“My father—” curious he’d not caught that flickering edge of hysteria in her voice till now—“when I was only five also began to stay away from home. I never found out why. But it killed my mother. I will not wait for it to kill me.”
Threatening suicide? “Have you talked to your husband at all?”
“It isn’t a wife’s place.”
Smiling: “Only to talk to his employer. Very well, Signora, I shall try. But I can guarantee nothing. My employer is England: the King.” Which quieted her.
When she left, he began a bitter dialogue with himself. What had happened to diplomatic initiative? They—whoever “they” were—seemed to be calling the tune.
The Situation is always bigger than you, Sidney, It has like God its own logic and its own justification for being, and the best you can do is cope.
I’m not a marriage counselor, or a priest.
Don’t act as if it were a conscious plot against you. Who knows how many thousand accidents—a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop—brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.
Oh, of course: look at Florence. A random pattern of cold-air currents, some shifting of the pack ice, the deaths of a few ponies, these helped produce one Hugh Godolphin, as we saw him. Only by the merest happenstance did he escape the private logic of that ice-world.
The inert universe may have a quality we can call logic. But logic is a human attribute after all; so even at that it’s a misnomer. What are real are the cross-purposes. We’ve dignified them with the words “profession” and “occupation.” There is a certain cold comfort in remembering that Manganese, Mizzi, Maijstral, Dupiro the ragman, that blasted face who caught us at the villa—also work at cross-purposes.
But what then does one do? Is there a way out?
There is always the way out that Carla Maijstral threatens to take.
His musings were interrupted by Demivolt, who came stumbling in the door. “There’s trouble.”
“Oh indeed. That’s unusual.”
“Dupiro the ragman.”
Good things come in threes. “How.”
“Drowned, in Marsamuscetto. Washed ashore downhill from Manderaggio. He had been mutilated.” Stencil thought of the Great Siege and the Turkish atrocities: death’s flotilla.
“It must have been I Banditti,” Demivolt continued: “a gang of terrorists or professional assassins. They vie with one another in finding new and ingenious ways to murder. Poor Dupiro’s genitals were found sewn in his mouth. Silk suturing worthy of a fine surgeon.”
Stencil felt ill.
“We think they are connected somehow with the fasci di combattimento who’ve organized last month in Italy, around Milan. The Manganese has been in intermittent contact with their leader Mussolini.”
“The tide could have carried him across.”
“They wouldn’t want it out to sea, you know. Craftsmanship of that order must have an audience or it’s worthless.”
What’s happened, he asked his other half. The Situation used to be a civilized affair.
No time in Valletta. No history, all history at once . . .
“Sit down, Sidney. Here.” A glass of brandy, a few slaps to the face.
“All right, all right. Ease off. It’s been the weather.” Demivolt waggled his eyebrows and retreated to the dead fireplace. “Now we have lost Fairing, as you know, and we may lose Maijstral.” He summarized Carla’s visit.
“The priest.”
“What I thought. But we’ve had an ear lopped off out at the villa.”
“Short of starting an affair, one of us, with La Manganese, I can’t see any way to replace it.”
“Perhaps she’s not attracted to the mature sort.”
“I didn’t mean it seriously.”
“She did give me a curious look. That day at the church.”
“You old dog. You didn’t say you’d been slipping out to secret trysts in a church.” Attempting the light touch. But failing.
“It has deteriorated to the point where any move on our part would have to be bold.”
“Perhaps foolish. But confronting her directly . . . I’m an optimist, as you know.”
“I’m a pessimist. It keeps a certain balance. Perhaps I’m only tired. But I do think it is that desperate. Employing I Banditti indicates a larger move—by them—soon.”
“Wait, in any event. Till we see what Fairing does.”
Spring had descended with its own tongue of flame. Valletta seemed soul-kissed into drowsy complaisance as Stencil mounted the hill southeast of Strada Reale toward Fairing’s church. The place was empty and its silence broken only by snores from the confessional. Stencil slipped into the other side on his knees and woke the priest rudely.
“She may violate the secrecy of this little box,” Fairing replied, “but I cannot.”
“You know what Maijstral is,” Stencil said, angry, “and how many Caesars he serves. Can’t you calm her? Don’t they teach mesmerism at the Jesuit seminary?” He regretted the words immediately.
“Remember I am leaving,” coldly: “speak to my successor, Father Avalanche. Perhaps you can teach him to betray God and the Church and this flock. You’ve failed with me. I must follow my conscience.”
“What a damned enigma you are,” Stencil burst out. “Your conscience is made of india rubber.”
After a pause: “I can, of course, tell her that any drastic step she takes—threatening the welfare of the child, perhaps—is a mortal sin.”
Anger had drained away. Remembering his “damned”: “Forgive me, Father.”
The priest chuckled. “I can’t. You’re an Anglican.”
The woman had approached so quietly that both Stencil and Fairing jumped when she spoke.
“My opposite number.”
The voice, the voice—of course he knew it. As the priest—flexible enough to betray no surprise—performed introductions, Stencil watched her face closely, as if waiting for it to reveal itself. But she wore an elaborate hat and veil; and the face was as generalized as that of any graceful woman seen in the street. One arm, sleeveless to the elbow, was gloved and nearly solid with bracelets.
So she had come to them. Stencil had kept his promise to Demivolt—had waited to see what Fairing would do.
“We have met, Signorina Manganese.”
“In Florence,” came the voice behind the veil. “Do you remember?” turning her head. In the hair visible below the hat was a carved ivory comb, and five crucified faces, long-suffering beneath their helmets.
“So.”
“I wore the comb today. Knowing you would be here.”
Whether or not he must now betray Demivolt, Stencil suspected he’d be little use henceforth in either preventing or manipulating for Whitehall’s inscrutable purposes whatever would happen in June. What he had thought was an end had proved to be only a twenty-year stay. No use, he realized, asking if she’d followed him or if some third force had manipulated them toward meeting.
Riding out to the villa in her Benz, he showed none of the usual automobile-anxieties. What use? They’d come in, hadn’t they, from their thousand separate streets. To enter, hand in hand, the hothouse of a Florentine spring once again; to be fayed and filleted hermetically into a square (interior? exterior?) where all art objects hover between inertia and waking, all shadows lengthen imperceptibly though night never falls, a total nostalgic hush rests on the heart’s landscape. And all faces are blank masks; and spring is any drawn-out sense of exhaustion or a summer which like evening never comes.
“We are on the same side, aren’t we.” She smiled. They’d been sitting idly in on
e darkened drawing room, watching nothing-night on the sea—from a seaward window. “Our ends are the same: to keep Italy out of Malta. It is a second front, which certain elements in Italy cannot afford to have opened, now.”
This woman caused Dupiro the ragman, her servant’s love, to be murdered terribly.
I am aware of that.
You are aware of nothing. Poor old man.
“But our means are different.”
“Let the patient reach a crisis,” she said: “push him through the fever. End the malady as quickly as possible.”
A hollow laugh: “One way or another.”
“Your way would leave them strength to prolong it. My employers must move in a straight line. No sidetrackings. Annexationists are a minority in Italy, but bothersome.”
“Absolute upheaval,” a nostalgic smile: “that is your way, Victoria; of course.” For in Florence, during the bloody demonstration before the Venezuelan Consulate, he had dragged her away from an unarmed policeman, whose face she was flaying with pointed fingernails. Hysterical girl, tattered velvet. Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room, almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.
“Shall I tell you where I have been since our last closed room?”
“No. What need to tell me? No doubt I have passed and repassed you, or your work, in every city Whitehall has called me to.” He chuckled fondly.
“How pleasant to watch Nothing.” Her face (so rarely had he seen it that way!) was at peace, the live eye dead as the other, with the clock-iris. He’d not been surprised at the eye; no more than at the star sapphire sewn into her navel. There is surgery; and surgery. Even in Florence—the comb, which she would never let him touch or remove—he had noted an obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter.
“See my lovely shoes,” as half an hour before he’d knelt to remove them. “I would so like to have an entire foot that way, a foot of amber and gold, with the veins, perhaps, in intaglio instead of bas-relief. How tiresome to have the same feet: one can only change one’s shoes. But if a girl could have, oh, a lovely rainbow or wardrobe of different-hued, different-sized and -shaped feet . . .”
Girl? She was nearly forty. But then—aside from a body less alive, how much in fact had she changed? Wasn’t she the same balloon-girl who’d seduced him on a leather couch in the Florence Consulate twenty years ago?
“I must go,” he told her.
“My caretaker will drive you back.” As if conjured, the mutilated face appeared at the door. Whatever it felt at seeing them together didn’t show in any change of expression. Perhaps it was too painful to change expression. The lantern that night had given an illusion of change: but Stencil saw now the face was fixed as any death-mask.
In the automobile, racketing back toward Valletta, neither spoke till they’d reached the city’s verge.
“You must not hurt her, you know.”
Stencil turned, struck by a thought. “You are young Gadrulfi—Godolphin—aren’t you?”
“We both have an interest in her,” Godolphin said. “I am her servant.”
“I too, in a way. She will not be hurt. She cannot be.”
III
Events began to shape themselves for June and the coming Assembly. If Demivolt detected any change in Stencil he gave no sign. Maijstral continued to report, and his wife kept silent; the child presumably growing inside her, also shaping itself for June.
Stencil and Veronica Manganese met often. It was hardly a matter of any mysterious “control”; she held no unspeakable secrets over his balding head, nor did she exert any particular sexual fascination. It could only be age’s worst side-effect: nostalgia. A tilt toward the past so violent he found it increasingly more difficult to live in the real present he believed to be so politically crucial. The villa in Sliema became more and more a retreat into late afternoon melancholy. His yarning with Mehemet, his sentimental drunks with Demivolt; these plus Fairing’s protean finaglings and Carla Maijstral’s inference to a humanitarian instinct he’d abandoned before entering the service, combined to undermine what virtù he’d brought through sixty years on the go, making him really no further use in Malta. Treacherous pasture, this island.
Veronica was kind. Her time with Stencil was entirely for him. No appointments, whispered conferences, hurried paper work: only resumption of their hothouse-time—as if it were marked by any old and over precious clock which could be wound and set at will. For it came to that, finally: an alienation from time, much as Malta itself was alienated from any history in which cause precedes effect.
Carla did come to him again with unfaked tears this time; and pleading, not defiant.
“The priest is gone,” she wept. “Whom else do I have? My husband and I are strangers. Is it another woman?”
He was tempted to tell her. But was restrained by the fine irony. He found himself hoping that there was indeed adultery between his old “love” and the shipfitter; if only to complete a circle begun in England eighteen years ago, a beginning kept forcibly from his thoughts for the same period of time.
Herbert would be eighteen. And probably helling it all about the dear old isles. What would he think of his father . . .
His father, ha.
“Signora,” hastily, “I have been selfish. Everything I can do. My promise.”
“We—my child and I: why should we continue to live?”
Why should any of us. He would send her husband back. With or without him the June Assembly would become what it would: bloodbath or calm negotiation, who could tell or shape events that closely? There were no more princes. Henceforth politics would become progressively more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease would progress. Stencil was nearly past caring.
Demivolt and he had it out the next evening.
“You’re not helping, you know. I can’t keep this thing off by myself.”
“We’ve lost our contacts. We’ve lost more than that . . .”
“What the hell is wrong, Sidney.”
“Health, I suppose,” Stencil lied.
“O God.”
“The students are upset, I’ve heard. Rumor that the University will be abolished. Conferment of Degrees law, 1915—so that the graduating class this year is first to be affected.”
Demivolt took it as Stencil had hoped: a sick man’s attempt to be helpful. “Have a look into that,” he muttered. They’d both known of the University unrest.
On 4 June the acting Police Commissioner requested a 25-man detachment from the Malta Composite Battalion to be quartered in the city. University students went on strike the same day, parading Strada Reale, throwing eggs at anti-Mizzists, breaking furniture, turning the street festive with a progress of decorated automobiles.
“We are for it,” Demivolt announced that evening. “I’m off for the Palace.” Soon after Godolphin called for Stencil in the Benz.
Out at the villa, the drawing room was lit with an unaccustomed brilliance, though occupied only by two people. Her companion was Maijstral. Others had obviously been there: cigarette stubs and teacups were scattered among the statues and old furniture.
Stencil smiled at Maijstral’s confusion. “We are old friends,” he said gently. From somewhere—bottom of the tank—came a last burst of duplicity and virtù. He forced himself into the real present, perhaps aware it would be his last time there. Placing a hand on the yardbird’s shoulder: “Come. I have private instructions.” He winked at the woman. “We’re still nominally opponents, you see. There are the Rules.”
Outside his smile faded. “Now quickly, Maijstral, don’t interrupt. You are released. We have no further use for you. Your wife’s time is close: go back to her.”
“The signora
—” jerking his head back toward the foyer—“still needs me. My wife has her child.”
“It is an order: from both of us. I can add this: if you do not return to your wife she will destroy herself and the child.”
“It is a sin.”
“Which she will risk.” But Maijstral still shuffled.
“Very well: if I see you again, here or in my woman’s company—” that had hit: a sly smile touched Maijstral’s lips—“I turn your name over to your fellow workers. Do you know what they’ll do to you, Maijstral? Of course you do. I can even call in the Banditti, if you prefer to die more picturesquely. . . .” Maijstral stood for a moment, eyes going numb. Stencil let the magic spell “Banditti” work for an instant more, then flashed his best—and last—diplomatic smile: “Go. You and your woman and the young Maijstral. Stay out of the bloodbath. Stay inside.” Maijstral shrugged, turned and left. He did not look back; his trundling step was less sure.
Stencil made a short prayer: let him be less and less sure as he gathers years. . . .
She smiled as he returned to the drawing room. “All done?”
He collapsed into a Louis Quinze chair whose two seraphim keened above a dark lawn of green velvet. “All done.”
Tension grew through 6 June. Units of the civil police and military were alerted. Another unofficial notice went out, advising merchants to close up their shops.
At 3:30 P.M. on 7 June mobs began to collect in Strada Reale. For the next day and a half they owned Valletta’s exterior spaces. They attacked not only the Chronicle (as promised) but also the Union Club, the Lyceum, the Palace, the houses of anti-Mizzist Members, the cafés and shops which had stayed open. Landing parties from HMS Egmont, and detachments of Army and police joined the effort to keep order. Several times they formed ranks; once or twice they fired. Three civilians were killed by gunfire; seven wounded. Scores more were injured in the general rioting. Several buildings were set on fire. Two RAF lorries with machine guns dispersed an attack on the millers at Hamrun.
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