by H. E. Bates
‘At the top of the street. The white one.’
‘Thank you. Would there be someone there?’
‘Look over the garden wall and shout “Gina!”’ she said. ‘Gina’s there—she’ll show you over.’
As they walked up the street he said once or twice how queer it all was: how odd the atmosphere, wheel-less and quiet and sleepy, in the middle of the lake, in the heat of the afternoon. He said once that he thought it was like a deserted ship, moored and left to rot, and that you could almost smell the timbers, mouldering away in the water.
‘I think it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Away from everything.’
‘Or it might be the plague,’ he said. ‘And everyone driven out.’
‘It wasn’t the plague,’ she said. ‘It was Serpents. They had to be driven out. It was a saint named St. Julius who drove them out.’
‘Oh! I say!’ He was mocking her gently; but she was still not sure of it and she felt herself flushing. ‘Where did you find all that out?’
‘I read it in the guide.’
‘Not mother?’
She knew then that he was mocking, and she hated her mother.
‘Gina!’ He called twice over a wall, through a deep garden, to where pergolas of vine made another maze down to the edge of a stony slip-way, where two boats were moored.
‘Oh! you want to look at the villa?’
‘Yes, please.’
She was an Italian woman of great pleasantness, soft-armed, amiable, with drowsy dignity, who took them into the tall old house where, as he whispered once to the girl, he thought no one had lived since St. Julius had driven out the toads.
‘Not toads,’ she said. ‘Serpents.’
‘Well, serpents or toads,’ he said. ‘We don’t always have to be so accurate, do we?’
As she took them from floor to floor, by one mouldering staircase and another, under draperies that were decaying piecemeal where they hung and past beds sagging and drunk with the weight of invisible sleepers in shuttered bedrooms, the woman occasionally bathed them both in her drowsy, amiable smile.
‘For you?’ she said. ‘The house?’ She giggled. ‘There are plenty of rooms to fill—plenty for bambini—eh?’
‘Well—I don’t know. We might consider it——’
Lightly he mocked the woman and then with gravity looked down at the girl.
‘Would you like to live here?’
‘I’m not sure. I think so. Would you?’
He looked straight into her eyes and warmly and boldly through them.
‘Might be nice,’ he said.
‘Go out on the terrace,’ the woman said. ‘Bella vista—bella vista—it is very beautiful. The rooms are dark today because the shutters are up.’
On the terrace a broken oleander, its flowers pitched face downwards on the stone, and a small torn banana tree, were all that remained of a lake-side garden that had clearly once been very beautiful.
‘Would you really like to live here?’
She stood looking across the lake: villas like toy white blocks among distant cypresses and above them terraces of vine melting into mountains and above that mountains melting into sky.
‘I think it would be heavenly. I should love it,’ she said.
For almost all the rest of the time, as they stood staring over the hot tranquil lake, she did not know if he was mocking.
‘Well, why not?’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to mother and mother will talk to Dad. Instead of a new Bentley next year he could buy the villa. That’s what cotton does for you. If you think about it, there’s no reason why not, is there?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Not even the serpents,’ he said. ‘They’ve been driven out—we wouldn’t have them to bother us anyway.’
All the way back, through the deep gully of the curving street, he kept up that half-teasing, half-serious fondness in his way of speaking. The woman Gina had stood for a long time lifting her hand in farewell, beaming on them her own fondness in cow-warm smiles, as if in amiable dedication to them as lovers.
‘You know, I’ve just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The streets are the tracks the serpents made.’
He stopped. They were in a narrow place, a twist in the street that left them isolated. Far above them the dome of the Basilica burned in the sky and from somewhere she could hear the sound of a fountain dribbling water.
A moment later he was pressing her against the wall. Over the wall a high oleander poured wasted pink blossom, vanilla-soft, into dark shade. The island about her melted completely into the deep substance of this one half-sweet scent and as he kissed her she stared high above the Basilica, eyes wide open, with shocked wonder, at the sky.
Afterwards, as he laughed down at her, she had no way of knowing if the tenderness of it, the easy warmth, had separated itself finally from mocking. She felt there was a skein of rose-shadowy air in front of her face and she kept trying to wipe it away.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to stop anything if you really want to.’
When they had rowed back to the piazza on the mainland his mother said:
‘Well, what was it like? Tell us.’
‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to ask Dad to buy it. It has a banana plantation. Grapes, figs, two boats and a view to Monte Rosa. We could live on fish and fruit—live for nothing. Absolutely.’
‘Oh! hark at him!’ Mrs Smithson said. ‘When can you believe him? You really can’t, can you? What was it really like?’
‘Awful,’ he said. ‘God-awful. It hasn’t been lived in since St. Julius threw out the toads. You should see the curtains.’
‘St. Julius who threw what?’ Mrs Smithson laughed with tears of doting in her eyes. ‘You must have had a good time out there. Did you,’ she said to the girl, ‘have a good time?’
‘It was beautiful,’ the girl said.
‘You’ll have to be careful! You don’t have to take too much notice! They tell him I spoil him!’ she said.
The girl and her mother drove on after lunch the following day. Mr Smithson, at the last moment, stood on the terrace with his camera pressed against the wiry hairs of his chest. ‘Smile!’ he kept saying. ‘Smile! We must have a smile,’ and Mrs Smithson stood with one arm about the waist of her son.
‘Good-bye!’ everyone shouted and Mr Smithson, having taken the photograph, called:
‘May see you in Pisa—leaning against the leaning tower!’
‘We are going another way. We are going to Monte Rosa,’ Mrs Carey said.
‘Don’t forget the serpents!’ the young man called.
In the mid-afternoon the car wound slowly up into the mountains. With her round colourless unripened apple face the girl stared forward into the haze of sun and dust and high places. Once again peasant children were selling, on the roadsides, little bunches of chalk-rose cyclamen, wild from the hills.
Once or twice she stared back.
‘What is it?’ her mother said. ‘Don’t fidget. What are you looking at? I hope you haven’t forgotten anything again?’
‘Only the lake,’ she said.
‘Not like you did at Verona? You said “No” that time and we had to go back. You’re sure you haven’t forgotten anything?’
‘No,’ the girl said. Far below her she could see the little lake, in full clearness, blinding white in sun, the island dark in the heart of it. ‘Not this time.’
The Common Denominator
The two sisters, Miss Constance and Miss Jackie, lived alone with their manservant Spratchley. Sometimes it did not seem possible that this natural and simple arrangement had gone on for more than thirty years.
The house, of a kind of gimcrack baronial Tudor constructed of false beams darkened with creosote, was set in the lower slopes of a hillside from which there had once been a view across a flat wide valley. But Miss Jackie, the younger, who was fond of shortening some of her words and so spoke of a ‘pash for trees,’ had planted many poplars and fast-growin
g cypresses along the boundaries of the garden, gradually shutting out the circle of the world. Gradually, too, neither she nor her sister missed what they had seen there. In summertime coverts of hazel and hornbeam along the hillside thickened into an unbroken wall of leaf. In winter a thin white soil of chalk seemed to give off a continuous dirty smoke of travellers’ beard. There seemed nothing much else to bother about, and the two sisters grew content, and then old, in their life with Spratchley.
‘Spratchley will do it,’ they said. ‘Spratchley will see to it. Leave it to Spratchley.’
In habit and appearance, as sisters so often are, they were very different from each other: Miss Jackie was small and vigorous and nervously wiry, with brown dry skin. In her pash for trees and her pash for flowers she was restless and could not stay in bed after she had woken. She liked to be out early, in unsullied mornings, pushing wheelbarrows, labouring among what she called her delphs or her gladdies or her pollies or her rhodies, whistling in the pure air. She wore trousers of bleached khaki gabardine that hid her stocky legs, and a brown pork-pie trilby hat that concealed most of her short grey hair.
Miss Constance, older by seven or eight years, had the plumpness of an irate goose that does not care to be disturbed. Her day did not begin until ten o’clock, when Spratchley brought breakfast to her bedroom on a tray. When she sat up in bed Spratchley came forward, coughing in gentle asthmatical politeness, with a pink woollen wrap for her shoulders. He held it while she tied its ribbons about her neck. Then he brought her oval ebony mirror, with her ebony brush and comb, and held the mirror steadily in front of her face while she brushed and combed her hair—hair that was like a crest of grey-white goose-feathers, ruffled at first with the irritation of sleep, then smoothed and humanised and softened as she brushed it down.
Spratchley knew better than to speak while she did these things, but sometimes, involuntarily, he coughed again. The flabby creases of her neck hung down like those of an old dog and her lips sagged loosely as if in the interrupted act of sharply drawing breath. Then Spratchley took away the brush and comb and replaced them with her powder and her lipstick. After she had used them, dusting herself with a huge swansdown powder-puff, her face wore a mask of pale grey-mauve pollen and her lips wore a short oval of crimson carefully scalloped so that the upper lip looked firm.
Then she would say: ‘It’s chilly, Spratchley. What is that row Jackie is making? Shut the window. I didn’t sleep a wink,’ and Spratchley would close the windows and sometimes, if she asked for it, even draw the curtains against the strong mid-morning sun.
‘Now what have you got for me?’ she snapped, with a commanding expectation as if she suspected for a moment that he had brought her anything other than an orange, her Turkish cigarettes and a pot of milkless tea.
Spratchley always poured her tea and then, while she drank it, peeled her orange, laying it carefully about the plate in its prepared divisions. As the heat of the tea floated aromatically up into her face, followed by the scent of the orange, she squirmed her shoulders against the pillows with luxuriation, aware of the first pleasure of wakefulness. After she had eaten the orange—and sometimes in winter there was a little mound of castor sugar with which she could sweetly frost each quarter—she smoked her first cigarette, which Spratchley lit for her. And suddenly, after the first smoke cloud had risen, the room was all life for her—it quivered with the scent of her powder, the aroma of tea and orange, the delicious Turkish odour of her cigarette and, in a way she never troubled to define, with the gently coughing presence of Spratchley.
She always drank three cups of tea and as she began the second Spratchley sat down by the bed and prepared to read to her aloud from the newspapers.
She drank her tea with noiseless deliberation, pulling quietly at her cigarette, while Spratchley read out descriptions, perhaps, of strange women who allowed their husbands to bring home their mistresses to live under the same roof with them or of married couples who, in fits of irresponsibility or boredom, changed partners on holiday for a night or two, as it were experimentally.
Sometimes scandal caught Spratchley unawares, leaving his mouth open in hesitation.
‘Well, what is it, Spratchley? What are you gibbing for?’
‘There’s a piece here, miss——’
‘Well, read it, man, read it. What do you suppose I am?’
Under the dry drone of Spratchley’s readings the day woke fully and a tenderness, a kind of cocoon of bemusement, descended on her slowly and softly, leaving her content.
Downstairs, at last, Spratchley took off his white house-jacket, rolled up his sleeves and tied on the green baize apron that would make him ready for the world of Miss Jackie, trundling a wheelbarrow noisily over paths of crazy paving, whistling among her passions.
‘I’m going to change the layout of the path, Spratchley. It’s not wide enough. I want to bring it down in a wider sweep, in front of the rhodies and then out here and along by the pollies.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘I’m sure it will be better, don’t you?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘I’ve got some of the paving stones up and I’ve marked where I want them to go. Will you start laying at that end?’
‘Yes, miss.’
In the robust, energetic, whistling, passionate world of Miss Jackie he worked till noon. The sisters liked to have lunch at two. At twelve o’clock he took off the green baize apron and put on a white apron and began preparing vegetables. In his white house-jacket he had a bony stiffness of body that made him appear to stand to attention while serving Miss Constance’s tea. In the apron of green baize he was not rigid. His limbs unbent from cragginess and became supple, his hands large and easy as they used the spade.
At two o’clock he served lunch, putting on the white house-jacket just before he rang the gong. Miss Constance, already in afternoon dress, her hair set in crimped sharp waves, sat at one end of the oblong dining table, Miss Jackie in trousers and leather coat, with bobbed unbrushed hair, at the other. Miss Jackie did not like gravy on her vegetables; she preferred bread and cheese to sweet things. Miss Constance was fond of mustard, made rather thinly and freshly for every meal and set before her, dead centre, in a silver pot. She drank nothing with her meals except a large cup of weak white coffee when the pudding came, but Miss Jackie drank bottled beer poured froth-high into a pewter tankard, consuming it noisily, in long gulps, making a heavy clatter each time the tankard was set down.
They took it for granted that Spratchley knew and would take care of these little differences in their taste for things.
In the afternoon Miss Jackie, who had perhaps been up since five o’clock in summer-time, rested for a time on her bed so that she would be fresh to work again among her passions, in the evening, until supper-time. It was Miss Constance’s turn to enjoy the garden, sitting in a swing canopy, in shade that would be kind to a complexion that had by now received, like a bluer, pinker mask of muslin, its third or fourth coat of powder. In privacy and shade she would relish once again the flavour of the pieces Spratchley had first read to her from the newspaper. She did not know what Spratchley did with himself during these hours of the day. She supposed he was occupied with, as she put it, ‘bits and pieces.’ But, as she said, ‘I never ask. I never interfere.’ Spratchley, in fact, would be polishing the stairs or the hall or the dining-room; cleaning silver or washing windows; releasing blocked pipes and flues; repairing gutters after or against the threat of thunderstorms. Each spring he painted the outside of the house, creosoted the gimcrack beams with their distant impression of baronial grandeur and retrained, under Miss Jackie’s instruction, the roses and japonica that covered the walls. In summer he bottled and preserved the fruits Miss Jackie grew and in autumn he filled outhouses with the harvest of onions, apples and potatoes.
Every afternoon at four o’clock he took Miss Jackie’s tea to her room. She liked it strong and black and in a breakfast cup. Miss Constance did not like her own,
with lemon, until five. Miss Jackie, lying on the outside of the bed with a dressing-gown over her trousers, always needed to be woken by his gentle rusty coughing. Spratchley poured tea for her, watched her regain wakefulness under the first cup very much as he watched Miss Constance in the morning, and then waited for what she had to say.
‘You get on with the path and I’ll do the edging. We ought to get it finished by supper-time. Have we got manure? Bring up three or four barrowloads if we have. It will do the pollies good.’
Divided between Miss Jackie, among the polyantha roses, and Miss Constance, greedily absorbed in the evening papers brought up by the newsboy from the station two miles away, Spratchley cooked and served supper at nine. After supper he could be heard scrubbing the scullery or sweeping the yard outside the kitchen or chopping kindling in the outhouse across the yard.
‘Spratchley!’ they would call to him then. ‘Jackie!—have you seen Spratchley about? Connie!—for heaven’s sake where is Spratchley?—’ and their long cooing wails for him would explore, owl-like, the summer night air—‘Spratchley! Coo-ee! Spratchley!’
At eleven o’clock Miss Constance went to bed and, luxuriously propped by pillows, smoked a final cigarette and enjoyed a glass of whisky and water brought up by Spratchley on a tray. Miss Jackie preferred warm milk, with arrowroot wafers and the evening paper, in the lounge. Spratchley stood for a short time with each of them, hovering with what might have been asthmatical coughs of hesitation while Miss Constance tasted the formula of whisky and water and Miss Jackie sipped at the low warmth of her milk, dipping into it finally, like a child, two thin arrowroot wafers, before sucking them wetly and noisily away.
Then Spratchley, thin, with a slight hunch of the shoulders that came, perhaps, from so often holding his hands together just below his chest, and a final series of small scraping coughs that might have been mere clearings of the throat for words that never came, said good night. Miss Constance and Miss Jackie, absorbed in whisky and milk and final words to read, said good night too, not quite perfunctorily but almost, each assuming that Spratchley and daylight, both inevitable, would eventually wake them.