The Italian Girl Read Free

look after; but some trick of fate had left her behind ever since in that northern house. Otto claimed he remembered being wheeled by Maggie in his pram, but this was certainly a false memory: some previous Carlotta, some Vittoria, merged here with her image; they were indeed all, in our minds, so merged and generalized that it seemed as if there had always ever been only one Italian girl.
    ‘A hot-water bottle in the bed? How kind of you, Maggie. No, not a meal, I’ve eaten, thank you. Just bed. It’s at eleven tomorrow, isn’t it? Thank you, good night.’ With this came to me some old comforting breath of childhood; warm beds, prompt meals, clean linen: these things the Italian girl had provided.
    I stood alone in the faded pretty room. The patchwork bedcover was turned back for me. I looked about. A lot of my father’s pictures hung in this room, placed there by Lydia who had, after his death, collected them from elsewhere in the house to make of this place a sort of museum, a mausoleum. It was as if she had, in the end, enclosed him in a narrow space. I looked at the pale water-colours which had once seemed the equal of Cotman and the mannered engravings which had once seemed the equal of Bewick; and there emanated from them all a special and limited sense of the past. They looked to me, for the first time, dated, old-fashioned, insipid. I felt his absence then with a quick pathos, his presence as a sad reproachful ghost: and it was suddenly as if after all it was he who had just died.

2. Otto’s Laughter
    Soft, sweet, mechanical, senseless music was being stereophonically produced. We were waiting for the coffin to be carried in. There was to be no service; only as I gathered, a few minutes of quietness in the presence of the dead. Lydia had been a firmly convinced atheist. This was one respect perhaps in which my father had influenced her.
    I had scarcely seen the family during the morning. Maggie had brought up my breakfast, and I had exchanged clumsy greetings with Otto and Isabel as we were getting into the cars.
    I looked now at my niece, who was sitting a little in front of me on the other side, and savoured an astonishment in which last night’s experience had some part. I had not seen Flora for eight years, since she had not been at home on my last visit. I remembered her as a forward exasperating little fairy, yet always to me infinitely gentle, with a spontaneous affectionate grace whose sheer directness seemed a miracle. She made nothing of the complicated barriers with which I had surrounded myself, and she loved me then, naturally and carelessly, just because I was her uncle, and accepted me utterly. She was perhaps the only person in the world who did. As a child she had wonderfully possessed that open simple quality which makes adults oddly ashamed before children with a shame which is also a pleasure. Otto said I ‘idealized’ Flora; but it was true that I might, for her, have come home often, if it had not been for Lydia.
    But now she was, not quite grown up, but certainly a little girl no longer. She must be, I reflected, sixteen, perhaps seventeen. After all, I was over forty myself. And now she was beautiful. As a child she had had a broad radiant appealing expression and the sweetness of a little animal. Now there was before me a handsome impressive girl, with long reddish hair, neatly pinned up, and a pale dreamy face in which the innocent radiance which I remembered shone like a surface mist above the firmer features of a grown-up. Her face had that pure transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children. She wore a big, longish, striped skirt and a black tightfitting jacket and a large, black velvet, broad-brimmed hat tilted far back on her head. She did not resemble her mother, but had something of the gipsy grace of the young Lydia.
    Isabel, beside her, looked morose and preoccupied. She too had changed, her face had aged in that