The Woman at the Window (10 page)

GRIFFITHS, Afforestation, handled the coloured print with a certain disdain. A random record of someone else's night- time revelry had found its way into a wallet of sober views of properties for sale.

‘Where on earth did this come from?' he said.

‘I suppose I must have taken it. Although I must admit I don't remember doing it.'

Griffiths' companion sitting at the cast-iron terrace table was Marloff, Aridlands. They were colleagues and friends, international civil servants on leave, bound even more closely by their wives being cousins. Marjorie Marloff and Myfanwy Griffiths had gone to bed leaving their husbands to their cigars and brandy and their taste for a pleasant mixture of reminiscence and disputation.

‘Never mind. It's quite useful. Gives you some idea of the atmosphere, Griff. This girl on the left could be a key player.' 

A night at the Villa Louisa was an agreed break on their journey south. The two childless couples had often enjoyed holidays together and now they were setting out on a pilgrimage to find a suitable property for their retirement due in four or five years' time. Geneva, where Griffiths and Marloff were stationed, had the wrong climate for Marjorie's sciatica. Both she and her husband wanted to settle in the south. Myfanwy was devoted to her cousin and would do most things to please her. Griffiths took up his usual position of needing to be convinced. This need grew stronger when his wife was not present to accuse him of being obstructive or unconstructive. He had the larger share of disposable capital and, like an amiable bank manager, he was prepared to sit back in his chair and listen. He also enjoyed an argument. No holds barred.

‘It's too easy,' he said. 

‘What is?'

‘Superficial conviviality. Typical.'

They squinted at the photograph in turn. 

‘Who is this priapic creature in the middle?' 

‘That's Mario. As you can see a cheerful soul.'

Mario was awarding the camera a faunlike possessive grin: a force of nature with close-cropped hair, narrow eyes and a bull neck thrust forever forward.

‘He looks the apotheosis of greed to me,' Griffiths said. ‘I wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him.'

‘That wouldn't be far.'

This was a frank reference to Griffiths' plump condition. Marloff made more of an effort to keep himself in shape. He still played tennis and squash. Griffiths smoked cheap cigars and the most physical effort he was inclined to make was a brief swim and a prolonged sunbathe when the weather permitted.

‘And the woman in question?' Griffiths said. ‘This one.' 

The woman on Mario's right had long fair hair and a 
smile that seemed to bleed down a pretty confused face. 

‘The fair Annette. Annette Vennenberg. She owns every
thing. You may as well say our fate is in her hands.' 

‘And this one?'

Griffiths wanted to know about the younger woman on Mario's left. Her black hair and her white teeth glittered with acquisitive intention.

‘That's Giusi,' Marloff said. ‘All the way from Sicily. What a contrast eh? Annette from Augsberg and Giusi from Agrigento. And Mario the mighty determined to serve them both with equal enthusiasm. A joyful symbol of European unity.'

‘Huh,' Griffiths grunted. ‘More like a testament to the hopelessness of the human condition.'

‘Now then,' Marloff said. ‘Now then Griff old boy. You're doing it again.'

Marloff was a Swiss of White Russian extraction, but he had been to Cambridge and he liked to indulge in a worldly drawl. He would tease his friend and then tell him not to be so touchy.

‘It's your Puritan upbringing,' Marloff said. ‘You can't help it.'

‘Can't help what?'

‘Confusing morals with mores, what else? You deal too much in abstractions, old boy. I mean you just couldn't go telling these people that life is a pilgrimage or whatever. They simply wouldn't understand you.'

Griffiths struck the table with the edge of his hand as if to announce that the debate had started.

‘Right and wrong should apply with equal force throughout the planet.' he said. ‘They should be universals. Otherwise the distinction is not worth making.'

Marloff 's finger was already extended to poke a hole in the thesis.

‘In this case it isn't. What we are dealing with here is a clash of cultures. And culture is man made. It's not genetic.'

‘That is precisely my point…'

Marloff picked up the photograph to wave it in the air. 

‘Just look at it,' he said. ‘A culture clash if ever I saw one.

Look at them. Teutonic, romantic Annette, and pragmatic, prehensile Giusi. We have to deal with them as they are. Forget that neo-Darwinism lurking in that Puritan skull of yours squealing to get out. We have to deal with these people as they are. Base our judgements on objective analysis. Mario has no sense of wrongdoing. And neither has the girl Giusi. Life for them is a business. A sequence of deals and bargains where things have to be worked to the best advantage. Particularly their own. Conscience doesn't come in to it. In any case they haven't killed anyone.'

‘Not yet.'

Griffiths gave his interim verdict in such a gloomy voice. Marloff burst out laughing. He reached out to shake his friend's arm in a gesture of unstinting friendship. They had been friends and colleagues and collaborators for a long time. Griffiths began to chuckle himself.

‘Come on then,' he said. ‘Out with it Anton Marloff. Speculation is sparks and smoke. Knowledge is power. Especially when you deal with “people like these”. I quote you.'

He extracted a fresh cigar from a packet and waved it to evoke a symphony of information before wedging it in his loose, melancholy mouth. Marloff was a linguist and his command of Italian dialects was a source of continuing admiration and envy. Griffiths had the more ample financial resources. They made him all the more intent on equipping himself with as deep a knowledge as possible of the customs and practices and folk ways of the place they were likely to settle. Here Marloff was the expert and he was the only one versed in the saga of Annette Vennenberg.

‘You remember Vennenberg?' 

‘Vaguely. Of course I do.'

‘Well now this young thing was his missus.' 

‘Mistress?'

‘Okay. Mistress first. Then missus.'

Marloff tapped the fair girl's image with a fingernail. Griffiths leaned forward to study the three seated so close together at the end of a table.

‘Looks more like a tomb than a trattoria,' he said. ‘Those red eyes belong to the inferior regions. Where's Vennenberg anyway? I don't see his ghost.'

‘Well there she is,' Marloff said. ‘The fair Annette. You could say our future is in her hands. Or their hands.'

Griffiths pulled a face to demonstrate distaste and disapproval.

‘It's only a transaction,' he said. ‘If it comes to that. That's negotiation, not fate.'

‘How did she come by her wealth? After all property is wealth. That's fate if you ask me.'

‘You amaze me.'

‘Do I. In what way? Do tell me.'

‘You've no religion and acres of supersition. That's one thing. And then this curiosity about people. Detached and yet insatiable. I mean this girl for example. “What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba…?” What's Annette to you or you to Annette? Eh?'

‘Peasant origins. Limited horizons. That's you, Griffiths, old fruit. I'm only a poor old cousin-in-law trying to bring a little colour and variety into the monotony of your daily life…'

They were happy to tease each other, seated on the terrace on a warm evening, and to reminisce about old misadventures and mistakes that could no longer blight the settled course of their careers. Since they deserted the groves of academe their promotion at Geneva had been slow but reassuringly steady. Now they were in sight of those comfortable pensions. Pooling their resources would give them a wider choice of suitable havens in which to settle.

‘I was always a bit sorry for him.'

Marloff assumed a pose of Olympian detachment. This tranquil interlude on the terrace was a fine balance between a satisfactory past and a secure future. Villa Louisa was a favourite holiday haunt to return to. Behind them was the classic facade of a sixteenth-century palazzo converted into an old-fashioned hotel: through the lines of oleander and myrtle below them, steps led to the stone jetties nudged by painted boats.

‘Let us not speak ill of the dead. Old Vennenberg was a decent chap. He had his weaknesses of course. But then don't we all.'

Marloff touched his trim white moustache with his knuckle. Griffiths noted the habitual twitch. Marloff had once jokingly admitted it grew there to prevent young women looking straight through him. Even in the soft lights of the terrace garden he was conspicuously better dressed and more aware of his appearance than his friend slumping untidily in his chair, fondling his cigar and waiting to be diverted.

‘It doesn't need to be a secret any more. He was scared stiff of his students. And worse than that. They knew it. He was liable to spasms of diarrhoea before delivering a lecture. He would swig a stiff whisky before reaching the lectern.'

‘I always preferred seminars,' Griffiths said. ‘Get a good discussion going and the time passes more quickly. Anyway you can always read lectures.'

‘Where did it all come from? That deep insecurity. My guess was it came from having a more brilliant older brother.'

‘All I can remember is a tall, thin Swede with a ginger moustache hanging over his mouth. Hence the hangdog look. Wasn't there some trouble about him exploiting the research of one of his students? There you are. The temptations of a man promoted above his true capacity, concentrating on career moves instead of the hard grind. Marloff, my boy, we are well out of it.'

‘Annette was bright enough and extremely pretty. I could see it coming. To be honest I rather fancied her myself. That old goat Wagner used to say that nothing stimulates the appetite for research more than the daily proximity of a fuckable young female.'

‘Irresponsible old sod. Amazing he never got caught.' Marloff chuckled and winked.

‘Do I detect a note of envy?'

‘Nothing of the sort. As you well know all my life I've made a point of being responsible and reliable.'

‘And respectable! And who has ever thanked you for it? Except me, I mean.'

Once again he reached across to shake Griffiths' arm with soothing affection.

‘And here's me thanking you again. Reliable as a rock, Ellis Griffiths.'

‘What about the girl? It's the girl presumably we shall have to deal with. Not Vennenberg's ghost.'

‘Ah.'

Marloff raised two fingers to show that they were crossed. ‘The fact is, old boy, Vennenberg left his wife and two grown sons for the fair Annette.'

Griffiths shook his head as if he had been given something to think deeply about. They were both silent as they contemplated the ramifications of an old male abandoning the family nest for a younger female. Griffiths sighed.

‘It happens so often,' he said.

He was not only regretting the absence of restraint among privileged academics. There were wider implications. Surely every civilisation depended in the end on some form or other of systematic restraint? It disturbed him that even at this mature stage in his life there were deep and urgent questions to which he was unable to find a simple answer. Accumulating evidence was always more than an interim activity.

‘What was her background? This Annette.'

‘She was Annette von Ense. I don't know where the “von” came from.'

Gossip was more relaxing than the effort of distilling precepts. They could enjoy an interlude of unbuttoned frankness. Their wives were safely in bed.

‘A solid Augsburg family. Only too solid. The money came from automobile spare parts. Vital I suppose to the German war effort and so on. Anyhow war guilt was the principal agent of family disintegration. You can just imagine it, can't you? Brought up with loving care and bourgeois comfort, Annette becomes an ardent young feminist and in no time at all takes it upon herself to discover the awful truth and she accuses her grandparents and her parents of criminal complicity with Das Dritter Reich. “And as for you,” she points across the dinner table at her father whose heart is in poor condition, “You served in the criminal army”. She even points her finger at her grosspapa. “How many secrets have you got on your sleeping conscience?” '

‘How do you know all this?'

Griffiths spoke quietly to encourage Marloff to keep his voice down.

‘Vennenberg told me,' he said.

Griffiths raised an eyebrow to indicate he had no idea Marloff had known Vennenberg so well.

‘The appalling honesty of the young,' Marloff said. ‘Makes one quite relieved to be childless.'