Surviving

by Allan Massie

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “It was like it frightened him.” He sipped his Coca-Cola. “Why d’you think she was so keen to take us there? It was her idea, wasn’t it, not yours.”

  “Yes, it was her idea.”

  “That’s a relief. Really. I wouldn’t have known what to think if you’d said it was your idea. Was it a kind of test, for Gary? A tad nasty?”

  Belinda couldn’t answer that one, not out loud and not even really in her own mind. “Oh I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’m not sorry I’ve seen it,” Erik said, “the way you are not sorry you’ve seen a horror movie even if it scared you shitless. I’ve read about the Mamertine, in the guidebooks and in a novel about Tiberius. That’s how I knew about Sejanus. The guy who wrote the novel got it wrong though. He said Sejanus was thrust down that twisting stair. But the stair wasn’t constructed till the Middle Ages. Before then they dropped the prisoners through a hole in the roof, and I guess the executioners descended the same way. Sejanus was strangled you know. Do you think it’s true Jugurtha was stripped naked before they threw him in and that he chewed his own arm because he was starving? That’s what the story says.”

  “There’s no story so horrible it can’t be true,” Belinda said. “Surely we know that now.” Erik flicked a lighter towards Belinda’s cigarette. He took a spoonful of ice cream and just touched it with his tongue.

  “What do you think Kate hoped to learn about Gary from taking us there?”

  Belinda looked away. Erik put the spoon in his mouth, holding it there while he allowed the ice cream to begin to melt.

  “I guess that place is evil,” he said. “You get the feeling it is, don’t you. Emanation – that’s the word, emanations of evil. Do you think she wanted to test his response to that? Or is that kind of fanciful?”

  Again Belinda didn’t reply. She looked out through the smoke rising from her cigarette to the rocks of the Capitol across the road down which the traffic streamed.

  “I’m nervous,” Erik said. “That’s why I’m talking too much. He didn’t show anything, did he, not till she put her hand on his shoulder and he shook it off. With a sort of shudder like.”

  Belinda thought: it was Reynard took me there, my only previous visit. It excited him too. It excited him no end. It was there he asked me to marry him, in the execution chamber. Would you believe it? I would have refused him anyway, but … that made it easy. I don’t think I’ve ever told Kate that, no reason to; I don’t think I’ve ever said outright more than I said this afternoon, that I nearly married him once. Would it excite Erik now, if I told him I had a proposal of marriage there? I hope not, but …

  “Does Kate think Gary’s in love with death?”

  “Is anyone really?”

  “Necrophilia’s not just dead bodies,” Erik said. “I’ve read somewhere, that it’s not always sexual. Maybe Edgar Allan Poe. What do you think?”

  Belinda had two thoughts which she couldn’t speak: first that Erik himself was too excited by the Mamertine, and second that she would like to know what he expected from … what? … life? … her? But she couldn’t speak the criticism, and as for the question – she feared his answer. She didn’t care to take the risk.

  XXI

  Leg was hurting. Not for the first time Tom wondered if a doctor would recommend a hip replacement. He leaned heavily on his stick. No doctor would get the chance. He’d walked too far, that was all. But the Via Giulia at twilight, the warm facades of the lovely buildings in deepening, almost purple shadow, worth an ache in hip and leg to limp its length.

  It was again the bad time of day. It’s worse in Rome than in any other city I know, he thought, except Venice of course, and the natural thing is to go and have a drink that will dull the solitude that is so sharp in the half light. But you can’t do that and, touch wood, you don’t even want to. You ought to be glad of that, but it’s like when you’ve broken with a woman and there is that emptiness …

  A man who might have been old, sitting with his back to the wall of a house that was some kind of government building according to the plaque by the door, extended an open hand in his direction. There was a bottle between the man’s legs, and a big shaggy dog slept by him with one eye half open. Tom nodded and fished a note from his breast pocket and pushed it at the man. Often in his drinking years he’d pictured himself in the man’s position.

  He should have gone after Meg when she ran out of the restaurant. If he’d done so, they might be in bed now. Or not; it would be grotesque if they had really done that so many years back. With his belly and his hip and now his impotence, it didn’t bear thinking on.

  Mike was in a mess, a sad mess. He ought to feel for him, as with the beggar and his dog. But the beggar asked only for money, or could be forgotten after money changed hands. Mike demanded what Durward was in no mood, or even condition, to give.

  In Piazza Farnese a boy with tangled curls smiled at him. The boy was sitting sideways on his scooter with one knee pulled up against his chest. He asked for a cigarette. Tom shook a couple from his packet of untipped Camels, and lit one. The boy looked over the flame and the eyes and smile and posture told Tom he was available.

  “Nothing doing,” Tom said in Italian, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “Hey, I didn’t really think you were queer,” the boy said. “I was just passing the time. I’m waiting for my girl.”

  “Lucky you. Congratulations.”

  “And I deserve them, she’s quite something.”

  “The best ones always keep you waiting,” Tom said. “Have patience and then enjoy yourself.”

  Turning into Campo de’ Fiori he settled at a table outside a bar on the river side of the square. The blonde woman greeted him as one who had established himself as a regular, and fetched him an espresso and a half litre of mineral water. It pleased him to be accepted this way; he had always liked to form a routine for himself.

  He thought about the boy on the scooter and how it might have been if he had been that way. You couldn’t – he drew on his toscano – pretend you have been a happy success with women. There’s only so much that even the best or worst of them can take. But the other, no, not at all. He’d been afraid for Jamie when he sent him to Stowe because Jamie was blond and brave and ingenuous. And then he was dead, drowned in that beautiful, level, loathly lake. They called it an accident. Tom tried to persuade himself it was.

  For a long time subsequently he played the Hemingway man, destroyed but not defeated. He read Hemingway and cried over the good sentences. “In the Fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more …” But it was the old Colonel in Across the River and into the Trees that he made himself into. Those who knew about such matters and set up as critics panned that novel. One, Tom remembered, dismissed the old lion as a “garrulous buffoon” because he was capable of proclaiming Across his best work. Well, he hadn’t been there, that critic. Tom had. Sure it wasn’t his best work – that was to be found in the short stories, a few pages of To Have And Have Not and the bits of A Moveable Feast where there were no other writers present. But Tom would rather have written Across than, hell, have got tenure as a Distinguished Professor. The duck-shooting on the lagoon made the spine tingle, no matter how often you read it.

  Well, it was years since Tom had been the Colonel, but Hem and the Colonel had seen him into and through bad times.

  You could make a wonderful mood movie of Across. He’d written it himself, keeping at most five per cent of the dialogue which was mostly so corny and embarrassing. Lew Silcouth was interested, enthusiastic, keen to produce it, then went off his head, choked to death on his own vomit. So there it was, or rather wasn’t. Tom had no copy even of his screenplay.

  A flock of starlings wheeled like acrobats across the darkening sky. Tom called for another espresso, and he saw Belinda and the soft boy Erik come into the piazza. They approached his table, exchanged greetings, settled there.

  “You haven’t seen
Stephen, have you?” Belinda said.

  “Stephen?”

  “Stephen Mallany. You remember, you said he was like a Church of England vicar.”

  “Oh him, I didn’t know that was his name.”

  “He’s gone missing again,” Belinda said. “He’s drinking, we’re sure of that. So we’ve been searching …”

  “It’s hopeless,” Erik said. “I mean, we’ve no idea, just none. We’ve hunted all over Trastevere.” He flashed a smile at Tom. “Bel’s exhausted.” He sought to draw Tom into complicity.

  “Just anxious,” she said.

  “Mallany,” Tom said.

  He lifted his hand. The blonde woman came and took their order: Schweppes Tonic for Belinda, Diet Coke for the boy. She looked like a tougher younger version of Belinda; not fresher; she’d been through it herself, and it showed.

  Erik said, “I’m glad we’ve met, wanted to tell you how good I thought your story was, really helpful. I was too shy, I guess, to say more than thank you yesterday.”

  The words came in a rush, but prepared and stored up.

  “These starlings are quite something,” Tom said, “just look at them. Mallany.”

  “You sound as if it means something to you.”

  “It does, indeed it does.”

  “I’m sure you could help Stephen,” Erik said. “When we find him that is. I think he’d listen to you. I can’t say anything to him, and I’m not sure Bel can either, can you?”

  “He’s in full flight,” Belinda said.

  “I hate this side of AA,” Tom said. “It embarrasses me. Never been happy with the Good Samaritan.”

  “Flight’s the wrong word,” Belinda said. She sipped her Schweppes, “Stephen used to fly very prettily when I first knew him, and he was sweet then, but now … his wings are damaged.”

  “This isn’t a good city for a bender,” Tom said. “It frightens the Italians.”

  “Why’s that?” Erik said.

  “Drunks make them nervous.”

  “Stephen’s not a violent drunk,” Erik said. “Least, I’ve never seen him … he’s never hit anyone, I’m sure. He starts crying.”

  “Oh yes,” Tom said, “we’re all screaming like abused and abandoned children.

  “You don’t believe that,” Belinda said.

  “Believe that shaming purple prose? Let’s call it ironical. We’re all into irony now. It’s the only defence left us.”

  “Defence against what?” Erik said.

  “Take your pick. Reality? Sincerity? Truth?”

  XXII

  Rain in the night had washed the dust from the oleander leaves. Now, seven in the morning, Parioli sparkled. There was more of autumn in the air. Kate stood on the balcony and breathed deeply – in, out, in, out, twenty times – before she allowed herself the first cigarette of the day.

  Then she took a pot of coffee to her writing-desk and began to transcribe her tapes. She wrote up the account of the visit to the Mamertine; that had gone well. When she placed her hand on Gary’s shoulder, she felt his tension. On the way home they stopped outside a cutler’s. Gary examined the knives in the window. She asked if he wanted one. He looked her in the face, then his eyes slid away, and he lowered his head and mumbled words she didn’t catch. In the evening he announced he was going for a walk and looked at her as if he expected she would either insist on accompanying him or try to stop him. But she said nothing. He returned an hour later, and said, “Mr Yallett’s coming just for the weekend, that’s right, isn’t it?” Then, “Why’s he coming? Are you two up to something?”

  “I didn’t invite him,” Kate said.

  Now she wrote: he doesn’t like being put in a position where he has to ask questions. Evidence of a deficiency in self-confidence? Is that why he feels always under threat? He’s disconcerted, even alarmed, by the prospect of Yallett’s visit.

  She drank a cup of coffee; wrote, “In The Politics of the Family, R. D. Laing says that he considers many adults, among whom he includes himself, to exist in a species of hypnotic trance, induced in early infancy; we remain, he thinks, in this state unless – ‘when we dead awaken,’ as Ibsen has it – unless that happens, it’s as if we have never lived.”

  “He was such a happy child, as a kid,” his mother said to me. “Then his father went away and he took charge of me. That was till he was twelve or thirteen, and he got in with a bad lot, easy to do that round here.”

  So the hypnotic trance came later than infancy in this case. But species of hypnotic trance – yes. Laing was only half a charlatan, the other half genius. Would he have got through to someone as carapaced as Gary, who shrinks from physical contact which Laing valued so highly? A knife keeps all bodies at a distance, unless or until …

  The telephone rang.

  “Meg here, sorry to interrupt you, Kate, but have you seen him? He’s not with you, is he?”

  “No. He’s still at it then. I thought he was winding down?”

  “Some hope. Christ knows where he is. I rather think I’ve had enough, all I can take. I know it’s early in the day for such decisions, but then I haven’t slept all night. He wasn’t pleased, you know, when you said you’d have no time for him for the next while. She is my bloody sponsor, he kept saying. Not that I’m blaming you, Kate. I’m not even blaming myself. I’m too busy breathing fire in the old brute’s direction. Or I was, till I said, to hell with him.”

  “But you still called me, Meg.”

  “Well, yes, you can’t throw off responsibility as easily as you throw off love, can you?”

  “Some people would put that the other way round.”

  “I guess they would. Oh hell.”

  “You could try Sol,” Kate said. “Mike has a great respect for Sol. We all have of course.”

  “OK, but I suppose the old bugger’ll turn up, when he’s through. He always has.”

  It was eight o’clock. Yallett’s plane would be in at 10.30. She made a cup of tea and took it through to Gary’s room. He was still asleep, lying on his belly, his face turned to the wall. He made a little grinding noise with his teeth. She opened the shutters to let the sunlight in. Falling on his cheek it turned the skin the colour of unsalted butter. She laid the cup on the table by the bed and left him to sleep. Reynard could make his own way from the airport. She had said she would meet him and was pleased not to. In sleep Gary looked easy, even happy. When she had asked him about bad dreams, he denied ever having them. She thought he might be speaking the truth there.

  She returned to her notes and leafed back to read again his version of the night of the killing.

  XXIII

  Reynard Yallett waited less than five minutes at Arrivals before he called Kate, mobile to mobile.

  “Are you on your way?”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t possible. We’ll meet you for lunch. Say 1.30 or a little later. Vecchia Roma, Piazza Campitelli. You’ll find it with no difficulty.”

  She rang off. Yallett smiled. He liked the way she had offered no excuse; that was the real bitch. He liked the hostility in her voice. He strode out of the airport towards the taxi rank. There was a fast train service to Termini now, but it wasn’t for him.

  “Hotel Excelsior, Via Veneto.”

  The day sparkled. He felt good. He felt dangerous.

  He savoured the thought of the interview he had given a girl journalist last night: for The Sunday Times Colour Magazine. “I despised my father,” he told her, “and his limp post-Christian morality. They made him a bishop, you know, and all his philosophy was wet liberalism.” Now he smiled to see again the skinny girl’s eager greedy mouth. He’d leaned forward, and pressed the stop button on her recorder, and put his hands round her waist to draw her to her feet; and then he had forced open her linen trousers, colour of ripe peaches, and searched deeper, while she thrust her tongue into his mouth, and they staggered locked together to the bed where he took her quickly, with no words, and she moaned and cried out for more. That was his way and he h
ad his father to thank. The contempt with which he’d spoken of him had excited her.

  He had her three times, once up the arse, where she’d never had it before. She cried a little, and took a shower, and dressed, in tears again, because it was the first time, she said, she had cheated on her husband. She was twenty-seven and he didn’t believe her.

  “Come to Rome with me tomorrow.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, her short ragged-cut dark hair and flat chest making her look like a ruined child, and shook her head, not looking at him.

  “You never finished your interview.”

  “It’s not possible,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  “All right,” he said. “Tuesday, here, six o’clock.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do, really. Six o’clock. You’ll come.”

  He reached up and pulled her over him, and let his hand fall smart on her buttocks. He held her like that several minutes.

  Now he held the memory, rolled it around. What had she said to her husband when she got home? “Oh yes, sure, it went well, but we got interrupted, so I have to go back on Tuesday to finish it, rather a nuisance, darling, on account of my deadline.” And the husband would say, “Is he the monster he’s painted as, the genuine Rottweiler?” And she would smile – a smile to conceal her excitement – the knowledge that he, Reynard, knew her better than she had known herself till that afternoon … Oh yes, he could imagine the scene, just as surely as he could still smell her skin on his, such a slut beneath that glossy Soho House exterior.

  They had arrived in the Via Veneto and he had seen nothing of the drive into Rome.

  There were faxes awaiting him at the hotel desk. There always were. There would be e-mails too. Reynard Yallett was ever in demand. He impressed himself on the desk clerk. He exuded authority. At seventeen a rebel, a problem provoking long discussions – “What shall we do with Reynard? What can we make of him?” – now, at forty-five, Reynard Yallett knew himself to be formidable, and feared. And “they” had nothing to do with it. He was a self-created man. It gave him a kick to know he was disliked. Let them hate, provided they fear.