It's Later Than You Think

by MONICA STIRLING

IT WAS almost night when the autocar reached Briancon. Like ink-drops in a bowl of water, darkness spread through the clear mountain air, and the triple fortifications momentarily assumed the color and lexture of silver. Stars appeared in the sky and, as if in answer to their signal, electric lights popped on in one window after another, the scattering of golden squares emphasizing the austerity of ihe little town’s beautiful seventeenlhcentury lines. Inside ihe autocar tourists revived, blinked, yawned, stretched, threw away sandwich wrappings, and plunged distractedly after hats, gloves, guidebooks.

“Six o’clock tomorrow morning and may I remind you that we shall depart with the greatest exactitude?” cried the guide, who knew perfectly well they would do nothing of the sorl but who dearly loved drama. Shuffling themselves into twos and threes all but one of the passengers hurried foodwards. The exception was a thin Londoner in her early thirties who paused for a brief glance at Briancon before pushing her straight fairish hair into her newly acquired beret and smoothing her light blue topcoat, a homemade copy of one of Princess Elizabeth’s. Precipitous mountain roads had given Molly Lloyd a headache, and cheap red wine a touch of indigestion, but she was still upheld by a feeling of adventurousness so authentic that it survived contact with the drab restaurant in which she presently confronted an omelet.

The omelet was congealed, the coffee full of chicory, but neit her fact made any impression on Molly’s palate, which was governed by her imagination. Where she came from it was well known that French food is the best in the world and French love-life the most shocking — and, since she had been abroad only a week, Molly still enjoyed bad omelets as sincerely as good ones and agreed with the fat passenger who had had her behind pinched at the Folies-Bergere by a Swedish tourist that this just went to show the French can’t keep their minds off that sort of thing if you get my meaning dear.

While diligently eating her omelet — “it’s those fines herbes they put in that make all the difference” Molly gazed shyly around the restaurant. The yellow bead curtain separating the main room from the kitchen had been tied back and she could see the proprietor and his family settling down to their own meal. They were not particularly attractive people a fat father and mother and two ordinary-sized girls who would become fat as soon as married — but the hearty, good-natured energy with which they laid siege to the table, tucking napkins under their chins, ladling up richly smelling soup, stretching across each other for immense sticks of bread, and talking all at once with their mouths full, was so homelike that Molly fell twinges of loneliness.

In London her parents would be sitting by the radio listening to the Brains Trust and murmuring “Just fancy! How on earth they think it all up I can’t imagine.” They hadn’t liked the idea of their only child holidaying abroad but, since she was a good girl who didn’t get much fun and had been ever so good about her disappointment, over that boy, they had refrained from asking what was wrong with Brighton and merely begged her to be careful of t he drinking water over there. Caught by remorse, Molly pushed the water carafe away, poured a glass of wine, drank it, and struggled to keep the tears back. As she did so she noticed an oleograph of the Pope on the wall opposite. Ever such a kind face she thought, feeling comforted and smiling at the Pope as il he had done her a good turn.

Thoughts of the Pope had occupied Molly quite often since the moment three months ago when, thumbing through a woman’s magazine in search of what the stars foretold that week, she had had her attention caught by a Holy Year feature topped by a fourteenth-century ury quotation: “All ye from near and far, and ye whom the sea divides from our shores, tear masts from the woods, unfurl your sails and ply your oars so that you may come and touch the Holy Doors at Rome.” The unfacetious exhortation had appealed to Molly ‘s slogan-fed mind and on leaving her office she had stopped by a tourist agency. And now hero she was on the Franco-Itlian frontier, en route for the Holy Doors.

No strange men tried to speak to Molly as she took a digestive stroll, disconsolately keeping her chin up, and the hotel lounge was so quiet and drab that only an obstinate determination to get her Money’s worth out of abroad kept her from going straight to bed. Too shy to switch on the radio, she made do with a handful of tourist handouts and half a dozen worn copies of illustrated papers. Most of the latter contained sensationally captioned photographs of Ingrid Bergman, and as Molly gazed at ihe candid Swedish face a vague but tenacious melancholy crept over her: they ought to leave the poor girl alone, they really ought, after all it isn’t as if she’s the first person in Hollywood to get a divorce, or anywhere else for that matter.

As she plodded up the dim green staircase, which was hung with outsize steel engravings of Napoleon and his army crossing the Alps, a feat that impressed Molly far more now than it had done two days ago, she found herself comparing the busybodies’ attitude toward Miss Bergman with the silent tact displayed by her parents at the time of what they now referred to — when a reference was unavoidable — as Molly’s disappointment.

2

MOLLY’S disappointment had occurred far away and long ago. During the half-forgotten summer before World War II the Lloyds had gone to Brighton for a holiday, during which Molly had become acquainted with an Italian boy, the son of a Milanese hotelkeeper, who was doing a six months’ stint as a waiter in England. So serious and kindly was Ernesto that Mr. Lloy d lost no time in pronouncing him a nice lad with nothing Italian about him, and Mrs. Lloyd barely concealed her eagerness to hear that he and Molly had come to an understanding. At the end of an anxious fortnight a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest provided the shy young couple with a shared joke that led to handholding and, eventually, kisses. Ernesto then returned to Italy to obtain his family ‘s consent to the marriage, and Molly bought a paper booklet entitled “Italian in 3 months.” They had exchanged two letters when war was declared. They did not see each other again, and since Molly was simple, modest, and overconscientions she rapidly gained control of her distress.

Much as the Lloyds deplored girls in uniform — “You never know what it’s going to lead to, look at Mrs. Smith’s Betty, why she hadn’t been in the A.T.S. a week before she forgot herself and now she’s expecting!” — they would have been glad to see Molly prov ided with a fresh occupation to take her mind off that boy. But Molly’s health was not robust enough for the services, so she continued typing thanks for yours of the 1st. inst. in an office that was presently evacuated to a practically manless corner of the Welsh countryside.

During the evenings when she wasn’t fire-watching or attending Red Cross lectures, she knitted socks for seamen, read war and Peace, or listened apprecial ively to the other girls’ stories of husbands and sweethearts overseas, in order to have a man about t he place herself, she kept a picture of Churchill in her room. She was devoted to Churchill, and the feeling that he wouldn’t think it the thing to moon over an enemy alien helped her not to dream of Ernesto. There was a period when Churchill’s iniluence paled beside that of a group of American fliers; but the Americans were soon posted elsew here and anyway they were all engaged to girls who looked like Rita Hayworth.

It was several years now since Molly had consciously given Ernesto more than a passing thought but tonight, as she stood alone in the unfamiliar hotel room and tried to coax a trickle of water out of the rusted hot tap, she began to wonder what her life would hav e been like had she been able to go and live it abroad. A week’s accumulated pictures of abroad fluttered in her imagination: the big white floodlit Arc de Triomphe, little bronze replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the fountains at Versailles, the meringue-like roofs of Sacre-Cceur, the wicked lights of a Paris By Night excursion, long straight poplar-bordered roads, walnut-faced peasants in wooden sabots, wayside sanctuaries, snow-topped mountains, chalets that reminded her of a Swiss money box she’d been given for her tenth birthday. Awfully peculiar living abroad would have been, she thought, jumping as water suddenly spurted from the tap — but the adjective peculiar was soon swallowed up by her recollections less of Ernesto as a person than of the sweetness of shared love, which he had enabled her to guess at. Oh well, she thought, scrubbing her short nails energetically, no use crying over spilled milk, that’s sure and certain.

Maxims were among the pillars of Molly’s life. The darkest hour comes before the dawn, every cloud has a silver lining, things are never as bad as they seem, there’s no place like home: solid and dependable they had helped her through many a nebulous place. But tonight they failed her and when she turned away from the washbasin — over which hung yet another engraving of Napoleon looking vexed — the unfamiliarity of the big, soft, high, foreign, double bed, its brass frame and sateen coverlet so different from the fumed oak and cretonne of her single bed at home, filled her with uneasiness. She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket book, went to the window and pushed the shutters open.

Sleeping in the moonlight Briancon looked even lovelier, and to Molly more exotic, than it had at nightfall and it aroused the simple unacquisitive responsiveness to new sights that made her an admirable tourist. The fact that she thought first: why, those battlements are just like the ones in Gamage’s Christmas Display for the kiddies, secondly: there’s no doubt about it travel does broaden one, did not diminish the authenticity of her instinctive appreciation.

She would have gone to bed cheered if a clock in the square alongside had not struck at that moment. Leaning out to discover where the heavy echoing chimes came from, she noticed a couple meandering along ihe narrow street below. They were young and bareheaded, their arms around each ottier’s waist, and their slow progress — so slow 1 hat they seemed to be floating in the river of moonlight half submerging them — was arrested every now and again by their stopping to kiss. A small tight sob thrust its way into Molly’s throat and on her face was the look of a child whose birthday has been overlooked. She had often seen couples kissing before— under lampposts, in buses and subways and dance halls and air-raid shelters, and even in the office—but the banality of the surroundings had preserved her from being impressed, as she was by this poignant, this exotic, this foreign kiss, with a sense of all that she herself was missing.

Forgetting to close the shutters she stumbled between the cold sheets and gave way to homesickness. She had never before had the sea between her and her parents and, for the first time since early childhood, it struck her that they would, in the nature of things, die before she would. And to what would they leave her? What happened to whitecollar girls? Faces closed in on her, faces she didn’t remember having noticed, unpainted elderly faces of office colleagues w ho lived alone in cheap rooms, cooking on gas rings and filling their scanty leisure with unreal movies, synthetic fiction, complaintdominated gossip. Only when she was half over the brink of hagridden sleep did Molly remember Robert Brown, the widower next door, who had been so sorry she was going away for her holiday. But of course, he had added — and she realized now that his tone was fond —of course at your age it ‘s only natural you should want a little gaiety. Dragging herself from the brink of sleep, Molly folded her hands and remorsefully repeated the prayer she had used since childhood. God bless mother and father and all my friends and relations and make me a good girl for Our Lord’s sake amen.

3

NEXT morning Molly couldn’t understand why she had felt so foolishly depressed. The breakfast coffee was excellent, the croissants crisp, the butter fresh, and as she climbed back into the autocar she realized that neither she nor her parents would ever die and anyway it’s morbid to let one’s mind dwell on such subjects. Presently she began to hum “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” Her neighbor observed that my word someone was feeling good this morning: Molly said thal was right, and they giggled companionably. The ebullient driver began to describe Napoleon in a-chap-I-was-at-school-with tones.

Darkness drained away from the mountains; in its place came first pearly then roseate light. This was the way Napoleon entered Italy, proclaimed the guide, and I he word Italy began to wheel like a swallow in Molly’s imagination. She was so untraveled that she expected the fact of crossing a frontier to transform the landscape as radically as the Fairy Godmother’s wand transformed the pumpkin into Cinderella’s coach. She was still embedded in this state of exaggerated expectation when the autocar’s brakes gave a shrill screech and a grubby carabiniere with a feather in his cap ambled sleepily out of a shabby pink stucco house and began examining passports with the awed carefulness of the nearly illiterate. “Adesso siamo in Italia,” said a passenger who had been to Berlitz School, and romance was restored to the situation.

The mountain slopes on either side the road were exactly like those a hundred yards back, but the facade of ihe pink stucco house was patterned with bullet holes and, although Molly was familiar with London’s bombed debris, she was deeply impressed with these bullet holes which had, for her, the distinction of handmade goods. The beautifully built road continued as before, and as before the driver talked loudly, lovingly, patronizingly, of Napoleon. But, at last, Italian life manifested itself in the shape of roadside hoardings: bright bottles of Cinzano, industrious Singer sewing machines, Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby in Le Campanelle della Santa Maria and, again and again, a boy and girl sheltering beneath one raincoat and the legend “Joy in the Rain.” Sturdy acacia trees had tenderhued convolvulus clambering round their trunks, and at the bottom of a steep slope the autocar screamed to a standstill. Here, said the driver, is a truly impressive monument.

For once, the monument was impressive. A pocket-sized, whitewashed chapel marked the place where the Germans had shot twenty-one Italian and French partisans. Sleepy, awed, and longing for a second breakfast, the foreign tourists gathered round, their heads respectfully bowed — until the proprietor of the inn patronized by the autocar company drew them to him with fumes of caffá espresso. As usual it was Molly, with her eager tourist spirit, who lingered.

Italy was more foreign to her than France and her attention correspondingly more intense. Everything unembarrassing that she saw was going to be mentioned in her letters home, and to her, as to most English people of her kind, the word partisans still meant something infinitely heroic, respectable, and as remote from daily life as the Pope. Newsreels already spotted by time jerked across her mind: Churchill in his siren suit, Roosevelt in his cloak, Stalin receiving the King’s sword, the desert rats and the aerial few, violence become acceptable if not respectable, and the nightmare of Dunkirk’s beaches terminating in the heroism of the Paris barricades. . . .

Lost in the history of which she had unknowingly been a part, Molly came to the curious conclusion: I suppose the partisans were people like us actually. The idea was simple but her imagination reeled beneath the strain of trying to imagine heroic characters, born with machine guns beneath their arms, silting listening to the BBC Brains Trust or deciding that it would be nice to have a pot of tea before going to bed. Shaking her head, Molly stepped forward and began to read the names of the dead partigiani: Gaetano Giuseppe Manfredi, Enrico Angelo Levi, Ernesto Luciano Bcrto. . . .

Ernesto Luciano Berto.

Seated once more in the autocar, Molly found her handkerchief and shed some tears. But they were not very bitter ones. Difficult as her parents would have found it to believe, she had long ago resigned herself to losing that Italian boy, and all this small shock had done was to restore her self-respect. Her tears were tears of unwitting relief: for from being a dull girl jilted by an alien she had been transformd into a hero’s widow and a potential second wife.

Beside the coffee cups, the baskets of oranges and white rolls, that decked the zinc-topped bar of the second stopping place was a case of postcards. Molly chose one at random, addressed it to Mr. Brown, and wrote: “Hoping this finds you as it leaves me. Am having a very nice trip, Paris is ever so nice tho’ I must say they talk so fast it’s difficult to follow! Italy is very nice too in a different way. Singer sowing machines seem very popular. Part of our export drive no doubt! Am very glad I came because there’s no doubt travel does broaden one but you were quite right there’s no place like home.” When the driver began shouting “All aboard” she blushed and added “With love from yours sincerely Molly Lloyd.”

Only when she was in Turin, happily and respectfully buying Holy Year postcards, did Molly remember that Ernesto’s second name was not Luciano but Angelo. Nevertheless she sent Mr. Brown a second postcard. And a third one.