Alice read that when Gabriella died – which she did much later that evening – it was with a greater sadistic delicacy than Jem’s Umberto had ever dreamed of. Having taken care to place a dish of poisoned figs beside his suitably rococo marriage bed, Umberto had then got her to put on her wedding clothes before making highly explicit and passionate love to her. Then she had eaten one of the figs. The effect had been instantly fatal. She had died the moment the venom touched her lips. Umberto had thus had no need to scar that whiter skin than snow and smooth as monumental alabaster.
Gabriella died so charmingly at the hands of the Demon Padrone that she never knew the mutilated Scozzese on the autostrada was none other than her own dear Angus, come all the way from Aberdeenshire in response to the recorded telephone message which she had left for him the previous day.
When the carabiniere turned up at the palazzo to question him, Umberto was in his embroidered silk bathrobe, tippling at a glass of grappa and admiring a new portrait of his wife. Before the police officer could respectfully state his business, Umberto had offered him a glass. ‘It has been sent to me by my brother the Cardinal from his vineyards in Liguria,’ Angeletti’s Umberto observed. ‘I think you will agree it is very fine.’ Umberto was touched with urbane amusement once the officer had stated his business. ‘My wife? My beautiful young wife? Pitched over a cliff?’ he said. ‘Good sir, my dear wife is sound asleep in her marriage bed where, within this bour, I have come upon her with my passion. You may verify what I say with the greatest of pleasure, but I beg you do not wake her, for I am an exacting lover and I left her very tired.’
Alice read, with increasing indignation, that the carabiniere had taken a peek – hesitant; of course, and suitably deferential – through the heavily draped door of the Padrone’s bedchamber, from which he had seen, against a backdrop of faded silk tapestries, that a hauntingly beautiful girl lay peacefully asleep between the silk sheets of her marriage bed. The carabiniere had then crossed himself and bowed his head before backing quietly away. ‘E bella come la madre di Dio,’ he had murmured and he had taken his leave at once.
The Padrone had given it out next day that his wife was confined prematurely in childbirth in the sixth month of pregnancy. When the news of Gabriella’s death reached the villagers, she was much lamented by great numbers of black-clad crones and her funeral was really quite something – though Umberto had already begun to negotiate for the acquisition of a suitably patrician fourth wife, since he needed a son and heir for the palazzo. A thing which the divine Gabriella had seemed so unable to provide.
Alice slammed down the book and got up. Her first response was to look for the contracts which she had been all too easily duped into signing. Having failed to find them, she was trembling so hard with anger and panic that she could not wait for the alarm to bleep on Angeletti’s watch. She bashed him awake on his iron thigh and rounded on him at once.
‘Where are those contracts?’ she said. Angeletti took the hat from his face. He blinked and looked at her. Then he raised himself on to his elbows. ‘You’ve completely messed up Jem’s story!’ she said. ‘How dare you do this, Angeletti? How could you do this to her?’
Angeletti slowly drew forth a cigar and a lighter from his pocket. ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’ he said.
‘Do what you like,’ Alice said. ‘But don’t think you can mess about with my friend’s story like that.’ It seemed to her that Angeletti was quite deliberately taking as long as he possibly could over unwrapping and lighting his cigar. It was like watching somebody starting a fire with a magnifying glass.
‘So what’s the trouble?’ he said eventually.
‘You’ve changed the end,’ Alice said.
‘Sure,’ he said complacently. ‘The end was lousy.’ Alice watched him inhale and release a cloud of smoke. ‘Had the author been living,’ Angeletti said, ‘I’d naturally have gotten her to make the change herself.’ Alice sat, staring at him from a well of bitterness, saying nothing. ‘Alice,’ Angeletti said coaxingly. ‘Your friend’s story is perfectly enchanting.’
‘Don’t you “Alice” me,’ she said.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Listen. I love this story. You know that. It has a most delicious sense of the absurd. I adore that precarious balance of sophistication and naivety. God knows but this was truly some remarkable child who could convey all that kooky, High Renaissance intrigue and still get away with the Ferrari and the telephone answering machine. Her detail is all so extraordinary. Do you happen to know, did she read Lampedusa at all?’
Alice said nothing for a bit. ‘You changed the end,’ she said.
‘Oh come on,’ Angeletti said. ‘The Highland brain surgeon is a disaster.’
‘And Umberto is a murderer,’ Alice said.
‘So what?’ Angeletti said. ‘He’s a thoroughly delightful character. And he’s sexy. Now the brain surgeon is just monumentally boring. That’s half the point, isn’t it? If you’d thought about it for half a minute, you couldn’t possibly want that Gabriella should marry him.’
‘Well at least she’d be alive,’ Alice said.
Angeletti laughed. ‘Alive and married to Mr John Knox? You disappoint me, Mrs Riley. And I thought you’d like it the way I amended it – with the dead girl in the bed.’
Alice, though she averted her eyes, was mortified to know that Angeletti’s hawk’s eyes were picking up on the signs of her embarrassment. She was infuriated to feel that she was blushing. She was equally infuriated to realize that Angeletti was right. Angus was monumentally boring. He was prissy about Gabriella’s modelling. He didn’t like foreign parts. And hadn’t Jem’s letter itself expressed a hint of serious disappointment that Umberto had not materialized for her?
‘All right,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I agree with you.’
‘Good,’ Angeletti said and he filled her glass. ‘That’s nice. I mean that we can agree about something.’ Alice drank.
‘What is this stuff, anyway?’ she said.
‘Grappa,’ Angeletti said.
For Alice, Angeletti’s lunch was a wholly new experience in gastronomy. It knocked Minette McCrail’s charcuterie into a cocked hat. Angeletti’s picnic basket contained the dried eggs of grey mullet and the salted eggs of tuna fish. It contained dark red slices of Parma ham which he served to her with fresh, purple figs. It contained a whole glazed salmon with a garnish of mayonnaise made green with pounded basil leaves. Angeletti’s picnic basket contained a cold breast of veal stuffed with raw artichoke hearts and sweetbreads. It contained the seasoned corpses of miniature inkfish which had been impaled upon sharpened green twigs.
‘Gosh!’ Alice said. Angeletti, for all that she was ravenous, appeared to operate upon the principle that food should titillate rather than satiate, because, once he had filled her plate rather modestly, the food seemed to have disappeared. It must have gone back into the basket, she supposed, but she had not seen him reload it. Perhaps it had vanished through the forest floor. Or perhaps she had been a bit too boozy to notice. She had no idea what the wine was that she was drinking. She only knew that Angeletti had been filling her glass rather often. And the wine’s lightness was such that, really, one could quaff it with the ease of downing lemonade.
Angeletti criss-crossed the delicacy of his crucified inkfish with one or two brutal wisecracks with regard to Aaron Schutzburger’s on-going rout of poor Iona Morgan. It was perfectly apparent to Alice, even through the mellow haze of wine, that Angeletti thrived on blood sports. Any prospect of litigation, ritual asset-stripping and public humiliation quite evidently turned him on.
‘You’re a real swine, Angeletti,’ she said, giggling lazily. ‘She’s just a loony, unwashed schoolgirl.’ She was lying indolently on her belly on the ground. ‘She’s a very brainy girl, Iona Morgan. You should commininishion-commish-commission her to write you something. You really should.’
Angeletti seemed entertained by her benevolence. ‘That little lady cheated on you and she took me for a rid
e,’ he said. ‘She cost me a considerable sum of money—’
‘Oh Angeletti!’ Alice said. She paused because she felt the wine’s cold bubbles burst delicately in her nose. ‘Excuse me, but it’s perfectly obvious to me that you don’t mind squandering all your money.’ The usual tidal rush of Angeletti’s spleen seemed remarkably sluggish that afternoon in the face of her repeated provocation.
‘ “Squandering?” ’ he said mildly. ‘You call it “squandering” for me to buy a few small gifts for my author’s daughter and for the people who helped save her life?’
‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘If you’re going to put it like that—’
‘You call it “squandering”,’ Angeletti said, ‘for me to take a beautiful and deserving young woman to the opera?’
‘Well,’ Alice said, and she smiled at him radiantly, ‘if you’re going to put it like that—’
Angeletti smiled back at her. ‘I have a little present for you,’ he said.
Alice watched him get up. ‘Is it the prettiest little ring?’ she said and she blinked at the phrase, as though she had heard it somewhere before. ‘Angeletti? Would you call this “dense mixed woodland”?’
‘No,’ Angeletti said firmly. ‘I would say that it was rather sparse woodland. Excuse me.’ And he returned to the car.
In the parcel, which he handed to her, there was – along with a calligrapher’s pen and a bottle of green Indian ink – an old handwriting practice book which Alice opened at once. The first line jumped at her with a bizarre familiarity.
‘ “ ’Tis better to Die than to Lie”,’ she read out loud and she burst out laughing. ‘Good God, Angeletti!’ she said in a rush of un-suppressed delight. ‘I don’t believe it. You’ve rifled the stockroom of the Convent of the Ascension. Oh how can I ever thank you?’
‘Watch yourself, Mrs Riley,’ Angeletti said. ‘You’re mellowing.’
‘But wherever did you get it?’ she said.
Angeletti gestured modestly. ‘Those things were printed in great numbers,’ he said. ‘Getting a hold of a copy was really not at all difficult.’
‘Well, thank you,’ Alice said. ‘I’m vastly touched that you went to all that trouble.’
‘There’s a catch,’ he said.
‘What catch?’ she said.
Angeletti filled her glass. ‘I took a look at that bunch of stuff you left with me. The schoolgirl stories and so on. All that daguerreotype dyke.’
‘All that what?’ Alice said.
‘It bores me,’ Angeletti said. ‘I admit your friend wrote with an enviable flair. That Miss Davidene Delight, for example. She surely has to be the hottest little female fag I’ve met with in a long while. She is certainly by far the best dressed. One peek at those “exquisite rosettes” and it’s tantamount to ripping off her panties.’
‘Perhaps you’re a pervert, Angeletti?’ Alice said. ‘Has that ever occurred to you?’
‘I took the liberty,’ Angeletti said, ‘of handing on some copies to an editor. In London, that is. I figured the British are maybe fixated on that sepia-tinted bun-monitor scenario. Now I guess you’re angry with me.’
‘What did he say?’ Alice said expectantly.
‘She,’ Angeletti said. ‘She liked them. She liked them a lot, as a matter of fact. With your permission, she’d like to publish three of the stories together in one little volume. Now, I suggested to her that you write an introduction.’ Alice stared down at the earth, fixing on the blades of grass as evidence of external reality. They appeared to be dilating. ‘Two thousand words or so,’ Angeletti said. ‘Is that an agreeable prospect?’
Alice looked up. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. Really. I can’t think of anything that I’d rather do.’ Angeletti, she observed, was once again looking at her in that way that made her feel slightly uncomfortable. She turned quickly to examining the label on the bottle of green Indian ink.
‘The ink was a mere flight of fancy,’ he said. ‘You may prefer to use an IBM compatible.’
Chapter 35
Doubtless through the advantageous ratio of Angeletti’s wine to his food, Alice had fallen asleep in the coarse, dry grass of the forest. When she awoke, blinking through a haze of dappled sunlight, she was feeling acutely hungry. Angeletti was talking on his telephone. He was reclining with his face half turned from her and shaded under his hat. He was exchanging affectionate wisecracks with a woman whom he was calling ‘Nance’. It was apparent to Alice that he was colluding with this female person over the unexpected ease with which he had got Alice’s co-operation over the changes in the book.
‘Sugar and spice,’ he said. ‘No problem at all. Mrs Riley decided to put away her meat axe.’ Alice took no offence. She was feeling remarkably mellow and this in spite of her encroaching hunger. She had had a truly marvellous day. It had been extremely good, in retrospect, to have escaped from the baby and the hospital. And Angeletti, for all his half-menacing dottiness – or, more accurately, because of it – had proved the very soul of excellent company.
She had felt a kind of sustained thrill, as though she were somehow playing hookey from the nunnery. Perhaps not unlike the feeling she had had during that first little tea with Father Mullholland, only this had been writ so much larger and wilder and altogether more dangerous. It came to her as a pleasant discovery that she was not after all incapable of enjoying the company of men – because the only male company she had otherwise enjoyed was that of David Morgan, who was as sexless to her as a rumpled teddy bear.
‘I’m in Hampshire,’ Angeletti was saying. There was a pause followed by laughter. ‘Hamp shy-er, England,’ he said. ‘Not New Hampshire. Listen, bimbo, quite how fast do you imagine I can work?’
The remark bounced at Alice with the force of complete surprise. It had not crossed her mind until that moment that Angeletti had been making a play for her and she inspected her feelings to discover whether or not she felt affronted. Not a bit of it. It made her feel very high. She found it delectably amusing and she promptly began to gloat. It was all so outrageously blatant, once she thought about it. All day he had been drowning her in booze and buying her favours with expensive treats. Ha! And he the married man; the conspicuously practising Catholic, doling out missals to babies and schmarming the sisterhood with hand-made sweets. Mr Angeletti, the ‘man of honour’. And all the while he was plotting a little lechery on the side. Alice gorged on inward laughter. Because here he was, effectively laying bets with a person who was clearly his working partner in New York. He was rating his chances of manoeuvring Mrs Riley into a dirty weekend in his ‘cabin’ in New Hampshire. And all no doubt while the second Mrs Angeletti stayed home wiping little noses and diligently trimming the bassinet. Ha! She reflected, for a moment, upon the fate of the first Mrs Angeletti, because he surely hadn’t divorced her? Perhaps he had fed her from a dish of poisoned figs after making explicit and passionate love to her. It was suddenly crystal clear to Alice that Angeletti was sexy.
She recalled, now, that through some fortunate miracle she had actually not yet disclosed to Angeletti the fact that she wasn’t married. God only knew, she had told him almost everything else in the course of the afternoon. She had got very high and voluble. She had bombarded Angeletti with a constant barrage of anecdote which had caused him to respond with well-aimed shots of dry, laconic wit. And these, which ought to have wounded her, had somehow not done so at all. Perhaps she had been too drunk to take offence? It surprised her now, on waking, to remember how often he had made her ache with laughter.
She had, for example, regaled him with a most reprehensible account of Mr Fergusson’s dying. She had told him, with a quite unprecedented and graphic relish, how Flora’s father had swelled and curdled and breathed his last before her eyes in The Fisherman’s Grotto. And how – with his soul sent all unhousel’d to account – he had then recurred in her restless, childhood dreams as the leering Giant Mollusc of the Protestant graveyard.
‘So your mother is an infamous poisoner
,’ Angeletti said. ‘The Lucrezia Borgia of the pigeon belt.’ Yet this quite unfounded calumny had caused a cascade of disloyal merriment against her female parent.
‘And she kept Jem’s letter from me,’ Alice said, confiding darkly. ‘That’s why I got it so late. The secretary must have boobed in giving it to me, you see. My mother wanted me not to have it, Angeletti. It’s perfectly obvious. She always hated Jem. And she thinks all Catholics are fanatics. I will have to fight her tooth and nail, Angeletti. May God give me strength. I’ve never really quarrelled with her before.’ Then she had paused while Angeletti had filled her glass. ‘She has behaved very badly towards me,’ Alice said. ‘Just like Sister Teresa’s mother.’
‘Pardon me?’ Angeletti said.
‘Oh not your Sister Teresa,’ Alice said. ‘Jem’s Sister Teresa.’ And she had then told him, in another irreverent crescendo, about the orange and the epileptic nun and how Jem’s mother had leapt over the convent wall for Gordon McCrail, the exquisite man of letters, with his summerhouse and his cordless telephone and his concern for the health of Mr Ezra Pound and his deep and moving compassion for the common garden snail. Angeletti had evidently enjoyed it all enormously, especially the bit about Ezra Pound.
‘I observe,’ he said, aiming deftly below the belt, ‘that Mr Matthew Riley has all the while been playing second fiddle to this excellent gentleman of the mind.’
Alice now, as she eavesdropped Angeletti’s phone call, felt no shame at all in doing so. Because to be with Angeletti seemed in itself an invitation to employ any strategy to hand. It was like constantly having to skirt minefields and avoid trapdoors in the floor. One employed what means one could muster.
‘What’s a “meat axe”, Angeletti?’ she said audibly. And it delighted her to see him twitch.
They drove to Angeletti’s hotel in Piccadilly before they left on foot for the opera house. Alice put on the sea-green silk in the ladies room of the bar while Angeletti went up to his bedroom to change into his evening dress and run a razor over his jaw. She paused a while before the glass, treading the spongy, cloud-grey carpeting beneath her feet. She felt very good in the dress, even though she wore it with her flat, laced-up shoes. There was something remarkable about the way it had been cut, which gave it a subtle, almost schoolmarmish sexiness. High-necked and long-sleeved, it caressed her hips suggestively before falling in nice, soft pleats almost to her ankles.
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