When in Rome (5 page)

The young man looked still more fixedly at him and said: ‘It’s odd—really, it’s quite a coincidence, sir, that you should mention Il Cicerone. A week ago I could have told you very little about it. Except, perhaps, that it wasn’t likely to be a distinguished affair. Indeed—‘ he hesitated and then said—’please forgive me, sir. I’ve been at our London office for the past three years and I can’t help thinking that I’ve had the pleasure of looking after you before. Or at least of seeing you. I hope you don’t mind,’ the young man said in a rush. ‘I trust you will not think this insufferable cheek: I haven’t mastered my Anglo-Saxon attitudes, I’m afraid.’

‘You’ve mastered the language, at least.’

‘Oh—that! After an English university and so on, I should hope so.’

‘—and have an excellent memory.’

‘Well, sir, you are not the sort of person who is all that readily forgotten. Perhaps, then, I am correct in thinking—?’

‘You came into the general manager’s office in Jermyn Street while I was there. Some two years ago. You were in the room for about three minutes: during which time you give me a piece of very handy information.’

The young man executed an involved and extremely Italianate gesture that ended up with a smart slap on his own forehead.

‘Ah-ah-ah!
Mamma mia!
How could I be such an ass!’ he exclaimed.

‘It all comes back to you?’ observed the tall man drily.

‘But completely. All!’ He fell away a step and contemplated his visitor with an air of the deepest respect.

‘Good,’ said the visitor, unmoved by this scrutiny. ‘Now about the Il Cicerone thing—’

‘It is entirely for recreation, sir, that you inquire?’

‘Why not?’

‘Indeed! Of course! I merely wondered—’

‘Come on. What did you wonder?’

‘If perhaps there might be a professional aspect.’

‘And why did you wonder that? Look, Signor Pace—that
is
your name, isn’t it?’

‘Your own memory, sir, is superb.’

‘Signor Pace. Is there, perhaps, something about this enterprise, or about the person who controls it that makes you think I might be interested in it—or him—for other than sightseeing reasons?’

The young man became pink in the face, gazed at his clasped hands, glanced round the bureau which was empty of other people and finally said, ‘The cicerone in question, Signore—a Mr Sebastian Mailer—is a person of a certain, or perhaps I should say,
uncertain
reputation. Nothing specific you understand, but there are—’ he agitated his fingers ‘—suggestions. Rome is a great place for suggestions.’

‘Yes?’

‘I remarked that it was quite a coincidence you should inquire about him. That is because he was here earlier today. Not for the first time.
He asked to be put on our books some weeks ago but his reputation, his appearance—everything—did not recommend his venture to us and we declined. Then, this morning as a new inducement he brings us his list of patrons. It was quite astonishing, Signore, this list.’

‘May I see it?’

‘We still have not accepted him. I—I don’t quite—’

‘Signor Pace, your guess was a good one. My interest in this person is professional.’

‘Ah!’

‘But I am most anxious to appear simply as a tourist. I remember that in London your chief spoke very highly indeed of your discretion and promise—a promise that is evidently being fulfilled.’

‘You are kind enough to say so, sir.’

‘I realize that I can’t get a booking with Il Cicerone through you but perhaps you can tell me—

‘I can arrange it with another agency and will be delighted to do so. As for the list of patrons: under the circumstances, I think, there is no reason why I should not show it to you. Will you come into the office, if you please. While you examine it I will attend to your booking.’

The list Signor Pace produced was a day-by-day record of people who had put themselves down for Il Cicerone expeditions. It was prefaced by a general announcement that made his visitor blink: ‘Under the distinguished patronage of the celebrated author, Mr Barnaby Grant.’

‘This
is
coming it strong!’

‘Is it not?’ Signor Pace said, busily dialling. ‘I cannot imagine how it has been achieved. Although—’ he broke off and addressed himself elegantly to the telephone.
‘Pronto. Chi parla?’—
and, as an aside: ‘Look at the patronage, Signore. On the first day, Saturday, the twenty-sixth, for instance.’

Here it was, neatly set out in the Italianate script.

After further discussion, Signor Pace broke out in a cascade of thanks and compliments and covered the mouthpiece. ‘All is arranged,’ he cried. ‘For whichever tour you prefer.’

‘Without hesitation—the first one. Saturday, the twenty-sixth.’

This, evidently, was settled. Signor Pace hung up and swung round in his chair. ‘An interesting list, is it not? Lady Braceley—what
chic!’

‘You may call it that.’

‘Well, Signore! A certain reputation, perhaps. What is called the “jet set”. But from the point of view of the tourist-trade—extremely
chic.
Great éclat. We always arrange her travel. There is, of course, immense wealth.’

‘Quite so. The alimony alone.’

‘Well, Signore.’

‘And the Hon. Kenneth Dorne?’

‘I understand, her nephew.’

‘And the Van der Veghels?’

‘I am dumb. They have not come our way. Nor have Miss Jason and Major Sweet. But, Signore, the remarkable feature, the really astonishing, as one says, turn-up for the book, is the inclusion of Mr Barnaby Grant. And what is meant, I ask myself, by Guest of Honour?’

“Prime Attraction”, I imagine.’

‘Of course! But for him to consent! To lend his enormous prestige to such a very dim enterprise. And, we must admit, it appears evident that the gimmick has worked.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought Lady Braceley was a natural taker for the intellectual bait.’

‘Signore, he is impressive, he is handsome, he is famous, he is prestigious—Am I correct in saying “prestigious”?’

‘It really means he’s a bit of a conjuror. And so, of course, in a sense, he is.’

‘And therefore to be acquired by Lady Braceley. Or, at least, considered.’

‘You may be right. I understand she’s staying at my hotel. I heard her name at the desk.’

‘Her nephew, Mr Dorne, is her guest.’

‘Fortunate youth! Perhaps. By the way, what are the charges for these jaunts?’

‘In the top bracket and, at that, exceedingly high. I would have said impertinently so but, as you see, he is getting the response. One can only hope the patrons are satisfied.’

‘In any case you have given me the opportunity to form an opinion. I’m extremely obliged to you.’

‘But, please! Come,’ said the jaunty Signor Pace, ‘let us make our addition to the list.’

He gaily drew it towards him and at the bottom wrote his addition.

‘You see!’ he cried in playful triumph. ‘I remembered everything! The rank! The spelling!’

‘If you don’t mind, we’ll forget about the rank and the spelling.’

The visitor drew a line through the word ‘Superintendent’ and another through the letter ‘y’, so that the entry read:

‘R. Allen, London.’

It became fairly clear from the outset why Mr Sebastian Mailer made extravagant charges for his expeditions.

At three-thirty in the afternoon two superb Lancias arrived at the rendezvous near the Church of the Trinity and therefore within a very short distance of the hotel where three of Mr Mailer’s prospects were staying.

From here, as they assembled, his seven guests looked down at April azaleas flaring on the Spanish Steps and at Rome suddenly laid out before them in a wide gesture. There was a sense of opulence and of excitement in the air.

Alleyn got there before the appointed time and saw the cars draw up. They had small labels in their windows:
‘Il
Cicerone’. Out of one of them stepped a dark man of romantic appearance whom he at once recognized as Barnaby Grant and out of the other the person he had come to see: Sebastian Mailer. He was smartened up since Barnaby Grant’s last encounter with him and was dressed in a black suit of some material that might have been alpaca. This, together with a pair of clumping black shoes gave him a dubiously priestly look and made Alleyn think of Corvo and wonder if he might turn out to be such another. The white silk shirt was clean and the black bow tie looked new. He now wore a black beret on his cropped head and no longer had the appearance of an Englishman.

Alleyn kept his distance among a group of sightseers who milled about taking photographs. He saw that while Sebastian Mailer, half-smiling, talked vivaciously, Grant seemed to make little or no response.
He had his back to Alleyn who thought the nape of his neck looked indignant. It looks, Alleyn thought, like the neck of a learner-driver seen from the rear. Rigid, cross and apprehensive.

A young woman approached the cars, spotted Mailer and made towards him. She had a glowing air about her as if Rome had a little gone to her head. Miss Sophy Jason, Alleyn said to himself. He saw her look quickly at Barnaby Grant. Mailer pulled slightly at his beret, made a little bow and introduced her. The girl’s manner was shy, Alleyn thought, but not at all gauche: rather charming, in fact. Nevertheless she said something to Grant that seemed to disconcert him. He glared at her, replied very shortly and turned away. The girl blushed painfully.

This brief tableau was broken by the arrival of two over-sized persons hung about with canvas satchels and expensive cameras: a man and a woman. The Van der Veghels, Alleyn concluded and, like Barnaby Grant before him, was struck by their resemblance to each other and their strangely archaic faces. They were well-dressed in a non-with-it sort of way: both of them in linen and both wearing outsize shoes with great rubber-studded soles and canvas tops. They wore sensibly shady hats and identical sun-glasses with pink frames. They were eager in their greetings and evidently had met Grant before. What great hands and feet you have, Baron and Baroness, thought Alleyn.

Lady Braceley and her nephew were still to come. No doubt it would be entirely in character for them to keep the party waiting. He decided it was time for him to present himself and did so, ticket in hand.

Mailer had the kind of voice Alleyn had expected: a rather fluting alto. He was a bad colour and his hands were slightly tremulous. But he filled his role very competently: there was the correct degree of suavity and assurance, the suggestion that everything was to be executed at the highest level.

‘So glad you are joining us, Mr Allen,’ said Sebastian Mailer. ‘Do come and meet the others, won’t you? May I introduce—’

The Baron and Baroness were cordial. Grant looked hard at him, nodded with what seemed to be an uneasy blend of reluctance and good manners, and asked him if he knew Rome well.

‘Virtually, not at all,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ve never been here for more than three or four days at a time and I’m not a systematic sightseer.’

‘No?’

‘No. I want things to occur and I’m afraid spend far too much time sitting at a caffè table waiting for them to do so which of course they don’t. But who knows? One of these days the heavens may open and big drama descend upon me.’

Alleyn was afterwards to regard this as the major fluke-remark of his career. At the moment he was merely astonished to see what an odd response it drew from Barnaby Grant. He changed colour, threw an apprehensive glance at Alleyn, opened his mouth, shut it and finally said ‘Oh,’ without any expression at all.

‘But today,’ Alleyn said, ‘I hope to improve my condition. Do we, by any chance, visit one of your Simon’s haunts? That would be a wonderful idea.’

Again Grant seemed to be about to speak and again he boggled. After a sufficiently awkward pause he said: ‘There’s some idea of it. Mailer will explain. Excuse me, will you.’

He turned away. All right, Alleyn thought. But if you hate it as much as all this, why the hell do you do it?

He moved on to Sophy Jason, who was standing apart and seemed to be glad of his company. We’re all too old for her, Alleyn thought. Perhaps the nephew of Lady Braceley will meet the case but one doubts it. He engaged Sophy in conversation and thought her a nice intelligent girl with a generous allowance of charm. She looked splendid against the background of azaleas, Rome and a pontifical sky.

Before long Sophy found herself telling Alleyn about her suddenly-bereaved friend, about this being her first visit to Rome, about the fortunate accident of the cancellation and finally about her job. It really was extraordinary, she suddenly reflected, how much she was confiding to this quiet and attentive stranger. She felt herself blushing. ‘I can’t imagine why I’m gabbling away like this!’ she exclaimed.

‘It’s obliging of you to talk to me,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ve just been, not exactly slapped back but slightly edged off by the Guest of Honour.’

‘Nothing to what I was!’ Sophy ejaculated. ‘I’m still cringing.’

‘But—isn’t he one of your publisher’s authors?’

‘He’s our great double-barrel. I was dumb enough to remind him that I had been presented by my boss. He took the news like a dose of poison.’

‘How very odd of him.’

‘It was really a bit of a facer. He’d seemed so unfierce and amiable on the earlier occasion and has the reputation in the firm of being a lamb. Aren’t we rather slow getting off our mark? Mr Mailer is looking at his watch.’

‘Major Sweet’s twenty minutes late and so are Lady Braceley and the Hon. Kenneth Dorne. They’re staying at the—‘ He broke off. ‘Here, I fancy, they come.’

And here, in fact, they came and there was Mr Mailer, his beret completely off, advancing with a winning and proprietary air towards them.

Alleyn wondered what first impression they made on Sophy Jason. For all her poise and obvious intelligence he doubted if the like of Sonia Braceley had ever come her way. Alleyn knew quite a lot about Sonia Braceley. She began life as the Hon. Sonia Dorne and was the daughter of a beer-baron whose children, by and large, had turned out disastrously. Alleyn had actually met her, many years ago, when visiting his Ambassadorial elder brother George at one of his official Residences. Even then she had what his brother, whom Alleyn tolerantly regarded as a bit of an ass, alluded to as ‘a certain reputation’. With the passage of time, this reputation had consolidated. ‘She has experienced everything,’ Sir George had weightily quipped, ‘except poverty.’

Seeing her now it was easy to believe it. It’s the legs, Alleyn thought. More than the precariously maintained mask or the flabby underarm or the traitorous neck. It’s the legs. Although the stockings are tight as a skin they look as if they should hang loose about these brittle spindle-shanks and how hazardously she’s balanced on her golden kid sandals. It’s the legs.

But the face was not too good either. Even if one discounted the ruches under the eyes and the eyes themselves, there was still that dreadfully slack mouth. It was painted the fashionable livid colour but declared itself as unmistakably as if it had been scarlet: the mouth of an elderly Maenad.

Her nephew bore some slight resemblance to her. Alleyn remembered that his father, the second Lord Dorne, had been rapidly divorced by two wives and that the third, Kenneth’s mother, had been, as George would have said, ‘put away’. Not much of a start, Alleyn thought, compassionately, and wondered if the old remedy of ‘live on a quid-a-day and earn it,’ would have done anything for Kenneth Dorne.

As they advanced, he noticed that the young man watched Mailer with an air that seemed to be made up of anxiety, furtiveness and perhaps subservience. He was restless, pallid, yellow and damp about the brow. When Mailer introduced him and he offered his hand it proved to be clammy as to the palm and tremulous. Rather unexpectedly, he had a camera slung from his shoulder.

His aunt also shook hands. Within the doeskin glove the fingers contracted, momentarily retained their clasp and slowly withdrew. Lady Braceley looked fixedly into Alleyn’s eyes. So she still, he thought, appalled, gives it a go.

She said: ‘Isn’t this
fun?’
Her voice was beautiful.

Mailer was at her elbow with Grant in tow: ‘Lady Braceley, may I present? Our guest of honour—Mr Barnaby Grant.’

She said: ‘Do you know you’re the sole reason for my coming to this party? Kenneth, with a team of wild horses, wouldn’t have bullied me into sightseeing at this ghastly hour.
You’re
my “sight”.’

‘I don’t know,’ Grant said rapidly, ‘how I’m meant to answer that. Except that I’m sure you’ll find the Church of S. Tommaso in Pallaria much more rewarding.’

‘Is that where we’re going? Is it a
ruin?’
she asked, opening her devastated eyes very wide and drawling out the word. ‘I can’t tell you how I hate roo-ins.’

There was perhaps one second’s silence and then Grant said: ‘It’s not exactly that. It’s—well, you’ll see when we get there.’

‘Does it come in your book? I’ve read your book—that Simon one—which is a great compliment if you only knew it because you don’t write my sort of book at all. Don’t be huffy. I adored this one although I haven’t a clue, really, what it’s about. You shall explain it to me. Kenneth tried, didn’t you, darling, but he was even more muddling than the book. Mr Allen, come over here and tell me—have
you
read the last Barnaby Grant and if you have, did you know what it was about?’

Alleyn was spared the task of finding an answer to this by the intervention of Sebastian Mailer who rather feverishly provided the kind of raillery that seemed to be invited and got little reward for his pains. When he archly said: ‘Lady Braceley, you’re being very naughty. I’m quite sure you didn’t miss the last delicate nuance of
Simon in Tuscany,’
she merely said ‘What?’ and walked away before he could repeat his remark.

It was now the turn of the Baron and Baroness. Lady Braceley received the introduction vaguely. ‘Aren’t we going to start?’ she asked Alleyn and Grant. ‘Don’t you rather hate hanging about? Such a bore, don’t you think? Who’s missing?’

Upon this cool inquiry, Sebastian Mailer explained that Major Sweet was joining them at the basilica and proceeded to outline the programme for the afternoon. They would drive round the Colosseum and the Forum and would then visit the basilica of S. Tommaso in Pallaria which, as they all knew, was the setting for the great central scene in Mr Barnaby Grant’s immensely successful novel,
Simon in Latium.
He had prevailed upon the distinguished author, Mr Mailer went on, to say a few words about the basilica in its relation to his book which, as they would hear from him, was largely inspired by it.

Throughout this exposition Barnaby Grant, Alleyn noticed, seemed to suffer the most exquisite embarrassment. He stared at the ground, hunched his shoulders, made as if to walk away and, catching perhaps a heightened note in Mr Mailer’s voice, thought better of this and remained, wretchedly it appeared, where he was.

Mr Mailer concluded by saying that as the afternoon was deliciously clement they would end it with a picnic tea on the Palatine Hill. The guests would then be driven to their hotels to relax and change for dinner and would be called for at nine o’clock.

He now distributed the guests. He, with Lady Braceley, Alleyn and Barnaby Grant would take one car; the Van der Veghels, Sophy Jason and Kenneth Dorne would take the other. The driver of the second car was introduced. ‘Giovanni is fluent in English,’ said Mr Mailer, ‘and learned in the antiquities. He will discourse upon matters of interest en route. Come, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr Mailer, ‘let us embark.
Pronto!’

The four arches that lead into the porch of S. Tommaso in Pallaria are of modest proportion and their pillars, which in classic times adorned some pagan temple, are slender and worn. The convolvulus tendrils that their carver twined about them have broken in many places but the work is so delicate that the stone seems to tremble. In the most shadowed corner of the porch sat a woman with a tray of postcards. She wore a black headscarf pulled forward over her face and a black cotton dress. She shouted something, perhaps at Mr Mailer. Her voice was strident which may have caused her remark to sound like an insult. He paid no attention to it.

He collected his party about him and looked at his watch. ‘Major Sweet,’ he said, ‘is late. We shall not wait for him but before we go in I should like to give you, very shortly, some idea of this extraordinary monument. In the fourth century before Christ—’

From the dark interior there erupted an angry gentleman who shouted as he came.

‘Damned disgusting lot of hanky-panky,’ shouted this gentleman. ‘What the hell—‘ He pulled up short on seeing the group and narrowed his blazing eyes in order to focus upon it.

He had a savage white moustache and looked like an improbable revival of an Edwardian warrior. ‘Are you Mailer?’ he shouted. ‘Sweet,’ he added, in explanation.

‘Major Sweet, may I—’

‘You’re forty-three minutes late. Forty-three minutes!’

‘Unfortunately—’

‘Spare me,’ begged Major Sweet, ‘the specious excuses. There is no adequate explanation for unpunctuality.’

Lady Braceley moved in.
‘All
my fault, Major,’ she said. ‘I kept everybody waiting and I’ve no excuses: I never have and I always do. I dare say you’d call it “ladies’ privilege”, wouldn’t you? Or would you?’