Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 19

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Billy wrote home to her mother every week, and Mary Brown, more Martha than Mary, would sit down at night when the work of the day was over, and re-read those breezy, adjectival letters. Billy always had been a consoling person, able to look after her own clothes. She had never been guilty of thoughtless messes, and Mary Brown, with the darning and the mending put away, would give the fire a poke, and light the one cigarette she allowed herself, and try to forget the neuritis in her left leg. She could go to sleep happily on Billy’s letters, because they were so full of health and happenings.

Billy wrote breezily of Tindaro.

“This is a topping place. I like Miss Lord awfully. Some people call her a beast, but she’s a just beast.

“I’ve been making marmalade. We sell it to the visitors for twelve lire a pot. You have to watch the Italian cook like a cat. A nice sense of property—when it’s somebody else’s. That’s Bolshevism, isn’t it? And she’s an ingenious creature. I caught her pouring soft sugar into one of her shoes!

“The society here is really marvellous. You have to catalogue it to understand it properly.

“A. The hotel people. Mostly old. Lots of Sir Somebodies, and Americans. The Elyseo, de luxe, the Bristol not quite so much so. The St. George and the Florio rather fly-blown.

“B. The English and American villa colony. Just so. They give tea-parties. You stand about, and try to balance a chocolate eclair in your saucer, and hear all the gossip. Rather high-brow and very ‘cleeky,’ quite in the golf style.

“C. Us. The doctor, the lace-shop, the antichità shop, the library.

“D. Stands for the damned. I haven’t met any of the damned yet. Except one or two mild ones who came to the library. Odd people, with lurid pasts or something. Miss L. calls them the exiles, people who live out here always, and can’t go home.

“E. The natives, real Tindaro, and the goats and the donkeys, and the wretched cats. I haven’t been able to make friends with a Tindaro cat. The dogs are mostly yellow, and spend much time in scratching.”

Mary Brown found Billy’s letters comforting. There was a Browning lilt to them—an “All’s well with the world” touch. Dear Billy! Always this brown, vital, lovable child had been Mary’s favourite, and especially so in this age of self-expression, a phrase nicely chosen to justify the extremes of a crude selfishness. Even as a small child Billy had stood up squarely on her sturdy legs and insisted on carrying things, and Mary had been very loth to see her go. But what would you? She had four other children at home at No. 19 Braybrook Road. Eric she had contrived to place in a Bank, but he was in the thick of that uneasy phase when collars and ties are of supreme importance, and the opinions of one’s elders dotard’s tosh. Rachel had a job as a teacher of dancing with Miss Gloria Molyneux of Wigmore Street, and Rachel was a little irresponsible. The two younger children, Mildred and Roy, were still at school, Roy at Merchant Taylors’, Mildred at an Ealing academy. Their fees were paid by an uncle. Mary Brown could afford only a slip of a servant, and every item in the weekly books had to be checked and considered. She smoked her one cigarette a day, and bought two new hats at the sales in January and July.

But Billy was all right; Billy was the dark, red rose of the bunch, without a blotch on her petals. Such a warm-hearted child, and so wise in her way, and Mary Brown would sit and look at the fire, and forget the splutterings and nasal discords of Roy’s wireless in the back room. What an age it was for noises! Somebody’s orchestra playing, and Rachel trying a new step in the Yale Blues! And over there in Italy Billy was making marmalade, and issuing books, and taking round teatrays to those fortunate people who had spare cash to play with. Dear Billy! Mary Brown’s face softened to the firelight.

Billy herself thought well of her new world. She had moved from the Villa Vesta into the two rooms above the library and teashop, and her sitting-room window looked over cypresses and olives and old brown roofs to the sea. The bedroom window fronted upon the Corso, but Tindaro went early to bed, and after ten o’clock the stones of the Corso were silent. Moreover, Billy was still sleeping an English sleep, and getting up at six with a sense of adventure, to stand in a tin bath and sluice herself. She had accepted Miss Lord’s clean cult, though she had to carry up her own water overnight in a great brown earthenware jug. The Italian women had refused to recognize the necessity for so much water, and had protested by pretending to forget.

“These English!”

Did not Mascati, who owned and ran the Bristol Hotel, say that when the Italian season began the deluge of bath water ceased, and became a reasonable trickle. Even the Germans were more considerate.

Moreover, Billy’s first week had given much of its energy to a war of attrition with Maria the cook. Maria came in daily, arriving at seven. She was big and swarthy and raucous; she had relatives, and a light hand. And Billy having accepted the whole job and nothing but the job, had found Maria proposing to take advantage of Billy’s newness. Billy had smiled, and shown herself capable of taking care of the flour, and the sugar, and the baking-powder, and the raisins. Maria, sullenly and silently saucy, had met her Caporetto over the sugar.

Actually Miss Lord had laughed. Billy’s picture of Maria’s black-stockinged feet caked with sugar was irresistible.

“She couldn’t put it down to the cat, you know.”

Obviously not. And after the incident of the sugar-lined shoes, Billy had no more trouble. Maria accepted the inevitable, and at the end of the second week she was breathing garlic and beneficence upon Billy. But that bath water! Neither Maria nor Vanna could ever remember to carry up the monstrous crock.

In the library things went pretty smoothly, and Billy had a way with the constitutionally discontented.

“How is it that I can—never—get the book I want? I have been a subscriber for three months.”

Billy displayed a firmly smiling face.

“It depends so much on the book. What is the particular book?”

“ ‘Red Ruin’ by Ruby Rudd.”

“There is a run on ‘Red Ruin.’ ”

“Then you ought to have more copies.”

“We have three. That is our limit. I’ll hold the next copy for you when it comes in.”

Even the most crusty had to refer to her as “That nice girl at the library.” Nice was the universal adjective.

Lady Pipp, the leader of the villa coterie, came and saw and approved, and invited Billy to one of her Sunday tea festas. Lady Pipp was a little yellow woman with rimless glasses, long flat feet, and her hair very much in control. Billy went on Sunday to the Villa Dante, and found herself in a room full of Louis Quinze furniture and much people. Here were the Sudbury Smiths, the Bromheads and the Landers, Dr. Burt and his little shy wife, and Miss Cramm of the antichità shop, and sundry residents from the Elyseo and the Bristol. Billy stood in the crowd and tried not to bump people or to get her teacup joggled. Sir Reginald Pipp was kind to her. He had a head that went straight up like the sides of a hard felt hat, and was cut off abruptly at the top. His face was brick red in colour, and his lips precise and thin. His conversation suggested a wireless operator talking in morse. Billy heard him talking to Dr. Burt. “Yes, yes, yes. Indeed! Quite so. Most remarkable. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly my opinion. Very late season. Wind. Yes, yes, yes. My wife does not like freesias. Mimosa? Which variety? Yes, yes, yes. Dealbata. Quite so. Yes, yes, yes.”

Billy found herself extracted from the crowd by Dr. Burt, and led out into the Villa Dante garden. It was a garden after Lady Pipp’s own heart, all stone chips and correct paths, and palm-trees, and nicely disciplined borders. It was full of spinous and prickly things, strange cacti which Dr. Burt looked at with a sort of gentle malevolence. Somehow Lady Pipp’s garden made Billy think of an Easter egg, but an egg with no frills to it.

Dr. Burt she liked very well. She had met him at one of the bi-weekly dances at the Hotel Elyseo, and she had been grateful to him, because at the age of five-and-fifty he was not among the feverishly eager old men who fox-trotted with bent knees and tantalized you with senile prancings. He did not move in that way. He was one of those men who convey the impression of stillness. The head, and shoulders and bulk of him suggested a wild boar. His bristling moustachios were tusks. He was ugly, grotesquely so at the first glance, but when you had looked into his eyes for a while and listened to his voice, his ugliness was forgotten. He had strangely gentle eyes in a fierce face.

His manner was abrupt, perhaps because he had to deal with so many people who were ready to waste his time, and when he was not doctoring he was hunting—Græco-Roman antiquities. He was an authority on the flora and fauna of Tindaro and its coast. He tramped the hills in a pair of heavy black boots and grey worsted stockings. Or you might catch him with his coat off, working with the labourers who were excavating in that classic soil. If a figurine, or a potsherd, or a piece of old metal was found anywhere for miles round it was carried to “Il Dottore.”

Mrs. Sudbury Smith had said of him, “Burt just blurts at you. No manners. Half the time he is thinking of a Roman pavement or a Greek figurine. I wish he would think more about my figure.”

Burt blurted at Billy, but gently so.

“Like this place?”

“Tindaro or the garden?”

“Tindaro.”

“I think it’s marvellous.”

His blue eyes observed her. She could remember a doctor looking at her with the same intentness when as a girl at school she had developed measles. Burt’s eyes were like two blue slits.

“O, well, that’s all right. You must come up and have tea with my wife. She’ll fix it up. I don’t suppose we shall meet professionally.”

They exchanged smiles.

“Ought to say I hope not?”

“Of course. You are rather lucky in having struck a woman like Miss Lord.”

She agreed, and with sincerity. Miss Lord was so clean cut, not at all smudgy, and when she used the word smudgy Burt’s eyes gave her another of those alert glances. The word was so right, so applicable to much that was human, especially in Tindaro, and he wondered whether she had used it with any complete understanding of its meaning. She herself had so clear and fresh a surface. She looked utterly untarnished.

He said, “O, by the way, Bromhead wants you to play tennis. I’ll introduce you. I hear you are pretty good.”

“I’m keen. We had lessons at school.”

Bromhead was found, a big, pleasant person with a red face and a ruff of grey hair. He reminded Billy of the Examiner in “Outward Bound.” He had eyes that were always ready to laugh.

“Miss Brown says she can play.”

“Splendid. I’m president and secretary rolled into one. The courts are a little unsympathetic. When can we have the pleasure?”

“I’m free on Tuesdays and Fridays from two till four.”

“What about next Tuesday? I’ll get a man and a girl from the Elyseo. I’m rather a rabbit.”

“I’d love to.”

“Splendid.”

He was jocund and kind and clean, and she liked him.