Another death in venice, p.3
Another Death in Venice, page 3
II
Sarah was a physical prude though her intellectual scheme of things did not admit the notion of prudery. Frank and open discussions about sex had to be entered into with a smile, but she recognized that she heartily disliked them. Another person who recognized this was her dearest and oldest friend, Avril Hadley, who took great delight in countering Sarah’s social conscience with her own super-sexuality. Empathetic tears for Asian orphans would still be staining Sarah’s cheeks when Avril, with a cunning twist of the conversation, would bring to light her latest orgasmic ecstasy, substantiated whenever she and her husband spent the night at the Massons by the odd long, juddering, climactic cry, which Michael in one of his more endearing moments had suggested was learned from a set of Linguaphone records.
Avril was merely an irritant, but Sarah’s present problem could turn into an embarrassment. It was all a matter of trying to react like the person she ought to be rather than the person she regrettably was. When Wilf had pressed himself against her on the dance floor and made sure she recognized his physical excitement, her first reaction had been to make an indignant exit. Then, reacting against the reaction, she had merely endeavoured to put a bit of distance between them, á manoeuvre he acknowledged with a complacent smile. On the coach on the way back as he sang ‘I’m tired and I want to go to bed’ he had run his hand along her upper leg, withdrawing it before she could protest and again giving her the complacent smile which this time acknowledged her complicity.
In an ideal marital relationship she would have discussed the matter with Michael, but she could not forecast his reaction and she did not want to risk another diningroom shuffle. Worst of all, he might just laugh. He had become quite unpredictable recently, light years removed from the young teacher whose selfless ambitions and liberal principles had seemed such a reproach to her own empty-headed young life. Somewhere along the way they had slipped past each other. As she became more and more involved in the serious business of being a responsible, civilized, concerned human being, Michael had drifted gradually from forecasts of radical upheaval to a kind of cynical materialist escapism which was as practically unprofitable for the Masson family as his earlier idealism had been for mankind at large. (Would she have minded so much, she sometimes asked herself, if he had turned into a successful capitalist?)
In the past year her concern about this change in him had reached new heights as his turning away from the high seriousness of life had become more marked. Always a cinéaste, he had seemed in the three years since he took up his lectureship to have accepted the world of the cinema screen on at least equal terms with reality. She had discussed his behaviour with various friends and even created models of possible behaviour patterns to present as case-histories to the psychotherapy group. Attempts to talk to Michael himself met with little response.
She moved uneasily. The sun was stinging her back.
‘Michael,’ she said.
He didn’t answer so she dug her fingernails into his foot.
‘Michael,’ she said, raising her voice above the multi-lingual transistors. ‘Is it time?’
‘What? Oh Christ, I’m sorry. You should have turned ten minutes ago. I’ve been dreaming. Never mind. You’ll be all right. Frozen meat’s always the toughest.’
‘What’s that mean?’ she snapped angrily, sitting upright and wriggling into a sun-top.
‘Nothing really. Simply a reference to our cold and clammy native land. Time for our excursion, I think. Today I feel we can make it to Jugoslavia.’
‘No, thanks,’ she said, unmollified. ‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Not feel like it? Think of the welcome you’d get from all those comrades who for four days now have been thronging the beaches of Croatia in daily anticipation of fraternal greetings from the Wesley Lane Labour Club.’
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘And stop being elephantine.’
‘You’re not sick?’ he asked. ‘I felt a bit gippy last night myself.’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Sarah.
‘You’re sure? What about a Diocalm tablet washed down with an ice-cold lemonade? I’ll go and get you one.’
She knew how much he hated joining the undisciplined mêlée round the beach bar and this evidence of solicitude soothed her irritation.
‘No, honestly. You go and have a pedal by yourself. I’ll just read my book. Go on, now. You never know what you’ll pick up out there.’
‘All right,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll just try half an hour then.’
She watched him pick his way carefully through the recumbent bodies, past the boule players, down to the fat woman with the white yachting cap who was mistress of the pedal-boats. A few moments later, reclining in his canvas-backed chair like a bishop at the Athenaeum, he was heading out to sea.
‘At last,’ said Wilf, sitting down in the vacated deck chair, ‘we are alone.’
Michael pedalled hard until he was well out of the inner band of bathers and boaters and only a couple of yachts broke the shimmering line where sky and sea met. He glanced back to the beach. It was a mere colourful ribbon, a long way away. Beneath him the water rocked gently with that hint of restrained power which great depth gives even on the calmest day. Michael was a poor swimmer but he had no fear in these conditions. Even the life-guard, who in choppier conditions would have been shepherding holiday-makers within fifty yards of the shore, was relaxing in the bottom of his boat.
Michael clambered out of his seat and lay on the small platform behind. The sun was a drug, he had decided. Ten minutes’ exposure produced a mindless torpor in which the mind could cope with no concepts beyond the satisfaction of basic appetites. It was what he needed. Last year they had taken a cottage in North Wales and those damp winds and black simmering skies had opened up his mind to a torrent of past regrets and future fears which even whisky could not stem.
Now he could lie back and relax, quite untouchable. First, however, he prudently checked that the light breeze and tidal movement were drifting his craft inshore. He sometimes thought that the capacity to end his own life was the only real power left to him. But suicide as a failsafe device was a Roman virtue; death by misadventure would be a silly little English farce.
He was awoken by someone grabbing his ankle and trying to pull him into the sea. Through his sun-shot mind ran thoughts of the dream he had invented to mock Molly with; then, as he plummeted closer to reality, of the boy in the red shirt mouthing threats through the coach window. Fully awake, he pulled his foot free of the questing hand and slithered as far from the platform edge as he could get.
‘He’s gone too far this time,’ said Wendy.
She was hard to recognize. An elaborate bathing cap designed like a sunflower covered her hair, and the removal of her make-up by the sea made her appear at once younger and older. Her wrinkles were now visible but her skin looked healthy and he reduced the lower limit of her possible age by a couple of years.
‘Would you like to come aboard?’ asked Michael.
She was resting with her forearms on the platform and he thought she would need assistance if the rest of her substantial being was to be pulled out of the water. But she thrust herself upwards with surprising ease and he realized now what her appearance at this remove from the shore should have told him, that her bulk was not merely the flab of a chronic chocolate-box picker but the decay of a long-distance swimmer.
She was wearing a black one-piece swimsuit of rather severe cut. He watched with interest to see if she would take off her cap and reveal the true colour of her hair, but she merely shook her head so that the droplets of water fell off the sunflower like dewdrops, and settled down beside him.
‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said. He obeyed and lit one for himself, using a box of matches as he seemed to have mislaid his lighter. She drew in deeply.
‘He’s gone too far this time,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Michael.
‘It’s come to blows. I knew it would.’
‘Ah,’ said Michael again.
‘Yes. Look, why should you be involved? I’m sorry.’
Why indeed? thought Michael. It seemed to him a good cue for Wendy to leave, but she made no move. Perhaps it was expecting too much for her to plunge into the sea with half a cigarette in her mouth.
‘You must be an excellent swimmer,’ he said pleasantly.
‘He’s done it before, of course. But I told him last time. Just once more.’
‘Yes. Well,’ said Michael.
‘What you see is the jolly surface. He’s wild underneath. Mad. But he knows where to hit.’
‘Look, Wendy,’ said Michael, forced against his will to try to bring these obliquities on to the plane of a rational dialogue. ‘Do you really want to talk about this? You hardly know me, after all, and while, if there’s anything I can do in the name of common humanity, of course I’ll do it, I can’t just step into a family quarrel.’
That, he thought rather sadly, was an unacceptable offer of help if she’d ever heard one. This time she seemed to have taken the cue. She tossed her cigarette over the side and struggled into a kneeling position.
‘Look,’ she said.
She unfastened her left shoulder-strap and pulled the front of her bathing costume down, catching her heavy breast as she did so in a gesture which Michael mistook at first for modesty but which turned out to be merely manipulatory as she lifted it to reveal a dark bruise on the rib-cage beneath.
‘Now do you believe me?’ she said.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Michael, glancing anxiously around to make sure he was the only witness.
Wendy took this as affirmation and fastened her strap again.
‘We got married too young,’ she said, moving to the edge of the boat and dangling her solid legs in the water.
‘Always dangerous,’ agreed Michael.
‘I was a trainee nurse. Another two years and I’d have known better. Another fifty and he might have been ready for it.’
There was another long pause. Michael felt panicky. In his profession the temptation was always to break silences with questions and the only questions he could ask here would invite more confidences he didn’t want.
‘Can I give you a lift back to the beach?’ he said in the end. There was enough of chivalry in this, he felt, to balance its finality.
‘We’d better not let him see us together,’ she said, and slid off the platform.
He examined this parting remark as he watched her swim away with a long slow stroke which would have drowned him had he attempted it. In the water he was like Sarah in her home life – only feverish activity kept him afloat. He wondered if he should tell her about this extraordinary interview. On the whole he thought not. Had these assertions of marital violence been offered direct to Sarah, she would not have rested till the whole squalid story was out, and not then. Even at second hand, the story would invite her total involvement, though she might have mixed feelings about the tit. Michael himself had mixed feelings about the tit.
He glanced at his watch. His time was nearly up.
That night he suggested they should skip the hotel dinner, take a bus into the old town and have a real Italian meal. To his surprise, Sarah, the family economist, agreed without demur. Rimini-città at night was a pleasant change from Rimini-marina. They strolled the whole length of the Corso d’Augusto, from the Bridge of Tiberius to the Arch of Augustus where the Via Flaminia began its journey to Rome. Not many people were around and as they stared up at the birds roosting on the ledges and capitals of the ancient arch, Michael felt safely distanced from the clutter of other people’s lives at the Leonardo.
They had a meal in a restaurant at the edge of the Piazza Tre Martiri where the food was a distinct improvement on the hotel cuisine.
‘Everything I see feels familiar in a dreamlike way,’ said Michael. ‘Even places that didn’t appear in the film.’
‘You mean I Vitelloni?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry, did I ever take you to see it?’
‘Only three times during the Fellini season at the film society a couple of years ago. I remember, though, you used to talk about it when we first met. All the time.’
‘Did I? Well, it made a deep impression.’
‘Deep perhaps, but not very firm,’ observed Sarah drily.
‘What?’
‘You used to talk about its social comment. The death spasms of the bourgeoisie.’
‘Did I say that? Ah well, what it was to be young and stupid. More wine?’
‘Yes, please. I must admit it still looked like that to me when I saw it. These vitelloni, what were they? Just layabouts, surely? Empty lives. I mean, it was post-war Europe, wasn’t it? Devoid of vitality or direction.’
‘Balls.’
‘That’s what I mean. Your impression has changed. When I first met you, it was all social stuff. But then you started, I don’t know …’
‘So I grew out of Bicycle Thieves. But I Vitelloni is about, well, the avoidability of experience, you know, as if perhaps even in their failing, there’s some hope. Not hope in any stupid political or even religious way, but as if unexpectedly out of something trivial … I’m not explaining this very well.’
‘No,’ said Sarah. ‘You’re not explaining it at all. Michael, sometimes what you say and do makes me wonder …’
‘It’s solutions that kill us. Isn’t this veal splendid? Almost as good as you cook.’
‘I never cook veal, you know that. It’s inhuman.’
‘Well, as good as your veal would be if you cared to cook veal.’
‘Have you been up to something?’ she asked. ‘Or are you just changing the conversation?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Compliments from you usually mean you’ve been up to something.’
He drank some more wine and laughed, though the observation was oddly disturbing. A flotilla of motor-scooters went by and he watched them through the open window as they wheeled round the Piazza. There were more than half a dozen of them, each with a young girl riding pillion. Michael’s hang-ups were not specifically concerned with the fading of youth – indeed the memory of what he had been now set his teeth on edge – but there was something so utterly careless about the scooterists that he felt a pang of envy. Or perhaps it was love, like the Ancient Mariner and the water-snakes. Then a face among all those young faces turned in his direction and love and envy were both replaced by fear. It was the young man from the barbecue. He was sure of it. Even the shirt was the same.
Quickly he turned away from the window and downed the glass of Royal Stock which the waiter had just brought.
‘What’s up?’ asked Sarah.
‘Nothing. A tickle in the throat,’ he said.
‘Brandy won’t help. Try some water.’
He hadn’t told Sarah what had happened the previous night, any more than he had told her what had happened that afternoon. She was intensely curious about what he did when they were apart, but over the years had grown used to his uncommunicativeness. She had the habit of returning to topics and happenings long since divested of all interest for him, so he had developed a technique of silence which stood him in good stead when he really had something to hide. At the moment, of course, he did not really have anything to hide and he had a feeling that a frank and open discussion now might save a deal of trouble later on. But something in him shrank back from this kind of frankness and openness like a wary ant on the edge of a Venus’ fly-trap.
The scooterists had more or less settled in a buzzing and still gently undulating swarm in front of an elegant neo-classical tempietto opposite the restaurant. Michael lingered over his brandy until Sarah pointed out that according to their calculations the last bus back to the sea-front was due in five minutes. They paid the bill and left. To reach the bus stop they had to walk diagonally across the square, passing within twenty yards of the young people. Michael resisted an impulse to hold a handkerchief to his face as if blowing his nose. There had been enough melodrama already.
As they reached the stop, the scooterists began to move again, not purposefully, but like birds in a field inexplicably disturbed, fluttering on high for a moment before settling to earth again.
There were two men at the bus stop already, one about fifty, the other much younger, early twenties at the most. They were both bearded, the young man with soft brown Christ-like wisps, while the older man resembled an English naval officer in a wartime movie. He wore blue-tinted sunglasses, a jacket that looked as if it had belonged to a City business suit, khaki drill slacks and tennis shoes. His companion wore a black tee-shirt, blue and white candy-striped flares, and no shoes at all. Round his neck on a silver chain was a tiny bell which tinkled as he moved. Between them stood a once-elegant hide suitcase and a large plastic carrier bag packed to explosion point.
‘I hope we haven’t missed it,’ said Sarah. ‘You never know with these Italian timetables.’
‘Be comfortable,’ said the naval officer. ‘They are always a little late. Not much. Just enough to permit tardy passengers to catch their bus, not enough to irritate. Part of their amiable realism. You are English?’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. Michael smiled warily and took a half-step sideways. Casual acquaintance he found a bore at the best of times; conversations at bus stops with unsavoury-looking men were fraught with danger.
‘And you are staying at …?’
‘The Leonardo,’ said Sarah.
‘I see. I see. A good hotel? I suppose, a full hotel?’
‘Yes, I think it is. Full, I mean. It’s not terribly good, though it isn’t bad. Just an average package-deal place.’
‘I see. Yes, the package. I am Sydney Dunkerley, by the way. My friend, Aristide. Forgive my curiosity, but we are between lodgings.’
His friend, Aristide, smiled nervously and rather ingratiatingly at the mention of his name. Dunkerley nodded reassuringly, though whom he was reassuring was not quite clear. He spoke English with an educated Home Counties accent, but as though he was used to speaking it with foreigners. Michael anticipated that Sarah would wish to know more about this being ‘between lodgings’. In England a firm intervention at this point might have been necessary, but here there was no chance of her inviting them home. It was just a question of being bored till they got off the bus at the other end. He detached himself from the group and went to peer into a shop window. Reflected in the glass he saw the motor scooters wheel slowly by; all except one. It stopped and its rider stared towards Michael as though he had just discovered the Pacific, while the pretty girl on the pillion drew on a cigarette and yawned widely and smokily.
