She stared up, arrested. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, I don’t think she wants to.’

‘Ronald …’

‘I’m awfully sorry.’ But his mother had turned away from him in contempt; her eyes were fixed on the door as though under their long, strange, relentless compulsion it must open again to deliver up Sydney. When he came forward she warded him off with a hand. He did not like to look at her, and did not know where else to look, so he stumbled back on to the balcony where he found, still alight, a cigarette that he had taken out of his mouth an age ago and balanced aslant on the rail. He rolled it round between his fingers, considering it, took two or three puffs and threw it into the darkness, then remained standing still there, waiting to be called back. After waiting for some time his tension began to relax again, but looking round at the sky, the sea, the tops of the trees he still saw everywhere his mother’s head in the circle of light from the reading-lamp printed everywhere on the darkness.

25

Going Away

A ONE-HORSE VEHICLE with a canvas hood called by the English visitors a shandrydan came round about three o’clock to drive Mr Milton and Ronald down to the Genoa train. It appeared about half an hour before it had been ordered, and the limp horse in a bonnet, looking as if it had been propped up on its legs precariously, waited on the gravel, indifferent to the flies, long enough to advertise to the whole Hotel that somebody was going away. Departures at this time of the afternoon were unusual, and people coming downstairs after the siesta and people on their way out to the tennis courts stood about in the doorway (the double doors had been fixed back as for the passage of a grand piano) or gathered round the foot of the steps to smile at the inefficient way in which the concierge, the boots and one of the younger waiters were stacking up the light luggage on the box of the shandrydan. Antonio the boots was very popular; every time he let Milton’s leather hat-box or one of Ronald’s many dispatch-cases glissade past him and bounce on to the gravel there was laughter and a cry of ‘Oh, oh, Antonio!’ And Antonio, knowing this to be part of a very amusing English song, would smile woodenly.