by Francis King
‘‘For fever,’’ the woman said simply. ‘‘It cured my youngest bambino when he had the same kind of malady.’’
‘‘Have you scrubbed the bath as I told you?’’
‘‘Not yet.’’
‘‘Not yet! But it’s past seven o’clock.’’
‘‘I can stay later,’’ the woman said calmly. ‘‘I was busy with the Signore.’’
‘‘Well, go to him now, please. He wants you to paint his throat.’’
After Anna had been away for over five minutes, Karen was about to go after her when the peasant woman returned, carrying some cotton-wool, which Karen knew she had taken from her own table, a handkerchief torn into strips, and a silk scarf of Frank’s. ‘‘What are you doing with those?’’ Karen demanded.
The woman began to fill a kettle as she said: ‘‘I thought I’d give him a fomentation—get some of that muck away. No wonder the poor thing can hardly breathe.’’ She turned her back on Karen and began to rake the charcoal burner.
‘‘Did he say he wanted a fomentation?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ the woman replied, continuing with her job.
‘‘Now what are you doing?’’ Karen asked, as a few minutes later the woman unwrapped some newspaper and began to pick at the green leaves thus revealed. ‘‘What are those?’’
The woman mentioned the names of some herbs of which Karen had never heard and then went to the cupboard and took down a bottle of vinegar with which she proceeded to scatter the leaves after she had put them in a saucepan.
‘‘Does he know about all this?’’ Karen stood with her hands deep in the pockets of her suit. She felt an intense, helpless frustration; she hated the woman—her calmness and competence and the dirty, vivid charm of the body which seemed about to burst through the rags in which it had been clothed. The woman was exploring one ear with her forefinger while she waited for the kettle to boil, and she now said:
‘‘Don’t take on so, ducky. It’s the best thing. He’ll be as right as rain tomorrow.’’
‘‘Please don’t call me ‘ducky’.’’
The woman shrugged her shoulders, and smiled as she peered down at the forefinger she had now removed from her ear.
‘‘You’re extremely insolent,’’ Karen said.
The woman said nothing; and in the end the English girl went out on to the terrace where she sat slumped in a deck-chair, glaring angrily at the river.
The next afternoon Frank, who was no better in spite of Anna’s ministrations, banged on the wall between his room and the kitchen as a signal that he wished to speak to Karen. His voice was almost inaudible, and the rattle of mucus in his throat oppressed her as if it were in her own. ‘‘Look,’’ he whispered. ‘‘I’ve been thinking. You’d better sleep in the room upstairs tonight. Have Anna make up the bed.’’
‘‘Upstairs!’’
‘‘Now don’t argue. Please. I know you hardly slept at all last night—I’m so restless when I’m like this. And besides I like having the bed to myself when I’m ill. That’s not unreasonable.’’
‘‘Well, let me sleep in here on two chairs.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘But why on earth not? Suppose you want something during the night? I might never hear from up there. While if I sleep in a chair——’’
‘‘That’s all right. I’ve seen about that.’’
‘‘Seen about——?’’
‘‘I’ve asked Anna to stay the night. She says she’ll sleep in the kitchen, and I can bang if I want anything.’’
‘‘But there’s no need,’’ Karen burst out; and then in a quieter voice she asked: ‘‘Can’t I sleep in the kitchen?’’
‘‘No, you’re tired out.’’
‘‘But don’t you see that I might want to—that’‘—her voice broke—‘‘ that I should regard it as my right to nurse you myself. I want to nurse you!’’
‘‘That’s very sweet of you.’’ But he destroyed the appeasing words by suddenly twitching his mouth. ‘‘I’m touched,’’ he said.
‘‘Oh, no, you’re not! Because you’re hard—you’re utterly hard—and ruthless—and selfish! It matters not a damn to you that I—I—— Oh, what’s the bloody use?’’
Again his mouth twitched, the strange vertical lines on either side of it deepening in the haggard face. ‘‘Nursing is a matter of skill, not of sentiment,’’ he whispered.
‘‘Skill—sentiment! You mean that Anna has the skill, while I have nothing but—’’
He raised a hand to quieten her. ‘‘It’s better to be nursed by someone impersonal. You’re all strung up—look at you now.’’ He indicated her trembling figure and pinched, white face. ‘‘Besides, she’s had so much practice. She’s nursed her children and her father, and after the Armistice she nursed the wounded German who was hiding with her. She was telling me about that. You must get her to tell you the story, too—I think it might amuse you.’’
‘‘Impersonal,’’ Karen said bitterly, sinking down on a chair and drawing her hands down her dress. ‘‘So Anna is impersonal—that sly, lousy trollop.’’
‘‘My dear Karen!’’ he laughed.
‘‘She’s in love with you.’’
‘‘Oh, don’t be so silly.’’
‘‘Well, of course she is. Anyone can see that. Why else should she offer to sleep in the kitchen? Just to keep an eye on you? She has her own family, hasn’t she? Her two little bastards who presumably need her care? Oh, I’ve watched her looking at you when she didn’t know I was watching. There’s only one thing in life that interests her, that’s quite obvious. And how you love it—to be worshipped and flattered and have her cringe before you! Of course, you love it!’’
He had shut his eyes at the beginning of this speech and he kept them shut until she had finished. Then he said quietly: ‘‘Tell her about the bed, will you? Don’t forget.’’ He again closed his eyes.
Karen stared at him for many seconds, biting her lower lip in rage and picking with a forefinger at the skin around her thumb until it began to bleed; then she got up and dragged out to the kitchen.
‘‘You’re to sleep in here tonight, the Signore tells me.’’
The woman had the damper of the fire open, and her face and the arm with which she was putting in the charcoal were both ruddy in its light; triangular shadows flickered upwards from the eyes she turned on Karen. ‘‘Yes, my sister-in-law will take the bambini.’’ She looked even more closely at Karen and said: ‘‘The Signora is tired.’’
‘‘I’m not in the least tired!’’
Late that evening, on the pretext of fetching herself a drink of iced water, Karen came down to the kitchen and found Anna asleep in one corner, like an animal, her knees drawn up to her breast so that both the blackened soles of her bare feet were visible. She was curled on the threadbare mat which usually lay before the doorstep of Frank’s room and she had rolled up another mat and put it under her head. The room was full of the smell, in no way unpleasant, of stables and kennels, for even on this hot August night she had closed every window before retiring.
As Karen turned the tap and the water, lethargic after a long drought, began to trickle into the tumbler she had fetched herself, the peasant woman gave a snort and a shudder, and at once was awake.
‘‘I came for ah iced drink.’’
‘‘Let me, Signora.’’
The woman at once took the glass from Karen’s reluctant hand and, going over to the ice-box, picked out some chips of ice, not with the tongs, but with her own bare fingers. Karen did not protest; but when she reached her own room again, she could not drink the water. She put the tumbler on the window-sill and then drew up a chair and sat there, watching the glimmering sheet of the river under the moon. Soon she began to feel a little light-headed, as if from an excess of air or of moonlight, and her resentment against Anna and Frank began to seep away. She seldom thought of others, even those to whom she was attached, when they were absent, but now, curiously, he
r mother came to her mind and she wondered, drowsily, whether she, too, were asleep or whether, as so often, she lay awake in spite of the luminal or barbitone the doctor had ordered. And then Karen remembered another night such as this, spent sitting at an open window. It was after she had first met Max, and full of a vague, romantic ardour she had felt she could not sleep while the memory of him so oppressed her. She had drawn a chair up to the window just as she had done now, and had looked out on to the school garden, vast and secret in the autumn moonlight, and then along the windows of the main wing, each glimmering like ice, until, suddenly, she had caught her breath. Someone else was seated at one of the windows and was gazing into the moonlight, and she guessed that it was her mother. It was strange, the other woman’s face, like the reflection in a dim mirror, and all about the silence and loneliness of night in the empty school; but Karen had never spoken to her mother about it, had never asked her what had kept her up or whether she had noticed her fellow watcher.
She could hear Anna move about below and she supposed that Frank wanted something. Perhaps this was the crisis of his illness; perhaps he was really ill. But she stayed where she was, her arms along the window-sill and her head on her arms. She was empty of all desire to go to him and if someone had then said to her, ‘‘Is he to live—or die?’’ she would probably have shrugged her shoulders.
When she came downstairs early the next morning, she met Anna in the hall. ‘‘Well, how is he?’’ she asked.
The peasant woman shook her head. ‘‘It was a bad night. Didn’t you hear?’’ she added.
‘‘I heard nothing. You should have called me.’’
‘‘What would have been the use? It was better for you to sleep.’’
‘‘Did you sleep?’’
Anna laughed; and Karen was conscious that while she herself, in her silk dressing-gown and slippers, must still look haggard and limp from her vigil at the window, the peasant woman, on the contrary, seemed to have opened to the morning light, like some rich flower, in the full ardour and vitality of her nature.
‘‘Shall I go into him?’’ Karen said, feeling the ignominy of having to ask such a question.
‘‘Better later. He’s at last got to sleep. He was fighting for breath all night, poor soul.’’ Anna had gone into the kitchen, where she began to rake the ashes from the fire, and Karen now followed her. ‘‘The things they think of, when they’re like that! It was ants with him—ants the whole night. He kept telling me they were crawling all over him. It was all I could do to keep him in bed. And then there was a lot of gibberish, English maybe, and then those blessed ants again. There was no end to it. Now with my boy’’—she always spoke of her German as il mio ragazzo—‘‘when he was taken bad—his wound green and purple it was—bless me if it weren’t rats. They were gnawing him, see, all the live-long night.…’’ She went on talking in her guttural peasant voice, Karen understanding only a word here and there, while she energetically raked out the ashes and began to crack some sticks between her strong brown finders to lay the new fire. Karen noticed that where the seam of her blouse had split a substantial part of her breast was visible to the eye. ‘‘Oh, he has it real bad,’’ Anna ended up. ‘‘The poor pet!’’
Frank continued to ‘‘have it real bad’’ for the whole of that day, lying on his back with his eyes closed and that perpetual bubbling, snorting noise in his throat, except on those occasions when his fight for breath made him suddenly raise himself on one elbow and hawk violently until he had spat mucus into the enamel bowl on the bedside table. Every hour Anna would go into him to renew the fomentations, carry him some drink which would with difficulty penetrate down his throat, or pull straight the moist sheets, now tangled about his body. He would look at the peasant woman with tired, suffering eyes in which Karen, in her jealousy, always detected some gleam of interest or even admiration. At Karen herself he never looked, keeping his eyes closed or staring fixedly at the ceiling whenever he spoke to her.
She had decided that if he did not improve by the evening she was going down to the village store, without telling him, to telephone for a doctor. But as she changed from the slippers which she had worn all day into a pair of sandals, Anna appeared in the doorway, the enamel bowl in one hand, to say: ‘‘He says he’s feeling better. Look what he brought up.’’ She tilted the bowl towards Karen who had no desire to look.
Karen went down, and Frank said weakly when he saw her: ‘‘ I think I’m better. I feel much better. The temperature seems to have gone.’’
‘‘Then you do admit you had a temperature? In that case, why wouldn’t you let me take it? … May I take it now?’’
‘‘Oh, if you wish,’’ he said between teeth which had suddenly started chattering.
‘‘It’s sub-normal,’’ she said, when she had gone to the window with the thermometer and held it to the light. ‘‘Let me see the throat.’’
‘‘You don’t want to look at it. It’s not a very pretty sight. Anna says a lot of the mucus has cleared.’’
But for this mention of Anna she would not have persisted as she did now: ‘‘Let me see,’’ she said. ‘‘I’d like to see.’’ She looked, using a spoon as a spatula, and then gave an involuntary shudder. The whole mouth was ulcerated, the throat thick with mucus. ‘‘It looks much the same to me.’’
‘‘No, it’s easier,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s easier to breathe.’’
From then on he improved slowly, though for the next two nights, in spite of Karen’s protests that she could look after him, Anna continued to sleep on the mat in the kitchen while she herself slept upstairs. On the third day he went out on to the terrace for a short time, but he was so weak that he had to be supported between the two women. When they had placed him in a wicker-chair he looked from one to the other and then, with what appeared to be a deliberate cruelty, said: ‘‘Poor Karen! I’m afraid I’ve fagged you dreadfully. You’re almost done in.’’ This concern for her breathlessness over such a trivial physical feat inevitably implied a comparison with Anna who had carried Frank as easily as if he were one of her children.
After the peasant woman had gone, Karen sat on the arm of his chair and said: ‘‘ Glad to be up?’’
‘‘I feel terribly weak.’’
‘‘Well, of course you do, you poor darling.’’ She attempted to put an arm round him and kiss him but he said fretfully:
‘‘Don’t suffocate me— please.’’ He added: ‘‘I think I’d like my sketch-book.’’
‘‘You are a funny old thing.’’
The following day she said: ‘‘ I’m telling Anna to make up my bed with you again. Is that all right?’’ She had missed not sleeping with him and her whole being now craved for a renewal of their intercourse.
‘‘If you don’t mind I think I’d rather be alone just at present,’’ he said, without looking up from his sketching.
‘‘Oh.’’ She placed herself on the ledge of the terrace, her back to the view, and then said: ‘‘Why?’’ as calmly as she could manage.
‘‘Why?’’ he repeated. ‘‘Oh, because I do—that’s all.’’
She did not realize that he had always been unconsciously disgusted by the sexual act, and that he regarded it as an evil necessity rather than as a source of light and joy. Now, illogically, in the secret recesses of his personality, there had been established some connection between his illness and the hours of intense, unthinking pleasure he had snatched with Karen. The illness had been a retribution; he did not say that to himself and consciously he did not even think it. But he felt it in his whole immature, twisted being; and perhaps he was right. The subterranean guilt may have at last chosen to erupt in this manner.
‘‘All right,’’ she said listlessly. ‘‘I’ll stay upstairs. For how long?’’
‘‘Oh, I really don’t know. Do you mind?’’
‘‘Well, of course I mind!’’
‘‘It matters so much to you?’’ he said with a mixture of astonishment and
repugnancy.
‘‘Yes.… You seem to think that I should be ashamed. You know it’s a Victorian notion that women endure that sort of thing but don’t really enjoy it.’’ But for ‘‘that sort of thing’’ she used a far cruder word.
He looked up at her now for the first time and stared at her. Then he suddenly burst into laughter; and that was his only comment.
For the next few days they ate together and sat together, as they had done in the past, and Anna ceased to spend her nights at the villino; but Karen felt that he now only tolerated her presence whereas before he had taken pleasure in it. He would go about his occupations of painting, reading and writing, and she herself would attempt to concentrate on some task which kept her beside him. But sooner or later, while she was darning socks, or shelling peas, or writing one of her short, illiterate letters, she would find herself watching his absorbed face with a bitter mingling of impatience and regret and a longing to be possessed by him. She would say something, and he would answer, briefly, in his staccato voice, and then he would return to what he was doing as if a door had been quietly locked in her face. One morning, as she finished a late breakfast, she heard him laughing with Anna on the terrace as she beat one of the mats, and then their voices, speaking Italian, began to weave an invisible net of sound in which she felt that her whole being was struggling for life and freedom. She held her coffee-cup in trembling hands and stared into its depths; until she noticed, with revulsion, that a black hair, obviously Anna’s, was clinging to one side. She thought, I knew the woman was dirty; and it was as if she had succeeded in scoring some immense, if subtle, triumph.
One day Frank decided to go out shooting, and slinging a rifle he had borrowed across his shoulders, he set off towards the ferry which would take him from their side of the river to the marshes on the other side. He wore khaki shorts and a khaki tunic whose breast-pockets were swollen with the cartridges he had put there; his brown, sinewy legs were bare except for some army boots and the short, thick army socks he had folded over them. He wore a straw sun-hat on his head.