Territorial Rights (2 page)

They went into the house then, the joint proprietors, who apparently spent most of the time in harmony downstairs in the large hall at the entrance, watching the television, gossiping with the guests, or hastening to the reception desk to check in a new arrival and show them their rooms. Sometimes as Robert passed in and out Eufemia was alone behind the desk, totting up accounts or answering the telephone; at other times both of them were busy there together, one putting straight the picture postcards on their racks and the other supplying a guest as it might be with a postage stamp or a travel pamphlet. On these occasions they were so equally amiable to all and to each other as to be almost interchangeable.

After the women had gone indoors Robert continued to contemplate the empty garden for a little space, then shook himself out of his idleness and turned back to his room.

On the last lap of his journey from Paris, Mark Curran drove across the causeway on the approach to Venice, the water-flats of the lagoon spreading on either side in a fading light. Mark Curran had come to settle things with Robert; he was rich in substance and experience, a man of sixty-two, with settled, sophisticated tastes and few doubts.

He preferred to be called ‘Curran’ rather than by his Christian name, for reasons which, when he gave them, were difficult to puzzle out as, for instance, that he hated anyone to pity him or feel that he ever needed pity. From this it was presumably to be supposed that to call him ‘Mark’ might conceivably lay him open, at some given time, to be offered sympathy.

His being known as ‘Curran’ to his friends and ‘Mr Curran’ to passing acquaintances had a curious effect on his relationships with women. For, unless the women were very young and free, or else tough like those older ones who rang him up and said, ‘Oh, is that you, Curran?’ (as if he were the butler), most women stuck to ‘Mr Curran’, and this kept them rather far away. In fact, Curran’s simple phrase, cast off in earnest jollity, ‘I prefer my friends just to call me Curran’, had many strange effects on his life. It forced the men he met socially to always treat him in a man-to-man style: ‘My dear Curran, I’m passing thro’ Paris. …’ And ‘Yours, Curran’ he would sign his letters, no matter how much he wrote to Dear James, Dear Arthur or Dear Robert.

He drove into Venice very much aware of being Curran. He knew Venice well; it had been his territory for the best part of his life, in the late thirties and after the war onwards, when he had become a settled expatriate. He returned once a year to the United States to see a few ageing members of his family and attend to those things that had to be attended to. Paris was his headquarters from where he drove around when a change was called for. He was often in London, often in the South of France, often in Capri, sometimes Florence and less frequently nowadays, in Rome. He hardly ever went to Germany unless to buy a picture and he left Switzerland alone. Venice was very much his territory; it changed less than other places with the passing of time.

With time and its passing much on his mind, and, as always, full of the Curran idea, he left his car at the terminus and took a water-taxi to the Hotel Lord Byron.

At the back of the Campo di Santa Maria Formosa was a network of streets and narrow gutter-canals, at high tide smelling like dead fish and at low tide even worse. The befouled water lapped at the lower doors of the tall buildings on either side; but these doors had been closed for ever. The entrances to the buildings were round the other side, in some narrow alley between the waterways.

Lina Pancev lived in a room perched at the top of one of these narrow houses. From the street, this room projected like a large bird, a dangerous-looking piece of masonry, yet not dangerous presuming the bird could fly. The beak protruding from its small window was at this moment devoid of its washing, and the small black mouth was shut, unlike the windows underneath it, set further back into the building. To reach the hovering attic it was necessary to climb, in the first place, five twisting flights of stairs, each step of which was worn to a thin curve in the centre. The iron banister, wrought in curly patterns on the lower floors, soon became a rusty twisting strip, too shaky and broken to depend upon. The sight and smell of rats, cats and garbage at the entrance changed, as the climber proceeded, to the smell of something or other more frightful. Then, with the staircase left behind, came the testing part, the challenge: a pair of builders’ planks about three feet in length led from the landing, itself slanting by quite a few degrees, across to the threshold of Lina Pancev’s eyrie. What had been there before the planks were laid would have puzzled any architect; the building was at least three centuries old, and the planks themselves looked as if they had been there for at least ten years; and how the jutting room where Lina lived defeated the law of gravity to the functional extent it did, perhaps not even the original constructors had known. The building had been many years condemned by the authorities, but was fully inhabited; its dim and puddly privies on every landing were vital evidence of the tenants’ presence.

Robert Leaver, crossing the planks to Lina’s door, could not resist looking down through the slit between them, as he had done on his first visit. The planks were springy; a sheer long drop to the narrow street below. He rang the bell which always astonishingly not only worked, but did so by electricity. ‘Who is it?’ called Lina in Italian, ‘It’s me,’ said Robert in English. She opened the door and let him into her lamplit room.

‘Did you bring your torch?’ she said.

‘Oh, I forgot it again!’

‘I’ll have to take you down with mine when you go.’ Dusk was falling and there was nothing to light the uncharitable staircase but an occasional slit-window on a landing. ‘I’ll have to go down with you and then climb all the way back. The batteries are expensive.’

But she didn’t seem to notice that her greeting to Robert was no sort of welcome at all. He accepted it in a casual dazed way, plainly thinking of something far more pressing. Inside the room he had to walk downhill to a heavy armchair, with many cotton cushions and broken springs, more or less tethered to the slope. Robert sat lop-sided like a paralytic and told Lina that Curran had arrived in Venice. ‘He phoned me up out of the blue,’ Robert said.

‘Blue?’ she said. She looked at her plain wood worktable: a folded painting-book; paint-brushes soaking in a jam-jar half-full of grey water.

‘Unexpectedly,’ he said sulkily.

‘Oh, you must have given him your number,’ Lina said, ‘or else how could he find you?’

‘Curran wouldn’t find that difficult; and in this case all he had to do was to get the hall porter at his hotel to ring up the obvious places. In any case Curran’s used to finding people.’

Then in that case, maybe he can find my dead father’

‘He might do that,’ said Robert.

‘Good,’ she said, really taking him up on it.

‘You seem very delighted,’ he said, ‘to know that Curran’s here.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not in rivalry never with no one. I told you that.’

‘You’d like to use Curran,’ he said.

‘Why not, if he could be useful?’

‘Curran paints too, you know,’ Robert said. ‘I’m no judge, but he sells his paintings. They’re abstract in oils. He gets a lot of money for them.’

‘Who from? His fancy friends?’

‘Exclusively, his friends. Nobody else goes to his shows.’

‘It happened also in Bulgaria like that,’ she said. ‘But there I had a lot of friends, myself.’ She was very placid, not in the least resentful of Curran, as were two other professional artists whom Robert knew in Paris. She was clearing part of the table. ‘My friends were poor but Curran’s are rich.’ It was like a piece from a nursery-rhyme.

She was arranging her spirit-stove on top of a wooden fruit-crate. She filled a cooking-pot with water from a big old-fashioned jug, and put it on the stove to heat.

‘Tell me the whole story,’ she said, with warm comfort in her voice.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so ambitious.’

‘I don’t pay rent any more,’ she told him, following some sequence of her own thoughts. ‘Friday was my rent day, but I’ve stopped paying because my neighbours have asked me to join them in a strike. We live in a condemned building, so he has no right to rent the rooms. He’s angry. It was so little rent, but I am showing solidarity.’ She adjusted the flame ‘… with my neighbours,’ she said, poising the dry spaghetti above the pot, ready to send it in as soon as the water came to the boil. ‘And I can do my cooking if I want to because everyone else does. From today I don’t smuggle out the rubbish. I put it in the canal like the other people, when there’s no police boat coming up.’

Robert watched her while she cooked; a smaller pot, onions, peeled tomatoes from a tin, a drop of oil, another drop. Her black hair had a high shine, with its short bob and fringe; it was the sort of hair that hairdressers loved to handle, and looked expensively cut, although this was unlikely. She had apple-red cheeks and white teeth, looking very Balkan, like one of the tourist-shops’ Dolls of All Nations. He liked her unscrupulous story about the rent; in fact, he agreed with her about the rent in one sense as much as he disagreed in another. At his universities he had known girls without materialistic scruples, as they put it. His mother had strict scruples; what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.

Lina’s voice chattered on. Eventually he said, ‘What was that you said, Lina?’

‘You haven’t been listening.’

‘Yes, I have. I just didn’t catch—’

‘What was I talking about?’

‘You said “eggs”. What about the eggs?’

She attended to her paraffin-stove, moving her two pots, the big and the small, alternately over the flame. She said, ‘I said that this is all I’ve got to offer you. Tomorrow I’ll go out and get some
eggs.’

‘It’s very good of you,’ he said. ‘You’re a lovely woman, too.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘When are you seeing Curran?’

‘Tomorrow, in the evening.’

Tomorrow, in the evening, Robert walked through the lanes and across the bridges, under the clear stars and over their reflection in the waters, to Harry’s Bar, took a place downstairs and waited. The older man, when he arrived, looked more opulent than usual, appearing very much like a rich elder friend of a nice good-looking, lean young student.

‘Well, Robert,’ said Curran, ‘nice to see you again. A bit of luck I found you in Venice.’

‘It was a bit of luck,’ said the young man blithely.

‘Ever eaten here before?’ Curran said, even though he knew Harry’s Bar was beyond Robert’s pocket, and that this was the young man’s first visit to Venice.

‘I’ve found a moderate restaurant,’ Robert said firmly. ‘And there are snack bars.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Well, we can make a more spectacular meal tonight if you feel it would be a change. I’ve booked a table upstairs. First of all, what will you drink?’ They sat at a table near the bar.

Around them was the buzz and small-clatter of multifarious activities, such as the shuffling of chairs and feet, the conversations at the bar and at the other tables, the sound of the door swinging open with the entrance of new arrivals and the constant clink of bottles and glasses at the bar. It made a good environment for their meeting. Robert was relieved that Curran had not asked him to come somewhere quiet, and it did not occur to him now, as they waited for their whiskies, that in fact he need not have come at all.

‘What brings you to Venice?’ he said, invitingly, to Curran.

‘Force of will,’ Curran said, as if there had been no ‘Goodbye, goodbye, good
bye’
and no shouting recriminations leading up to it.

Curran said, ‘What about your studies?

‘I can do history of art here as well as I can in Paris. Perhaps better. Venetian architecture and art. I can switch.’

‘How?’

‘You can arrange it for me,’ Robert said. ‘I can switch my grant and do a term paper in Venice.’

Curran laughed, and said, ‘Were you counting on me to come and arrange things for you?’

‘I suppose, maybe, I was.’

‘Exactly what aspect of Venice would you undertake? I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to decide if I were in your place. And you’d be surprised how much I know Venice. I was here as a young man. I was here at the end of the war. I couldn’t tell you the number of times, off and on … and yet, where would one begin?’

‘If you had to begin, you’d begin.’

‘I dare say. Sheer force of will would do it. I’ve done some of my best paintings in Venice, but of course that’s rather a different thing.’

‘Well,’ said Robert, ‘when you begin to deal with a subject, you gather as many details as possible, then you find the features general to all of them, and you develop the generalities.’

‘Very enlightening,’ said Curran, ‘so far as it goes. But you’ve described a lifetime’s occupation if you’re going to do it thoroughly, and you haven’t been here a week. Will you have another drink or shall we go upstairs?’

They went up to dinner. Robert said, ‘I’m starting off with Santa Maria Formosa. It’s a curvaceous building, most unusual.’

‘Oh, yes, I know it. What made you pick on that?’

‘It’s the first thing I saw when I walked out of the Pensione. I might as well begin there. I’ve looked it up in the library. There are some vague legends about the name, but my thesis is that the name of Santa Maria Formosa originally came from the “formosa” of the Song of Solomon in the Bible. Original Latin:
Nigra sum sed formosa—
“I am black but comely.” It was a pre-figuration of the Madonna according to the early theologians. Now as it happens I have discovered that the ancient Hebrew could mean “black but comely” or “beautiful” or “shapely” and it could also mean “black
and
comely”, or again it could mean “black,
therefore
comely”. So I intend to write a thesis. …’

Curran held up his hand to indicate the waiter standing by the table. ‘We’d better order,’ Curran said.

And when they had ordered he said, ‘Go on.’

‘Are you bored?’ Robert said.

‘Your thesis should be popular,’ said Curran.