Leopold arrived that evening. I introduced Philip and noticed that his manners were perfect—natural, but with just the right tone of respect. Both of them seemed to appreciate something in the other which I could not altogether understand. I had that maddening impression that after ten minutes they had formed a club to which women were not admitted, and later on I mentioned it to Philip.
‘Oh, we were just glorying in you!’ he said.
I replied that I did not like being treated as a museum exhibit, and that of course started him off on lovely, obscure nonsense about Aphrodite rising innocently from the sea and puzzled by the goings-on of ordinary human beings. Period: Late Hellenistic, he added—just to make it all safely impersonal.
The next morning I thought Leopold looked tired after his journey, and persuaded him to stay in bed. The sun was hot, and the beach opposite the hotel was crowded. So I walked along the sands towards the rocks near the mouth of the estuary where I had met Philip the day before. He was there, with a blue, sheltered pool rising and falling at his feet, as the surf crashed against the other side of the promonotory.
I discovered that he knew very little about me, but at least had heard of my father. It was rather a tense morning. I did not want to lecture him about my interests; on the other hand I was not going to let him shrug me off as a wealthy society girl whose intelligence was not worth bothering with. And on the top of that he made me self-conscious about my apple-green and white. Anyway he deserved it, and I meant him to remember me in future.
In the afternoon I drove Leopold along the coast nearly as far as Santandér. He was rested, and fascinated by country so different to anything he had ever seen. Cyril had at least been right in his choice of a place for us. When we came back very late I went up to my room, feeling rewarded for doing my duty by such a sense of joy and flowering.
It was a hot, humid night after the storm., In the late evening we had seen the flanks of those huge, round hills steaming like horses. When Leopold came up at about midnight, he looked as if he expected me to be dressed for winter. One would have thought that he at any rate would be accustomed to women wearing as little as they pleased. But I suppose there are conventions as illogical as our own. A girl is probably considered an abandoned hussy if she doesn’t have the proper little pattern of scars or something on her right breast.
Leopold had brought with him a draft of the proposed agenda for the Addis Ababa meeting. He wanted me to read through it all and tell him what would be the attitude of my Group if the resolutions of the conference recommended direct action in states where Africans were not yet free and equal citizens. I said that I thought it would depend on the wording and the circumstances. For me and my friends violence was always wrong. But, so long as it was recognised to be wrong, it might sometimes be justifiable without being condoned. He was afraid that point might be too subtle for inexperienced politicians.
I worked on the papers till it was nearly half past one, trying to suggest phrasing which Cyril would approve. Then I went into the bathroom. There was half a man hanging down from the little window with a camera round his neck.
Can you imagine the shock and the vileness of it? He looked dead. At first it was not so much that which appalled me as what he believed, what he intended. Obviously he had hoped to get a shot of my bed through the open bathroom door.
But nothing quite fitted. He could never have done it secretly because of the flash. Perhaps he thought he would have time to escape. Perhaps he meant to try and blackmail me on the spot. Another funny thing was that the bathroom door was shut. I am almost sure that I left it a little open—which would be much more convenient if somebody wanted first to listen and then to throw it wide open suddenly.
I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. I was like someone killed instantaneously. I told Leopold to look. The effect on him was to make him savagely angry. Against me, it almost seemed. There was a yellow light in his eyes. Then he stood very still, looking at that limp thing. He said that the man must have been pushed through the window already dead, and that we were not only compromised but should be accused of murder.
I could not believe that. I told myself that it was I who must do something. This was my civilisation, not his. Spain or not, instinctively I must be nearer to it than he. And Philip nearer still. I asked him if I should fetch Philip.
He was doubtful. In spite of their mutual admiration society he did not know what kind of a person Philip was. I did. He was not committed to anything at all except scholarship, but he had kindness and absolute integrity. I did not understand—then—how anyone could have moral courage without a set of firm beliefs, but I was sure he would help me, because he would be outraged at what had been done, not because he was attracted by me.
Leopold considered that neither of us should open the door or go out, since we did not know who might be waiting in the passage nor what sort of trap had been set. I wasn’t going to open the door anyway. I knew very well how Philip could get to my room. It was two balconies away from his, and I had often seen him leaning on the railings.
When we had turned out the light, everything outside was dark. So I risked it. Philip was asleep. He did not make any remark or want to know what it was all about. He just came. And when he had looked into my bathroom, he believed at once in our innocence. Only afterwards I saw how wonderful it was that he should be so confident.
He did what we ought to have done—feeling the man and making certain that he was really dead. He treated the body as if it had never been alive at all, calling it Punch or The Puppet or something. It was heartless—like those horrible, falsely humorous expressions of soldiers by which they prevent themselves feeling what they know they ought to be feeling. It only breeds more killing if you shrug your shoulders and say a man ‘has had it’ when he is dead.
Under Philip’s influence Leopold showed that he was not either as resigned or as sensitive as I had thought. Together they pulled the body into the bathroom and laid it face upwards on the floor.
I recognised him. It was Alberto Livetti. He was notorious for his lack of scruples and his enterprise. He was just the man to make his way into an hotel and try to get pictures of a Prime Minister and his girl friend. I couldn’t speak. There was a stupid inhibition which any woman would understand and, besides that, a second shock, for I never thought he would try to degrade me all over again after what had passed between us.
Three years ago when I was in Rome with Hilaire Bomumba I employed Livetti to take the publicity stills. All that I knew about him then was that he was a superb artist with an extraordinary gift for catching the glow and vigour of the human body. He worked for the Press, of course, like the rest of them, but he was much more important than the loathsome little men who were always trying to get intimate shots of celebrities and pestered us. Every picture they made was an innuendo.
Hilaire was temperamental, never still. He would not have had the patience to endure sittings if I hadn’t accompanied him to the studio and held his hand—sometimes literally—while Livetti experimented and experimented with his animal, elemental quality. Some of the poses were more candid than were really necessary. Livetti was as fascinated by anatomy as any sculptor. I think that is what he ought to have been, not a photographer at all.
He tried to catch my interest, and he did. He pretended to share my opinions, which was easy; for, if he had any sincere politics at all, he was a left-wing socialist. He told me that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Though I knew very well that from an Italian to any girl with money that meant no more than tenderly wishing her good afternoon. I could not help being impressed since he never attempted to make love to me. He treated me with a sort of neutrality, like a judge in the show-ring awarding a Highly Commended.
When he asked me if I would sit for him I hesitated, because his cynicism and his comments were unpleasant. But he was a genius in his own way, and his pictures of Hilaire were quite marvellous. I felt that I would be untrue to myself if I refused,
for what he needed was not mine any more than my money. I hate possessions except when they make it possible for me to give.
So I sat for Livetti because it was my duty, and I could not allow personal, prudish feelings to interfere with duty. What a muddle! As if I could have had the detachment of a professional model! As if I could separate myself from what I live in!
After he had taken a few of the simpler shots, he started to paw me under the pretence of arranging shadows, but so delicately that I was not quite sure. The delicacy was the appalling thing, even worse than his disgusting candour. He told me that Hilaire was being unfaithful to me with a senator and his daughter at the same time and wanted to know what sort of sexual intercourse I enjoyed myself.
The situation was more unmanageable than if he had attacked me violently. I was lost and did not know what to do. I couldn’t reach my clothes and I was completely defenceless. I felt like a schoolgirl and wanted to cry like one. But I couldn’t do that either. So I just stood still and met his eyes and told him what I was.
The change in him was devastatingly unexpected. Of course he made it twice as dramatic as was necessary. He begged my forgiveness. He kept on exclaiming that how could they know. For him, he said, I had been simply a girl with too much money entertaining a brutally amoral dancer whose behaviour made us both fair game for anyone.
While I dressed, he defended himself. The words streamed out of him. He boasted that he was a man of the Renaissance, that he had no religion, no principles, and that his only duty was to the truth. He despised the rotten, corrupt society which paid him, and laughed at it and humiliated it. He spat at the film stars who paid for publicity and screeched when he gave them too much of it. He confessed to the vilest things—photographing poor old American nymphomaniacs without their make-up on and selling the negatives back to them. He claimed to be a specialist in bad taste who exaggerated the bad taste of others until it recoiled on them. Fie said that he used his camera like a dagger between the shoulders of the despicable and dishonoured.
I could hardly bear to speak to him, but I asked him what all this had to do with his attempt to excite me. He said that ‘they’ wanted to find out what I liked. ‘They’ were all prepared to give such a woman whatever she wanted of either sex. It was only afterwards that I began to imagine that ‘they’ had been watching.
I left Rome and Hilaire at once. I knew the whole thing ought to have no effect on me at all, but I felt humiliated and degraded. The only comfort was that I believed Livetti’s remorse to be sincere, and that so far as he was capable of recognising simplicity, he had. Even there I was wrong. Evidently I had not impressed him at all. Fie still put me in the class of rich girls whom he thought deserved his camera.
All through that horrible night of his death I tried to believe some good of him. Livetti’s mind was full of patterns instead of worries and scruples like the rest of us; he used to deny that they had any relationship to life or morals or beauty or anything. But I was never allowed to agree with him. If I said that Form had no meaning, he would get very excited and shout that it did, that of course it had a human value, that of course Form was a shadow of reality. So he must have had a sort of religion—something he believed in, something for which he would fight.
Philip and Leopold removed the body down the ladder which Livetti had put up against my bathroom window. I could not help or watch or do any more. I was on my bed, shaking without being able to control myself. They took him out to the garage through the central shaft. They must have done it very carefully, for the police never suspected that Livetti had been inside the hotel at all.
Philip drove away with him in the boot of my car and ran out of petrol before he had a chance to get rid of him. He had to hide Livetti in a field in case the Civil Guard searched the car—which they did. When he recovered the body, Livetti’s passport fell out of his pocket and was found in the road. That was the first bit of evidence which pointed at us.
He returned to the hotel, still with Livetti, and never blamed me for not telling him that Leopold and I had finished our afternoon’s tour on the reserve tank. He was gentle and patronising as if it were quite natural for me to forget. It was infuriating to be treated as a hysterical, irresponsible child when I couldn’t forgive myself and never shall.
Leopold and I kept an eye on the car while poor Philip got some sleep. When it was my turn to go down to lunch—I didn’t want any but I had to try to behave naturally—I was appalled to see Mary Deighton-Flagg in the restaurant. There was no way of avoiding her. She had been at school with me, and was a monitor when I was a little, long-legged thing in the juniors. Always there was something unhealthy about her. I think she had been overwhelmed by trying to keep up with too many brothers; at that age the effort made her coarse and unfeminine. Under her influence—and in the comparative privacy of their own room—the monitors used to compete who could break wind the loudest. I suppose it was a revolt against the over-ladylike manners upon which the school insisted. Decorum would have been easier to observe if the food had contained less starches.
I mention this because it holds the key to Mary’s character. She was so determined to be the leader who formed public taste that she did not care if it was tastelessness. That must have been a great help to her when she went in for journalism. She could write, too.
Her speciality was castigating vice in high places. Her stuff was thin after the paper’s legal staff had removed all the possible libels, but she used to dine out on the bits that her editor wouldn’t touch. One of these startling revelations of hers was every word of it true, and could not be ignored. Fortunately she got out of the country a few hours before she would have been arrested on a charge of criminal slander.
I couldn’t prevent her taking the rest of her lunch at my table. She asked me if I had been ill; I was looking so lovely and so tired. I said that I had been a little overworked in London, to which she replied that she had noticed Mr Mgwana in the hotel. I let the innuendo pass. I wasn’t equal to the effort.
Then she wanted to know who Philip was. I gathered that he had been down already to the bar, that she had spoken to him and that she knew he was in some way close to Leopold and me. It occurred to me that I really did not know Philip well. Her dark hair and large, sad eyes were beautiful. But I felt he was not the sort of man to be taken in by foam rubber at one end and too slithery skirt at the other.
I told her that Philip was just a friend, and remembered too late that the phrase is a cliché in her profession. She promptly asked—as an old schoolfriend and off the record—if the two weren’t jealous of each other and how did I manage so cleverly.
I tried to understand her and be charitable. I reminded myself that after all this time she probably could not help believing what she wrote. She was such a pitiable creature, and her life must have been desolate—living in Madrid on men, cadging stories from the police and the café journalists and the movie extras.
So I did my best to explain to her what my relations with Leopold Mgwana really were, and that I had accompanied him as cicerone and secretary because Cyril Flanders and the Group thought it important that I should. I think now that when the police questioned her she passed on all I said, naturally making it sound an exclusive, mysterious spy story. At the time I just kept on talking about Leopold to head her off Philip. I felt that Philip might be already afraid that I was an embarrassing person to know, and that one of Mary’s little paragraphs suggesting that Olura Manoli was now taking an interest in the older universities would just about finish him.
From time to time I shivered with nervousness. I had to say that the dining-room was icy. The wind was getting up again, so perhaps it was. She couldn’t help seeing that there was something badly wrong. She told me that now she had met me she would stay another night.
I went up to Leopold’s room and found Philip there. Mary had made a bad impression on him. In fact he was so disgustingly rude about her that I had to tell him she had been at school with me and t
hat it wasn’t her fault if she had to fight to get enough to live on.
That afternoon Pedro Gonzalez turned up, so detestably obliging and polite and unavoidable that he haunted us like the ghost of an income tax inspector. I am sure he has exactly the same expression whether he is torturing a suspect or accepting a drink. The Government had attached him to Leopold as a security guard. The last thing Cyril and I wanted was that he should be bothered by Franco’s police. And if Gonzalez had to come and protect us he might have started it earlier!
As it was, his arrival meant that Leopold could not help with the body. Philip insisted on going alone. I would not allow it. He had sacrificed enough already for a helpless, notorious society girl who couldn’t even remember that there was no petrol in her car. I was determined to show him that I didn’t use either tears or tranquillisers and that I could face for his sake just as much as he could for mine.
I think he was the more nervous of the two. For no reason at all he objected to my red cloak. I could not see why, for it didn’t matter if it was ruined; and I knew very well how conventional he was and that he thought it affected. But then suddenly I did understand. The cloak had become my trademark and dear to him. I could have thrown it over him and kissed him. It would have shocked his masculine sense of propriety if I had told him that, however much I shrank from what we had to do, I did not intend to lose a moment of his society by fainting when the boot was opened.
We were about to set off when Leopold stormed into my room. It was the second time that I had seen him angry. There must be a side of him which he has never shown to me. He had just received a telephone call in his native language from someone who knew that we were hiding the body. This terrified me, though it stood to reason all the time that the murderer must guess what had happened. Up to then I was just living a piece of theatre—fast and unreal and on a dream stage where we three were the only players. I had no picture at all of the other members of the cast waiting in the wings. I should have realised—Philip and Leopold did—that Mary would not have come up from Madrid for nothing.
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