in which she obviously took an unaccountable pride. She was aware that the crowd round the bar and the four men playing cards at the next table were all watching her, and she experienced a fierce joy. She sipped at the bitter drink and said: ‘‘This is fun. Isn’t it?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ Max said. ‘‘Yes, it’s gay here—gay and’’—he sought for an adjective—‘‘ and kind of colourful. It’s the real Italy, I guess. One so seldom sees it.’’
‘‘I am always seeing it,’’ she said. ‘‘Tonight it seems gay, but it does not always seem so. I think I prefer the Palazzo d’Oro. But of course for you Americans it must be fun to go slumming every now and then.’’ Suddenly there was bitterness in her voice, as if she were attempting to provoke him to some emotion, no matter what. ‘‘I used to work in an office next to this bar and sometimes I came here for coffee. It was warm in winter, that was why I came.’’
