How sad it was. Looking into his face just now, finding nothing of interest, she had been so pierced by sadness that tears filled her eyes and she had to bend over the stain on her dress to hide her face. It was absurd that they should face each other this way—antagonistically, in silence—simply because they had once been so close. She would have done anything for him. Even though she no longer cared for him, saw his weakness quite clearly, still she would do anything for him. She cared for him, now, less than for any man she knew, and yet she would have done anything … It was a pity about her dress, though —wine was absolutely the worst thing; it would never come out.
Upright on her rock, May gave a short, exhausted sigh. She closed her eyes for a moment, to clear them, and Ivor called out to her that she must watch him, watch the game. She looked back at him without smiling. On either side, her palms were pressed hard against the stone.
THE WORST MOMENT OF THE DAY
“THIS is the worst moment of the day,” said Daniele.
The table—with the emptied wine flasks, the grapes and figs left in large bowls, the clusters of stained napkins—was like a beach from which the tide had ebbed. Conversation had dwindled until slow afternoon sounds could be heard through shutters striped with heat.
The long room had windows at each end, and on one side opened through double doors into the drawing room. The opposite wall, slate blue, was bare except for two paintings hung together like illuminations on a blank page. They were landscapes painted by Marina some years ago, before she and her brother turned the villa into a pensione and her time ceased to be her own. She sat at the head of the table, straight and slender in a faded green dress, red-gold hair falling on her shoulders. Her hands were loosely clasped in her lap, and in her face poetry and reason met without the customary signs of struggle. She turned toward her brother’s remark with a faint smile.
As though at a signal, the diners drew themselves together to surmount this worst of moments. Chairs scraped, a glass was knocked over; some inconclusive suggestion was made for a drive down to Florence in the evening.
It was late in the season, and the four guests—an elderly English couple and a young one—stood around the table as singly as the surviving fruits lay in the china dishes. Old Mr. Fenwick, who had been at the villa just a week, pushed his chair back into place and crossed to the windows. Unlatching one of the shutters, he peered into the garden, and only his wife’s going over to join him suppressed his daily utterance concerning a brisk walk. There was something of fearful symmetry about the Fenwicks, he slim and inflexible, she plump and stately. It was their first journey to Italy, and they had been gratified to find so many forebodings justified.
Through the slit that now parted the shutters, the old man stared despondently at the day. The scene, it was true, was of dimensions comparable to those of his own land—in fact, he had made the comparison all too frequently, as though Tuscany were remarkable only for this similarity—but then there was that sky. He had never experienced such a sky. In England, where heaven is a low-hung, personal affair, thoroughly identified with the King James Version, a sky such as this would not have been tolerated for a moment. It was a high, pagan explosion of a sky, promising indulgence for all kinds of offenses to which he had not the slightest inclination. He felt, beneath it, exposed and ridiculed. And the light, too—a light that not only illuminated but was an element in itself, as distinct as rain … He would go and read in his room, after all, for he realized that the brisk walk, if taken, would be somehow impeded by that dazzling light.
The younger couple, the Stapletons, lingered at the table, folding their napkins. The Stapletons had spent other summers at the villa, but this year, for the first time, they had brought with them some unconfided anxiety of their London life. Francis, a fair man with a sensitive and orderly manner, contrived to conceal his present unhappiness—or at least to give it a reasonable, disciplined air that made it socially presentable. But his wife, Harriet, carried her part of their suffering publicly, and in return received, unfairly, a greater deference.
Marina had begun to stack the dishes for the maids, who had their lunch at this hour. “Vai riposarti, cara,” she told Harriet, drawing the napkin out of her hand.
After a moment, Harriet did go—but not, immediately, to rest. She disappeared into the drawing room, and they heard the opening creak of the side door and the thud of its closing. Francis was helping Marina to clear the table, walking around it to bring her the littered fruit plates. It was a relief to him to be here, in this cool room, doing automatic tasks, but he knew that in a moment he must go and look for his wife. He took a tray from the sideboard and arranged on it the glasses gathered together by Marina. Marina, who seemed to know everything—and he found it rather shocking that with her secluded life she should know so much—stood silent, pushing the grape seeds onto one large dish with a knife and making a pile of the stained plates beside her, but he felt soothed and understood, as if she had said something to console him. He dropped the napkins into their basket and, with a murmured excuse, left the room.
In the drawing room, he recovered his book and reading glasses—placed on the table when the lunch bell rang—and opened one of the shuttered doors into the garden. The door was weighted with the heat that met him as he stepped outside; it fell heavily back into place behind him. It annoyed him that Harriet should go out at a time when all other people—all of Italy—rested; annoyed him that he was unable to turn his annoyance into anything but concern, for real anger might have alleviated his misery. He made his way around to the front of the house, his mind presenting his predicament to him in words so simple that they might, but for the context, have been uttered by a child: “She does not love me any more.”
Then: “She loves someone else.” But if that was so, why were they here, together, trying to make things work again? He brushed with his shoulder the dying fronds of wisteria at the corner of the house, and stood in the wall’s shadow, looking for Harriet.
In front of the house was a formal garden, and from this a crescent of graded steps descended to an avenue of ilex. The short avenue was never used now, the house having been connected with the road by a separate, graveled drive that led to the kitchen door. The trees, which needed trimming, met overhead and stood deep in weeds and wild flowers. Throughout the day, hens wandered into the avenue and picked among the straggling grass and made their way haltingly up the steps to stare into the ordered garden. From time to time, on the road below, a car passed, going toward Florence, and country sounds reached the house from the surrounding slopes.
Harriet sat now on the lowest of the arc of steps, her back curved in the sun, her face pressed into her arms, which were folded on her drawn-up knees. The sleeves of her pink blouse had been rolled up, and her skin was moist with heat Her cotton skirt was carelessly bunched under her. She was motionless, not even roused by the hens rustling near her feet.
Her attitude was so abject, so forlorn, that Francis, at the top of the steps, stood quite still before he called her name. “Harriet.”
The face she raised to him, however, was smooth and preoccupied, only creased above the eyes by the pressure of a bracelet. He came slowly down, dropping from step to step, and sat just above her, his knee touching her shoulder. She put no weight on him. After a moment, she resumed her former position without speaking.
He opened his book at the beginning and shaded the print with his hand. He had had a shock, coming upon her like that. And her calm uplifted face had not reassured him—because what was shocking, he thought as he turned the first page, was that it had seemed perfectly plausible that she, who had been chattering pleasantly enough at the lunch table a few minutes before, might have come out here and thrown herself down in this abandoned attitude in real anguish. It would have been terrible to find her so, but not surprising; people in general, and he and she in particular, were so separate that anything was possible. That knowledge moved him to press his knee once more against her b
ent shoulder. Feeling, perhaps, that some response was required of her, she turned her cheek toward him, her eyes closed.
“Hens are ghastly,” she observed. And then: “Read me something.”
He read aloud the lines he had just reached:
“ … Ferme les portes
Il est plus facile de mourir que d’aimer.”
“Heavens,” she said, and turned her face back into her arms.
He closed the book and put it on the stone step beside him. He looked down at her huddled body and dark, shaggy head, her brown arms and exposed knees, the tail of her blouse, which had come out of her skirt. He parted the hair on her neck and laid his hand there. “Come inside,” he said. “We can’t stay out in this heat.”
She tilted her head once more. “In a moment,” she replied.
“No,” he insisted. “Really. It’s the worst part of the day.”
“In a moment,” she repeated, wishing he would take his hand, which had become quite damp, off her neck. One can’t ask to be left alone, she thought, or not to be touched, even once in a great while, without creating a scene—without changing everything. Do we have anything in common at all, she wondered—almost idly, because the sun had drained her. Will we manage it? Sometimes it is all right. But not today.
She sat up straight, thrusting her hair back from her forehead. He rose and helped her to her feet. She brushed at her skirt and made a perfunctory effort to push her blouse back in at the waist. They went up the steps together.
The hallway was cool and darkened and smelled strongly of the carnations that stood, white and red, in a big ceramic jar on the marble table. The stairs, which were of white stone, projected from a wall of colossal depth, so that, climbing them, one imagined oneself scaling a cliff. The house had been intended for pleasure, and perhaps that was why it was built like a fortress.
The Stapletons’ room also was in darkness, for the maids had closed the shutters throughout the house. When Harriet opened them, it seemed that heat, no less than light, filled the room, igniting the red stone tiles, the pale walls, the two narrow white beds and their ornaments of brass. Below the window, as she looked down, a garden enclosed by a tall hedge of ilex was brilliant, too, a square of oleander, phlox, and petunias. Descending softly from the house, the country rose again into a freshly plowed hillside and a skyline black-penciled with cypresses.
She lay down on her bed. Francis came and sat beside her on the edge of the bed, filling her vision. She moved her head toward him on the pillow without rising, like a sick person. She had spoiled his tranquil, costly summer. Too much was wrong between them for these fine days to be enjoyed, or this idyllic place. They did not blame each other, having been educated since the days when faults could be attributed; nevertheless, it seemed that the sense of grievance was very strong. It was the worst moment of the day—an inarticulate exchange of pain. She could not speak yet, or make promises, and in any case the reassurances she could give were too meager to offer. Detached, she pitied him, too, and saw that she had never been more dear than now, when she lay there excluding him with her indifference and her look of displeasure. On her knee, his fingers became points of heat through the light cotton skirt.
“All right?” he asked, helplessly.
“I thought I might sleep.”
“Shall we go down to town before dinner?”
“See how we feel. After I’ve rested, I may take a walk.” And, to forestall him: “I’ll be back in time to go in to town.”
He rose and pulled one of the shutters, so that her face was shielded from sunlight With indignation and longing, he felt disqualified from kissing her as he turned to leave. It was almost as if he did not dare to.
“If I were you,” she said, elaborating their estrangement, “If I were you, I should have a look at the car before we go.
Pondering the discomfort of having hurt her husband and the relief afforded by his departure, Harriet folded her hands across her breast. Somewhere, one of the maids was ironing, her soft singing accompanied by the thump and clash of the iron. Down at the road, a dog and a scooter barked together through the roar of a truck climbing the hill; a woman called; a child cried out.
Harriet stared at the ceiling, the physical displacement of her sorrow expanding within her—difficulty of respiration, and an aching in ears and eyes. She wondered if this were, after all, the worst moment of the day, and thought of the scene in the kitchen every morning when the letters came. (It was the butcher who brought the mail from Florence once a day; his small gray delivery car trundled up the drive about eleven o’clock. Occasionally he was late. There was talk with the maids before the bundle was laid down, with the day’s meat, on the kitchen table, and there were papers, circulars, letters to be turned over before Harriet could be sure that there was nothing for her. Sometimes there was an envelope with an English stamp, and for a moment anxiety would be replaced by apprehension—for what could now be written that she might want to read?)
She knew she must not weep, and she watched the ceiling with the same impassive face and dry eyes she had turned to her husband in the garden. It seemed to her that the tears were flowing inside her head.
The wheel of her mind turned laboriously on a familiar route, as though a required number of revolutions might set it in easy motion. The ray of sunlight lay flat on the farthest wall, patterned by the vines about the window frame. The house at this hour became a well of greenish light filtered through the color of it shutters. From time to time, a cicada droned from the garden, pressing upon the silence a weight that seemed to seal it completely. The afternoon swung Harriet, immobilized, between sleeping and waking, and slowly closed on the distraction of pain.
When Francis came downstairs, he found Marina preparing to go into the garden.
“It’s all right,” she told him, lifting her hand a little to check his protest. “I’m going to tie up one or two plants and come straight back.” There had been a storm the night before.
He followed her into the garden, feeling rather like a child with whom other children will not play, and who is allowed, for that reason, to trail about after the grownups.
Marina put her implements down by a bed of dahlias and drew on a pair of blackened gardening gloves. She knelt to examine the fallen plants, and after a moment looked up at Francis, shielding her eyes from the sun with her gloved hand. “The sticks,” she said. “Would you mind? In the shed at the back of the house. But not the short ones,” she called as he turned away. “The long ones, in the corner near the door.”
Francis walked down the path, the sun pressing on his head and shoulders. The dim shed, smelling of earth and fertilizers, was cool after the garden. In the corner near the door were a hoe, a rake, a stack of pots, and an encrusted trowel. The only sticks he could find, on a shelf, were too short for Marina’s purpose, but after a hasty search in the half darkness he took them back into the garden.
Marina did not hear him return, and he stood looking at her as she bent over the plants. All her actions were complete and reassuring, all her attitudes graceful and yielding. As she worked, she watched her own hands with a reflective smile, and her hair fell forward across her cheek and swung with the movements of her arms. It occurred to Francis that he had never been so close to beauty. His need for deliverance, for human comfort, was so great that for a moment he thought he had actually taken Marina in his arms, and could feel under his fingers the worn material of her dress and the delicate bones of her shoulders.
“Oh, Marina.” He fell on his knees beside her, his hands still full of the sticks from the shed. “Marina.”
She looked up abruptly. Kneeling, they stared at each other.
His eyes dazzled. He lifted his closed hands. “I could only find the small sticks.”
She was very pale. For an instant, he could imagine how she might look if she were ever to lose her composure.
She sat back on her heels. “They must be there,” she said. “I’ll go and look.” She got
up and left him on his knees on the grass, his hands extended and full of short, blunt sticks.
Mr. Fenwick, at his window, was relieved to see the young man get up and come inside; the sun was downright dangerous. Surely the summer should be over by now, even here, he expostulated to himself. He would have expostulated to Mrs. Fenwick, but a deep, regular breathing from the bed promised him little response. She had taken off her shoes and lain down to sleep, with a scented handkerchief on her forehead, as soon as they came upstairs from lunch. But Mr. Fenwick maintained, at the window, something approaching a vigil, holding his book (Trollope: Phineas Finn) firmly on his knee. Someone must, after all, keep their wits about them.
When he saw Francis leave the garden, Daniele closed and latched his shutters and sat down in an armchair. He propped his feet on the end of the bed and laid his open book (Ausonius: Mosella) upside down in his lap. Marina asks for this, he told himself—invites confidences, implies sympathy, and then isn’t prepared to go through with it. She is as incapable of living, of truly living, as I, he conceded—with a suggestion of high praise. She likes to preside serenely over the emotions of others, but she doesn’t care to participate. And those who do participate seem shrill or untidy by comparison.
This wave of resentment, subsiding, was replaced by an image, as true as if he had risen to confirm it from the window, of Marina alone in the garden in the heat, patiently restoring the dahlias.
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