by Ann Bridge
“Child! Not on the stone! You will get piles!” the old lady cried again.
“Bonne-Mama, you are incorrigible!” Suzy said lazily; “Take my cushion, Marietta—I have the hammock.” She moved slowly over and arranged herself in the gay striped affair, her full skirts flowing over the edge, showing hints of filmy lace petticoat, her little cream shoes poised above the fringe.
“Well child, and how are you?” the old lady asked.
“Oh Bonne-Mama, I am so impatient for Miss Prestwich to come! I did so want to go with the carriage and meet her, but Mama said not,” said the girl, with the easy confidence which she always used to her Grandmother; they understood one another perfectly, these two.
“She could not go alone, Bonne-Mama, and I really could not rise at that hour,” said Suzy. “It was quite unnecessary, also.”
“You are always impatient, Marietta, and your mother never—at least never before lunch!” said the old lady, with a touch of mischief. Suzy laughed, but with a slight effort— she always found it easier to get on with her Mother-in-law when Marietta was not there—the old Marchesa doted quite absurdly on the child, would have spoilt her utterly, left to herself.
“Yes, I am impatient about her,” the girl said eagerly, “I want to see her. I look forward so to having a governess! I shall learn so much.”
“And what do you want to learn?” the old lady asked, still fondling her hand.
“Languages!” Marietta replied promptly. “I shall learn to read Shakespeare in English, and Goethe in German!”
“Your great-grandmother, my Mother, could read English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. But she always rose at seven!” said the old lady, pretending to whisper. Marietta giggled. “Senta, Suzy,” the old Marchesa went on, “of what age is this Miss Prestwich?”
“I have no idea, Bonne-Mama. Whatever age governesses are,” replied Suzy casually, putting down a foot and making the hammock swing a little. She knew that her mother-in-law thought this undignified—it was her reply to the early rising great grandmother. “Lydia Asquini wrote that she was in every way suitable, and I asked no more. She has studied at Oxford, so she must be very well educated.”
The old Marchesa disapproved of women going to college to be educated, and said so. Governesses at home, masters and classes, perhaps, in Rome, were all that was required for the most ample female education. Marietta and the Marchesa Suzy had to listen to a long account of various accomplished women whom the old Marchesa had known. Suzy hardly heard. She lay smoking another tiny Russian cigarette, and thinking about Nadia, Pipo’s wife, and her troubles. Marietta listened politely, but with one ear open for sounds of a carriage on the road behind the house—one could just hear it, from the terrace. She would have liked to look at her watch, but that would not have been polite—also, with only one hand free it would not be easy, since the watch, suspended from a long gold chain, was buttoned into a tiny pocket on the breast of her white piqué blouse. It was with a sense of release that she caught sight of two figures coming round the eastern wing of the house. “There are Elena and Giulio!” she exclaimed, and sprang up to meet them.
Chapter Five
La Vecchia Marchesa watched the three cousins benevolently as they came strolling along the terrace, Marietta and Elena arm-in-arm and chattering like birds, Giulio looking quite animated. Suzy observed him with raised eyebrows and an air of indolent amusement. She knew quite well that he disliked her, but though this surprised her a little, she never bothered as to the reason, and she was both too lazy and too good-tempered to dislike him in return. The ill opinion of a bookish boy did no harm to anyone. She was however quite prepared to tease him.
“Well, Giulio, this is an unwonted pleasure,” she observed, holding out a white and much-ringed hand to be kissed as he approached her. “I thought you always studied all the morning.”
“Not always, Zia Suzy,” Giulio replied, obediently kissing the hand. “Come sta?”
“He’s come to catch sight of Marietta’s governess, Zia Suzy,” Elena observed mischievously. “Because she has been at Oxford, where the philosophers come from, he hopes she will be a philosopher too!”
“She will be a rather unusual governess if she is,” Suzy said.
“On the contrary, my dear Suzy, I think governesses are a race of philosophers—they certainly need to be,” said the old Marchesa. “Giulio! do not sit on the stone! You will get piles. Bring a chair—and one for your sister.”
“He wants her to teach him English,” Elena chattered on, while Giulio fetched a couple of chairs from under the ilex— she was in tearing spirits, as usual. “Shall you mind if he does lessons with Marietta, Zia Suzy? Because that is his idea!”
Giulio was at once upset by this unveiling of his secret plans. “Idiot!” he muttered to his sister as he set down the chairs. “Zia Suzy, I hope you do not believe—” he began, and paused, at a loss how to finish, since this was so very like what he did wish.
“My dear Giulio, if Miss Prestwich can be of any service to you in her spare time, of course I shall be delighted,” the young Marchesa said smoothly.
Marietta intervened. She saw that Giulio was vexed, and she hated him to be vexed. “Giulio, come round to the torrino and let us watch for the carriage,” she said; “Come on.”
The torrino was a small stone turret, once a part of the earlier castle, which had occupied a site far larger than the present house—it stood some hundred yards away from it, on the opposite side of the building, beyond the eastern wing. The broken masonry had been repaired, a roof put on, and stone seats placed inside, making a sort of small summer-house. It overhung the road, which wound up the hill some sixty feet below; to reach the front door of the house the visitor must either ascend several long flights of stone steps, flanked by cypresses, which rose up from a small gate with a wrought iron grille in the wall at the foot of the slope, or else follow the road round the shoulder of the hill right up into the village of Vill’ Alta itself, with its gaudy-fronted white church and ancient elm-tree—and from there double back along the level, through the great entrance-gates, with the carved stone castles surmounting each pillar, and along the wide terrace which stretched past the whole south front of the house, with its bright formal flower-beds set among the raked gravel, and its carved stone balustrade surmounted with classical statues standing out white against the darkness of the trees which grew on the slope below. Marietta and Giulio, passing through the house, emerged onto this terrace, and walked across it to the eastern end, where a second small flight of steps led down to a path which wound its way through ilexes and olive-trees, up to the jutting rock on which the summer-house stood. A stone Venus and a stone Mars, one on each side, guarded the top of these steps —the Venus, with a provocative simper, stretched protective hands across her person. As he passed the last flower-bed Giulio stooped and picked some scarlet geraniums, and going up to the Venus, with a derisive scowl, he stuck the flowers behind her long tapering stone fingers,—the effect was at once ludicrous, and extraordinarily indecent. Marietta laughed.
“Giulio, you are silly!”
“That makes her look the fool she is,” he retorted. “Stupid creature! I hate her.”
“Povera Venere! Why?”
He did not attempt to tell her why he hated the Venus, with her feeble unintelligent suggestiveness—he left the scarlet mockery of the flowers on the silly stone, and went on down the steps into the damp coolness of the trees. He probably could not have explained, even if he had wished to, the shivering contemptuous dislike which any reminder of the feminine aspect of sex aroused in him. Zia Suzy’s perfumes, her lazy use of her eyes, and indolent alluring attitudes, the blatant false modesty of the stone Venus—they were all part of the same thing, a thing which he felt was the enemy of the world as he wanted it. It was not that he was shocked by sex, as young Englishmen often are—indecency rather amused him than otherwise, and he shared the admirable naturalness of his race, which regards the human body a
s rather a good joke, or at least as the source of innumerable good jokes; it was more that he felt vengeful towards the female principle, as the foe of the ascetic idealism by which he wished to live. Walking up to the summer-house to watch for the carriage, still irritated by Elena’s indiscretion, his mind turned with relief to the picture he had formed of the woman whom the carriage was bringing—the governess, middle-aged and wise, in whom the female principle was subordinated to learning and goodness, as it was in Fräulein Gelsicher. Only with more learning than Gelosia had. She would be restful and helpful, as such women alone were.
Marietta followed him. She was quite accustomed to having her questions to Giulio left unanswered, and having to think out the replies to them for herself—weeks afterwards, some chance word of his, often addressed to someone else, would tell her whether she had guessed right or not. Marietta spent a very high proportion of her time in thinking about Giulio. He was one of the few people who were as important to her as trees and views, and rather in the same remote way. His ideas and his opinions had for her now a value, an importance that those of no other human being possessed; places, paths, seats, loved for themselves, took on a precious quality that was like holiness when some memory of Giulio attached to them. So far Marietta had two great loves in her life—Vill’ Alta and her cousin Giulio. She loved, with a child’s wistful passion, all the external aspects of her home, clinging to them with youth’s haunting desire for permanence; any alteration was agony to her, she mourned a tree cut down as women mourn a lost child. All the winter, in Rome, where the bright golden light beat on the warm golden buildings, she was home sick for Vill’ Alta; walking in the Pincio gardens, she looked wistfully at the unfamiliar beautiful ilexes and stone pines, and longed for the known identifiable shapes of the trees at home —the triple ilex on the northern terrace, the irregular rising ranks of the cypresses beside the southern steps, the gnarled olives round the torrino, the squat umbrella pines on the grassy ridge along which one walked to Odredo. The homesick child wrote poems about them—bad, exaggerated little poems, which nevertheless had this surprising quality: that she used the language of a lover heartsick with absence towards her distant home—the grey house, sunrise through the olives, the heart-lifting nearness of the mountains on a day of clear wind.
Within the last year her feeling for Giulio had become less a rival to than an extension of this passion—the two were linked, since it was only at Vill’ Alta that she saw Giulio. It is hardly possible to find words to put down secretly and delicately enough the first stirring of love in a young girl— grave, distant, shy and yet intense, a selfless strange enchantment, fed on music, on poetry, on the shape and name of beauty; asking nothing but its own secret life of memory and anticipation; as moving and as remote from actualities as the song of birds. Then, to be spoken to is to be honoured; to serve, a rapturous privilege; to be alone in his company a silencing delight.
Marietta however knew Giulio too well to be readily silenced by his presence, and at the moment her desire to soothe him was stronger than any other feeling. Sitting there, hanging out over the road to watch for the carriage, she said:
“Elena is a tease. But you heard what Mama said.”
“Elena is idiotic!” Giulio returned, kicking his heels moodily against the stone wall. “She has no idea of what will go and what won’t.”
“But Mama didn’t mind. She said you could work with her. So that is all right, Giulio. It is arranged!” she said earnestly, pushing her grave little face forward to gaze into his, willing him to be reassured and happy. “I shall not do so many lessons, and I shall explain to Miss Prestwich about you.”
“She may have her own ideas about your lessons! But teachers usually like to teach,” he said, thoughtfully, “and perhaps Gela could coax Papa to let her have a fee, if she does much. I wonder what books she will bring?”
They discussed, in an ignorance as complete as hers about them, what books the unknown Miss Prestwich was likely to bring, and gradually Giulio’s spirits rose again, and he began to talk of his ambitions and his difficulties. “You see, Marietta, here it is impossible for me. I can read, but I have no one to ask for explanations. And if I write, there is no one to tell me whether I write sense or not.”
“Do you write, Giulio? What sort of writing? Poems?”
“Not poems!” His gesture brushed poetry aside. “No, I try to express ideas that I get, from my reading, or from something I see. I suppose you would call them essays.”
“Shall you publish them?” Marietta asked eagerly. To her to see her writing in print, over her own name, was an unattainable heaven into which she never hoped to enter.
“I did publish one,” Giulio said, half proudly and half nervously, “in a Milan magazine. Roffredo knew the editor and got it in for me. But you must not tell anyone that, Marietta.”
“I shall not, I shall not! But Giulio, how wonderful! What was it about?”
“It was called ‘Dancing and Life’—it was about how people speak and act in a ball-room, and how they act, those same people, the next day or the day before, with their maid, with the bailiff, with their families. It came into my head after Zia Suzy’s big dance here last year. But the idea was, What is the reality of these people’s lives—the ball-room part or the other part? You see,” Giulio pursued, “usually people would say the normal was the most real, and the dancing part unreal. And for many people perhaps it is so. But for others, it seemed to me, only in the ball-room do they become their most real selves.”
He stopped—he had really been thinking about her Mother, and did not care to tell her so. Marietta puckered her dark brows in thought over this.
“Yes—for some that could be so, perhaps. And for others, when they are seeing certain things. Giulio, do you know, this idea of yours is very important!”
“You think so?” he said seriously, surprised and pleased by her response. For such a child she was very sensible and quick, he thought.
“Ma si! One must know when one is most one’s real self, or how can one live properly? At least some of the time, one must be being one’s real self, or it is such a waste.”
She spoke with intense conviction. Giulio was astonished at this fervent echo of his own feelings, coming from his little cousin. He looked at her, sitting there, her black plait swinging over her school-girlish blouse, her long black legs dangling under her short skirt; her face was alight with comprehension, the thing he always longed for, and usually so vainly. In a burst of expansiveness, released by her sympathy, he said—”You do understand that, Marietta. But how many people don’t!” He paused. “Elena, for instance.”
“Elena is most herself when she is writing those wicked letters!” Marietta said, with a sudden little grin which made her look girlish again. But then a dreamy seriousness replaced the grin on her small face. This was being wonderful, this talk with Giulio. To be made the sharer of his secrets, to be praised by him for understanding what others failed to understand—what could be more wonderful? This was the height of happiness. “When do you feel most your real self?” she asked him, anxious to prolong the talk, to learn more: “Reading? or when you are writing something?”
Giulio was not sure—and while he argued it out with himself aloud, the girl sat in supreme contentment, her elbow on the back of the stone seat, her chin cupped in her hand, staring out with absent eyes over the flatter country to the South, which was becoming steadily more colourless and indistinct in the noonday heat and haze—nodding her head now and then in emphatic comprehension. She had actually forgotten about the new governess, so absorbed was she in Giulio’s ideas and plans, and when a cloud of white dust began to boil up through the trees at the foot of the hill, where the road wound round the corner, it was a moment or two before she paid any attention to it. Down there the trees hid the road itself, but below them it became visible; noticing the dust at last, Marietta twisted round and craned out over the parapet, to catch the first glimpse of the advancing vehicle. Yes, th
ere were the fat white horses, with yellow sweat-stains down their necks and flanks, and the straw Homburg hat of Tommaso, the equally fat coachman, foreshortened by the angle from which she saw him. “Giulio! Here she is!” the girl said, in a low excited tone. “Here is the carriage!”
Giulio came and craned out too, over her shoulder. Thoughdessly, he put a hand on the parapet on each side of her, so that his arms enclosed her; she could just feel the light pressure of his suit against her arm and back—the careless intimacy of the position made her shiver a little. But Giulio was gazing at the carriage. There was little to reward his scrutiny. Tommaso had thoughtfully taken one of the driving sunshades, a plain affair of natural shantung silk lined with green, and Miss Prestwich had put it up; the summer carriage rug, of striped green and fawn linen, with fringed ends, was spread over her knees—so that all that the watchers from above could see was a circle of fawn above a patch of stripes, with one dark-blue arm, and a hand in a brown suède glove, projecting onto the striped lap. Nevertheless, they watched the carriage in its slow progress up the hill with grave attention. Giulio, who had a natural gift for the portentous, spoke at last. “There goes someone who is going to make a great difference to our lives, yours and mine, Marietta,” he said solemnly. Marietta nodded in silence. The solemn remark was truer than either of them knew.
But Marietta, even at the most solemn moments, had always an eye to the practical. With a quick movement, now, she wriggled out backwards from between Giulio’s propped arms, and stood up. “Giulio! Should we not go down to meet her at the little gate, and bring her up? It is prettier that way—and it will be more welcoming, no?”
Giulio too straightened himself. “Yes, but quick, or we shan’t be in time.” They set off along the little path, took a short cut through the bushes, cascaded together down the long flights of steps under the cypresses like two dogs chasing the same ball, and reached the small gate just as the carriage drew level with it. So it happened that Almina Prestwich, who ever since Tommaso pointed out the rather grim bulk of Vill’ Alta among its cypresses on the hill, had been sitting under the sunshade in the corner of the victoria, hot, thirsty and nervous, bracing herself to encounter a majestic Marchesa, as grey and grim as the house, now found herself confronted by a boy and girl, flushed, laughing, breathless and extremely untidy, who tugged together at a small wrought-iron gate in a wall. The gate had sagged on its hinges, and always stuck a little; when it opened, it did so with a jerk, and the whine of iron on stone. This happened now, and the pair came hurrying through. “Here is the signorina inglese!” said Tommaso, beaming, by way of introduction. But at the sight of the figure in the carriage, small and slight, in a navy-blue coat and skirt and a broad-brimmed sailor hat, the two eager creatures checked, in the plainest astonishment. Only for a moment—then the girl sprang forward, made a little quick curtsey, and seizing Almina by the hand cried—”Oh, you are young! But that is lovely! I expect I should have loved you anyhow, as Elena does Gela; but now that you are young, of course I shall!”