The Dividing Stream by Francis King Read Free Book Online Page A

fear becoming panic, she hurried out on to the terrace where ‘‘Tiny’’ Maskell greeted her by exclaiming: ‘‘Ah, now the cup is filled to overflowing.’’ To show off his height, he had reached up and swung one of the suspended lamps back and forth, back and forth, with a flick of the hand, so that a white radiance splashed over the frightened, and almost cowering, old woman.
    The same light, thus swaying outwards, illuminated the two figures who were perched far beneath on a balustrade by the Arno. Each of them had devoured a loaf of bread sliced in two and crammed with thick, greasy rounds of Mortadella and now they shared a cigarette, passing it from one to the other in the pauses in their conversation.
    ‘‘Let’s go to the ‘casino’,’’ Rodolfo had just said. He added an obscene allusion to the state of his health. ‘‘Come on!’’
    ‘‘And what do we use for money?’’
    ‘‘Money! You’ve got three thousand lire, haven’t you?’’
    ‘‘That’s for the doctor.’’
    ‘‘Christ! You mean, you really——’’
    ‘‘I promised.’’
    ‘‘Bravo! Bravo!’’ The Tunisian taunted in a soft, singsong voice. Then he noticed the light from the terrace, spurting out over the Arno in a pure milky jet. He looked up: ‘‘ They’re sitting there, I bet. Drinking and smoking cheroots, after their dinner. And what a dinner. They’re lucky,’’ he said. ‘‘ Christ, they’re lucky.’’

Chapter Three
    I T was eleven o’clock, and Enzo’s mother sat out on a straight-backed, wooden chair mending the shirt which Rodolfo had torn. She was alone under the solitary street-lamp which lit the winding, cobbled Borgo, and as she carefully drew the frayed ends of stuff together she was already half asleep. From above she could hear Giorgio, her eldest son, plucking one lazy note after another from his mandoline; he was too careless to do more than vamp out a tune, but when he began to sing in his soft, slightly nasal tenor, she lowered her sewing and listened with pleasure. He was her favourite child.
    ‘‘Going to bed?’’ Giorgio asked his brother. He was sitting at the window, the mandoline in his lap, and as he spoke he began to cough, jerking the phlegm up and up from his aching chest until he could lean over and spit it loudly into the empty street below.
    ‘‘Are you unwell?’’ his mother asked from the darkness.
    ‘‘No, no.’’ One hand, the nails long and carefully polished, idly teased the strings; twice he sang over the same phrase, a commonplace one, as if it gave him an extreme, voluptuous pleasure; now he tried it again with a series of trills and elaborations. He laughed: ‘‘She’s promised to meet me,’’ he said. Then he exclaimed: ‘‘Washing again!’’ as he turned and saw that Enzo was standing naked before a tin basin which rested on a trestle in a corner of the room. ‘‘What do you do it for? You haven’t got a girl. And look how you’re splashing the floor.’’ The cold water, thrown energetically over Enzo’s gleaming shoulders, trickled down his body to his feet where the boards gulped it greedily.
    ‘‘Yes, she’s going to meet me tonight,’’ Giorgio repeated.
    Looking at him, as he sat, fair-headed and sturdy on a wicker couch beside the window, one would not at first imagine that, having been accidentally gassed through his own carelessness during a held-exercise, he was now a chronic invalid. But then, inevitably, his incessant cough and the intense languor of his voice and all his movements would betray his real state of health. He was good-looking and he was aware of his looks; nor was he slow to profit from them, since his pension as a mutilato di guerra , small though it was, excused him from all activity except that of local Don Juan. His vanity caused him to walk through the streets with his shirt unbuttoned to his wide, leather belt; to tend his nails with the care of a woman; even, as he was preparing to do now,