The Marchesa too had risen. “Mr. Craine,” she asked, “you will consider my plan?”
“I’m afraid not.” Without being aware of it, he smiled at her as one might smile at the quaintness of a child. She was inconsequent; it was for Jill that she had sent; and yet now – simply, it seemed, because the Craines were revealed as having acted in innocence – she wanted Jill kept out, wanted Jill absurdly and monstrously deceived. It struck him that her second thought in the matter wasn’t perhaps after all a consequence of her discovery of that innocence; it represented in her a more settled disposition than her impulsive cable had done. Yes, that’s it – Craine said to himself still smiling – that’s exactly it. The old lady doesn’t, at the pinch, really want to share that poor chap upstairs with any other woman. But she wouldn’t mind sharing him with me. “I’m afraid not,” he repeated “In fact I shall explain the situation to my wife this evening.” He said this as flatly in the English manner as he could contrive. And he gave the words “my wife” no air of asserting a claim; they represented a mere common- sense of linguistic usage. “She will no doubt want to come over tomorrow. I hope that will be convenient to you?”
The Marchesa acquiesced with a bow. She didn’t like being crossed, but he suspected that she didn’t wholly detest his manner of doing it. “I am seldom engaged,” she said dryly. “Later, it is true, I shall be a little taken up with my removal.”
Craine uttered his hopes that this impending event would not prove too fatiguing; he added a few sentences on the pleasures and conveniences of living on the outskirts of Florence. These were civilities that echoed nothing very urgent in his mind. But he’d be a little failing, he thought, in the matter of showing the flag, if he didn’t take his leave with some regard to a code. And the old lady accepted his words as constituting the entirely proper concluding note.
His last impression was almost his strangest, and it came to him simply from the reserve into which she withdrew as she said good-bye. He had made – totally unlikely as it seemed, he had made – a hit with the Marchesa. But it was a hit which a great deal in her disapproved of. She might be returning to her earlier attitude long before he left the last of Castelarbia’s fifty-one farms behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jill was still asleep when Craine woke up next morning; was sound asleep despite the racket that had brought him awake with a jerk.
He got out of bed and went over to the window. It wasn’t cosy in the hotel bedroom, and it must be chilly outside. Perhaps it was simply to warm himself up for his day’s work that the man Craine now looked down at was belabouring his horse with a shovel. It was the sound of these blows, and the man’s angry shouts, and the rattle of the cart-wheels on rubble as the horse backed and swerved, that made the racket – a racket reverberating from the great blank wall of San Francesco against which these primitive excavations were going on.
There was a further – this time a mechanical – clamour. Two men appeared to be engaged on the modest task of undermining the church. The second had a motor-tricycle with a barrow hitched behind; he had backed this into the courtyard with a roar, and at once – having no horse to discipline – fallen to work with a pick. He was already stripped to the waist, and his back was glistening. The men worked side by side, ignoring each other. They were rival contractors, employed, it seemed, to demolish and carry away by a sort of ant-like effort the very foundations upon which were reared, in the dimness of the building beyond, Piero’s majestic evocation of the history of the True Cross.
Of course nothing dramatic was actually happening. The foundations of San Francesco went fathoms deeper than all this feverish scratching – which would be in the interest of leaning a new garage or cinema against so admirably massive a rampart of stone. The men worked with a strong concentrated energy that Craine could feel in his own muscles. The second man filled his barrow, flung himself across the saddle of his tricycle, kicked the engine into life again and vanished in pandemonium and dust. The first man worked on; he had a bigger cart which it took him longer to fill. He exacted as much from himself as from his miserable animal; he was paid, no doubt, according to the weight of what he shifted, and if short on his day’s stint might himself be flailed at home by a desperate wife with children to feed. Certainly at the moment the horse was having the best of it, nuzzling in a meagre nosebag with no sign of apprehensiveness. From beating to beating the creature carried, conceivably, no more than a dim sense that the universe has its unkindly moments. In humans, Craine thought, we call that displaying a good nervous tone. It’s how one gets along – more or less ignoring or forgetting until the great shovel is again about one’s head and flanks.
Against the side of San Francesco a rope quivered and flapped. High up, what looked a very small bell wagged in its belfry. The brazen syllables tumbled briefly, hastily on top of each other; they meant something to the monks; but the man with the shovel laboured on. Craine turned round. Jill was awake.
She smiled at him through a sleepy grimace from the farther bed. Everything became her, he thought. Once you had realised it, her beauty would hold you, were she in the middle of sweeping a chimney. And it was a beauty that would shine out in sorrow and be more precious in pain.
He saw her shoulders move, and he knew that she was stretching out her limbs beneath the bed-clothes. Then her body went still, and he could see the pupils of her eyes contract. He felt his heart contract as if through some organic link with them. For he understood. It was the moment of recollection – the strangely unfair moment at which the awakening mind has to accept, again and anew yet with a special quality of suffering that haunts this hither fringe of sleep, some deprivation, some burden, upon which only dreamless nights will henceforth have any power to scatter the poppy. You could put it that way. You could put it – quite brutally – that he was watching the instant in which she became aware again of the raised shovel.
He was about to speak – heaven knew to what sombre effect – when she forestalled him with three or four murmured words. She was still smiling – as a married woman will smile at her own innocent prescriptive call to love. Her smile belonged with the fact of their having been married a thousand years. But when he went over to her, jumping over his own bed like a boy, it was rather swiftly that she put out her arms to him.
They had been cautious the night before – tacitly agreeing to turn out the light on unresolved bewilderment. She hadn’t, after the single strange cry his news had drawn from her, moved towards anything that could be called decision or even exploration. And this, he realised, was right. He’d have been shocked if she’d said, “This makes no difference to us” – as shocked as if, on the other hand, she’d promptly packed a bag and said good-bye. It isn’t in every situation that the heart can speak at once, and in some a ready word is likely to be a shallow one.
Her reserve – he’d said to himself in the small hours – was of the kind she’d have maintained in any crisis. It went with the breeding – as aristocratic as Marchesa Forni’s – that she’d received in the paradoxical democracy he’d found her in. She’d maintain it, for instance, were one of the children suddenly taken to hospital, and the two of them left waiting with reason to fear a dire diagnosis.
But no – he’d then gone on, as he turned with due caution on his pillow – there really wasn’t much of an analogy in that. Or, if there was, it was only to the extent of their holding in common, in the one case as the other, emotion they must both repress. With the sick child it would be fear. But now, to put it mildly, the situation was less simple. In each of them it must arouse a complex of emotions, only parts of which overlapped. And the elements even of what they thus had together might be so difficult to give a name to that there would be folly in not acknowledging the need to wait for them with a strained ear. Which didn’t mean that it wasn’t a good idea to go to sleep – and Jill’s being asleep while he lay sleepless he simply took as an exemplification of what he liked to acknowledge as her generally superior
talent for life. That sort of ear didn’t go off duty while one slept; it sometimes became hypersensitive then.
But Jill hadn’t wakened up and announced any clarification; she had wakened up and called him into her bed. Perhaps that was a clarification. Yet he suspected that it just wasn’t – and that there would be naivity as well as arrogance in supposing the contrary. And now, when he had picked up the telephone and ordered coffee and pannini from the camariera at the other end of it, he felt that his vigil had put him ahead after all. He could, in fact, name something. He could name a response which John Arnander’s resurrection had elicited alike in Jill and in himself – a response, an element, which, however obscure now and subsidiary to other emotions, would in both of them play its part in any explosion that the affair was fated to produce. He could name it, although to name it was perhaps scarcely to understand it. It was excitement.
Perhaps there was no need to distrust this feeling as much as he found himself doing. It might be called, in either of them, a biologically healthy response to their new situation. When anything firm comes unstuck, when the static turns fluid, when not the sun but a question- mark sails up over the horizon one day; then this undertone of excitement – distinguishably pleasurable even if what one largely faces is calamity – represents simply the wholesome knowledge that one isn’t dead, that one has powers to call up and perhaps even quite surprising possibilities to explore. And now, through whatever labyrinth of feeling he and Jill must follow their several threads
“Do you think he’ll see me?”
He had been clearing a table for the tray that would be brought in. Now he turned round. Jill was lying back in bed with her eyes shut, and her face suggested so gentle a repose in their recent moment that it was difficult to believe she could be feeling forward into the future at all. But, as he was thinking this, her eyes opened and she looked at him in a way he could interpret at once. She was experiencing her affectionate amusement at his ruminative way of going to work on whatever confronted him. He had a second’s irritation in which he said, “He certainly won’t see you.”
“You know I don’t mean that. Why should he want to start bothering with me again? He made up his mind, it seems, long ago. About me, and Tim, and an unborn child. Why should he want to see me? He’ll send down a message – by that old woman.”
“I think that’s very unlikely.” He paused, because there was a knock at the door and their breakfast was brought in. He remained silent until he had poured out a cup of coffee and carried it to her. “I didn’t feel he was antagonistic.”
“You chatted about me?”
It would have been fatuous to tell her she was upset. But her words showed him a new dimension of the thing. As far as he was concerned, John Arnander had simply come alive. But for Jill he had not merely done that; he had revealed himself as once having decided to sham dead. “No,” he said. “We didn’t mention you – as I thought I’d made clear last night. I simply tried to tell him a little about Tim and Charles. That seemed the best way in. And all that happened was that his interest just stirred. He’s in a queer way, but I don’t think he’s in the least mad. And I didn’t, as I say, feel any current of hostility in him.”
“So you feel that, if I try hard, I may just stir his interest too?”
He was suddenly very much troubled, for he had caught himself tumbling into the feeling that she was being horribly perverse. And yet the truth was as formidable. For he saw what it was from which she had been taking refuge in him ten minutes ago; it was her sense of bitter humiliation at having once been let pass, without word or sign, out of John Arnander’s life. “I don’t know,” he said, “what he will feel about you. But you’re going to find out.”
“Whether he’ll be prepared to forgive and forget. More coffee, please.” She watched him pour it. “The bastard,” she said.
He set down the coffee-pot abruptly. The mere word had startled him – rather as it would have done if suddenly used by a bishop about a contumacious curate. His mind even tried to take it literally – in its application, say, to one of his own children. Jill hadn’t given it any accent to stagger him. She hadn’t attached it to Arnander as a covert term of indulgence or endearment. She meant it – or thought she did. But – just as a bit of vocabulary – it didn’t belong to her. He remembered how, when the Marchesa’s cable had come, she’d dropped in an instant into what wasn’t her, what wasn’t their, tone. No doubt Arnander talked about bastards – and used, when talking to women, any words that came into his head. Plenty of perfectly decent men did, and Craine had no particular notion that it was nicer to be more refined. But they had a habit, the two of them, and when Jill came out with the statement that Arnander was a bastard she was in fact dipping back into Arnander’s world. “You’ll have to find out,” he repeated. “What he feels about you, and what you feel about him.”
“Clearly.”
“And whether you mean much or little, either way, by talk of forgiving and forgetting.”
“He let me down—didn’t he?—going to earth without a word. I mourned him – in hard desolate fact and not just by convention. Do you realise that I even visited what they told me was his grave? What he did was a bloody thing to do.”
It was certainly that, Craine thought. “Yes,” he said, “it was bloody, all right.”
For a moment Jill looked surprised, much as if he had produced this summary unprompted. “He’d have called it that,” she said, “John would. If he’d heard of it, I mean, in any other man. He was unsatisfactory, but I never found him lost to decency.”
“Not many people are that.”
“After all, he had children: Tim born and Charles coming. That’s what makes it seem so utterly strange to me.”
“It certainly increased the responsibilities he was deciding to evade.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. There’s something natural in a man’s walking out on a woman. When a man flies off the handle that way, there’s an obvious centrifugal force at work. There’s the tug of another woman – or just other women – whom he hasn’t had. It’s primitive – but there the excitement is.”
“The excitement?” Craine put down his coffee-cup.
“Yes. But as a man walks about the streets, or works in his garden or lies in his bath, he isn’t liable to be prompted, from deep within himself, to the notion that it would be fun to take over his neighbour’s children. That’s one direction in which Nature doesn’t set promiscuity working. There wouldn’t be any society if it did.”
Craine said nothing. He walked to the window and looked out again. The man with the horse and cart had tied a handkerchief round his head and was labouring on – was acknowledging, you might say, the burden of fatherhood in the sweat of his brow. And John Arnander hadn’t acknowledged it. Jill’s deepest feeling was of that. She had given him sons and he had turned away from them. It was that – it wasn’t his having turned away from her after heaven knew what woman or women in those obscure disastrous months – that she believed she couldn’t forgive.
He turned back into the room. It was his urgent impulse, for her sake and, as he instinctively knew, for his own, to get some of this bitterness dissipated. “Look,” he said. “There’s something you must face. Arnander’s is, was, a special case.”
“What do you mean – a special case? We’re talking, surely, about quite damnably universal things.”
“He’s a powerful painter – a very great artist. That’s a cardinal fact.”
“To hell with art.” Suddenly, and not wholly to his astonishment, she blazed out at him. “You’re always paddling around in art, Rupert. But, for God’s sake, don’t start splashing me with it now.” She sprang out of bed and strode to the wash-basin, as if her one concern was to get into a fit state to leave the room. Then she turned and came towards him, with tears in her eyes. “We’ve had this for just twelve hours,” she said, “and already it’s made a bitch of me.”
“Rubbish. And of course yo
u’ve had enough art. It’s a deplorable habit of mine – collecting it and staring at it and talking about it. I’ll quit. We’ll have nothing at Pinn but prints of foxhunts and steeplechases, and daguerreotypes of great-uncles and aunts.”
She laughed, rather uncertainly, and began to dress. “Tell me what you were meaning,” she said. “Although, of course, I know.”
“You took him on. You knew what he was – an obsessed and compelled artist – and you took him on. Of course it isn’t true that artists are inescapably prompted to let their fleshly children starve while they labour to beget nurslings of immortality on their canvas. That’s no doubt vulgar twaddle. Still, when a man has that sort of creative temperament, and bows to it, there are certain to be very special strains upon his marriage and upon all that naturally flows from it.” He hesitated. “You may find this infuriating too.”
“Bits of the address that, unfortunately, the parson didn’t deliver at my first wedding.” Jill’s head emerged from the dress into which she was scrambling. “Of course your mind’s beginning to move down the right lines, Rupert. It always does.” She pulled down a zip, and put her hands to her hair. “Just to look at you makes the world seem manageable for a while. And nothing else does. I’ll always, you know, be quite, quite clear about that. Now, go on.”
“It should be easier to forgive him for letting you down, and yourself for letting him down . . . “
“You know about my feeling that? I must always have felt it – and yet I never quite fully knew that I felt it, until last night.”
“Quite so. It’s part of the devil of the whole business. And if all the regrets are to be got into a proper proportion”—although he didn’t pause, he heard her give a little sigh, as of helpless satisfaction, at the banal phrase—”you have to remember that it was a hazardous sort of marriage. And that’s not a disparagement. It’s a fact.”
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