Territorial Rights (3 page)

‘That’s what it seemed to me.’

‘I should say you’ve done a lot of thinking in quite a short time.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve done that.’

‘I should say the church might well be named merely after its own shape. Quite simply that,’ said Curran. ‘Talking about shape, you haven’t told me about the girl.’

‘Which girl?’

‘How many are there?’

‘Only one that matters.’

‘She’s dangerous. Keep away from her.’

‘Is that what you’ve come to tell me?’

‘Yes. Lina Pancev, daughter of Victor Pancev whom I knew before the war, a Bulgarian. He was suspected of being part of a plot to poison King Boris, who in fact died of poisoning. Pancev got away, but the Bulgarian royalists caught up with him and killed him in 1945. That was your woman-friend’s father.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago. I wasn’t born.’

‘But the daughter was. She’s no youngster compared to you.’

‘Nor are you, compared to her.’

‘I don’t enter into it. I’ve only come to tell you that this woman’s dangerous. She’s a defector from Bulgaria and it seems to me she’s being followed. How is your steak?’

‘What?’

‘What you’re eating. Is it done all right?’

‘Yes, it’s all right. I don’t notice what I’m eating.’

‘You young people don’t. Well, she’s being followed by agents of some sort, probably Balkan. They don’t like people slipping away.’

‘Look, she’s only a little nobody to them—’

Curran said, ‘She was on a group visit with some Bulgarian art teachers in Paris last year, and she left the group. They’re after her.’

‘The Paris police know all about her. She’s got asylum,’ Robert said. ‘All in order,’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, what’s it got to do with me? She’s looking for her father’s grave here in Venice, and I’m helping her.’

‘We’re talking in circles. You’re in danger if you’re seen with her.’

‘You mean,’ said Robert, ‘I’m in danger of losing your friendship if I’m seen with her. Do you think I’m afraid? I’ve got a right to have a girl. You think I’m effeminate?’

‘Don’t raise your voice like that. We’re probably being overheard, anyway.’

‘You think me effeminate. I’ve told you I refuse to be labelled,’ Robert said.

‘I think you masculine to a fault,’ said Curran.

Robert looked round the room. The other diners were all of them in parties, intent on their talking and eating, their ordering and their drinking, laughing, smiling. They looked as if they had nothing else but their own lives on their minds, and on their well-dressed bodies, no virtue so penetrating even as an eavesdropping device. On the other hand, look again: maybe everybody, every single diner, could be capable of extending his range. The place could be filled with spies, how could one tell?

‘You know,’ said Robert, ‘I don’t believe what you’re saying. I don’t believe she’s being followed. I think it’s a cheap trick you’ve thought up.’

‘What for?’ said Curran. ‘Why? Why should I take trouble for you?’ He looked round the room. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘those people who keep following you and Lina Pancev are not here tonight. I hardly thought they would be.’

‘It gets me down,’ said Robert, ‘the way you look around as if you owned the place.’

‘How you nag!’ said Curran. ‘Just like a middle-class wife.’

‘What’s wrong with the middle class,’ Robert said, ‘apart from people like you?’

‘Men like you,’ said Curran, ‘is what’s wrong with the middle class. The English public schools used to make heroes; nowadays they turn out Hamlets:’

‘If you don’t like men like me,’ Robert sniped, ‘then what are you doing in Venice?’

After dinner they walked briskly through the chilly lanes and squares, where the side-canals were ill-lit and the future beyond every few steps was murky. ‘Easy …’ said Curran, as practically every visitor to Venice says, sooner or later, ‘very easy—wouldn’t it be?—to slither a knife into someone, push him into the canal and just walk on.’ At which Robert looked at Curran in a startled way, so that Curran laughed.

A motor-barge could be heard approaching from a side-canal ahead of them. ‘That’s the port authority,’ Curran said. A smooth-sounding motor followed it. ‘That’s the water police,’ said Curran.

‘You look good’ said Curran.

‘Go to hell.’

Robert had found Curran in the front hall of the Pensione Sofia, seated at a table with Katerina and Eufemia. It was mid-morning. Robert had come in the front door with the English newspaper in his hand, and there was Curran chatting away as if he had known the women all his life.

The women dispersed discreetly as Curran got up to greet Robert. And ‘Go to hell,’ Robert said when Curran came out with, ‘You look good.’

‘But you looked bad yesterday,’ Curran said. ‘Something on your mind, no doubt.’ Equable, gradual, encompassing, Curran looked around him, owning the place with his manner. ‘In daylight,’ he said, ‘the interior of this house has always been enchanting. That staircase. …’ He let his eyes muse on the staircase.

‘You know the house, then,’ Robert stated. It was inevitable that Curran should know the house. And in fact Curran then said, ‘If one has knocked about Europe as long as I have, one does tend to know places.’

‘I’ve got an appointment,’ Robert said, looking at his watch.

Regardless, Curran said, ‘It was owned by a Bulgarian count up to the beginning of the war. In those days it was the Villa Sofia.’ He still looked up the staircase; it was wide with well-worn shabby carpets, and Curran gazed as if to say, ‘I remember when it was a private villa and I was a young man coming down, going up, those stairs.’ Above the staircase was an old, well-preserved chandelier; it was three-tiered, made of white Dresden china, the top tier portraying pineapples and shepherdesses, and the other two tiers being fully occupied by electric-bulbed candelabras, elaborately ivied. That was here in those days,’ Curran said. ‘It was imported to replace a Venetian glass chandelier. We found it rather comical, amongst ourselves.’ And, as usual, Curran didn’t say who were ‘we’ and ‘ourselves’, thus leaving Robert far away beyond the scope of one of the many worlds that Curran pervaded and seemed to own.

And indeed, like a proprietor, Curran said, ‘Let’s go out through the garden and round to the landing-stage. When will you be free? Can we lunch?’

‘Are you sure visitors are allowed in the garden?’ Robert said. ‘It looks like their private garden.’

Curran said, ‘I know them well. Katerina and Eufemia are old friends.’ He was already at the french windows, followed by Robert. ‘And lunch?’ Curran said.

‘I’ve promised to take Lina to the island of San Michele today. San Michele is the cemetery island. She’s looking for the place where her father’s buried.’

‘You won’t find him there,’ Curran said, stepping into the winter sunlight. Robert followed him.

‘Have you any idea where he’s buried?’ Robert said.

Curran said, ‘He’s buried in his friends’ memory. Isn’t that enough?’

The compost of dying leaves had gone from the place where the women had stood quarrelling in a high-pitched battle over the heap. Probably the leaves had been carted to the end of the garden earlier that morning, and burned; certainly, the smoky smell of autumn fires, from one garden or another, hung about the air they breathed.

They walked down the gravel path which divided the pretty garden. Robert told how he had seen and heard the two good ladies quarrelling, each on her own side of the garden. Curran seemed interested in this, and sadly amused. ‘I believe they’ve shared everything equally all their lives’ he said.

Robert said, ‘You know a lot; too much. I don’t trust this place.’

‘It’s a perfectly good place. The best value in Venice.’

Robert said, ‘Out here one would hardly know one was in Venice.’ But he looked beyond the railings and the trees, where Venice could be seen, sure enough. Tips of houses, bell-towers and a strange chimney-pot rose on the skyline at the end of the garden, beyond the side-canal, beyond the tops of buildings; they rose in sunlight from the noisy cold canals. To the people walking about, across the bridges, down the narrow streets and across the squares it was everyday life, devoid of tourists, capricious as the sun; to the people going to work it was a day of dull routine and bright weather, boring, cold and quite normally inconvenient.

A water-taxi was approaching up the side-canal; its engine changed rhythm as it chugged into the side, to slow up at the landing-stage of the house. It held two passengers, a man and a woman, both standing, now, getting ready to disembark. Robert gave a shiver some seconds before he really saw these people, probably because he had not slept well and so was specially intuitive. He took Curran’s arm and held it tight, so that Curran started with alarm, as if afraid of some violent attack from Robert.

By now the man was standing up and stepping ashore. He was a good five feet away. An elderly man, tall, exceedingly neat, slightly bent at the shoulders, with spectacles and a white-yellow moustache which was small and well cut. He in turn had recognised Robert. His companion, a woman of middle-age wearing a golden-brown fur-coat and tight boots, and, like the man, very neat about the head, said clearly enough to be heard by Robert and Curran, ‘What’s the matter?’

The man did not reply. He stared, with his lips forming a gasp, very much resembling Robert in his aghast expression.

‘Almighty God!’ Robert said in a low voice. ‘That’s my father.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ said Curran.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘And is that his friend?’

‘I have only the faintest idea who she might be.’

‘Evidently he has a lady-friend’ Curran said. ‘No harm in that.’

The elderly man stepped ashore leaving his companion to be helped by the taxi-man. The motor-boat swayed as their luggage was unloaded.

In some embarrassment the father said, over the hedge which separated them, ‘Robert! what are you doing here? I thought you were in Paris.’

The woman looked at Robert with a social smile which seemed out of place in the open air, but somehow showed willing. But Robert’s father was agitated. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ Robert said.

Meanwhile, the porter had arrived to pick up their luggage and carry it into the house. Robert said, ‘We’d better go back indoors. It’s the only way.’

‘Try to be friendly to them,’ Curran said. ‘What have you got to worry about?’

They went back through the garden door, emerging in the hall just as the couple were being escorted to the front desk. ‘Well, Dad,’ said Robert, ‘this is a surprise.’

The father gave a childish sort of laugh and looked round the room as if wanting to say he had not come ashore from the water-taxi; he had not arrived in Venice; it was all a mistake. But his woman-friend stood there by his side, solid and indissoluble. ‘A little holiday,’ he said. ‘My former colleague and I are having a little holiday. Here in Venice.’

‘Oh, your colleague …’ said Robert, with the cruellest of courtesy. The elderly man suddenly gave his son a look of disgust.

Robert introduced his companion in a vague sort of way which obliged Curran to pronounce his own name as he shook hands with Robert’s father and his woman companion. ‘This is my friend …’ Robert had said. His father, Arnold Leaver, was more explicit in return. ‘Arnold Leaver,’ he said, ‘and my colleague Mary Tiller—my son Robert, he was at Ambrose before your day, Mary, and Mr …?’ ‘Curran,’ Curran repeated, with pronounced breath-withholding, restraint in his voice. ‘D’y’-do,’ he murmured, his eyes half-closed in keeping with his half-closed voice.

‘Well, Robert,’ said his father, ‘I thought you were in Paris. What brings you here?’

‘Research,’ said Robert.

He looked hard at his father, in an effort not to look hard at the woman. He had been told his father had this rich mistress but he had never seen her. She said, ‘What a coincidence! We must meet later. Let’s get this desk business over and unpack our things.’

‘Two singles,’ Robert’s father was demanding at the desk as if it was a railway station.

‘Leaver?—We have a booking for a double room. There is the grand bridal suite: bedroom, dressing-room and bathroom.’

Curran withdrew discreetly, but Robert did not.

There must have been a mistake,’ said Arnold Leaver. I reserved single rooms, for Mrs Tiller and for myself.’

There is one single room for Leaver, already taken,’ said the perplexed lady at the desk, who happened to be Eufemia. She was joined, then, by Katerina, who bent her head likewise over the ledger. ‘Leaver,’ said Katerina, pointing a finger to the place; both she and Eufemia pronounced the name ‘Leāver’.

Robert, who was close beside his father and companion at the other side of the desk, put in, ‘I’m the Leāver in that room. This is my father Mr Arnold Leāver and Mrs Tiller who both want single rooms.’

‘We have single rooms on different floors, will that do?’ Katerina said. She looked suspicious but tolerant. She said, ‘We have a double room booked for a Mr and Mrs Leāver.’

Those single rooms will do’ said Robert’s father. He pulled out his passport and Mary Tiller coolly revealed that her passport was packed away in her luggage. There and then she opened one of her pieces of matched luggage to produce it, in spite of the two proprietors’ protests that she could bring it down later, at her convenience. Meantime, Robert noticed that his father’s well-worn passport was a double one, made out in the names of Arnold Leaver colour of eyes grey, colour of hair grey, and his wife Anthea colour of eyes blue, colour of hair fair. He couldn’t see the photographs on the passport from where he stood, but Mrs Tiller’s eyes and hair corresponded well enough with those attributed to the absent Anthea. She was not unlike Anthea, a younger Anthea and more flamboyant. That’s typical, Robert thought. He leaves one woman for another practically the same.

‘Here you are!’ Mary Tiller said with a perceptible look of triumph towards Robert, defying his thought with her common cheeriness, so unlike his mother’s. She held out the passport, open on the name-and-address page, while handing it over the counter, so that Robert, if he wanted, could clearly see that she had her own. Robert looked away at something vaguely else, then turned his head towards his father. ‘Anyone would think,’ he said with nasty geniality, ‘that you were travelling as man and wife. Double passport—Double room booked. …’