The Dividing Stream (30 page)

Most of her days had seemed to be passed in this kind of strained sleep; she read little, ate little, and spoke only under a weary compulsion.

Pamela had begun to read to Nicko, and Enzo, like a child, had seated himself by the boy to listen to the story. He must have understood little, but he followed every expression on the face of the English girl, and when Nicko laughed he, too, joined in.

Colin got up and went across to his grandmother. ‘‘Granny!’’ he said. But the only answer was a long, hissing whistle from Mrs. Bennett’s half-open mouth. ‘‘ Granny!’’ he repeated louder.

Without any apparent transition from one state to another, Mrs. Bennett was all at once awake. ‘‘What is it?’’ she asked.

‘‘Granny, you know I have some money on trust?’’ He had heard about this money, though he did not know what ‘‘on trust’’ meant or how much it was. ‘‘You know that, don’t you?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Well—well, would I be allowed to use it?’’

‘‘Use it? What for?’’ she asked without any apparent surprise.

‘‘For something, something private. Something important,’’ he added.

‘‘But if it’s on trust until you’re twenty-one, you’re not allowed to touch it.’’

‘‘Not allowed? But I thought—it
is
my money, isn’t it?’’

‘‘Yes, it’s your money, but you can’t use it until you’re twenty-one.’’

‘‘Oh.’’

‘‘Not unless your father lets you.’’

‘‘He has to say yes?’’

‘‘I suppose so, as he made over the money. But I don’t really know.’’

‘‘I’d better ask him.’’

‘‘Yes, that would be best.’’

Still without curiosity as to why the boy should want the money, Mrs. Bennett again closed her eyes and slipped back into unconsciousness; and the long, hissing whistle, like a kettle on the boil, started once more.

When Max came into the room many minutes later, he exclaimed, ‘‘Nicko, you should be in bed! What are you doing here? It’s very nearly ten.’’

Nicko did not answer; he tugged at the thick pile of the carpet on which he was seated and kept his eyes still fixed on Pamela’s face.

Mrs. Bennett said in a drowsy voice, without opening her eyes: ‘‘He obviously wasn’t going to sleep, so I thought I’d let him up. After all the Italian children go to bed at all hours, and look none the worse for it.’’

‘‘But he needs sleep,’’ Max said. ‘‘ Otherwise he gets whiney and overtired.’’

Mrs. Bennett rose: ‘‘ Come along, Nicko.’’

Nicko did nothing.

‘‘Nicko!’’

‘‘Did you hear what Granny said, Nicko?’’ Max asked in a slow, loud voice. ‘‘ Nicko!’’

Nicko did not answer, but continued to tug at the carpet.

‘‘Nicko, I don’t want to speak again. Do as Granny says.’’ Max’s face was slowly darkening.

When Nicko still made no response, Max suddenly strode across the room, put his arms round him and dragged him to his feet. ‘‘No, no, no!’’ the child screamed, and Mrs. Bennett said: ‘‘Put him down, Max!’’

‘‘He must learn his lesson.’’

As he was half-carried, half-dragged to the door, the child put out arms and legs to anchor himself to each person or object that they passed. He clutched Maisie, kicked at a table, and at the last, lunging for a vase containing some vast white and red peonies, brought the whole thing in a crash and tinkle to the floor. Water streamed outwards; and half-insane with fear at what had happened, the child gulped, was momentarily silent, and then emitted a long, piercing wail.

‘‘That’s enough,’’ Max said. When roused, his temper was terrible. ‘‘I’ve just about had enough.’’ He threw the child over the arm of the sofa, and holding him down with one hand, began savagely to beat him with the other. Nicko was silent; and it was only this silence that, in the end, made Max stop, fearing he had struck the child senseless. Pamela was pulling at her father: ‘‘No, Daddy! Daddy! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”, the tears streaming down her cheeks. Rodolfo and Maisie both watched from the patience-table with an air of alert interest. Colin was pale.

‘‘Come, Nicko.’’ Mrs. Bennett picked up the child, who began to sob as soon as he felt her, and carried him from the room. Max went across to the french windows, opened them and stood looking out. His loins and back ached, as if in a fever; he was covered in a chill sweat.

‘‘Why did you?’’ Pamela asked, going across to him. ‘‘What was the point? It won’t make him any better. You know that it won’t.’’

‘‘Oh, shut up!’’ Max said thickly; and turning from the window, he strode from the room.

‘‘I wanted to ask him something,’’ Colin said. ‘‘It won’t do now.’’

At the same moment Maisie exclaimed: ‘‘Oh, clever boy!’’ Rodolfo had discovered a way to make the patience come out.

As Enzo walked home after saying goodbye to Rodolfo he began to think of Bella. It was a beautiful night, with a wind that touched and then left the water as if afraid of any long fusion with the element that it wooed. Sauntering, Enzo experienced a vague romantic longing, compounded of desire for the epileptic girl, nostalgia and the determination to escape—to Tunisia, perhaps, as Rodolfo had suggested, or to America; to anywhere where he would be free, and have work, and be able to live the life of a man. Even the clothes he was wearing, the brief pair of shorts, the open shirt and gym-shoes, suggested the uncomfortable physical state in which he now found himself, neither man nor boy, but something of both; and as his body seemed to be about to burst through the outgrown structure of the shorts and his muscular, hairy legs looked absurd thus revealed, so he felt the closeness and the absurdity of the life he now lived, and longed to put it aside like an outgrown suit of clothes.

It was strange that Bella should be a part of these musings; and yet, often, when he had nothing else to do, he would begin to think about her. She was beautiful; and yet it was a beauty which left him full of dread and hopelessness. For he knew that, in spite of his brother’s momentary possession of her body, she would always be, in her inmost depths unattainable, unpossessed. She was like a cup so cracked that it will not hold water; a ground so barren that no seed will grow there. Nothing human touched her in the inaccessible silences of her being, he was sure of that. Her griefs were not human, any more than her sudden fits of laughter or those more terrible fits when she writhed and frothed before him, filling him with a ghastly physical malaise as if the whole human creation had suddenly been turned into wild beasts. Yet he loved her. He did not know it, but as he walked home, sauntering through the evening, the desire at the heart of all his other desires—to go away, to be rich, to begin a new life—was his desire for her.

He called in at the Bar, kept by the old woman with the eye like a hard-boiled egg, and pleaded with her for credit, remembering how Rodolfo had stolen for him the damp, flaky horns of pastry with their oozing of pus-like custard. The woman said no, but then, as he was about to go out, she summoned him back, and sighing, prepared a cup of coffee. ‘‘I go into hospital to-morrow,’’ she said.

‘‘Yes?’’

‘‘It’s my eye,’’ she said. ‘‘ They say they roll it off as you roll off the top of a sardine-tin. Well, I shan’t be sorry to lose it.’’

‘‘I expect not.’’

‘‘I’m eighty-six, but I’m not afraid. They won’t give me a general, just a local to make it not hurt. Well, I don’t mind that, provided there’s no blood. Blood makes me turn right over. Even my own blood. Would you believe it?’’

Did he imagine it, or as she nodded her head, did the whole cataract wobble like a piece of semi-transparent jelly? It seemed as if, at any moment, it would slither to the floor.

‘‘You can pay my grandson,’’ she said. ‘‘Don’t think because I’m going into hospital that you needn’t pay.’’ To indicate that she was joking her mouth, with its vertical, dirt-encrusted furrows, fell open to reveal the stumps of a few blackened teeth.

‘‘I hope all goes well,’’ Enzo said, running his tongue round his mouth as he put down the cup.

She looked offended as she said: ‘‘They say he’s the best one in Florence—and only thirty-two. Studied in America,’’ she said. ‘‘Oh, I was determined to have the best.’’

When Enzo let himself into the house, the family had evidently not returned; but still, from high upstairs, he could hear the sound of sweeping and scrubbing. She would work all night, he supposed, and in the morning the dusty feet of her guests would obliterate all she had done. Then the tiles would be left and they would again slowly blacken. It all seemed so pointless.

He climbed, and the coffee he had drunk still tasted sweetly bitter in his mouth as if a tooth were bleeding. Outside Bella’s room he halted, standing with his face only two or three inches from the door as if his mere presence would undo the lock. It was probably because his whole body was wrought to such a pitch of concentration that at last there penetrated to his ears a sound from within. At first it seemed no more than the sound of deep breathing, and he imagined it was his own, after the steep climb; but punctuating it at irregular intervals was a sound too indeterminate to be called a hiccough—the sound of a bubble breaking or the snapping of a string. He did not know why these two sounds in conjunction should all at once drench him with cold sweat and make his scalp prick. He knocked on the door, saying, ‘‘Bella, Bella,’’ softly; and then, raising his fist, he hammered for entry. ‘‘Bella!’’ he shouted.

‘‘What is it?’’ the woman called from the upstairs landing, and her startled face could be seen peering, while a few drops of water from the cloth she held in one hand suddenly spattered downwards.

Enzo took no notice of her. ‘‘Bella!’’ he shouted; and it was as if his whole life were locked in behind that door. ‘‘ Bella!’’ He listened: and at last heard a faint rustle, a click and then a brief gasp. All at once was silent.

He hurled himself against the door, retreating to the banisters and running up to assault it, not once but repeatedly. The door creaked and shuddered and finally, with a splintering of wood, tore from its hinges. Enzo fell almost headlong in.

Horror. Bella lay on the floor, half-undressed, flung down like a doll, her legs wide apart and her head resting against the side of the bed. Her hands were smeared with blood, there was blood on her cheek, and blood was congealing on the black-and-white tiles as it slowly pushed towards Enzo. Her eyes were shut, but all the time he was aware of that sound, now terribly magnified, of deep, gulping breathing punctuated by what appeared to be the bursting of one bubble after another in the white, tilted throat.

He gave a sort of cry, more animal than human, not unlike the cry which had always so frightened him when she had her fits. He dragged her on to the bed, and once again cried out, now with the vexation of a child who has a task too difficult for it, as he saw the blood, blood everywhere, bright arterial blood which her body had covered. Her eye-lids fluttered and her mouth all at once clicked: ‘‘Gior—ior——’’ He knew the name she was trying to say, and a sudden wild, destroying hatred of his brother filled his whole being, casting out all the other devils of horror, fear and anguish. ‘‘I—
mamma
——’’

The woman from upstairs had screamed; she put both hands to her temples and gave one short, yelping scream after another like a wounded dog. Then she hid her face against the splintered lintel of the door, and burst into a loud paroxysm of hysterical weeping. ‘‘Tomorrow,’’ Enzo could hear her saying over and over again, ‘‘tomorrow … tomorrow …’’ And then, as if she were accusing either him or the dying girl: ‘‘Oh, what a terrible thing … terrible … terrible … And the wedding—the wedding!’’

T
HE
American family had stayed on in Florence through August and into the middle of September without there seeming to the children any reason for doing so. When they had first come out they had been told that after a few days in Florence they would be going to the seaside. Colin’s accident had apparently postponed that plan, though what he did not realize was that, when his step-mother expressed so much confidence in the doctor who was attending him and urged the inadvisability of making a change to another, she was in fact seizing on the best excuse for remaining with Frank Ross.

Nicko and Mrs. Bennett both fretted against the enforced stay and Max himself would talk of ‘‘pushing on”, though with little conviction; but Colin and Pamela felt no such desire for change. They were happy in Florence; and whenever Colin thought of being separated from Enzo a chill came to his heart.

One day Max drove the children, Lena and Mrs. Bennett out to the sea. Karen pleaded an appointment with the dentist, but Max knew that she would, in fact, spend the day with Frank Ross, and she knew that he knew. Yet the strange thing was that neither of them had ever openly discussed the affair. ‘‘You must have it out with her,’’ Mrs. Bennett frequently urged him. ‘‘You must do something before it is too late”; and he would always respond with the same shrug of fatalistic melancholy.

‘‘But you must, you must. The whole thing is becoming so ridiculous.’’

‘‘I don’t honestly believe in the value of ‘having things out’. I’ve never found it worked. You have them out, and then all at once, you have them over. There’s nothing to do but to wait; to wait quietly and hopefully. He’d never do for her, of that I’m quite certain. And she’d never do for him—no woman would.’’

But in his heart was a stone-like weight of doubt which he now dragged with him wherever he went. Except on those rare occasions when he lost his temper, he always avoided scenes. His father and mother had bickered all through his childhood and, though he now knew that they had loved each other as he and Karen had never known love, yet the memory of those quarrels had rooted itself so deep in his nature that nothing could drag it out. Anything was better than that people should savage each other in that bloodless, useless way.

Karen, too, stayed dumb; at first because she thought that Max had not guessed and later because, until he mentioned the subject, her morbid reticence made it impossible for her to do so. Besides, she was not sure of Ross, and was never to be sure. He had possessed her many times, but their affair seemed to her like a telephone conversation in which the other person is for ever hanging up. No sooner were they wholly in communication than he all at once eluded her. And so she was afraid. Never in her whole life, not even when she was waiting for news of Nicko’s father after the announcement that his plane had not returned, never, never had she experienced such a persistent anxiety. For she knew now she loved him, as she had loved no one else, and she knew that without his love, her whole being would shrivel up and die.