It happened at last that Alec had to be taken to the Rivabella hospital, where the local poor went when it was not feasible to let them die at home. Eric Wilkinson, new family friend, drove his car as far as it could go along a winding track, after which they placed Alec on a stretcher; and Wilkinson, Mr. Cranefield, Will, and the doctor carried him the rest of the way. A soft April rain was falling, from which they protected Alec as they could. In the rain the doctor wept unnoticed. The others were silent and absorbed. The hospital stood near the graveyard — shamefully near, Wilkinson finally remarked, to Mr. Cranefield. Will could see the cemetery from his father’s new window, though to do so he had to lean out, as he’d imagined passengers doing and having their heads cut off in the train game long ago. A concession was made to Alec’s status as owner of a large villa, and he was given a private room. It was not a real sickroom but the place where the staff went to eat and drink when they took time off. They cleared away the plates and empty wine bottles and swept up most of the crumbs and wheeled a bed in.
The building was small for a hospital, large for a house. It had been the winter home of a Moscow family, none of whom had come back after 1917. Alec lay flat and still. Under a drift of soot on the ceiling he could make out a wreath of nasturtiums and a bluebird with a ribbon in its beak.
At the window, Will said to Mr. Cranefield, “We can see Lou Mas from here, and even your peacocks.”
Mr. Cranefield fretted, “They shouldn’t be in the rain.”
Alec’s neighbors came to visit. Mrs. Massie, not caring who heard her (one of the children did), said to someone she met on the hospital staircase, “Alec is a gentleman and always will be, but Barbara … Barbara.” She took a rise of the curved marble stairs at a time. “If the boys were girls they’d be sluts. As it is, they are ruffians. Their old cook saw one of them stoning a cat to death. And now there is Wilkinson. Wilkinson.” She moved on alone, repeating his name.
Everyone was saying “Wilkinson” now. Along with “Wilkinson” they said “Barbara.” You would think that having been married to one man who was leaving her with nothing, leaving her dependent on family charity, she would have looked around, been more careful, picked a reliable kind of person. “A foreigner, say,” said Major Lamprey’s mother, who had not cared for Malta. Italians love children, even other people’s. She might have chosen — you know — one of the cheerful sort, with a clean shirt and a clean white handkerchief, proprietor of a linen shop. The shop would have kept Barbara out of mischief.
No one could blame Wilkinson, who had his reasons. Also, he had said all those British-sounding lines in films, which in a way made him all right. Barbara had probably said she was Irish once too often. “What can you expect?” said Mrs. Massie. “Think how they were in the war. They keep order when there is someone to bully them. Otherwise …” The worst she had to say about Wilkinson was that he was preparing to flash on as the colonel of a regiment in a film about desert warfare; it had been made in the hilly country up behind Monte Carlo.
“Not a grain of sand up there,” said Major Lamprey. He said he wondered what foreigners thought they meant by “desert.”
“A colonel!” said Mrs. Massie.
“Why not?” said Mr. Cranefield.
“They must think he looks it,” said Major Lamprey. “Gets a fiver a day, I’m told, and an extra fiver when he speaks his line. He says, ‘Don’t underestimate Rommel.’ For a fiver I’d say it,” though he would rather have died.
The conversation veered to Wilkinson’s favor. Wilkinson was merry; told irresistible stories about directors, unmalicious ones about film stars; repeated comic anecdotes concerning underlings who addressed him as “Guv.” “I wonder who they can be?” said Mrs. Massie. “It takes a Wilkinson to find them.” Mr. Cranefield was more indulgent; he had to be. A sardonic turn of mind would have been resented by E. C. Arden’s readers. The blond-headed pair on his desk stood for a world of triumphant love, with which his readers felt easy kinship. The fair couple, though competent in any domain, whether restoring a toppling kingdom or taming a tiger, lived on the same plane as all human creatures except England’s enemies. They raised the level of existence — raised it, and flattened it.
Mr. Cranefield — as is often and incorrectly said of children — lived in a world of his own, too, in which he kept everyone’s identity clear. He did not confuse St. Damian with an Ethiopian, or Wilkinson with Raffles, or Barbara with a slut. This was partly out of the habit of neatness and partly because he could not make up his mind to live openly in the world he wanted, which was a homosexual one. He said about Wilkinson and Barbara and the blazing scandal at Lou Mas, “I am sure there is no harm in it. Barbara has too much to manage alone, and it is probably better for the children to have a man about the place.”
When Wilkinson was not traveling, he stayed at Lou Mas. Until now his base had been a flat he’d shared with a friend who was a lawyer and who was also frequently away. Wilkinson left most of his luggage behind; there was barely enough of his presence to fill a room. For a reason no one understood Barbara had changed everyone’s room around: She and Molly slept where Alec had been, the boys moved to Barbara’s room, and Wilkinson was given Molly’s bed. It seemed a small bed for so tall a man.
Molly had always slept alone, until now. Some nights, when Wilkinson was sleeping in her old room, she would waken just before dawn and find that her mother had disappeared. Her feeling at the sight of the empty bed was one of panic. She would get up, too, and go in to Will and shake him, saying, “She’s disappeared.”
“No, she hasn’t. She’s with Wilkinson.” Nevertheless, he would rise and stumble, still nearly sleeping, down the passage — Alec’s son, descendant of civil servants, off on a mission.
Barbara slept with her back against Wilkinson’s chest. Outside, Mr. Cranefield’s peacocks greeted first light by screaming murder. Years from now, Will would hear the first stirrings of dawn and dream of assassinations. Wilkinson never moved. Had he shown he was awake, he might have felt obliged to say a suitable one-liner — something like “I say, old chap, you are a bit of a trial, you know.”
Will’s mother picked up the nightgown and robe that lay white on the floor, pulled them on, flung her warm hair back, tied her sash — all without haste. In the passage, the door shut on the quiet Wilkinson, she said tenderly, “Were you worried?”
“Molly was.”
Casual with her sons, she was modest before her daughter. Changing to a clean nightdress, she said, “Turn the other way.” Turning, Molly saw her mother, white and gold, in the depths of Alec’s mirror. Barbara had her arms raised, revealing the profile of a breast with at its tip the palest wash of rose, paler than the palest pink flower. (Like a Fragonard, Barbara had been told, like a Boucher — not by Alec.) What Molly felt now was immense relief. It was not the fate of every girl to turn into India rubber. But in no other way did she wish to resemble her mother.
Like the residue left by winter rains, awareness of Barbara and Wilkinson seeped through the house. There was a damp chill about it that crept to the bone. One of the children, Will, perceived it as torment. Because of the mother defiled, the source of all such knowledge became polluted, probably forever. The boys withdrew from Barbara, who had let the weather in. James imagined ways of killing Wilkinson, though he drew the line at killing Barbara. He did not want her dead, but different. The mother he wanted did not stand in public squares pointing crazily up to invisible saints, or begin sleeping in one bed and end up in another.