The Italian Girl (17 page)

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘He got them for our future.’

The train came in. David picked up his bag. With a last frenzy of will I took out my pocket book and wrote my address on a page. I thrust the folded paper into his breast pocket. ‘That’s where I live. Think again. Let me know.’

He turned to open a carriage door.

‘David, have you any messages – for them?

He paused. ‘No. The best I can hope is that I shall soon seem as unreal to them as they will seem to me.’

‘That is not the best, as you know.’

‘One cannot always achieve the best, as
you
know.’

The folded piece of paper fluttered to the ground between us.

The whistle was blowing. He put his foot on the train. With deliberation he took my shoulder and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Goodbye, Lord Edmund.’

19. Boxwood

‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was an enormous bird in the house. I think it was a kite –’

‘A vulture,’ I said wearily.

‘What? Well, anyway it was following me through the rooms trailing its wings after it like a sort of train, and I could hear a sort of heavy dragging rustling sound just behind me all the time. I got to the telephone to call for help, but the dial was made of butterscotch, so I didn’t dial, and then this bird –’

‘Otto, we must decide about Lydia’s tombstone.’

We were in the workshop. Otto was sitting on the workbench, in a space he had cleared among the tools, eating his lunch. He had just crammed a fat piece of raw carrot into his mouth. As a handful of parsley followed it closely, shreds of munched carrot fell out onto Otto’s bare chest and lodged in the curly mat of hair. I was sitting on a block of black Irish limestone. A black pollen covered the floor round about it. Otto had been working.

He rubbed his big unshaven chin with a sandpapery sound. ‘Yes. I’ve been thinking. Let’s just put “Beloved Wife of” and “Beloved Mother of”. The usual stuff. Don’t you think? After all she
was
our mother and she
was
our father’s wife. I don’t see why she shouldn’t put up with it now.’

‘I agree. I’ve been thinking that too. And, Otto – ’

‘Mmm?’

‘You do really agree about accepting Maggie’s suggestion? You won’t throw a fit about it later on?’

‘That I keep the house and we split the rest three ways? No, I’ve no objection at all. It seems rational, doesn’t it? The insurance have come up trumps about the fire damage, thank heavens. Lydia’s fire extinguishers did a good job. It’s only Isabel’s room that’s a write-off.’

I stared at my brother with a mild surprise. I had expected some gestures, some fuss: but Otto seemed to take Maggie’s generosity for granted.

‘There’s plenty, you know,’ he said, as my wonderment left a suggestive silence.

‘Yes, yes, plenty. Well, Otto – ’

‘Yes, I know. You’re just going. Ah, well. Maggie’s going too, you know. She’s off. I don’t suppose we’ll see
her
again. It does seem the end of an epoch, doesn’t it?’

‘How will you manage, Otto, without – without anyone?’

‘So you know Isabel’s going too? I was right not to stop her, wasn’t I? I would never have suggested it. But we were punishing each other. I feel in a curious way it’s all for the best, this part of it. I’ll manage so long as I can get to the greengrocer’s. And I’ve just learnt how to bake potatoes. All you do –’

‘I know, Otto, I’ve baked many potatoes. You’ll manage.’

‘And Isabel will manage too. She’s wonderful you know.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t think I ought to have fought it, tried to persuade her to stay?’

‘No.’

‘I felt – somehow so tired – it was like dropping something very heavy, letting go, letting her go without hatred, setting her free. It seemed essential now, absolutely proper, and I feel so much better about her. You know how when one acts rightly at last it’s suddenly very
easy
?’

‘I don’t actually.’

‘Maybe it’s just something to do with being in despair. You remember how I said I wanted to be stripped, denuded? Well, it’s come. I’ve become a vegetable. Now there’s no hope or fear of anything I just live in the present. I don’t even want to drink. Do you think I’ll go on like this, do you think I’ve really changed?’

‘I don’t know, Otto.’

He did in fact look different. The big flabby face seemed collapsed, fallen apart, as if the strings of anguish had been cut. A vacant, curiously serene, light shone from behind. I had not expected this: I had expected a whole drama of violent grief and guilt. I had expected some sort of breakdown, But since he had returned home Otto had been completely quiet. He was working regularly and hardly drinking at all. He did not avoid speaking of Elsa; he seemed better able to think about her than I was. It was not that he made little of her death or failed to see his own share in that destruction. It was that this contemplation had brought him, as he said, to a kind of extremity of which despair was perhaps not the right name. He was beyond the consolations of guilt. He was beyond even the sober machinery of penitence. He was broken and made simple by a knowledge of mortality. Whether he would remain so I could not be certain. But in a way that would have surprised him very much I almost envied him.

‘Go and see Isabel before you go, Ed. She’s very fond of you. You might be able to help her. She’s at the hotel.’

‘I know. I’m just going there. Then I’ll come back and pack.’

‘Funny for you to go home, won’t it be? Us all altered and you just the same. But then you were always miles ahead of us, above us. Sometimes I thought you had a sort of religious vocation, Ed. If we’d been brought up differently – ’

‘No. It’s you who have the religious vocation. I’m just taking a long time to reach the human level. You’re the one that watches.’

‘What one that watches?’

‘Never mind. I must be off.’

Otto laid aside the onion he had been eating. He wiped his mouth on the long silky black hair which covered the back of his hand. He dusted shreds of carrot off his chest on to his worn and rather smelly corduroy trousers. Gorilla-like he rose and I rose too for the parting.

My eye was caught by some change of colour on my left among the tall stones. Flora was standing there so still that she looked for an instant like a pre-Raphaelite girl, all patience, all regard. But then I saw that it was a new Flora. She too had changed. She was neat, tense, modern, a greyhound. As she came forward I flinched before her.

She put her suitcase down while I shuffled my feet in the black limestone dust. She gave me a brief hard glance and then turned severely to Otto. He shrank back a little, looking at her with gaping drooping mouth, eagerly yet piteously. ‘Flora – ’

‘I’m going to stay here now,’ she said in a high voice. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ She looked, she sounded, like Lydia. Otto wriggled like a deflating balloon and got back on to his table. He smiled a grateful lunatic smile. I moved away.

‘You are leaving, Uncle Edmund?’

‘Yes, it looks like it. I think I’m being seen off!’ I smiled at them both. I was very glad she had come back.

Otto turned his beam upon me. He smiled at me tenderly, exhaustedly, as someone might smile in the presence of death. I had never seen quite this smile before. Flora gave me the severe prim look of the very young. I blessed them both with a salute. ‘Good-bye, then.’

‘Good-bye, Ed. By the way, what happened to those boxwood blocks of father’s that you found? I think I might use them after all.’

‘They’re upstairs, I’ll just leave them in my room. I’m glad you want them. They’ve all healed, you know, they’re quite sound and whole again. Good-bye, Flora. I hope you’ve forgiven me.’

‘Good-bye.’ She frowned, taking off her coat slowly. ‘Is your eye better?’

‘Yes, much better. It looks funny still, but it feels all right.’ I reached out a hand and she took it. We did not exactly shake hands. It was more like a chaste embrace.

‘Good-bye, Ed. Thanks for all. Gosh, I’m a wreck.’

‘Human lives mend too, mysteriously.’

‘Mine’s the kind that’s better cracked.
Ciao,
Ed.’

‘Ciao,
Otto.’

I left them together and wiped the butter and onion off my hand with a handkerchief.

20. Isabel in a long Perspective

‘You know, I think it was Otto that David really loved.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘He certainly loved being afraid of Otto – and that’s a sort of love, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. There are many sorts of love, Isabel.’

She was gradually denuding the scene. The shabby, nakedly brown hotel room emerged from under mountains of feathery downy garments which Isabel folded quickly into fantastically small square packages and stowed into suitcases. It was like a metamorphosis of birds.

‘I think he wanted Otto to beat him.’

‘So he didn’t tell you where he was going?’ I asked.

‘No. His letter just said he was going abroad. I dare say it’s America. Oh, I don’t expect to see him again, Edmund, I really don’t.’ She sighed.

I sighed. I had decided not to tell Isabel about my last talk with David. It was better to keep silent and to let the deep logic of the situation remain entirely hid. Simplicity was better than puzzlement. I sat down upon the bed from which the sheets had already been removed. Our voices were beginning to echo in the empty room. How we had all been stripped, Otto, Isabel, David – and myself.

‘America. Yes. Isabel, are you going to be all right? I mean, if you need money, of course Otto – ’

‘Oh, I have some money of my own, don’t worry. You aren’t shocked at me, are you, Edmund?’

‘Shocked? Dear Isabel, of course not! I’m just worried –’

‘Yes, I know. But I thought you might be shocked, you’re such a very austere and upright sort of person yourself. I know you’ve hated seeing me and Otto muddling along. You don’t think
this
makes it even worse?’

‘Isabel, you make me speechless. How can I judge? I just want you both to be happy, and you obviously weren’t before. I suppose it’s – inevitable, is it, this parting?’

She turned towards me and I saw how different she looked now. Her little intent round face seemed plumper and more youthful, assembled and harmonious, purged of anxiety. A warm radiance shone through like light through alabaster, and her eyes had something of that strange almost joyful vacancy that I had seen in Otto’s. Only the new Isabel seemed not fallen apart but more centred, more human, more complete. It was not in her to become scattered and crazy.

She said, ‘Yes. I suppose I knew a long time ago that I was through with Otto. I was through with him ever since he started hitting me. Violence has a terrible effect and in the end one can only go away from it. But I wouldn’t see this. I kept being sorry for him in a bad way.’

‘A bad way?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t really compassion, it was just an obsessive sense of connexion with him, so that being sorry for him was being sorry for myself.’

‘Are you sorry for him now?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t think about him now. I’ll think later and it will be better then. I’m glad Flora turned up. He’ll be all right with Flora. He was all right with Lydia until I came along. Flora will keep him in order.’

‘Don’t you want to see her before you go?’

‘No. There are moments for just letting things drop in a blank sort of way. We would only hurt each other if I saw her now. Have an apple, Edmund. I got some Cox’s Orange specially for you.’

‘No thanks.’ I settled back on the bed and looked at her with puzzlement. She was mysteriously, overwhelmingly, full of herself. I realized she had been, in the past, only half present. Now she was filled out into the complete Isabel. The sun, shining in a luminous blue sky, sent a long beam through the window and kindled her bright face and her hair as she bent over the suitcase. Millions of golden points moved about her in the sunny haze.

‘You seem happy,’ I said almost accusingly.

‘No, just real. I can see. That is why you can see me.’

‘Couldn’t you see before?’

‘No. I was living with a black veil tied round my head. Look here, look out of the window.’

I went to her and together we looked out at a yard of black coal-like earth with a few patches of very green weeds. Two cars were parked. A tabby cat emerged from under one of the cars and lounged to rub itself against a corner of red brick.

‘Can you see that cat?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, until lately I couldn’t have seen it at all. Now it exists, it’s there, and while it’s there I’m not, I just see it and let it be. Do you remember that bit in the
Ancient Mariner
where he sees the water snakes? “Oh happy living things, no tongue their beauty might declare!” That’s what it’s like, suddenly to be able to see the world and to love it, to be let out of oneself –’

I understood her. ‘Yes. I’m glad about the cat. But where are you going to now, Isabel?’

‘Back home to Scotland, to my father. He’s very much alive and he always detested Otto, so someone will be pleased. I think I shall resume my maiden name.’

‘What is your maiden name?’

‘Learmont.’

‘That’s a good name. Did you know that it was the family name of the Russian poet Lermontov? His ancestors were Scottish –’

‘I know, and he was killed in a duel when he was twenty-eight. You said all that to me, Edmund, in exactly those words when we very first met, before I married Otto. Can’t you remember?’

I could not remember. I could not out of the pit of time call up that memory of my exchange with the young distant Isabel. I looked at her, sad and baffled. ‘No. Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.’

‘I’ve never felt less like a machine. I recall that occasion very well. I’ve thought about it quite a lot just lately. Help me with the case, will you?’

I pressed my hands down on the suitcase and my sleeve caressed her bare arm. She smelt of a fragrant cosmetic animal warmth. The case clicked shut. The little brown room was bare now, impersonal, waiting for us to go.

‘What will you do up there in Scotland? Will you get a job?’