The cathedral itself filled her with a greater sense of awe than any she had felt in Rome or Florence. She was in no way a religious woman and had long ago abandoned the beliefs she had been taught in childhood and had held conventionally without much thought while she was working in Church of England schools. Since she had been ready to declare her agnosticism she had also not concealed her long established disgust and horror of the Rood. So it was an enormous relief and lightening of the spirit to find in the dark, gold-glittering interior of St. Mark’s that eastern, Byzantine conception of Christ the over-looker, the judge, the all-wise, all-loving friend, the active son in human form of the Almighty Father, universal Good, Immortal God. No possibility here of false humanism, sentimental self-indulgent self-sacrifice.
Overcome by the surging of these thoughts that took her back over those events in her life that had first forced them to emerge, and at the same time moved by the sheer beauty and splendour of the gleaming intricate mosaics all about her, Mrs. Lawler walked slowly away from her companions. They did not follow her, for Myra especially remembered what she had heard, standing on the bridge above the Arno. Flo remembered the monastery of Monte Scenario and how familiar Rose had seemed with the rather doubtful Mr. Strong. There had been some trouble with Gwen, perhaps between that girl, would you call her trendy, and the strange man whose face gave her the creeps.
As Mrs. Lawler passed into the deep shadow of one of the solid pillars in the nave of the church, part of the shadow moved. Owen’s hand touched her arm, closed on it without any apparent effort checked her movement.
“I didn’t see you, Owen,” Rose said in a low voice.
“I didn’t intend to be seen, except by you,” he answered.
It was wickedly effective. In that place, in the mood it had imposed on her, the sheer sensual beauty she was accepting without northern puritan misgiving or southern superstition, laid her open to any guarded flattery from any quarter, not even allowing for this man’s personal appeal in her most personal desire for atonement.
“Is anything the matter? Can I do anything?”
It was ridiculous, she thought humbly, at her age, but if only she could —
“Is it about Gwen?” she went on as he did not answer.
“Yes. How could you guess, Rose?”
“Tell me.”
They still stood in the shadow of the pillar, where she tried to make out his face but could only really see the strong hand gripping her arm, sending its message of strength into her own body, together with its appeal, equally compelling.
“We were to meet, here in the cathedral, half an hour ago. She hasn’t come. She isn’t here.”
“But she left the hotel before we did. I know, because I saw her key was up on the board as I left mine.”
Quite definite, this. Because Mrs. Lawler always now put her key into the hand of the chief clerk at the desk and waited until he had disposed of it.
“It’s very dark in here. Whereabouts were you to meet?”
“Just inside the door. Where they sell postcards.”
“She wasn’t there when we came in. Shall I go and look again? I could ask Myra and Flo. They’re about somewhere.”
“They’ve gone to see the picture behind the screen.”
So he had been watching with the definite intention of speaking to her, but not to them? Again Rose felt, as she was meant to feel, the glow of being chosen, of being singled out, favoured. Poor Owen, so mistakenly in pursuit of such a worthless quarry. Never mind, if that was what he wanted.
“Have you tried the square?” she asked. “I don’t think Gwen would find much in here to interest her, do you?”
A quick flare of anger took his hand from her arm, but he controlled it. What had he found himself or even looked for, except darkness, he raged inwardly? Aloud he said in a very reasonable voice, “The square — yes. Come with, me, Rose. Look a fool if I appear to be chasing …”
He gave a little embarrased laugh. Rose joined him. She had never felt so much pure pity, such sympathy, for this poor war victim. If Gwen had let him down already, even after accepting his truly magnificent present, well, it would be better sooner than later.
They moved to a side door, Owen showing the way. She did not consider that this was not the obvious way to find a waiting friend. But it provided a little more temporary shade for which she was grateful, as the sun was now high, the crowds very dense, mostly clustered below the clock tower with its two immense iron figures built with their hammers to beat out the hour upon the bell between them.
“They must be huge,” Rose said gaily, forgetting Gwen, “the people up there on the tower beside them are tiny!”
He did not answer but took her arm again to urge her forward. Together, as an obvious tourist couple, they made their way through the surging mob.
It was Mrs. Lawler who saw Gwen first. She recognised the yellow tunic and the white slacks.
“There she is!” she said, pointing. “Over by the rows of chairs! On the sunny side! With — I don’t recognise — I don’t think it’s any of our lot … Gwen!” she called, but they were a long way off and she couldn’t be sure she had heard. Perhaps it wasn’t Gwen after all. She tried again.
“Gwen!”
The girl turned, not looking directly at her, rather searching the crowd beyond and behind her. But Mrs. Lawler stopped dead, halted by that wild, chalk-white face. Gwen Chilton indeed, but in an extremity of fear. The man beside her turned away, the two men with him following. Gwen turned also, stumbling as she tried to catch up with them.
“It was Gwen!” Rose exclaimed, turning to Owen.
But Owen had vanished.
Chapter Ten
“Oh there you are!” Myra was breathless.
“We waited at the main door for simply ages,” Flo complained, breathing hard but not actually panting.
“I came out by the side door,” Rose answered, still searching the crowd behind her for a sight of Owen, but not finding any. Gwen, too, when she turned her head the other way again, had disappeared, together with her escort of three strangers.
“Why? Why a side door, Rose? Why here? What’s happened?” Myra persisted, at last finding her friend’s eyes staring into hers with a very strange expression of both confusion and alarm.
“I don’t think anything has actually happened,” Rose said, slowly. “But I think a lot of things may be going to happen. Only I haven’t the foggiest idea what.”
“Honestly!” Flo was annoyed. “I’m for a good long sit-down and a coffee.”
“Iced,” Myra added. “And with music. Real music. They have orchestras at the cafés or just outside them.”
“In the shade, then,” Rose said, coming to herself with an effort. “The sun glares even through my sunglasses, after the blessed, heavenly, gloom inside.” She smiled back at St. Mark’s as she spoke, remembering Owen’s voice, compelling, appealing.
It was so comfortable, so pleasing, so restoring, to listen to heavenly Mozart while watching the crowds from a necessary distance that Mrs. Lawler decided not to confuse the minds of her friends with the problem of Owen’s troubles and hesitations, the puzzle of his sudden departure. Instead she explained her recent behaviour by saying, “Didn’t you see Gwen? Across the Square? That was what brought me up short. Just before you caught up with me.”
“I thought it was Mr. Strong who stopped you?” Flo said.
“Mr. Strong?” So they had seen him.
“Yes. I noticed him first. Then he turned and went away.”
“Did he? Which way?”
“Towards the shops. That first little street out of the Square.”
“I saw Gwen,” Myra said. “And I didn’t see Mr. Strong. I must say I didn’t think much of Gwen’s new friends. Distinctly sinister.”
“That was what I thought,” Rose said, trying to make the remark light-heartedly. “Did you see her face? I think she knew them, but wasn’t very pleased to see them here.”
�
�Which doesn’t surprise me,” Myra answered. “No, I didn’t see her face. I was focussing on the men. Villain with bodyguards. Heroine in ambush.”
“I think you may be right at that” Rose gave up her pretended gaiety. Heroine in ambush. Then could one add, Hero evades it?
Flo’s excited voice said, “Oh look, both of you! Straight across the Square, that boy with a guitar slung across his shoulders. The girl with him, long skirt and fringy leather waistcoat. Penny Banks, surely? Isn’t it Penny Banks?”
“Yes,” said Rose. “You’re quite right. Penny. Not deported. Not in the nick. How very extraordinary.”
Myra had left her chair and was threading her way past the tables. Her progress was slow, but from time to time she raised an arm and Rose was amused to see Penny first drag her partner round to face the ranks of chairs and then pull his arm up with her own to signal recognition in his turn.
“They’re coming over,” Flo said, with some surprise. “I had no idea she ever even noticed our existence.”
“She noticed, but didn’t acknowledge,” Rose explained.
“So now I very much doubt … Ah yes, Mr. and Mrs. Banks on our right. About twenty yards away. Yes, Penny’s turning off a bit now. I hope Myra realizes …”
The latter did, in time to turn to her friends and signal to them that she had been disappointed, had made a mistake.
“That mannerless child pretends she hasn’t seen us either,” Flo said, as the pair drew nearer with Myra returning, not many tables away.
Rose nodded and then smiled across the tables to Mrs. Banks, who returned the greeting. Mr. Banks, who was watching his daughter, stood up as she arrived at their table and sat down when she took her seat, leaving her to introduce her escort and the boy to find himself a chair. He dragged up two, one for himself and one for the guitar. An elderly waiter, approaching for orders, nearly tripped over the legs of this unorthodox accessory, swore at it, pulled it away. The guitar slid towards the ground but was saved just in time.
“Sock him one!” Penny said fiercely.
“Don’t you dare!” Mr. Banks ordered, swivelling to speak to the waiter, at the same time pushing out a leg to intercept the young man.
“Belt up,” the latter said to Penny.
The waiter moved the extra chair to its former place.
Though the music and the distant hum of the crowd prevented these exchanges from reaching the three friends, they understood what they saw and deplored it.
“Poor Mrs. Banks,” Myra said. “She’s so hopeless where Penny is concerned. Since title girl left us she’s been so much more relaxed and chatty, hasn’t she?”
“The knitting has put on a yard or two — if that’s a good thing,” Rose said.
“What I want to know,” Flo sighed, “is what really happened to Penny. She certainly went away from the hotel in an ambulance. Was that really appendicitis or an overdose? Then she was supposed to have gone back to England to convalesce. But rumour said she’d been put on a charge, without bail. All nonsense, the lot of it. So what really …?”
“Not our business,” Myra told her firmly.
“I know it isn’t.” Flo was indignant. “If they were an ordinary nice family I wouldn’t try to find out. But the parents are so dim and the girl’s such a stinker—and now that insolent young man — Penny’s breed, whoever he is.”
“Come along,” Rose said, getting up and beginning to move away. “I want to see the shops and the little canals and the gondolas at work. If there are any at work. That stack of them near our landing place made me think of the few hansom cabs in Trafalgar Square in the twenties when I was a child. Waiting. Waiting. On show, poor things. A sort of Victorian dinosaur.”
That made them laugh and follow her willingly. So she walked on ahead, staring into shop windows, crossing narrow bridges, pausing to take photographs of picturesque corners where the dark water reflected sunlit old houses standing up from it, sunk now to the bottoms of their green-slimed doors. Everywhere she saw new and unexpected-sights and marvelled at what she saw; everywhere she looked for Owen, but did not find him.
At last they came to the Rialto and stood there gazing at the actual, the living Canaletto spread below them. The morning was nearly over. It was time to go back to the hotel on the Lido.
“Don’t forget we have booked a hut on the beach,” Myra reminded her friends.
“Then we must get a boat from here,” Flo decided.
“And we can take photographs as we go down this … this …”
“Grand Canal,” Rose supplied as she set off briskly down the steps from the bridge.
At the San Marco stopping place Mr. and Mrs. Banks joined their ferry, but alone now. The couple looked sad, but brightened when they saw the three friends and made their way slowly but patiently through the intervening crowd until they reached them, when Mrs. Lawler moved to make room for Mrs. Banks on the seat beside her, while Mr. Banks leaned over the back of it to join in their conversation.
As usual the couple were prepared to compare notes about their sightseeing that morning, their opinions of what they had seen, their plans for the rest of the day.
“We’re going to bathe,” Rose told them.
“Well, I don’t know about bathing,” Mrs. Banks said. “But we’ve booked a place on the beach. Only they said we might have to share the hut with others.”
“They said that to us too. I think they say it to anyone, so as not to disappoint the customers.”
Mrs. Banks, listening, nodded.
So Rose was not surprised when they arrived at their hut that afternoon to find the Banks pair already settled in two long chairs in the sun, Mr. Banks in bathing trunks and linen sun hat and dark glasses, his wife in her usual flowered nylon summer dress, no hat, no glasses, but her knitting flowing over her lap on to the sand.
The three joined them, greeted them with pleasure and surprise at not finding strangers in possession. Mr. Banks smiled up at them.
“My doing,” he explained. “Glad to see you approve.”
“Of course we do,” Myra told him. “We’ll just change and join you in the sea, if you’re thinking of going in.”
“Thinking, yes. Too darned lazy, though.”
“Nonsense,” said Flo stoutly, making for the hut.
They all changed and Mr. Banks was moved to give his chair to Rose, who said she would let her lunch settle fox a bit longer.
“Are you not going in?” she asked Mrs. Banks as she sat down.
“I never bathe,” was the answer. “They tried to teach me to swim at school, but I was too scared to take my feet off the bottom even with someone holding me by the back of my costume. Do you swim, Mrs. Lawler?”
“Oh yes, I have always swum,” she answered, smiling.
As long as she could remember. Well, yes, though she remembered best those Olympics, just before the War, when she had been hailed as the girl champion swimmer, near champion, no medal but promise of one, what would now be called a “teenage wonder” or some such nonsense. At sixteen, rising seventeen.
“I still do swim — when the water’s warm, as I suppose it must be here.”
She waited a few minutes and then said, “We saw Penny was back. You don’t mind my asking about her, do you? We were so sorry she had to leave the tour.”
“No, you weren’t,” said Mrs. Banks. It was the first definite, the first strong statement Mrs. Banks had ever made and it quite startled Rose, who sat up straight and said, in a voice to match, “Well, in a way we were all glad to lose the tantrums and so on. We were sorry for you and Mr. Banks.”
“Which didn’t stop a lot of you making up stories about Penny. You needn’t think we didn’t hear them, in a roundabout way, of course.”
“Stories, yes,” said Rose. “To be perfectly honest, we three did discuss what could have happened, but we never passed on anything or discussed it with anyone else, I do assure you. So I meant it when I said we were glad to see Penny looking well and strong in
Venice this morning.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Banks, relapsing into her familiar soft, vague manner. “Penny had a sudden acute appendix, they thought at the hospital, not typhoid as the local doctor thought. We asked Billie to announce it to the tour, only I don’t believe she did it properly. She went to hospital in an ambulance from the hotel. Oh, I know there were rumours of a police ambulance and drugs and I don’t know what all.”
She paused, staring at Rose, who stared back, making no answer.
“She left hospital and we arranged for her to go to my sister in Wimbledon to convalesce. We asked Billie to announce this also and again die did it too vaguely. So of course the rumours started that she had been moved to prison on a charge of having drugs in her possession. All false.”
Again Mrs. Banks paused and again Mrs. Lawler waited.
“But Penny, being so independent and — and willful …” Mrs. Banks’ voice wavered, but she continued to knit vigorously.
“Came back from Wimbledon?” asked Rose gently.
“Yes. With Gary. That’s her boy-friend. Her latest boy-friend. Of course we cancelled her booking when she left the tour, but they hadn’t filled it, they couldn’t, could they, halfway through? She’s at liberty to use the booked room here and the two other separate one night stops on the way back to Genoa.”
“Will she? I mean what about the boy-friend?”
“I don’t know if she will. They joined us for coffee in the Square, as you noticed. But they didn’t come over with us to the Lido.”
“Or turn up for lunch, either. I don’t think the rest of tine tour know she’s back. Only Billie, I suppose.”
“I’ve left all that to my husband,” Mrs. Banks said with a glance seawards, where the stout figure was threshing about between the long waves, with Myra and Flo jumping and splashing beside him.
“I think I’d better go and join them,” Rose said. “I’m sorry we have all been so lacking in … understanding and — and just commonsense. Too much melodrama in the newspapers and on the goggle-box, I’m afraid.”
A Pigeon Among the Cats Page 10