Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The car, arriving in the Piazza del Duomo, turned westwards along the Corso. The road, paved with blocks of stone, was a chequer of light and shadow. The little cafés and wine-shops were busy, and boy barbers were holding their patrons by their noses and scraping at blue-black chins. The girl saw as much of this new world as the passing machine allowed her to see. There were shops that sold antichità and shops that sold lace, and just before reaching the Hotel St. George she saw a white board on the front of a narrow house—“English Library and Tea Room.” She leaned out to get a longer glimpse of that particular house, for it was to be her workshop.

Below the Hotel St. George the car swung out of the Corso into a lane that climbed the side of a hill. The darkness and the scattered lights had returned. The car bumped and swayed, and turning a sharp corner stopped with unexpected abruptness opposite an iron gate. Billy’s suitcase toppled over on her toes. The gate was painted white, and carried a wooden panel upon which was the name of the villa—“Villa Vesta.”

She had arrived. The driver was down and opening the door, and insisting on handling her suitcase, and leaving her suitcase with him, she pushed open the heavy iron gate and heard it utter a little protesting squeak. A gritty path led directly to the door of a white villa shaped like an oblong box, with two stone lions couchant beside the doorstep.

Someone had been waiting for the car and had heard it stop, for the door opened, and a very tall woman stood erect in the doorway. Her back was to the light, and her face dim, yet Billy’s first impression of Miss Julia Lord was by no means vague. She saw the gleam of very beautiful white hair, an uncompromising and upright carriage, and heard a voice that came suddenly and concisely.

“Miss Brown—I presume?”

Billy smiled. Her smile could be as sudden as Miss Lord’s voice, and it was complete and unconcealed. She smiled with her eyes and her mouth and her teeth, and her short, blunt nose.

“I think so.”

“Come in.”

On the very doorstep of the new adventure Billy stumbled upon Miss Lord’s rock of gravity. She allowed herself no sense of humour, perhaps because life had given her the choice between laughter and ice, and she had chosen to be cold marble. She offered a hand to Billy, its long straight fingers pressed together, and when Billy grasped it she felt that she was grasping an ivory paper-knife. Her smile fell back into the pool of herself.

Miss Lord stepped back, and the driver appeared with the trunk. She spoke to him firmly, calling him by name. She had lived in Tindaro for nearly twenty years.

“Seppe, carry the trunk up to the landing. Maria will show you the room.”

She turned and walked down a tiled passage, and her shoes made a crisp tapping on the tiles. Billy followed, feeling somehow that the Villa Vesta was a schoolhouse and that she might find a text in her bedroom. Miss Lord led the way into a sitting-room that had the air of having been furnished with desultory carefulness for very temporary tenants. The chairs were as straight in the back as the lady. The table was laid for a meal.

“I expect you are hungry.”

Billy’s smile was more controlled.

“I’ve had nothing since lunch.”

“Sit down. Supper will be ready in a quarter of an hour.”

The villa felt chilly, and Billy and Miss Lord sat down on two chairs on opposite sides of that hole in the wall which the Latins conceive to be a fireplace. Billy could now see Miss Lord’s face. It was curiously unwrinkled and firm and solid, rather like a face that had been kept in ice. The features were fine and emphatic, the eyes steady, disillusioned and blue. Miss Lord looked at people very directly and at her leisure, and she was looking at Billy with deliberation and care.

She was asking herself that most important question: What sort of girl was this new girl? Would she be like the previous young women? Would Tindaro play its Circe tricks on her as it had played them on those others? Miss Brown. Undoubtedly Miss Julia Lord had been influenced by the suggestive brevity and the unsensuous plainness of the name. She had had Barbara Irene Brown’s photograph sent out to her, and it had appeared to be that of a plain and solid young woman who played games.

But Billy in the flesh was not the Miss Brown of the photo, and Miss Lord was feeling surprised and yet not wholly unsatisfied. She saw Billy as a strong and shapely young woman, obviously very healthy, and with one of those irregular faces that are unexpected and interesting. Billy’s brown hair seemed to clasp her head like the young leaves and tendrils of a vine. Her eyes were brown, and of a warm, clear brightness. She looked Miss Lord straight in the face.

Miss Lord made inward comments. Cold she might be, yet her consciousness was not mere glass, but quicksilvered like a mirror. She liked the girl’s eyes, and her frank, broad forehead, her blunt nose and her expressive mouth. She liked the strength and the solidity of her, that open-air candour, the healthy whites of the eyes, the texture of hair and skin. Miss Lord’s consciousness was not unlike a camera, and she had put her various negatives away, and had grown wise through years of recording and comparing.

She said, “Perhaps you would like to go upstairs and wash. The trains are very dirty.”

“I should.”

Billy, too, had been gathering impressions. She found herself liking Miss Lord better than she had thought she would. This white-haired woman was definite; she finished all her sentences; she might be rather changeless and like a snow-peak, but you could be sure of her outlines.

Miss Lord rose, and when she stood she appeared like a full-length portrait of herself, dignified, deliberate and complete.

“You are not quite like your photo.”

She smiled faintly.

“You look both older—and younger.”

Billy’s smile returned.

“Well—perhaps I am. We are—sometimes. It depends——”

“I’ll show you your room.”

“O—by the way—I haven’t paid the taxi man.”

“Maria will have paid him. She knows. He would have asked you for five lire more than was due to him. You can pay Maria.”

Miss Lord led the way up the stairs to a tiled landing, and opened a grey-blue door.

“If there is anything more you want—ask me.”

“Thank you.”

“Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”