by Francis King
‘‘Tell me about your life,’’ Max said. ‘‘You know, I know absolutely nothing about you.’’
She sighed and shrugged her shoulders: ‘‘Oh, there’s nothing to tell. My father was an army officer and he died in Somalia when I was six. Once we had money, then we had less, now we have almost none. I work for you and I keep my mother who is always ill—and Signor Commino wishes to marry me,’’ she added with a sudden, artificial laugh. She stared down at the glass and he thought she was going to burst into tears; but instead a blush, agonizing in its intensity, swept up from her bare shoulders. ‘‘I shall not marry him,’’ she said.
‘‘And what work will you do, when I go?’’
‘‘I don’t know.’’
‘‘I must do what I can to find you something else.’’ He looked at her and added: ‘‘Unless you would like to come to England to work for me there.’’
‘‘I? To England?’’ She was incredulous. ‘‘But how can I possibly——?’’
‘‘Why not?’’
‘‘But my mother——’’ she began. ‘‘Oh, there is nothing I should like more, nothing, nothing! But it is all so difficult. You do not understand how difficult it is.’’
‘‘Well, think about it.’’
‘‘Of course I shall think about it.’’ She gulped what was left in the glass and said: ‘‘You are so kind to me. And I have always wanted to visit England. But—’’she stared down at the sawdust on the floor and then twitched at her furs—‘‘it is my mother,’’ she said. ‘‘No, it is impossible. Impossible,’’ she repeated on a strange, dying note.
‘‘You are the best secretary I have ever had.’’
‘‘Oh, nonsense!’’
‘‘I mean it, Lena.’’
She looked at her watch, her face still expressing pleasure at the compliment, and then said: ‘‘ I suppose we must go back.’’
‘‘Oh, must we? It really is torture.… Listen!’’ He cocked an ear and said: ‘‘It’s already begun. Can’t we stroll until the others come out?’’
‘‘Why not?’’
Suddenly a scruple overcame him: ‘‘But Mino——?’’ he said. ‘‘Won’t he be hurt?’’
‘‘Oh, let him!’’
They walked arm-in-arm up and down the street, and then round the Duomo, gazing from time to time at a sky that was brilliant with stars. Because they were in evening-dress they were stared at, but neither of them cared. Lena was telling him about her father and how the few of his relics that had been sent back from Somalia had been stolen in passage, and then she described her life with her ailing mother and her one brief love-affair with an English clerk who had been stationed in Florence and had later turned out already to have a wife. ‘‘Poor Lena!’’ Max exclaimed. ‘‘What a life you’ve had.’’
Meanwhile Mino fidgeted in his seat, incessantly turning round to see if they were coming in; he had bought them an ice each, but the two packets were already limp and soggy. At last he got up and went to the back of the ramp on which the seats had been placed, and stalked up and down, peering in all directions. He explored each of the canvas lanes. No, they had gone, they had left him, they had been bored. Someone in the audience hissed at the sound of his ceaselessly plodding feet, and he stopped, ineffectually pushing the end of his black tie under his collar and staring at the monstrous shadow which his body cast on the canvas screen beside him. From the stage poured light and noise and movement; in himself there were darkness, silence and death.
After the performance he did not show his disappointment and even if he had, Lena was too happy to have noticed it. As she said good night to Max she whispered: ‘‘ I shall think of that idea. I shall try to make it possible.’’
‘‘Yes, try,’’ he said. He walked up the steps of her house with her, and kissed her, briefly, behind the door, where the others could not see them.
When he reached the hotel there was a letter for him, with a Swiss stamp:
DEAR MAX,
You see that I am here in Zurich, where I came to find
Maisie. But she left unexpectedly for Salzburg yesterday and
I haven’t a bean. You said if I ever needed money you would
let me have it and that is why I am writing. You were right
about Frank. He tired of me, and though he never told me to
go, I knew that was what he wanted.
I didn’t intend to ask for money but there’s nothing else for it. Is there?
K AREN .
PS. How’s Nicko?
Chapter Thirty-Five
‘‘ANOTHER, another!’’
‘‘But, my dear, I have no more paper.’’
‘‘You have that,’’ Nicko said, pointing at the sketch-book which lay among the other odds and ends in Mrs. Bennett’s string-bag.
The old woman hesitated, and then pulled off the elastic band which clasped the book together and ripped out a sheet. ‘‘What is it? What is it?’’ the child demanded. ‘‘Let me see!’’
‘‘Rodolfo and Enzo.’’ She stared down at it for a moment, bunching her lips so that the deep furrows around her mouth all at once deepened; then, swiftly, she began to fold another boat.
‘‘Don’t you want it, Granny?’’ Nicko asked; he had not imagined that she would take the suggestion seriously.
‘‘No, I don’t want it.’’
‘‘It was a beautiful drawing.’’
‘‘No, it wasn’t,’’ she said gruffly. ‘‘There! Take it. But don’t fall into the water.’’
She watched the child as he scrambled down an incline strewn with fragments from the destroyed bridges, and called: ‘‘Be careful, Nicko! Be careful!’’ He was going to the place where an endless gush of water foamed and roared out of a tunnel to join the sluggish river; he had discovered it for himself, and now always insisted that she should take him there when they went on their walks. She made him paper-boats and he would launch them in the rushing waters; and then he would stand, one hand shielding his eyes, as he watched them sweep into the river, bobbing up and down, whirling round, and in the end either sinking or travelling so far that they were lost to his gaze. He did not know, as she did, that the water, glittering so beautifully in the sun as it poured from the hillside, in fact came from a sewer.
After he had launched the boat, he still watched the water, rapt away by its speed and noise and power; and she still watched him. Though it was now late afternoon, the sun made her head ache and gave her a tight pain between her eyes, as if from too much scowling. But from here, among the scattered chunks of masonry, the sewer looked pure as it flashed into the sunlight from the dark of the tunnel. It looked beautiful, as the child looked beautiful, with one brown arm raised to his face, his legs sturdily apart, and his fair hair gleaming. Beyond him the semi-naked children of the city splashed and shouted in the brown scum of the river; and beyond them was the outline of the city, dissolving in a heat-haze, the blue mountains and an intense blue sky.
… The water was clear and cool, she thought, it was aerated, coming like that from the hillside, and ice-cold; it would sting the tongue and make the teeth ache, and afterwards it would leave a delicious feeling of satisfaction. So many years ago they had drunk at the stream at Fiesole, he cupping his hands over the thin spirt of water and then raising them to her mouth. The carriage had been left where a cart-track led off the high-road and the three of them, her friend, the man who was to become her husband, and herself had trudged up through the dust and heat and incessant shrilling of cicadas to find the ‘‘view’’ which had at first sent them on the errand. He and she had never found it; they had found the stream instead.
Afterwards they had sat on a rock, and suddenly out of the burnt clusters of broom two figures had emerged, their arms intertwined. They were girls, in the blue frocks and black stockings of an institution, and they had hideous, simian faces in which there were no eyes. They chattered to each other, led unerringly by the low murmur and lisp of the spring, until the
y had reached it. Then, as if they were re-enacting the scene which had already passed, one girl lowered her coarse hands and cupped them for the other. The two unseeing faces were close, while the lips gulped greedily, like an animal lapping from a bowl. Now they changed their rôles, and the girl who had lapped in turn cupped her hands to the flashing water.
At first it had been a scene of an ugly, and even grotesque, pathos. But there was something monumental in the pose of the two figures, in their blue uniforms; something so little human that the young girl who watched them had the feeling of watching while two wild beasts quenched their thirst in what they imagined to be an unbroken solitude. Five minutes previously, his hands with the small, beautifully manicured fingers and the narrow wrists had been raised to her mouth; and when she had performed the same service for him, he had suddenly caught the tender flesh of her palm between his white teeth.… One of the blind girls put her face to the spring and the other gave her a push. They laughed, and then, their arms once again intertwined, they disappeared down into the silence and heat below.
‘‘Come, Nicko, come!’’ she called; and it cost her an immense physical effort to shout even that distance.
‘‘In a minute.’’
‘‘No. Come now!’’
But she knew he would come only when he wanted to come, and she felt too tired and ill to shout any more. She perched on one of the jagged lumps of masonry and looked about her, twisting her bowed head as if it were a too heavy flower withering in the sun. In its noisy confusion the water seemed to be pouring through her body; but it was not cool, as she had imagined, but hot, hot, hot. She swept her bloodshot eyes from side to side and suddenly let her string-bag slip to the ground as she gazed at one spot. Someone was asleep, where the last row of a plantation of Indian corn cast a brief shade. She thought it was an old man, and she guessed which old man it would be. He lay, arms outstretched, on his back, like a wax effigy slowly dissolving in the heat. There was no bridge to his nose and his red-rimmed eyes stared, sightlessly open, at the blue of the sky above him. The long, curving nails of one hand glittered like claws in the sunset. She stared, fascinated, while the water seemed to pour faster and faster through her. Then she looked wildly about her, half-rising as if to summon assistance, and saw—Enzo.…
‘‘Oh … Oh …’’ she said. She put out both hands, seemingly in entreaty, to the Florentine whose half-naked body glistened with water. ‘‘Oh … save me …’’ she said in English She pointed: ‘‘There! Look! The man …’’
‘‘Sì, sì,’’ the Florentine said, nodding his head energetically. He had not understood. ‘‘My clothes,’’ he explained in Italian. He pointed to the spot and smiled, and then brushed back a lock of wet hair which had fallen across his forehead. He had vowed to himself that he would never again speak to any member of the family; yet now he welcomed this encounter with joyful exhilaration. Once again he smiled.
Mrs. Bennett stared at him and then at the spot where the man had been sprawled; and as she did so, Enzo sprinted off to fetch his towel with a murmur of excuse. There could be no doubt; she had been mistaken. And yet … She felt almost tearful with mingled exasperation and relief.
Enzo sauntered back, drying himself as he did so; and, seeing the Italian, Nicko at once let out a squeal and bounded up the incline. He flung himself into Enzo’s arms and Enzo lifted him off his feet and swung him round and round in a circle, both of them laughing. ‘‘Take care, take care!’’ Mrs. Bennett warned. Nicko’s shirt was now covered in patches of moisture from the other’s wet body.
The Italian and the English child played together for many minutes and Mrs. Bennett lost all interest in them. She remained perched on the slab of masonry, her legs, with their grape-like veins, crossed one over the other, and her eyes staring vacantly at the brown water or at the outline of the houses on the other bank. There was the pensione at which they had stayed; and there was the balcony … ‘‘Are you happy?’’ he had asked, and she had seemed to be suffocating in the cool night air as his body had shuddered against hers. ‘‘I don’t know.’’ And she had never known. When he was dying, they had seemed to act the same scene all over again, with her arms once more about him and his body straining against hers, as her whole life seemed to issue out of him in spasm after spasm. She was suffocating in the odours of illness, and he had gasped: ‘‘Have you been happy? Have you been at all happy?’’ And there was no reply she could make but the old ‘‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’’ … For the things most important to her in life were physical health and physical beauty; it was immoral but there, it had always been so and she could not help it.… Health and beauty: her whole being embraced in a dying tenderness the fair-haired child and the dark-haired boy moving in the unconscious perfection of their youth as if to enact some last ritual before her. Enzo held Nicko in his arms and was swinging him from side to side, the muscles in his legs and belly straining. And now she felt for this ill-educated, uncouth stranger what in her whole life she had never once felt for her husband; she knew that she loved him.
‘‘Basta, basta!’’ Enzo laughed to Nicko. He came over to Mrs. Bennett and stooped down to speak to her, his hands on his knees: ‘‘I am going to sleep,’’ he said in his guttural Italian; and because she looked at him with so vacant a gaze, he repeated: ‘‘I am going to sleep, sleep.’’
She put out a hand and ran it slowly down his face, neck and glistening shoulders in the gesture with which she had first acknowledged his beauty when Max had brought him to the hotel, and she had tried to draw him. Her mouth twitched, as if she were either about to laugh or burst into tears, and suddenly, in her appalling Italian, she said: ‘‘My grandson—Colin—he’s very sad. He so much wants to see you again—so much, so much. Please—please—go and see him. Forgive him. Forgive.’’ Her nails dug into the flesh of his shoulder as she said the last three words with immense emphasis. For the first time in her life, whether by accident or intention, she had used the tu form in Italian.
‘‘Sì, sì. I’ll go. I’ll go this evening.’’
She closed her eyes, rocking from side to side on the piece of masonry as she said: ‘‘Va bene, va molto bene.’’
Enzo strolled away and pillowing his head on his heap of clothes, soon fell asleep. Nicko came to Mrs. Bennett and said plaintively, ‘‘I’m tired.’’ She put out her arms and he clambered into them, curling up like an animal, his cheek against hers. ‘‘Sleep,’’ he said.
‘‘Yes, sleep, sleep.’’
The sun shifted and after many minutes the old woman and the sleeping child were in its full glare. But Mrs. Bennett did not move, though her whole body seemed to be shrivelling in the heat. Now the only coolness was where the child’s breath issued gently against her throat; everywhere else was fire. And from that one spot the child seemed to be drawing out her whole life with each gasp of air. She looked for the balcony but it was now no more than a glittering bar of light. She looked for the pensione and all at once it seemed to burst into flames. She looked for Enzo, and under the shadow of the Indian corn saw the effigy-like figure, now purple and swollen to an enormous size, as she had once seen a corpse when nursing in the Great War.… She looked down at Nicko; and he at least was safe. His breath came easily and one of his hands was opening and shutting rhythmically over her withered breast. There was moisture on his lips, as if he had just licked them, and innumerable small beads of sweat at his temples and each of his eyebrows. Once again she felt her whole being envelop him in a last embrace.
When Enzo woke, he dressed himself, combed his hair and then slouched over to say good-bye to the old woman and Nicko. They now sat in shadow, and Mrs. Bennett’s head had lolled forward so that it almost entirely covered the sleeping child. No, he would not disturb them; they both were asleep.… A smile, full of the tenderness which lurked, so often hidden, in the Italian boy, now transfigured his dark, sunburned face. Until he stooped. A trickle of dry blood gleamed black on Nicko’s cheek and throat.
It took Enzo a long time to separate the old woman’s locked fingers and remove the by now screaming child.
Chapter Thirty-Six
IT was the loneliest hour of night.
Since Karen’s train from Switzerland was due to arrive at half-past three, Max had decided that it would not be worth his while to go to bed before he had met it. He wandered from street to street, oppressed by the sense that the whole city was dying all about him; lights went out, shutters were drawn down over bars and even the beggars, usually so importunate, curled up on benches and in corners and dropped into sleep. He could not stop thinking about the dead woman, but all the wildness of grief had spent itself and as he listened to the echo of his own feet in the silence and solitude, there was nothing now but a vague and tender sadness. He had not imagined that he would care so much and only now realized how, in these last days without Karen, his spirit had been bound to Mrs. Bennett’s no less securely than to those of the children.
It was not cold, but as he thought of her, it was as if the circulation of the blood in his veins were slowing as it slowed in the empty streets. Everything seemed to be coming to a standstill, and his pace slackened too until, almost unconsciously, he was leaning above the river. Down below, in the brown undergrowth, two shapes were huddled together, but even they were motionless. A solitary figure crossed the Grazie bridge as if in a dream, and a long tapering shadow swung from side to side with each step it took. They would bury the old woman in the English cemetery and the archdeacon’s tenor, richly valedictory, would say the service for her. They would throw earth on her, and then … no, no, he could not think about it.
In the vast, glittering hall of the station two soldiers slouched in one corner on their kit-bags; dark, pigmy figures with blank faces and eyelids drooping with sleep. In another corner, a woman leant against the closed shutters of the tobacconist’s kiosk with a suit-case beside her and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. She was waiting for someone, in silent patience, and all the time that Max watched her she never once moved. From time to time a voice came over the station microphones, sounding as if a piece of celluloid were being crackled in imitation of human speech, and one or other of the isolated travellers would stir from his stupor.