Roman Nights (29 page)

‘There!’ she said, ‘so much for your token of love. It is no use your coming to me when you are tired of her. I never want to see you again.’

‘Charles,’ I murmured. I was afraid he would cease to be a decadent product of a Victorian system and actually sock it to her. ‘You have to concede a ruff and discard. Goodbye, Sophia.’

‘Goodbye, Sophia,’ everyone said, eventually, in varying cadences. Timothy picked up the bags. After a moment, she turned on her heel and walked off, followed gently by Timothy. I said, ‘Charles. Now you won’t be able to go to her when you’re tired of me. She said she met you in Naples.’

‘She certainly did,’ said Charles with some feeling. ‘She wanted all her presents back. I told her she could have them when I got back the price of her engagement ring.’

‘She didn’t offer you a bed,’ I suggested happily, ‘whenever you felt like a little variety?’

‘Come off it,’ said Charles. ‘Of course she did. Do you think I’m losing my first bloom or something? She offered, and I fancy I kept her hoping. It’s supposed to be kinder.

‘Memories are like threads of gold,

Never tarnish or grow old.’

‘It is not kinder,’ I said firmly, ‘to the older, permanent workforce. Please be realistic in your dealings in future.’

‘Come on,’ said Johnson. ‘The ball’s at your feet, Digham’s Jackal.’

It was, too. I even kicked a couple of goals, as I remember. Then I recalled it was the morning of Monday, November 20, and the day of the late Mr Paladrini’s last assignment and my footwork went off.

I told Charles after that who Johnson was. He took a long time to believe it and even when I brought Johnson in to confirm it, he couldn’t quite keep his face straight. I was glad I had mentioned it. The letter I wrote to Charles in prison had never reached him and he had begun to wonder, who wouldn’t, what the hell I was up to, wandering about the Tyrrhenian in Johnson’s yacht in November.

So I told him about the list of dates, and what had happened on all the islands, which was a complete mistake because his chromosomes all began waving flags and he settled down nose to nose with Johnson in my stateroom masterminding the afternoon’s visit to the Villa San Michele.

I squeezed up and down, passing them gins and pointing out that now it didn’t matter a damn. Nobody was assaulting us, so the criminal element must have come to realize that Charles’s pictures were truly disposed of. Charles wasn’t implicated any longer. The idea that anyone in authority might have suspected him of complicity in the murders was so novel that we couldn’t get him to take that seriously either and stopped trying. The final stupid outcome of that masculine conference was that both twits were hell-bent on going to the Villa San Michele that afternoon and neither appeared to think it necessary, as I kept pointing out, for Charles to get the hell out of it. The other natural disaster was that I had to tell Charles I had developed his photographs.

I kept my cool, telling him because I’d had twenty-four hours to rehearse it in. Johnson lit his pipe. Charles went rather red and then said, reasonably, ‘Why?’

I wished Johnson wasn’t there. I wished I had had two minutes alone with Charles since Sophia departed and we had all come back on board
Dolly
. I said, and could feel my own face growing hot, ‘I thought you knew they’d pinched the wrong camera. I thought you’d been using the other one perhaps for pictures of Sophia.’

I could feel Johnson looking at me and I didn’t care. I’ve never met a man yet who minded his girlfriend being jealous of someone else. But I wasn’t going to let Charles know my faith in him had dimmed, even for the space of an evening. I said, ‘I was an ass. And I’m sorry I burned them. Johnson says if I hadn’t, it would have cleared you of suspicion immediately.’

I added, tentatively,

‘
The kindness of his nature

The sunshine of his smile

Are things I shall remember

and treasure all the while.’

‘I’m not sorry,’ Charles said. He took my hand and pulling me suddenly down to sit beside him continued to hold it so tightly that it hurt. He said rather thickly, ‘They were rotten pictures anyway,’ and at that moment, thank God, Johnson remembered something he had to do, and took himself off.

When we both emerged, to let a sarcastic Diana have access at last to her stateroom, it was to find that the spy fever had spread like foot-and-mouth disease through both yachts, embracing even the worldly sybarites of the
Sappho,
who had come on board
Dolly
to lunch with us. At three o’clock that afternoon, I could see, the Villa San Michele was liable to be thronged by excited astronomers calling to one another the now classic phrase,
Let’s capture the bastards.

Johnson did what he could to defuse us. ‘Do remember,’ he said, uncorking bottles. ‘Unless the message in Paladrini’s flat has been seen and understood by the two parties concerned – the seller of information and the purchaser – nothing will happen today whatsoever.’

Innes recrossed his legs irritably. He said, ‘Anyone looking for information about his next rendezvous wouldn’t find Paladrini’s flat, surely, hard to get into. Relatives, to remove the effects. Workmen, to repair the ceiling.’

‘It seems mad to me,’ Jacko said. ‘Why smuggle over the date of an appointment when you might as well hand over the loot on the spot?’

The Professor’s pebble glasses inclined towards this evidence of superficial thinking and Jacko wilted faintly in his folding chair. ‘I can think of several reasons,’ said Lilian Hathaway. ‘The material may not always be of convenient size to hand over in public. Provided the amount of contact is kept to a minimum, a mobile liaison office such as the balloon cart could be used over and over again, and doubtless has been. And lastly, it argues, does it not, that an appointment for the future is made because at the time of contact the merchandise itself is not yet available?

‘Had the missing couture photographs been in Ruth’s possession at the time of the attack on her in Ischia, no doubt they would have figured in the next meeting. Perhaps this was why the San Michele arrangement was made; in which case the seller has still to explain to the purchaser that he has nothing to give him. And I doubt if anywhere on the island you would find a house and garden with more secret corners for such an encounter than San Michele. Axel Munthe, of course, was a most unusual gentleman.’

‘You know the villa?’ said Johnson.

‘I have had cause to visit it,’ said Professor Hathaway calmly.

She had been to the Grotta Azzurra as well, so it transpired, and gave us a lucid account of the refractive effects of the sun’s rays filtered through cavern water. I could see Jacko’s illusions all wilting. Then she said that she would be glad to conduct us on a tour of the San Michele precincts and who else wished to be of the party? Too many Chiefs, as well, and not enough unfortunate Indians.

It appeared that everyone but Maurice and Di, who wanted to get her hair done, wished to be of the party; and Maurice only opted out because any party Maurice is in has to be Maurice’s party, and this wasn’t. In all, six of us fell into line behind Johnson when he left the boat at 1300 that afternoon: Charles and I and Professor Hathaway, together with Jacko and Innes and Timothy.

We were, it is fair to say, inclined to giggle. It seemed enough, on the face of it, to frighten off the toughest conspirators, but Johnson did nothing to stop it. He probably couldn’t. Only Charles and I, after all, knew his curiosity had official endorsement. All I could do was resolve not to let Charles Digham leave my sight until the visit to Capri was over, and a fat lot of good that was to do me.

It was rather warm, I remember, and Jacko wore moss green shorts with laced flies which the natives of Capri in their winter wool thought dead dishy. Charles had on a needlecord shirt with a flower pattern and a jewelled belt around his pants. Johnson wore a white keyhole sweater and flannels: L’Escalade de l’Erotisme. ‘Dear boy,’ said Maurice, ‘you look like a veteran seed with no balls left. Do look after the children. I trust you.’

Someone said that Capri was shaped like a slipper. From where we were floating, it was like two mountainous knobs with a saddle between them. At the bottom of the saddle is the big harbour with a half circle of houses and shops and trattorias swarming with traffic and tenders and cruise ships in season. The quickest way to Capri proper, which is the top of the saddle, is by funicular. From there, San Michele is reached by taking a winding hill road to the right-hand cliff, on which sits the little town of Anacapri.

We all got into the scarlet carriage of the funicular and allowed Timothy to describe to us the orgies of the Emperor Hadrian while the fig and orange and lemon trees and the tops of the villas disappeared slowly down by our feet. A notice on the wall said:

SEGNALE D’ALLARME:

In caso di pericolo, tirare la maniglia

I thought if anything happened to this carriage, the Pope wouldn’t get his picture and the Trust would need a new director, so why should I worry.

Then we got to the top, and walked around to the Umberto I Square, which is pure, living Kodak, with white buildings and greenery and café chairs and tables and a little square tower containing a blue and yellow clock with Roman digits just like my telescope.

It reminded Charles of something else altogether.

‘Like falling leaves the years slip by

But memories will never die

Time may pass and fade away

But thoughts of you will always stay.’

A sad thing happens with Charles and myself. If the setting becomes too romantic, he tips over into obituary verses. I suppose this is why I weep all the way through teleromanzi. I know moments of high romance will never come my way with wine and moonlight and soft violins playing. If Charles didn’t break down and cackle, then I should.

We piled into two taxis for Anacapri.

With seven of us up, the taxis nearly didn’t make it, and the steam was rising to the pine trees as we finally wheezed into the little square and tumbled out at our destination.

We were too early. There was no one standing about the sunken park with a Gents in the middle, or the hotels and houses and shops built around it. In front of us, a notice said:
To the Villa San Michele

Behind that rose a large modern hotel with a submarine window let into its swimming pool. The only natives in sight were grouped before that green aqueous rectangle through which moved the stomach of a stout woman performing the breast stroke.

It was like the fish tank in the Ischia restaurant. Johnson said, ‘Let’s go up in the chair lift.’

One of Johnson’s larky ideas, and very funny until it turned out that he meant it. Jacko, told there was a terrace with beer at the top, became instantly enthusiastic. I thought of the stiff in the meat safe. Some people never learn from life’s lessons.

Innes was made of different stuff. ‘You bent on living dangerously?’ he inquired of Johnson with sarcasm. ‘The view?’ offered Timothy placatingly. He was anxious for Johnson to be pleased.

‘Ah. The view,’ said Professor Hathaway, and we all turned and looked at her.

Charles got her point in fact before I did. ‘The view of San Michele,’ he said, looking at Johnson. ‘Granted. But if we can watch the approach path, won’t our quarry be aware of seven high-level spectators? Two taxi-loads of yachtsmen in November can hardly have escaped anyone’s notice. We must be notorious.’

He was right. As far as public argument went, we must have the Runners-up Art Deco Cufflinks already. Johnson said patiently, ‘Ponder this. If this meeting hasn’t already been cancelled it’s only because the two people concerned haven’t been warned about us. And if they haven’t been warned, two taxi-loads of bent foreign yachtsmen won’t worry them.’

‘Well said,’ said Lilian Hathaway. ‘Likewise, what man of sense would attempt to dispose of seven people? Where is the chair lift?’

At Anacapri, the chair lift is like any other. You place your feet on a pair of red footprints, then the chair steals upon you from behind and sweeps you into the air, while a safety bar clips at your middle. Professor Hathaway was lifted first; then Charles and Timothy and Innes and Jacko. Johnson put me in the next chair and then seated himself in the last one. We rocketed heavenward.

I don’t mind heights. I like, Charles maintains, being above people. I enjoyed looking down into their gardens and their vegetable patches, and passing their lanes and their roofs and their henhouses. The chairs were very close, in Anacapri, to the chimney tops. You could kick the tallest vine stakes with your sandals. You brushed the tops of their greenery: lilac bushes and olives and almonds, little poplars and oak trees growing densely below you in silence.

That was the main surprise: the lushness, the mild air and the quietness. Sometimes a bird would twitter in the pine trees. Sometimes, far off among the dipping white houses, you heard the snore of a motorbike or the beat of a tool, distantly hammering. But up here in space there was silence, save for the four hissing wheels of each pylon as the chairs swung from tower to tower.

Ahead, depending from its single rod, I could see the chair with Jacko in it, his camera appearing first on one side and then on the other. The others, dark figures against the sky, were crossing the next chasm, beyond which the terrain seemed much wilder, with grass and bushes and slabs of crumpled grey rock underneath.

I wondered how high exactly was the mountain we were thus ascending. Parallel with us the empty chairs came swooping down on the other side of the pylons, their worn seats bearing the imprint of God knows how many thousands of summertime tourist bottoms.

Our seats were facing away from the villa. I turned around, my eyes searching for bearings. Behind me, Johnson was doing the same, standing embracing the bucketing rod, his binoculars pressed to his glasses.

If anything was manic stupid, that was. I made to call him, and decided against it. I sat fuming while we swept up to a tower. The ripped-silk noise of the wheels sang out and diminished. We began descending the arc to the next one. Johnson changed his stance as he too passed the tower. For a moment he released the rod while he focused his binoculars. I swore, and bumped around, glaring, to see if Jacko had noticed.