The Evening of the Holiday Read online

  Sophie thanked him. She stood in the doorway, looking into his grave face. He still had not spoken. It did not seem possible to tip him.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said.

  ‘Good night.’

  She ran down the few steps into the street. She heard the door being locked again behind her.

  The square in front of the cathedral was empty. She crossed it and started at a half run down the road. She was now in a residential area, not prosperous but respectable. Lights had been turned on in the streets and in the rooms and the occasional shops that lined the sidewalk. (The way was so narrow that there was in fact no sidewalk, only a white painted strip to guide pedestrians; but tonight, in the absence of traffic, a thin stream of people had moved into the centre of the road.) Here the crowd was small and the faces cheerful. Only the children cried out in exhaustion, slung over their fathers’ shoulders, clutching ribbons or tiny flags. There was no sign of the members of the procession. Rounding a bend in the road, Sophie slowed to an ordinary walk. A clock struck a quarter to eight. She had plenty of time.

  She had plenty of time. As she walked along she smiled, from a sensation of deliverance, a disproportionate sense of danger past. It was night now. The lights were going on one after another, and from almost every doorway there were the smells of dinners being cooked, special dinners for the evening of a festival. The people in the street became fewer and fewer, then disappeared altogether. Looking up, she saw for the first time the shape of the gate ahead of her, its merlons and crenelations carved on the blue night sky and the stars. The road widened; she heard the swish of the cars on the highway outside. She began now to think of him and wondered if at this moment he might be there waiting for her beyond the gate, but she did not quicken her pace; there was something so delicious in this certainty of meeting that she went along more slowly still. As she left the sidewalk and crossed the open space to the gate, she changed the bag into her left hand and put up her right to arrange her hair. And in the shadow of the archway she hesitated - not in trepidation but from delight.

  Eight

  Since they left Florence the dark had come down completely and the moon stood before them in the sky however the road turned. It was two days since the night of the festival and they were on their way home. They had been driving for several hours, and now she sat inclined towards him, her head lowered not quite to his shoulder. She touched him only with one hand, resting the tips of her fingers on a fold of his linen jacket.

  The previous day, on their way to Florence, she had sat up straight beside him in the sun, her scarf tied over her hair, her elbow on the open window, his cigarettes and matches in her lap, and watched the woods and fields pass by. They played a game of identifying the trees, because he claimed she did not know their Italian names.

  ‘Questo, cos’è?’

  ‘Lecio.’

  ‘E quello?’

  ‘Tiglio.’

  ‘No - quercia.’

  Or they spoke about themselves, confirming to one another that they were there together.

  ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t be at the station.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t come.’

  ‘So it seems that one must believe in miracles after all. Not the miracles of the Church but of the railway station.’

  ‘Just think - there must be miracles at the railway station every day.’

  They had reached Florence in the afternoon, crossed the river, and found a place for the car near the cathedral. They went to lunch in a nearby restaurant, where, because of the lateness of the hour, they were almost alone - and where, because of their happiness, no one seemed to reproach them. When they came out of the restaurant, the city was reviving from the afternoon closing. They walked about the streets with their arms linked, he on the road and she on the narrow footpath. Almost everything they said was irrelevant.

  ‘Ghiberti made the doors because Brunelleschi designed the dome.’

  Or ‘Look - they found the head of the Primavera.’

  ‘Do you read Pratolini?’

  ‘That’s the Palazzo Strozzi.’

  If they stopped to look at one another and to ask without speaking the same question over again and give the same reply, they walked on again smiling. They must have been smiling all day, she thought, from the pleasure of being together.

  She discovered that he collected paintings of battles - an odd taste in someone so attached to life. In the Via de’ Fossi they inquired in one antique shop after another without finding what he wanted.

  ‘Do you have any battles?’

  ‘No, signore, there are no battles here.’…‘There aren’t as many as there used to be.’…‘No, we don’t even expect any.’

  He gave up the pursuit of battles and bought instead a pair of earrings - long, dusty gold loops that he fixed into her ears while she stood before the mirror in a cluttered shop.

  It was cool in the early evening and they walked along the river. A group of young men were casting a net from a boat, one standing up to ship the oars against the current, the others spreading the lines of the net in the clouded green water. The boat swung very slowly in a half circle, resisting the river with an air of purpose and necessity that contrasted oddly with the evening bustle of the town. Lights from the bridge fell on the intent brown backs bent over the water and on the silent, upright figure of the oarsman.

  ‘How strange.’ The stone parapet of the Lungarno is exactly the right height for leaning, and she leaned on it. Inches from her back, the traffic roared past. ‘This, in the centre of the city.’ They looked at the boat and then into the river.

  ‘D’Annunzio wrote a poem about the Arno.’

  ‘Can you say it?’

  ‘No.’

  They leaned side by side, their bent elbows not meeting, their lowered faces not seeing.

  ‘Oh, signorina.’

  ‘Ah, Professor.’

  The boat had drawn towards the opposite bank and they walked away, forgetting it.

  ‘Do you remember where we left the car?’

  Now she sat silent beside him on the dark road and he could not be sure if she slept or not. When she moved her hand on his side, he glanced at her and saw that her eyes were open. ‘Sleep, darling.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  But she would not have slept for anything. Tilting her head she could see the red moon and the stars rising and lowering over the uneven road. The car rushed between rows of sloping pines whose trunks were barred with white paint, and past an army of advertisements for gasoline, Chianti, and men’s hats. Once in a while they passed through a village whose main and single street shone like a fair with a confusion of neon lights, and in whose unadorned cafés children, too late out of bed, slept on their mothers’ laps. As clearly as if it were day she could picture the symmetrical Tuscan landscape that extended on either side. She had made this journey from Florence a dozen times before without ever finding it too short, but tonight the numbered notices of decreasing kilometres seemed to be posted at every turn. She wanted to go on for ever - but wanted it intensely, as if it were a possibility - and wondered whether she had ever been as happy as this.

  She put up her hand to his, on the wheel. ‘There are no battles here.’

  ‘And we don’t even expect any.’

  She withdrew her hand and replaced it at his side. ‘I don’t ever want to arrive.’

  She would have a good dinner when they reached home, and a warm bath; she would wash her face and brush her hair, and they would make love. Even so, she did not want to arrive, for this safety, this perfection, would have passed, and there was no way to detain or even acknowledge it; no pact she could make, if she were willing, with that notoriously bad keeper of bargains, God.

  He turned his head once more. ‘Look at me. Will you love me as much as this tomorrow?’

  He had asked this rhetorical question during the day and they had laughed at it. Now she turned her cheek against the hard leather and didn’t reply. It was the qu
estion no one could answer, and her reason for not wanting to arrive. Whether tomorrow she would love him, or he her, as much as this, or more, or less, no one could say. The road, the city (whose lights and towers could now be seen below the stars), the warm bath, the comfortable bed and their sleep together, all brought that tomorrow closer. And the thread of her happiness was no stronger than the clasp of her fingers on his coat, no longer than this last mile of their journey.

  Nine

  While they were sitting at lunch a great storm broke. At this time of year, the height of summer, there were brief thunderstorms almost every day, but this was something special. The sultry day was split by lightning - not crackling flashes but a series of full, silent illuminations, weird as moonlight - and by explosive thunder. Then the rain came down, white, torrential. The day darkened. The shutters of the dining room had to be closed, and they could hear one of the maids doing this throughout the house. Isabella, the old servant who was waiting on the table, switched on the lights, but a moment later the electricity failed, on a peal of thunder, and the three of them went on with their meal in the half-dark.

  They were seated, Luisa and Sophie and Tancredi, at equal distances around the circular table, and were in this way quite far from one another. At first the storm was perfectly discussable. Luisa spoke about certain leaks in the upstairs rooms, cracks that she had meant to have repaired. Tancredi mentioned the risk to the threshing and the possible damage in the orchards. It was even a means of animating an awkward conversation, for this was the first time Luisa had seen Sophie since she had gone to live with Tancredi in his own house. They were in love, presumably. And why, Luisa had been wondering when the storm broke, did one qualify the situation to oneself in that way? One would always want to think of oneself as being on the side of love, ready to recognize it and wish it well - but, when confronted with it in others, one so often resented it, questioned its true nature, secretly dismissed the particular instance as folly or promiscuity. Was it merely jealousy, or a reluctance to admit so noble and enviable a sentiment in anyone but oneself? Charity, talent, love were real, perhaps, only to the sufferer and the beneficiary, and abstractions in the eyes of others.

  When the storm began they were all glad of the interruption. There was quite a lively conversation about storms in general. Darkness, in this long, large room lined with furniture and dim paintings, drew them closer together. As it went on, however, the storm ceased to be welcome or even socially acceptable. The heavens gaped and roared above the house. Isabella ran out of the room with her hands to her ears and could be heard having hysterics in the kitchen. It was frightening in the way that an earthquake is frightening, because it was so immeasurably beyond anyone’s control. Their talk subsided. They came to the end of the fruit and sat on around the table without speaking.

  Or is it simply, Luisa went on to herself (turning up, as it were, the volume of her thoughts to make them coherent through the storm), that love so often makes for trouble, for such a fuss? Tancredi had a wife and children. And in Italy there is no divorce. It could only end badly for everyone concerned. (She included herself in this ‘everyone’.) What a fuss about nothing. Then - No, she corrected herself; not about nothing. If it was a fuss, it was a fuss in the way that life itself is a fuss. She could concede them that.

  ‘There are candles,’ she said. But no one spoke.

  She tried another conversation, about the crops, because the two of them began to seem quite chastened, as if she were censuring them as they sat there on either side of her. And in this way they passed the time, while the storm continued, until Sophie suddenly exclaimed: ‘But this is awful!’ Their minds were running so much in two directions that she herself added: ‘This storm.’

  ‘It’s dying down,’ Tancredi said. He moved his hand on the cloth as though he would reach over to comfort her, but the table was round and he and she across from each other. Indeed, the storm was receding. The lights came on again, but soon were not required. The hysterics in the kitchen ceased, and Isabella came back to remove their plates. They could hear the thunder going away, grumbling, in the direction of Rome.

  ‘Let’s see what’s happened to the garden.’ Luisa got up, pushing back her chair, placing her napkin on the table decisively, as if she were physically changing the trend of all their thoughts. She went through into the living room before the others had time to rise from their seats.

  Tancredi came round the table to Sophie, but now it was he rather than she who seemed in need of comforting. He wanted to touch her in order to reassure himself, but Isabella was still clearing the table. He reached out and adjusted one of her ear-rings instead.

  ‘Don’t worry - it’s not like that.’ She said this as if she had understood Luisa’s thoughts as well as his. They walked into the living room.

  He said: ‘It’s not like anything.’

  He helped Luisa to open the doors into the garden. It was still raining and from the trees and the eaves of the house large drops of water came splashing down like stones. The wind had died with the storm and the sky had cleared, but there was no sun, no colour whatever. The entire countryside looked blanched and beaten. On the surrounding hills, the crops, the vineyards, the harvested and freshly tilled fields might all have been of the same texture.

  The garden had been treated with a violence that seemed almost intentional. A row of terra-cotta urns holding orange and lemon trees had been bowled off their pedestals and lay about the stone paths in the attitudes of the slain. Some of the urns had smashed, and rested in pools of their spilled red earth. Others had stayed intact, but in them the trees were crushed or broken. The fruit itself was cast about in the grass and the flower beds.

  ‘What a sight it must have been,’ Luisa said - unexpectedly, for the others were waiting for her to lament the losses - ‘these great things reeling about, being swept off their perches.’

  They came down the steps from the house. The whole length of the garden was littered with fallen flowers and with the dropped leaves of the trees. Taller plants were bent double and shorter ones laid against the earth. All the depressions of the grass and paths were filled with water. They walked slowly over squelching pebbles, around plots of petunias and dahlias. The rain ceased now altogether and a thin, chill breeze came up. There had been so many days of extreme heat that at first the sensation was practically unrecognizable. The palm trees swayed and water was shaken down from the oleanders and the laurel. Sophie folded her arms across her waist and shivered in her cotton dress.

  ‘I’ll get you my sweater from the car.’ Tancredi went around the house by one of the sodden paths and in a few minutes came back with an olive-green pullover. She arranged it across her shoulders with the sleeves hanging down on her breast.

  Now the gardeners began to arrive and one or two labourers from a farm near the house. Luisa talked to them as they walked back and forth among the ruined urns, pointing out this and that - how one bush was virtually undamaged, another split in two. They paced about, like doctors and orderlies on a battlefield, assessing the situation before they went to work, taking account of the losses but more engaged with what could be saved. Tancredi went over to help the men lift up the urns. Four or five of them, pushing and struggling, finally forced a few unbroken vases back on to their stone blocks.

  They all set to work - raking up the rubbish from the grass, staking and tying the larger plants and building up earth about the small ones. To Luisa this activity was instantly comforting. Why do we make such an issue of everything, she wondered, putting in order a row of zinnias, pressing the wet soil so firmly into place that her fingerprints remained around each plant. It was all in the course of events - things blowing about, being set to rights, flowering again. She thought: There is the resilience of things; these plants are designed with just such storms in mind. She said to herself: It is their nature.

  Tancredi’s labours had the opposite result. Ever since the dispiriting lunch, he had wanted to get away, to take Sophi
e home, to see how his own garden had fared. And now, with everyone manfully setting things to rights, it seemed impossible to leave. He watched Luisa rise from the plot of zinnias and survey the scene in her highminded, high-handed way. He could not move. In the storm a fig tree had been wrenched away from a low wall that supported it, and he found himself holding it up in his arms while one of the gardeners attempted to truss its dangling branches. Water slid down the enormous leaves above his head and pelted his face and clothes. The man went to fetch a piece of cord, and Tancredi, still embracing the tree, leaned against the wall and looked across the garden at Sophie.

  A boy was collecting the lemons in a hessian bag, and she was going about with him, picking up the fruit and handing it to the boy or dropping it in the bag. She had tied the sleeves of Tancredi’s green pullover around her neck. Her hair was rather wet and hung flatly down against the sides of her head. Her dress was wet too and clung to the backs of her legs as she bent down to pick up the lemons. To Tancredi she looked unbearably mortal, a prey to her present circumstances, to himself, to mysterious events to come. She seemed so intent on her simple task, so fastidious - rubbing the muddied fruit on the grass before it went into the bag. Each time she looked up and handed another lemon to the boy, Tancredi felt a pang for her, as if she were giving away something precious of her own. He could not get over this impression of her vulnerability, though he reasoned with himself as he stood there propping up the dripping tree. He wished she would stop, go and sit on the steps, fix her hair, be more in command of herself; looking as she did at present, she was too great a responsibility for him.

  As he watched her she did in fact come to the end of the lemons. She and the boy glanced about, found one or two more under the trees, and put them in the bag. Then she went, without offering to do anything more, and sat down on the highest of the few steps that led up to the house. She did not attend to her hair or her dress. At first she watched the activities in the garden. Then she looked up, as if she had been intending to do so all along, straight into Tancredi’s eyes. He thought she would smile (for he knew that he looked ridiculous, standing there all wet grasping the wretched tree), but she looked for a moment more serious than ever, and when she did smile it was a smile in no way concerned with the tree.