The Wapshot Scandal (34 page)

There was a pool in the garden where they swam and they ate their meals on a terrace. With her this time he never seemed to achieve consciousness; or perhaps he had discovered a new level of consciousness. There were six black dogs around the place who watched them and the servants came and went with trays of food and liquor. He had no idea of the passage of time but he guessed he had been there a week or ten days when she said one morning that she had to drive down to Ladros on an errand but that she would be back before lunch.

She hadn’t returned by two and he ate his lunch alone on the terrace. When the maids had cleared the table they went upstairs to take their siesta. The whole valley was still. He lay on the grass by the pool, waiting for her to return. He felt drugged by an acuteness of sexual sensation and like the absence of a drug her delayed return left him in pain. The black dogs lay in the grass around him. Two of the dogs kept bringing sticks for him to throw. Their demands were insistent and tedious. Every few minutes they would drop a stick at his feet and if he didn’t throw it at once they would howl for his attention. He heard a car in the road and thought that in another five minutes she would be with him but the car continued on to a villa farther up the cliff. He dove into the pool and swam the length of it, but as he pulled himself out of the cold water into the hot sun this contact only made his need for her seem keener. The flowers in the garden seemed aphrodisiac and even the blue of the sky like some part of love. He swam the length of the pool again and lay on the grass in a shady part of the garden where the dogs joined him and the retrievers howled for him to throw sticks.

He wondered what she was doing in Ladros. The cook bought the wine and the food and there was, he thought, nothing she needed. Her inability to resist his touch and his looks made him wonder if she could resist the touch or the look of any other man and if she was not now climbing some staircase with a stranger with hairy forearms. The degree of his pleasure in her immersion in sensuality was the exact degree of his jealousy. He couldn’t credit her with any vision of constancy; and he went on throwing sticks for the dogs.

He went on throwing sticks as if some clear duty were involved, as if their welfare and amusement were on his conscience. But why? He had not liked them or disliked them. His feeling was substantial enough to be traced. He did, it appeared, feel some obligation to the dogs. There was some mutuality here as if in the past he had been a dog, dependent upon the caprices of a stranger in a garden, or as if in the future he might be transformed into a dog asking to be let in out of the rain. There were obligations and rewards, it seemed, for the patience with which he threw sticks. But where was she? Why was she not now with him? He tried to imagine her on some innocent errand but he couldn’t. Then he sat up suddenly in anger and pain and the dogs sat up to watch. Their golden eyes and the whining of the retrievers made him angrier and he climbed the stairs to the
salone
and poured himself a drink but he left the door open and the dogs followed him in and sat around him on their haunches as he stood at the bar as if they expected him to speak with them. The house was still; the maids would be sleeping. Then his rage at her propinquity, her uselessness, her corruption shook him and the gaze of the animals only seemed more questing, as if this hour were speeding toward a climax they well knew; as if he were traveling toward some critical instant that involved them all; as if their dumbness and his lust, jealousy and anger were converging. He ran up the stairs and dressed. It was an hour’s walk to the village but he didn’t expect her car to pass him because he was convinced by then that when she did return it would be with another lover and he would have been transformed into a dog. But when she did pass him and stopped and when he saw that there were groceries in the back of the car, his moral indignation collapsed. He went back with her to the villa and returned to Rome with her at the end of the week.

CHAPTER XXX

Returning to her
pensione
one morning Honora found Norman Johnson waiting for her in the lobby. “Oh, Miss Wapshot,” he said, “oh, it’s so good to see you. It’s so good to see anybody who can talk English. I was told that all these people studied English in school but most of the ones I’ve seen don’t speak anything but Italian. Can we sit down here.” He opened his briefcase and showed her the order for her extradition, a copy of the criminal indictment passed down by the circuit court in Travertine and an order for the confiscation of all her property; but with so much documented power in his hands he seemed shamefaced and it was she who felt sorry for him. “Don’t you worry,” she said, touching him lightly on the knee. “Don’t you worry about me. It’s all my fault. It was just that I was so afraid of the poor farm. I’ve been afraid of the poor farm all my life. Even when I was a little girl. When Mrs. Bretaigne used to take me motoring to see the autumn foliage I used to close my eyes when we passed the poor farm, I was so afraid of it. But now I’m homesick and I want to go back. I’ll go down to the bank and get my money and we’ll go home in one of those flying machines.”

They walked together to the American Express Office, not as a jailer and a culprit but as dear friends. He waited downstairs while she closed her account and she joined him, carrying a large bundle of twenty-thousand lire notes. “I’ll get a taxi,” he said. “You can’t walk through the streets like that. You’ll be robbed.” They stepped out into the Piazza di Spagna.

It was a bright winter’s day. At Fregene the catamarans would be up on rollers, the bathhouses shut, the light on the olives a sad light, the
zuppa di pesce
signs fallen or hanging from a single nail. The swallows were gone. In Rome it was hot in the sun, cold in the shade, the soft, bright light heightening the curious tidewater look of that old and crowded city as if, sometime in the past, the Tiber had risen over its banks—a flood of dark water—and stained the buildings and churches up to their pediments, leaving the limestone above still pale and still, this late in the year, overgrown at every cranny with thick tufts of grass and capers that looked so like pubic hair that they gave to the celebrated square an antic look. Americans wandered away from the office reading the news from home-sweet-home. Most of the news appeared to be humorous since most of them, from time to time, would smile. They walked, unlike the Italians, as if they accommodated their step to some remembered and explicit terrain—a tennis court, a beach, a plowed field—and seemed set apart by an air of total unpreparedness for change, for death, for the passage of time itself. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people in the square when Honora entered it and glanced up at the sky. A Danish tourist was photographing his wife on the Spanish Steps. An American sailor was dousing his head in the fountain. There were fresh flowers on the monument to the Virgin. The air smelled of coffee and marigolds. Sixteen German tourists were drinking coffee in a café across the street.
11:18 A.M.

Honora was approached by a barefoot beggar in a torn green dress who held a baby. She gave her a lira note. She gave one to a man in a striped apron, to a little boy in a white coat carrying a tray of coffee, to a good-looking tart holding her coat closed at the throat, to a stooped woman wearing a hat shaped like a wastebasket, to three German priests in crimson, to three Jesuits in black with lavender piping, to five barefoot Franciscans, to six nuns, to three young women in the black, sleazy uniforms worn by the maids of Rome, to a clerk from one of the souvenir shops, to a hairdresser, a barber, a pimp, three clerks, their fingers stained with lavender government office ink; to one dispossessed marquesa, her ragged handbag stuffed with photographs of lost villas, lost houses, lost horses, lost dogs; to a violinist, a tuba player and a cellist on their way to the rehearsal hall on the Via Athenee; to a pickpocket, a seminarian, an antique dealer, a thief, a fool, an idler, a Sicilian looking for work, a
carabiniere
off duty, a cook, a nursemaid, an American novelist, a waiter from the Inglese, a Negro drummer, a medical-supply salesman and three florists. There was not a hint of charity in her giving. The good her money might do would never cross her mind. The impulse to scatter her money was as deep as her love of fire and she sought, selfishly, an intoxicating sensation of cleanliness, lightness and usefulness. Money was filth and this was her ablution.

By this time the roofs of the square were black with people. A clerk from the express office climbed out the window, slid down the awning and dropped to the sidewalk at Honora’s feet. Bystanders stood knee deep in the water of the fountain. Then some mounted
carabinieri
came up the Via Condotti and Honora turned and climbed the stairs while the voices of thousands blessed her in the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost, world without end.

CHAPTER XXXI

Coverly’s security clearance was renewed pending Cameron’s return from New Delhi but Brunner had gone to England and Coverly had no way of knowing when the old man would come back. Then, through some irreversible and confused bureaucratic process Coverly was served a ten-day eviction notice by the government housing office. His feelings were mixed. Their life in Talifer seemed over, if it could ever have been said to have begun. He could easily find work as a pre-programmer somewhere else and the thought of leaving Talifer seemed to Betsey like the promise of a new life. At about this time he received a wire from St. Botolphs.
COME AT ONCE.
This unprecedented directness from his old cousin alarmed him and he packed and left. He arrived there late the next afternoon. The day was rainy but as they approached the sea the rain turned to snow. The fall of snow whitened the bare trees and the slums beside the tracks and gave them, so Coverly thought, a pathos and beauty that they would have at no other time in their history. All this whiteness made him lighthearted. When he got off the train Mr. Jowett was nowhere around and the station had been abandoned. He saw no one to wave to in the windows of the Viaduct House; no one in the feed store. Crossing the green he was stopped by a procession of men and women leaving the parish house of Christ Church. They were eight and they walked two by two. All the men but one, who was bareheaded, wore stocking caps. He guessed that there had been a tea, a lecture, some charitable gesture, and that these were the inmates of the poor farm. One of them, an angular man, seemed mad or foolish and was muttering: “Repent, repent, your day is at hand. Angel voices have told me how to make myself pleasing to the Lord. . . .” “Hushup, hushup, Henry Saunders,” said a large Negress who walked at his side. “You just hushup until we get into the bus.” A bus was parked at the curb with
HUTCHINS INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND
painted on its side. Coverly watched a driver help them in and then walked on up Boat Street.

A nurse opened Honora’s door. She gave Coverly a knowing smile as if she had heard a great deal about him and had already formed an unfavorable opinion. “She’s been waiting for you,” she whispered. “The poor thing’s been waiting for you all day.” There was no reason for reproach. Coverly had wired his old cousin and she knew exactly when he would arrive. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” the nurse said and went down the hall. The house was dirty and cold. The walls, plain as he remembered them, were now covered with a paper printed in black latticing and dark red roses. He opened one of the double doors into the living room and thought at first that she was dead.

She slept in a shabby wing chair. During the months since he had seen her she had lost her corpulence. She was terribly wasted. She had been robust—hardy, as she would have said—and now she was frail. Her leonine face and the childish placement of her feet were all that was not changed. She slept on and he looked around the room which, like the hallway, seemed neglected. Here was dust, cobwebs and flowered wallpaper. The curtains were gone and he could see the light snow through the high windows. Then she woke.

“Oh, Coverly.”