The Evening of the Holiday

by Shirley Hazzard

  Fourteen

  Now I’m early, Sophie thought as she came down the stairs, and he won’t be there. Because she had a sense of having, in Luisa’s eyes, just repudiated him, she needed to see him at once. She didn’t want to stay in the house - she passed no one in the corridor but there were voices in the downstairs rooms. The front door was open and she thought she would go out in the garden and wait for Tancredi.

  When she came out of the house the car was there. It was still so early that she wondered at first if Tancredi had not left at all. Then she remembered that he had driven off while she was waiting to be let in. She went down the steps and over to the empty car as if it might offer her some information, but as she reached it she saw Tancredi farther off, in the garden.

  He was standing at the end of a path, between a pair of poplars. His back was towards her. The overhanging leaves, lime and yellow, fringed and dappled his person so that he too looked like some tattered autumnal tree. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at a girl who was raking the pebbled garden paths, a girl from one of the nearby farms who came up occasionally to work at the house. She was short and strong, this girl, with black hair and a very young, very golden skin. She was wearing a dark-blue chequered dress, and from her throat a cheap gold cross fell forward on a chain. She knew she was being watched, and that gave a conscious and not at all displeasing grace to her actions. And Tancredi stood watching her with a cigarette held in his green-and-golden hand.

  Far from being hurt at finding him like this, Sophie could not help thinking how immensely she had separated him from such simple flirtations and how long it must be before he was free again - free of affection or remorse, or the sense of guilt - to enjoy them. She called to him in a low voice from where she was standing. He turned round and smiled. He came up to her, throwing his cigarette down on the stones.

  They walked back to the car. She said: ‘I’m early. I didn’t expect to find you here.’

  He put her in the car, then went round to the other side. ‘I drove into town,’ he told her, getting in. ‘But then it seemed best to come back and wait here. If I’d gone to the office I could only have spent a few minutes there.’

  She imagined his littered desk, thought of the clients who, knowingly or unknowingly, stood to benefit by her departure. Now that a day was fixed for her going, she was absolved from these responsibilities. For a moment she felt almost an elation, an extraordinary happiness at being with him. When they reached the main road she leaned over to touch her shoulder to his, and laughed. ‘It’s just as it used to be,’ she said.

  He looked round and smiled at her. ‘Used to be? Before what?’

  ‘Oh, before -’ she began. ‘Before we were important to one another. Before you began to look serious.’

  They had climbed a low hill and now started down a curving road bordered by fields. ‘Are we going home?’ he asked her.

  ‘Let’s drive for a little while.’

  At the foot of the hill he turned off on another road. ‘You haven’t told me about Luisa.’

  Sophie said: ‘They’ve sent for another doctor.’ She felt some necessity to keep her morning with Luisa intact as long as possible.

  He frowned. ‘Is it bad then? Worse than we thought?’

  Sophie nodded. Although he could not see this, he did not repeat his question. A moment later he asked: ‘She spoke about you? I mean, about me? What does she say?’

  ‘It was she who told me you looked serious.’

  ‘She’s always given me to understand that would be an improvement. What did you say?’

  ‘I said -’ There was a long pause, during which he did not prompt her. She resumed, then, in her shaken, alien’s voice. ‘- that I would not be here much longer.’ She put out her hand to steady herself as they turned a corner, then kept her palm pressed to the upholstery as if this might strengthen her voice as well. ‘I said that I would be going on Tuesday.’

  They were climbing another gentle rise, and to the left above them, winding through vineyards, a private avenue had come into view. This avenue was noticeable for its length - at least a mile of it could be seen from the road - and for being lined with oaks rather than with the usual cypresses or ilexes of the region. There were no gates to the driveway where it met the road, but at that point the trees were arched so thickly together that they made a close tunnel. As they drew level with this entrance Tancredi slowed down involuntarily and Sophie leaned across to look.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked him.

  ‘A villa,’ he said. ‘An eighteenth-century villa.’ They had passed the entrance, but he stopped the car.

  She peered back into the drive, but the road wound upward beneath the mingled branches and disappeared on a curve of the hill without revealing the house.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ Scarcely waiting for her reply, he reversed the car and turned into the drive.

  The rough surface was comforting after the urgent efficiency of the highway; among its dents and ridges they slowed to a walking pace. On either side grass grew high against the twisted trunks of the trees. When they had gone about fifty yards along the avenue, Tancredi parked the car at a place where the roadway widened slightly and where another car might pass. But nothing approached them in the driveway or from the road behind. Under the hospitable arch of green, sheltered from the light of these last curious days, they were silent in one another’s arms.

  Insects and birds resumed their interrupted life outside the car. A leaf or two fell on the windshield, and they heard the flourish of some small animal in the grass. All around them, across the countryside, men and women went about their work or sat down to their lunch, talked and laughed - or wept, as they wept now. Even in that luminous green she persevered, trying to fit this love into some immense, annihilating context of human experience, assailing it with her sense of proportion.

  Tancredi, who knew more about proportion, lifted his head from hers. ‘What could be worse than this?’ he asked. ‘What could be worse?’

  Not long ago he had thought it logical that she should leave him. In the face of this pain, it now seemed meaningless, an action deliberately performed against the only life they could be sure of, their present existence, in the name of a future that might never come, and that in any case must contain inapprehensible elements. It was not her former decision to leave that he found irrational but her ability, having reached this degree of suffering, to go through with it. Were human beings not endowed with the ability to reverse their own decisions - and were they not always at their most sympathetic and most judicious when they did so?

  He withdrew from her. He leaned his arms on the steering wheel and lowered his head over them. What can be worse than this? he wondered. Unless when she is actually gone.

  ‘It will be easier when I have actually gone,’ she said. She put her arm across his shoulders and her cheek on his sleeve. ‘This is the hardest - here, on this road this morning; this is the hardest. I promise you.’

  He lifted his head. ‘How can you do this?’ he asked, in his ingenuous, inquiring way.

  She said: ‘I have thought of it all.’

  He was aghast at such determination. He thought vaguely: She will ruin her life with this sort of thing - as if her life were some distant future thing she had yet to embark on. He sat for some minutes staring ahead into the roadway with her head on his shoulder.

  At last he sat up, letting her arm slide down his back. He said: ‘Do you think I have room to turn?’

  She twisted round to look out her side of the car. ‘It seems the only place, doesn’t it?’

  When she looked back at him he pulled out his handkerchief and carefully dried both sides of her face. ‘My love,’ he said. He put his handkerchief away and started the car.

  ‘What is it like, the villa?’ she asked, leaning forward once more to stare up the drive.

  ‘Oh - it’s a famous house.’ Tancredi paused, with his hand on the brake. ‘It fell into ruins in the last century. The fami
ly who owned it never came there and everything went to pieces. Then it was inherited by a distant relative who had always wanted it but never expected it would come to him - I forget how it came about. Anyone could tell you - it’s a well-known story. And this man, though he had no family and never married, devoted his time, his fortune - his life, you might say - to putting it back in order, restoring the façade and the interior, having the grounds laid out again according to the original plan…. It was his great passion. It was supposed to have ruined him. It was - what’s the word?’

  ‘A folly.’

  ‘Yes. His folly.’ He let the brake off and began to back the car slowly on to the grass.

  ‘Is he dead now?’

  ‘He died just after the war. He was very old. My father knew him - I met him once or twice.’

  ‘What is it like,’ she persisted, ‘when you get up there?’

  ‘Very beautiful, I’m told. There’s a great hallway, entirely frescoed. A fine library, splendid rooms, furniture, carpets, tapestries, and so on. An orangery, and a small theatre where they used to have music and plays. And then, of course, outside - there are fountains, arbours, a wood, pleasure gardens.’ He looked out his own window to make sure he had room. ‘And a terrace with a view of what seems to be the whole world.’ Now he had turned the car. They jolted down the rough path and in a matter of seconds they were back at the road. He halted again under the rim of the last trees, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the road and looking to left and right. ‘I have never been there,’ he said.

  Fifteen

  The water froze that winter in the pipes and drains, in the canals, lakes, and rivers of Europe. Snow fell on palms and temples in Sicily; icicles hung in clumps from the petrified fountains of Rome; and Venice, apparently loose from her moorings, drifted in an arctic sea. It was a fearful winter, cruel to the poor and expensive for the rich. In its final weeks, when it had displaced every instinct except that of survival, the certainty that it must come to an end was recognized as something glorious, a marvel of Nature - the edge, in fact, that Nature has over human ills.

  When the end did come, it brought a dangerous thaw and a flood of statistics - figures of deaths and losses, of temperatures and dates, of centimetres of ice and snow. It was the worst winter that had ever been - that is to say, the worst winter on record, which, of course, amounts to the same thing. Only the very old claimed to remember winters as severe, and that was no doubt due to the exagerations of memory.

  At the end of March, Sophie arrived on a plane from London and a train from Rome - too late for her purpose, because Luisa died that very day. Luisa had been three days in a coma and died - it was at once pointed out - without a struggle; without knowing; without, as it were, feeling a thing. When that is said of someone loved whose life has been consumed in the assimilation of knowledge and feeling, their death seems more pitiful, more grossly a levelling than ever. It was all over, as they said, in a second. And this consolation - which lacks authority, for how can we know whether death is instantaneous to the dying? - even suggests a betrayal, for there is something shocking about such submissiveness, such alacrity to be dispatched from lovers and dependents, from thought and sensation, trees and sky, from that all which is over in a single second.

  In the brief instant which put an end, then, to Luisa’s life, Sophie was fastening back the thick curtain of her railway compartment north of Rome. She had the carriage to herself; this alone would have made it an extraordinary journey, since it was a trip she had always made in hot weather with the curtains drawn, the luggage racks full, and every place taken. The passing countryside gave an impression of hopes falsely raised, for the advanced spring of Rome became more tentative with every northward mile. The budding trees and hedges disappeared within an hour and the land was bare - not wintry so much as swept bleakly clean. The very trees seemed to have been taken up, brushed off, and replaced. The roads and bridges, the banks of swollen streams showed up as sharply as incisions. There was, nevertheless, one flagrant assertion of growth - for in this gaunt scene of earth, stone, and wood the almond trees were blooming in torrents of pale flowers.

  There were a great many stops. Even people must have been scarce in the vacant landscape, since few got on and none got off. The railway line travelled through hills all the way, but the hills, lacking their summer crops and foliage, were reduced in size and character, so that the land appeared more vast and low-lying, almost a plain. Farms were numerous, and from time to time a handsome villa put in an appearance. These houses, like the sheds and waiting rooms of the stations where the train stopped, showed the winter in the way that buildings do - they had the look of having just been through a war, were bedraggled, shrunken, and somehow turned inward in self-protection.

  An uncle Sophie had not seen since she was a child, one of Luisa’s brothers, met her in the evening at the station. Like all that family, he was tall, stooping, long-nosed, long-necked, and long-limbed. His only profound conflict - a respectable one, between his sentiments and his judgement - showed pleasantly on his defeated face. He arranged for Sophie’s bag to be put in the car and, standing on the cold platform in the dark, he told her that Luisa was dead. He for his part thought this unknown young woman must have been ill herself, she looked so very pale and stared so very hard. However, she was coming from a northern country at the end of the worst winter on record and that possibly explained it; the winter had been bad enough here in the south - what must it have been like for her?

  He coughed his polite cough and put his polite hand on her arm to lead her to the car. There was nothing now for them to discuss, any other topic seeming unsuitable and the obvious one having been exhausted. Sophie apologized, as they drove along the country roads, for bringing the old man out, and he answered quite sincerely: ‘Oh, it was fortunate, really it was. It gave me something to do.’

  She understood this at once when she entered the house, for inactivity greeted her at the front door. Relatives - a dozen or more of them - sat downstairs in corners of the drawing room and the library, sometimes talking leadenly of social events or politics or the opera, sometimes in restless silence passing the intractable minutes of that day. When someone dies a long-expected death, the waiting goes on for a while - the waiting for what has already taken place but cannot yet be properly comprehended or decently acted upon. And so these figures sat downstairs and resignedly leaned their heads back against bookshelves or propped their feet on worn upholstery, and waited for Luisa to die - that is, for Luisa’s death to become a reality. Those who wept a little gained, in their spasms of grief, a small advantage over the others, for they were already embarked on the process of realization and eventual reconciliation.

  Sophie was given a room high up at the back of the house. There were several bedrooms there that had not been used since Luisa’s children were young and brought friends home to stay in school holidays. That the room had been kept for this purpose was still to be seen in the lightness and modesty of the furniture, the inexpensive bedspread of flowered cotton, and a touching selection of books on a single shelf - touching because no taste is so quickly dated as that of the young. There was no fireplace, and the room was warmed, after a fashion, by an electric radiator. The windows, paned and unshuttered, gave on to a dark valley, and at the end of this valley could be seen very clearly the lights of the town.

  All the guests sat down to dinner at one long table. Like Sophie’s room, the ultimate leaf of the table had not been used in years; having warped in storage, it left an awkward ridge beneath the tablecloth. A small chandelier was suspended over each end of the table, and in the centre was an unlit candelabra. The corners of the room remained in darkness, making a pale oval of the light. Paintings were dimly seen on the walls - a romantic landscape, an upturned urn spilling eighteenth-century flowers, an unknown warrior bursting out of his froggings.

  Some of the women had changed their dresses in order to give themselves something to do, and each had with her
a shawl, a small fur, or a velvet jacket; one old lady had even brought a rug for her knees. Seen together, these relatives, with their prominent, attenuated features and light colouring, resembled nothing so much as a group of collie dogs, lifting their muzzles to greet one another and twitching their fine-boned shoulders or shifting about in their delicate, nervous way.

  Old Isabella waiting at table was too busy to cry. She softly and consolingly spoke to herself as she handed around the platter.

  On these occasions no one can feel quite free of blame. It is, first of all, difficult to exonerate oneself from a sensation of having contrived to stay alive while some one else has perished, and from the awareness of having, no doubt, behaved imperfectly to the dead. And then, in order to balance the excess of feeling, the harshest aspects of one’s nature are forced up to the surface of the mind, and there they jostle confusingly with genuine regret. There was not a person in the room who could prevent himself from thinking from time to time, in the crudest or most mercenary terms, of the possible effects of Luisa’s death on his own life. Her two sons were taken aback to find how often their minds reverted to the disposition of the house and the land. Her brother, who had innumerable possessions of his own and had never in his life coveted anyone else’s, found himself speculating on the fate of every object that met his eye. Her cousin reflected that she would no longer make these tiring journeys to the country several times a year. As they had all loved Luisa, they were at first distressed to find themselves harbouring such ideas, then explained them away as the natural result of stress, and were less surprised than bored when they constantly recurred. Thus each passed the evening in a process of self-censure, interpretation, and acquittal, and, rather than submit fully to their loss of Luisa, unwittingly dispossessed her with their eyes and in their minds.