by Francis King
‘‘Bit of an artist, eh? We saw her sketching on the Ponte Vecchio just after lunch yesterday. Right in the sun, too. She should be careful of sunstroke, you know.… Play golf?’’ he asked as they began to stroll towards the hotel.
‘‘No, I’m afraid not.’’
‘‘Pity. The wife and I’ve just spent a day on the links. The Ugolino. They’re not too bad, you know, better than I’d expected. We took a picnic lunch with us, seemed cheaper than eating out there. Shame we English should be made to feel such paupers while we’re abroad. Of course we could have gone to a cheaper hotel, but the wife and I prefer to do things in style for a fortnight rather than spin out our fifty pounds. We didn’t have too bad a picnic either. Flies, of course. Some cold chicken, and those ‘ paninos’ with some ‘formaggio’—and of course a bottle of ‘vino’. I never miss my ‘vino’; I think one’s system needs it. I’m a medical man myself, and I’m sure one’s system needs it. Well, it stands to reason with all that oil in the food.… Going into the dining-room?’’
‘‘Yes, I haven’t finished my dinner yet.’’
‘‘Oh, well, bye-bye. I must wash first. I expect we’ll bump into each other—literally, I shouldn’t be surprised, with your wife at the wheel?’’ His bass laughter swung back and forth like a bell as: ‘‘Maskell’s the name,’’ he said, ‘‘ ‘Tiny’ Maskell’’; and once again the bell was shaken out loudly. ‘‘ ‘ Tiny’ Maskell,’’ he repeated. ‘‘That’s me.’’
In the dining-room Karen was sitting sideways to the table, one bare leg crossed over the other and her head supported by her left elbow, while, fork in right hand, she jabbed at her food. Max touched her head momentarily as he went to his place, but she did not look up. Mrs. Bennett was peeling a peach, the drops trickling down her forearms and even spattering her dress. ‘‘This is the last,’’ she said. ‘‘I haven’t left you one.’’
‘‘We can ask for some more.’’
‘‘I told you I was becoming greedy. I never used to care for food.… What have you been doing all day, Karen? Did you like Viareggio?’’
‘‘Yes.… I don’t know why we stay on here,’’ Karen added peevishly after a moment; her hair, falling forward over the hand on which her head rested, made it impossible for either of them to see her face. ‘‘It’s much pleasanter there, much cooler.’’
‘‘We decided we should be three weeks in Florence,’’ said Mrs. Bennett, ‘‘because I wanted to come here. When the children arrive, of course we shall go to the seaside. But to somewhere pleasanter than Viareggio, I hope. I’d always heard it was the Italian Blackpool.… You still haven’t told us what you did there.’’
‘‘There’s nothing to tell.’’ Karen pushed her plate aside, only half emptied, and then impatiently looked round for the waiter to bring the new course. ‘‘I get so tired of this Italian food.… Oh, I bathed, and I ate, and I bathed again, and I sunbathed. And then I ate again.’’
‘‘Karen’s so informative,’’ Mrs. Bennett said to Max. ‘‘She was like that, even as a child. I can’t understand it, I love to share experiences—and so do you. Perhaps that’s why she never reads, and writes such bad letters.’’
‘‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about me as if I weren’t here,’’ Karen said.
‘‘Well, I don’t feel you are here,’’ her mother replied. ‘‘You haven’t been here for a long, long time.’’
‘‘Oh, do leave me alone! I can’t bear this incessant prying, questioning, fidgeting. It makes me so self-conscious. Can’t one be oneself without having to be subjected to incessant analysis from you and Max? That’s all I ask—to be left alone.’’ Max had covered one of her small, childish hands, the nails bitten short, with his own large one. ‘‘No, please don’t. If it’s not this mental mauling and messing about, it has to be the other kind. No, don’t!’’
‘‘Why use ugly words like mauling and messing to describe things that are perfectly natural?’’ Max asked softly.
‘‘Because they’ve become ugly.’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t understand you,’’ Mrs. Bennett sighed.
‘‘Well, don’t try to understand me! Leave me alone, I tell you! Leave me alone! … Now you’ve spoiled my dinner,’’ she announced like a tearful child, her napkin thrown to the floor.
‘‘Karen!’’ Max attempted to grab her hand, but she pulled away from him. ‘‘Do sit down.’’
‘‘Scenes in restaurants,’’ Mrs. Bennett murmured. Then she saw the waiter hovering with Karen’s chicken: ‘‘Oh, put it down here, man—anywhere.’’
But Karen had gone and Max appeared to be about to go after her.
‘‘Sit down, Max. It’s always best to leave her alone. She’s over-tired, anyone can see that. She’s not sleeping well and she won’t take those pills.’’
‘‘She’s not happy,’’ Max said gloomily.
‘‘No, I suppose not.’’
‘‘You know she’s not. She hasn’t been for ages. Is it my fault?’’
‘‘You can’t help being what you are.’’
‘‘That’s not very kind.’’
‘‘Isn’t it? I thought it was the kindest thing I could say.… I should like to eat that chicken of Karen’s, but I’m afraid I should shock the waiter.’’
‘‘Aren’t you at all fond of her?’’ Max asked angrily. ‘‘ You discuss her in this cold voice, and you make all those upsetting remarks to her, and then it appears that all the time you’re only thinking about eating her chicken.’’
‘‘Yes, you’re right to be cross with me. But I find I can care about very little now. And even when I do care, there’s nothing I can do. Ten years ago I had the power to alter people and circumstances; and I don’t know I often used it well. Now, it’s gone—and I doubt if I should want to use it even if I had it. I like to think that in its place I’ve gained in understanding; but sometimes I even doubt that.… You were once very cruel to her, Max,’’ she added suddenly.
‘‘Yes, I know.’’ His misery was plain. ‘‘And I’ve never forgiven myself for it. But it was six years ago. Can’t one ever forget and forgive.’’
‘‘It’s usually easier to forgive oneself than to forgive other people.’’
Seven years before Max had been a widower with two young children and, having been sent by his firm to England, had there met Karen. Only eighteen, she was teaching in her mother’s school while her father succumbed to a slow and humiliating illness with none of the fortitude that even the cowardly can usually muster for death. She had been his favourite daughter and she had loved him; but now she had come to resent his incessant demands and complaints, to shrink from going near him, and to dream incessantly of a future in which he would no longer exist and she would be free. Circumstances had driven her to believe in the not uncommon heresy that only the healthy are deserving of love; and because, with a family of three sisters and a younger brother, money was always scarce, she had decided that next to health, she most desired money. Perhaps when she accepted Max, she had really loved him; but the wealthy American whom she had taken round the school, because her mother was busy, had at first appeared as no more than a miraculously offered escape—from the boys, whom she could never control, from a large, bickering family, from her mother who always confessed that she ‘‘could not understand her”, and, above all, from the quavering and tearful cripple for whom she had to perform so many horrors in the name of love and duty.
Soon Max went to the war; and while he was on active service she met the twenty-year-old boy whose child, whose V.C. and whose handful of books were all she now had of him. He had been killed in an act of reckless courage (because of her father’s cowardice she had always admired courage more than any other virtue) three days after Max had returned on his first spell of leave. It was absurd to have looked for sympathy from the husband she had deceived, but in the past Max had always fulfilled her smallest expectations. Now, once she had given up to him the whole secret, she met nothing but a stony
muteness; and their separate, solitary agonies had continued up to, and beyond, the birth of the child. They were never to have any children themselves.
‘‘I was suffering as much as she was,’’ Max now said, as if in self-justification. ‘‘ If she’d lost him, I’d lost her. And she became so utterly remote. It’s silly to say that grief brings people together.… Besides, there was the deception of it. Until his death I never even knew she knew him. Probably if it hadn’t been for his death and the child, I never would have known.’’
‘‘But she never lets one know anything.’’
‘‘Surely keeping the child was a big enough gesture. There can’t be many husbands——’’
‘‘Many more than one thinks, probably. Oh, we’ve been over it all so often before, Max. You did all that could possibly be expected. It was just sad that you couldn’t do more—as people sometimes can. That’s all.’’ Mrs. Bennett plunged a bunch of grapes into the bowl of water provided for that purpose: ‘‘Have a grape.’’
‘‘No thanks.’’ She was staring at them with a dreamy absorption and he added: ‘‘But don’t let me stop you.’’
‘‘Oh, I don’t want to eat them. But they look so beautiful with the water on them.’’ Some drops hung opaque like small seed pearls, others glittered like minute splinters of glass on the chill, blue flesh. Mrs. Bennett sighed.
They found Karen out on the terrace, crouched like an animal, her knees drawn up and her back against the railing.
‘‘Come over here, dear,’’ Mrs. Bennett said, patting the wicker sofa on to which she had lowered herself. ‘‘ That cold stone isn’t good for you. Or fetch the rug from my room.… Oh, as you wish.’’ Karen hadn’t moved. After a moment Mrs. Bennett got up and went across, the evening breeze making her clutch her skirt to prevent it from ballooning upwards. ‘‘Cheer up, dear.’’ She put out a hand to brush the hair away from the girl’s averted cheek, and was surprised to touch something moist. Karen had been crying. In silence Mrs. Bennett watched her daughter while Max leant over the balustrade, his face in his hands. ‘‘That blouse looks charming,’’ Mrs. Bennett suddenly leant over to whisper. ‘‘But you know, dear, it’s beginning to need a wash.’’ Karen said nothing. ‘‘It’s funny—you’re fastidious about everything except your own appearance.’’
‘‘Oh, do stop nagging, Mother,’’ Karen burst out.
‘‘Well, what have I said now?’’
‘‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’’
Mrs. Bennett turned away. ‘‘It’s getting chilly here. And I can hear a mosquito. I think I shall go into my room and play patience. Come and see me, Karen, before you go to bed, don’t forget. Good night, Max.’’
She went through the french windows into her room, and Karen watched her as she cleared a space at the writing-table, took some cards from a drawer, and then, moving the lamp close to her right elbow, dealt out ‘‘ Miss Milligan’’. Caught in the long, horizontal shadows thrown by the lamp, her face looked older than her daughter had ever before seen it.
‘‘Forgive me, Karen,’’ Max said. He was going to kneel beside her on the terrace but she stopped him:
‘‘No, please—don’t come near.’’
‘‘I don’t understand.’’
‘‘It’s a thing I’ve got and it’s becoming worse and worse—I can’t explain. I had it when I was nursing father. He liked me to sit by him and let him hold my hand or stroke my hair.’’ She shuddered involuntarily: ‘‘ Such hot hands, and yet so weak that I felt I only had to squeeze them in order to break them. I used to think of any excuse in order to get away. I couldn’t bear it. Doing the most appalling things for him was far, far better. Once he caught hold of me and began to cry against me—like a baby, it was—and I remember that I pushed him away. That was wrong of me, I know, because he was in such pain.’’ She stopped and then said in a tranquil voice, ‘‘Yes, this blouse is dirty, Mother is right.’’ She added after a moment: ‘‘ I wonder if she’ll ever stop having a down on me, Max?’’
‘‘A down on you?’’
‘‘She doesn’t realize it, but she’s never been able to forgive me. I can see that it must have been hard for her.’’ Momentarily a smile passed across her face.
‘‘How—hard for her?’’
‘‘Father caring so much more for me at the end. It was funny, that—and also so unfair. She did everything for him, and I did nothing. She wanted him to live, and I had begun to wish him dead. Yet he loved me.’’ She gave a small, childish laugh. ‘‘Like the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, so terribly unjust.… Oh, Max, don’t look so gloomy.’’
‘‘You’re not exactly bright yourself.’’
So they remained for several minutes, she crouched on the floor of the terrace and he standing a few feet away from her, his back against the sky; between them lay his shadow and, gleaming in the middle of it, her white bag stuffed with the jackdaw odds and ends which her untidy, hoarding nature accumulated from hour to hour. Suddenly a voice boomed out from the end of the terrace:
‘‘Ah, there you both are. We thought you might be here. May we butt in on a domestic scene? I want you to meet the wife, Mrs. Maskell.’’
Mrs. Bennett heard the laughter, swinging out and in like a bell, and then, a second later, the telescoped vowels of Mrs. Maskell’s voice exclaiming her enthusiasms: the Uffizi was unbelievable, she raved about Donatello, the Signoria had just knocked her sideways.… The old woman got up, shut her french windows and went back to the table where her patience lay. But suddenly she felt dizzy, there seemed to be an oppressive weight at the back of her neck. She clutched the tablecloth and, swaying, pulled it towards her so that a few of the cards slipped to the floor. A high-pitched buzzing had started in her ears, and she looked vaguely round her for a mosquito, but found none. All at once she felt frightened, and her fear becoming panic, she hurried out on to the terrace where ‘‘Tiny’’ Maskell greeted her by exclaiming: ‘‘Ah, now the cup is filled to overflowing.’’ To show off his height, he had reached up and swung one of the suspended lamps back and forth, back and forth, with a flick of the hand, so that a white radiance splashed over the frightened, and almost cowering, old woman.
The same light, thus swaying outwards, illuminated the two figures who were perched far beneath on a balustrade by the Arno. Each of them had devoured a loaf of bread sliced in two and crammed with thick, greasy rounds of Mortadella and now they shared a cigarette, passing it from one to the other in the pauses in their conversation.
‘‘Let’s go to the ‘casino’,’’ Rodolfo had just said. He added an obscene allusion to the state of his health. ‘‘Come on!’’
‘‘And what do we use for money?’’
‘‘Money! You’ve got three thousand lire, haven’t you?’’
‘‘That’s for the doctor.’’
‘‘Christ! You mean, you really——’’
‘‘I promised.’’
‘‘Bravo! Bravo!’’ The Tunisian taunted in a soft, singsong voice. Then he noticed the light from the terrace, spurting out over the Arno in a pure milky jet. He looked up: ‘‘ They’re sitting there, I bet. Drinking and smoking cheroots, after their dinner. And what a dinner. They’re lucky,’’ he said. ‘‘ Christ, they’re lucky.’’
Chapter Three
IT was eleven o’clock, and Enzo’s mother sat out on a straight-backed, wooden chair mending the shirt which Rodolfo had torn. She was alone under the solitary street-lamp which lit the winding, cobbled Borgo, and as she carefully drew the frayed ends of stuff together she was already half asleep. From above she could hear Giorgio, her eldest son, plucking one lazy note after another from his mandoline; he was too careless to do more than vamp out a tune, but when he began to sing in his soft, slightly nasal tenor, she lowered her sewing and listened with pleasure. He was her favourite child.
‘‘Going to bed?’’ Giorgio asked his brother. He was sitting at the window, the mandoline in his lap, and as he spoke he began to
cough, jerking the phlegm up and up from his aching chest until he could lean over and spit it loudly into the empty street below.
‘‘Are you unwell?’’ his mother asked from the darkness.
‘‘No, no.’’ One hand, the nails long and carefully polished, idly teased the strings; twice he sang over the same phrase, a commonplace one, as if it gave him an extreme, voluptuous pleasure; now he tried it again with a series of trills and elaborations. He laughed: ‘‘She’s promised to meet me,’’ he said. Then he exclaimed: ‘‘Washing again!’’ as he turned and saw that Enzo was standing naked before a tin basin which rested on a trestle in a corner of the room. ‘‘What do you do it for? You haven’t got a girl. And look how you’re splashing the floor.’’ The cold water, thrown energetically over Enzo’s gleaming shoulders, trickled down his body to his feet where the boards gulped it greedily.
‘‘Yes, she’s going to meet me tonight,’’ Giorgio repeated.
Looking at him, as he sat, fair-headed and sturdy on a wicker couch beside the window, one would not at first imagine that, having been accidentally gassed through his own carelessness during a held-exercise, he was now a chronic invalid. But then, inevitably, his incessant cough and the intense languor of his voice and all his movements would betray his real state of health. He was good-looking and he was aware of his looks; nor was he slow to profit from them, since his pension as a mutilato di guerra, small though it was, excused him from all activity except that of local Don Juan. His vanity caused him to walk through the streets with his shirt unbuttoned to his wide, leather belt; to tend his nails with the care of a woman; even, as he was preparing to do now, to wave his naturally straight blond hair.
As he lit the spirit stove, he said: ‘‘I managed to slip into the room while Ma Kohler was out shopping. For once she had forgotten to lock the door. The girl was hot stuff, I can tell you. She liked it all right when she got it—and came back for more!’’ He continued with his story while the stove whined and spat, and Enzo, in a disgust which he could never dare to voice, continued to splash the cold water over his face, arms and torso.