The Matchmaker (36 page)

But it had served the purpose of making Mr. Waite feel that Alda and Jean were ladies permanently in distress and in need of his protection, and he made this clear to them, in a reserved manner, whenever the two households met, which was more frequently now that full spring, with bluebells and may, had arrived. Once or twice they even found five eggs sitting upon the cottage doorstep; large, unallocated, unstamped eggs whose smooth brown countenances were so different from the pallid visages (blurred with purple letters and smeared, like hopeless tears, with heaven-knew-what) of the allocated eggs that they seemed to belong to another egg-world: eggs of a primal vigour and bloom; eggs before the Fall.

This gesture impressed Alda and Jean with a sense of his growing goodwill towards them the more strongly because, ever since their first days at the cottage, the Hoadleys had indicated that it was no use hoping for presents of stray eggs from Mr. Waite; what the Egg Board did not demand as a natural right, he himself needed for his private customers, among whom the family at Pine Cottage was not included. After these warnings of course, they would all have bitten their tongues out before hinting about the eggs, admiring the eggs, or even mentioning the eggs (though Meg had sometimes turned large-eyed looks upon her mother when they met Mr. Waite crossing the meadow carrying two baskets filled to the brim with them). In these circumstances, they felt that the eggs upon the doorstep were profoundly significant.

JUST AS ALDA
had promised the children in December, life at the cottage now became pleasant, for it was possible to spend hours in the open air. Two or three times a week she and Jean met Jenny and Louise at the convent gates with Meg in her pram and high tea packed in a basket, and off they would go to the nearest wood and settle themselves under the rosy foliage of young oaks, exclaiming at the profusion of primroses (now beginning to retire, rather than fade, so gentle was their decline down into their leafy cradles before the advance of the bluebells) and the occasional drifts of dying violets and the bluebells themselves; gentle, limp and cool, with their heavenly odour wherein water and wine seem blended and their dim, thick purple-blue petals.

Long after tea was over, and the children were beginning to ask what there was for supper, they would linger on, while day radiantly declined behind trees not yet fully leafed enough to break the light into rays but revealing it as one glory, and Jenny perhaps told some story of a little boy stricken with leprosy and declining intercession for his recovery on the part of his confessor because he longed to go to Heaven, which had that day been related to the children at the convent. Louise listened in silence, and if she joined in the laughter which followed, it was constrainedly and with a troubled look. Alda noticed this, though she made no comment. Ronald would be home on leave again in a week or so and she was determined to have a long talk with him about Louise and the Roman Catholic Church.

On one of her free afternoons Sylvia accompanied them on a picnic and at first added to everybody’s pleasure by her own pleasure in the sights and sounds and scents of the woods; she
loudly
declared, more than once, that she must come here again, she must bring Mum, and so forth; and she helped Jenny and Louise to light a fire to boil water for tea (for it transpired that she had once been a Brownie).

But when she wanted to turn the fire into a bonfire, casting excited and covetous glances at the young branches hanging low enough to tear down and burn, and imploring Alda to go home with Meg and let the kiddies stay on with her until the moon came up and have a real gipsy-fire and a sing-song, Alda firmly said no, and then Sylvia turned sulky. The afternoon was not spoiled, for she soon became good-tempered again, but the kiddies themselves were disappointed because they had been excited by her suggestion, and the next time there was a picnic they seemed to find the woods, lacking Sylvia’s shrieks and her thirsty quest for thrills and her stories about murders and vampires and zombies, rather dull.

Jean and Alda agreed with some amusement that she would have felt herself deeply insulted if they had compared her with the “ignorant nursegirl,” the “skivvy,” of papers and magazines published fifty years ago, for she was a Communist, an ex-dramatic student, and heir to the Humanism of four hundred years. Yet here she was, coming from the same class as the skivvy of the ’90’s and over-exciting and frightening the gentry’s children exactly as the skivvy used to do whenever she got the chance, and lacking the skivvy’s unanswerable excuse of ignorance.

Alda was not one of those people who excuse every human fault, from rudeness to murder, by saying that the offender has been badly brought up, and she told the children that Sylvia was stupid and vulgar and had not made the most of her advantages. But as Jenny, Louise and Meg now had a passion for Sylvia as a source of excitement and fun, these remarks made no effect.

Alda herself could not refrain from asking her a teasing question or so about Fabrio, to which Sylvia replied that he had gone
all
haughty again and was always coming the old acid over her, and that she was getting browned off with him. She added that she supposed he had just made a convenience of her to learn English off of, and now he could speak and read it a bit he thought he could drop her. “And that suits me, so we’re both happy,” she ended, with her ploughboy grin.

Indeed, she drew a gleeful, malicious pleasure from his imploring looks, instantly withdrawn when she glanced towards him, his miserable silences, his sullenness under the jokes of Emilio; all this amused and delighted her and fed her vanity. It made a good story to tell the girls down at the Linga-Longa, where she had quickly found company greatly to her taste: three or four girls who had managed to evade the Services and the factories on pleas of old mothers or delicate health, who now earned a scanty but more or less cheerful living as waitresses.

All were pretty and all were pining to get work in London or Brighton, but they stayed in Sillingham because the work was not so hard there and because they liked Ma, who managed the café and was easy-going. Boiling coffee and pretty faces attracted plenty of casual male custom, and at the Linga-Longa there were always current love affairs to discuss. Bette and Pat and Pam slopped and shuffled about, with paint peeling off their nails and their curls half-way down their backs in fuzzy blonde or dusty brown tangles; they were always ready to stop work and slip arms round each other’s waists and stand with heads close together, murmuring and giggling: they never thought about the past, they never thought about the future, they lived completely in the present and were interested in nothing but tales about other people and their own looks.

They found Sylvia amusing and welcomed her visits, and she enjoyed every moment that she spent at the Linga-Longa and on her one half-day a week she was usually to be found there, gossiping and laughing with the girls and sometimes helping with the work during a rush of custom.

Once or twice she went with the three into Brighton and
walked
arm-in-arm rapidly along the front; past the pale, curved houses gilt by the spring sunlight and the closed, dusty little shops which had once sold luxuries, while a cold wind blew steadily in from the vast, dim grey sea and the old Jewish men and women sat huddled in their furs and thick clothes behind the glass of the shelters, showing now and then a gleam of gold against a wrinkled neck. In Brighton her rough innocence served to check some grosser instincts in her friends, and the outing took on a schoolgirlish flavour which none of them were sufficiently worldly or corrupt to find dull: they usually ended by going to the pictures and eating a large tea in the restaurant attached to the cinema before catching the bus back to Sillingham.

These excursions and the improving weather made her life much pleasanter, and had it not been for the increasing gloom at Naylor’s Farm she would at this time have been thoroughly enjoying her work and her circumstances.

But the news had now been mysteriously allowed to circulate that Mrs. Hoadley was to have a baby in December, and depression crept over everyone. Mr. Hoadley was silent and timid in manner towards his wife and she herself went about looking martyred. White and pink wool (for Mrs. Hoadley was of course going to bear a daughter) appeared in odd corners, and knitting needles and work were whisked away when men appeared, and the farmer’s wife began to make occasional resigned references about the coming event to Sylvia. Her appearance remained as neat as ever and her health was apparently unimpaired save for an increasing fear of burglars and tramps. One day she abruptly announced that the baby’s name was to be Joyanna, looking resigned when Sylvia heartily agreed that
Jo
anna was ever such an uncommon name.

“I’m very glad to hear it; it’s what she needs and that poor man is so fond of children,” said Alda decidedly, when Sylvia told her the news.

“Well, I wish it was here and done with. It gets me down, the way we all have to creep about the place,” Sylvia grumbled.
“It
was bad enough before, but it’s awful now. If we weren’t all so busy, I don’t know how I should stick it.”

“Oh, she’ll get over that. We all go through it,” said the matron.

They were very busy, so busy that the lengthening days were not long enough to hold all the work that had to be done as the spring advanced, and Sylvia found amusement in her frequent encounters with Fabrio in the open air, as their duties took them about the farm.

The English lessons had ceased without a word on either side. When they met, she shouted a casual “Hullo!” or “
Buon giorno!
” and he either ignored her or answered roughly without looking at her. There was embarrassment between them, rather than anger. She remembered that kiss with extreme vividness, which did not lessen as the weeks went by, and she was sure that he remembered it in the same way. Men had tried to kiss her before now and been repulsed, but not one of them had been so serious about it afterwards, avoiding her, and not looking at her, and going about the place with such a miserable face. She made up her mind two or three times to ask him what on earth was up with him: and each time, on meeting him, she had suddenly found that she could not.

She enjoyed Alda’s teasing and she did not deeply resent Emilio’s nods and winks, while she revelled in boasting and complaining to the girls at the Linga-Longa about Fabrio’s behaviour; but when she actually saw him, when his sturdy graceful body shrank aside to let her pass him in some narrow way, and he stood in silence, pale, with downcast eyes and trembling mouth, as she hurried by with a laugh, then she did not find him in the least funny and she could not ask him what was the matter: she was furious, and she would have liked to give him a good shaking, and sometimes she believed that he was doing it just to annoy her, but she could not bring herself to question him.

And Fabrio spoke of his feelings to no one. Emilio had met
him
with eager questions after the excursion to the Wild Brooks, assuming in the face of all improbabilities that what used to be known as The Worst had happened, and Fabrio had allowed his friend to think what he liked. He neither boasted nor denied. He kept a haughty smile upon his face and answered Perhaps and Maybe and Who Knows? for his manly pride would not let him deny a conquest, and yet his true love for Sylvia, the lost girl, the gentle maiden imprisoned within the blundering body of
La Scimmia
, would not let him lie about their happy hours together. Let Emilio think what he chose to think.

Emilio was much taken up by letters from Genoa, where the eldest of his
bambini
, aged nine, had just embarked upon a promising career of American lorry-robbing, armed with a razor blade to slit tyres or canvas, and commanding a band of eight followers younger than himself. Giulia wrote that the family had twice enjoyed tinned meat within three days! the first meat of any kind that they had tasted for two years! Emilio’s fatherly heart glowed with mingled envy and pride.

Fabrio spoke of his feelings least of all to Father Francesco in the confessional box. His faith resembled some sturdy bright flower of the hedgerows with a winding, accommodating habit, and he had even suppressed the fact that Sylvia was teaching him English, for had not the Father sternly discouraged his wish to learn? and would he not be even sterner if he heard that Fabrio had been taking lessons after all, and lessons from a young
protestante
girl? Fabrio did not want anyone to be stern with him: he had had quite enough of that in the army and the prison camp, and now he wanted only to be loved and admired. It was difficult to conceal his increasing fluency in English from Father Francis, but he pretended to be stupider than he was.

Fabrio was also troubled over Sylvia’s soul, for her wild words at Amberley had revealed to him that she was a victim of
ateismo
, atheism, a state of darkness terrible in its implications to this believer. He believed that if only he prayed earnestly enough to Our Lady, She would work a miracle and show Sylvia the
truth
, and he did pray exhaustively for her on Sundays at Mass, but during the week there was so much to do, and no proper place to pray in, so he resolved to utter a prayer for her every time he passed her in the fields or the farmyard, but the light shone on her hair, her blue eyes glanced smilingly up at the blue sky while she scattered the grain, and he forgot his prayer in human longing.

He was very miserable and increasingly homesick, with a thirsty, passionate longing for San Angelo that the coming of fine warm weather did nothing to slake. He noticed the flowers, but they were not the flowers he knew at home; and the shade of these great trees, that had towered so gloomily over him in the winter, was not as grateful as the sharp black shadows of the olive grove, because the sun was not so hot; it was hardly hot at all; it was always being shaded by some cloud or cut off by one of those same enormous trees that dripped down his neck when it rained; and this year, more painfully than in any other spring during his captivity, he missed girls and love.