Angeletti, meanwhile, having put down the cardboard box and locked the door, was surveying his own reflection in the oval mirror of the wardrobe door.
‘Santa Maria,’ he said a little bitterly, and he picked fastidiously at a cobweb adhering to one of the strands of hair which still adorned the upper reaches of his brow. ‘Behold the man of letters.’ Alice turned on him at once.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you call yourself?’ She had not meant to sound quite so confrontational, but Angeletti’s presence was not conducive to serenity. Angeletti reacted angrily. He took a small step backwards and bristled.
‘I called myself a “man of letters”,’ he said. ‘Have I offended against one of your codes of etiquette here, or what?’
‘Well no—’ Alice said. ‘I—’ But Angeletti had seemed to become increasingly disagreeable with their admission to the hotel.
‘So what do you suggest I call myself?’ he said. ‘You have some suitably understated and misleading British way of describing a person such as myself?’
‘Oh no,’ Alice said. ‘I—’
‘ “I read a bit; I scribble a bit”?’ Angeletti minced viciously. ‘I “cough in ink”? You call that a “profession”, Mrs Riley? To cough in ink? Or a “hobby”? Which is the more discreet? To earn one’s living from a profession, or from a hobby?’ Alice blinked. She wondered why he didn’t swallow tranquillizers and get on with it. He spread his hands as he confronted her, spewing fire and smoke. She noticed then that Angeletti wore a wedding ring. It caused her to donate a moment’s thought to Mrs Angeletti. What did the woman do all day, Alice wondered. Was she required to consume her life in appeasing the wretched man?
‘P-please,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t shout. It’s late. I only wondered if you’d ever worked in a summerhouse, that’s all.’
Angeletti’s anger modified itself into a sort of touchy puzzlement. ‘Sure I’ve “worked in a summer house”,’ he said. ‘I have a small cabin in New Hampshire. I take a break there in the summer. So what?’
‘Oh, but that’s not a summerhouse,’ Alice said, with relief. ‘That’s just a summer house.’
‘Go take a shower, Mrs Riley,’ Angeletti said. ‘Like you said. It’s late.’
The bathroom had no shower and the bath water, which coughed and gurgled through pocky, nickel-plated taps, set up a horrendous, compromising knock which ran like morse code through the hotel plumbing. Frappe frappe. It ran hot for about three inches and then it began to run cold. Alice washed her hair in soap and rinsed it as best she could. Since there was no towel in the bathroom, she dried herself on the bathmat and finished the job on the curtains. Then she got back into her clothes.
‘There’s no shower,’ she said to Angeletti. ‘But there’s a bath. I’ve left my bath water for you, because you may be glad of it. It is a bit scummy, I’m afraid.’
‘What?’ said Angeletti. ‘ “Scummy”? Get rid of it, Mrs Riley. Is there something the matter with you?’
‘There is nothing the matter with me,’ Alice said. ‘There’s something the matter with the plumbing. You can have your bath scummy or ice cold. It’s all the same to me.’ Angeletti sent out death rays through his eyes.
‘I’ll take ice cold,’ he said. Alice returned to the bathroom. She pulled out the plug and sluiced the tub. Then she turned on the hot tap. To her immense satisfaction, the water ran as if drawn up from some underground refrigerator. After that she got into one of the beds. But was it safe to sleep?
‘Try sleeping with one eye open,’ said Angeletti, who had managed to read her mind before taking off for the bathroom.
Angeletti made an uninhibited clatter in the bathroom, turning the taps on and off again and churning about like a tidal wave. Alice worried for the hotel’s other guests. On top of this, he began, suddenly, to transmit various carpings and whinings through the bathroom door.
‘Mrs Riley?’ he said. ‘There are no toilet items in here. Did you happen to remove them?’
‘If you mean shampoo,’ Alice said. ‘There isn’t any. You’ll find there are no towels either. I used the bathmat, but you can have one of the bedspreads if you like.’ She got up and ripped the candlewick spread from off his bed. She pitched it, bunched into a ball, against the bathroom door. Then she got back into bed. Angeletti said nothing for a moment.
‘So how come you washed your hair?’ he said.
‘I used the soap,’ Alice said. She yawned and sank down on the pillows.
‘Soap?’ he said prissily. ‘I can’t wash my hair with soap.’
Alice sat up again, her patience sorely tried. ‘Use the soap and get on with it!’ she said. ‘You’ve got practically no hair to bother about in any case.’ A deathly silence followed upon this utterance during which Alice began to hold her breath. When Angeletti spoke again, it surprised her to notice that his tone had changed. He was actually sounding slightly tentative.
‘Mrs Riley?’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’
‘Fire away,’ Alice said.
‘Do you have an opinion about hair replacement therapy?’ Alice wondered if she should scream.
‘It’s really none of my business,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask Mrs Angeletti?’
‘Now that’s an interesting idea,’ he said. ‘The first or the second Mrs Angeletti?’
‘Oh, the second, I’d say,’ Alice said. And she lay down again on the pillows.
When Angeletti emerged from the bathroom, his loins were wrapped in the bedspread. His hair was wet and plastered darkly to his head and his almost hairless chest, covered in smooth, olive skin, rose powerfully above a flat, iron-hard abdomen. He ran a pocket comb through his hair in front of the glass. Alice sensed that he was feeling somehow aggrieved.
‘You’re really quite a long way from being completely bald,’ she said, wishing to make amends. ‘Your hair’s receding, that’s all. No, honestly. It makes your brow look higher. It’s not altogether unattractive.’
Angeletti turned and looked at her, cocky and sarcastic. ‘ “Not altogether unattractive”,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell me how I decode that, Mrs Riley?’ Alice found that irritation gave her speech.
‘Decoded it means I think you’re not altogether unattractive,’ she said. ‘Or you wouldn’t be, if you weren’t s-s-so in-c-c-credibly bad-tempered and vain.’ Then she turned her face to the wall and addressed herself to sleep. As she dozed, it was her impression that Angeletti had returned to his telephone.
When Alice rose next morning, she thought first of Flora and Matthew. Was Flora nestling with that virginal, Grünewald body in the crook of Matthew’s faithless arm? Were they breathing together in sleep after a night of gentle touchings? She saw the fine brown hair on Matthew’s naked legs and the appealing angles of his toes. Then she thought of Jem. She had to think of Jem, though to do so caused her hands to tremble and her heart to pound violently against the cage of her ribs.
Had the letter been the last and most devastating of Jem’s dazzling repertoire of ‘ventriloquism’? Was it all a gigantic hoax? Could Jem seriously no longer distinguish fact from fiction? Was the hospital in truth a hospital for the mentally ill? Was Jem completely off her tree? Or was it all true?
Jem had said nothing about wanting to see her. Alice was deeply grieved by this, but she tried hard to understand. Did she not wish Alice to see her in her condition of ‘rot and putrefaction’? In which case, what right had Alice to come at all? Had all Jem’s buoyant brown curls been thinned to nothing by galloping illness? Had that magic bell, Jem’s golden voice, been half consumed by voracious disease? Was Jem, at this moment, lying on a bed of sores, oozing putrid substances from the surface of that radiant, girlish skin? Jem had kept the bracelet, she said. She would be wearing it even after death. Was this the latest of Jem’s many wacky, ghoulish postures? Was Jem now posing Donne-like in her shroud; staging her own death complete with ‘bracelet of bright hair about the bone?’
Angeletti, coco
oned in Eastern Standard Time, slept on. He was sleeping on his stomach, like a Benjamin Spock baby, his face turned sideways, his bare right arm dangling to the floor. Alice moved uncertainly to the bathroom. She felt sick. Sick from anxiety and distress and too much driving amid the stink of Angeletti’s cigar smoke. She rinsed her teeth with warm water and tried to comb her hair with her fingers. It was dull and tangled from the night’s assault with soap. As she ran her fingers through it, she came to a decision. She would stay behind in the hotel room with the exercise books and make Angeletti go on alone. His could be merely a business call and nothing like so intrusive. Meanwhile she would write Jem a note, brief and to the point. Angeletti could hand it to her and explain that she was in the neighbourhood. Then he could summon her to the hospital as soon as Jem gave the go-ahead.
She picked the pocket of Angeletti’s evening jacket which yielded up pen and memo pad. On this she wrote her letter. Coffee, she then thought desperately. Black coffee would not come amiss. But could she possibly venture out and leave Angeletti alone with all Jem’s manuscripts?
Angeletti was a mystery to her. A mystery and a powerful irritant. Yet perhaps having him there had, after all, been a help. It had awakened reserves of malice in her and had certainly sharpened her wits. These things had distracted her from grief over Jem and had helped to block out the treachery of Matthew and Flora. She saw in a moment what she had been doing all evening. She had been caustically bantering time away, like a prisoner condemned to long nights before the rope. She had behaved like people everywhere who have reason to fear the dawn.
She could of course take the book box with her, she thought, but Angeletti had stowed the thing under his bed. She crouched with care and reached for it. But at the first, faint swish of cardboard shifting against carpet nap, Angeletti’s right hand came down and closed like a steel clamp around her outstretched wrist. Her heart leapt into her mouth.
‘Ouch!’ she said. ‘Don’t do that!’ Angeletti, like a predator roused from slumber, was instantly awake. He released her wrist immediately and sat up.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Riley,’ he said. ‘Forgive me. I guess I thought you were a thief. God knows what I thought. It’s been a rough night.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I suppose so.’ The pain in her wrist was quite considerable. It caused her for an instant to recall the bird in the oil painting over the hotel fireplace. In order not to have Angeletti observe this, she tried discreetly to flex it behind her back.
‘I hurt you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached out and took possession of her arm and began to massage the bones of her wrist. ‘Did you have your breakfast yet?’
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘I was just going to.’
He smiled at her quite suddenly. It was the first smile he had allowed himself in something like fourteen hours. The effect of it was astonishing, with his beard growth showing so blue against his hangman’s jaw.
‘You’re a nice woman, Mrs Riley,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’
Alice withdrew her arm immediately and stood up. ‘What question?’ she said, suspiciously, and she walked over to the window.
‘Is your husband Catholic?’ he said.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Alice said irritably. ‘Can we please go and get our breakfast?’ When they entered the breakfast room, Angeletti was carrying the book box. They drank black coffee and ate tinned grapefruit which was served in sundae glasses. This they followed with cardboard triangles of toasted Wonderloaf. Angeletti looked at his watch.
‘Time to make a move,’ he said. ‘On your feet now, Mrs Riley.’
Alice felt her teeth tap-tapping against the glaze of her coffee cup. She wondered if Angeletti could hear it. ‘Angeletti,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I want you to go without me.’
Angeletti stared at her hard. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he said. ‘Oh no. This is your friend, Mrs Riley. We are in this together, you and me.’
‘You’ve read her letter,’ Alice said. ‘Sh-she doesn’t really want to see me.’ She took her note out of her pocket and passed it over to him. Her arm was vibrating so markedly as she did so, that it knocked his empty cup sideways into the saucer, making it clatter against the teaspoon. ‘P-please,’ she said. ‘Give her this. Then after that, if sh-she wants to see me—’
Angeletti took it and stood up. He took the back of her chair. ‘Mrs Riley,’ he said. ‘You are coming with me.’
Alice stood up. As she did so, the issue resolved itself, because the room began to spin and the floor rose up to meet her. For just a moment Angeletti wondered which to pick up first. The book box or the woman. Both of them were lying on the floor at his feet.
Chapter 28
When the telephone rang in the hotel bedroom the sun was high overhead. Alice, who had been resting there since she had come round from her faint, had at sometime during the morning fallen asleep. She started and groped clumsily for the receiver.
‘Mrs Riley?’ said the voice. ‘This is Joe.’
‘Joe?’ Alice asked.
‘Joe Angeletti,’ said Angeletti. ‘Giovanni. I’m sorry it’s been so long.’
Alice sat bolt upright as her heart began to race. ‘What time is it?’ she said.
‘It’s five after twelve,’ he said. ‘Listen. It’s all over. Your friend is dead. I’m sorry.’
Alice said nothing. She was unable to cry or speak. She saw her life suddenly as an endless, pointless, featureless plain stretching cruelly ahead in place of all that might have been and once was.
‘Are you hearing me?’ Angeletti said eventually. His voice jarred in her ear. ‘Mrs Riley, are you still there?’
‘I’m here,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you. I’ll hang up now if that’s all right.’
‘Look,’ Angeletti said. ‘Wait. You will have to forgive me. This whole business. It has been a little taxing for me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said woodenly. ‘I’ll hang up now.’ But Angeletti seemed anxious to talk.
‘Your friend had been administered a sedative drug,’ he said. ‘Literally just as I got here.’ Alice felt a spasm like retching seize her throat. ‘The sisters were kind enough to let me talk to her,’ he said. ‘But you’ll understand that I had to work fast. I’d like you to know that I read her your letter, Mrs Riley. I gave it priority over the novel.’ Angeletti waited for her to speak, but she said nothing. An ice splinter was penetrating her heart. ‘The sedative was prior to anaesthetic and rather effective in its soporific result,’ Angeletti said. He seemed determined to weigh her down with detail. ‘The doctors couldn’t hold out any longer. They had to operate, Mrs Riley.’ Alice still said nothing. She envisaged Angeletti’s intrusion as a relentless, obscene jabberwocky of copyright and contract as Jem – having commended her soul to her Maker – lay sinking into sleep. It appalled her to consider that she had provoked it. ‘It’s too bad,’ Angeletti was saying, ‘that our timing worked out that way.’
‘So if you’d believed me yesterday—’ Alice began, but she couldn’t go on. The thought was too poisonous for utterance. ‘I need to hang up now,’ she said. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’
‘Look,’ Angeletti said, with a tenacity to induce despair. ‘There’s something really puzzles me about that letter. The letter you gave me yesterday. There’s a sister here says she mailed a letter to you over four weeks ago. Did you never get that letter?’
‘I only got one letter,’ Alice said. ‘The one that came yesterday. Is there really any point to all this?’ There was a longish silence.
‘Hold on,’ Angeletti said, his voice neutral with the dawning of terrible knowledge. There was a pause. ‘Jesus, Mrs Riley,’ he said with difficulty. ‘It’s a mistake. I made such a stupid, obvious mistake. She’s written the date as eight colon seven.’
‘That’s the eighth of July,’ Alice said. ‘You told me August the seventh—’
‘God forgive me,’ he said. ‘She never wrote you any earlier letter. I made a mistake. Se
e, in the States we’d read that as August seventh. You people reverse the month and the day.’
Alice assimilated this bitter little irony of Angeletti’s fallibility with a pain that went beyond recrimination.
‘You’re saying I could have talked to her last night,’ she said weakly.
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Had we been aware of the greater urgency.’
It was his use of the plural pronoun which suddenly provoked her to accusation. ‘ “We”?’ she said.
‘I,’ he said. ‘Look. I can’t begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am.’ Alice had every wish to be spared the depth of Angeletti’s sorrow.
‘I’d like to hang up now,’ she said.
‘Wait!’ Angeletti said desperately. ‘Please. Your friend’s priest here will need to speak with you. There’s a newborn child requires your attention.’
Alice was becoming frantic to be alone with her own grief. And she was suddenly about to cry.
‘I don’t care about the child,’ she said, and her emotion tumbled into the phone. ‘Can you please understand that, Angeletti? I don’t care about the child. Or the book. Or the priest, or you, or me, or anything. I care about nothing. I cared about Jem, that’s all. I never got to her in time, that’s all.’ And she put down the phone. When it rang again she picked it up only in order to cut it off. Then it rang again.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Please.’
Angeletti’s anger assaulted her unexpectedly through the wires. ‘Do that again and you will be in trouble,’ he said. Alice was momentarily awed into silence. ‘Just you get yourself in gear now,’ he said. ‘OK? You can’t flagellate in that flophouse for the rest of your life.’ Alice had no stomach to reply. She let the receiver fall slowly into her lap, though his voice went talking on, into the air. ‘I know you’re there, goddammit,’ she heard him say. ‘I know you’re listening to me. Now there’s a letter here for you. A sort of a will, I guess. Your friend Veronica McCrail has expressed her wish for you to become the baby’s guardian.’
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