The Italian Girl (5 page)

Otto raised a wet crimson face. ‘I know, I know. You’re a close one. You’ll think it all out. But I just miss her.’ The tears came again.

I could hardly bear this. ‘Please, please, Otto. And don’t worry about the will and all that. I shouldn’t have spoken of it. I’ll write. I think I’ll go and pack now.’ In a strange and terrible way I missed her too. But I felt an iron intention to postpone my grief until I should have got back to my own house where I could indeed ‘think it all out.’ Here it would be, somehow, too dangerous. I did not want to catch some last infection from the shade of Lydia.

‘It’s all right,’ said Otto. He was wiping his face with one of the rags he used to clean his chisels. ‘We may as well talk about it now. I haven’t found the will yet. At least, Isabel hasn’t found it, and she started looking as soon as Lydia had the first stroke. There may not be one.’

‘That wouldn’t be Lydia, not to make a will. It’ll turn up. It’s probably somewhere in her bedroom.’

‘Well, maybe. Anyhow, she’s probably just divided the property between us. There should be no problems. I’ll give you half the value of the house.’

‘I should think it’s more likely,’ I said, ‘that she’s left it all to you and cut me out.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Otto. ‘She and I rowed an awful lot these last years. You were the far-off hills. She might quite well have left it all to you and cut
me
out. That would be like her sense of humour!’ He gave his orchestral giggle, stuffing the last handful of mint and dandelions into his mouth.

‘If she has,’ I said, ‘of course I’ll divide it equally with you.’

‘Well, I’ll do the same by you if she’s left it all to me.’

It occurrred to me that this arrangement was a bit unfair to Otto, since it was overwhelmingly more likely that if there was one heir it would be him. And after all he had put up with Lydia all these years. However, I decided to argue about that when the time came.

‘Thanks, Otto. I suppose she’ll have made some provision for Maggie?’

‘I suppose so. If not, we will.’

‘Is Maggie going to stay here?’

‘Of course,’ said Otto with some surprise. ‘Where should she go to? This is her home. She hasn’t been to Italy for years.’

There was a soft footfall and a figure emerged from behind a tombstone. It was Levkin, carrying a tray. I had not heard the outer door open, and it occurred to me that he might have been hiding among the stones for some time and listening to our talk. I did not trust any of Otto’s young men.

The boy went to Otto, who gave up his plate and the greasy remains of his meal with the docility of a little boy obeying his nurse. Levkin packed the tray neatly. He looked at me with a slightly coy air, stretching his long neck like an animal, his big lips impudently pursed. He tossed his longish brown hair forward to veil his eyes as he leaned over, deftly removing the fragments of biscuit and cheese which had formed a milky way down the front of Otto’s jacket. Then he removed a lump of butter from Otto’s cheek with his finger, balanced the tray lightly on one hand and stood springily to attention. ‘And when I get back, my Lord Otto, to work, yes?’

‘Yes, David,’ said Otto. He hauled himself obediently to his feet with a grunt and a hiccup while the boy, with another humorous look at me, disappeared among the stones.

I was irritated. ‘Why do you let him address you in that idiotic way?’

Otto meditatively picked up a wooden mell and balanced it in his hand. ‘He’s a good boy. And I think he’s fond of me.’ Otto said that about all his apprentices, usually in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary on both counts.

I shrugged my shoulders. It was time to leave Otto and his problems behind. ‘Well, I’ll be off –’

Otto shambled after me. We climbed over a little suburb of marble blocks and opened the door. It had been cool and grey in the workshop with the clear northern light from above. The door opened upon the damp sunny jungle of an English summer. Past one corner of the house, where the Virginia creeper hung like light-green cut-out paper upon the blackish-red brick, was visible a triangle of lawn seeming now almost golden in the sun. In the midst of this haze of gold Flora stood, as if she were waiting. She had put on her sun hat and the blue ribbon was tied in a big bow under her chin. As the workshop door opened she turned and walked slowly away into the green shadow in the direction of the wood. We watched the nymph for a moment in silence.

‘Innocence, innocence,’ said Otto. ‘To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How
can
it begin? Yet we were there once –’

5. Flora and Experience

‘Uncle Edmund, could I speak to you for a moment?’

I had left Otto behind in the workshop and was crossing the lawn. I had meant to give Flora a brief wave, not intruding on her summery solitude, and go to pack my case. Farewells could wait until, the taxi having arrived, they would have to be brief. However, on seeing me emerge Flora had turned purposively towards me and there was no avoiding her.

‘Hello, Flora. What a long time it is since we met. You must call me “Edmund” now that you’re so grown up, mustn’t you?’

I felt rather awkward with her. She was not the little girl I had known, but she was not yet a woman either. She seemed like some little ageless nymph of the woods, some gracious sprite from an Italian painting, too smooth, too slim, too luminous to be really made of flesh. I saw her as Otto had seen her, radiant with innocence, and I felt tongue-tied.

‘You haven’t looked at the stream,’ said Flora. ‘It’s all different now. Do come and look.’

‘I haven’t much time. But I’ll come a little way.’ It would have been gross to refuse her.

As I went I heard again, from Isabel’s open window, the sad music of Sibelius. Isabel was wrapped in her ‘wild cloak’. I wondered if she was watching us now.

The trees at the edge of the lawn were mixed conifers and birches, very tall birches with long bare silver stems and high feathery foliage, looking more like eucalyptus than like the tamed birch of the south. Where the stream emerged and briefly skirted the lawn the trees drew apart to make an archway through which could be seen a shimmering of bamboos where the sun chequered the receding water-course with a more golden green. It was a luscious miniature jungle scene such as would have delighted the eye of Henri Rousseau; and indeed, for all my anxieties and my sense of a great pain postponed, it took my breath away at that moment and I could hardly help seeing the distant pattern of the sharp bamboo leaves, framed by the birch pillars, as a fine subject for an engraving. Of course, it was a subject which I had done before; but as Flora had said, the scene had changed. We began to walk along the path by the stream.

The birches and conifers had receded here toward the top of the hill and their place was taken by the bamboos which fringed the water and the shrubby tangle of the camellias which clothed the slopes. The bamboos had invaded the stream now, their straight strong stems grouped in the water itself, while the stream, more choked than ever with its debris of round grey stones, meandered a blackish brown under the sun-tinged arches. The waterfall distantly murmured. A riot of wild flowers and grasses had covered the bank and made the path invisible and all but impassable. The jumble of campion and ragged robin gave place to briars and ground elder as Flora still pushed on ahead of me with determination in the green half-light.

The extreme beauty of the scene put me into an instant trance. It was always a trick of my nature to be subject to these sudden enchantments of the visible world, when a particular scene would become so radiant with form and reality as to snatch me out of myself and make me oblivious of all my purposes. Beauty is such self-forgetting. Yet in all this I saw Flora clearly, saw that her great-skirted dress was not white, as I had seen it before, but a very pale blue and covered with little black sprigs of flowers. Her heavy, thick, straight hair, still all undone, flopped and shifted on her shoulders like a garment, and as she stooped every now and then to detach some trailing stem from her dress, I saw her profile, her pale freckled cheek and strong slightly up-tilted nose. The short upper lip and forward-thrusting mouth recalled my mother. But Flora’s face was larger, heavier already in feature, and it suddenly struck me, more modern. With that it occurred to me that Flora must be taller than either Lydia or Isabel. And then she looked to me less like Alice in Wonderland and more like a country girl painted in a truthful unassuming moment by some honest unambitious painter at the turn of the century. There was a certain simplicity, a certain unashamed prettiness.

I was brought to my senses by a large stinging nettle, which, in a leisurely manner, brushed itself lightly across the back of my hand, leaving behind a fine scattering of little red-hot pinpricks. I exclaimed and then called to Flora. ‘Look, let me come in front. What am I thinking of? You must be getting murdered by brambles and nettles. Or shouldn’t we turn back now?’

I had half-consciously assumed that the child was leading me somewhere. There was, indeed, at the end of the path, the cascade and the broad black pool into which it fell, a fine sight, and one which I had many times painted and engraved without ever producing more than an eighteenth-century pastiche. Perhaps the cascade really did live in the past. But the path was so thick with weeds now it seemed pointless to continue. My coat was covered with burrs and little green pellets of goose grass and I could see Flora carefully detaching her skirt from a bramble. ‘Let’s go back, eh? I’m glad to have seen it. It’s prettier than ever. We’ll turn round and I’ll lead.’

‘It’s easier in a minute. We can get under the camellias.’

I looked rather anxiously at my watch. I could of course catch a later train. I looked up and she had vanished. The place had me now under some sweet compulsion and I followed. Next moment the green tangle was gone and there was bare, dark brown earth underfoot.

The camellias, disciplined by the winds of severe winters, crouched on the slopes, rising here and there to the eminence of a tree, their branches and shiny dark green leaves twined and knotted into a continuous fabric. Underneath they formed a series of interconnected caverns or grottos through which, bending double, one could freely pass; and now I could see Flora’s pale dress appearing and disappearing as she darted ahead of me under the low roof. With a sort of excitement I began to run too, bending very low to keep my head clear of the branches, and in a moment there was sunlight ahead.

When I emerged, Flora was already sitting on the bank with her shoes off and her bare feet in the water. I was breathless, but she looked as if she had been sitting there all the morning. She pulled her dress up to her knees and looked up at me gravely.

My heart was beating hard after the doubled-up running. I must be out of condition, I thought, as I sat down beside her. Here the cascade seemed to make but little noise, a small music which surrounded us and seemed to form a shell in which the scene floated detached and perfect. The cascade was not large, but it was so well proportioned to the pool that it seemed to escape the vulgar dimensions of real size and partake rather of the measureless nature of art. It fell from a shelf of rock straight into the round black pool and seemed to disappear through a foamy brown ring into the deep water so little was the glossy black surface elsewhere disturbed. Above the rock the course of the stream receded up a green gulley overgrown with bog myrtle and willow herb towards a birch-ringed glade at the summit. The sun shone on the pool, but coldly, out of a bright pale northern sky. I looked up and was dazzled. Then I looked down. Flora’s feet in the dark water were almost invisible. Her bare knees were a light biscuity brown, slightly polished.

It was easy to guess that this place was the child’s private retreat. I could not see Isabel, with her high-heeled shoes, making the passage through the brambles, nor could I see the huge Otto crawling beneath the stooping camellias. Even as a child Otto had not been such a frequenter of the cascade. It had been my place. Now it belonged to Flora.

I rubbed my hand with a dock leaf until it was a green hand. Flora was picking white daisies from the bank and laying them out on her skirt. I thought it was indeed a pretty picture to take away with me. I looked at my watch. Then I looked back at Flora, at that smooth unmarked young girl’s face; and even as I looked I saw that she was starting to cry.

I was for a second surprised and at the next upbraided myself. After all, she had loved her grandmother. Ought I not to be grieving too in just such a simple way? I still felt accused by Otto’s perception that I would ‘think it all out’. I said to her, ‘Don’t grieve, Flora.’ Of course she must grieve. But ‘We are all mortal’ or ‘You will soon forget her’ could not be said to children though both were true.

Flora shook her head violently, shaking tears off her cheeks. She was staring at the centre of the pool.

‘It’s not that.’

‘What is it then?’

She turned towards me. Her face had become wet and red very quickly. It was as if she had whipped on a different mask. I looked with dismay at the puckered brow and the bloodshot eyes. ‘Uncle Edmund, do you really want to catch that train?’

‘Edmund.’

‘Edmund.’

‘Yes, Flora. Or the next one would do. But I asked you what was the matter. Is it Lydia?’

The cascade softly incapsulated our voices in its sound, making a privacy.

‘I said no. I want you to stay here and do something for me.’ She had stopped weeping now and wiped her face with the back of her hand. Darkened strands of hair adhered damply to her neck.

‘What’s the matter?’ I was troubled by her wild look and by the solitude of the scene.

Flora then said something which I could not catch, or rather which I half caught and could not credit. ‘What?’

‘I am pregnant.’

I stared at her. It was not possible. Then I felt a violent flush as if a warm cloth had been thrown round my head. I blushed with shock, with shame, and with an obscure and fierce distress.
‘No.’