He came home to find Moira and Tonino superintending the fitting of the new cretonne covers for the drawing-room chairs.
‘Carefully, carefully,’ Moira was saying to the upholsterer as he came in. She turned at the sound of his footsteps. A cloud seemed to obscure the brightness of her face when she saw him; but she made an effort to keep up her gaiety. ‘Come and look, John,’ she called. ‘It’s like getting a very fat old lady into a very tight dress. Too ridiculous!’
But John did not smile with her; his face was a mask of stony gravity. He stalked up to the chair, nodded curtly to Tonino, curtly to the upholsterer, and stood there watching the work as though he were a stranger, a hostile stranger at that. The sight of Moira and Tonino laughing and talking together had roused in him a sudden and violent fury. ‘Disgusting little adventurer,’ he said to himself ferociously behind his mask.
‘It’s a pretty stuff, don’t you think?’ said Moira. He only grunted.
‘Very modern too,’ added Tonino. ‘The shops are very modern here,’ he went on, speaking with all the rather touchy insistence on up-to-dateness which characterizes the inhabitants of an under-bathroomed and over-monumented country.
‘Indeed?’ said John sarcastically.
Moira frowned. ‘You’ve no idea how helpful Tonino has been,’ she said with a certain warmth.
Effusively Tonino began to deny that she had any obligation towards him. John Tarwin interrupted him. ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt he was helpful,’ he said in the same sarcastic tone and with a little smile of contempt.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Tonino took his leave. The moment he was gone, Moira turned on her husband. Her face was pale, her lips trembled. ‘How dare you speak to one of my friends like that?’ she asked in a voice unsteady with anger.
John flared up. ‘Because I wanted to get rid of the fellow,’ he answered; and the mask was off, his face was nakedly furious. ‘It’s disgusting to see a man like that hanging round the house. An adventurer. Exploiting your silliness. Sponging on you.’
‘Tonino doesn’t sponge on me. And anyhow, what do you know about it?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘One hears things.’
‘Oh, it’s those old beasts, is it?’ She hated the Bargionis, hated them. ‘Instead of being grateful to Tonino for helping me! Which is more than you’ve ever done, John. You, with your beastly tumours and your rotten old Faust!’ The contempt in her voice was blasting. ‘Just leaving me to sink or swim. And when somebody comes along and is just humanly decent to me, you insult him. And you fly into a rage of jealousy because I’m normally grateful to him.’
John had had time to readjust his mask. ‘I don’t fly into any sort of rage,’ he said, bottling his anger and speaking slowly and coldly. ‘I just don’t want you to be preyed upon by handsome, black-haired young pimps from the slums of Naples.’
‘John!’
‘Even if the preying is done platonically,’ he went on. ‘Which I’m sure it is. But I don’t want to have even a platonic pimp about.’ He spoke coldly, slowly, with the deliberate intention of hurting her as much as he could. ‘How much has he got out of you so far?’
Moira did not answer, but turned and hurried from the room.
Tonino had just got to the bottom of the hill, when a loud insistent hooting made him turn round. A big yellow car was close at his heels.
‘Moira!’ he called in astonishment. The car came to a halt beside him.
‘Get in,’ she commanded almost fiercely, as though she were angry with him. He did as he was told.
‘But where did you think of going?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Let’s take the Bologna road, into the mountains.’
‘But you’ve got no hat,’ he objected, ‘no coat.’
She only laughed and, throwing the car into gear, drove off at full speed. John spent his evening in solitude. He began by reproaching himself. ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken so brutally,’ he thought, when he heard of Moira’s precipitate departure. What tender, charming things he would say, when she came back, to make up for his hard words! And then, when she’d made peace, he would talk to her gently, paternally about the dangers of having bad friends. Even the anticipation of what he would say to her caused his face to light up with a beautiful smile. But when, three-quarters of an hour after dinner-time, he sat down to a lonely and overcooked meal, his mood had changed. ‘If she wants to sulk,’ he said to himself, ‘why, let her sulk.’ And as the hours passed, his heart grew harder. Midnight struck. His anger began to be tempered by a certain apprehension. Could anything have happened to her? He was anxious. But all the same he went to bed, on principle, firmly. Twenty minutes later he heard Moira’s step on the stairs and then the closing of her door. She was back; nothing had happened; perversely, he felt all the more exasperated with her for being safe. Would she come and say good night? He waited.
Absently, meanwhile, mechanically, Moira had undressed. She was thinking of all that had happened in the eternity since she had left the house. The marvellous sunset in the mountains! Every westward slope was rosily gilded; below them lay a gulf of blue shadow. They had stood in silence, gazing. ‘Kiss me, Tonino,’ she had suddenly whispered, and the touch of his lips had sent a kind of delicious apprehension fluttering under her skin. She pressed herself against him; his body was firm and solid within her clasp. She could feel the throb of his heart against her cheek, like something separately alive. Beat, beat, beat—and the throbbing life was not the life of the Tonino she knew, the Tonino who laughed and paid compliments and brought flowers; it was the life of some mysterious and separate power.
A power with which the familiar individual Tonino happened to be connected, but almost irrelevantly. She shuddered a little. Mysterious and terrifying. But the terror was somehow attractive, like a dark precipice that allures. ‘Kiss me, Tonino, kiss me.’ The light faded; the hills died away into featureless flat shapes against the sky. ‘I’m cold,’ she said at last, shivering. ‘Let’s go.’ They dined at a little inn, high up between the two passes. When they drove away, it was night. He put his arm round her and kissed her neck, at the nape, where the cropped hair was harsh against his mouth. ‘You’ll make me drive into the ditch,’ she laughed. But there was no laughter for Tonino. ‘Moira, Moira,’ he repeated; and there was something like agony in his voice. ‘Moira.’ And finally, at his suffering entreaty, she stopped the car. They got out. Under the chestnut trees, what utter darkness!
Moira slipped off her last garment and, naked before the mirror, looked at her image. It seemed the same as ever, her pale body; but in reality it was different, it was new, it had only just been born.
John still waited, but his wife did not come. ‘All right, then,’ he said to himself, with a spiteful little anger that disguised itself as a god-like and impersonal serenity of justice; ‘let her sulk if she wants to. She only punishes herself.’ He turned out the light and composed himself to sleep. Next morning he left for Rome and the Cytological Congress without saying good-bye; that would teach her. But ’thank goodness!’ was Moira’s first reflection when she heard that he had gone. And then suddenly, she felt rather sorry for him. Poor John! Like a dead frog, galvanized; twitching, but never alive. He was pathetic really. She was so rich in happiness, that she could afford to be sorry for him. And in a way she was even grateful to him. If he hadn’t come, if he hadn’t behaved so unforgivably, nothing would have happened between Tonino and herself. Poor John! But all the same he was hopeless.
Day followed bright serene day. But Moira’s life no longer flowed like the clear and shallow stream it had been before John’s coming. It was turbulent now, there were depths and darknesses. And love was no longer a game with a pleasant companion; it was violent, all-absorbing, even rather terrible. Tonino became for her a kind of obsession. She was haunted by him—by his face, by his white teeth and his dark hair, by his hands and limbs and body.
She wanted to be with him, to feel his nearness, to touch him. She would spend whole hours stroking his hair, ruffling it up, rearranging it fantastically, on end, like a golliwog’s, or with hanging fringes, or with the locks twisted up into horns. And when she had contrived some specially ludicrous effect, she clapped her hands and laughed, laughed, till the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘If you could see yourself now!’ she cried. Offended by her laughter, ‘You play with me as though I were a doll,’ Tonino would protest with a rather ludicrous expression of angry dignity. The laughter would go out of Moira’s face and, with a seriousness that was fierce, almost cruel, she would lean forward and kiss him, silently, violently, again and again.
Absent,
