The Italian Girl Read Online Free PDF

exclaimed. ‘Why, there’s Flora. How very pretty she is.’
    I could hear Isabel move behind me and in a moment her sleeve was touching mine. We both watched the child as she strolled, head thrown back, as if she were aware of nothing but the brilliant trees and the bright light blue summer air.
    ‘Alice in Wonderland! She must be a joy to you, Isabel.’
    ‘Yes and no.’ She added half under her breath, ‘I wish I had other children.’
    Flora disappeared among the trees. I sighed.
    ‘Still all alone, Edmund?’
    ‘Yes.’ I moved away from her. My exasperated distress had gone, and in feeling sorry for myself I felt more sorry for her.
    ‘How long are you planning to stay with us?’
    ‘Well,’ I said, looking at my watch again, ‘if you’ll excuse me, and if I can get hold of Otto now, I’ll catch the five o’clock train.’
    ‘ What? ’
    Already half-way to the door, I turned to her. Her plump hands were crossed at her throat in an attitude of horror and supplication. ‘No, no, no –’ she said. Then with an air rather of authority than entreaty she stretched out an arm in my direction. She seemed, in her golden fiery shrine, like a little prophetess. ‘You can’t go, Edmund.’
    ‘Well, really I –’
    ‘You must stay. Something will hold you here. You must stay on now and help us. Otto needs you. We all need you. Who else could I have talked to like this? I was so much looking forward to your coming. You are the only person who can heal us.’
    ‘I am no healer,’ I said. I could not add: ‘I cannot heal you. Perhaps no one can.’
    ‘Yes, you are. You are many things. You are a good man. You are a sort of doctor. You are the assessor, the judge, the inspector, the liberator. You will clear us all up. You will set us in order. You will set us free.’
    I was thoroughly alarmed by this speech. My intense desire was to return to my own simple unencumbered place. I did not want to dally in the mess of Isabel’s world, let alone to be assigned a role in it. I said firmly, ‘I’m sorry, Isabel. I don’t exactly have to go, but I intend to go. I couldn’t do anything for you and Otto. Now please forgive me and excuse me.’
    The tense prophetic little figure drooped, and she shambled back to the fire, knocking over a small table. One of the fluffy slippers had come off. She poured out some more whisky and said without looking at me, ‘Perhaps you’re right, Edmund. You’d better get back to your good life. I shouldn’t have bothered you like this. It’s just that I’m caged, bored. I want emotion and pistol shots.’
    Emotion and pistol shots: Lydia had wanted these things too. They were just what I feared and hated. I fled from the room.

4. Otto and Innocence
    ‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was a huge tiger in the house. It kept prowling from room to room and I kept trying to get to the telephone to ring for help. Then when I did get to the phone I found I couldn’t dial properly because the dial was all made of marzipan. And then this tiger –’
    ‘Do you mind,’ I said. ‘I do want to catch the train. And there are still various things to be settled.’
    We were in the workshop and Otto was eating his lunch. The workshop, with large pieces of worked and unworked stone rising and receding about the central space, had a megalithic solemnity, like a meeting-place of Druids. The stone seemed to give back a peculiar marmoreal quality of sound, melancholy and a little hollow, and to exude coldness. Otto now mainly produced gravestones and memorials. Sober plain surfaces of slate or marble recorded here and there in confident impeccable Blado or Baskerville the names of the deceased who could have no fears for their identity with their arrival in another world announced in lettering by Otto. A bright clear light from above showed the irregular whitewashed walls, now gauzy with innumerable cobwebs. A beautifully executed memorial tablet of dark green Cornish slate