Cliffs of Fall Read online

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I only said that once, didn’t I?”

  “Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.

  “Several times, then,”—he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case—I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”

  She thought that the digressions in the minds of men were endless. How many disguises were assumed before they could face themselves. How many justifications made in order that they might simply please themselves. How dangerous they were in their self-righteousness—infinitely more dangerous than women, who could never persuade themselves to the same degree of the nobility of their actions.

  “What are you thinking about” he asked her.

  “Men,” she said absently.

  Taken aback by the plural, he stopped to assemble his thoughts once more. She was not being very encouraging, lowering her eyes and offering him monosyllables in this way. But there was no reason why she should encourage him, and he reminded himself of that; he was nothing if not fair.

  “Why did you say it, then?” She looked up briefly. “If it wasn’t true?”

  He said slowly: “I thought it was true when I said it. I’m trying to say that I don’t feel quite the same—I mean, not as I did.”

  She was silent, watching her fingers uncurling from his and the tiny white dots on her blue dress waver with the trembling of her knee. The words seemed so loud that she thought their echo could diminish only over a lifetime, would go on sounding within her forever: “Not as I did.” “Not as I did.”

  “I would always care about you,” he went on, now anxious to be understood, as it were, once and for all. “But it can’t be as it was … I’d like to think we can go on being fond of one another, that you can think of me as someone who …” He paused for a moment and then continued, unconscious of irony, “who showed you what love is.” He withdrew his hand from her slackened grasp and lifted her chin so that she looked at him. “Darling, please. Please try to understand.”

  “I do understand, I do really,” she said earnestly—almost in a tone of reassurance. “It’s only that I cannot bear it.”

  He withdrew his hand and leaned forward with a little sigh, his elbows on his knees. Having been compelled to look at him, she now could not stop doing so. When he turned back to her, he was unnerved by that intent, expectant stare. Spreading one of his palms upward on his knee in an apparent appeal to common sense, he met her eyes and said, reasonably: “My dear, we have to come to terms with this.”

  “Yes, to terms,” she said. “But whose terms—isn’t that the point?”

  “Don’t.” Bending forward again, he took a sip of his cold coffee. “I hate to hear you talk like that.” He did not know how to show her that she was simply adding, uselessly, to an already difficult situation. After a silence, he asked: “Do you have anything to drink?”

  She got up and put the cups and saucers back on the tray: “Is Scotch all right?” She went into the kitchen, and in a few moments reappeared carrying a bottle and a glass full of ice. He saw that her hand shook as she set the glass on the table.

  “You mustn’t exaggerate the importance of this,” he told her.

  She let him take the bottle from her and fill the glass. “But it does seem rather important,” she answered, apologetically. She sat down again and watched him drink, so obviously awaiting his next pronouncement that he took an extra sip of whisky to gain time.

  “Yes,” he went on. “It seems—is—dreadful, if you like. But darling, I mean that you have everything ahead of you. At your age, this isn’t a—matter of life and death.”

  She thought that it would, in fact, be easier to die than to get used to being without him. (But that, perhaps, was not a fair way of putting it, since it is really easier to die than to do almost anything.) The possibility of taking her own life was, however, something to be held in reserve, like a pain-relieving drug that can only be resorted to in extremity. It interested her to think that her words and actions would then assume an authority they could never command so long as there remained the possibility of their repetition; it seemed hard that one should have to go to such lengths to make one’s point.

  If, on the other hand—as he suggested—she was merely beginning a series of similar experiences, she could scarcely feel encouraged. She sensed that she would never learn to approach love in any way that was materially different, or have the energy to go in for more than a little halfhearted dissembling. Up to this, she had led a life sheltered not from rancor and mistrust but from intimacy; nothing could convince her that this first sharing of her secret existence, more significant even than the offering of her person, represented less than it appeared to. That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

  She remembered her uncombed hair. Startling him, she got up quickly from the sofa and went into the bedroom. She stood at the dressing table, releasing her hair from the knot of ribbon, and then, with her hand on the hairbrush, stared into the mirror. After a moment, forgetting what she had come for, she sat down on the side of her unmade bed, propped one elbow sidewise on the pillows, and leaned her jaw on her hand.

  When he appeared in the doorway, she made a small explanatory gesture with the hairbrush, which still dangled from her right hand, then reached across and replaced it on the dressing table. He leaned for a moment against the doorframe, and when he came into the room she curled her legs up on the crumpled sheets and drew back on the pillows, allowing him to sit at the foot of the bed. They passed, in this way, some minutes of that hot afternoon. Both had the sensation of leaving behind them, simply by changing the scene, the antagonism in the living room.

  At last he reached out and took her hand again, as though needing for a little longer to be in touch with her. He frowned into space, and only turned his head when she spoke.

  “Tell me,” she asked him, in a voice that was now shaken and fatigued, “what we are going to do.”

  The hand holding hers opened briefly and closed again. “There aren’t many possibilities … We shall see less of each other. Not meet at all, perhaps.” Incongruously, he added: “I will hate that.”

  After a pause she repeated, as if he had not answered her: “Tell me what to do.”

  He lowered his troubled, abstracted look to her head. “You could go abroad for a while,” he said. “That might help.”

  They looked at each other. Her hand grasped his convulsively. “Tell me,” she insisted, almost whispering, “something that won’t be hard, or lonely.”

  “My dear,” he said. Even to him, it was inconceivable that her love should not be reciprocated. In compassion, he kneaded her fingers for a moment with his own. “What should I tell you? How happy I’ve been with you? How many things you’ve done for me? That, in a way, you’ve brought me back to life?” He let her hand go so that she could lie back on the pillows, and stretched himself exhaustedly along the foot of the bed with one arm beneath his head. Staring at the ceiling, he said: “I owe you everything.”

  This admission seemed to her to set the seal on the dissolution of their love: total indebtedness could only be acknowledged where no attempt at repayment was contemplated. She closed her eyes on some sustained crest of pain. Tears of desolation moved haltingly from the corners of her eyelids and disappeared into the hair above her ears. She was scarcely aware of shedding these tears, drawn as they were from weakness and the accessible surface of grief; no such ready means of human expression could give the real nature of sadness.

  “I think I should go home,” he said listlessly.

  “Why?”

  “We’re just exhausting ourselves, like this … Let’s hope we can see things more clearly tomorrow.”

  She gave a small regretful smile, her eyes still shut. ‘I think I must h
ope to see them less clearly.“She felt him sit up and lower his feet to the floor. She opened her eyes as he rose and came round the bed to stand beside her.

  “If I leave,” he said, “you might get some sleep.”

  “Stay a minute,” she said, still with that faint smile. She put her hand up to the now creased edge of his jacket. “I’m going to be so unhappy when you go, and I want to postpone it.”

  He sat down again, on the edge of the bed. Ineptly, he smoothed back her hair, and then drew his finger along the wet mark between her eye and ear. With an air of helpless simplicity, he said to her: “I’m sorry.”

  “My love,” she said, in the same hushed voice. “It hurts me so.”

  “I know, I know.” His fingers passed irresolutely down her head and began to spread out the tangled hair on her shoulder. “I know,” he said again, half to himself. “It isn’t easy.”

  He looked at her with such bewilderment that she raised her hand and laid it for a moment on his shoulder before letting it fall, hopelessly, across her body. After that she lay perfectly still, with her eyes on his face. This submissiveness and the slow familiar movements of his hand only served to emphasize the constraint of their attitudes. Neither of them spoke; the stillness in the room was the passionless, critical silence of a sickroom. He lifted her hand aside and unfastened the belt of her dress as gently and carefully as if she had had a serious accident, and he was ministering to her.

  VITTORIO

  VITTORIO stopped at Nannini’s on his way home, and bought a cake. It was almost four o’clock, and the town was coming to life again after the siesta. The shop was already full of people; it was divided into a café and a confectioner’s, and as he pondered the display of cakes Vittorio could hear behind him the clatter of cups and glasses at the bar, and the exchange of voices.

  Leaning on the glass counter and waiting to be served, he began to feel foolish about the whole thing. He did not want a strange couple in his house. The idea would never have occurred to him had it not been for Francesco, his lawyer. It seemed to Vittorio than Francesco was interfering too much in his financial affairs. It was Francesco’s suggestion that he should let rooms for the summer, and it was Francesco who had found the English couple who might at this moment, Vittorio thought anxiously, be arriving at his house to be interviewed. He rapped on the counter, and when the girl came selected a green cake with a pattern of crystalized fruits. As he waited for it to be wrapped, he pulled out of his pocket for the third time the piece of paper Francesco had given him, and stared at the name: Jonathan Murray.

  Holding the red and gold cakebox by its loop of string, he made his way out of the shop. The girl at the counter and the girl at the cassa smiled at him; so did the policeman, as he crossed the main street: “Buona sera, Professore .” The cake, he knew, had been observed and its purpose noted. The town, which had known what to expect of him for almost sixty years, could with a little application account for his slightest deviation from habit.

  The house stood nearby, at the end of a narrow street, and he never approached it without being conscious of its charm. It had once belonged to his family and was now converted into apartments. Built in the twilight of Siena’s glory and not truly medieval, it was not listed with the splendid little palaces that are among the town’s attractions. Still, it was an elegant building of weathered white stone, with four narrow rows of arched windows along a curved façade. The entrance, as he stepped in from the June sunshine of the street, felt cool and dim and smelled like a church. The elevator was out of commission again, according to a notice dangling on the bars of its little cage, and he set off slowly up the shallow steps.

  Giuseppina was at the door before he could ring. She was wearing, he saw, her best black dress and a starched apron, and her gray hair had been carefully strained back into its bun. How ridiculous we are, he thought, handing her the cakebox. I shall tell them that I’ve reconsidered, that there are no rooms. He began to smile at his own panic, while Giuseppina, in a lowered voice, reproached him for his lateness. “E già venuta, la signora,” she whispered, letting him pass.

  He stopped at the hall mirror to straighten his tie. “Ah, si? E com’ è?”

  She hovered beside him, the cakebox in both plump hands. “Carina. Carina e gentile. Sta nello studio.”

  He ordered tea and went along the corridor to his study. The door was not quite closed, and as he pushed it open the afternoon light reached from the windows and made him pause. The woman who sat by his desk looked round and started to rise. He crossed the room quickly, murmuring in English: “Do sit down, how do you do,” and she, taking his hand, replied: “I am Isabel Murray.”

  When she was reseated, Vittorio turned to adjust one of the shutters, deflecting the light from their faces. His first thought, as he drew up another chair, was that the room was shabby and hopelessly cluttered. His Persian rug, which he had always considered beautiful, was, he now saw, almost worn through; the leather arms of the chairs were white with use. Books had overflowed from the shelves onto the table and the desk, were even stacked on the floor. Among the ornaments on the piano, the photograph of his wife, Teresa, was warped and faded in its plush frame. The piano itself, which had scarcely been used since Teresa’s death, was an antiquated upright of no distinction whatever, decorated with brass fittings for candles. He stared vaguely about as though he, rather than his visitor, were the prospective tenant.

  His second thought, also accompanied by a sense of irritation, was that Mrs. Murray, as Giuseppina had suggested, was quite beautiful. Her face was almost a countenance—a pensive sunburned oval elaborated with brown eyes, a short nose, and a defenseless smile. Her fair hair, streaked by the sun, was coiled around her head and drawn to one side, in the style that was being worn in Italy that year—it was 1957. Her cotton dress was printed with blue flowers. About twenty-five or six, he supposed, looking at her almost with indignation, as though she had brought some disturbance into his house. She answered his look with her unsuspecting smile.

  “My husband sends his apologies,” she was saying. “He had to go to Florence for the day, on business.”

  “He is writing a guidebook?” asked Vittorio, wondering whether Francesco had got it right.

  Apparently not, for Mrs. Murray hesitated, wrinkled her brow, and then said: “Well, a sort of guidebook. A description of the paintings, actually, in Siena. He went to Florence to see about reproductions. We expect to be here about two months, but it depends how long it all takes.” She paused, and when he said nothing went on: “I believe you lived in England?”

  “For nine years,” he replied, thinking how remote his exile seemed to him. “I went there in 1937, after my wife’s death, and came back in ’46.”

  “I hope they were nice to you.”

  He smiled. “To be there at all, an Italian during the war, meant that I suffered. They realized that, and allowed me the stature of my condition. I have never known people so polite. And in my profession—I am a classicist—I could find immediately those who shared by interests.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” she said, as though the responsibility had been her own.

  “In England, life is a long process of composing oneself,” he continued. “For us, the English are as strange as Orientals, with their formalities, their conventions, their silences. I should never have known, had I not lived there, how vulnerable they can be, and how sentimental.”

  On a tinkle of plates and silver, Giuseppina entered, bearing the tea tray. Vittorio, who took his tea each afternoon from a chipped ceramic mug, hastily cleared a space. The cake, ostentatiously intact, had been placed on a silver platter.

  He began to spread the cups and saucers. “Or would you prefer a glass of something—vin santo …?”

  “No,” she said, “this is lovely. Shall I cut the cake?”

  When they were established across the cups and plates, he asked: “Your husband—is he an artist himself?”

  “No. He’s doing a series
of these books—last year we went to Perugia. It’s just that he’s interested in it. As a matter of fact, at Oxford he read classics,” she added, not urging this bond. A little wedge of cake, crumbling between her fingers, fell to the floor, and she bent to pick up the pieces. “Your lovely rug,” she said.

  “Do you work, too?” he asked.

  “Not very much, I’m afraid. I keep card indexes, and that sort of thing, and I go round with Jonathan, though sometimes he prefers to be alone. We’ve hired a Seicento, and we usually drive somewhere in the mornings—the book is on Siena and the surroundings. Yesterday we went to Rosia; the church there has a painting by …” She paused.

  “Matteo di Giovanni,” he supplied, pleased by her ignorance. In England, he had taught Latin at a girls’ school for a short time, and he sketched to himself her education—a little implausible history, some disproportionate geography, and a muddled, lasting familiarity with the poets. The Latin, he knew through his own defeat, he could discount completely. He saw again rows of pale, virtuous faces inclined over blotched books.

  There was a short silence. Vittorio put down his cup. “I should tell you about the house,” he said, “or, rather, show it to you. You would have the bedroom and the salotto. The bathroom is next to the bedroom. I would, you see, move in here, into this room, so you wouldn’t be disturbed. No, really,” he said as her look deepened to protest, “I’d be much happier. I often sleep in here, when my brother comes from Rome. Unfortunately, being immediately under the roof, the apartment is quite warm in summer, but my father—the whole house was once his own—kept the top floor because of the view. What else? Well, there is hot water, but in the mornings only, I’m afraid.” He hesitated again, and then mentioned uncertainly the price he had proposed to ask.

  “It seems so little,” she said.

  “I thought it was too much,” he answered, matching her ineptitude.

  Jonathan Murray was so tall that he stooped to enter Vittorio’s apartment, and so thin that sinews and veins were plainly seen on his taut, bare arm, which was weighted with a suitcase. He was in his middle thirties, a handsome, deliberate man with somber eyes and straight brown hair. Depositing the suitcase in the entrance hall, he turned to shake hands with Vittorio. His look, as far as courtesy would allow, held all things in abeyance, and it was Isabel, coming in behind him with a rug and a portable typewriter, who spoke first.