‘That was Cantrip,’ said Timothy, sitting down and addressing himself to Selena. ‘I’m afraid it sounds as if Julia’s in a spot of trouble.’
‘She can’t be,’ said Selena. ‘She’s still in Venice. I mean, I dare say she could be, but Cantrip couldn’t know about it.’
‘Cantrip, you will remember, is working in the News Room of the Scuttle. The News Room is equipped with a number of teleprinter machines, which produce a continuous print-out of the reports coming in from the various international news agencies – Reuters and so on. The process, I gather, is nearly instantaneous: once a report is telephoned through to the agency, from anywhere in the world, it’s only a few minutes before it’s on the teleprinter.’
‘Yes,’ said Ragwort, ‘we know that. But what could Julia do that would interest an international news agency?’
‘They seem to think,’ said Timothy, looking apologetic and still addressing Selena, ‘that she’s stabbed someone. Fatally.’
It was, as I say, a pity that he had so recently refilled Selena’s glass, for she now released her hold on it and it dropped, almost full, on to the hard composite floor.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Selena. ‘How very clumsy of me. I don’t think, Timothy, that I have correctly understood you. What exactly do you say it said in the agency report?’
‘So far as I can discover,’ said Timothy, ‘that an English tourist has been found stabbed to death in a hotel bedroom in Venice. And that a member of the same group, Miss Julia Larwood of London, barrister, has been detained by the police for questioning.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Selena.
‘I know,’ said Timothy, still looking apologetic. ‘But that seems to be what it said in the report.’
‘They didn’t say,’ asked Ragwort, ‘who’s supposed to have been stabbed?’
‘No. I suppose they’re waiting to tell the next of kin, if there are any. But it sounds as if it must have been one of the Art Lovers.’
‘Timothy,’ said Selena, ‘are you sure it isn’t one of Cantrip’s frightful jokes?’
‘Quite sure, I’m afraid. Cantrip’s jokes, though admittedly frightful, are not as frightful as that. Besides, if it had been a joke, he would have been trying to sound serious. He wasn’t: he was trying quite hard to sound casual. He was still in the News Room, you see. I was rather confused at first. He began by asking me if I knew a bird called Julia Larwood and I said of course I knew Julia, what on earth was he talking about. To which he replied that he didn’t think I did, but he thought it was worth asking because his news editor had suddenly got interested in her. So I gathered then that something odd was happening.’
‘Are we,’ asked Ragwort, ‘going to do anything, in particular?’
‘We’re meeting in Guido’s, as arranged. Cantrip will be keeping an eye on the teleprinter, of course, and if any more news comes through before ten o’clock he’ll tell us about it.’
It is difficult, on such an occasion as I have described, to know on precisely what note to resume the conversation. We were silent for several moments.
‘Dear me,’ said Selena eventually. ‘What a very good thing, after all, Timothy, that you are going to Venice tomorrow.’
4
Guido’s is not the nearest restaurant to the Corkscrew, nor the most economical in that vicinity. The superiority of its menu, however, is sufficient compensation for the short walk down Holborn Kingsway and round the back of the Aldwych Theatre; and Timothy was paying the bill.
It was not yet nine o’clock: we could not expect Cantrip for at least an hour. I proposed that in the meantime, and while eating our asparagus, we should proceed, as previously intended, with the reading of Julia’s letters. Though they might throw no direct light on the stabbing incident, it would, I suggested, be useful for Timothy, before plunging in medias res on Julia’s behalf, to be as well informed as possible of the antecedent events.
The first began ominously.
Hotel Cytherea,
Venice.
Late on Thursday night.
Dearest Selena,
I have news of a most shocking nature to impart to you. You will scarcely believe it. If anyone else had told me, I should not have believed it myself. ‘No, no,’ I should have cried, ‘it is not possible. The monstrous cannot disguise itself in an angelic mask. Reason and nature prohibit it. The deformity of the mind would necessarily distort the perfection of the profile. The depravity of the soul would infect with some hideous blemish the smoothness of the complexion. No, it cannot be.’
‘I suppose she’s referring,’ said Timothy, ‘to the young man she admired so much on the aeroplane. But this is evidently written only a few hours later – what can have happened in the meantime that Julia finds so shocking? She is, after all, a tolerant woman.’
‘To a fault,’ said Selena.
But it is no use writing to you in this haphazard incoherent fashion, beginning at the end and ending God knows where. I will proceed clearly and chronologically, beginning at the beginning.
The beginning was not altogether auspicious, owing to my separation from my passport. We were fortunately met at the airport by our courier, a haggard, aquiline, fragile-nosed Venetian lady, who told us that her name was Graziella. It took Graziella a mere ten minutes to understand my difficulty, explain it to the Customs officer and secure my lawful entry to Italian soil. In the meantime, however, the other Art Lovers were obliged to wait for us in the motorboat which was to transport us across the lagoon to Venice. By the time we joined them, there were signs of restiveness.
The armour-plated matron, in particular, who was sitting next to the beautiful young man, made some rather wounding remarks about total imbeciles with no consideration for other people. She may not, perhaps, have intended me to hear them; but she much underestimates, in that case, the carrying power of her voice.
So fearful was I of incurring yet further disapproval, so intent on the composition of some soothing apology, that while getting into the boat I somehow missed my footing. My entry into the vessel was accordingly at an angle rather obtuse than perpendicular to the quayside and at a speed rather rapid than graceful. In short, I fell in head first.
This caused the armour-plated matron to make certain further comments reflecting on my sobriety. Still more regrettably, it enabled the Major, on the pretext of breaking my fall, to gather me in a tenacious embrace, uttering as he did so loud cries of ‘Whoops-a-daisy’.
By a further stroke of misfortune, my handbag, in consequence of my over-rapid descent, had become unfastened and its contents had dispersed themselves about the floor of the boat. Anxious to be as little obliged as possible to the Major for the assistance which he offered in their recovery, I set about collecting them with, as I now realize, imprudent haste and insufficient thought for the effect on my balance of an attitude of semi-genuflection. Impatient, no doubt, of further delay, the boatman now cast off. The sudden movement threw me against the side of the vessel, and brought the wooden bench, fitted thereto for the repose and comfort of passengers, into collision with my nose. My nose began to bleed.
I was thus compelled, after all, to be obliged to the Major, videlicet for the loan of his handkerchief. He took the occasion to pat me here and there, and seemed inclined to offer me his shoulder to bleed on. I explained to him that it was essential, when suffering from a nosebleed, to lean backwards rather than forwards, and that if he did not object to my first soaking his handkerchief in the lagoon the bleeding would stop very shortly. ‘Attagirl,’ said the Major, patting me again and adding that he liked a woman with pluck.
I considered the advantages of bursting into tears: not only would it have relieved my feelings but also, apparently, discouraged the Major’s admiration. Looking about me, however, I felt that I would not have a sympathetic audience. It seemed possible, moreover, that the Major would change his mind and discover a preference for the weeping and womanly. I judged it better to keep a firm hold on the remnants of my sangfroid.
Settling myself as far as possible from my fellow passengers, I leant back with my eyes closed and the Major’s sea-soaked handkerchief pressed firmly against my nose.
I could not feel I had made a favourable impression.
‘Julia did very well,’ said Selena, ‘not to fall into the lagoon. How beastly of that woman to suggest she’d had too much to drink.’
‘Most uncharitable,’ said Ragwort. ‘Julia, as we all know, needs no assistance from alcohol to make her trip over things.’
Graziella, as we crossed the lagoon, gave a most instructive account of the history of Venice from its foundation in the fifth century to the defeat of the Frankish Invasion in the ninth. I was not, however, in any condition to attend to it as I should have done, or to observe the many features of artistic and historical interest which she pointed out to us. When at length I thought it prudent to remove my nose from the handkerchief, the crossing was almost completed. I looked up and saw Venice, floating on the water.
Venice, as one sees from the map in Ragwort’s guide, consists essentially of three large islands, though subdivided by canals into a great many smaller ones. Two of the three lie curled together, divided only by the Grand Canal, in an embrace of such Gallic sophistication as to prevent my pursuing further the anatomical analogy. To their left, excluded from their intimacy, the long thin island of Giudecca stretches out alone, a parable in geography of the hazards of a partie à trois. For consolation, like a divine hot-water bottle, it has at its foot the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
The church of San Giorgio, therefore, and a little afterwards that of the Salute, rising on the left at the entrance to the Grand Canal, are the first of the great religious buildings of Venice to offer themselves to the admiration of the tourist. That they are to the honour of exclusively Christian deities seems by no means certain: there is a too Eastern voluptuousness in their swelling domes, a too Athenian elegance in their Palladian façades. They seem designed for travellers who would wish, on setting forth, to murmur a prayer to Allah as well as to Saint George; or who, giving thanks for a safe homecoming on the wide steps of the Salute, would include a word or two to the goddess Aphrodite.
With the palaces along the Grand Canal there is no such ambiguity. They, one does not doubt for a moment, were built entirely to the greater glory of their owners, in a single-minded spirit of keeping up with the Foscari. If one façade has two tiers of columns and carved stonework, the one next to it has three; the one opposite has columns even more delicate; the stonework of the next is pierced and drawn in a still more intricate embroidery. So that one almost expects, seeing them reflected in the water, to find there too some further embellishment.
I experienced, as we travelled through this great corridor of mirrors, the emotion I had last felt during the transformation scene of the pantomime, when taken to it, at the age of seven, by my maternal grandmother. She took me again when I was eight, for my maternal grandmother was always very kind to me; but by then I was less easily impressed. The pleasure was one, therefore, that I had not looked to feel again.
Turning off to the right somewhere after the Accademia Bridge, we disembarked at the landing stage of the Cytherea.
‘Signore, signori,’ said Graziella, ‘dinner will be at eight o’clock. If you will come to see me before then in the reception area, I will explain to you about our excursions. You have plenty of time to wash and repose yourselves; but dress is quite informal.’ She glanced at me, however, in a way which suggested that the management of the Cytherea, broad-minded though it might be, would prefer to draw the line at mud-stained trousers and a blood-spattered shirt.
We retired, as instructed, to wash and repose ourselves. I directed my mind, while so engaged, to the subject of the beautiful young man, lamenting once more the absence of your own always admirable counsel. Deprived of it in fact, I sought it in hypothesis: ‘If Selena were here,’ I asked myself, ‘what would she advise?’
I answered without hesitation that you would recommend a pragmatic approach: not to base my plans on some theoretical first principle, but to examine the situation as it was and see what advantage could be taken of it.
This naturally led me to think of canals. We were in a city full of canals. How could this circumstance be turned to my advantage? One possibility would be to fall into one and be rescued by the beautiful young man. That, I thought, would surely lead to something. There was, however, a flaw in this scheme: I might fall into a canal, but the young man might not rescue me.
Another possibility would be for the young man to fall into one and be rescued by me. That seemed even more certain to lead to something. But I saw that this scheme also was by no means foolproof. The only way of ensuring that he fell into a canal would be to push him into it: unless this could be done with extraordinary discretion, the enterprise might well prove self-defeating. Nor was I entirely confident that once I had got him into the canal I would be able to get him out of it again.
‘Timothy,’ said Selena, ‘Cantrip did say “stabbed”, didn’t he?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Timothy, ‘ “stabbed” was certainly the word.’
To be perfectly candid, Selena, I was not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about any plan involving my immersion in a canal. Though beautiful, they are not, at close quarters, appetizing: it seemed to me that what they would certainly lead to would be a nasty cold, complicated, possibly, by some unpleasant virus.
I concluded that you would advise me to have nothing to do with canals, but to concentrate on the opportunities offered by the hotel itself. The Art Lovers are accommodated in an annexe, surrounded by canals on three sides and joined to the main hotel by a little bridge. On the fourth side it adjoins another building, forming part, as it were, of the same peninsula; but this has nothing to do with the Cytherea and there is no way through to it. The bridge is accordingly the only means of access. The rooms on the first floor are occupied by the Art Lovers, those on the second, apparently, by members of the hotel staff. The ground floor is used merely as a sort of entrance hall, where the chambermaids sort the linen and so forth.
I contemplated with some satisfaction the possibilities offered by this arrangement. I had only to get rid of the other Art Lovers and the hotel staff and find some means of barricading the bridge – and I should have the lovely creature entirely at my mercy, without means of escape. Unless, of course, he were to jump out of the window into the canal, in which case I would be obliged, albeit reluctantly, to revert to the plan previously mentioned. Though certain points of detail remained to be worked out, it was in a mood of some optimism that I went down to dinner.
I remembered that I had at least the benefit of your advice on general strategy. It is your view, as I understand it, that when dealing with young men one should make no admission, in the early stages, of the true nature of one’s objectives but should instead profess a deep admiration for their fine souls and splendid intellects. One is not to be discouraged, if I have understood you correctly, by the fact that they may have neither. I reminded myself, therefore, that if I could get the lovely creature into conversation, I must make no comment on the excellence of his profile and complexion but should apply myself to showing a sympathetic interest in his hopes, dreams and aspirations. Little did I know, Selena, how fearful were those dreams, how sinister those hopes, how altogether unspeakable those aspirations.
‘Dear me,’ said Timothy. ‘What can he have done?’
‘It would be very helpful,’ said Ragwort, ‘if this young man turned out to have a serious criminal record. It would make him a natural suspect for – any unpleasantness which may have occurred.’
‘Most helpful, certainly,’ said Selena. ‘Though whether Julia, in such a case, would have expressed herself in quite those terms – still, no doubt we shall see.’
The dining-room of the Cytherea occupies a corner at the junction between two canals, so that one may eat by a window looking out on one and adjourn for coffee to a terrace at the side of the
other. The terrace, in fact, faces the annexe in which we are accommodated.
The management, it seemed to me, had done rather badly about the seating arrangements. They had put the beautiful young man and his travelling companion at a table with the armour-plated matron. They had put the pretty blonde girl at a table with the trapezoid young man. They had put me at a table with the Major.
‘Care to join me in a bottle of plonk, m’dear?’ asked the Major. The notion of joining the Major in anything was repugnant to me; but I felt I could not civilly refuse. He studied his wine list with the furtive squint which has characterized the English abroad since the decline of the pound sterling: it comes of comparing prices while pretending to study the vintage. He suggested that the Colle Albani sounded like a decent little wine. Confirming, by a similar surreptitious glance, that it was two hundred lire less than anything else available, I concurred in his choice.
‘Comfy little billet, this,’ said the Major. I did not dispute it – the standards of the Cytherea seemed to me to be luxurious. ‘Been in worse quarters than this in my time, I can tell you, m’dear,’ he continued, undiscouraged by my agreement. ‘I remember the troopship I went on to Tripoli in ’48 – ’
From this starting point, he launched adroitly into an epic of military reminiscence, beginning shortly after the Second World War and ending – no, I fear it has no ending, or, if it does, that I have not yet heard it. It included a number of anecdotes designed to illustrate the proposition that the Major had ‘always been a bit of a japester’. There was one, as I recall, about hijacking a tramcar in Alexandria in ’49 and another about the introduction of a goat into the nurses’ quarters in Limassol in ’52.
I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello’s courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning ‘When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi – ’ or ‘I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes.’ The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?
Thus Was Adonis Murdered Page 4
