“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know something so important?”
“Jack had a good chance at things, but he made a mess of everything,” said Iris. “My father is still living. Life really is too incredible for some of us.”
A dark girl of about twenty turned up soon after. Her costume, a gray dress buttoned to the neck, gave her the appearance of being in uniform. She unzipped a military-looking bag and cried, in an unplaceable accent, “Hallo, hallo, Mrs. Ross? A few small gifts for you,” and unpacked a bottle of Haig, four tins of corned beef, a jar of honey, and six pairs of American nylon stockings, which Netta had never seen before, and were as good to have under a mattress as gold. Netta looked up at the tall girl.
“Remember? I was the middle sister. With,” she said gravely, “the typical middle-sister problems.” She scarcely recalled Jack, her beloved. The memory of Netta had grown up with her. “I remember you laughing,” she said, without loving that memory. She was a severe, tragic girl. “You were the first adult I ever heard laughing. At night in bed I could hear it from your balcony. You sat smoking with, I suppose, your handsome husband. I used to laugh just to hear you.”
She had married an Iranian journalist. He had discovered that political prisoners in the United States were working under lamentable conditions in tin mines. President Truman had sent them there. People from all over the world planned to unite to get them out. The girl said she had been to Germany and to Austria, she had visited camps, they were all alike, and that was already the past, and the future was the prisoners in the tin mines.
Netta said, “In what part of the country are these mines?”
The middle sister looked at her sadly and said, “Is there more than one part?”
For the first time in years, Netta could see Jack clearly. They were silently sharing a joke; he had caught it too. She and the girl lunched in a corner of the battered dining room. The tables were scarred with initials. There were no tablecloths. One of the great-uncle’s paintings still hung on a wall. It showed the Quai Laurenti, a country road alongside the sea. Netta, who had no use for the past, was discovering a past she could regret. Out of a dark, gentle silence — silence imposed by the impossibility of telling anything real — she counted the cracks in the walls. When silence failed she heard power saws ripping into olive trees and a lemon grove. With a sense of deliverance she understood that soon there would be nothing left to spoil. Her great-uncle’s picture, which ought to have changed out of sympathetic magic, remained faithful. She regretted everything now, even the three anxious little girls in blue linen. Every calamitous season between then and now seemed to descend directly from Georgina Blackley’s having said “white” just to keep three children in their place. Clad in buttoned-up gray, the middle sister now picked at corned beef and said she had hated her father, her mother, her sisters, and most of all the Dutch governess.
“Where is she now?” said Netta.
“Dead, I hope.” This was from someone who had visited camps. Netta sat listening, her cheek on her hand. Death made death casuaclass="underline" she had always known. Neither the vanquished in their flight nor the victors returning to pick over rubble seemed half so vindictive as a tragic girl who had disliked her governess.
Dr. Blackley came back looking positively cheerful. In those days men still liked soldiering. It made them feel young, if they needed to feel it, and it got them away from home. War made the break few men could make on their own. The doctor looked years younger, too, and very fit. His wife was not with him. She had survived everything, and the hardships she had undergone had completely restored her to health — which had made it easy for her husband to leave her. Actually, he had never gone back, except to wind up the matter.
“There are things about Georgina I respect and admire,” he said, as husbands will say from a distance. His war had been in Malta. He had come here, as soon as he could, to the shelled, gnawed, tarnished coast (as if he had not seen enough at Malta) to ask Netta to divorce Jack and to marry him, or live with him — anything she wanted, on any terms.
But she wanted nothing — at least, not from him.
“Well, one can’t defeat a memory,” he said. “I always thought it was mostly su-hex between the two of you.”
“So it was,” said Netta. “So far as I remember.”
“Everyone noticed. You would vanish at odd hours. Dishuppear.”
“Yes, we did.”
“You can’t live on memories,” he objected. “Though I respect you for being faithful, of course.”
“What you are talking about is something of which one has no specific memory,” said Netta. “Only of seasons. Places. Rooms. It is as abstract to remember as to read about. That is why it is boring in talk except as a joke, and boring in books except for poetry.”
“You never read poetry.”
“I do now.”
“I guessed that,” he said.
“That lack of memory is why people are unfaithful, as it is so curiously called. When I see closed shutters I know there are lovers behind them. That is how the memory works. The rest is just convention and small talk.”
“Why lovers? Why not someone sleeping off the wine he had for lunch?”
“No. Lovers.”
“A middle-aged man cutting his toenails in the bathtub,” he said with unexpected feeling. “Wearing bifocal lenses so that he can see his own feet.”
“No, lovers. Always.”
He said, “Have you missed him?”
“Missed who?”
“Who the bloody hell are we talking about?”
“The Italian commander billeted here. He was not a guest. He was here by force. I was not breaking a rule. Without him I’d have perished in every way. He may be home with his wife now. Or in that fortress near Turin where he sent other men. Or dead.” She looked at the doctor and said, “Well, what would you like me to do? Sit here and cry?”
“I can’t imagine you with a brute.”
“I never said that.”
“Do you miss him still?”
“The absence of Jack was like a cancer which I am sure has taken root, and of which I am bound to die,” said Netta.
“You’ll bu-hury us all,” he said, as doctors tell the condemned.
“I haven’t said I won’t.” She rose suddenly and straightened her skirt, as she used to do when hotel guests became pally. “Conversation over,” it meant.
“Don’t be too hard on Jack,” he said,
“I am hard on myself,” she replied.
After he had gone he sent her a parcel of books, printed on grayish paper, in warped wartime covers. All of the titles were, to Netta, unknown. There was Fireman Flower and The Horse’s Mouth and Four Quartets and The Stuff to Give the Troops and Better Than a Kick in the Pants and Put Out More Flags. A note added that the next package would contain Henry Green and Dylan Thomas. She guessed he would not want to be thanked, but she did so anyway. At the end of her letter was “Please remember, if you mind too much, that I said no to you once before.” Leaning on the bar, exactly as Jack used to, with a glass of the middle sister’s drink at hand, she opened Better Than a Kick in the Pants and read, “… two Fascists came in, one of them tall and thin and tough looking; the other smaller, with only one arm and an empty sleeve pinned up to his shoulder. Both of them were quite young and wore black shirts.”
Oh, thought Netta, I am the only one who knows all this. No one will ever realize how much I know of the truth, the truth, the truth, and she put her head on her hands, her elbows on the scarred bar, and let the first tears of her after-war run down her wrists.