Olura (16 page)

Three years ago when I was in Rome with Hilaire Bomumba I employed Livetti to take the publicity stills. All that I knew about him then was that he was a superb artist with an extraordinary gift
for catching the glow and vigour of the human body. He worked for the Press, of course, like the rest of them, but he was much more important than the loathsome little men who were always trying to
get intimate shots of celebrities and pestered us. Every picture they made was an innuendo.

Hilaire was temperamental, never still. He would not have had the patience to endure sittings if I hadn’t accompanied him to the studio and held his hand—sometimes
literally—while Livetti experimented and experimented with his animal, elemental quality. Some of the poses were more candid than were really necessary. Livetti was as fascinated by anatomy
as any sculptor. I think that is what he ought to have been, not a photographer at all.

He tried to catch my interest, and he did. He pretended to share my opinions, which was easy; for, if he had any sincere politics at all, he was a left-wing socialist. He told me that I was the
most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Though I knew very well that from an Italian to any girl with money that meant no more than tenderly wishing her good afternoon. I could not help being
impressed since he never attempted to make love to me. He treated me with a sort of neutrality, like a judge in the show-ring awarding a Highly Commended.

When he asked me if I would sit for him I hesitated, because his cynicism and his comments were unpleasant. But he was a genius in his own way, and his pictures of Hilaire were quite marvellous.
I felt that I would be untrue to myself if I refused, for what he needed was not mine any more than my money. I hate possessions except when they make it possible for me to give.

So I sat for Livetti because it was my duty, and I could not allow personal, prudish feelings to interfere with duty. What a muddle! As if I could have had the detachment of a professional
model! As if I could separate myself from what I live in!

After he had taken a few of the simpler shots, he started to paw me under the pretence of arranging shadows, but so delicately that I was not quite sure. The delicacy was the appalling thing,
even worse than his disgusting candour. He told me that Hilaire was being unfaithful to me with a senator and his daughter at the same time and wanted to know what sort of sexual intercourse I
enjoyed myself.

The situation was more unmanageable than if he had attacked me violently. I was lost and did not know what to do. I couldn’t reach my clothes and I was completely defenceless. I felt like
a schoolgirl and wanted to cry like one. But I couldn’t do that either. So I just stood still and met his eyes and told him what I was.

The change in him was devastatingly unexpected. Of course he made it twice as dramatic as was necessary. He begged my forgiveness. He kept on exclaiming that how could they know. For him, he
said, I had been simply a girl with too much money entertaining a brutally amoral dancer whose behaviour made us both fair game for anyone.

While I dressed, he defended himself. The words streamed out of him. He boasted that he was a man of the Renaissance, that he had no religion, no principles, and that his only duty was to the
truth. He despised the rotten, corrupt society which paid him, and laughed at it and humiliated it. He spat at the film stars who paid for publicity and screeched when he gave them too much of it.
He confessed to the vilest things—photographing poor old American nymphomaniacs without their make-up on and selling the negatives back to them. He claimed to be a specialist in bad taste who
exaggerated the bad taste of others until it recoiled on them. Fie said that he used his camera like a dagger between the shoulders of the despicable and dishonoured.

I could hardly bear to speak to him, but I asked him what all this had to do with his attempt to excite me. He said that ‘they’ wanted to find out what I liked. ‘They’
were all prepared to give such a woman whatever she wanted of either sex. It was only afterwards that I began to imagine that ‘they’ had been watching.

I left Rome and Hilaire at once. I knew the whole thing ought to have no effect on me at all, but I felt humiliated and degraded. The only comfort was that I believed Livetti’s remorse to
be sincere, and that so far as he was capable of recognising simplicity, he had. Even there I was wrong. Evidently I had not impressed him at all. Fie still put me in the class of rich girls whom
he thought deserved his camera.

All through that horrible night of his death I tried to believe some good of him. Livetti’s mind was full of patterns instead of worries and scruples like the rest of us; he used to deny
that they had any relationship to life or morals or beauty or anything. But I was never allowed to agree with him. If I said that Form had no meaning, he would get very excited and shout that it
did, that of course it had a human value, that of course Form was a shadow of reality. So he must have had a sort of religion—something he believed in, something for which he would fight.

Philip and Leopold removed the body down the ladder which Livetti had put up against my bathroom window. I could not help or watch or do any more. I was on my bed, shaking without being able to
control myself. They took him out to the garage through the central shaft. They must have done it very carefully, for the police never suspected that Livetti had been inside the hotel at all.

Philip drove away with him in the boot of my car and ran out of petrol before he had a chance to get rid of him. He had to hide Livetti in a field in case the Civil Guard searched the
car—which they did. When he recovered the body, Livetti’s passport fell out of his pocket and was found in the road. That was the first bit of evidence which pointed at us.

He returned to the hotel, still with Livetti, and never blamed me for not telling him that Leopold and I had finished our afternoon’s tour on the reserve tank. He was gentle and
patronising as if it were quite natural for me to forget. It was infuriating to be treated as a hysterical, irresponsible child when I couldn’t forgive myself and never shall.

Leopold and I kept an eye on the car while poor Philip got some sleep. When it was my turn to go down to lunch—I didn’t want any but I had to try to behave naturally—I was
appalled to see Mary Deighton-Flagg in the restaurant. There was no way of avoiding her. She had been at school with me, and was a monitor when I was a little, long-legged thing in the juniors.
Always there was something unhealthy about her. I think she had been overwhelmed by trying to keep up with too many brothers; at that age the effort made her coarse and unfeminine. Under her
influence—and in the comparative privacy of their own room—the monitors used to compete who could break wind the loudest. I suppose it was a revolt against the over-ladylike manners
upon which the school insisted. Decorum would have been easier to observe if the food had contained less starches.

I mention this because it holds the key to Mary’s character. She was so determined to be the leader who formed public taste that she did not care if it was tastelessness. That must have
been a great help to her when she went in for journalism. She could write, too.

Her speciality was castigating vice in high places. Her stuff was thin after the paper’s legal staff had removed all the possible libels, but she used to dine out on the bits that her
editor wouldn’t touch. One of these startling revelations of hers was every word of it true, and could not be ignored. Fortunately she got out of the country a few hours before she would have
been arrested on a charge of criminal slander.

I couldn’t prevent her taking the rest of her lunch at my table. She asked me if I had been ill; I was looking so lovely and so tired. I said that I had been a little overworked in London,
to which she replied that she had noticed Mr Mgwana in the hotel. I let the innuendo pass. I wasn’t equal to the effort.

Then she wanted to know who Philip was. I gathered that he had been down already to the bar, that she had spoken to him and that she knew he was in some way close to Leopold and me. It occurred
to me that I really did not know Philip well. Her dark hair and large, sad eyes were beautiful. But I felt he was not the sort of man to be taken in by foam rubber at one end and too slithery skirt
at the other.

I told her that Philip was just a friend, and remembered too late that the phrase is a cliché in her profession. She promptly asked—as an old schoolfriend and off the
record—if the two weren’t jealous of each other and how did I manage so cleverly.

I tried to understand her and be charitable. I reminded myself that after all this time she probably could not help believing what she wrote. She was such a pitiable creature, and her life must
have been desolate—living in Madrid on men, cadging stories from the police and the café journalists and the movie extras.

So I did my best to explain to her what my relations with Leopold Mgwana really were, and that I had accompanied him as cicerone and secretary because Cyril Flanders and the Group thought it
important that I should. I think now that when the police questioned her she passed on all I said, naturally making it sound an exclusive, mysterious spy story. At the time I just kept on talking
about Leopold to head her off Philip. I felt that Philip might be already afraid that I was an embarrassing person to know, and that one of Mary’s little paragraphs suggesting that Olura
Manoli was now taking an interest in the older universities would just about finish him.

From time to time I shivered with nervousness. I had to say that the dining-room was icy. The wind was getting up again, so perhaps it was. She couldn’t help seeing that there was
something badly wrong. She told me that now she had met me she would stay another night.

I went up to Leopold’s room and found Philip there. Mary had made a bad impression on him. In fact he was so disgustingly rude about her that I had to tell him she had been at school with
me and that it wasn’t her fault if she had to fight to get enough to live on.

That afternoon Pedro Gonzalez turned up, so detestably obliging and polite and unavoidable that he haunted us like the ghost of an income tax inspector. I am sure he has exactly the same
expression whether he is torturing a suspect or accepting a drink. The Government had attached him to Leopold as a security guard. The last thing Cyril and I wanted was that he should be bothered
by Franco’s police. And if Gonzalez had to come and protect us he might have started it earlier!

As it was, his arrival meant that Leopold could not help with the body. Philip insisted on going alone. I would not allow it. He had sacrificed enough already for a helpless, notorious society
girl who couldn’t even remember that there was no petrol in her car. I was determined to show him that I didn’t use either tears or tranquillisers and that I could face for his sake
just as much as he could for mine.

I think he was the more nervous of the two. For no reason at all he objected to my red cloak. I could not see why, for it didn’t matter if it was ruined; and I knew very well how
conventional he was and that he thought it affected. But then suddenly I did understand. The cloak had become my trademark and dear to him. I could have thrown it over him and kissed him. It would
have shocked his masculine sense of propriety if I had told him that, however much I shrank from what we had to do, I did not intend to lose a moment of his society by fainting when the boot was
opened.

We were about to set off when Leopold stormed into my room. It was the second time that I had seen him angry. There must be a side of him which he has never shown to me. He had just received a
telephone call in his native language from someone who knew that we were hiding the body. This terrified me, though it stood to reason all the time that the murderer must guess what had happened.
Up to then I was just living a piece of theatre—fast and unreal and on a dream stage where we three were the only players. I had no picture at all of the other members of the cast waiting in
the wings. I should have realised—Philip and Leopold did—that Mary would not have come up from Madrid for nothing.

Philip would have made as painstaking a criminal as a philologist. He pointed out that whoever had killed Livetti knew nothing as yet about Gonzalez and himself and would not dare to attack us
or blackmail us when they saw that Leopold and I were accompanied by two strange men. He was right—though all I saw at the time was a black car on my tail, which passed, slowed down and then
ran away.

We stopped at a little town called Amorebieta, where Philip ordered dinner for us and vanished. He didn’t come back for hours, and had no right whatever to look so pleased with himself
after leaving me to chatter French with the tiresome Gonzalez and appear quite unconcerned, when I could not guess whether he had been kidnapped or assassinated or was merely showing off his Basque
to complete strangers.

He told Gonzalez that he was going off in my car, and that he had ordered a taxi to take the three of us back to the hotel because I was tired. I was having none of that. When he suddenly jumped
up to go, I went straight out with him and started the car.

He did not even bother to explain himself. He just told me in a superior way that he had got a taxi-driver to block the car which had followed us, and that I shouldn’t amble. We spent the
next hour and a half bumping over the pot-holes of mountain roads while I listened to him pretending that he wasn’t lost. He did not know his beloved Vizcaya as well as he thought he did, and
he was. And all the while the Atlantic was hurtling wind and rain at us.

At last we saw the lights and filling stations of a main road below us. When we had crossed it, quickly from one darkness to another, I felt that we were committed. From then on what we had to
do was far too serious for me to be petty or Philip to be patronising. His plan was to dump the body in a pool at the bottom of a disused iron-mine. He left me alone in the car while he explored
the place, and at last came back with an old wheelbarrow. Again it was he who was the more upset of the pair of us. Why cannot sensitive men face a necessity without making fun of it? Naturally I
loathed the job, but humour made it no better.