‘No, don’t smoke those,’ she said to Tonino that afternoon as he reached for a cigarette in the silver box that stood on the drawing-room mantelpiece. ‘I’ve got a few of those Egyptian ones you like. Got them specially for you.’ And, smiling, she handed him a little parcel.
Tonino thanked her profusely—too profusely, as was his custom. But when he had stripped away the paper and saw the polished gold of a large cigarette-case, he could only look at her in an embarrassed and inquiring amazement.
‘Don’t you think it’s rather pretty?’ she asked.
‘Marvellous! But is it . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Is it for me?’
Moira laughed with pleasure at his embarrassment. She had never seen him embarrassed before. He was always the self-possessed young man of the world, secure and impregnable within his armour of Southern good manners. She admired that elegant carapace. But it amused her for once to take him without it, to see him at a loss, blushing and stammering like a little boy. It amused and it pleased her; she liked him all the more for being the little boy as well as the polished and socially competent young man.
‘For me?’ she mimicked, laughing. ‘Do you like it?’ Her tone changed; she became grave. ‘I wanted you to have something to remind you of last night.’ Tonino took her hands and silently kissed them. She had received him with such off-handed gaiety, so nonchalantly, as though nothing had happened, that the tender references to last night’s happenings (so carefully prepared as he walked up the hill) had remained unspoken. He had been afraid of saying the wrong thing and offending her. But now the spell was broken—and by Moira herself. ‘One oughtn’t to forget one’s good actions,’ Moira went on, abandoning him her hands. ‘Each time you take a cigarette out of this case, will you remember how kind and good you were to a silly ridiculous little fool?’
Tonino had had time to recover his manners. ‘I shall remember the most adorable, the most beautiful . . .’ Still holding her hands, he looked at her for a moment in silence, eloquently. Moira smiled back at him. ‘Moira!’ And she was in his arms. She shut her eyes and was passive in the strong circle of his arms, soft and passive against his firm body. ‘I love you, Moira.’ The breath of his whispering was warm on her cheek. ‘Ti amo.’ And suddenly his lips were on hers again, violently, impatiently kissing. Between the kisses his whispered words came passionate to her ears. ‘Ti amo pazzamente . . . piccina . . . tesoro . . . amore . . . cuore . . .’ Uttered in Italian, his love seemed somehow specially strong and deep. Things described in a strange language themselves take on a certain strangeness. ‘Amami, Moira, amami. Mi ami un po?’ He was insistent. ‘A little, Moira—do you love me a little?’
She opened her eyes and looked at him. Then, with a quick movement, she took his face between her two hands, drew it down and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘I love you.’ And then, gently, she pushed him away. Tonino wanted to kiss her again. But Moira shook her head and slipped away from him. ‘No, no,’ she said with a kind of peremptory entreaty. ‘Don’t spoil it all now.’
The days passed, hot and golden. Summer approached. The nightingales sang unseen in the cool of the evening.
‘L’usignuolo,’ Moira whispered softly to herself as she listened to the singing. ‘L’usignuolo.’ Even the nightingales were subtly better in Italian. The sun had set. They were sitting in the little summer-house at the end of the garden, looking out over the darkening landscape. The white-walled farms and villas on the slope below stood out almost startlingly clear against the twilight of the olive trees, as though charged with some strange and novel significance. Moira sighed. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said; Tonino took her hand. ‘Ridiculously happy.’ For, after all, she was thinking, it was rather ridiculous to be so happy for no valid reason.
John Tarwin had taught her to imagine that one could only be happy when one was doing something ‘interesting’ (as he put it), or associating with people who were ‘worth while.’ Tonino was nobody in particular, thank goodness! And going for picnics wasn’t exactly ‘interesting’ in John’s sense of the word; nor was talking about the respective merits of different brands of car; nor teaching him to drive; nor going shopping; nor discussing the problem of new curtains for the drawing-room; nor, for that matter, sitting in the summer-house and saying nothing. In spite of which, or because of which, she was happy with an unprecedented happiness. ‘Ridiculously happy,’ she repeated.
Tonino kissed her hand. ‘So am I,’ he said. And he was not merely being polite. In his own way he was genuinely happy with her. People envied him sitting in that magnificent yellow car at her side. She was so pretty and elegant, so foreign too; he was proud to be seen about with her. And then the cigarette-case, the gold-mounted, agate-handled cane she had given him for his birthday . . . Besides, he was really very fond of her, really, in an obscure way, in love with her.
It was not for nothing that he had held and caressed her in the darkness of that night of thunder. Something of that deep and passionate tenderness, born suddenly of the night and their warm sightless contact, still remained in him—still remained even after the physical longings she then inspired had been vicariously satisfied. (And under Berto’s knowing guidance they had been satisfied, frequently.) If it hadn’t been for Berto’s satirical comments on the still platonic nature of his attachment, he would have been perfectly content.
‘Alle donne,’ Berto sententiously generalized, ‘piace sempre la violenza. They long to be raped. You don’t know how to make love, my poor boy.’ And he would hold up his own achievements as examples to be followed. For Berto, love was a kind of salacious vengeance on women for the crime of their purity.
Spurred on by his friend’s mockeries, Tonino made another attempt to exact full payment for his mending of the fuses on the night of the storm. But his face was so soundly slapped, and the tone in which Moira threatened never to see him again unless he behaved himself was so convincingly stern, that he did not renew his attack. He contented himself with looking sad and complaining of her cruelty. But in spite of his occasionally long face, he was happy with her. Happy like a fireside cat. The car, the house, her elegant foreign prettiness, the marvellous presents she gave him, kept him happily purring.
The days passed and the weeks. Moira would have liked life to flow on like this for ever, a gay bright stream with occasional reaches of calm sentimentality but never dangerously deep or turbulent, without fall or whirl or rapid. She wanted her existence to remain for ever what it was at this moment—a kind of game with a pleasant and emotionally exciting companion, a playing at living and loving. If only this happy play-time could last for ever!
It was John Tarwin who decreed that it should not. ‘ATTENDING CYTOLOGICAL CONGRESS ROME WILL STOP FEW DAYS ON WAY ARRIVING THURSDAY LOVE JOHN.’ That was the text of the telegram Moira found awaiting her on her return to the villa one evening. She read it and felt suddenly depressed and apprehensive. Why did he want to come? He would spoil everything. The bright evening went dead before her eyes; the happiness with which she had been brimming when she returned with Tonino from that marvellous drive among the Apennines was drained out of her. Her gloom retrospectively darkened the blue and golden beauty of the mountains, put out the bright flowers, dimmed the day’s laughter and talk. ‘Why does he want to come?’ Miserably and resentfully, she wondered. ‘And what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen?’ She felt cold and rather breathless and almost sick with the questioning apprehension.
John’s face, when he saw her standing there at the station, lit up instantaneously with all its hundred-candle-power tenderness and charm.
‘My darling!’ His voice was furry and tremulous. He leaned towards her; stiffening, Moira suffered herself to be kissed. His nails, she noticed disgustedly, were dirty.
The prospect of a meal alone with John had appalled her; she had asked Tonino to dinner. Besides, she wanted John to meet him. To have kept Tonino’s existence a secret from John would have been to admit that there was something wrong in her relations with him. And there wasn’t. She wanted John to meet him just like that, naturally, as a matter of course. Whether he’d like Tonino when he’d met him was another question. Moira had her doubts. They were justified by the event. John had begun by protesting when he heard that she had invited a guest. Their first evening—how could she? The voice trembled—fur in a breeze. She had to listen to outpourings of sentiment.
But finally, when dinner-time arrived, he switched off the pathos and became once more the research student. Brightly inquiring, blankly intelligent, John cross-questioned his guest about all the interesting and important things that were happening in Italy. What was the real political situation? How did the new educational system work? What did
