by Allan Massie
“Childish,” Kate said. “Adolescent.”
“You’re so good for me. I wouldn’t take that from anyone else. I didn’t take it from Stephen.”
“I suppose you hit him.”
“What else was there to do?”
“I can think of a few things. It’s not good, Mike, time you quit …”
“I know that. Don’t think I don’t know that. I’ve heard time called. ‘Last orders, gentlemen, please’ … Can we go to a movie?”
Kate paid the bill.
“Sometimes,” Mike said, “I think I’m fucked. Stephen’s fucked too. That little bitch Erik … God’s jokes, that’s what we are, and AA asks us to put our trust in him.”
“Sometimes it works,” Kate said. “For some people it works. For some it works all the time.”
She crossed her fingers.
V
The telephone woke Belinda from a dream of her long-cold father … They were in the November library of a dusty country house; rain smearing the windows. He had a tartan rug over his knees. He reached out for a packet of Goldflake and lit one, coughing. “I’m a done man, Bel,” he said, “done up, down and out. That’s our secret. Tell nobody because the news will reach your mother if you do. I’ll deny her that … satisfaction.” He took her hand. His felt like dry bones covered with tissue paper.
She let the telephone ring. Fifteen times. Then it stopped. But it had killed sleep. She shook the dream off her. Benito stirred, extending claws. They dug but gently into the soft flesh of her upper arm. Strange dream, her poor father. She had been twelve when he died, not of cancer as the dream would have it. He had cut his throat in a Paris hotel, hard by the Gare du Nord. It was unnecessary. The case which so unnerved him had already collapsed.
Tea, she thought, pulling on a dressing-gown. Her legs, now reflected in the glass, were still good, better indeed than in her twenties. She looked at the reams of fax, and looked away; warmed the pot, a spoonful of Lapsang, kettle, let the tea rest three minutes; half-filled a Rockingham china cup. The tea was pale, straw-coloured, the scent finer than the taste. But she held the first mouthful a long time and allowed the lingering taste to remove the sourness of sleep and dream.
The telephone rang again. This time she answered. It was Erik.
“Stephen’s not with you, is he?”
“No. Should he be?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t home last night, so I guess I hoped he was still with you. It’s not good. Can I come up and see you, Bel?”
“Up?”
“Yeah, I’m in the bar below, your bar. Please.”
There was a no in her mind, but …
“Give me ten minutes. I’ve been asleep, must have a shower. So, yes, ten minutes, all right?”
She looked a fright, she was sure of that.
Erik? From his first night at the meeting Mike took against him, denied him the right to be there. “Fucking phoney … bumboy …” Mike was drunk when he said that. No reason to suppose it didn’t represent his true feelings, though Belinda had herself told too many lies when drinking and been told too many, countless, in reply, to put any trust in the line “in vino veritas”. Veritas belonged the near side of vino.
She dried herself, removed the shower-cap, sprayed scent, dressed. She heard steps on the stairs, opened the door, offered her cheek, first one, then the other, held Erik just a moment by the shoulders, gave him a hug.
“Oh Belinda, I just can’t think where he might be.”
His voice was creamy, West-coast, a whine never far distant. But, as ever, to look at him was a pleasure, and to know that, no matter what Mike said, he was a disturbed boy. He might also be what Stephen in sad and angry moments said: selfish, shallow, unfaithful. But pretty. Very pretty.
Benito came and rubbed against the boy’s white-jeaned legs, tail erect.
“Would you like some tea …?”
“Oh thank you, that’s exactly what I do need …”
He flashed her that beach-boy smile.
“Was it a good party?” she said.
“Oh I knew he was jealous. I suppose he made a thing of it. But it was no big deal, not really.”
“Stephen made it sound like one.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s what bugs me. It’s like I’m his possession. It’s like we were married.”
“Oh, not as bad as that, surely?” she said.
They took their tea out on to the terrace. Erik leaned against the wall. He had long legs, neat buttocks. His body looked very good to her when he was still. There was something gangling, uncoordinated in his movement, the way he threw out his right foot. She couldn’t believe he had really ever had a serious ambition to be a dancer. He was just wrong for that.
“I’m not even a hundred per cent sure I’m a hundred per cent gay,” he said, and smiled.
“Yes. That upset Stephen. But then is anybody?”
“Anybody what?”
“A hundred per cent anything.”
Belinda had never been to bed with a woman, didn’t like the idea. But what she felt for Kate and had felt for other women friends was more, in some respects and different ways, than she had felt for any of her husbands, or indeed lovers.
“Tell me about the girl.”
“Oh her. She’s nothing. Really, she’s nothing.”
“No?”
“No, honest. I’m really worried about Stephen. He might do anything.”
“Oh I don’t think so. Not anything, not really anything.”
Was she already a little bored? Erik had that effect on her. And yet just looking at him was a pleasure.
He turned now, brushing that floppy lock of hair out of his eyes. The skin of his arms, bronzed against the white T-shirt, was soft, smooth, silky.
“Can we go look for him?” he said. “I can’t do just nothing … I feel I’m like some way responsible.”
“Well perhaps, but it’s time Stephen learned to cope with his emotions.”
“Oh sure, I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Nevertheless she consented. There was no way not to.
“But first ring the apartment. He might be home now, you never know.”
Erik dabbed out the number on his mobile.
“No answer. And no message. Just the standard no one to take your call.”
“Well, you leave a message. Say you’re with me and we’re anxious. Let him know he’s wanted.”
“I guess he doesn’t want to see me right now. He thinks I’ve behaved like a shit. But he doesn’t own me. There are days I wish we’d never met.”
“Very probably,” she said and picked up her bag.
VI
Tom Durward brushed past back-packers in shorts as he emerged from the American Express offices in Piazza di Spagna. It was late afternoon. A little breeze had sprung up. There used to be, he had read, a breeze like this one that came at twilight into the city from the campagna carrying intimations of mortality – fanciful stuff? That was when the campagna was malarial, before it was drained. Was it Henry James who had remarked that breeze? Might be, sounded like him.
He turned right and, just before the Steps, paused at the house where, as he read, Il poeta inglese Giovanni Keats, mente meravigliosa quanto precoce, morì in questa casa il 24 febbraio 1821 nel ventiseiesimo anno dell’età sua … in the twenty-sixth year of his life. It was more than twenty-six years since Durward had read a line of Keats, though the “Grecian Urn”, the “Nightingale” and most of “Autumn” were lodged in his mind. Tom Lehrer: when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for years. How many years? Durward had lived, he calculated, almost two and a half times as long as Keats. If Keats had survived to Durward’s present age, he’d have been able to read “In Memoriam” and, Durward thought, also “Maud”.
It was a bad time of day, to be alone in a city … not as bad as in an hour or two when the light began to fade, but bad nevertheless. Had he been foolish to return here, where so much of his past, thought to b
e buried, awaited – or threatened? – resurrection. And to return alone? But he was alone now wherever he was. “A man alone ain’t got no fucking chance” – Harry Morgan’s last thought, Hem’s tribute to the solidarity of the Popular Front and the Republic, no enemies on the Left. Like hell, none. How was it early in the morning in Ketchum, Idaho? How do you like it now, gentlemen? That came a bit close, just a bit close. Sixty-two, wasn’t he? That gave Durward eighteen months. When he was young and writing his first short stories for The London Magazine, Alan Ross had told him to fine himself for any echo of Hemingway. That was after he submitted a story about a Hemingway typecast hero and an Italian boxer. It wasn’t a good story, and Ross had been right to refuse it. A dozen years later he’d sold it as a movie idea and scripted it. John Huston was to make it, then didn’t.
Standing, hat in hand, on the lower steps of the great staircase, as if he was waiting for one of these boys with gold chains round the neck to approach him and with a luscious smile offer to introduce him to his sister – or was that another thought that dated him, belonging to lost time? – he saw Belinda crossing the piazza below him. He was tempted to call out, but didn’t, not only because she was with the young faggy Yank from the meeting, but more because he was so in need of company and ashamed of the need. So he stood and watched as she slipped her right arm round the boy’s slim waist, and he reciprocated with his left round hers and they moved, like a yoked pair, out of sight. Durward’s longing followed them, against the breeze.
When he was young in Rome, he might, at this hour, have mounted the steps and made his way to a bar or pavement café on the Via Veneto where, then in Fellini-time, film people and beautiful people congregated. But it wasn’t, he thought, like that now, and even if it were, he wasn’t now what he had been then. But what was? Giovanni Keats, il poeta inglese … can you quote ten lines from any living poeta inglese? Not bloody likely.
At last, Durward moved, slowly and leaning heavily on his stick, along the Via del Babuino towards the Piazza del Popolo. He found a table outside Rosati’s and ordered a pot of tea. He laid his Maigret on the table. He had read fifty pages earlier in the afternoon and was in no hurry to finish it. It was a late one but good. Maigret had been summoned to the apartment of a successful civil lawyer, near the Elysée Palace, by an anonymous letter which warned him that a murder would be committed there. The idea – the McGuffin – was absurd, its treatment compelling. Durward preferred his Maigret to be in a different, less moneyed, ambience; the canals of the Franco-Belgian border, a poor quarter of Paris or an Atlantic port. Nevertheless this was good. He wanted to postpone coming to the conclusion which, however, he was sure he could guess. Not that it mattered …
“Tom Durward …”
He looked up. At first he couldn’t see who had addressed him, wasn’t sure he was pleased to be recognised, even wondered if he had, not for the first time, imagined the speaking of his name. Then the woman at the table just behind his left ear, whom he could see only out of the corner of his eye, said, “and you don’t remember me.”
He stumbled to his feet and half-turned so that he could look at her properly.
He saw a woman, in or around her thirties, with café-au-lait skin, a nose that widened at the nostrils and was slightly tilted, and the sort of mouth often called generous. Her hair was piled high and she wore a dark cashmere jersey. He didn’t think he had ever seen her before, and he didn’t think she was the sort of woman he would forget.
“You really don’t remember me. Well, that’s a blow to my ego. Fortunately it’s a substantial one, if buffeted.”
“I’m sorry. You must think me stupid. And rude.”
“You used to have much better manners,” she quoted, “even when you were plastered. And you were, mostly.”
She laughed and picked up what looked like a negroni.
“This is embarrassing,” he said. He sat down on the vacant chair at her table. Seeing him do so, the waiter transferred his tea and his book.
“Embarrassing for you? What do you think it is for me?” She laughed again. “You bought me my first Martini.”
“I did?”
“You did. In the Ritz it was.”
That couldn’t be right. He had always drunk gin rickeys in the Ritz, as far as he remembered.
“The Ritz in Paris.”
“Oh, the Ritz in Paris. That must have been … your first Martini?”
“It’s too late for chivalry,” she said. “More years ago than I care to think. 1975 to be exact.”
1975? It was a year, one of a few around then, of which he recalled precisely nothing. He looked at her again. 1975? He must have been cradle-snatching.
“Did we …?”
“We certainly did.”
The smile she gave made her more certainly than ever underage in 1975.
“This is awful. You said I was plastered mostly. I have to tell you that period of my life’s a blank. Total amnesia.”
“You were in a bad way, sure. Your nephew – Jamie? – had been drowned. You blamed yourself.”
She must be real, unless she was a waking nightmare.
“I never knew,” she said, “when you were making sense or not.”
“This is awful,” he said, again. “Least I can do is buy you a drink. Negroni is it? Looks like a negroni?”
“Negroni,” she said.
He gave the order to the waiter.
“You’re not drinking yourself?”
“I almost could. But no, I’ve retired. Been off it for years, seven actually.”
“AA?”
“AA. How could you tell? What do you know about AA?”
“Seven years,” she said. “People in AA always count, don’t they? I’ve a husband. Not that he’s ever lasted seven years. Seven weeks is a triumph. I’ve been to a few Al-Anon meetings myself. They’re not my thing either, but I’ve a lot of respect. You must be secure, buying me a drink.”
“Secure? I don’t know as anybody’s secure. What’s your name?”
“Will that help you remember?”
“Doubt it,” he said. “If I’ve forgotten someone who looks like you … I just want a handle.”
“I looked better then, in 1975,” she said. “I guess we all did. It’s Meg Baillie now, but that’s not going to mean anything to you. I’ve been other things and Baillie only for five years, long years I have to say. But I used to be Meg Franklin.”
“Franklin? You’re Eddie’s baby sister?”
“I should be offended you remember Eddie and not me …”
“But I knew Eddie long before I fell apart. He used to talk about you.”
“He talked about his baby sister? Come on.”
“But he did.”
Tom looked across the piazza. It was rush hour now. Cars jostled each other, horns blew, scooters nipped here and there. At the edge of the pavement, just in front of the tables, two scooters were parked. Boys and girls embraced. The girls who had been riding behind their boyfriends mounted one scooter and rode off, and the boys, calling after them, then clapped each other on the back and exchanged a comrade’s punch to the chest. They got on the other scooter and zoomed away, bare-headed in defiance of the law. Durward, conscious of them, also saw a slim coffee-coloured boy naked but for a loincloth running through the surf of a Caribbean beach in a bad movie he himself had written …
“Eddie,” he said, “I haven’t seen him in years. There was a long time I saw nobody. But I think of him quite often.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “so do I, often.”
She looked away, across the piazza, to the pine trees on the hill beyond.
“You’re waiting for someone?” he said.
“Tell the truth I was waiting for anybody or nobody. Then I saw you and we got this conversation off on the wrong foot. Eddie’s dead. I hadn’t realised you didn’t know. Though how the hell you couldn’t have …”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. The words were no good. “I live out of things,
see almost nobody, don’t read obituaries …”
“It was front page,” she said, “not just obituaries. He was murdered. I never thought you could have not known. I nearly didn’t speak to you when I recognised you; I nearly got up and walked away. If I’d known you didn’t know, I would have.”
The dance was out of her eyes. Tom Durward dug the nails of his thumbs hard into his forefingers.
“You’d better tell me everything.”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s an old story, a nasty old story.”
VII
“It’s no good,” Erik said. “He might be anywhere.”
She understood. It had been impossible for him to return to Stephen’s apartment and wait, and impossible for him to be by himself. But the futility of their quest was unimportant. He would be able to say, later: “I hunted everywhere for you, really everywhere. So did Belinda. We were so worried, so fucking worried.”
“Is there anyone he might have gone to see, called on?”
“Oh I don’t know. I just don’t know. It’s hopeless.”
They had arrived back in the Via Condotti without her being aware of where they were going. She said, “We need a break. I know what you need. Poached eggs and strong Indian tea in Babington’s.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Oh but you should. Actually it’s the sort of place that should be Stephen’s. It’s like a tea-room in an English cathedral city in a Hugh Walpole novel.”
“I’ve never read him. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of him.”