Another Death in Venice, page 2
She looked at Michael as she spoke, not challengingly but with the resigned weariness of a nit-nurse in a slum-school.
‘Hello, hello!’
It was the husband with his quiz compère smile.
‘So we’ve been passed fit for human consumption! That’s grand. Give us another year and the waiters might start speaking. It’s Mike and Sarah, isn’t it? I thought so. I always do a roll-call soon as I arrive anywhere. Force of habit. I’m Wilf, Wilf Trueman. You’ve met the wife. Nice of you to let us join you. Hey, Mario! Una bottiglia di vino. This one’s on me, I insist. Grande bottiglia, Mario. My usual.’
Michael caught Sarah’s eye and was pleased to see his own horror reflected there. But he realized that the slightest sign of acerbity on his part would drive her into a compensatory excess of sweetness and light with God knew what unbearable results.
He held out his hand.
‘Glad to meet you, Wilf.’
Wilf took the proffered hand, shook it, then gave it a squeeze and a twist.
‘Just testing,’ he said. ‘I like to know if my new friends are masons or poofs. Well, Sarah, I don’t think he wears an apron, but I’m not sure about a skirt. Just joking, old man,’
‘For God’s sake!’ said Wendy, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting another.
‘What’s your line, Mike?’ asked Wilf. ‘How do you butter the bread?’
‘I work in a Poly. A Polytechnic, that is. I’m a lecturer.’
‘Well, well,’ chuckled Wilf. ‘I guessed something like that. Stands out a mile. Mind you, it’s not really fair. Some might say, it takes a one to know a one.’
With a sinking heart Michael awaited the revelation that he was sharing a table with the Provost of King’s.
‘Are you a lecturer too?’ asked Sarah.
Wendy coughed derisively.
‘What? No! I lecher a bit, you might say, nudge, nudge. No, I have a little business. A few little businesses actually. Butchers. That’s why I like to meat people, eh! But I know something about the teaching game. I’m on the council, deputy chairman of the Education Committee this year, so we’re in the same line in a way, you and me, Mike.’
He grinned triumphantly before going on.
‘What’s your subject, Mike? No. Let me guess. Arithmetic. You look a calculating kind of chap. Right?’
‘No,’ said Michael. ‘I’m in the department of communications media. I specialize in cinema.’
‘Well, well. They pay you for that, do they? I like a good picture, mind you. Here, I saw this one the other week, Midnight in the Dorm, do you know it? Never mind, I’ll tell you all about it some time when we’re by ourselves.’
Michael smiled wanly at this threat, a smile which became a rictus of pain when he saw the huge plastic bottle of sweet white wine which Mario was depositing on the table.
He tried to refuse on the grounds of a delicate stomach, but Wilf insisted the more, asserting its therapeutic qualities like a shareholder.
‘Which party do you represent?’ said Sarah.
‘Party? You can stick your parties, no offence. I belong to a ratepayers’ group. I’ve got the small businessmen behind me. What have your parties ever done for them?’
The question was rhetorical, but Sarah, who spent half her life (Michael alleged) pushing socialist literature through letter-boxes, was more than willing to answer it. Michael, appreciating now why Wendy preferred to sit a couple of yards away, pushed back his own chair and smiled politely at her. She looked back at him with an expression so remote that he wondered if she were on some kind of drug.
‘I think the price of things has gone up ridiculously,’ she suddenly said.
‘Ah. You’ve been here before?’
‘Yes. Benidorm and Dubrovnik. Profiteering.’
‘Ah,’ said Michael again. He had a feeling that this was not a conversation to pursue, but the habit of precision was part of his job.
‘The economies of Spain and Jugoslavia used to stand in a very low relationship to ours,’ he explained. ‘Though of course that is no longer the case.’
‘Some bastard’s making money. Whisky here is more expensive than at home. Do you know that?’
‘Yes. I suppose it would be. But there are some very palatable Italian brandies at very reasonable prices.’
‘I don’t like brandy.’
The arrival of the first course drew them back to the table.
‘Don’t eat over-hearty,’ advised Wilf. ‘Leave some space for the chicken and chips.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The barbecue. You’re going to the barbecue, aren’t you?’
Sarah and Michael exchanged alarmed glances.
‘Everyone goes to the barbecue!’ said Wilf. ‘You’ll look very stand-offish if you don’t come. Very stand-offish.’
How soon he had found the right buttons to press, thought Michael admiringly as a look of guilt replaced Sarah’s alarm.
‘We haven’t got tickets,’ she said. ‘It must be booked up.’
‘In any case,’ began Michael, who frequently had occasion to deplore his wife’s use of the refusal conditional when a little extra effort would produce the refusal absolute. But it was too late. Wilf was out of his seat and heading for the small side dining-room where the hotel courier and reception staff ate their, it was alleged, very superior meals. He returned triumphant with two pieces of cardboard which he tucked into the neck of Sarah’s sun-top.
‘There we are,’ he said. ‘Just call me Mr Fixit.’
‘He can fix anything that doesn’t matter,’ said Wendy to no one in particular.
The barbecue coach came as they were drinking coffee. It had already picked up holidaymakers from other hotels and looked quite crowded, but in the event only five couples from the Leonardo climbed aboard.
‘There must be a lot of stand-offish people here,’ observed Michael drily to Sarah.
‘Fortnighters,’ said Wilf from the seat behind. ‘They all went last week, I expect. That’s how I heard it’s so good.’
It was unspeakable. They sat at trestle tables in what looked like a derelict smallholding which had specialized in chickens and pigs. The chickens had probably died of undernourishment, or worse, and were shortly served enshrouded in their own grease. To wash this down, the clients were invited to help themselves freely from a huge barrel of wine which turned out to be like Wilf’s usual – white, warm, weak and sweet.
There was dancing too, with music supplied by a group in peasant costume who, after a token gesture towards their own country with Arrivederci Roma, began to run through the whole gamut of English Palais music from the Military Two-step to the Conga. There were three elements present, Michael realized, the ‘Come Dancing’ lot who did their tailor’s dummy pirouettes wearing fixed grimaces like royalty with piles; then the non-contact shake-and-wagglers; and finally the Italian youths who clearly came to every barbecue and stood overlooking the dancing like bored satyrs till they found a partner to clasp tightly and (he guessed) painfully as they swayed slowly in time to rhythms other than the band’s.
Wilf had carried Sarah off into the maelstrom and Michael felt he had to ask Wendy. His intention was to shake-and-waggle but the press was so intense that it soon became a choice between complete separation or close contact. He took her in his arms with some reluctance but she was soft and warm and the experience soon became so voluptuous that the strains of a conga came as both relief and intrusion. He lost touch with Wendy in the subsequent reshuffling and found himself clinging to a behind which his gentle probings told him didn’t begin to compare in terms of shape or texture.
Suddenly he was shouldered violently aside.
‘I’ve warned you before,’ growled Bob taking his place in the line. The woman ahead looked round and Michael now saw it was Molly.
‘Sorry,’ he said. It was, he realized, both too little and too much.
He looked around the dance floor but could not spot Wendy, nor for that matter Wilf and Sarah, so he returned to his seat via the bar where those who could not stomach the free wine paid exorbitant prices for more potable liquor.
The bitterness of his Campari-soda was a pleasant antidote to the wine, and for a few minutes with his eyes half-closed he was almost able to transform the setting into some sophisticated Roman night-spot where the dolce vita had been going on for two thousand years.
Then the band launched into ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ and he was back to reality. The others had still not returned and he made his way once more to the bar. This was situated behind the bandstand in a kind of concrete blockhouse which might have been purpose-built for security reasons or just left behind by the Germans in 1944. As he approached he saw Bob at the bar and, reluctant to risk again the man’s inexplicable truculence, Michael moved behind the building to wait till he had left.
Suddenly he was back in Italy. The music, changed now to a gentle waltz, was merely a background to the richness of the night. Out there waiting was … who? Mangano, perhaps; Magnani; Monica Vitti; Giulietta Masina …
It is dark. Cicadas grate. A woman giggles. The camera grows used to the dark as the human eye does. Lines of vines emerge, wreathed around wires strung between posts. Among them here and there, white beneath the moon, human limbs wreath around each other also.
He moves forward, carefully but eagerly. Somewhere in another aisle a match splutters. Through the leaves a woman’s face is visible for a moment, lips red and sensual, teeth bright in the moist open mouth.
‘Why don’t you all sod off?’ said a weary voice.
Michael halted. He knew that voice.
A man said something in Italian, too rapidly for Michael’s sub-title linguistics, and there was an outburst of laughter. There were about half a dozen of them. He guessed they were the young pseudo-Byrons who hung around the dance floor.
The man’s voice came again.
‘Signorina, come, I will show you a nice place, these others no good. Come.’
‘Just sod off, I say. All of you.’
It was definitely Wendy. Michael was uncertain what to do. He hardly knew the woman, didn’t want to get to know her better and if she cared to wander around in the dark with these youngsters, that was her business.
On the other hand she didn’t sound as if she wanted their company.
‘Signorina,’ murmured the Italian urgently. ‘Please, you come, eh, signorina?’
Signorina! Michael grinned. He was wasting his time with that subtle bit of flattery, he thought. He was both right and wrong.
‘I’m not signorina, I’m signora,’ declared Wendy. ‘So go and find someone your own age, sonny.’
Enough of this must have got across to the others to cause a general laugh at the wooer’s expense and he was provoked to seize Wendy’s arm as she tried to brush him aside.
‘Oh, get your greasy fingers off me,’ she said. There was no panic in her voice, and while one part of Michael’s mind told him his intervention was more likely to cause trouble than curb it, another part assured him this was the logic of cowardice and sent him moving forward.
‘Evening, Wendy,’ he said in his best Noel Coward casual voice. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Who’s that? Oh, it’s you,’ said Wendy ungraciously.
‘The bus will be going soon,’ said Michael. ‘The dance is over.’
It was true. The strains of the waltz had faded away and been replaced by the shuffling of feet and the hoarse roar of diesel engines.
Wendy stepped away from the young Italian and Michael sighed with relief. Then she screamed, twisted half round, lost her balance and fell into the young man’s arms. Michael rushed forward and pulled her free.
‘Go back to the car park,’ he said steadily. She walked away and the young man tried to brush past Michael, who grasped him by the pocket of his wine-red sports shirt. It felt rather expensive. The youngster pulled away and he heard the pocket tear. Now the boy turned on him angrily and for a moment they stood face to face.
‘OK, blue-eyes,’ said Michael.
They locked arms round each other like a pair of Cumberland wrestlers and crashed to the ground, Michael on top. He felt the boy’s sinewy body go limp beneath him and at the same time he had a sudden panicky awareness of the other youths all crowding around him. Pushing himself upright, he whirled round, ready to defend himself. They hadn’t moved but remained in an interested row along one of the vines. Gathering his Anglo-Saxon dignity together, he strolled after Wendy. He had, he felt, done rather well.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her again.
‘I hate those bloody things,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, as judiciously as became a victor, ‘there’s good and bad, I suppose. They’re not very old.’
‘What’s that got to do with it? Once they’re in your hair, who cares if they’re ancient or have just been hatched?’
Her choice of metaphor puzzled then perturbed him.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘Those awful insects. Ciceros. What do you think?’
‘Cicadas,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus. Is that why you screamed?’
‘It got right in my hair,’ she said.
Michael looked round with a mixture of unease and guilt. Only the rows of vines scratched the velvet darkness, but out there was a young mafioso with good grounds for a bitter vendetta. No, that was an absurd over-dramatization. More probably he was the son of some respected local citizen who was at this moment ringing the carabinieri to complain of this unprovoked assault by a drunken foreigner.
‘I thought he’d grabbed you,’ he said feebly, but she had moved on and it struck him that she probably hadn’t even noticed the brief moment of violence.
In the barbecue area the holiday-makers were still moving in slow files to the bus park. Some, Michael noticed with a shudder, in a desperate effort to get their money’s worth were standing by the wine-vat filling and refilling their goblets. He suddenly recalled a childhood trip to Blackpool to see the lights. The one image that remained to him was of an endless tunnel of flashing neon jammed solid with coaches, with human heads being sick through every window.
‘Hello, hello! What’s been going on here then?’
It was Wilf, very jovial, standing with his arm round Sarah’s shoulders and his small bright-glinting eyes flickering from his wife to Michael.
Wendy ignored him.
‘A breath of fresh air,’ said Michael.
‘Fresh air? In this country. Fresh air!’
‘Michael’s been very kind to me,’ snapped Wendy.
Sarah tried to raise her eyebrows quizzically. Her thin over-mobile face lacked the control necessary for such subtleties and she merely looked startled.
‘Anyone seen my missus?’
It was Bob, sweating profusely in his muscle-taut tee-shirt. For so possessive a man, thought Michael, he really was extremely careless with the girl.
‘Molly? No,’ said Wilf. ‘Probably went for a stroll, old son. V. noisy it got in here. V. noisy you got! Where do you put it all, eh? No, she’ll have gone for a breath of fresh air. Mike, you didn’t spot her when you were out there enjoying your fresh air?’
Michael shook his head. Wilf’s suggestive intonation had not been lost on Bob but words were not going to help.
‘Hadn’t we better get back to the bus?’ said Sarah. One of her pet phobias was being late and missing things. Michael usually would have made some crack but not tonight. The Leonardo was beginning to feel like some comer of a foreign beach which was as near to England, home, and safety as he could hope for tonight.
On the coach he found that Wilf had manipulated him into sitting next to Wendy while he and Sarah shared a seat a few places back. Was this wife-swapping, Education Committee style? The coach was delayed because Bob and Molly had not yet turned up.
‘I hope they’re all right,’ said Michael, recalling his own experience. On reflection, if Bob found his wife being chatted up by any of the local lads, it was the locals he felt sorry for. He peered out of the window to see if he could spot them. The other half-dozen coaches had all started to move and were disputing the exit with much gunning of engines and hooting of horns. A figure was running from one coach to another, then slowly moving down the line of windows scrutinizing the faces inside. With a quite disproportionate shock of fear, Michael recognized him as the boy he had attacked. The red shirt was unmistakable. Whether his motive was immediate personal revenge or simple legal identification he couldn’t guess. He took out his handkerchief and mopped his face, partly out of necessity, partly as concealment. But with Wendy sitting next to him, concealment was futile.
A cheer went up. Bob and Molly had arrived. She smiled shyly at their reception, he glowered, then both were thrown into their seat as the driver, who had been muttering impatiently to himself, released the clutch pedal and the coach bounded forward. As the vehicle squeezed through the narrow gate, the Italian boy appeared at the window. He recognized Wendy and, beyond her, Michael. His mouth opened in an inaudible shout and he rapped on the glass. Wendy looked down at him with total indifference. Michael tried to compose his features into an expression of conciliatory rue. The coach gathered speed. The youth ran alongside for a few yards, then was carried back into the darkness by the rushing road and Michael relaxed in his seat and tried to rationalize his fear. Behind him Wilf began to sing ‘Show Me The Way To Go Home’, and gradually other voices took up the burden, singing the words with a tipsy vigour which permitted no hint of irony.
That night it was Michael who awoke in the early hours to hear Wendy sobbing. It was not the noise that had disturbed him, but a slight nausea brought on, he diagnosed, by a combination of drink and fright. The crying stopped for a moment and he heard voices. Then it started again. He sat up in bed and Sarah turned over muttering, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s Wendy. She’s weeping again.’
‘Uh-huh? Well, let her weep.’
She pulled the single sheet over her head and went back to sleep. Michael too subsided and lay awake, listening till he was certain his feeling of sickness was not going to necessitate getting out of bed. He put his arm round Sarah’s naked body but the night was too warm for the contact not to become quickly uncomfortable, so he turned away, started counting men whose top jobs he could do standing on his head, and after fifty fell asleep.
