The Evening of the Holiday Read online

  Tancredi’s feelings, stirred to an easy Latin intensity, rushed forth to greet the landscape. Although he had been born and brought up far to the south, this countryside was to him phenomenal, possessed of an almost communicable significance. They walked along in silence until she paused to shake a stone from her shoe. Then he stood still and, when she looked up, said to her: ‘We’ve come at the right moment - the light is so beautiful.’ He spoke in a lowered voice, as if the hills were a flock of birds that might get up and fly away.

  ‘Yes, lovely,’ she replied, in an abstracted, mechanical voice, glancing towards the horizon as she walked on.

  The scene might have been of Tancredi’s own creation, so keen was his disappointment. He watched her with injured pride at such ingratitude, like a chef with whose great dish a diner only toys. And yet, it was this very lack of sympathy, in a person obviously responsive, that attracted him; and even now he wondered how, and if ever, he might tap the spring of a passion sometimes discernible in her expression and gestures.

  If the walk had aroused any emotion in Sophie, it was the solitary pang of the expatriate. This countryside - which usually pretended to be exclusively decorative, which posed for paintings and photographs, feigned a private income - was now revealed to her in all its true domestic purpose. She felt like an outsider at a family feast. She wondered: What am I doing here, on this road, with this man, these sights, this language? She wished she were an authentic tourist - an Englishman come to flaunt his reticence, an American secretly hankering for gift wrapping and matching towels. She did not really know where she most belonged. Even those places to which she felt most drawn were mere approximations of home.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ she said suddenly, turning to him, seeing him across this gulf.

  He had recovered his good humour. He stood still again and smiled at her. ‘You are always wanting to go home,’ he said, and took her lightly by the wrists as if he would detain her.

  Her empty hands struggled under the tightening grasp. She experienced a fleeting, irrational terror of a strength superior to her own. When he leaned forward to kiss her, she stepped back awkwardly on the uneven road and said in a high, unnerved voice: ‘No. I don’t want to.’ It was not simply that she did not want his kiss. She did not want this inadvertent, troublesome encounter. She did not want to be disturbed.

  After a second or two he released her, spreading his hands open in an attitude almost identical to her own. Her scarf had slipped back across her shoulders and her hair fell forward on her cheeks and brow. He stared at her. ‘Let’s go then,’ he agreed, pained as he had been over her indifference to the landscape. There is no pleasing her, he thought.

  He helped her into the car and, with a little difficulty, started the engine. The anger he was too proud to inflict on her showed in his treatment of the car. The motor roared, he wrenched the wheel around, trying absurdly to turn in one attempt. The turn eventually completed, they pitched forward down the rough road. But when they reached the highway, he slowed again to enter the traffic, and asked her in a perfectly controlled voice where she would like to be taken.

  ‘To the hotel,’ she told him, her voice less easy than his. Her behaviour, since he manifestly thought it so, seemed to her cold and unaccountable. After all, she reasoned with herself, if I have coffee with him occasionally, does that give him the right to make love to me? (But this she knew to be unjust; his right to approach her was implicit in all their meetings.) She thought: It isn’t that I am unapproachable; it is the circumstances. She said, and her voice was thin and shaken as it had been when they stood on the road: ‘I can’t see you any more.’

  After a silence he said carefully: ‘Why is that?’ and she was touched by the serious inquiry in his voice, as if he found the matter more crucial than anger.

  ‘It must be obvious.’ She too was more earnest, looking at him swiftly, affirming her position by clasping her hands in her lap. His idea of her, she thought, was as superficial as her own impression of this countryside: he saw her on holiday, and not as she actually was - someone with parents, bills, ailments, someone who did the shopping and went to the dentist and was accountable to friends.

  ‘I’ll be in the piazza tomorrow,’ he said - but without confidence, for the first time.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I won’t come.’

  The walls of the town were in sight over the slope of the road. He asked her: ‘Is this because I tried to kiss you?’

  ‘No,’ And for the first time she searched her thoughts to give him an honest reply. ‘It’s because, if things had been different, I would have let you.’ The fields dropped away, and they entered the city by the Roman Gate.

  Five

  Sophie was going out to lunch. It had been arranged that Luisa, with two friends, would call for her at the hotel and take her to lunch at a restaurant in the town. Although she went to some trouble over her appearance and was not ready at the appointed time, the three others were later still. She came downstairs and sat on a sofa at the back of the lobby, where long windows overlooked a garden. Below her, in bright morning sun, the plants and flowers flashed with an almost tropical prodigality; beneath her feet, the same flowers, shaded lilac by the overhanging folds of her dress, were perpetuated in faintly crazed tiles. She leaned back and crossed her legs. She sighed.

  ‘You make a pretty picture,’ her aunt said, appearing at her side. ‘We’d better not sit down. We’re so late already - my fault of course - and we have a reservation. You know Daria. And this is Massimo Tordini.’

  Sophie smiled to a tall woman dressed in white, with an enclosed pale face and a dome of teased golden hair. She gave her hand to Tordini, who was at once squat and dapper, a retired musician visiting the town’s summer arts festival. He held her hand, then kissed it, paid her an extravagant compliment, and reminded Luisa that he had left his car in a forbidden space. They walked back slowly through the hotel lobby in pairs. Daria, incredibly, had brought a white spiked parasol, which aloofly pecked the patterned tiles at every step. With this, and her high insubstantial hair, she was as self-possessed, as perfectly balanced as Queen Mary. Luisa walked with her, on the opposite side from the parasol - letting her have, as it were, her sword arm free.

  Walking behind with Tordini, Sophie contrasted Daria’s figure with her aunt’s. Luisa’s body was also straight and disciplined, but somehow more yielding, more ready to stoop, its pride more intelligible. Her aunt’s grey head was inclined towards Daria’s and she was laughing.

  Tordini detained Sophie with a finger on her arm. ‘Someone wants you.’

  They had reached the door of the hotel, and she turned to find a lame young man from the Reception at her side, with an envelope in his hand.

  ‘It just came for you,’ he said. ‘An espresso.’

  She took it from him and held it in both her hands, looking at the postmark. Tordini pulled back the heavy glass door and they passed out into the street.

  ‘You have a letter,’ Daria observed unnecessarily.

  ‘A special-delivery,’ remarked Luisa.

  Sophie screwed up her eyes in the fierce sunlight, still frowning at the envelope. She felt the two women looking at her. ‘It’s from Grosseto,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone at Grosseto.’ She turned it over to open it and saw the name on the back. I had never even seen his handwriting, she thought.

  Daria sat in the front seat of the car with Tordini. Sophie, in the back with Luisa, laid the unopened envelope on her knee. She resisted pleasure, as for days she had resisted sadness. She pretended to herself that she was Daria, blank, erect, armoured in white silk.

  ‘Massimo,’ Luisa complained, ‘this car is like a furnace.’

  ‘We have hardly any distance to go,’ he said. ‘Can I turn down here - is this a one-way street?’ A shriek of horns assured him that it was. ‘Keep an eye out for a parking place.’

  In the end they parked beside the restaurant, in another forbidden spot. The interior of the restauran
t was cool; its thick red walls and low, curved ceiling gave a sense of being underground. They had a table in a corner and Daria laid her parasol on the floor since, despite repeated attempts, it could not be made to stand against the wall.

  ‘It will get dirty,’ said Luisa.

  Sophie said: ‘Will you forgive me if I open my letter?’

  ‘Of course, dear. I can’t imagine how you’ve waited so long.’

  ‘It’s nylon,’ said Daria. She was speaking of her parasol.

  Sophie slit the envelope with her finger and drew out a single sheet written on both sides.

  ‘It must be a love letter,’ Tordini said, teasing her.

  ‘My sweet Sophie,’ the letter began, ‘This is not a love letter.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Luisa agreed.

  ‘Have you thought about what you want?’ Tordini waved to the waiter. ‘We’re ready to order. What’s good today? Is the fish fresh?’

  Sophie read on. ‘I went to the piazza, as I said I would. I find that I too have A Thing about waiting, when it is for you and you don’t come…. On Friday I drove to the coast -’

  ‘Sophie, will you have antipasto? Two then. And red or white?’

  ‘- to visit my children, and I am spending the night here at Grosseto on business on the way back. If you will see me when I return, please send a note to my house tomorrow.’

  She folded the page in two without finishing it, and laid it beside her plate. The concluding lines of the letter, written in a more impetuous hand, started up from the white cloth between her plate and her wineglass, but she could scarcely decipher them: ‘…explain myself…if you were made of flesh instead of air.’

  Tordini said: ‘It’s strange that love letters’ - he had forgotten how the subject had come up - ‘to the Anglo-Saxon mind always take on the character of ravings.’

  ‘Unless they are very understated,’ Luisa agreed.

  Sophie sipped her wine. Her eye fell again on the fold of the letter. ‘Se invece che d’aria tu fossi di carne.’ It’s well phrased, she thought - like a line from a libretto.

  ‘But I suppose,’ Tordini went on, ‘that kind of language is pretty appalling, if you take it seriously.’

  ‘Anything’s appalling,’ said Luisa, ‘if you take it seriously.’

  Sophie ate an olive from her antipasto and a slice of ham. Of course, she thought, I can’t see him. Of course I can’t. She smiled at Tordini, who had started telling jokes. Only - why should I mind as much as this? She felt, for their meetings in the piazza, an exquisite nostalgia, as if they had belonged to a distant idyll in a country never to be revisited.

  Tordini was saying, his hands spread open before him: ‘And then this Italian says to his friend: “Why are you always with foreign girls? What is it they do that’s so special, these foreign girls?”’ The waiter took away his plate and put down the dish of pasta. ‘Thank you. And the friend replies: “They leave.”

  Sophie laughed. For a moment she thought: I am going to cry. No, I can’t cry here. Only children cry in public. It’s the sort of thing one should do in childhood, quickly, before it’s too late. The events of the morning rocked before her - the blaze of flowers by the hotel window, Daria spiking the coloured tiles with her parasol at every step. Perhaps I have a touch of the sun, she wondered. Or too much wine. And then she thought sharply: I won’t see him. She shifted her foot determinedly beneath the table.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to Daria. ‘I trod on your sunshade.’

  Six

  A boy with a handcart was selling carnations. They were only one hundred lire a bunch, according to the sign, and didn’t look in the least wilted.

  ‘How large is a bunch?’ Sophie asked him. He held it up for her, the flowers wobbling on their long, supple stems. ‘Two pink then. And one of the deep red.’

  He wrapped the ends in newspaper and she paid him, holding the sheaf of flowers awkwardly on her arm and counting out the coins. He put the money in a black cloth bag. ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled, and shifted the carnations into the crook of her arm. How absurd, she thought, to have bought these flowers; now I have to go home and put them in water. And she began to climb the steep street she had just come down. The stems in their damp paper rested against her body, and the strong delicious scent rose over her face. But they are lovely, she thought, and they’ll last until I go.

  Her way back to the hotel lay past the post office. She crossed the wide, unshaded piazza without a glance at the café, although it was early in the afternoon and in any case she knew he wouldn’t be there. It was two days since she had received his letter. In another two days she would be gone. Except for the possibility of such an accident - running into him in the street or the piazza - she need never meet him again. It was for this reason, perhaps, that she imagined she saw him so many times as she walked down the main street of the town.

  Yet, oddly, as she strolled along, she thought of Tancredi only indirectly. She was thinking, rather, of a man she had loved when she was a schoolgirl, and she saw herself walking up and down with him in a garden, anxiously listening to his complicated exposition of the reasons why he could not love her in return. It must be the carnations, she thought suddenly - the smell of the carnations - that brought that far-off garden and that other summer into her mind. She had not thought of it for years, and was glad now to be reminded of the intricate, lasting nature of any form of love.

  The entrance of the hotel was beautifully cool after her walk through the streets. She went over to the desk for her key, but the young man at the Reception came limping out to meet her. He thought she did not understand what he said to her, and repeated his message, directing her to the back of the lobby with his hand.

  Tancredi had seen her first, and in the instant before their eyes met he had a strong impression of her appearance. He thought involuntarily (as he sometimes thought if he saw a stylish woman walking alone in the evening or a girl leaning out of a window): She is in love. So detached was this judgement that his first response to it was a pang of jealousy.

  He stood up as she came across the coloured tiles to where he was waiting by the windows. She made a movement to put the flowers from her, as if they gave her an unfair advantage. He took them gently out of her grasp and, calling one of the bellboys, asked for them to be put into water. She made no attempt to give him her hand or to speak casually. She came and sat beside him on the sofa with her head slightly lowered and her hands in her lap.

  ‘Don’t be annoyed,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going away soon.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  She glanced up and half smiled. ‘You’re a threat to me.’

  He said seriously: ‘You must forgive me for that.’

  ‘You don’t deny it,’ she observed.

  ‘Are you always like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Following the score instead of listening to the music?’

  She shook her head, but not in answer to his question. He lifted her hand on to his knee and laid his own hand over it. ‘You won’t leave,’ he said.

  She stayed in her slack, acquiescent attitude - like a defeated general, not accounting for the errors that led to this predicament.

  He said: ‘You aren’t happy now. But I promise that you will be.’ When he removed his hand, hers remained on his knee as though she had placed it there to comfort him. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

  Tomorrow seemed to her as remote, as unlikely as the end of the summer. She thought that probably she would not go away after all; they could have their afternoons again, for a while, in the piazza. Nothing need be undone; nothing more need happen. She thought that, since he said so, perhaps she would be happy.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we can make some plans.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Plans?’

  ‘It would be better,’ he said, ‘not to go on meeting in the piazza.’

  She sat up straight. The
ir heads, which had been almost touching, now parted. She moved her hand back into her lap. And the bellboy, who had been hesitating in the middle of the lobby, seized the opportunity to come up with her flowers in a brass vase.

  Seven

  In this town every summer a festival is held to celebrate an ancient battle - to celebrate the battle rather than the victory, which was gained by the opposing side. It was, in fact, a decisive victory, a turning point in the town’s brief but illustrious medieval prominence. But the men of the town conducted themselves so valiantly in the field, under so gallant a commander (Guelph or Ghibelline, it is not easily established), and the defeat was in all its aspects so utterly conclusive, that its celebration each year has become one of the town’s, and the nation’s, greatest spectacles.

  During the festival the town can be entered only on foot. Empty cars and buses stand along the roads outside the walls, and even in the fields. At the railway station, which is beyond the main gate, special trains deliver tourists and visitors for a week beforehand, and in the town itself every hotel and pensione is full to bursting and every spare room is let. In the vast main piazza each window is draped with tawny or crimson cloth, and on the night of the festival the campanile of the Palazzo Pubblico is lighted from top to bottom with flares. The main streets are decorated with embroidered banners and with the shields and devices of the city’s saints and heroes. (These personages originate without exception in the Middle Ages; in fact, it is said of this town that when its citizens speak of ‘the turn of the century’, they mean the fourteenth century. In 1944, when the retreating German front approached the city walls with the Allies in close pursuit, the townspeople closed the gates - with some mechanical difficulty, since this had last been done in 1416.)