by Joan Aiken
“Did the headache really last two days?”
“Yes. So I never tried acid again. Once was plenty.”
“And which of them was it that you’d seen the last of, Jas or Jim?”
“I assumed it was Jas.” He sounded surprised, as if the other alternative had never occurred to him. “And in fact I never — never thought of him any more — till you came out with the name on the bridge.”
“Stirring up sunken wrecks that ought to be left alone. Muddy ponds of memory. What about the girl?”
“What girl?” He had rolled over towards me and started on a slow but arousing process of delicate nibbles, touches, and movements, a formula that had proved highly satisfactory in the past and almost certainly would again.
“The girl who took the acid? What became of her? The one who read economics?”
“Oh,” he answered vaguely, “I lost sight of her after that. She was rather a hopeless girl . . . ”
He picked up my hands, which had been resting on his thorax, and studied them. My hands are not beautiful. One of my worse features. Small, thin, worn, roughened and reddened from years of immersion in water, wringing out cloths in hospitals, then dishwashing in Greek restaurants, then scene-painting and hauling on ropes; I have to put a lot of whitener on them for the screen, specially for a part like Rosy.
“Why do you wear that crummy little jet ring?” Ty asked censoriously. “It looks like something picked up at a flea market.”
Almost certainly it had been. Fitz had given it to me for my birthday, ages ago. I always wore it. Ty had never noticed it before.
“I’ll get you a black diamond,” he said. “You can’t go about in that.”
Ty had shown approval of my thorough-going enjoyment of luxury, though I had honestly told him that I didn’t in the least object to privation or discomfort. He said it was good that opposing forces were reconciled in me. That I seemed well balanced. But it did seem to irritate him when he came across traces of my humble past. He wanted them expunged. He expected me to be Rosy through and through.
“Well,” I said, mildly belligerent, “before you I spent most of my life at flea markets.”
“Hush —”
Later on, after our usual highly successful conclusion, as we lay spent and reflective among the grape seeds and splashes of grappa, I announced, still rather combatively, feeling it was time this got said,
“You haven’t asked me about my past life. About my horrible father. Or my mother.”
“I know more than you think.” His tone was indulgent, a little bored.
“What can you mean?”
“It was I who wangled you that part as Rosy. You’d never have got it otherwise.”
“What?”
“When they were casting. I remembered the play that Flanagan directed. I remembered you. So when Randolph wanted someone to play the part of Rosy, I suggested you. I had to throw my weight about quite a bit.” He chuckled. “Grove was horrified. — Of course he changed his mind later, agreed that it had been a really inspired choice.”
I felt as if I had swallowed a frozen cucumber, whole.
“But I hardly spoke two lines in that ghost play — and I looked absolutely different — how —”
“Oh, I know. But I could see what your potential might be, with a bit of grooming and retouching. I must admit, though,” he added generously, “that even my conception fell short of the mark.”
I was speechless with outrage; and just as well, really.
I could have murdered him.
My lovely part, my lovely triumph, and here he was, taking all the credit.
But I’d show him, I’d —
Luckily, just after that point, I toppled into a canyon of sleep.
Next day Ty’s black eye had faded to a delicate, greenish grey, like the outside of a hardboiled egg yolk. Mahjongg and Paradise Lost had long begun to pall, and the foggy rain, the rainy fog, still hung in a mussel-coloured murk through the streets of Venice. So at long last he consented to buy a hat and take the air. He looked terrific in the hat: Goya would have painted him in a grey cloak swirling and two hounds straining at the leash and a range of Castilian mountains in the distance.
We hired a gondola and rode about in the brume, through the quiet canals behind the Zattere, listening to the drip of sweeps and the gondoliers’ doleful cries. “Premi!” and “Stali!” they are supposed to shout, according as to whether they intend to pass on the right or on the left, but in nine cases out of ten it sounds like the first few bars of “Voi che sapete.” Palazzi everywhere were boarded up against possible flooding, boatmen shrouded in oilskins, walkers wore shawls and fur hats.
Ty had the intention of buying me a watch; he thought nothing of the hard-wearing nurse’s watch that I had worn since the age of fifteen. “Good for timing eggs, or taking temperatures, perhaps, but not the kind of thing you can wear now, where anybody might see you,” was his comment.
So we presently uncoiled ourselves from the gondola’s waterproof wrappings, stepped ashore, and went, not to one of the flashy arcade jewellers’ shops near the Rialto or San Marco, but to an almost sinisterly small, exclusive, and remote little establishment in a narrow alley, where we had to be received by appointment, and two doors were unlocked for us by a bowing major-domo who ushered us through to an inner room, curtained and carpeted in grey velvet, with pale grey velvet armchairs and not a jewel to be seen. I never feel comfortable in that kind of boutique; vulgarly commonplace, I fear, in my tastes, I prefer a straightforward emporium, where the goods are laid out on display, and you may wander at will and see what’s to be had without committing yourself.
Right away I felt myself growing prickly and nervous.
However a beautiful whiskery expert, grey-haired to match the carpet, with brilliant black eyes — he looked like a compromise between Albert Einstein and a prawn — was already giving a big hello to Ty, who, it seemed, had made other purchases there.
Who for? I wondered, and fleetingly wished that, previous to me, Ty had conducted a long liaison with some gorgeous Bird of Paradise, had garlanded her with diamonds and scattered rubies under her feet. For I was beginning to feel my position a shade invidious; to sense the existence of a curious vacuum in his past. Just where, with most people, you begin to be aware of layers, geological series, events built into strata in their makeup, giving a sense of solidarity, one incident leading to another, things, people in definite order, with Ty this was not the case. There appeared to be a kind of echo-chamber within him. When you tapped, all you got back was a hollow ring, no feel of solidarity at all.
Where had he been, who had been his friends or lovers for all those years after he left off biting his nails and picking off his scabs, after he inherited his father’s fortune, quit the accounting school, and went into business on his own?
Two or three glittering spindly little baubles were brought out. They were merely samples — this was made clear; I gathered that I was to have a watch built for me, specially adapted to my personality.
The trouble was that I’m not all that keen on gold and diamonds.
I didn’t like any of them. They were all too small, with peevish tiny faces, oblong or heart-shaped; one was digital, others had gems or art-deco hieroglyphics instead of proper numbers. I don’t care for a watch masquerading as a bracelet; I want a watch to tell the time, simply.
“I’m afraid these don’t look right on my wrist,” I said. “I need something plainer.”
“But Signora la Contessa has such beautiful hands,” lamented Einstein Prawn. He must have been pretty desperate to bring out such a whopper. “Eccolo! They set off my gems to perfection.”
“You are behaving like Jane Eyre, insisting on being married in grey bombazine,” said Ty to me coldly.
Aha! So there was one book he had read. Unless of course he saw the movie.
“Wait, wait a little moment — I will show you — wait —”
Signor Seal hastened away to an inner repository from which he came back with a whole tray of watches, each one clasped around the wrist of a grey velvet hand.
The effect was highly surreal — not to say macabre — a forest of grey jewelled hands all reaching up, Dali’s comment on Buchenwald perhaps.
“Oh, how extraordinary!” I was fascinated. “Aren’t they exactly like enormous grey crocuses.”
I longed for Joel to see them, to take a picture of them, or a pair of my friends, Mad and Dom, who put together very original TV plays and would, I felt sure, be able to use those hands for a launching point into some complex, bizarre, dramatic, and significant tangle.
I was turning to James, trying to express a little of this, to assure him that if I lacked subtlety in my taste for watches, at least I could appreciate the unexpected existential experiences he was able to offer so lavishly — but I stopped in dismay, for his complexion had gone as grey as the velvet hands, he looked mortally ill, with a sick, disgusted expression, as if his thoughts were too awful to be borne; he shivered, kept swallowing, and had come out in a fine pearly sweat.
“Fames! What is it? Do you feel bad?”
“Mal di stomacho? Il Conte soffre di influenza, raffredore, forse,” sadly suggested Signor Seal. “The signor should at once lie down, take a little brandy — at this season, in Venice, such afflictions are common. Le posse offrire qualcosa? No?”
Speechless, James shook his head, and we left in haste amid copious regrets and profuse thanks and numerous polite promises to return very soon, tomorrow maybe, certainly within the week.
By good luck it was not more than a ten-minute walk back to our hotel, but I seriously wondered if James would be able to make it, for he looked so deathly. If only there were sedan chairs in Venice nowadays! However he curtly threw off my suggestions of calling for help, and presently we were back in our luxurious rooms (which unseen hands had tidied and made presentable during our absence) and I was able to administer a slug of brandy and request the chambermaid to produce a hot water bottle (la borsa d’acqua calda) which to my amazement she did, quite speedily. James seemed chilled to the bone and lay retching miserably and shivering; then, after the rigor passed off, he began to complain of an unbearable headache.
“Have an aspirin? Codeine? Paracetamol?”
“No. It’s one of my migraines,” he muttered. “It’ll last at least twenty-four hours — there’s nothing to be done about it.”
I was appalled. “But that’s dreadful! Can’t I get a doctor?”
“No, no, he’d be no help at all. You’ll find some pills in my sponge-bag — feverfew — they are the only thing that works and they don’t help much.”
He swallowed a handful, curled into a foetal position, and clamped his eyes shut. His forehead was corrugated with pain.
I felt hideously helpless and inadequate. Had it been my obstinacy, my difficult and thankless behaviour over his proffered gift that had brought on this sudden seizure? Up to that moment he had seemed perfectly normal.
Were these migraines of frequent occurrence in his life?
“Can’t I massage your scalp? I’m quite good at that. Or make you a tisane?”
“Just leave me alone,” he snarled. “Will you? I have to sleep it off. Can you dim the light? It hurts my eyes. And make sure no one disturbs me.”
Since I saw no value in sitting for an incalculable number of hours in a darkened hotel room I tiptoed out, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside, and impressed forcibly on the desk that no calls, none, were to be put through to Signor il Conte; messages were to be taken and given to me; he was on no account to be woken.
“Il sento poco bene.”
“Ah! Il povero—”
They were full of sympathy, commiseration, suggestions for doctors, hospitals, masseurs, even acupuncturists, but, politely declining all these offers, I found a Penguin copy of Vanity Fair in the hotel boutique and decided that I might as well eat an early dinner in the dining room.
I was not dressed for dinner, but I didn’t wish to go back and run the risk of disturbing James if, by chance, he had managed to escape from his pain in sleep. In order to shop for wristwatches I had put on a charcoal grey wool dress, short sleeved and cowl necked; let the Marchesas and Principessas look down their noses at it if they must. To me it seemed suitable enough for a solitary dinner. In fact, at such an early hour, very few other people were in the dining room.
I had rather expected a diminution in the attention of the headwaiter when I appeared solo without Il Milord Inglese, but my Rosy persona was still earning dividends, it seemed, and he escorted me to a perfectly respectable table and solicitously tendered a two-foot menu and wine list to match. It occurred to me, as I threaded my way through their complexities, that this was the first time since marrying Ty that I had reverted to the status of solitary female fending for herself; it had been amazingly restful to sink into the role of Little Woman and let Ty take care of the ordering, which he did with maximum efficiency; his appearance and manner brought waiters, porters, taxi drivers and gondolieri flocking like pigeons to corn; but, I wondered for the first time, did I really want this kind of attention for the rest of my life? Just at present, yes; luxury made, there was no denying, a wonderful holiday. Just at present; but in perpetuity?
I hadn’t settled the argument, was still meditatively sipping my Orvieto and nibbling my saltimbocca when the receptionist came threading his way between the tables.
“A telephone call from England for Signor il Conte; will Signora la Contessa take it here?”
I said I would, and the phone was brought to my table.
The caller turned out to be Ponsonby, Ty’s man of business. When I explained that Ty was afflicted with a bad migraine and at present quite unable to come to the telephone, he expressed deep sympathy.
“Poor old Ty; I know those turns of his. I know: all he can do is sleep it off. What rotten bad luck. Wonder what brought it on.” Tactfully, he did not pursue that thread, for surely, on a man’s honeymoon, he should not be laid low with a psychosomatic complaint, but went on, “I have a piece of news, though, which, if he’s at all in a state to hear it, may be able to cheer him up. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Oh, what is it? Can you tell me? Can I tell him?”
“Certainly; but don’t breathe a word about it anywhere else; it is still under wraps, absolutely between ourselves. So you will maintain total discretion, won’t you?”
“Of course.” I didn’t trouble to add that, in any case, I had no acquaintance in Venice, no confidante to whom I could betray Ty’s secret; I simply said, “I won’t breathe a word to a soul.”
“Well: I had a whisper along the pipeline that Ty has been shortlisted for the Companions of Roland. Which, in fact, is tantamount to saying that he’ll be elected; 99 per cent of the preliminary checking must have been done already.”
“Companions of — ?”
“Roland.”
“I’m sorry: you’ll think me terribly ignorant but I’ve never heard of them.”
“You’re not unique — many people haven’t.” He sounded indulgent. “It’s a European organization — keeps a very low profile. But I know that being invited to join has been Ty’s secret ambition for years; I believe he’d rather that than win the Nobel Peace Prize.”
“My goodness! Well, that’s wonderful. What a splendid piece of news. I’ll tell him the very minute he wakes up. — You say he’s been shortlisted. When will he be let know for certain?”
“Next month, they hold the annual elections. He knows all that. Give him my very best congratulations.”
“You’re quite sure they won’t be premature?”
&
nbsp; “Oh no. I can’t think of anything that could cause a hitch in the proceedings at this stage. It’s just formalities from here on.”
Armed with this piece of information I finished my dinner and tiptoed back to our suite, where I found Ty in a state of half-sleep, half-wake, miserably shifting from side to side and grunting with agony at each movement.
“James? Can you hear me?”
“Umh? What’s that?” he muttered irritably.
He seemed conscious enough to take in the information, so I related it, slowly and carefully, adding Ponsonby’s message of congratulation. A silence followed my announcement; I wondered if he had taken in what I said.
Presently he mumbled, “What was that? Did you tell me something, or did I imagine it?”
I repeated the message word for word, adding, “I’m terribly glad for you, love. Ponsonby said you’d be pleased about it.”
“Of course I’m pleased. What do you think? Can you get me a glass of water and some more of those feverfew pills.”
His voice sounded firmer, and when he had swallowed the pills I suggested a cup of tea. After considering for a moment he agreed, and when it had been brought and he had drunk it, a more normal tinge of colour returned to his face. He was able to lean back on heaped pillows; the crease of pain in his forehead gradually cleared and his hands relaxed. He looked less deathly.
I said with caution, “Tell me about these Companions of Roland? What in the world are they? I never heard of them.”
“It’s a European organization. Goes a long way back — to Byzantium. Connected with the Crusades originally, I believe.”
“Like Knights of St John?”
He nodded and winced. “It’s a kind of high-class Rotary now.”
He spoke lightly, but this was to conceal, I could see, his enormous pleasure. He was deeply, deeply impressed by the news I had brought; plainly this accolade meant something hugely important to him.