When in Rome (6 page)

Major Sweet turned his blue glare upon her for two or three seconds. He then yapped ‘How do you do’ and seemed to wait for further developments.

Mr Mailer with perfect suavity performed the introductions. Major Sweet acknowledged them by making slight bows to the ladies and an ejaculation of sorts to the men. ‘Hyah,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Mr Mailer. ‘To resume. When we are inside the basilica I shall hand over to our most distinguished guest of honour. But perhaps beforehand a very brief historical note may be of service.’

He was succinct and adequate, Sophy grudgingly admitted. The basilica of San Tommaso, he said, was one of a group of monuments in Rome where the visitors could walk downwards through the centuries into Mithraic time. At the top level, here where they now stood, was the twelfth-century basilica which in a moment they would enter. Beneath it, was the excavated third-century church which it had replaced. ‘And below that—imagine it—’ said Mr Mailer, ‘there has lain sleeping for over eighteen hundred years a house of the Flavian period: a classic “gentleman’s residence” with its own private chapel dedicated to the god Mithras.’ He paused and Sophy, though she regarded him with the most profound distaste, thought: He’s interested in what he’s talking about. He knows his stuff. He’s enjoying himself.

Mr Mailer went on to describe briefly the enormous task of nineteenth-century excavation that had so gradually disclosed first, the earlier basilica and then, deep down beneath it, the pagan household. ‘Rome has risen, hereabout, sixty feet since those times,’ he ended. ‘Does that surprise you? It does me, every time I think of it.’

‘It doesn’t me,’ Major Sweet announced. ‘Nothing surprises me. Except human gullibility,’ he added darkly. ‘However!’

Mr Mailer shot him an uneasy glance. Sophy gave a little snort of suppressed amusement and caught Barnaby Grant looking at her with something like appreciation. Lady Braceley, paying no attention to what was said, let her ravaged eyes turn from one man’s face to another. The Van der Veghels, standing close together, listened intently. Kenneth Dorne, Sophy noticed, was restless and anxious-looking. He shuffled his feet and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. And the tall man, what was his name—Allen?—stood a little apart, politely attentive and, Sophy thought, extremely observant.

‘But now,’ Mr Mailer said, ‘shall we begin our journey into the past?’

The woman with the postcards had sidled between the group and the entrance. She had kept her face down and it was still shadowed by her black headscarf. She muttered, almost inaudibly,
‘Cartoline?
Posta-carda?’ edging towards Sebastian Mailer. He said generally to his company, ‘There are better inside. Pay no attention,’ and moved forward to pass the woman.

With extraordinary swiftness she pushed back her headscarf, thrust her face up at him and whispered:
‘Brutto! Farabutto! Traditore!’
and added what seemed to be a stream of abuse. Her eyes burned. Her lips were retracted in a grin and then pursed together. She’s going to spit in his face, thought Sophy in alarm and so she was, but Mr Mailer was too smart for her. He dodged and she spat after him and stood her ground with the air of a grand-opera virago. She even gave a hoarse screech of eldritch laughter. Mr Mailer entered the basilica. His discomforted flock divided round the postcard-seller and slunk after him.

‘Kenneth, darling,’ Lady Braceley muttered. ‘Honestly!
Not
one’s idea of a gay little trip!’

Sophy found herself between Barnaby Grant and Alleyn. ‘Was that lady,’ Alleyn asked Grant, ‘put in as an extra touch of atmosphere? Does she recur, or was she a colourful accident?’

Grant said, ‘I don’t know anything about her. Mad, I should think. Ghastly old bag, wasn’t she?’ and Sophy thought: Yes, but he hasn’t answered the question.

She said to Alleyn, ‘Would you suppose that all that carry-on, if translated into Anglo-Saxon terms, would amount to no more than a cool glance and an indrawn breath?’

Grant looked across Alleyn at her, and said with a kind of eagerness, ‘Oh, rather! You have to make allowances for their sense of drama.’

‘Rather excessive in this instance,’ she said coolly, giving, she said to herself, snub for snub. Grant moved round and said hurriedly, ‘I know who you are, now. I didn’t before. We met at Koster Press didn’t we?’ Koster Press was the name of his publisher’s house in London.

‘For a moment,’ Sophy said and then: ‘Oh, but how lovely!’

They were in the basilica.

It glowed sumptuously as if it generated its own light. It was alive with colour: ‘mediterranean’ red, clear pinks, blues and greens; ivory and crimson marble, tingling gold mosaic. And dominant in this concourse of colour the great vermilion that cries out in the backgrounds of Rome and Pompeii.

Sophy moved away from the group and stared with delight at this enchantment. Grant, who had been left with Alleyn, abruptly joined her.

‘I’ve got to talk about this,’ he muttered. ‘I wish to God I hadn’t.’

She looked briefly at him. ‘Then why do it?’ said Sophy.

‘You think that was an affectation. I’m sorry.’

‘Really, it couldn’t matter less what I think.’

‘You needn’t be so snappish.’

They stared at each other in astonishment.

‘I can’t make this out,’ Grant said unexpectedly. ‘I don’t know you,’ and Sophy in a panic, stammered, ‘It’s nothing. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I snapped.’

‘Not at all.’

‘And now,’ fluted Sebastian Mailer, ‘I hand over to my most distinguished colleague, Mr Grant.’

Grant made Sophy an extremely stuffy little bow and moved out to face his audience.

Once he was launched he too did his stuff well and with considerable charm, which was more than could be said for Mr Mailer. For one thing, Sophy conceded, Grant looked a lot nicer. His bony face was really rather beautifully shaped and actually had a carved, medieval appearance that went handsomely with its surroundings. He led them farther into the glowing church. There were two or three other groups of sightseers but, compared with the traffic in most celebrated monuments, these were few.

Grant explained that even in this, the most recent of the three levels of San Tommaso, there was a great richness of time sequences. When in the twelfth century the ancient church below it was filled in, its treasures, including pieces from the pagan household underneath it, were brought up into this new basilica so that now classical, medieval and renaissance works mingled. ‘They’ve kept company,’ Grant said, ‘for a long time and have grown together in the process. You can see how well they suit each other.’

‘It happens on the domestic level too,’ Alleyn said, ‘don’t you think? In houses that have belonged to the same family for many generations? There’s a sort of consonance of differences.’

‘Exactly so,’ Grant agreed with a quick look at him. ‘Shall we move on?’

A wave of scent announced the arrival of Lady Braceley at Alleyn’s elbow. ‘What a marvellous way of putting it,’ she murmured. ‘How clever you are.’

The doeskin glove with its skeletal enclosure touched his arm. She tipped her head on one side and was looking up at him. Sophy, watching, thought a shutter had come down over his face and indeed Alleyn suffered a wave of revulsion and pity and a recognition of despair. I’d give a hell of a lot, he thought, to be shot of this lady.

Sebastian Mailer had come up on the far side of Lady Braceley. He murmured something that Alleyn couldn’t catch. Grant was talking again. The hand was withdrawn from Alleyn’s arm and the pair turned away and moved out of sight behind the junction of two pilasters. Now, Alleyn speculated, was Mailer doing a rescue job or had he something particular and confidential to say to Lady Braceley?

Grant led his party into the centre of the nave and through the enclosed
schola cantorum
, saying, Sophy thought, neither too much nor too little but everything well. She herself was caught up in wonder at the great golden bowl-shaped mosaic of the apse. Acanthus and vine twined tenderly together to enclose little groups of everyday persons going about their medieval business. The Cross, dominant though it was, seemed to have grown out of some pre-Christian tree. ‘I shall say nothing about the apse,’ Grant said. ‘It speaks for itself.’

Mailer and Lady Braceley had re-appeared. She sat down on a choir bench and whether by some accident of lighting or because she was overtaken by one of those waves of exhaustion that unexpectedly fall upon the old, she looked as if she had shrunk within her own precarious façade. Only for a moment, however. She straightened her back and beckoned her nephew who fidgeted about on the edge of the group, half-attentive and half-impatient. He joined her and they whispered together, he yawning and fidgeting, she apparently in some agitation.

The party moved on round the basilica. The Van der Veghels took photographs and asked a great many questions. They were laboriously well-informed in Roman antiquities. Presently the Baron, with an arch look, began to inquire about the particular features that appeared so vividly in Grant’s novel. Were they not standing, at this very moment, in the place where his characters assembled? Might
one not follow, precisely, in the steps they had taken during that wonderful climactic scene?

‘O-o-oah!’ cried the Baroness running her voice up and down a chromatic scale of enthusiasm. ‘It will be so farskinating. Yes?’

Grant reacted to this plea as he had to earlier conversations: with a kind of curbed distaste. He gave Sophy and Alleyn one each of his sharp glances, darted a look of something like pure hatred at Sebastian Mailer and suggested confusedly, that an author seldom reproduced in scrupulous detail, an actual mise-en-scène any more than he used unadulterated human material. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t start off with San Tommaso,’ he shot out at Sophy. ‘Of course I did. But I gave it another name and altered it to my purpose.’

‘As you had every right to do,’ Sophy said boldly and Alleyn thought the two of them were united for the moment in their common field of activity.

‘Yes, but do
show
us,’ Lady Braceley urged. ‘Don’t be beastly.
Show
us. You promised. You know you did.’

Kenneth Dorne said, ‘Isn’t that why we came? Or not? I thought you were to be the great attraction.’

He had approached Grant and stood in an attitude of some elegance, his left arm extended along one of the closure-slabs of the
schola
, his right hand on his hip. It was not a blatant pose but it was explicit nevertheless and at least one aspect of Kenneth was now revealed. He looked at Grant and widened his eyes. ‘Is it all a sellout?’ he asked. ‘Or have I made a muddle? Or am I merely being impertinent?’

A rabid oath, instantly stifled, burst from Major Sweet. He shouted, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and glared at a wall-painting of the Foolish Virgins.

‘Oh dear,’ Kenneth said, still to Grant. ‘Now the Major’s cross. What
have
I said?’ He yawned again and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief.

Grant gave him a comprehensive look. ‘Nothing to the purpose,’ he said shortly and walked away. Mr Mailer hurried into the breach.

‘Naughty!’ he tossed at Kenneth and then, vindicating Grant to his disconcerted customers, told them he was unbelievably modest.

Lady Braceley eagerly supported this view as did the Van der Veghels. Grant cut short their plaudits by adopting, with a great
effort, it seemed to Alleyn, a brisk and business-like air and by resuming his exposition.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if you’d really like to see the equivalent places to those in the book I’ll be delighted to point them out, although I imagine if you’ve read it they declare themselves pretty obviously. There, in the right-hand aisle, for instance, is the picture so much admired by Simon and, I may add, by me. Doubting Saint Thomas, himself, by Masolino da Panicale. Look at those pinks and the “Pompeian” red.’

‘Fabulous!’ Kenneth restlessly offered. ‘Psychedelic, aren’t they?’

Grant disregarded this. He said to Sophy, ‘He’s so
very
doubtful, isn’t he? Head on one side, lips pursed up and those gimlet fingers! How right that enormous hospital in London was to adopt him: he’s the very pith and marrow of the scientific man, don’t you think?’

Sebastian Mailer gave a shrill little cackle of appreciation: perhaps of surprise.

‘While we are in this aisle of the basilica,’ Grant said, leading them along it for a short distance, ‘you may like to see something that I’m afraid I did adopt holus-bolus.’

He showed them a railed enclosure, about six feet by three in size. They collected round it with little cries of recognition.

It encompassed an open rectangular hole like the mouth of a well. Fixed to the rails was a notice saying in five languages, that climbing them was strictly forbidden.

‘Listen,’ Grant said. ‘Can you hear?’

They stood still. Into the silence came the desultory voices of other sightseers moving about the basilica: the voice of a guide out in the atrium, footfalls on marble and a distant rumour of the Roman streets. ‘Listen,’ Grant repeated and presently from under their feet, scarcely recognizable at first but soon declaring itself, rose the sound of running water, a steady, colloquial voice, complex and unbroken.

‘The Cloaca Maxima?’ Major Sweet demanded.

‘A pure stream leading into it,’ Grant rejoined. ‘More than sixty feet below us. If you lean over the rail you may be able to see that there is an equivalent opening immediately beneath this one, in the floor of the earlier church. Yet another thirty feet below, out of sight unless someone uses a torch, is a third opening and far down
that
, if
a torch is lowered, it’s possible to see the stream that we can hear. You may remember that Simon dropped a pebble from here and that it fell down through the centuries into the hidden waters.’

The Van der Veghels broke into excited comment.

Grant, they warmly informed him, had based the whole complex of imagery in his book upon this exciting phenomenon. ‘As the deeper reaches of Simon’s personality were explored—’ on and on they went, explaining the work to its author. Alleyn, who admired the book, thought that they were probably right but laid far too much insistence on an essentially delicate process of thought.