The Italian Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

life is a divertissement.’ She moved from the window to the mantelpiece and began to drop dry shaggy bits of wood onto the fire. I backed away, edging my feet along the crowded floor.
    ‘And you –’ said Isabel. ‘Yes, you lead a simple good life. You help people. Oh, I know about it. I wonder if you think it’s easy to be like that?’
    ‘I’m selfish too,’ I said. ‘It just suits me that way. I have unworldly tastes.’ I added, ‘And of course I had such an example before me in my father.’ I was beginning to hate the conversation.
    ‘If only your father hadn’t met Lydia! He ought to have been a monk. But in a way you’re living his life for him.’
    ‘No one could live his life for him. He lived his own life. He was a much much finer person than I could ever be.’ Besides, I added to myself, I met Lydia too and at a rather earlier age. I looked surreptitiously at my watch and wondered if my brother was sober yet.
    ‘Yes, but you’re a free man,’ said Isabel. ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving. God, how I hate engravings! Sorry, Edmund, but there’s something about those black cramped things – it’s a Gothic art, a northern art. And why do engravers always choose such gloomy subjects? Hanged men, wailing women. You can’t be gay in an engraving. No colour. God, how I hate the north!’ She tapped her wedding ring with exasperation on the mantelpiece.
    I knew I was not a free man, but I was certainly not going to discuss this with Isabel. ‘There were plenty of Italian engravers. It wasn’t all invented by Dürer. Mantegna, for instance –’
    ‘Otto’s Gothic, you know,’ said Isabel. ‘He is the north. He’s primitive, gross. Otto’s the sort of man who’ll pee into a washbasin even if there’s a lavatory beside him.’
    I detest coarse talk in women and anyway would have thought it most improper to bandy words about my brother with his wife. I said in a cheerful leave-taking tone, ‘Ah well, Isabel, I think you are exaggerating. Even if you were imprisoned you are much more free now. And you can be free at any time if you choose to be. And now if you don’t mind –’
    ‘Don’t be a fool, Edmund,’ said Isabel. She was pouring more whisky into her glass and I realized with distaste that she was slightly intoxicated. ‘You know as well as I do that one can be imprisoned in one’s mind. Here we’ve all been destroying ourselves and each other to spite Lydia. We’ve become monkey men and spider women. Otto and I are specialized destroyers of each other. Lydia’s departure makes no difference to that.’
    The vehemence of her tone both touched and alarmed me. This was everything that I wanted to get away from. I felt compassion and yet knew that to be really moved by Isabel’s plight would do neither her nor me any good. ‘Try and brace up, Isabel. Let cheerfulness break in occasionally! You can lead a happy, useful, independent life –’
    ‘Do you remember,’ said Isabel, ‘how Saint Teresa describes a vision of a place reserved for her in hell? It’s like a dark cupboard. Well, I live in that dark cupboard all the time. I am separated by my whole being from the good life you speak of The only thing that consoles me now is sleep. Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.’
    She was tapping her wedding ring again, fiercely, her moist lips apart, her eyes wrinkled against the glow of the bright fire. She seemed dishevelled now, the flowery dressing-gown pulled wide at the neck where she kept darting a nervous hand to rub her breast and shoulders.
    In acute distress I turned to the window. Then, out in the garden, slowly crossing the lawn in the bright sunshine, I saw Flora. She had changed into a white summer dress and carried a big sun hat which she swung idly in one hand from a blue ribbon. Her hair was still undone. It was indeed not an engraver’s task. It was a subject for Manet.
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