by Francis King
‘‘But I didn’t imagine it! I tell you, I saw him. I couldn’t mistake him. How could I?’’
‘‘Mistake who?’’ Max asked in bewilderment.
‘‘Oh, nothing.’’ She sank on to a grass mound and put a hand to her forehead. ‘‘Perhaps I did imagine it,’’ she said.
‘‘You’re tired,’’ Max assured her. ‘‘It was the moonlight on a branch, or a cat, or something.’’
Meanwhile Rodolfo and Enzo had come up to ask what was the matter. When Max told them, they both began to look excitedly among the bushes where Max himself had already searched. Suddenly Enzo gave a triumphant whoop. ‘‘Ecco!’’
‘‘Have you found him?’’ Max asked, hastening to the spot. And then, in disappointment, ‘‘ Oh, it’s only a pair of spectacles.’’
The Florentine emerged carrying the familiar gold-rimmed glasses, fastened at one side with a piece of rag and cracked horizontally across both lenses. He showed them to Mrs. Bennett, but she at once turned her head.
‘‘Rotto,’’ he said.
‘‘Yes,’’ said Max. ‘‘ No good to anyone now. I should throw them away.’’
The Florentine raised his right arm and, silhouetted against the illuminated city, hurled the spectacles downwards and outwards into the dark void. For a moment, they flashed as the moonlight caught them, then they were lost.
‘‘That’s how you should learn to throw,’’ Pamela said to her brother. ‘‘But where did he find them?’’
‘‘In the bushes.’’
‘‘Is that why you stopped? … Do let’s go on, Daddy.’’
‘‘You go on, children. Wait for us at the bottom. I’m feeling a little giddy and want to sit down,’’ Mrs. Bennett said.
‘‘Oh, Granny, let me stay with you,’’ Colin offered.
‘‘No, you heard me telling you to go on,’’ Mrs. Bennett answered with an unwonted asperity. ‘‘ Your father will stay with me.’’
‘‘Granny, are you really all right?’’ Pamela asked, coming over and putting a hand on the old woman’s head.
‘‘Yes, yes—don’t fuss so!’’ Mrs. Bennett cried in exasperation. ‘‘I only want to rest.’’
‘‘Let’s have a race—to the bottom,’’ Colin said.
‘‘Yes, to the bottom, right to the bottom! Enzo and Rodolfo must play too,’’ Pamela exclaimed. ‘‘A race, a race!’’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘‘But no unfair starts.’’ She caught Enzo’s shirt and pulled him back beside her; and the Florentine, momentarily puzzled, at once understood, crouching like a trained athlete for the word to be off. Meanwhile Rodolfo, examining the wall which ran beyond the path, realized that by jumping down its easy seven feet he would save a hundred yards. He was sure he would win.
‘‘You start us,’’ Pamela said to her father.
‘‘All right.’’ Max raised a handkerchief in his right hand and shouted, ‘‘On your marks—get set—go!’’ The handkerchief descended and they all thudded off into the darkness, except for Rodolfo who, with the agility of a cat, jumped on to the wall and then, like Tosca flinging herself off the battlements, leapt out of sight.
‘‘To be young,’’ Mrs. Bennett sighed. Looking down at her Max saw that she was weeping, he supposed from her fright, large tears glittering like beads in the innumerable folds and wrinkles of her face.
‘‘Why, what’s the matter?’’ he asked. ‘‘ You mustn’t worry about that scare of yours. It could have happened to anyone.’’
‘‘But not the glasses,’’ she said softly.
‘‘The glasses?’’
Before he could search this mysterious reply further, a high-pitched yelping, as of a dog in pain, broke the close and resinous silence of the hill. The yelping went on, and through it Pamela could be heard calling: ‘‘Daddy, Daddy,’’ in a voice which grew louder and louder until it ended in a despairing wail.
Max hurried down, leaping the steps two and three at a time, and Mrs. Bennett with a remarkable agility hurried behind him.
‘‘Colin’s hurt,’’ Pamela said. ‘‘ He’s in awful pain. He won’t stop screaming.’’ Her face gleamed white and panicky in the moonlight.
Enzo and Rodolfo were bending over the English boy, one on either side of him, while he writhed and twisted between them so that they could not see the extent of his injuries. Suddenly he stopped his inhuman yelping and began repeating with a strange hiccoughing sound: ‘‘Granny, Granny, Granny!’’
‘‘Yes, I’m here, dear. What have you done to yourself? What’s the matter?’’
The old woman knelt on the path, the Italians making room for her, and took the boy in her arms.
‘‘What is it, darling?’’ she repeated. ‘‘ What did you do?’’
‘‘Fell,’’ he gasped. ‘‘My leg. It’s awful—awful.’’
Other children might have been brave, but he had never had any capacity to bear pain, and now he showed none. Afterwards, lying in the ambulance, he hated himself for having given way with the uncontrolled, abject screaming of an animal in a trap. He was sure the Italians had despised him.
… But with what consideration and gentleness they had carried him between them to the bottom of the steps, both talking to him in soft, coaxing voices which somehow soothed his outraged nerves though he understood not a word. He did not then guess it, but that evening was to be the beginning of a devotion to a country and a people and, less happily perhaps, of a whole way of life.
Chapter Thirteen
‘‘I’VE left my bag at the Piazzale. I’ve just remembered. I hope somebody has the sense to bring it back.’’
Karen and Frank Ross were leaning over the parapet of the Lung’ Arno while from time to time he would excavate a grain of masonry and flick it, in a wide arc, into the black water.
‘‘Last time it was only a lipstick,’’ he said. ‘‘Now it’s your bag. You’re careless, aren’t you?’’ He turned his face towards her, with its two strange vertical creases down each cheek, and all at once smiled.
‘‘When I saw you, I rushed down without thinking,’’ she confessed.
‘‘And you thought you’d be going back?’’ Once again a piece of masonry plopped into the water, its rings spreading out and out until they grounded and snapped on the bank.
‘‘I didn’t know,’’ Karen replied.
‘‘Did you tell your husband where you were going?’’
‘‘No. Why should I?’’
‘‘Why indeed?’’ He laughed; but as always his laugh seemed to express, not amusement, but some less creditable emotion. ‘‘I like that,’’ he said.
‘‘Like what?’’
‘‘Oh, your spirit.… Why do you dress so carelessly?’’ he continued. ‘‘You obviously spend a lot of money on clothes and you know how to choose them. You’re beautiful, too,’’ he added, as if he were assessing the points of a horse. ‘‘But look at your finger-nails.’’ She looked at them, holding them to the light that fell from the hotel. ‘‘Good hands, but the nails are dirty and that spoils the effect. Besides, you bite them. Your hair, too. When did you last brush it?’’
‘‘How gallant you are!’’ Karen said, in a pretence at being offended. But strangely she was not offended, only curious, surprised and perhaps even pleased.
‘‘Oh, you won’t get gallantry from me. I don’t pay compliments. And you like compliments, don’t you? You like to be admired and petted and spoiled by a husband for whom you care that much’’—he clicked his fingers together—‘‘and to whom you yield not an inch. I’m right, aren’t I?’’
‘‘You have a very low opinion of me.’’
‘‘No lower than of most people. You obviously have all the usual faults of the beautiful woman.’’ He laughed: ‘‘And you’re enough of a narcissist to enjoy having even your faults discussed.’’
‘‘My husband says you’re someone famous. Is that true?’’
For the first time he seemed to topple momentarily from the heights of his sel
f-assurance. ‘‘Was he a Burma man?’’ he asked shortly.
‘‘Yes.… But well behind the front line,’’ she added with contemptuous untruth.
‘‘You’ve no right to despise him,’’ he retorted coldly. ‘‘… I’d like to meet him.’’
‘‘If you wait, he should be back soon.’’
Ross raised his slender shoulders in their khaki-drill blouse, and smiled: ‘‘ Is this the best moment—when you’ve run away from him without an explanation to join another man?’’
‘‘Oh, he’s not like that. Max is never jealous.’’
‘‘You’ve trained him too well?’’
They both turned round at the screech of the ambulance swerving to a halt before the swing-doors; a taxi stopped behind, from which Max, Pamela and the two Italians jumped down. ‘‘What’s happened?’’ Karen asked, at first with no more than an amused curiosity. Then she exclaimed: ‘‘Oh, my God! It must be Mother. I thought she didn’t seem well.’’ She gripped the bare flesh of Ross’s forearm. ‘‘Come with me and see.’’
‘‘No, no,’’ Colin was exclaiming petulantly, as two clumsy stretcher-bearers jolted him down from the ambulance.
‘‘They don’t know how to do it. Oh!’’ He let out a sudden angry scream. ‘‘Granny, tell them to put me down! Granny! Let the boys do it, they know how to do it Granny, the boys …’’
Reluctantly the stretcher-bearers yielded their burden to Enzo and Rodolfo, who came forward like two awkward understudies before the audience that had already thronged round to watch. But there was no awkwardness in their movements as they raised the English boy, and he at once fell silent, closing his eyes. Meanwhile Karen was questioning Max and the doctor, and Mrs. Bennett was attempting, with the help of a flustered and inefficient porter, to make a way for the stretcher through the crowds.
Frank Ross strode forward.
‘‘Fate largo,’’ he shouted. He put out both arms and shoved the people back; and at once all resistance left them, so that murmuring, it seemed in approval, they made a wide lane up the hotel steps as if for a bridal procession. And ‘‘Further, further,’’ he commanded. Now he spoke in a conversational voice since he knew they were listening to him. ‘‘That’s a bit better,’’ he said. ‘‘Back. Back. Back.’’
Colin passed and Ross stared down at the boy’s face—green, tear-spattered, and puckered with dread and pain. The boy opened his eyes, looked up for a moment, and then, with a grimace and a sudden hiccoughing sob, turned his head away. His whole body was rigid.
Chapter Fourteen
THE Italian doctor who was to set Colin’s leg was a young man of charm and skill who had found, to his surprise, that neither of these qualities took him far in an overcrowded profession. For that reason he was delighted, in spite of the lateness of the hour, at being summoned to the wealthy American family at the Palazzo d’Oro. While he examined the fracture, with Mrs. Bennett, Max and Pamela looking on, he explained that he had been a prisoner-of-war for three years at a camp near Newcastle. ‘‘Do you know Newcastle?’’ he asked Colin, who could do no more than gasp ‘‘No’’ between clenched teeth.
‘‘It is ugly.’’
He had soft, cool hands, the nails manicured with generous half-moons, and his voice was soft and cool also. His perpetually fixed smile, his black-and-white shoes and his chalk-coloured tropical suit, with its wide shoulders and pinched waist, all gave him the appearance of a member of the male chorus in a London ‘‘revue”. ‘‘This may pain you,’’ he coaxed. He looked round at the three onlookers. ‘‘ Would you like Mummy with you?’’
And for the first time the others realized that Karen was not there.
‘‘Yes, where is she?’’ Mrs. Bennett said. ‘‘She was downstairs when we arrived. What’s happened to her?’’ She felt it to be extraordinary that Karen had not come up with Colin to learn the extent of the damage.
‘‘Shall I get her?’’ Pamela said.
‘‘Yes, slip down, there’s a good girl. Tell her the doctor is just going to set Colin’s leg.’’
‘‘No,’’ Colin said, raising his head from his pillow. ‘‘No, don’t call her.’’ The abrupt movement made him again grimace with pain.
‘‘Well, why ever not?’’ Mrs. Bennett asked.
‘‘Because—because that man will come with her. I don’t want him to come. He mustn’t come in here!’’
‘‘What man?’’ Max queried, mystified as they all were, since in the tumult of their arrival none of them had noticed Frank Ross.
‘‘The man who cleared a way for the stretcher. The soldier man—you know, the one you were talking about, the Burma man.’’ It was strange how he had at once known Ross’s identity; it was the sort of thing that only happens when we fall into love or hate with another. ‘‘I don’t want him here,’’ he reiterated, and added in sudden resolution: ‘‘I don’t want anyone here while I’m being hurt. I want to be alone with the doctor. Could you please all go? Please, Granny!’’
‘‘Very well, dear. If you prefer it so.’’ Mrs. Bennett passed a dry palm across his forehead, and gazed down at him, her pale blue eyes into his suffering brown, as if she hoped by doing so to pour some of her own spirit into the frail vessel which she knew him to be. ‘‘ Come, Pamela, Max.’’
They went out on to the balcony and, leaning over the rail into the coolness and dark, waited without speaking for the screams which they felt must inevitably follow. ‘‘Poor Colin,’’ Mrs. Bennett sighed, with the natural compassion the strong feel for the weak and the brave for the cowardly. Pamela, who was trembling as if with cold, could no longer bear not to look and she turned her head to peer through the open window. But all she could see was a gigantic shadow thrown by the bedside lamp—the doctor’s stooping head and shoulders; it looked like some enormous, grey wolf, crouched above her brother’s prostrate body, and she felt suddenly faint and sick.
But the scream they had expected never sounded. Soon the doctor came out through the french windows, the revue actor taking his curtain, and flashed his brilliant smile: ‘‘All over. I have given him something to help the sleep. I shall come again to-morrow.… He was very brave,’’ he added with an upward inflection of astonishment which exactly matched their own.
Chapter Fifteen
THAT morning, five days after his accident, Colin was to have many visitors.
After breakfast, he sat up in bed, some half a dozen pillows piled up around him, and worked at a jig-saw puzzle while from the corridor he could hear one of the hotel servants sweep the stone floor with a broom dipped in water. First there was the splash, then a sputtering, and last a series of tearing sounds as of someone trying to draw one long, agonized breath after another … ah, ah, ah.
The door opened and an old man in hotel uniform, the tunic unbuttoned to reveal what appeared to be a soiled blue-and-white flannel pyjama top, put his head into the room, said ‘‘Scusi’’, as he did every morning at this hour, made a pretence of retreating and then returned with pail and broom when Colin shouted to him to come back.
He smiled at Colin with his whiskery, slightly fox-like face and then asked, ‘‘Come sta, signorino? Sta meglio?’’
‘‘Si, meglio, meglio,’’ Colin said.
‘‘Bene, bene,’’ the old man said, giving a little cough after each word. He at once set to work, energetically rolling up the carpets, taking them out on to the balcony and beating them one by one, scrubbing the wash-basin, and fussing over the piles of books, jig-saw puzzles and sweets with which visitors had littered the room. Meanwhile Colin watched him. He must be very old, the boy decided, with his twig-like arthritic hands, the thumbs growing into his palms almost at right angles, the deep, dirt-ingrained furrows which ploughed his whole face, and his curved back out of which his shoulder-blades sprouted like two clipped wings. He wheezed, grunted and blew small bubbles from between his chapped lips as he worked.
After some minutes, a piece of the jig-saw puzzle fell out of the boy’s
hands and leaning over to pick it up he so jarred his leg that he gave an audible whimper. The old man at once dropped the mat he was carrying in from the balcony and hurried across to the bed, stooped to recover the piece, one hand to the small of his back as if it were turning an invisible handle to make his spine bend, and then returned it to the board with a gasped ‘‘Ecco!’’
Without any diffidence, he next smoothed Colin’s hair from his forehead and asked: ‘‘Fa male? … poveretto!’’
Colin said: ‘‘Non capisco.’’
‘‘ ‘Non capisco’,’’ the old man chuckled, an unusually large bubble swelling between his lips. ‘‘Sempre ‘non capisco’.’’ He picked up two pieces of the jig-saw puzzle and attempted to force them together, twisting and pressing them between his hideously deformed fingers.
‘‘No, no,’’ Colin cried in English. ‘‘You’ll break them.’’ He took the pieces from the old man, and said: ‘‘Look,’’ fitting them as they should go.
‘‘Bene, bene,’’ said the old man with a kind of amused wonder. Like pistol-shots his knee-joints cracked as he went down on to his haunches to see the board better; and thus he continued to watch Colin while the boy slowly built up the puzzle, until Chris Maskell, Karen and von Arbach came in. Then the old man hurriedly got to his feet, bobbed to each of them in turn with a rapid ‘‘Scusi, scusi’’, picked up his broom and rags, and scuttled from the room.
‘‘You mustn’t encourage the servants not to work, you naughty boy,’’ Chris said. ‘‘ They’re lazy enough already. My room wasn’t touched until after lunch yesterday. Would you believe it? … Well, and how’s the leg today? You’ve got a lovely colour in your cheeks,’’ she hurried on, with the fear of silence that afflicted her whenever she was with children. ‘‘Hasn’t he, Béngt? A lovely colour.’’
The Swede remained leaning against the doorway, his only movements being to transfer his weight from one haunch to another or to pick at his front teeth with the nail of his forefinger. He had a rolled towel under one arm and another towel appeared to have been used to make the open-necked shirt which he wore above his blue linen slacks.