Famous Last Words (12 page)

“Flit—flit,” says Ezra. “You done pretty well with your words. Seems to me I’ve seen a few corpses floating in your wake from time to time.”

Dorothy says; “you two fighting again?”

Ezra says; “we two are parting.” He clambers onto a table under the window. “Mauberley cannot bear the world of

men at arms,” he says, “and I cannot bear the world of men in white linen suits.”

He begins to jab at the cat. Dorothy runs out through the door. “Leave it alone!” she cries.

Ezra pokes the stick at the cat—but the cat is three feet further up the tiles than he can reach.

“Leave it alone!” says Dorothy again. “Dear

one…Ezra…Please!”

The cat looks down at Ezra and the stick. I am compelled to stand up. All my papers fall to the ground.

Dorothy tugs at Ezra’s sweater. Ezra goes on rattling the stick and banging it against the tiles. “God damned cat!” he says. “God damn you, cat! Come down!” Bang! Bang! Bang!

And then the one thing happens no one has bargained for, The cat makes a leap at Ezra’s face.

Dorothy screams. Ezra falls back. I run forward.

All of us land on the grass in a heap, and the cat takes off across the lawns and up the nearest tree and over the wall.

Dorothy untangles herself and hurries away to bring a

cloth and some lemon juice to rub on Ezra’s wounds. He is bleeding profusely. Most of the cuts and scratches are superficial.

Only one, drawn down lengthwise over his skull

and through his hair, is serious. I put on my hat. My bare

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head makes me nervous. Then, having brushed off my trousers, I cut up the lemons—handing them to Dorothy, watching

her clean up Ezra’s face and beard.

“Thought I was going to drown in blood,” he says in his best dove’s voice, all smiles. He is sitting like a child, his legs spread wide apart and Dorothy kneeling beside him.

“One more bleeding poet drowned, eh, Hugh?”

I cannot even nod. I feel as if I might never speak to him again. I truly hate him. But then, I’ve hated him before, and loved him since, and will, I am sure, another day. Nonetheless, I do not speak.

“God damn neighbour’s cat,” says Ezra, smiling. “God

damn cat.” And he lifts up Dorothy’s hand and kisses it.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “Tomorrow I will kill it.”

1 turned away. That’s right, I think. First you feed it, then you kill it. Like your mind.

And mine. If I let you.

“What a prick,” said Freyberg—reading the end of the encounter with the cat just as Quinn reached it himself. “What

a prick.”

Quinn turned around, surprised he was not alone. “Who?”

he said. He was still somewhat lost in the spring afternoon he’d been reading on the wall.

“Take your pick.” said Freyberg. “excepting, of course, the cat. Cat had the right idea—and you should pardon the pun, but 1 wish to hell he’d got the bugger’s tongue instead of just his face.”

Quinn went over to the table and pretended to look through the records. He wished that Frevberg would go away and

let him read. instead of barging in and shooting his mouth off. If Freyberg didn’t want to know the story and hatrd all the people so much, why not just go out and commandeer

a sledge-hammer or a stick of dynamite and bring the whole thing down? Not that Quinn believed for a moment the cap

FR1;smiled at Quinn. “Nice assessment, eh?”

“Maybe you’d better tell me what corpses you think he

had in mind,” said Quinn.

“Oh…1 think by the time you’ve finished reading you’ll find out who they are.”

Freyberg’s smile was infuriating: and the more so because Quinn had no comeback up his sleeve.

Freyberg dropped a candy wrapper neatly into the centre of the floor and began to walk away. “Good reading,” he said.

When he had gone, Quinn looked down at the wrapper.

His instinct was to pick it up and put it somewhere out of the way. But, instead of that, he left it sitting there: the perfect reminder of the mind he was up against.

Venice: May 5th, 1936

In Venice 1 was crossing the foyer of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, certain I’d got through Europe without a trace of recognition, when suddenly I heard my name being called very

loud across the lobby from the furthest distance. It was Edward and Diana Allenby, just come south themselves to see

her ailing father, “Old Redoubtable” Wyndham, who was

dying in his mistress’s palazzo on the Via d’Aquila. Lord

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Wyndham once had given me the privilege of reading Disraeli’s original manuscript of Coningsby.

“You’ve been very naughty,” said Diana, linking her arm through mine. “I read those dreadful pro-Fascist pieces you wrote in the Daily Mail and debated burning all your books.

Still, you’re very talented—and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything Herr Hitler might approve of.”

Ned looked slightly rumpled. He was limping more than

usual and having to use a cane. He hung back.

“Hello, Ned.”

“Hugh.”

Yes, there was a coolness there—but I would have to suffer it. I offered to take them into the bar and buy them a bottle of wine.

Perhaps if we had been in London, Allenby might have

declined. But in a foreign place, an Englishman never refuses an acquaintance. He did not say yes. He merely turned towards the bar.

“Neddy hates Venice,” said Diana, chipping away at the

ice between us. “Dampness plays havoc with his legs.”

We sat at one of the tables with a view of the Canal and I ordered a bottle of Pernod. Until it came, we sat quite silent, smoking Abdullahs—even Diana—staring through the awninged windows, trying not to see each other. When the Pernod was delivered, I dismissed the waiter and tipped the liquor into the glasses myself. As I poured the water over it, Allenby broke the silence by saying; “all these years in Europe and you still don’t know how to do that.”

I sat back and thought; oh dear. He’s going to criticize everything I do. “All right,” I said. “What am I doing that’s wrong?”

“Toss that back and I’ll show you.”

“Thank you very much,” said Diana. “But no thanks. I’ll drink mine just as it is.” And she raised her glass in my direction. She, at least, was prepared to forgive me for what I’d done. But Ned. Was it the pictures in the press of me and Mrs Simpson? Or was it the pieces I’d written: Mussolini and co.?

I handed the bottle to Allenby.

Diana said; “I do hope you aren’t going to drink it neat.

It destroys the brain, you know, just like absinthe. Deadly.”

“I can think of lots worse ways to die,” I said. “All right, Neddy. Show me how it’s done.”

Allenby filled each glass with about three fingers of water from the pitcher and then said: “now. You have to do this very carefully.” And he raised the bottle of Pernod and tipped it slowly, letting the liquor fall from about eight inches height. There was barely a sound: like the pouring of oil. “Watch,” he said. “Watch.”

All of us watched the marbling of the waters: green; yellow; white and then very slowly a paling off into milky

clouds.

“How beautiful,” said Diana. “Beautiful. But, surely it tastes the same as mine.”

Allenby lifted his glass and drank. “I doubt it,” he said.

“Why, dear? Why? It’s the very same mixture.”

“Anticipation makes it different,” said Allenby. “And the fact one cares enough to do it right. One is just a ho-hum drink that makes you want to spit and the other is a work of art.” He looked at me. “Sort of like the difference between your articles and books.”

So that was it. My political sympathies after all.

“Oh dear,” said Diana. “Are you going to argue? Not today.

Please.”

Allenby put out his cigarette and immediately lighted up another. He looked around the room. The clientele was almost entirely English, with a few Americans thrown in. “I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable coming here since the war,” he said. “In those days, the Italians were our allies.

It rather made sense to come here, then: give them our money and our patronage…swim from the Lido…learn their language.

. .revel in their art. After all, they gave us the Renaissance.

Even he can’t quite obliterate that.”

“Even he?” said Diana. “Who, dear? What are you maundering on about?”

“The Fat One; the Great One; Zio Benito.”

“Are you tight?” said Diana.

“No. But I will be. Soon I hope.”

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Allenby poured another glass of water, oiling it with Pernod from an even greater height than before, holding the

bottle almost a foot above the glass.

“I’m afraid my presence is making you unhappy, Ned,”

I said. “Perhaps I’d better leave.”

“If you stand up to go, I shall trip you with my cane,” said Allenby, meaning it, having said it without a trace of humour.

“I already seem to have fallen on my face so far as you’re concerned.”

Diana laughed. Allenby didn’t.

He oiled his glass with another inch of Pernod and rolled the ash from his cigarette against the edge of the enamelled dish in the centre of the table. “Seems to me, Diana, you and I have come here to take part in more deaths than one,”

he said.

Diana winced, but didn’t speak. At least she was somewhat reconciled to her father’s death, since he was very old (in his ninety-second year) and had lived abroad for a very long time. They were not estranged, but had lived entirely different lives for over twenty years. She was more concerned,

I think, for me and Ned. We’d been friends a very long time.

But Ned, when he got in this mood, was apt to say things unretractable.

A party of Blackshirts entered the bar. Four of them, with two very handsome women. The maitred’ and several waiters made a great fuss as these officials were seated. Diana watched them. So did I. Allenby, pointedly, did not.

“As I was saying,” he continued, raising his voice, staring at his cigarette, “we seem to be taking part in more deaths than one. One old man…one old culture—one old continent and—one old friendship.”

“Don’t,” said Diana. She even touched my hand. “That

isn’t fair.”

“Hugh understands,” said Allenby. “Don’tcha, Hugh.”

Allenby narrowed his gaze and spoke through the smoke.

“I’m fifteen years your senior,” he said. “I’ve known you ever since you came to England, Hugh. All I’m exercising now is the privilege of years. Seniority. I know you—maybe

not entirely inside out, but better than you like to think. I suspect you like to think there isn’t anyone who knows you.

But I do. You’re some kind of pilgrim looking for a faith.”

He winced a sort of belch, carefully hidden behind a fist.

“Only thing I don’t understand about you, dear old friend—

what I positively bloody hate—is that you’ve started looking for it under rocks…for instance, over there at that table with those four young men sticking out their chins.”

“Don’t dear, they’ll hear you,” said Diana.

“Lady, dear lady,” said Allenby, smiling at his wife, taking her hand, raising his voice another decibel, “I’m sure you would say that if Hitler were sitting across the room.”

“I just hate embarrassment,” Diana said. “That’s all.”

“Yes. You do, don’t you. Yes, you do. And on your way

to the concentration camp you will probably apologize for falling down when they push you through the gate.”

“What concentration camp?”

“The one we shall all end up in if things keep going the way they are.” His voice kept getting louder and louder: and some of the individual words were shouts—like rifle-fire.

“Now I know you’ve had too much to drink. And I think

we should go,” said Diana.

“Not before I say one more thing to Hugh. because…”

But he was interrupted.

Out in the streets, out on the canal, out in the hotel lobby—

everywhere, it seemed—there was a shout: a great, wildfiring boom of exultation, just as if a gigantic display of

fireworks had reached its climax and all of ten thousand spectators roared their approval.

“What in the name of hell is that?” said Allenby.

Diana turned as white as a sheet. She reached for Allenby’s hand, but it wasn’t there. He was fumbling for his cane and knocking things over in the attempt to rise. All around us, in fact. the whole room was turning, rising, running onto the terraces, waving. It was craw.

Somewhere, a drum was being beaten; somewhere a bugle

was calling: somewhere there were people singing. Out across the canal, a gigantic Italian flag—the largest flag I have ever seen—appeared to descend from the heavens and cling to

the side of the building there.

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“Che cosa? Che cosa?” I kept repeating. How could everybody know but us?

And then we heard it. The meaning and the jubilation all in one name: Addis Ababa.

The city had fallen. The war in Ethiopa was over. Mussolini had his empire.

Neddy apparently gave up his attempt to recover his cane.

He was rigid in his chair, with his tie askew and his hair falling forward onto his forehead, revealing its sparseness and its dampness. He looked like a man with a fever and his eyes were very slightly glazed.

Diana looked at her lap and then at me.

I reached down, thinking it would be easier for me to

retrieve the cane, but Ned said; “you touch that stick and I’ll have your head.” Not even raising his voice.

We sat that way for another twenty minutes, while the

ructions around us died away to mere celebrations and the drums and bugles faded off towards St Mark’s and the singing into another part of the hotel.

Allenby poured himself a very large, utterly undiluted

shot of the Pernod. Diana brushed a few imaginary things from her lapels.

A waiter came—thank heaven—and picked up the stick;

but Ned denied it was his. It was handed, instead, to me.

“Grazie.”

Diana made a motion with her shoulders, meaning it was

time to get poor Ned away.

“I still have one more thing to say to Hugh,” said Allenby: precisely as if the past half-hour had not even happened and the very sentence that had been on his tongue before the fall of Addis Ababa came up out of the rubble like a survivor only very slightly dazed.