The Old Contemptibles (2 page)

The King’s Head pub was never bright on the best of days; this afternoon it seemed as damp and pallid as the pavement outside. The ceiling fixtures cast bands of yellowish light across the polished bar like streetlamps in the mist; the colored panes of the leaded-glass window by their table were tracked with rain.

Even the lank hair of the unhappy-looking girl who gave the wet-ringed table a swipe before transferring their drinks from her damp tray to the table looked rained on. “Rotter, innit?”

As the waitress walked away, Jane Holdsworth smiled. “She should live up North if she’s put off by this drizzle.” She ran her hands through her hair, damp and curling at the ends where the scarf had missed covering it.

“Which part are you from?” asked Jury, raising his pint of bitter in a toast to their meeting.

“I? I’m not, at least not any longer. I have relations there, though. A sister of my own and a few in-laws. I was married. I’m not, now. He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

She merely nodded. “The relations are all on my former husband’s side. Except for my one sister. They live near Wast Water—one of the lakes—in one of those old manorial houses the rich threw up in the last century after the poets and painters decided that mountain scenery was worth painting and writing about. I still visit. I have a son and it seems only fair to let his grandparents see him now and then.” She laughed.

But the hard expression in the eyes that regarded him over the rim
of her glass suggested she didn’t much care for the visits. “I have a small house in the Lewisham Road. It’s near Blackheath. The unfashionable side of the Thames, according to my relations.” Her expression softened. “That’s all there is to me; what about you?”

“I doubt that’s all there is. But me, I live here. In Islington, I mean.”

“Ah!
Very
gentrified and fashionable.”

“Not my digs; it’s a terraced house. But only the ground-floor flat of one.” He signaled the waitress, who gave him a pathetic little look. Couldn’t he see how rushed she was? All this custom? This rotten weather?

“I loved the coronet. That actressy girl could have haggled him out of his whole tableful of wares.” She leaned her chin on her hands. “Beauty drives a hard bargain.”

“Then you should have got that gown for very little yourself.” He looked at the brown paper bag. She would take it as a compliment, but he wasn’t sure it was entirely one. It surprised him that he was annoyed by her comment about Carole-anne.

Jane picked the bag from the table, set it down again and laughed. “How did you know about the gown?” She was rummaging in the outsized paper bag as happily as a child searching for a promised gift. The topaz satin strap was resting over her finger.

“Ooh!” The weary waitress had just come up behind Jane. “ ’D’ja get that at market? You’ll look a right treat in that. Two more, then?” She picked up the glasses. “If only the bloody rain’d stop.”

Hastily, Jane had bunched up the paper bag and was gathering up her coat. “No, thanks. I really must be getting back.”

“Suit yerself.” Almost as if the remark had wounded her, she walked away.

“In this rain? And south of the Thames?” But she had already risen and so did he to help her on with the white raincoat that she couldn’t seem to get her arms into.

“I don’t care much for pubs. It’s more comfortable at home. Even in Lewisham.” Instead of looking at him, she started buttoning up the coat, shoving the top button in the wrong buttonhole.

Jury sighed and took her hands away. “It’ll hang all lopsided.” He rebuttoned the top ones.

She was tying on the scarf. “In weather like this, what is there to do but go home and read a book?”

“Can’t imagine.” Jury straightened her collar and they walked toward the door.

 • • • 

He closed the door of his flat and took longer than necessary to help her out of her coat, hoping it would give her a bit of time to examine the room and settle on something to say.

She settled on its neatness, which made him laugh. “Carole-anne takes it upon herself every once in a while to play char.” He looked at the tiled hearth. “I only have an electric bar in the fireplace, but your coat will probably dry out by the time you leave.”

“It’s pretty wet.” She looked at him quite openly.

He had been about to say something suiting the occasion—
Perhaps you’ll have to stay longer, then. . . . How about the rest of your clothes? . . . Borrow a dressing gown of mine. . . . Shall I put the kettle on . . . ?
To delay the inevitable, however pleasurable; to increase the sexual tension; to put them at their ease. The variations on the theme were endless. He smiled slightly, looking at his old stereo, thinking there was always music, but thinking Kiss of Death (Carole-anne’s favorite) might not be quite the ticket. She was always finding new groups—here was What the Cat Dragged In. And here was her favorite: Julio and Willie and all the girls they’d ever loved. He thought about those girls and their vulnerability and how chauvinistic that song was. Revolving doors full of women . . .

He felt Jane’s hand on his arm. Her cough was light and she said, “What are you thinking of?”

“Nothing.” He smiled.

“It was a long silence for a nothing.” Her own smile was unconvincing. She was nervous.

“Well, then, I was thinking of all the girls I ever loved before.”

Jane didn’t seem to know where to look as her eyes roved the featureless (to him) room and she asked, “Have there been that many?”

He put his hands very lightly on her shoulders. “Practically none. It’s the name of a song—my upstairs neighbor’s favorite. But I’m sure the men don’t send her out their doors. She leaves them when she wants to.”

There was a silence as she seemed to be studying his shirtfront. “It sounds awfully final, though.”

Jury smiled. “Oh, she can always go back whenever she wants.”

“Lucky girl.”

He pulled her closer but not so close that their bodies touched. “I can’t promise an endless succession of afternoons, since this is the first one I haven’t been working in God knows how long.” He smiled. “But I might be able to do evenings.”

It happened so suddenly it amazed him, how quickly she put her arms round his neck and how tightly she held on, their bodies more than touching, melting. His voice was very low when he said, “Should I put the kettle on?”

 • • • 

His bed faced the window and through it, above the little park, he watched a flight of swallows rise; with the sun behind them they drifted up like burning leaves darkening, coiling. Suddenly, he rose up on both elbows, disturbing the drape of her arm. The swallows lifted, circled and then the dark
V
of them vanished. For some reason, he thought of a funeral pyre; he thought of Aeneas.

“ ‘Vestigia flammae,’ ”
Jury said, without thinking.

She caught a laugh behind her mouth. “Oh, dear. Not Latin. Not Latin, too, after everything.”

Her little laugh had struck the wrong note; not her fault, he told himself, but he felt absurd.

Jostled slightly from her comfortably dissolute position, she looked up at him. “Did I say the wrong thing? What’s the matter?”

In answer, he merely lay back, pulled her back again. But the note had been struck and it was false; a note that could become a false chord. When her face turned and burrowed into his neck, he felt himself mean for not speaking. “It’s what the Queen of Carthage said when she first saw Aeneas. ‘I recognize the vestiges of an old flame.’ ”

He tried to shake it off, the sense of the wrong note, the feeling of foreboding. But the window was a blank square of white, the sunlight gone, and the park deserted.

Feeling like Lambert Strether, Melrose Plant looked up over the edge of
The Ambassadors,
bought especially for the occasion, and toward the Adriatic.

Beside him, Trueblood snapped shut his own book and sighed. “What a
yummy
novel!”

Melrose squinted his eyes nearly shut. “That’s the first time I’ve heard
Death in Venice
called ‘yummy.’ Wait until you get to the end, where Aschenbach is dying in his deck chair.” He looked at the colorfully striped beach cabanas. No deck chairs.

“I have, old trout. Oh, I admit the plague part isn’t much fun, but then comes that beautiful young man standing by the sea. All of that eloquent sunlit description.”

“Take off that tangerine scarf. It completely spoils the effect,” said Melrose. They were both dressed in white—Armani white. Thank the Lord the designer did white, since Trueblood had said he’d wear white over Melrose’s dead body.

Fortunately, at the time of this whining argument, they’d been in the Calle dei Fabbri, behind San Marco. Suddenly Trueblood had stopped dead, causing a head-on collision between four old women, black-shawled, who babbled insults in Italian.

The Giorgio Armani shop. Trueblood gazed into its windows until Melrose felt like getting a prayer-rug. This holy icon had kept
Trueblood buzzing round for well over an hour and Melrose saw the loose off-white silk and wool suit as Trueblood was taking out his traveler’s checks. It was the only way to get Trueblood into white.

 • • • 

“And roll down your cuffs. You look like you’re at Wimbledon.” First, the tangerine scarf;
now
Melrose saw a jade-colored handkerchief blossoming out of the jacket’s pocket. “And for the Lord’s sake, get rid of that handkerchief. You’re ruining the consumptive effect.”

“I don’t see why,” said Trueblood, stuffing the jade silk down into the pocket, “the Giappinos never become ill. Why does it always have to be
our
side of the family?”

Over the years of Vivian’s engagement, these Italians, whom they had never met, had had so many stories woven around them, they had almost become Long Piddleton’s second family.

“We aren’t ill; we never were,” Melrose reminded him.

 • • • 

Trueblood insisted on sitting behind Melrose when they boarded the vaporetto.

Coming upon it across the water this way, Melrose thought that the city which floated there in the distance might actually have been—as the travel books said—the most beautiful city in the world. It was as if all the angels in heaven had fallen asleep at once and Venice were their collective dream.

“And don’t forget to cough,” he called back to Trueblood as the vaporetto lurched and sprays of water hit him in the face.

“Cough? Why should I
cough?”
Trueblood yelled back over the roar of engines, slapping water, foreign tongues and dialectic babble.

The boat was jammed with Europeans (largely Eastern by the look of them) overflowing from Rome. It was surprisingly touristy for March.

“Because of the pneumonia, for God’s sake! You’re only just recovering!” Couldn’t the man remember anything?

Marshall called back: “That’s
you,
old sweat. You’re the pneumonia one. I’m the one got hit by the lorry—”

Imprecations lost on the wind.

“Oh. Sorry.” Melrose felt abashed, but quickly forgave himself as he saw a rainbow wasting its palette of pale violets and pinks across a city that needed no further embellishment.

 • • • 

The trouble was, of course, that ever since Vivian Rivington had left Victoria Station that morning in January, Melrose Plant and Marshall Trueblood had been sitting around in Northampshire, either at the Jack and Hammer over Old Peculier; at Ardry End, family seat of the Earls of Caverness, over port; or at Trueblood’s Antiques over Queen Anne and Lalique.

Hatching plots. Hatching plots to delay the wedding of Vivian Rivington to Count Dracula. Since Vivian herself had managed to drag out her engagement to Franco Giappino for—how many years? three? four?—Plant and Trueblood had been sure a little help from Northants would not come amiss.

Vivian was a sentimental woman. She would not go through her wedding ceremony without her old friends from Long Piddleton gathered about her.

The alleged lorry accident to Marshall Trueblood had delayed the wedding for a good five weeks. Marshall had been in traction for four of them, and was still hobbling about on a cane. (He had grown stubborn, however, and refused to hobble in Venice.)

The complete physical examination Melrose had decided to have (after ten or more years of avoiding his doctor) turned up one shadowy lung (that was Melrose’s rather poetic description of it) that the Harley Street doctor was not
awfully
worried about just so long as Lord Ardry had complete bedrest for several weeks. Which had taken care of the month of February.

No, no, no, no, Vivian! It’s not necessary for you to come back to England. Honestly . . .

God help them if she had.

The third debacle that Plant and Trueblood had discussed was an accident to Lady Agatha Ardry. If necessary, she could break her jaw in one of the auto accidents she was always having. And had to have it wired shut, Melrose had added.

The two of them had discarded that because it might speed up, rather than delay, the marriage.