by Francis King
‘‘I expect not.’’
‘‘I’m eighty-six, but I’m not afraid. They won’t give me a general, just a local to make it not hurt. Well, I don’t mind that, provided there’s no blood. Blood makes me turn right over. Even my own blood. Would you believe it?’’
Did he imagine it, or as she nodded her head, did the whole cataract wobble like a piece of semi-transparent jelly? It seemed as if, at any moment, it would slither to the floor.
‘‘You can pay my grandson,’’ she said. ‘‘Don’t think because I’m going into hospital that you needn’t pay.’’ To indicate that she was joking her mouth, with its vertical, dirt-encrusted furrows, fell open to reveal the stumps of a few blackened teeth.
‘‘I hope all goes well,’’ Enzo said, running his tongue round his mouth as he put down the cup.
She looked offended as she said: ‘‘They say he’s the best one in Florence—and only thirty-two. Studied in America,’’ she said. ‘‘Oh, I was determined to have the best.’’
When Enzo let himself into the house, the family had evidently not returned; but still, from high upstairs, he could hear the sound of sweeping and scrubbing. She would work all night, he supposed, and in the morning the dusty feet of her guests would obliterate all she had done. Then the tiles would be left and they would again slowly blacken. It all seemed so pointless.
He climbed, and the coffee he had drunk still tasted sweetly bitter in his mouth as if a tooth were bleeding. Outside Bella’s room he halted, standing with his face only two or three inches from the door as if his mere presence would undo the lock. It was probably because his whole body was wrought to such a pitch of concentration that at last there penetrated to his ears a sound from within. At first it seemed no more than the sound of deep breathing, and he imagined it was his own, after the steep climb; but punctuating it at irregular intervals was a sound too indeterminate to be called a hiccough—the sound of a bubble breaking or the snapping of a string. He did not know why these two sounds in conjunction should all at once drench him with cold sweat and make his scalp prick. He knocked on the door, saying, ‘‘Bella, Bella,’’ softly; and then, raising his fist, he hammered for entry. ‘‘Bella!’’ he shouted.
‘‘What is it?’’ the woman called from the upstairs landing, and her startled face could be seen peering, while a few drops of water from the cloth she held in one hand suddenly spattered downwards.
Enzo took no notice of her. ‘‘Bella!’’ he shouted; and it was as if his whole life were locked in behind that door. ‘‘ Bella!’’ He listened: and at last heard a faint rustle, a click and then a brief gasp. All at once was silent.
He hurled himself against the door, retreating to the banisters and running up to assault it, not once but repeatedly. The door creaked and shuddered and finally, with a splintering of wood, tore from its hinges. Enzo fell almost headlong in.
Horror. Bella lay on the floor, half-undressed, flung down like a doll, her legs wide apart and her head resting against the side of the bed. Her hands were smeared with blood, there was blood on her cheek, and blood was congealing on the black-and-white tiles as it slowly pushed towards Enzo. Her eyes were shut, but all the time he was aware of that sound, now terribly magnified, of deep, gulping breathing punctuated by what appeared to be the bursting of one bubble after another in the white, tilted throat.
He gave a sort of cry, more animal than human, not unlike the cry which had always so frightened him when she had her fits. He dragged her on to the bed, and once again cried out, now with the vexation of a child who has a task too difficult for it, as he saw the blood, blood everywhere, bright arterial blood which her body had covered. Her eye-lids fluttered and her mouth all at once clicked: ‘‘Gior—ior——’’ He knew the name she was trying to say, and a sudden wild, destroying hatred of his brother filled his whole being, casting out all the other devils of horror, fear and anguish. ‘‘I—mamma——’’
The woman from upstairs had screamed; she put both hands to her temples and gave one short, yelping scream after another like a wounded dog. Then she hid her face against the splintered lintel of the door, and burst into a loud paroxysm of hysterical weeping. ‘‘Tomorrow,’’ Enzo could hear her saying over and over again, ‘‘tomorrow … tomorrow …’’ And then, as if she were accusing either him or the dying girl: ‘‘Oh, what a terrible thing … terrible … terrible … And the wedding—the wedding!’’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THE American family had stayed on in Florence through August and into the middle of September without there seeming to the children any reason for doing so. When they had first come out they had been told that after a few days in Florence they would be going to the seaside. Colin’s accident had apparently postponed that plan, though what he did not realize was that, when his step-mother expressed so much confidence in the doctor who was attending him and urged the inadvisability of making a change to another, she was in fact seizing on the best excuse for remaining with Frank Ross.
Nicko and Mrs. Bennett both fretted against the enforced stay and Max himself would talk of ‘‘pushing on”, though with little conviction; but Colin and Pamela felt no such desire for change. They were happy in Florence; and whenever Colin thought of being separated from Enzo a chill came to his heart.
One day Max drove the children, Lena and Mrs. Bennett out to the sea. Karen pleaded an appointment with the dentist, but Max knew that she would, in fact, spend the day with Frank Ross, and she knew that he knew. Yet the strange thing was that neither of them had ever openly discussed the affair. ‘‘You must have it out with her,’’ Mrs. Bennett frequently urged him. ‘‘You must do something before it is too late”; and he would always respond with the same shrug of fatalistic melancholy.
‘‘But you must, you must. The whole thing is becoming so ridiculous.’’
‘‘I don’t honestly believe in the value of ‘having things out’. I’ve never found it worked. You have them out, and then all at once, you have them over. There’s nothing to do but to wait; to wait quietly and hopefully. He’d never do for her, of that I’m quite certain. And she’d never do for him—no woman would.’’
But in his heart was a stone-like weight of doubt which he now dragged with him wherever he went. Except on those rare occasions when he lost his temper, he always avoided scenes. His father and mother had bickered all through his childhood and, though he now knew that they had loved each other as he and Karen had never known love, yet the memory of those quarrels had rooted itself so deep in his nature that nothing could drag it out. Anything was better than that people should savage each other in that bloodless, useless way.
Karen, too, stayed dumb; at first because she thought that Max had not guessed and later because, until he mentioned the subject, her morbid reticence made it impossible for her to do so. Besides, she was not sure of Ross, and was never to be sure. He had possessed her many times, but their affair seemed to her like a telephone conversation in which the other person is for ever hanging up. No sooner were they wholly in communication than he all at once eluded her. And so she was afraid. Never in her whole life, not even when she was waiting for news of Nicko’s father after the announcement that his plane had not returned, never, never had she experienced such a persistent anxiety. For she knew now she loved him, as she had loved no one else, and she knew that without his love, her whole being would shrivel up and die.
‘‘Mummy should have put off the dentist,’’ Pamela said as they unpacked their picnic lunch in a bay beyond Livorno. ‘‘ It was silly of her.’’ She handed round napkins, plates, forks and spoons, and ugly plastic beakers. ‘‘You’ve taken more than your share,’’ she told Lena, who was helping herself to cold chicken. ‘‘And now that’s too little. Let me do it.’’ She began to separate the meat on to the six plates and then gave them round.
‘‘You have such a sense of justice,’’ Mrs. Bennett said. ‘‘That is something one learns at school, where everything is ‘ fair’. And then one goes out in
to the world where nothing is ‘ fair’ and of course one is outraged.’’
Nicko, who was still peevish from being car-sick, all at once cried: ‘‘Oh, there’s a worm in my chicken!’’
‘‘Don’t be silly, that isn’t a worm,’’ Pamela said. ‘‘It’s a bit of sinew.’’
‘‘Don’t want it, anyway”; and before they could stop him, he had flung the leg of chicken into the sea.
No one said anything; and soon he began to whimper, clutching the plate with both hands to his chest, his face turned sideways. Max gave a brief exclamation, but he was too inhibited by the memory of the scene with Nicko to do anything more. He was now ashamed of that act of savagery, particularly before Pamela and Colin, and wondered if they remembered and held it against him.
Lena said: ‘‘Here, Nicko. Have half of mine.’’
‘‘Don’t want it.’’
But she knew that he did, and having separated a piece of the wing, she shifted it to his plate. In her white silk dress, against which the brown of her bare arms and legs glowed in the sun, she looked more attractive than any of them had ever seen her. She never ceased to watch Max, and whenever he made one of his jokes, so dry that the children never laughed at them, it was as if her whole body were being consumed by mirth as, at the other times, it was as if it were being consumed by devotion.
Such a response would inevitably either flatter or madden a man; and Max was in a mood for flattery. Dear Lena, he thought. She was so capable and sensible and kind, and yet, unlike most people who possessed those qualities, she had such a sense of humour. Physically she had always a little repelled him in the past, with the thick black hair that covered her arms and legs and made a small moustache on her upper lip, and those ugly feet, calloused and misshapen, which she insisted on exposing by wearing no socks and sandals; but these details no longer worried him. They were ‘‘all of a piece”. He decided she was charming.
‘‘Oh, it’s so hot,’’ Mrs. Bennett exclaimed. ‘‘ I feel I shall suffocate.’’ She got up from the party and wandered away, some twenty or thirty yards, where she placed herself on a small rock in the shadow of a larger one. The two rocks were covered with a greenish-purple moss from which seeped a vaguely disinfectant smell, reminiscent of the wards of public hospitals. Seen by the others Mrs. Bennett’s faded blue dress merged into the shadow cast by the rock overhanging her; but the straw hat, bought at a street-market when they had motored through Arles and worn by her ever since whenever she went out, made a bright, shimmering hole in this peace of coolness, depriving the eye of rest. She sat huddled, her knees wide apart and her arthritic hands clasped between her knees, as she watched the sea pounce inwards on the smooth, hard sand. In spite of the heat, her headache and a feeling of suffocation, she was now completely happy. A month ago she would have fretted with a pencil and a sketch-book, attempting some communion with the landscape before her; and the communion would have been impossible, and the realization of this would have filled her with a vindictive kind of frustration. But now she was resigned; such communion had at last ceased to matter. Here she was, and here under her fingers was this greenish-purple moss, as if the rock had grown a diseased skin, and there before her was the sea, hurling its glittering knives against the quiescent sand. And there were Max, Lena, and the children, with their white napkins, their red, plastic beakers, and their green picnic basket. No, she no longer wanted communion with them either. They looked beautiful like that, the sunlight glinting on Nicko’s fair hair and Lena’s ready smile, and it was enough to see them, without that desire to be identified with what one saw. Like the sketching, intimacy was too costly, too frustrating, too great an expenditure of oneself—and all for what, for what?
‘‘I think I shall go in now,’’ Pamela said.
‘‘Is that wise,’’ Lena asked, ‘‘so soon after a meal? What do you think, Mr. Westfield?’’ She leaned over to Max, who lay outstretched, his arms behind his head, so that her face was only some six inches distant. He opened his eyes, and the red eyelashes flickered in the dazzle as he said: ‘‘Wait for half an hour.’’
How strong he seemed; and how clean, in his white silk shirt, at the opening of which she could see the coarse hair growing. His hands were so clean, with the wide, beautifully kept nails and the palms whose skin, even in this weather, had a slightly chapped look as if from too much scrubbing. He was wearing some beige linen trousers, with a silk scarf twisted round his waist, and as he lay there in the sunlight, the trousers were rucked over his thighs, as if they were too small. She wanted to twine the hair at his throat round her large, competent fingers; to pick at the knot of the silk scarf.
But how sad he looked, even in repose. And all because of that minx, who was willing to spend his money, though it was obvious she refused to sleep with him. Lena hated Karen; and now, as she thought about the other woman, a sullenly voracious expression came over her face, making Colin say: ‘‘A penny for your thoughts.’’
She ran some sand through her fingers and said: ‘‘Oh, nothing.’’
‘‘I bet you were thinking about Signor Commino,’’ Pamela laughed.
All at once Lena was inexplicably angry. ‘‘ Oh, you children, you really are absurd! It’s so ill-mannered, Pamela, to talk in that way. Don’t you see that it’s ill-mannered? I don’t understand you.’’ Then she fell silent, and again brooded on Max’s shut face.
Nicko had wandered off into the heat of the afternoon, and Mrs. Bennett called: ‘‘Put on your sun-hat.’’
‘‘I don’t want to, Granny.’’
She said nothing more; and soon he walked back to the others, picked up the hat, and pulled it over his ears. He began to grub for shells. ‘‘Look,’’ he called. ‘‘ Look what I’ve found!’’ He ran up to his grandmother and held to her ear a shell so gnarled and brown that it looked like a fragment of old bone; and to fortify this impression, brown strands of dry seaweed hung from its orifice like attenuated sinews. It smelled of salt and decay.
From its depths came a strange, high-pitched singing; at first Mrs. Bennett supposed it was some noise in her own head. ‘‘Strange,’’ she said; and the child, hearing the word, chanted out, ‘‘Strange, strange, strange!’’ as he wandered off from her, bearing his trophy. But soon he tired of it and let it drop from his fingers; in the bright glare it lay like the rotten, half-buried remains of some man or animal, deep orange against the lighter orange of the sand. Mrs. Bennett imagined that she could still hear its high-pitched trilling in her ears.
After a while Lena disappeared behind a rock and reappeared, shivering a little with excitement, in a white silk bathing-costume for which she had had to pay nearly a quarter of her monthly salary. ‘‘Oh, it’s wizard,’’ Pamela exclaimed, as Lena had hoped she would, to attract Max’s attention.
His eyes flickered up: ‘‘Very nice, Lena,’’ he said, as she placed herself, somewhat self-consciously, on the sand beside him. ‘‘It’s like that one of Karen’s,’’ he added and of course did not notice the immediate darkening of the girl’s face.
‘‘Are you coming in with us, Mr. Westfield?’’
He yawned: ‘‘Oh, I expect so—later. I feel so sleepy. Don’t wait for me now. I’ll join you when I’m ready.’’
‘‘Colin?’’ Lena asked.
Colin pulled a face, as he flicked one stick after another, with a plop, into the sea.
‘‘Ready, Lena!’’ Pamela called, and she emerged from behind a rock while she was still pulling up one shoulder-strap to cover her right breast. Her back was red and peeling and the sun had brought out freckles on her arms and legs. But as she and Lena ran down to the sea together, she had acquired an effortless speed and grace and beauty which made Lena seem all at once dull by comparison. These were the qualities of youth, and in a year, or two years, or three years, she would inevitably lose them; but because of them, Max was now watching his daughter and not the woman who imagined she was being watched by him.
He peeled off his sh
irt, rolled it into a ball to put under his head, and was about to close his eyes again when Colin said:
‘‘You’re going to peel terribly. You know you always do.’’ He was sitting, with a bored, slightly disconsolate expression as he still threw stones at the waves.
Without opening his eyes, Max said: ‘‘I brought some oil, but really I can’t be bothered.’’
Colin scrabbled in the picnic basket, and having found the bottle containing the oil, went across to his father: ‘‘ I’ll do it for you,’’ he said.
‘‘Oh, don’t trouble.’’
‘‘No, I’ll do it.’’ He spoke almost sullenly, tipping some of the amber liquid into the palm of his hand.
‘‘I think I’ll have a dip first,’’ Max said, raising himself on an elbow. Colin felt cheated, as he let the oil trickle into the sand; he watched it as it glinted downward, large, rich drop by drop, and was then sucked into the universal, glaring dryness. ‘‘Oh, all right,’’ he mumbled. He wiped his palm on his own bare leg; he had a slight headache.
‘‘What about you?’’ Max said.
‘‘I don’t think I want to.’’
Max was pulling his trunks over his naked thighs as he said gently: ‘‘You must learn sometime.’’
Colin had the impression that this had all happened before; and then he remembered the scene by the Arno, with Frank Ross’s malicious taunts. The connection once established, a connection of mood also took place; he wanted to defy his father, as he had attempted, so feebly, to defy Frank Ross; and because he was not afraid of his father, whereas he had dreaded Ross, he hoped to atone for having been so weak then by being firm now.
‘‘I’m not interested in learning,’’ he said abruptly, still massaging his greasy palm against his leg.
‘‘That seems to be rather silly.’’
‘‘I dare say it does.
Max looked up from fastening the belt of his trunks. ‘‘Come along, come along!’’ Lena was shouting, but Max took no notice of her as he wondered, sadly, what he had done to deserve his son’s hostility. He hesitated and said: ‘‘I’m sorry if sometimes I don’t seem to try to understand you.’’ Colin remained silent, his eyes focused on the anchor which his father had had tattooed on his arm during his service in the Navy during the Great War. ‘‘Because I do try,’’ Max continued, now gazing out to where Lena and Pamela were splashing and screaming. All at once he hated their high-pitched, hysterical fun. ‘‘ I do try,’’ he repeated, like a stubborn child in a school classroom. He put out an arm, the muscle swelling beneath the anchor, and attempted to draw his son to him; but the boy had moved away.