Sophie was not exempt from this natural law and had her own way of deploring Luisa’s death. After dinner she stood by the window of her room and leaned her forehead against the icy glass and tried, like the other guests in the house, to grieve for Luisa. It was too soon; the memories she deliberately summoned came in true shapes and colours, but were transfixed and lifeless - a splendid collection of lepidoptera. In their place, before long, she could see the dark shapes of hills facing the house and the lights of the town going up the end of the valley. She discovered that she could not think of Luisa without accusing her of desertion - How could you leave me now? Why have you done this? She had lost her crucial witness, for if Luisa had not shared Sophie’s experience she had acknowledged it, and her continued existence had testified to it.
Sophie stepped back from the window, leaving the pane smudged with her breathing and the warm impression of her brow. Again she thought of Luisa’s kindness, of her tender manner and her graceful mind. And her thoughts went on: Why have you done this? How could you leave me now?
The servants took turns throughout the night to sit up in pairs in Luisa’s room. The women of the household and their relatives, having performed this service for the dead before, came prepared with knitting and mending and occupied themselves in this way while they talked in low voices. Occasionally they forgot where they were and for a few moments exchanged gossip with no sense of impropriety. However, the conversation had mostly to do with the past. There were some who remembered Luisa as a girl, others who had cared for her young children or nursed her husband in his final illness. In all these recollections Luisa was given an exaggerated advantage that would have made her smile. But this was a tribute paid not from hypocrisy but to her general impression on their memory; if she had not merited high praise on these particular occasions, she had so much deserved it in the rest of her life that it should be offered at every opportunity.
On the following morning crocuses were discovered in the grass. The gardener remarked on this when, like everyone else, he came upstairs to view Luisa’s body. The winter was by no means over - everything would be late this year and some of the shrubs had died or must be cut back to the earth if they were to survive. But the day was splendid, the sun strong, and there was talk of bringing the orange trees out of doors if the weather continued.
Sophie heard these things said in the corridor as she left Luisa’s room. She went downstairs and out of the house by the side door, not taking time to fetch her coat. She had already decided to leave for home that day, taking an evening train to Rome, without waiting for the funeral, which was to be held the following morning. Passing through the garden she saw the crocuses flaring from the taut earth. When she came to the end of the path she sat down on a bench and, putting her elbow on her knee, shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand.
Unnecessary and distasteful as it is, the viewing of a dead body may be a last attempt at recognition. Just as the victims of crimes or accidents must be identified under the law by those in a position to verify their past existence, so that morning Luisa had been seen and acknowledged by her closest acquaintances: ‘Yes, this is she - whom I knew.’ If the ritual is intended to confirm in the living the realization of what has happened, it was less than successful - for the rooms and corridors of the house and the garden where Sophie now sat were to remain for a long time the scenes of Luisa’s experience. No one, that morning, coming down the stairs or looking through a window or wandering into the kitchen for more coffee, could do other than see with Luisa’s eyes - as if they themselves were performing these actions and looking on these things for the last time. Alerted to their own mortality, they observed all the more closely what Luisa had been cut off from.
‘When you think of her condition,’ said one of the collie dogs, ‘this was the best thing.’ The statement was made directly, without much expression, like a theme on which variations are shortly to be played.
One or two more guests had arrived in the night and were staying for the funeral. The lunch table was cramped and all around it elbows were touching, as if in some country dance.
Leaning forward, Sophie’s neighbour took his turn. ‘The best thing,’ he agreed. ‘All things considered.’
No one has the capacity to consider all things, even if he wished to. From all those things that force themselves on our attention, we select what we can bear to consider. And that was happening now.
There was a grateful murmur: ‘The best thing.’ It was like the response in a prayer.
The best thing, Sophie wondered. It is not in the least the best thing. The best thing, surely, would have been for Luisa to live to be ninety, in full possession of her faculties. How can this be the best thing?
It was, of course, the best thing because it was the only thing; it had happened. Anyone who would not now recognize it as the best thing must be looking for trouble.
An old man said bravely: ‘She wasn’t old.’
Giorgio, Luisa’s son, said: ‘It seems so wrong.’ And - taking heart, as it were - ‘It seems such a pity.’
‘Ah - but given the circumstances, it was the best thing.’ For the circumstances had been given - no one could dispute that.
‘It was good of you to come.’ This remark was addressed to Sophie.
‘I’m only sorry,’ she began, but all that was understood. So she said: ‘I’m leaving this afternoon,’ as if she were refuting her good intentions.
A taxi was coming for her at five. She would leave her bag at the station and spend an hour in the town before the train left. When she had explained this, there were offers to drive her, to keep her company, carry her bags, and put her on the train. ‘Oh thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you,’ lowering her eyes and following with her finger the gloss of the tablecloth. ‘Thank you so much.’ And at last, when it was all arranged, she said: ‘No thank you. I’d rather go alone.’
It was an occasion when one could say such a thing.
Sixteen
The women of the town were well dressed at all times, and in winter particularly distinguished in suits of English material and coats trimmed with beaver or astrakhan. Sophie, standing at a counter and warming her hands around her coffee cup, watched them go by in the street - stately women whose tawny or dark-gold hair curled from beneath their pretty hats or over their well-cut collars. The lamps had been turned on in the café, and these women passed across the lighted squares of window like figures across a screen, some carrying flowers or small parcels, some accompanied by a man or pulling a sagging child. If they seemed to Sophie that evening all more beautiful and younger than she, that was not what preoccupied her as she stood there.
She put a coin on the counter and went out herself into the street. She had left her handbag at the station with her luggage and she jingled loose money in the pockets of her coat. She went along slowly, like an unseasonable tourist, eyeing the buildings as if she had not seen them before but had heard a great deal about them. She kept her head attentively raised but seldom looked into the passing faces - nor did anyone take particular notice of her. When she came to the turn-off that led to the cathedral, she stopped and looked back down the sloping street, and again gave the impression of seeing all this for the first time, or of saying farewell to it after a long acquaintance - which is sometimes the same thing.
She strolled across the cathedral square. It was getting colder as the dark came down. The square had no motor traffic but was very busy with people on their way home - strange shrouded shapes from Goya, in heavy coats and mufflers that covered the mouth. Eyes met hers indifferently; she was of no interest to this hurrying cold-weather crowd. On the far side of the square she came to empty streets and locked doorways; soon the centre of the town would be like a deserted fairground. A clock began to strike and she stood still, separating her sleeve and glove, in order to alter her watch. Then she walked on in the direction of the station.
If she were to send a cable this evening before she took the train, the
re would be someone at the airport when she arrived in London - someone grateful for her cable, her arrival. This certainty affected her sadly, in much the same way as the sight of the pretty women walking in the street, and with an almost unbearable pressure of continuity. It was a piece of knowledge, arduously acquired, that one would rather not possess. Nevertheless, she began to compose the telegram in her mind and wondered if she had enough money with her to pay for it. And when she came to the last piazza, the unadorned square where the post office was, she crossed the street and went up the steps into the telegraph office.
The cable forms were stacked on a sloping counter under the pre-war yellow light of a hanging lamp. Sophie leaned on the counter, tore a page from one of the blocks of forms, and wrote her name in the space reserved for the sender’s address. They were several people at the counter beside her. Every few minutes the street door swung open and the stuffy, stove-heated room was swept by night air. One or two crumpled forms lay about in admission of defeat, and the row of people concentrated on their scraps of paper as if this were an examination room. Sophie too stared at the trenchant little form and idly embellished with her pen the letters she had already written.
But her mind wandered, and in a little while she found she had written ‘Dear’ at the left of the page, as though she were beginning a letter. She tore this sheet off and threw it in the wastebasket, but did not begin another. After a moment she put the pen back on the desk and went out.
Tancredi’s car was parked outside the post office. Sophie saw it at once - it was so much what she had been expecting that she glanced at the number to be sure it was his. Standing still on the post-office steps, she could see possessions of his scattered on the back seat, things she had never seen before because they belonged to the winter: a woollen scarf, a pair of brown leather gloves, a green felt hat - little clues to a daily life that she did not wish to imagine. Moved by the pain of seeing these things, she came slowly down the steps and stood beside the car. He must be very near, and she must go away before he came. For a second she closed her eyes trying to reconcile those two things. The knowledge of his proximity, the sight of his possessions compelled her to remember his face, his person, and the sound of his voice. Even the gloves on the seat of the car were shaped to his gesture.
She pushed back her cuff once more and looked at her watch - it was as if he had, at last, been late for their appointment. She put her cold hands back in her pockets and went on her way towards the station.
The rear coach of the train was filled by thirty or forty young soldiers being moved from one military encampment to another. They, and their ungainly equipment, were in the charge of an officer, a pink and portly man who left the train at each stop in order to stride importantly up and down the platform. (At one such stop, owing to the complicity of the guard, this maresciallo came near to missing the train, which started without warning.) The soldiers, like all soldiers on the move, were loud, ribald, and fairly cheerful - but they were also shabby, shy, and ignorant, their callow wrists and necks squirming in the ill-fitting clutch of their uniforms, their pale faces occasionally puzzled and humiliated like those of prisoners. From time to time one of the group would escape from the maresciallo and find his way into the other coaches. But, having made this intrepid journey, he would find himself too timid to speak to the passengers and, after loitering in the first-class corridor for a few minutes, would return to the fold smiling foolishly.
The soldiers were forbidden to leave the train, but at every station they pushed the windows down so that they could call to girls on the platform or buy chocolate bars from a barrowman or jeer in transparent asides at the striding maresciallo. When the train was still for a few minutes in this way, the bugler would begin to play - always the same air, an antiquated sentimental tune that belonged, perhaps, to a regional song. This wistful music filled the train and floated out on the cold dark station of every town they stopped at. The song never reached its conclusion, for the train would always start up again with the last refrain and the instrument would be violently shaken in the musician’s mouth and grasp. But after each such depature, for a little while, the bugler tried to keep playing, to reach the end of the song; and these last notes, wobbling and swaying, persisted out of the station and into the countryside until the train, gathering speed, made it impossible to play any longer.
Also by Shirley Hazzard
Fiction
The Great Fire
The Transit of Venus
The Bay of Noon
People in Glass Houses
Cliffs of Fall
Nonfiction
Greene on Capri
Countenance of Truth
Defeat of an Ideal
THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY. Copyright © 1966 by Shirley Hazzard.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hazzard, Shirley, 1931-
The evening of the holiday / Shirley Hazzard.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0105-9
I. Title.
PR9619.3.H369E94 1988
823
87-32823
The Evening of the Holiday Page 11
