Illyrian Spring Page 16

  Another thing which Lady Kilmichael now looked at clearly for the first time was exactly how much importance she attached to Nicholas. She had long recognised, with the utmost readiness and freedom, that she was extremely fond of him – his very need and dependence had attached her. But looking back over the past three weeks she was rather startled to find how much she had enjoyed and valued him as a companion, quite apart from all the valuable information he afforded her about the young. At the time she had hardly realised this – consciously she had chiefly thought of him as an unhappy child in need of consolation, and as a searchlight thrown on the ways of youth; she now saw that this was not the whole of it. In spite of the years which separated them, she had found him a most satisfying friend – and quite without vanity, with the most extreme simplicity. She was a little surprised at this.

  She need not have been. The old are too apt to forget that age alone is not the decisive or even the most important factor in any relationship. As a rule the decisive factor is community of feeling or interest, and what contribution one person has to bring to life as a whole, as it exists for the other. What makes this contribution valuable is partly experience, and still more the use made of experience, a question with which age has little or nothing to do. The stockbroker of sixty-six does not necessarily bring a richer contribution to life, by virtue of his extra forty years, than, say, one of our young modern adventurers in the early twenties. On the other hand what makes the young modern adventurers’ contribution to contemporary life so rich and gay is not alone the fact that they have canoed and waded through the Matto Grosso, or flown and joggled on motor-buses across China or Africa – it is the use they have made of those experiences: the lively enquiring mind, watching its own reactions, and those of others, forever checking theory against reality – amused, inquisitive, intelligent, sceptical and ardent. Nicholas Humphries was no great adventurer, but he did stand possessed of this special quality of their common generation, the sceptical intelligence combined with ardour, the irreverent debunking spirit, which will surrender to the genuine, but only to that. He did make use of such experience as he had, examining it, checking it, testing it; Lady Kilmichael on the other hand, in common with many women of her generation, had made remarkably little use of her experience. It had been impressed upon her in youth that experience was necessary and valuable, but no one had ever told her what to do with it; it was something which you apparently acquired in large or small packets, like Lux, and then put away in a cupboard. Experience so treated does indeed leave a sort of sediment of knowledge – the mere possession of those stored packets may give a certain confidence; but it does not make a very vivid contribution to life, and intellectually Grace Kilmichael and Nicholas Humphries were not so far apart as one might have supposed.

  Lady Kilmichael was thinking about Nicholas while she sat eating her lunch – dry bread, olives, goats’-milk cheese and white wine – on a hot rock on the sunny slope. But the conclusion of the matter was satisfaction: here she was, happy, and so free! – he was all right, and the problem of what to do about it all shelved for the time. So she thought of him with affection and content, untroubled – and while she did so Linnet was writing to her best friend again:

  Aunt Gina has triumphed at last – Poppy did see Sir John Lord on Tuesday. Apparently he really is in a pretty dicky state – ‘nervous exhaustion’ and all that. He’s got to go on a cruise. The crushing part is that he and Aunt Gina want me to go too – though what help I’m likely to be to a case of nervous exhaustion I can’t think! According to Mums I’m quite enough to produce it! However. I see I shall have to go, though – Poppy can be a bit roughshod at times. Of course if I thought I should be the faintest use I wouldn’t mind, though it will mean no Ascot and all sorts of things. Too withering.

  Oh, Aunt Gina heard from that terrific Lady Roseneath. She did see Mums in Venice, but only for a minute; she was going off on some boat to Greece, to paint and all that. The cruise goes to Greece. Wouldn’t it be supreme if we were to bump into her! I rather wish she would write – I’m sure it’s largely fuss about her that is rotting up Poppy’s nerves. Not but what in a way I feel he’s bought it, with all that business about Rose. Our Rose by the way seems to me to be fading rather fast. I have an idea that she volunteered to go on the cruise too and was turned down, and that I’m being roped in to eliminate all necessity for her presence. I’m not sure – but I shouldn’t wonder. In a way, you know, I’ve sometimes thought that Mums would be in a stronger position if she had a boyfriend – but anything of that sort is simply unbelievable in connection with Mums, and anyhow if she had one she wouldn’t know what on earth to do with him.

  Lady Kilmichael had not quite finished painting when her ‘porter’ appeared, an immature relation of the Signora’s, who for a few dinars daily carried her things to and from the village. He was a healthy sturdy freckled urchin, with a head of bleached dusty hair, and bare feet thrust into the usual local slippers – a heel and sole of goatskin with the hair still on, and ‘uppers’ of fine cord laced through the sole and rather intricately plaited all up the instep. He sat whistling on a rock till she was ready to start, and then, laden, preceded her down the steep path. He took a short cut to the village through the fields, and Grace presently found herself passing down a lane under the high thick hedge of the villa which had the monkey puzzle in its garden. A wooden door in this hedge stood open, and as she passed she glanced in. She caught a glimpse of an immense ilex with a stone seat under it, groups of sea buckthorn with pale pink rambler roses wandering through their silver foliage, standing round a fountain playing into a parapeted pool. Even from that hurried glance she got an impression of a garden created with unusual taste; she walked on vaguely surprised, for a monkey puzzle is not usually associated in English minds with taste in garden planning. Out on the fondamento she walked slowly, loitering with deliberate pleasure; the schoolchildren were returning to their homes on the other side of the river, and it amused her to watch the casual and competent way in which quite small mites unmoored a boat, rowed themselves across, and tied it up on the further bank. Grace had already discovered that as regards boats, the sense of meum and tuum was very slight in Komolac; anyone who wished to cross the river took the first boat he came to, rowed over, and left it on the further side – someone else was sure to be returning shortly, and would bring it (or some other boat) back again. As she approached the Orlando house she thought with happy anticipation of her evening to come – warm hours in the garden with a book, another delicious meal, a little gossip perhaps with the Signora; but in the main, solitude and freedom. No Nicholas, no problems – just an idle evening of peace. With a sense of homecoming she turned into the garden – there under the vines, roughing-in a charcoal outline on a canvas and looking very completely at home, sat Nicholas.

  He got up when he saw her, came over with his rather slow walk and stood in front of her, looking at her with immovable gravity. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said at length.

  ‘Oh, my dear child, have you come out for tea? I’m so sorry I wasn’t in,’ said Grace, very considerably taken aback by this apparition.

  ‘No – I’m staying here too,’ said Nicholas serenely.

  ‘Not here, in the house?’ said Grace, almost aghast.

  The young man burst out laughing at her expression. ‘Oh, Lady K., would it be so appalling if I were? You look completely shattered.’

  ‘Not a bit – what nonsense!’ said Grace, recovering herself. ‘Only there isn’t room. What do you mean, Nicholas? Where are you staying? At the inn?’

  ‘No, not at the inn.’ He cocked his head at her, enjoying her still evident discomfiture.

  ‘Well, where then?’ she asked, a little impatiently. She sat down on the trellis parapet, threw off her hat, and pushed back her hair with a faintly weary gesture.

  ‘Oh, Lady K., it is a shame to tease you! But you are so funny when you’re nearly cross – I always long to make you quite cross, and see what happens!
No, listen,’ he said, as she made a movement to rise, putting his hand on her arm, ‘I’ve planted myself on the villa.’

  ‘What villa?’

  ‘The monkey puzzle villa – Villa Araucaria, I presume.’

  ‘But that’s a private house.’

  ‘I know – but the venerable owner is away, and his equally venerable housekeeper is allowed sometimes to take Doctor Halther’s friends as PGs to reduce expenses. So she’s taken me as a PG.’

  ‘But you aren’t a friend of Doctor Halther – whoever he may be – are you?’ objected Grace.

  ‘No – but she thinks I am,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Nicholas, you are crazy!’ said Grace, half impatient and half amused. ‘What on earth will happen if he turns up?’

  ‘He won’t turn up – he’s just been here. He only left a week ago, and he never comes twice in the same spring the old party says. He’s gone off to Greece.’

  Grace remembered, inconsequently, that Lady Roseneath no doubt believed that she herself was in Greece at that very moment, and it made her feel somehow that Greece offered a rather slender security. But all she said was – ‘How did you find all this out?’

  ‘From the bus conductor and the inn keeper. Everyone in Komolac knows all about everyone else’s affairs! I’ve done a lot of sleuthing here in the mornings, the last two days, while you’ve been painting up the hill,’ said he, looking very complacent.

  ‘Is that why you were so interested in my picture – and the light?’ said Grace.

  ‘Yes, of course – little Machiavelli! And once I’d found all that out, nothing was easier than to march up to the door with a card and get off with Maria; she talks Italian, thank God. I’m Mr Humphries, a young English friend of Doctor Halther’s, who met him in Vienna last year. He belongs in Vienna – he’s a philosopher. I got away with it completely. Wonderful marvellous us!’ He chuckled with the most disarming self-satisfaction, but Grace could not altogether respond; this was just the sort of irresponsible prank the young would play; and such pranks nearly always led to tiresome consequences in the end. And what now became of her precious freedom and solitude? The problem of dealing wisely with Nicholas was shoved neatly and firmly onto her shoulders again, like a well-placed knapsack.

  ‘Well, I hope it will be all right,’ she said, rather despondently.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Lady K.,’ he said, coming and sitting down by her, and leaning forward so that he could look into her face. ‘Of course it will be all right! And you wanted me to come if I could, didn’t you?’

  For some reason the artless confidence of that question made Grace Kilmichael feel ready to burst into tears. She so much didn’t want him there just then, and he was so certain that she did! It was like the absolute confidence of the child in the affection, the interest and sympathy of the parent – the most complete security that human love knows; and it gave her the measure at once of the innocence and the depth of his affection.

  ‘Of course I did, dear child – only I think this is rather a risky way of getting here,’ she said, after the slightest possible hesitation.

  But Nicholas had noticed the hesitation. He sat for some time, gazing at her with that sort of searching gravity peculiar to him. At last – ‘Lady K., tell me honestly – did you want me not to come?’ he said. ‘I never thought of that, or I’d have stayed in Ragusa. Please tell me. You see’ – he paused, looked away, and with a certain determination looked back at her again – ‘I enjoy working with you and being with you so much that I don’t always think of you, and that I may be a bore to you, because I’m so young and all that. And you’re so frightfully nice, so angelic to me, that I forget to think about it more than ever. Will you tell me honestly?’ he said.

  Looking into those determined eyes, anxious, but intent on the truth, Grace Kilmichael could not lie. But neither could she shatter that affectionate security. There was just one true word which in that moment she could say, and she said it. ‘I have never been bored by you once, Nicholas,’ she said, as gravely as he.

  He gleamed then with a sort of startled happiness that almost frightened her. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. And suddenly he grinned – ‘I wish my Father could hear you! Now I’m going to make you some tea. Where’s the basket?’ And he was off into the house, where she could hear him wheedling the Signora for milk and cakes, and trampling upstairs to her room to find the tea basket. Peals of female mirth travelled about in his wake. Grace could not help smiling as she listened. But even as she smiled she sighed a little. With that one true sentence she had fastened the knapsack of her problem onto her back more firmly than ever.

  FOURTEEN

  There were certain peculiarities about the domestic régime at the Restauraĉija Tete Mare – the official style and title of the Orlandos’ restaurant – which Grace Kilmichael could never quite fathom. There was the question of the white-haired crone, for instance. She occupied a position of apparent authority, or at least of oracular wisdom, for she was consulted by the Signora on all knotty points, such as Grace’s en pension terms; on the other hand she performed all the most menial tasks, peeling vegetables, chopping herbs, getting in the kindling and washing up the dishes and cooking pots. Everyone called her Teta (Aunt), and Grace sometimes wondered if she was the Aunt Mary who gave its name to the place; but everyone, even the Signora’s niece, ordered her about. (The niece was the assistant schoolmistress.) Teta only spoke Serbo-Croat, so Grace could not question her directly. Then Teta’s ordering of her own life aroused Grace’s curiosity. Why, for instance, did she rise at five o’clock every morning to wash up last night’s pots and pans? This was a matter of personal concern to Grace, since these purifications took place in a small half-basement yard immediately under her window, and the splash of water and clatter of metal re-echoed as off a sounding board from the walls of the small enclosed space, mounted daily to her ears and woke her up. If the crone had gone on working steadily till seven-thirty, when the rest of the household arose, Grace could have understood her zeal and extolled it, but she did not; after half an hour of scouring and clattering she crept off, nodding her white head, and for the next two hours silence reigned, except for the river, the nightingales and vague cheerful village noises in the distance. Sometimes Grace fell asleep again after this disturbance, sometimes she did not; she didn’t mind in either case – she slept marvellously at Komolac. But every morning she wondered afresh what the old woman did between half-past five and half-past seven. If, as Grace believed, from certain light creakings on the stairs, she crept back to bed again, why on earth did she get up at that extraordinary hour?

  A couple of mornings after Nicholas’s unexpected reappearance in Komolac, Grace lay in bed, as usual asking herself this question. And a sudden idle impulse prompted her to get up and find out. It was a perfect morning, and she was far too wide awake to go to sleep again; she might just as well go out, and have a long siesta in the afternoon. Quietly she washed in cold water, dressed, and put on a pair of tennis shoes – she had already discovered that any form of nailed or leather sole was agony on the steep rough limestone paths; then, taking up her hat and stuffing a few small-denomination notes into her pocket in case of emergencies, she crept softly downstairs.

  Teta had finished her morning task at the pump by this time, but Grace made a cautious examination of the premises to see if she was anywhere else downstairs – she was not. In the front restaurant the bottles were locked up in the cupboard behind the counter, the chairs piled neatly on the tables; the family sitting room was empty, so was Grace’s own little dining room. She went into the kitchen. Not a soul was there; the door into the yard stood open, and the pigeons had come in to forage – stepping delicately on their little pink feet, they were pecking at some fragments of bread, the crusts and ends off the long stick-shaped loaves, which lay heaped in a large dish on the white scrubbed table. Grace stepped out into the yard. The air was divine, cool and fresh as water; the sun was barely up, and a faint g
low in the sky made the light tender to everything. It was a perfect morning for a walk. And the thought suddenly struck her – why not walk in to Ragusa along the aqueduct, that ‘Acquedotto Promenade’ so strongly recommended by the book on the Ionian Islands? She had not done that yet, and there was a lot she still wished to see in Ragusa – the Memling in the Duomo, the Titian and the Nicolo Ragusanos in the Dominican church. She would – and come back on the bus. It was just after half-past five now – she would get in to Ragusa by seven-thirty. Passing back through the kitchen to go out – the yard had no exit – she bethought her to take one or two of the stale bits of bread to eat on the way; the pigeons, indignant at this intrusion on their claims, sidestepped with little angry flutters, and then walked back to give small soft vicious pecks at her hand. Laughing, Grace flourished her crusts at them before she put them in her pockets and went out.