Temples of Delight

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Yes, all right,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll be quick.’

  ‘I feel bound to point out,’ he added gratuitously, ‘that for you to move another step in this habitation without first checking on your medical cover is probably inadvisable.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. She began in the attic and worked her way back to the ground floor. The cardboard box was nowhere. After thirty minutes of scrupulous but fruitless searching, she confronted Angeletti.

  ‘It’s not here,’ she said. ‘I think it’s very possible that Iona Morgan destroyed it – or she’s taken it with her to America.’ Angeletti fixed his penetrating gaze upon her as she spoke. ‘In which case,’ she said, struggling to arrest the spasm in her lower lip, ‘I haven’t got a manuscript, I’m afraid. You’ll have to believe me, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re saying there was only one copy?’ he said. Alice’s irritation became intense.

  ‘Well yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. It was handwritten in school exercise books, after all – by a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. I told you all that on the way here.’

  ‘I guess I wasn’t listening to you,’ Angeletti said. ‘I had other things on my mind.’

  ‘Well thanks for nothing,’ Alice said and she wiped away the unobtrusive beginnings of tears.

  ‘Handwritten in school exercise books?’ Angeletti said. ‘Mizz Pilling, I’m sorry for your evident distress. Now look. As I see it, it’s like this. Your friend once wrote a story. A while back now, I guess. It happens to share a title with a book currently on my list. So what? It’s not unprecedented. A title is there for the taking. In this case it’s Robert Browning, as your friend already observed.’

  ‘Flora,’ Alice said with feeling, ‘is not my friend.’ Angeletti got up. She was aware that she had finally lost all shred of credibility for him.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘Come on. This is becoming ridiculous.’ She followed him hang-dog to the front door. In the porch he glanced again at his watch. He offered her a shepherding arm and proceeded down the front steps with an air of gracious and politic appeasement. ‘No hard feelings,’ he said. ‘Though I won’t pretend this little fiasco has not cost me my seat at the opera this evening. C’est la vie. I guess I’ll be heading back now. Can I have the driver drop you off, Mizz Pilling?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Alice said curtly, feeling her own temperature rise as his seemed to fall.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Angeletti said. ‘Look, it’s no problem.’ He paused to lift her spirits with an ill-timed pleasantry. ‘It’s too bad those pigeons’ll be cold by now,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I pulled you away from your dinner like that.’

  It was at this moment that Alice was diverted from indignation by the sight of Koplinski’s skip. It was bulging with fall-out from the newly banished floor and ceiling.

  ‘I know what,’ she said. ‘Koplinski’s dumped it!’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Angeletti.

  ‘Over there,’ Alice said. ‘He’ll have dumped the cardboard box with all Jem’s stories and then he’ll have dumped all that other stuff on top of it, don’t you see?’

  Angeletti looked as if turned to stone. ‘Are we talking about the dumpster?’ he said. The colour was draining from his face.

  ‘Well yes,’ Alice said. ‘That skip over there. I mean, after somebody’s shipped out to America and you’re glad to see the back of them, mightn’t you dump their stuff?’

  Angeletti stood staring in disbelief at Koplinski’s immoderate mountain of Victorian lath and plaster.

  ‘I’d like to believe you’re joking,’ he said. But Alice had already approached the skip and she immediately started to delve.

  With her first incursion into that weighty latticework of old beams and slats of wattle she ripped her right thumbnail to the quick, but she carried on regardless. The mountain was topped with heavy old floor joists, meshed together with batons and rusty four inch nails. With each heave the meshwork rocked briefly leftwards and re-established itself very much as before. Blood gushed from the palm of Alice’s right hand where a splinter had wedged itself into her flesh. With the pain it came to her with sudden force how outrageously – how unprofessionally – Angeletti had behaved towards her. First he had stolen Jem’s novel and then he had effectively frog-marched her from her own front door. Ever since he had tyrannized over her, either with bossiness or with petulance. Or he had patronized her from the dizzy heights of his own provoking sense of self-importance.

  ‘Since you’ve behaved all evening like the Grand Inquisitor,’ she said, ‘I expect you to help me now. Oh yes! For three hours and more I’ve watched you bully me and turn the whole thing round on me. I’ve watched you write me off as a liar and a madwoman. And you? And you?!’ She sucked at the blood and dust which ran from her palm, remembering with what easy, girlish confidence she had once promised Jem to look after those stories for as long as ever Jem needed her. The appalling memory brought a surge of remorse which lent strength to the confrontation.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you!’ she said. ‘ “Mister” Angeletti! Because my friend who wrote that story is right now lying on her deathbed. She has no family to defend her. Only me. She is about to die in childbirth while you try and publish a stolen novel. Well, you’ll do that over my dead body.’

  Angeletti blinked at her sceptically. ‘Women do not schedule themselves in advance to die in childbirth, Mizz Pilling,’ he said. ‘You will have to do better than that.’

  ‘And I wonder what you would know about it?’ Alice said. ‘From your very vast personal experience? I wonder how many of the women you know have just happened to die in childbirth?’ Angeletti fixed her intensely with a moment’s pure loathing.

  ‘It could be that my mother died in childbirth,’ he said. ‘I find your manner both presumptuous and hectoring, Mizz Pilling.’

  Alice, meanwhile, had wrenched again at the resolute joists and slats. The action had yielded the same impotent result.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said. ‘Me “presumptuous and hectoring”? Ha! And I’m really not at all surprised about your “mother” dying in childbirth. It’ll have been from catching sight of you. Now Jem McCrail—’ She paused as misery began to overwhelm her. ‘Jem McCrail is dying. She’s pregnant and she won’t have chemotherapy because she wants to save the baby.’ Her voice rose in volume as the blood dripped from her hands and, remarkably, the words kept on coming. ‘My dearest friend is dying,’ Alice said. ‘And, God knows, this isn’t much that I’m doing for her now, and, God knows, it’s late, but I’m going to do it. All anyone ever did for Jem was steal from her and steal again. Flora stole her scholarship and everyone stole her talent. But you, Mr Angeletti – only you – could possibly be gross enough to steal from her her unborn baby.’

  Angeletti, she noticed, had begun to look unexpectedly subdued. It drove her to further heights of confrontation. ‘So why don’t you put your conviction where your mouth is?’ she said. ‘Since you won’t believe a word that I say, why don’t you help me to get this junk off here and prove yourself so right? Go on. Because if you don’t, then you’re not only a bully and a thief, Mr Angeletti. You’re a ninny into the bargain.’

  Angeletti cast an eye a little dubiously over his clothes. ‘I’m not exactly dressed for heavy work,’ he said, conceding with difficulty. ‘But if you’re quite serious about this, Mizz Pilling, I’d be more than happy to hire you some labour in the morning. Right now I think it’s apparent that we should talk.’ Alice snorted with contempt. With all her remaining strength she heaved vengefully at the meshwork of aged joists which showered Angeletti’s clothes with plaster dust and smuts. Some of it went down his neck.

  ‘ “Talk”?!’ she said. ‘As if I hadn’t had my fill of listening to you talk from the moment I got you on the answering machine.’ Angeletti stood silent, tensing his executioner’s jaw. The action lent to his physiognomy a kind of menacing presence which would normally have caused her to quail. But Alice was blinking down
into the skip. For a moment she stopped in her tracks. Her brain had taken a photograph which had just that second made its print upon her consciousness. That moment when the wood had moved, she had seen – or had she? – for the merest particle of a second, a dusty section of black fishnet tights and the broken jaw of the waffle iron. Underneath these items, she had seen about four square centimetres of manila, printed with the letters ‘sion’. Ascension.

  ‘Please,’ she said hoarsely, hardly daring to believe it. ‘Mr Angeletti, please. I’m sorry if I was rude to you, but I think I may have found it.’ Angeletti, when she looked at him, was staring at her fixedly. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help me.’

  Angeletti took off his coat. He moved to place it on Paul Koplinski’s wall. Then he took off his dinner jacket. After that he removed his cuff-links. He put them into his trouser pockets and rolled up the sleeves of his beautiful silk shirt.

  ‘Oh hurry up,’ Alice said. ‘Oh please.’ Angeletti was removing his black silk tie. He approached the skip rather grimly.

  ‘Stand back,’ he said. Alice stood back. She watched as he leaned his right arm into the skip and heaved the knot of joists to the ground in one huge, marvellous, creaking arc. Alice saw the woodwork rise and crash in a filthy cloud of disintegrating plaster.

  ‘Gosh!’ she said. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘I work out,’ Angeletti said. ‘With weights.’ He was fastidiously trying to dust the filth from off his hands.

  ‘Gosh!’ Alice said again, because there, like a benediction under the black fishnet tights and the waffle iron, lay the cardboard box with the pile of convent exercise books.

  ‘There you are!’ Alice said. ‘There it is.’ Angeletti exhumed the cardboard box and carried it solemnly to the street lamp. He sat down on the kerbstone and began at once to read quietly to himself.

  ‘Well?’ Alice said anxiously, and she approached him to read the book over his shoulder. ‘Well?’ He said nothing. He kept on reading.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered something. I’ll bet your “Mizz” le Fey’s typescript is missing all its aitches.’ Angeletti said nothing. He kept on reading.

  ‘Well, surely you believe me now?’ she said. When Angeletti did not reply, Alice took Jem’s letter from her pocket where it had lain now for something like nine hours. She unfolded it and handed it to him. ‘Wouldn’t you say – I mean making allowances for illness and growing up – wouldn’t you say that was the same person’s handwriting? You see, nobody in England writes like that any more. She learned it from an old copy book.’ Angeletti looked at it.

  ‘May I read the letter?’ he said.

  ‘Please do,’ Alice said. ‘You will find that it’s a bit strange.’ She watched him closely as he read the letter carefully once through. Finally he folded it and returned it to her.

  ‘Well?’ Alice said. Angeletti looked as though he were struggling to rise above the heavy drama of its contents.

  ‘I’d have to admit it lends a degree of credence to your assertions,’ Angeletti said.

  ‘ “Degree of credence”?’ Alice said. ‘What else can you possibly want?’

  ‘Mizz Pilling, forgive me,’ he said. ‘It may be that I owe you a big apology. I would like to hold my horses on that until I speak with the writer of that letter.’

  ‘Jem?’ Alice said. ‘You mean us to go and see Jem? Well, that’s what I’ve wanted to do all evening. It’s only you has kept on stopping me.’

  ‘When did you get the letter?’ Angeletti said.

  ‘Today,’ Alice said. ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘What’s the date on it?’ he said. Alice, in her feverish haste to read the letter, had not stopped to register its date. She passed it over to Angeletti. He unfolded it and checked it.

  ‘August seventh,’ he said. ‘OK. I suggest we wait until the morning. It’s gotten kind of late to visit a hospital for the dying.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Angeletti said. ‘If it’s no problem for you, I’d like to head out and check into a nearby hotel. That way I can undertake any necessary business as early as possible.’ He unrolled his shirt sleeves as he spoke. Then he lifted the box of books which he began to carry towards the car. ‘Get my clothes there, will you?’ he said.

  Before she got back into the taxi, Alice cast an eye over the impressive pyramid of debris which Angeletti had so dramatically deposited in the guttering outside Koplinski’s house. She felt suddenly sufficiently skittish to want to write Paul Koplinski a note.

  ‘Can I borrow a pencil?’ she said. She fixed the note firmly to the apex of the remaining debris in the skip. ‘Dear Mr Koplinski,’ it said. ‘Don’t worry about all this mess. I wasn’t dumping on you. Truly. I was only taking out. Thanks a million. Alice.’

  * * *

  ‘Where to, squire?’ said the driver. He had made significant inroads into the rat book which he shelved, once more, in the glove compartment.

  ‘Southampton,’ Angeletti said.

  ‘Come again?’ said the driver. First they stopped briefly at a wooden prefab alongside the railway station where Alice and the cabbie ate hamburgers and chips. Angeletti, having enquired without hope after hot fudge sauce, ate two scoops of vanilla icecream on a bath bun and washed it down with Cherry Coke.

  ‘If that’s your idea of a good wholesome supper,’ Alice said, ‘it’s hardly any wonder that you wouldn’t eat my pigeons.’ Angeletti, she thought, was disposed to react to anything she said as though it were about to bring him out in spots.

  ‘I’m not due for “supper”,’ he said irritably. ‘Not for another five hours. Right now I’m on Eastern Standard Time. Are you intent upon bludgeoning me into your time zone?’

  Alice didn’t mind. In fact it made her laugh. She had unconcernedly stuffed in the last of her French fries and her mouth was too full to allow for reply. A goods train lumbered heavily over the railway bridge as she munched. She was feeling unreasonably elated. She had found Jem’s books. She was going to see Jem. What more could one ask for in this life?

  The cardboard box lay between them on the back seat alongside the cellular telephone. Once again they spoke hardly at all for the duration of the journey. Angeletti, having used the telephone to re-arrange his flight schedule, had seized the opportunity to catch up on sleep. This had had the effect, at least, of saving Alice from his cigar smoke. She took the opportunity to scrutinize his appearance and registered, to her satisfaction, that he had become pretty filthy from his encounter with the skip. His trousers were ingrained with plaster dust and so were his beautiful black shoes.

  The driver, with the assistance of his AA road map, delivered them to a village adjacent to where she had assessed Jem’s hospital to be. He stopped outside a small, rather pretty old inn which, miraculously, still had a night clerk at the reception desk. Angeletti went in to make sure. Then he came back.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘They have a room. Come, Mizz Pilling. Andiamo. We could both of us use a decent shower.’ Alice went rigid. He opened the back door and took up the telephone and the cardboard box. ‘Shift your ass now, Mizz Pilling,’ he said. ‘We got business to transact in the morning.’

  Alice got out and followed him determinedly down the driveway, wondering how best to resolve the business of the ‘room’. She cursed the fact that she had not thought to bring her handbag with her, wherein she had all those items necessary for asserting her independence. Cheque book, Visacard, driving licence. But then Angeletti had so domineeringly manipulated her from her own living room.

  ‘I want my own room,’ she said. Angeletti swallowed.

  ‘Look. I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘The place is thick with tourists. The room on offer is vacant, pending refurbishment. That’s why it’s available. I twisted an arm or two to acquire it for us, Mizz Pilling. But maybe you would prefer it if I slept on the forest floor?’ Alice, who would undoubtedly have preferred it, hardly felt in
a position to admit to it.

  ‘And if you would kindly stop calling me “Mizz” Pilling,’ she said irritably. ‘It’s been getting on my nerves all evening.’ Angeletti then emitted the first laugh she had heard him utter. It was brief, sardonic and menacing.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. Since we are about to pass the night together in this enchanting and intimate little hostelry, maybe I ought to know. Is it Miss or Mrs?’

  ‘It’s Mrs,’ Alice replied with unnecessary haste.

  ‘Mrs Pilling,’ he said. ‘OK.’

  ‘Mrs Riley, as it happens,’ Alice said. ‘I use my own name in my business capacity, that’s all.’

  Angeletti paused on the path as if knocked back. His response, though delayed, was predictably offensive.

  ‘Not “Mrs Riley” as in Mister Matthew Riley of the pigeon house?’ he said. ‘Or ought I to say “of the Dovecote”?’

  ‘If you don’t mind!’ Alice said angrily. ‘You are talking about my husband.’

  Chapter 27

  The Inn had a very nice reception hall. Its ambiance was cosy. There was a barometer, a grandfather clock and a polished oak settle. Two Baluchi rugs lay on the floor, while a brass fender, brass fire irons, brass equestrian accessories and a Georgian brass coal scuttle adorned the fireplace. On the chimney breast there hung an oil painting of a hunting dog with a bird in its mouth. In the warm light which bathed the reception desk, Alice could see that Angeletti’s thinning black hair had acquired an outer coating of dust, broken cobwebs and miscellaneous Koplinski filth.

  ‘Any luggage, sir?’ said the reception clerk.

  ‘Just the carton,’ Angeletti said firmly. ‘Which I prefer to carry myself.’

  Mercifully, the room had twin beds, though it smelled of Rentokil and perishing rubber carpet underlay. On the walls it had a sort of faecal green damask wallpaper which, in the glow of the unshaded forty-watt bulb, appeared to match Angeletti’s eyes. A jaundiced green carpet gave stickily underfoot and, through a small casement window, Alice looked out upon a concrete servants’ yard with mop buckets and drains.