Rose in Darkness (22 page)

Nan flew to the telephone but evidently Etho was not at home; nor was there any reply from Rufie. She dared not leave the hotel in case Sari returned or even rang up. The Sardines were so uncooperative, no help there. She sat scared and bewildered in the lobby, not knowing what to do. The police? But a pretty young woman had simply left the hotel and gone off with a man, and wherever she turned she was hamstrung by her lack of Italian and inability to recount anything but the broad facts. And she felt herself hedged in with small, frightening mysteries. What had so much terrified Sari up at the hospital? True, she, Nan had seen much that she had not been intended to see: she recalled Sari’s insistence that their rendezvous should be at the front door—and that she herself had come out through a side door, out of sight of the main entrance. And there had been the strange woman; a strange woman, indeed, to have been encountered in that place—with her cobweb of delicate, innocent-sounding questioning. She recalled now that the woman had spoken to her directly in English; had not paused to assume that she might be of any other nationality. A Follower?—entering the walled cemetery, knowing that Nan was there, forcing a conversation with her not very necessary question about the wall. But then—this elegant Frenchwoman, one of Sari’s ‘Followers’? And Sari had said nothing of their destination until they were in the hall, summoning the hire car—how could anyone have know of it? Spies?—were there spies right here in the lobby of the Sardines’ hotel in the heart of Rome? She looked uneasily over her shoulder... Of course Sari was obsessed with this idea of being followed, her friends laughed the whole thing off, she was always trying to make herself interesting... Or they used to laugh it off; but now Vi Feather was dead.

Vi Feather was dead. Was dead, was murdered. And no one laughed so light-heartedly any more when Sari described how a car had followed her through the night of storm; and laughed not at all when Sari said that Vi Feather had been murdered in mistake for herself.

If the Frenchwoman had indeed been spying upon Sari, trying to learn the secrets of the convent hospital? ‘Swear you won’t tell anyone,’ Sari had said to Nan. ‘Whatever you may think.’ Sari had not wanted to take Nan there; unable to refuse without seeming to make the visit of too much importance, had been edgy and irritable. ‘God knows
I
didn’t ask you to come!’ she had burst out, and had made Nan swear to tell nothing, to say nothing, whatever she thought or guessed, to say nothing to anyone. Had offered a few vague, placatory confidences. She had failed to complete her work on the film, not because she would not but because she could not. She had been ‘ill’; the nuns had been terribly good to her, she had been ill—and it had been Aldo’s fault but ‘the moment real trouble arose’ he had simply walked out on her... ‘I see,’ Nan had said; and suggested, all easy tolerance, ‘So you come back for check-ups?’ She remembered the small, quizzical glance with which Sari had answered. ‘Well, yes, for check-ups. You could say that.’ And the penny dropped at last. Yes, on the ludicrous excuse about Luigi and the hair-do, Sari came back regularly to Rome for check-ups; but it was she who did the checking up.

A small boy—to whom, with elaborate lies and excuses, Sari had brought the cherished blue pottery pig—a boy crippled and mentally defective. Child of Prince Aldo of San Juan el Priata; and his legal heir.

She sat absolutely stunned; and her first thought was—Who else knows? Did her friends know?—did the Eight know? But they didn’t, Nan felt sure of it. ‘Not a word of this to anyone, Nan, you swear? Even Etho doesn’t know.’ So who did know?

Had Vi Feather known? She had been a dresser in the studio, she had worked closely with Sari; had Vi known? But Vi’s mouth had been closed for ever. What Vi had known she could never now tell; and who else knew?

Well, now
she
knew. Nan knew.

She crept to the telephone again and this time Etho was there. But what to say? How much to tell? Were spies all around her in that suddenly lonely place? ‘Etho—Sari’s gone, she’s disappeared. You haven’t heard—?’

‘Disappeared?’ said Etho. ‘Oh, my God!’ He said almost angrily, ‘I did beg you to look after her.’

‘Well, I couldn’t attach her with a ball and chain,’ said Nan, driven by jittering nerves to irritability. ‘She went off with some man—’

‘Went off with a man?’

‘Well, in fact some man went off with
her.
’

He seemed to cool down into his own old casual way. ‘Oh, well, men are always going off with Sari.’

‘This isn’t... You always make light of everything.’

‘Yes, well... It’s all another nonsense, ducky, I expect, like your Juanese chums in Trastevere last night.’

‘It’s not nonsense.’ said Nan, almost weeping. ‘It’s not nonsense.’ She took a resolution. ‘Anyway, Etho, I’m coming home. I can’t do any good out here, I don’t know who to turn to, I can’t speak the language and what’s more it’s all too dangerous—there’s a lot more to it than you think, Etho, you all turn it into silliness and laughing, but it isn’t really funny and I’m frightened, and first thing tomorrow, Sari or no Sari, I’m getting the first flight out and coming home.’ She slammed down the receiver and when almost immediately the ‘phone rang back, refused to answer it. They’re all very sweet and charming and funny, she thought, but after all, what are they to me?—why should I risk my life for them, why should I end up in the back of some car like poor wretched Vi Feather? And she thought with a small blaze of resentment that, for the few brief months she had known them, she was now and would be perhaps for the rest of her life, a frightened woman; scared to go to bed, scared to close her eyes and sleep—I shall have to sit up all tonight and creep out in the morning and get out of this horrible country as soon as I can... And she found only little room in her terrified heart to pray that Sari would come back safe at last: that all would yet be well with her. What are they all to
me
?

But she did not come back; and next morning, sick with dread, Nan found herself a taxi—not the first that offered nor the second, but one chosen at random in another street—she began, as she humped her heavy suitcase, to recognise something of the strain under which Sari must have lived all these years—and got to the airport safely and aboard a plane. She would wash her hands for ever—please God!—of the Eight Best Friends. And if the air hostess comes round offering barley sugar for the takeoff, she thought, I shall be sick. Flying off from the most wonderful city in the world, without having glimpsed even one of its most beautiful sights—because, forsooth, dear Sari must, as Etho himself had said, ‘be different’—must reject, thought Nan, whipping herself up to an easy resentment, all that was ordinarily acceptable, all that was rational, made sense; must live in a state of inconsequential nonsense regardless of the feelings and wishes of her companions; dye her hair orange and affect not to know that she was stared at, array herself in bright patterned tops and painted pants, tie golden scarves over her head with pencilled partings, ruining an expensive thing for a single occasion... It’s all stupid and deliberate and entirely self-conscious, thought Nan, savagely obliterating memories of innocence and gaiety that Sari had carried with her always outrageous or not; they were all just silly, affected bores; and buns and shoppings and slippery elm and the lot, her own old friends, and Bertrand’s, were best in the end...

And yet again... Trips to the picture galleries with other mildly ‘cultured’ widows, little dinners with older married couples who had scraped the bottom of the barrel for ‘a man to make up a four’, afternoons of bridge, solitary evenings of television looking at the ‘better’ programmes so as to have ‘a talking point’ at the careful foursome dinners—nowadays, none of it seemed what Rufie would have called the most rivvy of pastimes. Ap-solutely not. I dare say, she thought to herself, crushing down rueful longings, I shall go beresk with boredom. But in the end, they’d been right, Mavis and Lillian and all of them. It was all too frightening, too bewildering; she would harden her mind against the magic circle and know them no more.

Yet as she came at last to the warm safety of her Hampstead flat with its nice safe colours and its nice deep sofas and its nice, familiar porters downstairs, protecting her—something of the terror fled. It was all too bizarre and ridiculous—she had been brain-washed into accepting the self-dramatisation and silly games; but going through to the kitching to make herself a chicking sangwidge, an old depression closed in; and she thought with a sore heart, Oh, Sari, where are you now, are you safe, ought I to have stayed and found you? and what will you think of me, what will they all think of me, for having abandoned you and left you there alone?

Sari waited until Nan had departed down the gangway and then got off the same plane, found a taxi and made her way straight home. Sergeant Ellis waited until they had both gone and then also alighted, found a police car and made his way straight to Chief Superintendent Charlesworth.

Rufie was in the flat alone, Pony having tactfully taken his departure before her return. ‘So now tell, my dovey-darling, what is it all about?’

She sat curled up on the couch, towelled down after the great, deep, reviving, scented bath, wrapped in a dressing-gown, sipping at hot black coffee. ‘I wasn’t going to spend another night in the hotel with that one! All the time, Rufie, she’s been a traitor, she’s one of Them. I don’t just think. I know.’

‘Something’s happened, Sari, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, well it has but I’ll wait till I see Etho, I’ll tell you the whole thing after that. But Nan’s in it, up to the ears. I mean—even that business about Trastevere—who could have told those creatures, how could they have known I’d be at the Piazza Navona?’

‘You always do go there, darling, when you’re in Rome.’

‘Yes, but surely they’re not crouching there all through the year watching my Pore Horse, like big game hunters in a machan or whatever it’s called, sitting over pore goats? And then, up at the convent...’ She was silent.

‘The Something was at the convent, Sari?’

‘
Somebody
was at the convent. And how could anyone have known I was going there? Only Nan could have told; made a sign, some sort of message, I don’t know what. So the moment I got back to the hotel with her, I just crept out again.’ She looked ill, dreadfully pale, her fists were clenched tight. ‘Rufie, I’m afraid of her now, I’m afraid of everything.’

‘She rang up Etho in a terrible state about you.’

‘All a pretence. She does a good job, give her that. But anyway, I wasn’t taking any more chances.’ She broke off. ‘Oh, Rufie, sorry darling, but the quickest wee in the world, all that coffee, I simply must.’

Rufie took advantage of the wee, to make a dash for the telephone and beg Etho to come round as soon as he could. ‘I do think something bad has happened, she’s genuinely scared.’ He was sitting innocently back on the long sofa when Sari returned and curled up there next to him, reaching out a long arm for the inevitable cigarette. ‘So tell, Sari—no money left by then, surely, so how did you make the get-away?’

‘Oh, well that—yes, sheer inspiration.’ At thought of it, her spirits began to rise, the colour came back to her cheeks, a spark of hilarity. ‘I had to pay my bill, I wasn’t going to be beholden to her. Benediction was wailing away in the next door church and I thought to myself surely no Juanese in a church? They pretend to be Roman Catholics but they’re not really, no Apostolic Succession and all that jazz, they just create their own bishops and things and get on with it. The only Catholic on the island, if she is one, would be the Grand Duchess.’ A shadow darkened her face. She said: ‘She’s not Juanese. She’s French.’

The door of the flat was never locked; you simply pushed it open and came in. Sofy came in now, warned by Etho that there were breakers ahead. She had supposed it would be something to do with Phin but no, something had happened in Rome, it seemed, that had put even Phin into the background of Sari’s mind. Nan had come home after some rumpus or other, alone; Etho would be along as soon as he could... While Rufie made more coffee, (‘And biscuits, Rufie, I still need a pound and a half), the gist of Nan’s offences was gone over again, and a potted account of the get-away, as far as it had been narrated. ‘So you went into this church?’ prompted Rufie, yielding his place on the couch to Sofy and himself sinking into the bag of beans. ‘Sari says they’re not really proper Catholics on San Juan el Pirata; only the Grand Duchess is, because she’s French.’

‘Oh, is she?’ said Sofy, innocent of overtones.

‘Yes, she is, she’s a Parisienne. Aldo’s father saw her there,’ said Sari, ‘and simply took one look, marched up to her father and said he was going to marry her and the poor man was apparently so scared that he simply said yes, yes, of course, of course. The Grand Duke is about nine foot high and terrifying—Aldo’s petrified of him; in fact that was a lot of the trouble. But anyway, the Duchess—very beautiful she is, Aldo showed me thousands of pictures of her.’ She paused. ‘I’d know her anywhere.’

‘Yes, well, about the get-away, then?’

‘Oh, yes. Well. Well, so I went into this church and searched round for a suitable-looking man and knelt down beside him and what is known as burst into highly becoming tears, and asked him to help me. So of course the Latin Lover leapt to it and I told him the tale about my cruel husband—he went a bit pale so I assured him, perfectly harmless to everyone except me—and he crept into the hotel with me and paid my bill and out we came into the street, all before he had time to think; where to his great surprise I dragged him into a taxi, briskly took down his address and promised to send him the money; and told the man to drive out to Fiumicino, fast, kindly offering to drop my chum off anywhere he cared to be taken to. Miles out of my way, wouldn’t you know? Hardly a lira left when I’d paid.’

Rufie, too familiar with Sari’s improvisations to see anything very extraordinary about this
histoire,
poured more coffee for Sofy and asked, where, then she had spent the night.

‘Well that was it, wasn’t it? Of course she’d paid for everything up to that, except for my Pore Horse and I did insist on doing Luigi, out of the wiggy-bank. So I thought, well, an airport at night would probably be safe because this time really nobody could have known where I was going, not even rotten, spying Nan. And so it was, because—’