‘One can only be old once,’ I replied. It was the kind of quip I particularly dislike; but it served, for she laughed, and rubbed her cheeks as though to call her expression to life. And with the first glass she began to talk about growing old. She talked with a kind of pondering eloquence, as though it were a subject to which she had given a great deal of thought but only now was in a position to expound. Some of the things she said were silly, others were rather striking; but what illumined her words, and gave them character and consistency, was their tone of wistfulness and speculative appreciation. It was as though she were praising the scenery and perfect climate of some island which none of her cruises had allowed her to set foot on.
‘Another thing that would be so marvellous would be knowing that, remember as you might, you wouldn’t have to do anything about it—not make amends, find a new way round—nothing of that sort. Everything would have been put safely out of reach. Even with the most appalling things you had done, the most embarrassing mistakes, it would be like sitting on a mountain and seeing, far, far below you, a minute bull chasing a minute man. And the lovely things, they would be out of reach, too. You wouldn’t have to cry your eyes out because you couldn’t hold onto them much longer. You would …’ It was unheard-of for Mary to talk like this, and I was listening with the touched astonishment with which parents see a quadruped baby suddenly stumble towards them on two feet, when it flashed on me that all this was part of her kind encouragement; that she was gently shoe-horning me into my old age. ‘Would!’ I interrupted. ‘Would! Why all these conditionals? It would be wonderful to be old. It would be wonderful to die. My dear girl, the word is “will”, not “would”. There’s no conditional about it.’
She was like a snail drawing back its horns—alarmed, vulnerable and inoffensive. I have a liking for snails; they are beautiful, and rather intelligent. Seeing Mary draw back her horns, I regretted my interruption. It was a coarse act, for she had been enjoying her run of eloquence and doing me no harm. ‘Tell me more about your travels,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Iceland.’
‘I didn’t like it. It frightened me. I don’t mean those absurd geysers. But it’s like a horse’s skull, and it hates you.’
There was real fear in her eyes. She whisked it away, and again asked me what I had been doing with myself. This time I told her about my operation, and about the tortoise, and the upheaval of a retirement, and consulted her about redecorating my ground-floor flat—retirement had given me leisure enough to realize how dirty it was, and how inconvenient. As usual, her advice was excellent. She found room for my besetting books by turning the larder I never use into a book-closet, and her flawless memory for dimensions and objects enabled her to rearrange my dwelling as though she had been in it only yesterday. My own memory is far from flawless, and I took out my pocket-book and made notes of what she said while our pudding plates were taken away and our coffee brought.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much, Mary. And now what about you? Wasn’t there something you wanted to ask me?’
‘Yes. I want you to be my executor.’
‘Your executor? But why? And why me? You know me well enough to know I’d be hopeless.’
‘You’d be all right if you were put to it. Besides, my solicitor will be the other, he will do the practical dealings. All I want you for is to tear up letters, and generally dispose of my private life, and see that various things I’ve left to people really get to them.’
And fend off Basil, I thought. It was an inducement; but not a sufficient one.
‘It’s flattering that you should remember how good I am at parcels,’ I said. ‘My single talent well employed, I did them better than you. But I won’t be your executor, my dear. For one thing, an executor has to be a survivor—and I shall be dead long before you are.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that.’
An instant later, deftly and deliberately, she knocked over her coffee-cup. A look that was almost a look of criminality was recast to match exclamations about clumsiness, and apologies to the waiter, who came and mopped.
‘So you will let me put you in?’ she resumed when he had gone. ‘I am so grateful. I can’t tell you what a weight off my mind it is.’
‘You can’t jump me like that,’ I said. ‘I want to know what is on your mind. Mary, what is all this? What did you mean, just before you knocked over your cup so cleverly?’
‘What I said.’
‘You’re fifteen years younger than I am, you’re wearing a new hat, you look the picture of health…. You’ve got some nonsense into your head.’
‘That’s all you know.’
She put on her teasing smile; but now the look of criminality was that of a criminal brazening it out.
‘Mary.’
‘Oh, shut up, Gilbert! You bore me. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘I’d rather you told me,’ I said after a pause.
‘Leukaemia. That’s why.’
I knew I could say nothing to comfort her. I told her I was sorry, and that I would be her executor if she wished. In my maladroit consternation I used the word ‘gladly’. She laughed delightedly. I should not be needed for some time, she said; perhaps not for another year; she wanted to get things settled well beforehand, that was all. After I had put her into a taxi and waved a farewell, I remembered how I had interrupted her wistful evocation of growing old.
FENELLA
‘MAMMA!’
‘Oh, do you know the Sackrees, too? Then I expect you know their cousins, the Leighs—Nicholl and Tabby Leigh. No? Oh, but you should! They’ve got such an amusing house.’
‘Mamma!’
‘At Margate, of all places, embossed with shells. Yes, Fenella, what is it?’
‘Mamma, if you have no other plans for this afternoon, may I go to Grifone with Miss Wilson?’
‘But I thought you were going to play tennis with Roger.’
‘I was. But now he doesn’t want to.’
‘Tiresome boy! Well, darling, why not wait a little, and then we’ll go and bathe in the lake together.’
‘I bathed this morning. Twice. I bathed with the Darnleys, and then I bathed all over again with Susan and Melissa. Now I feel I want a change.’
‘But, my pet, Grifone is halfway up the mountain, and just another of these squalid little villages with open drains. Anyway, why Grifone?’
‘Miss Wilson is painting the church.’
The lady who didn’t know the Leighs gave a laugh. ‘Fenella wants a change after all that modern art at the Biennale.’
Fenella’s mother echoed the laugh. ‘Some good old English fare. Cut off the joint and two veg.’
‘Oh, cruel! But I’m sure it’s a perfect description.’
Both ladies laughed. Fenella remained silent and uncomplyingly grave. All that money spent on having her teeth straightened, and never a smile out of her, thought her mother; and said ‘Well, darling, I see you’re bent on it. Go with my blessing. But don’t hang over the drains. And for God’s sake don’t let Miss Wilson give you an ice off a barrow.’
‘No, Mamma.’
She would be almost pretty, thought the lady who didn’t know the Leighs, if she didn’t look so like a tallow candle, and hadn’t her father’s upper lip. But a miss is as good as a mile—and in this case it was a mile. The object of these considerations having moved away, she said, ‘All the same, I expect your daughter’s right. The young have an instinct for what’s coming next, and ten to one in another few years we shall all be scrambling to buy strong beefy canvases by Miss Wilson.’
‘God forbid! Do you really think so?’
‘I’m positive. After all, people are doting on Landseer already.’
‘Landseer, yes. I’m beginning to dote on him myself. But Miss Wilson.’
‘Sh-h-h! There she is.’
A tall lean woman in a faded blue cotton dress and carrying an easel had come up the steps of the hotel terrace. Fenella hurried towards her. ‘It’s all righ
t, I can come. I’ll just dash to my room and put on my rope-soles.’
‘Dash, then!’ exclaimed Miss Wilson in a voice too loud and too dramatic to sound convincing.
The two ladies averted their gaze and lowered their voices.
‘Doesn’t it seem extraordinary to find someone like that in San Barbaro?’
‘Quite extraordinary.’
To Miss Wilson, on the other hand, who had settled in San Barbaro twelve years before, and so matter-of-factly that in another twelve years she would probably be regarded as an inhabitant, it was the presence of such figures as Fenella’s parents, the lady who didn’t know the Leighs, the Darnleys, etc., that seemed extraordinary.
In point of fact, they had got there by a very natural course of events. In 1956, Timon Hogg, an eminent art critic and connoisseur, had an attack of mumps on his way home from Venice. His wife, his sister-in-law and his nephew, who were travelling with him, had known instantaneously what to do, and battered their way into a convent near Belluno, assuring the mother superior that in England everyone of distinction, regardless of denomination, went into convents for nursing. The onslaught was so pervasive and Timon’s Italian so commandingly fluent that the mother superior gave way. To visit the sick is a Christian obligation; perhaps she thought that to accept visitations by the sick came under the same heading. Anyway, they got in. They were soon on terms of affection with the whole convent, and giving a great deal of trouble. Finally, the convent’s doctor and the chaplain intervened. What the convalescent needed, said the doctor, was pure air and repose. Pure air and repose were available in perfection, together with mountain scenery, said the chaplain, in his native village of San Barbaro, where the church contained some most interesting frescoes, where the policeman’s wife, a retired nurse, let lodgings that were simple but commodious and entirely free from insects. Somehow or other, the party was bundled off to San Barbaro. What was left of the frescoes appeared to have been painted in mid-nineteenth century by the village idiot, and the lodgings stank of disinfectant and rang with mosquitoes. But Timon, never at a loss for an unknown masterpiece, discovered in the loft above the sacristy two icons and a harpsichord decorated by Angelica Kauffmann, and drew attention to them in an article. From then on, San Barbaro became a preserve of Timon’s intimate circle, who came there on their way to the Biennale or on their way back, arriving in punctual flocks like migrant birds. A stretch of the lakeside at a discreet remove from the outfall of the village’s main drain was cleared of its deposit of old tins, old shoes, old tires and broken crockery, a tennis court was laid out, and two rival hotels were built and promoted by Signora Amalia Pons, widow.
‘Height,’ remarked Miss Wilson, leaning over the wall at the third turn of the road that led to Grifone, ‘height shows one proportion.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it,’ gasped Fenella. She was already rather out of breath, which was why they had paused. The proportion Miss Wilson had in mind was that between the old San Barbaro and the new. Seen from above, this was reassuring. The Excelsior and the Splendide were well on the outskirts of the village; round its patron’s mild dome, nothing broke the pattern of tiled roofs, the outdoor-apricot-coloured roofs over which the shadow of the mountain would presently advance its astonishing blue.
‘From here the roofs look almost like corrugated iron,’ Fenella said.
‘Rested?’ inquired Miss Wilson. ‘Shall we go on?’
Two designs warred in Miss Wilson’s mind. She wanted to get to Grifone and finish her painting of the church; she wanted to make a portrait of this pale, lanky girl, with her air of being a mermaid who had never for an instant sported in her native element. But Grifone must come first. The girl was hers for the whole afternoon. Not so the light.
Fenella was more simply preoccupied with self-expression, idealism and revenge; she wanted to show those bores, those tittering, copycatting, running-around-in-a-circle-and-being-fashionable bores, that she, at any rate, could discern the difference between the sham and the true. While they were all laughing at Miss Wilson and her easel; while Miss Wilson, sitting like Coleridge ‘in the exceeding lustre and the pure intense irradiation’ of her love of art, was paying no attention to any of them, Fenella had defied public opinion and made determined approaches—had asked the name of a flower, had offered an ice, had asked to see her pictures. ‘What I would actually like would be to see you actually painting,’ she had then said. The invitation to Grifone had followed; and having lied all round, and plotted like a Communist, and endured two dreary strategic bathes in one morning she was now on the way to enjoy it. Unfortunately, the road to Grifone was remorselessly steep, gritty, parchingly hot and apparently interminable; and all that bathing had weakened her legs. Nothing had weakened Miss Wilson’s legs. Despite the easel and the canvas and the knapsack, they darted on ahead. It was like following a machine—one, two, one two!—a reaping machine or something of that sort.
Though the mountainside from below looked uninhabited, they passed several farmhouses, where large dogs rushed out at them, where unseen pigs yelled. At the roadside by one of these farms a terrible sort of idiot with an enormous head lay in a go-cart under a cloud of flies. Miss Wilson’s legs darted onwards. ‘Nearly there, Fenella.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘In winter this road is often impassable for weeks on end.’
‘Really? How do the—the Grifonesi get out?’
‘They don’t.’
The flies that had buzzed over the idiot seemed to be buzzing in Fenella’s head. The stony surface of the road was so hot that it was like walking over red-hot ploughshares.
‘If I lived at Grifone, I think I should quite look forward to winter,’ she said.
‘What? I didn’t hear.’
‘I just said that must be a gorgeous view from Grifone.’
Presently, remarking that this was a short cut to the church, Miss Wilson stepped over a dead snake, scrambled up a precipice and was out of sight. Struggling up the narrow path between the brambles, Fenella was obsessed with a fear that she would slip, roll to the bottom, lie there beside the snake and be swarmed over by the ants that were swarming over it.
The church squatted in an enclosure of long sunburned grasses. Here and there black wire crosses rose out of the grass like thistles. It was a very small church and quite ordinary, except for the porch, which was disproportionately ample and deep. Miss Wilson had already set up her easel, the canvas was mounted, and she was standing back surveying it with a thoughtful expression.
‘Please, may I look?’ Fenella asked.
Miss Wilson made way for her. Fenella’s first impression was disconcerting. Miss Wilson, after all, was only another of these clever modern artists. Yet the picture did not seem to be altogether an abstract: it looked more like a church the wrong way up.
‘Oh, but I like it!’ She had not wanted to sound like Mamma, but the words came automatically, and she did.
‘You haven’t seen it yet. I was standing it on its head to see how it hangs together.’ Miss Wilson reversed the canvas. It now looked exactly like the church.
‘I see.’
This sounded even more reminiscent of Mamma. She blushed furiously.
Miss Wilson glanced up from unpacking the knapsack. ‘My poor child, how hot you look! Why don’t you go and sit in the church, and cool off?’ At that moment Fenella had no mermaid charms for her, was not paintable, was not even pitiable—an affected chit.
Dogged by her mother’s voice, dogged, too, by the thought that the long grasses must certainly harbour a great many snakes whose hissings would be inaudible in that din of grasshoppers, and reflecting on the inadequacy of all human relationships—she was not really cynical but there are some things one just has to admit—Fenella approached the church. The shade in the porch was as blinding as the sun outside. Beneath her tread there was suddenly a rattling, resounding vacancy, crossed by vacillating iron slats. She drew back.
‘Go on, go on! It’s only to keep out an
imals,’ Miss Wilson called.
Inside the church was silence, coolness, safety, a smell of piety and paraffin, a dimmed daylight. A small lamp steadfastly burned in a crimson glass shade. Fenella made a deep genuflection, crossed herself, spread her handkerchief on the floor, crossed herself again and went down on her knees. Only then did she remember an omission: dry crossings of oneself are comparatively worthless. She ventured back into the porch, reawakened the rattling and the vacancy, found a holy-water stoup. ‘She can’t be coming out already!’ muttered Miss Wilson.
Properly dampened, like linen before ironing, Fenella returned to the handkerchief and settled down to go on resolving to become a Roman Catholic. Of course, it wasn’t totally original—Peregrine Fielding had, and Lucy Trivett, and Mr. Walmisley. But in her case it would be different. They were all middle-aged—Mr. Walmisley was over forty, indeed, and could remember Queen Mary’s toques; their lives were behind them. She was thirteen. Her passions were stronger than theirs, her need intenser. She wanted to escape from always feeling scornful, selfish and lonely. She wanted to have a deep spiritual life that wouldn’t always be leaking away from her. She craved to be understood and guided and rebuked and consoled and to feel herself part of an all-embracing yet exclusively True Church. She longed to call someone Father—someone not Popski. If she could get inside—walk calmly and firmly over all the rows and arguments and amusement and expostulation as she had walked over the arrangement in the porch to keep out animals, and be christened all over again, and properly, with salt and holding a candle in her hand, and be called Chantal instead of horrid Fenella, like an advertisement of pyjamas! But no one would possibly listen to her. No one ever listened to one unless one said the wrong thing. If she could have a vision … or if at this moment a priest would come into the church, a dear simple old parish priest who wouldn’t laugh at her bad Italian … or if Miss Wilson were a Roman Catholic, and also rather different, so that one wouldn’t have that Hunt-the-Thimble sensation. As for Peregrine, or Lucy, or Mr. Walmisley, that was quite out of the question. They were bogus. Anyone with an atom of religious feeling could see that.
A Stranger with a Bag Page 4