“I don’t know where I shall be then. But don’t let me be a burden to you.”
“You’re not, you’re not!” wailed Eustace. “Let’s have another drink! Cameriere!” he cried. “Ancora due strega!” Nancy looked appeased. “What are you doing to-morrow?” he went on.
“I told you, taking the train for London.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Well, what are you doing?”
“I don’t quite know ... perhaps going shopping with Lady Nelly.”
“Then it’s not much use my staying, is it? You won’t want me for your shopping-party.”
“I’m sure she’d love you to come ... or we could meet some other time.”
A tired look that Eustace was too absorbed to notice came into Nancy’s face. Her attitude relaxed, and the million tiny threads by which she was holding Eustace went slack too.
“I don’t think you’re really interested,” she said. “I don’t blame you. Why should you be, after all these years? I’m nothing to you. I don’t know why I thought——”
“Oh, but you are!” cried Eustace, relieved but distressed by her change of tone. “You don’t know how often I’ve thought of you, Nancy! If they hadn’t been so—so severe with me.” He suddenly saw himself and Nancy a married couple of old standing; he was still enjoying the benign patronage of Lady Nelly and all the privileges of his bachelor life, while she had been spared all the horrors of her marriage with Captain Alberic. “Please don’t go, Nancy. Stay a little longer. We could have such fun.”
A gleam kindled in Nancy’s blue eyes. She looked meditatively into her strega.
“Do you really mean that?”
“Of course I mean it,” cried Eustace. “There are—there are such heaps of things we could do together.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re very sweet,” she said. “You always were. It’s a pity——” She left the sentence unfinished.
“A pity we didn’t meet sooner? But we have met now.”
Nancy laughed. “Come along,” she said. “It’s time you were taking me back.”
They walked in silence through the airless alleys, skirted the dark bulk of the Fenice, and before they knew where they were found themselves under the gold arrow pointing to Nancy’s hotel. Here they stopped.
“Come in and have one more drink,” Nancy said. “I expect Tonino’s got some of your favourite poison.”
“Will he still be up?” Eustace asked.
“If he isn’t you can go away again.”
Tonino was still behind the bar in his white coat, otherwise the room was empty. Nancy asked for orangeade and Eustace ordered another strega.
“You will have a head in the morning,” Nancy said. “Do you do this every night?”
“I don’t dine with you every night,” said Eustace.
Nancy gave him a teasing look. “I believe you just make me an excuse for drinking.”
“Oh no—though I wouldn’t drink alone, of course.”
“So I am some help?”
“I wish I could be some help to you,” said Eustace earnestly.
The barman had retired to an inner sanctum, out of sight if not out of earshot.
“You could be,” said Nancy slowly, “if you wanted to be.”
I shall have to put this very delicately, thought Eustace.
“I didn’t dare to ask you,” he said. “But would you really let me help you?”
Nancy’s lips curved in a smile.
“Honoured. Delighted. Overjoyed.”
Bending forward, Eustace said, in what was meant to be a whisper, but was not, “Then will you give me your address?”
“My address?” repeated Nancy. “Why, you know it. Do you mean the number of my room?”
Confusion clouded Eustace’s very vision. Putting his strega down untasted, he struggled on.
“I mean so that I could send it to you.”
“It?” said Nancy.
“Well, the cheque.”
Nancy said nothing. Avoiding Eustace’s eye she glanced over each shoulder in turn, as though she felt a draught. Then she looked him full in the face. Rising to her feet, she said, “Are you trying to pay me off?”
Eustace also rose.
“Pay you off?” he muttered. But there was no answer: she had gone.
He was still staring stupidly through the open doorway when the barman came back. “Another strega, Signor Cherrington?”
Eustace shook his head. Starting up with some idea of following Nancy, he heard the barman’s voice, “Scusi, signore, but shall I put those down to the Contessa?”
Arrested in mid-flight, Eustace rocked to and fro. “No, I’ll pay,” he said, returning slowly to the bar.
When he telephoned the next morning he was told that Mrs. Alberic had gone away from Venice without leaving an address.
“
10. DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS
THE EPISODE left an impression which remained with Eustace many days, festering and throbbing. His imagination, balm-laden, invented outcomes flattering to his self-esteem. In one, Nancy accepted his gift with tears of gratitude, saying that he had saved her life, enabled her to face her parents and to turn over a new leaf. ‘I shall never, never, be able to repay you, Eustace. You are a darling —you always were. I had forgotten there was any good in men until I met you.’ Nancy didn’t leave Venice; she stayed several days more, and on her last evening dined at the Palazzo with Lady Nelly, who congratulated Eustace on having such a sweet, charming friend. ‘Why haven’t I been told about her? What an old humbug you are, Eustace!’ Eustace beamed.
In another version of the incident he accepted Nancy’s invitation. The concierge bowed, the pages gaped, the liftman lowered his eyes, the passing housemaid turned to look as they drew near to Room 193 (this was the number that established itself in Eustace’s mind). At the threshold his imagination boggled, but Eustace was in no mood to be deterred; the stregas, like the true witches they were, made everything easy. His personality painlessly divided, the proto-Eustace stayed decorously outside the door until his daring döppelganger within, having covered him-self with glory, rejoined him in the corridor. Immediately they were as one. It was Eustace Cherrington, integrated as never before, who received, and affirmatively answered, the veiled respectful question in the eyes of the descending liftman. It was Eustace Cherrington who thrust ten lire into the hand of the sleepy but sympathetic night porter as he ushered him out. It was Eustace Cherrington who, finger on lip, gave a considerably larger sum to Mario who, in response to repeated summonses, came yawning to the door of the Palazzo Sfortunato. The same Eustace Cherrington, but withal a new one, newly equipped for a new day.
Alas, these flattering pictures thinned away, erased, often before they reached completion, by the scorn in Nancy’s parting look and the unhealed smart in his breast where still her arrow quivered. Oh that he had gone back and dined with Lady Nelly and the Morecambes, whose last evening it was, and not exposed himself to this mortification! He had got up early next morning, to see them before they started. Undisturbed by the thought of their journey to the Lake of Como, they looked as fresh as daisies. They were charming to him and spoke of reunions in London and New York. He promised to send them copies of his book. “You must get on with it, you know,” Lord Morecambe had said. “No more of these late nights. He looks a bit down in the mouth, don’t you think so, Héloise?” That was regret for their departure, Eustace said. But how clouded the whole occasion was, that might have shone with sentiment and been crowned with friendship’s garland, worn and still to wear.
The Count lunched with them, and that afternoon the new visitors arrived, a celebrated Danish pianist with a leonine head, his pale, nervous, retiring wife, and their eighteen-year-old daughter Minerva, a girl who knew everyone and everything and had it all pat. The newcomers were not new to Venice, they were as much at home there as was Lady Nelly, and their knowledge, at least the knowledge of father and daughter, was much
more articulate. Names of churches that Eustace had only just begun to get sorted in his mind tripped off their tongues; they must revisit Tintoretto’s Presentation at Madonna dell’Orto, the so-called Negroponte at San Francesco della Vigna, the Catena behind the altar of S. Giovanni in Bragora. Far longer was the list of sights they need not see—and these included many—for instance the Tiepolo in the Palazzo Labia—that were especially dear to Eustace. They did not care for Tiepolo: he was too theatrical for them. (But ah, thought Eustace, the banquet of Antony and Cleopatra! Until yesterday it had been his favourite picture in Venice.)
Even more astonishing than their connoisseurship of pictures was their familiarity with people. All the Venetian Christian names that Eustace knew, and many that he did not, flashed across the table. Compared with them he felt himself a new boy.
“And how’s that old gurmudgeon, Jasper?” asked the great man, whose foreign accent sometimes betrayed him. “Is he as grotchety as ever?”
Listening to them, Eustace realised how slight, how featureless, was the background of his Venice, a mirage in a desert of Continental inexperience. Even the daughter had been there before the war; the precocious child of a world-famous father, she had been petted and fêted on a score of occasions, all of which she remembered.
Eustace had been mistaken when he imagined that to him would fall the rôle of showing them the ropes. It was they who would do this office for him; but no, they wouldn’t, for already they had made a dozen engagements at the Lido, at Florian’s, at the Wideawake Bar, at which his presence was never mentioned. Indeed, they often seemed to forget that he was there. Baffled, he turned his attention to the pianist’s wife, a woman who seemed to feel herself chronically left out. He had a fellow feeling with her. But her worried dyspeptic face gave him no encouragement, she answered him abstractedly, and he realised he could only add to her preoccupations, not lessen them.
Buoyant as ever, Lady Nelly’s frail barque floated on these tossing seas seemingly without direction, but really knowing very well its course. It seemed to Eustace that the arrangements they made under her very nose, almost without consulting her, did not put her out at all. Perhaps she welcomed them, because they left her free to go her own way. That way, alas! was not his way, for though there had been no decrease in the intimacy of her manner, the times were growing fewer when she sought him out for special attention, casually suggested meeting-places, or kept him by her when the others had gone. He was not discarded, but the novelty was wearing off. At least Eustace fancied so; perhaps it was only fancy. Just because the sun was shining elsewhere did not mean that it would not look his way again.
Meanwhile he had his book, and the unfriendly aspect of the world outside his room gave the security of home to the grey-green writing-table, the companionable chip of the Anchorstone block and the mounting pile of ‘quadernos’ (his English exercise books had long ago been filled). He was astonished by his facility; he got on faster now that things were turning against him than he had when his star was in the ascendant. The rasp of circumstance did not matter if it left the nerves of his mind more sensitive. His work for Schools he had entrusted to the miracle-bearing future (with Eustace always about a month ahead) in which all things were possible, and the labours of three days could easily be accomplished in one. How enviable to be a novelist, independent of other people’s favour and disfavour, their times and conveniences; using them merely as the oyster its grain of grit, for the sake of the salutary irritation they produce. The world well lost that another world more satisfying and more lasting might be found, a world beyond the two letters which since breakfast had been lying beside him on the writing-table. He had done a good morning’s work under their silent but stimulating scrutiny: he could open them now.
He would take Stephen’s first.
My Dear Eustace,
This will be in the main a business letter, though I am afraid that ‘business’ is hardly the right word, so unbusinesslike have been the proceedings hitherto.
Things have not been going very well since I wrote to you. Your sister has had a return of her nervous trouble, not serious enough, I am glad to say, to bring her back to Willesden, but serious enough to impair the smooth running of the clinic. At least that is how the directors explain her attitude, and though my sympathies are all with her, I think that in this instance they may be right. I cannot but regret the stand she has taken, and I do not think she would have taken it but for something that happened earlier this summer, something that distressed her mind and warped her judgement. (She has not spoken to me directly, but if rumour is to be believed, your taking her to Anchorstone Hall was a mistake.)
But this is not my business. My business is to find a modus vivendi between her and the directors. She is impatient with them because they refuse to put up another £1,000 for improvements; they complain of her autocratic ways and of certain absences from duty apparently unconnected with her illness (she showed me the letter in which these were referred to, but made no comment).
She talks of resigning the secretaryship; their attitude, though much more guarded, suggests they might accept her resignation. I am afraid that her health may compel her to resign in any case.
She was very restless when I saw her, and spoke of everyone being against her; she said she had to get rid of some of the servants and the nurses because they spied on her. I won’t disguise from you that the place looks uncared for and going downhill.
I asked her if she had written to you and she said no, you were enjoying yourself, and she didn’t want you to be worried; there was nothing you could do to help. Afterwards she seemed to change her mind and said, if you write, tell him it isn’t his fault, it might have happened anyway. I didn’t ask her what the ‘it’ referred to, or why you might feel your-self to blame; I imagine she was trying to spare your guilt-complex. I could not possibly speak to her of the gossip I had heard, we are both much too reserved, and the very feeling that makes me want to help her also makes me shy of seeming to pry into her concerns. I told her that if she did leave the clinic she could always count on me, and she said I had always been a good friend, or something like that.
But I feel uneasy about her and I think you would too, if you saw her. She isn’t happy. You probably know why. I don’t, I can only surmise. When I suggested she should go down to Mrs. Crankshaw at Anchorstone to recuperate, she refused almost violently, as if she had a horror of the place. Why did you take her there, Eustace? Why did you?
I have been to Willesden to see your aunt. I know she is genuinely devoted to Hilda, but I could see that she is influenced by the family legend of Hilda’s invincible good health, and doesn’t believe that anything could be seriously the matter with her—a view I fancy your sister Barbara also holds. But I am sure they are mistaken. Whatever the cause, the strain is mounting up.
You once told me you were not in Hilda’s confidence. Well, I think you ought to be, even if it means asking her straight out what is the matter—even if it means leaving Venice.
I needn’t think about this letter yet, not yet, not yet. I’ll see what Antony says.
Dear Eustace,
How like a winter has your absence been! Even literally, for no sooner had you turned your back on us than summer set in with its usual severity. Icy blasts raged until August, and how we all shivered at Anchorstone! As you know, I went there again, for Dick’s birthday-party, but it wasn’t half so much fun. I expect your sister has told you about it. I’m afraid she didn’t enjoy herself very much. None of us did. Mama says the Staveleys never show up so well as in a disaster. They were quite human when your sister and Dick got lost. But Cousin Edie wouldn’t have any joy-riding this time, and Dick behaved like a sulky dog that wants to be taken out for a walk. We weren’t allowed to split up, we had to do everything together, in droves, and every minute was organised. It was just like Soviet Russia. At one moment we were all made to bathe; only Victor Trumpington held out. Anne was blue with cold for the rest of the day; poor g
irl, she has almost no circulation, but what do they care? You know what the sea is like there, we had to walk out miles among the jelly-fish and the sharks before even our knees were covered! Your sister hadn’t brought a bathing-dress, but that didn’t save her. Dick made them hunt out one for her. It was so old-fashioned—you know the kind, with a bodice and skirt and pleats and a train. We couldn’t help laughing. I hope she didn’t mind.
Dick was in his element; I think it was the only time he thoroughly enjoyed himself. He swam under water and fastened his teeth in Monica’s leg. I must say she took it well: she has more party spirit than anyone I know, and never flagged from the first moment to the last. Your sister must have been glad to have been protected by her Victorian draperies. She doesn’t swim—Dick seemed a little put out by that; he tried to teach her, but gave up when she’d swallowed one or two mouthfuls of salt-water. I don’t think they did her any harm, and I only mention the incident to show you what rigours we went through.
But the communal life was the worst part. It was such a relief when I went to bed (I had a room in the Victorian dormitory to which you never penetrated) not to find rows of other beds besides mine.
I missed you terribly. They all asked after you, particularly Anne. I think she improves on acquaintance. Dick wanted to send you a telegram in answer to yours. It was one of his jokes—you wouldn’t have known how to take it, no one would. In the end your sister managed to stop him—but at the cost of a good deal of argument. Cousin Edie backed her up. But how tenacious he is. You see what happens in your absence. We all go to pieces.
I loved your letter about Countess Loredan and Jasper Bentwich and the rest. I was in Venice just before the war—of course, I was only a child, but I remember they were exactly like that then. Mama didn’t quite like some of the parties—she said one didn’t go abroad to see people—but I was fascinated. I love one’s parents’ way of looking at things, don’t you? But—and this is the point of my letter—their views have broadened, and when Lady Nelly asked me to stay with her for the first fortnight of September, they were quite pleased for me to go. You will still be there then, won’t you? Promise me you will. We could have such fun. It’s awful, but I haven’t answered Lady Nelly. I wanted to hear from you first—perhaps you could send me a telegram—because, much as I love Venice, and dote upon her, I’m not sure I could face the journey if you weren’t to be at the other end. Don’t tell her that though!—just say I’ve been working very hard, which is nearly true—so hard that I haven’t any gossip to give you—except that stuff about Anchorstone which is as dead as last week’s Chatterbox.