The Dividing Stream

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• Francis King
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chaper Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three
  
• Chapter Twenty-Four
  
• Chapter Twenty-Five
  
• Chapter Twenty-Six
  
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-One
  
• Chapter Thirty-Two
  
• Chapter Thirty-Three
  
• Chapter Thirty-Four
  
• Chapter Thirty-Five
  
• Chapter Thirty-Six
  
• Chapter Thirty-Seven
  

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the
Sunday Telegraph
and he reviewed fiction regularly for the
Spectator
. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for
Act of Darkness
(1983). His penultimate book,
The Nick of Time
, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

TO MINA

T
HERE
were three of them there.

Of the two boys outstretched beside the Arno one from time to time shifted or muttered in his sleep, and the American, who had been perched for many minutes on a slab of stone from the ruins of the Trinità bridge, continued to watch him with a vague curiosity. It was that hour when a sudden relenting in the heat of the day lures the bathers out of the shrunken waters and makes those who sleep on the banks awake and reach for clothes with arms that all at once seem cold, hard and stiff. Although at this season no mist arises from the river and the dusk serves only to sharpen the town’s outlines as it sharpens the afternoon’s once drowsy appetites, yet in a moment the hills appear to be about to dissolve into the receiving sky beyond. The rattle of the trams becomes strangely muted, the balustrades of the Lung’ Arno are dark with leaning crowds.

Suddenly, like an animal roused from sleep, one of the boys jerked upright, looked about him, gazed long and carefully at the watching American, and then once more sank his head back on to the rolled shirt on which it had been pillowed. He lay like that for a long time, his eyes half-closed, while the American, a man of forty-six with red hair
en brosse
and a still youthful physique spoiled only by a slight stoop and over-long arms, opened the case of his camera and began to fiddle with its gadgets. He attached a filter and then a lens-hood; but immediately he unclipped the filter and attached another; twice he changed the aperture. At last he rose to his feet, pointed his camera up towards the Ponte Vecchio and seemed about to take a photograph; but with a shake of the head the camera was once again lowered. One by one the stops were changed, the gadgets were unscrewed and placed in their separate boxes.

Through all this routine he had been watched by the Italian boy; but some children had begun to pick their way over the tufts of bruised and burnt grass, their clothes over their arms or trailing from their hands, and seeing them, the boy turned from the American to let out a piercing whistle. They waved to him and shouted greetings, and one of them, a girl of sixteen whose sturdy legs were caked in mud, picked up a flat stone and threw it to where he lay, so skilfully that it skimmed across his naked body without doing him hurt. The boy shouted something obscene at her and they all laughed; then, still laughing among themselves as they attempted to push each other into the water, they moved on until they, too, were lost in the throng about the bridge.

The American, who was called Max, had by then returned to his seat. He yawned twice and looked at his watch, disappointed that it was less late than he had hoped. He was waiting for his wife’s return, but it was unlikely that she had even left Viareggio yet; she had said that she would be back at eight, but she was always unpunctual, and on the days when they quarrelled unpunctuality became one of the many instruments used for his punishment. She would know that he was waiting for her, eager for forgiveness, and that knowledge would delay her; usually a reckless driver she would now on purpose drive slowly.

The boy had reached for his shorts over the sleeping body of his friend and having searched in both pockets, he produced an inch-long stub of cigarette, stared down at it for a moment as if about to burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of hoarding such a fragment and then, looking about him in a pretence of not knowing that the American was the only person near, at last sauntered over for a light. He was well-built and he walked gracefully, but it was at once apparent from the leftwards sag of his body and a protruding bone that his collar-bone had once been broken and never properly set. When he was thirteen he had fought with an Arab in a street in Tunisia and had been thrown down a flight of stone stairs; but (he would always hasten to add) he had won the fight. Like this: and he would demonstrate how, bull-like, he had butted his opponent with his forehead, shattering nose, teeth and left cheek-bone. He rarely fought with his fists; this was better. And once again he would demonstrate the butt, the tightly drawn muscles of his neck making it seem coarse and ugly.

‘‘
Grazie
.’’ He drew three or four times on the fag-end, holding it between finger and thumb. His short toes, widely spaced from walking so often barefoot, closed and unclosed on a dusty clump of goose-grass as he attempted to wrench it from its roots. ‘‘
Inglese
?’’

‘‘
No. Americano
.’’

‘‘
Ah, Americano
.’’ He stared at Max for a moment and then shook his head. ‘‘Don’t seem it,’’ he said in Italian.

‘‘Don’t I?’’

‘‘You speak Italian well.’’ He perched on the stone beside Max but in such a way that, becoming top-heavy, it at once keeled over. He leapt up and then resettled himself; now his body, naked except for the bleached strip, leant against the other’s. He drew his knees up and hugged them, and a rank, not unpleasurable odour, such as often comes from the fur of cats in the south, filled the American’s nostrils. ‘‘You speak Italian well.’’ He repeated the compliment.

‘‘No. Only a little.’’

‘‘French too?’’

‘‘Yes, I speak French.’’

‘‘
Vous parlez Français
?’’

‘‘
Out, je parle Français
.’’

‘‘
Mot, je parle Français
.’’ He sucked for the last time at the cigarette and then threw it away with an exclamation as the red-hot tip touched his fingers. ‘‘Tunisian,
moi
.’’

‘‘Tunisian?’’

He nodded. ‘‘Three years in Florence: In Tunisia my father had a large house—large, large.’’ He stretched his bare arms to their utmost extent, revealing under each a shadow of the only hair which could be seen on his whole body. ‘‘Pastry-cook. Then the French came back and we all had to leave. I was three days in the boat.… How many days did it take to come from America?’’

‘‘Oh, five or six.’’

The boy looked crest-fallen at the comparison. Until: ‘‘All my family was very sea-sick,’’ he declared. ‘‘There was a terrible storm. Everyone was sea-sick, all over the deck.’’

‘‘Were you sea-sick?’’ Max asked, already knowing the answer.

‘‘Me?’’ The boy pointed at himself in incredulity. ‘‘Me sea-sick?’’ He made a contemptuous-gesture of dismissal. ‘‘I’m never sea-sick.’’ He looked at the case of Max’s camera and pronounced with difficulty: ‘‘Ko-dak.… Is that your name?’’

Max laughed. ‘‘No. That’s the name of the camera. My name is Westfield. Max Westfield.’’

‘‘Westfield.’’ He repeated the name, but on his lips the
w
became a
v
. ‘‘My name is Rodolfo. Rodolfo Binelli. My friend’’—he pointed to the sleeping boy who, having now turned over, lay with his face in the dust—‘‘is Enzo. He’s a Florentine.’’

‘‘I was wondering why he was so restless in his sleep.’’

‘‘He has a bad back, and when he lies down it hurts him. He doesn’t know what’s the matter.’’

‘‘Hasn’t he seen a doctor?’’

‘‘The doctor wanted an X-ray. Three thousand lire.’’

‘‘But there must be free hospitals.’’

Rodolfo shrugged his shoulders; he had begun to fiddle with the catch of the camera case, and now he asked, ‘‘How much did this cost?’’

Max first told him the sum in dollars, but the Tunisian asked for it in lire. Then he whistled. ‘‘Can I see it?’’

‘‘If you take care.’’

As soon as he had grasped the camera, the boy leapt up and sprinted away, his bare feet scattering the dust. ‘‘Hey!’’ Max shouted. ‘‘Hey!’’ He rose and gesticulated vaguely and then decided that if he ever wanted to regain the camera he had better start running. But meanwhile Rodolfo had stopped some fifty yards away, his body arched forward and his hands on his knees; he was laughing uncontrollably. ‘‘Do you want your camera?’’

‘‘Yes, bring it here at once. At once!’’ Max shouted.

‘‘How much will you give me?’’

‘‘Don’t be a fool. Bring it here!’’

‘‘How much?’’ the boy shouted.

‘‘Do you want me to call a policeman?’’

Still laughing the boy began to saunter forward while Max hurried to meet him. ‘‘Thank you.’’ Max snatched the camera.

‘‘Were you frightened?’’ the boy asked. Again he laughed, but seeing Max’s displeasure, he at once attempted to smother the sound by putting a hand over his mouth. A splutter emerged. Max did not answer. ‘‘Did you think I would steal your camera?’’