Rose in Darkness (21 page)

‘Yes, but... I don’t want to pry, darling, I’ll just wait around, do whatever you say.’ She pleaded: ‘I did promise them all at home to look after you.’

‘Where I’m going, I’ll be safe enough.’

(‘I just want to know where she moodles
to
,’ Etho had said on the ‘phone, and seemed really earnest about it.) ‘Let me come along and then I can do a church or something, while you go to wherever it is?’

If I don’t let her come, thought Sari, she’ll follow me. And the very thought of being followed turned her heart sick and cold; better to drag the intruder along, let her make what she would of one’s secrets. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But it’s very dull. It’s only a convent; well, sort of a convent, it’s a hospital really- miles out of Rome, out towards Tarquinia...’ But there came the ringing of a telephone bell, she leapt to her feet, a Sardine wordlessly indicated a telephone booth and she ran off and closed herself in. ‘My darling, my
darling...
’ Nan saw, through the glass, how the cloud passed, the whole lovely face lighted up...

She came out, radiant. ‘One thing at any rate is safe,’ she said. A self-drive car had been ordered and they drove out of Rome and into the country, Sari at the wheel. ‘This is such a lovely place, Nan, where we’re going. The nuns are such angels. They were very good to me once...’ She thought over it, came to a decision. ‘You see—everyone was so angry because I didn’t properly finish the film, but the truth was that I couldn’t. Aldo—he walked out on me, you know. After we were married—well, Phin has explained to me now the sort of person Aldo was. A psychopathic personality, no real love in him and no kindness; Phin’s ex. is the same. At any rate—I became—well, ill; it was Aldo’s fault, but that meant nothing to him and the moment real trouble arose, he just walked out. None of which would have done much good to my so-called image, that they were all so keen on; and certainly nothing I could be particularly proud of.’

‘I
see
,’ said Nan, slowly; and indeed, slowly, a new and unlovely dawn was breaking. The regular visits to Luigi for an out-of-date hair-do which anyway any salon in Mayfair might have accomplished. An illness of which one could hardly be proud; which had been Aldo’s fault but still had driven Aldo precipitately away. ‘Oh, well, never mind, darling,’ said Nan, very easy-going and worldly-wise, ‘these things can happen and after all you were married to him. And you’re quite OK now? You just come back for check-ups?’

Sari gave her a slightly quizzical look. ‘Well, you could say that, yes; I come back for check-ups.’ She added: ‘But not a word of all this to anyone, Nan, you swear? Even Etho doesn’t know.’

‘No, no, Sari, as if I ever would!’ She suggested delicately, ‘You won’t want me to come in with you?’ After all, once behind convent walls, Sari must be safe enough from whatever lurking terrors Etho feared for her. ‘Is there somewhere that I can wait?’

‘Oh, yes, a heavenly little church in the village. The frescoes are famous for being the most hideous in Italy, people come from the ends of the earth. And the cemetery!—it’s divine, all these wreaths made out of coloured beads and the poor dead people’s photographs in little mosaic frames in the middle, and I must say more hideous people must have lived in this village than anywhere else in the world. Even the kiddywinx seem to have been ap-solute monsters, poor little creatures, and one does wonder whether their relatives may not have had the same idea and kind of edged them off a bit, I’ve never
seen
so many early die-ers in any churchyard.’ They had climbed to a dusty hill-top village, its small grey church and walled graveyard dwarfed by the long white walls of the hospital buildings, set about with parched gardens punctuated by exclamation points of poplar trees. In the wide gravelled space before the tall front door, Sari stopped the car. ‘I’ll meet you here at five, outside the door, OK?’

‘At five?’ Nan looked with dismay at the available entertainment for a two-hour wait. ‘Will it take all that time?’

‘Well then, why did you come?’ said Sari, bursting out with it almost savagely. ‘I didn’t ask you to, God knows.’ But she got herself back under control. ‘I’m sorry; only it does take a while, I thought you realised. I have to—see the doctor, like you said; and then visit all my chums, the nuns and the priests, they’re all friends of mine, and some of the patients I knew are still here. And the children!—well, all hoppity, you know, I mean lame or blind or two heads, that kind of thing, and pretty loopy, most of them.’ She sat again for a moment musing, in the stationary car, her narrow hands gripping the wheel. ‘Nan—never tell anyone. I’ve trusted you in bringing you here. Whatever you may think or guess at—never tell anyone. You swear?’

‘Of course I won’t, darling,’ said Nan wretchedly, for to whom must she now be a traitor—to Etho who had entrusted Sari to her care, or to Sari who was putting her faith in her?

‘So, all right. There’s a caff of sorts, you’ll be ever so comfy. But you
must
do the church, top on the list of horror-tourism. Put up a candle for me.’ She got out and walked off to the door, the glowing golden hair, the brilliant colours of the reconstructed kaftan over the bright pink pants, swinging the inevitable huge painted canvas bag; looked back and called, ‘And one for my Pore Horse. A special candle for my Pore Horse, love, you won’t forget?’

Dear Sari—sweet Sari—maddening and yet so much loving, so compassionate Sari, with her outgoing heart! To whom must one be a traitor?—to those who loved and were anxious over her, or to Sari herself, perhaps at her own expense. Life with Bertrand had prepared Nan very little for such eventualities.

The frescoes were after all only rather amateurish and dull and the cemetery offered no more than a modicum of absurdity so touched with pathos as to be not really all that amusing. But as she wandered about the special part set aside, it seemed, for the ‘early die-ers’, there was a creaking of the gate of rusty scrolled iron-work and she saw that she was no longer alone. A woman had come into the graveyard and stood in the gateway looking about her as though she were a stranger there.

Very beautiful. In her early forties, perhaps: slender as a willow, dressed in a perfection of countrified wear reminiscent of Marie Antoinette playing milkmaids at the Trianon. She too seemed more interested in the side of the churchyard reserved for children, bending down to look close at the pitiful photographs, walking the length of the wall with its indentations of small niches for the pictures, the little flower vases, too many now empty for years. She came close at last to Nan and said, her English fluent if not perfect, but with a delicious French accent: ‘Madame—excuse me. Do you understand how is this wall?’

‘I think they build them to take the coffins, don’t they? Like—well, like pushing them head first into drawers or something. And then they’re sealed off and the ledges are left for flowers and things.’ Poor little coffined bodies, stacked in their orderly rows, beside one another, above, below. The woman said pityingly: ‘It is sad to see so many little ones?’

‘Well, with this great hospital here ...And I think they take a lot of children, crippled...’ Pretty loopy, most of them, Sari had said, in that off-hand way of hers that must never deceive one into supposing that she spoke without feeling. ‘So I daresay they do get a lot of deaths. But I don’t really know much about it, I’m just waiting for a friend.’

‘I also. Will your friend be a long time?’ The sun beat down on the little grey enclosed place with its clutter of great beaded wreaths which the Eight would have found so hilarious but to Nan seemed only depressing, too many of them long neglected since those who had with such munificence placed them there had ceased to remember and care. She said: ‘I have to wait till five. But it’s dreadfully hot. I believe there’s a cafe somewhere...’

‘Will you accept to have a cup of coffee with me? It must be better than wandering here?’

But the cafe was closed: in the afternoon sun the village was taking its siesta, not a soul in sight. Across the square from the hired car stood a glistening black limousine, whose chauffeur and another man leapt out as, with her companion, Nan approached, but were motioned back again. ‘We could wait in my car but it will be—
etouffant—
I don’t remember how you say in English that there is no air? You think we might ask in the convent—?’

‘Oh—well—I don’t think
I’d
better,’ said Nan, a trifle alarmed. ‘My friend—well—she’s here on private business...’

‘Private business?—in a convent?’ said the woman, with a little
moue,
half protesting, amused. ‘I think a convent doesn’t hold so many guilty secrets?’

‘A hospital may,’ said Nan; but everything she uttered began to sound equivocal and she wondered uneasily how much Sari would care for this acquaintance suddenly blown up with a stranger—and a stranger so curiously unlikely, now one came to think of it, to be encountered at this particular spot: and yet not easily to be shaken off. She suggested, ‘There’s a little sort of garden over there, with a bench, rather nice and shady’—and nice and private too, she did not add—‘where we could sit under the trees.’ And as they sat down, afraid of being led into further possible misunderstandings, she apologised: ‘I’m so hot and weary; I think I’ll let myself have a little doze.’

‘But assuredly, Madam. Do not let me incommode you.’ But it was not to be as easy as that. ‘If your friend should come out—will she not wonder where you are waiting? We can’t be seen here, from the front door. She will be perhaps anxious and if she has been to the hospital for—because of illness—?’

‘No, no, she’s just—well, just visiting, I think,’ said Nan, vaguely. But she wouldn’t let herself actually sleep, she said, just doze but keep her eyes on the time.

‘I will awake you if I hear the big door open. What does she look like, that I may recognise her?’

‘Well, she’s—I’m so sorry,’ said Nan, letting her head fall forward, ‘I really can’t keep my eyes open...’ Perfectly innocent questions; and yet... With Sari so paranoid about everything... ‘Do excuse me! I’ll just doze off...’

It was terribly uncomfortable but at least silence reigned. It was broken by a small gasp from the woman at her side. Nan’s eyes flew open. ‘Oh, my
God
!’ she said.

Far down the long white side wall of the building, a door had opened and Sari came down the few steps to the gravelled path. There was a nun with her, and a priest. And—a child.

They stood for a little while, talking. Between the two darkly-covered heads, the black biretta and the heavy veil, the bright hair shone, burnished in the afternoon sun; flanked by the two dark habits, the flamingo pink pants, the floppety tunic flamed brilliant as tropical flowers. One hand held tight to the hand of the little boy: for the child was a cripple.

A cripple and more than that. If the small pale face bore signs of physical suffering, it bore no other sign. The great dark eyes stared only vacantly up at the brightness above him. The little hand clung only from the need of physical support.

One small hand clinging. Under the other arm, he clutched tightly the bright blue wiggy-pig.

Sari glanced down at her wrist-watch, was suddenly in a hurry to make her farewells. The regulation convent kisses, cheek banged against cheekbone on either side; a tiny reverential bob sketched to the priest who, however, took her by the shoulders, passed a hand as though lovingly across the glowing crop of soft hair, made with his thumb on her forehead the sign of the cross. She knelt down by the child and put her arms around him. Unsteadied, the little boy tottered and crumpled, and burst into resentful tears, hitting out at the bright visitor with vicious small fists. She endured it, turning to the nun for assistance, handing the child over to her care; and came away at last, walking with bent head slowly along the path to where it emerged into the gravelled drive before the big front door.

And looked up and saw Nan and Nan’s companion, went absolutely ashen white and began to run.

They came to the car. Nan scrambled in after her. Sari swung the steering-wheel, tyres skidded and scraped, for a moment the world was filled with a nightmare of a thousand tiny sounds as dry gravel hit the bodywork of the car and fell away; and they were on to the cobbles of the village and belting through its narrow streets and out again into the countryside. Nan clung to the nearest handle as they jerked and bucketed their way along. She saw Sari glance into the driving mirror, turn round to look back through the rear window. The car slowed down to a more reasonable pace. She implored: ‘Sari, what’s the matter? What’s this all about?’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Sari, her eyes on the road. ‘I’m always upset when I go there.’

‘It’s nothing to do with that woman? I wasn’t talking to her, I didn’t tell her anything.’

‘No, no,’ said Sari. ‘It’s quite all right.’

‘I just met her accidentally. She was in the cemetery too.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Sari, ever staring straight ahead. ‘The cemetery.’ She quoted: ‘The grave’s a fine and private place...’

‘What ever do you mean, Sari?’

‘Never mind. Just making jokes to myself, while I still can.’

‘My dear, I hope you don’t think—’

‘Nan, for God’s sake!’ said Sari. ‘Just leave me alone. I’ve got a headache like all hell. Simply don’t talk to me.’

Silence, then. Back in the hotel, silently to their rooms presumably to meet later for the evening meal.

But when Nan emerged, bathed and changed, praying only to know how now to conduct herself—Sari’s room was empty, Sari had gone.

The Sardines, in their scanty English, yielded reluctant information. The Signora had come down almost immediately and hurried out of the hotel; yes, she had carried her bag, the large canvas bag, the Signora always carried such a bag and never any other luggage. Soon after, she had come back and this time a man had been with her, who held her by the arm and, so holding her, brought her to the desk, demanded her bill and continued to hold her while she handed over the money, looking about him meanwhile, somewhat—furtively; and then gone out with her again. No, she had said nothing, not spoken at all. As to whether she had looked pale, ill, whether or not she had seemed to go willingly with the man, they shrugged oily shoulders. The hotel had been paid, suggested the shrug, and, unregretted, another guest had departed from their inhospitable doors. That was all they cared about.