*
One day while she was in Rome on a visit to the Arnoldi family, she looked up Dr Santini. His son had been one of her father’s old schoolfriends. At the time of her father’s death, the son had written to her; a year afterwards, when the son was killed in an excavation, she had had to write to the old man. She wouldn’t have gone to see him, except that his name came up and Signora Arnoldi said, ‘I hear he’s dying.’
She sent a letter first, and was invited. The professor lived in a part of town she hadn’t seen for many years. The house was large, underlit and cold. It had abundant tile decoration, some marble, dark wood paneling and many tarnished silver wall sconces adorned with ugly human figures. Three maids stood in the hallway to greet her. They were dressed in baggy skirts and shawls. For all she knew, they might have been relatives. The one who struggled up the staircase in front of her screamed down to another one near the kitchen entrance to get the tea ready.
The old man was delighted to see her. He said that he remembered her father as a young boy: when he’d come to visit his son, Giorgio, at their cousin’s house on the island. The two boys had been up to all sorts of tricks. They were always inventing games and stories; her father, even then, was fascinated by the past. But he was also a boy who liked to play outdoors – not at all the bookworm type. Dr Santini could remember him and Giorgio catching the big, hard-shelled beetles they used to have on the estate: you could pick up any beetle easily while it fed on grapes or flowers – tie a thread around the middle of its body, and walk around with it that way. The beetle would fly at the end of the thread and make a loud, whirring sound like a bumblebee. What the children liked best about the game was the noise the beetles made, but the creatures were also wonderful to look at – black on the underside and on top a bright, emerald green that changed in the sun to gold. He could remember seeing her father and Giorgio – his son, Giorgio – walking down the path side by side, and their beetles flying above on strings. Everyone had loved her father. It was a pleasure when he came to stay.
‘And his mother,’ the old man continued, ‘your grandmother; sometimes we’d see her. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Did you know that?’
Beatrice said no, she hadn’t known.
One of the maids brought tea and propped the doctor higher in his bed. He went on to talk about his own childhood and also asked about her life. She told him that at the moment she had to decide what to do with her father’s collection. Some of it would go to museums. ‘And I ought to sell the rest, I suppose. All those things should be in a place where they can be seen. Where people can learn from them.’
‘And you must get married,’ he said. ‘Don’t smile. I can still see well enough to tell what expressions people have.’
‘If that’s meant to happen –’ she began.
‘You shouldn’t wait. I waited for too many things. Sometimes there isn’t another chance.’
‘But sometimes it doesn’t matter. I’d rather be the way I am than the way I might have become if I’d married the first man who asked me.’
The doctor shook his head. He said that he’d probably been spoiled: he’d always had a large family around him and of course, he knew, it was the women who had to do the work in the house. But if you outlived all your family, it made you wonder what sense there was in anything. He blamed the French, for not providing adequate supports for the higher trenches on the site, so that when it rained the mudslide came down all in a flash and buried his son. It was a matter of seconds; nothing could be done for him. ‘This tea tastes bitter,’ he said.
Everything tasted bitter when you were sick. Her father might have voiced the same sort of complaint, and that could have given rise to the rumors about poison.
She stood up, brought the sugar to him and offered to spoon some crystals into his cup. He asked her to take the cup away, which she did. And soon after that – seeing that he was tired and wanted to think about his son – she left.
She went to his funeral. She would have gone anyway out of respect, but the fact that she hadn’t been able to attend any last ceremony for her father made her want to be there for her own sake too. Vittoria Arnoldi accompanied her. They, and the maids, were the only women. All the other mourners were old men. Vittoria said she thought that they were probably part of the archaeological faculty of the university; unless, she added casually, they were something it had dug up. Beatrice slapped a handkerchief to her face and exploded into giggles. For several minutes she fought against hysteria. She hadn’t known anything like it since her schooldays. Fortunately the handkerchief was large enough so that everyone would assume her to be weeping. Vittoria, having caused the trouble, remained unaffected, and unrepentant afterwards.
The lawyers sent Beatrice a letter to say that the doctor had left her a picture, which she could come to collect. She imagined that it would be something to do with her father or perhaps with the house where he and Giorgio had spent their school holidays. But a note on the package she was handed said: This is your grandmother. She was more beautiful than her picture. The portrait was in pen and ink, the face lovely, and the attitude so natural and modern that if it hadn’t been for the arrangement of the hair and the set of the rakish little hat – both in the style of another age – it might have been of someone who was still alive. There was no resemblance to her father, nor to anyone else, as far as Beatrice could see. She was so pleased with the picture that for a long while she didn’t ask herself how the doctor should have come to have it in his possession. It was possible, of course, that her father had given it to him. And while she was still wondering about that, she thought again how strange it was that, enigmatic as these lives were to her, they were all on one side of the family. She still knew nothing about her mother’s people, not even where they had orginally come from. The parent about whom she kept finding out unusual facts was the one she already knew. Her mother, never known, could not be mysterious. Her mother had become a being she recognized emblematically: an unalterable, undifferentiated presence, stationed in another place, reaching her from another time; always the same. Her father had become the mysterious one: more could be known about him; more of his life revealed by other people.
Signora Arnoldi admired the grandmother’s portrait so extravagantly that she asked for permission to have it copied. And when the work was done and she held it in her hands, she said jokingly, ‘Who would ever have thought it of old Santini?’
‘Thought what?’ Beatrice asked.
‘That he’d nurse a hopeless longing for years. He always seemed such a dry old fellow.’
Beatrice wanted to say that there was no proof of any longing, hopeless or otherwise, on anyone’s part and that this was just gossip again; but since Signora Arnoldi had hit on the same suspicion she’d had herself, she let it go.
*
That summer in Switzerland she hired a young student named Ernst to help her with the recataloguing of her father’s library. She also made preparations to sell most of the Greek and Roman sculpture and the larger objects from ancient Egypt. Some of them were very large indeed. Even statues smaller than life-size required the kind of lifting gear normally found only among the loading equipment in a harbor town.
She took photographs of everything and was so satisfied by the results that she went on to take pictures of Ernst, his fiancée, Marta, and Marta’s parents, who came to visit her one day and were frightened by the statues and helmets, and the vases and jars emblazoned with animal heads. They had never been in a museum before. They thought that everything was slightly sinister. They went down the hallways behind their daughter and said, ‘My, how interesting. Think of that.’ They held hands and looked as if they were prepared to protect each other if anything strange were to happen.
Beatrice chattered on in an attempt to put them at their ease. She told them about the gods and goddesses represented in the works of art. She described aspects of religion that the couple wouldn’t find too shocking. ‘I didn’t rea
lize how much there was,’ she ended. ‘I’d never thought about all those boxes out in the old barn. And the things stored at the institute. At least a third of the collection was given to him by his teacher, long ago. I don’t suppose there’s anyone nowadays who has anything like this – certainly not like the big statues. They really shouldn’t be in private hands.’
Marta’s parents shook their heads. They agreed: Get rid of the things as soon as possible.
The auction was held eight months later. It went well. Several American museums joined the bidding, which knocked the prices up considerably. Beatrice sold to the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, Russia and several countries in South America. Private collectors accounted for over fifty per cent of the sales, despite the size of some of the statues. There had been a great demand in recent years for garden statuary of any kind and in any condition. It pained Beatrice to think of the Greek Apollo outdoors in a German winter; the Roman cupid with his pet deer had gone to St Petersburg and the two Etruscan sarcophagi to Vienna. She was glad to hear, however, that most of the Egyptian treasures in the sale had gone back to Cairo, to a bidder named Hassan. She assumed at first that that meant purchase by an institution, but a man on the auctionhouse staff told her that the largest of the Egyptian lots were all going to a private family. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to a private museum, like my father’s.’
‘Well, possibly,’ the man said. ‘I’d understood it to be a private collector.’
She thought that that couldn’t be: she knew what the prices were. For a single family to buy such things might have been possible in North or South America, or in Russia, but the sort of millionaire who might have a weakness for Egyptian statuary didn’t live in Cairo. A rich Egyptian collector would be looking for French and Italian paintings, German machinery, South African diamonds; or, at least, small objets d’art and objets de vertu. The father of one of her schoolfriends in Cairo had had a vast collection of enamel boxes; he’d once said to her that the ancient art of the Pharaohs gave him the shivers – modern life was much more to his taste. He’d also had a passion for sweet liqueurs, Irish racehorses, the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and English tweed jackets. She remembered him as a very agreeable man.
She thought suddenly that there had been many pleasant people in her life with whom she’d fallen out of correspondence. It was possible that they’d moved, or – like her – suffered bereavement. Most of the girls would be married by now, and would have children. Claudia already had three and her American husband, Charlie, was putting on fat and beginning to look important.
As long as the collection had been unbroken, she’d had so much to do that her life was full. Now that most of the pieces were disposed of, she felt that she’d lost her occupation. She sat down at the desk that had been her father’s. She wrote to Claudia. As her pen shaped words on the paper, she remembered their schooldays. She felt a longing for the friendship of her childhood and for the family that had seemed to be hers: among whom she was at home, never just a guest.
Claudia wrote back; she was coming to Paris and going on to Florence: Beatrice must stay with her.
They met. On the morning after Beatrice’s arrival, Claudia told her, ‘You should come to New York. You need something entirely new.’
Beatrice said, automatically, that that was certainly something to consider. Later in the day she did think about the possibility, and asked herself: Why not? Some of the treasures from her father’s collection had gone as gifts to museums and some – but only a few – he’d held in trust for archaeological foundations that were looking for places to house them. Most had been his. They had brought her a huge sum. She hadn’t yet begun to contemplate what she was going to do with it. She could go anywhere in the world.
‘I just might,’ she said the next day.
‘Good. Come to town for the spring and spend the summer with us at the seashore. And during the winter – we’re going back for a visit to Egypt. You’ve got to come. You can help to cheer up Jack. Did I tell you about Evie?’
‘Yes,’ Beatrice said. ‘Such a simple thing. And so quickly. It’s terrible to think about.’ Claudia’s sister-in-law, Eve, had developed a cold sore on her lip. She’d tried to cover it with powder and some sort of liquid make-up and then it had become infected, either as a result of what she’d put on it or simply because it wouldn’t heal. At any rate, the infection had turned septic and it had killed her. She and Jack had two small children. ‘He’s still knocked sideways‚’ Claudia said.
Jack met them in Florence and did the museums and galleries with them. Beatrice felt that, after so many years, it was still as though they were her family. She found that she seemed to know Jack just as well as she’d always known Claudia. When Claudia said that she wanted to stay in the hotel one rainy morning, Beatrice and Jack went out together. After that, they’d often go out with each other. He began to court her. It happened so easily, and her response was so wholehearted, that it was as if she’d burst into flame. She knew that he’d loved his wife and undoubtedly still did, and that he was lonely and needed a mother for his children. She also knew that he genuinely wanted her and had always been her friend. She didn’t mean to wait an instant: she was afraid of losing her happiness before it had begun. But it wouldn’t look right to be in such a hurry, and before his year of mourning was over. ‘After Egypt,’ he told her.
Claudia said, ‘It was my doing, of course. You two didn’t stand a chance.’
Beatrice smirked and blushed. She was blushing all day long. She considered it ridiculous for a woman in her early thirties to be overcome by such feelings of maidenliness, but she was also happy. She made plans. She prepared to sell the house in Switzerland.
She arrived in Egypt two days before the others and had time to settle her luggage and unpack her clothes. As soon as the Schuylers joined her, they began a series of parties at the hotel, at friends’ houses, at restaurants. All the family was there, including some of the Arnoldis, with in-laws and children. In the daytime they enjoyed the sunshine, at night they ate and drank and danced. Jack presented Beatrice with her engagement ring – an emerald centered between two smaller diamonds.
The next morning an invitation arrived for Beatrice; it was delivered to the hotel by hand. She’d never heard of the people. While she was puzzling over the question of why strangers should ask her to their house, she picked up the envelope again and saw that there was a second piece of paper inside. She pulled it out and read the explanation: the stranger, a Mme Cristo-Marquez, thought that Beatrice might want to see her father’s collection in its new surroundings.
‘How nice‚’ she said. ‘It’s the people who bought Papa’s statues.’ She read out the name.
‘Not them?’ Mrs Schuyler exclaimed from her end of the breakfast table.
‘Don’t you remember?’ Claudia said. ‘You once told me about meeting the daughter in a shop. There was something unusual about it – I can’t remember. She said something to you.’
‘No,’ Beatrice said. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘Of course you do. In that shop that sold the rugs and the paper. Where I bought my silver bangle. She was going out and she said something that upset you so much that –’
‘Oh,’ Beatrice said, remembering all at once. The family must belong to the strange-looking girl she’d seen shopping with a servant nearly twenty years before. ‘Now I know. What an odd coincidence.’
‘One couldn’t possibly go there,’ Mrs Schuyler said. ‘No one could. It’s out of bounds. And certainly not at night.’
‘Mother, dear,’ Claudia said, ‘what difference could that make?’
‘It makes a difference in that house. The whole of Cairo knows what they get up to at night. I won’t tell you what they used to say about that family.’
‘Why not?’ one of the children said, and was immediately shushed. Beatrice too would have liked an answer, but the interruption had brought the topic to a close.
She
accepted the invitation. When the fact came out during a comparison of dinner-dates, Mrs Schuyler expressed such concern that Beatrice began to feel unsure about her decision.
‘You mean to say, you accepted?’
‘Yes, of course. I thought it would be so lovely to see the collection again. It was thoughtful of them to ask me.’
‘They aren’t thoughtful people. You can’t go, Beatrice.’
‘But I’ve accepted.’
‘You’ll have to cancel.’
‘No, I don’t do that kind of thing.’
‘My dear, this is serious. I should have made it clearer. These people are much more than simply undesirable. They are extremely unsavory. They indulge in practices that – that – I don’t quite know what to call it. A great deal more than the ordinary sort of orgy. And the servants join in.’
‘I’ve accepted,’ Beatrice said.
‘You can become ill at the last moment.’
‘As soon as I’m well, they’ll ask me again.’
‘And you’ll still be unable to go, until finally they stop asking.’
‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Beatrice, it’s not a house to go to at all, but if you can’t get out of it, at least it’s not a house to go to alone. I expect Jack will have to go with you.’
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