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Snow and Roses

Page 14

by Lettice Cooper


  “For heaven’s sake somebody give me a drink.”

  “Please don’t take any notice if the dinner isn’t very good tonight,” Miranda begged. “There’s a storm brewing.” Ludo, surprised, looked up at the clear evening sky. “Not that kind of storm. It’s Agatina. She suddenly dropped everything about two hours ago, and went to Confession.”

  “Well, that will have settled whatever the trouble was, won’t it?”

  “No. It means that she and Enrico have had a real quarrel, and she’s put herself in the right by confessing her part of it, so she’s free to take it out of Enrico.”

  “That’s the way they always go on.”

  “Oh no, Dennis, this is quite different. It’s serious. I can tell by the sound of their voices. I know that Agatina refused to cook the dinner and Enrico had to finish the lasagne. I do hope you won’t mind if neither of them has got round to the veal.”

  “So long as I can stuff myself with lasagne in peace I shan’t mind at all.”

  “There will be plenty of lasagne, but I don’t know about peace.”

  Dulcie, not too pleased at losing the centre of the stage, said with an attempt at languid sophistication,

  “If they get on so badly with each other why don’t they divorce?”

  “Darling, for heaven’s sake don’t let them hear you say anything like that! They’re absolutely devoted to each other.”

  “If they could make common cause against Dulcie,” Martin suggested, “they might be reconciled and we could have our dinner.”

  “It’s coming now.”

  Enrico emerged from the kitchen carrying a steaming dish of lasagne which he plonked on the side table.

  “You help yourselves, please.”

  He twitched off a napkin bound round his arm, and exposed a long scratch from which beads of blood were oozing.

  Martin, who hated the sight of blood, turned his head away.

  “Poor Enrico,” Miranda exclaimed. “How did you do that?”

  “I? I did not do it. You ask me who did it? It was Agatina, that strega, that dirty witch. She did it with a kitchen knife, which most likely was not clean because you know that unless I watch her all the time she is careless and dirty. I go now at once to the doctor to get anti-tetanus injection.”

  “But, Enrico, you had one a fortnight ago when you ran the skewer into your hand.”

  “Yes and whose fault was that? She left the skewer in the wrong place as she always does. No, I need another anti-tetanus injection for this.”

  “You don’t, really. They last a long time, two or three years.”

  Enrico dabbed at the scratch with the napkin. Martin muttered, “For heaven’s sake, Miranda, send him in.”

  “Anyhow I go to the doctor to get an injection for my nerves.”

  Miranda got up and patted his shoulder.

  “You come in with me, Enrico, and I will tie that up for you properly, and give you two aspirins. Then you can go to the doctor in the morning if you still want to.”

  “That will not be possible because in the morning I leave on the first bus. I go to Spoleto to my mother for a rest. Ah, my good old mother.” Enrico began to cry.

  “Come along. We’ll get the first-aid box.”

  Miranda, talking to him soothingly in her pretty Italian, led Enrico off. From the kitchen, where Agatina had probably realized the enormity of her crime, came the sound of hysterical sobbing.

  Martin and Dennis looked at each other with an approach to sympathy.

  “She’ll have to go to Confession again.”

  “I’ll toss you which of us drives her.”

  “All right, but let’s eat our dinner while we’ve got it. There may be no food at all tomorrow and lasagne is no good unless it’s hot.

  Flora lay naked and flat on her bed. It was so hot that after stripping off her blanket and sheet, she had thrown her pillows, damp with sweat, onto the floor. Mosquito bites on her arms and neck were irritating her, but she was too limp to get up and find the ointment to soothe them. Her body felt thirsty; the bottle of mineral water on her bedside table still retained a little chill from the fridge where it had been all day, but it was not that she wanted, it was Hugh, to fill her emptiness and make her feel whole again.

  As she became drowsy she drifted into a half dream, half fantasy of Dennis making love to her, but the sensation of pleasure was short-lived and immediately swamped by disappointment. She woke right up and found herself crying. She recovered a pillow from the floor, thinking perhaps that now it had had time to cool she might be able to get to sleep before it grew hot again under her neck. She was pushing it into place when she heard voices below her window. Miranda and Martin speaking in low tones, but with an emphasis that made the words perfectly clear to her.

  “Why can’t you let him alone?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Martin. I have to entertain my guests, don’t I?”

  “Yes, but not to seduce them. Nor to encourage that brat of yours to go the same way.”

  “Poor Dulcie! That really is ridiculous. The heat must have turned your brain. She’s just an adolescent in a muddle.”

  “She was making eyes at Ludo all through dinner. She had tarted herself up for him.”

  “Of course she had. Personally I was delighted to see it.”

  “Did you know that I had arranged with Ludo to go for a walk with him in the woods as soon as I had had my sleep?”

  “No, I didn’t. But you can go tomorrow.”

  “You really are the most exasperating …”

  “Hush. Don’t wake everybody.”

  They dropped their voices. Flora, still half there, began to realize that she had been eavesdropping. But it was not her fault if people talked loudly under her windows after bedtime, and she was too lazy to move.

  Miranda’s voice was incautiously raised again.

  “How you can waste your time and your affection on that spineless little nincompoop.”

  “I am sorry for Ludo.”

  “Yes, you’ve dragged him out of the station in life where he ought to be.”

  “How very old-fashioned you are! At least Ludo isn’t a vicious, possessive harpy. What are you going to do with Flora when Pauline arrives, you tell me that?”

  Miranda must have made some gesture, for the voices suddenly stopped, and there was the scrape of a chair being pushed back across the tiled floor of the loggia. In a minute or two Flora heard the faint sounds of careful movements in the house. She was beginning to feel as if she could sleep now, she turned her cheek against the pillow and her eyelids dropped.

  There was a light tap on her door, so light that she was not sure if it was one until it was repeated. She called, “Come in.”

  “It’s only me, Miranda. I looked in to see if you were asleep or if you would like some iced lemonade. It’s so hot neither Martin nor I could sleep, we’ve been sitting out on the loggia having cold drinks. I hope we didn’t disturb you?”

  “No. I heard you but you didn’t really disturb me. I was half awake, I couldn’t sleep either.”

  “You’ve been crying. I can tell by your voice.”

  “Only for a minute after a dream. It’s all right.”

  “Nothing’s all right. Martin and I have been quarrelling. He seems to think that both Dulcie and I have been trying to seduce Ludo’s affections from him. Dennis is difficult because you know when he’s here he thinks he’d like our marriage on again. Or at least I don’t know if he gets as far as thinking it but he feels it, and of course that makes him angry with me. He wouldn’t like it on again a bit really, he’s far more comfortable with Jane. Enrico broke two glasses washing up, and then left. He walked out with a little valise late in the evening. Of course there was no bus he could get at that hour, but he has friends in the village; he said he was going to sleep there and go to Spoleto first thing in the morning. He’ll come back, he always does, probably he’ll come in a couple of days, but it’s very hard work for Agatina while she’s on her
own, she might collapse.

  “And then,” her tone deepened, “Pauline. I was expecting her in a day or two. And now I just don’t know whether she’s coming at all. I don’t know why she went to Vallombrosa. I don’t know who she’s with. She knows so many people all over the place. There are parts of her life quite secret from me. Why is she at Vallombrosa? She told me she was going to drive straight down by Genoa, and Spezia and Pisa. Flora! I feel jangled all over tonight and absolutely exhausted. I couldn’t sleep if I went to my bed. Let me lie down for a little time by you.”

  “Of course.”

  Flora shifted across the bed. She smelled Miranda’s scent, her naked thigh was brushed by the flimsy stuff of Miranda’s nightgown. Miranda murmured,

  “Flora darling. Come to me.”

  With a feeling of going right back to some place where she belonged Flora let herself be drawn closely into Miranda’s arms.

  “Miranda.” Dulcie sat up and shook the damp hair off her face. “Can’t we go inside that villa? I’m sick and tired of looking at all those shutters.”

  “Of course we can, darling. The Orbini wouldn’t mind in the least. I saw Roberto working in the lower vineyards, but Silvana is sure to be around the house, she’ll unlock the rooms for us. You’d like to see it, wouldn’t you, Flora?”

  “Very much. It would be like walking through a stage backdrop, a thing I always longed to do as a child.”

  “They’ve got some beautiful things and some hideous ones. Adelmo Orbini has some taste, but Claudia! … The view from the tower is glorious, you can see the towers of San Gimignano on a clear day.”

  Flora, Miranda and Dulcie were lying in the shade of the ilex after bathing. The three men were still splashing languidly in the pool.

  “We’ll all go up to the villa as soon as they come out.”

  Dulcie protested, “Must we go in a crowd like a coach party?”

  It was at Flora, not at the bathers, that she directed her hostile glance.

  “Anyone can go who wants to.”

  Dulcie with a pettish movement rolled over and turned her back to them.

  They all wanted to go. They trooped up the steps, and drifted about between the lemon trees while Miranda went round to the back to find the caretaker.

  Flora leaned on the balustrade looking down into the valley. The murmuring sounds, the lights and shadows of the beautiful countryside suffused her with a happiness that did not belong only to them. To be able to love somebody again was solace and fulfilment.

  Martin came and leaned on the balustrade beside her.

  “I had a letter from Lalage this morning; forwarded from All Souls. She shot an arrow into the air, she doesn’t know where I am nor where you are. She wonders if you are still with my sister. She hasn’t got the address. She’s worried, she says something seems to have gone wrong between you, do I know anything about it? She really means: Have I given her away to you; in fact she’s probably realized by now that I must have. She knows perfectly well that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would, and that I’m in the first ten of them. Isn’t it time that you stopped making a mountain out of a ridiculous mouse and sent her a pretty postcard?”

  “That’s up to me.”

  “Not only. Lalage and I are in it too.”

  Old affection and habit were strong enough to make Flora feel pleased that he was identifying himself with Lalage, almost pleading for her, and her own relaxed tensions took a good deal of the sting out of the past.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t think you could keep it up much longer. Blame me if you like. Lalage did it to please me.”

  “That’s something I would never do.”

  “I know. One reason why I like you. But then again it’s for the opposite reason that I like Lalage. Do you know what she thinks, poor girl? She thinks that one day I shall be old and crotchety and the pretty ladies will be tired of me, and I shall be tired of the pretty boys, but she will still be there.”

  “I hope she won’t. She’s much too good to spend her life waiting till nobody else can stand you.”

  Martin laughed. At this point Dennis, who felt that he was being left out, invited Flora to come and look at a toad that had managed to climb up and over the rim of one of the tall lemon jars.

  Miranda returned with Silvana, a brown, rosy, plump young woman, clearly delighted at the prospect of having company, even for an hour. It was very quiet, she said, when the family did not come in July and August, but of course their other villa was near the sea, so it was better for the children after being in Rome all the summer, poor little ones.

  She unlocked the big front doors, and led them through. Flora saw that the Villa Orbini, which from the pool below had looked like a solid block, was built round a quadrangle. Pillars made a cloister walk on three sides of the square, their vaulted roof supported part of the upper storey.

  In the middle of the quadrangle a fountain, shaped like a dolphin, curved over a shallow, stone-rimmed basin, but the basin was dry, the fountain not playing. Sunlight trapped in the quadrangle made it so hot that Dulcie when she ran across to examine the dolphin, exclaimed, and scuttled back into the shade.

  Silvana unlocked the door of the long salone that ran all down one side of the villa. It was shuttered and dark, deliciously cool after the burning heat outside. Silvana’s sandals made a flapping sound on the polished floor as she crossed the salone, ran the curtains back, and unbolted the shutters until light searched every corner of the long room. Except for the vaulting of the ceiling, it was not, Flora thought, beautiful. There was too much yellow brocade, too many big jars of totally undistinguished china, too many inconsiderable pictures crowding together on the walls, and too many glass-topped cases, so that the whole effect was of a museum that had been stuffed with anything that came handy. She walked across to one of the tall windows to look at her beloved valley from the other side.

  Dulcie took a slide along the shining floor.

  “Oh don’t, Dulcie. Your sandals are probably damp. Silvana will have to polish it all again.”

  “Non far niente,” Silvana smiled. “My bambino, my little boy likes to do it too.”

  This effectually stopped Dulcie, who did not care to be compared to anything young enough to be called a bambino.

  “Lucky for the Orbini there are no squatters about here,” Dennis observed. Dulcie swung round on him.

  “There ought to be. Of course there ought to be. People who own a large empty house like this that they never use ought to let other people have it. They could put several poor families in here, couldn’t they, Ludo?”

  Ludo laughed uneasily as he did at any suggestion of controversy. Martin eyed his niece distastefully.

  “Dulcie, I hope you are not going in for egalitarianism, one of the most obvious forms of sentimentality.”

  “You often call things that ordinary decent people think sentimental.”

  “They often are.”

  “I don’t see it’s sentimental to want a huge place like this to be some good to somebody, when a lot of families with children haven’t got anywhere to live. You were all talking last night about how poor the people in the South of Italy are. I know you only minded because you thought it gave the Communists a better chance, but …”

  “You don’t yet appear to understand that there can be more than one motive for any action. You also don’t understand that if a dozen poor peasant families from Calabria were put into this house they would be very unhappy and would walk out after six weeks.”

  “How can you tell? Has anybody tried?”

  Dennis, who embraced any opportunity of disagreeing with Martin, came to her support.

  “Dulcie may be right. I do myself slightly resent one family having all these houses in these inflationary times when God knows it’s hard enough to keep one going.”

  “Don’t you realize that everything of quality and taste is being threatened by envy—your kind of envy?”
r />   “I don’t envy the Orbini if that’s what you’re saying. You don’t suppose I should want to live in this isolation, or in a place of this size?”

  “You do, all the same, resent the Orbini having it, and if that isn’t envy …”

  “Martin,” Miranda looked round from a case she was bending over at the side of the room, “come and look at these enamels.”

  Dennis glared resentfully at Martin’s back as he stooped over the case; Miranda had not called him to look at the enamels.

  “You mustn’t believe everything your uncle says about that sort of thing, Dulcie. In some ways he’s very reactionary.”

  “Oh, I don’t take any notice of what he says, ever. I think he bosses Ludo too much. It’s pretty boring in here, isn’t it?”

  “I thought it was you who wanted to come.”

  “I just wanted to see what it was like inside and now I have seen. Ludo! Come with me and let’s look for the staircase up to the tower.”

  Ludo, who was not in the least interested in rooms, furniture, pictures or objets, was quite ready to go with her. Flora soon heard their footsteps scampering overhead.

  Martin turned round from the case.

  “Ludo!”

  “He’s gone with Dulcie to find the tower.”

  “I wanted him to see these.”

  Miranda made an impatient movement.

  “Leave him alone, Martin. He doesn’t care for this sort of thing and never will. What’s the sense of bothering him about it?”

  “Are you suggesting that nobody can ever learn?”

  “No. Only that some people can’t learn some things. But call Ludo down if you want him.”

  Miranda turned away from him, came across to Flora and put an arm caressingly round her.

  “I feel today that Martin and Ludo and Dulcie and Dennis have all stayed long enough. It will be very nice when they all move on and you and I are alone together again.”

  “But isn’t Pauline coming?”

  “I don’t know. I daresay not. She’s quite unpredictable. I don’t know who she is with at Vallombrosa, and she might go on with whoever they are to Greece or Turkey or China for all I know. Never mind, we shall be perfectly happy without her. Let’s go upstairs and look at the bedrooms.”

 

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