Julie washed the dishes, and Lilian dried them. The Marchants, waving, had disappeared with Spot in their car, shortly after lunch. Ben had gone out to work in the garden (“Before the rain comes,” Julie said, although there was no sign of rain ) . In the sun outside the kitchen window, Simon slept in his pram.
“Is he warm enough there?” Lilian asked.
Julie looked up, her hands in the sink. “Oh, don’t you think so?” she asked anxiously, alarming Lilian, who had expected a confident reassurance.
“It’s beginning to get chilly,” she said. Together, they looked uncertainly at the strip of sunshine on the grass Their shoulders touched.
“Oh, God!” shouted Ben from the garden. He crossed rapidly in front of the kitchen window and came in at the back door, a bundle of drooping plants in his hands. “Julia,” he said, using her full name to emphasize his displeasure. (How infantile men are, Lilian thought.) “Julia, the lupines are all dug up. Will you please tell those people for Christ’s sake not to bring their filthy dog here again?”
“Yes, dear,” Julie replied seriously, apparently memorizing the message in order to convey it with complete accuracy. “Can’t they be replanted?”
He shook his head. “The blighter’s chewed them.”
Lilian wiped the draining board and hung the wet dish towel on a rod to dry. “I’ll bring Simon in, shall I?” she said smoothly, and made her way past Ben into the garden.
“Leave the pram,” Julie called. “Ben will bring it.”
Outside the kitchen door, the grass was sparse and trampled, and flaked with wood shavings from the recent passage and unpacking of furniture. Beyond, however, it became lavishly green, in need of cutting and scattered with spring flowers. The garden, more delicate than ever in the already dying light, was surrounded by ancient trees and, on one side, by a thick, trim hedge of box. A memory even as one stands here, Lilian thought, saddened by anticipation of her own nostalgia—and yet pleased all at once to have come out at this moment, to find the scene imposing some sort of misty symmetry on the untidy events of the day. I may cry, she told herself with surprise, as she lifted the sleeping Simon.
Ben, still grasping the ravished lupines, looked at her with interest as he came out of the house.
Lilian gathered up the trailing blanket with her free hand and walked slowly away. He will say: “Poor old Lilian,” after I’ve left, she reminded herself. In the kitchen, she handed Simon over to his mother. “Now I must really go and pack,” she said.
Lilian leaned from the window of the train. “I’ll telephone you from London,” she told Julie.
It will come right again, on the telephone, they assured each other silently.
Julie, suddenly pale and tired, brushed away tears. “It’s cold. I should have brought a coat”
“What?”
“It’s cold.”
“Next time I’ll come in the summer.”
Crying, Julie laughed. “It’ll still be cold. But come back soon.”
“Do you have everything you need?” Ben asked, too late for ambiguity, glancing at the magazine stall.
“Yes, thanks. Oh, goodbye.” The train drew away. “Goodbye!”
“Goodbye! Lilian … goodbye.”
They waved, close at last for a moment, before the train ran into the darkness.
The two on the platform stood still for a few seconds, convalescent, before they walked away to their little car. In the clear, black, country air outside the station, Julie shivered again. The wind had risen, as it had the night before. They got into the car without speaking. Only when the engine started, on the third try, did Julie move up against Ben. He put his arm briefly around her, and then withdrew it. The car moved off.
“Poor old Lilian,” Julie said.
HAROLD
EVERY evening of the summer, lanterns were hung from the oleanders and they had dinner in the garden. The table was a long and rickety affair on trestles, and there were always insects because of the lights, but on balance it was worth it. The evenings were cool even after the August days, which recorded heat, long after dark, in the villa’s outer walls. The wall facing onto this terrace-garden was still warm to the touch, although it was past nine o’clock and Signora Ricciardi and her guests were sitting down to dinner.
The scene, too, was worth the discomfort: the white table, three flasks of wine, pale dishes of bread, red dishes of meat, green bowls of salad; the summer-colored dresses of the women, and a crimson shawl hung on a chair; everything scented by flower beds, in eclipse beyond the lanterns, and by lemon trees, which stood about in great stone urns. Above the line of hills facing across a valley, the sky glowed from the lights of Siena, but the house at night rode its hilltop in rolling, dark countryside with the purposeful isolation of a ship at sea, and people around the table, too, assumed something of the serene animation of voyagers.
Bernard Tourner was as lean and astringent as his wife, Monique, was plump and soft—a dove in her gray dress. For many years they had come from Paris to spend their summers at this pensione, and each morning they would disappear in their little ancient car for an excursion to Arezzo or Volterra, or simply into the Chianti hills, returning as children return from a trip to the seaside, refreshed and exhausted and painfully sunburned.
Bernard’s appearance was an index of his personality, sensitive and slightly waspish. A quick understanding and a rich, ready memory made him an excellent companion at the table, but because of his occasional moodiness it was felt that Monique was not to be envied. However, they were deeply dependent upon each other, and Monique seemed always sweetly and unheroically content.
They were sitting, this evening, on either side of Charles Holmes, who was an Englishman, and who, from shyness, talked and listened with a habitual vagueness, glancing at Dora, his wife, sitting opposite. Dora passed the wine to him across the table; Dora was dark and beautiful and not shy at all.
“O pittore,” called Signora Ricciardi, from the head of the table. Charles turned to her, always charmed that she should address him in this way, since he was an amateur and not very gifted painter, on holiday from a business concerned with lead and zinc. “O pittore, have you seen our three boys at all? Have they come back yet?”
Charles gestured toward the house, as if to conjure up the three young men, who at that moment came hurriedly into the garden and seated themselves at the table, murmuring apologies. Englishly alike in grave manners and incisive speech, in an almost womanish refinement of feature and fair skin reddened but not tanned by the sun, they had the names of antique Romans: Julian, Adrian, Antony. With quiet fortitude they had received, that summer, telegrams confirming success in their examinations at Cambridge. At twenty, they already offered a certain distinction and the promise of charm. The only criticism that might have been made of them was that their background and prospects had been provided so amply as to encroach a little on the scope of the present; nothing had been left to chance—perhaps on the assumption that chance is a detrimental element. “Tutto a posto,” the Signora said of them.
In her way, the Signora herself was as much “in place” as these boys; she would never have been mistaken for a voyager. Sitting at the end of the table, a slender, ageless woman with a disproportionate share of accomplishments, she chatted and rejoiced and sympathized with her guests, sharing their confidences and fulfilling their expectations, giving them a sense of infinite leisure, as though these symmetrical days of summer were to last forever. Their recollections of the villa would be almost indistinguishable from memories of her.
A little withdrawn from the talk that evening, she was listening for the arrival of a pair of unknown guests, a mother and son who were the friends of a friend. All day they had been expected—a not unwelcome intrusion into the intimacy of the present guests, who had been in one another’s company all summer. Though, indeed, it had all gone very well this year: no one had been ill or quarreled or fallen in love. They were all on the best of terms, even with Mis
s Nicholson.
Miss Nicholson was a diminutive middle-aged Englishwoman who played—surprisingly—the cello and was attending the summer courses at the music academy in Siena. She did not attempt even the simplest of Italian phrases, and she spoke of England with a longing as constant as though she had been condemned to exile. Most surprising of all, she wore a hat to the lunch table, a navy-blue sailor hat with a group of white flowers at one side of it, and in this hat she would take the bus to Siena every afternoon to attend her lesson. The small, prim figure burdened with the cello had become familiar in the spiraling main street that led to the academy, and the instrument was recognized as a token of sympathy and permanence, the antithesis of the camera usually carried by foreigners.
The boys were at their best with Miss Nicholson, who represented a type familiar to their own family circles. They were kind and deferential, invariably willing to help with the inevitable cello or to find out where she could buy an English newspaper. In return, she regarded them with real affection and an almost personal pride.
Now, as the meal began, the arrival of the new guests was announced by one of the maids, the smiling, circular Assunta. “O Signora,” she said, the formal vocative “O” of Tuscany coming oddly from that genial face, “son appena arrivati da Firenze.” Arriving at Siena by the late train, the new guests had come out to the villa in a taxi and were seeing to the unloading of their luggage. The Signora, taking up her red shawl, went into the house to greet them, and around the table there was a short, expectant silence.
“Una vecchia signora,” whispered Assunta, handing around the pasta, “e un giovane grande.” Two chairs were added to the table and two more places set. Conversation resumed, but now they were all detached, awaiting this diversion.
Presently a voice could be heard, raised as a voice sometimes is in a strange house, and the Signora brought the new guests through the doors that led from the living room into the garden; the two women were followed by the “giovane grande,” a tall young man who remained in shadow behind them while introductions were made. The men rose from the table, scraping their chairs over pebbles.
The mother, large and handsome, was of that vigorous type of Englishwoman generally caricatured for its addiction to outdoor life. Gray hair, squarely cut, contributed to the strength of a face almost grimly straightforward, a directness scarcely modified by an impression of unhappiness. She was wearing a dress of brown linen much creased across the lap from the train journey and, around her neck, a heavy pendant of Mexican design. On her arm was a silver bracelet of incongruous delicacy, and Florence had contributed the sandals in which her feet were firmly planted apart.
Names were pronounced and mispronounced to her by the Signora, and she smiled politely, repeating them like a lesson. She was led to the place laid for her next to Bernard and settled into it.
Her son’s name was Harold. He stepped forward into the circle of light to be introduced and stood silent while chairs were shuffled along the table to accommodate him. The three boys, now reseated, looked him over with courteous reserve, exercising that perception for affinities and failings with which public-school life had endowed them.
This boy had none of their diffident grace. Long-limbed and excruciatingly awkward, he was still, at their age, almost grotesquely adolescent. He was very brown, and dressed in khaki trousers and a blue shirt with rolled sleeves, and scratches on his arms were blotched with that purple antiseptic upon which British mothers place such reliance. His blond hair and eyebrows, sun-bleached to a startling fairness, contributed to a look of vacancy that really began at wide-spaced, wide-staring eyes. On his behalf, certainly, there would be no telegraphed confirmation of outstanding performance in examinations; rather, one imagined an education interspersed with letters from school principals, sympathetic and unyielding: “Harold’s gifts are not suited to the discipline of the school curriculum.”
Stumbling to his chair with an embarrassed acknowledgment of greetings, he sat down next to Dora. His mother was already embarked on an easy tide of conversation concerned with her journey. “So hot in Florence … a little tired, yes, but what a beautiful journey … light most of the way … Lovely country …”
Bernard was helping her to pasta. “Yes, it’s a journey one never tires of, that trip from Florence to Siena.”
“So much to see,” she went on. “That scenery, sometimes vast and sometimes almost in miniature, like a fairy tale … A great fortress quite near here, what would that be?”
“That was probably Monteriggioni,” replied Bernard. “It’s from the thirteenth century. But Tuscany is crowded with these hilltop fortresses and walled towns.”
“Tomorrow you will see another, just below the house,” the Signora told her. “Montacuto. It was ruined by Barbarossa.”
“So hard to associate violence with this countryside,” the new guest said, and sighed, comforted by antiquity.
“It isn’t all as remote as that,” the Signora said. “In the last war the front passed through here. The Germans were in this house.”
“You see how it is,” said Bernard, with a faint smile. “In this country everything has been done, as it were—even this landscape has been done to the point where one becomes a detail in a canvas. And they all know too much. In Italy one is almost too much at ease, too well understood ; all summer here I feel that nothing new can happen, nothing can surprise or call our capacities into question; that none of us can add anything.”
“Does this mean we shan’t see you here next year?” asked Dora, laughing because Bernard had come there for so many years.
Bernard laughed, too. “Well, you English, you find a sort of prodigality here, too—an easy acceptance which you enjoy but which, after all, you don’t wish to emulate.”
“You mean that we have scruples about giving but none about receiving?” Charles asked.
“Not even that,” Bernard said. “I simply mean that in our countries one must still be prepared for a few surprises, but here all experience is repetition, and that gives one an outrageous sense of proportion. That’s why we feel so comfortable—why we find it so attractive to come here. After all, France is certainly as beautiful as this”—Bernard included the Italian peninsula in a brief gesture.
“And England,” said Miss Nicholson, misunderstanding.
“Well, it isn’t a competition, after all,” replied Charles, filling her wineglass. “Do you know France, Miss Nicholson?”
Miss Nicholson replied that she did not, adding that she had been there several times.
The new guest remarked that she knew France well but that this was her first visit to Italy, and took the opportunity to resume her account of it. Yes, Florence was lovely, lovely, but a week was nothing, one must go back. “There is too much, far too much,” she added accusingly. With a forkful of salad she indicated infinite riches.
“And you.” Dora turned to the boy beside her. “What did you think of Florence?”
He stared at her uneasily, shifting his feet on the pebbles beneath the table. His mother’s face clouded with a recognizable intensification of the discontent already seen there. “He scarcely saw anything of Florence,” she said. “He wouldn’t even have seen the cathedral if I hadn’t insisted on it.”
“I had to do some work,” he murmured.
His mother appealed to the table. “Such an opportunity at his age. One would think he’d make the most of it.” She gave the three boys a covetous, comparing look. Disconcerted, they vaguely protested their own inertia, not wishing to appear to advantage.
“I’m determined that he shall see Siena properly,” she persisted.
Something in this prospect seemed to dishearten the boy even further, and he went on with his meal. He did not look at his mother. While she chatted on again about Florence—the heat, the della Robbias, the bargains in tooled leather—she directed toward him a current of censure and disappointment, evoking from him a slow, painful awareness.
But for the wonderin
g eyes, the boy’s expression would have been intense. It was a look that concentrated hard but could not quite find its object. Once or twice he entered the conversation, to express agreement with an enthusiasm suggesting that he seldom found his views shared, or to disagree with an emphasis which confirmed that impression. Between times, he maintained a state of subdued apology for his outbursts; in fact, apology appeared to be for him an involuntary means of self-expression. “I’m sorry,” he said, passing dishes or reaching his daubed arm for the salt; “I’m sorry,” as his wineglass was refilled. His self-effacement was, in its way, demanding; his youth, his gaucheness called up a collective effort of reassurance and encouragement, but he, in a sense, was proving the stronger character. As the evening drew on, his ineptitude pervaded them all.
Signora Ricciardi always left the table early, to negotiate with the cook the meals for the following day. At this interruption, Harold’s mother rose, too, tired from her long day, and nodded around the table. “Don’t stay up late,” she told Harold, who stood to wish her good night. “You know how tired you are.”
This knowledge passively acquired, Harold prepared to hurry with his fruit. Dispelling a momentary, hopeful silence, the other guests encouraged him to stay, describing to him the house and its surroundings, proposing excursions into the town. They listed for him the attractions of Siena, from pinacoteca to post office, and he listened diligently, leaning forward and twisting his napkin about his fingers. He was taking them and their attentions very seriously, almost as seriously as he took himself. A burden of compulsory activities could be seen mounting in his imagination, although he might easily have guessed that those hot days would dwindle into a catalogue of churches unvisited and pictures unsurveyed. At last, with an effort, he mentioned anxiously that he intended to keep part of the day free for his work.
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