by Francis King
There was only one other person on the platform to which Max went, and he was a little, old man, beautifully manicured and dressed, with a white, clipped moustache, white hair and a rosy complexion. He sat on a bench, and he all at once unlaced one of his black patent-leather shoes, pulled it off and began to stare into it, turning it this way and that to catch the light better. He was completely absorbed, though it would be impossible to say for what he was searching. Some porters, clustered round a trolley, were smoking in silence and their cigarettes, glowing in the shadows of an unlit corner, seemed even brighter than the stars which stretched, in parallel sheets, between the roofs of the station.
Karen was almost the last to descend from the train, and she looked white and ill. Without returning his greeting, she said: ‘‘ I’ve lost everything.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘All my suit-cases—they’ve been stolen.’’ She spoke with a quiet, hopeless melancholy, her voice almost inaudible and her face without expression.
‘‘Stolen!’’
‘‘I changed carriages before Verona, because there was a man I didn’t like—he gave me the creeps. I didn’t bother to move the cases, I thought they’d be safe. They must have been taken at Verona.’’
‘‘Oh, my God! … Have you told the guard?’’
‘‘Yes, I’ve told all sorts of people. Now I’ve got to see the station police. It’s lucky I left all that stuff at the Palazzo d’Oro. But my most precious things …’’ She stopped, because she was going to burst into tears.
Max attempted to take her arm as they walked away up the platform but she drew away from him, with no more than a light sigh. They continued to walk in silence, until she said: ‘‘I came as soon as I got the wire. I’m glad it was like that, sudden and without fuss. She hated illness, and she’d had twenty years of Father.’’ She asked questions in the same soft, tranquil voice until they reached the office where they had to report the theft. Then sinking into a chair and leaning forward, her hands clasped together, she allowed Max to talk for her; nor did she again look up until some question was asked to which she alone knew the answer.
‘‘Well, that’s that,’’ Max said as they left the office. ‘‘We must hope for the best.’’
‘‘Where are you taking me?’’
‘‘To the Palazzo d’Oro, of course.’’
‘‘There was no need to book me a room there. You could have sent me to somewhere cheaper.’’
‘‘It’s the old room.’’
‘‘Oh, no—Max, no.’’ She stopped. ‘‘ I must be by myself—alone. I don’t mind where I am, but I must be alone. I—I haven’t come back, you see. Not like that.’’
‘‘That’s all right,’’ he said softly. ‘‘I’ve asked for a room for myself on another floor.’’
‘‘Thank you,’’ she muttered, again almost inaudibly. Many seconds later she said: ‘‘We have so much we must discuss—so many decisions. About Nicko, above all. Poor Nicko! What a terrible shock it must have been for him.’’ Suddenly she began to bite savagely at the nail of one thumb: ‘‘ I can’t think at the moment. I can’t decide anything. All through the journey, I was only thinking.…’’ Her voice died and her expression seemed to die with it, leaving her face still.
‘‘We have plenty of time,’’ he said.
In the car he noticed how she kept touching her throat with one hand as if it were tender, and he asked: ‘‘What’s the matter? Have you a sore throat?’’
‘‘A slight one. It’s the dust from the journey.’’
She had a headache too, though she did not tell him so; but the
next morning she could not go to the funeral. The doctor took a
swab and announced that she had diphtheria.
She had evidently caught it from Frank.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
MAX was preoccupied. Having dictated two letters, he said to Lena: ‘‘You can deal with the rest yourself, can’t you?’’ He strode over to the french windows and gazed out, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched.
‘‘Please do not worry,’’ she said. ‘‘Of course I can do them.’’
‘‘Probably better than if I dictate.’’ He swung round: ‘‘ Did you remember to order the flowers?’’
‘‘Of course.’’
‘‘And you rang up Seeber about the two books?’’
‘‘I fetched them myself on my way over here.’’
‘‘But there was no need,’’ he began; and then he added awkwardly: ‘‘You’ve been wonderful to us all through this.’’
‘‘Don’t use the plural,’’ she said quietly; and all at once, a blush sweeping over her, she began to fiddle with the typewriter roll, as if in an attempt to distract his attention from this last remark.
‘‘The—plural?’’ he asked, in slow bewilderment. ‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘Nothing.’’ Her hands were so clumsy that one of the sheets of paper with which she had been fiddling slipped to the floor. Her face became even redder as she stooped to pick it up.
Max appeared to be about to say something, as he stood looking at her, his hands still deep in his pockets and his sandy eyebrows drawn together in a scowl above his small green eyes. But instead he turned away and went back to the window. Mournfully he whistled a few bars from the first act of La Traviata, swinging the sash of the blind in one hand as he did so; then he said: ‘‘Can you be responsible for Nicko until we get back?’’
‘‘Of course.’’
Bitterly she thought that the only use he would ever find for her would be this of substitute. While Karen was away, she was the substitute wife who encouraged him and told him he looked tired and ought to rest, and went out to buy him a new pair of socks. Now, with Karen ill and Mrs. Bennett dead, she was no longer the substitute wife but the substitute mother. It was she who woke Nicko at ten o’clock and put him on the pot, who took him to sail his boats by the river, and who checked Colin’s and Pamela’s clothes when they returned from the laundry. Lena knew now that she would never achieve anything more than this kind of usefulness; and the despicable thing, which filled her with fury against herself, was that she accepted the rôle and would not rebel against it, just as, during the occupation, she had accepted the humiliating discovery that the man who had professed to wish to marry her was, in fact, already both husband and father. Yes, she already knew, as she looked at Max’s slouched figure, that, to the end of her days, she would always rather beg for a few crumbs from his table than eat a banquet at Mino’s.…
‘‘I’ve been thinking,’’ she said. She clicked a few letters of the typewriter and then looked up. ‘‘ I’ve been thinking,’’ she repeated.
‘‘Oh, yes—yes?’’ he murmured absently. He turned, but instead of looking at her, gazed fixedly at one point on the corner of the desk. ‘‘Yes?’’ he said.
‘‘Perhaps, if you really wanted me to go to England, I could manage it. I do not know. First I must speak to my aunt and see if my mother can go and stay with her. Then I must——’’
‘‘Oh, fine, fine,’’ he cut short this laborious explanation. ‘‘That’s fine. Yes, do that, do that.’’ But of course he was thinking of Karen.
Then Lena did an extraordinary thing. She rose to her feet, and supporting herself with the desk, the fingers of one hand white as she clutched it, she said in an even, but curiously intense voice: ‘‘You do not really care. And you have not understood. And you never will understand. ‘Yes, do that, do that.’ ’’ She mimicked his intonation with surprising skill. ‘‘And so I leave my mother, and my home, and my—my chance of happiness’’—she flung out the hand that had been gripping the table—‘‘and all—all for what? For what?’’ No less suddenly she crumpled up before his astonished gaze, and collapsed back into the chair from which she had risen. She placed her elbows on either side of the typewriter and rested her head in her hands, so that her hair fell over her burning cheeks. She gazed d
own at the letter she had begun: ‘‘Dear Sir, Mr. Westfield asks me to thank you.…’’ She waited and at last she felt Max’s hand on her shoulder.
‘‘I don’t understand,’’ he said. ‘‘ Lena—I——’’
‘‘There’s no need to understand,’’ she said in a faint whisper. ‘‘I’m sorry.… No, please do not say any more,’’ she checked him. ‘‘Please!’’
‘‘But look, Lena——’’ Of course he had long since known she had loved him. But he was not very imaginative, and it was the first time that he had fully realized the depth of her devotion; the discovery at once touched and appalled him. ‘‘Lena——’’
‘‘Please!’’ she exclaimed again.
He put his hand on her shoulder, and then with hesitant footsteps he made for the door. Lena rose and said calmly: ‘‘I’ll give you the books. And I have a little present here for Mrs. Westfield from myself. Perhaps you would be very kind and take it for me.’’ Nothing betrayed her previous emotion except the shiny flush of her cheeks and the way in which she spoke, through barely parted lips. ‘‘ My best wishes to Mrs. Westfield,’’ she said.
‘‘Can we see Mummy?’’ Pamela asked when she, Colin and Enzo had piled into the car.
‘‘What?’’ Max was still preoccupied—with Lena now, not with Karen. ‘‘No—no, I’m afraid not. The doctor says not. She’s still infectious.’’
‘‘I’m not afraid of infection,’’ Pamela said. ‘‘ If I’m going to become a doctor I shall have to get used to it.’’
‘‘Plenty of time for that.’’
The nursing-home was out on Bellosguardo and Max left the three children in a garden which fell, in a number of terraces, down a steep hillside. They sat round a gold-fish pond into which Enzo began to spit, making the gold-fish huddle together with darting tails and gaping mouths as they fought to devour each blob of saliva. The English children laughed uproariously and then they too began to spit, until the game tired them. Pamela said: ‘‘Do you suppose Mummy has been in great pain?’’
‘‘They say diphtheria is painful.’’
‘‘You know, in a way, I rather hope she has been in pain.’’
‘‘Pamela!’’
‘‘I do. It’s a punishment for her. It’s a kind of visitation from God. He did it to her to send her back to Daddy. And I’m glad she suffered, because she made Daddy suffer.’’ Her eyes glinted and her cheeks were suffused as she tugged at the clumps of grass which straggled round the pool. ‘‘Oh, don’t look so shocked!’’ she burst out at Colin.
‘‘Well, it does shock me when you say things like that.’’
Meanwhile, upstairs Max had been greeted by the doctor who had set Colin’s leg. The Italian was justifiably pleased with the rapidity with which Karen had made her recovery, and being young and intensely interested in his work, he proceeded to describe in detail the whole of her treatment. His smile was brilliant and his manner almost hysterically gay, as he sat on an edge of his desk, in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling round his neck, and kicked his legs back and forth as if in time to some invisible music. The contrast between his exhilaration and the sluggish melancholy of the American was extreme.
At last he led Max to Karen’s room and after a few encouraging words, most of them delivered while he took deep gulps of air at the open window, he left them alone together. Without saying anything, Max put down the parcels he had brought and began to fill a vase with water to hold the flowers. Karen watched each of his movements, as if she were puzzled by them. Her blonde hair looked white on the pillow, and her face seemed to have taken the impression of a number of minute furrows, as if old age had come on her suddenly, like a fall of snow in spring.
‘‘Well?’’ he said, when he had finished arranging the flowers. He came and stood beside her, and looked down at her small, triangular face, as he asked: ‘‘Better?’’
‘‘Oh, I think so.’’
‘‘Antonini was saying that you’d made a wonderfully quick recovery.’’
She gave a sudden, small smile: ‘‘I don’t feel as if I’d recovered.’’
‘‘You’re weak, I expect.’’
‘‘Sit down,’’ she said. ‘‘ Sit here, beside me.… No, perhaps you’d better go and sit by the window.’’
‘‘Oh, that’s all right,’’ he said. ‘‘I had diphtheria when I was a kid.’’
‘‘I never knew that. I’ve never bothered to know much about you.’’ When he had placed himself on the bed beside her, she said: ‘‘Max, what are we going to do?’’
‘‘Do? … Oh, let’s discuss all that later.’’
‘‘No, now. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I must get it all straight.’’ She spoke in a tranquil, slightly husky voice, her small, urchin’s hands resting outside the sheet.
‘‘Well, what do you want?’’ he said.
‘‘What do you want?’’
‘‘Is—is it all over with Ross?’’
Momentarily she pulled in her lower lip: ‘‘ Yes, all over.’’ And then she added in the same quiet tone: ‘‘It was ghastly, leaving him, but there was nothing else for it. You can’t imagine the loneliness when I reached Zurich, and found no Maisie there.’’
‘‘Yes, I can imagine,’’ he said; but the irony was lost on her, for she would never learn to identify herself with others, least of all with him.
‘‘The hell of caring, caring, caring, when you know it’s all for nothing. When you’re despised and, in the end, even hated for asking for what you know you’ll never get. Oh, I want to forget all that!’’ She brushed her hair away from her forehead: ‘‘And then Mother …’’
He wanted to take her hand in his, but did not dare to do so; he tried to speak, but no words came to him, until at last he said: ‘‘I know you’ve had the hell of a time.’’ And then he realized the inadequacy of that comment.
‘‘Will you have me back?’’ she suddenly asked, ‘‘Max?’’
‘‘Of course,’’ he said, simply and without hesitation.
‘‘I don’t know if it’s fair to ask that, because I don’t know if it’ll really be awfully different. But I’ll try, I promise I’ll try. And there’s Nicko—we must think of him. I thought I liked being alone, but that week in Zurich made me want never to be alone again. And Frank has done one thing for me—I don’t think I shall mind your making love so much now. I don’t think I shall. But you do see that I can’t promise ever to love you? In fact, I know I shan’t—ever, ever. I can’t say why, but it’s as if I could love only those who don’t love me—those who make life hell, as Frank did, and who end up by hating me.’’ With a clairvoyance rare in her nature, she said: ‘‘Like you with me. Because you go on loving me, and all the dreadful things I do to you only make you love me more. Frank, for instance. I believe you love me more now than before I went away with him. You do, don’t you?’’
It was the cruellest of questions, but he answered truthfully: ‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘And now you’ll take me back, and you’ll be glad to take me back. I can’t understand it! Why do we cling so to people who make our lives miseries? Cling so to our crosses instead of climbing off them?’’
‘‘I’m happier with you than I’ve ever been without you.’’
She smiled, as if at something peculiarly ingenuous, and then said: ‘‘Very well. Next week we’ll go back to England—shall we? The children are already terribly late for school. And we’ll try again. I’ll try again.’’ She sighed: ‘‘But don’t expect too much, will you? Deaths and illnesses and things like that bring people together—but seldom for long, so I don’t expect it’ll really be much different. I expect it’ll always be much the same, right to the end—to the bitter end.’’
‘‘I’m prepared for that.’’ He clasped both her hands in his, but he lacked the confidence to take her in his arms, and after a few seconds of silence, he got up and went to the open window and looked out. ‘‘The children are in the garden,’’ he said, �
��‘with Enzo. They patched it up with him. I’m glad, because Colin was kind of upset about all that. But I guess he’ll miss Enzo.’’
Only the two boys now sat beside the gold-fish pool, for Pamela had wandered off on her own. They were talking to each other and they looked happy there, with the sun glinting on their hair and their bare knees and the water between them.
Copyright
First published in 1951 by Longmans, Green & Co.
This edition published 2013 by Bello
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-4472-5844-5 EPUB
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Copyright © Francis King, 1951
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