by Allan Massie
And now this weekend promised amusement. Kate Sturzo was formidable too, in her own way, steel there. Her preoccupation with evil wasn’t just academic.
And the Chicken. The Chicken had held his interest from their first interview, when they had sat for fully five minutes, eyes fixed on each other, before the Chicken submitted and looked away. His confederates were ordinary scum, the sweepings of South London. But there was something to the Chicken, a boy whose life had been passed east of Eden.
He looked the Chicken over: the smooth, never shaven cheek, the old eyes under the soft hair. There was a touch of colour to him now, a buttery sheen imparted by autumn sun. They sat – it was just warm enough – at a table outside the restaurant. Saturday lunch, most tables were occupied in the little enclosure, protected from the street by a child-sized fence through which and around which grew a dark green dusty hedge. Reynard took it in: Italians mostly, except for one table of obvious Americans, and another small one at which two young people, Americans also, sat opposite each other, silent, the boy studying a street map, the girl reading a paperback. She was blonde, puppy fat gleaming on her brown naked legs.
He talked to Kate, stories of the courts, the BBC, some politicians, common acquaintances. He drank wine, hesitating as he lifted the glass, to taunt the others for not joining him.
“Don’t you miss it? You were such a sparkler in your drinking days.”
“Oh, I was, wasn’t I,” Kate said, “a sparkler.”
Gary crumbled his bread, ate little. His fingers were long, thin, the nails bitten to the quick.
Reynard said, “One of these French novelists – you’ll remember which, I’m sure – has one of his characters, a spoiled intellectual, naturally, commit a murder just to see what it feels like. He’s nothing against the victim, you understand. It’s just an acte gratuit – that was the phrase, wasn’t it? The idea seemed outlandish, shocking in 1900 or whenever it was. It’s commonplace now, happens all the time. Just this week – you’ll read about it when our rickety legal machine creaks into action – I was brought such a case. Four boys, about Gary’s age, two of them, but the youngest only fourteen, stopped a young man just after midnight up Ladbroke Grove way. Nice young man, so they roughed him up, just a little at first, for fun, then tied him up, shoved him in the back of a stolen car – and what they said made him piss himself. They stopped on the bank of the canal, got out, leaving him there, and pushed the car into the water.
“Some old biddy saw it, called the police who, amazingly, responded, and they found the four of them sitting by the canal drinking vodka, smoking dope, and giggling. There’s not much of a defence.”
XXIV
“Sorry, I can’t eat any more,” Meg said, “It’s the first real meal I’ve had in days.”
“That’s all right,” Tom said. “You know, drunks look after themselves, somehow, usually. He’s probably holed up in a hotel.”
“Is that what you used to do?”
“It is indeed. You can feel safe in hotels. Nobody who cares can get at you. Of course sometimes there’s nobody that does care.”
Meg lit a cigarette, and looked beyond him, across the piazza, to the Pantheon and the never-ending flow of tourists.
“He says, you know, that if the writing came right again, then he wouldn’t need to drink, not the way he does, as an alcoholic. He could be a normal social drinker again. That’s what he says.”
“We’ve all said that or something like it. If only … How did he drink when you first knew him?”
She paused, tipped the ash off her cigarette, screwed up her face, picked up her dark glasses, but didn’t put them on.
“I want to get this right, I’d like to be fair. Heavy, yes, very heavy, but most of us were that then, weren’t we? There was nothing he liked better than holding court, in a bar or over a restaurant table. He was good fun, I have to remember that. And later when he was dry – and he’s been dry for long periods, months sometimes, it was different. He started saying he couldn’t stand other people without a drink. He couldn’t stand me either.”
“Read one of his novels once,” Tom said. “May have been his first, about a group of undergraduates following the bulls. Fake mostly, ersatz Hemingway, but there was something there. The dialogue was lively as I recall.”
“It won prizes that book. But Mike knows how much was fake. Then he wrote a couple that were sincere, one about middle-class life in Glasgow, and good really, the critics weren’t interested and sales were awful. His publishers lost interest too. That was four, five years ago. So I feel sorry for him and he can’t stand that. I can’t stand it myself. Nothing kills a relationship more surely than one partner feeling sorry for the other. That’s how it seems to me.”
Tom lifted a hand to call the waiter to them and ordered coffee.
“Would you like a grappa?” he said. “Or something. I don’t mind, really. It doesn’t disturb me.”
“Did it once?”
“Sure it did.”
“I don’t think I will,” she said, “but thank you.”
“Just coffee then,” Tom said. “Due espressi.”
“If he wasn’t so bad,” Meg said, “I could leave him. I did, actually. Last summer. We were in Spain. He’d been commissioned by a Sunday paper to write a piece for their colour magazine – he can still do that sort of thing. It was about, I can’t remember his name, the young Englishman who’s set out to be a bullfighter – this on the strength of that novel written more than a dozen years ago. Which struck me as pathetic. We were in Salamanca. I was sitting by the window of our hotel room looking at the storks standing by their big ragged nest on a church tower across the way. I liked the storks, they could do nothing for such a long time, bit like Belinda really. It was kind of peaceful. Mike was tapping away on his typewriter. Then he gave me his article to read, which he almost never does. He was smiling the wrong sort of smile. I said it was cheap, what he’d written. ‘They pay well,’ he said. ‘It’s still cheap,’ I said. ‘You won’t object to spending the money,’ he said, and hit me, quite hard, hard enough to knock me off the chair. Then he went off. I knew he was heading for a bar. He’d never hit me before, never got beyond clenching his fists. That was when I decided to get out. I packed my bag. Before I left the room I looked out of the window. The storks were still there in just the same attitudes. They hadn’t moved. There’d been this sordid little domestic drama and the storks hadn’t moved. I had to wait hours at the station, there aren’t many trains to Madrid from Salamanca. I called him a couple of days later and he joined me. I felt guilty he’d written something so cheap. It makes no sense to me but that’s how it was. He didn’t apologise. We just carried on as if nothing had happened. But he’s made no effort to control his drinking since, even if he still goes to AA. Or rather I got him to return and he went to get me off his back. Why am I telling you all this?”
Why was she? Because she had to tell someone? Because Eddie was dead and he was the closest to Eddie she had left, or at least to hand?
She said, “Could he be right? If he could write the way he thinks he is meant to write, could he stop drinking then?”
Tom Durward took his time. He cut a toscano in half and lit it.
“That’s what he says?”
“Sometimes … often.”
“I wish it was true,” he said, “but it’s the booze that’s the problem, not the writing.”
She began to cry. He looked away, into the sunshine. She cried silently for perhaps two minutes. Then she got up and went through to the Ladies’ room to recover and repair. What he hadn’t said: I felt that way for years. But then, earlier, when I was young, I often thought: if I can write one book that is really good and true, it doesn’t matter what sort of a mess I make of my life otherwise. Which was nonsense. Sadly. A book written was something consigned to the past, far more completely than the affairs of your non-writing life which stayed alive to delight or disturb or haunt or pain you. Whereas the written book wa
s dead to its author. He had indeed brought off once, maybe twice, what he had aspired to do. And now, these books meant nothing to him. They had been thrown into the world, and, if they mattered at all, it was to other people that they mattered now.
“I’m sorry about that,” Meg said, returning. “It’s because what you said is what I know, only I’ve been trying to deny it, just as Mike does, and that’s because it’s easier to kid myself he might write well again than to believe he can stop drinking. Does that make sense?”
“Oh yes, only too good sense. But it’s a waste of time to think of the ‘whys’. The only question that matters is how you stop yourself taking that first drink. We have so many ways of persuading ourselves we’re entitled to it, some more shameful than Mike’s. You reminded me of that the other night, how I used what happened to Jamie …”
“I was never clear about that,” she said, “but I know it was terrible. Like Eddie for me, but I could see it coming to Eddie. He was on his way down already. Which was sad enough.”
For a little they sat, not talking. Maybe both thinking about Eddie, and how lives go wrong. Eddie had challenged the gods, knocked the heads off the Hermes, and then, Tom didn’t know but supposed, he woke one morning and was no longer young and the weather was cold and grey.
“Can we walk a bit?” Meg said.
“Sure, why not?”
“All right for you, with your leg?”
“Good for it.”
A troop of tourists – Japanese, Americans, Germans, English too, he supposed – emerged from the Pantheon.
“What do they make of it, do you think?” Meg said. “No, that’s silly and patronising. What do I make of it after all? Or you? You’re not religious, are you?”
“I don’t know. The Latin word, religio, originally meant just ‘attention’, paying heed to the things you must do. I might be religious in that sense, like Dr Johnson touching lamp posts.”
Meg said, “I was brought up religious. So was Eddie. When he was twelve or thirteen he was going to be a priest.”
Maybe he should have stuck to it. Tom kept the words to himself. He had a knack of making words come out bitter even when he hadn’t thought them that way. Maybe Eddie should have stuck to it. He gestured towards the Pantheon again.
“Some pope, forget which, had twenty-eight wagon-loads of martyrs’ bones brought from the catacombs and buried there, under the floor.”
“Bit morbid,” she said. “Of course I see the point of morbidity. Thinking about Mike encourages outbursts of it, if you can have an outburst of morbidity, I wouldn’t know.” They stopped to buy Meg an ice cream.
“How odd,” she said, “to think of everyone who has walked these streets, with their problems, over the last couple of thousand years, and here we are. And you still see the same faces, from Renaissance paintings, a Raphael here, a Caravaggio there – look at that boy for instance. Is that true of anywhere else, do you think?”
“They’d more painters in Rome than elsewhere,” Tom said.
They crossed the Corso, walked a bit up the noisy bustling Via del Tritone, till they were past the square with the post office and the buses, and then, turning left, made their way through narrow expensive streets to the Piazza di Spagna and mounted the steps towards Trinità dei Monti.
A dozen steps up Meg clutched Tom’s arm.
“Oh no,” she said, and led him over to the wall against the Keats-Shelley house. A man was lying there, a bottle of grappa, almost empty, by his right hand. His mouth was open and his eye was bruised and bleeding. He had lost one shoe, his shirt was unbuttoned, and the zip of his trousers undone.
“It’s Stephen,” she said. “Oh God.”
“Stephen?”
“Stephen Mallany, he’s a friend of Mike’s, sort of. They were on this bender together … If Mike did this to him …”
Tom got one arm under him, a dead weight. He couldn’t have been there long … the police … even now. Tom stopped a young man descending the steps, asked for help. Together they heaved him upright.
“Go down and get a taxi,” Tom said. “Tell him we’ll pay double fare, say there’s been an accident.”
XXV
They took him to Meg’s apartment in Via Milano, and laid him on the couch. Meg brought a bowl of warm water laced with Dettol, and sponged the blood and dirt from the cut and broken face.
Tom Durward turned away. He had no doubt now who Stephen Mallany was. But, as Meg wiped, she seemed to wash years away, and Tom saw revealed the monkey-face of a lively and nervous adolescent. It was like the cleaning of an Old Master, with the grime of years and the varnish once applied to give the paint a glossy surface, now sponged clean to let you see the bright colours or even, sometimes, long-hidden figures emerge.
Tom experienced one of those moments of deceptive déjà-vu. He saw himself wiping that other face, Jamie’s, to reveal the colour of death. He hadn’t of course done so, except in imagination and bad dreams; someone else had cleaned Jamie up hours before Tom saw his dead body.
“Have you and Stephen fallen out?” he had asked Jamie in that chilly Sunday hotel restaurant the last day they were together.
“Stephen’s in trouble,” Jamie said, “he’s gated.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Just trouble.” Tom was sorry to hear that, said so. Stephen had stayed with them in the London flat over Easter, and they had gone to the National. The Cherry Orchard or Uncle Vanya? Yes, Uncle Vanya. But he didn’t pursue the matter, which was evidently awkward.
It hadn’t been a good day. It rained in the afternoon and they sat in the hotel lounge looking out at dripping azaleas and rhododendrons so wet their leaves seemed to be black. At one point Jamie said, “Do I have to stay on at school?”
He wasn’t quite fifteen. “I don’t like it,” he said.
He drowned himself in the lake ten days later. For the sake of the school, the coroner was persuaded it was an accident.
There was no explanation in the diary Jamie had kept. But then there were no entries for the last fortnight, except a note of that lunch. For years Tom kept that diary with him. He knew it by heart. But it yielded no solution.
He said to Meg, “We ought to get him to hospital.”
The funeral was the last time he had seen Stephen.
Meg said, “He’s going to sleep now. It’s all right, I can look after him. I’ve done it for Mike often enough.”
“It’s not your responsibility.”
“Oh responsibility …”
“He might get worse, go into convulsions.”
“I’ll ring Sol, he’s Stephen’s sponsor, he’ll know what’s best, he always does.”
Tom lit a toscano and stood by the window looking out at the unrevealing block across the street. It was a dull nineteenth century part of the city.
Sometime, in the bad years when he was mostly out of his mind, he’d had a letter from Stephen who was just about to be ordained, a self-indulgent (he thought) confessional letter.
Stephen was writing, he said, because they had both loved Jamie. He himself had been in love with him, still was, but nothing had happened. Jamie wasn’t like that. Tom must believe him. But … but he couldn’t forget Jamie and how he had failed him. That was why he was writing now. He wasn’t the cause of Jamie’s killing himself. But still he had failed him. (He said that three times.) There was another boy in their House, a prefect, who he was sure was responsible. That was all he could say, and maybe he shouldn’t be writing at all.
It was a mad confused letter, but Tom was mad and confused himself. He got out the Stowe school list from Jamie’s untouched desk in his bedroom in the flat in Cornwall Gardens and pored over it, marking down the names of prefects. He even employed a private investigator to find out what had become of each of them.
But that was all. He should have called on Stephen in the theological college from which the letter had been written, and forced him to give the name. Hadn’t that been what Stephen hope
d he would do when he wrote the letter? But Tom hadn’t dared.
How odd that the sun shone bright, beautifully life-giving on the street below.
For years he had held the thought that you can’t ever know other people; not really. If he had known Jamie, the boy would have lived. And if Jamie had known him …? People, he thought and wrote, can be simple as long as you keep them at a distance. You can have a very clear and certain idea of those for whom you don’t give a damn.
Stephen opened his eyes. Tom knew he knew him. He was sure now that Stephen had recognised him at that first AA meeting. Was that why he had gone on this bender? Was he running away from Tom, memories, everything? Well maybe; and maybe he just wanted a drink.
Meg came back from the telephone.
“Sol’s coming round.”
“Oh good.”
He gave Meg a kiss. They talked a little. Sol would be there almost at once. Tom couldn’t stay.
XXVI
The sun was hot as Tom descended Via Nazionale towards Piazza Venezia, full of tourists. He went into a bar and telephoned Belinda; he could remember when you had to search several bars to find a telephone that wasn’t guasto, out of order. She said, “Come round and tell us properly. Sounds grim. It’s only ten minutes walk.”
Turning into the ghetto he relaxed. He stayed there, almost forty years ago, in this same Via Portico d’Ottavia which for centuries had been at once prison and sanctuary for Rome’s Jews, with its gates locked at night to prevent them from roving. He had come for a night and stayed months with two English friends, the girl a Cambridge contemporary. He hadn’t seen either for decades. Their marriage, which had danced beautifully then, was long over.