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Updated: May 11, 2025
How proud your dear father would have been!" He fidgeted with the papers on his table, rearranging, re-sorting, desperately trying not to suffer. But he would have torn the whole place down in ruins to have remembered that he had given her one day of happiness. Well, there had been that one day on Francey's hill the picnic. She had liked that.
The others Howard and Gertie and even Connie now went in and out, risking ruthless ejection if she were hard pressed, to sit in the best chairs, with their feet in the fender and drink coffee and smoke endlessly whilst they poured their good-natured cynicism over life. If they were hungry they rifled Francey's larder, and if they were hard up they borrowed her money.
There were relics from Francey's old home, trophies from her Italian wanderings, books that his hands itched just to touch, and things of strange troubling beauty. A bronze statue of a naked faun stood in the corner where the light fell upon it, and seemed to gather into itself everything that he feared a joyous dancing to some far-off music.
The wood at the bottom, like a silent, deep, green pool and Francey's arms about his shoulders, Francey's mouth on his, giving him kiss for kiss. Ghosts everywhere and no living soul who cared now whether he failed or won through, whether he suffered or was satisfied.
The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof. And now Robert saw Francey's face. It was white and pinched and unfamiliar, as though all her humour and whimsical laughter and loving-kindness had been twisted awry in a bitter fight with pain.
Since it was everything that picnic parties demanded in the way of a hill, it was only reasonable to accept Francey's theory that it was not really there at all or at most only there for her particular convenience. They spread their table-cloth on its slope and under the dappled shadows of the half-fledged trees, with Christine presiding on the high ground.
"I'll make a poem of that one day, when I'm awfully drunk, and don't know what I'm doing." But Robert sat up sharply, frowning at her, white, almost accusing. "When did you live in Italy, Francey?" "Last year all last year." "You mean you chucked your work everything just to play round ?" Howard yawned prodigiously. "You don't get our Francey's point of view, Stonehouse. You don't understand."
She corrected herself severely, and held the door wide open. "Dr. Stonehouse to be sure. Francey's upstairs." She led the way. It was almost as though she had been expecting him. At any rate, she was not surprised at all. But half-way up the stairs she glanced back over her shoulder. "I don't usually open the door. I'm her secretary. And a damn good one too. Rather a jest, eh, what?"
From where he waited for Francey's order on the threshold of the pantry Robert could see and hear them. It was really the old days over again. Fundamentally things outside himself did not change much. The Brothers Banditti had grown up. They were not nice children any more.
He rubs his beastly old thumb over my rottenest charcoal sketch, and it's a masterpiece." Robert, lying outstretched at Francey's feet, wondered at them at their talk of genius in connection with a revue star and a smudgy, underpaid studio hack, more still at their reverence for a God in Whom they certainly did not believe.
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