Chapter 14

I felt glad that I had not lost my temper, but nonetheless I was shocked and needed a little time for reflection, so I climbed down on to the platform and began to look around me for food. It was the last chance before Belgrade next morning. I bought six ham rolls off a trolley and a bottle of Chianti and some sweet cakes – it was not so good a meal as Chicken would have provided, I thought sadly, and what a dreary station it was. Travel could be a great waste of time. This was the hour of the early evening when the sun had lost its heat and the shadows fell across my small lawn, the hour when I would take my yellow watering-can and fill it from the garden tap…

Tooley’s voice said, “Would you mind getting me some more Coke?”

“There’s nowhere on the train to keep it cold.”

“I don’t mind warm Coke.”

Oh, the absurdity of it all, I could have cried aloud, for now the man with the trolley wouldn’t take a pound note, and I had to give him two of the dollars which I was carrying in my pocket-book against emergencies, and he refused any change, though I knew the exact rate and told him the lire required.

“Julian did a fabulous picture of a Coke bottle once,” Tooley said.

“Who’s Julian?” I asked absent-mindedly.

“The boy-friend, of course. I told you. He painted the Coke bright yellow. Fauve”, she added in a defiant way.

“He paints, does he?”

“That’s why he thinks the East’s very important to him. You know, like Tahiti was for Gauguin. He wants to experience the East before he starts on his big project. Let me take the Coke.”

There was less than an hour’s wait at Venice, but the dark was falling when we pulled out and I saw nothing at all – I might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria. Tooley sat with me and drank one of her Cokes. I asked her what her boy-friend’s project was.

“He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment – say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity – do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate – you wouldn’t break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in another”.

The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, “Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?”

“Not Heinz, Campbell’s,” Tooley said. “That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell’s are long like English pillar-boxes.’ I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn’t the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age – only he didn’t call it that. He said it was the Art of the Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn’t have been any use at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.”

I was badly out of my depth with Tooley in terms of culture and of human experience. She was closer to my aunt: she would never, I felt sure, have criticized Mr. Visconti: she would have accepted him, as she accepted Julian’s project, a voyage to Istanbul, my company, her baby.

“Where does your mother live?”

“I guess she’s in Bonn at the moment. She married a man on Time-Life who covers West Germany and Eastern Europe, so they move around a lot. Like Father. Do you want a cigarette?”

“Not for me. And you’d better wait till we’re past the next frontier.”

It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening when we arrived at Sezana. A surly passport man looked at us as though we were Imperialist spies. Old women heavily laden with small parcels came down the unplatformed track, making for the third-class. They emerged from everywhere like a migration, even from between the goods trucks which stood uncoupled all along the line looking as though they would never be linked together. No one else joined the train: no one got off. There were no lights, no waiting-room in sight, it was cold and the heating had not been turned on. On the road beyond – if there was a road – no cars passed. No railway hotel offered a welcome.

“I’m cold,” Tooley said. “I’m going to bed.” She offered to leave me a cigarette, but I refused. I didn’t want to be compromised on this cold frontier. Another uniformed man looked in and regarded my new suitcase on the rack with hatred.

At moments during the night I woke – in Ljubljana, in Zagreb – but there was nothing to be seen except the lines of stationary rolling-stock which looked abandoned, as though nothing was left anywhere to put in the trucks, no one had the energy any more to roll them, and it was only our train which steamed on impelled by a foolish driver who hadn’t realized that the world had stopped and there was nowhere for us to go.

At Belgrade, Tooley and I had breakfast in the station hotel – dry bread and jam and bad coffee, and we bought a bottle of sweet white wine for lunch, but they had no sandwiches. I let my aunt sleep on: it was not a meal worth waking her to share.

“Why are you two going to Istanbul?” Tooley asked, taking a spoonful of jam – she had given up trying to crumble the bread.

“She likes to travel,” I said.

“But why to Istanbul?”

“I haven’t asked her.”

In the fields horses moved slowly along, dragging harrows. We were back in the pre-industrial age. Tooley and I were both depressed, yet it wasn’t the lowest point of our journey; that came as evening fell in Sofia, and we tried to buy something to eat, but no one would take any money but Bulgarian except at an exorbitant rate, and even when I agreed to that, there were only tepid sausages on sale made of some coarse unrecognizable meat and chocolate cake made of a chocolate substitute and pink fizzy wine. I hadn’t seen my aunt all day except once when she looked in on us and refused Tooley’s last bar of chocolate and said sadly and unexpectedly, “I loved chocolate once. I am growing old.”

“So this is the great Orient Express,” Tooley said.

“All that’s left of it.”

“Istanbul can’t be much worse, can it?”

“I’ve never been there, but I don’t imagine so.”

“I guess you are going to tell me that I mustn’t smoke because there’ll soon be another frontier.”

“There will be three frontiers,” I said, looking at the time-table, “in less than four hours. The Bulgarian frontier, the Greek-Macedonian frontier, the Turkish frontier.”

“Maybe it’s real luxury travel,” Tooley said, “for people not in a hurry. Do you think they have an abortionist on the train? It’s lucky I’m not nine months gone, isn’t it, or I wouldn’t know whether my baby was going to be Bulgarian or Turkish or – what was the other?”

“Greek-Macedonian.”

“That sounds a bit special. I’d choose that. Not a Bulgar. If he was a boy there’d be dirty jokes.”

“But you wouldn’t have a choice.”

“I’d hang on. When they said push I wouldn’t push. Not till after the Greek-Macedonian frontier. How long are we in Greece-Macedonia?”

“Only forty minutes,” I said.

“My, it’s complicated. I’d have to work quick.” She added, “It’s not funny at all. I’m scared. What’s Julian going to say when the curse hasn’t come? I really thought the train would do it, sort of shake it out of me, I mean.”

“It’s Julian’s fault as much as yours.”

“But it isn’t any longer, not with the pill. It’s all the girl’s fault now. I really did forget. When I take a sleeping pill I wake up muzzy and forget, and then when I take a methedrine to wake up properly I get so excited I don’t remember all the dull things – like the pill and washing the dishes. But I guess Julian won’t believe all that. He’ll feel trapped. He often feels trapped. He was trapped first by his family, he says, and then he was nearly trapped by Oxford – so he went away fast without a degree. Then he very nearly got trapped by the Trotskyists, but he realized just in time. He sees traps a terribly long way ahead. But, Henry, I don’t mean to be a trap. Really I don’t. I can’t call you Henry. It doesn’t sound like a real name. Can I call you Smudge?”

“Why Smudge?”

“I had a dog once called Smudge. I used to talk to him a lot. When Father and Mother got divorced I told him all the horrid details. About the mental cruelty I mean.”

She leant against me in the carriage. I liked the smell of her hair. I suppose if I had known more about women I could have identified the shampoo she must have had in Paris. Her hand was on my knee, and the enormous wrist-watch stared up at me with its great blank white face and its four figures in scarlet, 12 3 6 9, as if those were the only important ones to remember – the hours when you had to take your medicine. I remembered Miss Keene’s minute gold wrist-watch like a doll’s which Sir Alfred had given her on her twenty-first birthday. In its tiny ring it contained all the figures of the hours as though none were unimportant or without its special duty. Most of the hours of my life had been eliminated from Tooley’s watch. There were no hours marked there for sitting quietly and watching a woman tat. I felt as though one night in Southwood I had turned my back on any possibility of home, so that here I was shaken up and down between two segments of Bulgarian darkness.

“What was the mental cruelty?” I had to ask her questions: it was the only way in which I could find my way about in this new world, but questioning was not a habit I had ever formed. For years people had asked me questions: “What unit trust would you recommend? Do you think I should sell my hundred Imperial Tobacco shares before the next cancer report?” And when I retired most of the questions I might have wanted to ask were answered for me in Everyman His Own Gardener.

“The only mental cruelty I ever saw personally,” Tooley said, “was when Father woke her up bringing her breakfast in bed. I don’t think that awful Bulgarian sausage was good for my metabolism. I’ve got a terrible stomach-ache. I’ll go and lie down. You don’t think it was horse, do you?”

“I’ve always understood that horse has a sweetish taste.”

“Oh God, Smudge,” she said, “I didn’t want a literal answer, not real information I mean.” She dabbed her lips against my cheek and was off.

I went down the corridor rather nervously to find Aunt Augusta. I’d hardly seen her all day and the problem of Tooley was one which I felt she ought to share. I found her with a Baedeker opened and a map of Istanbul spread over her knee. She looked like a general planning a campaign.

“I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon, Aunt Augusta,” I said. “I really didn’t mean to say anything against Mr. Visconti. After all I don’t know the circumstances. Tell me more about him.”

“He was a quite impossible man,” my aunt said, “but I loved him and what he did with my money was the least of his faults. For example he was what they call a collaborator. During the German occupation he acted as adviser to the German authorities on questions of art, and he had to get out of Italy very quickly after the death of Mussolini. Goering had been making a big collection of pictures, but even he couldn’t easily steal pictures from places like the Ufizi where the collection was properly registered, but Mr. Visconti knew a lot about the unregistered – all sorts of treasures hidden away in palazzos almost as crumbling as your Uncle Jo’s. Of course his part got to be known, and there’d be quite a panic in a country place when Mr. Visconti appeared taking lunch in the local taverna. The trouble was he wouldn’t play even a crooked game straight or the Germans might have helped him to escape. He began to take money from this marchese and that not to tip off the Germans – this gave him liquid cash or sometimes a picture he fancied for himself, but it didn’t make him friends and the Germans soon suspected what was going on. Poor old devil,” she added, “he hadn’t a friend he could trust. Mario was still at school with the Jesuits and I had gone back to England when the war began.”

“What happened to him in the end?”

“I thought for a long time he’d been liquidated by the partisans, for I never believed that story about the gondolier. I suspect he got someone to spread it for him. Mr. Visconti, as I told you, was not a man for fighting with knives or fists. A man who fights never survives long, and Mr. Visconti was great at survival. Why, the old sod,” she said with tender delight, “he survives to this moment. He must be eighty-four if he’s a day. He wrote to Mario and Mario wrote to me, and that’s why you and I have taken the train to Istanbul. I couldn’t explain all that in London, it was too complicated, and anyway I hardly knew you. Thank goodness for the gold brick, that’s all I can say.”

“The gold brick?”

“Never mind. That’s quite another thing.”

“You told me about a gold brick at London Airport, Aunt Augusta. Surely…?”

“Of course not. It’s not that one. That was quite a little one. Don’t interrupt. I’m telling you now about poor Mr. Visconti. It seems he’s fallen on very lean times.”

“Where is he? In Istanbul?”

“It’s better you shouldn’t know, for there are people still after him. Oh dear, he certainly escaped the hard way. Mr. Visconti was a good Catholic, but he was very very anticlerical, and yet in the end it was the priesthood which saved him. He went to a clerical store in Rome, when the Allies were coming close, and he paid a fortune to be fitted out like a monsignor even to the purple socks. He said that a friend of his had lost all his clothes in a bombing raid and they pretended to believe him. Then he went with a suitcase to the lavatory in the Grand Hotel, where we had given all those cocktail parties to the cardinals, and changed. He kept away from the reception-desk, but he was unwise enough to look in at the bar – the barman, he knew, was very old and short-sighted. Well, you know, in those days a lot of girls used to come to the bar to pick up German officers. One of these girls – I suppose it was the approach of the Allied troops that did it – was having a crise de conscience. She wouldn’t go to her friend’s bedroom, she regretted her lost purity, she would never sin again. The officer plied her with more and more cocktails, but with every drink she became more religious. Then she spied Mr. Visconti, who was having a quick whisky in a shady corner. ‘Father,’ she cried to him, ‘hear my confession.’ You can imagine the tension in the bar, the noise outside as the evacuation got under way, the crying children, people drinking up what there was in the bar, the Allied planes overhead…”

“How did you hear the story, Aunt Augusta?”

“Mr. Visconti told Mario the essentials when he got to Milan, and I can imagine the rest. Especially I can picture poor Mr. Visconti in his purple socks. ‘My child,’ he said, ‘this is no fit place for a confession.’

“‘Never mind the place. What does the place matter? We are all about to die, and I am in mortal sin. Please, please, Monsignor.’ (She had noticed his socks by this time.) What worried Mr. Visconti most was the attention she was provoking.

“‘My child,’ he told her, ‘in this state of emergency a simple act of contrition is enough,’ but oh no, she wasn’t going to be fobbed off with something cheap like that – ‘Bargain sale owing to closing down of premises.’ She came and knelt at his knees. ‘Your Grace,’ she exclaimed. She was used to giving officers a superior rank – it nearly always pleased a captain to be called a major.

“‘I am not a bishop,’ Mr. Visconti said. ‘I am only a humble monsignor.’ Mario questioned his father closely about this episode, and I have really invented nothing. If anyone has invented a detail it is Mario. You have to remember that he writes verse plays.

“‘Father,’ the girl implored, taking the hint, ‘help me.’

“‘The secrecy of the confessional,’ Mr. Visconti pleaded back – they were now, you see, pleading to each other, and she pawed Mr. Visconti’s knee, while he pawed the top of her head in an ecclesiastical way. Perhaps it was the pawings which made the German officer interrupt with impatience.

“‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘if she wants to confess, Monsignor, let her. Here’s the key of my room, just down the passage, past the lavatory.’

“So off went Mr. Visconti with the hysterical girl – he remembered just in time to put down his whisky. He had no choice, though he hadn’t been to confession himself for thirty years and he had never learnt the priest’s part. Luckily there was an air-conditioner in the room breathing heavily, and that obscured his whispers, and the girl was too much concerned with her role to pay much attention to his. She began right away; Mr. Visconti had hardly time to sit on the bed, pushing aside a steel helmet and a bottle of Schnapps, before she was getting down to details. He had wanted the whole thing finished as quickly as possible, but he told Mario that he couldn’t help becoming a little interested now she had got started and wanting to know a bit more. After all, he was a novice – though not in the ecclesiastical sense.

“‘How many times, my child?’ That was a phrase he remembered very well from his adolescence.

“‘How can you ask that, Father? I’ve been at it all the time ever since the occupation. After all they were our allies, Father.’

“‘Yes, yes, my child.’ I can just see him enjoying the chance he had of learning a thing or two, even though his life was in danger. Mr. Visconti was a very lecherous man. He said, ‘Always the same thing, my child?’

“She regarded him with astonishment. ‘Of course not, Father. Who on earth do you think I am?’

“He looked at her kneeling in front of him, and I am sure he longed to pinch her. Mr. Visconti was always a great pincher. ‘Anything unnatural, my child?’

“‘What do you mean unnatural, Father?’

“Mr. Visconti explained.

“‘Surely that’s not unnatural, Father?’

“Then they had quite a discussion about what was natural and what wasn’t, with Mr. Visconti almost forgetting his danger in the excitement, until someone knocked on the door and Mr. Visconti, vaguely sketching a cross in a lop-sided way, muttered what sounded through the noise of the air-conditioner like an absolution. The German officer came in in the middle of it and said, ‘Hurry up, Monsignor. I’ve got a more important customer for you.’

“It was the general’s wife, who had come down to the bar for a last dry Martini before escaping north and heard what was going on. She drained her Martini in one gulp and commanded the officer to arrange her confession. So there was Mr. Visconti caught again. There was an awful row now in the Via Veneto as the tanks drove out of Rome. The general’s wife had positively to shout at Mr. Visconti. She had a rather masculine voice and Mr. Visconti said it was like being on the parade ground. He nearly clicked his feet together in his purple socks when she bellowed at him, ‘Adultery. Three times.’

“‘Are you married, my daughter?’

“‘Of course I’m married. What on earth do you suppose? I’m Frau General’ – I’ve forgotten what ugly Teutonic name she had.

“‘Does your husband know of this?’

“‘Of course he doesn’t know. He’s not a priest.’

“‘Then you have been guilty of lies too?’

“‘Yes, yes, naturally, I suppose so, you must hurry, Father. Our car’s being loaded. We are leaving for Florence in a few minutes.’

“‘Haven’t you anything else to tell me?’

“‘Nothing of importance.’

“‘You haven’t missed Mass?’

“‘Oh, occasionally, Father. This is war-time.’

“‘Meat on Fridays?’

“‘You forget. It is permitted now, Father. Those are Allied planes overhead. We have to leave immediately.’

“‘God cannot be hurried, my child. Have you indulged in impure thoughts?’

“‘Father, put down yes to anything you like, but give me absolution. I have to be off.’

“‘I cannot feel that you’ve properly examined your conscience.’

“‘Unless you give me absolution at once, I shall have you arrested. For sabotage.’

“Mr. Visconti said, ‘It would be better if you gave me a seat in your car. We could finish your confession tonight.’

“‘There isn’t room in the car, Father. The driver, my husband, myself, my dog – there simply isn’t space for another passenger.’

“A‘ dog takes up no room. It can sit on your knee’.

“‘This is an Irish wolfhound, Father.’

“‘Then you must leave it behind,’ Mr. Visconti said firmly, and at that moment a car back-fired and the Frau General took it for an explosion.

“‘I need Wolf for my protection, Father. War is very dangerous for women.’

“‘You will be under the protection of our Holy Mother Church,’ Mr. Visconti said, ‘as well as your husband’s.’

“‘I cannot leave Wolf behind. He is all I have in the world to love.’

“‘I would have assumed that with three adulteries – and a husband…’

“‘They mean nothing to me.’

“‘Then I suggest,’ Mr. Visconti said, ‘that we leave the general behind.’ And so it came about. The general was dressing down the hall porter because of a mislaid spectacle-case when the Frau General seated herself beside the driver and Mr. Visconti sat beside Wolf at the back. ‘Drive off,’ the general’s wife said.

“The driver hesitated, but he was more afraid of the wife than the husband. The general came out into the street and shouted to them as they drove off – a tank had stopped to give precedence to the staff car. Nobody paid any attention to the general’s shouts except Wolf. He clambered all over Mr. Visconti, thrusting his evil-smelling parts against Mr. Visconti’s face, knocking off Mr. Visconti’s clerical hat, barking furiously to get out. The Frau General may have loved Wolf, but it was the general whom Wolf loved. Probably the general concerned himself with his food and his exercise. Blindly Mr. Visconti fumbled for the handle of the window. Before the window was properly open Wolf jumped right in the path of the following tank. It flattened him. Mr. Visconti, looking back, thought that he resembled one of those biscuits they make for children in the shape of animals.

“So Mr. Visconti was rid of both dog and general and was able to ride in reasonable comfort to Florence. Mental comfort was another matter, and the general’s wife was hysterical with grief. I think Curran would have dealt with the situation a great deal better than Mr. Visconti. At Brighton, Curran would offer the last sacrament in the form of a ritual bone, which the poor beast of course could not possibly chew, to a dying dog. A lot of dogs were killed by cars on Brighton front, and the police were quite annoyed by owners who refused to have the bodies shifted until Curran had been summoned to give the corpse absolution. But Mr. Visconti, as I have told you, was not a religious man, and the consolations he offered, I can well imagine, were insufficient and unconvincing. Perhaps he spoke of punishment for the Frau General’s sins (for Mr. Visconti had a sadistic streak), and of the purgatory which we suffer on earth. Poor Mr. Visconti, he must have had a hard time of it all the way to Florence.”

“What happened to the general?”

“He was captured by the Allies, I believe, but I’m not sure whether or not he was hanged at Nuremberg.”

“Mr. Visconti must have a great deal on his conscience.”

“Mr. Visconti hasn’t got a conscience,” my aunt said with pleasure.