Roman Nights (2 page)

I said, ‘I hear Innes coming. What breakfast?’

‘My first one,’ said Jacko. ‘This is my second one. I’d have a third one if that American bastard would eat like a Christian. Why let Charles lay you, and not your old physicist buddies?’

‘Because he writes good obituary notices,’ I said. I was meeting Charles at three on the steps of the Villa Borghese, where he had a photo assignment with four models and half the Italian fashion collection. Jacko was on duty tonight. I poured out the coffees and found the olive oil for Jacko’s bacon, and sat down again with an apple and the
Messaggero
open at all the film advertisements, while Jacko stood with his frying pan over my shoulder reading aloud all the entries on the opposite page under: massages aesthetics.

They ranged from
AAAA Very young attractive masseuse, independent house, every afternoon, to AAAAAA Ambiente elegante, brave brave manicure
and explain why Rome’s principal newspaper is nicknamed
Il Massaggero
and never gets into the red. We were just working out the price of forty-two capital A’s at L.210 a word when Innes’s voice said, ‘That’s my bloody bacon!’

Innes Wye is a very clever man, but he is small, and his voice is rather high, and he is apt to talk about a role of soft galactic X-rays in the alignment of dust, for example, in the coffee break. ‘And I’ll tell you something else!’ said Innes to Jacko. ‘You’ve got your bloody playmates all over my darkroom again!’

He had, too. The developing tanks were all full of busts and bottoms and blow-ups of Jacko’s latest models. What was more, Jacko knew that Innes would see the pictures and Jacko knew that Innes would be offended, so I said, ‘Yes, I was going to say to you, Jacko, I want to do my plates before lunch.’

‘I’ll get them out,’ said Jacko casually. ‘Bacon. Innes? Shirred Eggs with Thick-Cut Salami and Straw Taters? Old Plantation Blueberry Pancake with Wild Berry Syrup? Spaghetti?’

‘Shut up,’ I said. I fished in my basket and tossed out yesterday’s shopping: some eggs, a tin of caffe solubile and two gold packets of salami, L. 250. ‘I don’t see why Innes should feed us. Shove it in the fridge somewhere.’

‘He has enough to do, feeding Poppy,’ said Jacko. ‘How’s Poppy, Innes?’ And as Innes still stood there, glaring at him, Jacko added in exasperation, ‘Give us a break, mate. We’re all big, grown-up scientists and we can drink and smoke and go to X films and everything. My God, I wonder you don’t put a G-string on Poppy.’

Poppy (or Poppaea, according to Innes) is a white mouse who lives in Mouse Hall by the Incubator. She is trained and looked after by Innes, who feeds her sunflower seeds and cleans out her cage on a Saturday.

Innes said, ‘It is nothing to any of us, I imagine, how you spend your spare time. But you have heard Ruth say she wishes to develop her night’s work. I imagine she hardly wishes to do it in the ambience of a low-grade Soho nightclub.’ And bending, he brought out two chaste eggs and cracked them.

I finished my coffee and got the hell out of it. I had my log to write up and my lists to tick off and my plates to develop, once I had stacked Jacko’s porn where it would attract less attention. I had time to be pleased that Jacko was on duty that night. Two more weeks and we should all have left Italy and scattered for Christmas. Winter skies are no good for photography and electric storms interfere with the power lines, so that I was reduced sometimes already to opening the cupola of the Dome with my muscles, not to mention manhandling the whole bloody weight of the 50-Inch. When Charles dropped in, he was able to help me.

We shared my digs, as I have said, because I was tied to Velterra. The rest of the time he spent in Rome, in a rather lush flat with a bar fitted into a sedan chair. I shall never, I suppose, get to the end of all Charles’s friends but I knew Sassy Packer, the idiot he was sharing it with, and most of the set who wandered in and out half the day and all, but all, of the night. I never did discover whose flat it was in the first place.

We gave a party or two there, but it was easier to live near the observatory. Gradually, Charles’s gear landed up in my wardrobe and he only went to the flat when he was working. Today he was working, and the car had broken down anyway, so I changed, and repainted, and yelled ‘See you at the party’ to Innes, and then caught the Rome train at Parassio. I wonder – I often wonder – if the car hadn’t been out of use, what would have happened.

Rome in November isn’t beloved of tourists. The visitors are mostly businessmen, doing the rounds with their secretaries. The pavement pavilions in the Via Veneto were steamed up with the resident foreign element having a quick hamburger and cappuccino, but your Roman proper had gone off to lunch. I climbed up the street, feeling underprivileged, to the Aurelian Wall at the top, walked through the crumbling arches and over the park to the villa.

The Villa Borghese (17th C., the property of the City of Rome) shuts at two, and the run-out of picture fakers and art students and culture vultures usually starts before that: the attendants want to get at their gnocchi. From the uproar floating down from the vestibule, I gathered that Charles and the four leggy ladies were still doing their stuff around the Titians. The closed-circuit TV in the entrance hall showed six empty rooms and then Charles’s back, very kinky in jodhpurs. He was talking to an Afro-wigged model in a transparent two-piece sexy tunica who, I saw to my sorrow, was Diana. I walked forward into the sculpture hall saying, ‘Help for the photographer,’ and two men with collars and ties on followed me in without buying a ticket.

Before we got to Room I, one of them drew alongside and opened a smiling conversation. By Room VII he wanted to know where I was going to lunch. Charles was in Room VIII, and when we greeted one another, my opportunists politely retreated. Italian manhood does a lot for one’s ego, especially when confronted with three scowling Art Deco chicks and Diana Minicucci, whose mother was Bernadette Mayflower of Hollywood, and whose father is Prince Minicucci, the industrialist. I stood with Charles’s hand in mine and said, ‘Hul-l
o
Diana. We’ve seen you already this morning. You’re absolutely all over poor Jacko’s developing tanks.’

She groaned in a desultory way, above almost as many unclothed molecules as had been on view in the darkroom. ‘He has the
coldest
hands,’ she said. ‘I do blame your telescope. Or is it his circulation?’

‘It doesn’t make me cold,’ I suggested.

The six pairs of eyelashes considered me. ‘Ruth sweetie, you haven’t a chilly pore in you. And if you did, dammit, you’ve got your own heating system.’ She glared at Charles, who blew a solid raspberry at her. The terrible thing about Di Minicucci is that she is rich and pretty and fearfully likeable.

‘Wait,’ said Charles gravely, ‘for the seasonal lull. That’s it, girls. I’ll be five minutes, darling.’

This to me. I looked around at the lighting man and the dressers and the hairdressers and the couturiers’ men, and the gaggle of attendants and illegal gaggle of onlookers and finally, at the TV screen out on the landing, which showed two men in collars and tie, standing somewhere surveying a Rubens. ‘Where for lunch?’ I said to Charles hopefully. It was a long, long time since my apple.

Di had pulled off her wig and, bare to the waist, was preparing to let drop the rest of her dress. With a hiss of offended propriety, the group at the door drew closer and then was shepherded reluctantly away. ‘I thought,’ shouted Charles, over a ripple of pink female fleshpots, ‘of the Rome Zoological Gardens.’

The zoo it was. A sample of Charles being whimsical. A sample too of his childlike conviction that wherever he chooses to take himself something astounding is bound to turn up.

In this he was perfectly justified.

We said goodbye to everyone and left our gear, all but his house-trained Zeiss Icarex and my basket, with the lighting man and set off to walk through the park, which was leafy and mostly deserted. The sun shone and the wind blew through my hair and Charles’s as he swung along with his hands on my elbow, murmuring confidingly exactly as follows:

‘Full fathom five my father lies

He fell in off a tender

The herrings come up pickled there

On gin from father’s bender.’

I groaned, which was what he expected.

With its substance reverently adjusted, that crap was due to go off with eleven others to the obituary files of Charles’s favourite publisher, for future selection by sorrowing relatives. Some early girlfriends, worried by his morbid inclinations, had tried to switch Charles from Mourning Cards to Anniversaries. But it just wasn’t Charles. Charles was Obituary Verses, and there was no point in trying to change him.

Outside the yellow stucco triumphal arches of the zoo there was a red truck with occhiali giocattoli, otherwise Toy Spectacles, on the front of it, full of flags and films and cameras and hopping dogs and balloons. Charles bought me a large red balloon with a cardboard fish dangling inside, and I carried it after him through the barrier and past a llama standing about patiently under a fine date palm roaring with sparrows.

‘You don’t wish,’ I said to Charles, ‘to be photographed in Agfacolor
con il lama
?’ A nun with a string of five children paused to read the notice on her way out, and someone entering behind us also stopped at the truck and bought a large blue balloon. It was November and an hour short of closing time: the Giardino Zoologico di Roma was not going to be seething with patrons. We strolled past the carousel and the monkeys and Lo Yack and Il Gorilla, who was playing lightly with motorcar tyres, and the Moorish palace occupied by the giraffes.

‘I’m hungry,’ I said, with some feeling, and seizing my hand Charles took to his heels so that we ran together up the broad tree-lined slope to the restaurant, which was, being November, quite shut. So we sat under the closed sun umbrellas on the piazza and ate finger rolls and Panfrutto Motto supplied by the kindhearted barman. A fountain hissed and the sun shone benignly and a lot of red geraniums bloomed among tubs of laurel and myrtle. There was a faint scent of corpse-red Rapaci wafted from the condor enclosure behind us. Charles said fretfully, ‘And what about this bloody party?’

‘Di is going,’ I said.

‘You said that for no other reason than to make me say To hell with Di, poor little Di,’ said Charles fluently. ‘You’re a sour, sex-starved cow and I am not going to friend Maurice’s party.’ Under the table, his knees had trapped mine and he was uncorking and pouring into the two water glasses before us the contents of his silver hip flask. The man with the blue balloon came into the piazza, looked vaguely around him and went and sat next to the condors. The child, if he had a child, was not immediately visible.

I sighed. I refolded my newspaper and said rapidly,
‘
La Vendetta di Tarzan
?’

‘No.’

‘
Il Figlio di Frankenstein
?’

‘No. No films. No plays. Maurice’s party if you like, but very, very late . . . Oh, come on, Ruth,’ said Charles flatly, and rising, pressed the back of his hand against my cheekbone and then went off to square with the waiter. A moment later he said, ‘Where the hell’s my bloody camera?’

It had been where he had slung it, on the next wrought-iron table with my basket. My basket was still there, but the Zeiss Icarex had quite vanished.

The sun, losing its grip, slid behind the restaurant roof. The sound of sawing machinery stopped, and the man who had been painting the railings put the lid on his paint and walked off. A woman came out of the bar and took down the wall cage of budgerigars; various stoutly built men in faded blue cotton trousers who had been leaning against walls or sitting on the customers’ benches came erect and began treading about, dimly purposeful. The park was about to close for the night.

I jumped to my feet. Charles was already weaving around the piazza, saying things in restrained Italian to the white-coated waiter and the woman with the cage of budgerigars still hanging from one finger. When my balloon burst we all jumped as in an old Bogart film, including the budgerigars. The cardboard goldfish, dangling exposed from its stick, had
Fall Fair, 500 L.
neatly marked on its stomach; a price which only a financial moron like Charles would have paid for it.

It reminded me of something and I looked across at the white-collared condors, who stared back, their raw flesh peeping coyly through the black feather boas on their bosoms. The man who had been sitting there had gone, and his big blue balloon with him, at that. I said, ‘He came near the table.’

‘So he did,’ said Charles. ‘Stay here. He’s probably juiced to the eyeballs.’ And vaulting over the myrtle hedge, he bounded off down the path past the condors. I followed him.

The Zoological Gardens of Rome occupy about thirty acres of gently undulating ground. Anything could hide there with utter impunity. The inmates of the cages are far too much taken up with their indigestion to pay any attention to interlopers.

But the zoo was closing. We belted down that path without overtaking or seeing the slightest sign of the thief of Charles’s camera and then we did the sensible thing: we returned to the entrance and, concealed behind the broad, fluffy flanks of the llama, scanned the trickle of patrons emerging.

Our quarry came, too, strolling past the flamingos with one hand in his pocket and the other still holding his stupid blue balloon on its stick. The sunset, glaring red in his face, showed me what I had missed in the piazza. The thief was one of the two who had entered the Villa Borghese behind me.

I squeaked. It was not, as Charles made out afterwards, an animal ululation. But it made the llama twirl on its neck. The man turned. Charles, revealed, made a headlong dive in his direction, with me following. The man whirled and, running like hell, disappeared behind the flamingos again. The last visitor strolled through the zoo gates and the gates were loudly locked.

At this point, naturally, we should have summoned the police and the director. Instead, we raced after the disappearing patter of footsteps until Charles stopped and I cannoned into him and Charles said, ‘He’s hiding.’