by Francis King
‘‘Go away,’’ the boy’s voice came sullenly. He still remained like a sick animal, crouching, with his knees drawn up and his face under his arms.
‘‘But—look, son—you must eat——’’
Suddenly Enzo’s whole body opened like a spring, and he leapt to his feet. The carabiniere drew away, made a sudden dash for the iron grille and slammed it behind him. There was a rattle, as with agitated fingers he turned the key in the lock. ‘‘ What’s the matter?’’ he asked, his face yellow under the glossy black wings of his hair. ‘‘What’s up?’’
‘‘You know perfectly well.’’
‘‘I know?’’
‘‘You told them—what—what I’d told you,’’ Enzo said bitterly, holding his blotched, swollen face close to the bars while he gripped them with both fists.
‘‘But look, I never——’’
‘‘They told me you had.’’
‘‘I have to do my duty,’’ the young man replied and as he spoke his face turned rapidly from yellow to crimson.
‘‘Oh, I see that!’’
‘‘They asked me if you’d said anything, and what could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted—’’
‘‘Shut up!’’ Enzo turned his back on him and returned to the wooden bed. He heard the carabiniere say in a frightened, pleading voice: ‘‘Anyway, eat what I’ve brought you,’’ but though he felt agonizingly hungry, he made no move to take what was being proffered through the bars.
‘‘I’m sorry,’’ the carabiniere said. ‘‘I suppose It was a shit’s thing to do.’’
Again there was no answer; and having taken off his tunic and hung it on a peg behind him, the carabiniere continued learning English from his grammar in apparent composure.
At half-past five the peasant detective clattered down the stairs with an uncharacteristic nimbleness and announced to Enzo, as if he were an old friend: ‘‘Good news, Rocchigiani! You can go home.’’ The grille having been opened, he grabbed Enzo by the hand and shook it, saying: ‘‘ No hard feelings. We have to do our duty.’’
Enzo looked at him in complete bewilderment.
‘‘But come and eat first.’’
Colin had returned home.
Late that evening, Giorgio said to Enzo: ‘‘ You’ll never believe how Father got that money. I managed to drag the story out of him. You know, he does some pretty shabby things.’’ He cleared his throat and spat into a small enamel bowl in which frothed a mixture of disinfectant, phlegm and streaks of blood. ‘‘ The day after—after Bella’s death, I remember hearing him and Ma Kohler argue, and I wondered what it was all about. Well, he was asking her for compensation. Can you beat it?’’
‘‘Compensation?’’
Giorgio nodded his head as he again began coughing. ‘‘ Yes, compensation,’’ he said breathlessly. ‘‘ The chair to be re-covered, the carpet to be cleaned. God knows where she found the money, but to-day she gave it to him. And of course the chair and the carpet will remain exactly as they are.’’ Suddenly, in soft, plaintive reiteration, like a man in a delirium, he said: ‘‘ Oh, Bella, poor Bella … poor Bella … poor Bella.…’’ He had closed his eyes and the long, fair lashes made deep fringes of shadow on his smooth cheeks. He put but a hand and suddenly gripped his brother’s.
Chapter Thirty-One
THERE was a small, white-washed room at the end of the villino in which stood a plain deal table, a rush-bottomed chair and along the wall a number of dusty packing-cases which gaped splintered wood and rusty nails. There was a lamp on the table and Frank Ross was working there. He wrote slowly, and with few corrections, in a small, rounded handwriting, using Greek e’s and showing a complete disregard for the lines of the foolscap paper on which he was working.
Karen knocked at the door and, before he answered, came in, wearing slippers and a silk kimono over which she had tied an apron of coarse brown cotton, one of her acquisitions in the market. ‘‘It’ll be ready in five minutes,’’ she said.
‘‘Oh, I can’t come now,’’ he replied without looking up.
‘‘But you must. It’ll spoil.’’
‘‘Of course it won’t spoil,’’ he said, gazing fixedly at the blurred cone of the lamp.
But you know, darling …’’ She came across to him, put a cheek against his and an arm round his shoulders, and then, kissing his ear, said: ‘‘You’re such a cross-patch if the dinner isn’t nice.’’
‘‘Look …’’ He extricated himself from her and dipped his pen in the ink-well, preparatory to writing. ‘‘ You run along and call me in half an hour. All right?’’
‘‘Well, don’t blame me if the meal tastes awful.’’
He did not answer; and soon, to her irritation, she could hear his pen scratching on the paper as he continued with his work. She sighed and went out.
When she had served him, in the kitchen, with one of the slices of beef-steak she had fried over the charcoal burner, she stood and watched as he plunged in his fork and began to cut a section. ‘‘Well?’’ she said.
He masticated, the light from the lamp gleaming on his ceaselessly working jaws; then he swallowed, and gulped at some wine. Wiping his mouth on his napkin, he said: ‘‘It’s not the waiting that spoiled it.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘There was nothing to spoil.’’ He looked up at her and smiled; but his eyes were strangely cold, even hostile as he asked: ‘‘ Where on earth did you buy such a hunk of meat?’’
‘‘At the butcher where I always go.’’
‘‘And you paid——?’’
‘‘Four hundred lire. For the two pieces.’’
‘‘Four hundred——! But, my dear Karen!’’ She had already discovered that meanness was one of the essentials of his character, and since she herself was naturally extravagant, she was often to be irritated by remarks of this kind. She knew, of course, that between them they had little money and must therefore economize; he was always telling her so. But for her to economize was to eat an expensive tea at Doney’s and then, in a rush of conscience, to leave ten lire instead of fifty as a tip. Unfortunately Frank’s economies were of a more logical nature.
‘‘I can see that I’ll have to do the household shopping,’’ he said, chewing heavily. He put his hand to his mouth and drew out a long piece of sinew. ‘‘I bet this is horse … Well, aren’t you going to eat yourself?’’ he asked. Karen had remained standing before him, the frying-pan in her hand, while on her face was the expression of love mingled with exasperation with which she now usually confronted his moods. ‘‘ Come along, sit down!’’
‘‘Do you really think it’s horse?’’ she asked, turning the pan from side to side and peering at the chunk of coarse-grained flesh. ‘‘Because if it is …’’ She shuddered slightly. ‘‘ I just couldn’t.’’
‘‘Now don’t be silly. Come and eat.’’
‘‘But I couldn’t.’’
‘‘Very well, it’s not horse.’’
‘‘If you say it like that …’’ She flung the pan down on the kitchen-range.
‘‘Now don’t be silly,’’ he repeated in a quietly ominous voice, laying his knife and fork down. ‘‘You can’t waste it, and you must eat something. Bring it here and eat it. Bring it here.’’
She hesitated as if about to challenge his authority and then brought the pan over and speared the meat with her fork. They both ate in silence, she forcing herself to swallow lump after lump of the resilient, crimson flesh, though at each mouthful she felt she must retch. When she had consumed half the steak in this manner, he said softly: ‘‘Good girl. You can leave the rest if you like.’’
She wanted to reply ‘‘ Thank you’’ with all the irony she could. But the words when they came out sounded ineptly docile. She even found herself closing her hand on his, as:
‘‘How’s the throat?’’ she asked.
‘‘The——?’’
‘‘The throat. This morning you said your throat was sore. R
emember?’’
‘‘Oh, I’d forgotten about it,’’ he replied with the staccato abruptness he used when he did not wish to discuss anything. But she knew that he lied. She had watched him gulp his wine, and by now the way in which he did so had become so familiar to her that she could notice the smallest difference.
‘‘That’s good,’’ she said. ‘‘ I bought some gargle at the English chemist’s, just in case. But you won’t need it now.’’
‘‘That was one way to waste more money,’’ he retorted; and again her face assumed that expression of irritation which dare not express itself because of the restraints of love. ‘‘There’s only one good gargle—salt and water. Salt’s good for most things; we found that in the jungle.’’ She had heard this eulogy of the medicinal value of salt many times before. ‘‘There’s no point in buying expensive gargles when you can do the same job with a teaspoonful of salt in water. And why go to the English chemist?’’
‘‘You know my Italian——’’
‘‘But heavens above, you can speak the language—after a fashion.’’
‘‘Yes, but they’re always so helpful there—they’re like old friends.’’
He smiled sardonically and shrugged his shoulders as if this last remark were too fatuous even to be worth an answer.
Then, as so often, he all at once changed. He checked her, as she rose to fetch the fruit, and carried it himself from the sideboard. ‘‘Peach?’’ he asked. ‘‘Or banana?’’
‘‘Peach.’’
‘‘Shall I peel it for you?’’
‘‘Please.’’
She watched him as he took a small silver penknife which hung from his belt, opened it and began deftly to remove the skin between his brown fingers. The juice trickled down one arm and cascaded in a number of opaque pearls on to the marble-topped table. He cut the peach into slices and fed them to her one by one. Suddenly he seemed to be overflowing with tenderness and consideration, and when the peach was finished, she rose and sat in his lap, her head on his shoulder. ‘‘You find me a terrible slut,’’ she said.
‘‘Yes.’’ But the words lacked any sting. He kissed the back of her neck, and said: ‘‘I don’t suppose that you’ll ever learn. And I don’t really care. I like you as you are; with the kitchen dirty, and a hole in your stocking, and this awful dressing-gown thing which you will always wear.’’ He pulled the kimono open. ‘‘I don’t care,’’ he repeated, as he slipped it from her shoulders. She sat staring at the lamp, impassive as a doll; but her whole being was waiting for him and she gave a small cry when at last his touch came.
Afterwards he told her that he was going to scrub and tidy the kitchen. ‘‘But I only did it two days ago,’’ she protested.
He laughed. ‘‘Now you run along; and come back in an hour and you’ll see how a kitchen should really look. All right?’’
She pouted as she replied, ‘‘You make me feel so useless.’’
‘‘Absolutely useless!’’
‘‘Let me help,’’ she urged.
‘‘God forbid! Have you forgotten when you helped to paper the room? No, you go and see to those letters you always complain you haven’t the time to write. And try not to get ink on your fingers,’’ he added, in the same jocular mood which nevertheless filled her with a vague resentment.
She did not write the letters; she wandered out into the overgrown garden, one corner of which Frank had already begun to tame, and made her way along a path flanked with straggling box hedges, to the wall above the river. It was a night without a moon, but the whole garden and the sky round it gave off a subtle radiance. The box hedge scratched at her kimono and her slippers, flapping at the heels, seemed to make an unnaturally loud clatter in all that silence. She stared down for a moment at the sunken rectangle of stones, like the foundations of some miniature house, which had caused her and Frank so often to wonder; he said that there had once been a greenhouse there and she, more imaginatively, a tomb. None of the villagers appeared to know anything about it.
After the heat of the day the stone balustrade over the river still felt warm. She perched on it, leaning forward as if she expected to have to jump off at a moment’s notice, and looked back at the villino where she could see the lamp still burning on the kitchen dresser and Frank moving briskly about his tasks. She took a childish pleasure in seeing him thus when he could not see her. He had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, and a lock of grey hair had fallen across his forehead. Suddenly she felt the impulse to go to him again and put her arms round him, but she knew he would be angry.
Beside the villino was the tall shell of what had once been the big house, destroyed in a bombardment. There were two walls, stretching as high as the highest trees, and a few heaps of rubble, buried in dock, nettles and bindweed; and sometimes, in the stillness of such nights, if one listened, one could hear a sudden plop and rustle as yet another fragment of stucco crumbled away. The peasants said the old house was haunted, because in the bombardment some Germans had been killed, and certainly now it was eerie, rising up like a blank wall notched with narrow spaces of black where the windows once had been, and housing stray cats, birds and some strange yellow-winged insects which had flown up into Karen’s face, buzzing loudly, on the only occasion when she had dared to penetrate within. No, it frightened her; and she gave a little shudder as she twisted round from it to gaze at the river.
The Arno here curved wide and shallow, and in its crook were the marshes from which, throughout the day, there would ring the shots of those who came out from Florence on their bicycles and vespa’s with guns strapped on their backs. A bright yellow under the sun, the water now spread grey, with a few wisps of mist dinging to it and meeting the vertical black of the trees which fringed its distant edges. Some kind of river-fowl was calling through the greyness with an insistent, plangent note, and then over her head Karen heard a sudden flurry and creak of wings.
She looked back at the old house, with its blank, imperious façade, and all at once her mind returned to the Palazzo d’Oro. She had left without saying goodbye to any of the children, because she had feared the ‘‘ scenes’’ which, all her life long, she had done everything to avoid. ‘‘Say good-bye to them for me,’’ she told Mrs. Bennett and her mother had answered with the indifference which now seemed to govern all her actions: ‘‘As you wish.’’ … Staring at the white ruin for which Frank was always elaborating plans—he would pull it down and use the bricks to build another villino, or he would train vines or some other creeper to cover it picturesquely—Karen felt a desolation strike at her heart. When she walked out of the hotel, she had so gladly divested herself of all that had belonged to that former life; but, from time to time at moments such, as these, she would be visited by an intense, parched regret. It was of Mrs. Bennett and Nicko that she chiefly thought. There was nothing to prevent her seeing either of them whenever she wished it, but she had discovered that Frank nursed a secret jealousy of whatever belonged to her and could not belong to him, and he discouraged her, more by an attitude than any actual words, from too often going into Florence to see her son or her mother. Besides, after such visits she returned to the villino full of a vague, nagging restlessness and it would take many hours before she was once again lulled back into her former well-being.
‘‘Did Nicko cry when you told him I’d gone away?’’ she had asked Mrs. Bennett at their first meeting.
‘‘Well, what do you think?’’
There was a silence, and then Karen asked: ‘‘And Max—how did he take it?’’
‘‘How angry you’d be if I told you he hadn’t cared!’’
‘‘Oh, you’re so unsympathetic, Mother. You usen’t to be like this.’’
Mrs. Bennett had shrugged her shoulders, and then stooped over the cup of chocolate the waiter had brought her.
… Now, as once again there was that wild, plangent note of the bird calling out from the marshes held in the dark elbow of the river, Karen felt her eyes
fill with tears. She was even thinking with tenderness of Max: of the small, daily decencies of their life together, of his consideration and his tolerance for all she did. It was absurd never to be satisfied. But I am satisfied, I am satisfied, she said over to herself in a passionate agony of spirit. I love Frank. I am happy with him. I want nothing more. And as if to reassure herself of these facts, she sought reassurance in the way she always sought it from him; from his mere physical presence. He was still there, moving back and forth across the small, square window, and his shadow moved behind him on the white-washed wall. She plunged down into abysses of fierce, aching longing. But she must wait; he would finish his job, and then, the kitchen scrubbed and tidy, he would come out to her or call to her to go in to him. She must wait.
Suddenly she turned in horror. Without a sound the whole high, blank face of the old, bomb-dilapidated shell of a house was slowly curling forward. It seemed to stretch itself, like a vast piece of rubber, and then, with a noise like the explosion of a high sea on shingle, it plunged downwards, as Karen covered her head with her arms. Stones scattered around and she could even feel them stinging her own body. Trees cracked and split and were wrenched from their bases; the old wall parted like a wooden fence, buckling inwards to let a cascade of masonry slither with a crashing recoil of water into the river. A cat, pinioned somewhere in the darkness, screeched like a child in pain, through the strange crescendo of noise made by birds racing across the river into the safety of the marshes. Then, when Karen looked again it was as if a ghost of the old house were slowly rising up to take its place. A wall of glimmering white dust slowly unrolled upwards from the ruin, until bursting through it, she saw Frank racing towards her. ‘‘Karen!’’ he was calling. ‘‘Karen, where are you? Are you all right? Where are you? Karen?’’
She could say nothing; could not even move. When he found her and gripped her convulsively to him, pressing his lips on her face and saying over and over again ‘‘Thank God … thank God …’’ she remained stiff and silent. ‘‘Oh, I was so afraid, so terribly afraid. It was hearing that cat—it sounded almost human.’’