Another Death in Venice, page 6
To Michael’s surprise, Wilf did not crush this suggestion with the rude guffaw he expected. True, they had ended up on better terms the previous evening than the opening salvos had promised. Dunkerley’s revelation of his African activities had lost him Sarah’s auspices but seemed favourably to impress Wilf. Still, at the very least Michael expected an enquiry to be made as to whether Dunkerley was proposing himself as a paying passenger or a paid guide.
‘Include me out,’ interrupted Sarah.
‘Oh no. Tragic!’ exclaimed Wilf.
‘Like Wendy, I’ve a weak stomach,’ said Sarah. ‘Michael, dear, you go, please. I know you’re keen to see the Malatesta castle where Francesca was killed.’
‘Who?’ said Wilf.
‘Francesca da Rimini,’ said Dunkerley. ‘Wife of Gianciotto Malatesta who, having surprised her in the arms of his brother, Paolo, stabbed them both to death.’
‘Quite right too,’ said Wilf. ‘It’s a husband’s privilege. What say you, Bob?’
Bob turned from the nearby group he was talking with and said, ‘What’s that?’
‘Deceived husband should have the right to chop his wife’s boy-friend. It’s a story Syd here’s been telling us. Good man to have along on our little trip, I’d say. He knows all the local filth. Right then, Mike. Half an hour, shall we say? At the front of the hotel. Will you pick up the packed lunches? See you!’
‘Well, this is nice,’ said Dunkerley, stretching himself luxuriantly in his armchair. ‘I’ve some small experience of being a courier, of course. Mainly in South America and the African game reserves.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t pay as well as shooting people,’ said Sarah acidly.
‘True. But at least the people you work with aren’t shooting back.’
‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Michael gloomily. Dunkerley obviously thought of himself as a non-paying passenger, which left only three men to divide the expenses unless Wilf found someone to fill the sixth place.
‘You know,’ he said to Sarah, ‘if you’re not going, I don’t think I’ll bother either.’
She looked at him, surprised.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
‘But what will you do?’ he asked.
‘Darling, even with your non-productive, layabout job, we spend more than half of our lives away from each other. If you must have a timetable, I shall do some present-shopping and finish The Gulag Archipelago.’
She glowered at him as she spoke. Strange, he thought, how her resentment at any suggestion of dependence on his company never inhibited her keen desire to know where he had been.
‘All right, I’ll go.’
‘Splendid,’ said Dunkerley. ‘I have just been planning an itinerary in my mind and you would be foolish to miss it. Sarah, my dear, do not worry if we are not back by dinner-time. I shall return him to you by midnight.’
‘As late as that, Mr Dunkerley? Take a wooll Michael, just in case.’
‘Don’t let Aristide get under your feet. He has things do such as searching out some accommodation for us.’
He spoke sharply to Aristide in French and the boy nodded and smiled.
‘If he might be permitted to leave our luggage in your room, it would be a great help,’ said Dunkerley. ‘It’s heavy to carry and dangerous to leave, even in the foyer of so illustrious an hotel.’
‘Of course,’ said Sarah.
‘Splendid. Then come along, Michael. There are these packed lunches to collect, are there not?’
Sarah watched them go, entertained by Dunkerley’s emergence as the organizer of the trip. Michael’s need to be persuaded into doing the things he wanted had long ceased to entertain her. She turned to Aristide and received the usual white-toothed smile. He looked much fresher this morning, having changed into a rather smart, dark brown sports shirt and put a pair of green plastic sandals on his feet.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘how did you first meet Mr Dunkerley?’
She had discovered that if she spoke slowly, slightly exaggerating her mouth movements as though to a deaf lip-reader, he picked up nearly everything she said.
‘We meet in Marseilles. He was very helping to me. There was a trouble and he helped.’
‘Oh. What kind of trouble? With the police?’
‘No. Not police.’
Aristide looked slightly put out and Sarah smiled apologetically.
‘No,’ he continued. ‘With, I do not know the word. Not police, but uniform, yes.’
‘Bus conductors? Soldiers?’ she suggested.
‘No. In the prison. Guardians. Trouble with guardians.’
‘Prison guards? Warders?’ said Sarah.
‘Guard-warders, yes.’
‘You were in prison? Both of you? What for? What crimes had you and Mr Dunkerley committed?’
‘Ah. Grimes. Yes. Different crimes. Stealing. In supermarket, food tins. Like in America, rip-off. You understand rip-off?’
Sarah nodded. She felt considerable theoretical sympathy for the rip-off philosophy and in addition had written letters to the local press about the temptation to crime presented by supermarket sales techniques.
‘And Mr Dunkerley?’
‘Yes, Mr Dunkerley.’
‘The other crime,’ she said slowly. ‘What was that?’
‘Ah,’ he shrugged. ‘Not good. A girl. Pff!’
He made a breathy whistling noise and flicked his forefinger across his cheek.
‘A girl? I’m sorry, what …?’ said Sarah.
‘Girl. Putain. Jig-a-jig girl. She tries to keep too many money. Not pay her share. So, pff!’
‘My God!’
Well, it fitted, she thought. Dunkerley the pimp, razorslashing young prostitutes who wouldn’t pay.
‘But he helped you in prison.’
‘Yes, helping,’ said Aristide, nodding vigorously.
‘What happened?’
‘Guard-warder who likes me, he wants … wait, I have learnt the word ... he wants to bugger me. Yes. Bugger me.’
Despite the strongest effort of her will, Sarah’s head moved round to check the reactions of those who sat near them in the now crowded lounge. On one side were an elderly retired couple, so precisely on the mid-point of the curve which runs from the unselfconscious raucousness of the working class to the self-congratulatory braying of the upper that in public they never addressed each other above a whisper. Though they sat trancelike now, one staring at the window, the other at the wall, their heads were cocked like robins’ and Sarah almost preferred the undisguised attentiveness of the coarse-featured woman in curlers on the other side.
‘I think I should like a walk,’ she said. ‘A walk. Will you come?’
‘Yes. Walk,’ agreed Aristide, rising and following her from the lounge. In the foyer he bent behind a table and rose up with the old suitcase and stuffed carrier bag.
‘I’d forgotten those,’ said Sarah. ‘Hang on.’
She went to the reception desk and claimed her key and then, followed by the curious gaze of the receptionist, she led Aristide up the stairs.
The cleaners were in her room, two placidly jolly women who did what they felt essential with calm efficiency and neglected the rest with equally calm indifference. Sarah tried to see in them nothing but the dignity of labour to counterbalance Michael’s judgement that Latin layabouts were even worse than their English counterparts; but unemptied ashtrays and untucked-in sheets were a constant irritation.
They smiled at her in greeting as she came through the door then more broadly at each other when Aristide followed her.
‘Put them down there and push them under the bed,’ ordered Sarah.
Aristide obeyed, one of the women spoke and they both laughed, hesitating a moment when Aristide uttered a few words of rapid Italian, then all three laughing loudly together.
‘What was the joke?’ asked Sarah casually as they descended the stairs.
‘Joke?’
‘Yes. Why did you laugh?’ she said slowly.
‘Ah, the women. She ask the other, shall we fetch another bed? And I say, no thanks, one will do all three.’
He laughed again and Sarah smiled uncertainly. She did not care for suggestive conversations, but after all, she had asked Aristide what had been said.
Outside there were still quite a lot of people walking aimlessly along the beach. The air was warm by British standards, despite the wind which ran the breakers up the easy shore as though in a failure-doomed effort to lick the coastline clean of concrete and glass, metal and plastic. Sarah tried to balance in her mind the employment opportunities offered by the building and running of this vast holiday machine against its empty-headed and non-productive function. All this money. If you stopped and listened carefully you could almost hear it chinking into the tills above the gusty wind.
Surprised by such imaginative thoughts, she glanced at Aristide as though he might be laughing at her and saw that the tinkling sound she heard derived from the wind-swung bell charm he wore round his neck.
‘What do you do for money?’ she said. ‘How do you earn money?’
‘Money,’ he said, making a gesture of the left shoulder which may have been contempt or bewilderment. ‘Sydney makes money. Sometime I work, in farm or in shop, but not long. Sometime beg. Sometime steal. Watch.’
He did a slow mime, approaching a beach table on which a single plastic cup had resisted the pressures of the wind. Twice he circumambulated the table, moving closer each time. Then he swayed slightly as though on some unevenness of the sand and the cup was gone. He returned to Sarah smiling expectantly, and when he reached her pulled the cup from beneath his vest and offered it.
The whole action filled Sarah with unease, not because of its morality which she was always willing to debate in terms of social and psychological cause and effect, but because during it Aristide, without shedding one whit of his charming lost-puppy-dog appeal, had appeared so purposeful, even dangerous. Now the young dog was back, offering its stick, eager for applause.
‘That is wicked,’ she reproved sternly.
‘I know,’ he said, still grinning. ‘Only joke. Sometime a peach. Nothing more.’
She wasn’t sure whether she believed him and they walked on through a grove of beach-umbrellas which, folded down, shook like dead Christmas trees in the turbulent air.
‘How does Mr Dunkerley, Sydney, make his money?’ she asked.
‘Many ways,’ said Aristide mysteriously. ‘See, here we sleep last night.’
He took her arm and led her to a row of beached pedal-boats.
‘In a boat?’ asked Sarah.
‘No. Too hard. On the sand.’
He pointed to where between two boats could be seen a shallow hollow not yet filled in by the wind.
‘It is soft. Here. You try.’
Still holding her arm he sank down and she sank with him.
The texture of the sand appeared no different from that on which she and half a million others sunned themselves every day, but Aristide seemed to expect some comment.
‘Very nice,’ she said.
She wanted to stand up, but he had such a tight grip on her arm just above the elbow that it was impossible without forcibly prying herself loose. For a cold moment she feared he was making some kind of pass at her, but now he stood upright, helped her to her feet and waved her courteously out of the space between the boats as though ushering her into a drawing-room.
After half a mile Sarah tired of the wind and the energy-sapping sand and suggested they turned into the town. Aristide agreed readily – it was very like taking a dog for a walk, she thought again. They stopped for a drink when they reached the main street, which the weather had rendered unusually crowded with tourists for this time of day.
Sarah drank her cappuccino and watched Aristide excavate the huge ice-cream confection he had chosen. It struck her that this was perhaps all he had eaten that morning, but she was a little reassured by the thought that Dunkerley did not seem the type to tolerate such fasting.
Aristide looked up suddenly and caught her watching him. He smiled. A smear of pink and green ice-cream ran like theatrical make-up along his bottom lip.
‘You nice lady,’ he said. ‘Kind. Like my mother.’
Was he mocking her? Please to God let him be mocking her! Sarah in her mind heard quite clearly Michael’s laughter at the scene. Would she ever tell him? She had told him too much in the past and knew now that a deflation shared was usually at some time in the future a deflation repeated.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ she said brightly.
‘Poor family,’ he said. ‘My father he cut wood. You know, chop-chop.’
He made axe-swinging motions.
‘Much drink,’ he went on. ‘My mother, no drink. Much pray, much sorrow. My father beat her. Beat me. Beat my brothers, sisters. Beat all.’
He was silent for a moment, looking more serious, older, than she had yet seen him.
‘I grow,’ he said. ‘One day, I beat him. Then I come away.’
‘But how terrible!’ cried Sarah, wishing she didn’t really feel ‘how marvellous!’ ‘But you are in touch? Do you write? Do you send letters home to your mother?’
He shrugged. ‘She not read very well. Some day I go home. Next year, year after. Maybe.’
Sarah paid the bill and they left. It did cross her mind that Aristide could be a rather expensive friend but immediately, as if sensing her thought, he touched her shoulder lightly and disappeared into a souvenir shop, returning a few moments later with a small paper bag which he presented to her. She opened it and took from it a necklet, a small enamelled medallion on a fine chain.
‘Thank you, Aristide,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely. You shouldn’t have. It’s too much.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Buy, no steal.’
He grinned as he spoke and she smiled back, a fully shared joke.
When they got back to the hotel, to Sarah’s surprise the first person she saw was Molly.
‘Hello,’ she said, approaching. ‘What’s happened to the expedition?’
‘They’ve gone,’ said Molly. She was sitting at a table outside the town entrance to the hotel, writing postcards. Sarah glanced uncertainly over her shoulder at Aristide. She did not wish to appear rude but it looked like a good chance to talk with Molly, whose shyness always seemed worse in the presence of men. And in addition she wanted to know the whys and wherefores of this suddenly all-male expedition.
Aristide waved his hand as though reading the situation.
‘Go now and look at lodging,’ he said. ‘Later, I come once more. Ciao!’
He really was a pleasant boy, thought Sarah. And interesting too.
Settling down beside Molly, she said rather more forcibly than intended, ‘And why haven’t you gone with them?’
‘Well, I thought, when Bob said that Wilf said you weren’t going, and not Wendy either …’
She tailed off. Sarah felt absurdly guilty.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I never thought. I’ve spoilt your day.’
Molly didn’t deny it but nervously shuffled her postcards. She was a pretty girl, in her early twenties, Sarah guessed, five or six years younger than her husband, perhaps the youngest woman in his social circle and always very conscious of this. Sarah had not been able to dig out much background material so far but she had a picture of Molly trapped in some council semi surrounded by working women or older wives whose lives were kids and curlers. Though the council semi might be wrong. Without knowing what Bob did, it was impossible to say. That was a mystery that now seemed a good time to solve.
‘Mind you,’ said Sarah, ‘I didn’t much fancy being stuck in a car all day on a culture tour. It’ll be red hot inland. Bob likes that kind of thing, does he?’
Molly stared at her uncomprehendingly. Really, Aristide was easier going.
‘Frescoes, churches, Roman ruins. Is Bob interested in that?’
‘No,’ said Molly. ‘I don’t think so. Is that what they’re doing?’
She sounded quite incredulous and Sarah felt an odd pang of unease. Stag groups had always bothered her and in recent years she had surprised herself as well as Michael by the vehemence with which she had opposed the traditional all-male pint when friends had visited them for lunch. Casseroles had proved the answer. Now everyone went to the local while her mother looked after the children. She would have looked after the cooking too, but Sarah felt almost as strongly about this.
‘I assumed so,’ she said. ‘What else is there for them to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Molly, wrinkling her brow. Did she imagine they’d gone off for a pint of bitter followed by a football match? wondered Sarah.
‘Bob’s not a culture vulture then,’ she said.
‘Oh no.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s more in Michael’s line. He’s in education, you know. A lecturer,’ she enunciated carefully.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And Bob?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s his line?’
‘He’s not a lecturer. No,’ said Molly. ‘Is it lunchtime yet?’
‘Hardly,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s only quarter past eleven.’
‘Is that all?’ said Molly. ‘I wonder what they are doing now?’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘I wonder.’
‘But it tastes pretty awful,’ said Michael.
‘Balls! Add a pint of port to one of these and you’ve got something lethal. Lethal, I tell you. Your original sexual fire-water. It dissolves knickers, this stuff.’
Wilf held up one of the half-dozen litre bottles of San Marino brandy he had just purchased.
‘Now give us a hand and we’ll get them to the car. Two each. There we go.’
He doled them out to Bob and Michael. Dunkerley was some distance away talking intimately to the store proprietor; probably bargaining over commission, thought Michael. He felt extremely disgruntled. A morning in San Marino in search of cheap liquor was not his idea of a profitable use of the car. Not that San Marino, with its Disney adventure-film fortresses perched on precipitous bluffs, was not worth visiting. But it was packed full of tourists brought by the coachload from all along the Adriatic. The Leonardo itself seemed very well represented and Wilf halted from time to time to exchange greetings.
