Mr B. picked up another card. ‘How many children?’
‘Only one. A son. I want to keep him out of it. He doesn’t count. Don’t make any card for him, please.’
‘Well, his name and age. It’s only that. ….’
She shouted, ‘My son doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. He’s out of it, right out of it. I shouldn’t have mentioned him.’
‘Well, now, the minimum preliminary costs. … Let me see. …’ Mr B. shifted the cards, re-reading each one carefully. ‘Only an approximation, of course, because we may have to have other meetings, Mrs Leaver, after the data is processed. It has to be processed. The reason for these separate cards is, let me tell you, for your own protection. They are so distributed in our processing system as to defeat any attempt to steal the said information. Nobody would know where to look. The data are in several places at once.—Something like ourselves, if I may say so.’ He laughed on top of his smile, then added, ‘Only we, very few of us, would know the complete picture, you can rest assured of that.’
‘The price?’ Anthea said. ‘If it runs to hundreds and thousands, I’m afraid—’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Mr B. ‘Above all, avoid being afraid.’
Anthea fumbled in her bag and made visible the tip of a leather-encased cheque-book.
‘No, no,’ said Mr B. His hand came out across the desk to arrest her action. ‘We don’t do business like that,’ he said.
‘Anything I can possibly afford,’ she said. ‘I only want to know. It’s worth any price I can possibly pay.’
‘Mrs Leaver,’ he said, ‘each case is different from another.’ He looked at his little armada of cards. ‘I have decided,’ he said, ‘that your case is different. It is utterly unique. First let us get some results for you and then we can see what we can afford to pay, shall we? Perhaps we won’t have anything to pay.’ He gave a smile on top of his fixed one. ‘You’re a very charming person, Mrs Leaver. I hope that money will not come into our relationship at least, not to any appreciable extent.’
He then coped, in comfortable words, with her confused amazement and got up to usher her out.
‘We’ll be in touch with you as soon as we have processed the cards. We may even have something concrete,’ he said as she left the office. ‘But if you need counsel at any time be sure to refer to me, Mr B. of Global-Equip Security Services, Mr B. of GESS. Do not, for your own sake, I emphasise, for your own sake, attempt any investigations on your own account. Leave it to us. Leave it to GESS.’ He opened the door of his office to let her pass through. ‘Mr B., Global-Equip,’ he said.
She looked at him before she walked out and said, ‘Human nature is evil, isn’t it?’
His features did not change, nor his smiling lips open, but he made a small cynical snort. Then he said, ‘I wouldn’t call it evil. Human nature is human nature as far as I’m concerned.’
Grace, who in other words was Mrs N. Gregory, was waiting on the doorstep, her upbraiding bosom in semi-profile, when Anthea got home. ‘Oh, God, Grace,’ Anthea said, ‘I forgot you were coming.’
‘I’ve been and come, been and come again,’ Grace said. ‘I thought something must have happened to you. I thought, if nothing’s happened and she’s only forgotten, then I’ll soon tell her her fortune.’
She stumped into the house after Anthea. ‘Grace,’ said Anthea. ‘Wait till you hear what’s happened. No wonder I forgot you were coming. I’ve taken steps.’
The Leavers had occupied this house, where Grace and Anthea sat talking, since the previous July. Before that, their residence for eighteen years had been an old rectory in the grounds of Ambrose College, the boys’ school where the absent Arnold Leaver had been headmaster.
‘God and public opinion will judge,’ Anthea said, as if the two were one and the same. She and Grace Gregory sipped their sherry.
Arnold’s retirement and the move to a better-equipped but less imposing house had upset Arnold to the extent that as soon as his books were finally in place on the new shelves he declared himself exhausted in body and mind. He returned from his doctor with an ‘order’ that he should take a holiday, with a ‘strong recommendation’ that he should go without his wife. It was early in October.
Anthea made a furious telephone call to Arnold’s doctor but got no farther than the snooty receptionist who told her the doctor would not discuss his patients except with their consent and in their presence. Anthea threatened to sue the doctor for disruption of family life, and in this way got the last word; but that only, she being too angry, inarticulate, dismayed and outraged to pin herself down to finding a lawyer at that moment. Arnold left the next week for the Continent, quite calmly.
Anthea telephoned around to her friends invoking God and public opinion on her side. She found a lawyer who told her that what Arnold had done was perfectly reasonable, and within his rights. A holiday abroad on his own. But, said frantic Anthea, he isn’t on his own. He has a travelling companion, a rich lady, and he says it’s platonic. That’s something else again, said the lawyer. Perhaps he’s going through a phase. The lawyer’s desk was covered with papers and files. He looked bored. At the end of that week Anthea had made up her mind and had gone to GESS of Coventry.
Grace Gregory had been matron at Ambrose College up till a few months ago when she retired. She had taken with her into retirement a boy, now eighteen, who had spent his schooldays at Ambrose College. He was lodging with her while working at his first job in a travel agency, being good at languages.
‘I mustn’t stay, or my young lodger Leo won’t have his supper,’ said Grace.
‘I’ve got to talk to someone,’ Anthea said. ‘Can’t you ring him up and say you’ll be late?’
‘He gives me such laundry problems,’ Grace said. ‘And you should see him eat. Just the same as when he was at school. But never mind; I like Leo, he’s good company, that boy. He thinks the world of me. Have you heard from his Nibs in Venice?’
‘He phoned from Paris on his way to Venice. Sounded guilty, really guilty. I said, “Is your woman there with you?” He said, “You mean my colleague?” I said, “I mean your woman.” He said, “You must be referring to my platonic friend.” So, Grace, you’ll never believe. I’ve been to a private investigation concern and placed the matter in their hands.’
‘You must have more money than sense,’ Grace said.
‘I haven’t paid anything. They’re going ahead without any deposit. I told the man everything at least, as much as he needed to know. He seemed to be quite on my side.’
‘Someone will have to pay,’ said Grace, nodding wisely into the second fold of her neck. ‘If you get in the hands of a private eye someone’s got to pay through the nose.’ She wagged her forefinger and tapped her toe, pressing as many images of physiognomy into the scene as might bring reality Anthea’s way. ‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ she said. ‘I wasn’t Matron at Ambrose College for eighteen years without learning something about private investigation.’
‘Oh, no, Grace,’ Anthea said. ‘This has got to be done objectively by a firm of experts. I made up my mind and I did it. The person I saw was very understanding towards me, and very efficient. I had cold shivers at first but he grew on me, and I’ve promised to wait till he gets in touch with me.’
Grace mused, as she gathered up her shopping-bag and gloves and umbrella, ‘Nosey Parkers never hear any good of themselves.’
‘I only want the truth,’ said Anthea.
‘All this fuss,’ said Grace. ‘What’s marriage these days? It’s only a bit of paper. I’ve got to get back to Leo; he’s a hungry lad and if I’m not there to get his supper he sits around like a spray of deadly nightshade waiting for someone to pick it.’
Anthea watched the news on two channels while she ate her supper. Then she took up her library book, a novel comfortingly like the last novel she had read:
Matt and Joyce finished their supper in semi-silence. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to ask the
vital question: had he got the job? Was it so vital, was anything so vital anyway?
If he had got the job he would have said so without her asking.
Matt got up and stacked the dishes. She followed him into the kitchen and ran the hot tap. What had there ever been between them? Had it all been an illusion? The rain poured outside. Mamie’s knickers and two of John’s pullovers were drying in the kitchen. She looked at the damp clothes and found no significance in them. Matt looked at the kitchen clock. ‘Half-past ten. I must have been late!’ he exclaimed.
‘You were late’ she remarked, slipping the dishes into the drying-rack.
Matt stood, unmoving.
‘Colin and Beryl rang,’ she sighed.
Anthea’s eyes drooped. And so to bed.
Chapter Four
‘I JUST TOLD HIM’ Robert said, ‘to go to hell.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Lina said. That man is very important. Maybe he could get me a job. Perhaps he could help to find my father’s grave. You should ask him to accompany us to the cemetery—’
‘Oh, as to your father’s grave, he knows one thing about that he isn’t buried at San Michele. Curran might even have an idea where he’s buried. “Victor Pancev,” he said. He seems to have known your father away back in history.’
‘I have to meet with Curran,’ she said.
‘Oh, that won’t be necessary.’
‘I would like to ask him some questions.’
‘Curran,’ said Robert, ‘asks the questions, generally speaking. Or, to put it more precisely, he demands to know. All very politely, of course. Curran is a cultivated man.’
‘Could he get me a job?’
‘He could command you a job. Curran would believe he was God if he believed in God. All his life Curran has commanded the morning and caused the dayspring to know its place.’
‘It sounds crazy,’ she said. ‘Why do you boast about Curran to me? Do you boast about me to Curran?’
‘Yes, because you’re my first girl, and he knows it. And I told him to go to hell.’
‘Then why are you frightened?’
‘I’m not afraid of Curran.’
‘You’re afraid of something.’
‘He says you’re being followed,’ Robert said. ‘And that it’s dangerous for me to be seen with you.’
‘Being followed? Let them follow. I have asylum. I have residential rights, and my father’s grave is here in Venice. I will go to the police and complain. And I have to get a job because my refugee fund money isn’t enough. And nobody wants my paintings in Venice. I’m a defector and I have my rights. Maybe I get a job in a movie.’
She walked around her little room, agitated but inhibited by the cramped space and the physical obstacles in the way of every step, the surfaces of which were moreover covered entirely by food-tins, paint-tins, crockery, her drawing-boards and her crayons, her bag of flour, her jar of salt, her folded clothes piled high, and Robert himself sprawling in the chair.
But Robert wasn’t listening to her anyway. He was wondering whether to tell her, too, to go to hell, this being his mood of that day. He saw, from the washing-line extending from Lina’s little window, her green bulbous drawers hung out to dry; sometimes, so she told him, she found this garment useful for shoplifting in the grocery departments, when her cheque from the refugee fund in Paris was late in arriving, or when she ran out of money at the end of the month.
He said, ‘Maybe you’d like to meet my father, too. He’s turned up in Venice with his mistress.’
‘With his mistress, are you saying?’
‘That’s right.’
She was very shocked. There was no knowing what would shock Lina.
‘Why do they come to Venice when you come to Venice. It’s you that’s being followed, not me.’
‘Everyone,’ said Robert, ‘comes to Venice. Yourself, for example—’
‘But he has no right to bring his mistress to you.’
‘He brought her to Venice, not to me,’ Robert said.
‘Who is she? What a woman! How could she come to Venice? Is she a Jew?’ Lina had a stubborn phobia about Jews, a burden of her upbringing which had lost her most of her friends in Paris. On learning that Mary was not a Jew, so far as Robert was aware, Lina next enquired as to Mary’s profession.
‘She’s a cookery teacher, but that’s only a hobby. She’s rich. I rather liked the look of her,’ Robert said. ‘She was showy and flashy which I think is right for a mistress.’
Lina started to cry. She said, ‘I don’t understand half the words you say, and now you want another woman, you have desire.’
Robert repeated in French, which she could better follow, all he had said and more; he spoke quite slowly with a venom that had no bearing on the present occasion; except that, feeling in a bad mood, he saw no need whatsoever to control it.
Lina said, ‘I will meet with your father. I will meet with Curran. I will tell them the story how I got away for a better life. It’s a great story.’ She was crying even more, as she worked herself up with the drama of her story.
Robert started to feel enjoyment, and laughed.
Lina Pancev, now aged thirty-five, had grown up in post-war Bulgaria. Her father had disappeared the year she was born, while Bulgaria was still under German occupation. Victor Pancev had been a minor official at the court of King Boris of Bulgaria; the king was a fairly silly man who had playmates rather than friends; Victor Pancev was one of these. The king collapsed and died one day, poisoned, it was said, at the instigation of the Germans. Victor Pancev disappeared on the day of the funeral, never to return. Some weeks later his wife, in Bulgaria, had a letter from a friend who had seen him in Venice where he was staying with a Bulgarian count at a house called Villa Sofia. She had a postcard from Victor himself, not in his usual style, to say he was well and busy. Shortly after this, Lina was born.
Amid the chaos of war, when Russian liberators in Bulgaria followed upon German liberators, and in Italy the Allies finally liberated right, left and centre, the noble owner of the Villa Sofia in Venice died a natural death, while his friend Victor Pancev was killed. This was all that could ever be ascertained afterwards by his friends. Who killed him and why, nobody knew. It was said that he was killed by monarchist agents of Bulgaria who suspected him of having been part of the plot to poison King Boris. But the two maidservants who remained in the Villa testified only that he was found dead in the garden and that his body was ‘taken away’.
The two servants were Katerina and Eufemia. They inherited the Villa under the will of the old count, who had no relatives at his death; it was supposed they were his illegitimate daughters.
Lina Pancev grew up in communist Bulgaria in the midst of a large family of cousins, uncles, aunts, and step-brothers, for as soon as Victor Pancev’s death was officially established his widow had married again.
Lina had no interest in the past, King Boris and all that set about whom her elders sometimes let fall nostalgic phrases, even sentences. She had an early talent for drawing; later she learned to paint objects with photographic exactitude, and to portray people a little larger than life. She did views of monasteries, hills and landscapes, cloudscapes, flowers on a table; she went to the Black Sea and did work-groups at the docks all looking in the same direction, very tanned; and she excelled at women, large and strong, coming out of a shoe factory near her home, all looking healthy and refreshed after a good day’s work. These women were in some demand from Lina’s hand. It might have been, when she finished her studies in applied architecture at the university, that she could have been able to earn her living by her paintings alone.
One summer, her second cousin and boy-friend, Serge, returned from London, having spent six months there on a student exchange programme. Lina sat by the open window, doing nothing, with the flower-boxes of pink geraniums on the sill beside her, listening to Serge as he talked during the long summer evening. He was lean-faced, tall and idealistic, with vivid lar
ge brown eyes and a dark skin.
Lina’s mother came in with a bowl of fruit, jaunty, still with her slim figure, her hair smartly cut, her dimples and pointed chin. She laughed as Serge, without waiting for the knife and the fruit-plate to come, took a peach and bit right into it with his white teeth. Lina laughed, too. The mother left the room and Serge continued to talk against the noise of traffic and children in the street below.
He spoke in the manner of his own education; automatically he exaggerated, and he meant it. England, he said, was full of ideological contradictions. They were hypocrites, especially the young people; their left-wing movement was a laugh. Nice people sometimes, but only because of their innocence; they simply did not know themselves, and how truly they were bloated capitalists. Three meals a day, and always money in their pockets; you couldn’t distinguish between them and the Americans.
Most of all Serge talked about the woman in Hampstead he had stayed with for a while; it was a love-affair ‘at least if you call it a love-affair when there’s no illusion of permanency on either side’.
Lina prepared a supper of ham omelettes; she laid two places, for they were alone in the house, her step-brothers and sisters being either in the country with relatives or at a youth camp, and her mother gone off to play cards, her step-father working late in the shipping office where he was a manager, international section. Lina told Serge to stop eating the fruit lest he spoil his appetite, and to save up his story while she went to prepare the supper. She felt the woman in Hampstead was the part of his tale she was hungry for, like supper. Swiftly she cut the bread and bore it in with the omelettes, all on one tray, with the tomato and cucumber salad.
‘Well, what about her, your London woman?’ she said after they had started to eat. Serge, encouraged by the success of his general report, had, in Lina’s short absence in the kitchen, assembled the next part of his story to mind, in closely remembered detail which he arranged for the best possible effect. He wanted simultaneously to make Lina jealous and to impress her with his masculinity in having managed to have a love-affair in the midst of all his busy time in London; and he wanted also to reassure her that the woman, capitalist bourgeoise as she was, left-wing as she claimed to be, was not remotely to be thought of seriously by an intellectual Bulgarian like himself.