“I see what you mean.” Garth glanced at her cautiously. “But I’ll never say again that scientists are incapable of taking a holiday.”
Because she was unable to laugh, and knew that she was meant to, she put out a hand to him quickly. “There are perceptions, aren’t there, before which science leaves one merely helpless? Or not so much perhaps perceptions as feelings, intuitions.” She paused, frowning ahead, as if the physical terrain before them had grown unfamiliar and treacherous. “A thing like that”—her hand made a quick backward gesture—”makes me feel in the presence of a force so powerful that monkey-tricks should be beneath its dignity. But they’re not. It may sweep across a continent, but it enjoys planning potty little tactical operations by the way. There may always be something coming.”
“Of course there may.”
Although there was nothing portentous in the tone of Garth’s reply, it pulled her up on a long breath. “You came!”
He laughed – on a quick surge of the confidence that he realised it was his to create. “For what I’m worth.”
“Yes – for what you’re worth.” She took her long breath again, like a diver breaking the surface.
“It’s like the simple sort of history books we have in America – and I guess you have them too. Good things and bad things are always coming along. In that sense we’re a cock-shy, sure enough. We can do a bit of dodging and a bit of grabbing – although not, I agree, as much as in our more complacent moments we suppose. But sometimes we know we’ve grabbed what makes most things else not matter.”
She put out both her arms to him; and for a time their walking was ended.
SIX
“Garth, if you’re to meet Miss Bave’s train we must go on.”
“Oceans of time, honey. I’ll drop you at the Pastorelli and walk down to the street-car that end.”
“At that end. And a trolley-bus isn’t a street-car.”
“Aw, sister – give us a break.”
“You’re a fraud. You can’t really talk it at all. You couldn’t even moo convincingly to those Texas cattle.”
He made a dive for her, and they scuffled in bracken. He scrambled to his knees and picked the fronds from her hair. They dusted each other, breathless and laughing, and went on their way. But as their path doubled back on itself before dropping down to Settignano Garth saw that the frown had returned to Anthea’s face. He took her hand. “Worried still?”
“Everything comes too soon.”
“Too soon?” He was puzzled. “Wastefully late, I’d say. When I think why we didn’t meet years ago, it makes me mad.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean that. I mean the ups and downs, and the turns on the paths, and the farms, and the places where there is a view. They have all contracted – just as that chapel has.”
“It’s become a whole landscape for the little hermits?”
“Yes. Look at that place on the right. It’s la Morte – the Podere la Morte.”
“Well, that’s not very cheerful, I agree. But I don’t see—”
“It ought to be farther away. And its oaks should be larger. I know it’s the effect when one returns to childhood scenes. But that’s the point. It’s as if the world were suddenly closing in on me.
“It’s opening out.” He looked at her anxiously, seeing that there was something persistent in her change of mood.
“I know it is. But that’s the future. The past never opens out; it only closes in. And I don’t know that I like mixing them. Settignano and Raymond and the bells of Florence and that chapel and all the rest of it squeeze me up. And then you give a great tug, and the universe grows vast, and I have to grow vast with it. I feel like a concertina. Presently I shall begin to produce the most excruciating wails.” She came to a halt. “Let’s get away. Let’s go to Rome.”
“To Rome?” He looked at her in astonishment. “Just ourselves? Now?”
“Yes!” She turned on him in passion. Then, seeing his face, she burst out laughing, kissed him, and stood back. “Or you can bring Miss Bave, and cable for the return of the Chipchase and the Sub-Dean as well. Only, let’s just try Rome.”
“What if we had a chance of finding The End of It All – finding it perhaps within the next twenty-four hours?”
“Oh – that!”
Garth’s surprise increased. “I really believe—”
“Let’s try Rome. The Forum, if you like. Real excavations. And excavations that have nothing to do with us.”
“You mean you’d rather not find it?”
Anthea walked on. “It’s the last thing we should be thinking about, if we take it in one sense. For isn’t the very sound of it ominous? Can’t you imagine a novel of my father’s – another novel – in which two people who should be at the beginning of it all, not the end, muck about after just such a sinister-sounding thing? Would you plan our honeymoon for the Podere la Morte?”
Garth, although he perhaps felt his experience of feminine mutability to be growing at a confusing rate, replied to this reasonably. “The Mark Lambert heroine,” he said gently. “Do you know, it’s a real bogey with you – a goblin sitting quite deep down in your mind? Having started in on all this, we’d do much better to go right ahead, I guess, and clear things up.”
“But we don’t go ahead. Whether for good or ill, we don’t go ahead at all. Raymond is shifty and your father has vanished and we just haven’t a clue.”
“It certainly looks that way. But I’m not sure I haven’t got a clue. You remember how in the Memorandum Book there is a pointer to the novel’s title, and that I tumbled to it? Well, I have a kind of glimmering notion that I have a pointer to its whereabouts as well.”
“Then why haven’t you told me?”
“It doesn’t sound as if you’d be all that interested to know.”
He saw her flush as he spoke, and he realised with horror that the possibility of a first quarrel was before them. “That’s not the point,” she said. “It’s true that I don’t, in a way, any longer very much care. Perhaps the Mark Lambert business was useful in making a grab at you.” Anthea’s flush deepened as she went off at this wild tangent. “And perhaps now I feel it can be chucked—”
“For pity’s sake quit talking nonsense.”
“Is it nonsense?”
“If you don’t make me mad!” Garth was in sober fact blessedly angry. “Haven’t we had all this out already? Don’t we agree that you’d have had less interest in this missing novel if I’d been an old creature with a beard, and I’d have had less interest in it if you’d been Miss Chipchase?”
“Yes – of course.” They found that they were both trembling and both staring at each other in astonishment. “Do you mind telling me”—Anthea’s voice had grown comically meek—”just where I’d got to?”
“You were saying that something wasn’t the point.”
“Yes. It isn’t the point whether or not I any longer feel hotfoot on this scent. It’s that you know something – anything in the world – and haven’t told me.”
“This is where we make it up.” Garth heaved himself up on the breast-high wall by the roadside and surveyed his agitated beloved with sudden cheerful mischief. “Could I give you a pearl, which I know – quite certainly know – to be on some particular spot at the bottom of the sea? My pointer to the novel’s whereabouts is no more than that. I don’t know. Not consciously. But, at any time, things I do know may sort themselves into some significant message. It’s a way my mind has. And that’s why I mentioned twenty-four hours. I do obscurely feel that I may have The End of It All in my hands before they’re out.”
Anthea pulled him from his perch. She might have kissed him again had their situation by this time not been moderately public. But they had only to look at each other to pursue their way downhill for a time in silent contentment. Then Anthea spoke again. “But your clue, Garth, may be either to where the novel is or to where the novel was!”
“That’s true enough. The scientific min
d is coming into its own again.”
“Don’t be intolerable. And explain yourself.”
“Well, until I identify the clue – supposing it to be really there – I shan’t be able to tell. It might, for instance, help us to trace the novel for a time, and then fade out. Or it might bring us to a point at which there was conclusive proof of it’s having been destroyed. One can’t be in the least confident. It’s just that I have a hunch.”
“You can go on having it – in Rome.”
“Fine.” Garth instantly took this reiteration as final, and looked at her gravely. “I’ll fix it tonight.”
The Villa Pastorelli was now directly beneath them – an irregular building of the sort that has grown intermittently through some centuries without ever attaining to imposingness; a sprawl of red tiles and dusty pink walls falling so much away into courts and verandas and loggias – all in much dilapidation – as to be only approximately demarcatable from outbuildings and terraces and gardens which in turn faded indistinguishably into the vineyards and olive-groves surrounding it. The young people approached it in silence – without awkwardness, but as if each were taking a fresh measure of the other’s thoughts.
“Finds reads.” Anthea had spoken quite suddenly.
“Say?”
“Don’t you know ‘Finds keeps’? Well, it must be the same with The End of It All. If it comes into the hands of either of us – either of us independently, I mean – the one of us must take it away and read it. Without a word. You understand?”
“I understand. You don’t commonly fail to make yourself clear. But why?”
Anthea shook her head. “I don’t at all know. Perhaps it’s just that hunches aren’t bred exclusively of watching the cattle down Mexico way.”
“Very well – it’s an agreement.” Garth walked for a moment frowning. “By the way, and talking of reading, what was that thing the Chipchase gave you like?”
“The Chipchase?” Anthea was puzzled.
“The book by Poyle, with an essay on Mark Lambert.”
“How very odd – I quite forgot. There was something in the woman’s manner – and even, I think, something she said – that rather disgusted me. I shoved the thing away.”
“Something the Chipchase said?”
“About a disagreeable duty, or some such rubbish. I suppose this man Poyle takes a poor view of my father’s talents, and she wanted me to know it. It seems a pretty dim sort of pleasure, poor soul. However, the book’s in my room and I’ll read it tonight. But I’m not much, you know, on modern masterpieces of critical appraisal.”
“Poyle won’t have produced that. He chatters. And gossips. In fact, I ought to have thought of him. It’s always possible that a gossip has something you want to know. So when you’ve finished him, put him in the bag for Rome.”
“Very well.” They were skirting a high stone wall, sufficiently massive to be stable even in decay; and by a small shabby door inset in this Anthea now stopped. Through its rusty grille could be seen part of a decayed cottage, up the low facade of which there was trained an ancient vine. “I’ll go this way. Are you coming in?”
Garth looked at his watch. “I’d better go straight down.” He rubbed his finger on an illegible inscription set beneath a broken wrought-iron bell-pull. “What does this say?”
“Only Giardiniere. And there really is one still. But he sleeps in the village.”
“I don’t blame him.” Garth peered disapprovingly through the grille. “The cottage looks damp and mouldy, if you ask me. And I’d say that goes for the whole place as well.”
She smiled. “Mouldy? That’s the effect of the copper sulphate they use on the vines. Everything’s falling to bits, I agree. But it’s certainly not damp.”
“I didn’t think much of the drains.”
This time Anthea laughed aloud. “You’d be no good at following in the footsteps of your expatriate papa, any more than I should be with mine. Your speech may be adulterated, but your deepest instincts are American to the core.”
“All right, all right.” He grinned good-humouredly at this teasing. “But is it really agreeable, putting up in the old place? I thought your brother horrible.”
“I know you did, and I don’t think I’d care to settle down for a long spell. But as we’re leaving, dear boy, it doesn’t make any odds.”
“O.K.” But he still hesitated, suddenly obstinately solicitous. “But who looks after you?”
“Looks after me?” Anthea was amused. “Do I need it?”
“In no time, I’ll be getting on the job myself. But meanwhile—”
He was so serious that she achieved sobriety. “There’s Maria. As a matter of fact, she is doing quite a lot of it. She even found me, of all things, a rubber hot-water bottle. It has entirely perished, but she was terribly proud of it, all the same. She thinks it’s just the thing for the English in high summer. I’ve been pretending to revel in it.”
“Is that the old woman with the cast in her eye?”
“Yes. She was virtually my nurse from infancy until I left for England, and she makes a great thing of it – of my being here, I mean. She’s really why I decided I must stop at the Pastorelli.
“I once . . . ” Anthea broke off. “Garth Dauncey, you’re not even listening to me!”
He looked startled. “I was kind of thinking – although I don’t know of what.”
“Of Miss Bave, I suppose. The lover panting for his hour.” They smiled at each other – this singularly childish joke having established itself firmly between them. “You’d better catch your street-car.” She paused, and was suddenly wholly serious. “But remember. We’re off.”
“We’re off.” He confirmed it with a nod which, if entirely acquiescent, was slightly puzzled. “You almost make it sound as if we must clear out before it’s too late.”
“Nonsense!” She was gay again. “How could it be too late? It’s just that I’m through for a bit with the old. I’m through forever with it – through with the entire universe as it existed before—”
“Before?”
“Garth – you’re like that great creature Sandro.” She was suddenly mocking. “I can hear you preparing to purr. But there’s no more steak today. Do you hear, sir? Off with you! Shoo!” She opened the door, made him the gesture of a kiss, and vanished.
He took a long breath, turned, and swung down the hill to Settignano.
SEVEN
Grappa before dinner constitutes a milestone in the expatriate life. That the road tilts all one way thereafter is a commonplace observation touched wonderfully to pity and terror in a chapter of The Cosmopolitans – it is the penultimate chapter of that intricate and ordered masterpiece – which records the degeneration and death of old Lord Quentin Saltire. Raymond Lambert knew this chapter well – he claimed, with some justice, to know his father’s great things by heart – and it is conceivable that he took a sombre satisfaction in going the same road as the brilliant and aberrant scion of an ancient Scottish house. Certainly the grappa was before him now – and had been before him at this early evening hour for many years. He sipped it slowly and steadily. Through long intervals there would be no sound in the villa except the tinkle of the little fountain in the cortile and the answering chink – a double or treble chink – as Raymond set down his glass uncertainly on the marble table beside him.
He sat under the high two-arched loggia, westward facing, which caught still an agreeable warmth from the declining sun. Before him, the valley fell straight towards the city – a valley down the slopes of which the cypresses made scattered sorties from their stronghold on the higher ground, advancing through the olives like a dark soldiery amid the vicious spurt of small grey explosions. To the right were his own vines, gnarled fingers desperately clutching at what would presently be reft from them; to the left, beyond a ridge which in part concealed it, lay the village. In this loggia his father had often worked, a figure majestic and absorbed, surrounded by a litter of papers, while he had hi
mself sat idly in a corner, ineffective before some lesson to be prepared for the perfunctory attention, in two or three days’ time, of a professor of the most pronouncedly “visiting” sort. Raymond’s education had been conducted entirely by persons of this itinerant persuasion, and to an effect so singularly inappreciable in its early stages that two English public schools had expressed themselves with regret as totally unable to receive him.
He considered that he had thus been given no chance. The chances, he was persuaded, had mostly gone to his father; and a few, long afterwards, had gone to Anthea, the child of his father’s old age. These were facts upon which Raymond Lambert reflected a good deal, particularly when drinking grappa. They were responsible for his most prominent characteristic: that of bearing – and particularly in family matters – no consistent or settled mind. He was freakish and veering. The learned might have described his attitude as ambivalent. It was certainly uneasy.
Uneasiness was apparent in him now. It was the first thing remarked by Anthea as she came out to join him. Physically he was very like their father – or at least like that portrait of their father in which Sargent had approached the novelist on a disquieting side. He rose to his feet – unsteadily but formally – as she came out on the loggia, and moved forward a chair. Whatever had gone wrong with Raymond’s breeding, and whatever refining contacts with a larger world he had been denied, there was nothing boorish about him. He stood before her now – cold, even perhaps hostile, but courteous and alert. “What you drink is Cinzano, I think – and without gin? Then lemon peel is essential, and ice and a dash of soda water. But I must fetch them. Everything is neglected, you know. And usually there seems to be nobody here.”
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