A bottle and some glasses stood on the large table in the middle of the room. ‘We’ve come up to get warm’, said Amelia. ‘We’re drenched up to our knees’. Guido poured out drinks – it was red wine – and Amelia took a glass over to Rodrigues, who left his recumbent position to sit up. While they were drinking, Amelia said to him, ‘If Guido doesn’t object, I would be glad if, now that you’re up, you would let me have the bed to warm up my legs in. Beds are for women. You come too, Ginia!’ But Ginia did not wish to and said that the wine had warmed her up and sat down on a chair. Then Amelia removed her shoes and her jacket and threw herself under the bed-cover. Rodrigues remained sitting on the edge of the sofa as before.
‘Go on with the conversation’, said Amelia. ‘But this light’s worrying me’. She stretched out her arm up the wall and turned it out. ‘That’s that. Give me a cigarette’.
Ginia sat in the dark, terrified. But she realized that Guido had gone over to the sofa, heard him striking a match and saw the two faces in the flame and the darting shadow. Then darkness again, and for a few seconds no sound of breathing. You could just hear the rain dripping under the windows.
Someone broke the silence for a moment but Ginia who still felt ill at ease, did not catch the words. She noticed that Guido was smoking too and quietly pacing up and down in the dark. She could see the glow of his cigarette and hear his footsteps. She next became aware that Amelia and Rodrigues were having a tiff. It was only when she had gradually got used to the darkness and was beginning to distinguish the table, the shadow of the other people and even a few of the pictures on the wall that she felt less worried. Amelia was talking to Guido about an occasion when she had been ill and had slept on the sofa. ‘But you hadn’t this friend in those days’, she said, ‘eh, what are you doing, stripping?’
It was all so strange to Ginia that she said, ‘It’s like being at the pictures’.
‘Except you don’t have to pay for a ticket’, remarked Rodrigues from his corner.
Guido was still walking up and down and seemed to be everywhere at once; the thin floor vibrated under his boots. They were all talking at once but Ginia suddenly noticed that Amelia was silent, though she saw the cigarette, and that Rodrigues was silent as well. There was only Guido’s voice filling the room, explaining something, she could not make out what, because her ear was against the sofa. A light from the lamps outside came through the windows like a reflection from the rain and she could hear the rain splashing and pouring on to the roofs and guttering. Every time both the rain and the voices ceased, it somehow seemed colder. Then Ginia strained her eyes into the darkness trying to see Amelia’s cigarette.
SIX
Now that it had stopped raining, they said goodbye at the door down in the street. Ginia was still seeing the studio, untidy, dripping with water, in the light of the lamp. Guido had relit it several times, to pour out drinks or to hunt for something and Amelia had shaded her eyes, shouting to him from the sofa to turn it off, and she had noticed too, Rodrigues curled up against the wall at Amelia’s feet, motionless.
‘Haven’t those two got anyone to do the room for them?’ Ginia had enquired on their way back home. Amelia had replied that Guido was too independent to leave the studio key with Rodrigues.
‘Did Guido paint those pictures?’
‘If I was in his shoes, I would be afraid that dago would sell them and sublet the room into the bargain!’
‘Have you ever posed for Guido?’
As they walked along, Amelia told her how she had got to know Rodrigues in earlier days when she was sitting for some artist or other, and Rodrigues had turned up, as he had now, and sat down in the studio as if it were a café.
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