Eustace and Hilda (67 page)

Stephen, Eustace reflected, had got an entirely different impression of his home from the one he had grown up with. Perhaps visitors always did. But his family must also have behaved rather differently. Certainly his aunt had. She had never told him she meant to invite Stephen, and yet the invitation must have been sent almost before he left the house. He could not remember that, unprompted by himself or Barbara, she had ever asked anyone to dinner before. Perhaps it was not strange that she should have wanted to see Stephen for herself, for she had always seemed to like the idea of him. But it was strange that she should exhibit Eustace's prizes, a thing he had never known her do before. He almost wished she hadn't. The admiration Eustace felt for her had never wavered, but the affection had. On his conception of her as a just but unloving woman—unloving at least to him—he had built up and justified the idea of himself as being more appreciated abroad than at home. Now he would have to revise that conception, and in spite of Stephen's assurances, suffer the sense of guilt that the consciousness of being more loved than loving always brought him.

Touched and saddened, he pictured her grey head bent over the prizes, memorials to his past achievements in which she felt she could legitimately take pride; for she had made it clear to him, and evidently to Stephen too, that she didn't regard the visit to Venice as a feather in his cap. She had been against his going, but only passively, as though resigned to it as yet another stage in his development, of which she could not approve. But perhaps Stephen had made up the episode of the prizes, just as he had made up some of their titles; you could not be sure with him, he got an idea and then embroidered it. Hilda's remark about Lady Nelly finding another friend was perhaps a little wounding, but might not have been meant so; she might just be expressing concern for his future. Stephen, Eustace was sure, had a genuine interest in his welfare, but he liked to constitute himself its director; like so many others, he didn't want Eustace to be happy in his own way—wherever that was.

But everything was going well—that was the main fact that had emerged from Stephen's letter. True, there had not been much time for anything to go wrong. Eustace had a feeling that any ship he left must inevitably sink; but Willesden and the clinic were obviously still afloat. More than that, there was a subdued excitement in Stephen's letter that suggested they were actually on the move, borne by favourable breezes, with Stephen himself at the helm. Towards what destination? The thrill of excitement communicated itself to Eustace and increased the elation that he already felt from the presence of Venice, drifting into his room with the shouts from below and the wavy lights on the eggshell-coloured walls. Hilda had found a friend—yet another friend.

‘You must come to see us at Anchorstone, Stephen, and spend a long week-end with us—a week, if you can spare it. Dick is longing to see more of you and so am I—I've got a lot of work for you in connection with winding-up the clinic. And Dick has some business for you too, I don't quite know what it is. You didn't know I was giving up the clinic? Oh, but I had to, you see, there's so much to do here—entertaining and parish work and one thing and another—since Sir John died and my mother-in-law went to live at the Dower House, a charming house, though she says it's too big for her. Of course I shall always take an interest in the clinic—a very friendly interest. To tell you the truth, Dick has partially endowed it; wasn't it good of him? Yes, twenty thousand pounds. How stupid of me—you naturally would know that, being our solicitor as well as the clinic's. It is such a relief to me, Stephen, to know that the dear old place is in such good hands.'

Back at Anchorstone, Eustace's thoughts began to busy themselves with the coming birthday-party. He would have been going there, of course, only Lady Nelly had made a special point of his coming out to Venice in time for the Feast of the Redeemer. He couldn't do both; the dates, it seemed, clashed. Perhaps it was just as well; events never moved while you were watching them, and his own particular scrutiny, he sometimes felt, had a peculiarly arresting effect. He becalmed things. At a cricket match it was always when he had withdrawn his attention that the batsman was bowled. He had conscientiously and indeed excitedly followed the course of Barbara's first flirtations; it was just when he stopped looking that she got engaged to Jimmy Crankshaw. And the same with the clinic. He knew its day-to-day history, but the moment when it put forth fresh buds and blossoms always took him by surprise. Hilda hated being overlooked. She would feel freer out of range of his anxious, watch-dog face. Dick would feel freer too. Perhaps they would both feel as though a weight had been lifted. It was much better, really, that he should be away. He would not like his ghost to haunt those passages, mounting guard over the door that he had never seen.

All the same his thoughts, crossing the mountains, hovered on that northern shore; he passed by the window in the College front behind which the helmets gleamed; from across the lake he saw the brown-pink Banqueting Hall mirrored in the calm water, a diamond polished but uncut, so different from the Venetian water with its myriad sparkling facets. Soon he was on the site of the ruined chapel, where he had talked to Dick; of all the places in Anchorstone Hall this was his favourite, perhaps because, being a roofless ruin and belonging to the past, it did not repel his imagination with the pride of alien ownership. They had laughed at him, at home, for bringing away the carved fragment that Dick had wrenched off the font; Barbara said he would have to pay duty on building material imported into Italy. But Eustace had a strong feeling for relics, and it should even earn its passage by acting as a paper-weight. The stability of paper-weights appealed to him. They tethered things down, they anchored the past. The Anchor Stone! Policeman to the Muses, ready to arrest any development, it lay on the bureau—grey-green with touches of dull gold—where Eustace was to work. He jumped out of bed. His bath-room was next door, but he lingered a moment in the immense gallery, lit by six flamboyant Gothic windows linked arm in arm across the end. Many doors opened off it into rooms that no doubt would be occupied later, but until then Eustace had the whole floor to himself.

He had been working for some time, with half an eye on the seductive window on his left, when the door opened and Giacinto appeared.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but the Countess will be ready at twelve o'clock.”

Eustace thanked him and went on making notes; it was only just half-past eleven by Miss Fothergill's watch.

A few minutes later there came a knock at the door, several times repeated in spite of the “Come in” with which, with a rising volume of tone amounting in the end to a yell, Eustace greeted each assault. At last the door opened, and a small dark maid with hair tightly pulled back stood transfixed on the threshold.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” she said, staring at Eustace as though hypnotised, “mais Madame la Comtesse sera prête à partir à midi.”

Eustace thanked her and, wondering, returned to his work. His imagination was haunted by a person under a railway arch who had come to this uninviting rendezvous specially at Eustace's request to keep an appointment with him. Eustace had failed to turn up and the man was pacing to and fro, wringing his hands, while the rain poured down outside and the opportunities of a lifetime slipped by him. But it still needed twenty minutes to twelve, and Eustace's dread of being on the wrong side of the clock was balanced by an unshakeable confidence when on the right side. What was his consternation, therefore, when a few minutes later he heard a scurry of steps outside. The door, after hardly more than a premonitory rattle, burst open, and the major-domo advanced into the room, followed by Giacinto and the maid and (as it seemed to Eustace) by several other domestics as well.

“Signore,” announced the major-domo, composing himself and directing a quelling look over each shoulder as though to make sure that his aides, though well in sight, were keeping their distance—“la Signora Contessa è già in gondola.”

Lady Nelly already in the gondola!

Eustace was appalled by the idea, now conveyed to him in three languages, that he was keeping her waiting. Without staying to see the cloud of messengers disperse, he dashed wildly about the room trying to assemble the things that might be needed for a picnic. His mackintosh? In spite of the favourable weather forecast, yes. A book? On the whole no, Lady Nelly might take it as a reflection on her conversational powers. Gloves, no. His brandy flask in case he should feel faint? Yes, but where was it? A frantic search. His hat, in case he should get sun-stroke? Here it was, but more suitable for keeping off a thunderstorm. Money—well, Lady Nelly would no doubt pay for everything, but a man should never leave the house, his father had told Eustace, without money in his pocket. In they all went—pounds, lire, francs, shillings, soldi, the cosmopolitan gleanings of Miss Fothergill's bequest. Handkerchief, cigarettes, matches—starting out into the unknown, Eustace did not feel complete without a two days' supply of everything. A wild dash into the bath-room to wash the ink from his fingers, and Eustace's body was ready, though his mind, still searching, considering, rejecting and accepting, was lamentably unprepared.

Along the gallery he sped and down the pale stone staircase, uncarpeted here, but still furnished with the lovely handrail of crimson rope, hanging in long shallow loops from staples in the wall. No time to avail himself of its support; no one ever had a heart attack going downstairs, and better fall headlong than be late. Just a glance at the lower gallery, companion to the upper, but with its crimson damask, its pictures and its mirrors, as sumptuous as that was bare. Now his feet were on the red stair-carpet, or rather on the rivulet of white drugget that cascaded down its centre, a protection from dirty footmarks, only removed, Eustace supposed, for Royal visits, and out into the long, high cavern below. Far on his left, behind an iron grille, glittered the water of the Grand Canal, but the tall doorway immediately opposite was his goal. Bracing himself to meet who knew what indignant reproaches or icy reproofs, what suggestions of a curtailed visit or immediate return to England, Eustace charged through the opening on to the pavement.

For a moment he was only aware of the impact of the sunshine, which was quite blinding. Then, crossing the pavement, he looked over the stone coping of the low red wall into the gondola. Both gondoliers were there: Silvestro reading his paper, the other sitting motionless on the poop. They looked as if they had been there for hours. But no sign of Lady Nelly.

Three or four idlers, of shabby and even diseased appearance, who were leaning on the wall and staring in a bemused fashion at the gondola, at Eustace's approach slid their tattered elbows a few inches to right or left to make room for him; otherwise, to Eustace's disordered fancy, still moving at high tension in a maelstrom of unpunctuality, all movement in heaven and earth seemed to be suspended.

Silvestro looked up from his paper and saw Eustace. He rose to his feet and rested his beringed brown hand on the warm parapet.

“Buon giorno, signore,” he said.

“Buon giorno,” panted Eustace, feeling that the conversation would have to end there.

“Manca cinque minuti a mezzo-giorno,” remarked Silvestro.

Oddly enough this sentence corresponded almost exactly to one that Eustace had learned in his phrase book. It was five minutes to twelve.

“Ma la Contessa”—he began, slowly emerging from the penumbra of a threatened scolding into the more congenial consciousness of a grievance.

“Oh, la Contessa,” said Silvestro. He turned upwards a much-callused palm, and shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate that Lady Nelly's ways were unaccountable. “La Contessa non si trova.”

“The Countess does not find herself,” volunteered the younger gondolier, in a strangely breathy voice, as if in English every word were preceded by an aspirate. Silvestro gave him a withering look and he said no more.

“But I was told——” began Eustace. He stopped, but the sense of being ill-used prompted him to try to overcome the language difficulty. “The major-domo, the butler, the head of the palace——”

“Vuol dire il maestro di casa,” ventured the younger gondolier.

Silvestro availed himself of the information, but without acknowledging its source.

“Non sa niente, quello lì,” he remarked. “E matto.” His voice suggested that the maestro di casa was like a contagious disease, only to be spoken of because, unfortunately, it existed.

A little more boldly than before the other gondolier resumed the rôle of translator.

“He does not know hanything, that one. Is mahd.”

Silvestro did not reprove his assistant's audacity, and went on: “I domestici dentro di casa sono tutti matti, salvo il cuoco.”

“He says the domestics inside are hall mahd, except the cook,” repeated the second gondolier, with some unction.

Eustace was wondering in what hall-madness consisted when the midday gun fired its tremendous salvo. He jumped; the faces along the wall, after a second's animation, settled into lines of deeper despondency, as though they had now nothing to hope for. Silvestro took out his watch.

“La Contessa è in ritardo,” he said.

“Si, si,” said Eustace warmly, delighted to have understood something at last. A barge passed by, piled with the furniture of a family which was evidently moving house. Intimate objects of bedroom use crowned the cargo. An old woman sat in the prow, looking undisguisedly woebegone. Perhaps the things were hers. The rower had the long handle of the tiller between his bare feet; the heavy blade of his oar dripped with water, and he looked anxiously and rather angrily ahead.

Silvestro remonstrated with him for passing too near the gondola, the splendour of which made a violent, and in Eustace's eyes a painful, contrast with the cheap, shabby contents of the barge. But the bargeman, with a rather touching humility, seemed to acknowledge the prior claims of the luxurious vessel, stared at it with admiration unmixed with envy, and managed to avoid touching it. The danger averted, Silvestro returned to the parapet.