The Daffodil Sky (15 page)

While her mother sat microscopically peering the girl looked up.

‘Those people we saw at the Arena at Verona are here,' she said. ‘Mr and Mrs Smithson and the boy. They're just coming on to the terrace——'

‘Concentrate on your food. I don't know that we altogether——'

‘Well, hullo!' Mr Smithson said. ‘Small world!'

Mr Smithson wore a bright blue linen shirt with a deep open neck that showed a forest of strong black chest hairs.

‘You remember Mrs Carey and Josephine, Mother,' he said. ‘The amphitheatre at Verona. Biggest in Italy or something, isn't it?'

‘After the Colosseum,' Mrs Carey said.

‘Well, how nice!' Mrs Smithson said. ‘What a nice surprise! You remember our boy, don't you, Mrs Carey? You remember John?'

The black hair of the young man was still wet from swimming. Mrs Smithson, small, fair, sandy-eyed, was blistered in unhealthy crimson patches from too much sun.

‘I'm afraid we're late for lunch,' she said. ‘But we waited for John. He kept having another swim. The waiters don't like it here if you're late. One said “One-thirty, one-thirty!” to me yesterday.'

‘It's my fault,' the young man said. ‘I just had to go in again.'

‘Well, we must go,' Mrs Smithson said. ‘We want to get lunch over and go to Orta this afternoon.'

‘Ah! yes, the little lake.'

‘Oh! you know it?'

‘Of course. It's well known.'

‘Well, why don't you come over with us?' Mrs Smithson said and Mr Smithson too said why didn't they come over?

‘We're going to look over a house there,' he said. ‘A villa or something. Just for fun. We saw the advert. in a paper. Why don't you come over?'

‘I rather like to rest after lunch.'

‘Well, why doesn't Josephine come over?' Mr Smithson said and Mrs Smithson too said why didn't Josephine come over?

‘Would you find that amusing, dear?'

‘I—well, if it's——'

‘Yes!' Mr Smithson said. ‘Of course. Why not? We've got the Bentley. We can have tea there. It'll be fun.'

‘Well, if you think you'd find it amusing, dear——'

‘Good!' Mr Smithson said. ‘That's the stuff. Good! We'll pick you up at two.'

It was just after three o'clock, in the heat of the afternoon, when the young man drove the car into the little enclosed piazza, under a line of plane trees, on the edge of the lake.

‘Did you have the green macaroni?' Mr Smithson had said several times. ‘Something in it was salt. The cheese in it or something. God, it was salt—my tongue's hanging out.'

‘Ask the boatman if that's the island,' Mrs Smithson said. ‘I suppose we have to row over there.'

The boy, by the side of the mottled leather-faced Italian boatman, looked very tall, his flanks smooth and slim in their fresh coppery linen trousers.

‘Yes, that's it,' he said.
‘Isola san Giuilo
. That's a monastery or something——'

‘I think it's a Basilica,' the girl said.

‘Shall we have a cup o' tea first?' Mr Smithson said. ‘God, my tongue's like emery paper.'

‘Oh! I don't know,' Mrs Smithson said. ‘Do we want to row over there? Just to see a house? We'd never live there, anyway. I tell you what—you go, John. You and Josephine. Dad and me'll sit here and have tea while you go. Eh, Dad?'

‘Do what you like,' Mr Smithson said. ‘But I got to have a wet of some sort——'

‘All right, John and Josephine go and we'll wait for you.' She smiled with bright, encouraging, sandy-eyed laughter. ‘John and Josephine—that sounds rather nice, doesn't it? They go well together. Wasn't there a book with that name?'

On the island, from a flight of steps under the Basilica, a street not wide enough for a car went winding up from the water's edge like a cool stone gully between high houses of crumbling stucco or under walls crested with dark spires of cypress and pink bushes of oleander. There was a sleepiness over everything, a drugged siesta silence that absorbed, as into thick wool, the sound of footsteps.

‘Where could the house be?' the young man said. ‘Villa Agordo—that's a nice name, I think, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's like a maze,' he said. Walls of great height, joined across in places by little insecure bridges connecting the top storeys of villas with terraces of vine, kept out the sun. The tiny street curled round and round,
deep-cut, traffic-less, without people, with no footsteps but their own.

‘We'll have to ask,' he said, ‘if there's anybody to ask.' His eyes were suddenly amused, impish, blackly twinkling. ‘Shall I shout? Do you think someone will answer if I yell “Anyone at home?”'

‘Oh! no.' She could hear the profound silence of the little street pressing down on her, almost singing, as she stood there.

‘I'm going to chance it,' he said. She watched his face lift, break into a broad smile and yell: ‘Anybody there? Anybody at home?'

It might have been that his voice set off a spring in the high walls, flicking open the windows of a bedroom.

‘Signor?'

‘Villa Agordo,' he said. ‘Do you know the Villa Agordo?'

‘At the top of the street. The white one.'

‘Thank you. Would there be someone there?'

‘Look over the garden wall and shout “Gina!”' she said. ‘Gina's there—she'll show you over.'

As they walked up the street he said once or twice how queer it all was: how odd the atmosphere, wheel-less and quiet and sleepy, in the middle of the lake, in the heat of the afternoon. He said once that he thought it was like a deserted ship, moored and left to rot, and that you could almost smell the timbers, mouldering away in the water.

‘I think it's beautiful,' she said. ‘Away from everything.'

‘Or it might be the plague,' he said. ‘And everyone driven out.'

‘It wasn't the plague,' she said. ‘It was Serpents. They had to be driven out. It was a saint named St. Julius who drove them out.'

‘Oh! I say!' He was mocking her gently; but she was still not sure of it and she felt herself flushing. ‘Where did you find all
that
out?'

‘I read it in the guide.'

‘Not mother?'

She knew then that he was mocking, and she hated her mother.

‘Gina!' He called twice over a wall, through a deep garden, to where pergolas of vine made another maze down to the edge of a stony slip-way, where two boats were moored.

‘Oh! you want to look at the villa?'

‘Yes, please.'

She was an Italian woman of great pleasantness, soft-armed, amiable, with drowsy dignity, who took them into the tall old house where, as he whispered once to the girl, he thought no one had lived since St. Julius had driven out the toads.

‘Not toads,' she said. ‘Serpents.'

‘Well, serpents or toads,' he said. ‘We don't always have to be so accurate, do we?'

As she took them from floor to floor, by one mouldering staircase and another, under draperies that were decaying piecemeal where they hung and past beds sagging and drunk with the weight of invisible sleepers in shuttered bedrooms, the woman occasionally bathed them both in her drowsy, amiable smile.

‘For you?' she said. ‘The house?' She giggled. ‘There are plenty of rooms to fill—plenty for
bambini
—eh?'

‘Well—I don't know. We might consider it——'

Lightly he mocked the woman and then with gravity looked down at the girl.

‘Would you like to live here?'

‘I'm not sure. I think so. Would you?'

He looked straight into her eyes and warmly and boldly through them.

‘Might be nice,' he said.

‘Go out on the terrace,' the woman said. ‘Bella vista—bella vista—it is very beautiful. The rooms are dark today because the shutters are up.'

On the terrace a broken oleander, its flowers pitched face downwards on the stone, and a small torn banana tree, were all that remained of a lake-side garden that had clearly once been very beautiful.

‘Would you really like to live here?'

She stood looking across the lake: villas like toy white blocks among distant cypresses and above them terraces of vine melting into mountains and above that mountains melting into sky.

‘I think it would be heavenly. I should love it,' she said.

For almost all the rest of the time, as they stood staring over the hot tranquil lake, she did not know if he was mocking.

‘Well, why not?' he said. ‘I'll talk to mother and mother will talk to Dad. Instead of a new Bentley next year he could buy the villa. That's what cotton does for you. If you think about it, there's no reason why not, is there?'

‘I suppose not.'

‘Not even the serpents,' he said.
‘They've
been
driven out—we wouldn't have
them
to bother us anyway.'

All the way back, through the deep gully of the curving street, he kept up that half-teasing, half-serious fondness in his way of speaking. The woman Gina had stood for a long time lifting her hand in farewell, beaming on them her own fondness in cow-warm smiles, as if in amiable dedication to them as lovers.

‘You know, I've just thought of something,' he said. ‘The streets are the tracks the serpents made.'

He stopped. They were in a narrow place, a twist in the street that left them isolated. Far above them the dome of the Basilica burned in the sky and from somewhere she could hear the sound of a fountain dribbling water.

A moment later he was pressing her against the wall. Over the wall a high oleander poured wasted pink blossom, vanilla-soft, into dark shade. The island about her melted completely into the deep substance of this one half-sweet scent and as he kissed her she stared high above the Basilica, eyes wide open, with shocked wonder, at the sky.

Afterwards, as he laughed down at her, she had no way of knowing if the tenderness of it, the easy warmth, had separated itself finally from mocking. She felt there was a skein of rose-shadowy air in front of her face and she kept trying to wipe it away.

‘You see,' he said, ‘there's nothing to stop anything if you really want to.'

When they had rowed back to the piazza on the mainland his mother said:

‘Well, what was it like? Tell us.'

‘Marvellous,' he said. ‘You've got to ask Dad to buy it. It has a banana plantation. Grapes, figs, two boats and a view to Monte Rosa. We could live on fish and fruit—live for nothing. Absolutely.'

‘Oh! hark at him!' Mrs Smithson said. ‘When can you believe him? You really can't, can you? What was it really like?'

‘Awful,' he said. ‘God-awful. It hasn't been lived in since St. Julius threw out the toads. You should see the curtains.'

‘St. Julius who threw what?' Mrs Smithson laughed with tears of doting in her eyes. ‘You must have had a good time out there. Did you,' she said to the girl, ‘have a good time?'

‘It was beautiful,' the girl said.

‘You'll have to be careful! You don't have to take too much notice! They tell him I spoil him!' she said.

The girl and her mother drove on after lunch the following day. Mr Smithson, at the last moment, stood on the terrace with his camera pressed against the wiry hairs of his chest. ‘Smile!' he kept saying. ‘Smile! We must have a smile,' and Mrs Smithson stood with one arm about the waist of her son.

‘Good-bye!' everyone shouted and Mr Smithson, having taken the photograph, called:

‘May see you in Pisa—leaning against the leaning tower!'

‘We are going another way. We are going to Monte Rosa,' Mrs Carey said.

‘Don't forget the serpents!' the young man called.

In the mid-afternoon the car wound slowly up into the mountains. With her round colourless unripened
apple face the girl stared forward into the haze of sun and dust and high places. Once again peasant children were selling, on the roadsides, little bunches of chalk-rose cyclamen, wild from the hills.

Once or twice she stared back.

‘What is it?' her mother said. ‘Don't fidget. What are you looking at? I hope you haven't forgotten anything again?'

‘Only the lake,' she said.

‘Not like you did at Verona? You said “No” that time and we had to go back. You're sure you haven't forgotten anything?'

‘No,' the girl said. Far below her she could see the little lake, in full clearness, blinding white in sun, the island dark in the heart of it. ‘Not this time.'

The two sisters, Miss Constance and Miss Jackie, lived alone with their manservant Spratchley. Sometimes it did not seem possible that this natural and simple arrangement had gone on for more than thirty years.

The house, of a kind of gimcrack baronial Tudor constructed of false beams darkened with creosote, was set in the lower slopes of a hillside from which there had once been a view across a flat wide valley. But Miss Jackie, the younger, who was fond of shortening some of her words and so spoke of a ‘pash for trees,' had planted many poplars and fast-growing cypresses along the boundaries of the garden, gradually shutting out the circle of the world. Gradually, too, neither she nor her sister missed what they had seen there. In summertime coverts of hazel and hornbeam along the hillside thickened into an unbroken wall of leaf. In winter a thin white soil of chalk seemed to give off a continuous dirty smoke of travellers' beard. There seemed nothing much else to bother about, and the two
sisters grew content, and then old, in their life with Spratchley.

‘Spratchley will do it,' they said. ‘Spratchley will see to it. Leave it to Spratchley.'

In habit and appearance, as sisters so often are, they were very different from each other: Miss Jackie was small and vigorous and nervously wiry, with brown dry skin. In her pash for trees and her pash for flowers she was restless and could not stay in bed after she had woken. She liked to be out early, in unsullied mornings, pushing wheelbarrows, labouring among what she called her delphs or her gladdies or her pollies or her rhodies, whistling in the pure air. She wore trousers of bleached khaki gabardine that hid her stocky legs, and a brown pork-pie trilby hat that concealed most of her short grey hair.