The Italian Girl (10 page)

‘Of course not. Oh well, yes you can, what task can I set you now. You can remove all the tacking threads from the hem of this dress, that might be within your capacities.’ She laughed a crazy little laugh. ‘Here, take these scissors. See you cut off
all
the threads and
don’t
cut the material.’

She pushed the chairs back to make a space before the hearth. Feeling an idiot, I knelt down awkwardly and began snipping and pulling at the white threads at the hem of the dress. The task began to upset me extremely. I saw at close quarters Isabel’s plump nylon-stockinged legs and the white serrated tip of her petticoat. It was difficult not to see more. There was a warm perfumy smell of soap and scent and clean velvety skin. I tried to keep my hands steady.

‘That will do,’ said Isabel from above.

I put the scissors down on the floor and got up. As I rose I realized at once that something odd had happened. Isabel, like a nymph in a legend, was metamorphosed, changed. Then I saw that she had undone the linen dress all the way down to the waist and was displaying to me two pink round bare breasts.

She stood quite still looking up at me with a sort of dazed ferocious expression, with vague yearning eyes, her mouth drooping open. I looked at her breasts. It was years since I had seen a woman’s oreasts. Then I took the linen stuff, which she was holding wide apart, and drew it gently and firmly together again. I felt her little hands fluttering inside mine.

At that moment, or perhaps a second before it, there was a disturbance at the door, a knock, and the sound of someone entering. Both Isabel and I were slowed and confused by the shock of our encounter. Indeed Isabel hardly moved, hardly turned, as Maggie came into the room carrying a tray and stopped abruptly in front of our little tableau.

There was a moment’s silence and then the door closed again sharply. Isabel and I continued to stare at each other. She began to cry quietly.

Part Two

10. Uncle Edmund
in Loco Parentis

The best way of curing a crack in boxwood is to leave the block in a cool damp place for twenty-four hours or so; usually the patient makes a miraculous recovery from quite a severe split. I examined with satisfaction the blocks which I had just retrieved from the cellar. They had healed well. Those who do not work with such material, such thingy, aspects of nature, may not quite imagine or credit the way in which a piece of unformed stuff can seem pregnant, inspiring. I can imagine how a sculptor might feel about a lump of stone, though I have never felt this myself. But pieces of wood can quite send my imagination racing even in the handling of them. There is the lovely difference between boxwood and pear wood, the male and the female of the wood-engraver’s world. But there is also the strong individual difference between one piece of boxwood and another. Each one is full of a different picture.

It was four days later. I was still waiting, still hanging about. I had no new conception of my role or indeed any clear conception of it at all. And nothing had happened, I had done nothing, Flora had not returned, I could not find her. I was fairly miserable. At moments I told myself that I simply felt ‘involved’ or that I was waiting with morbid curiosity for some outrage of which I would be a useless and somehow gratified spectator. Then I told myself I ought to go. There was a sort of vanity involved in staying, a vain desire to retrieve a lost dignity. I had been more affected than I had liked to admit by Isabel’s picture of me as a healer. Having healed no one and failed grossly in the one task where I had a little power of good, I had better, I argued, go home and digest the bitter incompleteness of my excursion. I had better go home and mourn for Lydia.

Yet I stayed. After so much it seemed impossible to go without more. I
was
involved, and in no bad sense. I stayed out of some sort of affection for my brother and sister-in-law, I stayed in order to keep some sort of faith with Flora. I had made more vain telephone calls. I had still not said anything to Isabel. This problem continually tortured me, but I decided it was better to keep quiet. Isabel would be as helpless as I was, and if the worst had happened it might even be better that Isabel should not know at all – or at any rate it seemed fair to leave that decision still in the hands of Flora. I am very literal about promises. And from every point of view Otto was better in the dark. But I was tormented by my responsibility, and by a feeling that I was only keeping quiet because I did not want to resign a sort of privileged position, I did not want the situation to collapse into the hands of Isabel, so that I should become superfluous. I debated the matter continually.

I also tried to think about Lydia, but I could think of no way of thinking about her. It seemed proper to begin now, and here, where there was a sharper sense of her presence, her absence, to weave as it were, to put on, the idea of her death. But I kept seeming to forget that she had died, as if
that
didn’t matter, and kept returning in fantasy to the old undying Lydia that I carried inside me. I could not by this sort of meditation invent any decent motive for remaining. And I occasionally thought that I was really only staying on because I could not face the return to my lonely little flat which became, when I was away from it, quite cold and impersonal as if it forgot me completely as soon as I closed the door. By comparison the rectory was as full of warmth and humours as a pigsty. It was, for all its miseries, a wonderfully inhabited house. And emanating from somewhere within it, I was not sure from where, was a gentle compelling air which made me feel unexpectedly at home.

I had promised Otto that I would help him to go through all Lydia’s things, but we kept putting it off. We were still frightened of her, it still seemed a kind of sacrilege to touch her belongings. We half-heartedly sorted out the contents of her desk which had already been ransacked and disordered by Isabel. There was still no sign of the will, and we concluded there was none. But we found a lot of other things, including all the letters which Otto and I had written her from school, tied up in ribbons, Otto’s in a blue ribbon, mine in a pink. We carried these packages unopened down to the kitchen range and burnt them. We could not bring ourselves to touch her clothes. There were wardrobes full of the gay long-skirted dresses; and since Isabel refused to have anything to do with the matter we eventually asked Maggie to deal with them. They all then vanished overnight, distributed no doubt to those in the town whom Otto called Maggie’s ‘suppliants’.

I had had, after the curious scene in her bedroom, no further ‘explanation’ with Isabel. But some kind of peace or truce existed between us to which I contributed the rather stuffy dignity with which I had managed to carry that occasion off, and Isabel contributed a sort of rueful philosophical contrition. She did better than I did, and I would have liked to make some more definite, more friendly, gesture to her, but I was afraid of initiating some further muddle. In fact, the situation was saved by a wordless affection on both sides and we continued as if nothing had happened, or almost. I did feel I had gained, for better or worse, a clearer vision of Isabel’s picture of herself as a sort of sexual queen and empress
manquée.
If she had been a happier woman she would have cast herself as the Lou Andreas-Salome of her little town. As it was, she simply radiated these obscure frenzied little waves of sexual need and would-be authority which, although I was strictly indifferent to them, did have a generally disturbing effect.

I had had no further talk of an intimate kind with Otto and had indeed scarcely seen him as he seemed now to spend most of the day at the summer-house. I visited the empty workshop at intervals and was grieved to sec his tools so idle. Levkin I saw only in the garden in the distance. Whenever he saw me he would seem to be convulsed with laughter, would gesticulate wildly and then leap into the air. I ignored this.

I had been eating an orange and the dark wood now smelt pungently of the fruit. It was a childhood smell, lingering with a certain combination of the innocent and the disgusting. Oranges are one of the few fruits whose taste I like but whose smell I dislike. I piled the boxwood blocks up neatly and tidied the orange peel on the table. I was sitting in the kitchen. Since yesterday I had discovered that the kitchen suited me rather well. The weather had turned to wind and rain and I was glad of a warm corner. I equally shunned company and the quaint austerity of my father’s room, but sitting in the kitchen required no justification. It was a high, square place with a shiny linoleum in big black and white checks like a Tintoretto floor. The original Victorian range, a great black machine much cherished by my father, glowed and purred at one end in a large shrine of Dutch tiles, surrounded by dead-beat wicker chairs. The huge deal table, its surface strained and pitted by relentless scrubbing, was as familiar to my hand as to my eye. It had been the natural place to do one’s homework, fix one’s meccano, or sort out the inward parts of an electrical device. Here too I had eagerly ruined my first precious blocks of wood. Here I had frequented in sorrow and in joy under the régimes of Carlottas and Giulias and Vittorias as far back as I could remember.

It was about five o’clock in the evening, a time which always finds me fretful and restless. I had a permanent pain of worry about Flora. And I had not yet recovered from the shock which Isabel had given me, a shock now oddly separated from Isabel herself as if a demon had emanated from her which teased me still. I stretched my legs out and contemplated at the other end of the table a heap of cherry-red silk which Maggie had been sewing, presumably a dress for Isabel. Like a true house-serf the Italian girl had always made clothes for Isabel and Lydia. Lydia’s old beautiful gipsy robes, the garments which my dear father had inspired and which he so much loved to see her wear, had all been made by Maggie: or perhaps by Giulia or Vittoria or Gemma or Carlotta.

Maggie had left her sewing and was busy at a side table with a dismembered chicken and some vegetables. Now the chicken was sizzling softly in a pan while with quick small fingers Maggie plucked the soiled tattered skins from big mushrooms revealing the creamy fleshy discs within. Then on an oval chopping-board with brisk little movements she chopped yellowish-white fluted stalks of celery and a large moist onion. The sharp smell of it pricked my eyes, while now Maggie was plucking at a greyish-silver papery integument of garlic and peeling the plump yellow clove within. A glass of red wine stood by her on the table. I looked up from her hands. Her pale bony face had a rather damp denuded look and her large dark severe eyes were a little dewy from the onion. A strong arabesque at the nostril was echoed in the curve of the long thin mouth. It was a fierce, intelligent yet unprotected face. Her copious hair, pulled harshly back, fell in the long looped bun, black as onyx, shiny as lacquer. She wore no make-up. Had the others looked like that? I could not remember what the others had looked like.

‘Che cosa stai combinando, Maggie?’

‘Pollo alia cacciatora.’

There was a sudden loud flurry in the hall outside and then the sound of someone noisily running up the stairs. I turned sharply and caught a quick snapshot of Flora in hat and coat. I leapt up and was out of the kitchen in a second.

The door of Flora’s room banged abruptly in my face and I heard the key turn in the lock. I pressed the door and said softly ‘Flora, Flora –’ I scratched on the door like a dog. I did not want to disturb Isabel. I frantically, desperately wanted to see the child alone, to find out what had happened, simply to see her. I was already panting with distress and anxiety. ‘Please, Flora –’

After a moment or two the door opened quietly and I slipped in. Flora had thrown off her coat and hat. Her hair was piled up in a woven mass behind her head with a lot of clips and pins and she looked older, handsomer. Yet it was still the same transparent, milky, unmarked face of a young girl. She stood very self-consciously straight and upright, her head thrown back defiantly.

‘Well, Uncle Edmund, what can I do for you?’

I was almost breathless with shock, with sudden fear and remorse, with some other emotion, on seeing her there so tall, so good-looking, so complete, so full of the unnerving authority of her youth. ‘Oh Flora, I was so worried about you. I’m so sorry I didn’t come that morning. I came later, but you’d gone –’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’ She stared at me with a sort of mad radiance in her face.

‘What’s happened, Flora?’

‘I’ve had it out!’ She laughed shortly.

‘Oh God.’ I sat down on her bed. I had known it, of course I had known it at once, when she had gone, that this was how it would be. But I felt a new pain, I felt like a murderer. ‘You shouldn’t have –’

‘I decided all your moral stuff was no good. There are moments when one’s got to follow one’s instincts, when one’s got to do what one wants. And I wanted to tear that thing right out of me. If I’d had that child I would have killed it.’

‘You have killed it.’ The words were brutal, but it was myself I was accusing.

‘It isn’t like that!’ She stamped her foot. ‘What do you know about it? You’re a man. You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel that cancer inside you, to feel it eating up your youth, your happiness, your freedom, your whole future. Men can moralize! But whoever heard about the problems of unmarried fathers? They haven’t any problems!’

I knew it would be useless and unkind to reproach her now. She was filled to the brim with that sense of her right to freedom, her right to happiness, which makes the young, when they confront their elders, so unattractive and so ruthless. No man has a right to happiness or the right, for that, to trample upon other lives. Yet turning, with an old automatic movement, all the rebuke upon myself I thought: I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy. She has still a happy destiny.

We were facing each other. I still seated and she leaning against the edge of the window, her chin lifted, her hands nervously smoothing her smart tartan pinafore dress. She looked very pretty and full of the new life which that surrendered life had given her. I felt a pang of resentful envy and felt at the same time a sort of admiration for her sheer vitality.