Chapter 13

When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an overture. All the rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: a factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gas-works by a modern church: the houses began to tread on each other’s heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and MILANO flashed the signs, MILANO.

I said to Tooley, “We’ve arrived. We’d better get lunch.

It’s our last chance to get a square meal…”

“Your mother…” Tooley began.

“Aunt Augusta – she’s here.”

The conductor had preceded her down the corridor (I should have realized who the important passenger was) and now she stood in the doorway of our compartment wrinkling her nose. “What have you two been up to?” she asked.

“Smoking and talking,” I said.

“You seem extraordinarily cheerful, Henry. It’s not quite like you.” She sniffed again. “I can almost believe that poor Wordsworth is with us still.”

“It’s fabulous,” Tooley said, “that you know Wordsworth, I mean.”

“Il y a un monsieur qui vous demande, madame,” the conductor interrupted, and I saw beyond my aunt, between a trolley of newspapers and a trolley of refreshments, a very tall thin man with exquisite white hair gesticulating with an umbrella.

“Oh, it’s Mario,” my aunt said, without bothering to turn. “I wrote to him that we should need lunch. He will have ordered it. Come, my dear, come, Henry, there’s no time to be lost.” She preceded us down the steps and dropped straight into the arms of the white-haired man, who with steely strength held her for a moment suspended. “Madre mia, madre mia”, he said breathlessly and dropped his umbrella as he put her carefully down onto the platform as though she might break – the very idea connected with Aunt Augusta was ridiculous.

“What on earth is he calling you that for?” I whispered. Perhaps it was the effect of the Cannabis, but I had taken an extreme dislike to the man who was now kissing Tooley’s hand.

“I knew him since he was a baby,” Aunt Augusta said. “He is Mr. Visconti’s son.”

He was very good-looking in a histrionic way; he had the appearance of an ageing actor and I didn’t like the way he was trying to dazzle Tooley with pieces of his repertoire. After his burst of theatrical emotion with my aunt he was conducting Tooley ahead of us down the platform to the restaurant, holding his umbrella by the ferrule and pointing the crook up like a crozier. With his white hair and his head bent towards Tooley he looked like a hypnotic bishop instructing a neophyte on purity.

“What does he do, Aunt Augusta? Is he an actor?”

“He writes verse dramas.”

“Can he live on that?”

“Mr. Visconti settled a little money on him before the war. Luckily, in Swiss francs. I suspect too that he gets money from women.”

“Rather disgusting at his age,” I said.

“He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It’s the best way, Henry, to win a woman. They are wiser than men. They think of the period that must elapse between one lovemaking and another. In my youth not many women smoked cigarettes. Look out for that trolley.”

I could feel in my head the cunning of Cannabis. “He must have been born when you knew Mr. Visconti… Did you know his mother too?”

“Not very well.”

“She must have been a beautiful woman.”

“I am not a fair judge. I detested her and she detested me. Mario always thought of me as his real mother. Mr. Visconti called her the blond cow. She was German.”

Mario Visconti had ordered a saltimbocca Romana for each of us and a bottle of Frascati wine. My aunt began to speak to him in Italian. “You must forgive me,” my aunt said, “but Mario speaks no English, and it is many many years since we have seen each other.”

“Do you speak Italian?” I asked Tooley.

“Not a word.”

“You seemed to be having quite a conversation.”

“Oh, he was very expressive.”

“What was he expressing?”

“He sort of liked me. What does cuore mean?”

I looked at Mario Visconti with resentment and saw that he had begun to weep. He was talking a great deal and using his hands in explanation and once he picked up his umbrella and held it above his head. In the short intervals between paragraphs he put a lot of saltimbocca Romana into his mouth, leaning his handsome face forward over the plate, so that the fork only had a short distance to travel and the tears only a little way to fall. It was lucky that the dish was heavily salted already. My aunt lent him a wispy lace handkerchief, which he applied to his eyes and afterwards adjusted becomingly in his breast pocket to show a frilly corner. Then he became dissatisfied with the wine, which seemed very good to me, and called to the waiter to change it. Only after he had tasted a new bottle did he resume his tears. I noticed the waiters were as indifferent to the scene as usherettes at a cinema are to a movie which has been running a week.

“I don’t like a man who cries,” I said to Tooley.

“Have you never cried?”

“No,” I said and then added for the sake of accuracy, “not in public.” The waiter brought us all ice-creams in three colours. They looked dangerous to me and I left mine untasted, but Mario’s disappeared quickly and I noticed how his tears were quenched as though the ice had frozen the ducts. He gave my aunt a shy boyish smile which went strangely with his white hair, and she surreptitiously lent him her purse to pay with.

On the steps of the train I was afraid he would begin to cry again when he embraced her, but instead he gave her a small brown-paper parcel and walked silently away, holding up his crook to hide his emotion or perhaps his lack of it.

“So that’s that,” my aunt said with cool thoughtfulness. Tooley had disappeared – I suspected into the lavatory to smoke another cigarette – and I decided to tell Aunt Augusta about her trouble.

But I found when I sat down beside her that she wanted to do the talking herself. “Mario seems rather an old man,” she said, “or has he dyed his hair, I wonder? He cannot be more than forty-five. Or six. I am bad about dates.”

“He certainly looks a good deal older than that. Perhaps it is the poetry.”

“I have never much cared,” she said, “for men with umbrellas, but he was charming as a child.” She looked out of the window and I looked too: a new housing estate in red brick straggled beside the line and on the hill beyond a medieval village crumbled away behind its ramparts.

“Why was he crying?” I asked.

“He wasn’t crying. He was laughing,” she said. “Something about Mr. Visconti. I haven’t seen Mario for more than thirty years,” she said. “He was a sweet boy then – too sweet perhaps to last. The war came. We were separated.”

“And his father?”

“I never associated sweetness with Mr. Visconti. Charm perhaps. He was a terrible twister. Very generous with cream buns, of course, but one can’t live on cream buns. Perhaps I am being unfair. One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal. And after all he was kind to me from the very start – he found me my situation in Italy”.

“At the theatre?”

“I can’t think why you persist in calling it a theatre. ‘All the world’s a stage’, of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”

I was a little shocked by her unexpected attack on Shakespeare. Perhaps it was because he wrote verse dramas like Mario. “You were talking about Mr. Visconti,” I reminded her.

“I must admit he was very kind to me in Paris. I was quite heartbroken when I left Curran. I couldn’t appeal to your father because I had promised Angelica to stay away, and when Curran left, after our final quarrel, he took everything except the cash in the church collecting-boxes and twelve tins of sardines. He had an unnatural passion for sardines. He said they calmed his nerves, that eating them was like pouring oil on troubled waters. There was enough in the collecting-boxes to pay my passage across the Channel and I was lucky to get this job of mine in the Rue de Provence. But I wasn’t really happy there, and I was grateful to Mr. Visconti when he took me to Italy. The work, of course, was the same, but I enjoyed the travel from one city to another. And every eight weeks when I came back to Milan I enjoyed seeing Mr. Visconti. Cream buns were a great improvement on sardines. Sometimes too he would pop up unexpectedly in Venice. He was a twister, no doubt of it, but there are many worse people than twisters.” She sighed, looking out at the dull scenery of the Po. “I grew to be very very fond of him. Fonder than any other man I have ever known. Except the first, but the first is always a special case.”

“How did you come to retire?” I asked. I was going to say “from the stage,” but I remembered her inexplicable dislike of the term. I had not forgotten Tooley’s trouble, but I thought it only fair to let my aunt finish first with the memories stirred up by the sight of Visconti’s son.

“Your Uncle Jo left me all his money. It was quite a shock. The house, too, of course, but there was nothing to be done about that. It’s still crumbling away near the autostrada. I settled the house on Mario when I had to leave Italy because of the war and I think he sometimes takes a woman there to spend a week-end in the ancient family palazzo. He even calls it the Palazzo Visconti (he’s a bit of a snob: quite unlike his father). One day they’ll want to build a connecting road to the autostrada and then the state will have to pay him compensation if he can show that the house was inhabited.”

“Why didn’t you marry Mr. Visconti, Aunt Augusta?”

“There’s no divorce in Italy, and Mr. Visconti was a Catholic, even though a nonpractising one. He even insisted on my being received into the Church. It was his wife who had all the money and that hampered Mr. Visconti badly until he managed to get his fingers on most of what Jo had left me. I was very careless in those days and Mr. Visconti was very plausible. It was lucky that no one would buy the house – that at least was left me for a time. He had a scheme for selling fresh vegetables – tomatoes, particularly, of course – to Saudi Arabia. At the beginning I think he really believed he would make our fortune. Even his wife lent him money. I shall always remember the conferences at the Excelsior in Rome with Arab notables in long robes who arrived with a dozen wives and a food-taster. Mr. Visconti would take a whole floor in the Excelsior – you can imagine that made quite a hole in Jo’s money. But it was very romantic while it lasted. I had my fun. Mr. Visconti was never for a moment dull. He even persuaded the Vatican to put in money, so we had cardinals for cocktails at the Grand Hotel. The Grand had once been a convent, and I suppose they felt more at home there. They were greeted at the door by flunkeys with tall candles, and it was a wonderful sight when the Arabs and the cardinals met, the desert robes and the scarlet skull-caps and all the bowings and embracings and the genuflections of the management and the kissing of rings and the blessings. The Arabs, of course, only drank orange juice, and the tasters stood at the bar sampling each jug and occasionally snatching a whisky and soda on the side. Everybody enjoyed these parties, but only the Arabs could really afford their fun, as it turned out.”

“Was Mr. Visconti ruined?”

“He pulled out in time with what was left of my money and what was left of his wife’s, and to do him justice he had settled some of mine on Mario. Of course he disappeared for a while, but he came back after things had quieted down. The Vatican made a very profitable deal, you remember, with Mussolini, so that what they lost to Mr. Visconti seemed very small beer indeed. He had left me enough to live on in a modest way, but I have never been very keen on modesty. Life was very monotonous after Mr. Visconti disappeared. I even visited Havana, as I told you, and afterwards I went back to Paris for a while (Mario was with the Jesuits in Milan) – that was when I met Monsieur Dambreuse. But when the affair was over I came back to Rome. I always hoped that one day Mr. Visconti would turn up again. I had a two-room apartment, and I did a little part-time work in an establishment behind the Messaggero. Life was very middle-class after all the Arabs and the cardinals. I had been spoilt by Curran and Mr. Visconti. No men have ever given me more amusement than those two did. Poor Wordsworth!” my aunt added. “He was not in the same league.” She gave a very young laugh and laid her hand on my knee. “And then – Oh praise to the Holiest in the height, as Wordsworth is fond of saying – I was putting in a little part-time behind the Messaggero when who should walk into the reception room but Mr. Visconti. A pure coincidence. He wasn’t looking for me. But how happy we were. How happy. Just to see each other again. The girls didn’t understand when we joined hands then and there and danced between the sofas. It was one o’clock in the morning. We didn’t go upstairs. We went straight out into the lane outside. There was a drinking fountain shaped like an animal’s head, and he splashed my face with water before he kissed me.”

“What was that half-time employment?” I suddenly broke out. “Who were the girls? What were the sofas there for?”

“What does it matter now?” my aunt said. “What did any of it matter? We were together again and he splashed me and splashed me and he kissed me and kissed me.”

“But surely you must have despised the man after all he had done to you?”

We were crossing the long aqueduct through the lagoons which leads to Venice-Mestre, but there were no signs of the beautiful city, only tall chimneys with pale gas flames hardly visible in the late-afternoon sunlight. I was not expecting my aunt’s outburst.

She turned on me with real fury as though I were a child who had carelessly broken some vase she had cherished over the years for its beauty and the memories it contained. “I despise no one,” she said, “no one. Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality. What do you suppose I was doing in the house behind the Messaggero? I was cheating, wasn’t I? So why shouldn’t Mr. Visconti cheat me? But you, I suppose, never cheated in all your little provincial banker’s life because there’s not anything you wanted enough, not even money, not even a woman. You looked after people’s money like a nanny who looks after other people’s children. Can’t I see you in your cage, stacking up the little fivers endlessly before you hand them over to their proper owner? Angelica certainly brought you up as she wanted you. Your poor father didn’t have a chance. He was a cheat too, and I only wish you were. Then perhaps we’d have something in common.”

I was astounded. I could find nothing to say in reply. I thought of leaving the train at Venice, but then there was Tooley and I felt responsible for Tooley. The squalid station wrapped us round with its dirt and its noise. I said, “I think I’d better find Tooley,” and I went away, leaving the old lady glaring on her couchette. Only as I closed the door of the compartment I thought I heard her laugh.