The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [179]
I ran down to the kitchen. Rosina was sitting on the table swinging her legs and being (there is no other word for it) worshipped by Gilbert and Titus. She was wearing a dark grey very fine check, very smart lightweight coat and skirt and a white silk blouse and very long wrinkled white high-heeled boots. Her glossy glowing dark hair had been cut or piled by a clever hairdresser into a rounded segmented composition which looked both complex and casual. (Horace would have liked it.) Her intense animal face was blazing with health and vitality and feral curiosity. She was entirely in control of a situation where the other two, perhaps as a result of prolonged strain, had now broken down into helpless crazy giggling and fou rire. My appearance provoked another outburst of slightly hysterical laughter, and they all spontaneously broke into song again. They sang in round, and showed no sign of stopping, an Italian catch whose words I can remember since Titus and Gilbert had been singing it obsessively in the preceding days. Titus taught it to Gilbert and now Rosina had got it too. It went Eravamo tredici, siamo rimasti dodici, sei facevano rima, e sei facevan’ pima-poma-pima-poma. God knows what it was supposed to be about. Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey. Intoxicated by their own voices they now roared it out, round and round, Gilbert’s fruity baritone, Titus’s pseudo-Neapolitan tenor and Rosina’s strong rather harsh contralto. I shouted ‘Stop! Stop! Stop that bloody row!’ But they went on singing at me, their bright eyes, moist with laughter, fixed upon me, waving their arms in time to the tune; until at last they wearied, stopped, and went off into another crazy laughing fit.
I sat on a chair and watched them.
Coherent at last, Rosina said, wiping her eyes, ‘Charles, you’re so funny, you are an endless source of amusement to your friends. I hear you’ve got your lady-love here, hidden away upstairs! You really are priceless!’
‘Why the hell did you have to tell her?’ I said to Gilbert and Titus.
Gilbert, attempting unsuccessfully to erase the laughter wrinkles from his face, avoided my look. He started rolling and swinging his eyes.
Titus said rather sulkily, ‘You didn’t say not to tell.’ Then he caught Rosina’s eye and beamed.
Gilbert had of course met Rosina before and knew her slightly. He had hitherto regarded her with the prudish hostility which some male homosexuals instinctively feel towards very feminine predatory women (whereas with gentle sweet women such as Lizzie they got on very well). However he seemed now to have suffered an instant conversion. Titus was simply a boy absolutely thrilled to see a famous actress in the flesh and to find that she not only noticed him but appreciated the charms of his youth. They kept eyeing each other, he shyly, she with bold amusement. Titus’s appearance had profited, as Gilbert’s had, from sun and sea. His reddish blond hair had been burnished and enlivened into a halo of fine wire, and his shirt, scarcely buttoned, showed the glowing skin and blazing red curls of his chest. His trousers were rolled up to reveal long elegant bronzed legs. He was barefoot. The scarred lip gave a twisted male force to his pretty mouth. Rosina was at her sleekest, delighted and amused by her exercise of power. As she held court, her piercing cross-eyed glance kept moving encouragingly from one