Cut and Come Again (15 page)

‘Let me give you some wine?'

‘Thank you.'

‘And you, Angela?'

Slowly, with distressing, trembling slowness, he poured out the water into the three glasses, and as he poured it he seemed also to pour away his idiocy and weakness. When it was all over he sat back in his chair and gazed at me for the first time with consciousness,
strength and complete intelligence. It was as though a miracle had been worked in him by the pouring of that water.

‘You must have come a long way,' he said. His voice was normal, strong, unfaltering. And the change in him wrought a change in the woman too. She sat with bright eyes, her face flooded with the light of relief.

‘Which way did you come?' she said. ‘Over the hill, from the Roman villa?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you saw some flowers?'

I told her about them, how I had followed them all day, up and up from the valleys, of the constancy of the harebells and wild scabious, which had blossomed everywhere, of the thickening of the flowers and the coming of the rock-roses as I climbed higher and higher, and finally of that hill, from which I had seen the village, with its festival of blossom on the banks of the roadside and the willow-herb thick as corn.

‘Did you see the anemone, the mauve one?' said the old man. ‘It's called pasque-flower by some people.'

‘But not in summer, father,' said the woman. ‘He wouldn't see it now. It's over long ago. That would be in the spring.'

‘Yes, yes. But has he ever seen it?' He turned to me, making a cup of his frail hands. ‘That shape, and pale mauve, like the scabious. Beautiful, a beautiful thing. You've seen it?'

‘In gardens,' I said.

‘But not wild, not wild? Up on the hills it grows so much smaller. It's so frail and so aristocratic. The Romans brought it over – they could make a dye from it. And wherever the Romans have been there's a chance that you'll find it.'

He began to talk rapidly, a little excited, but now always with control of his words and actions and with the light of understanding in his eyes, and he went on to tell me that it was the pasque-flower, the little wild mauve anemone, that he loved better than all English flowers, and how in the spring I might find it up there, on the hillsides, beyond the woods through which I had come that day.

‘You must come and see us again then,' he said. ‘You must come and I will take you up there.'

They were both a little excited by my love of flowers and as we sat eating the fresh raspberries and cream that the woman had fetched while the old man was talking, I excited them even more by saying that in the morning I thought of climbing the hills again and searching for rare species, for orchids perhaps and new campanulas. I asked them the way they thought I should go.

‘He must go up behind the woods, mustn't he, Angela? He'll find orchids there all right,' said the old man.

‘Oh, no, you're mixing it up, father. He'd find anemones there, but –' and she turned to me – ‘if you want orchids you must go the other way. And campanulas too.'

She began to give me directions but I was confused, not knowing the place, and at last she saw it and said:

‘If you've finished we could go out into the garden and I'd show you the roads going up the hill.'

We left the old man at the table, staring again. Out in the garden it was between light and twilight. The formal terraces of white stone rising up from the house to reach the final level of the fruit trees stood out with strange whiteness. The scent of the day-blooming flowers, carnations and late pinks and stocks, had begun
to mingle with the heavy exotic fragrance of the evening-scented things, tobacco-plants and night-scented stocks and evening primroses. We climbed the terraces. The beds were neat and formal and she told me how she had built the terraces and steps with her own hands, using the stone of an old barn that had collapsed in a blizzard. Where the barn had stood she now grew roses, in a square raised-up bed edged with a little wall of stone, all that was left of the barn and its foundations. On the highest terrace she had planted a long bed of pink and blood-coloured carnations and she wanted to take slips of them but she hardly knew how and asked me if I knew. I bent down and tore off a grey shoot and slit the stem with my penknife and found a pebble no larger than a grain of wheat and slipped it in the cut I had made.

That was the right way, I told her.

She laughed. And must she go searching about on her hands and knees for the tiny pebble every time?

It was the right way, I said.

Again she laughed. It might be right but she had no patience to do it. She trusted to luck. If a thing died it died, if it lived it lived. But she had no patience.

I would do it for her, I offered, in the morning, after I had been up to the hills, if she would let me.

It was very kind. She went up the last of the terrace steps hastily, as though she suddenly wanted to have done with it all.

I followed slowly, wondering, not knowing until I had caught up with her that she was embarrassed, almost frightened by what I had said. Her face was flushed, foolishly, like a girl's. I said nothing and we went in under the fruit trees, in silence, in a conscious, strained silence of common embarrassment.

At the highest point of the long garden stood a
walnut tree, and reaching it she paused and looked back over the house and pointed out the road to me lying like a piece of dirty string on the opposite hills.

I was to go up there, as far as I could see the road now, and then turn off to the right, across the bare hill. In the hollow was a farmhouse, where the road branched. I was to go left by the house.

As she was speaking, I picked off a walnut leaf and crushed it in my fingers, smelling the strange walnut-sweet fragrance. She stood very straight, with one arm outstretched, pointing to the hills, her head uplifted. In that moment she looked extremely young, her face very pale now in the twilight against her black hair, and her breast curving out strong and clear, as she stood so straight and lifted her arm.

Back in the house I had made up my mind about her. She cleared away the supper things and brought in the lamp and set it on the bare black table. Just as we had left him, the old man sat there, staring, back in the old mood of half-idiocy.

She brought some sewing and sat at the corner of the table, her face in the half-light, her hands in the full glow of the lamp, she herself silent and absorbed in the work. With my eyes half on her, half on her work basket, a long beautiful basket of pale yellow straw lined with rich green silk and with a hundred silk-lined compartments for her reels and needles and thimbles, I told myself over and over again that I knew all about her. It was so obvious, so easy to see I thought. All her life and her happiness had been tied by the old man. Without him she would have been eligible; the men would have run after her not only for the money but because she was good looking; but no one would want the old man, the idiot, and she would simply go on living out her life until he died and all her chance
for love and even her desire for it had gone. It was an old story; and what had at first seemed strange and mysterious was now just common. It was simply her destiny to sit there, sewing and waiting upon the chance guests that she took in to relieve the boredom of it, until he died, and then to sit there again, alone, until she herself died too.

She was sewing a length of lace round the collar of a dress of green velvet. It was a beautiful pale brown colour, as though dipped in coffee. I leaned forward to look at it.

Was it pillow lace? I wondered.

No, she didn't think so. She didn't know.

Had she ever seen them making it, with the pillow and the coloured bobbins?

No. She did not lift her head.

It was fascinating. She should learn to do it. I had always liked to see old women doing it.

She looked up at once, startled, a bright pin-light of pain in her eyes. Instantly I knew that I touched her, that I had drawn my finger harshly, as it were, over her heart at a tender place. She was not old, but it was the stupid unthinking inference in my words that had wounded her. After one moment of unconcealed pain her face brightened. All the time she had been a little distant with me, we had talked impersonally, but now she suddenly retreated even further into herself. Her pain and her anger against me were too fresh and sharp to conceal, but presently they were withdrawn, leaving a blankness of silence that was worse than all reproach.

To my relief the old man stirred himself. He seemed to wake up from a sort of trance and presently he got up and went to a cabinet by the fireplace and took out an oblong box.

Putting the box on the table he asked me if I would be so kind as to play him a game of dominoes?

‘It's years since I played,' I said.

‘No matter. Threes and fives?'

‘Just as you like.'

‘And stakes? You would like to play for something?'

He had already opened the box and was fingering the dominoes. Before I could answer him I felt the woman looking at me and involuntarily I turned my head towards her. Her anger against me had vanished and she was shaking her head, beseechingly, frowning a little.

‘I'll play for love,' I said.

There was something almost sinister about the glance he gave me as he began to spread out the dominoes on the table, each sharp flick of wood against wood a sound of disgust. We divided, I picking up a domino with each hand, he stretching out two thin white fingers of one hand and drawing his pieces sharply across the ice-smooth mahogany. In silence I set up my dominoes in rows, making a triangle. With furtive glances at me, in which I could catch the half-sinister, half-childish glint of idiocy, he faced his own flat against the table, very slowly, as though memorizing every pip. I noticed also that he had kept the pegboard by his left hand; it was a beautiful board of some pale red wood inlaid with green and golden parallelograms and squares, and fine rings of jet about the peg-holes; the pegs themselves were of crimson and white ivory, very small and delicately carved like chessmen. He mistrusted every glance I made at him, the board and the dominoes. The quivering of his hands was pathetic.

When he saw that I had the double-nine his agitation nearly broke into tears, and cautiously, with
fear, he lifted a dozen dominoes before he found the nine-blank. Having found it and played it his face broke into a strange slow smile, half-inane, half-cunning.

‘I thought I remembered,' he said. ‘I thought I remembered.'

All the time I could feel the woman watching us, looking up from her lace. I wondered if she also played dominoes with him and if she did how she endured, night after night, year after year, his suspicions and fears and imbecilities. I wanted to look round and catch the look in her eyes, but presently she put her workcase on the table and left the room. It was a warm, breathless night and I could hear her walking about in the garden, catching the sound of her dress as it brushed sometimes against an overdrooping bush or flower.

In a little while she came back, watched us for a moment, saw that I was losing and went away again. Then she came back and stood watching us for a moment and again retreated. She came back finally as the game was ending. I had let the old man win, and I heard her give a sigh, like someone who had waited for the passing of a crisis, as she saw him pegging himself home.

‘Angela, my dear, I won! I've beaten your friend here. I've won. Angela, I've won. You see?' He was like a child.

‘Yes.' She treated him like a child. ‘All right. Now you must go to bed.'

‘Another game, another game,' he entreated her.

‘No!' She began to gather up the dominoes into stacks, as though she were counting up money, her lips tight and wintry against him and all his entreaties. She did not speak again and at last he slouched from
the room like an awkward boy, muttering to himself about her.

When she had followed him I went out and walked in the garden. The warm summer half-darkness was drenched with the fragrance of the evening-scented flowers, exquisite and intoxicating. It was very quiet. The sun seemed to have burnt up even the tiniest breath of air, leaving only a thick dusk of flower fragrance. The stone of the housewall by the apricot was still warm to the touch. On the house, in the flower-beds and up in the orchard the leaves were black and motionless.

I was looking at the apricot tree when I heard her footsteps coming. When she came round the corner of the house and saw me, she was startled. ‘Oh, there you are!' There were times when her voice was girlish, with its sudden breathless timidity.

She had only come to ask me when I would like breakfast, she said. Her breath was agitated, as though she had been running to find me.

Would eight o'clock be too early for them? I wondered.

Oh, no. And would I like to have it in the garden?

It was very nice – but wasn't it a great trouble to her?

Oh, no, no. She would be up very early herself, and her father never came down till after ten.

Then I should like it very much, I said.

She stood silent, twisting her hands, more timid than ever, as though she wanted to ask me something embarrassing and difficult. But she didn't speak and at last I asked her about the apricot tree.

It was very old, I said. Did it bear?

It had been planted, she thought, when the house had been built, in 1795. But it never bore anything.
There had never been an apricot as far as she remembered.

I looked at the tree, up and down. It was a beautiful tree, strong and well-shaped, the thick branches making a perfect candelabrum up the long wall of the house.

She watched me. It was pruned, she said. It wasn't that. It had been pruned and shaped every year she could remember.

Had it ever been root-pruned?

What was that? She didn't understand.

It was simple. It was only that the tree was making wood instead of flower-buds. There was a long taproot which went straight down, too deep, and sucked up a richness from the earth which made the wood but not the blossom. It was the little surface-roots which mattered. The tap-root would have to be severed, so that the flow of sap would be checked, or it could be done by ringing the bark, by making a ring that did not meet by an inch or two about the trunk.