The Evening of the Holiday Read online

  She unfastened the sleeves of his pullover from about her neck. Then she held the pullover up so that she could pull it over her head. It was far too big for her, and in any case the breeze had died and the day was getting warm again. Nevertheless, sitting there on the steps, she put on his pullover. At that moment, in the presence of all these people, it was the closest she could come to taking him in her arms.

  Ten

  They slept in a room upon whose high, high ceiling the painted branches were obligingly abundant with an equal variety of fruit and flowers. The white walls had at one time borne panels of a similar decoration, but these had to a large extent been worn away and even, around doors and windows, painted over. The blue-tiled floor had been trodden into slight undulations, the shutters were the colour of red earth, and the furnishings were few and massive. The bed was mounted on a low step between two windows. Its four corner posts, spirally carved, had been intended to support a canopy, which had long since disintegrated, leaving unobscured overhead the view of ripe oranges and full-blown roses.

  ‘Is it getting late?’

  ‘It’s only seven. And the day will be as hot as ever, from the feel of it…. How can you be so cool? So cold and smooth. Like having a fish in one’s bed.’

  ‘Never had one. Besides, fish have scales.’

  ‘Only if you rub them the wrong way.’ He reversed the direction of his hand. ‘What would you like to do today?’

  ‘Let’s think. Since it’s Sunday, we might drive somewhere for lunch.’

  ‘Or take a picnic with us.’

  ‘We should try to stay off the main roads.’

  ‘There’s a place, a farmhouse, on the plain as you go towards the coast. There are some remains of a monastery - a wall and a fresco. I own land there, just a few acres. Perhaps you’d like that?’

  ‘Then let’s get up. We can have breakfast in the garden.’

  They had breakfast in the garden almost every day. They sat together at a table under the trees and passed each other the bread and brushed the bees from the marmalade. It was now the end of August, and each morning produced a blazing sun, a desert sun that had strayed north from Africa. Beyond the house, farms and villages shimmered in the bleached countryside. There were no pedestrians on the roads, which the traffic covered at a feckless holiday speed. But in the garden there was always shade and sometimes a breeze.

  Unlike Luisa’s, this garden had not run wild; the hollyhocks, the dahlias, the marigolds were all as accomplished as the flowers on the painted ceiling. The pale climbing roses had been meticulously set in their patch of shade and the ferns fell over the stones as they had been trained to do.

  Enclosed on two opposing sides by a low wall, the garden was a square large enough to include some splendid palms and a row of lime trees. The rosy colour of the wall could be seen only in the intervals of a hedge of thick clipped laurel. In the centre of the garden there was a well - a large circular stone well raised on a double pediment and arched over by a hoop of iron. The arms of the original owner of the house had been engraved on one side, and the other was looped with a garland of chipped stone roses. The well was no longer in use and had been closed with a grating. A circle of flowering plants stood on its broad rim, and above - from the centre of the iron hoop where a bucket should have been suspended - there hung a great pot of pink geraniums. At its far end, away from the house, the garden finished in a grove of ilexes. Out of sight beyond the trees, a sunken maze had been levelled to make a tennis court.

  On its remaining side the garden was overlooked by the rear of the house. It was four storeys high and covered with uneven gold stucco, which seemed in the sun to be stretched like skin over the bricks, so that all the nerves and sinews of the house rippled beneath it. Staircases and fireplaces had been concentrated in this wing when the house was built, and there were no windows above the ground floor, except for a deep-set row of apertures belonging to servants’ quarters under the roof. Long ago and almost at random, several false windows had been painted on the otherwise blank façade of the intervening storeys, and these were utterly charming. In one, the faded green make-believe shutters were completely closed; in another they were half open; on the sill of a third, a blue pot held a cluster of flaking marigolds. The house was high and finished in a moulded cornice supported by deep curving modillions.

  ‘It’s a pity to go anywhere, it’s so lovely here.’

  ‘We’ll be back in the afternoon.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘No, but a winding road. And we can’t drive right up to the farm - there’s nothing but a path for the last half mile. We’ll have to leave the car on the road and walk across a field.’

  The field, which for some time had not been ploughed or planted, was full of coarse grass and tough little shrubs that caught on Sophie’s dress and scratched her bare legs. Tangled everywhere through this dry summer slope were thousands of red poppies. The path, a strip of trodden grass, led them over a slight incline and was quite unshaded. The only trees were the olives of surrounding fields and an occasional furled poplar. Renoir painted such a scene and called it ‘The Upward Path’ - even though the figures in his painting are descending.

  Sophie and Tancredi had eaten their picnic in a wood of cypresses on one of the nearby hillsides, then driven down to the plain. Centuries before, this plain had been a shallow lake, and it was from this time that the monastery was dated. Even now the drained fields lay on the plain with a relapsed stillness of inland water, and the two figures waded through the grass as if through the shallows of a pool. It was afternoon and their slowly moving forms were the only sign of life as, one behind the other, they climbed the little rise.

  Tancredi, in cotton trousers and a blue shirt, brushed his way along the rough field, sometimes humming and sometimes absent-mindedly singing a song. From time to time he put his hand back to help Sophie over a small ditch or an outcropping of stone - as though, like Orpheus, he were in some way prevented from turning to her. The day was so hot that even this brief contact made the sweat start in their hands. The sun dazzled them and burned their necks and their bare heads.

  He broke off singing. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘You must be dying.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It isn’t as far as it looks. We’ll be there in a few minutes.’

  ‘Will they mind my coming?’

  ‘They’ll be delighted.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘In the family? Oh - an old couple, who must be practically incapacitated; then Filomena, who is my age and used to be beautiful. Her husband died in the war. Nelda, her daughter, who was married last year to Nestore from the village up there. Now he lives here and works the farm, because Nelda’s brother is learning to be a mason…. Well, there it is.’

  They had reached the top of the rise. Before them was a clump of poplars through which a web of vines had been pleached into a thick curtain. To the left of these trees there was a low stone farmhouse, yellow grey with a red roof and one tall brick chimney. At right angles to it, there stood another building of the same size. Shrubs and flowering creepers had been grown against all the walls, perhaps as protection from the sun on days like this. There were no ruins to be seen. There was no garden; the cultivated fields came right up to the house, but where they rose into a bank before the front wall the poppies were growing in such profusion that the sea of crops appeared to have broken there in a great wave of red.

  As they approached the house Tancredi stopped, beside the group of trees. Sophie drew level with him, and they stood for a moment looking at each other in this shade that was no more than a dappling of the heat. It was too warm to embrace. He put his hand to her hair and they smiled at one another.

  How happy we are, she thought, without the slightest reflection or attempt to establish cause - as someone might marvel at a wonder of nature.

  ‘How happy you look.’ He kissed her forehead lightly and they went on. There was room now for them to w
alk side by side, and the path led through cultivated land. There was no one in sight - not even an animal or a chicken to be seen. All the shutters of the house were closed.

  ‘Perhaps we should have let them know we were coming,’ she said.

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘They’ll be delighted,’ he said again.

  A woman in a black dress and black stockings came out of a side door, saw them, and called loudly - not to them but into the room behind her. She disappeared, and they heard other voices. The house visibly stirred, although the shutters remained closed. As they reached the front door, which was set above two steps, the same woman came out, smiling and followed by a girl in a black blouse and skirt. ‘Signorino,’ the woman said, and shook hands with Tancredi and laughed with pleasure. She was not tall, but dark and stately, with a refined, cheerful face and a smooth broad brow.

  The girl then put out her hand, though more tentatively. She stood aside, smiling, to let them come in. Sophie thought, going first into the dark house: They are delighted.

  ‘Filomena,’ Tancredi said in an authoritative voice. ‘Can we have some light?’

  Filomena went to unlatch the shutters, and the girl, Nelda, pulled chairs out from a centre table. Tancredi and Sophie sat down, hardly able to see one another. The room smelled strongly of all its history - of meals, of children, of sleep and hard work.

  A hot half-light was let in by Filomena, and at once, in a corner of the room, a baby began to cry. It was Nelda’s new baby, a little boy, and she went and picked him up and brought him to the table, where, still yelling, he was handed about to be admired.

  ‘Where’s Nestore?’

  ‘In the other room,’ Filomena answered. The house was apparently divided into only two rooms. ‘He went to get the old people out of bed.’

  There appeared to be no question of protesting this. The old people must be awakened; not only would they want to get out of bed, they would be delighted.

  Nelda rocked the baby and smiled shyly down at its head. Tancredi leaned both his elbows on the table and clasped his hands before him; this gave him the air of conducting an interview as he questioned Filomena about the farm. The questions were not idle, and these were evidently matters he wished to know about.

  Sophie had never seen him in quite this role before. His authority, their humility, made her uneasy. No one seemed to mind but her. She looked around the room.

  It was not a large room, and it had been asked to accommodate a great deal. There was the round wooden table, grooved and glossy with age, at which they sat, and this was surrounded by six unvarnished chairs with woven rush seats. A small marble-topped table stood in one corner; on it was set a white enamel stove with two burners, and beside it a dark green cylinder of gas. Apart from an urn on the stone floor, there was no sign of water - which might have been drawn from a well. One end of the room was entirely taken up with a vast, sagging wooden bed draped with a red coverlet, and next to this stood the baby’s cradle. Above in the beamed roof was the only truly new and truly sordid object in the room - a naked circle of fluorescent lighting, for the moment inactive. A faint glow came from a miniature shrine fixed in the wall above the stove - a tiny bulb, trailing a too heavy cord, lit a plastic image of the Madonna wreathed in faded paper flowers and backed by a card with a printed text.

  Nestore appeared, a short and wiry young man with a brown face worn not by anxiety but by hard work and the weather. Tancredi got up, and there was some bustle about bringing in the old people. The old man still showed signs of having been dressed for church that morning; he wore a collarless blue shirt and thick grey trousers that came stiffly to his armpits and were supported by canvas braces. A few strands of grey hair had been combed back across his head. His eyes were a very pale blue and out of them he gave a bewildered look of recognition to Tancredi.

  The old woman was more alert. She bowed her birdlike little head practically to Tancredi’s fingers. Her face still had some colour not due to the sun, and her manner showed that she had once been pretty.

  They all sat on the hard chairs. There was a short respectful silence, as though grace were being said, and then Nestore began to talk about the land. Now everyone had their hands clasped before them on the table. Tancredi’s - confident, capable, well kept; the hands of the old couple were of the texture and colour of a walnut; Nestore’s, almost as broad as they were long; Filomena’s and Nelda’s, reddened and not really in repose, stealing an unaccustomed holiday. And Sophie’s own hands - shapely and soft, the nails carefully painted, one white wrist turned upward and circled by a gold bracelet.

  Nestore’s hand was lifted from the table and extended towards Tancredi in a gesture that was apologetic without being sorry. ‘We had to support the others,’ he was saying.

  Tancredi shrugged. ‘Perhaps they thought they were supporting you.’ He turned his head to Sophie. ‘The threshing,’ he said. ‘There was a strike over the threshing. The farm labourers wanted higher wages.’

  ‘Did they get them?’ she asked, hoping so.

  ‘Not what they wanted,’ he replied, and then he smiled at Nestore and again shrugged his shoulders. The whole family seemed to shrug in response, but there was a silence, an awkwardness. The old couple were almost asleep.

  Filomena pushed back her chair. ‘Will you have a glass of wine?’

  ‘I think not,’ Tancredi said, ‘since we have to climb up to the fresco.’ Everyone smiled again and he turned back to Sophie. ‘We have to go up a ladder. The fresco is on the upper part of a wall.’ He unclasped his hands and spread them out flat on the table. ‘Shall we go?’

  Nelda woke her grandmother and gave her the baby. The old woman supported the child on her knee with one practised arm and looked at it with pleased detachment.

  They left the house by a back door and crossed a hot little yard to the other building that Sophie had seen from the field.

  Nelda, walking behind with Sophie, said timidly: ‘Your dress is pretty.’ She touched her own black skirt. ‘This is so hot, this black.’

  Sophie asked cautiously: ‘Could you wear a lighter colour?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the girl, with another suggestion of a shrug. ‘It’s mourning for my husband’s mother. We wear black for a year. For that,’ she said, with the air of citing an unalterable law, ‘is the custom in this country.’ She meant the word ‘country’ to apply merely to what could be seen around them.

  The other stone building was a combination of two structures of differing heights. The first, which they did not enter, was apparently used as a cowshed and barn, and stood open to the yard with a pair of immense wooden doors propped back by stones. The second building had similar doors and they were closed.

  Nestore struggled with the bolts of these doors, and Tancredi came over to Sophie. ‘Are you getting tired?’

  ‘Oh no.’ But she was standing with her head lowered and one hand up to shield her eyes from the glare.

  ‘Does all this depress you?’

  She shook her head, and gave a shrug like Nelda’s.

  ‘As soon as we’ve seen the fresco we’ll go home.’

  She found it incredible that they should be able to extricate themselves within a few minutes from the world she saw here. Tancredi’s villa and their life in it appeared to her, for the moment, inordinately pleasurable, and Tancredi himself the beneficiary of privilege so all-pervasive that it could not even be described as entrenched. She wanted to apologize for the disproportion, confronted with this other existence. She half turned away, but at this moment the doors swung back and Nestore called to them to enter the building.

  The interior was well lit, through a series of long slits near the roof. The floor was of stone, irregularly flagged and bare except for a few implements. The shed might have been reserved for winter storage but at present showed no sign of use. At the far end a high wall provided the division from the adjoining building. The character of this wall was in no way related to any of the surroundings in which it
found itself. It stood apart, as it might have stood in an open field. It was like a strip torn from a magnificent illumination. The fresco covered the wall almost completely. The background was a dark, burnt red and had been much damaged by the damp - it was mottled with little craters of mould. The lower half of the fresco was discernible only in vague shapes and a broken pattern of formal decoration. Higher up, higher than eye level, there was a seated central figure rather larger than life-size, surrounded by saints and angels and balancing a child on one knee in the same matter-of-fact way that Nelda’s grandmother had held the baby. This child was less an infant than a diminutive man. The Madonna, whose inclined face was a pale, almost featureless oval, was draped in a blue robe that also covered her head. Out of the robe and on to her shoulders streamed tendrils of corn-coloured hair. Her knees, beneath the fluted folds of blue, were set apart.

  There had been no attempt at restoration. The fresco was in an advanced state of decay. The impression it made was unaccountable; there was nothing in any of its details to suggest the splendour of the whole.

  There were no signs of other ruins. Nothing remained of the other rooms of the monastery, which had been abandoned, perhaps, and then demolished when the farm was built.

  ‘No one knows who is responsible,’ Tancredi was saying. It was not clear whether he referred to the destruction or to the fresco.

  Nestore brought the ladder, and this was fixed, with some unheeded scraping, against the upper part of the fresco. Tancredi climbed up and pointed out to Sophie from above the details that could still be seen - the disintegrating stars on the robes of the saints, the powdery remains of gilt circlets about the heads of angels. Enraptured, they all smiled. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ they asked her. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’