Journey by Moonlight (11 page)

“And then?”

“Properly speaking, that’s all there was. But what happened next is quite inexplicable. An old lady came into the room, a strange, old-fashioned, repulsive, large-eyed woman, and with a fairly expressionless face asked me something. I didn’t
understand
, because she wasn’t speaking English. I tried her in French, German, even Hungarian, but she just shook her head sadly. Then she said something in a strange tongue, with much greater
expression
, besieging me with more and more questions. I listened hard, if only to try and catch what language she was speaking. I have a good ear for languages, especially those I don’t speak. I decided that what she was talking was not Latinate, Germanic, or Slav. It was not even Finno-Ugric, because I had studied Finnish at one stage at university. And then suddenly I just knew that she was the only person in the whole world speaking that language. Where that idea came from, I really don’t know. But I was so horrified I jumped up, rushed out of the room and back home.”

“And how do you explain it all?” asked Ellesley.

“I can think of no other than that it was November. I had got into that house through some strange random mistake. Our lives are full of inexplicable coincidences … ”

“And the eye?”

“The eye was surely in my imagination, an effect of the situation I was in and the London November. Because I am unshaken in my belief that the dead are dead.”

H
IS TIME
was up. Mihály was well again and due to leave the hospital. No thief released after twenty years’ prison could have felt more cut off from everything, or more devoid of purpose, than Mihály did when, with his little suitcase (his only possessions were the few frugal purchases he had put together on the day of his escape) he made his solitary way between the
low-roofed
houses of Foligno.

He was in no mood to go home. It would have been impossible to appear among his family after his desertion, which he would be unable and unwilling to explain. And he could not bear the thought of returning to Pest, going in to the office, involving himself in the firm’s business, and relaxing over bridge and small talk.

He still had so many Italian cities to see. They would surely have so much for him to discover. He decided to write home and ask for money.

But he put off the business of writing the letter from one day to the next. He had so far remained in Foligno to be near Dr Ellesley, the only person with whom he had any connection, however slight. He took a room, where he lived quietly, read the English novels the doctor lent him, and enjoyed his lunches and dinners. Food was the only thing that tied him to reality in those blank days. He loved the undisguised sentimentality of Italian cooking. Conventional French-European cuisine approves only subtle,
subdued
, qualified flavours, like the colours of men’s suits. The Italian loves intense sweetness, extreme tartness, strongly distinctive
aromas
. Even the huge servings of pasta could be seen as an
expression
of this sentimentality.

One evening he was sitting with Ellesley outside the main coffee-house of the town. As usual they were speaking English. Suddenly a young girl approached, addressed them in an American accent and joined them at the table.

“Please excuse my troubling you,” she said, “but I’ve spent the whole day wandering around this godforsaken town and found no-one I could communicate with. Can you please explain
something
? It’s the reason I came here. It’s very important.”

“We are at your disposal.”

“You see, I’m studying art history at Cambridge.”

“Ah, Cambridge?” cried Ellesley with delight.

“Oh yes, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why? Did you graduate there?”

“No. I was at Cambridge, England. But how can we be of
service
?”

“Well, I’m studying art history and I came to Italy because, as you probably know, there are lots of great pictures here they don’t have anywhere else. And I’ve seen everything.”

She took out a little notebook, and continued:

“I’ve been to Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, and a whole lot of other places whose names I can’t read just now, the light’s so bad here. The last place was Per … Perugia. Did I say that right?”

“Yes.”

“In the museum there I met a French gentleman. He was French, that’s why he was so kind. He explained everything beautifully, and then told me that I absolutely must go to Foligno, because there is a very famous picture there, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the guy who did the
Last Supper
. So I came here. And I looked for this picture the whole day and didn’t find it. And nobody in this revolting little bird’s nest can direct me to it. Would you please tell me where they hide this painting?”

Mihály and the doctor looked at one another.

“A Leonardo? There’s never been one in Foligno,” replied the doctor.

“That’s impossible,” said the girl, somewhat offended. “The French gentleman said there was. He said there’s a wonderful cow in it, with a goose and a duck.”

Mihály burst out laughing.

“My dear lady, it’s very simple. The French gentleman was
having
you on. There is no Leonardo in Foligno. And although I’m no expert, I have the feeling that there is no such picture by Leonardo, with a cow, a goose and a duck.”

“But why did he say there was?”

“Probably because cynical Europeans tend to liken women to these animals. Only European women, of course.”

“I don’t get it. You’re not telling me the French gentleman was playing a trick on me?” she asked, red-faced.

“You could see it that way, I’m sorry to say.”

The girl thought deeply. Then she asked Mihály:

“You aren’t French?”

“No, no. Hungarian.”

Her hand made a gesture of indifference. Then she turned to Ellesley:

“But you’re English.”

“Yes. Partly.”

“And do you agree with your friend?”

“Yes,” said Ellesley, nodding sadly.

The girl again thought for a while, then clenched her fist.

“But he was so kind to me! I just wish I knew the bastard’s name.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Ellesley consoled her:

“But there’s no great harm done. Now you can write in your notebook that you’ve been to Foligno.”

“I already did,” she said with a sniffle.

“Well, there you are,” said Mihály. “Tomorrow you’ll go happily back to Perugia and continue your studies. I’ll take you to the train. I’ve already had the experience of getting on the wrong one.”

“That’s not the point. The shame of it, the shame of it! To treat a poor defenceless girl like that! Everyone told me not to trust Europeans. But I’m such a straightforward person myself. Can you get whisky here?”

And they sat together until midnight.

The girl’s presence had a lively effect on Mihály. He too drank whisky, and became talkative, although mostly it was the girl who spoke. The little doctor became very quiet, being naturally shy, and finding her rather attractive.

The girl, whose name was Millicent Ingram, was quite wonderful. Especially as an art historian. She knew of Luca della Robbia that it was a city on the Arno, and claimed that she had been with Watteau in his Paris studio. “A very kind old man,” she insisted, “but his hands were dirty, and I didn’t like the way he kissed my neck in the hallway.” That aside, she talked about art history, passionately and pompously, without stopping.

It gradually emerged that she was the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia parents who enjoyed considerable influence in high society, at least as she saw it, but that some Rousseauistic tendency in her drove her towards solitude and nature, which from her point of view meant Europe. She had attended study semesters in Paris, Vienna and other fine places, but none of it had had any effect. Her soul had preserved its American innocence.

And yet, as Mihály walked home and prepared for bed, he hummed cheerfully to himself, and his apathy slipped away. “Millicent,” he said. “There’s someone in the world actually called Millicent! Millicent.”

Millicent Ingram was not the mind-boggling, soppily-named, beautiful American girl to be seen in Paris in the years after the war, when everything else in the world was so drab. It was only in the second of those contexts that Millicent could be classed as an American beauty. The basis of this beauty, though the word is perhaps an overstatement, was that her face was quite devoid of expression. But in any event she was very good-looking, with a little nose, a wholesome mouth that was large (and painted larger) and a fine athletic figure. Her muscles seemed as elastic as rubber.

And she was American. Indisputably of that class of
wonderful
creatures exported to Paris in Mihály’s youth. The ‘foreign woman’ is an element of young manhood, of footloose youth. What remains in later years is the undying nostalgia, for in the footloose years we are still gauche and timid, and let slip the
better
opportunities. Mihály had now lived for so long in Budapest that his lovers had all been from that city. The ‘foreign woman’ now rather denoted his youth. And liberation: after Erzsi, after the serious marriage, after so many serious years. An adventure, at last: something coming unexpectedly and moving towards an unforeseen conclusion.

Even Millicent’s stupidity was attractive. In the deepest
stupidity
there is a kind of dizzying, whirlpool attraction, like death: the pull of the vacuum.

It so happened that the next day, when he had escorted her to the station, and they were about to buy the ticket, he said:

“Why are you going back to Perugia? Foligno is a city too. Why not stay here?”

Millicent looked at him with her stupidly serious eyes, and said:

“You’re right.”

And she stayed. That day was rather hot. They spent the whole of it eating ice-cream and talking. Mihály had the skill that makes English diplomats so feared in their profession: he knew how to be extremely dim when the need arose. Millicent noticed nothing of the intellectual distance between them. Indeed, she felt herself at an advantage because of her art history studies, and this rather flattered her.

“You are the first European I’ve met who really understood me intellectually,” she said. “The others were so dull, and took no interest in art.”

He had won her complete confidence. By evening he had gleaned everything there was to know about her, not that there was anything worth knowing.

That evening they met Ellesley at the café. The doctor was quite surprised that the girl was still in Foligno.

“You know, I decided I can’t always be thinking about problems of art,” she told him. “A doctor friend of mine said that prolonged intensive study is bad for the skin. Isn’t that so? Anyway I decided to switch myself off for a bit. I’m giving myself an intellectual holiday. Your friend has such a calming influence on me. Such a kindly, simple, harmonious soul, don’t you think?”

Ellesley noted with resignation that his patient was courting the American girl, and grew even quieter. For he was still very attracted to Millicent. She was so different from Italian women. Only the Anglo-Saxon type can be so clean, so innocent.
Millicent
—innocent: what a splendid rhyme that would have been, if he had been a poet. But no matter. The main thing was that this heaven-sent delight was doing visible good to his dear Hungarian patient.

The next day Mihály and the girl went for a long walk. They ate their fill of pasta in a modest village tavern, then lay down in a classical-looking wood and slept. When they awoke, Millicent observed:

“There’s an Italian painter who painted trees just like these. What was his name?”

“Botticelli,” replied Mihály, and kissed her.

“Ooooh,” she said, with horror on her face. Then she kissed him back.

Now that he held the girl between his arms, Mihály decided happily that she did not disappoint. Her body was as elastic as rubber. Oh the ‘foreign woman’ made flesh—how much she means to the man whose passion pursues fantasy and not
physiological
fact! The pleasure of the preliminary and quite innocent kiss suggested that every detail of Millicent’s body would prove foreign, other, wonderful. Her healthy mouth was entirely
American
(Oh, the prairies!), the little hairs on her neck were foreign, the caresses of her large strong hands, the transcendent cleanliness of her well-scrubbed body (Oh Missouri-Mississippi, North against South, and the blue Pacific Ocean!) …

“Geography is my most potent aphrodisiac,” he thought to himself.

But in the evening a letter was waiting for Millicent at the post-office, forwarded from Perugia. It was from a Miss Rebecca Dwarf, Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Cambridge (Mass.), Millicent’s tutor and chief spiritual adviser. Over dinner Millicent tearfully explained that Miss Dwarf was very satisfied with her previous letter in which she had spoken about the progress of her studies, but deemed it absolutely
essential
that she should now travel forthwith to Siena, to see the famous Primitives.

“But it was so good to be with you, Mike,” she sniffled, and put her hand in his.

“So you must go without fail to Siena?”

“Of course. If Miss Dwarf says in her letter … ”

“To hell with the old cow,” Mihály broke in. “Look, Millicent, listen to me. Don’t go and see the Siena Primitives. The Siena Primitives are probably almost identical to the Umbrian Primitives you saw in Perugia. And anyway, does it really matter whether you see ten pictures more or less?”

Millicent looked at him in astonishment and withdrew her hand. “But Mike, how can you talk like that? I really thought you felt so strongly about painting, for a European.” And she turned away.

Mihály saw that he had struck the wrong note. He was obliged to go back to the stupid type of voice. But he could not think of stupid arguments with which to reason with her. He tried
sentimentality
.

“But I shall miss you terribly if you go now. Perhaps we’ll never meet again in this life.”

“Sure,” said Millicent. “I’ll miss you horribly too. And I’ve already written to Philadelphia, to Doris and Ann Mary, telling them how wonderfully well you understand me. And now we have to part.”

“But stay here.”

“That isn’t possible. But you come with me to Siena. You’re not really doing anything here.”

“That’s true. I could leave what I’m doing here.”

“Then why not come?”

After some hesitation, he confessed:

“Because I haven’t any money.”

Which was true. By now his money was almost entirely spent. It had gone on the few decent items of clothing he had bought the day before, out of respect for Millicent, and on buying her meals, which were very substantial and extremely well-chosen. True, it would be gone in a day or two even if he stayed in Foligno … but if you stay in one place you don’t feel the lack of money as much as when you are travelling.

“You’ve no money?” she asked. “How’s that?”

“It’s run out,” he said with a smile.

“And your parents don’t send you any?”

“Oh yes. They’ll send some. When I write to them.”

“Now look. Until then I’ll make you a loan.” And she took out her cheque book. “How much do you need? Will five hundred dollars be enough?”

The amount shocked Mihály, as did the offer itself. Every bourgeois scruple in him, and indeed every quiver of romantic sensibility, protested against borrowing from the object of an
amour
, from the heaven-sent stranger, whom he had kissed for the very first time that day. But Millicent, with charming
innocence
, insisted on the offer. She was always lending money to her boyfriends and girlfriends, she said. In America it was quite
natural. And besides, Mihály would pay her back soon. They finally left it that Mihály would think about it overnight.