The Dividing Stream by Francis King

Author:Francis King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781447258438
Publisher: Pan MacMillan (Bello)
Published: 2013-12-04T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

IN appearance there was little impressive about Lady Newton. She was slight, with small, sharp features, and she wore her grey hair still shingled in a manner reminiscent of the years during which she had been Mayoress of a town in the Potteries. Her hands with their innumerable callouses and far from clean nails were those of a gardener’s boy. Whatever the season she always wore the same tweed skirts, usually with at least one press-stud unfastened at the side, flat-heeled strap shoes and grey blouses knitted so unevenly that at a first glance one assumed the moth had helped with the pattern. It was usual for those who did not know her to mistake her for a governess or lady-companion.

Yet this was a woman whom English and American visitors to the city invariably wished to meet. It would be hard to say why. Except to a few chosen friends like Maisie Brandon she behaved with a gross, and sometimes even a foul-mouthed, incivility; in summer her dilapidated villa smelled and in winter the damp streamed down its walls; once a brilliant conversationalist, she now preferred to talk only about dogs, gardens and the postage-stamps whose collection had become a mania of her life. Yet still she was visited. True, she was said to be a wealthy woman, and the reputation of her dead husband’s fortune, long since squandered on gaming, litigation, and that most lost of all Italian lost causes, the prevention of cruelty to animals, still somehow persisted. Such reputations always die hard.

For example, the young man from Cambridge who was to visit her that morning had gleefully informed the friend with whom he was travelling: ‘‘She’s said to be fabulously rich. Her husband left six hundred thousand.’’ He tossed out the remark as he sipped at his coffee, but at heart he was deeply impressed. In his wallet was the letter of introduction which would take him to all this imagined wealth.

He was typical of the many visitors who climbed the steep, dusty path in the heat of the day, and Lady Newton knew how to deal with him. She was shrewd and she guessed at once that here was yet another undergraduate who was using a slim artistic gift to help himself up the Italian social ladder. He explained how his interest in painting had taken him to some of the leading Florentine houses; and he hinted, tactfully, that her introduction would take him to the rest. He wore a bright shirt and linen trousers, and fanned himself with a panama hat with a wide green-and-red band. He talked of the author who had sent him to visit her, without realizing that she had long since taken one of her unaccountable dislikes to the man, and he exclaimed extravagantly on the beauties of a garden which she knew to be out of hand and pictures which she knew to be negligible.

He was only nineteen and it was therefore perhaps unkind of her suddenly to cut him short:

‘‘But I mustn’t keep you any longer, Mr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.