“What we want is something that’ll look like a natural mishap—no contrivance about it.”
I smiled at her and she smiled back. “ I give in,” I said again.
She was suddenly mischievous. “Well, I guess it seems to me that instead of delaying the car it would be easier to delay the train.”
A peaceful oasis of two hours in all the stress and the danger.
A remarkable two hours. It is, I suppose, one of the rewards of the man who lives dangerously: his days are floodlit in this artificial light of impermanence; the present becomes everything and the future nothing.
I shall always associate that short time with apricots. We had apricot jam with our rolls and coffee, and there was some fragrant climbing plant round the pillars of the café garden which gave off a sweet, warm apricot smell.
The day was brilliant now. When we had reached Peschiera the lake was still shrouded in haze, and only the peaks of the distant Dolomites showed here and there, looking much less substantial than the mountains of cloud. But now it had cleared, and the foothills at she opposite side of the lake looked as if they had been painted there by Tintoretto.
There was much to discuss in Jane’s scheme, but once we had talked it out, then it was natural to let it drop—as something decided for better or worse—and turn to ourselves. Almost everything that passed between us I remember, word for word, because in loneliness I have gone over it so often since.
We talked of hills and lakes, of Austria and England and Italy and Australia. She told me more of her married life, which, after the quarrel and the break away in Paris, had settled into a cool, tolerant friendship.
“Maybe we should never have married,” she said; “ maybe it’s a good argument for free love: we should have been lovers for a few months and then parted. But we—took to each other; he seemed to have such charm, to know so much; I was twenty-one, impressionable maybe; we married. There’s nothing wrong with him: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. There was nobody else involved either way. It just didn’t work out. So we live together now for the convenience of war, and go our separate ways.”
“And your separate way leads you into great danger.”
She shrugged. “ Just being alive is dangerous.”
I wanted to speak about Andrews but did not know how.
“You’re in it all too deep,” I said. “I wish you would leave this task to me this afternoon.”
She played a little tune with her fingers on the table-cloth. “I obey orders.”
“Andrews should never have given them.”
“You don’t like Andrews much, do you.”
So it was coming. “ No. How can I?”
“Why not? He’s brilliant at his job.”
“I wish——” I said.
“What do you wish?”
“It is not my business. I have no right.
“Robert, what’s the matter with you?”
“I wish you weren’t involved with him.”
“But why me? We all are. We all take orders from him.”
I said: “What upsets me is that you take more than orders …”
She stared at me. “ More than orders? …”
“Of course. Do you think I can forget how we met?”
Her eyes widened. “How we … But you don’t mean …”
She broke off again and her hostile expression changed and she began to laugh. She laughed and the waiters turned and looked at her. I had never heard her laugh like this before, and it was a lovely sound: but I hated it because it was directed at me.
“Jane!”
“Oh, Robert …” She put her head on my arm. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s all Vernon’s fault. I thought he’d obviously explain. Isn’t that just too bad! I surely beg your pardon …” She had stopped laughing but was out of breath. I might have got up in annoyance but her hand was on mine.
“Sorry, Robert … one or two other things you’ve said— I’m sorry to have been so dull.”
“I’m sorry to Clave been so dull,” I said stiffly, my feelings in a melting pot.
“No, so, no. Do let me explain.” She swallowed, but did not move her hand away. “He ought to have … look, it’s like this. Paul is well-off; I buy a lot of clothes; in fact I’m extravagant. I buy them mostly from Lorenzo & Co. of Milan. Every now and again I go to Milan for a fitting. Sometimes too they send me models on approval. Well, some of the models I get have embroidery worked on the neck or the shoulder, or a flower design at the waist; something like that. When they have, I put them on and walk over to Vernon’s flat. Then I sit and wait while he spells out the code message which has been embroidered on the frock. That’s how we usually get the figures of the Italian output of aircraft. That’s how we first received news of the conference.…
I stared blankly out at the ultramarine blue of the lake, at the startling purple hills. I stared out at a barge moving down the lake, its red sail extended by the gentle morning savor. Sails again now, one of the advantages of the petrol shortage. I looked at the bent old man brushing up the leaves in the roadway. I looked at the row of tall poplars standing like paint brushes against the improbable sky.
Although great pleasure and relief were not far away, I still felt a fool. And although I warned to believe, some perverse streak in my nature demanded proof. Yet the slightest hint of doubt on my part …
“Andrews is fond of women,” she said, “Oh, I’ll grant you that. But you ought to bum he’d never mix business with pleasure.”
I said: “ Yes.”
“Anyway,” she said, “ I don’t think I’m very much flattered with your opinion of my taste in men.”
I got up, “ I’m sorry. You have to see …”
“Of course I see,” she said. “It was natural. But please sit down. Time’s passing so quickly. Too quickly for a mis-understanding …”
I sat down and looked at her. She looked at me.
“One last thing,” I said. “What did Andrews mean this morning, telling you to see I obeyed orders?”
“Just that. He’s not blind, Robert or, as it happens, jealous. He just wanted to make sure that yea and I didn’t mix business with pleasure.”
The waiter, who had been getting restive at the length of time his customers were staying, came forward to ask if there was anything more. Without consulting Jane I ordered lunch for two, although we had only recently finished breakfast. It didn’t seem to matter. We sat in silence until the hors d’oeuvres came. In some way we managed to eat then, still in silence.
“I can’t manage a thing more,” said Jane, pushing away her plate.
“It’s better to try. We don’t know when we shall get out next meal.”
“We?”
“We.”
“That’s not obeying orders.”
“Damn the orders!”
She made a face, half a wry smile. “ It’s just what Vernon was afraid off.”
I said: “ No, It’s not. That’s not what he was afraid of.”
“You’re very sure.”
“Suddenly on this, yes.”
“Why?”
“Jane, you cannot go on with this life you’re leading. Not after this business is over. The Lorenzo thing is finished— Andrews said so. Corns back to England with me. Your husband can hardly put up any fight about it, if he is as you say. There’s still some chance of happiness there.”
“Not much while it’s being bombed.”
“Oddly enough, there is. You are in the front line there, but it is the right side of the line. A man and a woman can make their own lives.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I could make my own—especially if I’d gives this up.”
“You can work. There’s plenty of honest work in England to-day.”
“It’s all very well for you, Robert. You’re a chemist of great repute and there aren’t many like you. But there are thousands of women who can make munitions. I happen to be the only one who can do this, because of my marriage
. If I left I should leave a gap.”
The waiter brought the near course and the delicate lake trout tempted our disturbed appetites.
“I’m not a quitter,” she said. “After the war. Oh, after the war, my dear … Paul wouldn’t stand in my way. I’m young. I’ll keep …”
By right the sun should have gloomed ever, but it still shone as brilliantly.
“Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
“My own father,” she said, “ died when he was twenty-eight. Four years older than I am now. His youth didn’t endure. I kind of feel that even if two generations are spoiled, we’ve got to make it right for the next one.” She put down her fork. “ Sorry to sound like a ghastly propaganda leaflet. I didn’t at all mean to.”
“The war might go on for years.”
“It won’t. Not in this country at least. The Italians aren’t prepared to face a long war any more than the French were. And other things might happen. America might come in. Then I should have to leave.”
Her attempt to reassure me was a failure. I waved away the waiter who was bringing a dish of pasta. “ What I find impossible is the idea of our parting now, in half an hour. Even if everything goes well, we shall be separating almost at once, for months, probably for years. That is the unbearable thing. Intolerable.”
“Would anything at all, make it tolerable?”
“No,” I answered. And then quickly: “ What do you mean?”
She screwed out her cigarette in the ashtray and went on screwing it round and round long after the last trace of smoke had disappeared.
“After doing this job,” she said, “I should catch this evening train back to Venice. I’ve an excuse for two days’ absence from Venice. But my two days won’t be up until to-morrow. I could return to Garcia, perhaps even stay on.”
The vessel with the red sails was almost out of sight round the headland. The stirring breeze raised the scent of apricot. Apricot and warm sunshine and a blue lake.
She said: “If you like, forget I spoke.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I’ll keep the room at the hotel—or book another.”
The boat had gone, and in its place a tiny rowing barge crawled across the surface of the lake like a beetle on a pond. The sun had moved an inch in the sky.
I was holding her hand too tight and I let it slacken.
“Dwight and Andrews may not return till Thursday,” I said, “It’s—ephemeral, all the other things one does not want of love—but it might last two whole days.”
“If the angels are on my side,” she said.
“I think they will be.”
It was a rash and uncharacteristic statement of mine that events were going to bring in doubt.
Chapter Sixteen
I left Garda at ten minutes to two and arrived in Verona with time to waste in the matter of changing stations. So I caught a tram outside the Porta San Giorgio and this took me along the river bask, across the Umberto Bridge as far as Capitello. Then I took another tram from there.
In the Porta Vescovo there was no sign of Jane. I knew—as she did—that there were flaws in her scheme; but as the time came to act these loomed larger. To plan in theory is one thing.
I sat near the ticket barrier reading an account of Italian air successes in the Popolo di Roma. I thought I might have difficulty in recognising Fräulein Leni Yolkmann; but it was not so. A handsome young woman—but the sort you would instinctively describe as a young woman and not as a girl— five feet eight or more; on make-up of course; a grey tailored costume and royal blue scarf and gloves; pale skin, vivid auburn hair. She was wearing a “Napoli” armlet— “Napoli” being an abbreviation of the ponderous Nazionalpolitischenerzichungsanstalt. It meant she was a teacher at an Adolf Hitler school. I wondered if she taught Good Behaviour to the Young.
Jane arrived just before the train steamed in. She wore a halo hat and very short pleated skirt, which made her look innocent and almost in her teens. I watched Fräulein Voikmann get in a first-class compartment in the middle of the train. Jane walked towards the end to the second class. As the train was about to leave I swung aboard and began to move down the teak, pushing past the people in the corridor. In the last coach Jane had found a place and there was one other seat vacant.
“Is this seat taken?” I asked an elderly man in the corner.
Jane did not look up, though it had not been arranged we should be in the same compartment.
“No. Someone has just got out.”
I murmured nay thanks and squeezed into the small space. There were three others on my side, two of them sailors. On the opposite side was the elderly man I had spoken to, Jane, a thin, nervous young man, and, in the window corner a good-looking woman of forty-odd who was just removing her hat to reveal shoe-black hair bound neatly with a close-tied veil.
The train chuffed into the first cutting.
From the start Jane began to prepare the ground. She dropped her glove and apologised to the grey-haired woman opposite her who stooped to pick it up. They had a brief conversation on wartime travel, and then there was a few minutes’ pause while the effect of her foreign accent was allowed to sink in. Presently the dark woman asked if the other woman felt the draught from the window, and the woman deferred to Jane. Jane said no, no, not at all, and then apologised for her difficulty in pronouncing some words but she was, she said, an Americano. As conversation went on, she explained that her father was attached to a bank in Venice, and she had been at a finishing school in Switzerland and had joined him recently. She found the intonation difficult at times; it was awkward to know what you accented and what you did not. She had begun well and thought it easy, but really there was nothing easy about it. All the same she admired Italy and thought it the most marvellous country in the world and hoped she would never have to leave it.
The sentiment of the carriage warmed towards her. The elderly gentleman broke in with one or two comments, showing a tendency to veer around to the uncomfortable subject of the war and America’s unfriendly attitude to the Axis powers; but Jane always steered him away from the contentious subject. She seemed to find just the right thing to say at the right moment and I, who am always short of small talk, marvelled as it.
I did not join in, but now and then would lower my paper and stare at this slim, pretty, extrovert girl with the silk legs and the vivacious face and the ready wit, whom the sailors were now eyeing with so much appreciation, and wonder—not that the retiring, introspective, seemingly doom-dogged Robert Mencken should have fallen in love with her but that she should, apparently, have fallen in love with him. Life, I should know, does not work by probabilities: its prizes are distributed haphazard.
The lady with the bound hair picked up a bag of grapes, but before eating them carefully drew on a pair of cotton gloves to avoid soiling her fingers.
We readied Brescia at two minutes after four. Here the thin nervous man left and another woman joined us. In wartime there was little likelihood of a compartment being too empty for Jane’s plan, but the fuller it was the better.
The day was still brilliant, and the rays of the afternoon sum struck across the carriages as the train gathered speed on the last eighty kilometres to Milan.
There were soldiers standing in the corridor now. I looked at Jane. She made no sign. Having done all that was necessary, she had fallen silent, and there was no conversation for some distance. The two sailors had taken ration cards out of their hats and were discussing them. They were on eight days’ leave.
After some While the train slowed again and I had a moment’s panic. But no, it was barely five o’clock. For the first time since leaving Verona I met Jane’s glance, but there was no glint of recognition in it. Treviglio. The express surely did not normally stop here?
The lady with the hair-veil confirmed that this was a routine wartime stop and added that the train was running a few minutes late. Good news.
Off again. Due in Milan in twenty-five minutes—thirty if we wer
e late. Testing time near. I wondered if everyone in the carriage could hear my heart thumping. The man next to me must, for you could see the beat of it in the tiny vibrations of my newspaper. I hurriedly folded the paper so that it should have no loose edges, tried to concentrate on the page.
No use. The Italians bitterly accused the Greeks of pro-British activities, of even allowing British submarines to refuel in their naval bases. This, the paper said, must step— or it must be stopped. The fact did not interest me. I was waiting for a movement. I was waiting for a movement … I was waiting …
It came. The train had been steaming rapidly through the sunlit vineyards, the olive trees and the mulberry plantations for more than another ten minutes before Jane rose.
She put her magazine and gloves on her seat and turned to leave the compartment Various people withdrew their legs to give her room to step past them, but in some manner— perhaps it was the swaying of the train—she caught her foot against the foot of one of the sailors and stumbled. She might have fallen against the open passage door, but put out her hands to save herself, and as she fell, in the most natural way is the world, one of her hands caught the handle working the communication cord. In Italian trains, as distinct from English trains, this is very accessible; it is suspended down on a polished chromium rod and is made in the form of a handle shaped to fit the hand.
… A curious whistling could be heard above the rumble of the train. Jane had saved herself from falling into the corridor, and instead sat for a moment in the lap of the elderly man by the door. Now she quickly recovered and stared up in horror at what she had done.
The whistling sound was lowering its note, became plaintive ebbed, breathily away as the train braked, died completely as it came to a standstill.
Silence. For a moment all was silence, as if the train and everyone in it held a breath. Then, growing in place of the patterned beat of the wheels, a murmur of excited voices, At the same time seven of the eight people in the carriage began talking.
“Gee, I’m awfully sorry,” said Jane, in English. “ How ever did I do that?”