Cliffs of Fall
Page 15
Still, he continued to himself (effortlessly, because he considered these things almost every afternoon), we are unreal. We shall never do anything now except go on here, feeling the extent of our losses. We’ve been obsolete since … (Here he left in his mind the row of dots that stood for Fascism, the war, debts, the last illness of his father, the death of Marina’s husband, who had had a heart attack in 1949 while hanging a painting in his house in Milan—matters now too familiar to cause pain or merit reiteration.)
On the other hand, he concluded, Harriet and Francis —exasperating as they may be at the moment—are real. He pictured Harriet intrepidly hailing a London bus or standing in a crowded room with a glass in her hand. (He himself never entered a shop or made a new acquaintance without reluctance and apprehension.) And there was something admirable about being close enough to love to be able to quarrel over it. The thought of Harriet, now, lying tormented on her bed—crying, possibly—because of love, filled him with wonder and envy.
He turned his book over and switched on the lamp at his side.
Lying on her back with her eyes closed, Harriet reached out her arm for the little traveling clock, lifted it onto her chest, and held it there, too sleepy to look at it. It rose and fell on her breastbone for a few moments, and then tumbled forward with a glassy slap.
Raising the clock before her face, she opened her eyes. “Five past four,” she announced. She put the clock back on the table and looked about the room. On the wall, the sunlight seemed less certain now, the design of leaves a little blurred. “Yes?” she called, in answer to a knock on her door.
Marina came into the room and leaned on the high brass rail at the end of the bed. Harriet once again had the sensation of being treated as an invalid, and sat up, crosslegged, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “You’ve changed your dress,” she said.
“I got muddy from gardening,” Marina explained.
“You shouldn’t have gone out in the sun,” Harriet said, with satisfaction.
“It did me no harm. Did you sleep? I came to ask if you would come down for tea.” Tea, unexpectedly, was always precisely that—thin, hot tea in chipped cups, uncompromised by cakes or biscuits.
“Is it really time for tea?” Harriet glanced again at the clock. “I thought the afternoon would never end. Didn’t you?”
Marina straightened her back and smiled. “Every afternoon of the summer, I have serious doubts of the evening,” she said. “No amount of repetition reassures me.” She released the brass bar of the bed. “I must go and see if Daniele wants tea.”
Harriet lowered a foot to the floor, feeling for her sandals, and promised to come downstairs. But as the door closed, she crossed the room and, resting her hands on the window sill, looked again into the garden. The light was the easier light of late afternoon. Farther along the wall, between the columns of the loggia, geraniums were fluttered by a faint breeze. On a nearby hill, a bell was rung—an unmelodious, useful country bell. Two little barefoot girls in faded pink dresses and straw hats were carrying to the kitchen a basket of zucchini for the evening meal. Each held a handle, and the tilting basket was covered by the golden flowers of the plant; these would be fried tomorrow for the lunch table.
Harriet turned to the mirror, where a face glimmered in the glass, shadowed by tousled hair. She would go and look for Francis, with some atoning suggestion for a walk together. Oppressed by obligation, she leaned her elbows on the bureau and heard him calling her somewhere in the house. Inaudibly and mechanically, she answered him. “Yes, dear.”
The endearment was disconcertingly sharp, but she looked again into the glass and, as his steps drew near, slowly began to comb her hair.
Mrs. Fenwick stirred, lifted the handkerchief from her brow, and wondered where she was. At the window, the pages of Phineas Finn slipping under his fingers, Mr. Fenwick closed his eyes and slept.
ALSO BY SHIRLEY HAZZARD
Fiction
The Great Fire
The Transit of Venus
The Bay of Noon
People in Glass Houses
The Evening of the Holiday
Nonfiction
Greene on Capri
Countenance of Truth
Defeat of an Ideal
CLIFFS OF FALL. Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963 by Shirley Hazzard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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eISBN 9781466800496
First eBook Edition : August 2011
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Nine of the stories in this collection appeared originally in The New Yorker. “A Place in the Country” was first published in The New Yorker as two stories entitled “A Place in the Country” and “A Leave-Taking.” “In One’s Own House” appeared in Mademoiselle.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hazzard, Shirley, 1931-
Cliffs of fall and other stories / Shirley Hazzard. p. cm.
Contents: The party—A place in the country—Vittorio—[etc.]
EAN 978-0312-42327-8
I. Title.
PR9619.3.H369C55 1988
823
88-17970
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
First Picador Edition: July 2004