by Jane Arbor
‘Trevor Land. You knew he was coming to see me settled in.’
‘Yes, of course. News to me, though, that anyone could suppose I planned to furnish a love-nest for you, merely because I wouldn’t have you leaving my home for the kind of hovel that apartment was when I viewed it with you. Though little enough could be done for
it, I did what I could. It was as simple as that.’
Dinah bristled. ‘Then why couldn’t you have made it a simple affair of doing it for Maria Pacelli’s benefit
as much as for mine? As it was, she thought -----------------------
They both thought ------------ ’
She heard Cesare sigh, whether in simulated or real despair she couldn’t tell. He murmured, ‘Santo cielo, you do have some naughty-minded friends! So do allow me to assure them through you that if I really wanted to undermine your virtue, I should do it more subtly than with a pot of paint and a lick of colourwash. Meanwhile, you haven’t thanked me for mak ing the place a bit more habitable. Or don’t you care for the colour scheme?’
Despairing of making him take her scruples seriously, she said, ‘Of course I’m grateful, and I do thank you. Though I still don’t see why you thought it necessary to do it at all. For me, that is, as you say you did.’
‘Why not for you?’ I haven’t any obligations to Signorina Pacelli. ’ ‘Well, have you any to me either?’
‘None that I know of. Unless you count your efficient stewardship with my cousins.’
‘Well then.........’
‘Well then,’ he mimicked, ‘you should give your self the exercise of thinking of a minimum of six motives I may have had, and by the law of averages you might arrive at the right one.’
This was turning into a fencing-match with words. Dinah said, ‘Surely it would save me some trouble if you told me what was the right one?’
‘Willingly—if I had any idea of it myself,’ he counte red, and rang off.
CHAPTER SIX
The routine of Dinah’s working day took over. Some times she was not able to avoid joining Trevor at the Grillo in the midday break,
but as often as she decently could, she took a packed lunch and a book, and went to the Public Gardens. Though the office did not close until half-past seven in the evening, the flat was still hot when she returned to it, and it was then that she most minded her solitary life.
At home there had always been family, friends, something to do by way of recreation, and her stay at the Palazzo had always been enlivened by the twins’ active demands on her company. She would not let herself admit to a longing for Cesare’s chal lenging presence, but the contrast of everything about life in his home made the confines of the flat into a prison cell.
Trevor had embarked on a business course in Management which kept him at study in the evenings— a fact which postponed for Dinah a confrontation which she was dreading. Sooner or later she would have to broach the subject of their plans being so indeterminate that they had no right to monopolise each other’s leisure time. But while it was Trevor who had to make the excuses for not taking her out, she could agree wholeheartedly with him that work and his chances of promotion must come first, and could salve her conscience at the same time.
Meanwhile Etta seemed fully content with Trevor’s preoccupation with work. To be there for him whenever he needed her services appeared to be all she asked, and Dinah wondered when, if ever, he would realise that here was a girl eager to take all that he had never offered to herself; eager to give all that Dinah had not been able to give to him.
The tall houses of the Calle Maser and Dinah’s courtyard teemed with life. No one house was occupied by any one family. Each floor housed several, with the inevitable consequence that on hot nights adults and children alike spilled noisily out of doors to continue their talk, their handiwork, their play, until the air cooled sufficiently to send them to their beds.
Dinah's immediate neighbours on her floor were a young grass widow, whose husband was at sea, and an old lady who should never have been marooned on a top floor, since she suffered from a condition which Dinah never heard her describe as other than ‘my legs’, and she could not easily manage the stairs. Sometimes, when young Signora Forza, driven out by the heat, took her two toddlers downstairs in the evening, Dinah would sit with Signora Benito to keep her company, and both Signora Forza and Dinah did her shopping for her.
Cesare did not ring to make a date. Dinah had not expected he would, though she couldn’t quite stifle the hope that he might. Once she saw his name listed among the guests at a civic dinner, and the same journal carried a picture of him with Princess Lagna at his shoulder, the caption reading, ‘Signor Cesare Vidal, with friends.’
News of the twins came via the occasional brief scrawl.
Jason (or Lesley) was well; Jason was in college in Reading, Lesley was training at Oxford, so that, with the help of the Mini, they sometimes got together for a day off. How was Venice? Dinah was to give it Jason’s (or Lesley’s) love. He/she would be back some time. Why had Dinah left the Palazzo in such a rush after they had gone? Surely Cesare hadn’t turned her out when he had no further use for her? And was that princess of his still swanning around? Or had he taken up with someone else? If so, serve her right for being so bossy.
The first days of Dinah’s isolation became a wee k, two, three, a month. The tide of tourism ebbed a little, but the great heat held through September into October, and the nightly exodus on to the pavements of the Calle Maser went on. But one evening a sharp torrential downpour sent everyone indoors early, and the staircases and open doorways to the flats took over as meeting-places. The building quieted sooner than usual, as bored children were sent early to bed; the rain had cooled the air a little, and it was easier than usual to sleep at a reasonable hour.
Dinah did not know what time it was, nor what had waked her with a start. She reached for the light-switch without response from it; evidently the storm had fused the connections. Oh well—she was
preparing to settle down again when an unfamiliar sound caught her attention and she sat upright, straining to listen.
It was an intermittent crackling sound which became busier—the encouraging sign that a reluctant
fire in a grate was beginning to take hold...................Fire?
Here? In the middle of the night, in grates which either did not exist or had been stuffed with paper decorations for the summer? Dinah felt her blood chill and her legs weaken. For a moment or two she could not move; then she was out of bed and going, barefoot, to open the flat’s outer door on to darkness, the continuing crackle and an acrid smell.
The smoke came next, curling experimentally up the stairs, then billowing in clouds as it was fanned by some draught from below. It cleared and fanned out again; cleared, and that time there was a small lick of flame at the lowest stair which Dinah could see before the flight took a turn down to the next floor. And then there was the noise—of doors opening, of excited panic, shouting, of children’s cries, and the sinister roar of the fire.
Dinah prayed that someone would have the presence of mind to shut some doors. There was one on the second floor landing which, shut, could prevent the staircase-well acting as a veritable chimney, drawing the fire upward. The noise swelled; people were out in the c ourtyard now, shouting; Signora Forza was at Dinah’s side, peering down the well, clutching Dinah’s arm.
‘Miei bambinishe breathed. ‘They wake and cry in the dark. We must get them out. But how—down there?’
Dinah shook her head. ‘I don’t know. There is Signora Benito too. How well can she walk if she had to, do you know? ’
‘She can walk if she must,’ Signora Forza confirmed. ‘Only step by step, but she can. But my little ones—how?’
‘We must try the fire-escape outside my room,’ Dinah decided. ‘I have a torch. If you’ll get the babies, I’ll light you down as far as I can, and there must be other people using the escape from the other floors. They will help you, and if y
ou could leave Rosetta and Pietro with someone on the ground, perhaps you could come back or send someone back to help me with Signora Benito?’
‘They will be so frightened!’
‘Aren’t we all?’ Dinah murmured in an idiom Signora Forza did not understand. She pushed the girl towards her own room. ‘Get them, and hurry, ’ she urged.
Signora Benito was out of bed and tottering bravely. Dinah begged her to wait until the other three had got down; then she went back to light their descent.
Signora Forza went first, carrying baby Rosetta, guiding Pietro’s step on to each iron rung. From the second floor platform there came a clamour of voices, and Dinah concluded that from there on the three would have some help.
She coaxed the old lady out of her window and waited, calculating how long it might take Signora Forza to explain what was wanted. While she waited Dinah heard the utterly welcome wail of a fire-float’s siren in the distance. ‘Listen! The alarm has been given,’ she told Signora Benito, who nodded dumbly and achieved a smile.
Signora Forza was coming back. Couldn’t she have found a man to volunteer to come in her place? But —this, way a man. First his head appeared, then his foreshortened body; then he had reached the topmost rungs and was stepping up on to the tiny platform where the three of them made a crowd. What was more, he wasn’t just any man, a stranger. He was Cesare.
Dinah drew a long breath of disbelief. How could he be here, at this hour? He looked her over. Though she had hustled Signora Benito into a thick cape and bootees, she had forgotten that she herself was still in her nightg own and barefoot. ‘Get something on, and I’ll come back for you,’ he said. With which he heaved the old lady into a fireman’s lift over his shoulder, and steadied himself on the top rung of the iron steps.
Dinah called after him, ‘I can make it!’ but he ga ve no sign that he had heard, and by the time she was dressed in pants and a shirt and stout shoes, he was back.
He went down first and she followed safely enough until, a dozen rungs from the ground, she missed her foothold and slid painfully downward, to be caught and steadied by Cesare’s hands, firm about her waist.
On the ground the confusion was infinite, the fire men’s work hampered by the crowds of onlookers with no more than a ghoulish interest in the disaster. Dinah’s own neighbours were nowhere to be seen.
‘I gave the old lady into the care of a hospital squad with a stretcher. And I saw the girl and her two children claimed by some people who took her away,’ said Cesare, and then, ‘Come along. We can do no good here, as I understand you were the last people to get out. Better leave it to the professionals now. I’ll take you home.’
‘Home’, she guessed, had to be the Palazzo, and when they had pushed clear of the crowds, he explained how he had happened on the scene.
‘I’d been at a business dinner o n the Calle Verona,
and I had moored in the basin near San Fantin.....................’
‘Where you moored, the day you brought me to see the apartment?’ Dinah questioned.
‘That one, yes. When I came back to the launch there was talk of fire in the Calle Maser, and I went alon g with the crowd.’
‘I was never so glad to see anyone,’ she breathed thankfully. ‘Though no doubt anyone would have done.’
At the Palazzo she sat resignedly in the hall while Cesare roused Tomasa, who came down, clucking shocked sympathy and offering food and wine, none of which Dinah could face, though she obediently accepted from Cesare a neat Cognac which he insisted she drank.
‘She has brought nothing of her own away with her, so make her up a bed and provide her with night clothes and anything else she needs,’ he told Tomasa, and to Dinah he said, ‘We’ll discuss ways and means in the morning. Get to bed now, and sleep if you can.’
‘What time is it?’ she asked, not knowing.
He looked at his watch. ‘Past two. Morning already.’
‘The office........?’ she hazarde d.
‘You won’t be going,’ he decided for her. ‘Give me their number and I’ll ring them.’
For Dinah there was no routine at all about the next few days.
That first night she had spent, sleepless, in a flannel nightgown contributed by Tomasa, and used a comb abandoned by Lesley for her hair the next morning. Cesare took her to see the devastation of the fire-blackened building, where shutters hung askew; window-frames, empty of glass, stared blindly, and dank, pitiful debris littered the soaked courtyard. The fire had been checked at the second floor, and Dinah was able to go to a nearby school in search of her own belongings among all those which had been rescued and dumped there for the claiming.
There she met Signora Forza on the same errand. Signora Forza had news that Signora Benito was being kept in hospital until a more suitable home than a top floor was found for her. Signora Forza was taking the children to her parents’ home in Ravenna.
‘And you? Where will you go?’ she asked Dinah.
‘I shall have to find somewhere else to live. I must advertise, or perhaps someone at Plenair will help,’ Dinah said.
She had rung Trevor to tell him where she was, and in the midday break he came to see her, bringing Etta with him.
‘Etta thought you might need some things she could lend you,’ he explained. ‘What plans have you for moving into another place? Or haven’t you had time to think about it yet?’
Dinah thanked Etta, but said that though everything she had brought away with her smelled of smoke, none of her possessions had come to any real harm. She told Trevor the manager of Plenair had given her a week’s leave in which to adjust herself, and she would use the time for finding somewhere else.
‘You won’t stay here,’ he said flatly.
‘No,’ she agreed, equally flatly.
‘ Well, Etta has a suggestion. Her widowed aunt has a spare room which she would let you have. Would you care to consider that?’
Dinah said she would. ‘Where is it?’ she asked Etta.
‘On the Rio Paglia—just as convenient for the office as the Calle Maser.’
‘Thanks. Would you make an appointment with your aunt for me to go to see the room?’ asked Dinah, hoping her problem was to be solved so quickly.
But she had reckoned without Cesare’s reaction. When she told him of Etta’s offer his rejection of the idea was typically direct.
‘One room on the Rio Paglia! Have you seen the Rio Paglia?’ he demanded.
‘No. I don’t know just where it is.’
‘It’s a narrow quay on a cul-de-sac canal, and the houses on it just as much fire-traps as that other place.’
‘Though is lightning ever supposed to strike twice?’
‘Don’t be so flippant,’ he snapped. ‘People, includ ing you, could have lost their lives in that tenement last night.’
Stung by the accusation of ‘flippant’, Dinah hit back. ‘Considering how you claim to care for Venice, you aren’t backward in condemning parts of it as slums, are you?’ she questioned. ‘The Calle Maser;
now the Rio Paglia------------ ’
‘It’s because I know it has slums that I do care,’ he retorted. ‘If its streets were paved with gold and its buildings were as antiseptic as hospital wards, it wouldn’t be my city; it wouldn’t be Venice. But that aside as an argument for another day, you aren’t moving to the Rio Paglia. You are staying here.’ ‘Here?’ Dinah echoed blankly. ‘How can I?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because -------- ’ Surely he must know why not!
‘Worried that I can’t afford to keep you?’ he inquired blandly. ‘I seem to have managed it before.’ ‘That was different! ’
‘Worried then about the proprieties? Why so? Tomasa is a fixture. So is Giuseppe. Between them they can be trusted to chaperon us adequately, don’t you think?’
Dinah shook her head. ‘I couldn’t consider it.’ ‘Because your Englishman who is only your good friend wouldn’t approve the situation for you?’
The very suggestion that Trevor had rights over her decisions acted as a goad. ‘My “Englishman”, Trevor Land, has nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ she said. ‘It’s I who can’t accept. Last night, tonight —while I have nowhere else to go—are one thing. Any other arrangement is out of the question.’ ‘Though I haven’t noticed you have offered any reason of your own as to why it should be,’ he pointed out. ‘Don’t you think you owe me one which I might be prepared to accept?’
She wondered what he would say if she told him, It’s because I want to say Yes too much. Because I want to be near you again in an everyday way. Be cause you are tempting me too far, and I mustn’t give an inch. Aloud she said lamely, ‘You must see I can’t be under a continuing obligation to you. Your —friends wouldn’t understand it, and it would put me in a v ery false position.’
‘Tchch!’ he exploded. ‘I thought we agreed there were no obligations on either side! ’
‘This would make a new one.’
‘And what do you think my mother is going to say if you don’t accept our hospitality when I am offering it to you, and until she comes home to confirm it herself?’
That brought Dinah up short. ‘Are you expecting Signora Vidal back soon, then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know just when. But very shortly now.’ As if he sensed her hesitation he pursued his advantage. ‘You see! You aren’t prepared to risk her disapproval of me for sending you adrift, are you?’
‘I don’t know why you should be so insistent that I stay,’ she said weakly.
‘I miss our academic arguments. I appreciate an opponent worthy of my steel,’ he said.
When they heard of it from Dinah, the twins were highly approving of her return to the Palazzo. They each wrote that they had never understood why she had had to leave it when they had come home. Unless (Jason’s surmise) Cesare had made a pass at her, and her young man at Plenair had taken umbrage? Or unless (Lesley’s) Dinah was no match for the Princess Lagna without them to stand up for her? Which, though the woman was sheer poison, had been rather craven of Dinah, and Lesley was glad that the fire-happening and Cesare between them had forced her to go back.