The Evening of the Holiday Read online

  For Francis

  Questo dì fu solenne: or da’ trastulli prendi

  riposo.

  GIACOMO LEOPARDI

  La Sera del Dì di Festa

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  One

  ‘Tancredi,’ Gabriella said to her brother, ‘you must show them the fountain.’

  ‘All in good time, my dear,’ he replied irritably. ‘Let’s have our tea in peace.’

  They were not really having tea; the word referred only to the hour. Italians are not good at entertaining in their houses in the late afternoon. It is precisely the time when they would normally be rousing themselves from the siesta and looking forward to the evening in the café. Also, they don’t quite know what to serve; tea, if done properly, should be an ambitious affair with cakes and scones, which they would not dream of providing, and they have never pretended to be sherry drinkers, which would be the convenient way out. So one is likely to be confronted, as on this afternoon, with half a bottle of sweet vermouth and a plateful of stale macaroons.

  Tancredi had grown up in Sicily, where no entertaining is ever done in the summer afternoons, where there is a solitary, almost therapeutic drinking of lemonade or almond milk in darkened rooms before the sun goes down. He regarded the afternoon as something to be slept through. Here in the north, however, shops and businesses reopened early, at four o’clock. He was an architect and his work was not much affected by the summer exodus; on any other day he would have evaded the tea party by returning to his office in the town. But today there was a religious holiday, the feast of the Ascension, and here he was pinned to a sofa among the women and the aged, like someone left behind during a war.

  He had been staying here in his sister’s house since the early spring. The reason he gave for this arrangement, to others and sometimes to himself, was the proximity of the house to the town - his own villa was well out in the countryside - and the company it gave his sister. However, as he had travelled back and forth to his villa for years without mentioning the inconvenience, and as his attitude towards his sister left something to be desired in the way of companionship, it was generally assumed that he found his deserted house intolerable since his wife had left him. In the town it was felt to be a great pity that such a beautiful house should stand empty - but for years the architetto and his wife had been…(here a gesture of two hands going in completely opposite directions). Now she had actually left him and gone to her family’s house at the sea (another gesture, signifying money on all sides), and taken the children. Ah, the poor architetto (and now a sign to the effect that money wasn’t everything), he missed his children, and that was why he had moved in with his sister.

  The mention of tea brought the contents of the tray to Tancredi’s attention. He looked down with distaste and saw that the maid had laid the tray, unsuitably, with heavy linen napkins and, uselessly, with slightly tarnished cake forks. ‘Look at the way she’s set the tray,’ he grumbled in front of the visitors. ‘Anyone would think we were a lot of bourgeois Neapolitans.’

  His sister, who was rather afraid of him, was unable to pass this off as another woman might have done with a little good-natured clucking. She looked anxiously at the tray, then apologetically back at him. Her delicate expression of long-suffering lengthened. The guests - an old painter and his wife, and the young woman they had brought with them - stared discreetly into the air above the tea table.

  ‘Our wine,’ Tancredi burst out. ‘You’d prefer our wine.’ The wine, which was from his own land, was one of the best in the district.

  But no, no - at once they began to protest, if not in so many words, that vermouth and stale macaroons more than met their needs. Only the foreign woman fully understood and asked him for a glass of wine, and he got up to fetch it. He brought it back and took his place again beside her on the sofa. (His sister had in fact asked him to sit next to the old man, the painter Giovanetti, whom he had known all his life but now rarely saw, but he had managed to change places by getting up to help when the tray was brought in - an intervention that earned him a look of mild surprise from the maid.) Now Gabriella was chatting with the old couple. They were visiting the town for two or three days from their home at Lucca.

  Old Giovanetti, sitting upright in a plush armchair, clasped both hands over the knob of a black walking stick that was planted between his feet. In this attitude he was like an old crusader, his noble face and his long, lean body and his stillness conveying some figure on a perpendicular tomb. He was almost eighty - many years older than Renata, his wife - and he put at a disadvantage the rest of the company, who could never hope to survive so well. Renata and Gabriella were both a little voluble, a little heavy, a little too handsomely dressed - in silk dresses with matching jackets - for the warm spring afternoon. They were well educated, pious women, and much of their conversation was taken up with illustrating the fundamental worth of human nature - a quality not always susceptible of illustration and, when illustrated, not always interesting. For all their chatter, they exuded less vitality than the old man sitting silent between them.

  Tancredi himself, in his forties, already had rather more flesh and slightly less hair than the old man and, although conventionally handsome, he lacked any particular physical distinction. This afternoon, for the first time, he had become aware of that discrepancy; it was one reason he had changed places.

  And the woman on the sofa, to whom he now handed a too full glass of wine - Tancredi shrugged in his mind: she was nothing extraordinary either. It seemed that she had known the Giovanettis years ago in Lucca, and Tancredi had met her yesterday when he called at their hotel in the town. She herself was spending some weeks here, she said, staying at the hotel. She had relatives in this area whom she visited from time to time - and he had been surprised, when he asked the name of these relatives, to discover that he knew her aunt, a Signora Brandi, a woman now grown old, a widow, well known to him and famous in that countryside for her beauty and character. He was afraid he had looked rather too surprised - there was so little resemblance. Then, too, the discovery that she was half Italian had come just as he was deciding that she was the archetypal Englishwoman. No, she was nothing special; only she had those startling green eyes that were rare in this country. Otherwise, a fair head, a thin neck, and attenuated arms that today were covered almost to the wrist by the cuffed sleeves of the dress she wore. The dress, patterned with narrow mauve and white stripes, had a high collar too, but yesterday he had noticed the shape of her shoulders and the prominent bones below her throat. As she set her glass on the table, a fine gold bracelet slipped out of her sleeve and along her wrist.

  ‘What is the fountain?’ she suddenly asked Tancredi.

  He said: ‘It’s down in the garden, behind the house. Oh - an old thing, you know, marble, rather decrepit. But it’s nicely placed, and has been attributed to a design of Pisano. Not that that means anything,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s only conjecture, and would hardly affect the thing’s appearance if it were proved.’ He took out his handkerchief and dried the table, which was splashed with the overflow of wine. ‘Certainly it wasn’t executed by Pisano. It may be even older.’

  ‘Perhaps we can see it later,’ she said.

  She was called Sophie.
He had not understood her Christian name when they first said it to him, but as they were all going out of the hotel together yesterday there was a message for her at the desk, and he had seen her name written on the outer fold of the paper. ‘Signorina,’ he began now, so that she would not find the rest of the remark too familiar, ‘you have a Greek name.’

  ‘How nice to think of it that way,’ she said, smiling at him.

  ‘Have you been in Greece?’

  ‘Never. When I get away I come to Italy.’

  ‘How did you know the Giovanettis?’

  ‘I was at college in Florence,’ she explained, ‘with their daughter Sibilla.’

  ‘Ah yes, Sibilla,’ he said.

  ‘She married a Dutchman at the United Nations - I suppose you know. They went to live in Africa.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In Mogadiscio.’ It happened that he had at one time been rather in love with this same Sibilla and was both pleased and sorry to be reminded of her now. They had carried on a long flirtation, quite unsuspected by his wife; after Sibilla’s marriage they kept vaguely in touch. And when she went to Mogadiscio he sent her letters, to which she never replied; he wondered if she had even received them. (These letters had, in fact, reached Sibilla and greatly amused her, bored as she was on that splendid, lonely coast of East Africa. She had written a long and indiscreet reply, which the Somali houseboy had thrown away instead of posting, having first removed the stamps for resale.) The thought of Sibilla - who was more beautiful than this girl - and of his unanswered letters now began to depress Tancredi. In his heart he sighed. What an afternoon.

  ‘What were you studying in Florence?’ he asked, making an effort. As though, he said to himself, they ever study anything but History of Art.

  ‘Oh -’ She laughed. ‘I had real pretensions. I wrote a paper on Anita Garibaldi.’

  At this moment Gabriella asked him to refill their glasses, and he got up again and went around the low table with the bottle in his hand. When he came back this Sophie was ready to talk of something else, but he sat down and said after a pause: ‘Anita Garibaldi then. I have a little association with Anita Garibaldi.’

  Now he was leaning forward, his right elbow on his knee, and she leaned back to put more distance between them.

  ‘There’s a monument in Rome,’ he went on, ‘to Anita Garibaldi.’

  ‘On the Janiculum.’

  ‘You know it, of course. Well, in 1932 or -3, it must have been - at any rate while I was at the University - they were raising money in Rome to erect that monument. I was a penniless student and I knew almost nothing about Anita Garibaldi. But it was at a time when there was precious little one could subscribe to, in any case, and I subscribed to that.’

  ‘How nice,’ she said, lifting her head. I was one year old, she thought.

  ‘I suppose it appealed to my romantic notions,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Though I would hate to tell you how little I gave. And it would sound even worse to you,’ he added, ‘when one considers what has happened to the lira since then.’ However, she was delighted. The distant gesture on behalf of the monument, which he had as good as forgotten, now quite seemed to him to have been ordained for this moment. The sagging room righted itself before his eyes. He felt that, if he particularly wanted to, he could make a conquest of this Sophie. The word ‘conquest’ had reality to him - he liked the idea of supremacy and believed, correctly, that women want to be prevailed upon; since he was not puritanical, this conquest did not necessarily imply to him one single carnal objective. ‘Garibaldi’s wife, however, is an unusual instance,’ he continued. ‘In Italy women are not encouraged to be so enterprising. In England, of course, there have been so many heroic women.’ He groped for a name or two. ‘Boadicea, and…’ Eighteen centuries slipped through his grasp. ‘Florence Nightingale. We Latins are rather to be criticized on that account - we tend to keep women inside the house.’ And an excellent thing too, he added to himself.

  ‘It’s probably a very good thing,’ she said.

  But even this remark struck him as a bit too opinionated for his taste. He hoped she wasn’t going to be full of theories. Even the term ‘a clever woman’ was disagreeable to him; one said ‘a clever man’ in commendation, but ‘a clever woman’ had a pejorative sound to it. ‘Oh, surely not,’ he said perversely. ‘Women should want to be independent.’

  But she laughed and turned away, taking up her glass. ‘I thought you said you were a romantic.’

  ‘Oh,’ he cried, pleased with her again. ‘Is this to be one of those days when everything you say is remembered and used against you?’

  ‘One of those days?’ She looked back at him over the glass, still smiling. ‘I shouldn’t have thought there was any other kind of day.’

  ‘In any case, I intended that against myself, you know. I meant to say that I was sentimental.’

  ‘It didn’t sound as if you thought it such a fault,’ she said.

  ‘Ah no, you’re right. We only accuse ourselves of what we really find rather attractive - or at least bearable. We say: “I’m too easy-going,” or too soft-hearted, or too honest, or too ingenuous.’ He made a dismissing gesture with his right hand, and then extended it towards her. ‘Isn’t that so, signorina? Isn’t it so?’

  ‘Tancredi,’ Gabriella called from the other side of the table. He felt, as it were, apprehended - leaning towards this Sophie, appealing to her with his open hand. ‘Tancredi, Renata says they have to go soon. Do take them into the garden first. Do walk down to the fountain with them.’

  ‘Is it far?’ the old painter interrupted, looking at his wife. ‘I don’t remember.’

  Tancredi swung round on the sofa, almost turning his back on the Sophie woman, publicly repudiating her soft, concentrating look, which was still arranged for his benefit, he felt. ‘Not far. Not far at all. Down the steps - don’t you remember? On the other side of the arbour. It’ll do you good. Why,’ he went on with an over-hearty diplomacy, ‘if you begin to make excuses, I’ll think you want to stay here alone with Gabriella.’

  They all smiled indulgently, as if the old man were a child. He looked at them aloofly. His wife, bending towards him, said archly: ‘Are you going to let that pass?’

  He shrugged, as if he hadn’t understood. ‘Let it pass? Let what pass? All my life people have been trying to whip me into indignation. Women are especially bad that way. “You aren’t going to let this pass,” “You can’t let that pass” - when all I want is to let it pass.’ He leaned forward in his seat, his hands clasping the silver knob of his stick. ‘To let everything pass.’

  There was an uneasy silence. ‘If it’s really too far for him -’ Tancredi began, and paused.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Renata cheerfully. ‘He’s the youngest of all of us.’

  ‘When people say that,’ the old man told her, ‘I know I must really be on my last legs.’ He got up without any suggestion of effort and stood leaning on his stick while the others gathered themselves together.

  Renata took Gabriella by the arm. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘I? Oh, I don’t do those steps more often than I can help,’ she said. ‘Not with my arthritis.’

  How long women take to leave a room, Tancredi thought. They can’t simply get up and walk out - all this shambling and turning back on their tracks, chattering and embracing, talking of their arthritis. His heart sank again. We are all thickened with middle age, he thought. We have let everything pass.

  They came at last through double doors on to a sunlit terrace, a flagged square at the top of the steep flight of steps. There was more talk with Gabriella, who now would not come out in the sun. The old man looked at the steps and shook his head. ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing is new,’ Tancredi said - not humorously, although the stairs and the urns decorating the stone railing were flaked and dinted with great age and the flagstones yellowed with a fine sheen of moss. ‘You needn’t come back up the steps, of course. We ca
n walk out to the car through the garden.’

  ‘Ercole, do come,’ said Renata, suddenly pleading, as if the short walk were of real significance. ‘Ercole.’

  He shook his head again. ‘It’s too much for me,’ he said, falling back on his age, falling in with them at last. ‘I’m past it.’

  ‘Then don’t let’s bother at all,’ Sophie suggested.

  ‘No, no,’ Renata exclaimed, again with disproportionate insistence. ‘Of course you must see the fountain. I’ve seen it many times; I’ll stay up here with Ercole.’

  ‘Perhaps another time,’ Sophie said.

  ‘My dear, what other time?’

  ‘Yes, go,’ the old man said to Sophie. ‘You must go. I’ve seen it, but so long ago - when you come back you must tell me about it. Refresh my memory.’

  What a fuss, Tancredi thought again. He moved aside to give Sophie the advantage of the stone banister, and they left the old couple standing at the top of the steps.

  In the garden it was warm, and utterly still. ‘It’s just as well he didn’t come,’ Sophie remarked as they walked slowly along a narrow pebble path. ‘He’s got old all at once.’

  ‘No one gets old all at once…. No, of course, I understand you - he’s suddenly very frail.’

  ‘The first time I visited them in Lucca,’ said Sophie, brushing aside long fronds of the shrubbery, ‘he took me walking on the walls.’ She looked at Tancredi. ‘Imagine - we must have walked right around the walls. It’s sad to see him like this.’

  ‘Though he still has his wonderful face,’ Tancredi said. ‘In his day, you know, he was very -’ He paused. ‘Very charming to women.’

  ‘He is still that,’ she said, turning the remark aside.

  ‘Well yes. But I mean -’