The Italian Girl Read online

  I looked now at my niece, who was sitting a little in front of me on the other side, and savoured an astonishment in which last night’s experience had some part. I had not seen Flora for eight years, since she had not been at home on my last visit. I remembered her as a forward exasperating little fairy, yet always to me infinitely gentle, with a spontaneous affectionate grace whose sheer directness seemed a miracle. She made nothing of the complicated barriers with which I had surrounded myself, and she loved me then, naturally and carelessly, just because I was her uncle, and accepted me utterly. She was perhaps the only person in the world who did. As a child she had wonderfully possessed that open simple quality which makes adults oddly ashamed before children with a shame which is also a pleasure. Otto said I ‘idealized’ Flora; but it was true that I might, for her, have come home often, if it had not been for Lydia.

  But now she was, not quite grown up, but certainly a little girl no longer. She must be, I reflected, sixteen, perhaps seventeen. After all, I was over forty myself. And now she was beautiful. As a child she had had a broad radiant appealing expression and the sweetness of a little animal. Now there was before me a handsome impressive girl, with long reddish hair, neatly pinned up, and a pale dreamy face in which the innocent radiance which I remembered shone like a surface mist above the firmer features of a grown-up. Her face had that pure transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children. She wore a big, longish, striped skirt and a black tightfitting jacket and a large, black velvet, broad-brimmed hat tilted far back on her head. She did not resemble her mother, but had something of the gipsy grace of the young Lydia.

  Isabel, beside her, looked morose and preoccupied. She too had changed, her face had aged in that imperceptible way, becoming yellower or greyer, as if a fine gauze of frowning and anxiety had been pressed upon it. But her mop of intricate brown hair was glossy and unfaded. She was smartly, quietly dressed, and could have been taken for a clever business woman, a woman of affairs, while her face might have been that of a retired actress. She had a face which was in some sense old-fashioned, a round rather wistful, big-eyed, small-mouthed face such as might have peeped and simpered at the turn of the century in some overfurnished drawing-room in France. This appearance blended in a piquant way with her rather precise Scottish voice: Isabel came from the farther north, from north of the border. She caught my look now and half smiled. She had a good smile, that direct beam of one human being at another. I liked Isabel, though indeed I hardly knew her, and had often wondered why she had stayed on in that gloomy house where she must have been so very far from happy. There was Flora, of course. And there are, I suppose, always for unhappy women many good reasons for bearing the devil they know rather than seeking the other one.

  Otto I could not see, he was somewhere behind me sitting with Levkin. That completed our party, except for Maggie, of course. Lydia had had, in latter years, few friends. I had scarcely spoken to Otto in the car, and I resolved now to have a quick business talk with him before lunch. There was no reason indeed why I should not get away promptly in the afternoon. Nothing detained me. I had not in the past enjoyed observing the wreck of my brother’s marriage and did not imagine that I would enjoy it now. And though I was bound to Otto by steely bonds more awful than the bonds of love, we had, on our rare meetings, but little to say to each other. I wanted now chiefly to discover whether Lydia, who had been my father’s sole heir, had left me anything in her will. It was unlikely, since after the scandal of my departure our relations had been cold, strained and scanty. I gathered from Isabel that my name was never mentioned. Still, it was just possible that she had left me something, and I certainly needed it.

  I lived a very simple solitary life, but on the other hand I also earned very little money. The art of the wood-engraver may be deep but it is narrow. I passed my days contentedly with the twenty-six letters of the roman alphabet, whose sober authority my father had taught me to love, combining their sturdy forms with wild fantasies of decoration to produce everything from book-plates and trademarks to bank-notes and soap-coupons. My father had frowned upon any decoration of the letter itself, whose classic familiarity he compared to that of the human form, and as a letterer I too counted as a puritan. I did occasional book illustrations, and for my own pleasure, with the names of Bewick and Calvert prayerfully upon my lips, transferred to the precious small surface of the wooden block many scenes, figures, objects that I saw or imagined. But I had never become a fashionable or well-known engraver and in that sense established. I was not ambitious. No type face bore my name. Perhaps I simply lacked talent. I had little curiosity about an exact estimate of my merits, and none at all about my prestige, except in so far as it affected money-making. I would have been happy enough to count myself a craftsman and to jog along in the background of some printing house, only a taste for freedom kept me at my own bench. I had no craving for luxuries and had never had, but I did not honour poverty for its own sake, and disliked its indignities and inconveniences. I lived a solitary life. It had not always been so. But my relations with women always followed a certain disastrous and finally familiar pattern. I did not need a psychoanalyst to tell me why: nor did it occur to me to seek the aid of one of those modern necromancers. I preferred to suffer the thing that I was.

  There was a sound of movement, a shuffling, a heavy tread. As we all rose to our feet I half turned to see the little coffin entering, and it seemed suddenly sad that the hirelings who carried it so easily were equal in number to the real mourners. I shivered and closed my eyes as they passed me, and looked again to see the coffin reposing on a sort of stage in front of a blue velvet curtain. The music ceased, but continued in my head, making the silence idiotic. I looked at the coffin and sought for feelings, but could only feel that I was cold, very cold. It was as if she were for the last time waiting, that so demanding spirit turned upon the threshold, and we were there in front of her, an embarrassed, pitiful, half-witted crew, hang-dog as we had always been. At least a Christian burial would with ancient images and emotions have covered up this moment of blankness and lent to that querulous frailty the dignity and sadness of a general mortality. To this we all come. I wished, not for the first time, that I had been brought up as a Christian. Christianity was not inside me, for all that I sometimes aped it, and I knew the loss to be terrible. This was yet another thing for which I could not forgive my parents. I checked the old familiar resentment with the old familiar check. I stared at the blue velvet curtain. The silence went on and on.

  Then suddenly, just behind me, there was a weird sound. I saw Isabel turning sharply and I turned too. The coffin-bearers stood stiffly in a row at the back. In front of them was the huge figure of my brother, and as I turned I saw him swaying, bending forward and putting his hand to his mouth. I thought for a moment that he was ill or overcome by tears: but then I saw that he was laughing. Monstrous giggles shivered his great figure from head to foot and turned, as he tried to stifle them, into wet spluttering gurgles. ‘Oh God!’ said Otto audibly. He choked. Then abandoning all attempt at concealment he went off into a fit of gargantuan mirth. Tears of laughter wetted his red cheeks. He laughed. He roared. The chapel echoed with it. Our communion with Lydia was at an end.

  The line of coffin-bearers was in scandalized disorder. Isabel had stepped into the aisle and was saying something to me. I turned towards Otto. But already David Levkin had seized him by the arm and was marching him, still gasping and rumbling, towards the door. As I left my place to follow them out I saw, behind Isabel, Flora standing perfectly still, almost at attention, gazing straight in front of her as if nothing had happened.

  Outside Otto was now sitting on the stone steps in the sunshine repeating ‘Oh God, Oh my God!’ and wiping his mouth with a filthy handkerchief. He seemed quite unable to stop laughing. He would stop for a moment, stare in front of him with a humorous delighted expression, and then as if unable to endure the exquisitely comic nature of his tho
ughts, explode again into a roar. ‘Oh my God!’ His eyes were running with water and spittle foamed down his chin. Levkin was sitting on the step above him with his knee against Otto’s shoulder. He was patting him with a patient almost abstracted air. As I approached my brother I detected a strong smell of alcohol.

  Drunkenness disgusts me. I recalled now that Isabel had said in a letter some time ago that she thought that her husband was taking to drink: and I recalled how I had thought then that Otto, at best an uncontrolled and sometimes a violent man, would make a horrible drunkard. I looked down at him with repulsion.

  ‘My lord, my lord, be quiet, be still.’ Levkin was speaking to Otto, sing-song, caressing and soothing him. I looked at the boy with surprise and with an equal dislike.

  ‘Let’s get him to the car,’ I said, I detest scenes and drama. Fortunately there was no one about. The two cars stood but ten yards off and beyond them the green trees of the Garden of Remembrance were resinous and sleepy in the sun. The women had not emerged from the chapel and our other attendants were not to be seen. ‘Get up,’ I said to Otto.

  Levkin took one arm and I took the other and Otto rose between us like a giant log released from the sea bed. His face was now radiantly serene and he belched and hiccuped meditatively as we tacked and veered our way to the car. Levkin opened the door and Otto fell in. He smelt like an old bar-parlour of stale drink and tobacco. I did not care to go on seeing my brother in this condition and it seemed kinder to him too to curtail the experience. ‘Take him away.’

  Levkin hesitated and then got into the car and began to turn it. The three women were now on the chapel steps. As I came back towards them I saw Isabel’s face bent upon me with a look of apology and appeal. Something in her eyes also said: This often happens, things are like this, do not make too much of it. Flora brushed past, tearing off her hat. ‘I’m going to walk home,’ she said brusquely to no one in particular. As she receded I saw her undo the pins in her red hair and let it fall down upon her shoulders.

  ‘Come with us, Edmund,’ said Isabel entreatingly.

  I felt at that moment that I simply wanted to shake them off like insects from my sleeve. Otto’s laughter, Otto’s reek of alcohol, the messy, muddled, personal smell of it all seemed suddenly to represent everything I detested. There was no dignity, no simplicity in these lives. In a few hours, thank God, I could leave them forever. ‘No thanks. I’ll stay here now. It’s not far to walk back. Don’t wait.’

  I watched the second car depart and then went slowly back into the cool chapel. It was not dark inside, plain windows and pale oak, but my eyes were dazed by the change of light and could not focus. Then I saw that the place was empty. Lydia was gone. The coffin must have receded through the curtains or sunk slowly into the floor, after the usual weird insipid rite of the cremation chapel. Lydia was in the furnace now.

  I sat down and tried to compose my mind. I tried to think of her, to remember her goodness and her fineness, to remember how she had loved me and suffered for me. This was no moment for thinking of her frailty or for measuring her devastations. My petty judgements were put to silence in the presence of her mystery. I would study charity now, as I ought to have done before, as I ought to have done from the start. I tried to feel some remorse, a little sober regret for my own failure as a son, as a man. I must not flinch from a measure of that vast failure. Nondum considerasti quantum pondus sit peccatum.

  These were the thoughts which I attempted to think, looking at the blue curtain beyond which my once-dear mother had passed. But I could not think them. All that came into my mind was the image of Flora. How exceedingly pretty she had become. I wondered how old she was.

  3. Isabel Feeds the Fire

  ‘You didn’t bring your car?’ said Isabel.

  ‘No. I hate driving northward.’

  ‘Have a drink? Some whisky?’

  Isabel’s gramophone, turned down to an almost inaudible murmur, was playing Sibelius.

  ‘No, thanks. I don’t drink much.’ In fact I did not drink at all, only I always thought it sounded priggish and aggressive to say so.

  ‘Unlike your dear brother!’

  ‘How long has it been going on, the drinking?’

  ‘Quite long, but especially since Lydia got so ill. Lydia was the only person who could control Otto. Thank you, Maggie, that will do. Just put the sandwiches on the table.’

  Maggie put down the tray and departed. With her neat black feet she seemed like a little donkey.

  It was lunch-time. Otto had not reappeared and Flora had sent news of a headache, so Isabel had suggested a sandwich lunch in her own room. She wanted to talk to me, she said, privately.

  Isabel occupied the bay-window bedroom in the front with the view over the lawn toward the camellias. Our house, bought by my father on his marriage, was a big ugly Victorian rectory, its red brick darkened by the sour wind that blew from the nearby collieries, whose slag heaps were invisible behind the trees. In his young socialist days my father, who came from hereabouts, had chosen this little northern town in the hope of establishing fruitful relations with the working people. But the silent suspicious miners had made nothing of that gentle personality; and by the time Otto and I were conscious of our surroundings he was already a defeated recluse. We grew up as children in exile.

  The garden was immense, and had been part of the grounds of a much larger house which had been destroyed by fire. A little mountainy stream of clear brown water spilt in over the far boundary in a long cascade, obedient to the will of some long-dead landscape gardener, The stream meandered for nearly a quarter of a mile between high slopes of camellias and dense thickets of bamboos before it briefly touched the lawn and turned away to flow under iron bridges into the town. The camellia bushes, indeed most of them were by now trees, unkept and running wild, had grown into an almost impenetrable tangle of implicated vegetation. The course of the stream was marked by the greener line of bamboo, while high up above a birch grove led away into the open country. For us children it had formed a vast region of romance. I sighed. I could not remember being happy in childhood, but now it was as if the woods remembered it for me.

  ‘No thanks, Isabel, I don’t smoke. I’m out of date about Flora. What’s she doing now? I was surprised to see her so grown up.’

  ‘She’s at the technical college, doing textile design. She has a small flair for it. I expect she’ll get married young. She’s longing to go south.’

  I sighed again. Through these various channels my father’s big talent was draining away.

  ‘Thanks, Isabel, just one sandwich. You haven’t anything soft, ginger beer? All right, tomato juice. What have you done to your hand?’

  Isabel had a long pale scar across the fingers of her right hand.

  ‘Nothing. I burnt it here on the grate.’

  ‘You must be careful with that fire. It’s like a blast furnace. Surely you don’t need it in summer?’

  ‘It’s company. Like a dog. I enjoy feeding it.’

  Lydia had always had a morbid fear of fire and kept at least six fire extinguishers in the house. Partly to annoy her, Isabel had always kept a very large open fire in her room which she piled high with wood and coal. It was roaring away now, a dazzling edifice of red and gold, although the sun was shining brightly outside. Isabel took some drooping flowers from a vase and threw them on to the blaze. There was a sizzling sound and the room filled with a sweet pungent smell.

  Isabel’s room had always been something of a provocation. It was her hobby, doubtless her consolation. Whereas the rest of the house was still appointed in the narrowly fanciful style favoured by my father, a sort of Spartan art nouveau, Isabel had built herself a luscious and eclectic boudoir. The room was crammed with furniture and the furniture encrusted with objects, and my heavy tread on entering had set a myriad trinkets tinkling like little bells. It was an Edwardian room with dreams of the eighteenth century. I backed away from the fire and leaned on the end of the mantelpiece, carefully shif
ting some ivory water-buffaloes out of reach of my elbow.

  ‘Do sit down, Edmund. You’ll break something if you go on loping around. You’re much too big for this room anyway. Thank heavens Otto doesn’t come here any more.’ She added after a moment, ‘Ah, you were so right to get away from Lydia.’

  Her voice with emotion became more Scottish. She was sitting now in a velvet sewing-chair which was treading upon the toes of a Georgian games-table and some ambiguous pieces of Chinoiserie. She must have changed some time after our return into what I had taken to be another dress but which I now saw to be a flowered summer dressing-gown. She had thrust her feet into fluffy backless bedroom-slippers. Since my last visit she had had her long hair cut off, though the elaborate curly coiffure had much the same curly appearance as before. Under the luxuriant hair her face was small, with little poised mouth and short pretty nose. She was thickly powdered, her eyebrows drawn in an exaggerated curve, and crude greenish smudges above her big round brown eyes. Below, her unpowdered neck, revealed by the open gown, looked gaunt and tired. I felt sorry for her.

  ‘I’ll stand if you don’t mind. I always prefer standing. How are things generally, Isabel? How is Otto, apart from the drink?’

  ‘All right, I suppose. He gets his work done. I never see him now. He sleeps in the workshop.’

  ‘I see he’s got a new apprentice. I think you mentioned it in a letter. What happened to the last one?’

  ‘Oh, he left early one morning with all the cash he could lay hands on and a lot of Otto’s clothes. Of course, Otto did nothing about it. Thank God Lydia was practically unconscious by then.’

  ‘What’s the new one like? The same old style? Otto can certainly pick them! He seems foreign.’

  ‘Foreign parents, I imagine. Russian Jew. He lives in the summer-house. I hardly see him either.’

  The summer-house was a round stone building, originally an eighteenth-century decoration, which later vandals had turned, with red brick additions, into a gardener’s cottage. Yet it still looked pretty enough among the first trees of the camellia forest. Otto’s workshop, an unashamed monstrosity of brick and slate, was happily out of sight behind the house.