The servants yawned.
Yet the four visitors, while their bodies sat – that was Mrs Fisher’s – or lay – that was Lady Caroline’s – or loitered – that was Mrs Arbuthnot’s – or went in solitude up into the hills – that was Mrs Wilkins’s – were anything but torpid really. Their minds were unusually busy. Even at night their minds were busy, and the dreams they had were clear, thin, quick things, entirely different from the heavy dreams of home. There was that in the atmosphere of San Salvatore which produced active-mindedness in all except the natives. They, as before – whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did – remained immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to. All their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico’s dog asleep in the sun.
The visitors could not be blind to it – it was too arresting after London in a particularly wet and gloomy March. Suddenly to be transported to that place where the air was so still that it held its breath, where the light was so golden that the most ordinary things were transfigured – to be transported into that delicate warmth, that caressing fragrance, and to have the old grey castle as the setting, and, in the distance, the serene clear hills of Perugini’s* backgrounds, was an astonishing contrast. Even Lady Caroline, used all her life to beauty, who had been everywhere and seen everything, felt the surprise of it. It was, that year, a particularly wonderful spring, and of all the months at San Salvatore, April, if the weather was fine, was best. May scorched and withered, March was restless, and could be hard and cold in its brightness – but April came along softly like a blessing, and if it were a fine April, it was so beautiful that it was impossible not to feel different, not to feel stirred and touched.
Mrs Wilkins, we have seen, responded to it instantly. She, so to speak, at once flung off all her garments and dived straight into glory, unhesitatingly, with a cry of rapture.
Mrs Arbuthnot was stirred and touched, but differently. She had odd sensations – presently to be described.
Mrs Fisher, being old, was of a closer, more impermeable texture, and offered more resistance, but she too had odd sensations, also in their place to be described.
Lady Caroline, already amply acquainted with beautiful houses and climates, to whom they could not come quite with the same surprise, yet was very nearly as quick to react as Mrs Wilkins. The place had an almost instantaneous influence on her as well, and of one part of this influence she was aware: it had made her, beginning on the very first evening, want to think, and acted on her curiously like a conscience. What this conscience seemed to press upon her notice with an insistence that startled her – Lady Caroline hesitated to accept the word, but it would keep on coming into her head – was that she was tawdry.
Tawdry. She. Fancy.
She must think that out.
The morning after the first dinner together, she woke up in a condition of regret that she should have been so talkative to Mrs Wilkins the night before. What had made her be, she wondered. Now, of course, Mrs Wilkins would want to grab – she would want to be inseparable – and the thought of a grabbing and an inseparableness that should last four weeks made Scrap’s spirit swoon within her. No doubt the encouraged Mrs Wilkins would be lurking in the top garden waiting to waylay her when she went out, and would hail her with morning cheerfulness. How much she hated being hailed with morning cheerfulness – or indeed being hailed at all. She oughtn’t to have encouraged Mrs Wilkins the night before. Fatal to encourage. It was bad enough not to encourage, for just sitting there and saying nothing seemed usually to involve her, but actively to encourage was suicidal. What on earth had made her? Now she would have to waste all the precious time, the precious, lovely time for thinking in, for getting square with herself, in shaking Mrs Wilkins off.
With great caution and on the tips of her toes, balancing herself carefully lest the pebbles should scrunch, she stole out when she was dressed to her corner – but the garden was empty. No shaking off was necessary. Neither Mrs Wilkins nor anybody else was to be seen. She had it entirely to herself. Except for Domenico – who presently came and hovered, watering his plants, again especially all the plants that were nearest her – no one came out at all; and when, after a long while of following up thoughts which seemed to escape her just as she had got them, and dropping off exhausted to sleep in the intervals of this chase, she felt hungry and looked at her watch and saw that it was past three, she realized that nobody had even bothered to call her in to lunch. So that, Scrap could not but remark, if anyone was shaken off, it was herself.
Well, but how delightful, and how very new. Now she would really be able to think, uninterruptedly. Delicious to be forgotten.
Still, she was hungry, and Mrs Wilkins, after that excessive friendliness the night before, might at least have told her lunch was ready. And she had really been excessively friendly – so nice about Mellersh’s sleeping arrangements, wanting him to have the spare room and all. She wasn’t usually interested in arrangements – in fact, she wasn’t ever interested in them – so that Scrap considered she might be said almost to have gone out of her way to be agreeable to Mrs Wilkins. And, in return, Mrs Wilkins didn’t even bother whether or not she had any lunch.
Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn’t mind missing a meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one’s time, and Mrs Fisher was, she was afraid, one of those persons who at meals linger. Twice now had she dined with Mrs Fisher, and each time she had been difficult at the end to dislodge, lingering on slowly cracking innumerable nuts and slowly drinking a glass of wine that seemed as if it would never be finished. Probably it would be a good thing to make a habit of missing lunch, and as it was quite easy to have tea brought out to her, and as she breakfasted in her room, only once a day would she have to sit at the dining-room table and endure the nuts.
Scrap burrowed her head comfortably in the cushions, and with her feet crossed on the low parapet gave herself up to more thought. She said to herself, as she had said at intervals throughout the morning: now I’m going to think. But, never having thought out anything in her life, it was difficult. Extraordinary how one’s attention wouldn’t stay fixed – extraordinary how one’s mind slipped sideways. Settling herself down to a review of her past as a preliminary to the consideration of her future, and hunting in it to begin with for any justification of that distressing word tawdry, the next thing she knew was that she wasn’t thinking about this at all, but had somehow switched on to Mr Wilkins.
Well, Mr Wilkins was quite easy to think about, though not pleasant. She viewed his approach with misgivings. For not only was it a profound and unexpected bore to have a man added to the party – and a man, too, of the kind she was sure Mr Wilkins must be – but she was afraid – and her fear was the result of a drearily unvarying experience – that he might wish to hang about her.
This possibility had evidently not yet occurred to Mrs Wilkins, and it was not one to which she could very well draw her attention – not, that is, without being too fatuous to live. She tried to hope that Mr Wilkins would be a wonderful exception to the dreadful rule. If only he were, she would be so much obliged to him that she believed she might really quite like him.
But she had misgivings. Suppose he hung about her so that she was driven from her lovely top garden; suppose the light in Mrs Wilkins’s funny, flickering face was blown out. Scrap felt she would particularly dislike this to happen to Mrs Wilkins’s face, yet she had never in her life met any wives – not any at all – who had been able to understand that she didn’t in the least want their husbands. Often she had met wives who didn’t want their husbands either, but that made them none the less indignant if they thought somebody else did, and none the less sure, when they saw them hanging round Scrap, that she was trying to get them. Trying to get them!
The bare thought, the bare recollection of these situations, filled her with a boredom so extreme that it instantly sent her to sleep again.
When she woke up she went on with Mr Wilkins.
Now if, thought Scrap, Mr Wilkins were not an exception and behaved in the usual way, would Mrs Wilkins understand, or would it just simply spoil her holiday? She seemed quick, but would she be quick about just this? She seemed to understand and see inside one, but would she understand and see inside one when it came to Mr Wilkins?
The experienced Scrap was full of doubts. She shifted her feet on the parapet, she jerked a cushion straight. Perhaps she had better try and explain to Mrs Wilkins during the days still remaining before the arrival – explain in a general way, rather vague and talking at large – her attitude towards such things. She might also expound to her her peculiar dislike of people’s husbands, and her profound craving to be, at least for this one month, let alone.
But Scrap had her doubts about this too. Such talk meant a certain familiarity, meant embarking on a friendship with Mrs Wilkins – and if, after having embarked on it and faced the peril it contained of too much Mrs Wilkins, Mr Wilkins should turn out to be artful – and people did get very artful when they were set on anything – and manage after all to slip through into the top garden, Mrs Wilkins might easily believe she had been taken in, and that she, Scrap, was deceitful. Deceitful! And about Mr Wilkins. Wives were really pathetic.
At half-past four she heard sounds of saucers on the other side of the daphne bushes. Was tea being sent out to her?
No: the sounds came no closer, they stopped near the house. Tea was to be in the garden – in her garden. Scrap considered she might at least have been asked if she minded being disturbed. They all knew she sat there.
Perhaps someone would bring hers to her in her corner.
No – nobody brought anything.
Well, she was too hungry not to go and have it with the others today, but she would give Francesca strict orders for the future.
She got up, and walked with that slow grace which was another of her outrageous number of attractions towards the sounds of tea. She was conscious not only of being very hungry, but of wanting to talk to Mrs Wilkins again. Mrs Wilkins had not grabbed – she had left her quite free all day, in spite of the rapprochement the night before. Of course she was an original, and put on a silk jumper for dinner, but she hadn’t grabbed. This was a great thing. Scrap went towards the tea table quite looking forward to Mrs Wilkins – and when she came in sight of it, she saw only Mrs Fisher and Mrs Arbuthnot.
Mrs Fisher was pouring out the tea, and Mrs Arbuthnot was offering Mrs Fisher macaroons. Every time Mrs Fisher offered Mrs Arbuthnot anything – her cup, or milk, or sugar – Mrs Arbuthnot offered her macaroons – pressed them on her with an odd assiduousness, almost with obstinacy. “Was it a game?” Scrap wondered, sitting down and seizing a macaroon.
“Where is Mrs Wilkins?” asked Scrap.
They did not know. At least, Mrs Arbuthnot, on Scrap’s enquiry, did not know; Mrs Fisher’s face, at the name, became elaborately uninterested.
It appeared that Mrs Wilkins had not been seen since breakfast. Mrs Arbuthnot thought she had probably gone for a picnic. Scrap missed her. She ate the enormous macaroons – the best and biggest she had ever come across – in silence. Tea without Mrs Wilkins was dull, and Mrs Arbuthnot had that fatal flavour of motherliness about her, of wanting to pet one, to make one very comfortable, coaxing one to eat – coaxing her, who was already so frankly, so even excessively, eating – that seemed to have dogged Scrap’s steps through life. Couldn’t people leave one alone? She was perfectly able to eat what she wanted unincited. She tried to quench Mrs Arbuthnot’s zeal by being short with her. Useless. The shortness was not apparent. It remained, as all Scrap’s evil feelings remained, covered up by the impenetrable veil of her loveliness.
Mrs Fisher sat monumentally, and took no notice of either of them. She had had a curious day, and was a little worried. She had been quite alone, for none of the three had come to lunch, and none of them had taken the trouble to let her know they were not coming – and Mrs Arbuthnot, drifting casually into tea, had behaved oddly till Lady Caroline joined them and distracted her attention.
Mrs Fisher was prepared not to dislike Mrs Arbuthnot, whose parted hair and mild expression seemed very decent and womanly, but she certainly had habits that were difficult to like. Her habit of instantly echoing any offer made her of food or drink, of throwing the offer back on one, as it were, was not somehow what one expected of her. “Will you have some more tea?” was surely a question to which the answer was simply yes or no – but Mrs Arbuthnot persisted in the trick she had exhibited the day before at breakfast, of adding to her yes or no the words, “Will you?” She had done it again that morning at breakfast, and here she was doing it at tea – the two meals at which Mrs Fisher presided and poured out. Why did she do it? Mrs Fisher failed to understand.
But this was not what was worrying her – this was merely by the way. What was worrying her was that she had been quite unable that day to settle to anything, and had done nothing but wander restlessly from her sitting room to her battlements and back again. It had been a wasted day – and how much she disliked waste. She had tried to read, and she had tried to write to Kate Lumley, but no – a few words read, a few lines written, and up she got again and went out onto the battlements and stared at the sea.
It did not matter that the letter to Kate Lumley should not be written. There was time enough for that. Let the others suppose her coming was definitely fixed. All the better. So would Mr Wilkins be kept out of the spare room and put where he belonged. Kate would keep. She could be held in reserve. Kate in reserve was just as potent as Kate in actuality, and there were points about Kate in reserve which might be missing from Kate in actuality. For instance, if Mrs Fisher were going to be restless, she would rather Kate was not there to see. There was a want of dignity about restlessness, about trotting backwards and forwards. But it did matter that she could not read a sentence of any of her great dead friends’ writings – no, not even of Browning’s, who had been so much in Italy, nor of Ruskin’s, whose Stones of Venice she had brought with her to reread so nearly on the very spot – nor even a sentence of a really interesting book like the one she had found in her sitting room about the home life of the German Emperor, poor man – written in the Nineties, when he had not yet begun to be more sinned against than sinning, which was, she was firmly convinced, what was the matter with him now, and full of exciting things about his birth and his right arm and accoucheurs – without having to put it down and go and stare at the sea.
Reading was very important: the proper exercise and development of one’s mind was a paramount duty. How could one read if one were constantly trotting in and out? Curious, this restlessness. Was she going to be ill? No, she felt well – indeed, unusually well – and she went in and out quite quickly – trotted, in fact – and without her stick. Very odd that she shouldn’t be able to sit still, she thought, frowning across the tops of some purple hyacinths at the Gulf of Spezia glittering beyond a headland – very odd that she, who walked so slowly, with such dependence on her stick, should suddenly trot.
It would be interesting to talk to someone about it, she felt. Not to Kate – to a stranger. Kate would only look at her and suggest a cup of tea. Kate always suggested cups of tea. Besides, Kate had a flat face. That, Mrs Wilkins, now – annoying as she was, loose-tongued as she was, impertinent, objectionable – would probably understand, and perhaps know what was making her be like this. But she could say nothing to Mrs Wilkins. She was the last person to whom one would admit sensations. Dignity alone forbade it. Confide in Mrs Wilkins? Never.
And Mrs Arbuthnot, while she wistfully mothered the obstructive Scrap at tea, felt too that she had had a curious day. Like Mrs Fisher’s, it had been active, but unlike Mrs Fisher’s, only active in mind. Her bo
dy had been quite still, her mind had not been still at all: it had been excessively active. For years she had taken care to have no time to think. Her scheduled life in the parish had prevented memories and desires from intruding on her. That day they had crowded. She went back to tea feeling dejected, and that she should feel dejected in such a place, with everything about her to make her rejoice, only dejected her the more. But how could she rejoice alone? How could anybody rejoice and enjoy and appreciate, really appreciate, alone? Except Lotty. Lotty seemed able to. She had gone off down the hill directly after breakfast, alone, yet obviously rejoicing, for she had not suggested that Rose should go too, and she was singing as she went.
Rose had spent the day by herself, sitting with her hands clasping her knees, staring straight in front of her. What she was staring at were the grey swords of the agaves and, on their tall stalks, the pale irises that grew in the remote place she had found, while beyond them, between the grey leaves and the blue flowers, she saw the sea. The place she had found was a hidden corner where the sun-baked stones were padded with thyme, and nobody was likely to come. It was out of sight and sound of the house, it was off any path, it was near the end of the promontory. She sat so quiet that presently lizards darted over her feet, and some tiny birds like finches, frightened away at first, came back again and flitted among the bushes round her just as if she hadn’t been there. How beautiful it was. And what was the good of it with no one there, no one who loved being with one, who belonged to one, to whom one could say, “Look.” And wouldn’t one say, “Look – dearest?” Yes, one would say dearest, and the sweet word, just to say it to somebody who loved one, would make one happy.
The Enchanted April Page 14
