John pulled at Randall’s hand, solemnly eyeing the three men, and asked softly, “Who are they, Uncle Ran?”
Domenico heard him and raised his eyebrows. Without thinking, he blurted, “He calls you ‘Uncle’?”
Randall looked him hard in the eye, deciding that now or never he must get the English-speaking member of this family on a basis of understanding. “Naturally,” he said. “In the circumstances—”
“But naturally, Signore.” Domenico smiled lamely, by way of asking pardon for his tactlessness. He bent down and put his hard, stained hand on John’s curly head. “You are my little cousin,” he said. “You must learn to speak Italian.”
“Posso parlare italiano,” said John quickly. “Ho fame.”
“Eh! Bello!”
“Carino!”
“Che bravo!”
“Che intelligente!”
They all spoke at once. Their faces warmed, they began to smile and nod, they closed in on the table drawing Randall and John with them while Zia Paola and Renata approached from the stove, each carrying a steaming pot. Randall had the feeling that but for John’s artless, charming remark they might have remained suspicious and chilly for a long time. Also, he saw once again, he had not reckoned with the delighted love of Italians for children. Suddenly, standing shyly by their poor, rough table, about to share their coarse food, he felt himself teetering on the brink of tears. He had struck a lode of human kindliness which in spite of all the problems, all the difficulties which still lay ahead, proved that his instinct in turning with the child to these people had been the right one. It was a staggering relief to feel, after the frightening, furtive, desolate years in New York, that there was in the world a fund of natural love upon which John could draw. Renata’s face did not altogether bear that out. She kept her eyes lowered and did not say a word. But her own shame, like his, and whatever means they found to come to terms with it, were not the concern of these Gandolfis. They had taken in the child because it would be against nature to do anything else.
Randall first saw the pink house a fortnight later when the weather turned so warm and soft, as it often does early in February, that Domenico suggested taking him and John out on the lake to enjoy the view from a boat. There had been a certain amount of visiting with the Gandolfis, but Randall was careful not to overdo it. He wanted no issues raised, and only by degrees had he discovered how enormously tired he was in every way. He was too tired to decide what he wanted to eat, what necktie to put on, what John should wear; he felt and acted like a sleep-walker and was content to have it so. The quiet, the remoteness, the timelessness, and the completeness of his escape enclosed him in a caressing mist. Until this should begin to disperse of its own accord, he had no idea of deciding anything, or even of learning anything, such as what had happened to Renata in the past three years. He kept his distance and still more she kept hers. They had scarcely exchanged a word alone. Even had they wanted to talk privately it would not have been feasible. There was no privacy in the Gandolfis’ kitchen and Randall in fact had been only a few times there. Nothing would have induced Renata to go out walking, or to sit with him somewhere in a public place in Bellagio or in one of the villages. Thus she had avoided him, but never her own thoughts which she had hidden with consummate success. His lifelong refuge in self-delusion had worked to hide from him the truths that behind her impassivity lay passionate, gnawing anxiety as to his intentions about the boy; that her calm tenderness with the child was a prodigy of self-control. In her downcast eyes, her deferential bearing towards her relatives, her austere reserve with himself, Randall could not sense her torments of suspense, sharpened by guilt, heightened by her adoration of the boy.
Domenico was the member of the family who appointed himself a kind of host, or guide, or courier, not having much farm work to do at this season and greatly preferring something that resembled the summer work which brought him into contact with foreigners. Randall was a bit uncomfortable with him at first. He wanted neither the subservience which Domenico would have proffered a real tourist, nor the intimacy that belonged to a real relative. Gradually they struck a medium and became, within a certain careful formality, friends.
It was chance that took them round the tip of the peninsula and into the eastern branch of the lake. From Bellagio Randall had not seen it and Domenico said, “It is beautiful too, you understand, but different. It has not got big hotels and beautiful villas, it is more simple.” He smiled lightly. “It belongs more to us.”
“I’d like to see that!”
So they drifted round the point and down the winding shore, with its tiny bays and coves, its softly terraced hillsides, their grass as green as April—but it is always so green here, said Domenico—its twisted silvery olive trees leaning tenderly to the sun, its dark patches of cedar and spruce, the tall solemnity of cypresses.
“One would never believe there could be so many different shades of green,” said Randall. “I’ve never seen such lovely soft variations of a color.” They floated along, Domenico barely plying the oars. To their right the hills were only moderately high, but on their left across the lake rose the Grigna, rugged and peaked with snow. Towns clustered along the shore at its feet; above and behind them the range turned rocky and grim.
“I suppose everybody remarks about that mountain down there that looks like a face,” said Randall pointing southwards.
“Yes.” Domenico laughed. “They call it the Profile of Napoleon. I think they call every such mountain in Europe by the same name.”
“Oh, look,” cried John suddenly. “A pink house! What a funny pink house, Uncle Ran.”
He pointed at a little cove, where a tall, narrow, shrimp-pink house nestled among grey olive trees and leafless, pale-trunked poplars, close to the water’s edge. On the rocks nearby were stretched some nets to dry. “I like it!” cried John. “I never saw a pink house before.”
“Pink houses are not admired in this region, Giu’an,” said Domenico. “You will not see many of them.”
“Why?” asked Randall.
“They are considered ordinary. In most places anyway, pink stucco is only for contadini. They say that only in Genova the nobili and rich people color their houses pink.”
“Oh, that can’t be true,” said Randall. “Every book you read about Italy is full of pink houses.”
Domenico shook his head. “I have never travelled,” he said. “I only know what we think here.”
Randall was looking at the house with a curiously sleepy kind of interest. The air and the springlike sun made him feel so relaxed that he held his eyes open with effort. Yet there was something peculiarly pleasing about the sight of the pink house. He asked Domenico to whom it belonged.
“To an old fisherman whom everybody calls Zio Pepe. He must be nearly ninety years old and he has always been there.”
“The place looks quite well kept.”
“Yes. Zio Pepe is a busy old man. He could never earn a sufficient living at fishing, for our fish are too wily to let themselves be caught in such numbers. But he owns a sandpit across the road back of his house which gives a certain quality of sand that the capomastri prefer for making stucco, and he sells enough sand to keep him going. But the real difference with him is that some ten years ago an English painter mooning about the lake in a rowboat fell in love with Zio Pepe’s house and wanted to live in it.”
Randall’s eyes were opened wider now and he listened carefully, looking at the shore and the nets and the house.
“They did a lot of talking and there was some expense for the Englishman, but not very much because he was a poor man. Still he had more money than Zio Pepe, who had none, and between them they fixed up about half of the house into the kind of place the Englishman wanted to live in. It is not like a real villa, you understand, but much more comfortable than our houses. They say there is a stove in every room. It has not got a bathroom such as my cousin Mauri the idraulico installs in rich people’s villas, but the Englishman contr
ived a way to get water into the house without carrying it, and heat enough of it at a time to fill a tin vasca da bagno like they all use, those inglesi.”
Domenico always showed off what he knew of foreigners’ habits and he never needed much prodding to encourage him to talk. Randall said, “Go on,” and Domenico said, “He was a good gardener and when he was not painting he was raising flowers. Lots of them are still there.”
“Where is he now?” Randall’s voice was husky, with a note of suspense in it which Domenico appeared not to remark, or anyway, not to understand.
“He lived there until a couple of years ago, then he had to go back to England in the winter because of some family matter, and naturally the climate killed him, poveretto. He should never have gone.”
“And the house, his part of the house—”
“Why, it has been empty ever since.” Domenico looked sharply at Randall. “I don’t know why, one would think that somebody would want it.”
“I do,” said Randall.
“You?”
“Do you think I could rent it?”
Domenico stopped rowing and sat resting on his oars, a few strokes offshore from the house. “I don’t see why not,” he said, but he was surprised.
John clapped his hands and said, “I want the pink house, too, Uncle Ran!”
“Can we go ashore now?” asked Randall. “Is Zio, what’s his name—Zio Pepe—there?”
“I suppose so. You can see his boat is there.” Domenico was finding himself not quite so used to foreigners as he had thought. Most people would not take such a decision in this sudden way.
“Let’s go and talk to him now, Domenico,” said Randall. “You do the talking and be sure you get me the house.”
It was a milky, windless morning in the middle of February when they moved in. Domenico brought them from the landing in Bellagio with their big valise and a basket of provisions. Randall was happy about the move, even rather excited; but that was tempered by his doubts about the wisdom of what he had done. He sat in the boat with his coat-collar turned up, for the air was chilly, watching the odd whitish tinge of the sky and the reflecting water, and so preoccupied by his doubts that he took no notice of John’s chatter with Domenico, mostly in the dialect which he was picking up very fast. The house might prove to be the haven of peace for which Randall had reached with the instinct of a hungry man for food. But he might too have ruined that possibility and done something disastrously unwise when he had followed the line of least resistance and consented to a startling resolution of his strange situation with Renata. He could not keep his feelings in balance. Each time that he arrived at reacceptance of the idea, his anxiety began to undermine it again.
Well, if it proved impossible, he would simply leave. At times in the past weeks he had had difficult moments, discomfited by the knowledge that the Gandolfis, while perfectly at ease about John, were always on their guard, always reserved with Randall himself. How could they be otherwise; indeed, how could he wish them otherwise? He did not. He thought they had attained a remarkable compromise and shown surprising poise in view of the gap of class and language and nationality. Renata had answered one of his infrequent questions by explaining that this was only because he was not Italian, only his foreignness enabled them to accept his presence on his terms. But he felt constantly their silent questions and the weight of their unmistakable views about him and about Renata and the child. They found it hard to understand why he should have come here merely as a drifter, a temporizer. He knew the source of Renata’s profound sense of natural truth: it was these people behind her. He knew that they expected one of two alternatives as the outcome of his presence here, either that he would turn over the child to Renata and go away, or that he would stay here and marry her. This indeterminate course of his, caring for the boy as no ordinary man would do, hanging about here without resolving anything, became more puzzling to the Gandolfis as time went on.
He wanted so much to live in the pink house and lose himself in the dreaming beauty of the place that he pushed those questions aside. He had been adept all his life at hiding what he did not want to see; nobody could know how adept. He had long recognized that one could hide thoughts, ideas, memories, intangibles, quite as well as paper and stuffs, a box, a locket, a blank-book, a desk. How could he be here at all if he could not fairly well keep hidden the thought of Seymour? It was when he was most impelled by this knowledge that he cared least how he appeared to the Gandolfis. He became then more commanding of himself, more decisive of manner. Inevitably they reacted with a certain increase of distance but also of respect. It was at such a moment last week that he had asked Zia Paola in Renata’s presence how he could go about finding a woman to keep house for him, or whether she would be willing to find him one.
She had first raised her shoulders in a slow shrug and made a sound which might mean anything. Then she said, “Ma!” and put on her shawl and said, “Talk to her about it,” jerking her head towards Renata; and she took her marketing-bag and went out.
Randall stood by the table, looking down at Renata who was hemming a silk handkerchief. He was thoroughly surprised and ill at ease. John was outside playing with some children in the piazza, he could hear their prattle through the open window. Renata kept her head bent over her sewing. She did not speak. After a time Randall said in English, “What did she mean?”
Renata’s muscular fingers whipped stitches and she did not look up. She said in English, the first time she had spoken it, “What you think? It seem clear enough.” Her voice was dull, muffled.
“But,” he said. He drew up a chair and sat down near her, across the corner of the table. “I wouldn’t dare think. It would never have occurred to me.”
“No,” she said, “probably not. Is like you, Randalo, not see what is the most simple, most natural.”
He was silent, weighing this extremely problematical idea. He had barely got used to the fact that Renata was here at all, instead of lost forever in the nowhere of South America—another piece of his characteristic hiding. And here was this astonishing proposal that she come and live in the house with him. Why was it not impossibly shocking, how could her aunt of all people have suggested such a thing? Embarrassed and confused, he asked Renata.
She looked up then, and he thought sharply of other times when she had given him this cool, almost patronizing stare. It was when her view of a situation, the rational, the factual one, had come up against his tentative or his evasive or his romantic idea.
“Is not natural,” she said, “its mother is the best woman to be with a child? You think Zia Paola care about something else? Whether is good the cooking or—or—” she shut her mouth for a moment, then opened it again and said, “Who you suppose she care about—you or Giu’an?”
Her use of the name in dialect struck Randall hard.
“But if I let you come,” he said slowly, “won’t they all think—”
She sighed, shaking her head, and dropped her work in her lap. “How you have not change’,” she said. “You don’t see what they think from the moment you arrive?”
“They think we are John’s parents,” he said reluctantly. He spoke more slowly, almost whispering. “They assume I am his father.”
“Well?” In spite of her self-possessed mien up to now he saw her pallor giving way to a slow, dark blush. She turned from his gaze and muttered, “You would have them think—otherwise?”
“My God—” the thought came back at him for the first time in weeks, a brutal, sickening thrust. “No.”
“Well,” she said.
There was a long silence. “Do you really want to come, Renata?” he asked finally.
“You have brought Giu’an here. Nobody understand why, but you imagine I don’t want to be with him?”
“But with me too?”
She shrugged, the ancient, infinitely redundant gesture of her aunt and all the women like her. “Why not? If to be with Giu’an means also with you, very well.”
“You think they say anything they have not said already? You do not understand them well. Like me, they are the realists. Like I always tell you, we—”
“I know. But—” he stopped. This he did not know how to say. But somehow he must force it out, there was all too much of this living with things he was afraid to talk about, afraid to face. “They will all be saying I ought to marry you.” He was uncomfortable. “And I—” he swallowed, and she looked up and saw the uncharacteristic hardness of his jaw. Something flashed through her mind and was reflected in a frown, but he was either too preoccupied or not in the mood to see it. It was a long time since he had been given to studying her face and hanging on what he might find there or hope to read into it.
“You have not the intention,” she said, perfectly calm. “Nor I.” Her level brows were still; her lips, her delicate nostrils; the deepest of inscrutable expressions darkened her eyes. “I never had it. Is no different now.”
His memory wrenched out an echo of the pleading woman who had stopped him in the December street. That had been the single chink in the solid wall of her consistency. Had time filled it in, could he be sure that hardship had not breached it? He wanted no new problem posed by her. She sat watching his face and watching him look, as he had done that first day, all round this poor, bare kitchen, and then at her hands, hardened by work, and at her ugly clothes; and last at her closed, silent mouth.
“You have not told me how any of this came about,” he said slowly.
“I tell you if it seem necessary,” she said. “Is little to tell. Perhaps is enough you know I was very sick, I lose my voice, I return here.” She paused, but not to give him a chance to ask questions. Her expression kept him silent. “Was my own choice,” she said, and picked up her sewing again.
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