The Evening of the Holiday Page 2

She said: ‘All Italians are charming to women.’

  She said this for politeness, but he thought that perhaps she intended it as a snub, guessing that his life had been rather eventful. He said: ‘You mustn’t judge that too harshly. You mustn’t think it as indiscriminate as it sometimes seems.’ She said nothing, knowing that he was accounting for himself, and he went on: ‘Petrarch says’ (for he often relied on Petrarch to excuse or even ennoble his own behaviour for him) ‘it’s something to this effect: “Thus, alas, I wander seeking your longed-for self in others.” That, of course, is putting it at its best.’ He did not know, as he said this, whether he intended Petrarch’s little apology as a compliment or an explanation - to her, to his wife, even to Sibilla in her solitary splendour on the coast of Somalia.

  They passed on through the arbour draped with a great arch of wisteria, and out once more into the sun. They walked along more slowly still - almost idly, as if they had forgotten the fountain and had no destination.

  They came upon it suddenly. It was, as he had said, well placed, in a slightly sunken paved court enclosed by flowering shrubs. The little court was circular and so were the two or three graded steps that formed the base of the fountain. The fountain itself was very old - of thick marble, veined and discoloured. On the shaft and at either side of the basin there were sculptured figures, loosely draped and apparently playing on instruments, from which all detail had been effaced. The bowl of the fountain was shallow and smooth and beautifully whitened, and brimmed with water that poured steadily into it through apertures beneath the figures grouped on either side.

  Sophie walked up to the fountain without speaking, and Tancredi came and stood beside her. The basin was at the height of her elbow, and she extended her hand over the rounded edge to dip it in the water, splashing the surrounding marble with ripples of green light.

  ‘How lovely,’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, how lovely.’

  ‘Yes, it has its quality,’ he agreed. Once again her sudden interest eased his afternoon. ‘It has something of its own.’

  ‘Has it always been here?’ she asked, still moving her hand in the water, vaguely disrupting the light rushing sound.

  He smiled, because she seemed to refer to the beginning of the world. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose it was in this spot from the beginning. The house in its present form is much later of course.’

  Now there was a faint tinkling, and the little gold bracelet she wore slipped over her hand and into the shallow basin of the fountain. It lay there against the worn stone, wavering at them through the water.

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ said Tancredi.

  ‘No, no.’ She made a motion of putting back his outstretched arm. ‘You have your jacket. I can do it more easily.’

  She leaned on the whitened outer curve of the fountain, smiling, a little dazzled by the hot sun. She unbuttoned her right cuff and rolled up her sleeve. When her arm was bare above the elbow, she bent over the marble rim and, plunging her hand through the water, brought out the bracelet.

  He thought, as he watched her, that in all his life he had never seen a more seductive thing than the unconsidered gesture with which she folded back her sleeve. He saw the brown outer skin of her arm, as she turned her wrist, the surprising vulnerable white of the inward flesh and the veined curve inside the elbow. Her reaching hand and forearm, momentarily transfigured by water, had seemed in that instant to form part of the design - the design attributed to Pisano but probably even older. These simple actions moved him by their involuntary power, their immense accomplishment. He was amazed too by the magnitude of his own response, which gave her gesture real consequence. Although he had spoken to her earlier of his romantic temperament, he was as shaken by this pang of authentic sentiment as if he had encountered a friend totally unchanged after an absence of twenty years.

  He recalled how the old man had said to her, at the top of the steps: ‘Refresh my memory.’

  Holding the wet bracelet, she laughed and looked up at him. The swath of the starched sleeve, standing out from her upper arm, was darkened where it had touched the water. ‘How silly,’ she said. ‘I must have it made tighter - have one of the links removed.’

  When he said nothing, she balanced her bare elbow on the stone once more and glanced away. The bracelet was dangling now so loosely from her fingers that it was in danger of falling in again. He reached out and took hold of her arm as if to remove it from the water’s edge. She let it rest briefly in his hand. She did not look at him or acknowledge his vision, but for a moment stood still in the sun with her head bowed and her arm, glistening with water, in his grasp, and the little gold chain in her hand.

  Two

  ‘Why are you sitting out here in the dark?’ he demanded, coming down the few steps from Signora Brandi’s villa and crossing the garden by one of its narrow pebbled paths.

  ‘Oh, Tancredi,’ said Luisa Brandi. She stretched out her right hand as he came up and, as he kissed it, included her companion in the greeting with a gesture of her left. ‘I think you’ve met Sophie. At a tea party, she told me.’ She paused while he took the more hesitantly extended hand of her niece. ‘Pull up that chair and join us. We’re waiting for the nightingale.’ He scraped the cane chair across the stones. ‘Sophie is complaining of the insects, but for my part I like to come out here in the evening. You can hear crickets and owls and, at this time of year, the nightingale. And in any case,’ she added, answering him at last, ‘it isn’t dark.’

  It was true; the garden was still coloured with dying light and the surrounding hills retained their features. The side of the villa, terraced on to the hillside and notched with great dark windows, gleamed above them, itself overhung at the hill’s crest by a wood. Briefly extinguished by the house, the wood surged forth again below this formal garden - if formal it could be called with the grass eight inches high and the coloured creepers encircling the arms and legs of the mock-pagan statues and, even more improbably, twined about a row of large cactus. The shaped garden beds, however, were disarmingly well tended and filled with flowers.

  ‘I thought perhaps you had gone away,’ said Tancredi, offering his cigarettes, taking one himself and striking a match. ‘There were no lights at the front of the house, and no one came when I knocked. In the end, I went round to the kitchen and Isabella let me in.’ The flame having almost reached his fingers, he paused to light his cigarette.

  ‘I’m the only one left. They’ve all gone now, for the summer.’ Luisa spoke of her sons and their families, who visited her in the spring and the autumn. ‘The house is closed up, except for Isabella and myself. Sometimes Sophie comes up from the town to keep me company in the evenings. Imagine, she comes all this distance and then I bring her out here among the insects…. Otherwise I am entirely alone.’ Quite without pathos - indeed, with a smile - she repeated: ‘Entirely alone.’ Turning to Sophie, she went on: ‘You see how he makes use of us. We didn’t so much as set eyes on him here in the winter. And now, because his friends have gone off to the sea and he has nothing better to do, he comes up here in the evening, beating on our doors…. No, no, my dear, I’m only joking. There’s no one whose company I enjoy more. As you know.’ But he should also know, she thought, that I am perfectly aware of the fact that he came here in the hope of meeting Sophie. Not that they are at all suited to one another, she reflected - and Tancredi has that very beautiful and very troublesome wife, from whom, it seems, he’s separated at last. But of course that is what he came for, to see Sophie. I know him so well. ‘I’ve known him since he was a schoolboy,’ she said to Sophie. ‘Heavens, what a lovely young man he was.’

  ‘People only say that,’ Tancredi remarked, ‘when they feel that early promise hasn’t been fulfilled.’

  ‘Not at all,’ returned Luisa, thinking there was truth in what he said. ‘I’m sure you have a long history of fulfilled promises.’

  ‘That, for some reason, sounds even worse.’

  ‘Tonight there is the moon,’ Sophie sa
id tactfully, and the more unexpectedly because she had her back to the thin crescent that as yet shed no noticeable light.

  Luisa leaned back in her garden chair to see the moon through the overhanging branches. Her next remark, however, suggested that her attention had wandered, for she said after a short silence: ‘One sees why the ancients honoured the laurel; it really is a noble tree.’

  They all stared upward into the dark, incisive fronds. Tancredi observed, with the faintly competitive air of someone who has trees of his own, that the tree should be pruned.

  Luisa sighed. ‘It’s what I keep telling Mario’ - Mario was the gardener - ‘who only says that the shears are broken, as if that took care of everything. He never suggests mending them. I would mend them myself, but I’m not good with mechanical things. Oh dear no. In fact, I’m too practical, not ingenious enough. Oh, you can smile’ - to Tancredi, who had not waited for this permission - ‘but it’s true. If I’d been an inventor, I’d have managed to think up the broom, perhaps, or a pair of tongs. Or an umbrella - a stiff one, you know, not the kind that opens and closes.’ She laughed suddenly. Sometimes at the end of her quick paragraphs she would pause in this way, with an abrupt flourish, like a skier arrested in a hail of crystal. ‘You, Tancredi, are much more ingenious. Your umbrella would have opened and shut.’

  ‘And Sophie?’ he asked, trying to get the girl to meet his eyes.

  ‘Oh - Sophie, on the other hand, is artistic.’

  Sophie smiled to hear on her aunt’s lips this dated adjective, which evoked a picture of hand-loomed skirts or ill-proportioned pottery or symmetrical flowers painted on the lids of boxes. She would not look at Tancredi, but she thought more than once that he had come just to see her, and she could not help being pleased. There was something avowed, almost old-fashioned, about his manner of sitting there in her aunt’s presence. However, Luisa did not really have the character of a duenna. Her tenderness, while deeply personal, as true tenderness has to be, had a monumental quality as if she saw in one’s own need a reflection of all the vulnerability and injustice in the world. Her understanding was too valuable - one could not make trifling claims on it. Sophie thought: They cannot stay for us, precious people; they must go on, for others await them. And I am perfectly able to deal with this man, who does not even attract me (she was sure of this, having given it some thought since she had met him at his sister’s), except in so far as he has the qualities that are attractive about Italy itself - grace and the lack of earnestness. He was probably older than he looked. And then there was the language. If I saw him alone, she thought, I would have to wonder all the time about the subjunctive. I don’t think I can be bothered.

  She hardly says anything, Tancredi was thinking. Facing him in this dusk, with her straight hair and narrow limbs all making long, scarcely curved lines, she was like a delicate, resonant instrument. Her thoughts he imagined to be quite prosaic. Even so, she had some air, however uncertain, of knowledge. At times she seemed to him (as women often did) like a piece of important information he must acquire. He had come to see her and he was pleased simply to be in her presence. Or so he concluded, since he had as yet no sense of wasting his evening.

  Possibly, Luisa thought, he should not be allowed to waste Sophie’s time. He would not know how to be serious even if circumstances permitted it, and Sophie could not be anything else. For that reason, she was not to be envied, though perhaps in the end she was luckier than he. All at once Luisa felt tired, threatened by a complicated and unnerving idea, and briefly closed her eyes. When we are young, she thought, we worship romantic love for the wrong reasons, as we do the music of Chopin or the poetry of Keats and, because of that, subsequently repudiate it. Only later, and for quite other reasons, we discover its true importance. And by then it has become tiring even to observe.

  ‘Are you asleep?’ Sophie inquired. Luisa had not spoken for so long.

  ‘No, I’m a little tired,’ she answered, still with her thoughts. It was now so dark that they could scarcely see one another. ‘I was thinking…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh - only about Keats. And in that connexion, I really don’t think I’m going to wait for this inconsiderate bird.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound particularly like Keats,’ Sophie said, smiling.

  ‘The connexion was indirect. But I’m getting cold. And I find you were right about the insects.’

  ‘I could bring you a rug,’ Tancredi said, rising and putting out his cigarette.

  ‘I think I’m going to bed.’ Luisa stood up, although she stayed for a moment by her chair. Sophie got to her feet and Luisa said good night to her, leaning forward to kiss her. ‘Of course Tancredi will drive you home,’ she said, not at all as a suggestion or as a reminder to him but rather as a pronouncement on the evening. She let Tancredi accompany her through the garden, putting no weight on the hand he placed at her elbow. He walked with unnatural, solicitous slowness, and held aside the branches of the shrubs so that he could stay at her side.

  ‘How sweet it smells,’ she remarked. She sighed as they went up the steps to the house, and paused at the top with her hand on one of the open doors.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, alarmed at this exhaustion which he had never seen in her before. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Just old,’ she said. She drew herself up and went inside. The drawing room, lit by one faltering lamp whose bulb had not been thoroughly secured, was high and thick-walled and lined, rather than furnished, with heavy chests, great chairs and tables, and cabinets of books. It was floored with geometrical patterns of large, glossy tiles, and over these Luisa passed, slow and erect, folding her sea-green shawl about her with an invalid’s automatic, careful gesture. The hallway was dark, but she crossed it with the confidence of someone who expects no change and was at the foot of the stairs by the time Tancredi found the light switch.

  He thought, coming up to her, that she had become very beautiful in this new state, this old age she attributed to herself. Her strong, almost Oriental features, in this light and beneath the silver coils of her hair, were refined to a supernatural transparency. She had turned on the first step, and stood leaning with one hand on the stair rail, her straight body wrapped in the shawl, which she clasped with the other hand above her waist. He saw that she wanted to mention Sophie but could not bring herself to do so directly.

  ‘Living in this countryside,’ she observed, ‘if you have foreign friends, is like running a convalescent home. They arrive every summer, pale and nervous, and we get them smoothed out and fattened up. And then send them back to the Front.’ Standing this way, on the step, she was slightly taller than he. She wanted to say to him: ‘Don’t cause her any trouble - let her have her holiday in peace.’ Aloud, she added: ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Dear Luisa,’ he replied politely. ‘It had not even occurred to me that we were behind the lines.’

  She laughed and put her hand in his. ‘You’re very nice, Tancredi,’ she said. ‘You aren’t a rascal, really.’

  He could hardly be flattered by this discovery, which had the air of a verdict only arrived at after considerable deliberation. But when she repeated it, almost giving it significance, he said ‘No,’ simply and seriously, as though he were making an important admission.

  She drew away, still with her hand in his. ‘How elegant you always are,’ she continued more lightly, her eyes wandering over his cream-coloured suit and crisp shirt and his carefully brushed dark hair. ‘You wear a new suit almost every day.’ She looked into his face. ‘Eventually, perhaps, you will find one that is just right for you.’

  He stayed at the foot of the stairs and watched her go slowly up. At the landing she stopped again, but merely said: ‘Perhaps you would put out the light when I get to the top. Good night, dear Tancredi.’

  When the nightingales, one in a cypress and the other hidden in a shrubbery below the garden, began to call to each other, Sophie clasped her hands in her lap and sat up straight, apparently
bracing herself for an experience. Across her uplifted head the song passed back and forth - a consummation of the darkness, as if night without this must always be imperfect. She saw Tancredi reappear at the top of the steps and stand for a moment in the light before coming back to her. He made no attempt to soften the sound of his footsteps on the stones as he crossed the garden. He came and sat beside her, in Luisa’s chair, but the nightingale, dividing them from the world, divided them also from each other, and they sat listening and remote.

  It might be interesting, she thought in her assiduous way, to recall the poem now - how did it go again? (She could scarcely concentrate because the song was insistently beautiful, and she closed her eyes as though the sound might enter there, too.) Ridiculous; she couldn’t remember how it started. ‘Thou still…’ No, that was the other one. There was that business about Ruth, and then the magic casements…. But she couldn’t for the life of her think of the first line.

  Tancredi was thinking of Luisa, whose light he now saw at one of the upper windows and whose shadow moved back and forth within the room. When he was a child his parents had had a summer house at the sea, near Pesaro, and he remembered hearing nightingales in the garden there; he had not, he thought, heard them since - there were fewer of them about perhaps. Luisa then - it was over thirty years ago - would have been a young woman, happy with her husband, bringing up her children in this house, and looking, he imagined, much the same but dark-haired, animated, more easily moved to tears. I would have been in love with her, he realized - and the absolute certainty of this touched him deeply. It struck him like a loss actually suffered, impoverishing his experience, diminishing all his prospects.

  To retrieve a reasonable view of things, he looked at once at Sophie, but her face, though very close, was dim and he had lost his earlier sense of her appeal. She offered no intimacy now, sitting there stiff and attentive, as though she were having a lesson. She is not in the least like Luisa, he thought. But the comparison dispirited him and he followed it immediately with the thought that he would make her smile more; she must learn to enjoy things for their own sake. When the nightingale stops, he thought, I will take her hand.