Those Who Walk Away (3 page)

“And Antonio Santini,” said Coleman, indicating the dark, wavy-haired young Italian at the table.

Antonio half stood up and extended a hand. “Piacere.”

“Piacere,” Ray said, shaking his hand.

“Sit down,” said Coleman.

Ray hung his coat on a hook and sat down. He glanced at Inez, who was looking at him. She was a darkish blonde, about forty-five, slight, and she wore good jewellery. She was not quite pretty; she had a receding and rather pointed chin, but Ray sensed a warmth and femininity, perhaps something maternal in her, that was most attractive. And again, looking at Coleman’s bloating face, his unappetizing brown moustache, his balding head freckled from Mallorca, imagining the bulging belly below the table level, Ray wondered how he could attract women as fastidious as Inez seemed to be. Coleman had been with another woman very much the type of Inez, when Ray had met him and Peggy the spring before last at an exhibition in the Via Margutta.
My father’s always the one who says good-bye
, Peggy’s voice said in his ear, and Ray hitched himself forward nervously in his chair.

“You’re a painter?” asked Antonio on his right, in Italian.

“I’m a poor painter. I’m a better collector,” Ray answered. He hadn’t the energy or the inclination to inquire into Antonio’s work. Coleman had said Antonio was a painter.

“I’m very happy to meet you finally,” Inez said to Ray. “I wanted to meet you in Rome.”

Ray smiled slightly, and could think of nothing to say. It didn’t matter. He sensed that Inez would be sympathetic. She was wearing a good and rather powerful perfume, earrings with a pendant green stone, a green and black jersey dress.

The waiter arrived, and they ordered. Then Inez said to Ray:

“You are going back to the States?”

“Eventually, but I go to Paris first. I must see some painters there.”

“Doesn’t care for my work,” Coleman mumbled across his cigar.

“Oh, Edward,” Inez said, pronouncing the name “Edouard.”

Ray tried to look as if he hadn’t heard. He was not fond of Coleman’s current pop art phase, but it had simply never crossed his mind to invite Coleman to join his gallery. Coleman now considered himself ‘European.’ As far as Ray knew, he was not and did not want to be represented by a New York gallery. Coleman had given up his job as a civil engineer when Peggy was four years old and had started painting. For this Ray liked him, and for this Peggy’s mother had divorced him, claiming Peggy. (And perhaps there had been another woman in the picture, too.) Then in less than a year, Peggy’s mother had been killed in a car she was driving. Coleman, in Paris, had then been informed that he had custody of his daughter, and that his deceased wife, who had been rich, had settled a trust fund on Peggy which Coleman could not touch, but which would pay for her education and bring her an income when she became twenty-one. All this Peggy had told Ray. Peggy had become twenty-one while they were married, and had enjoyed four months of the income. It could not, Peggy had said, be passed on by her to her father or anyone else. On her death it had reverted to an aunt in America.

“You are going to start a gallery in New York,” Inez said.

“Yes. My partner—Bruce Main—hasn’t got the space as yet. We’re trying for it.” Ray could scarcely talk, but he made an effort. “It’s not a new idea of mine. It’s an old one. Peggy and I—We’d—” He glanced inadvertently at Coleman, and found Coleman’s small eyes fixed calculatingly on him. “We were planning to go to New York after our year in Mallorca.”

“A little more than a year,” Coleman put in.

“Peggy wanted to stay on,” Ray said.

Coleman shrugged, as if to express disbelief or that what Peggy had wanted was of no consequence.

“Are you seeing painters in Venice, too?” Inez asked.

Ray was grateful for her civilized voice. “No,” he said.

Their food arrived. Ray had ordered cannelloni. Meat was repellent, the cannelloni merely uninviting. Coleman ate with appetite.

“What did you want to talk about?” Coleman asked Ray, pouring wine from the carafe for himself first, then for Ray.

“Perhaps I can see you some time tomorrow,” Ray replied, Antonio was listening to every word, hanging on their conversation, and Ray was inclined to dismiss him as of no importance; but as soon as he thought this, it occurred to him that Antonio might be a partner with Coleman, a young man who would help Coleman get rid of him, for a little money. Ray glanced at Antonio’s shiny dark eyes, his serious rather crude lips now gleaming with olive oil, and came to no conclusions about him. And Coleman, talking to Inez, had not answered his suggestion that they meet tomorrow.

“Where are you staying?” Coleman asked Ray.

“The Pensione Seguso.”

“Where is that?”

“At Accademia.”

A big table of men at the back of the room was extremely noisy.

Ray leaned forward and said to Coleman, “Is there any time tomorrow when I could see you?”

“I’m not sure—about tomorrow,” Coleman said, eating and not looking at Ray. “We’ve got some friends here. They’re joining us tonight, matter of fact.” Coleman glanced towards the door, then looked at his watch. “What time did they say?” he asked Inez.

“Nine-thirty,” Inez replied. “They eat early, you know.”

Ray cursed himself for having come tonight. Under the circumstances, there was nothing to do but be polite and leave as soon as possible. But he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to Inez. Nothing to say to her even about Venice.

The time dragged on. Antonio talked to Inez and Coleman about the horse races in Rome. He was enthusiastic. Ray could not listen.

Coleman stood up, letting his napkin fall. “Well? Better late than never. Here they are!”

A man and woman approached the table, and with difficulty Ray tried to focus on them.

“Hello, Laura!” Coleman said. “Francis, how are you? Mr and Mrs Smith-Peters, my—former son-in-law, Ray Garrett.”

Ray stood up and acknowledged the rude introduction politely, and found an extra chair that was needed. They looked like very ordinary Americans in their mid-fifties, and they looked as if they had money.

“Oh, yes, we’ve eaten, thanks,” Laura Smith-Peters said, sitting down. “Americans, you know. We still like eating around eight.” She was speaking to Inez. She had reddish hair, and her voice was too high and rather nasal. From her hard ‘r’ Ray gathered she was Wisconsin or Indiana.

“And we’re on demi-pension at the Monaco, so we thought we had to eat there tonight, because we were out to lunch,” Mr Smith-Peters said with facetious precision, his thin, birdlike face smiling at Inez.

Ray became aware that Mrs Smith-Peters was gathering herself to speak to him, no doubt about Peggy, and he braced himself.

“We’re really very sorry to hear about the tragedy in your life,” she said. “We’d known Peggy since she was eighteen. But not well, because she was always away at school. Such a lovely girl.”

Ray nodded.

“We’re from Milwaukee. I am. My husband’s a Californian, but we’ve lived most of our lives in Milwaukee. Except for the last year. Where’re you from?”

“St Louis,” Ray said.

Coleman ordered another litre of wine, and glasses for the Smith-Peters. But Mrs Smith-Peters did not want any wine, and at last, on Coleman’s insistence that she have something, asked for a cup of tea.

“What do you do?” Ray asked Mr Smith-Peters, feeling the question wouldn’t bother him.

“Manufacturer of sporting equipment,” Mr Smith-Peters responded briskly. “Golf balls, tennis rackets, skin-diving stuff. My partner’s carrying on in Milwaukee, but the doctor ordered complete rest for me. Heart attack a year ago. So now we break our necks climbing three flights of stone stairs in Florence—we live there now—and closing around Venice—”

“Darling, since when are we chasing around?” his wife put in.

He was a man who liked to move quickly, Ray saw. His hair was nearly white. Ray could not imagine him young, with more weight on him, but it was easy to imagine his wife young, bright-blue-eyed and pert, with a rather common Irish prettiness that needs youth or else. Mr Smith-Peters’s face reminded Ray of certain old baseball players’ faces he occasionally saw on sports pages in the States and never cared to read about. Lean, hawk-nosed, grinning. Ray did not like to ask if he had been keen on any sport before he started his business. He knew the answer would be either baseball or golf.

Ray felt Mrs Smith-Peters’s eyes on him, looking him over perhaps for signs of grief, perhaps for signs of brutality or coldness that might have precipitated Peggy’s suicide. Ray did not know what Coleman had told them, but it would not have been anything favourable, not a single thing, except perhaps that he had money, a fact Coleman would have stated with faint contempt. Yet Coleman had a nose for money himself, witness his wife, and the woman he was with now. And the Smith-Peters. The Smith-Peters were typical of the people Coleman collected for social and economic reasons. They probably cared little about art, but Coleman could sell them one of his paintings. Coleman could take a woman, with whom he contemplated an affair, to a party given by people like the Smith-Peters, and impress her. Peggy, for all her rather primitive terror of and respect for her father, had deplored his sponging and his hypocrisy.

“We were so surprised when Ed came up to us this morning in the plaza,” Mrs Smith-Peters said to Inez. “We had no idea he was here. We’re just here for a couple of weeks while they’re installing the central heating in our Florence house.” She looked at Ray. “We met Ed and Peggy in St Moritz one Christmas.”

“Laura, would you like to sweeten that tea with a cognac?” Coleman interrupted.

“No, thank you, Ed. Cognac keeps me awake,” Mrs Smith-Peters replied. She turned to Inez. “Are you here for long, Mme. Schneider?”

“You will have to ask Edward that,” Inez said with a wave of a hand. “He said something about painting here, so—who knows?”

Her frankness, the fact she admitted being in Coleman’s charge, seemed to surprise Mrs Smith-Peters, who might have suspected their relationship but hadn’t expected the female half to reveal it. “Paintings—of Venice?”

Ray tried to imagine what Coleman’s heavy black outlines and flat expanses of unvaried colour would make of Venice.

“You seem quite depressed,” Mrs Smith-Peters said gently to Ray, and Ray hated Coleman’s hearing it.

Coleman listened.

“That can’t be helped,” Ray said just as quietly, and in a way that he hoped dismissed the subject, but Coleman said:

“Why shouldn’t he look gloomy—a man who saw his wife die, a girl die, two weeks ago.” Coleman waved his cigar for emphasis.

“He did not see her die, Edward,” Inez said, leaning forward.

He saw her die by inches before he found her dead, Coleman retorted. He was certainly feeling his liquor, but he was also far from drunk.

Mrs Smith-Peters seemed to want to ask a question, but thought better of it. She looked like a distressed little Irish girl.

“It happened while Ray was out of the house for several hours,” Inez said to Mrs Smith-Peters.

“Yes, and where was he?” Coleman smiled towards Antonio, who still listened with serious attention, then turned towards Mr Smith-Peters, whom he wanted to draw into the conversation. “He was at the house of a woman neighbour. On a morning or an afternoon when his wife was obviously in trouble, he was somewhere else.”

Ray could not look at anyone at the table. But Coleman’s words did not hurt so much now, strangely, as they had in Mallorca when he and Coleman had been alone. “She was not obviously in distress that day,” Ray said.

“No more than any other day, you mean,” said Coleman.

“Edward, I am sure we don’t want to hear all this again,” Inez said, tapping with a table-knife hilt on the tablecloth, the knife held straight up. “I am sure the Smith-Peters don’t.”

“There was no one in the house?” Mrs Smith-Peters asked softly, perhaps meaning to show polite interest, but it was awful.

“The maid was there, but she left at one after fixing the lunch,” Coleman told her, glad of an ear. “Ray came home after three and found Peggy in the tub. Cut her wrists. Drowned also.”

Even Antonio squirmed slightly.

“How awful!” Mrs Smith-Peters murmured.

“Good God!” whispered Mr Smith-Peters, and cleared his throat.

“Ray wasn’t back for lunch that day,” Coleman said, meaningfully.

Nor did that hurt so much. Ray had been at the house of Elizabeth Bayard, American, aged twenty-six or so; and he had been looking at her drawings, which were better than her paintings. She was new in the village, and he and Peggy had been to her house only once. She had served him a Dubonnet and soda with ice, and he had talked and smiled a great deal that day, he remembered, enjoying Elizabeth’s company because she was attractive, decent and well-meaning; though not even those qualities were needed to make him enjoy those two or three hours with her, because he was tired of the handful of Americans and English in the village. He had said, ‘I’m sure Peggy doesn’t care if I’m back for lunch or not. I said I mightn’t be.’ Lunch was always cold, and they could eat it or not eat it, and at whatever hour they wished. And it was quite true, as Coleman implied, that he found Elizabeth Bayard attractive (Coleman had put it more strongly in Mallorca, but Ray had conceded nothing on this point), and he remembered thinking that afternoon that he could, if he were so inclined, probably start an affair with Elizabeth and conceal it from Peggy, and that Elizabeth would be casual and affectionate and that it would be a most salubrious change from Peggy’s mysticism for him. Ray also knew he never would have begun an affair. One couldn’t, with a girl like Peggy for a wife, a girl for whom ideals were real, even indestructible, maybe the realest things on earth. And certainly physically he had scarcely had energy for an affair, anyway.

“He does look gloomy enough to do away with himself, and maybe he will,” said Coleman, mumbling again.

“Edward, I insist you stop this,” said Inez.

But another question was rising in Mrs Smith-Peters. She looked at her husband, as if asking his permission, but he was staring at the tablecloth. “Was she painting at all?” she asked Ray.