Emilio, who had run some distance, returned slowly. His heart was beating as if to burst his chest. He had always been a little afraid of Il Signor even while despising him, and who knew what maggot might not have got into his head since that accursed girl had turned upon him? He might be mad. But he was more afraid to stay outside while Fabrio remained inside with the rifle, and so he walked slowly forward and into the shed.
He could smell cigarette smoke, and a spark glowed in the dusk. He heard a rustle as if Fabrio was making room for him in the straw, and he moved cautiously towards the sound.
“Sit down, sit down,” said Fabrio impatiently, with a heavy sigh, and then Emilio felt himself gripped by an unpleasantly strong hand and pulled down upon the straw. He was next aware of something white extended under his nose.
“Cigarettes,” said his friend, again uttering that labouring sigh. “Half are for thee—though thou dost not deserve them. Coming after thy comrade with rifles!”
“Didst thou steal them?” inquired Emilio, getting out his lighter. The flame sprang up and illuminated the grey rafters with dusty webs in their corners, the discarded household and farm implements crowded along the walls, the sacks of grain, and the deep pile of straw upon which Fabrio lay. He looked sullen and his hair was very untidy. Otherwise Emilio’s avid eyes could detect no such ghastly change as he had expected. He blew out the flame and again they sat almost in darkness save for what light was afforded by the grey summer dusk.
“No. The padrona at that place—Amberlei—gave them to me.”
“Thou hast been there? This day? Twelve miles!”
“I waited until the padrone had gone away in the car and then I rode in the bus.”
“But why? All day we have been searching for thee. The women—thou canst imagine!” and Emilio drew the smoke down, down, down into his lungs and grinned.
“I wanted a holiday. I hate this place, as thou knowest. And at that place, Amberlei, the padrona was glad to see me. She gave me eggs and meat to eat and drink from a little black bottle. It was very good. As for the women, all the women in this place, all the women in this accursed, wet, cold, miserable country, may they all burn in Hell for ever and ever.” And Fabrio spat.
Emilio said nothing for a minute. The smoke burned his throat with its familiar comfort and the scent of grain and damp sacks floating in the dimness was comforting too. Water dripped musically from a nearby gutter. He stretched out luxuriously on the straw. He did not want to move. He wanted to stay here all night and smoke all those cigarettes. But if he went off, too, there would be the father and mother of a row, so what was the use of doing what he wanted? He yawned.
“Thou knowest?” said Fabrio suddenly.
“What?”
“What I have done with La Scimmia.”
And then and there did Fabrio, in five minutes’ talk with Emilio, defile the memory of his love. It seemed to him the only way to heal the wound to his pride. What did it matter if he lied about that creature with brazen hair who had terribly insulted him? He would return her insult with his lies. So long as no one but himself ever knew of that day at Amberlei when she had seemed so different; so long as the memory of their secret smile remained his secret alone, what did he care what he said of her, what she thought of him, what anybody said or thought? He spoke as foully as he knew how.
When he had finished, Emilio laughed and congratulated him. He did not believe this yarn, of course; anyone with their eyes put straight in their head could have seen what had happened last night, when his friend’s perfectly natural suggestion had been refused by that female monkey. But he felt pity for Fabrio, and also there were times when men must stand together against women. This seemed to Emilio to be one of them. Besides, La Scimmia had never shown the slightest kindness towards himself. Let her get the reputation of a loose girl. She deserved it.
So he tapped the side of his long nose in the darkness, and laughed and admired, and presently Fabrio’s sore pride began to feel soothed. When Emilio casually suggested a little later that they should return to the farm, he turned sullen again, but made no objection, and later still, having smoked another cigarette, they leisurely set out. Fabrio had no dread of meeting La Scimmia, for he would retire again into that reserve with which he had first treated her, never addressing her except when it was unavoidable in the course of the day’s work, and soon, very soon, he would ask if he might be transferred to another farm.
Already, as he trudged back beside Emilio through yards dimly lit by the hidden moon, he felt less tender towards the memory of Sylvia. No man could continue to love a woman who had so cruelly insulted him.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hoadley’s rifle lay forgotten on the damp sacks near the open door where Fabrio had placed it, immediately beneath that musically dripping gutter. It had been raining smartly for quite twenty minutes when Emilio, cursing and swearing, came stumbling into the shed to retrieve it, and during those twenty minutes the rising wind had blown a great deal of water from the gutter over the rifle. On the way back Emilio did shroud it in a sack against the rain, but this did not prevent it from being very rusty indeed the next time Mr. Hoadley came to use it. To those readers who were hoping that Fabrio or Emilio would murder someone with it, we tender our unrepentant apologies.
32
SOME EIGHTEEN MONTHS later, a children’s party was in progress at the Lucie-Brownes’ house on the outskirts of Ironborough on the occasion of Jenny’s thirteenth birthday, and Alda had sent out the invitations marked Please come as a Nursery Rhyme.
It was a pretty scene. The grey walls in the one room, and the satin-striped white ones in the other, set off the children’s brilliantly coloured costumes, ingeniously devised with the help of Eastern scarves and shawls sent home by fathers and brothers still on active service. Alda had economised with coal, in order that with the help of her store of logs she might provide a royal fire, in itself enough to beautify the plainest apartment, in each room. The youngest unmarried aunt was seated at the piano thumping out “Here we go gathering nuts in May,” and down the long room, through the folding doors flung wide, pranced a row of tall creatures (Jenny’s generation is a collection of young maypoles) hand in hand; with plaits flying, skirts whisking, mop caps and turbans flapping, feet thundering on the gleaming floor as they chanted more or less tunefully:
Not all were pretty, but all had the charm of health and youth; their cheeks were like petals, and their brilliant eyes brimmed with laughter.
Meg, who was now nearly six years old but not considered old enough to join in this game, was sitting on a chair by her mother, surveying the dancers. These were the Big Ones at Miss Cowdray’s school which she now attended; the Big Ones, who dragged you along in the morning when they were late, and made you run so fast that your legs almost flew out behind you and you gasped for breath; who were sarcastically patient if you should happen to cry; who never stopped talking to one another about four feet above your head, and squeezed your hand dreadfully hard as they hauled you across the terrible High Street; the Big Ones whom, in spite of all this, you greatly admired, for whose notice and kindness you longed. But you did not often get it.
And when you turned to humbler circles for comfort, what did you find? People of nine and ten who only wanted each other and were always sharply telling you to buzz off and not be a nuisance, and hiding away from you. And somehow other people of six were not interesting. Jenny said that six was an awful age, the worst age of all. She said this poem about it:
But now I am six I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six for ever and ever.
Jenny said that that just showed what people of six were like; always boasting. It was dreadful to boast: it was the worst thing you could do, Jenny said. Things might be better, Meg hoped, when she was seven. Some people of seven were quite kind, only they always seemed so busy.
But Richard, their new brother, knew Meg now, and when she came into the room he smiled at her and he stared at her all t
he time and turned his head to look at her. Mother said that he noticed Meg more than the others because she was the nearest in size to himself. This was very gratifying.
Meg now slipped off her chair and rushed across the room (right in front of the opposing row of dancers, who shooed her on with impatient cries in their fresh, thrush-like voices) and pushed her face into Richard’s little soft one, where he sat within Nanny’s arm.
“Gently, now,” said Nanny, otherwise Mrs. Pakin, in her placid Yorkshire voice. “We aren’t a wild elephant, I hope.”
Meg rubbed her nose against her brother’s head, which was covered in down soft as the seed of a dandelion, and of almost the same silvery colour. He was a year old, and already very like his maternal grandfather.
“I’m taking him up now,” said Nanny. “He’s had a look at you all and it’s past his bedtime.”
She carried the baby across to Alda, and the aunts admired him and bade him good night, but were not encouraged to give him more than the gentlest of kisses. Then she bore him away.
“How pretty the tree looks, Alda,” said Alda’s mother, a comely and active lady in the early sixties who had dropped in on the party, “but what a business you must have had making all those presents, with everything else you have to do! Who began this fad that all the children at a birthday party must have presents? It’s something quite new and I call it nonsense. Pampering.”
“I don’t know, Mother. It started in the war. One does curse it, but everybody does it, so of course I have to do it too.”
Mrs. Norton did not snort but her expression did. Alda said no more, but watched the children with a contented air. It was of no use trying to explain the technique of contemporary living to her mother, who had passed the greater part of her married life, and experienced her motherhood, in the comparative safety of the early twentieth century. Mrs. Norton was generous with her own rationed luxuries, her fresh eggs and her bottled fruits, when there was a party at one of her daughters’ homes but she always sighed over my poor grandchildren, who had to put up with a chocolate biscuit apiece and jellies made from synthetic fruit juice. It was useless to tell her that what the tongue had never tasted the young stomach did not miss, while the Party Spirit crowned all.
Louise was dancing with the others, in a nondescript ruffled garment intended to represent the Queen of Hearts which unbecomingly revealed her lankiness. She had lost her Ice-Maiden look, and was now only thin and fair and rather plain, and retained that habit of gazing with her mouth open which called forth sharp rebukes. She read voraciously, and though she seldom spoke of the convent, and unprotestingly accompanied her mother and sisters to the church which Nortons and Lucie-Brownes had attended for years, Alda knew that she continued to correspond with Sister Alban. She also cherished a rosary. Alda anticipated that these tendencies would come to a head when Louise was about eighteen in a determined attempt to Go Over, which would then be thwarted by packing her off, if she could win a scholarship, to Cambridge, where her father had been. Louise was clever; far cleverer than the gay and vigorous Jenny, who was dancing into her teens with every sign of avoiding completely the awkward age, and was one of a group at Miss Cowdray’s known, because of their interests, as The Horsey Dogs.
The Lucie-Brownes have gone up in the world, thinks the Gentle Reader, with their satin-striped wallpaper and their Nanny for the new baby, but in fact these embellishments were less grand than they sound. Nanny Pakin was the mother of one of Doctor Norton’s poorer patients; a woman with a large but now grown-up family, who possessed a common and beautiful form of genius; the power to rear very young children. Having declined, several times and with vehemence, suggestions from local employers that she should enter what she roundly called their dirty old factories, Mrs. Pakin was happily installed in the large shabby comfortable nursery at the Orchard House for not much more than board wages. As for the satin-striped wallpaper, the old builder who had once decorated Alda’s father’s house for the homecoming of his new bride had just happened to have that particular piece by him.
Ronald Lucie-Browne now entered the room, and went across to the fire, rubbing his hands and appreciating the warmth after a walk home of several miles through cold, foggy, darkened streets. There was a strike of bus and tram drivers in Ironborough and street lighting had been reduced to save coal. He looked amused and tranquil, and in his head there lingered a line of Alfred de Vigny’s which he had quoted that afternoon during a lecture:
Marche à travers les champs une fleur à la main.
It seemed to him that it was still possible to do this, even during a Time of Troubles. He believed that there must have been many families, unrecorded by history, who had contrived to live happy lives even in the darkest periods, until they were finally overwhelmed, and as he gradually reassumed civilian life, he saw more and more plainly that this was what he must lead his own family to do. They were helpless, but they need not be unhappy, for most of the great natural sources of joy were still open to them.
At this point his reflections were interrupted by his mother-in-law, who joined him to congratulate him upon the election of his sister as Labour Member for Ironborough South at a by-election, made necessary by the sudden death of the Conservative Member, and held on the previous day.
“At least,” said Mrs. Norton menacingly, “now we know who to complain to if we don’t get more biscuits into the shops.”
“You take a low view of politics, Jane.”
“And you? What’s your view of them these days? I thought there was some talk of your standing for Ironborough South as a Liberal, at one time?”
“There was, but Marion has more of the necessary type of energy and brains, and she got there first.”
“She is very clever and has worked exceedingly hard,” said Mrs. Norton, in a tone whose scrupulous justice did not in the least conceal the fact that she thought Marion a dead bore.
“Yes. I saw her this afternoon; she has commissioned me to hunt up Jean Hardcastle. She wants her for a secretary.”
“She thinks her money would be useful to the Party,” said Mrs. Norton instantly. “But Jean isn’t trained. Besides, Alda told me that she has completely lost touch with her.”
He held up a letter. “This is from Jean, I believe. It was sent to the college to-day. I suppose she hasn’t our new address. Alda will be pleased, I know.”
He crossed the room to where Alda stood by the tree.
“Hullo, lovey,” she said. “You’ve just missed Richard; Mrs. P. has taken him off. All these women will have gone in half an hour, and then we’ll have our supper alone.”
“So I should hope, but look here.” He gave her the letter. “Isn’t that from Jean?”
“The blighter! After eighteen months!” exclaimed Alda, snatching it. “I’m dying to hear what she’s been up to. What’s the odds Potter got away?” and she tore open the envelope. Almost at once she began to laugh.
“I say, do listen!” And she read aloud:
“Darling Alda,
“I expect you will be absolutely shattered to hear that I’m married. We’ve got an absolutely smashing son aged eight months exactly like Phil (Phil? What does she mean? Potter’s name is Oliver!) and I’m terrifically happy. As you will see by the address we’re living in Daleham to be near Phil’s family, they’re rather dim but awfully kind. Do write and tell me you aren’t furious with me for not having written for such ages. I’m sending this to the College and do hope it finds you. How are the girls, I expect they’re enormous by now, do kiss them all for me. We must meet soon. I’m dying to show you Alex.
“Tons of love,
“from
“J.”
“Then Potter did get away!” exclaimed Alda, looking up from the letter at the interested faces of Ronald, her mother, and two younger sisters who had come up to hear what was going on. “She married Phil Waite after all. No wonder she’s been keeping out of my way! She is the limit!”
“But I thought you wanted he
r to marry Waite,” said Ronald.
“So I did, at first, but only because there was no one else. As soon as Potter turned up, I was all in favour of him. Fancy his getting away after all!”
“Perhaps it was Jean who got away,” said Ronald.
“Of course not; she adored Potter,” said Alda absently; she was re-reading the letter. “Oh well, she does say she’s terrifically happy. I’m glad. Good old J., she hasn’t done so badly for herself after all. But not a word of thanks to me, you notice, and I arranged the whole thing!”
“Never mind,” said Ronald. “It’ll soon be time to start arranging ‘things’ for Jenny and Louise. Have you anyone in mind for Meg?”
Alda laughed, but in fact she did have the youthful sons of various old family friends in mind for all three, and her laugh was a little conscious.
“And then there’s Richard,” he went on. “One can’t begin thinking about these affairs too early, can one?”
Alda’s expression changed. It became graver, slightly cautious.
“Oh, that won’t need thinking about for quite twenty-five years yet,” she said, “perhaps thirty. With girls it’s different, of course, but I really don’t approve of boys marrying too young. It leads to all kinds of difficulties. Of course, I shall always welcome any nice girls that he likes to bring to the house and I hope he will bring them whenever he likes, but I should never encourage an early marriage where Richard was concerned—what’s so funny, Ronald?”
33
IT WAS AUTUMN when Fabrio at last came home.
Across the south of France crawled the dirty, crowded train through the blazing sunlight of the year’s decline; stopping at villages still half-ruined, dead and silent in the brilliant light without a sign of human or animal life; then down the tranquil Swiss countryside, where girls came on to the railway platforms offering cherries in baskets lined with the green and golden leaves of the vine and the blue Rhône sprang along, rippling and glittering, beside the train, and far off snow peaks glistened in the haze.