“Meg doesn’t like that little black house, Mudder,” remarked Meg, who had been silently looking up at Pine Cottage.
“We’ll soon make it light,” answered Alda cheerfully, pushing open the gate. It had a rustic catch, and it stuck.
When they tried to unlock the front door with the key produced by Alda, that stuck, too.
“Here…” said Ronald, putting his shoulder to it. “Let me try….”
“Meg, you may come out now,” said Louise in a low authoritative tone, beginning to unbuckle the strap round her sister’s middle. “You must be a very good girl, because mother and father will be busy looking at the house and they won’t want to be interrupted. Come along,” and she set Meg’s tiny boots of patched rubber down on the path (which was of gravel; there was nothing so pleasant as a firm path of large stones, that could steam after a light spring rain or hold the heat of a long summer day, at Pine Cottage).
“Merciful heavens,” exclaimed Alda, as the door gave way with a wounded screech and Ronald fell into the black passage, “Are you all right, darling?”
He answered rather shortly that everything was comparative and then, as Alda lit the lamp on a table, they all burst out laughing; Meg was especially pleased to do so and held her face up to the light, making loud ha-has with her eyes shut. A passage was now revealed which apparently ran slap through the house and out the other side through a back door. It was covered in worn oilcloth. The yellow walls glistened with damp and the air struck deathly cold.
“B-o-r-l-e-y——” spelled Ronald, with a significant glance at his wife.
“Borley Rectory, the Most Haunted House in England,” took up Jenny promptly. “It was always cold there because of the ghosts. Do you think this is haunted, Father? How super!”
“Of course not, don’t be absurd.” Ronald put his hand on the shoulder of Louise, whose eyes suddenly looked very large. “Come along, let’s explore.”
“What a howwid smell,” said Meg heartily, as Alda with some difficulty opened a door on the right.”
“Look, darling, the living-room is rather small; I expect we shall live in the kitchen,” said Alda, withdrawing her head.
“I should think so too; beastly little morgue. What’s this?” as they approached another door at the end of the long passage.
“The kitchen. It isn’t too bad.”
“Everything seems fairly clean,” he said, glancing suspiciously about him when they had succeeded in getting the door open.
“And there’s a little boiler that heats the water, and the coal lives in a shed out here——”
She hurried with the lamp from room to room, only pausing when held up by a door which stuck; demonstrating, explaining, throwing open cupboards and generally casting her own glow so successfully over Pine Cottage that her husband found himself in the familiar position of thinking that the place was not so bad after all. The children followed her, with their three heads of flaxen hair palely reflecting the warm gold of her own; all three had a water-fairy look, with pale grey or green eyes and lily skins, but Jenny’s hair had the darkest tint and her eyes the deepest colour.
“Now let’s go upstairs,” said Alda, when they had inspected coal shed and larder and even ventured out into a small back garden overlooking the fields. “Now, the bedrooms really are the best part of the house.”
It occurred to Ronald that this was as well, since, when damp and lack of sun and endless mud had done their work, his family would probably spend much of their time in bed. But he did not say so; the house was taken; the contract signed and stamped, and Alda and the children, in their own minds, already settled at Pine Cottage. If he put his foot down and insisted upon an upheaval, he would have to go to Germany in the following week leaving his family still unsettled for the winter, and he felt that he simply could not endure any fresh anxiety about them. They and he were so newly re-united, their shared happiness was still so sweet, that he could not cast a shadow over it by trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to improve upon Alda’s plans. After all, they were sure of a roof for their heads when much of England and most of Europe was living in a damaged house, or homeless. Here his flock of excitable, talkative feminine creatures must stay, in this depressing little place that was neither villa nor cottage standing so unexpectedly in the lonely fields; and here at least, while he was quartered in some dying town in broken Germany, he would be able to think of them on the long winter nights; safe, and in a home…of a sort.
“This reminds me of the seaside lodgings we used to stay in when I was a boy,” he remarked, as they wandered in and out of the bedrooms, which were furnished with large brass bedsteads and solid Edwardian wardrobes and chests of drawers.
“We always stayed in hotels,” said Alda, whose father was a wealthy general practitioner in the provincial city where she had been born.
“Yes, you poor little beasts.” He was standing in front of a picture and shaking his head over it.
“We adored it; Jean and I used to get crushes on the waiters.”
“Jean? What was she doing there with you?”
“She used to come away with us whenever her wretched mother wanted to get rid of her.”
“The beds do bounce, Mother!” shouted Jenny from the next room.
“Don’t let Meg lie on them; they may be damp,” Alda called back. “It’s good that they bounce; they’ll be comfortable.”
“Didn’t you tell me that Mrs. Hardcastle died recently?” Ronald went on.
“Yes, about three months ago. I was so glad for Jean.”
“Oh Mother!” Louise was standing at the door with a face expressing double distress; that someone should be dead and her mother so unlike her usual self as to be glad because of it.
“Mrs. Hardcastle was very beastly, Weez,” said Jenny judicially. “You know what revolting teas she always gave us.”
“Perhaps she meant them to be nice.”
“Hur-hur! Perhaps not! Mother, I’m absolutely starving. How much longer are we going to stay here?”
“I shouldn’t let Louise and Jenny have this room, Alda; it gets no sun at all,” said Ronald, turning away from his picture. “All right, Jen, we’re going in a minute.”
“Have you seen enough to set your mind at ease, darling?” Alda asked, putting an arm about her husband’s neck and pulling his dark thin cheek down to her own. The gold in her hair, and her pale face and widely-curving smile, suggested a sunlit Amanda or Anthea, whereas “Alda” has an echo of the witchlike flowers and black berries of the elder tree, with some grey Norse sorceress weaving beneath its shade, but it means “rich,” and Ronald thought that it suited her.
“Nothing could do that,” he answered, sighing, and held her close for a moment. “How far are you here from Pagets?” (the house where they had been staying with the Friends).
“Only a mile across the fields in fine weather, but it’s a good three miles round by the road and the fields are impossible in the winter, unfortunately.”
“I wish you could have stayed on there.”
“So do I, but it just wasn’t possible. They’ll have no help in the house at all after next week, and the old lady is really ill. They’ve been so good to us; I can’t worry them any more.”
Ronald walked across to the window (which was a modern one, set flatly in a metal frame and interposing none of the comfort of wood and deep-sunk panes between the room and the chilly night) and stared out across the faintly moonlit fields. A low wind was sighing round the house and swaying the tops of the pines.
“And who are the people at the farm? Have you seen them?”
“The Hoadleys, man and wife. They have the keys of this place and I had to call there for them. They weren’t particularly forthcoming but they seemed harmless.”
“Could you go to them if you got in a hole? Have they a telephone?”
“Oh yes; I telephoned to the agent from there. It’s a little farm that used to belong to gentry, so I hear, but they got tired of it and the Hoa
dleys bought it. But I shan’t get in a hole; do I ever?”
He smiled, and pulled her ear. No, she did not get into holes; nevertheless, he mistrusted her feminine rashness and enthusiasm, her passion for the open air and flowers and picnic meals and her impatient overlooking of such details as damp rooms and inconvenient sinks.
“You won’t be completely isolated…” he muttered, turning away from the window and looking slowly round the walls, distempered an icy blue and stained with damp. “This really is a most depressing room, darling. Everything looks as if—as if——”
“It’s been underground for weeks,” she said cheerfully. “But the beds are really good and in the spring these woods will be brimming with primroses; you just wait! And Mrs. Prewitt is going to let us have Use of Linen and Cutlery.”
“Is that the owner? Who is she?”
“She went to Ireland in 1939 and just hasn’t come back. She owns several houses round here.”
“Are they all like this one?”
“Pretty much,” Alda said carelessly, smoothing her hair in front of the misty mirror. She had been too charmed by the situation of the cottage and the promise of those woods to pay much attention to a certain expression upon the faces of the Sillingham tradespeople, and a note in the voices of the Friends at Pagets, when she announced that she had taken Pine Cottage.
“Well,” Ronald said heavily, “I suppose we’d better be going. What are the children up to?”
Alda went out on to the landing, where there was the sound of giggling, and he slowly followed.
It added considerably to his depression that his family should have been victimised by a rentier. Naturally he did not share the Left view of rentiers as a class, but this specimen seemed to him to justify it. Pine Cottage had walls of single thickness and its doors and windows and fittings were cheap and mean. He thought of Pagets; built three hundred years ago, with an oak staircase solid as the decks of the ships upon which the original Friends had sailed for the New World; the house sunk deeply in its old, wide, sweet garden, and house and garden set secretly amidst the mild turnings of an ancient lane. He wondered (for his picture of the proletariat was Ruskinian rather than Marxian) that Mrs. Prewitt had been able to find Sussex workmen willing to throw her matchboarding and her bad bricks together, and he remembered how, when he looked out of a certain window at Pagets, his gaze travelled slowly up a massive, slabbed, sloping precipice, warmly grey as April clouds and fledged with emerald moss at the meeting of each slab and carrying little white flowers in spring; it was the roof of Horsham stone.
“What is all this?” he demanded, beginning to laugh as he came out on to the landing and found his wife kneeling with her head close to those of her three daughters, and all in fits of laughter.
“Meg says——” began Jenny, lifting a pink face.
“Oh no, it’s rude!” from Louise.
“——that when you sit on the seat in there,” jerking her head towards an open door, “it——” she went off again and could not get a word out.
“Come on, Jenny, we don’t want to be here all night,” commanded Alda, putting an arm round the two eldest. “You then, Meg. What does it do?”
“FLIES up and smacks your botty!” shouted Meg, and off they all went again, the four fair heads close together and their laughter ringing through the house.
Ronald laughed too, but he told Alda that she had “better have that seen to,” and the laurels in the front garden thinned, as well; it would make the living-room lighter and Mrs. Prewitt should be grateful. (Not that he wanted her gratitude, he added.)
Meg was asleep on his shoulder as they walked home through the winter moonlight. The way from Pine Cottage to Pagets was even rougher than the way from Sillingham to Pine Cottage and it became increasingly clear to Ronald that during the winter months at least his family (unless Alda made determined efforts towards a social life) would be almost completely cut off from what society the neighbourhood afforded.
2
ON A STILL morning some days later, Fabrio Caetano—of ITALY, as the flash on the shoulder of his uniform proclaimed—lay on his back amidst the stumps of oaks and birches in the middle of a sunny slope.
The slope was enclosed on all sides by woods; eighteen months ago a camp had been hidden there, and deserted huts stood in the thickest parts, and dumps of rusty petrol tins and other rubbish were being gradually revealed as the leaves fell from the blackberry bushes. A track ran straight through the middle of the north wood down to the main road a mile away, with its iron-hard mud monstrously rutted by the sprockets of tanks and blackened at intervals by fire, but that was all over now; the men with their casual blasphemy and jokes, and the alien spirit which came with them like another language although they talked in English, had gone away. Sussex people no longer drew in to the roadside to let the trucks race by, each delicately and instantly blazoning its nationality by a leaf or star painted upon its side; and the urgent sense that these men must take, or be given, everything that they wanted (space, the peace of the woods, food and drink and love) because at any moment they might have to go away to be killed, had gone too; and a robin was singing on its short flights from bough to bough.
An Italian lying in the sun! So many times that might have meant a dark face showing mere animal enjoyment of warmth or (since this was a prisoner’s face) a sullen relief in temporary freedom, but this time, for once, the face whose eyes beneath their lowered lids were watching an insect moving along a leaf was sensitive: not with the nervous responsiveness that belongs to the faces of educated people, but in an older and simpler way difficult to paint in words. People would glance at Fabrio, as he passed them cycling back from his work to the camp, and think: “That one minds; he’s taken it to heart.”
He came from a tiny fishing village on the Ligurian coast, lonely in its loveliness and uncorrupted by the money of tourists; his father was very poor and ignorant but lived a satisfying human life because, at eighty, he was still a healthy, handsome old man and undisputed head of a large obedient family and because he owned a piece of land and also a boat; that boat came next in importance, in the Caetano household, to the land and to Gianni Caetano himself and far, far ahead of the family tradition that they were descended from a wicked and beautiful principessa of the old days who had been the mother of famous tyrants.
Fabrio’s childhood had been passed in a poor, dirty, noisy home where there was plenty of excitement and affection and plenty of food—pasta, and garlic and tomatoes cooked in oil, and small sweet peaches. The boat and the piece of land were responsible for all this abundance; the former was small, but it was seaworthy and sound, and Fabrio’s father could go fishing in it at night and bring home a netful of luscious tiny fish, enough to feed all nine of the Caetani for a day; or occasionally take out a party of tourists from the nearest port, into which he sailed twice a week (tourists were not so numerous, alas, since the coming of Il Duce, who did not want the foreigners to come and see how poor Italy was, and then this accursed second war).
The Caetani’s boat was the opposite number of the English odd-job man’s bag of tools or small van, making it possible for them to rely on their own efforts for their sustenance rather than upon weekly salary packets and the caprices of an employer. Capitalist in a tiny way, Gianni lived outside the modern economic system; and some of the Caetano girls made lace and some made love, some of the boys fished and some of them hung about Pietro’s garage and Giorgio’s bench in the nearest port and learned a little about cars and a little about carpentry, and so they managed, not to exist, but to live.
For although there are slums in Italy and as bitter winds there as anywhere in the world, the Ligurian coast is sheltered and warm, and poverty and beauty, the ancient lovers, still go hand-in-hand there, lingering on in an ancient corner of the world. It is easier to be poor in the sunlight. Zola said so even of Rome, which endures more bitter winters than Fabrio’s village ever knew; and if those who are most earnest for the education
and comfortable housing of their fellow-men could have seen Fabrio and his brothers lying half-naked in the shadow of the brown sail of their father’s boat, laughing and quarrelling over a few cigarettes or a handful of fruit, even they would have admitted that poverty does not always mean misery, and that in Europe, at least, those who have the gold of the sun find it easier to do without paper money.
But what, the Gentle Reader will ask, of politics? What of the Fascist Movement and Benito Mussolini, who came to power in the year that Fabrio, child of his father’s old age, was born of a young second wife? Was it possible for any Italian, however poor and obscure, to avoid the pernicious scourge (or cleansing flame, as you please) that swept his country from 1922 to 1944? Yes, Gentle Reader, it was possible. Of course the Caetani sons joined the Balilla when they were seven and the Avanguardia giovanile when they were fifteen, and last of all the army got them and three of them were killed, but in the Caetani—in Fabrio especially—Fascism (an old idea) met something much older than itself. It met a deep indifference to ideas of any kind. The Caetani did not have ideas; they felt; and what they felt about most strongly was life, not politics; food, not Fascism; their boat, not Mussolini’s Balilla. They heartily agreed with every word that Mussolini was reported by rumour to have said, and forgot it the next minute. This very healthy attitude of mind, or rather body, prevented the Caetani from becoming what is called politically aware, and it also prevented them from attracting unwelcome attention from the local tyrantissimo at the port (who afterwards, we are pleased to relate, fell in the sea while drunk and was drowned). They also had a deep, cheerful sense of their own importance as individuals which made them more interested in themselves than in anyone else. That helped them to keep out of trouble, too.