by Allan Massie
She put a glass of aranciata and a glass of mineral water on the table.
“Oh God,” he said, and began to weep.
She stroked his hair.
“It’s all right,” she said, “we’ve all been where you are.”
“Voices,” he said. “I’ve had the voices, saying horrible things.”
“They do,” she said; “that’s what they do, but you know they’re not real. They’re not out there. Other horrors?”
“No, just the voices. Erik’s among them. Horrible, vile.”
She mopped his brow with the clean towel.
“Poor you. You need to sleep.”
“I’m afraid,” he said. “I try to pray, but there are no words.”
“I’m going to give you a couple of Mogadon,” she said. “They’ll let you sleep properly. Don’t worry. I won’t go till you’re sound. And I’ll be back. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”
“Bless you. Why are you so good to me? I don’t deserve it. I don’t really hate Erik, but we’re no good, not for each other, I knew that from the …”
Belinda knew that Stephen kept a set of spare keys in a kitchen drawer. She took them with her. It was only as she descended the stairs that she remembered Erik would have a set of keys himself.
He was sitting at a table outside the bar. He looked up from his book. “OK?”
“Not precisely. Could be worse.”
He stretched out a hand for hers.
“I really couldn’t face it.”
“No,” she said, “I quite see that now.”
XVIII
When Tom Durward came to Rome to write a novel a couple of years after Cambridge, there was a young prostitute he used to see on the Via Veneto. She was a flower in first bloom. It astonished him that she hadn’t been plucked. That was his first, romantic thought; nonsense of course. But she was beautiful, lovely, with red-gold hair cut short and long gorgeous legs. She wore a dull gold dress brief as a legionary’s tunic. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He returned to the street the next afternoon at the same hour. She smiled to him; it was almost, he thought, a shy smile. Her skin glowed. He approached her.
His experience was limited. Certainly he had never paid for sex. He had had a girlfriend at Cambridge from the autumn term of his second year. They went to bed after a first-night party at the ADC theatre. She had played Beatrice in that production, in which Tom had had the very minor role of Borachio. Actually she had had eyes only for Benedick, but, alas, Benedick was in love with Claudio. She was resigned to his unavailability, so took up with Tom. Her inexperience was equal to his. Their first fumblings were uncertain, but in time they arrived at an accommodation. Tom could still feel grateful for the confidence she had given him. She was called Caroline, as so many girls were then. Now he could picture her sturdy hockey-formed legs, but not her face. Her stage career hadn’t – surely? – survived Cambridge, unlike Benedick’s. Benedick indeed was now a knight, Sir Llewellyn Rhys-Davies – how assiduously he had polished his Welsh accent away, just before regional accents became the fashion.
Durward sat drinking coffee on the terrace of the Café de Paris, and looked down the tree-lined street, past the news-stand, to the corner where the girl Elsa had had her stance, with one knee bent and her gold-sandalled foot resting against the wall. They had gone to a dingy hotel in one of the little streets between the Veneto and Trinità dei Monti. It probably didn’t survive now, not as it had been then.
That was a few years before he had a connection with the film industry, which was a pity, because it was naturally the girl’s ambition to get into movies, and naively, touchingly indeed, she had chosen that stance in the hope of being “spotted” by a producer or agent. They had gone together a few times, though Tom couldn’t afford her, just as he couldn’t afford usually to eat and drink at the bars on the Via Veneto, where a chicken sandwich cost more than a dinner with pasta and meat in the sort of trattoria he was accustomed to. But he did so occasionally when he had come to collect mail from Thomas Cook’s, because it seemed the thing to do, just as when visiting London from Cambridge he and his friends would gravitate to the American Bar of the Ritz or Jules in Jermyn Street.
Perhaps because, being young, he made an agreeable change from her usual clients, she even went with him a few times when he wasn’t in funds, not certainly to the hotel, which was after all for her a place of work, but to stroll in the Borghese Gardens. They held hands as if they were real lovers.
He never found her more desirable than when they were walking the dusty paths with their little fingers crooked together. She talked freely, between long happy silences, but his Italian was poor, and in any case she had a strong accent, Roman or of some other region he couldn’t tell, and he understood no more than a third of what she said.
Then one day – and the next and the next – she was gone from the street, and he never saw her again. But for a long time, after calling at Cook’s, he would drink coffee or a whisky at the Café de Paris, and keep his eyes fixed on the spot where she had stood. He would then walk up the hill and into the gardens to a certain fountain, its stone discoloured by weather and old moss, where one day she had perched on the rim allowing him to take photographs. There was one he had kept in his wallet for years. It showed her with her head lowered so that her face was in shadow, and she was looking at him sideways, while the fingers of her right hand rested on the hem of her short skirt, which was rucked up just a little to reveal a long line of lovely thigh.
The photograph had long disappeared, but he didn’t need it really; it was in his mind’s eye. And it was on its account that he now turned up the hill towards the gardens in search of the fountain and his lost youth.
She had had a black eye, discoloured anyway, that day, powdered to conceal the bruise; and that was doubtless why she had held her head at that angle which, even now almost forty years on he recalled with longing, part lust, part regret.
So it was necessary to find the fountain and there recapture also the moment when, descending, she had stumbled, gone over her ankle, and swayed off-balance into his arms. Then she had turned her face to his and let him kiss her, first, tenderly, no more than a brush of the lips, on the bruised eye, and then on her mouth.
What was it they said then? Could he hear its echo now in the gently plashing water? And did it matter?
He stretched out his hands, cupped them, and drank. What had become of her?
The separateness of lives once joined appalled him, like the sun dipping behind a black cloud and leaving him to shiver in the shade of pine trees. That morning he had telephoned Meg Baillie and arranged to meet her at Rosati, and then lunch. Now he wished he hadn’t. If his memories of Elsa belonged to the young, eager and, in some respects at least, admirable Tom Durward, Meg had risen a ghostly figure from years the memory of which filled him with shame. She was, evidently, one of those he had wronged – one of so many, and yet she seemed happy to meet him again. It was after all she who had addressed him the other evening, and he had heard welcome in her telephone voice a couple of hours ago.
“I hear you were a great success last night,” she said.
He bridled, like a schoolboy embarrassed to be singled out for public praise. Yet he couldn’t resist asking who she had heard it from.
“The Marchesa,” she said.
“Marchesa?”
“Belinda, I call her the Marchesa because it puts her at a distance, and she really is a Marchesa as a result of her last marriage. I’m fond of her but a little in awe too, she’s so self-sufficient. Anyway you impressed her. Yes, let’s do, have lunch, I mean …”
The last words came in a rush as if her irony at the expense of Belinda might have caused him to withdraw his invitation.
Things do transpire about people. Who had said that? Good word, transpire, anyway. Someone about Conrad, he thought. Greene? Fitzgerald?
Cigar in the corner of his mouth, and leaning, sometimes heavily, on his stick, Tom limped alon
g the Via del Babuino, past the English church, dating from the days when the area around Piazza di Spagna was known as the ghetto inglese.
She wasn’t alone. He had sandy hair, a sandy scrub of beard, and a face that expressed resentment, perhaps defiance. He and Meg weren’t talking, but had the air of being enclosed in a silence that was part of a long angry dialogue. As Tom waited to cross the street, he thought it might be better – more tactful – to turn away, but she looked up, saw him, raised her hand, and denied him the choice.
“As you can see, Mike’s turned up.”
“What my wife means,” Mike said, “is that to her dismay I’ve crashed your party. Sorry.” He picked up his glass of beer and drank half in one swallow. “I’ll bugger off of course if you insist.”
“Why should I do that?”
In the restaurant Mike called for a litre of white wine.
“Half a litre,” Meg said.
“A litre.” Mike held the waiter’s sleeve to make sure his order was taken. “Meg tells me you were the sensation of the meeting last night. As you can see I’m off the wagon. Does that worry you?”
“You’re making a mistake, but you know that, and it’s your life.”
“Mine too,” Meg said.
“But for how much longer? My wife’s my severest critic. Who wants that? Who can live with a critic? She says my new novel’s crap.”
“It’s not new,” Meg said, “it’s recycled. He won’t write, can’t write about anything but himself and booze. Crap’s putting it mildly.”
“You see. She’s written me off. So has Kate. She’s my sponsor, or supposed to be but she’s ditched me for a pretty boy murderer.”
“You haven’t seen him. You don’t know he’s pretty. You don’t even know he’s a murderer.”
“Of course he’s a murderer, Kate wouldn’t be interested otherwise. And of course he’s pretty. Where the hell’s that wine?”
“I’ve met him,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t call him pretty.”
“Oh, you’re a man of the world, are you? You know things … But this time you’re wrong. Stands to reason he’s pretty. Why would Kate be interested otherwise? She’s that age.”
“You’re confusing her with Belinda,” Meg said. “Anyway her Dutch Nazi wasn’t pretty, was he?”
“Belgian,” Mike said. “You see, my wife gets everything wrong.”
The waiter brought wine and food, ravioli for Mike, spaghetti alle vongole for the other two. Mike seized the carafe, poured himself a glass, downed it, then poured another and one for Meg.
“Go on,” he said, “drink it. My wife drinks like a fish, but she has no drinking problem. No problem with alcohol, none at all. Just like my late, by me unlamented, brother-in-law. Never sober, queer as they come, but he had no drinking problem, that’s official, the official line.”
“I knew Eddie,” Tom said. “I liked him a lot. He wasn’t queer.”
“Is that so? Doesn’t matter, he was no good, Eddie, no good at all. Between you and me, a little rat. My wife doesn’t like me to say these things.”
“Oh shut up, Mike, for Christ’s sake, eat your ravioli and shut up.” She was near to tears. “I’m sorry,” she said to Tom. “I didn’t mean it to be like this. See if you can … I can’t stand it, sorry.”
She got up and blundering to the door left them.
Tom, wondering if he should have followed, forked his spaghetti.
“We all go into the dark,” Mike said. “Spoiled your date, haven’t I?”
“I wouldn’t call it a date. As she said, you should eat.”
XIX
“You can’t blame him,” Belinda said.
“But I don’t, believe me.”
“I mean, to be thrown among people who look at you as if you were an animal in the zoo. I can quite see why he needs to be on his own. Not that he isn’t on his own when he’s with us. He is, isn’t he?”
Kate nibbled at a stem of sun-burned grass.
They were lying in the shade of the pines. The hill was deserted, except for a German couple on a bench a little way off, engaged in possibly intellectual argument. Gary was leaning on the railing that surmounted the wall and looking out over the valley in which lay the Circus Maximus. Erik slept, stretched on his belly, his head resting on his folded arms. Three o’clock, the quiet hour of the day, even the traffic from the Via dei Fori Imperiali no more than a hum, less obtrusive than the rattle of the cicadas.
“How do you feel about him?” Belinda said. “Do you like him?”
“Like? That’s not the point. I haven’t yet penetrated the shell.”
“You don’t feel … repugnance?”
“You do?”
“I thought I would. I got Kenneth, you know, to fax me accounts of the murder and the trial. It was pretty horrible, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed yes,” Kate said. “I wouldn’t deny that for a moment. I’m never convinced though that people are what they do.”
“So you think now he was guilty?”
“Oh yes, I’ve never really had any doubt, whatever I said. Nor does his mother. I could see that. But so what? Doesn’t stop her loving him, being ready to fight anyone for him, lie for him of course till she’s blue in the face. And quite right too in my opinion. She’s a good woman. And you Bel, expected to feel repugnance, but you don’t really, do you?”
“He’s just a boy, isn’t he? Not that that means anything either way. What are you really looking for, Kate?”
“I like knowing about people. It’s my sort of exploration.”
“Why he did it, you mean?”
“Not really. I never think why answers anything. Why did we drink? Why are we alcoholic when others who drank more aren’t? Why do you fancy Erik, if it comes to that? You do, don’t you?
“Oh sort of,” she said, “but that’s sex. Different. You don’t find Gary sexy?”
“I can see that he could be. But no, I don’t. He’s a bit pathetic, and yet he’s not at all pathetic. That’s interesting.”
Belinda lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke curl deep-grey against the deeper blue of a sky which was touched with gold only at the edges.
“What a pair we are,” she said. “What would anyone looking at our picnic party think?”
“What indeed?”
“Two old bags and their toy-boys, that’s what. Or don’t they say toy-boys now? Is that last year’s word? Is Gary gay? Do you think he is?”
“Does Erik? He should know.”
“Oh Erik’s afraid of him. He tries to hide it, but he’s afraid. Fascinated too, but afraid. I see what you mean though about the little cough. It’s rather sweet, even endearing. And he has good manners, though he tries to act as if he doesn’t.”
“You noticed that too,” Kate said. “He’s a mother’s boy really. But gay? I think not. He’s a Puritan, a very English Puritan. I can always spot it, it’s the Latin in me. Hates the flesh. Have you watched him eat?”
“Yes. He nibbles.”
“Like it’s an unpleasant duty. He told me off for smoking too much this morning.”
They strolled through the trees, skirting the fenced-off bits of ground where excavations of the imperial palaces were being conducted at a pace so slow you might think eternity would not suffice to reveal all there had been of the Eternal City – a line Belinda had heard from Mike Baillie, but assumed (correctly) did not originate with him.
Kate put her hand on Belinda’s arm.
“Reynard’s coming out this weekend.”
“And that worries you?”
“Yes. Yes, it does. I don’t understand why he’s coming. Barristers don’t usually pursue their ex-clients, do they?”
“Not at all. It’s even against the rules, I think. In any case it’s the solicitor, isn’t it, who’s the client, not the accused? Reynard made a good job of the trial though, didn’t he? That was the impression from reading the faxes. But, if you want my opinion, the answer in one word is mischief …”
&nb
sp; “He makes Gary nervous.”
“He makes me nervous. Or used to. I nearly married him once, remember. I was crazy about him until, well, it evaporated.”
“Would you mind meeting him again?”
They leaned on the rail and looked out over the Forum.
“There’s something of the Roman Emperor in Reynard,” Belinda said. “One of the mad ones.”
“I’ve always been surprised he goes in for defending.”
“Oh no, defending poor brutes gives him a kick. It’s not kindness or generosity, you know. They’re so dependent on him, at his mercy. Mind you he did once say that if we still hanged people he would have liked to be a judge. He wasn’t joking. That was when I began to go off him. Who was the judge who had to change his knickers after pronouncing the death sentence?”
“Said to be Goddard, but I doubt the story. I mean, who would know?”
“His clerk?”
“But would he tell?”
“Why not?” Belinda said. “It’s only in sentimental novels servants are loyal. Think how telling would go down in the Saloon Bar.”
“You may be right. I see of course that defending can appeal to the sadist. And Reynard is one, isn’t he? People who’ve never tried have no notion how satisfying being nasty can be. I noticed that a long time ago. Actually, I’ve got a rather nasty experiment in mind myself.”
XX
“I guess that’s the most horrible place I’ve been in,” Erik said. “It was kind of gruesome.”
Belinda didn’t immediately reply. They were sitting outside a bar by the Teatro Marcello. Kate and Gary had taken the bus back to Parioli.
“You know, I could get to like Gary,” Erik said. “I never thought I would hear myself say that. But I could get to like him if he’d let me. He won’t though. He won’t open up. It’s like … I don’t know what it’s like – something I can’t express. Did you see when Kate put her hand on his shoulder?”