Hill Towns (32 page)

She cocked her head and deepened her smile, and dia-monds and precious stones flashed all over her: at her ears, throat, wrists, on her fingers. I thought meanly that if Joe planned on kissing her flesh, he’d have to hunt for a bare spot.

I smiled gratefully at Sam and mouthed, Thank you, and Joe laughed and dropped Verna’s hand in her lap and said,

“Ready when you are, Lady Cardigan,” and shook Lord Cardigan’s hand firmly.

“I’m delighted to meet you, sir. Thank you for having us to lunch.”

“It is entirely my pleasure,” Lord Cardigan said, and then, to the group at large, “Don’t you think we might have a wee nip more, now that everyone’s here? Except Yolanda. Where is that lass?”

It’s like he forgets he’s a Scot, and then remembers 264 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and throws in a Highlandism or two, I thought. He’s really more European than any of us.

“Hell, yes, let’s have several more wee nips,” Sam said.

“Yolie asked me to give you her profound regrets. She had sudden and urgent business over on Burano. This is a working holiday for her, you know.”

I laughed aloud, and Lord Cardigan raised his wizened paw for the waiter, and the afternoon flowed on.

It’s odd about times like that luncheon, when strangers come together in a strange place to do such intimate things as eating and drinking together. There is no context for them, and so, like amoebas, they form their own, make their own shapes by simply flowing in to fill the natural hollows and emptinesses. People behave in ways that are as strange to them and those who know them as if they were actors. Perhaps it’s because the other strangers present have no concep-tion of them, and they are free, for once, to choose their roles. On that swaying, dipping, dreamlike raft terrace, under that relentless sun, amid that dancing glitter of foul green water, we became, for that small capsule of time, other people entirely.

Ada became a child, a pretty one, winsome and giggling.

She touched people lightly with her long fingers; she patted knees and let her hands linger on other hands, and clapped them together in glee and said over and over, “Tell Verna and David about that, Sam,” and “Oh, Joe, do tell everybody what you said on the Lido!”

And under her capricious urging, Joe did indeed tell what he had said on the Lido, making of it something wry and drawling and understated, so very English I half expected him to say at the end of each sentence, “Don’tcha know?”

He was English all afternoon. He sat there under the shade of the umbrella, lounging grace

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fully, his bare ankle crossed on his knee, the hat riding low over one blue eye, and tossed off Lesley Howard one-liners until I thought Colin and Maria at least, who knew him so well, would jeer him off the terrace. For myself, I would wait until we got back to the Fenice and could read his mood better, but then I planned to tease him unmercifully. It was what I would have done at home, on the Mountain.

But Colin did not jeer him. Colin became the other half of this fedoraed, sockless English county duet and fed lines back to him, Cary Grant playing Brat Farrar, or maybe Michael Redgrave, just back in his shot-up Spitfire, wisecracking as he bled to death in the cockpit with his damp-eyed, stiff-lipped crew.

They were so utterly alien to me, and yet really so attractive and funny, that I could only sit and stare and drink. We all did that. Lord Cardigan kept the drinks coming and Joe and Colin kept the Empire bit going and I sat and drank and drank and drank, and did not get drunk, only more and more paralyzed. Sometime about the third Bellini, I realized that Joe and Colin were being who they were at home, on the Mountain, only carrying it to the ultimate, logical degree.

Or they were being who they would love to be and dared not: British to the core. Upper-class, Oxbridgian, donnish, foppish, utterly English. It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern. It must be a great relief to Joe and Colin finally to come out of the closet. They never would have dared to, at home.

I licked peach nectar off my lips and realized I would forget this startling insight as soon as I sobered up a little and, on the main, was glad.

Maria became waspish, a Sicilian fishwife. She tossed 266 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

her head, pouted, shook her foot, spilled wine down the front of her dowdy black dress, whined and carped and once or twice shouted shrilly at Colin.

“Look at him, jumping around over there, showing off and acting like Sir Laurence Olivier,” she said to the group at large. “He hasn’t moved in three days without moaning and groaning, and God forbid I should want to put my head out of the room for three seconds. He’s in such pain we can’t even go down to the dining room, but all of a sudden he’s ready to run the four-forty. Colin! For God’s sake, sit down and quit posing! If you sprain something else I’m not going to wait on you another second!”

“Easy, old girl,” Colin drawled, winking at Joe and Lord Cardigan. “Don’t get your knickers in an uproar.”

They laughed heartily, the three of them. Maria’s brown eyes filled with tears, and she took a deep breath to shout something I knew she would regret. I didn’t blame her; I wanted to smack Colin myself. There was nothing of the golden boy about him now.

I reached over and took her arm.

“Don’t, love,” I said softly. “It’s something in the air, and it’s going to have to wear off, like malaria. If you can be noble about it now you can lord it over him for the rest of his natural life.”

She looked at me. I did not know this woman.

“Sometimes I hate him,” she said. She did not bother to lower her voice.

Sam became utterly silent, a sphinx. He did not say another word until we had eaten our lunch, he who dominated every gathering with his good-natured roars, his drawling, mercilessly funny patter, the sheer, physical fact of him. He pulled the hat farther down over his face, until his eyes were utterly obscured, and sank his

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chin onto his chest, and slumped motionless in the sun.

Perhaps he slept.

I thought of Yolanda’s words that morning: “Sam has a place in every city that he goes when things get messy or complicated or overwhelming.” Perhaps he had places inside himself he went, too, when things did not please him and he could not retreat physically. Perhaps he was there now.

I did not blame him, but the thought made me feel oddly lonely.

After we had finished lunch, the waiter brought espresso and coffee and we lingered on. I was hot and depleted and inert, and longed for a nap in a dim room, and Maria and Sam were silent. But still Joe and Colin nattered on, and David and Verna Cardigan still applauded and encouraged them.

“You two, you are wonderful,” Verna Cardigan said. “I’ll take you both home with me. Joe, would you really trust your Cat to Sam?” Her tight linen dress had ridden up over her knees, and I could see, then, the cross-hatching of tiny white scars on them, dead white against the dingy tan. Well, so what if she was a genuine heroine? Heroines could behave as smackably as anyone else. I hoped Sam was listening.

It’s me he’s painting now, lady, I thought. You don’t like that, do you?

“Cat’s a big girl,” Joe said, smiling his new, slow white smile at Verna Cardigan. “She does what she pleases. The painting seems to be doing her a world of good.”

“Ah, ha! Sam is good, all right!” Lady Cardigan cried archly.

“Dump, you’re being a bad girl now,” Lord Cardigan said fondly. “I can’t take you anywhere these days.”

“I think,” I said, putting aside my coffee and begin 268 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ning to rise, “that we’ve kept Lord and Lady Cardigan out in this sun far too long. It’s surely time everyone had a rest.”

There were protests, but Maria rose too, and Sam came out from under his hat, got to his feet, and stretched. Just at that moment, a scurry and puff of wind found its way under the umbrella, set the napkins aswirl, died away, and gusted again, stronger. Then it began to blow in earnest. It was steady and dry, and felt absolutely wonderful. Around the terrace, people shifted and stretched and seemed to revive.

“That feels heavenly,” I said, holding my bare arms out to the wind. It seemed to dry the perspiration off them in seconds.

“Sirocco. Comes across from Africa,” Sam said. “It may feel good now, but wait a day or two. We’ll probably all have killed one another. The Sicilians call it the murder wind.

It’s supposed to drive people to bodily mayhem.”

“I’ll worry about that tomorrow,” I said. “Right now I love it.”

Lord Cardigan produced a small camera from somewhere.

“Must have a wee photo or two, to remember this fine day by,” he said. “I want to have the first photo of Catherine Gaillard, before she becomes immortal.”

I shook my head, laughing, but he insisted, and so I let him snap me, and then me and Sam, and then all of us together.

“This’ll show up in the authorized biography of Sam Forrest someday,” Joe said. I knew he meant it, and loved being in it.

“Now,” David Cardigan said, “somebody take one with me in it. Joe, how about it?”

HILL TOWNS / 269

“Yes, do,” Verna Cardigan cried. “You look like a photographer for
Le Monde
or
Town and Country
. The famous photojournalist, snapping our picture.”

Joe grinned and got up and took the camera and squinted into it.

“Turn around and face the water,” he said. “It’s not going to come out with your backs to the sun.”

He walked around us, lining us up, squinting judicially, stepping back, arranging us again. I thought he was fully into his new role as photographer to the famous. Joe had seen
Blowup
four times.

“Come in closer together,” he said, his eye pressed to the viewer. “I can’t get you all in. No, it’s still not enough. Wait a minute—”

He stepped backward, once and then twice.

“Joe!” I shouted.

He waved at me to be quiet, stepped back again, and went straight down into the Grand Canal. For an instant, only his hat bobbed on the oily water. I gasped, unable to say a word.

No one else did, either. Only when Joe shot up out of the water, his eyes closed, spitting and flailing, did anyone move or speak.

“Oh, God, darling!” I cried, and started for him.

Sam Forrest began to laugh.

It did not help at all that it was Sam’s great bare arms that fished Joe out of the water as if he had been a child.

Not at all.

Much later that afternoon, just at dusk, Joe and I sat at a small table outside Florian’s, having a
caffè granita
. The air was cool and dry, like wine after the sluggish stew of the past few days. The sirocco blew and blew. The great piazza was full of people, strolling, drinking, eating. The 270 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

light was clear and blue-edged. A few tables over, the small string quartet was sawing away.

“I did it my way,” they tremoloed, and then segued into

“Those little-town blues…”

“Napoleon called it the finest drawing room in Europe,” I said to Joe.

“He should know,” Joe said.

He was very quiet. He had been quiet since he came out of his long hot shower in our room. He had scrubbed himself until he was raw and red, and I thought once that I had heard him vomiting. But I had said nothing. On our way home, trudging the endless alleyways, people regarding him curiously as he squelched along, I had said, “Darling, it matters less than nothing,” and he had said, in a low, hopeless voice,

“Cat, please. Just don’t talk.” So I had not.

I had slept for a while, and I thought he had. Around six he’d said, “Get dressed. I promised you dinner out, and dinner out, you shall have.”

“We don’t have to. I’d truly just as soon get something here—”

“No,” he said. “I want to. Just us. We’ll have a drink at Florian’s and then just walk somewhere and find something we like and stop.”

And so we had come out into the twilight of our last night in Venice, he in shorts because he had nothing else dry, I in pants and a striped shirt. He had given the chinos to the hotel valet to wash and press but had told them simply to keep the rest of the things.

“They won’t dry in time,” he said to the valet, but I knew he did not want to see them again.

He seemed calm, abstracted, not really upset, but some essential fire had been drowned in that thick green water. I knew he hated the thought of it; filthy, he had HILL TOWNS / 271

called it. Full of excrement and dead things. My heart hurt with pity for him.

I touched his hand.

“We really should get you a typhoid shot or something,”

I said.

“Ada knows a doctor in Florence; she said she’d call him when we got there,” he said dispiritedly. “She thinks he’ll probably come to the hotel.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t just pull out a hypodermic with the proper antidote and tell you to drop trou right there on the Gritti terrace,” I said meanly. Ada would, of course, know a doctor in Florence who would come to the hotel.

Joe laughed, unwillingly, and I felt better.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see Saint Mark’s and all,” I said.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m sick of Venice. Nothing is what it seems. They even stole their saint.”

“Joe,” I said suddenly, “do you want to go home? We could. We could fly from Florence to Rome and then straight home.”

He picked up my hand and traced the lines in my palm with his forefinger. Then he looked up at me.

“Do you?”

“Maybe so,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a disgrace. Maybe all this is just…not us. Maybe what we are is what we are at home; maybe that’s our best talent. It’s an honorable way to live; it’s a wonderful way to live. So what if it isn’t Sam’s way, or Ada’s? They couldn’t live our way.”

“I love you, Cat,” he said, so softly I almost did not hear him.

“I love you too.”

Then he raised his head and looked past me, and 272 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

something came into his face, a hectic, glittering thing, and I turned and followed his gaze and saw Sam and Ada Forrest coming across the piazza toward us, with David and Verna Cardigan in tow. I saw it go in his eyes, knew the instant I lost him.