Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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Billy opened the green shutters on a cherry-coloured sun rising out of a purple sea, and she stood there in the cold thrill of the dawn, and saw Tindaro and the Tindaric sea as a new world and a new ocean. Over yonder a great headland black as soot seemed to catch the sun’s rays and splinter them into an ægis of gold. The hills and cliffs and groves and gardens had a diaphanous softness, and in the deeps below she saw the coastline and the edge of the sea melted together in a haze of blueness. The earth had the air of having just been born; she saw it newly made for her on that Mediterranean morning.

More intimately near to her was the garden of the Villa Vesta, and she was able to say to herself “Orange trees!” Yes, orange trees, deeply green in the hush of the dawn and all hung with fruit. How different from Ealing with its sodden greyness! And Billy, looking down into that surprising garden, and into the terraced valley and the dark bloom of the pinewoods, felt herself on the brim of a new world. Everything was different; she herself had a sense of difference; the very sun burning above the intense blue of the sea was different.

And there were olive trees! She had read that when a wind blew and the olives were ruffled the green lace of the hillside became a silvery grey, but on this morning there was no wind. The cypresses at the end of Miss Lord’s garden were like slim spires carved out of black marble. Tindaro itself looped from the hillside to hillside, seemed still silently asleep. Billy could look down on the brown roofs and into the gardens and courts of the white, pink and ochre-coloured houses, and feel Tindaro there to be known and conquered.

Her glances returned to the garden. It surprised her. Presumably it was Miss Lord’s garden, but it was unlike Miss Lord as a rose-bed is unlike a mason’s yard. Its very squareness had been cunningly concealed. All beauty has a suggestion of other dimensions, and Miss Lord’s garden—like all inspired gardens—seemed to have something more than depth and breadth and height. Those cypresses towered and yet were unmeasurable. The little formal pool surrounded by blue Iris Stylosa was a mysterious and glimmering hole in the apparent surface of things. There was a pergola scrambled over by roses and vines. There were great earthenware jars like the jars in the tale of Ali Baba. Patches of green growth, very vivid in the slanting rays of the rising sun, would show in the days that were to be tulips, anemones and jonquils. The orange trees kindled their lamps for Apollo. There were loquats and acacias, and oleanders, and a fig tree naked and the colour of stone.

Billy hung poised on the edge of it, with her blue bed-jacket pulled over her throat. Obviously, Miss Lord of the salon and Miss Lord in her garden were two creatures, and yet somehow explaining each other. But what a world, and what a sunrise, and what adventure! Her bed had been a dream; she had slept deliciously; her window opened upon all this, and down yonder lay Tindaro and her job. Billy belonged to a generation that demanded its job.

But someone was moving below, probably that excellent fat Maria with a shape like a pillow, and a moustache on her good-tempered face. And what was that pleasant perfume? Surely it was the smell of coffee, hot coffee? And suddenly three little bells began to jangle in one of the campaniles of Tindaro, and the still, silent scene seemed to take up the vibrations. A cheerful clangor.

Billy tossed her, head and smiled.

“Good business!”

While she was brushing her hair, and finding it crisp and vigorous, she heard sounds of distant splashings. Miss Julia Lord was taking her cold bath.