All were pretty and all were pining to get work in London or Brighton, but they stayed in Sillingham because the work was not so hard there and because they liked Ma, who managed the café and was easy-going. Boiling coffee and pretty faces attracted plenty of casual male custom, and at the Linga-Longa there were always current love affairs to discuss. Bette and Pat and Pam slopped and shuffled about, with paint peeling off their nails and their curls half-way down their backs in fuzzy blonde or dusty brown tangles; they were always ready to stop work and slip arms round each other’s waists and stand with heads close together, murmuring and giggling: they never thought about the past, they never thought about the future, they lived completely in the present and were interested in nothing but tales about other people and their own looks.
They found Sylvia amusing and welcomed her visits, and she enjoyed every moment that she spent at the Linga-Longa and on her one half-day a week she was usually to be found there, gossiping and laughing with the girls and sometimes helping with the work during a rush of custom.
Once or twice she went with the three into Brighton and walked arm-in-arm rapidly along the front; past the pale, curved houses gilt by the spring sunlight and the closed, dusty little shops which had once sold luxuries, while a cold wind blew steadily in from the vast, dim grey sea and the old Jewish men and women sat huddled in their furs and thick clothes behind the glass of the shelters, showing now and then a gleam of gold against a wrinkled neck. In Brighton her rough innocence served to check some grosser instincts in her friends, and the outing took on a schoolgirlish flavour which none of them were sufficiently worldly or corrupt to find dull: they usually ended by going to the pictures and eating a large tea in the restaurant attached to the cinema before catching the bus back to Sillingham.
These excursions and the improving weather made her life much pleasanter, and had it not been for the increasing gloom at Naylor’s Farm she would at this time have been thoroughly enjoying her work and her circumstances.
But the news had now been mysteriously allowed to circulate that Mrs. Hoadley was to have a baby in December, and depression crept over everyone. Mr. Hoadley was silent and timid in manner towards his wife and she herself went about looking martyred. White and pink wool (for Mrs. Hoadley was of course going to bear a daughter) appeared in odd corners, and knitting needles and work were whisked away when men appeared, and the farmer’s wife began to make occasional resigned references about the coming event to Sylvia. Her appearance remained as neat as ever and her health was apparently unimpaired save for an increasing fear of burglars and tramps. One day she abruptly announced that the baby’s name was to be Joyanna, looking resigned when Sylvia heartily agreed that Joanna was ever such an uncommon name.
“I’m very glad to hear it; it’s what she needs and that poor man is so fond of children,” said Alda decidedly, when Sylvia told her the news.
“Well, I wish it was here and done with. It gets me down, the way we all have to creep about the place,” Sylvia grumbled. “It was bad enough before, but it’s awful now. If we weren’t all so busy, I don’t know how I should stick it.”
“Oh, she’ll get over that. We all go through it,” said the matron.
They were very busy, so busy that the lengthening days were not long enough to hold all the work that had to be done as the spring advanced, and Sylvia found amusement in her frequent encounters with Fabrio in the open air, as their duties took them about the farm.
The English lessons had ceased without a word on either side. When they met, she shouted a casual “Hullo!” or “Buon giorno!” and he either ignored her or answered roughly without looking at her. There was embarrassment between them, rather than anger. She remembered that kiss with extreme vividness, which did not lessen as the weeks went by, and she was sure that he remembered it in the same way. Men had tried to kiss her before now and been repulsed, but not one of them had been so serious about it afterwards, avoiding her, and not looking at her, and going about the place with such a miserable face. She made up her mind two or three times to ask him what on earth was up with him: and each time, on meeting him, she had suddenly found that she could not.
She enjoyed Alda’s teasing and she did not deeply resent Emilio’s nods and winks, while she revelled in boasting and complaining to the girls at the Linga-Longa about Fabrio’s behaviour; but when she actually saw him, when his sturdy graceful body shrank aside to let her pass him in some narrow way, and he stood in silence, pale, with downcast eyes and trembling mouth, as she hurried by with a laugh, then she did not find him in the least funny and she could not ask him what was the matter: she was furious, and she would have liked to give him a good shaking, and sometimes she believed that he was doing it just to annoy her, but she could not bring herself to question him.
And Fabrio spoke of his feelings to no one. Emilio had met him with eager questions after the excursion to the Wild Brooks, assuming in the face of all improbabilities that what used to be known as The Worst had happened, and Fabrio had allowed his friend to think what he liked. He neither boasted nor denied. He kept a haughty smile upon his face and answered Perhaps and Maybe and Who Knows? for his manly pride would not let him deny a conquest, and yet his true love for Sylvia, the lost girl, the gentle maiden imprisoned within the blundering body of La Scimmia, would not let him lie about their happy hours together. Let Emilio think what he chose to think.
Emilio was much taken up by letters from Genoa, where the eldest of his bambini, aged nine, had just embarked upon a promising career of American lorry-robbing, armed with a razor blade to slit tyres or canvas, and commanding a band of eight followers younger than himself. Giulia wrote that the family had twice enjoyed tinned meat within three days! the first meat of any kind that they had tasted for two years! Emilio’s fatherly heart glowed with mingled envy and pride.
Fabrio spoke of his feelings least of all to Father Francesco in the confessional box. His faith resembled some sturdy bright flower of the hedgerows with a winding, accommodating habit, and he had even suppressed the fact that Sylvia was teaching him English, for had not the Father sternly discouraged his wish to learn? and would he not be even sterner if he heard that Fabrio had been taking lessons after all, and lessons from a young protestante girl? Fabrio did not want anyone to be stern with him: he had had quite enough of that in the army and the prison camp, and now he wanted only to be loved and admired. It was difficult to conceal his increasing fluency in English from Father Francis, but he pretended to be stupider than he was.
Fabrio was also troubled over Sylvia’s soul, for her wild words at Amberley had revealed to him that she was a victim of ateismo, atheism, a state of darkness terrible in its implications to this believer. He believed that if only he prayed earnestly enough to Our Lady, She would work a miracle and show Sylvia the truth, and he did pray exhaustively for her on Sundays at Mass, but during the week there was so much to do, and no proper place to pray in, so he resolved to utter a prayer for her every time he passed her in the fields or the farmyard, but the light shone on her hair, her blue eyes glanced smilingly up at the blue sky while she scattered the grain, and he forgot his prayer in human longing.
He was very miserable and increasingly homesick, with a thirsty, passionate longing for San Angelo that the coming of fine warm weather did nothing to slake. He noticed the flowers, but they were not the flowers he knew at home; and the shade of these great trees, that had towered so gloomily over him in the winter, was not as grateful as the sharp black shadows of the olive grove, because the sun was not so hot; it was hardly hot at all; it was always being shaded by some cloud or cut off by one of those same enormous trees that dripped down his neck when it rained; and this year, more painfully than in any other spring during his captivity, he missed girls and love.
Regularly once a week, as regularly as Mass and the lifted golden Cup with the white face of Father Francesco behind it, there came a letter from Maria. At first Fabrio had not taken much notice of it, except to
feel flattered and to wave it gaily in front of Emilio (whose letters from home were more and more concerned with the alarmingly successful prowess of the gangster-bambino) but as his reading improved, and he became able to master the contents without asking his friend’s help, he began to enjoy the letters; then to look forward to them; and at last, when April came and the woods below were filled with bluebells and the blue sky above them went on for ever, Maria’s letter had come to be the one happy thing; the only thing he looked forward to, in his week. It became his comfort, his link with home, giving him the warmth and peace which he had once dimly felt at Mass, and now felt no longer.
The letters were not long but they were filled with news. (There was never anything about thoughts or feelings in them; Maria would have regarded such a use of the difficult art of writing as a waste of skill and time and so would her corresdent.) She told him that his brother Giulio had cut his hand while planing posts for a gate; that there had been a fall of rocks on the path leading up to Santa Maria and one had to climb round them with one’s basket of three eggs for sale or one’s letter for the post because there was no one to clear the rocks away, as most of the men of the village had not yet returned from the war; Luigina had had a bambino by an Americano; Emma Tommasi was to marry her Americano; Giuseppina Cappa was to be married at Easter. Maria’s mother’s new white chickens, saved for during four months and bought at last, were laying well. Andrea and Paolo Montanari now had six children.
His letters to her were in a similar style, telling her of his work at the farm and doings at the camp; what he ate, where he went, but never what he felt. He boasted a little about the pleasures to be found in that fine large town Horsham, where there were many cafés and cinemas; he gave her the impression that life was not at all bad in England, and never once did he write “I am longing to come home.” Now that he could write, he shaped his letters with the natural grace and ease that he put into any small job, and Maria admired the bold regular lines and full curves of the “a”s and “o”s; it was quite a picture, Fabrio’s handwriting, and she looked up to him more than ever.
She was now living at home, she wrote, and doing most of the work on their smallholding. She did not tell him, poor Maria, that after months and months of blunders and excuses and tears and exasperated forgiveness in the shop at Portofino, her employer had at last rapturously welcomed a young man home from the wars who had offered his services as assistant. Maria had been sent home the same afternoon. I am very stupid, she thought humbly, and if I tell him that I was dismissed it will only make Fabrio despise me. At first she missed the sweet smells and the pretty combs and other trifles in the hairdresser’s shop, but soon she became used to weeding their small plot of ground in the hot dust of summer and hoeing it in the bitter mountain spring, with her head muffled in her old shawl and bowed before the wind, and she was content. There was almost enough for herself and her old mother to eat, and one day her brothers would come home from the camps in Austria and that other place, far away, down almost as far as Russia, and once a week the postman brought his old mule up the narrow path, round the fallen rocks, past the stream that dwindled every day as summer advanced, with Fabrio’s letter.
Very rarely, Fabrio received a letter from his eldest brother, but he only told him the family news which Maria had already heard from his sisters in her weekly visit, and Maria wrote a clearer hand that Giuseppe and at greater length. Fabrio’s father was ill. He was now too ill to sail the boat; he sat all day in the shade, in the stone yard where the olive-press stood and the doves rustled and cooed among the broad leaves of the chestnut tree, and Fabrio knew, though Giuseppe did not say so, that presently his father would die. Then Giuseppe would have the house and the land.
After he had read the letter giving him this news, Fabrio thought for a long time; and when the hour for dinner came, he bolted his lump of hard bread and his little cube of cheese and went to look for Mr. Hoadley. The farmer often took his dinner out into the fields nowadays and ate it while he worked, for Molly was no company at the dinner-table, picking at her food and sulking, and that great mare of a girl never stopped talking.
“What is it?” he asked shortly, looking up as Fabrio hesitatingly approached him. He was in one of the open sheds, removing rust from the mould-board of the plough.
“I want to save my money,” said Fabrio, and he took sevenpence from his pocket and held it out to the farmer. “Please keep it for me, signor.”
Mr. Hoadley straightened himself from his stooping posture and dusted his hands on his trousers. This seemed to him the first sensible remark he had heard from either of the Italians.
“Why, are you going home?” he asked, not ill-naturedly.
Fabrio shrugged his shoulders and smiled broadly.
“Some day perhaps,” he said.
“All right, I’ll keep it for you,” and he pocketed the sevenpence. “It’ll soon mount up, you’ll be surprised. But why pick on me?”
“I will not give it to Father Francesco, because he will tell me to put it in the church box,” Fabrio answered candidly, “and Emilio will want me to buy the cigarette and beer.”
“I see. Capisco. All right. And now how about you two learning to use a double handsaw on that oak down by the rue” (he meant a narrow ditch below a bank, bordering a coppice) “instead of wasting my time using an axe?”
This time Fabrio’s face sparkled with conscious mischief.
“Cannot,” and he shrugged.
“Cannot my foot. Will not, you mean. All right, get on with your work now. Your money’s safe.”
“Thank you, signor,” Fabrio answered, and went off.
His mind was more at ease. His eldest brother would have the land and the house and all the other brothers in between would have privileges before himself, who was only the youngest son, but he would return with some money saved, and what with that, and his knowledge of the English tongue and English ways he would not be a person who could be completely ignored and overruled in the family councils.
Mr. Hoadley presently started to whistle. It was a pity that Molly was so sulky nowadays and of course he was sorry for what she would have to go through later on, but it was the natural thing, after all; and it was the best piece of news he had had for years, and in spite of her resigned looks he had to express his satisfaction.
Alda had been prepared to give Mrs. Hoadley advice if it were asked for, but she had no intention of offering it if it were not, and when she perceived with surprise and some contempt that it was Sylvia who was to be the confidante, if anybody were, she lost her small patience with Mrs. Hoadley and referred to her as “that ass,” not realising that the farmer’s wife, still a girl in outlook and temperament, preferred to make her few confidences and complaints to another girl, rather than to a matron, however youthful.
Alda herself was not very content, for Ronald’s latest spell of leave had been delayed by more than five weeks and there was still no definite date for his arrival, and Father’s-Only-Sister-Marion had suddenly opened a sharp pincer-movement on the young Lucie-Brownes’ education, combined with an interrogation as to their political views. Were they being trained to take their place in the New Democratic World? Marion herself had a surprise for Alda: she hoped one day to stand for Parliament as Labour candidate in the very Ironborough constituency for which Ronald had planned to stand as a Liberal. It was at present held by a Conservative who was old and in feeble health. Should there be a by-election, Marion would stand.
“Beast!” cried Jenny, on hearing this news. “Why, that’s father’s constituency! Her own brother! She ought to be ashamed!”
“Sneaking it away from him while he’s abroad doing his duty!” Louise joined in hotly. “She is a beast!”
“Poor father,” mourned Louise. “Mother, he’ll be fearfully disappointed, won’t he?”
“I’m afraid he will, but not very surprised,” answered Alda, who had gathered from Ronald’s recent letters that something of this sort was b
rewing, “and as she’s got the money and the ambition and the brains, she’d better do it.”
“Father’s got brains!” cried Louise, shocked.
“Much better brains than Marion, lovey, but a different kind. Oh well, it can’t be helped. You must all be extra loving and good when he comes home next time, that’s all. And he might find another constituency later on,” she ended.
Although she honestly regretted Ronald’s disappointment, her own disappointment was not deep but she did resent the tone of Marion’s letter, which was so exultant and dictatorial as to seem insulting. There was a reference to Jean, whose orphaned, idle and prosperous condition now rendered her peculiarly fitted to take up some public work. She might Speak or Write (political writing, of course, not useless writing) or take a course of instruction in Socialist political theory. In any case, she certainly would not want to waste much more time down in the country doing nothing, and Alda was to let Marion know if she could help with introductions or advice. And how was Jenny’s riding getting on?
Alda was hurrying up the cottage stairs, waving this letter and muttering and intending to show it to Jean, when the latter came out of her bedroom. She wore her coat, and on seeing Alda she looked conscious.
“Jean, you must hear Marion’s latest. Your future is all arranged. Do listen! Really, she is——”
“I’m so sorry, darling, but I’ve got to beetle off. Terrific hurry,” and she was smilingly slipping past when Alda caught her waist.
“Where to? No, but do listen——”
“I will when I come back; I’m only going to the station.”
“Why? Are you meeting someone? Jean! It isn’t Ronald?” and Alda suddenly sat down on the stairs and gazed up at her with a face full of hope.
The Matchmaker Page 27