by Jane Arbor
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I was going to mention that, last week, before I had heard the sale was clinched, I had a surprise visit from Signora Parioli.’
‘But she rides here regularly, doesn’t she?’
‘Not this time. She said she had a favour to ask of me—she wanted me to show her over the house. Well, not knowing then who the prospective buyer was, I asked her if she was interested from that point of view. At which she laughed and said no—that she was only acting from a woman’s curiosity and from having promised a friend that she would give her opinion of the property. That being so, she knew she was asking a favour, but she hoped I would agree.’
‘And did you?’
‘Well, of course, though I needn’t have done, as she hadn’t come with any authority.’ Cesare smiled ruefully. ‘I’m afraid she didn’t think much of the interior. The rooms were cold, and the decorating deplorable. I went on the defensive for it—pointed out that it needed much more gracious living than Agnese and I could afford for it. And somehow, from the way she continually said, “I should do—this, or that”, by way of changes, I got the impression that she had a good deal more particular interest than mere curiosity.’
‘She had also said she was viewing it for a friend,’ Ruth reminded him.
He nodded. ‘Yes, that too. And when I heard later that Erle had bought it, a possible reason for her coming to view it clicked into place in my mind.’
Ruth suppressed a little shiver of apprehension and jealousy. ‘You think Erle may have sent her?’
‘It’s difficult not to think so. She certainly had the manner of a woman who might be planning for her own future comfort and pleasure.’
Thinking back to Erle’s gift of jewellery to Stella, Ruth protested, ‘But she couldn’t possibly accept a house from Erle!’
‘No. Unless—’ Cesare stopped, and Ruth had to force herself to meet his unaware gaze.
‘You mean—unless he’s going to marry her and install her here?’
‘At the moment, that seems a probable explanation,’ he agreed. And couldn’t know, she thought, how much her own question had cost her.
Later she was to reflect painfully that if she hadn’t wantonly destroyed Erle’s impression of her as a friend he could talk to he might have confided in her his change of heart in the matter of marriage. Even that—almost—might be preferable to the gulf that yawned between them now. When he came back to Rome, for appearances’ sake and for Cicely’s, they would meet and talk across Cicely, as it were. There would be nothing else to link them. Nothing.
It was on a day when the papers had carried a picture captioned, ‘Erle Nash, in New York on professional business, entertains a cosmopolitan party of friends at the Stork Club’, that Cicely, having pointed out to Ruth that Stella Parioli was of the party, suddenly announced, ‘You know, I think I’ve had Erle.’
‘Had him?’ Ruth echoed.
‘Had him as a pin-up, I mean. Grown out of him, if you like. I had a monumental crush on him and I haven’t any more. You have to work so hard at crushes for just crumbs in return. It’s a sort of one-way traffic. Or haven’t you ever had one? Wouldn’t you know?’
‘Yes, I’ve had one,’ said Ruth. ‘A long time ago.’
‘And suddenly, or perhaps not all that suddenly,’ Cicely pursued her theme, ‘it’s brought home to you that you’re getting nowhere fast. That if they notice you at all, they’re only being kind. That they pinch your cheek or pull your hair and even kiss you as they’d kiss a six-year-old. Take Erle—I’ve even stopped being jealous about him. He could take up with my best friend tomorrow, and I shouldn’t care. Odd, that, isn’t it?’
Odd? thought Ruth. The understatement of the year where I’m concerned! I, wholly wrong about the depth of your feeling for him; he cynically right. I, shielding you from him at the cost of his friendship for me; he, knowing that it was only calf-love which you’d soon forget. As, out of sight of him, I did myself. Though mine took longer to forget, and, in sight and sound and touch of him again, has come back full circle...
Aloud she told Cicely, ‘I think it’s a stage in growing up. It’s apt to happen when you find something less one-way to put in its place.’
‘You mean when you find someone you can communicate with? Someone who seems to communicate with you?’
Ruth said, ‘How your generation does overwork that poor word “communicate”! But yes, I suppose so, if by it you mean speaking the same language, which was our way of putting it, I remember.’
‘As Jeremy and I begin to, I think,’ Cicely mused. ‘Communicate, I mean. As I never could, quite, with Erle. Can you?’
Ruth hesitated. ‘Not always. But you need to remember he has to be something of a diplomat, manipulating people and situations as he does. And diplomats can’t always afford to tell the world all they’re thinking.’
‘All the same, Erle could let up a bit with his friends,’ Cicely judged. ‘But there it is. I’m not bothered any more. I’m cured of him—just like that.’
‘Able to put, say, Jeremy in his place?’
But Cicely was not to be drawn wholly on the subject of Jeremy. ‘Could be,’ she said carelessly. ‘At least we start level, which I suppose I never did with Erle. But do you know what I’d like to see one of these days?—Erle falling flat on his face for someone quite ordinary! Without any talent or any glamour or anything at all that he could use. How would that be for a laugh?’ Ruth said quietly, ‘You are disillusioned about him, aren’t you? I hope you’re not going to show it too plainly when he comes back. After all, you owe him quite a lot—this summer in Rome, for one thing.’
Cicely’s shrug dismissed any debt to Erle. ‘If he hadn’t laid it on for me, I daresay somebody else would,’ she said. ‘Anyway, he knows what I think of him. I told him, the night I was at his apartment.’
‘Oh—what did you tell him?’
Cicely had the grace to blush. ‘The worst of it was, the next morning I couldn’t remember what I had said,’ she admitted.
Ruth laughed. ‘Just the creme de cacao talking, eh?’
‘The—what?’
‘The liqueur that was the only thing you liked among Erle’s drinks.’
‘Oh, that. Yes, well—whatever I said must have been scathing, for I do remember that he looked quite taken aback. And for anyone as self-assured as Erle to be stopped in his tracks is quite something, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Quite,’ Ruth agreed, reflecting that Erle, nonplussed even momentarily, was a scene she had never yet witnessed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Now the city was in the grip of its torrid late August heat. As usual at this time of year Ruth and her language pupils took a month’s holiday and she and Cicely went often to the Lido to swim and to escape from sweltering streets where even the stone of walls was fiery to the touch.
Erle rang once to say he was back from America, but made no further contact for some time. His work of organising his clients’ winter seasons of concert and opera engagements was at its height, he had said when he telephoned. From then on every social contact he had was likely to have some professional purpose behind it. For him this was his financial haymaking time.
From behind Ruth Cicely had prompted, ‘Tell him we know he’s bought the Casa, and see what he says.’ But she was too late. Erle had already rung off.
Then, one afternoon when they came home from the Lido, his car was parked on the street and he was pacing urgently up and down. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you for hours,’ he said.
‘We’ve been out at the Lido since morning.’
‘All right. But let’s go in now. My mother has rung from England with some rather bad news.’
Cicely looked at him sharply. ‘Bad news for you? Or do you mean—for me?’
He nodded. ‘None too good, little one. But take it easy.’
Ruth had opened the door by now, and with a hand on Cicely’s shoulder he propelled her up the stairs. In Ruth’s living-room she turned on him
. ‘What for me? Not—Mother?’
‘I’m afraid so. She was in a taxicab smash last night, and she’s in hospital.’
‘Wh—why? What’s wrong? What’s happened to her?’
‘A broken leg, and they suspect some internal injury which they aren’t willing to confirm yet. She was still unconscious when my mother got in touch with me.’
‘Unconscious? Oh—no!’
He put an arm round her and she turned her face into his shoulder. He signalled to Ruth, ‘A drop of brandy, I think,’ then put Cicely into a chair and knelt by it, holding both her hands. ‘Do you want to go home, little one?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, yes! Can I? I mean—how soon?’ she pleaded.
‘Tonight. How about that? I’ve already provisionally booked a flight for you. It only needs confirming by phone, and I’ll come with you, of course.’
Her eyes filled with weak tears. ‘Oh, Erle, you’re good! Will you really? I thought you were so hideously busy just now?’
But he was already at the telephone, saying over his shoulder to Ruth, ‘Is that all right with you? Can you get her ready and give her a light meal if she can eat it?’ He phoned the airport, booked a call to his mother, and rang several other numbers. Cicely declared she couldn’t eat, but did manage most of a plain omelette Ruth cooked for her. She said to Ruth, ‘Jeremy and Vivien—you’ll tell them I’ve gone home?’ And reflectively, when it was just about time for her and Erle to leave, ‘And that’s a pity too. Jeremy told me the legend about the Fountain of Trevi—that if you throw lire into it, it’s a sign you’ll come back to Rome. But I meant to put it off until the night before I was really leaving, and now it’s too late.’
‘Do you want to come back?’ asked Erle.
Her face lighted slightly. ‘Do I? It’s been heaven—or nearly.’
‘Then on the way to the airport, what do you say to our making a detour from Tritone to take in Trevi? Have you got any small change handy?’
‘Oh, Erle, bless you!’ She turned to give Ruth a bear hug and a kiss on each cheek. ‘Thank you for everything,’ she murmured. ‘And may I come back?’
Across the room Erle, collecting her luggage for carrying down to the car, commented drily, ‘Mission accomplished, it seems.’
Cicely looked round at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that, before you came, Ruth threatened that when she had done with you, you’d want to come back—or else!’
‘Did you? Did you really?’ Cicely appealed to Ruth. Ruth nodded and smiled. ‘I’m glad it’s worked out,’ she said. Then they were both gone, leaving an emptiness and a finality behind. For it was already so near to the end of Cicely’s time in Rome that she was unlikely to come back this year. And with Cicely’s going, there weren’t even days to be counted to the severing of the link with Erle. It was surely broken now.
On the evening of the next day there was news from England. Erle rang to say that though Mrs. Mordaunt was out of danger, besides her broken leg, she had some internal haemorrhage from a crushed rib and a degree of concussion and would be in hospital for some time. Cicely sent Ruth her love. It would probably be a week before Erle came back.
Before he returned Jeremy and Vivien Slade, who were leaving themselves, came to say goodbye. Vivien was going to a domestic science college in the autumn; Jeremy on an advanced art course. They would pick up the threads with Cicely again, they promised themselves, and ‘Jeremy is really going for her,’ Vivien confided to Ruth when they were alone. ‘He’s going to be completely shattered if she takes up with anyone else.’ As if, thought Ruth, at nineteen and seventeen Jeremy and Cicely ought to plight their troth for good. But perhaps they had. Who knew? It had been known to happen.
Left alone, Ruth found herself with unwonted time on her hands. She was used to the recurring heat of Roman summers and didn’t mind it. Alone, she preferred the country to the Lido beaches, where family parties and couples shouted and laughed and swam and sunbathed together. So she packed picnic lunches and a book and, beyond the city boundaries, took any road which offered; using the car until Erle returned when, with Cicely gone, she would have no further right to it. She shopped and window-shopped on foot and took herself to the last nights of open-air opera at Caracalla, one among ten thousand people, neighbours for a night, who would scatter to the far corners of the earth when their time of holiday was over.
Cicely wrote happily of her mother’s improving condition, and Erle telephoned. He had left England, but was doing some business in Paris before he came back to Rome. Then one day Ruth had an unexpected visitor—Stella Parioli, who, Ruth would have said until then, didn’t know where she lived. Surprised and puzzled as to what the other woman could want of her, Ruth asked her in. To which Stella merely said ‘Thank you’ and followed Ruth’s lead up to the flat.
It was mid-morning. Ruth offered drinks. Stella refused them. She sat, graceful and poised, laid her bag and gloves on a table beside her, and waited while Ruth unplugged and removed the vacuum-cleaner she had been using. Then she said, ‘I do hope, signora, you will understand that it’s a certain goodwill towards you that has brought me to see you’—a remark which, in explanation of her guest’s errand, left Ruth none the wiser.
She echoed blankly, ‘Your goodwill, signora? Well, thank you. But am I in any particular need of it, do you think?’
Stella nodded slowly. ‘I’d say so. Reject it or misunderstand it if you like. But in view of—this’—taking a printed cutting from her bag and handing it over— ‘don’t you agree you are in need of all the charity of your friends and acquaintances that you can get?’
Ruth took the cutting, experiencing the all-over chill of gooseflesh as she thought she recognised the layout of the print; the gloss of the paper. Lo Sussorro again! Or a similar rag to it. She longed for the moral courage to hand it back, to refuse to read it. But that was beyond her will, and she read it through, while Stella watched her.
Head lowered, apparently still reading, she was silent until Stella prompted, ‘Well? You read Italian well enough, I suppose, to understand what it says about you?’
Ruth said slowly, ‘Indeed I know what it says—that I am in the habit of visiting Signore Nash’s apartment very late at night; alone and after midnight in one instance. But that’s not to agree that my friends could possibly believe the implication behind it. Nor, if I may say so, signora, do I appreciate the “goodwill” that bothered to bring it to my notice. Won’t you explain?’
Stella’s delicate brows lifted. ‘But surely? After all, someone would have done so, if I hadn’t. And by no means everyone, believe me, would be concerned enough to beg you to be more discreet in future. For Erle’s reputation, if not for your own.’
‘You are worried lest these lies should harm him as much as me? As if any real friend of his or mine could care!’ Ruth scoffed.
‘But haven’t your names been linked in a similar way earlier?’
‘At least once before that I know of.’
‘With some cumulative effect, no doubt, even if they are proved to be lies—’
‘Which they assuredly are,’ Ruth cut in. ‘I have never visited Erle Nash’s apartment for the purpose that’s hinted at here.’
‘Nor very late at night at all?’ Stella insinuated.
‘Never. That is—’ Ruth had remembered her abortive errand in search of Cicely.
At her check, Stella pounced. ‘Ah, then you have on occasion? You would do well to realise, signora, how much can be read into a small amount of truth like that!’ she advised.
‘Once only,’ Ruth said tautly. Not for anything, she resolved, would she reveal Cicely’s silly escapade to a sophisticate like Stella Parioli. ‘Signore Nash wasn’t even there,’ she added.
‘Tch! So you had a fruitless errand? But how unfortunate for you that on that one occasion you should have been seen by some interested party! Seen to arrive, that is. Not seen to leave, as I think it says there?’ Stella’s nod indicated the cutting wh
ich Ruth still held.
Ruth said, ‘Yes. Though my leaving happened a very few minutes later, when I found Erle Nash wasn’t at home.’
‘Which, sadly for you, the informant didn’t wait to see.’
‘Or chose to suppress, as it made a better lie that way.’ Ruth handed back the cutting, which Stella folded and dropped into her bag. Ruth went on, ‘I can’t help thinking that you are as concerned as you are, because you feel that this sort of thing involves not only Erle Nash and me, but reflects indirectly on his circle of friends as well. In which case, though it’s no fault of mine, I’m sorry.’
Stella smiled thinly. ‘Thank you. And you are very perceptive. I do care, as Erle will, that scandal spoken of him does no good either to intimates of his.’
‘Intimates such as yourself?’
Stella took a mirror from her bag, tilted her chin to examine her face from several angles, then put the mirror away and rose.
‘Such, perhaps, as myself,’ she agreed, and then, ‘Tell me, signora, how would you describe your own relationship with Erle?’
Ruth said, ‘As his friend, I hope. We first knew each other many years ago, at school in England.’
Stella nodded. ‘Yes, that he told me. Not, then, as his “good” friend, with all that the film stars have taught us to understand by that?’
Ruth flushed. ‘Certainly not,’ she said.
‘I thought not. He speaks warmly of you, of course. But I’m afraid he may not understand at all how you could be so careless of your own good name and his as to make gossip of this kind even remotely possible. You are not a child, signora. You should certainly know by now how readily one’s enemies talk!’
It was Stella’s parting shot. It left Ruth impotently raging, and in no doubt whatsoever that wherever Stella’s ‘goodwill’ was directed, it certainly wasn’t towards her. Stella was only concerned that through her own association with Erle, she shouldn’t be seen to be ‘touching pitch’.
But who, this time, could have witnessed her visit to Erle’s apartment? Ruth puzzled. True, the streets were still full of people, but Agnese Fonte would not have been among them at that time of night. Who else then had enough malice towards her to make up such a story? It was a question that was still unanswered when Erle returned to Rome.
