I nodded and, pointing to myself with a laugh, echoed, ‘The little English boy.’
I asked him about Vasco and again he nodded and said, ‘Yes, yes, Vasco.’
When I asked him if Vasco was here, this seemed to cause considerable trouble as he sought for the words. ‘Vasco,’ he said several times. Then something I couldn’t make out at all. Then finally and most hopefully of all, ‘Little English girl.’
‘With Vasco?’ I asked. ‘Was the English girl with Vasco? Are they still here?’
Again the difficulties of expression, again the difficulties of understanding. He was growing most frustrated by this time, banging his usable hand on the arm of his chair.
Finally he said two words which came out loud and clear.
‘Villa Colonna.’
Then as if exhausted by his efforts and their frustration, he sank back in his chair, breathing hard, and closed his eyes.
At the same moment a woman’s voice yelled loud in my ear, ‘Who are you? What do you want? What have you done to my grandfather?’
I looked round. A woman of about thirty stood behind me. She had rather thin, undistinguished features but they were lit up with a splendid rage. Only in the woman of Southern Italy is anger a beautifying emotion.
This I guessed was Anna. I stood up to explain myself and she shouldered me aside to get to the old man, who certainly didn’t look all that healthy.
Once more I started to explain who I was, but this time as soon as I mentioned my name she began to scream at me in terms of virulent abuse. There was no way of switching her off, and I guessed by the time she had run out of steam an audience would have collected below, possibly including a local cop or two. So I left her raging richly and tactically withdrew. She leaned over the balcony and matched the rhythms of her abusive rhetoric to my retreating steps.
My only consolation was that at least I was certain Vasco and Angelica were here somewhere. I toyed with the idea of going back to the Carducci bakery and continuing my enquiries there, but no doubt they would be as uncooperatively antagonistic as Anna. No, the clue I decided to follow had been given by old Matteo. Of course, when he said Villa Colonna, he might have been merely continuing the reminiscent theme of ‘the little English boy’, but I didn’t think so.
I got back to the Piazza Duomo. The car was still there at the foot of the steps but the traffic warden had been joined now by two large policemen, so I walked right through the square to the sea front, where a row of taxis stood while their drivers argued football in the shade.
I climbed into the leading one and waited. No one came so I leaned forward and blasted the horn. The drivers looked, then continued their discussion. I sighed, leaned forward again, switched on the headlights, windscreen wipers and radio.
He was with me in two seconds.
I didn’t give him a chance to start an argument but held up a twenty-thousand lire note and said, ‘Villa Colonna.’
He switched everything off and said, ‘Hotel Colonna?’
I nodded sadly. ‘Si.’
He took the note and started the engine.
As we left the town by the rising road which climbs back up the cliff out of the ravine in which Amalfi lies, he began to chatter away, assuring me that his knowl edge of the countryside and the antiquities around Amalfi was second to none, that he could arrange anything from a live performance of Wagnerian arias at Ravello to a moonlit trip to the Grotta dello Smeraldo. And if I preferred a knowledgeable female courier on the latter, he could fix that too.
I told him to shut up and closed my eyes. I was feeling this journey sinking the claws of the past into me more than anything I’d done since leaving Margarita. This was a journey back to a time when I’d been completely happy. No, that’s wrong. Not even happy children are happy all the time. But certainly to a time when the state of complete happiness was a daily probability. Nothing after Mama’s death, not even Angelica’s birth, had been lit with that pure dazzling white light of joy which casts no shade.
Once more, as always, the memory of that very last joy-lit moment shone perfect in my mind. My limbs supple, strong, and godlike even in their exhaustion, cleaving through the water. My fingers touching. The cheers of the crowd. The congratulations of the team. And then Mama, oblivious of the protesting officials and of the rivulets of water still running down my body, embracing me with joy and pride and love.
The happiness I had felt in my victory had seemed immortal. There was no friendly voice in my ear saying, ‘Mira, chico, that’s it. Finito. There is no more. The rest is anticlimax.’ My heart sang. The singing it seemed would never end.
Three months later Mama was dead, Pa was justifying himself in Moscow, and I was miming to someone else’s record, the someone else who those few months earlier had still been capable of perfect happiness.
A discord of horns brought me back to the present as my taxi and an oncoming coach exchanged opinions. I was grateful. This was where I had to be for the little time that remained to me. The one real thing to come of that old mimic life was Angelica, and she might be in danger.
We were almost there. Soon we would turn off the winding road and bump down the rutted drive to the rocky plateau on which the Villa Colonna stood overlooking the sea. Or perhaps that wasn’t such a clever move. I saw the turning ahead and said to the driver, ‘That’s fine. I’ll get out here.’
At the entrance to the drive, I saw a sign had been erected. It read Hotel Colonna but it looked to me as if it would be commercially counter-productive. The paint had been stripped off by the blow-lamp of the sun leaving the words scarcely legible, and one of the posts on which it was nailed had rotted away so that it listed like a railway signal ready to drop next time that violent wind known as the Tramontana blasted down the mountains from the north and set the boats rocking at their storm-anchorage in the middle of the bay.
I started to walk down the drive. The villa was built against the face of the cliff with the roof not far below the level of the road. The drive-way was an elbow doubling back on itself to form a hairpin which Pa had claimed did more for religion in Amalfi than all the relics of St Andrew preserved in the Duomo. The drive ran through a lemon grove clinging in a series of terraces to the cliff-face. It looked as if it had been sadly neglected in recent years, but there were some people working in it now. They looked like a family or perhaps two families, and they regarded me, men, women and children alike, with the blank inimical stare of the true peasant. As I reached the corner I met three or four hens picking at the dusty track and their reaction was even less welcoming, scuttering away clucking a loud warning to whatever lay ahead.
At the point of the elbow I paused and looked down. From here you got a magnificent view of the rocky cove above which the villa was built. In the ‘twenties a lift had been installed and I could see its shaft still clinging like a Meccano structure to the cliff face. It had been pretty unreliable even in the early ‘fifties and I wouldn’t fancy using it now. I looked past it far below to the little cove where in good weather we had kept Ariel moored to the concrete landing platform from which you could dive into fifteen feet of water. There was a boat there now, no Ariel this, but a broad tub with a sad stump of a mast, wallowing in the gentle swell.
I resumed my approach to the villa but not before I had become aware that two men had emerged from the lemon grove and were standing watching me on the drive behind me.
I was on the same level now as the main terrace whose white wall was almost invisible under a cascade of scarlet bougainvillæa. The driveway ran down to the third or bottommost level which housed the kitchen, the cellar and the garage. I kept straight on along a little dusty track which would take me direct to the terrace.
There were signs here both of neglect and of habitation. The pink walls of the villa were badly weather-stained, some tiles had come off the roof and a quick repair job had been done with what looked like a black polythene sheet. A shutter hung loose from its window by a single hinge. Over the
rail of the balcony which ran the whole length of the top floor above the terrace were draped sheets, and from a line stretched above the rail hung a variety of washing.
But to me the most surprising, indeed shocking, sight was the stump of the old column from which the villa derived its name. Thought to be the remains of one of the pillars of a Greek temple on whose foundations the villa itself was built, it stood in a little patch of grass with a few olive trees to the side of the building. Now someone had erected a makeshift chicken-wire fence around the column and in this pen a family of tiny pink piglets were rooting and basking in the sun.
I had no right to be indignant, but indignation was what I felt. Obviously the hotel had failed, probably because of its difficulty of access, and the place had been left to the deprivation of squatters.
With difficulty I shook myself free of this distracting emotion. I had more important matters in hand. At least I hoped I did. But I was beginning to wonder what possible reason Vasco could have for bringing Angelica up here.
I climbed on to the tarmac. Signs of occupation multiplied. From the kitchen below came drifting a smell of hot oil and garlic accompanied by a tuneless peasant singing. On a table on the fine marble floor of the terraces were glasses and some soft drink cans.
A sound behind me made me turn. The two peasants I’d noticed before were at the foot of the three stairs which lead up to the terrace. One of them was in his fifties with a deeply-lined, leathery face full of shrewdness and distrust. The other was younger, gipsy-like in English terms, with the surly, dark good looks of a Heathcliff. In his right hand he carried a broad and vicious-looking billhook. Slowly, as I watched, they mounted the stairs and came towards me.
I undid the button on my thin linen jacket and slid my hand inside till it rested on the comforting solidity of my pistol-butt.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I asked.
They stopped.
Then another voice, a young female voice repeated my words in hesitant Italian.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
I turned to the speaker. She must have just emerged on to the terrace from one of the rooms which lay behind it. She was quite tall, very slender, with long dark hair and a lively, pretty face. She was clad in the skimpiest of bikinis and there was no suggestion that the deep brown of her flawless skin diluted to modest pallor beneath the flimsy cloth. She stood there so young, so unself-conscious, that for a moment I could only admire her. Then my hormones got to work and desire set in.
But it was short-lived.
‘Who are you?’ she repeated, but this time in English.
I heard the truth in her voice for there I caught a rising inflexion of Kate’s which came back to me now after so many years. Even then I hesitated belief. The last snapshot I’d received via Uncle Percy had shown me a round-faced, uniformed schoolgirl, not this nubile nymphet. I suppose there was an element of defence-mechanism in all this. A man doesn’t care to find that his long-sought reunion with his little daughter had touched his groin before it touched his heart.
‘Angelica?’ I said stupidly.
She nodded uncertainly.
I took a step towards her. I don’t expect I looked a very appetizing sight and at the best of times my soulful expression tends to look like acid indigestion.
She let out a little cry of alarm and retreated, half stumbling against a canvas chair. I reached forward to help her. There was a noise of running feet. I looked up. Heathcliff was descending on me swinging his billhook with the easy vigour of a man who has no doubt but that he can remove the top of a man’s head like a ring of ripe pineapple. Even when I pulled out my gun, he kept coming.
Angelica’s cry of alarm swelled into a full-blooded scream of terror which drew my glance towards her once again. I’d still have had plenty of time to return my attention to Heathcliff and pick a spot in his muscular body to put my bullet into, but over Angelica’s shoulder, just emerging from the shadows of the terrace-lounge, I saw a man.
Tall, round-shouldered, grey-haired; a patrician head wearing at this moment an expression of mixed surprise and disapproval, but without the slightest trace of concern or uncertainty.
He spoke. I had my gun on his breastbone but I froze. Perhaps it was amazement, perhaps doubt. Perhaps I just wanted to savour the moment.
‘Lem,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Oh, Lem.’
And then I couldn’t fire because Angelica had run into his arms which went protectively about her. But oh! how that sight whetted my blunted purpose!
I’d forgotten Heathcliff, of course.
And now he was on me.
Everyone yelled at once including me. But yelling was all I had time for.
Fortunately, instead of slices he settled for chunks and at the last moment turned his wrist so that I got the flat instead of the edge of the blade full against my right ear.
The immediate result was just the same.
Like some wayward asteroid, I had travelled thousands of dangerous miles through the bright air for this encounter.
And now as I touched their atmosphere, my daughter’s and my father’s, I felt my substance dissolve and I went sputtering into darkness.
17
… a matching pair …
Waking was like coming out of one of the cellar dives in downtown Caracas. My head seemed full of noise and smoke, my belly awash with rotten liquor, and at first even this dim light and musty air hit me like a squirt of caustic. I’d have rolled back into the dive if I could, except that black memories were now stirring, like recollections of having been taken for every bolivar in your wallet.
I sat upright, regretted it, collapsed again, but the memories had been shaken loose. It wasn’t money I’d lost, but everything. Now he’d taken everything from me. He was up there with Angelica, holding her, comforting her, persuading her that I’d broken into the villa to harm her …
Up there. I opened my eyes again. Above my head a single bulb, grime-encrusted to near opacity, spilled just enough light to paint shapes. It was sufficient. My subconscious had been right. I recognized where I was. Far from emerging from a cellar dive, I was actually languishing in a cellar, the wine-cellar of the Villa Colonna. Here I’d come as a boy, fascinated and frightened by this cave of cool darkness carved in the rock behind the bright sunlit house, moving among the racks of bottles peeping like cannons from their ports, broadside upon broadside at the ready.
I sat upright again, slowly this time, and let my eyes grow accustomed to the light. I was lying on an old mattress, thin, lumpy and stained with God knows what, but at least it indicated some slight concern for my comfort, which was hopeful. I touched my right ear and winced. It felt big enough for Dumbo. Perhaps if I belted the other one equally hard, I could fly out of here. My head ached, but that apart, I suppose I didn’t feel too bad for a dying forty-year-old.
I got to my feet and tried a few steps. It felt like a novel form of locomotion and I didn’t reckon it would catch on, so I sat down again and resumed my examination of the cellar. It seemed to have weathered the years as badly as I had. The racks were still there but the only bottles in sight were a pile of empties in a corner. Odd bits of broken furniture littered the floor. It had degenerated to a junk-room. I should have felt at home but all I wanted to do was get out. I stood up once more and found I was beginning to master the new fashion. This time I made it to the door.
Why I bothered, I didn’t know. They weren’t going to dump me in here and leave the door open. Still, I had to try it before I started digging my tunnel through about half a mile of solid rock.
I tried it. It was locked. Disappointment has nothing to do with expectation. I was disappointed. I had decided to postpone my excavations for a while and return to my mattress for a ponder when I heard a key being turned in the lock. I dug deep into my mind, hoping to find some reserves of strength with which to launch an attack but when the door swung up it caught my shoulder a glancing blow and I immediately fell down.
/> I felt myself picked up and returned to the mattress. There were two of them and they spoke together in Italian in the strong accent of Avellino. One of them moved away and I wondered if this might not be my best chance, but when I opened my eyes, I saw the Heathcliffian face of the man who had hit me and in his hand the billhook he had hit me with, and I changed my mind. The other man couldn’t have gone very far for he was back in a moment with a tray. On it was a jug full of black steaming coffee, from the smell of it liberally laced with grappa, and a plateful of coarse brown bread, mozzarella cheese and a handful of juicy olives. He set it down a few feet away, the other made a permissive gesture and I sat up and began to drink and eat.
They waited till I had finished, then took the tray and dishes away and locked the door behind them. I listened for a while but was unable to determine how far they had moved away from the door. But presumably this meant that my own movements would be as difficult to follow. I rose once more and began to investigate.
The food and drink, or at least its grappa content, had reinvigorated me. Obviously this little hive of Communists had no immediate plans to sting me to death. Indeed, if I had a fair notion of how my father’s mind worked, he would already be examining the possible propaganda contribution my sudden appearance could make to his own little schemes. Perhaps I would be pulled out of a hat at an international press conference. Or sub-poena’d to appear as a witness at his trial. What could I say? That I’d been blackmailed by MI6 to assassinate him? What a splendid reinforcement of his own case against British security! Angelica too. My own daughter describing how she’d fled in fear while I was back in Rome, murdering her mother.
Oh Jesus. I’d almost forgotten about Kate. Did Angelica know yet? I had to get out of here and see her and speak to her and convince her that among all her bad memories of me that one at least should never figure.
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