North from Rome (17 page)

“Not too far. Sorry, though. Did I keep you from going out to dinner or something?”

Ferris softened a little. At least, he laughed. “Don’t give that a thought. It’s only half-past nine.”

Lammiter glanced at his watch in surprise. Nine-fifteen. When a man called that half-past nine, he was really annoyed. “I
am
sorry.”

“We’ve been waiting here—” Ferris began, his anger now dissipated a little by excitement.

Alert, Lammiter said, “We? Is our mutual friend around?”

“Yes. He’s returned. Thank God. Now I can pass you over to him, and go back to a normal existence.”

“He’s
there
—with you?”

“Very much so. He’s eaten all the nuts, finished the olives, and told us his stories twice over.” Bunny Camden’s voice cut in. “And how is my elusive friend? Carl thinks you’re in need of some dinner yourself.”

“I’m as sober as a Presbyterian elder. I’m just suffering from a touch of euphoria.” Lammiter glanced down, approvingly, at the envelope of photographs in his hand. “I must see you.”

“Where are you visible?”

“At Miss Halley’s apartment.”

There was a brief silence. Then Camden said, “Aren’t you complicating your life unnecessarily?”

“Not unnecessarily, I hope. Where do I see you? I’ve an appointment later this evening. At eleven.”

Behind him he heard the sound of wheels. Eleanor was pushing a trolley, arranged with food, down the hall towards the living-room.

“Remember where we bumped into each other a few days ago?” Bunny was saying.

“Yes.”

“Walk past there. Around—let’s see—around ten. And keep on walking. I’ll catch up with you.”

“My feet are in good condition.”

“That’s fine. But don’t trip over that euphoria.”

They parted, as usual, with a grin on their faces. I ought to see more of Bunny Camden, Lammiter thought: he’s good for my morale. But life had a peculiar way of dealing out agreeably mad companions only in little snatches. It was much more generous with the bores.

“All ready!” Eleanor’s voice called from the living-room. She sounded quite normally cheerful again. The room looked more cheerful, too, with all its warmly shaded lights switched on. She had cleared a round table and set out the supper, and she was studying the bottle of Valpolicella. “You’d better deal with this.” She handed over a corkscrew. “Good news?” she asked, noticing the expression on his face.

“I think so. When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“You know—I shouldn’t be surprised if I joined you.” She looked a little embarrassed, as if she were nervous about that idea. “I’ll try to get a seat—damn, I’ve got some more phoning to do—the airport.”

“Let’s eat the eggs first. I’m afraid I scrambled them.”

“That’s the way you felt, I guess.” He laid the photographs near her. She paid no attention to them.

“I imagined the eggs an English eccentric,” she admitted.

“They taste better than he does, I’m sure.” He put down his fork abruptly.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t the eggs—”

“They’re fine,” he told her. “But I just remembered a joke I could have made on the telephone. Dammit—why must I always be witty five minutes too late?”

“Is that why you write plays?”

“You sound as if you—” he looked at her quickly “—as if you didn’t like playwriting as a profession.”

“What was the joke?” she asked, dodging a straight answer.

“Oh, well, I was talking to a hungry man with a beautiful wife.”

“How do you know she’s beautiful?”

He thought of this afternoon. “By the way she inspires him.”

“Oh—he’s a sensitive type?”

“Knowledgeable,” he conceded. “And I ought to have quoted Max Jacob’s advice to a starving lover looking at his mistress’s bare shoulder. That would have silenced even a professor.”

“Now,” she said, “I’ll just let you soar. I don’t even pretend to be able to hang on to the tail end of the kite.”

“Jacob was a surrealist poet—kind of 1920 vintage—before we were born, anyway.”

“Just a dear old dotard,” she agreed. “But what did he say?”

“Oh—” he tried to get out of this now “—wit never seems so funny when you serve it up cold.”

“He was starving. He was looking at his mistress’s shoulder.”

“And what did he say?”

“Une escalope de vous, ma divine.”

She looked at him blankly.

“I will
not
explain,” he warned her.

“You don’t have to. I know my French.” She shook her head. “The truth is, it isn’t funny.”

“Ellie—it is! It’s the funniest poem—”

“If you are a man, perhaps. But it makes all women’s shoulders feel nervous. Are all men cannibals at heart?”

He grinned. “How often has a man told a girl he could eat her up? Or called her honey, cookie, sugar, peach? Or even— no, I never did like tomato.”

She had truly the most delightful of smiles. “Look—” she said in sudden surprise, “I’m all cheered up! I almost laughed.”

“I’m glad I’m good for something.”

She removed the empty plates, offered him cheese, helped herself to a peach. “Two hours ago,” she admitted, “I wouldn’t have dared to laugh because I’d have ended in hysterics. Two hours ago, I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t even pack. I’d pick a dress up and then drop it, and lift a pair of shoes and then I’d find myself at the dressing-table, looking for lipsticks and Band-Aids. I was sort of disjointed, mentally. But now I’m beginning to think, not very well, just a little... Bill, won’t you explain what all the trouble is about? There is something very far wrong, isn’t there?”

“I think so. But I don’t know very much. You probably know more than I do.”

“Why should I?”

“Because Pirotta seems to be the storm centre.”

“Is he in danger?” She stopped peeling the peach on her plate, and pushed it aside as if all appetite had suddenly closed down, like a shop front at noon. “Is that why he picked a quarrel—to send me away?”

“Perhaps.”

“But if he’s in danger, I should warn him—”

“Warn? Don’t look so God-damned worried about an utter, first-grade, one hundred and twenty-five per cent heel.” Perhaps he had let his own emotions carry him away a little.

She flushed. “Bill! I must say—”

“Don’t!” he advised her. “You’ve been pressing me all evening for the truth. Well, here it is—as I see it. Think of all the decent guys walking along the streets of Rome, and you had to pick a prize like Pirotta. If he is in trouble, he’s earned it. Save your sympathy for the decent guys who don’t make so much money, but at least make it honestly. They’re the ones Pirotta thinks he’s going to boss.”

“Honestly?” she repeated. She gulped and was speechless. Then, “Bill how can you, how dare you—”

“I’ll dare more than that.” He was ominously quiet. “The only honest thing Pirotta has done, since he kissed Mamma and went off to school at the age of nine, was to fall in love with you.”

She rose and began clearing away the last remains of supper on to the trolley. He let the silence last for at least two minutes. “How many photographs did you take out at Tivoli?” he asked.

“Five or six.” The temperature was glacial, touching zero.

“Only two came out.”

“Did they?”

“I took one of them along with its negative. Do you mind?”

That caught her by surprise. She shook her head, looking at him. “There
is
trouble. Isn’t there?”

He nodded. “Don’t take sides, Ellie, neither Pirotta’s nor mine. Please just get on that plane for home. Please.”

“And ask no questions?” She half-smiled. Perhaps his concern for her had touched a little.

It was the moment to apologise. “I’m sorry I was so crude. But you wanted the truth from me. I gave it.”

“As you saw it,” she added.

“Sure. And we’re all fallible, I know that.”

She looked at him. “I’m sorry I was angry,” she said in a low voice.

He became brisk, made a show of glancing at his watch, rising. “I’ll wheel this double-decker along to the kitchen, and then I’ll have to leave. Can you take care of yourself?”

She nodded.

“What is this gadget called, anyway? A super-deluxe push-me-around?”

“It’s a laboratory cart. I wanted something bigger than the usual little trolley. I got this from a hospital-supply firm—one of those drug-supply houses—”

He jerked to a stop. The peeled peach rolled off its bed of Bel Paese rind and Camembert crust, and splashed like a bomb on a black square of tile. “Help! —Help!” He searched for a napkin.

Eleanor began to laugh. “Now, this
is
funny,” she said.

“Very funny,” he agreed glumly and set her giggling again as she mopped up the tile.

“Your face—” she tried to explain. “You had such a sudden look of horror. Now, what were we talking about? Oh, yes— this laboratory cart and the drug-supply house. It’s a very big medical firm, and a well-known one.”

He wondered a little at all this elaborate build-up.

“Highly reputable,” she said. “And honest.” Her voice sharpened. “And that’s how Luigi makes his money.”

Fortunately, they had reached the kitchen, a dark cell lined with wooden cupboards. The cart was safely still. He walked back into the hall.

“Well?” she asked. “Or do you think it is dishonest to be a director of a firm that supplies medicine to cure people?”

“How many directors are there?”

“I’ve met four. They are the most delightful men.” She smiled mischievously.
“And
honest.”

“I’m sure they are.” And he
was
sure about that. Pirotta needed honest men and an honest firm for his support. The more reliable the firm, the less government supervision. How much opium and heroin had he diverted from the company’s warehouses? He wondered if the Italian detective with the romantic name was now studying Pirotta’s falsified lists of imports. All Pirotta needed was a handful of well-paid and efficient clerks in key positions to baffle any honest board of directors.

She walked along the hall with him. “Don’t you believe me about Luigi?” she asked suddenly, pathetically.

“Do you want a nice comfortable answer, or the truth?”

“We had that,” she said, a little bitterly. “The truth as you see it.” She shook her head wearily. “I wish I’d stop asking
myself questions. I wish I knew what to do.”

“Pack,” he told her, “and get all ready to leave. Will you do that for me?”

She nodded. But she was still trying to answer her own questions.

He said, “Keep the door locked and bolted. I’ll call you around midnight, just to hear how the packing is going.”

“Look, Bill,” she said, “aren’t you worrying about me a little too much?”

“No,” he said firmly. “And don’t start thinking I’m judging Pirotta badly because I don’t like him.” He took her hand and gave it a most formal shake. “Good night, Ellie.” He hesitated. So did she. Her moment of bitterness had gone. She had banished her anger. She smiled, not too happily. Perhaps she was wishing that everyone would give up dislike and prejudice and make this a world fit for heroines to love in.

She mustered her gratitude. “Good night, Bill. And thank you for—for rallying round.”

But not for giving advice, he thought. “Good night,” he said again, and turned away. Behind him, the door was locked. And then bolted. She might not believe him, but at least she had listened to him. He wondered, with a stab of pain, whether good night might not mean goodbye; and then, with a stab of fear, whether he might never get free of this girl even if he never saw her again.

“What’s wrong with this damned elevator?” he said angrily as he heard it shivering and groaning so slowly up towards him. He glanced at his watch. Seven minutes to ten. He began to run down the staircase, lightly, easily, round and round the pivot of an elaborate carved stone column decorated with
plaster acanthus leaves. You should have taken a hint from the builder of this place, Lammiter now thought; he didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Everything was fine until you had to start telling her the truth. That was the odd thing about truth: it wasn’t a variable; truth was hard cold fact, and yet it varied; it could seem a prejudice, an unjustified attack, almost a slander, if the moment were wrong. Your timing was miserable, he told himself angrily.

Upstairs, Eleanor Halley didn’t move away from the door. She stood there, looking along the empty hall, seeing nothing. She wished desperately that he hadn’t said what he thought about Luigi Pirotta. But perhaps the fault had been hers: why had she gone on and gone on, asking Bill questions? Because she wasn’t satisfied with any of her own answers?

She didn’t like the thoughts that suddenly confronted her, but she didn’t push them aside as she might once have done, She left the door, walking slowly down the hall, considering them from a variety of angles.

Yes, she decided, the fault is all mine: if Bill has become a jealous man, suspicious and exaggerating, I’m the one to blame. But I never thought that was the way it would turn out when I ran away from him. Ran away? Perhaps. But not from him. From Broadway and the life that would turn our own life together into something no longer ours. Rehearsals, rewrites, try-out in Baltimore, more rewrites, short tour in Boston, Philadelphia, more rewrites, a chorus of darlings echoing through dressing-rooms and after-theatre parties, a pantomime of meaningless kisses from almost-strangers.

“Don’t you see,” Bill used, to say worriedly, “these things mean little; it’s just their way, it has nothing to do with our life.”

Nothing? It took Bill away from me, using up the weeks, the months that never could be replaced. If I had been in the theatre it would have been different. But I don’t want to go to bed at four in the morning and rise at noon; I don’t want to live in hotel rooms and furnished apartments and have mobs of people always around me. Because that’s the way it was going to work out. If only his play had
not
been a success, then we could have planned— Oh well, what’s the use? Even when I ran off to Rome last April, was he free to follow me and persuade me back? Oh, no! The play was a success, but Miss Whosis wanted a new speech written and Miss Whatsis objected to the cuts in her lines and Mr. Whicher needed a few more aphorisms to bring out the texture of his character, and weren’t the changes made in Boston and reworked in Philadelphia perhaps a little unnecessary for New York? And on top of all that, Hollywood; six weeks dragging into months.