by Muriel Spark
The man did not reply. He stared, with his lips forming a gasp, very much resembling Robert in his aghast expression.
‘Almighty God!’ Robert said in a low voice. ‘That’s my father.’
‘What’s he doing here?’ said Curran.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘And is that his friend?’
‘I have only the faintest idea who she might be.’
‘Evidently he has a lady-friend’ Curran said. ‘No harm in that.’
The elderly man stepped ashore leaving his companion to be helped by the taxi-man. The motor-boat swayed as their luggage was unloaded.
In some embarrassment the father said, over the hedge which separated them, ‘Robert! what are you doing here? I thought you were in Paris.’
The woman looked at Robert with a social smile which seemed out of place in the open air, but somehow showed willing. But Robert’s father was agitated. ‘What are you doing here?’ Robert said.
Meanwhile, the porter had arrived to pick up their luggage and carry it into the house. Robert said, ‘We’d better go back indoors. It’s the only way.’
‘Try to be friendly to them,’ Curran said. ‘What have you got to worry about?’
They went back through the garden door, emerging in the hall just as the couple were being escorted to the front desk. ‘Well, Dad,’ said Robert, ‘this is a surprise.’
The father gave a childish sort of laugh and looked round the room as if wanting to say he had not come ashore from the water-taxi; he had not arrived in Venice; it was all a mistake. But his woman-friend stood there by his side, solid and indissoluble. ‘A little holiday,’ he said. ‘My former colleague and I are having a little holiday. Here in Venice.’
‘Oh, your colleague …’ said Robert, with the cruellest of courtesy. The elderly man suddenly gave his son a look of disgust.
Robert introduced his companion in a vague sort of way which obliged Curran to pronounce his own name as he shook hands with Robert’s father and his woman companion. ‘This is my friend …’ Robert had said. His father, Arnold Leaver, was more explicit in return. ‘Arnold Leaver,’ he said, ‘and my colleague Mary Tiller—my son Robert, he was at Ambrose before your day, Mary, and Mr …?’ ‘Curran,’ Curran repeated, with pronounced breath-withholding, restraint in his voice. ‘D’y’-do,’ he murmured, his eyes half-closed in keeping with his half-closed voice.
‘Well, Robert,’ said his father, ‘I thought you were in Paris. What brings you here?’
‘Research,’ said Robert.
He looked hard at his father, in an effort not to look hard at the woman. He had been told his father had this rich mistress but he had never seen her. She said, ‘What a coincidence! We must meet later. Let’s get this desk business over and unpack our things.’
‘Two singles,’ Robert’s father was demanding at the desk as if it was a railway station.
‘Leaver?—We have a booking for a double room. There is the grand bridal suite: bedroom, dressing-room and bathroom.’
Curran withdrew discreetly, but Robert did not.
There must have been a mistake,’ said Arnold Leaver. I reserved single rooms, for Mrs Tiller and for myself.’
There is one single room for Leaver, already taken,’ said the perplexed lady at the desk, who happened to be Eufemia. She was joined, then, by Katerina, who bent her head likewise over the ledger. ‘Leaver,’ said Katerina, pointing a finger to the place; both she and Eufemia pronounced the name ‘Leāver’.
Robert, who was close beside his father and companion at the other side of the desk, put in, ‘I’m the Leāver in that room. This is my father Mr Arnold Leāver and Mrs Tiller who both want single rooms.’
‘We have single rooms on different floors, will that do?’ Katerina said. She looked suspicious but tolerant. She said, ‘We have a double room booked for a Mr and Mrs Leāver.’
Those single rooms will do’ said Robert’s father. He pulled out his passport and Mary Tiller coolly revealed that her passport was packed away in her luggage. There and then she opened one of her pieces of matched luggage to produce it, in spite of the two proprietors’ protests that she could bring it down later, at her convenience. Meantime, Robert noticed that his father’s well-worn passport was a double one, made out in the names of Arnold Leaver colour of eyes grey, colour of hair grey, and his wife Anthea colour of eyes blue, colour of hair fair. He couldn’t see the photographs on the passport from where he stood, but Mrs Tiller’s eyes and hair corresponded well enough with those attributed to the absent Anthea. She was not unlike Anthea, a younger Anthea and more flamboyant. That’s typical, Robert thought. He leaves one woman for another practically the same.
‘Here you are!’ Mary Tiller said with a perceptible look of triumph towards Robert, defying his thought with her common cheeriness, so unlike his mother’s. She held out the passport, open on the name-and-address page, while handing it over the counter, so that Robert, if he wanted, could clearly see that she had her own. Robert looked away at something vaguely else, then turned his head towards his father. ‘Anyone would think,’ he said with nasty geniality, ‘that you were travelling as man and wife. Double passport—Double room booked. …’
‘How could you say such a thing?’ said the father in a hushed and beautiful tone, as if Robert had committed something reproachable in church. ‘It’s not funny,’ he said. ‘It could be embarrassing, their inefficiency, if there was anything to be embarrassed about, which of course there isn’t.’
‘How could you have done such a thing?’ Curran said. He was standing with Robert in a bar near the Rialto Bridge, taking a coffee. Curran said, ‘It was a horrible sight the way you embarrassed your father. It was also very indiscreet, very uncivilised and, in the civilised sense, unnatural’
‘I meant it,’ Robert said.
That’s my point,’ Curran said. ‘Positively destructive. We have enough difficulties without creating unnecessary antagonism.’
‘Speak for yourself’
‘Why?’ said Curran. ‘Why should I? If I choose to speak for us both, after all this time, I’ll do it. Your father turns up with his colleague—’
‘Colleague!’ said Robert. ‘She used to be a cook.’
‘As a matter of fact she was a colleague. As a matter of fact,’ Curran said, ‘I know something about your father’s career at Ambrose College. Mrs Tiller is your father’s mistress, naturally, but she was also his colleague, which is to say in a courteous way he preferred to style her a colleague rather than a subordinate, since she was on the staff at Ambrose. She taught cooking, an unusual experiment for a boys’ school, but successful. At first she visited three evenings a week to give lessons in cooking to five boys; and very soon her class increased to twenty-odd. When your father retired last year she gave three months’ notice and left the school within two. A woman of fairly independent means. An excellent cook. The school will have difficulty replacing her I should think.’
‘You seem to know a lot. You know too much. How can you know all this about my father?’
‘Money,’ said Curran. ‘Just money. Like buying a tie, or a plane ticket to Hong Kong, one can buy information about people’s fathers.’
He picked up his bill from the counter. ‘And so on,’ he said.
They left the café and stood at the landing-stage waiting for a water-bus.
‘To my mind,’ nagged Curran, ‘it was infantile, the way you hung around that reception desk, making so much embarrassment for the couple. You dislike your father all right—’
‘I don’t dislike him,’ Robert said. Only I was upset by seeing him here in Venice at this moment of my life, naturally. And I don’t approve of his travelling around with his so-called colleague, using my mother’s share of the passport.’
‘Your mother should have had a separate passport. It’s the best, the most sensible way, these days’
‘Oh well, my mother isn’t like that. She never travels abroad alone.’
A water-bus arrived. They watched, with automatic blank-faced attentiveness, the faces of the people who were getting off at this stop. Robert embarked with the waiting crowd, Curran walked away.
Chapter Two
THE LUXURY-CLASS HOTEL Lord Byron, which never closed out of season, on the water-front of the Grand Canal, was a Renaissance ducal palace. The interior had been converted at the end of the nineteenth century, and reconstructed many times since then with a view to those wealthy clients who came in season and out.
It was half-past one, time for lunch. Curran walked up the handsome staircase, tired and plodding, to the first floor and the dining-room. He stood in the doorway for an instant, looking round.
A waiter came forward with a dazzle of black and white, the black being his trousers and hair, the white being his coat, his teeth, and a napkin folded upon his wrist. Curran carelessly indicated a free table which stood by a far window in the mild sunlight.
The adjoining table, on his left, stood in a corner where the daylight did not fully penetrate. The dim wall-light sent enough rose-coloured illumination over the table for the couple who sat there to eat by and the waiter to serve by.
Curran looked in their direction, caught Mary Tiller’s eye, and nodded his recognition. She said to her companion, ‘There’s the gentleman of this morning!’ Arnold Leaver turned his head towards Curran, and said, ‘Oh, yes, good afternoon. Are you staying here, then?’
‘We moved from that Pensione,’ said Mary Tiller. Arnold made a small little laugh. ‘My son didn’t seem to approve of Mrs Tiller,’ he said.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t so much the young man, but the whole place, too. Not very relaxing. After all that I had unpacked my things, we went out for a walk and we looked round. I didn’t know there would be a very good hotel like this open at this time of year, but to our amazement we came across the Lord Byron. So we decided there and then to move.’
‘Personally,’ said Curran, ‘I think the Pensione Sofia has a charm of its own—’
‘Oh, certainly,’ said Mary, ‘all its own.’
‘It’s just that we felt a bit squashed-in with my son Robert snooping round,’ said Arnold.
The waiter brought their first course, a complicated creamy pasta-dish dotted with some bright green herbs. Mary studied this intently for a moment, then raised it to her nose to sniff at it. She put down the plate and looked afar off, savouring and analysing the smell.
Arnold laughed, more at ease. He turned to Curran, indicating his companion, and said, ‘She’s a cooking expert very hard to please.’
Curran smiled benignly from his table, and with a slightly dismissive gesture turned to the menu-card that the waiter had put in his hand. The couple at the next table started to prod what had been set before them with their forks.
A carafe of white wine was placed on Curran’s table. He gave his order quietly to the waiter who poured some wine, meantime, in Curran’s glass. Curran sipped his wine but the couple at the next table were not disposed to leave him alone.
‘You know Robert well?’ said Arnold, between mouthfuls of his stabbed pasta.
‘Quite well. I live in Paris.’
‘Are you an art historian?’ Arnold said.
‘You could put it that way,’ said Curran with a modest smile that conveyed a certain understatement on Arnold’s part. Curran lowered his lids while the waiter bent over him to place a plate of smoked ham in front of him. His self-effacing interest in the ham suggested strongly that Arnold should have known, if he had been sufficiently well informed, that Curran was something more than a simple art historian, that he dealt in art collections on a grand scale, was a name.
‘You’re an artist?’ said Mary, quickly.
‘I paint,’ Curran said, with an air to the effect that there was more to it than that.
Arnold looked as if he had made a gaffe, and Mary did not help the moment to an easy transition to better moments when she said, ‘These farfarlone al burro con erbe are not made al denti, which means hard, and by Anglo-Saxon standards, undercooked. They should be hard. The pasta is overcooked for the tourist trade I imagine. It’s too soft. I expect they think it’s what we want.’
‘Of course,’ Curran said, eating his ham. ‘I quite agree.’ He buttered a thin piece of toast which lay cuddling its fellows in the folds of a napkin.
‘I’m glad to hear that Robert is—’ Arnold said; but again Mary butted in. She said, with her openly impudent smile which could be on some occasions so charming, ‘Do you know, Mr Curran, when we met you this morning with Robert I was convinced you were a private detective. And now we meet you again here. You wouldn’t be a private detective by any chance? I mean, sent to watch us?’
‘Mary dear!’ said her friend.
Curran smiled across the table to her with friendly indulgence.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘What an exciting idea, though. One wouldn’t feel guilty about snooping if one were sent to snoop.’
‘Do you feel guilty, Mr Curran?’
‘Not a bit,’ Curran said.
‘Mary!’ said Arnold. But he smiled; and to Curran he looked, then, every inch a headmaster.
Curran said, ‘I never feel guilty. Even when I should.’
‘I always feel guilty,’ Mary said. ‘I love it. I don’t really feel alive without a feeling of guilt.’
Arnold apparently wanted to concentrate on eating. Mary looked at her companion; she seemed to adore him, although from an objective point of view he didn’t seem particularly adorable, that was all.
While waiting for his second course Arnold Leaver gave his childish laugh and said to Curran, ‘Any idea what Robert is doing here in Venice?’
‘How like Robert you look just now!’ Curran said.
Arnold looked perplexed. Curran said: ‘Your son is doing research, so far as I understand.’
‘You came here with him?’ Arnold said.
‘No, he’d already transferred to Venice when I bumped into him,’ Curran said.
‘What brings him to Venice? He didn’t write home that he was going to Venice.’
‘Young men seldom tell their parents of their plans.’
‘Venice,’ said Robert’s father, while a fleck of the Venetian sunlight caught his small yellow moustache. ‘What is he studying in Venice? In Paris, he—’
‘There might be a girl behind it, who knows?’ said Curran.
Mary said, chirpily, ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
Arnold said, ‘A what?’
‘A girl,’ said Curran, coolly.
‘Oh, yes,’ Arnold said, looking hard at the salad that had been placed at the side of his main dish. He was embarrassed, now, at having revealed surprise. Mary was tasting a piece of veal done in white-wine sauce, her eyes fixed on the far distance while she related the sensation of her taste-buds to her always better judgment. Having swallowed the test-piece she narrowed her eyes analytically, moving her tongue inside her mouth. ‘Well, Arnold,’ she said, ‘isn’t that nice that he has a girl? You know, you always misjudge that boy.’
‘Oh, come, it isn’t a question of judging, misjudging. No, I don’t stand judgment on anybody, far less Robert. He has his own life to live. Goodness me!’ Again, the childish laugh, the laugh of one who had been too long a schoolmaster, life-steeped in the job. ‘Mary’ he informed Curran, ‘is a professional cook, that’s why she’s so interested in the preparation of her food’
Mary was ruminating over her salad. ‘I enjoyed that veal dish,’ she declared, with every fibre of my being. How about you, dear?’
‘Very good’ he said.
‘Mrs Tiller, are you food-tasting for a travel book or something?’ Curran said.
‘Not just at the moment,’ she said. ‘But I’m always tempted to take on a job like that. I always remember a restaurant, how the food is prepared, what it’s like, how it’s served. It all goes down firmly in my memory.’
‘Mary taught cooking at
a boys’ school where I was headmaster,’ Arnold said.
‘A boys’ school!’ Curran marvelled.
‘Oh, the classes were a great success. More and more men have to cook their own food and like it,’ Arnold said, and Mary added, ‘The boys had to eat what they cooked, so they soon learned the rudiments.’
‘After all,’ said Arnold, as if arguing with a parent, ‘cookery is chemistry.’
Curran paid his bill and left the couple discussing the cheese to follow. When they said goodbye they asked him, in unison, to come to drinks one evening; this was obviously a decision they had made together in a quiet exchange in the course of the meal, probably while the waiter was attending to them, or to Curran, with a clatter of serving-spoons. Curran consulted his diary and accepted with thanks, casually, as if inattentive to the unknown contingencies of anything to come.
Mary waved her hand. ‘About seven tomorrow evening in the bar,’ she said.
About seven next evening Curran came down to the lobby of the Hotel Lord Byron and settled in a chair in the bar-parlour beside Mary Tiller and Arnold Leaver who were waiting for him.
Mary was wearing a fur stole round her shoulders although the hotel was centrally heated. She had that outstanding look she had the first time he had seen her on her arrival at the Pensione Sofia.
She said, ‘It’s cosier in our room. We have a refrigerator and plenty of drinks up there.’
‘Yes, let’s go upstairs,’ Arnold said.
The room was large with some comfortable chairs besides a huge ornamental bed; this bed was shaped like a swan, with gilded black swans’ heads forming the foot-posts. At the top of the bed two swans, quilted in body, met face to face with black lacquered heads and golden eyes and beaks. The ceiling was painted in a bright blue and white skyscape. Across this several cherubs blew puffily at a white-grey prancing horse and a very flesh-coloured nude classical rider whose biceps were so large as to be not really healthy.
‘It’s not fake,’ Arnold Leaver said, indicating these splendours. The ceiling’s eighteenth-century, restored of course, but original.’
