Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  Some six months later When in Rome was published.

  But in the meantime Doris, knowing I was writing this book, thought she would like to visit San Clemente for the third time. Down she went through the now familiar corridors, nave and apse, past exquisite garlanded columns and frescoes whose colours are as bright as when they were painted, having been preserved by long burial in protective earth. And again down to the lowest level and the temple of Mithras. And to his grotto at the far end. It had been roped off.

  Mithras was gone.

  At first she could not, as one says, believe her eyes. After almost twenty centuries there was now only a litter of the breast-like stones into which he had been so firmly sunk and sealed! She returned up all the stairs to the bureau where the good brothers sell their cards and pamphlets and innocent little holy knick-knacks. By this time she was on friendly terms with them and was greeted, as usual, in the richest of Irish brogues. But the answers she was given were evasive and she came away none the wiser except that it seemed clear that the Dominican brothers had had nothing to do with the removal of the god Mithras, born of a rock, who was said to have banqueted with Apollo.

  III

  When I was in Rome there was a riot. At that time riots were of frequent occurrence. Beyond knowing that as usual it was political in character, and that students were heavily involved, I never really understood what this one was all about. It came to a head one evening. The belligerents assembled in thousands in the Piazza Navona, hard by the Embassy, and overflowed into our little side street. We watched from our windows.

  It all seemed, in an odd sort of way, lackadaisical, more like a first ‘take’ for a film than the real thing. There were all the ingredients: a vast crowd of extras, students, shouting, a bit of singing here, operatically dressed police there, doing nothing in particular except lounge about and smoke.

  As far as we could see, there was a great deal of noise but no fighting or making arrests. But there was naughty behaviour of an exasperating, idiotic sort. A group of young men who had been lounging near a motorcycle parked under our windows, half-heartedly turned it over on its side and, after several, unsuccessful attempts, set fire to it and walked away. This was followed by a group of about a hundred young men erupting out of Navona and running down the side street, followed, though not very fast, by some of the police. They were not the highly picturesque carabinieri but the work-a-day corpo di polizia. They did not attempt to arrest anybody and as soon as their non-quarry got to the far end of the street and stopped, the police, very sensibly I thought, also stopped and lit cigarettes. I don’t remember any exchange of insults or threats or shaken fists, still less any baton charges. It was as if the director had shouted ‘Cut’ and everybody stopped acting. Meanwhile the background noise in Navona continued terrifically.

  I am sure these rather limp demonstrations were by no means typical of Italian street demonstrations and riots as a whole but they did seem to me to be in paradoxical contrast to the ordinary street conversations that so often suggest belligerence and a violent approach to the most harmless of commonplace remarks.

  While I was still in Rome I had a letter from Pammy, my former student-secretary, now a terrific passer of examinations and going great guns in Social Welfare. She suggested that I hire a car and that she come and drive it, being acquainted with Italy and the hazards of Italian motoring. When we had had our fill of this exercise we could return the car, no matter where we were, and take to the railroad. We planned to go to Perugia and thence to Florence for a week and on to Lucca to stay with friends who had a rural palazzo thereabouts. To Genoa then, by train. And so, by Paris and the English Channel, home.

  Pammy, intrepid girl, arrived in the afternoon, collected the car and launched herself into the streets of Rome where she soon got lost. She asked her way of a driver with whom she found herself cheek-by-jowl in a traffic jam. He spoke English and offered to pilot her to her destination. So she followed him. The course he took was not direct. Presently she found herself high up in the world. He signalled for her to drive up beside him and stop.

  She had arrived at the Tabularium on the Capitol and was looking down into the Forum on a fine evening – perhaps the most astonishing view in all Italy.

  They leant on the wall and her guide, who was a dashing young man with a pleasing manner, pointed out the near-at-hand three columns of the Temple of Vespasian, and in the middle distance those of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and far away, darkly, the ominous bulk of the Colosseum. It was as if everything she had ever read or been told of Roman history had been unrolled, suddenly, in the evening light. Pammy was deeply impressed but a trifle uneasy. Her escort, perceiving this, removed his hat.

  ‘I am a Roman gentleman,’ he informed her.

  ‘And I am very glad to hear it,’ she warmly replied.

  So he opened the door of her car for her, returned to his own and guided her back through chaotic traffic to the Piazza Navona and thence to the New Zealand Ambassadorial Residence where he took his leave, as a Roman gentleman should.

  We left Rome the next morning and Marcello drove ahead and with careful signals set us upon the road to Perugia. And there I said goodbye to dear Marcello. For some years we exchanged Christmas cards. I expect he still does his splendid indefinable thing at the New Zealand Embassy and if ever he comes across this book I hope he will accept my greetings.

  Before absolutely quitting Rome I would like to repeat a little legend which was much invoked at the time I was there.

  The Pope was giving audience to a group of visitors and to each of them he put the same question: ‘How long are you staying in Rome?’

  The first visitor replied: ‘Your Holiness, alas, no time at all. I am desolate but tomorrow I am obliged to leave. I shall have seen nothing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Pope, ‘I wouldn’t say that. It is possible, if you use your time wisely, to see quite a lot of Rome in twenty-four hours.’

  And he moved on to the next tourist and asked him the same question.

  ‘Your Holiness, unfortunately only three weeks. What can one see of Rome in three weeks!’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Pope, ‘it is a very short time, certainly, but use it advisedly and you will be the richer for your visit.’

  And he moved on to the third tourist and asked him the same question.

  ‘Your Holiness, I am very fortunate. My company has transferred me to Rome. I shall be here for five years.’

  ‘Five years!’ exclaimed His Holiness. ‘I’m afraid you won’t see very much of Rome in five years.’

  IV

  What a lovely drive we had that morning across the Umbrian plains. It was like seeing one quattrocento background after another, with little towns against rounded hills and surrounded by well-disciplined pastures and formal trees, all very fresh and cleanly defined. One middle-distance view I particularly admired was of Todi. There was nothing spectacular about Todi, no enormous church, no ‘must’ for the tourist. Simply a small mediaeval town that would have been none the worse for an angel or two flying decorously above the rooftops and in the streets a bullock wagon and perhaps a man driving it wearing scarlet stockings, a smock and a rustic hat.

  We stopped and photographed it and of all the photographs I took in Italy that is the one I like best.

  That afternoon we reached Perugia and the Rossetta Hotel. It was like any university town in any other country that had been uplifted and translated into an Italian setting. We sat in an outdoor caffè on a high terrace and almost all the other customers were students and looked like students and behaved like well-conducted students. Quite a lot of them spoke either English-English or American-English, since the University of Perugia has summer courses for foreigners and is very popular. It had been a long day and we went early to bed.

  The next morning, after breakfast, we drove to Assisi.

  What do I remember of Assisi?

  Great height. Up and up and then under a windy sky a long view from outside
the church. The mist that had been drifting over Umbria cleared slowly and one by one, here and there, vignettes appeared of houses and farms and Noah’s Ark animals. Foolishly I was reminded of the looking-glass view Alice had from the top of a hill above the chessboard country.

  We stayed here for some time while a fresh breeze blew in the little village of Assisi.

  At last we turned away and went into the church and of course it was the Basilica of St Francis and of course there was the Chapel of San Martino with frescoes by Martino Sierre of the Saint being nice to birds and an apotheosis with scarlet horses and a superb green and blue ceiling. As almost always in Italian churches, in spite of all these wonders, there was an air of everyday usage about the Basilica.

  Instead of returning to Perugia we now drove deep into the mountains because Pammy knew of a remote grotto at Remo della Carcere where an order of monks lived in simplicity and hardly anybody else ever went there. So we went and were moved by it.

  The next day we left for Florence.

  Our entry into Florence was little short of hellish. To us it seemed as if the various approaches led into it like the radii of a spider’s web but that, having passed through the perimeter, they broke up into a maze of lanes and passages into which we edged and out of which, with much ado, we gingerly backed. Our attempts to penetrate them closely resembled a certain slow-motion nightmare to which I am very prone: the one about not being able to get there. You move in a certain direction or seem to do so but The Others, persons who are always there in dreams and are always elusive and unhelpful, either misdirect you or don’t seem to hear what you say but merely nod or smile or don’t give you an answer because of something vague that you don’t understand. They say they will tell you the answer (to what?) when they come back but they don’t come back. On this occasion they seemed to be the sole inhabitants of the streets going into Florence. They came and went while Pammy left me in the car and ran after one of them showing him our address ‘Pensione Hermitage, Vicolo Marzio 1, Ponte Vecchio’. He pointed and gesticulated and seemed to make sense.

  Pammy returned and started us off and suddenly we were there at The Hermitage hard by the Ponte Vecchio. Only, when we stopped and began to take our suitcases out of the car, there were policemen saying we must move on. Somebody – a porter – came out of The Hermitage and there followed one of the Italian street scenes with which I had become so familiar. We were made to understand we might park the car in some cloisters nearby, but only on sufferance and not for long. We now decided the moment had arrived when the car was more of a burden than a blessing and Pammy rang up the local offices of the firm that had rented it to us and they collected it; we paid their very moderate bill and settled into our rooms in The Hermitage.

  It was one of the nicest places I have ever stayed in, small but wonderfully situated and beautifully ordered. There were two waiters, a porter and perhaps three chambermaids. The proprietors were two middle-aged ladies who spoke fluent English. We did not have a choice of dishes at meals but were served en famille, though at separate tables; the cooking was exquisite.

  After dinner we walked about Florence in the cool of the evening and were happy to be there.

  We stayed for a week and every morning there was a new wonder. The year was 1968 and the wreckage left by the flooding of the Arno was still evident: unbelievable high-water marks on the walls of churches and the bases of monuments and everywhere, on both gross and infinitely delicate surfaces, restorers were still at work. Miracles of restoration were achieved – paintings were actually separated from damaged surfaces and laid on new ones.

  Once again, this is not a guidebook which, in any case, I am not capable of writing and all I can hope to do in the way of ‘sights’ is give fugitive whiffs of my travels. To attempt this is rather like crushing a verbena leaf and finding oneself for a second or two in St Clair and hearing the squawk of Gulliver the lame seagull and the sound of the sea itself, when one was a child in Dunedin.

  Other travellers are better remembrancers than I. My memory has always been most eccentric, a thing of slipshod patchwork. Who was a girl in my very remote childhood who looked out of a stand of raupo in a riverbed and why did my mother say of her: ‘Puck in the bulrushes’? Why ‘Puck’? And how unbelievably young must I have been when I lay on my bed in a room with blue wallpaper and white flowers and, knowing my mother was resting on her own bed across the passage, wondered if I could stagger so far and did slide down and did stagger precariously across the passage and in at her door. I see her, really and truly I do, as if it were days and not two-thirds of a century ago, turn and smile her astonishment and hold out her hands. Why did my brain choose to retain this moment and no other of my remote infancy?

  It is the same with travels and sights. Say ‘Florence’ and I see chubby rumps of Utrillo horses, comically improper. Then Donatello’s little David, very smooth in hat and boots, then the David – Michelangelo’s – and realize how huge are his head and hands and how lovely the line of his left thigh seen from the rear. Above all, Michelangelo’s feeling for trembling flesh contrasting with firm flesh, expressed particularly in the veiled intensity of a mouth. For the hundredth time I see how little of the inner reality of art is conveyed by photographs and reproductions. Which makes me feel a bit smug, having experienced the reality. And after I’ve seen those things there is a kind of kaleidoscopic effect of quattrocento colour, clear pinks and blues and cardinal scarlet all as fresh as the day they were laid on, by Fra Angelico, of course: touching and truly devout but if I’m to be honest, no longer specific in my recollection. Not so the Botticelli. Aphrodite and her puffing zephyrs and dancing, well-conducted girls so often admired in coffee-table books, unlike the general surfeit of confused impressions, spring up in absolute clarity and perfection.

  Well, for a week we walked and looked. There were other pleasures: a violent display of fireworks one night because there was some festival toward. We watched from the roof. And an evening up at Fiesole where high above Florence there is an open-air Roman theatre. Here a retrospective season of Antonioni’s films opened with his early Chronicle of a Love Affair. We dined at Mario’s and Signor Antonioni was at the next table. We went on to the theatre and there he was again, across the aisle, and signed Pammy’s programme. It was a warm still night with the stars very emphatic overhead. Chronicle of a Love Affair is a remarkable and also an extremely long film. When midnight came and there seemed to be no end in sight we heard the bus for Florence start its engine and we bolted. We were only just in time.

  When we arrived in Florence it was dark and silent and we were not at all sure where we had been put down. A lone taxi appeared. We took it and were back at The Hermitage by one o’clock in the morning and crept up to our bedrooms in the sleeping house.

  V

  The week (what would the Pope have said?) in Florence had been dazzling and one left it again saying, as one always does, that some day we would return. When it came to an end Vera, our friend at Lucca, collected us and we were driven across the top of Tuscany to San Concordio where she and her husband Ake lived in a sort of princely farmhouse with a gentle garden tucked into wooded hills. Vera is a distinguished painter. She and Ake had spent most of their lives in China where he was a top man in British espionage; in his own words, I’m afraid, ‘A ball-bearing Mata Hari’. He was of Finnish descent but spoke English like an Englishman and Heaven knows how many Chinese dialects. He was also an authoritative sinologist. My great friends in New Zealand who had spent most of their lives in the Orient brought us together and in Lucca we had long gossips with, as Macbeth remarks in rather different circumstances, ‘no more sights’.

  And so after three good days with them, by train one Sunday to Genoa, where everything seemed to be called Christopher or Columbus or both, and then to Paris, where we spent a day with one of my student-players, Douglas MacDiamed, who lives there and is a painter of repute.

  The English Channel was rough and for some reason that I�
��ve forgotten, a strike no doubt, the Dover train was extremely late. Instead of arriving at Victoria in the early evening we fetched up at London Bridge at midnight. There were not anything like enough taxis to go round. The porters were West Indians, some zealous and nimble in securing a cab, others lethargic and bored, ours the slowest of all. The last taxi had long gone, and so had he. There sat Pammy and I on our suitcases until two o’clock of a sweltering morning. Most of the lights were out when the last two black porters came off duty and said they had a car and would take us, if we liked, wherever we wanted to go as long as it was not too far. I wanted to go to the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge and Pammy to a friend’s flat nearby. So we thanked our rescuers and climbed in. They were kind and helped with the luggage and when we asked how much we owed them they said whatever we liked. I had five pounds and gave it to them and I wish it had been more because they brought a dismal night to a happy and gentle conclusion and we parted pleasantly.

  I had been eight pampered weeks on my Italian travels and I now set about writing When in Rome.

  CHAPTER 13

  A Last Look Back

  Until one has achieved publication the odds against appearing, however modestly, between hard covers seem astronomical. ‘It couldn’t happen to me’ is the general feeling, or at least it was so in my case. I have related the circumstances under which it did happen and how by simply dumping my first Alleyn story with an agent and going out to New Zealand I escaped the awful humiliation of publishers’ rejection slips, those definitive badges of being unwanted.

  Nowadays, I suppose, like all professional authors, I am rung up or written to by people asking for short cuts to publication. It is not possible to reply in the way many of them obviously want you to. In my experience there are no short cuts. The only honest answer can be that all publishers are on the lookout for new authors but that few are prepared to risk the enormous cost of presenting a first book unless they are persuaded of its chances and those of a follow-up. It was this circumstance that prevented the publication of Allan Wilkie’s autobiography, a remarkable account of his classic journeyings throughout the southern hemisphere with the plays of Shakespeare. Some old Wilkonians, including Hector Bolitho and myself, tried very hard but did not succeed. The publisher’s reader’s comments were favourable but regretful. One, the most august, from T. S. Eliot, had been left, by some oversight, in the typescript. It began ‘This is a nice book’, went on to praise it and ended, ‘Unfortunately I am unable to recommend it for publication.’