Roman Nights (24 page)

‘Hullo,’ said Johnson. ‘Did Innes wake you? We found him downstairs, trying to shake you out of a dying coma. I had to explain that you’d been zonked by the Director.’

Behind his head, Stromboli rose from the sea like a pyramid bottle with smoke rising from the neck. It was olive green, with spillings of lilac and brown and grey down its sides. A lot of little white blockish houses lay scattered at its foot. Johnson’s bifocals, dividing their attention between the burgee and me, were noncommittal as ever. The sails were up, and there was no sound at all from the engine.

I had a faint, nightmarish recollection of being grabbed by somebody and rolled backward and forward. It was the most interesting piece of information I had received on the voyage. I said, ‘If it wasn’t for Innes, I suppose I should have missed the whole of my bloating morning feast? Where is my tè and pane, twenty grams?’ A pale, steamy cloud was rising slowly from the volcano, while new whiter plumes began to appear at the brim of the crater like lace, and blossom upward in their turn.

‘If you go in,’ said Johnson calmly, ‘you’ll find Lenny with his running spikes on. We’re going to circumnavigate the volcano on the recommendation of Professor Hathaway’s guidebook. It says Stromboli should be seen just before dawn, shaded in the morning haze, hollering lowly.’

‘What?’ I said. I could hear it.

‘Not that,’ Johnson said. ‘That’s a joke Jacko has discovered in his paperback.’ He added, without changing his tone, ‘Don’t play with Innes. He doesn’t understand obituary doggerel.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask him to invent any,’ I said irritably, and went in to have my miserable breakfast. Innes was up on the foredeck with the Professor, timing the eruptions which came every twenty minutes in a sort of creaming cauliflower shape in a nice tint of café au lait, rising to a burgeoning mushroom and dispersing in transparent apricot. A long lilac streamer hung behind when it had vanished. Close to, the old lava was layered like oyster shells, and the new falls were grey and turgid like mud, with the green and yellow of whin at their edges. Jacko, having failed to witness either Ingrid Bergman or a major natural disaster, continued to stay below with his paperback and Johnson finally took down the sails and, starting the engine, turned
Dolly
’s
head south for Lipari.

I said to Innes, ‘I’m sorry you were worried this morning. They made up their minds to keep me out of trouble.’

‘Is that what they told you?’ said Innes.

‘That’s what the Professor told me,’ I said. I was surprised. Innes and the Professor were as thick as thieves.

‘I’m sure she meant it,’ said Innes enigmatically. Lenny was out of sight and Professor Hathaway had wandered to the other end of the boat. He turned and, putting his hand on mine, looked into my eyes. Really looked, as if he wanted to get a formula across and wasn’t sure what grade the student belonged to. ‘You took phenobarbitone,’ said Innes tensely, ‘but it might have been anything. Watch what you eat. Watch what you drink. And if you take my advice, don’t trust anyone.’

I nodded. There seemed nothing constructive I could add to it. And I had one consolation as the yacht breasted the waters and the Exhaust Pipe of the Tyrrhenian Sea dropped behind us on the horizon.

No one was watching their food more carefully, damn it to hell, than I was.

We reached Lipari just before lunchtime, and the first thing we saw was the
Sappho.

The next was Di Minicucci, hanging over the rail in denim pants and a jersey slit to the navel. There were about five other heads with her, all plentifully covered with hair. Innes gazed at them all with an expression of impenetrable scorn, but you could have heard Jacko breathing in Jugoslavia.

Johnson began to gentle
Dolly
to lie in beside her, and Di came and hung over the other rail like a popped pod all ready for Birdseye. She had a book in her drooping left fingers. ‘Hullo, darling,’ she said. ‘We’ve all found the most super guidebook.’

‘So have we,’ I said with resignation.
‘There is a big talking about the isle of Lipari: some people are convinced that Lipari does not outstand in character as the other islands do
?’

The pod popped further and Di did nothing about it. Jacko moved up the rail, as if trying to get back to his reservoir. She said, ‘Have you seen the bit about George Sand?’

The engine cut out. Under a large notice saying benvenuto a lipari large numbers of workmen were congregated, listening to every shrieked word. I had seen the bit about George Sand. I thought, for a hysterical moment, Di was going to read it all out:

George Sand was much impressed by these islands. He was struck by the beauty of the sea and the sky. Perhaps Sand had found here a new valley of Eden? That is how these islands appeared to him.

‘We’ve read that bit too,’ remarked Johnson. ‘It must have been a hell of a shock for poor Chopin. You haven’t met Professor Hathaway. Professor, this is Diana Minicucci.’

Diana Minicucci leaned on the rail, looking at the knitted cap and the blue baggy trousers, and the Professor looked at Di Minicucci.

‘Very charming,’ said Professor Hathaway with pleasure. ‘You will have no recollection of it, but I spent a short period many years ago working for one of your father’s laboratories. Is Mr Frazer on board?’

‘We dropped Maurice and Timothy at Messina. They’re in Taormina now,’ Diana said. ‘They got bored with Vulcano. Too awful.’

The beautiful person on her right, in a masculine voice, added, ‘They got bored with Diana. Poor Maurice was sitting about in his mud baths, and Di kept lighting pieces of paper and erupting them. She sent the volcano up once. It was rather a pity, poor elderly Maurice, hopping out of his hole like lychees in neat whisky flambees.’ As he said this he grinned at Diana, who kicked him expertly in the groin but lightly, I couldn’t help noticing. He slid back, protesting, and Diana, turning back to Professor Hathaway, said, ‘Why not come aboard, all of you? We’re just going to have drinks.’

If the idea was to indicate that they hadn’t just been having drinks all the morning it was a dead loss, because the icebox was empty and there were unwashed glasses on every available horizontal space including the loos. I collected the glasses and took them all back to the galley for washing. No one was there; even the little man who sat and sang to the engines. I said to someone else of indeterminate sex who came in to dry for me, ‘Who’s running the boat?’

‘We are,’ said the dryer, who proved to be a female called Charlotte. ‘That is, Di’s little man works the engine and sails her and we do the rest.’

I didn’t say ‘What rest’ although I had caught a glimpse of the cabins, which were three feet deep in towels and ragged handmade underwear and screwed-up sheets with coffee stains on them. Since anything Timothy lived in always looked as if it had come fresh from Asprey’s, I wondered why Maurice had let Di and her crew come aboard
Sappho.
Then I realized what Charlotte had said. I said, ‘Doesn’t
Sappho
belong to
Maurice
?’

‘He likes to think so, doesn’t he?’ Charlotte said. ‘No, darling, it’s on permanent loan from Prince Minicucci, doing his Renaissance patronage bit. Not that Maurice couldn’t buy a yacht if he wanted to, but it’s so much less trouble this way. And it brings Di around. You know how Maurice adores being grand seigneur with all us golden children devotedly draped around his kneecaps.’

One of the hallmarks of Di’s personality is the number of extremely shrewd golden children she is able to gather around her. I said, ‘So Maurice and Timothy are alone at the moment in Sicily?’

‘Darling, how romantic it sounds,’ said Charlotte, breaking a glass and throwing it gracefully through the porthole. ‘But I expect you’re right. In any case, we’ve all to get off before you join him in Taormina, Timothy’s orders. I expect eighteen charwomen will come on board tomorrow and make everything simply gorgeous for everybody. Do you smoke?’

‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t thinking. ‘Professor Hathaway does.’

‘Does she?’ said Charlotte, looking astonished. ‘I must say, she looks a sporting old horse. Well, you’ll find it behind the netting on the second shelf of the cold store, but Timothy says don’t use it all. His little man with a rowboat was picked up last week and he says the rising profits trajectory could accelerate any moment . . . I think that’s enough glasses.’

I had been going to wash them all, to preserve the
Sappho
’s
passengers from more cross-infection, but their microbes were already probably mixed more than anyone else would ever know. We carried a trayful up the galley steps and into
Sappho
’s
palatial saloon, where we proceeded, with some justification, to dirty them again. Innes came and sat beside me.

Jacko, it was clear, was having a lovely time and all the other extroverts were lounging over beside Johnson with their best profiles elaborately displayed. I suppose they thought he was going to be like Maurice except that instead of putting them on the stage he would say, ‘My dear, you must let me paint you.’ Then some of them began to giggle and the next time I looked they were all sitting anyhow and laughing. He appeared to be talking about revolving bookcases, but you never know with Johnson.

Professor Hathaway was having a long talk with Di Minicucci and enjoying herself so much that it was quite hard to get her away for lunch. We arranged to gather for dinner that evening. There was a restaurant on the shore just beside us, standing on stilts overhanging the water. Then we went back to Lenny for lunch, and in the afternoon emerged en masse with guidebooks for a scientific exploration of Lipari.

‘”Somerset Maugham once said,”’ said Innes, reading from our favourite literature,
‘
“
No word/can do justice to this paradise.
”’

‘Did she?’ said Jacko.

I tell you, we shall make a scholar of J. Middleton yet.

Like them all, Lipari is a green and mountainous island, with the fiat-topped white houses piled up around the harbour and topped by more ancient ruins and a cathedral and a wide flowery terrace with trees. We walked to the edge of the piazza and looked down on the white curve of the quay, lined with shops and with parked cars and shelving down at the end into a strip of coarse pebble beach with boats on it. Nearer was the blue roof of the Ristorante Mistral, and the long thrusting strip of the jetty, with
Sappho
moored on its far side, next to
Dolly.

From above you could see the enormous beam of Maurice’s boat compared to the long slender lines of the
Dolly. Sappho
was all motor cruiser, with a canopied wheel house and afterdeck big enough to hold a dinner-dance on.

I didn’t spot anybody meeting anybody and handing an atomic warhead to him or her. Johnson didn’t even come over and speak to me. I thought again what a dim idea it had been to come here, and then considered
Sappho
and thought maybe it wasn’t so dim.

The entire payload of
Sappho
could be trading Plans like a roll-on roll-off ferry service, for all Johnson and I should know about it. But if, for example, they were still doing it in Taormina on Friday, and on Capri come Monday, there was a chance we might catch them at it.

Except that we hadn’t caught them at it on Ischia. And they were getting rather good at catching us.

Seeing it was Di’s party, I spent an hour and a half on the bodywork for that evening’s dinner and subsequently climbed on to the jetty and walked around to the Mistral with the rest with some sort of restored confidence. In fact, when we climbed the stairs and found our way to the table, it became quite easy to sort out Di’s males from Di’s females from the way their eyes glinted above all the necklaces. Di said, ‘You rotten cow, I saw that in Fratini’s and I was going to buy it. I hope you freeze to death.’

The black velvet top was joined to the black velvet slacks by a lot of loose satin ribbons. I must say, I do take to Di. She has a gift for saying all the right things. Then we sat down, thirteen of us.

I stuck to my diet and had orange juice to drink, instead of buckets of Val di Lupo, which explains why I was still sitting opposite the disapproving presence of Innes listening to Johnson giving an excruciating performance in Englishman’s German of a complete bowdlerized version of
Hamlet
with all the speaking parts and most of the action, when the passengers from
Sappho
began splashing wine and throwing cassata ice cream at one another.

Professor Hathaway, who had been holding a very lively conversation herself with three or four surprised young men at her end of the table, immediately got up, bent over Di and said, ‘You will excuse an elderly scientist, my child, but I think the night, outside the Dome, is for the young. Thank you.’ She kissed her. ‘I have enjoyed myself.’

What with paying for the damage and arguing about the bill and compensating fellow diners for the splotches of ice cream on their priceless jackets and blusas, the last chance of making a quintet of graceful farewells vanished when the Professor did. In any case, we couldn’t leave without Jacko, who had a girl on each buttock and appeared to be trying to throw them into the cassata-granita, or perhaps they were throwing him. Somewhat hampered by Innes, who kept attempting to hustle downstairs, dragging me with him, to the scornful delight of the mob, Johnson finally managed, with incredible calm, to find a guitarist to play for us. He then contrived, after two sets of Lancers and an Italian version of Strip the Willow which rocked the place on its piles, to charm the guitarist into playing down the stairs and along the long, sloping landing plank which joined the Mistral to the quayside.

It was bound to happen, and it did. Someone pushed someone and he fell into the water. Someone else jumped in beside him. Two other people thought a swimming party had developed and, diving in, began to splash about, ducking bodies and sitting on heads. Someone hit me a swinging punch between the shoulder blades and I went in as well, head first, with my black ribbons flying.