by Jane Arbor
Cicely said, ‘So they do know about me. A “very young” blonde, indeed! I wonder who told them all that?’
‘Who knew we went to Siena with Erle?’ Ruth mused.
‘Well, the Fontes, Jeremy and Vivien Slade. Or Erle may have told a lot of people,’ Cicely offered.
‘And they can make—this—out of it. How dare they?’ Ruth exploded. ‘They know so much about Erle that they must know what our connection is, and that it’s perfectly innocent!’
‘Making trouble for trouble’s sake,’ agreed Cicely. At the sound of a car stopping, she looked out of the window. ‘Erle. Coming here. Now we’ll see what he has to say about it all!’
She went down to let him in and bring him up. Erle said, ‘I’ve brought you two tickets for the open-air Aida at Caracalla tonight. It’s the most ambitious opera they do there, all colour and spectacle and a huge cast. So don’t turn up your pretty nose, Cicely love, just because you think it will be highbrow. It’s something that your mama will expect you to have seen.’
‘Aren’t you coming too?’ she asked.
‘No. Sorry. I’ve got to go to hear a new singer of lieder at the Eliseo Theatre, with a view to signing her up.’ Noticing the magazine on the table where Ruth had discarded it, he picked it up. ‘Lo Sussurro, eh? Whose bedside reading? Yours?’ he asked Ruth.
‘No. I bought it,’ Cicely told him. ‘Look at the cover, if you want to know why.’
He flicked back to the cover and emitted a long-drawn ‘We—lll.’ He glanced at Ruth, turned to the inside paragraph, and read it through quickly, then skittered the magazine from him.
‘Seems I’m supposed to have added some reserves to my alleged harem,’ he commented.
‘Can’t you do anything about it?’ Cicely demanded. He shook his head. ‘Freedom of the Press, and the Italian Press is more free than most. Lo Sussurro practically writes its own licence for that type of speculation. Besides, it manages to sail just the safe side of the truth. I did take you both to Siena, and as I have to be seen to enjoy showing off my professional clients in a social way, both my public and private lives are anybody’s business, making it inevitable that there’ll be guesswork as to how far my intimacy with any woman goes.’ He looked across at Ruth. ‘I’m sorry you had to get involved, but that’s your penalty for mixing with a piece of gossip-fodder like me.’
‘It isn’t your fault,’ Ruth said a shade grudgingly. ‘But how do they get their news and pictures? Do they follow you round with a camera or something?’
‘Well, when their newshounds heard about our Siena jaunt, they would have got their local correspondent to angle a picture so that it fitted the story, I suppose.’
‘But how would they hear about your movements?’
Erle shrugged. ‘Anyone’s guess.’
‘For instance, would they accept the information from anyone of the ordinary public who told them?’
‘Probably, yes. And be willing to pay for it, if they thought they could make something spicy out of using it. Why?’
‘I only wondered,’ said Ruth with studied carelessness. But her question had had purpose. She knew now that she had indeed made an enemy of Agnese Fonte. Agnese, Ruth felt sure, hadn’t been content to tell her garbled story to Cesare; she had found a much wider audience for it.
A fortnight later, on the eve of Cicely’s seventeenth birthday, Ruth went shopping for a present for her.
She knew what Cicely would like and where to buy it—a Parigi cameo brooch from a jewellers’ on the Spanish Square, and she was selecting one from the tray produced by the salesman when she was aware of the woman being served at the next showcase-counter. It was Stella Parioli. She looked up and across as Ruth did; their eyes met and Stella acknowledged Ruth with a nod and a patronising smile. But a minute or two after she had turned back to the spread of jewellery before her, she beckoned with an exquisitely gloved finger.
Surprised, Ruth excused herself to her salesman and went over.
‘So kind of you, signora,’ murmured Stella. ‘I am having difficulty in choosing, and it always helps to have the opinion of another woman, don’t you think? Now, which would you select, supposing you were making the choice for yourself?’
Ruth looked in some embarrassment at the cushions and trays, displaying a dozen or so jewelled sprays and clasps. ‘I think it would depend on what I wanted to wear it with, signora,’ she said.
‘Oh—for the lapel of a suit, or to light up a plain black gown, you know? I tried this one; and this’— Stella allowed the assistant to hold each of two sprays against her suit—‘but somehow they lack something. Oh—that? Yes indeed’—as Ruth touched a gleaming spray of leaves and flowers, each flower with a tiny pearl at its heart—‘that’s quite lovely, isn’t it? I think—’
‘Allow me, signora’—the salesman addressed Ruth as he held the spray against the breast of her sun-dress to enable Stella to judge it.
‘Yes indeed,’ she said again. ‘I’ll have that. How much is it?’
The man named a price at which Ruth barely suppressed a gasp. ‘I’m afraid I’ve chosen something very expensive for you,’ she said.
‘It shows your good taste. Thank you, signora. I am grateful,’ Stella said graciously, and then to the man who had asked if the sale was to be cash or account, ‘Neither. It is a present to me. I was to meet Signore Nash here to choose it. But he is late and I have an appointment to keep. So put it aside, will you, and when he comes in, tell him I’ve chosen and ask him to collect it?’
‘Of course, signora.’ She was bowed out with some ceremony, and Ruth returned to her own counter. Puzzled at first, she now felt it likely that Stella had wanted her advice rather less than she had wanted to advertise the fact of Erle’s gift. Ruth had chosen Cicely’s cameo and was waiting to have it wrapped when Erle came in, looked about him, noticed her, and came over to her.
‘I was supposed to meet Parioli here at noon. Have you seen anything of her?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she—’ Ruth began, but stopped to allow Stella’s assistant to explain what had happened. He produced the spray in its case for Erle to see. Erle said, ‘All right. Very choice. I’ll pay cash,’ and took out his cheque book. As he wrote, ‘You say you did see Stella?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I was buying a brooch for Cicely. It’s her birthday tomorrow.’
‘I know. There’ll be flowers and a present—an evening bag—for her by messenger in the morning. Were you and Stella speaking to each other? You met at the party I gave for Cicely, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, and she called me over, asking me to help her to choose your present to her,’ Ruth told him drily.
His eyebrow quirked up. ‘Did she indeed? Propping open the lion’s jaws in readiness for my head with a vengeance!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you disapprove heartily, I take it? Expensive trinkets being very much on the wrong side of that permissible line which you draw between chocolates and mink?’
‘By my code, yes. I’ve no right to judge for anyone else.’
‘But you’re judging like mad, all the same. Your very backbone is rigid with censure. But if you’ve finished here now, may I drop you anywhere? My car is just outside.’
‘If it’s not out of your way you can drive me home,’ Ruth told him.
‘Right.’
They had reached the flat and she was getting out when he asked, ‘What’s Cicely doing to celebrate tomorrow?’
‘Jeremy is taking her and his sister to dinner, and to a nightclub to dance.’
‘And you?’
‘I shall have a quiet evening to myself. I shall probably wash my hair.’
He turned in his seat and looked up at her, standing by the car. ‘Don’t wash your hair,’ he said. ‘Ask me to come round instead.’
‘You? Of course, if you—Why?’ she asked in surprise.
‘Not with any motive that Lo Sussurro could find suspect. May I come? What time are the youngsters leaving?’
‘At about eight, I expect.’
‘Then I’ll come some time after that. Don’t plan to feed me, I shall have dined. O.K.?’
She nodded Yes and he drove off.
Ruth was in a flutter of nerves before he arrived, as she went about hostess motions, plumping cushions and putting out drinks. She couldn’t think why he should actually invite an evening of the flippant or disputatious exchanges into which he and she were usually drawn.
When he came he accepted a drink and walked about with it, as he had done on his first visit to the flat. Ruth watched him, feeling, as always, the distance between them to be immense. As if beyond all reason, she loved someone on the far side of a great gulf! someone she knew only by sight and in daydreams; someone who didn’t know her at all.
At last he took a chair and sat easily, facing her. ‘You know, it’s a pretty rare experience for me to spend an evening with a woman to whom I feel I can talk, and she to me, without the undertow drag of the man-woman thing between us,’ he said.
‘You hope that of this evening, you mean?’ said Ruth.
‘With you, yes. It’s a rapport that no Latin women understand. For them it has to be charged, however slightly, with allure, felt, if not by both, at least by one. Or perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps for any woman, the sexual challenge bit has to be got out of the way before she can relax into friendship with any given man. As you and I could be said to have got it out of the way at Siena, don’t you think?’
Ruth reddened deeply at the shaming memory. ‘Did we?’ she said.
‘I understood so. You dismissed it as meaningless, and in that context, I agree it was. It was an experiment I shouldn’t have made, and it’s behind us. But supposing I said that, if I knew you better, I feel I could talk to you as I would to a man, would you be flattered or offended?’
She knew the answer to that. ‘I’d be flattered,’ she said.
‘And I’d mean it that way. But most women would be outraged—they’d conclude that I was implying they had no sex-appeal, and label me as a boor. Fortunately I got the message pretty early in my professional career, and I’ve exploited it successfully ever since. I’ve learned how and when to turn on the male-versus-female heat.’
‘You make yourself sound very calculating and coldblooded,’ said Ruth.
He shrugged. ‘Just self-preserving. I’ve a living to get that’s all-dependent on my management of people, particularly of women. And though I may be case-hardened by now, I enjoy my work—don’t get me wrong about that.’
Ruth thought for a moment. ‘You know, I doubt if I’d react very favourably to what you admit is so much—technique,’ she said.
He smiled his one-sided smile. ‘Ah, I don’t let the working parts show!’
‘And isn’t there a risk that so much of what you once called “jam”’ could—sort of—warp your aptitude for ... the real thing?’
‘If by “the real thing” you mean love and marriage, why not say so?’ Without answering her question, he laughed. ‘Do you realise how busily we’re proving my point? That even you and I, pledged to a platonic evening, are already launched on a classic he-and-she argument? I think instead you’d better fill me in on what happened to you after you left Charlwood. It’d be safer.’
His laugh and his words were a cool breath of sanity which she ought to have welcomed, and could not. She longed to tell him that, proud as she would be to feel herself treated like a man-friend, at heart she was no different from his ‘most women’; as fully aware as they of that man-to-woman pull which he admitted to exploiting.
But she managed a shrug and a smile as she said, ‘By your standards it was all rather dull. I only ever had one job—in the foreign section of a bank. That was how I met Alec—across the counter when he used to come in on business for his firm. We fell in love and then we married and came out here. Circumstances were difficult at first—the language, no friends, shortage of money—but essentially nothing was difficult. We used to—’ She had meant to give Erle the merest precis of those years, but suddenly, her memories of them vividly pictorial, she found herself describing them with tenderness and wry humour.
When she finished speaking Erle said, ‘You’re describing a completely other world from mine. You did nothing spectacular; you went hardly anywhere, except on the beaten track; asked if you could pick out one highlighted event or one particular day, I doubt if you could name it, could you?’
‘Of course I could. There were plenty of those,’ she said. ‘But it was all the ordinary days, the ones that rolled over our heads without our noticing them and that I couldn’t name now, even by the years they were in, that made our happiness—until it stopped.’
‘Well, thank you for telling me,’ said Erle. ‘Is your husband’s grave in Rome?’
She shook her head. ‘No. It was—’ She checked, her lip quivering, and Erle looked away, until she said with forced brightness, ‘And now don’t you owe me your life story?’
‘Another time, perhaps. Not now. It’s longer than yours, for one thing, and I couldn’t expect you to appreciate the necessity for some of the details.’ He nodded across at her small radiogram. ‘Have you got some good records? May I hear some?’
‘If I’ve got anything you like. Come and choose,’ Ruth invited, reading his change of subject as a deliberate switch-off from the personal.
They spent a companionable hour or so, listening to and discussing music. Of various famous and eccentric conductors and star performers Erle had some anecdotes which hadn’t reached the newspapers, and their talk didn’t touch anything personal again until Erle was about to leave.
He took Ruth’s hand, weighing it lightly in his own. ‘You know, I ought to have got better acquainted with you when you had freckles that showed all across your nose,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘The Sixth didn’t want to know about Form Four B.’
‘Was there anyone in your lot who used to walk you home from parties and put notes in your desk?’
Ruth dimpled at the memory of a contemporary admirer whose very name she couldn’t recall. ‘Yes, there was someone,’ she said.
‘Then perhaps it’s as well I didn’t make contact. I might have been jealous.’
‘Of freckles and a ponytail and rusty eyebrows? Not you!’ she scoffed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I was young enough to be romantic, and I wasn’t as wary of entanglements as I am now.’
‘Meaning you couldn’t be jealous now if you tried?’
He considered the question. ‘I suppose not. I hope not. Jealousy is a deplorable waste of spirit anyway, isn’t it?’
(She would not betray to him that she knew how cruel—and how demanding of spirit jealousy could be.) ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘Alec never gave me any cause.’
‘Then we’re two lucky people, aren’t we? We belong to ourselves.’ Erle dropped her hand, adding, ‘Meanwhile, thank you for a blessedly detached evening. They’re rare.’
When he had gone Ruth leaned her head back against the wall of the tiny vestibule. They hadn’t quarrelled; they had hardly even skirmished, and she could go to bed in the warm glow of his praise of her as a friend. She wanted more, but if that was all he had for her she must settle for that. Tomorrow she would wake up happier than for a long time.
CHAPTER SIX
Cicely was to take a poor view of Erle’s evening with Ruth.
‘Why couldn’t he have come when I was here?’ she wanted to know.
‘It was probably one night that he happened to have free,’ said Ruth. ‘By all accounts he doesn’t have many.’
‘But what did you talk about? What did you do?’
‘We talked about all sorts of things. About school for one. And we played some records. I asked him if he would stay until you came home, but he said that would be too late to keep me up, so he left at about eleven.’
‘What a mad, mad whirl!’ said Cicely in a sour grapes tone. ‘I must say that was a nice birthda
y for me, that was. Jeremy and I had a poozer of a row, and we aren’t speaking now.’
‘But he saw you home, I hope?’
‘Oh yes. We dropped Vivien at their pensione and it was on the way here that we had the row. What had happened was that Zeppe Sforza was at the same nightclub with a party, and we joined forces. One reason was that we needed a boy for Vivien, but Jeremy said I danced with all the others much more than with him. I said he knew what he could do with silly jealousy like that, and he said he ought to have known what a lightweight I was, the way I’d dropped Zeppe when he came along, and he wished me luck with my next, or with Beppo again, if Zeppe was fool enough to have me. Anyway, he was through. I said some more in the same vein, and that was that. I suppose Vivien will take his side. But who cares? Erle hasn’t gone riding with me since I took up with them, so now I’ll make the earliest date with him that I can.’
Ruth said mildly, ‘It’s a pity about Jeremy though. You seemed to have a lot in common. And choosing between Zeppe and Jeremy, I’d say there was a good deal more future in Jeremy. He’s English, for one thing. You wouldn’t have to leave him behind.’
‘And who has to choose between Zeppe Sforza and Jeremy? They’re not the only males in Rome. And who wants a “future”—at seventeen? Look—that for Jeremy Slade and all his works!’ Cicely raged petulantly as she ripped from her sketching-block a black-and-white drawing of the Fountain of Trevi, and tore it up.
The next news Ruth had of the rift came from Jeremy himself who caught her up one morning in the city. Hands in trouser pockets, he mooched along beside her, making an earnest business of keeping one foot on the pavement, the other in the gutter. He broached the subject first. ‘What’s Cicely doing with herself these days? Has she taken up with that lout Sforza again?’ he wanted to know.
‘Not that I know of,’ said Ruth.
‘With who, then?’ Jeremy demanded with a fine scorn of grammar.
‘She hasn’t mentioned anyone or brought them home. Is there no hope the two of you could make it up?’