Roman Nights (25 page)

The first person to jump in after me was Innes, and the second, Diana. I hardly got my eye make-up wet, they were so quick to retrieve me. Charlotte, squealing, came by doing a moderate butterfly, followed by one of the boyfriends, his hair streaming and his teeth shining.

The bow wave they created washed over us and I did get my make-up wet but not for long. I shot up with Innes’s hand under one arm like the prong of a fork-lift tractor while Di’s hand sought anxiously to heave my chin out of the water. I shook my head and said, ‘For God’s sake, Innes. I’m
standing
.’

‘Oh,’ said Innes. He took his hand away. The water was all of three feet deep.

‘And in any case,’ I said aggressively, ‘I
like
being in water.’

I suppose it was a back-kick from being too sombre. I wanted to show that I could be crazy too, man, on straight old orange juice. I kicked off my sandals, and turned, and launched into a good strong racing crawl, pointing straight out to Sardinia.

Sardinia turned out to be nearer than I had thought, and to have an iron stomach and a pair of uncompromising hands which closed on my arms, arrested me, and then turned me about to face the way I had come. ‘Oh, no,’ said Johnson. ‘I have a consistent dividend record, and you’re not going to spoil it. Are you decent?’

I didn’t know he’d jumped in. He must have gone in ahead of me. He must have swum faster than I had, if he hadn’t. I felt about. ‘I’ve lost my trousers,’ I reported. I had my pants on, and a bra. I was decent. My God, I was more decent than Di when she was dressed for the Via Veneto.

As I was thinking this, Di came up with Innes not far behind her. There was a discussion, growing steadily chillier, over whether I should attempt to swim to the boat, or go back to the Mistral with Diana, where at least I could borrow a tablecloth. Innes, in the most fluent speech I have ever heard him make, pointed out that the two swims were equally lengthy, and to expose my condition to the already upset diners in the Mistral would be tantamount to having me arrested.

I must say he seemed to have a point there, or at least Johnson thought so. In the end I swam to
Dolly
with Johnson, Innes and Di around in convoy and waited, hanging on to the side, until Lenny came and let down the ladder.

Di came aboard too, which did nothing for the saloon carpeting, followed shortly by Jacko, bone dry and confused. Di said, ‘My God, darling, I am sorry. I’ll get you another Fratini. And your poor bloody watch.’

‘I can maybe save it,’ Innes said. We were all standing wrapped in towels. ‘It needs to be plunged in pure alcohol.’

Di bent upon him the gaze of the daughter of Prince Minicucci and the top earner in Gene Kelly musicals. ‘Why bother?’ she said pityingly. ‘Hand over what’s wrecked, Ruth, and I’ll have it replaced for you, gratis. Unless you’re too bloody coy to take presents?’

‘No,’ I said with real gratitude and, wriggling under the towel, detached and held out the top half of the Fratini pants suit. ‘Another of the same, and I’ll love you forever. The underpinning will wash. And the watch doesn’t matter, it’s waterproof.’

‘And the sandals?’ said Diana briskly.

‘They were Samo’s,’ I said readily. ‘Handmade with foiled vamps at thirty-five thousand lire.’

I was afraid she had noticed them, and she had. ‘You lying rat,’ said Diana comfortably. ‘They were Marks and Sparks; I saw them. Good night, alcoholics.’

She blew me a kiss, and went and gave one to Johnson, and patted Innes, a little patronizingly, on the shoulder. Jacko, standing still by the door, continued to look at us all as if he were thinking in very simple phonetics. Di came up to him, placed her two hands in two very strategic pressure areas and, arching him slowly backward, sank a kiss full in the primary foliage of his Zapata moustache.

When she left and went out the door he was still laid on the bench seat, crepitating.

‘The more we walk around,’ said Johnson, towelling himself slowly with an expression of ineffable smugness behind the steamed glasses, ‘the more we are amazed by this multicoloured stage on which Nature likes to chisel and shape things following a skilful game and a genial whim. Every dawn, a new painting, an inexhaustible source of life, of love, of beauty, of peace . . . The too-marvellous-for-words beauty of this happy piece of earth smiling under ever-blue skies and subsiding into iridescent waters, harmoniously smiling, in an atmosphere of dream, life and beauty . . . Lipari!!!’

I went to bed.

We sailed out of Lipari next morning leaving
Sappho
behind, the curtains still closed over her portholes. Five hours later we were in Messina, Sicily, Johnson having won the argument over whether to press on to Taormina by mentioning casually that both water tanks were empty and unless we called at Messina we shouldn’t have any ice for the gin.

We tied up to a vast concrete waterfront filled with sightseers, whose feet were the first thing we saw through the portholes next morning. Then Lenny started up the engines, and we got going again for Taormina. On the way there we lost Italy, which receded gently into a long, light blue shadow and ceased altogether in a pale apricot scar.

I didn’t like losing Italy. I felt cut off, somehow, in a way I hadn’t before. In Sicily, people said, anything could happen, and people, as it turned out, had it right on the button. The first thing we saw, entering the bay below Taormina, was
Sappho,
sitting shining, smug and clearly deserted.

The next was Sophia Ow, alias Lindrop, decorating the Atlantis Bay Hotel’s sunbathing piazza alongside Di Minicucci.

We all went ashore in two goes of the rubber dinghy, admiring the scrubbed flanks of
Sappho,
which had clearly lost its passengers and gained a number of charwomen. Bodies littered the beach and the lounge chairs around the waterfront bar, indicating that the wind had dropped, and the sun, shining mildly, was doing its best to remind everyone that they were in Sicily.

Di, nearest the bar, was reclining face down in a bikini, of which the top half was patently unfastened. Lying beside her, as I have said, in a gorgeous one-piece black bathing suit which showed off her last summer’s tan, and her this autumn’s figure and all that spectacular Finnish blonde hair was Sophia Lindrop, the dish Bob and Eddie had seen with Charles in Naples. The girl Charles was once engaged to.

Di saw us and sat up, and the top half of her bikini fell off, and Jacko leaped forward to fix it. My blonde friend preferred to phase her delivery. She turned her head. Her white-lidded eyes fell on Jacko, whom of course she had known through the Trust. She smiled at him and at Lilian Hathaway, cast a long, studied glance at J. Johnson and then discovered the enemy: me.

Of course, she knew we were coming. She was in Di Minicucci’s company. She knew about Johnson and
Dolly.
She would know Charles was in clink and she probably knew all about the row we had had in Velterra. That didn’t prevent her from studying me with vivid astonishment.

‘Ah. The cradle-snatcher,’ said Sophia, and giggled at Jacko.

I am the same age as Charles; she is three years younger. With the others looking on I was damned if I was going to be childish. I grinned and said, ‘Hullo, Sophia. I’ve got a holiday pass from the geriatric unit.’

Professor Hathaway smiled and shook Sophia by the hand. ‘You will be fascinated to hear what developments we have been making in your field, Ruth and I. How nice it is to see you. Are you on holiday?’

‘I am here with friends,’ Sophia said. ‘I have to be back at the observatory on the twentieth. Old Mr Frazer has so kindly offered to take me on
Sappho
.’

Old Mr Frazer, damn his eyes. She wouldn’t call him that, I can tell you, when she asked him. Or when he offered. Maurice has grown into the sort of dramatist who doesn’t need a stage anymore. He winds up people, and then lays them down and starts watching them. Innes arrived rather late, blushing, and was introduced, along with Johnson. Innes said, ‘What observatory are you with now, Miss Lindrop?’

I didn’t know who she was with. I reckoned Bob and Eddie must have known, but they got off the subject so fast in Naples that I never discovered, and I didn’t choose to ask anyone else afterwards. I didn’t know that Johnson had asked them. I didn’t know how much he knew about Sophia Lindrop when he asked me so disarmingly that night to tell him about her. He was looking at her now, admiration printed all over his face around the bifocals, while Innes asked his gentlemanly question and Sophia opened her lips to reply to him.

Johnson forestalled her. ‘Miss Lindrop is with the Finnish Observatory. The Finnish Observatory on Capri, isn’t that so?’

I could feel veins standing out all over my eyeballs. Capri. We had to be in Capri on Monday. And so, it appeared, had Sophia. Sophia, who had been made out of tungsten steel in a doll factory. ‘You may not be so pre-Columbian in bed, darling,’ had said Charles to me, ‘but my God, at least you’re human.’

So Sophia, who used to be engaged to Charles, was working on Capri, where the fourth and last meeting arranged by the late Mr Paladrini was to have been held. And Sophia, according to Bob and Eddie, had been meeting Charles a fortnight previously in Naples. And Johnson, the rat, had said nothing to me.

I glared at him and he said to Sophia, without ever glancing in my direction, ‘We’re sailing for Capri on Sunday. Maybe we’ll see you there.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Sophia. ‘But you will be on holiday and I shall be working. It is possible, you know, for a woman to be serious about her career.’

This aimed at me. She had a dimple in her chin and she took size 34C-cup brassieres when she wore brassieres. I knew because I found one in the laundry the week after Charles and I first shacked up together. Johnson stood there in his wrinkled bags with a hank of string hanging out of one pocket and his pipe bulging out of the other and said winningly, ‘But there should, I hope, at least be time for a drink?’

‘Of course there will,’ said Professor Hathaway heartily. I let her get on with finding out how Sophia was spending her weekend and dropped down beside Diana, who had flopped to the horizontal again and was being oiled with some enthusiasm by Jacko. The fact that she was watching Johnson all the time under her lashes escaped Jacko but not, I thought, either Sophia or Johnson, who was getting on like a house on fire with Sophia now I wasn’t there. I hoped his interest was professional but it was a weak hope. Sophia deciding to move in on somebody was a sight worth selling tickets for.

Jacko went on oiling Di’s sun-kissed areas and asking leading questions about the frolic on Lipari, which was probably still going on but without
Sappho,
which had sailed empty with her working skipper and Di down to Taormina, passing us while we were tied up in Messina. I was making my contribution to the dialogue and dipping Ambre Solaire on to a Sicilian ant queue when the sudden silence told me that my party had retreated Maurice-ward into the hotel. I got to my knees ready to follow them, and found Sophia standing over me.

It was an exciting sight. Her two eyelids were arcs of white paint where she was staring down at me, and her lipstick had disappeared altogether, because her mouth was pressed shut so purposefully. Then her lips came apart, blurred, and she said, ‘Your rich friends, your stupid friends, have gone away. And now I will have my property, please.’

I looked around. ‘Jacko?’ I said.

‘Jacko,’ said Di firmly, ‘is out on charter already.’ She was lying on her face and Jacko was still preparing her deftly for fondue. Sophia continued to stare at me without moving. A few people on nearby towels lifted their heads, interested.

‘Charles?’ I ventured.

‘I have him already,’ said Sophia. ‘Whenever I want him. I am talking of
that
.’

It was getting interesting, if a trifle public. Di heaved around to look and even Jacko glanced up from his brave massage. Sophia was pointing to my left hand.

I looked at it, and so did Jacko and Diana. It was ringless. Part of the row Charles and I had had in Velterra had been over the fact that I won’t accept any rings from him. Our blank faces maddened Sophia.

‘
That
!’ she said, raising her voice considerably, and bending, seized my wrist and jerked my watch strap painfully forward.

It didn’t come far, being a man’s leather strap and firmly buckled. I hauled my wrist back and gazed at Diana. Diana lifted her eyebrows, shrugged and flopped down again, abdicating. ‘Christ!’ I said incredulously, chafing my wrist, and then, as more heads began to turn in our direction, lowered my voice. I said to Sophia, ‘Come on. Sit down. It isn’t a play group. I’m wearing Charles’s watch and you want it. Is that it?’

She didn’t sit down. Nor did she lower her voice. ‘I not only want it, I am having it. Together with anything else I have paid for that Charles has given you. Why do you need it?’ Sophia said. ‘Charles is in prison and your new lover is richer. Ask him for a wristwatch. I want mine back.’

‘Listen! Pipe down!’ said Jacko. He rose to his feet, a reasonable male, dealing reasonably with an unpleasant occurrence. ‘O.K., she’s got Charles’s watch on but you can’t demand it back and expect to get it, just like that. If you want to talk about it, for the Lord’s sake go inside.’

The white-lidded eyes barely glanced at him. ‘Is it your affair?’ said Sophia Lindrop. ‘If you are frightened, run after your party.’ She said coolly to me, ‘Do you wish me to show you the invoice?’

‘Do you keep them?’ I said, fascinated. ‘Sophia, do you want it back for the money, or are you really still sold on Charles? He won’t come back. He really won’t.’ I was thinking of all the other things he had told me about her. I hadn’t forgotten the so-called meeting in Naples. But I was becoming surer and surer how it had happened.

‘Won’t come back?’ said Sophia, and smiled. She smiled all around, at Jacko and Diana and even had a little to spare for the audience. ‘He
is
back, darling Ruth. Didn’t you know? Where do you think he goes, when he must fly to those assignments in Livorno and Firenze? He goes there, yes, of course. You know it; you see the photographs. But he does not show you the photographs of what we do when we meet – in Capri, in Naples, in Ischia. I gave him that watch after the first twenty-four hours we spent together, and you will not have it, you stupid horse.’