The Darts of Cupid: Stories (20 page)

When I had left to meet Clarence, Edmund had still been in his dressing gown of claret-colored silk with white dots. Now, as we came in, I saw he had got dressed, which meant that he was having what he called "one of his good days." In his gray flannels, white shirt, and Prince of Wales check jacket, casually elegant, he made Clarence look like a caricature of the City gent.

He said, "Clarence, before you sit down, just turn around and have a look at those statues on top of this bookcase. They are not bronze. They are covered in gold. The larger one is the Buddha, the smaller one is an incarnation of the Buddha, a sort of saint. Tibetan. No museum in the whole of Europe has anything like it. Only in America, in a museum in Chicago. I bought them in Kathmandu, from the chief Lama, who dealt in antiques and owned and ran two brothels. When the King heard about it, he got angry, said he would pay for them himself, and the Lama had to return my money to me. The King gave the order the Lama should be paid from the royal purse, and of course the Lama never got his money."

"Why? The King cheated him?" asked Clarence.

"Of course not. It was a matter of the faithful, dependable underlings. When they are told to pay out, you can rely on them, they never do. The money is accounted for and then it just gets lost. On the way."

After lunch we went out to have coffee. When we returned Edmund said, "I’ll now show you the picture of something you’ve never seen before and you’ll never see after. I’ll just find it, it’s in the small safe in my bedroom."

I said, "And get the pictures of you with the King in Egypt. Imagine it, Clarence, first the President of Egypt, Colonel Neguib, received the King with his whole retinue, and then he picked out Edmund and said he wanted to receive Edmund all on his own, the next day. Edmund says he gave him a cup of coffee, and they talked for half an hour. But he never says what they talked about."

As soon as Edmund had left the room, Clarence, who had been sitting in the corner near the French window which gave onto the balcony, got up. He threw his head back, and with both arms outstretched, came running toward me, in an attitude as though of desperate longing. It was a pose that might have been assumed on the stage, but only in a costume play, and even then, only by a youth. The sight of this white-haired man of sixty, the raised arms in the pencil-striped sleeves, the flabby chin trembling, while he was on the run, was more than ludicrous. It was repugnant. As he came rushing at me in a straight line, to the sofa on which I was sitting, it was easy for me to get up and move out of his way to the French window. He bumped into the sofa I had vacated.

"Stop it, Clarence," I said. He now turned to the window, still with his pencil-striped arms raised. I left the window and sprinted into the dining room, which was separated from the drawing room by an archway with a sliding door that was, as usual, left open, as Edmund preferred to have one vast space instead of two small rooms.

I posted myself behind the dining table and gripped the edge of the lyre-shaped back of a chair. It was one of a set of six Biedermeier chairs, and I wondered whether I would be able to lift it and use it as a shield. "Stop it, Clarence," I repeated. "There’s nothing doing, do you hear? It’s out of the question." I added, "Think of Sylvia." Mentioning Sylvia did not produce the hoped-for effect, because now he made a dash for the archway. As he reached the dining table, I ran round the other side, got back into the drawing room, and from there into the passage leading to the bedroom. As I had expected, Edmund was there. Standing in front of a chest, bent over an open drawer.

"Edmund," I said, "will you please come back with me into the drawing room. And don’t now, never again, leave me alone with him." He raised his head and gave me a quick glance. "Quite so," he said, picking up a folder.

"Come along, Clarence," said Edmund as he entered, "let’s sit down at the dining table, where I can spread myself out. I’ve dug out some stuff to make your visit worthwhile. First of all, this here, this photograph, it’s not amazing at first sight, is it? What do you see? A dagger. It’s life-size, mind you. Never mind the blade, it’s bronze, incised. Look at the handle; it is formed of one large single emerald. It belonged to the brother of a minor maharajah, both friends of mine, and he was desperately short of money. He wanted to sell it. I told him to send it to Cartier in Paris and let them handle it, they have worldwide connections, and I knew some people in the French embassy in New Delhi, I got one of them to take it along in the diplomatic bag, the usual way. And what do you think happened?"

"It got stolen," said Clarence.

"No," said Edmund, "Cartier saw it and they sent it back. The message was that they refused to deal with it. It was a unique piece, nothing like it in the whole world, as far as they knew, and so they could not, did not dare, put a price on it. How could they offer it and sell it, if he, the owner, would be within his right to claim they had cheated him and squandered it at a ridiculous price?"

Clarence had a return ticket to Genoa and was going to take the
rapido
at two minutes past eight. He was, he told us, exceedingly anxious about catching trains and would rather sit for half an hour at the station, in discomfort, in a dreary waiting room, and enjoy peace of mind, as long as he knew he would be on the train. Edmund went to the other extreme. I recalled one occasion when he, with the taxicab waiting at the door, had insisted on my preparing a dish of scrambled eggs.

Edmund liked a late dinner, after nine at night, because he never went to bed before one o’clock, and thus it was decided that I would get Clarence’s dinner at seven, and he would eat on his own, after which there would be plenty of time for him to get to the station. I had, already in the morning, cooked the main dish, so as to avoid spending a long time in the kitchen later, during the day. It was several slices of osso buco braised on a julienne of carrots, leeks, swedes, and turnips, and it was useful because it spared me from fixing separate dishes like greens or a salad at the last minute.

"I don’t suppose," said Edmund, "that you’ll want wine after your two whiskeys. It’ll be beer, won’t it, grain to grain?" and Clarence meekly agreed. I first served him two triangles of toast spread with a liver pâté and then I brought in the main dish and a bowl of rice. "This is scrumptious," said Clarence, starting to eat. I was annoyed but not surprised as I watched him having three helpings. I could see that there would not be enough left for our own dinner. I had been told by Sylvia that, on some occasions, when there was a large array of food on view, Clarence was able to consume an extraordinary amount. At a dinner party, when presented with a platter of grilled chickens, after the other guests had each taken a quarter, Clarence had helped himself to a whole chicken. Sylvia told me that, maybe due to this incident, they had never been asked there again. I said to Clarence, "I’m so glad you like it," wondering whether this greed, this drive to grab anything that happened to be on view, was not of a piece with his former shameless, insistent chasing of me during the afternoon. I then gave him deliberately only one single square of cream cheese and some crackers, and refrained from adding the stuffed olives, the anchovies, and the curls of butter that I had planned on.

Edmund said, "I can see you’re suffering from travel fever, a disease for which there is no cure. I suggest you get going. Louise will take you to the station straightaway. As you see, I got back into my dressing gown after our far-flung expedition to the coffeehouse. Now I’ll take it easy, I’ll dress in stages, and I’ll join you in good time to see you off, at the station."

Clarence picked up his attaché case and the umbrella from the chair in the hall where he had deposited them on his arrival. He gripped the case with his left hand and hooked the umbrella over his left arm. Then he moved toward the door. But instead of keeping on straight ahead, he turned right and opened the door of the in-built wall cupboard and made as though to step inside. Still with his head inside the cupboard, he muttered something.

"But Clarence," I cried, "that’s not the front door. Keep straight ahead."

We got out on the landing. As there were only two flats on each floor and as the flat opposite ours was empty just now, the lift was still there, as we had left it when returning from the coffeehouse. I let Clarence get in first and while I closed the door behind us, saw him groping at the panel. I said, "No, let me." There were only three buttons to press, ground, first, and second floor. We were on the second floor; I pressed
T,
for
terra,
ground floor.

As soon as the lift started descending, Clarence made a lunge at me, a forward thrust of the upper part of his body, with pursed, pouting lips. I squeezed into a corner at the rear and turned my head away, so that he managed only to brush his mouth against my cheek. Then he straightened up, and just as I thought, Well, that’s that, for God’s sake, he reached out with his right arm, the one not burdened by case and umbrella, and encircled my waist. I felt a dull, crushing pain. I knew he had done me a grave injury. He said, "Ah," in a triumphant voice and withdrew his grip.

I kept saying to myself, Keep quiet, keep still, don’t move, you are at the mercy of a madman, play dead till we get out. He’ll want to get out, he wants to catch his train. You can’t fight him, and if you tried, he’d crush the very breath out of your body.

The lift stopped, I pushed the door open, and he got out first. The pain, now piercing, was above my waist, on the right side of my body, where I guessed my liver was situated. I calculated that the journey in the lift from second to ground floor had not taken more than fifteen seconds—the only fifteen seconds during the day when I had not been able to get away from him—and I thought that even Edmund, with his knowledge that Clarence was "bats in the belfry" and his promise not to leave me alone with Clarence, had not been able to foresee the threat of my being imprisoned with him in this minute arc of time.

I let him precede me to the front door, and as we got out into the street he turned and said to me in a reproachful voice, "Last time, when you came to visit us, in Farnleigh, Sylvia was with us all the time, so that we couldn’t do anything."

I kept silent. I was flooded with relief, knowing that now, as we were in the open, nothing could happen to me anymore. He fell into a brisk walk and began to talk, looking straight ahead, but it was not talk, it was a babble, high-voiced, rushing, and monotonous, over and over the same words pouring out of him, like the coursing waters of a brook. "Tell me where we can meet so that I can rape you." He was in a ghastly, euphoric state, so tightly spun into the web of his derangement that he would not have taken in anything I might have said. Not that I wanted to say anything. The very words he kept repeating proved that he was truly insane. Because how could rape, if it was to be rape, be committed by mutual appointment? He ceased the babbling as we neared the crossing with the traffic lights. Then we entered the short street leading to the station square, with the station building at the far end, blocking out the view of the sea behind it, like a gigantic wedding cake covered in pink sugar icing and decorated with swirls of whipped cream and placed in front of a blue satin sheet.

THERE IS NO railway station I have ever seen which looks less like a railway station than the one in Bordighera. Built at the turn of the century, it seems a country manor, bereft of the park it should be overlooking. The peach-pink wall at the front might have been added at a later date, so as to be furnished with three glass doors, while a smaller first floor, crowning it, graced by arched windows with white trim and green shutters, could have held the bedrooms of the owners and some guest rooms.

As we were crossing the vast square, Clarence said in a normal tone of voice, "I couldn’t care less about Bordighera, I couldn’t care less about Edmund’s stories. I only came to see you."

We entered the main hall. The man behind the ticket counter watched us, then gave me a puzzled, questioning look. We got out onto the platform. I said, "There are only two railway tracks. You arrived on the one opposite. This here, where we are now, is the right one for you, now."

"Let’s sit down," he said.

The platform was almost deserted, perhaps a dozen passengers, mostly elderly women and a couple of youths, probably students. As soon as we had sat down on the nearest bench, Clarence, after having placed his case and umbrella on his lap, put a hand on my knee and drew it upward to my thigh, while turning his face to me and giving me a lewd, arch, conspiratorial smile. It made me cringe. I saw a deliberately naughty little boy, trying it on with a grown-up woman, perhaps a governess, looking out of the face of an elderly white-haired man. I forced myself to be calm. I said, "Stop it, Clarence. Everybody around here knows us, me and Edmund, even this man here," and I pointed to a porter who was passing by, trundling a laden trolley. The glow of his smile dimmed. He withdrew his hand while giving me a reproachful look, the same as when he had said, "But Sylvia was with us all the time and we couldn’t do anything."

I got up abruptly and as I did so was pierced by the pain. I slowly moved away, along the platform. Behind the low white fence beyond the second track there was the sea, faintly rippled under the cloudless sky. Soon, I knew, there would arise the amazing reversal of colors, when the sky would turn pink above the blue sea and then the sea would turn pink under the blue sky.

I stopped in front of one of the boards on stilts flanking the door to the waiting room, displaying the sheets with the timetables. It was for departures. I was going to study it, or at least feign to do so, till Edmund’s arrival. I was determined not to come near Clarence again until then. He is not entirely crazy, I said to myself, because when I told him that I was known around here, the penny dropped. No, that’s not true. He is crazy. Because even a murderer specializing in children never does it when people are around.

Now a bell started pealing, a few yards away from me, behind me, shrill and quavering. I knew that this was the signal that a train had just left the station in Ventimiglia and was on its way to Bordighera. And then I saw the dishy stationmaster come out of his glass-walled office, where the variously colored lights kept flashing like jewels spattered over the blackboards and where he reigned like the privileged guardian of a treasure cave.