The Evening of the Holiday Read online

  She said: ‘Don’t be anxious to find a reason.’

  He had forgotten what they were saying. She saw that, and added: ‘To come to the end of this.’

  He smiled at her vaguely, as if it were all a joke.

  In the same patient voice, she continued: ‘Since there’s no need. Since we don’t have much time left together.’

  The astonishment Tancredi felt at being thus relieved in an instant of any necessity to describe their position had nothing to do with a sense of deliverance - for by demolishing his belief in her unawareness of their dilemma she automatically brought into focus the dilemma itself, and he was faced not with discussion of the thing but with the thing itself. He felt a perverse disappointment that his concept of her love as an ideal love, something intact and indifferent to everything but its object, had turned out to be fictitious and that she was after all touched by the same earthly questions as himself. But what was strangest of all to him, and most interesting, was the revelation that she had in reserve these thoughts, perhaps limitless thoughts, of which he could have no knowledge; that her ideas might be entirely at variance with his assessment of them just when he was convinced he understood them best. This fascinated him - in the same way that the realization that his father and Luisa had been lovers had fascinated him by introducing into his father’s life some of those very facts whose absence he had deplored and, along with them, the possibility of others equally well concealed.

  He put up his hand again and turned her face towards him. Mysteriously, she had managed to keep some part of her mind aloof, and for the first time he sincerely wondered what she thought of him - that is, as distinct from what she loved in him. At the very moment when he had thought her most committed to him, she had shown herself to be to some extent detached, and her self-possession struck on him bleakly in spite of his relief. He had a presentiment of her restraint, of a capacity to deal, unbearably, with those matters that he himself could only deplore.

  The prospect of losing her would not, after all, arrange itself conveniently into the landscape of his experience; it remained a prospect, an unknown and terrible loss in store, and refused to be grappled with in advance. By acquiring substance, as today he had wished her to do, she had become more singular and more dear to him, and their attachment to one another appeared to be much more complicated than he had imagined when he was dealing merely with realities.

  Thirteen

  ‘Strange that no one comes.’

  They had arrived at the house some minutes ago but were still sitting in the car. From the way he spoke they might have been completely dependent on the intervention of others to separate them.

  ‘They can’t have heard. I’ll go in now.’ Yet she made no move to leave him. Every parting had become suggestive, a rehearsal, and neither wanted to initiate it. Circumstances would intervene; there was no reason to precipitate them.

  ‘I’ll come for you at one,’ he said. ‘All right? Down here at one.’ Soon she is going away, he thought, where I can’t come to fetch her. I will never see her again. Probably never see her again, he emended, retreating. Then, since it was impossible for him to think that way, he fell back on the unpredictability of events, the strange accidents of life. Something might change, something would happen. So often when one planned for happiness, chance came between, spoiled everything. Why, in that case, should one count on the reverse? The worst need not happen either. Ah, but the worst could happen - and had happened to him several times in his life, all the more terrible for having been foreseen and having followed its foreseeable course. In despair from this clumsy sparring with his reason, he turned to her and lifted her hand on to his knee. Soon she is going away and I will never see her again. He was to bear a double weight of loneliness, his own and hers. It seemed to him that they were doing an obscure, outmoded thing in parting from each other. At one time partings were a recognized and tragic part of life. History and literature and song were full of enforced separations, dramatic farewells. But nowadays - was it because one travelled more easily, or because one acted with less finality? - people did not part. On the contrary, contemporary tragedy seemed to be bound up with their staying together. If they ceased to be lovers, they saw one another still; even divorced couples met on friendly terms (though he had always thought this a particularly unnatural way of doing things). It was unheard-of now to say good-bye for ever. In all the world, so it seemed to Tancredi, only he and she were compelled to part. It made them seem more cut off than ever from ordinary life. It gave their love a mismanaged and dated aspect, a terrible privacy.

  It had been a week of days that were strange in their light and atmosphere, each one distinguished from ordinary time like the unreal, unclouded day of a celebration or the eve of an important journey. So much did this seem to Tancredi a part of his own condition that he was surprised to find the whole countryside speaking of it as an exceptional autumn - for the changing season had made, to him, no more than a monumental setting for Sophie’s departure. There had been no mellowness and little decay. The weather was still and dry, and the leaves, when they did fall, lay for a long time in brittle circular patterns around the trees, like fragments of broken glass. This strange premonitory element seemed to be literally a trick of the light, since each evening brought a short, consoling respite.

  He never thought at all of the time when she would be gone, never wondered what he would do with himself - if he might go away for a while, whether he would be reconciled with his wife. And when he remembered the time before he and Sophie met, he never felt that this could have been avoided. If someone had reminded him that he could have kept away from her, that this need not have developed, it would have been meaningless to him - as if an immunization had been discovered for a mortal disease he had already contracted.

  She took her hand off his knee and opened the door with an abrupt gesture, then stayed a moment longer. ‘I haven’t brought anything.’ Almost comically, like a suspect, she showed him her empty hands.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, she has everything she needs. It’s you she wants to see.’

  ‘Down here at one then.’ She slid out of the car. She went up the steps, and was ringing the doorbell as he drove away.

  It was no longer necessary to keep the shutters closed against the heat, and now the interior of the house was light in the mornings. There were flowers in the tiled hallway and on the landing of the stairs - florists’ flowers, intended for the sickroom.

  ‘How is she, Isabella?’ Sophie asked the old woman who showed her up the staircase and down a corridor - for Luisa’s room was at the back of the house.

  ‘Less bad,’ said Isabella, making it plain by a grimace that she was quoting the doctor. ‘Less bad - what kind of a consolation is that? They’ve sent for a specialist. Poor thing, she’s so weak. This morning she cried.’

  They had reached the door, and Sophie hesitated a moment longer with her hand raised to knock. Luisa’s tears were astonishing, even indecent.

  This was one of the smaller bedrooms, which Luisa had preferred for its view - of a sky, a hillside, a grooved orchard, and a farmhouse of rusty tiles and rough stone. The room was sturdily furnished with things that were old-fashioned rather than old. There was a chest of drawers, a small blue velvet Victorian sofa, a bookcase, flowers on a table, and a low bed. In the mornings the room was filled with sunlight.

  For many days now Luisa had scarcely left this room. Sitting up in bed supported by pillows, she received a few visitors, wrote a few letters, read, or looked out at the view. When the books that were brought to her became too heavy to hold, she sometimes lay for hours, scarcely thinking, though she was in complete command of herself. Her life seemed very long to her. Strangely, it had kept, in retrospect, a certain course and had even acquired a certain form - so much of a form that it was like a finished thing, she thought, awaiting only some dexterous stroke of termination. She would not have claimed that she now desired death - that was not in her character, and in any
case she would have thought it an affectation, an imposition, to say so. Love of life was still strong in her; that morning she had wept, on waking, to find herself no better. Yet she did not quite believe she would recover, could not quite imagine herself deeply engaged again in her own concerns and those of others. When she learned that Sophie was coming, she thought about this love affair as one might think of a life in another age or on another planet - with curiosity and good-will but with immense remoteness and even with a sense of safety.

  Her life, her long life, so she was thinking at this moment, had reached some point - not of completeness, perhaps, but of sufficiency. Although she had often been grieved by her own actions and those of others, she could hardly think of anything she wished undone. This was not from any sense of the perfection of the whole but from a now manifest continuity - and possibly because the imperfections had been so numerous that it would not be possible to subtract them and have anything left to assess. If she had sometimes been made aware that she was less rancorous and less infirm than many others, or more passionately anxious to understand, she attributed this to propitious circumstances, to the favourable conditions of her youth, the good influences of her friends and family. It was this benevolently directed course of her life that she now felt she could discern. What deflection could she herself have made that would have materially altered it? It amused her to think that she might have been lying in bed in a different room, staring through a window at quite another scene - for she did not doubt that she would have fallen ill just the same. She was smiling when Sophie came in.

  It was not until Sophie bent over her and kissed her that Luisa collected herself. She pressed her visitor’s hand and greeted her, and added: ‘Forgive me - I was wandering in my mind, though only in a literal sense. On days like this, at the beginning of autumn, one has an idea of how it must be to live in those mountain villages where the air is always clear. I was wondering whether I would be the same, you know, if I had led a different life in another place.’ She turned on her side, pushing back the sheet, for it was warm with the sun in the room. ‘Everything here is beautiful.’ She indicated the window. ‘All conducive to the right choice, or to no choice at all. Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.’

  Sophie sat in a chair beside the bed. ‘I feel it’s too late now,’ she said - as if she and not Luisa might be going to die - ‘to be different.’ She was thinking of Tancredi. Probably Luisa would speak to her of Tancredi. Seeing Luisa ill like this - much more ill than she had supposed her to be - Sophie was amazed at her own self-engrossment; she was like a guest who insists on having special food no matter what the inconvenience to others.

  Luisa said: ‘I should like to talk to you about Tancredi.’ She was silent for a moment, and smiled. ‘Having taken Tancredi as a subject for discussion, how hard it is to begin. He was here, of course, the other day.’

  ‘How did you think he looked?’ Sophie asked this conventional question seriously, for information. She had lost the sense of Tancredi’s appearance. She could no longer imagine his face at all when he was not with her - as we are sometimes unable to conjure up our own image without looking in a mirror, so much is it part of our entire existence. She could not recall whether his eyes were brown or green, his nose straight or bent, whether he wore glasses all the time or just for reading. She would promise herself to notice these things when they were together. But she forgot or, if she remembered, the details did not help her to picture him when he was next away. And now that they were to be parted she wondered whether her first clear impression would come back to her much later, months from now, when they were no longer bound to one another.

  ‘I thought,’ Luisa replied slowly, ‘he was more serious than I had ever seen him. It was curious to see him like that.’ One is apprehensive about the wrong things, she thought; in the beginning I was afraid for her, because of what his life had been. Instead, she has preserved her ability to act in a way that will be unthinkable to him. ‘You -’ She reached out to touch Sophie. ‘You are used to being serious, but he is not.’ She spoke almost warningly, as though one more bout of seriousness might kill him.

  Sophie said: ‘It won’t be for much longer. I’m going away.’ In saying this, her mouth lost its proper control, so that the words came out distorted, giving her a new, untraceable accent.

  Luisa said nothing. She wrapped her thin bed jacket more closely over her breast - protecting herself from such persistence, such pain; guarding, so to speak, the safety she had felt that morning.

  Sophie went on, in this foreigner’s voice that had mastered the grammar but not the shape of the words: ‘I’m going away. There’s nothing else to do.’ Her words, which expressed the lack of an alternative, might also have referred to the completion of an experience.

  Luisa now said thoughtfully, truthfully: ‘You could stay with him. Always, I mean. Or for a long time.’

  ‘Could you really advise that?’

  ‘It’s so much the issue that it deserves saying. Still - one shouldn’t assume a greater sacrifice than one can gracefully sustain. As for advice -’ She made a face, the kind of face Isabella had made when speaking of the doctor. ‘People at a disadvantage are so tempted by envy or destruction. Ideally, one should get advice from someone who is at an advantage, not from -’ She indicated the bed, the medicines, her condition.

  At what greater advantage can you be, Sophie wondered, than to have come to the end of your life?

  ‘Do you ever notice,’ asked Luisa, ‘how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one? I think…sometimes experience is like that, and that it matters to have committed yourself at one moment, even at great cost and disorder, and to know that you have that capacity. We can’t be orderly all the time without becoming bores.’

  They were both quiet for a long time, and Luisa closed her eyes. Watching her, Sophie noticed for the first time a resemblance to her mother, Luisa’s half-sister. There had always been some physical similarity - the same pale skin drawn over high cheekbones, the same pale hair grown grey, and a strength and beauty of features that contradicted the pallid colouring. But a true resemblance, which would have depended on common judgements and responses, there had never been - for Sophie’s mother, having at an early age observed the consequences of strong feelings, had prudently excluded herself from an encounter with them. She was cool and decisive about her own affairs; with her children she maintained a neutral position that from time to time she reinforced with sweeping pronouncements: ‘I expect you’re old enough to know your own mind,’ ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing’ - unlikely assumptions that would never have entered Luisa’s head.

  This very impersonality, which had distinguished Sophie’s mother from Luisa in looks and had subtly divided the two sisters throughout their lives, was now for the first time to be seen on Luisa’s face. Here the detachment was of a different quality, not merely because it was making its appearance for the first time (and it may be said that Luisa’s eyes, closed as they now were, were infinitely more expressive than her sister’s would have been wide open) but because it was directly connected to Luisa’s disengagement from life and to her speculations on her own death. Sophie saw this and understood it, and turned her face away.

  Luisa spoke, reaching out her hand again to touch Sophie. ‘When do you mean to go?’

  ‘Right away.’ And then, retreating like Tancredi from what was unbearable, she said: ‘In a few days.’ She chose a day at random, knowing she would be bound by it. ‘On Tuesday.’ A tremor that could have been hers or Luisa’s ran through their clasped hands.

  ‘Listen,’ Luisa said, drawing herself up in the bed and leaning on her elbow to look at Sophie, ‘It may be better not to go.’

  Sophie said: ‘I must go.’ She dre
w her hand away.

  ‘But think of it -’ Luisa began. Then she said: ‘No - I’m sure you’ve thought of it too much. That’s our indulgence, yours and mine, to think of things until we’ve thought the true meaning out of them and the need for any action.’

  Sophie smiled. ‘We’re used to being serious.’

  ‘Unlike Tancredi…. But think, my dear, of Tancredi.’

  Sophie repeated: ‘I must go,’ and this time she gave her words an immediate significance by getting to her feet.

  Luisa took her weight off her elbow and lay back on her pillow. At last she said: ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘Before I go?’ Sophie supplied. ‘Of course. Perhaps tomorrow?’ She looked about the room. ‘Is there something you would like? Shall I close the window?’ It seemed hard to leave Luisa without having been of any use to her, without having performed some small service for her or paid any deference to her illness. When she came back, tomorrow, she would show more concern for Luisa and talk about other things, about anything but Tancredi. She took Luisa’s hand again. Having made up one’s mind to suffer a great hurt, it was somehow disheartening, a disappointment, to be told it need not be borne and that some other way could be found, less lonely but harder, more imperfect but bearable. She stood over Luisa, trying to forgive her for causing such a disturbance. Then she laid the thin hand back on the sheet, as Tancredi had done. She waited a moment, awkwardly, and went out without speaking again.

  I should have consoled her, given her courage, Luisa thought. Or I should have said nothing. Why should I try to persuade her to do otherwise? Because it would be one of those important deflections one can make of one’s own choice? No, she is right, and I should have said nothing. But, heavens, when she stood there saying she must go, how like her mother she looked.