“But it is a charming voice, your sister tells me. And you were to have sung for Signor Caspelli to-night.”
Once again Candy became conscious of something stricken in the depths of the brown eyes, and she hesitated, feeling a little ashamed of her own abruptness. “I’m a coward,” she explained simply, “I don’t expect I should have been able to sing in front of Signor Caspelli when it came to the point.”
“I don’t think you are a coward, signorina.
“Go on, Candy—sing something,” There was an undercurrent of meaning in her sister’s voice; Sue undoubtedly thought she was behaving like a child.
“Sing what you would have sung for Caspelli,” urged the Conte. “I should like so much to hear you.” His gentle, courteous insistence was very difficult to resist. Candy capitulated.
“I was to have sung Caro Nome,” she told him, adding hesitantly: “You know...?”
Of course ... Rigoletto.” He stood up, walking to the piano, then waited for her to join him. As she did so, his dark eyes smiled into hers in a way that gave her a strange courage. “Don’t be nervous,” he advised softly. “Remember, even if you sing badly—which I think you won’t—it is not the end of the world. There are worse things in life even than making oneself look or sound foolish. I think you know that already.”
For a moment his gaze held hers, and then he sat down, and his fingers moved over the keyboard, bringing Verdi to life. Almost without thinking, she looked around the room. Sue, of course, was watching her, Colonel and Mrs. Ryland were watching her—from a position near the fireplace, even John was casually watching her. Something seemed to tighten up inside her throat, and although she tried to sing she couldn’t. Skilfully, the Italian covered up for her, but his eyes were reproachful—even, as she had thought earlier, faintly contemptuous—and his disapproval brought her to her senses. She began to sing, her clear, soft soprano ringing through the quiet room with such melodious purity that the man at the piano looked up at her rather quickly, and even John, bending to throw the last of his cigarette into the fire, glanced round in surprise. Her voice had a very youthful quality, but it had something else as well—the power to convey tremendous depth of feeling. As she made her way through, the famous aria all the tragic pathos surrounding the ill-fated Gilda seemed to surround her, and possibly because she herself suddenly felt so lost and vulnerable she almost accidentally managed to convey the vulnerability of Verdi’s heroine so effectively that before she had finished Sue began to be aware of a prickling sensation in her throat, and even Colonel Ryland, himself no opera-lover, put his brandy aside and muttered to his wife that the girl was good.
When she had finished there was a spontaneous burst of applause, and three of the listeners urged her to sing again, but the Conte di Lucca sat quite still in front of the keyboard, and for at least thirty seconds said nothing at all. Then he stood up and bowed.
“Thank you, Miss Wells. You have a fine voice.”
She looked at him a little vaguely, and he smiled, rather as he might have smiled at a clever child, and repeated what he had said.
“You have a very good voice. Take care of it.”
“Tell her to sing something else, Conte.” Sue, bursting with gratification, was beaming across at Candy.
“Not to-night. I think she is a little tired.” His voice was firm, and Candy was grateful for the understanding behind the words. She felt flat, and drained of all energy, and the knowledge that she had just sung a difficult aria with more power and artistry than she had ever commanded in her life before meant very little to her. It was over, and that was the main thing. All she wanted now was to go to bed, and without much caring what anyone thought of her she abruptly said so. Sue opened her mouth to protest, but a glance from her mother-in-law checked her, and the Italian, having closed the piano, moved to open the door for her. “Good-night, signorina.”
“Good-night.” She looked around the room, and quite without meaning to, caught John’s eye. He looked away quickly, and she knew he was relieved because he wouldn’t have to talk to her any more that night. A feeling of finality came over her; she supposed it was just a section of her life that had ended, but it felt more like the end of everything.
A chorus of slightly embarrassed ‘good-nights’ followed her out into the hall ... and then the Conte firmly closed the door behind her, and she was alone. More alone than she had ever been in her life before.
The grandfather clock began to chime ten, and she shook her head as if to clear it of something, then moved slowly up the stairs to her room.
CHAPTER THREE
THE following day was Sunday, and in Great Mincham it was Harvest Festival. After breakfast Colonel and Mrs. Ryland, Sue and Candy went to church—what the Roman Catholic Conte di Lucca did wasn’t clear, but Candy supposed he might have gone to Mass. It was a wonderful autumn morning, and as after the service they walked back to the house through a drifting carpet of yellow beech leaves the ache inside her seemed to ease a little, as if a soothing balm had been applied to it. For a while she walked between Sue and Colonel Ryland, and then, quite deliberately it seemed, John dropped back to join them, and Sue with elaborate tact walked on with the Colonel.
For a while they walked in silence, while Candy’s heart began to thump a little, and then, abruptly, the man beside her spoke.
“Candy...”
“Yes?” Her eyes were on the sky, tracking the flight of a solitary jackdaw, and she didn’t look at him.
“That singing of yours last night—it was quite something. I...” He hesitated and laughed, rather uncomfortably. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“I haven’t sung much lately—at least, not during the last year or so.” If he was only going to make polite conversation, why did he have to talk to her at all? She added: “And I didn’t really sing well last night. Your friend is a very good pianist—his accompaniment helped a lot.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He was obviously irritated. “You’ve got a real talent. You must know that. It’s time something was done about it ... something concrete.”
She said nothing.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t keep that appointment with Caspelli, but—well, there are other possibilities, you know. Good voices—really good voices—aren’t all that common, and the big names in the operatic world are always on the look-out. For instance, when I was in Rome...” He hesitated, and then went on rather quickly. “When I was in Rome I heard of a chap who has spent his life making that sort of ‘discovery’. He searches them out, then trains them and does everything necessary to groom them for stardom, as it were. The rest is up to them, of course, and they don’t all make it, but I know for a fact that quite a number of his ducklings have turned into swans.”
Half listening to him, half swallowing back a ridiculous urge to burst into tears, Candy murmured something inaudible.
“What I’m getting at,” he went on, not looking at her, but apparently determined not to be put off, “is that this particular chap does it all for nothing—as far as the pupil is concerned, anyway. He’d do it for you.” Scarcely hearing what he said, Candy repeated automatically: “Do it for me?”
“Of course he would. I’d say it’s a certainty. All you have to do is apply for an audition ... he has representatives in places like London and Paris. You know— people who sift through the local talent and send the pick of it on to him.”
“I don’t want to be sent anywhere,” she told him flatly.
“Now don’t be absurd, my sweet. You want to do something with your life, don’t you?”
He was looking acutely uncomfortable, she realized that now, and she sensed, too, that he very much wanted her to do what he suggested. She thought she knew why.
“Don’t feel responsible for me, John.” She was standing still, now, in the middle of the road. On either side of them quiet meadows and patches of golden stubble stretched to the misty skyline, and there was no sound anywhere but the slowly retreating fo
otsteps of the Rylands and the song of a bullfinch perched in the hedge. In the clarity of the autumn light her hair glowed more vividly than the beech leaves, and her eyes, wide and troubled, were like reed-shadowed pools.
John put his hands in his pockets, and kicked at a pebble. “Of course I feel responsible for you—we’ve known one another a long time, haven’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Well ... Naturally I take an interest in you. I want to see you make use of your talents—get something out of them.”
Strange, she thought abstractedly, that he had never before seemed to realize she had any talents. The same thought evidently occurred to him.
“I didn’t know you could sing—I mean, not like that. Look—Candy, are you listening to me?”
As she looked at him her eyes were almost expressionless. “I’m listening, John.”
“I want you to do as I say. Go to London and see this fellow’s representative-—have an audition. Before you know where you are you’ll be in Rome, training for La Scala.”
“I don’t want to go to Rome,” she told him. “I don’t want to be a singer.” Deep inside her, something seemed to add that just now she didn’t want to be anything. Existence itself looked unbearably drab.
“But why not at least give it a try? If nothing else, it’d be an experience.”
And it might salve your conscience, she thought wearily. Suddenly everything seemed clear. While he was in Rome, something—or someone—very important had happened to John, and now, because of it, he saw everything in life differently. In particular, he saw her, Candy, differently—or rather, perhaps, he hardly, saw her at all, except as a being towards whom he felt a duty.
And all this meant that for her, too, life was different. So different that it hardly had any meaning left. Without John, she had no desires or ambitions, no hopes ... or even fears. In fact she found it difficult, suddenly, to imagine the future at all. By far the easiest thing, since she had no wishes of her own, would be to fall in with the suggestions of others. And since she loved John—since, even now, she felt the urge to do what would make him happier—she might as well, she supposed, fall in with his suggestion. It would ease his conscience, that was obvious, and nothing else mattered very much.
She would go to London and have this audition, if it were possible. Sue would probably be pleased, too. She might be successful, and she might not. But beyond the audition nothing mattered anyway, because beyond the audition John would not be involved.
CHAPTER FOUR
THREE weeks later, flying over the Alps on a cold, brilliant day of early winter, Candy found herself wondering, suddenly, what she was doing. Until that moment she had not thought much about it, for most of the time lately she had lived in a kind of daze, out of contact, almost, with reality, and the significance of what was happening in her life had glanced off her. But now, all at once, realization came to her—and with it a slight feeling of dizziness, and a sinking sensation in her stomach which she hadn’t even begun to feel when they were taking off.
She was on board an airliner bound for Rome, and with her, in the three or four items of her not very smart luggage, she was carrying almost everything she possessed in the world. For her stay in Italy was likely to be a lengthy one, and there had been no point in leaving any of her things behind in England ... even if she had been able to find accommodation for them, which would have been difficult. Her tiny flat in Kensington had been given up, and there was only Sue— she didn’t want to trouble Sue, who had put herself out quite enough already.
There had been so much to do, so much to arrange in the course of this last fortnight, that without her sister Candy didn’t suppose she would possibly have been ready in time—not that that would have worried her very much, but it would, she knew, have worried Sue. The audition had been arranged so swiftly ... she had barely had time to think about it before she was summoned to present herself at a rendezvous in Kensington, where she was to be met by an Italian gentleman known as Signor Maruga. Apparently—so Sue discovered—Signor Maruga was quite a well-known personality in the world of music, and his connections in Italy were even better known. In Italian eyes, as far as Sue could gather, they even had the edge on Signor Caspelli.
Giacomo Maruga was short and plump, and he was gifted with a cherubic cheerfulness which Candy found oddly soothing. At the time of the audition she had had no nerves because, on the whole, it all meant very little to her, and yet at the same time she had done her best for Sue’s sake. The result had been that she had sung as she had never sung before, and Signor Maruga, his dark eyes sparkling with approval, had taken her hand in his and assured her that his good friend Lorenzo Galleo would certainly be delighted to see her in Rome. Everything that Signor Galleo could do to train her voice and shape her career would, he promised, be done, and she would have no need to trouble about finance.
“A voice like yours, signorina,” he had said, “is a gift from God—not only to you but to the whole world, if it is properly handled. It must be cherished, it must be brought to perfection—and that, signorina, you may safely leave to Lorenzo Galleo.”
And so all the arrangements had been made—largely by Sue and Signor Maruga, who put their heads together and discussed things over Candy’s head very much as if she were already a temperamental, impractical prima donna who must not by any account be worried with mundane trivialities. All of which was perfectly satisfactory as far as Candy was concerned, for she had no real interest in either the details or the main purpose of the adventure that lay ahead of her. She rather wished she didn’t have to go to Rome, for it was in Rome that that mysterious something had happened to John that had taken him away from her, but on the whole it didn’t seem to her to matter very much where she went. Wherever she went, there would be no John, and she knew now that for the last three years, although she had not quite realized it, he had been the central pivot of her life. For her, life had revolved around John, and without it was a meaningless jumble, coming from nowhere and going nowhere.
She had last seen him at Great Mincham, on the evening of the day when they had walked back from church together, and he had urged her to go ahead with her singing, and try for the patronage of Signor Galleo. She would remember that evening, she thought, as long as she lived—not because of anything that had happened, for very little had happened, but simply because of the tortures she had endured as the quiet hours of the rural Sunday slipped away, and she, surrounded by people but more alone than she had ever been in her life before, had struggled to come to terms with the upheaval going on in the depths of her mind and soul. Her sense of desolation had been so new, then, that she had not known whether she was going to be able to cope with it or not. The mists surrounding her had seemed so very dense, and she had not been able to see any way through them. Having satisfied his conscience by giving her the benefit of his advice John had said very little more to her, and when, that night, she went to bed early with a headache, they merely said goodnight to one another. The next day when she went down to breakfast he was gone, and she hadn’t seen him since.
So that chapter of her life was over, and another chapter, if one could call it that, had begun. But it wasn’t like living, it was more like existing in a perpetual, dream—an unclear, vaguely worrying dream in which all colour had been drained out of the world. Other people were alive and experiencing the full range of human emotions—happiness and misery, excitement and disappointment, boredom and exhilaration—but for the last three weeks Candy had had the peculiar feeling that she was not alive at all.
Until now. Now, with a mildly painful sensation like the coming to life of a limb that has ‘gone to sleep’, something stirred inside her, and the knowledge of what she was doing jabbed at her with the violence of a sharp needle. She was going away from everything she knew to a country she had never, seen, and she was going to live among people whose whole culture, temperament and way of life were utterly strange to her. She hadn’t met many Italians in the c
ourse of her life so far, and the only two she was able to remember with any clarity were Signor Maruga and the faintly mysterious figure of the Conte di Lucca, who had left the week-end party at Great Mincham early on Sunday afternoon. She had spoken to him very little, but before he left he had thanked her for having sung for him, and as she thought of him now his thoughtful dark eyes seemed to hover in front of her as vividly as if he had been sitting opposite her. There had still been pity in those eyes when they had last looked at her, but it had still been mildly contemptuous pity. The thought of the Conte di Lucca made Italy a little alarming, and she tried to shut those eyes out of her consciousness.
It was just getting dark as they began to circle Rome, and the Seven Hills were ablaze with light. Gazing down through the November dusk Candy could see very little, apart from the lights, but all at once it occurred to her that somewhere down there, only a few thousand feet below the throbbing shape of the aircraft, was spread a huge and famous city, one of the oldest and one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and just for a moment a twinge of something like excitement shot through her. But it was only a passing sensation, and the next instant all she knew was that she was feeling tired and a little panicky.
Smoothly and without any sort of hitch they landed, and she heard the voice of the stewardess instructing passengers to unfasten their seat-belts and prepare to leave the aircraft. The plane was not going on beyond Rome, and everyone on board had reached their destination. Feeling very stiff, she stood up and moved along the central aisle. Just in front of her a fatherly-looking Spaniard travelling alone with two small boys was rather anxiously telling his charges to comb their sleek black hair, and button up the jackets of their neat, dark brown, unchildish suits, and in front of him an attractive girl who was probably Italian was quite unmistakably smiling to herself. She looked as if she were walking on air, and Candy wondered who it was she was expecting to meet at the airport. A fiancé, probably, she thought ; or at any rate someone who stood a reasonable chance of becoming a fiancé within the foreseeable future. It must be wonderful, she thought, to be so completely happy at the thought of being with another human being. She had never known that feeling—not quite, although John ... She caught herself up sharply, annoyed with herself for having allowed her thoughts to stray into forbidden territory, and then the queue of disembarking passengers began to move forward more quickly, and the next moment she was at the head of the gangway, feeling the soft touch of warm rain on her face. The air was soft, too, and it seemed to caress her. As she moved down the steps and then set off across the tarmac she suddenly felt curiously soothed.
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