III
In September she slipped back to a life she was sure of. She had taken its color. The sea was greener than anything except Mrs. Unwin’s emerald, bluer than her sapphire, more transparent than blue, white, transparent glass. Wading with a twin at each hand, she saw their six feet underwater like sea creatures. The sun became as white as a stone; something stung in its heat, like fine, hard, invisible rain. War was somewhere, but not in Italy. Besides, something much more important than a war had taken place. It was this: a new English clergyman had arrived. Now that England was at war he did not know if he should stay. He told someone, who told the Unwins, that he would remain as long as he had a flock to protect. The Unwins, who were agnostics, wondered how to address him. His name was Dunn, but that was not the point. He was not the vicar, only a substitute. They had called his predecessor “Ted,” straight out, but they did not propose to call Mr. Dunn “Horace.” They decided to make it “Padre.” “Padre” was not solemn, and marked an ironic distance they meant to keep with the Church; and it was not rude, either.
Carmela understood that the Unwins’ relations with the rest of the foreign colony were endlessly complicated. There were two layers of English, like sea shelves. Near the bottom was a shelf of hotelkeepers, dentists, people who dealt in fruit and in wine — not for amusement but for a living. Nearer the light dwelt the American Marchesa, and people like Miss Barnes and her companion, Miss Lewis. These two lived in mean rooms almost in the attic of a hotel whose owner did not ask them to pay very much, because Miss Barnes was considered someone important — it was her father who had founded village schools and made a present of them to the Italian government. Between the two shelves the Unwins floated, bumping against the one or the other as social currents flung them upward or let them sink. Still lower than any of the English were Russians, Austrians, or Hungarians, rich and poor alike, whose preoccupation was said to be gaining British passports for their children. As passports could be had by marriage — or so the belief ran — the British colony kept a grip on its sons. Mrs. Unwin was heard by Carmela to remark that Hermione had this to be said for her — she was English to the core.
Mrs. Unwin still smiled sometimes, but not as she had in August. She showed a death grin now. When she was excited her skin became a mottled brick-and-white. Carmela had never seen Mrs. Unwin as smiling and as dappled as the afternoon Miss Barnes and Miss Lewis came to tea. Actually, Miss Barnes had called to see about having still more of her late father’s poems printed.
“Carmela! Tea!” cried Mrs. Unwin.
Having been often told not to touch the good china, Carmela brought their tea in pottery mugs, already poured in the kitchen.
“Stupid!” said Mrs. Unwin.
“That is something of an insult,” Miss Lewis remarked.
“Carmela knows I am more bark than bite,” said Mrs. Unwin, with another of her smiles — a twitchy grimace.
But Miss Lewis went on, “You have been down here long enough to know the things one can and can’t say to them.”
Mrs. Unwin’s face, no longer mottled, had gone the solid shade the English called Egyptian red. Carmela saw the room through Mrs. Unwin’s eyes: it seemed to move and crawl, with its copper bowl, and novels from England, and faded cretonne-covered chairs, and stained wallpaper. All these dead things seemed to be on the move, because of the way Miss Lewis had spoken to Mrs. Unwin. Mrs. Unwin smiled unceasingly, with her upper lip drawn back.
Miss Barnes, in a wheelchair because she had sprained a knee, reached across and patted her companion’s hand. “Charlotte is ever so bolshie,” she remarked, taking on a voice and an accent that were obviously meant to make a joke of it. Her eyes went smoothly around the room, but all she chose to see or to speak of was the copper bowl, with dahlias in it this time.
“From the Marchesa. Such a pet. Always popping in with flowers!” Mrs. Unwin cried.
“Frances is a dear,” said Miss Barnes.
“Ask Mr. Unwin to join us, Carmela,” said Mrs. Unwin, trembling a little. After that she referred to the Marchesa as “Frances.”
The pity was that this visit was spoiled by the arrival of the new clergyman. It was his first official parish call. He could not have been less welcome. He was a young man with a complexion as changeable as Mrs. Unwin’s. He settled unshyly into one of the faded armchairs and said he had been busy clearing empty bottles out of the rectory. Not gin bottles, as they would have been in England, but green bottles with a sediment of red wine, like red dust. The whole place was a shambles, he added, though without complaining; no, it was as if this were a joke they were all young enough to share.
In the general shock Miss Barnes took over: Ted — Dr. Edward Stonehouse, rather — had been repatriated at the expense of his flock, with nothing left for doing up the rectory. He had already cost them a sum — the flock had twice sent him on a cure up to the mountains for his asthma. Everyone had loved Ted; no one was likely to care about the asthma or the anything else of those who came after. Miss Barnes made that plain.
“He left a fair library,” said the young man, after a silence. “Though rather dirty.”
“I should never have thought that of Hymns Ancient and Modern” said bolshie Miss Lewis.
“Dusty, I meant,” said the clergyman vaguely. At a signal from Mrs. Unwin, Carmela, whose hands were steady, poured the clergyman’s tea. “The changes I shall make won’t cost any money,” he said, pursuing some thought of his own. He came to and scanned their stunned faces. “Why, I was thinking of the notice outside, ‘Evensong Every Day at Noon.’ ”
“Why change it?” said Miss Barnes in her wheelchair. “I admit it was an innovation of poor old Dr. Stonehouse’s, but we are so used to it now.”
“And was Evensong every day at noon?”
“No,” said Miss Barnes, “because that is an hour when most people are beginning to think about lunch.”
“More bread and butter, Carmela,” said Mrs. Unwin.
Returning, Carmela walked into “The other thing I thought I might … do something about” — as if he were avoiding the word “change” — “is the church clock.”
“The clock was a gift,” said Miss Barnes, losing her firmness, looking to the others for support. “The money was collected. It was inaugurated by the Duke of Connaught.”
“Surely not Connaught,” murmured the clergyman, sounding to Carmela not quarrelsome but pleasantly determined. He might have been teasing them; or else he thought the entire conversation was a tease. Carmela peeped sideways at the strange man who did not realize how very serious they all were.
“My father was present,” said Miss Barnes. “There is a plaque.”
“Yes, I have seen it,” he said. “No mention of Connaught. It may have been an oversight” — finally responding to the blinks and frowns of Miss Barnes’s companion, Miss Lewis. “All I had hoped to alter was … I had thought I might have the time put right.”
“What is wrong with the time?” said Mrs. Unwin, letting Miss Barnes have a rest.
“It is slow.”
“It has always been slow,” said Miss Barnes. “If you will look more carefully than you looked at the plaque, you will see a rectangle of cardboard upon which your predecessor printed in large capital letters the word ‘SLOW’; he placed it beneath the clock. In this way the clock, which has historical associations for some of us — my father was at its inauguration — in this way the works of the clock need not be tampered with.”