Territorial Rights

by Muriel Spark

  Curran said he could well believe it. His own room, he said, was in the modern wing.

  ‘Don’t you like Venetian styles?’ Mary said.

  Curran said he didn’t think the eighteenth century was their best period.

  ‘Well, that’s a fair observation,’ Arnold said, as if making a note on an exam paper.

  ‘I can’t tell you what fun it is,’ said Mary Tiller, ‘occupying a room like this. It’s fun. Especially as we’re on a fun-trip, you know, Arnold and I. They call this the honeymoon room, of course.’

  The abundant array of beauty bottles and jars on the dressing-table seemed to fit these grim words. Moisture cream, day nourishing cream, night cream, muscle oil—there must have been more than twenty bottles to bring aid and comfort to the fun-trip. Mary glanced in the direction of the dressing-table as Curran did, the sad mirror sizing her up before she looked away again.

  ‘What will you drink? Whisky?’ Arnold said.

  ‘Very good,’ said Curran. ‘That’s my drink.’

  Mary sat swirling her glass so that the ice in it rattled. Arnold, on his way to the bathroom to refill the ice-tray, said, ‘It’s been a fine day, cold of course, but we didn’t stay in. Mary and I—’ he reappeared with the watery ice-tray carefully balanced, and continued as he edged it into the freezer of the small refrigerator, ‘we went out, all the same. We went to the Frari church to see The Assumption of Titian. Marvellous!’ He sat down and took up his gin and tonic.

  ‘What an experience!’ Mary said.

  Arnold said, ‘Mr Curran, I want to tell you something about my wife.’

  ‘Why me?’ said Curran.

  ‘Mr Curran, we want to talk to you,’ Mary said.

  ‘Just call me plain Curran,’ Curran said. That goes for first name and second name with my friends.’

  ‘Curran. That’s nice,’ Mary said.

  ‘We decided, Mary and I,’ said Arnold, ‘that we should open up a bit to you. We decided today, while we were on our rounds of the churches, that we should take you into our confidence. After all, you’re my son’s friend and, no doubt, adviser.’

  Curran smiled, feeling wary, hoping they were not going to pump him about Robert but, rather, let themselves be pumped. ‘I’m hardly Robert’s Father-confessor’, he said.

  ‘Has he left Venice?’ said Mary.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Curran said.

  ‘We thought you were both here in Venice together,’ she said, glancing at Arnold.

  ‘Well, didn’t I tell you we met by chance? One always seems to bump into a friend in Venice, no matter what time of year.’

  ‘Well then, if you’re not in Venice as a friend of Robert’s what are you here for?’ she said.

  ‘Mary!’ said Arnold.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You simply mustn’t ask questions like that.’

  Curran looked very amused. ‘How long have you been on holiday together?’ he said.

  Mary giggled. Then she said, ‘Nearly two weeks. Arnold feels we’ve been followed. We were in France, you know, and a night in Paris; then Arnold called his wife, who seemed upset, but really, Mr Curran, I mean Curran—’

  ‘I want very much to tell you about my wife Anthea,’ Arnold said.

  ‘You seem to trust my discretion,’ Curran said. ‘But you know, your private affairs are no business of mine.’

  ‘My wife Anthea …’ Arnold kept on saying as if he had other wives by other names. He leaned back his head as he spoke, his eyes on the horse and rider rearing above him. As Arnold spoke, Curran took the opportunity to stare deliberately at Mary and, having obtained her prompt attention, he slowly winked one eye. She seemed delighted, hunching her shoulders in a quick gesture and puckering her face in a smile of conspiracy.

  ‘My wife Anthea, as I say, is a sensitive, a very sensitive woman. I have tried to give her affection, understanding. … She had a nervous breakdown three years ago. What is a man to do? A strong, normal man with a big responsibility, running a school, pleasing the Board of Governors, getting a high quota of boys through the university exams, getting the right teachers, controlling them, making the school pay. And all the rest of it—’

  ‘Etcetera, etcetera,’ suggested Curran with some nods of comprehension.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Arnold. He looked at Mary with a worried, rather sad, smile. Then two years ago, exactly, this month, Mary came into the school and into my life. How are your drinks getting on? Mary?’

  ‘I’ll help myself,’ Mary said. ‘Same for you, Curran?’

  ‘Yes, please, Mrs Tiller.’

  ‘Mary, to you,’ she said.

  ‘Mary to me,’ he said.

  ‘Now, Curran,’ said Arnold, ‘you, as my son’s friend, might know if Robert has, or, on the other hand, if he has not, telephoned, written, telegraphed, or by other method communicated to his mother, that is, my wife Anthea, that my trip to the Continent with Mary is on a basis of close familiarity rather than platonic companionship.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Curran.

  ‘Oh God what?’ said Arnold.

  Mary said, ‘I think our friend doesn’t want to answer these questions.’

  Curran said, ‘Not when they’re put in that way. Anyhow, I don’t know anything about Robert’s personal affairs, but I think it very unlikely he should bother his mother with distressing information.’

  ‘He’s capable of anything,’ Arnold said.

  ‘Do you know,’ Curran said, ‘I think you’re imagining a lot of things.’

  Mary said, ‘Well, we know, or at least guess to the point of certainty, that you’re Anthea’s private detective.’ She smiled intimately at Curran. He smiled back responsively. ‘Not at all,’ he said, without emphasis.

  Arnold apparently had taken a few drinks before Curran’s arrival, for he was now getting on for drunk. He got up, slightly staggered, made his way towards the table where the bottles and glasses were set out, and started to refill his glass, his eyes glaring at it as if it had outraged him in some way. Mary came to his rescue, so that the glass brimmed over a little less than it would otherwise have done.

  Curran looked at his watch and got up while he said he was afraid he must go.

  Arnold looked at him with the same outraged stare, and was about to make another speech when Curran rapidly said goodnight.

  Mary came out with him. The lift was near their room.

  Curran looked at her merrily. ‘He never got round to telling me about his wife Anthea.’

  ‘He’s brooding over it,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he can be very happy when he’s had a drop too much. But not when he’s brooding on Anthea.’

  ‘Well, goodnight.’

  She said, ‘Call me at nine tomorrow morning. He goes down to breakfast but I always have mine in bed at that hour.’

  Curran turned back to the room and, looking in, saw Arnold still standing uncertainly at the foot of the atrocious bed.

  ‘Would it help you if I took Mary off your hands for a while?’ Curran said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘She’s a very attractive woman,’ Curran said.

  Mary said, from behind Curran, ‘Arnold, he’s joking.’

  ‘Get out!’ Arnold said.

  Curran went back to the lift. ‘That might take his mind off his wife Anthea,’ he said to Mary.

  Chapter Three

  OUTSIDE IT WAS BEAUTIFULLY sunny weather in a rare, golden October. It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays a heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain snivelling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky:

  Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and grey,

  And soothe me wi’ tidings o’ nature’s decay;

  The dark, dreary winter, and wild-driving snaw,

  Alane can delight me—now Nannie’s awa.

  Into the glorious street of a Birmingham suburb stepped Anthe
a Leaver click-clacking her heels so sharply on the pavement that nobody who walked in front of her failed to hear her coming, and make way for her, since she was walking faster than anybody else.

  Her destination, however, was merely the bus-stop where she had to wait like everybody else. The people in front of her in the queue now pulled themselves straight and slouched no more as if anxious not to further provoke the terrorist who had clicked into position in her tweed coat, stick-like, wearing tinted glasses. Others dribbled into line behind Anthea in various attitudes of slouch, clearly unaware of her from the start; a young couple with two children, then the bus.

  Anthea got on the bus as if she meant business and got off two stops later, from where she clicked smartly across the road to the garage. There the car, fresh from a wash, polish and overhaul, was waiting for her. She paid sternly, folded up her receipt with precision and put it away in her bag. Then she drove off to Coventry, to the private investigation agency where she had an appointment. She stopped once before she got there on the very outskirts of Coventry to park the car. There were a few golden trees and the leaves lay on the pavement as if Coventry were pastoral as of old. Then she took a taxi to her destination.

  The offices of GESS (Global-Equip Security Services) Ltd were one floor up a narrow stair in a run-down side-street, so that it was inside the main entrance door that the difference abruptly emphasised itself. The offices had an established legal atmosphere in that there was a lot of wood prematurely aged for the purpose on the walls of the interior. The entrance hall was lined with this dark wood, with bare wooden floors, highly polished. Anthea was asked to take a seat by the receptionist, who then explained, ‘Mr B. is on the phone.’ Anthea seemed to try not to look at the receptionist; she seemed embarrassed to be there, as if the place was a pawnshop or a Roman Catholic confessional which one might be seen going into or coming out of. A folded brochure lay on the table beside her. Somebody had left it open, or perhaps it had been deliberately placed in a certain position for clients like her. Anthea could read without moving her head one of the columns suggesting, in an inscrutable order of syntax, what GESS could offer, discover, cure. …

  Missing persons

  Backgrounds checked

  Polygraph (Lie Detector) Examinations

  Complete Crime Laboratory

  Uniformed • Armed Guards • Plain-clothes • Negligence

  Motion pictures

  Matrimonial Escorts

  Latest modern Equip

  Apprehensions and Tailing

  Fidelity Department

  Skip Tracing

  Construction and Plant Protection

  Prompt • Precise • Discreet

  Bureau of Ethics and Charisma

  Male, female operators

  Anthea looked back up the list and stopped at ‘Fidelity Department’. That must be me, she thought, and looked up to find the receptionist staring at her. ‘Mr B. is still on the phone to Brussels,’ said the girl. ‘But you’re a few minutes early, anyway.’

  Anthea looked at her watch and then said, ‘What is the gentleman’s name did you say?’

  ‘The clients use only the initial of our executives. Your executive is Mr B.’

  ‘Mr B.,’ Anthea repeated.

  ‘Security,’ said the girl as if it were a sad, well-worn response in the litany of her working days. Her hand went to the box in front of her. There was a click. She then droned to Anthea, ‘Mr B. is free now. Will you come this way?’

  Mr B. not only smiled as Anthea entered his office, but in a sense continued to smile. Even when he got up, took her hand, and said, ‘Mrs Leaver. I’ve been expecting you,’ he had that extraordinary expression, so that it looked as if he had been smiling and waiting for her a long lifetime.

  She sat in the chair he had waved her into. It was not quite a smile that he gave but a shape of mouth and lips that he had been born with, a wide, fat-lipped mouth. Behind his glasses his eyes were not smiling; they were abstractly looking at the situation in hand, his client. He was fair, robust, in his early thirties. Who would have known but that his mouth-smile with the fruity closed lips might have got him into trouble in a court of law, before a judge and jury, should he have been giving evidence in a desperately serious case. His desk was clear of papers. He took from a side-drawer of the desk a foolscap-sized, photo-copied form and laid it in front of him.

  ‘Now, then.’ He took up the desk-pen. ‘Full name and address, telephone. …’

  Her determination and her storm-trooper attitude had not lasted but Anthea was sufficiently in possession of herself to say, when Mr B. came to ask her to sign the form, ‘Before I do that, we must discuss the price. I must know the price. It’s possible I can’t afford your services.’

  He put aside the form and brought out of the front drawer of his desk, tilting backward in the process, a stack of small oblong folded cards. They were unused, and in style similar to place-cards set out on the table at large and formal dinner-parties, with the names of the guests. Mr B. silently made a row of three cards on the desk in front of him, and behind them a further row of six. He had set about making yet a third row when he spoke. ‘The price,’ he said, ‘depends entirely on what you want, where you want it done, and how long the service will take. You must first give me some rough details before we can discuss the fee’; and as he spoke the word ‘rough’ he seemed to smile more than nature had predestined him to do.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Anthea, ‘I didn’t want to waste your time, that’s all. I just want you to know right from the start that I don’t own a fleet of yachts and I haven’t got big money, diamonds. …’

  ‘GESS is here to help you,’ said Mr B. ‘Let’s leave the Rolls-Royces out of it and not delude ourselves. Would it be a matrimonial difficulty?’

  Anthea agreed that it was that kind of question. He wrote something on one of the little cards and set it in another place on the desk. ‘Tell me the whole story,’ he said. She went on with the whole story for about twenty minutes, during which time he smilingly lifted the cards, one by one, to make notes on them. The first time he did this she halted; but he said, ‘Don’t mind me. Carry on.’

  She might have been lying on a couch, and he taking notes where she couldn’t see him. She looked at him with disapproval as much as to say some of his questions were precocious at this first meeting.

  ‘Are you in love with your husband?’

  ‘I don’t think that has anything to do with any arrangement we may come to.’

  ‘It’s only that we do try to discourage clients from embarking on an investigative venture if, in fact, they have no significant final interest in the pursuit.’

  ‘I asked you to name the price,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t possibly tell you yet,’ said smiling Mr B. ‘But your husband having gone abroad with this other lady, well, bang goes a pretty penny to start with. We have to send a man abroad to consult with our expert on the spot, and we need to have local informers, very expensive and somewhat—shall I say?—a local hazard in the area concerned. We have no territorial rights. Expenses here, expenses there, they mount up.’

  His cards were all over the clear table like a regatta assembling on a calm bay, outside which the infinite sea chopped everywhere.

  He smiled a real smile, which was not much different from the normal. ‘Mrs Leaver,’ he said, ‘we haven’t yet got all our cards on the table, have we?’

  She didn’t smile back.

  ‘Or haven’t we? I want to find out, you see, if it’s worth your money investigating your husband’s activities in Venice. Do you really care?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

  ‘You’re still in love with him?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘He’s my husband.’

  ‘A possible divorce? Alimony?’ he said. ‘We are counsellors, you know, counsellors. Do you depend on him entirely, financially?’

  She said nothing for a while, only watching him distrustfully. T
hen as if by a stroke of lucid madness she nevertheless went on eagerly, ‘He holds most of the property and his lady-friend is supposed to be rich.’

  He made notes on two cards, smiling, perhaps as if thinking: She says he has most of the property but it could be the other way round. Or perhaps he was only smiling because he couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Lady-friend supposed to be rich.’

  ‘I don’t care how rich she is or attractive,’ Anthea said, speaking rapidly. ‘I just want to know what my husband’s up to. He’s my husband. I want to know. Do you understand? I believe in one man, one vote.’

  ‘You mean one man, one woman,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said.’

  ‘No, you said one man, one vote.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. What has the vote got to do with it? You must have misheard.’

  ‘All right. Now, if you don’t mind my asking, Mrs Leaver, what did you marry him for in the first place? Do you recall? Was it infatuation, love, or let’s say security if he has a house and money, or a mixture of factors. …’

  She looked alert when he said, ‘house and money’, as if some suspicion held her. She leaned forward and said to him with some earnestness, ‘I’ve often thought over why I married my husband. I have concluded that I married for marriage in general, but more specifically for my wedding day, the event, the white dress, the hymns and the flowers, the picture in the papers. However, that doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘Your picture in the papers,’ he said.

  ‘I am not a criminal,’ said Anthea as if forcing him to mean that she was.

  ‘Good gracious, no. Has he suggested a parting?’

  ‘No, oh, no. He’s too comfortable with me.’

  Mr B. made some notes on the two latest of the small folded cards and stood them in position for the boat-race.

  ‘Venice!’ she said. ‘It’s an insult taking another person to Venice, and never me. We had our honeymoon on the Isle of Wight, but that was back in the humble days. Now it’s Venice. And my son is in Paris at the university studying art history. Everyone abroad, except me. No wonder people ask me, where is my sense of humour?’