She sat with the cheap silk crushed in her hands, her head bent. He picked up his newspaper and rattled it and made a show of reading. He heard her speak and pause and speak again and he stopped pretending to read and looked at her.
“How you are good!” she said, and pleased him by raising her small head, with a motion of pride that was sound and reassuring after so much humility. “You have always been good,” she said. Her eyes were glistening.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t. Let’s not pretend about that. But whatever I think I am doing here, I can try—” he stopped.
“You have not tell me why you really came,” she said.
“It was Seymour.”
“Oh?”
He sighed. Better tell her, he thought, hoping to find words which would not too gravely mortify her. Until he told her she must remain bewildered and doubtful. He began to talk, at first brokenly, little by little with more ease. Sitting there, listening to an east wind which had blown up outside, lashing the lake against the pebbly shore, it seemed not weeks, not even months or years, but a fantastic length of time, a planetary distance, since that last dreadful scene in the library and the long parade of previous dreadful scenes, stretching back into the dark, breathless night when their quarrelling was interrupted by the clanging of the rusty doorbell. Long before he could have got as far as that, she was sitting with her face in her hands, breathing “Dio! Dio! Madonna Santa!”
When he described Seymour’s behavior about John’s bear, which was upstairs now hugged in his arm while he slept, he heard her whimper as if she had been slapped; and when he told how John had been parted from Maggie, she gave a sharp sob and looked up, pale, her mouth dragged down at the corners, her eyes enormous. She laid her hands, clenched in fists, against her breast and said, “My fault. It is all my fault.”
“No,” he said. He too was deeply upset. “It was fault, Renata, God knows what awful fault. You call it—sin. But it was nobody’s alone. It almost seems,” he said slowly, looking at the small grating through which gleamed the embers of the fire, “as if we had all been destined to commit it. And we are still, I am still, anyway, condemned to keep on wronging somebody. Whatever I do, whichever way I turn—” he shook his head.
“It disturb you leave the Simorr as you have done. It worry you very much?”
“Oh, God. Blind. All alone. That house.” He shrank down in his chair.
“Ah, Randalo.” She shook her head. “I am very sorry. But he is not poor, the Simorr, he can pay somebody to care for him?”
“If such care can be bought,” said Randall, muttering. “But we have become … I too … when I am there … that house,” he said again, and drew a long breath and shut his mouth hard. She sat looking at her hands clasped in her lap.
“And by comparison,” he said after a long time, “the things you had told me about the life here, and your people and the way they felt about what men and women did—” He paused and made a gesture of a kind of surrender, of finality. “I knew I had to get John out of tha house, away from Seymour. And I thought I’d come and see your people and learn what the other half of John’s blood really was. Because my half—ours—” he turned brick red and was careful not to meet her eye. “As you know,” he said lamely, “I never expected to find you here.”
They were silent after that. Each sat thinking of questions he could ask, of thoughts he could voice, of gaps in time and space to fill; both knew they had talked enough tonight and both knew that there was time to come, unhurried, unmeasured, tranquilly spread before them.
CHAPTER 19
A year later the three occupants of the pink house had become as unremarkable to the countryside as the wistaria which curtained the loggia, or the olive trees leaning from the hillsides, twisted to the sun. It was said at first that the couple were married. It was said that they were not married. It was said with shrugs that Renata Tosi had got far better than her deserts; it was asked by others why she should not deserve as good and decent a life as this: had she not shown the penitence and humility that her youthful sins had exacted? She went faithfully to church at San Bernardo on every Sunday and every feast and fast day, bringing the boy with her. She was raising the child a good Christian without regard to the fact that the americano was a heathen: no, said some, only a Protestant; the languid argument usually wandered into the maze of whether Protestants were Christian at all. Yes, said Don Stefano, the parish priest, they were; but he gave as little further elucidation to that subject as to whatever he knew about Renata’s boy. It became for a time a mild titillation, a matter of small local pride, to have something in the community so original as the menage in the pink house. Beyond that lay the slow steps to complete and amiable acceptance of it. People approved of Renata’s modest bearing and intense devotion to the child. They approved of the americano’s hard work in his garden, his quiet friendliness, his unfailing generosity to the good works of the church. Presently he could have learned, if he had thought of it so concretely, that local opinion had lifted him over the barrier which divided the village people from the travelling foreigners who gave many of them their living, and welded him into the life of the place with little further remark.
He had achieved a balance of sorts in his thoughts about the past or the future, about this identity or the one that lay hidden under lock and key in the mouldering rooms four thousand miles away. He was helped by the sight of John, by his vigorous happiness and the unmistakable evidence of his unusual intelligence. He was helped by Renata, who brought to her life with him a tranquil profundity, set alight at moments by wonderfully natural expressions of passion, which gave him extraordinary wellbeing. He was not helped at all by the sparse reminders of his other self that came at long intervals in the post which usually brought nothing. There had never been a word from Seymour although Randall had tried to calm his aching conscience by sending a message when he had first come to this house. He had written his bank in New York a letter to be telephoned to Seymour, to which there had never been a reply. Thereafter the post brought only his bank statements and a communication now and then from the Trustees or, as time went on, their successors. Once Randall had yielded to a sense of acute concern for Seymour and had written to Mrs. Quinn, asking her to find out if she could, and send him word, how Seymour was doing. He knew that she would have to go and dabble in gossip among the people in the block; it was a bad thought, but he felt driven to it. Her short, illiterately scrawled reply said only that Seymour had never been known to leave the house and that “a black, sir, not the same one, goes in and does for him.”
The thought was harrowing, at times almost intolerable; and when such times came round, irregularly cyclic but prompted by the arrival of mail from New York, Renata acted with delicate perceptiveness and understanding. At such times even more than ordinarily, she kept a distance sensitively adjusted to all that the easy-going people of the countryside could never know and never be allowed to learn. Once she had seen Randall, sitting with an opened letter in his hand, stare hard at John who was lying on his stomach, absorbed in copying the alphabet. Randall’s face, red-brown from the sun, had hardened into a mask of grievous consternation; he had shaken his head slowly and leaned it on his brown, calloused hand, and Renata had moved silently away. It was on such a day that she would find a reason for going up to Zia Paola’s for the afternoon, returning quietly at dusk to prepare the simple supper, and retiring afterwards to her original bed in the smaller room to which John’s cot had long since been moved.
Her innate tact, clothed in tender warmth and naturalness, had eased them past those steps which Randall inevitably wanted, yet had been afraid to take. She knew him better than he could know himself; she knew too how to use her knowledge. He would never forget her gentleness in those first days after she had consented to sit with him in the evenings after supper. Sometimes they talked; quite as often they were silent while he read his newspaper and she sewed on the first of the dresses which he had persuaded her to mak
e for herself, to replace the coarse skirts and blouses to which he could not become accustomed. She bought some simple stuff on market day, which in the hand looked as modest as the grey flannel of her blouses, but when finished had the flair of the pretty things she had worn years ago, though tempered, quieter.
She had been, he would always remember, sewing a double row of tiny covered buttons onto the bodice of that new dress, when he had laid down his newspaper and looked at her and said, “Renata, I always think it such a pity that you people close all the shutters on the houses every night.” He spoke English as they usually did in the evenings alone; in the daytime when John was about they spoke only Italian.
“Why is the pity?” she looked up, smiling. “Is our habit. In America I could never understand. No shutters, sometimes open the windows—we believe is poisonous the night air.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s not poisonous, you know. But it’s not the air I was thinking about. It’s the beauty here. It’s so beautiful at night, sometimes I spend an hour on that balcony of mine, just looking at it all. Why—have you ever seen it at night?”
She laughed. “Is beautiful, yes. Of course I have seen. When I was younger—eh!” she made a quick gesture of mischief with her eyes and her chin. “But the beauty, you know—when you have lived always here—you grow used to it.”
“Nonsense. You people know every rock, every tree, every ripple of that lake and what the wind does to it, and all the changes of light, and the stars and the moon—”
“How you are becoming poetic!” she murmured, sewing hard.
“I am thinking about the moon,” he said. “It is full tonight.”
“Really?” He had not seen such bantering in her face since years ago.
“Really. You know it better than I do, like everybody else here. Why, nobody does a thing without consulting the moon.”
“Really?” she said again. She was laughing softly.
“I stayed awake most of the night four weeks ago when the moon was full,” he said. “I opened the shutters wide and lay in bed and looked at that moonlight on the water and watched the lights over on the other shore, and the mountains going dark again when the moon went down. It was the most beautiful sight I ever saw.”
She made no comment. Presently he said, “Do you remember the night at the Maynards’ farm when you came to my room? It was full moon then too.” He spoke without looking at her, his eyes on the green globe of the lamp.
“I remember,” she said, barely aloud. After that there was a long silence, so long that when she came to the end of her thread and had to look up at the lamp to rethread her needle, she met his eyes fixed there. Slowly her hands went down to her lap and he leaned forward across the table, looking into her eyes. The lids fluttered faintly, he saw that she was groping for the curtain of reserve which she meant to draw again across her features. She looked as if she could not find it; as if it must be impossible to look away from his face which in times gone by had evoked her startling, ingenuous tributes to what she called his beauty. He had never seen her so unconscious of her own looks, the low forehead serene, the lips quiet, the deep eyes not quite smiling.
“Renata,” he said, finding it hard to keep his voice level.
“Yes?”
“If—” he drew a long breath. “If I should ask you now to come to my room the way you did that night … what would you do?”
“I would come,” she said quietly.
She looked at him steadily, as if to say that she followed every shade of his thoughts, all the clamoring components of his memory; everything which he was dredging up, but thrusting back, into the unforgotten past. Here he was, turned and moulded by the potter of fate, hardened in the kiln of suffering; and he had asked her what the man of earlier days, the youth soft in the unformed clay, would never have asked. Now though she saw goodness in his face, vast relief, glowing warmth, gratitide, she saw no passion, no surge of eager love. Some of that might come, she thought; if not? Well: she would give him what she could. She saw too the serious look of question.
“It is Giu’an?” she asked. “You are wondering about him.”
He nodded.
She smiled gently and raised her head, tilting her fine chin at that angle which it gave him pleasure to see.
“Do not be worried about him. With what is natural, with the sincere feeling, a child is not hurt. He is at the right age now, too young to question, young enough to take us as we are. He love us so much, he accept whatever we do.” She put her work together and laid it on the table. “Come,” she said, rising. “I show you.”
She led the way up the stairs, carrying a lighted candle. She went first to her own room, took the counterpane off the bed, and turned down the covers. Then she went to Randall’s room where John was asleep in his cot, both arms tightly clasped round his bear. She put the candle on the night-stand and knelt down beside John and put her cheek against his. He stirred a little but did not wake. She slipped one arm beneath his head and raised him and whispered in his ear. He let go the bear and put his arms round her neck. She kissed him.
“You are going to sleep in Zia Renata’s room,” she said, “you and Teddy. You will like it very much.”
She motioned to Randall to take the bear and the candle and go ahead of her. He looked back over his shoulder as he crossed the narrow passage between the rooms. She was carrying John, still sound asleep, in her arms. She laid him in her own bed and put the bear back in his arms and he rolled over with a small grunt. She tucked the covers round him and kissed him again and looked up at Randall.
“Go and open your shutters to the moonlight,” she whispered, with a curious wistful smile. She looked down at John. “I will be with him here when he wakes in the morning.”
The barriers went down slowly. His impression persisted, his disbelief that he could ever have known an earlier incarnation of this woman who had been all play, froth, teasing, verve; who bore to this calm, warm, tender creature the relation that whitecaps skipping in a gay wind bore to the deep water beneath. To her he seemed even more changed, but she took the work of time and tribulation without surprise. He had never held, not once comprehended, the key to her nature: that she was incapable of astonishment at the manifestations of human character. In this she was born old, which is to say, born a peasant of an ancient race, in whose view everything has happened before, for whom men and women cannot devise acts or wants, betray faults, discover instincts, that have not always been known in them.
So she not only took him as he was: tentative, withdrawn, sometimes moody, occasionally demonstrative; she let him sense that she was content. Once she had sparkled with talk which had spiced every motion of her animated face, her graceful body. Now she said singularly little; she had, he thought, evolved to finer nicety an art of communicative silence. Now it was his gratitude which surrendered him to her wise and benevolent arms; not hers which he had repulsed in the days of his rhapsodic delusions. It was natural to attain a sense of profundity, of timelessness, simplicity, of human inevitability, surrounded by spontaneous beauty such as no contriving with art or money could ever have achieved.
The spring months were hardly credible in the completeness of their beauty, the enchantment that they lavished upon the senses. Had he never heard birds sing before, or were these as rare in their amazing music as the wildflowers which grew only in the Alps? Renata laughed when he asked her. He had sat for an hour on the top step of the loggia, whistling first to rouse, then to lead on, the bird whose song most enchanted him. He had never heard such a song, he said. “Listen! It’s an aria! What is that bird?”
She was leaning on the balcony railing upstairs with a duster in her hand. The May sun was hot on her shining hair and her face was framed in the mass of climbing roses. Bees buzzed and bustled all around her; she stayed quite still, unperturbed. She laughed again.
“Silly!” she said. “That is a merlo, a common merlo. Yes, he sings charmingly but wait until those cherries are ripe.
”
“What is a ‘merlo’?” he asked, too lazy to go inside and get the dictionary. She shrugged. “How should I know?” she said. It proved to be a blackbird when he looked it up.
“It can’t be!” he said. “A common blackbird. Whoever thought they had such a fascinating song?”
“We never thought otherwise.”
“And the one that sings this? The one I call the bel canto bird?” He whistled its song, two ridiculously Italian grace-noted turns, followed by a triplet in a preposterous, unrelated key.
“Also the merlo.”
“You mean he has a whole repertoire?”
“Oh, yes. He is the most original and melodious of them all.”
“A common blackbird,” he marvelled. “And which is this?” He whistled again, a simpler song on a single note.
She laughed. “That is the fringuello.”
“Oh, dear.” He found it to be the chaffinch. “I don’t even know one bird from another in English.”
“What difference does that make? Are you not content that these are Italian?”
He looked up at her. The sun was in his eyes, he squinted, and took a sort of refuge in the grimace. “Yes,” he said almost under his breath. “And you too.”
In the night they lay in bed with the shutters and windows open, which she had learned to accept, to please him, and listened to the nightingale.
“He is like many singers,” said Renata lazily. She must, he thought, be off her guard; this was the subject she usually abjured. “His reputation is more spectacular than his song.”
“Sometimes he is very profuse with his music, quite excited, like yesterday.”
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