When I opened the door of the flat I found everything in deep darkness. I set an occasional table rocking in the hall and something Venetian tinkled into fragments on the floor. When I drew the curtains the Venetian glasses had no glitter – they had gone dead like unused pearls. There was a scurf of correspondence on the floor among the broken glass, but it consisted mainly of circulars and I didn’t bother to examine them for the moment. I went into my aunt’s bedroom with a sense of shame – yet hadn’t she asked me to see that all was in order? I remembered how meticulously Colonel Hakim had explored the hotel room and how easily he had been outwitted, but I could see no candles anywhere, except in the kitchen where they were of a normal size and weight – presumably a genuine precaution against an electric failure.
In Wordsworth’s room the bed had been stripped and the hideous Walt Disney figures had all been put into drawers. The only decoration left was a framed photograph of Freetown harbour which showed market women in bright dresses descending some old steps with baskets on their heads towards the waterfront. I hadn’t noticed it when I came before – perhaps my aunt had hung it there in memory of Wordsworth.
I returned to the sitting-room and began to go through the post. One day my aunt might send me a forwarding address, but in any case I wanted to save anything remotely personal from the scrutiny of Woodrow and Sparrow if they came. My old acquaintance Omo had written, and there were various bills from a laundry, a wine-merchant’s, a grocer’s. I was surprised not to find a bank statement, but remembering the gold brick and the suitcase stuffed with notes, I thought that perhaps my aunt preferred to keep her resources liquid. In that case it seemed to me wise to take a closer look among the dresses she had left behind, for it would be dangerous to leave cash about in the empty flat.
Then among the bills I came on something which interested me – a picture postcard from Panama showing a French liner on a very blue sea. The card was written in French, in a tiny economic script to take full advantage of the small space. The writer signed himself with the initials A.D. and he wrote, so far as I could make out, what a concours de circonstances miraculeux it had been to find my aunt on the ship after all these years of a triste séparation and what a calamity it was that she had left the boat before the end of the cruise and not given him a longer chance to live over again the memories they shared. After her departure A.D.’s lumbago had taken a turn for the worse and the gout had revived in his right toe.
Could this possibly, I wondered, be Monsieur Dambreuse, the gallant lover who had kept two mistresses in the same hotel? If he were alive, then perhaps Curran was alive too. It was as though my aunt’s crooked world were destined to a kind of immortality – only my poor father lay certainly dead in the smoke and rain of Boulogne. I admit that a pang of jealousy struck me because on this voyage I had not been my aunt’s companion. It was to others that she now recounted her stories.
‘Forgive us coming in without ringing, Mr Pulling,’ said Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. He stood back to allow Inspector Woodrow to precede him according to protocol into the sitting-room. The inspector was carrying his umbrella which looked as if it hadn’t been opened since I had seen him last.
‘Good afternoon,’ Inspector Woodrow said stiffly. ‘It is just as well we have found you here.’
‘The door being open …’ Sergeant Sparrow said.
‘I have a search-warrant,’ Inspector Woodrow told me before I could ask him, and he held it out for my inspection. ‘All the same we prefer a member of the family to be present at a search.’
‘Not wishing to make a commotion,’ Sergeant Sparrow said, ‘which would be disagreeable to all, we were waiting in our car across the street till the manager closed the bar, but then seeing you come in, we thought we could do things on the quiet without even the manager knowing. Much nicer for your aunt because there would have been a lot of gossip in the bar tonight, you can be sure of that. You can’t trust a barman not to talk to his locals. It’s like husband and wife.’
While he spoke the inspector was busy examining the room.
‘Looking at her mail, eh?’ the sergeant asked me. He took the card out of my hand and said, ‘Panama. Signed A.D. Now you wouldn’t have an idea who A.D. is?’
‘No.’
‘You see, it might be an alias. Interpol doesn’t get much co-operation in Panama,’ the sergeant said, ‘except in the American zone.’
‘Keep the card, Sparrow,’ the inspector said, ‘nonetheless.’
‘What have you got against my aunt?’
‘You know, sir, we err on the side of kindness,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘We could have charged her over that cannabis affair, but seeing what an old lady she was and the coloured man taking off to Paris like that, we let her be. The case wouldn’t have stood up in court anyway. Of course we didn’t know a thing about this undesirable connection of hers.’
‘What connection?’
I wondered if they had arranged their two parts beforehand: the sergeant being told to keep me occupied while the inspector searched the flat, as he was now doing.
‘This man Visconti, sir. An Italian as you might surmise with a name like that. He’s a viper.’
‘All this glass,’ the inspector said. ‘Curious stuff. It’s like a museum.’
‘Venetian glass. My aunt worked once in Venice. I expect a lot were gifts – from her clients.’
‘Very valuable? Collectors’ pieces?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Works of art?’
‘It’s a matter of taste,’ I said.
‘Miss Bertram knew a lot about art, I daresay. Any pictures?’
‘I don’t think so. Only a photo of Freetown in the spare room.’
‘Why Freetown?’
‘Wordsworth came from there.’
‘Who’s Wordsworth?’
‘The black valet,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘The one who took off to France when we found the pot.’
They trailed from room to room and I followed them. I thought that Woodrow was less thorough in his search than Colonel Hakim. I had the impression that he expected nothing and was only anxious to make a formal report to Interpol that every effort had been made. Every now and then he tossed me a question without looking round. ‘Has your aunt ever mentioned this fellow Visconti?’
‘Oh yes, many times.’
‘Is he alive, would you say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Any idea if they are still in contact?’
‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘The old viper would be over eighty by now,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘Nearer ninety, I’d guess.’
‘It seems a bit late to be chasing him even if he is alive,’ I said. We had left my aunt’s room and entered Wordsworth’s.
‘That’s one of the troubles of Interpol,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘Too many files. It’s not real police work they do. Not one of them has ever been on the beat. It’s a Civil Service. Like Somerset House.’
‘They do their duty, Sparrow,’ Woodrow said. He took down the photo of Freetown harbour and turned it over. Then he hung it up again. ‘It’s a good-looking frame,’ he said. ‘Cost more than the photograph.’
‘Italian too from the look of it,’ I said, ‘like the glass.’
‘Perhaps given her by the man Visconti?’ Sergeant Sparrow asked.
‘There’s no indication on the back,’ the inspector said. ‘I had hoped for an inscription. Interpol haven’t even a specimen of his signature – leave alone finger-prints.’ He consulted a piece of paper.
‘Have you ever heard your aunt mention any of these names – Tiberio Titi?’
‘No.’
‘Stradano? Passerati? Cossa?’
‘She’s never spoken to me very much about her Italian friends.’
‘These weren’t friends,’ Inspector Woodrow said.
‘Leonardo da Vinci?’
‘No.’
He began to go through the rooms all ove
r again, but I could tell that it was only for form’s sake. At the door he gave me a telephone number. ‘If you hear from your aunt,’ he said, ‘if you ever do, please ring us at once.’
‘I promise nothing.’
‘We only want to ask her a few questions,’ Sergeant Sparrow said. ‘There’s no charge against her.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘It is even possible,’ Inspector Woodrow said, ‘that she might be in serious personal danger. From her unfortunate associations.’
‘Particularly from that viper Visconti,’ Sergeant Sparrow chimed in.
‘Why do you keep calling him a viper?’
Sergeant Sparrow said, ‘It’s the only description Interpol has given us. They haven’t so much as a passport photo. But he was once described as a viper by the Chief of Police in Rome in 1945. All their war records were destroyed, the chief’s dead, and we don’t know now whether viper was a physical description or what you might call a moral judgement.’
‘At least,’ the inspector said, ‘we now have a postcard from Panama.’
‘It’s something for the files,’ Detective-Sergeant Sparrow explained to me.
When I double-locked the door and followed them, I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be dead and the most interesting part of my life might be over. I had waited a long while for it to arrive, and it had not lasted very long.
PART TWO
1
WHILE the ship was tugged out into the yellow tidal rush and the untidy skyscrapers and the castellated customs house jerked away, as though they rather than the ship were at the end of the rope, I thought of that distant day’s depression and of how wrong my fears had proved. It was eight on a July morning and the sea-birds wailed like the cats in Latimer Road and the clouds were heavy with coming rain. There was one break of sunlight over La Plata which gave the dull river a single silver streak, but the brightest spot in the sombre scape of water and shore was the flames from gas pipes flapping against the black sky. There were four days ahead of me, up the Plata, the Paraná and the Paraguay, before I joined my aunt, and I left the Argentine winter for my over-heated cabin and began to hang up my clothes and arrange my books and papers into a semblance of home.
More than half a year passed after my encounter with the detectives before I received any news of my aunt. I had become convinced of her death by that time, and once in a dream I was badly frightened by a creature crawling across the floor towards me with broken legs which swung like a snake’s tail. It was going to pull me down within reach of its teeth, and I was paralysed with terror like a bird before a snake. When I awoke I remembered Mr Visconti, though I believe it is a cobra and not a viper which is supposed to paralyse birds.
During that empty time I received one more letter from Miss Keene. She wrote in her own hand, for a clumsy servant had broken the keyboard of her typewriter. ‘I was just going to write,’ she said, ‘how stupid and clumsy these blacks are, and then I remembered how you and my father had discussed racialism one night at dinner and I felt as though I were betraying our old house in Southwood and the companionship of those days. Sometimes I fear that I am going to be quite assimilated. In Koffiefontein the Prime Minister no longer seems the monster we thought him at home: indeed he’s criticized here sometimes as an old-fashioned liberal. I find myself when I meet a tourist from England explaining apartheid so convincingly. I don’t want to be assimilated, and yet if I am to make my life here …’ The broken sentence sounded like an appeal which she was too shy to make clear. There followed the gossip of the farm: a dinner party to neighbours who lived more than a hundred miles away, and then one paragraph which I found a little disturbing: ‘I have met a Mr Hughes, a land surveyor, and he wants to marry me (please don’t laugh at me). He is a kind man in his late fifties, a widower with a teenage daughter whom I like well enough. I don’t know what to do. It would be the final assimilation, wouldn’t it? I’ve always had a silly dream of one day coming back to Southwood and finding the old house empty (how I miss that dark rhododendron walk) and beginning my life all over again. I am afraid of talking to anyone here about Mr Hughes – they would all be too encouraging. I wish you were not so far away, for I know you would counsel me wisely.’
Was I wrong to read an appeal in the last sentence, a desperate appeal in spite of its calm wording, an appeal for some decisive telegram ‘come back to Southwood and marry me’? Who knows whether I might not have sent one in my loneliness if a letter had not arrived which drove poor Miss Keene right out of my mind?
It was from my aunt, written on stiff aristocratic note-paper bearing simply a scarlet rose and the name Lancaster with no address, like the title of a noble family. Only when I read a little way into the letter did I realize that Lancaster was the name of an hotel. My aunt made no appeal; she simply issued a command, and there was no explanation of her long silence. ‘I have decided,’ she wrote, ‘not to return to Europe and I am giving up my apartment over the Crown and Anchor at the end of the next quarter. I would be glad if you would pack what clothes there may be there and dispose of all the furniture. On second thoughts however keep the photograph of Freetown harbour for me as a memento of dear Wordsworth and bring it with you.’ (She had not even told me where to come at that point of the letter or asked me if it were possible.) ‘Preserve it in its frame which has great sentimental value because it was given me by Mr V. I enclose a cheque on my account at the Crédit Suisse, Berne, which will be sufficient for a first-class ticket to Buenos Aires. Come as soon as you can, for I get no younger. I do not suffer from gout like an old friend whom I met the other day on a packet boat, but I feel nonetheless a certain stiffness in the joints. I want very much to have with me a member of my family whom I can trust in this rather bizarre country, not the less bizarre for having a shop called Harrods round the corner from the hotel, though it is less well stocked, I fear, than in the Brompton Road.’
I telegraphed to Miss Keene, ‘Joining my aunt in Buenos Aires shortly. Will write,’ and set about selling the furniture. The Venetian glass, I am afraid, went for a song. When all was sold at Harrods’ auction rooms (I had some dispute with the landlord of the Crown and Anchor over the sofa on the landing) I received enough for my return ticket and fifty pounds in travellers’ cheques, so I did not cash my aunt’s draft on the Swiss bank and I paid the little that was over into my own account, for I thought it better for her to have no assets in England if she planned not to return.
But as for joining my aunt in Buenos Aires, my forecast had been too optimistic. There was no one to meet me at the airport, and when I arrived at the Lancaster Hotel I found only my room reserved and a letter. ‘I am sorry not to be here to greet you,’ she wrote, ‘but I have had to move on urgently to Paraguay where an old friend of mine is in some distress. I have left you a ticket for the river-boat. For reasons too complicated to explain now I do not wish you to take a plane to Asunción. I cannot give you an address, but I will see that you are met.’
It was a highly unsatisfactory arrangement, but what could I do? I hadn’t sufficient funds to stay in Buenos Aires until I heard from her again, and I felt it impossible to return to England, when I had travelled so far on her money, but I took the precaution of changing her single ticket to Asunción into a return.
I propped the photograph of Freetown harbour in its expensive frame at the back of my dressing-table and supported it with books on either side. I had brought with me among more ephemeral literature Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the collected poems of Tennyson and Browning, and at the last minute I had added Rob Roy, perhaps because it contained the only photograph I possessed of my aunt. When I opened the book now the pages naturally divided at the photograph, and I found myself thinking not for the first time that the happy smile, the young breasts, the curve of her body in the old-fashioned bathing costume were like the suggestion of a budding maternity. The memory of Visconti’s son as he took her in his arms on Milan platform hurt me a little, and I
looked out of my porthole, to escape my thoughts, into the winter day, and saw a tall lean sad grey man gazing back at me. My window gave on to the bows and he turned quickly away to watch the ship’s wake, embarrassed at having been noticed. I finished my unpacking and went down to the bar.
There was the restlessness of departure about the ship. Lunch, as I learnt, was to be served at the curious hour of eleven-thirty, but until that time the passengers could no more settle than can the passengers on a Channel crossing. They came up and down the stairs, they looked at the bar and inspected the bottles and went away again without ordering a drink. They streamed into the dining-room and out again, they sat down for a moment at a table in the lounge, then rose to look through a porthole at the monotonous river scene which was to be with us for the next four days. I was the only one to take a drink. There was no sherry, so I took a gin and tonic, but the gin was Argentinian, though the name was English, and had a foreign flavour. The low wooded shore of what I took to be Uruguay unrolled in the misty rain which now began to clear the decks. The water of the river was the colour of coffee with too much milk.
An old man who must have been well into his eighties reached a decision and sat down beside me. He asked me a question in Spanish which I couldn’t answer. ‘No hablo Español, señor,’ I said, but this scrap of Spanish which I had learnt from a phrase-book he took as an encouragement and at once began to deliver a small lecture, removing from his pocket a large magnifying glass and laying it down between us. I tried to escape by paying my bill, but he grabbed it from my hand and stuck it under his own glass, at the same time ordering the barman to refill mine. I have never been in the habit of taking two drinks before lunch, and I definitely did not like the taste of gin, but for lack of Spanish I had to submit.
He was making some demand on me, but I could not guess what. The words el favor were repeated several times, and when he saw I didn’t understand, he held out his own hand as a demonstration and began to examine it through the magnifying glass. A voice said, ‘Can I be of any help?’ and turning I saw the sad lean man who had watched me through my porthole.
Travels With My Aunt Page 19
