“You aren’t still nervous about that man?” she asked the girl, as they waited to take their places in the coach the next morning.
“I am, you know,” Gwen answered, though she looked really pretty that morning, Rose Lawler thought. She was wearing a fresh sleeveless cotton dress or rather shift about mid-thigh in length, but the legs were good and could take it. Far better than some of the other women, who looked well enough in slacks but not so good when they disclosed wide expanses of solid flesh or spindly blue-veined shanks.
Penny Banks dragged up the coach steps in another multi-coloured ankle length piece of material, topped by her usual dirty off-white sweater. But she stood aside for her mother to climb the steps before her and Mrs. Lawler, with a cheerful “Thank, you, Penny; what a lovely day” plunged quickly behind Mrs. Banks and received nothing in return but a fierce look and a movement of the mouth that might produce a collection of spit or merely a protruded tongue.
“You’ve got that girl taped,” Gwen said as they drove away. “She didn’t do a thing when you cut in getting on board. Just looked daggers. And she hasn’t even started up one of those cigarettes. Pot, aren’t they?”
“So that’s what the smell is?” Rose answered, taking it for granted Gwen knew or she would not have suggested it. She merely turned to glance at Penny, before removing her gaze and smile to her Civil Service friends, three rows behind on the girl’s side.
It was indeed a lovely day, a hot sun in a clear sky, still blue at that fairly early hour. It seemed a pity to be going to spend precious time underground, in corridors haunted by ancient fear and death, persecution and faith, the obstinacy of political power and the answering power of religion, which were perhaps aspects of the same thing. How often had they not discussed these matters in her college days and later listened to recurring arguments at the schools where she had taught? She looked forward to renewing such talk with Myra and Flo that evening. Useless to start it with Gwen now. The girl had already declared that her interest in the catacombs was identical with that of most of the coach load; anticipation of getting a “gowlish” or “goolish” thrill from the display of bones, skulls and other relics.
The little garden beside the catacombs’ public entrance was bereft of the flowers she remembered from her earlier visit to Rome, which had been in April. But the grass patch had been watered and there were leaves on the trees. Mrs. Lawler suddenly felt that she could not bear to go underground. She moved back to her own queue to tell Gwen, who protested strongly that she needed to have a hand to cling to.
“Mrs. Donald or Miss Jeans here will do that,” Rose said, laughing as the two others moved forward, hearing their names spoken. “I shall stay up here. I’ve been before, you know. These two know much more about it than I ever did.”
“May I really hold on to you?” Gwen asked them. “I didn’t think Rose would desert me.”
“Of course,” they answered and Myra Donald at once took one of Gwen’s hands to pull her forward, for their queue was moving on, urged by the Italian guard at the entrance.
Mrs. Lawler returned to the garden and sat down in the shade of trees to enjoy the blissful air, the scent of water-sprinkled grass, the view of wide fields still free of the Rome that had encroached so rapidly since her first visit. She took off her dark glasses to look at the now whitening Mediterranean sky and the brilliant patches of sunlight on the road and beyond.
She put them on again suddenly as a long black car slid to a stop behind ‘Roseanna’. She was sitting with her back turned to the entrance when Owen Strong walked up, took a ticket and was allowed to proceed inside to join the tail of the still waiting queue —
Well, well, well, thought Mrs. Lawler. So Gwen was right, after all, not exaggerating. She was glad she had not gone in. Gladder still she had put the girl in charge of her competent friends. She looked forward to hearing the outcome.
But she was disappointed. Mr. Strong came out again well ahead of the ‘Roseanna’ tour, got into his car without looking round at all and drove off. Gwen came out chatting and laughing with Myra and Flo. She did not say a single word about Owen Strong either on the way back to the hotel or after they got there.
But she joined the Civil Servants and Rose Lawler at lunch, making up a quartette that gathered as a matter of course from that time onward. They were all together at the Colosseum the same afternoon, dodging in and out of the many other tours and the hordes of mixed local citizens and private sight-seers, clambering up the wide steep stairs of this ancient place of entertainment, terror and death.
Mrs. Lawler leaned on the parapet of the terrace where their guide had gathered them together to explain the wonders of the building and its history. As before, ten years before, when she had come there privately with a friend, Rose deplored the absence of the arena floor. It was interesting to see exposed that multitude of little rooms and dens where fighting men, destined victims, wild animals and their keepers had been kept until their time came to go up to fight for their lives or suffer against impossible odds. But the general effect was muddled, presenting none of the imperial grandeur the wide sweeping floor space of the arena would have presented.
She was shocked too by the gross decay she found all over the terraces. She remembered rows of intact seats that were now heaps of rubble. She remembered too Henry James’s story of an American girl sitting with her boy-friend on one of these seats thinking about their history, their former use. Now, seemingly, with scaffolding all about the vast ruin, its total collapse was threatened. Crowds still flooded up the public entrance stairs, but used only one, the only safe one, now.
She heard her name called and turned to go. No point in taking another photograph. Her ten-year-old pictures showed far more antiquity, far less crumbling featureless stone.
She found she was separated from Myra and Flo by an alien group that divided them from her, but she made no attempt to push past, deciding without rancour that they would meet easily when the ‘Roseanna’ tour gathered again about the guide’s raised and waving arm.
But at the top of the wide stairs there was a parting of the ways. The alien group, hesitating, sub-dividing, split into a disorganised mob, some pushing forward, some, but only a few, beginning to go down. While Mrs. Lawler hesitated she felt a smart push in the back that propelled her forward, missed a step, knew she was falling, grasped that she was on the staircase and with a determined, conscious effort, began her rapid descent.
As Myra told her afterwards, “Flo and I were at the bottom looking back to see if you were coming. We saw you stumble and were horrified.”
Flo took up the tale. “It was like a slalom at first. You were dodging to right and left, two steps at a time, upright, steady as a rock …”
“People flabbergasted, struck still to keep out of your way …”
“So you had a very narrow but clear run to the bottom. Then the roar of applause …”
“And anger! Some people were shaking their fists,” Myra reminded her. “Why did you do it, Rose?”
But Mrs. Lawler only said, “Thank God I changed into slacks after lunch. Where are the others?”
They were beginning to tell her when the guide came up to them, white-faced, trembling, chiefly with fury, partly with concern. Mad Englishwomen! He had suffered from their appalling eccentricities before, but never quite like this!
“Signora, signora!” he spluttered, his English drowned in unspoken Italian curses.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Lawler said in his own language. “I was falling and with all those people on the stairs I might have been killed and taken a lot of others with me.”
She spoke carefully, understandably, but with a bad English accent and much hesitation. The guide found it impossible to forgive her; only good manners and thought for has own professional position made him accept the explanation with a polite bow and a shrug.
In the coach, as they re-assembled there, Rose met nothing but expressions of relief and congratulation. Most of them w
ere astonished. An old school teacher doing a circus act? Where had she learned such a stunt and when? Had she been an Olympic champion in her young days and what at?
She only smiled, told them again, she had been in the W.A.A.F in the war and had always kept fit. Told them again it was lucky she was wearing slacks.
Gwen turned up late as usual. She had been eating an ice in one of the little places off the terrace and had missed seeing the ‘Roseanna’ party leaving. She did not mention the fact that Owen had plucked her out of the back row of their lot and brought the ice for her and left her eating it while he went off, he said, to have an urgent pee. But he had come back quite soon.
Later that day, talking to Mrs. Banks at the hotel, she heard the story of Rose Lawler’s exploit.
“Those friends of hers, Mrs. Donald and Miss Jeans, think she must have been pushed. The crowds were terrible, weren’t they?”
Gwen agreed. The crowds had been terrible. It had been terrible too, and exciting, to come across Owen again. She wasn’t going to get rid of him in a hurry. But she’d better not confide in Rose yet once more. Because it was more than likely Owen had tried to get rid of her in a hurry.
She sighed. It was difficult to know what to do for the best. Later that evening she put through a call to England from the hotel. This time she took the precaution of sending her message and request for advice in code.
Chapter Five
The ‘Roseanna’ tour left Rome the next morning in a light drizzle that did not begin to lift until noon. This was a pity because the road passed through particularly beautiful, at times spectacular, country with tall hills covered with trees to the summit, the limestone rock from which they sprouted held in at the base where it touched the road by wide stretches of wire mesh.
But the rain damped down the colours and the contours and also the spirits of the tourists. Billie tried to rouse them with some account of the history of this part of Tuscany, never a peaceful one. But Gwelphs and Ghibellines, their distinctive battlements on their towers, their never-ending feud, meant nothing at all to the travellers, who could not be roused until the coach emerged upon open highway, with Assisi high upon its hill in the distance.
Mrs. Lawler had woken that day very stiff in the legs and back. She had slept well for several hours from sheer exhaustion, but had woken before dawn finding it an agony to turn over, and from then on had suffered with every move until she had forced herself to get up, take an aspirin, apply such massage as she could to her own back and thighs, he down again and wait with forced patience for the relief of movement in an upright position.
Sitting in the bus had meant renewed agony for poor Rose. She could hardly force herself to stand up when the coach stopped at Assisi in the big car park halfway up the hill. But her friends helped her, though Gwen, after trying to drag her out of her seat without any success, laughed nervously and toning hopped away and down the steps of the coach in front of Mr. Banks, who applied his extra strength to the job of getting Mrs. Lawler upright. Myra and Flo, by easy stages and with much encouragement, did the rest. The tour was to take lunch at an hotel in Assisi and do their sight-seeing in the afternoon. By the time the three women had made a slow march to this hotel Rose declared the walk had done the trick. The stiffness, finally broken, had disappeared.
“It usually goes this way,” she declared. “But I didn’t realise how bad it was going to be, or I might, have done something about it last night before I went to bed.”
“What, for instance?” Myra asked.
“Asked you to give me a rub. I take oil about with me even now. But I’d forgotten how much worse it was likely to be at my present advanced age.”
The other two exchanged glances.
“I think it is high time, Rose,” Flo said, “that you told us what exactly you taught in your schools or what your hobbies were or are that let you perform these Olympic stunts at will.”
“Not at will! Sheer necessity! Most unwillingly.”
“But what?”
Mrs. Lawler hesitated. She certainly dad not want coach gossip, tour gossip, to spread rumours or even true facts about her. To most of them her profession would mean nothing. To be reasonable, to very few indeed of her fellow-travellers. Why did she hesitate? She knew the answer. She had an immediate picture before her eyes of a wrinkled face, a crooked smile, a complete awareness of the meaning of her graceful, successful escape from injury at the Colosseum. But they had left Rome. Oh yes, they had left Rome. And the long black car had not been in the Assisi car park. Or not yet.
“I trained at Bedford,” she said quietly. “I was a junior games and gym mistress at one girls’ school in the south midlands before the war and at another in the south-west after I was demobbed and my boy started school.”
“You were able to pick it all up again?” Myra asked, astonished.
“I did a refresher course. I trained. It was the only thing I could do. I was no good at academic stuff.”
“But top-class in your own line,” Flo said, admiringly.
There was a short silence. Then Rose said, “Unless anyone wants to know exactly what I taught at schools I’d rather neither of you explained to them.”
“They won’t,” Myra said confidently, “They may have had some sort of P.T., even gym apparatus, but I don’t mink the hockey or lacrosse games mistress would mean a thing.”
“Don’t be such a snob,” Flo told her.
“Does that mean anything these days?” Rose laughed. “Snob, anti-snob! All a mix-up of nonsense, isn’t it? People trying to fit themselves into a class they want to belong to, or think they belong to, or want other people to think they belong to, or …”
“Stop!” Myra cried. “My head’s spinning!”
Gwen Chilton arrived almost first at the hotel. She had been hurrying, partly from fear, but chiefly from curiosity. Owen had told her he would keep in touch but he had not said where he would see her next. It was like him to go to the catacombs, frightening her half out of her wits; coming up behind her, not to pinch her bottom as the Italian boys did, but to whisper in her ear, wanting to know what the old schoolmarm snooper was doing in the garden up above instead of down here where he’d expected.
“She’s done this place before. She just wanted to rest in the shade, she said,” Gwen had told him.
“Rest, my arse,” he breathed, making her giggle.
“Hers, you mean.”
“Don’t be rude, darling.”
Heads turned in their direction. Owen slipped into the darkness, but was soon at her ear again.
“I shall keep in touch,” he whispered this time and she felt fingers at her neck as well as breath on her ear. “So don’t get tangled with the old bitch or we’ll have to eliminate her.”
He had gone after this and did not appear again until they were leaving the Colosseum mat afternoon. Having made sure she was out of sight of the staircase.
So was Rose Lawler’s spectacular descent set off by Owen? Several of the tour had asked her if Mrs. Lawler had been pushed?
She could truthfully say she did not know, but it wouldn’t be surprising, would it? These crowds do push, don’t they?
But she had a shrewd idea it had been Owen, pushing deliberately. Especially since, that very morning, a small man had pressed a note into her hand as she left the Rome hotel. She had slipped it into her bag and now looked forward to reaching the Assisi lunch hotel before the rest of their lot, to open the note in the safe privacy of the toilet.
Owen had written briefly: “Meet me Assisi 2.00 p.m. upper church.” He had not signed it or even addressed it in any way inside or out. So how had the little man known her? She shivered, feeling eyes about her in every direction, all her movements watched, enemies ready to pounce at every stage, upon each day of what should have been a safe, if boring, interval in a carefully planned operation.
But she pulled herself together, as she always had done and so far with more than reasonable success. When she joined the three eg
g heads, as she now thought of them, she was her most controlled shy self, no trace of the false hysteric who had caused them so much embarrassment from time to time.
Rose Lawler could only tell herself that Rome had done Gwen good and that must really be Owen Strong’s doing. Time would show if his pursuit of the girl was genuine. They would know that if he turned up in Florence. In the meantime she and her friends had much to enjoy and would not be hampered by guides other than their Baedekers and maps.
Gwen did not offer to join them. The four had coffee together in the hotel lounge, but when Myra, Flo and Rose took up their handbags and cameras with purposeful glances at one another and a polite question to her, she shook her head, getting out a fresh cigarette to light from the stub she took from her lips. They left her sitting there, staring out of the window, making no sign even to those members of the tour who remarked upon her strange inertia as they passed her.
“I can’t make out that young woman at all,” Myra said as they climbed the hill slowly towards the church. “Can you, Rose?”
“Not really,” Mrs. Lawler answered. Her own thoughts were too fantastic to be shared.
Until, in one of the darker recesses of the first church, she passed a stooping figure that she recognised. For a couple of seconds she thought of accosting him, but then recoiled from the impulse and passed on. This was helped by Flo, who asked her from behind where it was they expected to find certain of the famous Giotto paintings of the life of the Saint. When she had confirmed the answer from her guide book she looked round again, but Owen Strong had disappeared.
He had been startled, waiting in his dark corner, to see Mrs. Lawler at all. Her exploit at the Colosseum, that he had admired as much as he deplored its success and his own consequent failure had, so Rollo had told him, certainly crippled the woman, if only temporarily. So he had judged it safe to have a word with Gwen in Assisi. He had no doubt she had got his note. Rollo never let him down, over simple little jobs of communication, especially as the bread-line journalist had been done out of an expected scoop, “Englishwoman falls at Colosseum” by the heroine of the episode from her hospital bed, or an obituary if that was the alternative.
A Pigeon Among the Cats Page 5
