by Muriel Spark
But she didn’t seem to notice that her greeting to Robert was no sort of welcome at all. He accepted it in a casual dazed way, plainly thinking of something far more pressing. Inside the room he had to walk downhill to a heavy armchair, with many cotton cushions and broken springs, more or less tethered to the slope. Robert sat lop-sided like a paralytic and told Lina that Curran had arrived in Venice. ‘He phoned me up out of the blue,’ Robert said.
‘Blue?’ she said. She looked at her plain wood worktable: a folded painting-book; paint-brushes soaking in a jam-jar half-full of grey water.
‘Unexpectedly,’ he said sulkily.
‘Oh, you must have given him your number,’ Lina said, ‘or else how could he find you?’
‘Curran wouldn’t find that difficult; and in this case all he had to do was to get the hall porter at his hotel to ring up the obvious places. In any case Curran’s used to finding people.’
Then in that case, maybe he can find my dead father’
‘He might do that,’ said Robert.
‘Good,’ she said, really taking him up on it.
‘You seem very delighted,’ he said, ‘to know that Curran’s here.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not in rivalry never with no one. I told you that.’
‘You’d like to use Curran,’ he said.
‘Why not, if he could be useful?’
‘Curran paints too, you know,’ Robert said. ‘I’m no judge, but he sells his paintings. They’re abstract in oils. He gets a lot of money for them.’
‘Who from? His fancy friends?’
‘Exclusively, his friends. Nobody else goes to his shows.’
‘It happened also in Bulgaria like that,’ she said. ‘But there I had a lot of friends, myself.’ She was very placid, not in the least resentful of Curran, as were two other professional artists whom Robert knew in Paris. She was clearing part of the table. ‘My friends were poor but Curran’s are rich.’ It was like a piece from a nursery-rhyme.
She was arranging her spirit-stove on top of a wooden fruit-crate. She filled a cooking-pot with water from a big old-fashioned jug, and put it on the stove to heat.
‘Tell me the whole story,’ she said, with warm comfort in her voice.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so ambitious.’
‘I don’t pay rent any more,’ she told him, following some sequence of her own thoughts. ‘Friday was my rent day, but I’ve stopped paying because my neighbours have asked me to join them in a strike. We live in a condemned building, so he has no right to rent the rooms. He’s angry. It was so little rent, but I am showing solidarity.’ She adjusted the flame ‘… with my neighbours,’ she said, poising the dry spaghetti above the pot, ready to send it in as soon as the water came to the boil. ‘And I can do my cooking if I want to because everyone else does. From today I don’t smuggle out the rubbish. I put it in the canal like the other people, when there’s no police boat coming up.’
Robert watched her while she cooked; a smaller pot, onions, peeled tomatoes from a tin, a drop of oil, another drop. Her black hair had a high shine, with its short bob and fringe; it was the sort of hair that hairdressers loved to handle, and looked expensively cut, although this was unlikely. She had apple-red cheeks and white teeth, looking very Balkan, like one of the tourist-shops’ Dolls of All Nations. He liked her unscrupulous story about the rent; in fact, he agreed with her about the rent in one sense as much as he disagreed in another. At his universities he had known girls without materialistic scruples, as they put it. His mother had strict scruples; what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.
Lina’s voice chattered on. Eventually he said, ‘What was that you said, Lina?’
‘You haven’t been listening.’
‘Yes, I have. I just didn’t catch—’
‘What was I talking about?’
‘You said “eggs”. What about the eggs?’
She attended to her paraffin-stove, moving her two pots, the big and the small, alternately over the flame. She said, ‘I said that this is all I’ve got to offer you. Tomorrow I’ll go out and get some eggs.’
‘It’s very good of you,’ he said. ‘You’re a lovely woman, too.’
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘When are you seeing Curran?’
‘Tomorrow, in the evening.’
Tomorrow, in the evening, Robert walked through the lanes and across the bridges, under the clear stars and over their reflection in the waters, to Harry’s Bar, took a place downstairs and waited. The older man, when he arrived, looked more opulent than usual, appearing very much like a rich elder friend of a nice good-looking, lean young student.
‘Well, Robert,’ said Curran, ‘nice to see you again. A bit of luck I found you in Venice.’
‘It was a bit of luck,’ said the young man blithely.
‘Ever eaten here before?’ Curran said, even though he knew Harry’s Bar was beyond Robert’s pocket, and that this was the young man’s first visit to Venice.
‘I’ve found a moderate restaurant,’ Robert said firmly. ‘And there are snack bars.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Well, we can make a more spectacular meal tonight if you feel it would be a change. I’ve booked a table upstairs. First of all, what will you drink?’ They sat at a table near the bar.
Around them was the buzz and small-clatter of multifarious activities, such as the shuffling of chairs and feet, the conversations at the bar and at the other tables, the sound of the door swinging open with the entrance of new arrivals and the constant clink of bottles and glasses at the bar. It made a good environment for their meeting. Robert was relieved that Curran had not asked him to come somewhere quiet, and it did not occur to him now, as they waited for their whiskies, that in fact he need not have come at all.
‘What brings you to Venice?’ he said, invitingly, to Curran.
‘Force of will,’ Curran said, as if there had been no ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye’ and no shouting recriminations leading up to it.
Curran said, ‘What about your studies?
‘I can do history of art here as well as I can in Paris. Perhaps better. Venetian architecture and art. I can switch.’
‘How?’
‘You can arrange it for me,’ Robert said. ‘I can switch my grant and do a term paper in Venice.’
Curran laughed, and said, ‘Were you counting on me to come and arrange things for you?’
‘I suppose, maybe, I was.’
‘Exactly what aspect of Venice would you undertake? I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to decide if I were in your place. And you’d be surprised how much I know Venice. I was here as a young man. I was here at the end of the war. I couldn’t tell you the number of times, off and on … and yet, where would one begin?’
‘If you had to begin, you’d begin.’
‘I dare say. Sheer force of will would do it. I’ve done some of my best paintings in Venice, but of course that’s rather a different thing.’
‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘when you begin to deal with a subject, you gather as many details as possible, then you find the features general to all of them, and you develop the generalities.’
‘Very enlightening,’ said Curran, ‘so far as it goes. But you’ve described a lifetime’s occupation if you’re going to do it thoroughly, and you haven’t been here a week. Will you have another drink or shall we go upstairs?’
They went up to dinner. Robert said, ‘I’m starting off with Santa Maria Formosa. It’s a curvaceous building, most unusual.’
‘Oh, yes, I know it. What made you pick on that?’
‘It’s the first thing I saw when I walked out of the Pensione. I might as well begin there. I’ve looked it up in the library. There are some vague legends about the name, but my thesis is that the name of Santa Maria Formosa originally came from the “formosa” of the Song of Solomon in the Bible. Original Latin: Nigra sum sed formosa—“I am black but comely.” It was a pre-figuration of the Madonna according to the early theo
logians. Now as it happens I have discovered that the ancient Hebrew could mean “black but comely” or “beautiful” or “shapely” and it could also mean “black and comely”, or again it could mean “black, therefore comely”. So I intend to write a thesis. …’
Curran held up his hand to indicate the waiter standing by the table. ‘We’d better order,’ Curran said.
And when they had ordered he said, ‘Go on.’
‘Are you bored?’ Robert said.
‘Your thesis should be popular,’ said Curran.
‘That’s what it seemed to me.’
‘I should say you’ve done a lot of thinking in quite a short time.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve done that.’
‘I should say the church might well be named merely after its own shape. Quite simply that,’ said Curran. ‘Talking about shape, you haven’t told me about the girl.’
‘Which girl?’
‘How many are there?’
‘Only one that matters.’
‘She’s dangerous. Keep away from her.’
‘Is that what you’ve come to tell me?’
‘Yes. Lina Pancev, daughter of Victor Pancev whom I knew before the war, a Bulgarian. He was suspected of being part of a plot to poison King Boris, who in fact died of poisoning. Pancev got away, but the Bulgarian royalists caught up with him and killed him in 1945. That was your woman-friend’s father.’
‘Well, it was a long time ago. I wasn’t born.’
‘But the daughter was. She’s no youngster compared to you.’
‘Nor are you, compared to her.’
‘I don’t enter into it. I’ve only come to tell you that this woman’s dangerous. She’s a defector from Bulgaria and it seems to me she’s being followed. How is your steak?’
‘What?’
‘What you’re eating. Is it done all right?’
‘Yes, it’s all right. I don’t notice what I’m eating.’
‘You young people don’t. Well, she’s being followed by agents of some sort, probably Balkan. They don’t like people slipping away.’
‘Look, she’s only a little nobody to them—’
Curran said, ‘She was on a group visit with some Bulgarian art teachers in Paris last year, and she left the group. They’re after her.’
‘The Paris police know all about her. She’s got asylum,’ Robert said. ‘All in order,’
‘How do you know?’
‘Well, what’s it got to do with me? She’s looking for her father’s grave here in Venice, and I’m helping her.’
‘We’re talking in circles. You’re in danger if you’re seen with her.’
‘You mean,’ said Robert, ‘I’m in danger of losing your friendship if I’m seen with her. Do you think I’m afraid? I’ve got a right to have a girl. You think I’m effeminate?’
‘Don’t raise your voice like that. We’re probably being overheard, anyway.’
‘You think me effeminate. I’ve told you I refuse to be labelled,’ Robert said.
‘I think you masculine to a fault,’ said Curran.
Robert looked round the room. The other diners were all of them in parties, intent on their talking and eating, their ordering and their drinking, laughing, smiling. They looked as if they had nothing else but their own lives on their minds, and on their well-dressed bodies, no virtue so penetrating even as an eavesdropping device. On the other hand, look again: maybe everybody, every single diner, could be capable of extending his range. The place could be filled with spies, how could one tell?
‘You know,’ said Robert, ‘I don’t believe what you’re saying. I don’t believe she’s being followed. I think it’s a cheap trick you’ve thought up.’
‘What for?’ said Curran. ‘Why? Why should I take trouble for you?’ He looked round the room. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘those people who keep following you and Lina Pancev are not here tonight. I hardly thought they would be.’
‘It gets me down,’ said Robert, ‘the way you look around as if you owned the place.’
‘How you nag!’ said Curran. ‘Just like a middle-class wife.’
‘What’s wrong with the middle class,’ Robert said, ‘apart from people like you?’
‘Men like you,’ said Curran, ‘is what’s wrong with the middle class. The English public schools used to make heroes; nowadays they turn out Hamlets:’
‘If you don’t like men like me,’ Robert sniped, ‘then what are you doing in Venice?’
After dinner they walked briskly through the chilly lanes and squares, where the side-canals were ill-lit and the future beyond every few steps was murky. ‘Easy …’ said Curran, as practically every visitor to Venice says, sooner or later, ‘very easy—wouldn’t it be?—to slither a knife into someone, push him into the canal and just walk on.’ At which Robert looked at Curran in a startled way, so that Curran laughed.
A motor-barge could be heard approaching from a side-canal ahead of them. ‘That’s the port authority,’ Curran said. A smooth-sounding motor followed it. ‘That’s the water police,’ said Curran.
‘You look good’ said Curran.
‘Go to hell.’
Robert had found Curran in the front hall of the Pensione Sofia, seated at a table with Katerina and Eufemia. It was mid-morning. Robert had come in the front door with the English newspaper in his hand, and there was Curran chatting away as if he had known the women all his life.
The women dispersed discreetly as Curran got up to greet Robert. And ‘Go to hell,’ Robert said when Curran came out with, ‘You look good.’
‘But you looked bad yesterday,’ Curran said. ‘Something on your mind, no doubt.’ Equable, gradual, encompassing, Curran looked around him, owning the place with his manner. ‘In daylight,’ he said, ‘the interior of this house has always been enchanting. That staircase. …’ He let his eyes muse on the staircase.
‘You know the house, then,’ Robert stated. It was inevitable that Curran should know the house. And in fact Curran then said, ‘If one has knocked about Europe as long as I have, one does tend to know places.’
‘I’ve got an appointment,’ Robert said, looking at his watch.
Regardless, Curran said, ‘It was owned by a Bulgarian count up to the beginning of the war. In those days it was the Villa Sofia.’ He still looked up the staircase; it was wide with well-worn shabby carpets, and Curran gazed as if to say, ‘I remember when it was a private villa and I was a young man coming down, going up, those stairs.’ Above the staircase was an old, well-preserved chandelier; it was three-tiered, made of white Dresden china, the top tier portraying pineapples and shepherdesses, and the other two tiers being fully occupied by electric-bulbed candelabras, elaborately ivied. That was here in those days,’ Curran said. ‘It was imported to replace a Venetian glass chandelier. We found it rather comical, amongst ourselves.’ And, as usual, Curran didn’t say who were ‘we’ and ‘ourselves’, thus leaving Robert far away beyond the scope of one of the many worlds that Curran pervaded and seemed to own.
And indeed, like a proprietor, Curran said, ‘Let’s go out through the garden and round to the landing-stage. When will you be free? Can we lunch?’
‘Are you sure visitors are allowed in the garden?’ Robert said. ‘It looks like their private garden.’
Curran said, ‘I know them well. Katerina and Eufemia are old friends.’ He was already at the french windows, followed by Robert. ‘And lunch?’ Curran said.
‘I’ve promised to take Lina to the island of San Michele today. San Michele is the cemetery island. She’s looking for the place where her father’s buried.’
‘You won’t find him there,’ Curran said, stepping into the winter sunlight. Robert followed him.
‘Have you any idea where he’s buried?’ Robert said.
Curran said, ‘He’s buried in his friends’ memory. Isn’t that enough?’
The compost of dying leaves had gone from the place where the women had stood quarrelling in a
high-pitched battle over the heap. Probably the leaves had been carted to the end of the garden earlier that morning, and burned; certainly, the smoky smell of autumn fires, from one garden or another, hung about the air they breathed.
They walked down the gravel path which divided the pretty garden. Robert told how he had seen and heard the two good ladies quarrelling, each on her own side of the garden. Curran seemed interested in this, and sadly amused. ‘I believe they’ve shared everything equally all their lives’ he said.
Robert said, ‘You know a lot; too much. I don’t trust this place.’
‘It’s a perfectly good place. The best value in Venice.’
Robert said, ‘Out here one would hardly know one was in Venice.’ But he looked beyond the railings and the trees, where Venice could be seen, sure enough. Tips of houses, bell-towers and a strange chimney-pot rose on the skyline at the end of the garden, beyond the side-canal, beyond the tops of buildings; they rose in sunlight from the noisy cold canals. To the people walking about, across the bridges, down the narrow streets and across the squares it was everyday life, devoid of tourists, capricious as the sun; to the people going to work it was a day of dull routine and bright weather, boring, cold and quite normally inconvenient.
A water-taxi was approaching up the side-canal; its engine changed rhythm as it chugged into the side, to slow up at the landing-stage of the house. It held two passengers, a man and a woman, both standing, now, getting ready to disembark. Robert gave a shiver some seconds before he really saw these people, probably because he had not slept well and so was specially intuitive. He took Curran’s arm and held it tight, so that Curran started with alarm, as if afraid of some violent attack from Robert.
By now the man was standing up and stepping ashore. He was a good five feet away. An elderly man, tall, exceedingly neat, slightly bent at the shoulders, with spectacles and a white-yellow moustache which was small and well cut. He in turn had recognised Robert. His companion, a woman of middle-age wearing a golden-brown fur-coat and tight boots, and, like the man, very neat about the head, said clearly enough to be heard by Robert and Curran, ‘What’s the matter?’