The Evening of the Holiday Page 3

  That’s it, Sophie thought abruptly, opening her eyes and making a slight movement in her chair. Of course. That’s the way it begins - ‘My heart aches…’

  Three

  If he were even five minutes late, she decided, she would leave. And Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits. When he had said to her ‘Tomorrow at five,’ of course he didn’t mean he would be there on the hour. He meant ten past, a quarter past five. She could be gone with a clear conscience by the time he came. He would ask the waiter, and the waiter, understanding everything, would tell him: Yes, the lady was there, stayed a few minutes, and left. If encouraged, the waiter would even describe what she was wearing and whether she had seemed cross when she walked away.

  She stopped to buy a newspaper as she went up the slight incline towards the piazza, and she walked on frowning down at the folded headline but scarcely seeing it. She really could not think how she had got herself into this assignation - for that, certainly, was the word for such an appointment with a man one hardly knew. She had kept out of his way - and his way seemed to have coincided with hers to a remarkable degree. But yesterday, meeting by accident in a shop, they had been unexpectedly familiar with one another, leaning on the counter and talking in a light, ready way. He waited while she did her shopping, and they walked out into the street together. Only when she was leaving him had he asked her to see him. ‘Tomorrow at five. For a coffee. The big piazza near the post office.’ And when she said nothing to this telegraphic invitation, he had shown her, pointing towards the end of the street, precisely the café; its umbrellas could be seen across an open space, beyond a row of leaning houses. ‘Will you be all right?’ he had asked her then, as he stood at the edge of the sidewalk with his back to the traffic. ‘Do you know which way to go?’

  She had in truth looked a little lost. She had not known how to refuse him, and she left him almost without a word. For how could she have thought up a polite excuse, standing there in the middle of the street, looking into his face? And in any case the light had changed; she had to cross.

  Now, walking up to the café, she felt almost relieved. If they missed each other this afternoon, as they were practically certain to do, he would not try to see her again. She hardly knew him. She could not even remember his last name.

  ‘You’re very prompt.’ He got up from the little table and pulled out her chair. ‘I thought women were always un-punctual.’

  And so, in the end, she was annoyed with herself for being on time. However, she smiled and greeted him in an open, almost businesslike way. Let’s get this over quickly, her smile said. She sat down beside him and he called the waiter while she looked about the square.

  It was a utilitarian piazza in the most modern section of the town. Never having aspired to the magnificence of the town’s great central piazza, it had at some stage evidently capitulated completely and agreed to receive the workaday elements of the city’s life - the post office, for which the piazza was named, the police station, the main taxi rank, a cinema, and the prim brick headquarters of the local Communist party. All these were nevertheless arranged with an involuntary meridional adroitness, and the general effect was one of space and colour. In the centre of the square (it was, more accurately, a circle haltingly sketched) was a series of flower beds filled with purple and white petunias. The café where they sat was freshly painted, and their corner of it faced the piazza’s single architectural asset - a church consecrated to one of the town’s numerous patron saints, who appeared in marble above the portico with an open book short-sightedly held before his face.

  The transitory polite smile on Sophie’s face developed into something less fictitious. The scene was so totally lacking in haste or violence. It provided an easy accustomed setting for the long afternoon, which today had such a monumental afternoon quality that it might have been any afternoon in the whole of memory. It was for just these anonymous public pleasures that Sophie came to Italy. Then, there were times, after all, when one was glad of company - and his was perfectly acceptable. She even recalled his last name.

  For Tancredi, it was the time of year when the seasons ceased to have meaning. Now, try as he would, he could not imagine a cold day, a storm, a shower of rain. There were days in winter when the narrow spiralling streets of this town were reduced to slippery channels banked with snow; when, viewed from the foot of its hill, the city rose up like a symmetrical, frosted fir tree, branching into great terraces of church, palace, and piazza. But every spring Tancredi pardoned all this - with true forgiveness, since he could not even remember it. The summer light, the predominant light of the countryside, restored all the true shapes and colours; he got up earlier to enjoy the sight of them. Not that he forgot the complications of his life - the wife he no longer loved, the children from whom he was often separated - but these became more bearable in the light of June. Not that in his office he suffered fools gladly or forgave his enemies - but he was prepared to let them off more lightly than usual. This afternoon he could think of himself, here in the piazza, as a personable man with a woman who did him credit - his vanity was satisfied with an occasional glimpse of this kind. (He would have preferred, perhaps, someone less distraught, more companionable; and if she had belonged to him he would never have let her wear that particular shade of green. However, one could not always have exactly what one liked.)

  ‘What would you like?’ he asked her.

  The waiter was beside them - looking on, as Sophie had foreseen, with an interest so undisguised that it practically demanded an acknowledgement. She looked at the waiter and then at Tancredi, and they ordered two glasses of vermouth. There seemed to be no pressing necessity to make conversation. It was the most natural thing in the world that they should sit there without speaking, making no attempt to discover one another. Inside the café a popular song was being played on the radio, turned low so that only the highest and loudest notes reached them - and those with a reedy remoteness. Outside, at the table next to theirs, a young couple sat with their little boy, who was eating an ice-cream cone aloud, and their black Pomeranian, which had been tied to the leg of the table. A car circled the piazza, looking for a place to park. A station wagon with a little Swedish flag painted in a corner of the window drew up near the café, and a yellow-haired couple got out, followed by a whole matching set of children.

  The immune silence ticked towards its end. Sophie laid her hand on the table.

  But he spoke first. ‘What would you be doing,’ he asked, ‘this afternoon? If you had not come to meet me.’

  ‘Oh - I might have stayed at the hotel,’ she began vaguely, not bothering to dissemble. ‘Written my letters. Or gone to see my aunt.’ She cast about for a more satisfactory answer. ‘Or taken a walk perhaps.’

  ‘So you see,’ he said gravely, ‘you’re much better off here with me.’

  She drank her vermouth, shaking the single wafer of ice round the glass. The radio blurted out the climax of another song. Unsettled, trying to recover the dreamlike afternoon, she stared at the piazza. She was aware of his interest - his curiosity, rather - directed at her so strongly that it could be felt like an element on the exposed parts of her body: on her hands and arms and neck, and her averted eyes.

  What a shifty lot they are, these northern women, he was thinking, amused. Always afraid you might find them interesting or treat them as something other than men. There are really only two kinds - they are either strident or repressed. It’s the way they’re brought up; they can’t help themselves. ‘I wonder if you would help me,’ he began, and paused maliciously to see how much her apprehension would increase.

  But she was quite composed. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If I can.’

  ‘I have to buy a frame for a painting. The shop isn’t far from
here. Perhaps you would come and help me choose.’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Though I know nothing about it.’ She drank again. Across the café the Swedes had joined two tables together. Three little girls in blue dresses sat up eating gelati and swinging their legs, and a tiny boy in a sailor suit sipped inattentively from a spoon presented by his mother. The father, like the marble saint on the far side of the piazza, held an open book close to his eyes. They took turns at talking, loudly and gaily, in their quick lilting voices.

  ‘There are only two kinds of Swedes,’ Sophie remarked, watching them. ‘Fearful bores or very nice.’

  Tancredi counted out some change on to the table. ‘Those are the only kinds there are of any people,’ he said. He finished his vermouth, which until then he had not touched, in a single gulp. ‘But these generalizations are always false in any case.’

  The shop was at the foot of a short street leading down from the piazza. It was a prosperous place, fronted by a double window filled with cornici and with various examples of coloured shutters that were also sold there. There was a small ceremony of receiving Tancredi. The owner was called from the back of the premises, shook hands, and spoke at length about his family and his new car. A space was made for Sophie to put her handbag on the dusty counter.

  ‘Plain gold,’ Tancredi said, ‘and quite narrow.’ The samples dangled in long rows on the wall, and he began handling them. ‘No, this is too flat. And this too broad.’

  ‘This, Professore?’

  ‘No - something simple.’

  ‘What about this?’ She held it out to him, and he came over to look.

  ‘What an eye you have - absolutely perfect. How did you find it? This is just what I want.’ He called to the boy behind the counter. Sophie went to sit on a rickety chair while he stood waiting, fingering the slips of gilded wood. When the boy came with his block and pencil, however, she noticed that he ordered a frame slightly different from the one she had suggested. ‘You’ll send someone up to my sister’s house then?’ he said to the boy.

  ‘Yes, Professore.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow, at this time?’

  ‘No. No, you’d better come in the morning. Early, before I leave for my office.’

  Sophie, faintly irritated, stood up and brushed at her handbag with the edge of her newspaper.

  When they were out in the street again, he asked her: ‘Where would you like to go? Shall we go for a drive?’

  She said: ‘I’m afraid I must go home.’

  ‘Home? Why must you go home?’

  She found herself once more on a busy sidewalk with him, looking into his face. She was on the downward side of the steep slope and had an awkward sensation of confronting him. She said with more resolution: ‘I mean that I want to go home.’

  ‘You’ll come tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  ‘The letters,’ he said with a smile. ‘The walks. Your aunt.’

  She began to walk slowly on, at his side, up the slope toward the piazza. ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Nevertheless, I’ll look for you in the piazza. At five?’ His head was turned to her as they walked. ‘Think of me - as another possibility, along with the letters and the walks. A sort of aunt perhaps.’ He was not quite laughing, for he wanted to be sure before he left her that she would come. At the top of the street he took her hand and let her say good-bye. He did not watch her walk away, but strolled off across the piazza with his hands in his pockets.

  Four

  One day late in June when the flat modern clock outside the post office said ten past five, Sophie began to look up from her postcards, sending unconcerned glances around the piazza in search of his light-coloured suit and dark head; turning, just as unconcerned, to see if the navy-blue car had arrived in the parking area. ‘I miss you all,’ she was writing, on the back of a Last Judgment, when his shadow fell on the half-inscribed card and his hand on her lifted wrist. She looked up, this time into his eyes.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt you,’ he said, sitting beside her and still lightly grasping her hand - her right hand, with the pen in it.

  She greeted him, unsmiling, happy. ‘I was wondering if you’d come.’

  ‘Was that why you looked so strange? But, my dear girl, I’m not late, you know.’

  ‘Not really, no. It’s just that I have a thing about waiting.’

  He frowned. ‘A thing? What thing?’

  ‘I only mean I hate to wait. It’s a state of emergency - everything becomes so concentrated.’

  ‘You’ll get over that,’ he remarked, releasing her hand and looking over her head for the waiter.

  ‘When?’ she asked, amused to think there were habits she might still grow out of.

  He looked back into her face. ‘When you realize that I will always come.’ The waiter arrived, but instead of ordering Tancredi paid him for her coffee and sent him away. ‘Let’s go - I have the car over there.’

  On her postcard she added: ‘But I am happy here.’ She fixed the last stamp to it and put it away with the others in her handbag. She knew she need not hurry to please him; he would be pleased whatever she did. She stood up and smoothed her dress. When they left the thin shade of the umbrella she put up a hand to protect her eyes. Not until they were sitting in the car did she ask: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Let’s get out of the town and then see.’ He swung the car around, leaning out to tip the shabby parking attendant. ‘It won’t be as hot as this once we’re moving.’

  He drove slowly down the town’s main street, which was narrow, cobbled, lined with steep handsome buildings and filled with pedestrians and little cars. The shadows from the buildings were red or dark gold. Groups of girls walked with their arms about each other’s waists. Friends, meeting in the middle of the street, stayed there to talk. Several people greeted Tancredi, and one or two leaned in at the window to exchange a few words. There was none of the usual swift anonymity of a drive through a town - this ride had rather the character of a slow progress in an open carriage.

  ‘In the Middle Ages,’ Tancredi said, ‘there was nothing but foot traffic in these streets. Pregnant women were allowed to ride on donkeys, but even then someone had to walk before them calling out a warning. The streets were never meant to bear this kind of traffic - look how the paving has sunk.’ He waved briefly to an elderly man in a white suit and then to a young couple. ‘It’ll be easier when we get beyond the Duomo.’

  Within a few minutes they passed the turn-off leading to the cathedral and moved along more quickly until at last they drove under the crenelated arches of an immense double gate.

  They might have stepped from a busy house into a garden. The city fell behind them - the encumbered streets, the impeded drive, the glances and voices, all the peculiar suspense of towns. The stillness into which they drove was the more impressive - one might almost have said the more reproachful - for its imminence. It pressed, along with the caper and the climbing roses, upon the city’s outer walls.

  In this part of Italy the harvest begins early. By midsummer the whole countryside is bare and multitudes of small hills, more shapely than ever in their exposure, have turned to dry gold. The grain is variously stacked, according to the district - sometimes propped in circular, tent-like patterns, sometimes rounded like a series of mosques, here standing austerely, in keeping with the local architecture, in tall indented loaves. Coming so early, the harvest seems to lie at the heart of summer rather than to announce its overthrow. The harvesters’ suppers are truly celebrations and not - like the later wine festivals - overshadowed by the autumn.

  ‘This is the main road,’ he said. ‘The road for Rome. We’ll turn off in a minute.’

  But it was several minutes before they left the road. They climbed then, over a narrow track of stones and white dust, between low-slung fences of staked vines and tough, stunted olive trees. Pebbles were flung up noisily about the wheels, and behind the car the dust emerged
in a languid cloud. The sky, though always water-colour, was a bright bright blue - an injudicious paint-box azure, distantly reflected violet in the farthest uplands.

  They jolted slowly over this crest of the fields. Sophie brought a scarf out of her handbag and tied it round her hair. When they came to the highest rise, Tancredi had to pull aside to let a loaded truck pass by. He stopped the car in a slight depression below the road, and they smiled to three sunburned workmen sitting on slabs of the quarried stone with which the truck was loaded. A boy perched at the back waved to Sophie and called out: ‘Ca…rina.’

  Tancredi drove the car back on to the road. A few yards farther on he stopped again and turned off the engine. Sophie lowered her window, which she had closed against the dust raised by the truck, and a slight breeze blew across them.

  ‘Shall we walk a little way?’ he asked, turning his head from the view.

  She opened her door, which swung back heavily from the car’s angle, but before she could get out he had come round to help her. The stubble at the field’s edge scraped about the straps of her sandals as she stepped down. They walked along the side of the road, ahead of the car. Dust and the little stones of the road found their way between her toes. She had left her purse in the car and, like an adolescent, did not know what to do with her hands. Less solicitous than before, he walked at her side and looked about him.

  Here the corn had not been gathered, and lay in loose bundles in the fields. Endless golden hills were posted with clusters or straight lines of black cypresses and sometimes, magnificently, with one splendid tree. A handful of cooperative farmhouses, painted white, faced them on an approaching hillside, but the few other buildings were isolated, ancient, and of grey stone. From the fields the scents were of the dry red earth and the cut grain and of rosemary.